John Elizabeth Stintzi's ​Vanishing Monuments

Reviewed by Alanna Why

(Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020)

“[E]veryone’s childhood home is haunted. And everyone goes back.” Published in April by Vancouver-based Arsenal Pulp Press, Vanishing Monuments is the debut novel from non-binary Canadian writer and poet John Elizabeth Stintzi. The story is told from the point-of-view of Alani Baum, a non-binary photographer and professor in their late 40s, who returns to their childhood home in Manitoba for the first time in three decades after their Mother’s dementia significantly worsens in a long-term care home.
               
Vanishing Monuments is a non-linear and deeply interior meditation on memory, gender and trauma. For Alani, returning to their childhood home is equal parts memories and triggers. Throughout the novel, Stintzi guides the reader through each room of the house, dubbed by Alani their “Memory Palace,” and which events each room re-awakens in their mind. The tour starts on the main floor of the house in the hallway, living room and kitchen, before ascending the stairs to the narrator’s old bedroom, as well as their Mother’s room and studio.
 
The novel switches point-of-view throughout the story, going from first- to second-person, with Baum addressing themselves when certain memories are triggered. For instance, when going from the upstairs bathroom to their childhood bedroom, Alani suddenly addresses themselves and their feeling of lacking control by being back at the house for the first time in 30 years: 

“[W]ho said remembering is easy? Who said that you should be able to waltz through life nodding to the things you’ve passed by? No. That’s not what remembering is. Remembering is being dragged through the waist-deep rubble of the whole of your life - what you’ve lived and what you are living - without being able to get free.”  

These flexible point-of-view changes underscore the novel’s greater themes of memory and memory loss. While their Mother is dying of dementia, Alani also experiences thought slippages and spirals when returning to the home that is their source of childhood trauma. The non-linear narrative constantly shifts from the present to the past, and it is not until the end of the novel that the reader is able to make sense of the timeline of events presented. Likewise, this underscores the themes of difficult memories and deep wounding, as recollections of traumatic events rarely occur in a linear fashion.
 
This spiralic presentation of events also speaks to the theme of Alani’s experiences of gender nonconformity. At various points, Alani presents themselves under different names and pronouns. The reader comes to know them not only as Alani in the present day, but by all the identities they have had and continue to present themselves by. In doing so, Stintzi underscores how time, memory and gender are all spirals; they are not as linear or binary as one is led to believe, but in fact constantly move and change. The sudden use of second-person speaks to this queer feeling of fluidity; for instance, reflecting on their childhood, Alani says, “I didn’t realize that the ways I was feeling were queer. It’s hard to realize that you feel different from how you’re seen when the only pronoun you grow up hearing every day is you.”
 
While their childhood home functions as their most frequent memory site, Alani also presents the reader with the vanishing monument the novel takes its title from. After leaving the United States to live in Germany, from which Alani and their Mother first emigrated to Canada, Alani becomes fascinated with the Monument Against Fascism, a permanent installation of a 12-metre lead column in Hambourg, Germany, that citizens were invited to write on and that was slowly lowered into the ground. As Alani states, “Most monuments… make you think that there is only one version of something that you should remember. They make you think the past is clean and over.” The Monument Against Fascism, however, reflects the more shifting recollection of the past that speaks to Alani’s experience of memory, gender and time.
 
Still, the most significant monuments in the novel are the window of Alani’s childhood bedroom and the pry bar they used to escape it with. Early in the story, the reader learns that Alani used this pry bar to undo the window and run away in the middle of the night when they were 17. It is a scene that Stintzi returns to again and again, unveiling another layer of information each time that the memory is processed in Alani’s mind. These objects are significant because not only do they represent the very last moment in their childhood home, but also how crucial this escape was to Alani’s freedom and becoming. Both objects function as monuments to memory and identity, and to how Alani is inextricably linked to the past, their Mother, and the house upon their return. As they note at the end of the novel, “As I get out, I look up at the window, the small, simple shape through which the most seismic action of my life took place. A decision I could never excise from me, because it is me. I am the window, the frame, its replacement.” Ultimately, this return and reflection allows for Alani’s wounding from the past to be processed, even if it’s not - and could never be - completely healed. 

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Alanna Why is a pop culture, essay and fiction writer from Ottawa, Ontario. Her writing has appeared in Shameless, Razorcake, The Le Sigh, Weird Canada and Also Cool Mag. She is currently working on a novel about a long-lost ‘90s musician and a chapbook about Survivor. Find her on Instagram and Twitter: @alanna_why.