Toronto Book Awards 2002 short list:
Ten Good Seconds of Silence
by Elizabeth Ruth
Published by The Dundurn Group
This biographical information and excerpt is posted courtesy of The Dundurn Group.
Ten Good Seconds of Silence
Ten Good Seconds of Silence is the story of Lilith Boot, a psychic single mother who "finds" missing children inside the Allan Gardens Conservatory, and of her relationship with her daughter Lemon, who longs to know her father. On a deeper level it's a tale about "seeing", about the gap between how we perceive ourselves and how others choose to see us. Ruth uses metaphor - "the only mother tongue" - to explore the nebulous concept of what it means to be "normal" and to love what you've never known - a lost child, an absent parent. This novel tackles the age-old triad of women, motherhood and madness with fresh insight, connecting the issues to urban social realities.
Elizabeth Ruth
Elizabeth Ruth is a Toronto-based writer whose short fiction has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies across Canada. Ten Good Seconds of Silence, her debut novel, was short-listed for the 2001 Roger's Writers' Trust of Canada Fiction Prize and for the 2002 Amazon.com/Books In Canada First Novel Award. Elizabeth writes book reviews for the Globe and Mail, is an editor with Fireweed Journal, teaches short story writing at George Brown College and has recently been elected to the position of Ontario rep for the Writers' Union of Canada. She holds a BA in English Literature and an MA in Counselling Psychology, both from the University of Toronto. Ruth is also a graduate of the Humber School for Writers.
Ten Good Seconds of Silence - excerpt
"From Gerrard or Jarvis Streets, the Allan Gardens Conservatory with its glass dome ceiling and ornate fence could be mistaken for one of Toronto's many churches. Lilith Boot looks forward all week to visiting, to inhaling the succulent heat. Some might say a greenhouse is a poor excuse for the outdoors, but she insists it's a perfect compromise: halfway between wilderness and civilization. In fact, she's solved some of her hardest cases sitting there. Lilith works best surrounded by all that optimism - even if it is man-made.
In the police station where she also works, she's filled her office with trimmings from spider plants, sat clay pots with hydrangea in all four corners, and stood a three-foot rubber tree beside her desk. Still she has not managed to reproduce the texture and sensuality of the greenhouse, where her fingertips pucker as though she's lingered too long in a bath. She needs to be pliant and surrounded by life in order to receive her visions. Seeing is a porous business. Leaky. Information seeps into the lining of her tissue like aged wine through the cork. Images trickle into her bloodstream. Sensations ooze down her spinal column one vertebra at a time. Before Lilith knows it, she is soaked. And she can't close her eyes; they don't belong to just her any more. So she rolls back in her head and tries to find children. Rolls back like thunder and looks there, where everything spills from the inside out and back again.
What better environment for a clairvoyant to work than in a place filled with liquid promise, where sunshine, water and air exist in their most elemental forms? Chlorophyll. Carbon dioxide. Photosynthesis. The interaction of fundamental particles sweeps Lilith away to a state of mind not explained by science or religion, or even by herself. Only nature. Everything that's already happened reduced to its smallest denominator, and rebuilt in the present. There is nowhere, she is certain, with superior visibility than in a glasshouse."
