Catherine Cooper's ​Lásko

Reviewed by Marcie McCauley

(Freehand Books, 2023)

Whether Catherine Cooper’s second novel Lásko is titled for ‘love’ as an emotion, or as a term of endearment that substitutes for a proper name, is unresolved. But Mája is so absorbed by her relationship with Kuba that such a distinction seems petty anyhow.

Mája leaves Canada for the Czech Republic in 2015, to explore her ancestry and to postpone her marriage; Kuba furthers both goals, and their relationship develops quickly and intensely. “We have very few shared cultural references,” she says, “so instead of discovering what we both love, I discover what he loves, and he loves when I love it.”

Love is abundant, then overwhelming—and, indeed, Mája is overwhelmed. By what she feels for Kuba. By what he contributes to her desire to understand Czech culture (especially the songs he sings, which remind her of her mother’s singing when Mája was a girl). By her desire for him. And by her view of herself through his eyes. But she is also overwhelmed by the dimensions of Kuba’s spiritual quest, which encourages both extensive travel and intimacy with other seekers.

Rooted in Mája’s perspective, readers are overwhelmed alongside her. When stressed, she loses herself in other people’s words, which was true even before she travelled to Czechia: “The only thing left—the only thing that’s ever been left when there’s nothing else left—was books.” Sharing the books that mattered to her—Krishnamurti, Pema Chödrön, Thich Nhat Hanh—with her fiancé added distance to their relationship; with Kuba, this intensifies their connection. But his capacity to connect is problematic for Mája in other ways. Reading about trouble in a fictional relationship (it risks spoiling to identify the classic novel), Mája remains untouched: “They’re just characters in a story,” she says. But off the page, Mája is troubled.

There’s a sense that Mája has uprooted herself because she doesn’t feel like she is inhabiting her own story. In Cooper’s first novel, White Elephant (2016), one of the three narrators expresses something similar: “This was the way she was—more like a character in a story about herself than a real person.” There, too, Cooper examines how a new environment can impact perspectives and behaviours through a couple and their young son who leave their Nova Scotian home for Sierra Leone, where they, too, face challenges that highlight the body-mind-spirt connection. (Questions about belonging are also probed in her debut The Western Home: Stories for Home on the Range [2014], stories linked by the song in its subtitle.)

Inhabiting her own story has a cost attached for Mája, and the precarity she inhabits is presented in detail and with tenderness. As the novel develops, dialogue in a series of more populated scenes (often gatherings that Mája and Kuba attend) invites readers to broaden their perspectives. When Mája marvels at the idea that she’s “never experienced this kind of communication”, readers have an opportunity to privately query whether Kuba’s expression of “a fresh flame in my heart if I think about you” reveals a unique passion or an uncontrolled blaze.

Because when Mája expresses how she feels about his interactions with other young women, Kuba responds perfectly: “It’s better than arguing,” she says, but “it’s also like hitting a wall.”

There’s nowhere for the emotion to go:

​“Do we need to discuss more?” he asks. “Or can we let it go now?”
“We can let it go.”
He says, “This is heaven.”
“It is,” I say. “Once upon a time.”

But “once upon a time” belongs in a book, and Mája has yet to determine whether she wants to be the heroine of her own story. Whether her ideas about heaven align with Kuba’s—or anyone else’s ideas. Whether there are discussions she must have with herself—or let go. Whether anyone else truly matters.

What elevates Lásko beyond a character study is the intersection of questions that Mája confronts: “Until I turned thirty, I thought thirty was the age when people became adults,” she observes. Her grieving of her mother’s suicide exacerbates her urgent need to connect: “It’s probably not a coincidence that it’s also the age my mother was when she left.” She’s looking for answers and feeling “fed up with the simplistic, aggressively positive takes on world religions, and how they talk about the outside world as if it’s this homogeneous, bad thing.” But her inside world is in disarray, mirroring the fragmentation and loss that surround her. Connection proves not only desirable but essential: connection outward, yes, but inward too.
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Even without an actual resolution, at the end of the novel readers understand that Mája’s patience is waning—her patience with reading other people’s love stories and with writing communications for fundraising committees. Because Lásko exists, readers know that she finds a way to inhabit and tell her own story. Beneath the story’s surface, however, is a foundational question that readers are invited to contemplate: how do we remain true to ourselves in the presence of a powerful story that we long to believe, when we don’t yet know where we belong?

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​Marcie McCauley's work has appeared in Room, Other Voices, Mslexia, Tears in the Fence and Orbis, and has been anthologized by Sumac Press. She writes about writing at marciemccauley.com and about reading at buriedinprint.com. A descendant of Irish and English settlers, she lives in the city currently called Toronto, which was built on the homelands of Indigenous peoples—Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg, Huron-Wendat and Mississaugas of New Credit—land still inhabited by their descendants.