New
York: Harcourt, Brace & Company; ISBN: 0156000024. Paperback
1993; $13. |
Consider
This, Señora
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by Harriet
Doerr
Reviewed
by Arthur
D Hayward, MD
|
Harriet
Doerr attended Smith College in her youth, but it wasn't until she reached
the age of 67 that she earned an undergraduate degree in history from
Stanford University. Then, at an age to retire, she entered the creative
writing program at Stanford and began her own career as a fiction writer.
She won awards for Stones for Ibarra in 1984; and nine years
later, at age 83, she published this gem, Consider This, Señora.
For the
increasing numbers of Americans concluding first careers and contemplating
the prospect of living another 25 or 30 years thanks to increasing longevity,
Ms Doerr's late-life emergence as a fiction writer may inspire special
admiration and raise a question. Could others of us, both physicians
and our patients, have hidden creative talent? Who will support the
exploration of that possibility? In any case, she shares with readers
the sensibility of a highly competent author whose age and maturity
seem to have brought her wisdom, understanding, and a kind of bemused
indulgence.
In Consider
This, Señora, Ms Doerr places four US expatriates in a small
town in the Mexican countryside. All are starting a new phase of their
lives: One has returned as an old woman to reconnect with the land of
her birth. Two women have been disappointed in love. A failed businessman
is in arrears in paying US taxes. Their stories illustrate how people,
displaced in time, place, and culture, gain new perspectives and grow
wiser about life's major dilemmas: love, suffering, death. The ability
of memory: "... the brilliant patchwork of a never-ending past"1p144
to console and heal and to connect characters is one of several recurrent
themes.
Though
Consider This, Señora addresses profound issues, it is
neither weighty nor ponderous. The book engages readers in short sections
that bring to life serial moments and episodes in the lives of the four
expatriates and their Mexican neighbors and friends. Making frequent
use of quotations, Ms Doerr lets characters define themselves and tell
their own stories. She also takes us inside the minds of her characters
to show how misunderstandings and bafflement can proceed from conflicting
cultural habits and preconceptions.
The book
is primarily the story of Sue, a young artist who has divorced her mountain-climbing
husband and harbors, but initially stifles, bitter memories. In two
important chapters Ms Doerr narrates how the aging widow Ursala behaves
with dignity and demonstrates both purposefulness and acceptance at
the end of life.
The language
of Consider This, Señora is uncomplicated; the narrative
moves smoothly; the book reads easily. The many pleasures of reading
this book include depictions of the landscape and scenes of everyday
life in a remote Mexican village. The authenticity of detail and the
author's gentle handling of her characters and their discoveries about
life and about themselves suggest how the author's own life has given
her the wisdom and understanding she eventually grants to her characters.
Physicians seeing aging patients will find this an often-useful book
to recommend in order to help patients see new possibilities in their
lives--if not in the lives of the doctors themselves.
Reference
1.
Doerr H. Consider this, Señora. New York: Harcourt Brace &
Co; 1993.
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