The Beech Forestby Marlis WesselerPublished by Thistledown PressReview by Brandon Fick$24.95 ISBN 9781771872546 The Beech Forest by Marlis Wesseler is a novel that combines day-to-day life in rural Saskatchewan with a gradual reckoning with the Holocaust on the part of its protagonist, Lisa Braun. Lisa is a middle-aged retiree, a wife and a mother – with all the attendant regrets and worries – who is mostly separate from her German husband, Gerhardt, throughout the course of the novel. This causes her to reflect upon her marriage and far-flung children, induces general restlessness, and transforms a semi-detached understanding of the Holocaust into a morbid, all-consuming fascination. The latter is incited by meeting Ben Meisner, an elderly Jewish man who was interned at Buchenwald. Meisner’s harrowing recollection of life under Nazi Germany, coming at the novel’s midpoint, is the hinge that pulls all the story’s disparate threads together. Wesseler’s writing is clear and understated. Much like the pristine German beech forest Lisa walks through in the opening scene, there is no “excess of any kind.” But while there are no rhetorical fireworks, secrets and ironies – familial, cultural, interpersonal – abound. The largest irony being that Buchenwald means “beech forest” in German….

The Rasmussen Papersby Connie GaultPublished by Thistledown PressReview by Brandon Fick$24.95 ISBN 9781771872539 Connie Gault’s The Rasmussen Papers is a precise work of psychological realism about one woman’s obsessive quest to gain access to the papers of a deceased poet, Marianne Rasmussen, in order to write her biography. Readers enter the mind of an unnamed narrator who bluffs her way into lodging with Rasmussen’s former lover, the almost-centenarian Aubrey Ash, and his eighty-year-old brother, Harry, who live in an aging townhouse in Toronto’s Cabbagetown. Gault’s novel toys with the premise of Henry James’ 1888 novella, The Aspern Papers, but no knowledge of that book is required to enjoy this deft look at a lonely soul. One of the book’s major strengths is the narrator’s observations of those around her, whether it’s Aubrey’s “shiny, scaly, scabby scalp, his dandruff sprinkled Ray-Bans, the blue vein like a snake at his temple,” or in a key turning point, a female addict with the “look of having been eroded from the inside.” But there is a limit to these observations. What does the narrator really see? There’s more to the situation with Aubrey and Harry, Marianne’s poetry, the marginalized people she encounters, and even…