radiant press
Review by Brian Tanguay
The central event in Suzy Krause’s latest novel, I Think We’ve Been Here Before, is the end of the world. Sometime just after Christmas and before the new year is a few days old, a double gamma ray burst from deep space will destroy the ozone layer and incinerate the Earth.
This apocalyptic premise reminded me of the movie Melancholia, which also turns on an impending disaster from deep space, although it’s treated far more darkly than you will find here. Common to both, however, are the human reactions to the news that the world is doomed, and what becomes meaningful in the face of extinction, and how the characters choose to spend their last days and hours, whether in despair, denial or hovering somewhere in between. Shock gives way to doubt and confusion, and then an interregnum where people and communities seek any way possible to maintain some sort of routine normalcy. People need something or someone to cling to.
When we encounter nineteen-year-old Nora for the first time, she’s reeling from a broken heart after a breakup with Derek, her high school sweetheart. Nora’s emotional devastation is so profound that she seeks a fresh start, not in a neighboring town or province, but a different country. This puzzled me at first: why would a young woman from remote southwest Saskatchewan, move to Berlin, Germany, a place where she has no family ties or other connections? Why not move to Los Angeles or New York? Or better yet, Toronto? It’s a radical decision, and tells us something about Nora, and also her family, who allowed her the freedom to make a decision as irrational and illogical as youthful romance itself.
While Nora sorts herself out in Berlin, there’s bad news back home: Marlen, her father, has received a terminal cancer diagnosis. Marlen puts on a brave front and tries to face his demise with a matter-of-factness that sits very uncomfortably with his wife, Hilda, and the other members of the family. Everyone is feeling vulnerable even before the news of the world’s end arrives and upends everything.
But now another twist in the story: in stolen moments for more than a year Marlen has quietly and secretly written a book with the exact premise that now confronts them all, namely the end of life on Earth caused by a double gamma ray blast. Predicted it as if he’d lived through it before. Marlen fancies himself a prophet, and in fact the germ of his novel came to him as a teenager. Has he really been able to see and write the end of the world?
Krause works in some romance between Nora and Jacob, a German she meets at a coffee shop — he works there from time to time, she has applied for a job — and on their first meeting she has the feeling it’s not the first time. There are many deja vu moments in I Think We’ve Been Here Before, eerie, skin-tingling recognition that causes a feeling of certainty without any evidence. “This man is as familiar as her childhood home, a place she lived in that now lives in her. She has kissed him. Held his hand, cried on his shoulder.”
I don’t know if death is in the eye of the beholder, as Marlen says. Perhaps we do live our lives over and over until we get it right, achieve perfection. This notion is certainly more hopeful than thinking it all comes down to a final explosion of light, and then darkness. It’s an odd thing to say, but Krause renders the end of the world rather beautifully.
