Karen Zelas
Wiley Publications
Otago Daily Times, July 17th 2010
When I finished Past Perfect by Karen Zelas I was left in something of a quandary. On the one hand, I’m not sure the world needs yet another novel about a woman going through a midlife crisis. In this respect, the story’s protagonist Sue Spencer checks all the conventional boxes. Breast cancer scare, tick. Straying husband, tick. Career sacrificed for motherhood, tick. Wayward teenage son, tick. Elderly parent with Alzheimer’s, tick. Her chosen path of self-discovery involves researching her family genealogy, starting with her great great great grandmother Brigitte Dujardin, who arrived at Akaroa in 1840 as a 17 year-old bride. She follows the trail to France and back, finding revelations, temptations, and resolutions on the way.
Despite this, Zelas avoids the more obvious clichés. Although Sue’s story is interleaved with extracts of Brigitte’s letters home to her mother, she doesn’t conveniently stumble over this correspondence, which provide a snapshot of physical, political, social and personal challenges facing the French settlers. The letters provide information Sue must find for herself while condensing her own research in an accessible form for the reader. Nor does her life parallel Brigitte’s, a conceit I particularly dislike.
The writing is also better average. Some metaphors left me slightly startled (lovemaking like “trying to catch an eel …[that] slipped away into the murky depths and all you had in your grasp was slime”), but others lingered in my mind. Of Sue’s father’s passing, for example, we are told “The pause had grown into silence and the silence into death…[t]he edentulous mouth hung open.”
On balance, though, I was left feeling that Past Perfect didn’t quite live up to the promise of its title.
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