- Discuss the book’s cover. Does the image of a Balinese temple in the middle of a wheat field transcend your preconceptions of Canadian literature?
- If the prose were to have a personality, would it be:
A. Gregarious
B. Indifferent
C. Woeful
D. Puckish
E. Intemperate
- The fictionalized Kristinja Banks, the narrator of Everyone Sees a Different Blue, is described as a successful Canadian novelist who flees to Indonesia “to escape the horde of fawning sycophants and legion of talentless, mean-spirited dabblers in prose” of the Toronto literary scene. Following days of uninhibited debauchery at the expat bars and hotels of Kuta Beach, she packs up and leaves for Ubud, the cultural centre of Bali. She soon falls into the same trap of intemperance there, and one afternoon, after ingesting local hallucinogenic mushrooms, she heads out on her rented scooter to tour the terraced rice paddies. This leads to the novel’s first turning point: Kristinja’s near-fatal accident, ensuing amnesia, and ‘rescue’ by Ketut Pedjeng.
Considering the novel was published mere months after the well-publicized 2022 DUI arrest of Kristinja Banks—the author of Everyone Sees a Different Blue—outside The Viper Room in West Hollywood, and Banks’s widely known disdain for CanLit, how else does the fictional Kristinja mirror the real-life Banks?
- Banks, the author, is often dismissed as a restlessly unsentimental sybarite whose personal life as the nouveau enfant terrible of Canadian literati frequently garners more international attention than her writing. The media’s portrayal of her as an amoral relativist peaked during her vigorous defence of Tyrel Staats, her longtime literary agent implicated in a transnational child pornography ring. (Staats later became the prototype for Banks’s protagonist in her provocative, ground-breaking 2016 novel One Hundred Views of Vicky Santiago.) To what extent is the duplicitous nature of Everyone Sees a Different Blue’s narrator Kristinja that of Banks’s? After a night out, who would you rather wake up next to?
- Kristinja’s bisexual lover in Toronto is introduced as “Violet Tailfeathers, a Blackfoot from Red Deer [Alberta].”
i) Are the extended descriptive passages of their various and unrestrained sexual acts—from the lyrically erotic (“I tongued the swollen petals of her fuck-flower”; “we were continents of yearning, grinding our sex-slickened plates against each other”) to the near-clinical (“Violet’s fingers, palpating the anterior wall of my vagina, caused me to gasp and medially dilate”)—gratuitous? Provocative? Titillating? Or are they a refreshing, empowering repudiation of the heteronormative patriarchal establishment?
ii) How would your perception of Violet change had Banks given her the surname Lookingcloud? How would your experience of narrative space be altered if Violet was instead a member of the Skwxwú7mesh First Nation? Or an Ecuadorian refugee? What if she were a white Torontonian with the name of Sheila Bradstone?
- Certain feminist scholars, including Mary Jacobus and Kaja Silverman, have articulated gynocriticism’s need to co-opt psychoanalysis and its internalizing norms in order to “reconceive the predicament of women.” Perhaps most famously, Freud’s analysis of dreams yielded a vast array of symbolic phallocentric associations. Banks’s novel is fraught with sexual imagery. Consider the scene immediately following the scooter accident in which the sprite-like Kristinja—having removed her torn and bloodied clothing, and unable to recall who or where she is—is found wandering aimlessly through the lush bamboo forest by Ketut. Applying Freud’s hermeneutic, various meta-language symbolic representations virtually leap off the page: e.g., bamboo thicket = pubic hair; Ketut spitting dark-red betel-nut juice at her feet = Kristinja’s menstruation anxiety; etc. Come up with five more that champion the identity of women. Pay particular attention to the role of the machete. End with an intimate discovery about the text.
- Kristinja’s descent into the crater of the smouldering Gunung Agung volcano with Ketut and the sulphur gatherers is an obvious reference to Dante’s vision of Hell. Because of her amnesia, Kristinja doesn’t realize what the “curious soft jewels” held safe in her contact lens case are. Her myopia lends the scene an otherworldly blur, thereby heightening the oppressive sense of impending doom. When Dalem—the young man who steals the case—is attacked and eaten by a Komodo dragon while he urinates behind a boulder, Banks seems to allude directly to the painful transformation of the thief Agnello by the six-legged lizard in Dante’s Eighth Circle of Hell. Continuing with this parallel, how is Nyoman Ngurah’s peeling of a boiled egg symbolic of Count Ugolino’s gnawing of Archbishop Ruggieri’s brain in Dante’s Ninth Circle? Describe Banks’s vision of Satan in your own words.
- After giving birth to Ketut’s son Rai, Kristinja is accepted by the village and ‘reincarnated’ as Wayan Putri. Due to her towering height, pale “ghost-like” visage and “lean Caucasian limbs,” Kristinja/Wayan is indoctrinated into an underground Kecak dance troupe specializing in casting hexes at politicians, bureaucrats, tax collectors and other enemies of her “people.” She excels at the art; people soon fear her power. What is Banks trying to say about cultural appropriation and social verities? Is Kristinja/Wayan no more than a gawky agent of coloniality enacting global imperial tendencies to homogenize and erase differences? Is she a Frankenstein’s monster of Eurocentric altermodern aesthetics who—in the same way the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss’s praise of the Brazilian Indian exhibits precisely the ethnocentrism he deplores—chastises the diversity of human-created potential she appears to embrace by imposing a trivializing universalism? Or is the Kristinja/Wayan hybrid an embodiment of decolonial transmodern processes endorsing interculturality (delinking multiculturalism) and re-creating an inter-aesthetic pluriversalism?
[It is interesting to note that the same question can be asked of the author herself, whose very name superimposes Edward Said’s oriental “other”—in the exotic, Slavically charged “Kristinja”—with the hegemony of the stolid “Banks” surname with its subtext of Western-industrial solitude and search for order.
Do you personally know anyone like this? What about your neighbour?]
- After a particularly impassioned session of lovemaking, Violet Tailfeathers unburdens herself to Gert Van Velgen—the Dutch expat private investigator Violet hires in Denpassar to aid in her search for Kristinja—and discloses her darkest secret: as a runaway teen she survived an Albertan winter by prostituting herself to cruel, overweight truckers at stop after stop along the Trans-Canada Highway.
i.) In light of the MMIWG2S movement, should Banks be denounced as a racist propagating the institutionalized power dynamics of settler-colonial systems of domination, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, gendered forms of violence and the erasure of Indigenous self-determination? Or is she merely a lazy, insensitive, unimaginative writer falling back on tired stereotypes as a shortcut for characterization? Postulate and discuss.
ii.) Violet is a touchstone for the marginalized (female, Indigenous, bisexual). Through the prism of Queer Theory, her ambivalence toward homoerotic relations in the novel—despite being first introduced as Kristinja’s subservient “bitch”—can be seen as a productive interrogation of not just constructed heterosexual normativity and social phenomena, but of culture itself. Continuing this line of inquiry, what is it about Gert that allows Violet to become romantically involved with him? To what extent does substance abuse, intergenerational trauma, unresolved anger, victimization, emotional fragility and the 14-hour time change factor into her decision? How about Gert’s penchant for musicals and his “wide, voluptuous hips”? What do you make of the Hello Kitty vibrator?
- Why doesn’t Gert recognize his own penis in the photograph Violet takes of him? Does this remind you of an event from your own family life?
- Violet and Gert eventually give up the search for Kristinja. On their last night in Bali before flying to Toronto, they go to The Sari’d Monkey bar to toast the beginning of their new life together. It is October 1, 2005—the night of the terrorist attacks in Bali. Outside the Kuta Square Shopping Mall parking lot a car bomb explodes, instantly killing Gert and seriously injuring Violet. some text
i.) Do you feel manipulated by Banks’s use of the bomb to foment cognitive dysfunctionality by shamelessly exploiting our collective post-9/11 anxiety?
ii.) Is the irony of Violet—devastated by Gert’s death, and recovering from shrapnel wounds to her pelvis—becoming addicted to the same prescription painkillers produced by the multinational pharmaceutical conglomerate for which she works as a drug-study protocol developer, too much to bear?
- In what turns out to be her last Kecak dance performance of the Ramayana Monkey Chant, Kristinja enters a trance and in the height of ecstasy has an epiphany:
I could no longer see Ketut and the other villagers beyond the circle of men and the torches’ flames. Sweat streamed down their hairless chests, soaking the cloths wrapped about their thin waists, as they swayed in unison to the gongs of the gamelan. My body arched and writhed in the sea of flesh. The men stomped their feet and threw their arms into the air. Their percussive chanting rose to a frenzy—“CAK…CAK…CAK” —and as the spirit of Rama forced its way inside me, I surrendered to the darkness…
When I regained consciousness, I was alone in the empty square. A full moon hung overhead. A black bird streaked past, the breeze from its wings brushing my skin. At my feet a centipede writhed in the soil. I bent down to pick it up, and it changed into a lotus blossom, which I placed in my hair. Then Hanuman appeared in the form of a giant, smiling monkey. His long tail wound up my legs and tore the sarong from my body. Even though I was naked in front of a god, I felt no embarrassment or fear. Hanuman took in my nakedness, then opened his mouth, but instead of words a blue balloon escaped from between his sharp teeth, only to burst, releasing a host of yellow and orange butterflies. Hanuman grinned once more and I heard his booming voice, though his lips did not move: “You are Kristinja Banks, a writer. You do not belong here. The rice shop is closed.”
What is the implied subtext of the passage? Parse the text qua text phenomenologically according to Heidegger’s dictum: “Das ‘Wesen’ des Daseins liegt in seiner Existenz.”
- Immediately following Hanuman’s pronouncement, Kristinja regains her memory and flees her village handlers. She finds her way to the Canadian consulate in Denpasar, Bali’s capital, where she meets Buddy Gray, the consular officer whom Banks disparagingly characterizes as a “dewy-eyed cod out of water” from Cape Breton.
i.) Does Kristinja’s withering emasculation of Buddy in the interview scene further expose Banks’s thinly veiled, self-perceived Upper Canadian intellectual superiority? If you were as naïve and sexually frustrated as Buddy, would you fall for Kristinja’s account?
ii.) What do you think of Banks as a person for allowing Kristinja to abandon her child? Could she be considered a psychopath?
- The character Kristinja returns to Canada to write a fictionalized account of her experiences in Bali, which she entitles Everyone Sees a Different Blue, and names her narrator Kristinja Banks. Thus, in a perfect simulacrum of a Borgesian recursive loop, we the reader are reading the real-life Kristinja Banks’s novel Everyone Sees a Different Blue, featuring the narrator Kristinja Banks who is writing a novel Everyone Sees a Different Blue about the adventures of a ‘fictional’ Kristinja Banks. Some would argue this unrepentant meta-fictional house of mirrors is a case of authorial self-indulgence—onanistic lucubration indiscriminately spraying its graphemes everywhere, as it were—and illustrates Banks’s fondness for seeing her own name in print. Others assert it is Banks’s perceptive commentary on our vertiginous, over-mediated self-referential narcissistic world view.
i.) Use examples from your own compulsive preoccupations and/or your readings of the Slovenian culture critic Slavoj Žižek to support your opinion.
ii.) Which is the more likeable Kristinja Banks? Which is the better writer?
- How might the ‘flavour’ of the novel have changed if, in the second part, Kristinja had returned to live in Toronto, or Vancouver, instead of in Zelma, Saskatchewan? What if she had put roots down in Trois-Rivières, Quebec? In one sentence, explain how regional biases threaten Canadian federalism.
- Banks employs several archetypal symbols of rural Saskatchewan: grain elevators, potash mines, sharp-tailed grouse. What other images are supersaturated with meaning? Is the metaphor of the hail storm destroying the rye crop too heavy-handed?
- Some critics have suggested that the pulp-fictive subplot in the novel’s second half is gratuitous, and little more than a cheap, sensationalist attempt to inject dramatic action into the interminably slow-paced Canadian winter narrative in which very little else happens. When Kristinja infiltrates the international sex-slave ring run by a local Mennonite Brethren group and frees several teenaged Moldovan girls, is Banks simply trying to shock readers? Or is she skillfully using postmodernist heteroglossia to comment on the intersection of traditional spiritual values and neoliberal capitalism? How does this reflect on Canada’s prominence on the world stage? Are there parallels between the scene in which Kristinja participates in explicit acts of sexual sadism, and the author’s own, well-documented cocaine-fueled orgies in NYC? Discuss, with specifics.
- While at her ranch in Zelma, Kristinja is asked to help out when one of the Neufelds’ cows undergoes a difficult labour. During the tense night in the frigid barn, the cow’s pitiful lowing makes Kristinja think of her son Rai back in Indonesia. The cow finally gives birth to a calf with a spot on its side that looks, to Kristinja, curiously like Andy Warhol’s image of Marilyn Monroe. For which of the following is the calf’s birth a clear metaphor?
A. Unnatural love.
B. The inherent impurity of story.
C. The decline in arts funding at both the provincial and federal
levels.
D. Death.
- At the end of the novel, Kristinja celebrates after sending her publisher the finished draft of Everyone Sees a Different Blue by spending a luxurious weekend at the nearby Manitou Springs Hotel and Mineral Spa, where she, quite by accident, reconnects with Violet Tailfeathers, who is attending a pharmaceutical conference at the resort. In the healing waters they fall in love anew. Is this sense of closure enough to make you overlook the blaring artifice of the coincidence of their meeting? Is it satisfying on an emotional level? Draw on specific incidences of kismet in your own romantic life.
FURTHER CONSIDERATION
- In the novel’s opening scene, the character Kristinja enjoys a mango while looking at the sea from her beach-side bungalow. As she wipes the sweet, resinous juice from her chin, she describes the fruit as “the god-damned best thing I’ve ever eaten…exactly the sort of sensual rekindling I needed.”
Later, when Kristinja is recovering from the scooter accident in Ketut’s hut on the slopes of Mt. Agung, Ketut offers her a section of durian. Despite the fruit’s “overpowering smell of rotting onions and unwashed feet,” she finds the succulent, creamy flesh transformative: “I will never again taste anything more delicious, more magical, in my life.” Still in thrall, she allows herself to be seduced by Ketut, leading to the birth of a son.
The text thus deconstructs itself with the juxtaposition of the two fruits as opposites in a Derridean post-structuralist hierarchical construct. Can you find other such aporetic fissures involving fruit in the text?
- It is interesting that Kristinja’s seizures—the lingering after-effect of her scooter accident in Bali—are foreseen by the neighbouring farm’s dog, Bliss. How does this unique bond mirror some of the relationships between other characters in the novel? Do you have a special connection with your pet?
- Everyone Sees a Different Blue contains several allusions to vagina dentata (traditionally associated with cautionary tales of the dangers of sexual intercourse with ‘foreign’ women).
i.) Which of the following examples from the novel most successfully subverts the heterosexual matrix of patriarchal discourse?
A. The wolf eel bursting forth from a crevice in the reef off Kuta Beach.
B. Ketut’s severed finger following the orangutan attack.
C. The grinning face of the Mennonite shopkeeper Irma Schroeder in her
fur-lined hood.
D. Kristinja setting the leg-hold trap in a shallow pit by the lake while
children frolic nearby.
ii.) What objects do you fetishize?
- Use clustering to draw a concept (idea) map that explores the many meanings of blue in the book. Include significant words or phrases from the text (e.g., “the cerulean keening of the motherless,” “indigo days and indigo nights” and “his petulance was a steel-blue spider crawling across my peritoneum”). According to Kristinja’s perspective, what blue would frustrated desire be? What are some of your most meaningful shades of blue?
- Has this novel changed any of your opinions on the permeability of yearning? Freewrite on your own personal doubts and expectations about someone you love. Share with the other members of your group.
- After careful consideration, which of the following would you consider to be the theme of this novel? Choose all that apply.
A. Be careful when travelling abroad.
B. Asian men are intimidated by North American women.
C. The Dutch are always trampled upon.
D. The writer as tortured soul is an overused trope.
E. Love is hard to find.
F. Shit happens.
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