Stern Ismael and His Sisters cover[Granta; 2015]

“Everywhere in town, lips gave flight to swollen words that rose to just beneath the heavens, and accumulated there. It was the same in all the rest of the world.” In Ismael and His Sisters, the debut novel from Louise Stern, we are taken to a small Maya village, where the Virgin of Guadalupe looks over all, and old men drink beer in front of grocery stores. Speech interrupts sharply, or hums flatly, but talk is not limited to only lips: there is signing as well, as many of the town’s inhabitants are deaf. Words tumble then in “the blood through the veins, and into the arms and hands.” Of what binds us, language, whether in physical or verbal form, is ever essential. But as Stern shows, when language disappears or breaks down, the self can be susceptible to external threat, as well as our darkest desires.

Stern was raised in California, but moved to London over ten years ago. A fourth-generation deaf, she used sign language at home as her family and most of her friends were deaf, too. Signing was not always an option across the pond, so Stern turned to a new mode of communication: pens and paper. And when paper was not available, her own arms. “I try to scrub the words off in the shower,” she admits in an interview with the Daily Mail. “They don’t go away completely and the lines of the scratched-out words become grey on my skin.” For Stern, language began to linger, drawn from the mind, to return on the skin. And she is aware of how best to use this presence: “Although I don’t want to be seen first and foremost as deaf, I am trying to give a voice to deaf people,” she has said. Her debut collection of short stories, Chattering, was well-received — we followed her characters, many of whom were hearing-impaired, living dangerously in Rio or stealing away into stillness, or even falling in love with a gerbil.

In this novel, our main protagonists, Ismael, Rosie, and Cristina, are also deaf, living ensemble in a stone house. Under direction from his deceased father, Ismael provides for his sisters and rules the roost. Rosie is silent, the so-called calming force, where Christina is anxious, untethered — and there is the concern at first that the sisters will stick to these stock roles, shells of female characters, only used in relation to the male protagonist. And the focus is indeed on Ismael as we are introduced to the even, slow pace of village life, a tempered stagnation a la Welty and Munro. Ismael is also the one who throws this balance off-kilter as he falls, at a local fiesta, for a green-eyed woman. A narco (for the woman is later discovered to be involved in the drug trade) angrily pursues Ismael, who draws his gun in a deserted cantina and kills his attacker. Ismael flees town post-murder, leaving Rose and Christina for the first time in their lives. He heads to the big city, where signing is not (at first) possible and retires alone to the top of a mountain. “The thought of Ismael was with both sisters. Where was he, who would he be out of their sight?”

The novel tends to the parable, an all-knowing narrator guiding us through the moral wilderness. We count on Stern’s narrative red flags, telling us of troubles before they arrive, pointing out the changes that wait in the shadows. The tone is thus appropriately measured, the prose more refined and matured than Stern’s earlier work. And yet Stern can be quite vivid, especially when describing setting: “Concrete-block houses with square windows through which you saw hammocks heavy with the tumours of bodies, huts roofed with palm fronds.” Stern is also refreshingly un-afraid to use an unusual simile or turn of phrase, which can be successful (“the two claws encompassed her heart and the fear shook itself out in her veins like a wet dog”) or end up as a false step (“Some of the feelings left him like a fart, bringing relief to an overextended condition”). And on the whole, she manages a balance between sparse prose, and more sweeping abstractions, although her forays into metaphysical language can be difficult to bear. But what is perhaps most striking about the prose is its incredibly oral quality: it feels as if we are sitting at the knee of a grandmother, listening to her biblical words late on a Sunday night. This may in part be due to the parable pretence, but Stern has brilliantly found a way for her words to tell, and not just show.

This brings us to Stern’s rendering of signing, which she executes equally well. We see palms turned inwards, index fingers pressed to mouths, incorporated not only in narration, but also dialogue. Talk becomes un-winged, given physical form, almost lifting off of the page. “Even the things nobody could find, even the unknown, had a shape in your body.” And physical environment is incredibly important to Stern’s characters — they know who they are by where they are (“Then he knew where he was again and he felt inside his self again”). And where they are in turn supplies their language. Ismael, Rose, and Cristina are themselves by fact of their existence in the village, and because they belong to this village, they are identified by the practice to relay in signs what cannot be relayed in speech. Communication outside of the town can be accomplished, but it is minimal, and frequently, impossible. Ismael is alone, and thus silent, for much of his initial time in the big city. It is not until he meets another hearing-impaired group, who use a different signing language than he does, that Ismael begins to feel more at ease, more himself.

Although at first more weight is given to the titular character, it is Rosie and Christina who are the most engaging. Ismael, on the whole, is rather maddening. He is the prodigal son, the one who leaves and lusts for a woman, defined only by her sensuality. And when he finally does return to the village, after a violent tussle with the narcos, he expects to regain his position as the patriarch. Rosie and Cristina are more dynamic; they let go of their stock postures after Ismael leaves. Rosie is the only protagonist to have internal narration present, translated into written word from what we might call mental signing: “Me Rosie-old me sit top step. Eat orange sweet spill mouth. Cristina-big angry scorpion there, me Rosie-old me not tell. Me Rosie-old me better not tell.” In Rosie, all is internalised, and to this interior, we are privy. Outwardly, her hands are kept stilled, and kept silent. But because of this, Rosie is selfless — she exists only for Ismael and Cristina, she lives to keep “things intact.” She is the only sibling not to have a romantic relationship through the course of the novel, but in the end, she is the one who truly loves. Ismael may seem to be the nucleus of the family, but it is Rosie who remains grounded in the midst of her siblings’ revolts.

Her younger sister awakens in Ismael’s absence: Cristina welcomes the new freedom, taking off on a scooter with a man with a “tiger kerchief” and beginning a relationship with Neidi, an unmarried woman in town. “[Cristina] was glad that [Ismael] was far away, with his certainty that he knew what was best for her.” Finally, it is a woman’s turn to travel, experience intimacy, and ultimately make her own mistakes. The romance between Cristina and Neidi is an important twist in the novel, but as with other characters in Stern’s short stories, Neidi is introduced much too late for the relationship to be given the depth it deserves. We know Neidi only through her time with Cristina, spent hacking vines in the jungle or climbing down from a dormant volcano. We see her put her arms around Cristina in the kitchen, but the “world of flesh” that Cristina re-enters with Neidi by her side is opaque, fleeting. The surface is barely scratched. And sadly, it is Rosie who is most affected by the romance: Cristina ignores her sister to be with her lover. Her selfishness pushes Rosie more and more towards an irrevocable silence — or rather, a hopeless absence.

At the end of Ismael and His Sisters, we learn that once language is left behind, once it is sacrificed for desire, it cannot be easily re-learned. Ismael returns to the village, with a “new belligerence,” his hands “floppier when he signed.” The three siblings are then finally reunited in their birthplace, but they can no longer look to the village, or its blood-to-hand form of communication, to steady themselves. From Rosie’s point of view, we are told, “She had thought . . . that their mysterious words and signs outlined things and kept them configured, that they would be able to see each other faintly once they were in the same place again.” The sequence of their reunion is perhaps one of the most beautiful, the most well-crafted, but what follows is less so. Rosie is killed by a truck on the way to the grocery store in the last few pages of the novel, making for a very disappointing end. Stern had kept things subtle and tense until this point, and it might have been better to end on a similar note. Still, Stern observes, “Written words have a longer life than spoken words; it makes you want that life to mean something,” and Ismael and His Sisters, for the most part, responds in kind.

 
Madeleine Kruhly is a graduate of the University of East Anglia’s Poetry MA and the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared online in The Atlantic Monthly and The Economist.


 
 
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