Debut novel creates vivid account of aging and loss
Ivory Frame, the 92-year-old protagonist of Heidi Sopinka’s powerful debut novel The Dictionary of Animal Languages, has carefully crafted her life. She lives in isolation in a small house in rural France where she continues working on the titular dictionary, a decades-long immersion in the natural world in which Frame transcribes the voices of animals. “I am attuned to sounds,” she says, describing “all the animals I have recorded, read glyphic and elemental, like songs.” Her life’s work is reels of field recordings, volumes of animal calls and utterances, and pieces of geometric art.
“I am looking at the patterns that have emerged from the sounds,” she says, a process that bridges science and art, and one which removes the observer, the artist, from the work. Just the way Frame likes it.
Her existence is shattered, however, when unsettling news arrives. The fact that her funding is being cut is bad enough. What is truly troubling, however, is the news that she has a granddaughter. “But you know how — I search for the right word — absurd this is,” she says, “seeing as I don’t have any children.”
The news serves as the catalyst for the novel, which explores Frame’s life, both in the present and the past.
Disavowed by her family, and expelled from boarding school, Frame arrived in Paris in the 1930s to study art, falling in with a group of bohemian artists and writers. In particular, her involvement with Lev, a Russian painter, broken and hard, will shape her life even seven decades later.
Kopinka, a noted writer and designer with an impressive pedigree including publication in the Believer, Toronto Life, Flare and Chatelaine, writes with a swirling style, rooted firmly in Frame’s consciousness.
The style is concrete and grounded despite its poetic quality, with a visual and auditory immersiveness which puts the reader into Frame’s sensibility. It’s not always a comfortable place, for Frame or the reader.
While this approach might initially seem off-putting or forbidding, it’s an ideal form, and one for which close-reading is important. Elements build and shift, weaving together to create a vivid and powerfully human reckoning of a life, of aging and loss, of a century of conflict, and of the relationship between the natural and the industrial world. When these elements come together in the novel’s final pages, it’s an almost overwhelming experience. Robert Wiersema’s latest book is Black Feathers.