In the court of the snake king, the king sits on his throne, often in the dark, and sheds his skin daily, shrugging off flakes of the past, of guilt and responsibility. In the court of the snake king, everybody carries a gun to fend off rattlesnakes while being lethally charmed by the snake king himself. In the court of the snake king, the snake king is god and he awaits the return of the prodigal son. Hollis Woolf is the snake king.
After finding a gun in Curtis’s cabin, Martha, who was already starting to have religious doubts, leaves the Family and the peace-loving commune of Soltane. Wanting to have a better understanding of Curtis, and the reason he possesses a gun, she decides to follow his journey, pieced together from the mythical stories he would tell about himself, down to his place of origin. There, she discovers Curtis the criminal, Curtis, the chosen son of the patriarch, Hollis, who, whether sitting in his darkened room or lying in a hospital bed, controls his family through fear. Knowing that Curtis will try to bring Martha back, everybody waits for his second coming.
With Perfecting, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer creates a world where every detail is a clue and every thread counts, where characters understand each other with very few words and readers have to pay attention. Kuitenbrouwer plays with language deftly and uses the same words, the same symbols, to describe two different things. Though this technique could create confusion and dilute an image, her skill, in fact, gives these things, these people and these events more depth. For instance, after describing the land at the very beginning of the book, Kuitenbrouwer uses only one of the same words to describe Martha, which opens up our understanding of Martha’s physicality:
“The land around was a red-skinned beauty with hips to make a man cry or dare to touch.”
“Martha was a beauty…”
Furthermore, nature and characters are also described in the same way. Not only does this make a character of Nature, but it also makes the characters beings that can be threatening and soothing at once, beings that seem to have little control over their actions, their destinies.
Perfecting, a book of rare quality and beauty, commands a slow, savouring read because no word is wasted and every sentence is heavy with meaning. Moreover, because all of the character’s past is so present in his or her mind — a past that clings like a skin they can’t molt, unlike Hollis, whose skin condition allows him to constantly renew himself — the narrative flows effortlessly between the past and the present with very little warning, thereby forcing readers to pay all the more attention. Kuitenbrouwer demands a lot from her readers, but every effort pays off tenfold.
Mélanie Grondin is a writer and translator living on the south shore of Montreal. Her prose and poetry have appeared in carte blanche, Soliloquies, Headlight Anthology, Room Magazine and Nashwaak Review.
