SPEAKING OF ANIMALS
Debut novel rooted in fundamental human concerns
The Dictionary of Animal Languages Heidi Sopinka Hamish Hamilton
The music of insects. Yellow as the colour of red. The lie that tells the truth. Clouds eaten by the moon. Throwing your nightmare into the sea. The delicate vibration of butterfly wings.
Such imagery floats effortlessly through the landscape of Heidi Sopinka’s debut novel, The Dictionary of Animal Languages. And in a way, it provides a portal into another dimension — into an extended dreamscape.
Yet it’s the work of an engaging Torontonian whose previous lives seem resolutely earthbound — helicopter pilot, bush cook in the Yukon, travel writer, magazine editor and co-founder of the trendy fashion brand Horses Atelier. It’s also a novel devoted to fundamental human concerns — life, love death, art, communication — as filtered through the prism of its 92-yearold narrator.
“It’s hard to know what people will take away from it,” Sopinka says in an interview at her Toronto publisher’s office. “I knew I was trying to ask some really big questions, so I guess that if anyone feels a little less alone in the world after reading this book, that would be wonderful.”
It’s not just the mystery of living that fuels her new novel. It’s also the mystery of language and communication. Only in the world of a book like this would we be reminded of the ancient language of birds.
“Well, they do speak an old language,” Sopinka says matter-offactly. “They’ve been living a lot longer than we have.”
She’s been an avid reader throughout her life. “I always thought reading had the power to alter you. But I was also torn by the notion that words often miss the mark and say nothing. And I think, ironically, that this led to my compulsion to write — to try and find the truth about what I knew.”
The novel is a memory piece. Ivory Frame is a brilliant artist and scientist — still formidable at 92 as she pursues her final obsession, the compiling of a dictionary of animal languages. “What is communication?” she asks at one point. “What is silence?” How does one communicate the “wordless yearning of animals?”
But Ivory, who never married, is also haunted by a past that rises up to confront her when she learns in the twilight of life that she has a granddaughter. So the memories insistently resurface: her early years as an artist in Paris seeking to make her name with the avant garde, the lure of the Zoological Gardens, her love affair with an exiled Russian artist named Lev, the dislocation of the Second World War, mental breakdown, and more.
The inspiration for Ivory’s character is renowned English surrealist Leonora Carrington, an artistic free spirit who so fascinated Sopinka when she stumbled on Carrington’s novel, The Hearing Trumpet, that the younger writer — learning that she was still alive — set out to meet her.
“I started reading all her strange writings,” Sopinka says now. “And when I realized that the heroine of that novel was 92, the same age as the heroine of my novel, and then found out that Leonora herself was 92, I felt I had to meet her.”
So Sopinka flew to Mexico City, where the aging Carrington now made her home. “I hoped she wouldn’t refuse me when I showed up on her doorstep. I felt she would hold the secrets of what I was trying to unlock in my book.”
Her two days in the company of Carrington, who died three years later, proved to be of immense value to Sopinka in the creation of her own novel.
“Leonora, like Ivory, falls madly in love with a person who may or may not be good for her. And then war comes. It’s hard to imagine those times, but I felt Leonora’s story helped me locate some of my own novel in surrealist Paris, a larger-than-life place in those days.”
Becoming a mother was another factor in the novel’s creation.“I guess I have to say that when I had my first child, I became obsessed with death, with the difference between being and non-being, and how vast and abrupt it is. I thought of it as a cosmic joke: In birth, two people walk into a room and three come out; in death, one person goes in and no one comes out.
“I became fixated on that, and then jumped to the idea of an old woman coming up to dying but not yet dying. So I started reading about women in their 90s who were still working and living full, rich lives. They became my mentors.”
Sopinka initially sought to write a linear narrative — but it wasn’t working for her.
“I tried to write it in a more conventional way, and it didn’t feel truthful. I felt that to present the events sequentially really took away their power. I felt that’s not the way memory comes to us — it comes to us in fragments.
“That’s why I structured the book with two basic time periods — a woman at the ages of 19 and 92. I liked the notion that there’s more than one self — particularly after a traumatic event where you can’t be the same person you were before.”
But she did struggle with the tone, saying that although she wanted to write an “old lady novel” she didn’t want it to be sentimental.
“I remember Elena Ferrante saying that once you got the tone, that was the engine of the story. So in addition to elements in Ivory ’s life, which are really fantastical and wild and fascinating, I found her curt, non-sentimental tone was a gift to me as a writer.”
Some early readers urged Sopinka to soften Ivory and make her more likable.
“I felt I couldn’t do that,” she says. “The whole point was that I wanted a character who lived as she pleased.”