Synopses & Reviews
When fifteen-year-old Beth Weeks family is attacked by a grizzly, her father becomes increasingly violent, making him a danger to his neighbors, his family, and especially Beth. Meanwhile, several young children from the nearby Indian reservation have gone missing, and Beth fears that something is pursuing her in the bush. But friendship with an Indian girl connects her to a mythology that enriches her landscape; and an unexpected protector shores up her world.
Set on an isolated Canadian farm in the midst of World War II, The Cure for Death by Lightning evokes a life at once harshly demanding and rich in sensory pleasures: the deafening chatter of starlings, the sight of thousands of painted turtles crossing a road, the smell of baking that fills the Weekss kitchen. The novel is sprinkled throughout with recipes and remedies from the scrapbook Beths mother keeps, a boon to Beth as she learns to face down her demons--and one of many elements that give The Cure for Death by Lightning its enchanting vitality.
About the Author
Gail Anderson-Dargatz, whose fictional style has been coined as “Pacific Northwest Gothic” by the
Boston Globe, has been compared by critics to John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez. Her novels have been published worldwide in English and in many other languages.
A Recipe for Bees and
The Cure for Death by Lighting were international bestsellers, published worldwide in English and in many other languages, and were both short-listed for the prestigious Giller Prize in Canada.
The Cure for Death by Lightning won the UK’s Betty Trask Prize among other awards.
A Rhinestone Button was a national bestseller in Canada and her first book,
The Miss Hereford Stories, was short-listed for the Leacock Award for humour.
Her mother, who also wrote, instilled literary confidence in Gail, so that by the age of eighteen, Gail knew she wanted to be the next Margaret Laurence, writing about Canadian women in rural settings. "Laurence's interest in them made me feel that their and my experience was important."
In her early twenties, the future author got a job as a reporter for her hometown paper, the Salmon Arm Observer, but continued to enter her fiction in competitions, and she started to win. One submission caught the attention of the writer Jack Hodgins, who encouraged her to enroll in his course at the University of Victoria. She graduated from there with a B.A. in creative writing.
Gail's literary career began to take off when she won first prize in the CBC Literary Competition for a story taken from an early draft of her first novel, The Cure for Death by Lightning. When a Toronto literary agent took her on she already had a short story collection ready to go: The Miss Hereford Stories. Set in the 1960s in the fictional town of Likely, Alberta, ("what you call a half-horse town") the book, with its cast of colourful eccentrics, was published in 1994 and nominated for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. The Cure for Death by Lightning, her first novel, followed two years later.
Saturday Night magazine has said that the inclination to write about rural characters sets Anderson-Dargatz apart from many writers of her generation, who tend towards urban fiction. What does she find so fascinating about small-town and country life? "Once you step off the concrete, life stops being abstract and starts being very real, very immediate, very fundamental and very sensual." On this topic, the Financial Post said, “Anyone who thinks rural characters in Canadian fiction are dull and bland should pick up one of Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s novels. … The only certainty in her world view is that anything can, and very often does, happen.”
Although she is influenced by Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, her mentor Jack Hodgins and favourite writers such as Toni Morrison, she says her inspiration comes “from the people and landscapes around me more than from other books." Her style has been called "Margaret Laurence meets Gabriel García Márquez" because her writing tends towards magic realism, but she says the ghosts and premonitions in her writing arise from family stories of the Thompson-Shuswap region, which she carefully transcribed. "My father passed on the rich stories and legends about the region I grew up in, which he heard from the interior Salish natives he worked with. And my mother told me tales of her own premonitions, and of ghosts, eccentrics and dark deeds that haunted the area."
Gail Anderson-Dargatz has just recently returned home to the Thompson-Shuswap region found in so much of her writing, and she currently teaches advanced novel and advanced fiction in the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of British Columbia.
From the Hardcover edition.
Reading Group Guide
The introduction, discussion questions, suggestions for further reading, and author biography that follow are designed to enhance your reading group's exploration of The Cure for Death by Lightning, Gail Anderson-Dargatz's powerful novel about a young girl's coming-of-age in rural Canada during the Second World War. It is told in the unforgettable voice of Beth Weeks, who many years later uses her mother's scrapbook as a touchstone for her memories. Like the intensely private record her mother creates by juxtaposing brief personal notes, newspaper clippings, family recipes, and folk remedies, Beth's narrative unfolds in a gloriously idiosyncratic blend of poetry and documentation.
1) Beth writes, "The scrapbook was my mother's way of setting down the days so they wouldn't be forgotten" [p. 2]. In what ways does Mrs. Weeks' odd collection of clippings, recipes, and remedies fit the conventional definition of a journal or diary? What does it provide that even the most detailed written records lack? How does its form reflect Mrs. Weeks' character and the life she leads? Beyond the specific entries and handwritten notes, what other details does Anderson-Dargatz include to evoke the atmosphere of Beth's childhood home?
2) Beth first senses something "coming for" her when she uses the illicit treasures she has hidden in the woods [pp. 3-4]. How does this scene capture not just the material realities Beth associates with growing up, but the emotional changes, including an awakening sensuality, that she has not yet acknowledged? How does the language used to describe the setting enhance this?
3) Why is Beth's father obsessed with reclaiming the land he contends the Swede has stolen from him [p. 33]? Is it merely a sign of his "craziness" or does it reveal something about how he defines himself and perceives the world? Why is the battle between the two men conducted in silence in the middle of the night? What other incidents shed light on John's character and the things that are important to him? Why, for instance, does he insist that the porcupine he catches for dinner is a chicken [p. 13]? Why is he able to accept and feel compassion for Goat, who is mocked by the rest of the community [p. 59]?
4) Mrs. Weeks was the same age as Beth when she became the "woman of the house, making the meals . . . and looking after her two younger sisters . . . became her father's escort to plays and concerts . . . his favorite of the three daughters" [p. 17]. How have the roles she assumed as a teenager shaped her behavior as a wife and as a mother? Does her experience as a teenager explain her inability to discuss intimate matters with Beth? In reserving her thoughts and feelings for her scrapbook and conversations with her dead mother, is she intentionally protecting Beth from her own pain, or is she guilty of evading her responsibilities as a parent? Despite her reticence, do you think she helps Beth understand the pleasures, strengths, and satisfactions of womanhood, as well as its trials?
5) Bertha Moses and her family are the Weekses' only regular visitors. What is the significance of fact that Bertha's family is a "house of women" [p. 9]? Beyond offering friendship, what role does Bertha serve in Mrs. Weeks' life? What does she represent to Beth's father? How do Bertha's heritage, as well as her experiences with men, influence the advice and comfort she provides for both Mrs. Weeks and Beth? Do you think that her opinions and attitudes are intended to represent a feminist point of view?
6) In describing Beth's encounter with Dennis [pp. 30-31], Anderson-Dargatz creates an atmosphere charged with fear, violence, and sexual tension. How does she achieve this? What insight does the incident, including her confrontation with her father, offer into Beth's understanding of and feelings about the changes that she is undergoing? To what extent are the emotions that Beth experiences "normal," common to any young girl's sexual awakening? In what ways do they reflect the confusion and disruption that have become part of her everyday life?
7) Caught in a sudden storm, Beth sees lighting roll towards her "like a snake all knotted up, evolving and transforming as I watched . . . and coming right for me, as if meant for me . . . I felt it, shooting through my right arm [p. 79]." Is Beth's perception a product of her imagination, or do you think the author is suggesting that a supernatural force is at play? What impact does the incident have on Beth's attitudes and behavior? How does it relate to the title of the novel? In what sense, if any, does it represent death?
8) Why is Beth attracted to Nora? Which qualities does Nora possess that Beth admires or envies? At what point do you become aware of the sexual undercurrent in their relationship? At what point does Beth? What might explain the disparity between the two? What do you think Beth is feelings when she says, "[Nora] smiled at me under those strange two-woman eyes and watched for my every need, in the way my mother now served my father [p. 117]"? Is she comforted or unsettled by the parallels she sees? What do you think underlies Nora's interest in Beth? Does she feel a genuine love for her, or is the attraction only physical? What other motivations might Nora have for initiating an affair with Beth?
9) What role does Filthy Billy play in Beth's coming-of-age? Why do you think Anderson-Dargatz made him a victim of Tourette's syndrome, which forces him to choose between remaining silent and swearing uncontrollably? Why does she stress his unquestioning acceptance of Indian folklore and its rules and rituals? In what ways does Billy embody the intersection of the two different worlds depicted in the novel? What do Beth's feelings about him at the end of the novel show about her own maturity and self-acceptance?
10) Beth is offered the two explanations of the presence of evil in the world. "Mrs. Bell said all dirt was evil, and it was a Christian woman's duty to scrub evil away . . . Evil was what crept into your night dreams and made a sinner of you. . . . A woman must guard against the evil men brought into the house on their boots" [p. 16]. Bertha describes Coyote as "not a bad guy exactly. . . . But he's a clown, a scary little clown, like that Hitler. . . . Always beating his women. Stealing women. Killing women. . . . He doesn't know about shame, not until the end" [p. 170]. What parallels are there between these two points of view? How is each of them relevant to the questions and fears Beth has about her own sexuality?
11) Images of blood recur throughout the novel, most strikingly in the description of the smashed bodies of turtles along Blood Road [pp. 46-47]. Beth later says, "The storm had carried the red dust of Blood Road to our farm and rained it down . . . covering everything with the blood of turtles, the blood of our recklessness. The blood of a war a thousand miles away" [p. 63]. What else does blood (and the color red) symbolize in the novel?
12) What impact does the war in Europe have on this remote farming village in British Columbia? How has the departure of most of the young men for the army or for factory jobs in the city, as well as the imposition of rationing, affected the social structure of the community and the way people treat each other? In addition to the confrontation between John Weeks and Morley Boulee [p. 10], what other events in the novel reflect behavior that can be attributed to a wartime mentality? Does the picture Anderson-Dargatz draws of life on the home front conform to impressions you have formed about this period from other books or movies?
13) Myths, magic, and the surreal are mixed in with realistic descriptions of the landscape and graphic depictions of the harshness of life on the farm. How do the attitudes of Filthy Billy, Bertha, and the other Native Americans toward natural and supernatural events differ from those of the white characters? What evidence is there that Beth and her mother are more comfortable with the rhythms of the natural world--as well as the surprises it visits upon them--than John and Daniel are? Does this reflect their passive acceptance of their circumstances, or does it represent a spirituality that is lacking in the men?
14) The Cure for Death by Lightning explores many disturbing topics, including physical and psychological abuse, incest, mysterious deaths and disappearance of children, and bestiality. Did you feel that they were essential to the portrait of life Anderson-Dargatz wanted to convey or did you think that her depiction of hardships and horrors excessive? How does the style in which the novel is written, the humor with which many incidents are recounted, and the inclusion of homey recipes counteract its grim atmosphere?