The Gazette (Montreal)
June 23, 2006 Friday
Final Edition

Canadian novelists embrace diversity: Linda Ghan’s Sosi, like works
by Yann Martel and Camilla Gibb, reconciles religious identities

PAT DONNELLY, The Gazette

Sosi, by Linda Ghan, Signature Editions, 222 pages, $19.95.

– – –

Linda Ghan’s novel Sosi, like Camilla Gibb’s Sweetness in the Belly
and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, is a tale told by an orphan torn
between conflicting visions of the world.

The intent is admirable. But the execution here is not as smooth as
in Martel’s book, nor is it as deeply convincing as Gibb’s. Still,
Sosi is a warm, embracing read, leavened with a wry sense of humour.

Sosi, like Gibb’s Lilly, is raised by people whose background is
different from that of her parents. She is born to an Armenian
Christian mother and a Turkish Muslim father who see to it, before
they are murdered, that she is handed over to a kind-hearted Jewish
couple – the Reijskinds. In Sweetness in the Belly, after the death
of Lilly’s British parents, she is brought up in a mosque in Morocco
by a kindly Sufi Muslim scholar. Martel’s Pi Patel, who loses his
parents in a shipwreck, reconciles several religions in his mind as
he drifts across the ocean on a raft with a tiger.

Welcome to post-colonial, post-provincial CanLit in a globalized
world. Diversity to the max.

Sosi, whose Turkish name is Zeyneb, or "blessed one," reverts to her
Armenian name, Sosi Arta, as part of her strategy to avoid marrying a
Turkish boy whom she does not like. When her adoptive family moves to
Jerusalem, she meets and falls in love with Ara, a young Armenian
photographer with political inclinations. He wants to return to
Turkey to record evidence of the persecution of Armenians, which has
continued many years after the genocide of 1915-16. Shortly after the
birth of their baby, he leaves, on a false passport, to pursue his
quest.

Sosi soon loses hope of his return and moves to Montreal with their
daughter Sammi, determined to make a fresh start. Her reasoning is
based on a idealist’s view of Canada: "Sammi would grow up in a
country that had no massacres, no wars, no genocides. She would speak
their language, learn their stories, and play their games. She would
know only songs of life. She had a right to know nothing of the
history that had consumed her father, nothing of those who had driven
him to it: you couldn’t know so much about dying and not belong to
it."

Sosi’s rebellion against the past leads to her discovery of booze,
cigarettes, jazz and illicit romance in Montreal. Her adventures
allow the author, who has lived in Montreal off and on for many
years, a wonderful opportunity to write about familiar haunts within
the time frame of the 1950s.

Ghan’s writing, like her life, has been all over the map. Brought up
Jewish in Weyburn, Sask., she taught in Jamaica for several years
before moving to Montreal, where she produced a radio show, taught
creative writing at Concordia and wrote plays. Her children’s play,
Muhla, The Fair One, was produced by Black Theatre Workshop. She once
served a term as president of the Federation of English Writers of
Quebec (FEWQ). In 1996, she moved to Japan. She continued her career
as a journalist and teacher at Ibaraki University, where she led the
Canadian Studies department, and became a literary journalist,
writing for Japanese daily newspapers.

Her first novel was A Gift of Sky (1989). Her most recent book was
Gaston Petit: The Kimono and the Cross (2002), based on a series of
interviews with Petit, a Dominican priest.

Sosi is dedicated to the memory of noted Montreal carpet merchant
Kerop Bedoukian, whom Ghan became friends with after interviewing him
on her radio program. He was a survivor of the Armenian genocide who
helped other Armenians escape to Canada during the 1950s.

Bedoukian’s stories formed the main inspiration for this book. Sosi
takes us on an emotionally eventful journey from Turkey to Israel to
Canada. That this young woman’s struggle to transcend history
eventually finds a peaceful equilibrium offers comfort to the reader,
perhaps a little too easily. Ghan slips, occasionally, into
pulp-fiction glib.

Her summary of Middle Eastern politics seen through the eyes of an
Israeli-Armenian character is overly simplistic: "She had gone to
school with Baha’i, Greek Orthodox, Abyssinian, Muslim, Jew, Catholic
Armenian and Gregorian Armenian. They had learned each other’s
languages; they had respected each other’s church bells, chants,
prayers and holy days – until the British came along with
simultaneous offers of a homeland to the Jews and sovereignty to the
Arabs, allowing the Arabs to attack the Jews, and the Jews to
counterattack the Arabs, betraying them both and pulling out when
they were asked by the United Nations to oversee the peace. Now we,
the Armenians, were caught in the middle, of secondary consideration
in the old city as well as in the new Israel."

Much of the charm of the novel lies in the fact that Sosi, like Pi
Patel, Lilly, little orphan Annie and Oliver Twist before them, is
almost impossible to dislike.

In fact, if it weren’t for the inclusion of Sosi’s X-rated adventures
in Montreal, the book could be mistaken for teen literature.

pdonnell@thegazette.canwest.com

GRAP HIC:
Photo: SIGNATURE EDITIONS; Linda Ghan’s career, and her life, have
been all over the map.