Effect of Living Backwards Review

"Backwards is a colorful, bright, funny, and intriguing and you genuinely care about Alice. Her smartly off-kilter sarcasm and sharp, cynical sound bites allow her to cope... while Julavits's elliptical narrative makes our own days seem boring and linear by contrast."--- Seattle Weekly

The Effect of Living Backwards, is a story about a woman named Alice who is a dropout social work student who by "chance" gets on a plane bound for Mellila, that is hijacked by a blind man, and his two accomplices. Alice and the other passengers are taken for the most interesting flight of their lives. It is not until Alice speaks with the man named Pitcairn from the International Institute for Terrorist Studies in Lucerne that she begins to wonder about the situation and its meaning. Each of the passengers are armed with their truths and shame.

Mother’s Shame

This story is about an 18 year old girl who goes to Peru with her aunt (Aunt Bea). Aunt Bea is a pretty woman, but mocks any man who is kind to her. In Peru the first man Aunt Bea spurns is a balding English-man. In the end, her niece, who we later find is Alice’s mother, ends up sleeping with the balding man. After thinking on her escapade for a while, she and her aunt visit Machu Picchu. In the tour, she stays with the tour group but Aunt Bea soon disappears but she believes she simply decided to walk the exhibits on her own. A bony man leads Aunt Bea into the picnic area where her niece is and says he rescued her from being neck deep in a mud pit. The boy who rescued her is a bug boy at the exhibit and his name is Harold. Aunt Bea’s niece grows very fond of Harold. Ten months later, Harold tracks down the niece in the States and they agree to marry. It’s like the typical storybook ending. But The Effects of Living Backwards is not the typical storybook, so what significance does Mother’s shame story have?

Bruno’s Shame

This shame story was about how he met his wife and lost her. His wife lied to him and told him she was a part of a group that she really was not. She was a nun who left the covenant. She left because she thought very wicked thoughts about people with missing body limbs. Bruno tried to help her to see that it was nothing wrong with her and that maybe she would show affection towards someone she loved. So to help her, he got together with his fried who was a make up artist. He had the artist make him a blind man and then had him call his wife and tell her about the accident. She does not seem upset or anything and does not show any emotion. When he goes home he continues with the joke and his wife had told him a long time ago, that if anything terrible ever happen to him she would leave him. So he figured since they were married and said their vows “In sickness and in health” she would not leave him. But that part of the vow was taken out. In the end he went blind and when his wife left she never came back. To me the point of this shame story was to inform us of how he lost his sight. Not only that but also the shame of him loosing his wife because of the horrible joke he played on her. He tried to make different types of adjustments to their life to get her to stay with him such as living in the dark and wearing sunglasses so she would not have to look at him. I feel that if he would have just listened to his wife more than maybe he would not be left along. He was not understanding of her ways or feelings.

Winnie’s Shame

Winnie’s mother has a rare form of epilepsy that is triggered by smells. There was a medication she was taking but it made her gain a lot of weight and with that she was very sad. In the birth of her two daughters she never cuddled with them nor had that mother to daughter time with them, for this she decided to get off the medication and result to other methods. In order to have a better relationship with her children she put them on a strict meat only diet for a Tibetan seer said “meat makes you odorless to the enemy” (174). Winnie’s sister claimed that all the meat she was eating triggered her to have a thirst for blood. She would kill stray cats, beavers, rats and even the neighbor’s dog once. When they got to college Winnie moved into a vegetation cooperative and after college, Winnie’s sister bought an organic farm in Iowa. Things were going pretty good for the girls. Winnie decides to locate her father whose sperm was donated to her mother. She pretended to be a journalist doing an article on emerging poets. When she met up with him she asked him many questions, simply trying to get to know what he was about. Winnie went on with her lie, going back and forth from the vegetarian lifestyle to devouring herself with meat. Back at home, Winnie’s mother had a group of girls sleeping outside in tents, starving them, and put the girls through various tests as if they were in the military. Winnie’s sister caught a bunch of squirrels and began cooking them, making the young girls stomachs growl louder and louder. Winnie leaves to go to the police station to tell them what is going on back home. When they arrive back at the house they find Winnie’s mother has been suffocated to death. Winnie’s sister tells the police the hungry girls did this. Soon after the sister flies back to her farm and is not seen ever again. The funeral was attended by lots of people. Winnie goes to the casket and camera crews follow, hoping for an emotional moment from her for the movie they are making. Winnie fails to show any emotion for her mother. Interesting story indeed; Is the significance of the story the lack of a father figure, Winnie’s inability to show emotion for her mother, or is this simply a story to throw readers off?

Through out the entire story, there are many references to these shame stories. Many of the characters mention that life is meaningless, meaning is only ascribed by you. What you may find meaningful, only carries meaning to yourself. This story is a mind bender, it keeps you wondering what is real and what is not. It really shows that hind sight is the only way you can ascribe meaning.

"The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday--but never jam today."
"It must come sometimes to 'jam to-day,'" Alice objected.
"No, it can't," said the Queen."It's jam every other day: to-day isn't any other day, you know."
"I don't understand you," Alice said. "It's dreadfully confusing!"
"That's the effect of living backwards," the Queen said kindly: "it always makes one a little giddy at first--" --- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (and What Alice Found There)