Book review: SOMEONE YOU LOVE IS GONE by Gurjinder Basran

There’s a point just over halfway through Gurjinder Basran’s novel, “Someone You Love Is Gone”, when the totality of the emotional world her novel conveys is brought into brilliant highlight.

Basran writes a brief but evocative epic across generations of an Indian-Canadian family whose lives have mostly played out in a fictionalized BC south mainland, yet remain equally emotionally rooted in their family’s past in the north of India. The book is rooted in the present, as denoted by the headings of its “Now” chapters, but likewise the cavernous emotional spaces portrayed by Basran echo backward, receding through the emotional spaces of Then, Before. And it’s within this architecture of emotional time – soupy, muddled, remoulding perceptions – that we meet Simran, who is grieving the death of her mother. Simran is increasingly unmoored from time, from her relationships, from the mundane realities of work and home life, and into a nearly transcendent state of grief, driving her toward a crisis point.  Much of what Basran thus accomplishes is to create an emotional landscape that flickers as if with the changing light of shifting clouds: a changeable, motile atmosphere in which we can meet without great disbelief the novel’s most ephemeral character: the hallucination, or maybe the haunting, of Simran’s mother, Amrit.

The dislocating presence of grief: that’s the novel’s overarching theme, and it’s the force against which Simran struggles. Grief: it displaced her brother Diwa from his family for decades. It’s a silent presence that has worn down Simran’s marriage, riven a distance between mothers and daughters, and it’s a weight that has been passed down, ever heavier, through generations.

And so, at this midpoint in the novel, there’s a fulcrum point, where the hazy and thick emotional atmosphere of the novel, this river of grief thus far, is weighed against the counterpoint of the measures of grief which Simran is handed: A pamphlet from a funeral home that gives rise to the novel’s title; the recollection of a postpartum depression assessment tool that seems hopelessly futile. Arriving one chapter after another, they stand to establish the meagre support tools given Simran to comprehend grief, and to cope with it. It’s in this contrast that the real work of Basran’s novel makes itself clear: to attempt to draw a family story commensurate to the measure of grief. Simran, her often missing brother Diwa, their often emotionally distant sister Jyoti: each carries the imprint of their own grief as well as of the grievous circumstances of their parent’s lives.

As the novel begins its long, slow landing from the fulcrum point, and as Simran’s emotional life begins to be written into a sharper focus, so does Basran bring into a clearer narrative the tragedies of Simran’s parents’ lives: the secrets that they lived with, the choices that they made as well as the burdens thrust upon them. By the end of the novel, there’s a glimmer of Simran’s hopes for lightening her grief enough to bear it. How do you move on from the past? the book’s characters ask, repeatedly. Basran has plotted many different possible paths through, and so concludes with Simran, unresolved but firm in a determination that the time to reckon with the past has arrived.

Book details: 

Someone You Love Is Gone

by Gurjinder Basran

Publisher: Penguin Canada

Publication date: August 29, 2017

ISBN: 9780735233423

Thanks to the publisher for the privilege of an advance reader copy.