The Only Snow in Havana

Rating:
Summary: A writer's bleak notebook
Review: An episodic journey along a journalist's life with stops in Mexico, Canada's far North, and New York City. All journalists seem to serve an apprenticeship [a penance?] on Manhattan Island. Hay's career with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation finely honed her "people instincts"

Hay has given us an episodic journey through a journalist's life. The tour takes us to Mexico, Canada's far North and urban centres and, of course, New York City [nearly all journalists seem to serve an apprenticeship - penance?? - in NYC]. Hay's journey brings her in contact with various people, but it's her emotional links that become the focus in this book. With women, there's a strange ambivalence. She's clearly seeking friends, but keeping them requires something difficult for her to grasp. Her relationship with men is worse. She sheds a husband. She acquires a lover, then a baby. And loses a dog. As well as a friend to AIDS.

If these jerky sentences seem difficult, wait until you enter Elizabeth Hay's world. Her mind skips from place to place and condition to condition. Snow is an underlying theme, as is fur. In Canada, of course, snow and fur have a tightly entwined relationship. Winter is the best season for taking fur-bearing animals. Hay relates stories from the headiest days of the fur trade. The trade, of course, evolved from the intrusion of the European explorers. Hay delves into the private lives of several - Champlain, Hearne, Thompson, Hall - revealing overlooked foibles [Champlain's wife was eleven years of age when they married]. These accounts show Hay at her best, but then she relapses into her own relationships. The tie between these conditions are tenuous, at best.

If you're looking for insights into the workings of a traveller's mind, this is a good start. If instead, you want to learn how a journalist, even a radio journalist works, this isn't the place. If fact, if you want to learn anything about people in general, this isn't revealing. What we have is the introspections of someone troubled, and troubling. It's not a pleasant read, and only marginally enlightening. There is little, if anything, to inspire the reader to follow or avoid a course of action. This is evidence for a specialist's investigation. Why it was published remains a mystery. Except, perhaps, as a foundation for Hay's other books. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]