Worlds of thought, worlds of creation

The Alchemy of Paradise
by Susannah M. Smith

Halifax: Invisible Publishing, 2026
$24.95 / 9781778430855

Reviewed by Brett Josef Grubisic

*

In “The Museum of Becoming,” the prologue of The Alchemy of Paradise, the narrator discusses the creative outpouring that followed the death of her grandmother. A therapist friend recommended journaling as a means for the grieving woman to collect her thoughts and feel more composed.

This steady “harvesting” of “thoughts and impressions”—“a strange gallery” where the narrator “captured whimsies, marvels, knowings, feelings, fanciful things [she] liked or found interested, purely for pleasure”—eventually “became an advent calendar in the shape of the book.” It was called The Fairy Tale Museum, the title identical to the novel published by Vancouver-based Susannah M. Smith in 2018. 

With the outpour unabated, the author/narrator continues, further questions arose—

What if a book could be an elegant sheltering structure…. What if a book could be a protective place?…. What if a book could be a place to rest and grow and become?.…
What if a book could be an artwork based on the idea of the collection? What if there were no rules about what form the collection could take? What if happiness is the practice of collecting your favourite things in your mind and unhappiness is the practice of collecting harmful preoccupations and worries. What if our minds are the only thing we have any real control over?….
What if this is the great work?

Holy Socratic method, Batman: that was my thought. I did check my e-reader then, which noted 374 questions in the trim novel’s 200 pages, and wondered idly about a rule of thumb for questions posed per page. At some point, surely—the 150th question, perhaps?—the rhetorical pay off must plummet. Similar to the parent of a 4-year-old who keeps asking “Why?,” maybe the taxed reader begins to tune out. 

In The Alchemy of Paradise, the narrator is a museum curator. (“It is my job to think, perceive, intuit, and make connections between different objects and ideas, allowing for new synergies to emerge,” she explains. The other parts—admin, meetings, lectures, mandatory retirement parties—are the price paid for the job’s stellar characteristics: the time she is granted to “bask in the world of thought and information rooted in the world of creation, past and present.”) 

Following that professional context comes reminiscence. The narrator recalls growing up, an only child, in a “living testament to elegant decay,” an abandoned historical manor that her father restored. In her memories, she’s part of a “family of collectors”: “My grandmother was a storyteller and mystic and collector of stones and books and curious. My father was an architect of spaces, my mother a fashion designer and painter, and together they collected many things: art, clothing, furniture.”

Whether visiting galleries, discussing architecture, or listening to impromptu lectures (“‘What is art?’ my father would ask, not waiting for an answer. ‘Life is art. Your life is the artistic process and product’”), the narrator’s childhood was immersed in and nourished by a dusty environment of artistic expression, artistic education, and, of course, objets d’art. 

With great, aching fondness she revisits her parents’ theatricality—extravagant dressing and serial outfits each day, noses thumbed at bourgeois convention. This daily ritual echos her mother’s “visual inspirations” scattered throughout the house, “arrangements often indistinguishable for the constantly changing interior decoration of wallpaper, flowers, artwork, books, and curios.” 

And whether it’s of “[s]equins, metallic threads, [and] colour blocking” (later: “rhinestones upon sequins upon crystals”) or material goods from “inspiration trips”—“Precious objects nested in layers of paper and boxes inside boxes. Painting. Antiques. Artworks. Piles of fabric swatches she would later assemble into blank sketchbooks, organizing them by mill, material type, colour, print—all labelled in deep black ink with her leggy cursive”—the narrator’s recollection of this “exceptionally fortunate” “storybook life” underscores its unique, fairytale-adjacent magicality, as she papers the narrative with descriptive filigree that possibly rivals her mother’s “maximalist aesthetic.”       

Fittingly for the never-never land of a fairy tale, a death—in Venice, of all places—changes everything. The narrator’s father is found drowned in a canal. Like a bejewelled but maddened Auntie Mame, the narrator’s mother retreats into herself, declaring, “I need simplicity. I need barrenness. I need the outside to match the inside.” With her mother in white, purged and austere, the narrator turns to her grandmother, whose house was comforting because it “felt like like an antique store owned by a clairvoyant” and possessed a “dark wooden Spanish medicine cabinet… filled with blue glass bottles of essential oils: neroli, lavender, clove, benzoin, cypress, bergamot, rose.” The narrator has a true affinity for lists.

In Rome and Paris on a Grand Tour, the adolescent narrator immerses herself in art history; and in Spain she begins to “develop a personal philosophy of beauty.” Later, she moves to “the city,” attends university, makes “new friends” never identified by name, reads Walter Benjamin, savours “the intellectual revelry of university,” and meets her favourite professor, her future husband, elopes, and a secures a “curatorial position at one of the city’s leading museums.” 

The text, which represents her autobiography and an abundance of her inquisitive musings, includes both backward-glancing illustrations and a penchant for aphoristic truisms that can veer toward the banal: “Different types of artwork are portals to different worlds, widening and keeping our experiences through the act of imagination.” 

Elsewhere, the narrator reprises her autobiographical arc. Of her marriage, for example: “My husband and I read and wrote and entertained friends and were entertained. We were at the centre of an aesthetic and intellectual heaven—researching, travelling to conferences and symposia at different universities, attending art exhibitions, looking at art, thinking and talking about art,” she recalls (before the marriage summarily ends).

By this early midpoint The Alchemy of Paradise has grown incredibly non-specific and wearying. With her sketch of a husband, for instance, the narrator reads unknown books, writes undisclosed passages, entertains friends who are never named, described, or assigned the least characterization, and is entertained by them in a manner never shown. The “aesthetic and intellectual heaven”—symposia, art exhibitions, thoughts and conversations about art—is closed off: readers infer that this heaven is unspeakably rich, but are never invited to see or hear any of its facets. Like the “intellectual revelry” of university, the narrator’s “intellectual heaven” remains wholly out of reach: it might feature Das Kapital and Ästhetische Theorie but, then again, Oprah Winfrey and Tony Robbins paperbacks might be the required reading; readers don’t receive an invitation to the inner sanctum.

For someone who appears so untroubled about listing stuff—the contents of her family mansion or her mother’s former appetite for sequins, crystals, and metallic threads—the narrator is vexingly tight-lipped about material that can bring a story to life. Are they at the Tate Modern exclaiming about Jenny Saville’s Propped or viewing Sophie Calle’s Prenez soin de vous at Museum für Gegenwart? And what, exactly, are their topics of conversation at these august galleries, conferences, and symposia? 

Post-hubby, Smith’s narrator continues her alchemical, which is to say transformative, journey. With it, there’s substantial content related to what she earlier calls a “personal philosophy of beauty.” In passages such as this—

A cultural cure. Balm. Poultice.
Aesthetics. Craft. Artistry. Beauty.
What is culture?
A mental and physical receptacle for beauty.
What does it mean to be cultured?
Educated. Developed. Added to.
I was adding to myself.

—and this—

What if life is the Grand Tour?
What if your life in particular is a curiosity cabinet, 
and it is your job to collect all the beautiful things?
What if ideas are the root of all things?
What if your “work” is to seek the beautiful ideas
and collect them and revel in them and keep directing
and redirecting your mind and spirit toward
these objects of beauty?
What if a joyful life consists of being a curator
of beautiful thoughts, which then translate
into physical experiences and manifestations?
What if we live within a thought cabinet of our own making?
What are you putting in your drawers and on your shelves?
What are your favourites?
Do you like everything you’ve assembled
or do you want to sweep the contents of some shelves
onto the floor and smash them?
Why do you keep items in your collection
that do not bring you happiness or a sense of well-being?
What is the legacy you will leave 
when your tour comes to a close?

          These are questions worth considering.

—the pensive notations and interrogative philosophizing largely derail the narrative’s momentum. Disembodied, the narrating voice aligns with a sci-fi mainstay: a brain in a vat that can do little except think. 

“Before my father’s death. After my father’s death. These are the two timelines that have defined my life.” This sentiment, which mirrors Peggy Guggenheim’s, are placed at the start of the narrator’s section about university. It is, for me, the very core of Smith’s book: identifying formative, possibly archetypal, figures—an idealized then absent father, a glamorous but remote mother, a powerful, albeit eccentric grandmother—who must be understood and embodied for the protagonist to become a workable version of herself. 

When The Alchemy of Paradise grabbed me by the heart and mind, it was when the narrator turned personal and ‘real’ about her struggles with family and a stable selfhood. The rest, which is substantial, did not engage me even close to the same degree. Intellectual doodling about “beautiful thoughts” and 300+ question related to “Aesthetics. Craft. Artistry. Beauty.” kept my eyes terrier-keen for the next section of the book.

[Editor’s note: in support of her book, Susannah M. Smith will launch The Alchemy of Paradise in Vancouver on Friday, May 29. Upstart & Crow: 6:30-8pm.]

Brett Josef Grubisic‘s dissertation sits on a shelf somewhere at UBC, hopefully unread. He assigns, edits, and posts fiction, poetry, and children’s lit reviews for BCR; occasionally, he contributes reviews as well. [He’s written about recent books by Théodora Armstrong, Faith Erin Hicks, Hetxw’ms Gyetxw, Nathan Fairbairn, Otoniya Bitek, Martin Butler, Hannah Beach and Maggie Hutchings, Zsuzsi Gartner (ed.), Jennifer Cooper, Caroline Adderson, Sunny Dhillon, Wanda John-Kehewin, Ryan O’Dowd, Michael V. Smith, David Bouchard, Alice Turski, Louise Sidley, K.J. Denny (ed.), Sonali Zohra, Carrie Anne Vanderhoop, Kristen Pendreigh, Sam Wiebe, Maureen Young, Daniel Anctil, and Adam Welch for BCR.]

*

The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster