Conversations around war horrors, mother-daughter animosities and dissociative mechanisms in Heather O’Neill’s latest book.
Heather O’Neill launched her new novel The Capital of Dreams on Sept. 12. The event took place on the top floor of La Sala Rossa on Saint-Laurent and was hosted by the independent bookstore Drawn & Quarterly.
The evening started with a brief reading of the epilogue by the author herself, followed with a riveting conversation between O’Neill and her interviewer, Montreal-based singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Laurel Sprengelmeyer, who is mostly known by her stage name Little Scream.
The conversation ended with a question period and a book signing. The main bulk of the launch, however, was listening to O’Neill dissect her own work, placing the most important subjects forward and relating various themes to her personal experiences, and to international current events.
“Art is important in conflict because it threatens totalitarianism,” she said in the Q&A.
The story follows fourteen-year-old Sophia Bottom after her native country Elysia is taken under siege by the Enemy. As she travels through a war-razed world with as lone companion a philosophizing goose, the protagonist tries her best to cope with her relationship with her mother Clara, the end of her girlhood, and her desire to reclaim her mother’s lost manuscript.
O’Neill was inspired by WW2 when she created the basis of The Capital of Dreams. Her father went overseas to join the war effort when he was only 14 years old with the help of a forged birth certificate. Growing up, O’Neill was never told the cruel and raw reality of the battlefront, but instead ridiculous stories and silly anecdotes.
The story of WW2 was told to her like a fairytale, and this point of view is depicted through the character of Sofia, who navigates her trauma and philosophizes about it through the vehicle of the goose, who was inspired by Samuel Beckett and Simone De Beauvoir.
O’Neill was also inspired by the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict. O’Neill says she separates war from genocide by one criterion: Is the conflict exclusive to able-bodied men or do they include children and artists in their fight?
As she stood in front of destroyed poetry houses and burnt children theaters in a recent visit to Palestine, O’Neill felt revolted with the damages Israel has done to the history of the country.
However, in the chaos of the mass destruction and the debris of their rich culture, some Palestinians had gathered various pieces of tiles and other ceramics and had created an impressive Middle Eastern design on the razed earth. O’Neill was moved by this view, saying that the “city [seemed to] rise up from it.”
Review
I would recommend this novel to anyone who likes the philosophy behind war trauma and how it affects the ways we communicate and view the world around us. A few incredible one-liners have ignited my mind, such as Clara Bottom affirming that “war [is] good because it always [creates] new forms of art.” The story is fast-paced and reads effortlessly. If you are a lover of fairytales like Sofia, an enthusiast of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett or a Montrealer who wishes to support a local writer, then your next read should be obvious.
