Here is the original copy of a review before it was hacked exstensively by an editor. I rolled with the punches and received monetary compensation.

In Fond Remembrance of Me: A Memoir of Myth and Uncommon Friendship in the Arctic

By Howard Norman

North Point Press

(c) 2005 by Howard Norman

166 pages $21.00

Non-fiction/memoir

Currently available as of February 28th 2005



"What good is intelligence if you cannot discover a useful melancholy?"

-Ryunosuke Akutagawa





Howard Norman writes, in his new book, In Fond Remembrance of Me: A Memoir of Myth and Uncommon Friendship in the Arctic. "Memory is more a séance than anything replete with desire to resurrect original presences and attendant emotions."

How many of us wish they can go back and have a second chance to explain to a departed loved one just how much they mean to us and the impact they have had on our lives? The opportunity to tell them with a clarity, wisdom and hindsight that comes with the passage of time their importance without a sense of immediacy or choking loss and maintain a bitter-sweet perspective even while nursing a pang of their memory within our chests. Howard Norman has accomplished this and more.

In 1977 Norman was hired by a museum to travel to Churchill Manitoba in the Canadian Arctic to translate into English Inuit "Noah stories" told by an Inuit elder named Mark Nuqac in which the biblical Noah and his family somehow became lost and stuck in the ice on an arc full of animals the Inuit had never seen but thought they might be edible. While in Churchill, Norman met Helen Tanizaki who was translating the "Noah Stories" into Japanese. As their friendship progressed he learned she was dying from cancer. ..."linguist, translator, diarist, prodigious writer of letters...I knew Helen in Churchill, Manitoba, in 1977 during September and October, the first week of November in Halifax, and in letters sent from Japan until her death in the summer of 1978...perhaps the most introspective person I've know...born in London and raised in Japan..."

While Norman was gathering together his various writings to be placed in a "Special Collections at Boston University he, "...discovered the loose leaf journals I kept during my stay in Churchill. I was surprised and pleased to find out how dedicated I was to these journals...the journals served as the basic for In Fond Remembrance of Me."

Seemingly a short and light book Remembrance is deceptively complex. It is a love story without the usual psycho sexual babble that complicates relationships between men and women and a coming of age story where Norman learns an unconditional love.

In Fond Remembrance of Me is a lyrical tapestry that Norman has woven together by looking back at his journals, memories, his translations of "Noah Stories" and his relationship with Helen Tanizaki through the eyes of acquired life experience. The "Noah Stories" somehow compliment and enhance his writing. A refined sadness and humor is balanced with wisdom, wit and intelligence that only hindsight could bring and create a "useful melancholy".

Howard Norman is the author of five novels, including The Haunting of L, The Bird Artist and Northern Lights. He lives with his family in Vermont and Washington, D.C.