conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know a description for a book titled Elephant Winter about Award-winning, Toronto, Elephant with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Contemporary?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Award-winning author the author lives in Toronto. She is the author of Elephant Winter and Dagmar&#8217;s Daughter, and her third novel, The Disappeared, was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and won the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award for Fiction. Her most recent novel is Under the Visible Life.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Elephant Winter
  Thirty-year-old Sophie Walker is enjoying expatriate life in her adopted home of Zimbabwe, where she teaches art and studies ancient cave drawings, when she is called home to southern Ontario, Canada, to care for her dying mother. Sophie finds herself confined to her mother's home, which borders a touristy safari-zoo called Ontario Safari on the stark landscape of the old escarpment. Torn between duty and love, Sophie adopts the role of caregiver, sparking an emotional and spiritual journey. Her mother, a wildlife painter, is strong and outspoken and loving; she tells tales of her younger days living in Paris with her lover, Sophie's father. Once a vibrant and social woman, attending glamorous art openings and keeping a busy house, she has isolated herself from her friends and acquaintances during her illness, keeping company instead with her budgies and a pair of African Grays and listening to the sombre music of Arvo Pärt. In the intense daily domestic life of tending to the dying, Sophie lives moments of despair and joy and deep understanding through the daunting task of "waiting."
  Sophie watches the safari's rugged elephant-keeper, Jo Mann, walk his elephant herd each day through the frozen fields behind her mother's house. Seeing her in the window, Jo beckons her to join him. Sophie is instantly attracted to him. Slipping out of the house, she discovers unexpected life in Jo's love and in getting to know his elephants. When she becomes pregnant she observes how the elephants form themselves in a matriarchal group whose purpose is to survive, to care for their young, and to keep from boredom in their enforced captivity.
  Disrupting the calm daily routine of caring for the elephants is scientist Alecto Rikes, who arrives at the safari uninvited. Jo is concerned about Alecto's presence in the barn, and with due cause. Sophie soon learns of his past: killing wild elephants and performing autopsies to study their anatomy. Nevertheless, she is drawn to his intellect and his wide knowledge of the species, but as she gets closer to him she discovers that he possesses an even darker side. At once charming and disquieting, Alecto also fascinates Sophie's mother, who accepts his company just as she has accepted eccentrics throughout her life. When the only male elephant at the safari dies, Alecto's purpose for visiting the safari and his innate evil emerge in myriad ways.
  Q: The mother–daughter relationship is so pivotal to this story. Did you draw upon your own relationships with your mother and your children? Did you draw upon a personal experience of losing someone close to you when writing the story between Sophie and her mother?
  Our relationships with our parents and children, with caring for others, especially the marginalized and dying, demand great creativity. I have witnessed great tenderness toward the dying and from the dying. I have also witnessed people who prefer solitude as they die. All of these are personal experiences, but as a writer I want to be able to write in a way that makes the writer disappear. Our greatest writers create stories and language that go beyond their personal lives and linger in the reader's mind long after the moment of reading.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know another paragraph?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Our relationships with our parents and children, with caring for others, especially the marginalized and dying, demand great creativity. I have witnessed great tenderness toward the dying and from the dying. I have also witnessed people who prefer solitude as they die. All of these are personal experiences, but as a writer I want to be able to write in a way that makes the writer disappear. Our greatest writers create stories and language that go beyond their personal lives and linger in the reader's mind long after the moment of reading.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the last five paragraphs? End with the sentence ' I like that the silent undertow of the words has so much meaning.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Our relationships with our parents and children, with caring for others, especially the marginalized and dying, demand great creativity. I have witnessed great tenderness toward the dying and from the dying. I have also witnessed people who prefer solitude as they die. All of these are personal experiences, but as a writer I want to be able to write in a way that makes the writer disappear. Our greatest writers create stories and language that go beyond their personal lives and linger in the reader's mind long after the moment of reading.
  I used to dream frequently about elephants; they were an image that resonated with me. As I researched them I learned why they are such a powerful archetype. Not only do they embody enormous physical strength, but they have capacities of memory and sensitivity and communication that are still a source of wonder in the scientific and lay communities. They are religious symbols in some cultures; they live long lives in the wild, teach each other migration routes and language. I was especially interested in their matriarchal social structure. I wondered what it would be like to imagine a human community that was structured, after survival, on nurturing one another and the young.
  It started with imagining an idealized matriarchal culture. Language reflects our preoccupations, our social structures, our creativity. I wondered what kind of language would emerge from a matriarchal culture. Real elephant communication is rumblings in infrasound, which is too low for the human ear to detect and is felt by pressure changes in the air. My dictionary is a fiction. I divided it into sections on greetings, empathy, and nurturing, and then of course I put in the functionals that structure language and the expletives (or expressions of surprise, humour, sorrow, and wit) that are another creative component of living language.
  Q: Yes, this is a story about language and communication as much as anything else. What is the significance of language in Sophie's relationships?
  The elephants live in captivity. All the characters live in different captivities, whether alone or with others. Sophie's mother lives within the restrictions imposed on her by her illness, Jo lives with his insecurities, Sophie with having to be a caregiver before she feels ready for it. But living in these various containers helps the characters discover both their unexpected capacities and their limitations. Besides, they have no choice. It is part of being human to confront experience we do not feel ready for, and how we do this determines who we are. I allude to one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets, "Batter My Heart, Three-Person'd God," in which the poet describes faith learned in the experience of being broken. Finding the language for this was one of my challenges and I discovered it as often in rhythm as in the words themselves. I like that the silent undertow of the words has so much meaning.