Consumption

I highly recommend this book. Gave it to my father in-law who has written several books on Alaska, and the Inuit. He loved it so much that he wrote to the author. I loved this book also and like another reviewer, am really surprised this book is not winning awards all over the place. I've already gotten about 5 or 6 others to read it, am starting my own grass roots fan club for this book!

In almost whiplash fashion, Canada's Inuit people were yanked from the traditional lifestyle they had lived for centuries into what should have been for them an easier life in the small Artic communities they had only visited in the past. In a scant three generations (Patterson's book covers the 1950s to the 1990s), these people went from living "on the land" to watching their young people leave the Artic entirely in order to seek a lifestyle scarcely heard of by their grandparents. That such a rapid change was almost certain to be a destructive one does not lessen the impact of Patterson's story of the Inuit as they move from a difficult, but successful, lifestyle to one of poverty and confusion, and on to a generation of children with material and cultural desires that can no longer be satisfied in the Artic. Patterson tells the Inuit story largely through the eyes of Victoria Robinson, an Inuit woman who, when she developed tuberculosis at ten years of age, was taken from her parents and sent to Montreal for treatment. By the time that she was returned to her parents as a teenager, they were no longer living "on the land" and had moved to the small Artic town of Rankin Inlet. Victoria, now an educated young woman with some knowledge of the world, felt like an outsider when she was reunited with her family. She knew that she was different, and so did they. Her marriage to a Kablunauk, a white man, seemed inevitable to her parents, and the experiences of her bi-racial children reflect all of the pressures and desires confronted by young people who must abandon their own culture in order to have better lives than the one experienced by their grandparents and parents. Consumption is a complex, multi-generational family saga filled with numerous characters, each of which contributes to fleshing out the world that Kevin Patterson has created. Patterson does not limit himself to a single point of view, including among his characters several Kablunauk who have come to the Rankin Inlet settlement for reasons of their own, some looking for adventure, some hoping to profit financially from what they find there, and others determined to accomplish some good by working to make the lives of the locals better. Interspersed among the book's chapters are short medical science essays attributed to Keith Balthazar, the town doctor who splits his time between Rankin Inlet and his apartment in New York. Readers might be tempted to skim, or even to skip, these essays but, by doing so, would miss many details and subtleties associated with the overall story. Like each of Patterson's characters, the essays add bits and pieces of detail that help make Consumption into the moving novel that it is. It is near impossible for most readers to imagine the loneliness and isolation of the 1960s Artic settlements. Patterson not only makes it possible for us to imagine it, he achieves it in the most effective manner there is, by adding layer upon layer of de

This is probably the best book I read in 2007. It follows a woman of the Inuit tribes in northern Canada as she is treated for consumption (TB) as a child, brought to live among white Canadians, and then re-incorporated back into a changing Inuit landscape that is absorbing more and more white culture. The author tells the story from several points of view, the most interesting of which is a physician who provides a narrative history of consumption/tuberculosis. I learned a lot from those sections, as well as generally from the book about the Inuit and the travails of living in the Arctic circle. The only reason I did not give this 5 stars is because there is a plot line regarding a murder that I felt stuck out from the rest of the narrative in an uncomfortable way. I also got the sense the book was not quite sure how to finish itself. Otherwise, it was a book that was difficult to put down with very interesting and complex character development. Of particular note is how each character is depicted neither as all good or all bad (a trap that many writers fall into). Instead, each character is presented with a depth that includes both positive and negative aspects, so that ultimately we feel for these characters is the same way that we might feel for people in our real lives.

Consumption deals with the little known world of the Inuit people. Like our Amish here in America, the Inuit live a separated life; in ways,customs,dress,speech, and food. The story centers around the sensual and worldy-wise, some might say cynical, Victoria Robertson, a native Inuit who becomes pregnant with a white man's child and later marries him. Earlier in life, Victoria is severed from her Inuit world when she is ravaged by TB. Her parents send her to the city to be cared for by a religious order where she receives her elementary education and learns English, and she becomes close to a white family. When she is eventually reunited with her Inuit family, she shudders at the thought of seal meat. In time, she is hanging around town, and when diamonds are discovered and a mine is being constructed, an engineer is frequenting the stores. She hungers for knowledge of the outside world and soon strikes up a friendship with the much-older Robertson, who eventually impregnates her, then marries her. At the risk of revealing too much of the story, this book dwells heavily on the implications of what happens when cultures collide, when civilizatinos clash, when the old cannot be reconciled with the new; the results are complicated. There are a number of side plots and sub plots. The author is to be commended for not tying everything up into one neat tidy little package at the end of the book, but rather he leaves many questions unanswered. Consumption is as fine a work of fiction as I have read in a long time. There are the great existential themes that will have you putting the book down and looking out the window and pondering on life. It is a haunting work that borders on cynicism. It is, however, a tale of the tenderness, and weakness that is the human condition.

I have never written a review but I am surprised this book is not getting more attention. I read quite a few books every week and this one was exceptional. The majority of the book takes place in the Artic, a place where most of us will never visit and it has a wealth of information on the Inuit culture and history, past and present. Its story deals with universal themes of loss, adaptation to change, loneliness and isolation, and families struggling at all stages of their lives. Like life, this book takes you through every emotion. It also includes the lives of those who are not Inuit.