Tunes for Dancing Bears: Media

From Foreword Magazine | May/June 2025

By Meg Nola

In Irena Karafilly’s haunting novel Tunes for Dancing Bears, a woman gives birth to a stillborn child and struggles with ‘the shock and grief that follows.

In September 1991, Lydia delivers a full-term baby in a Montreal hospital. Controlled chaos ensues as Lydia’s obstetrician tries to revive her stillborn son; the room becomes quiet, “like a deserted theatre following a bomb threat.” Lydia is sedated by nurses, who offer vague assurances that she’ll be able to have another child soon. Set within a compact time frame of eleven days, the book details Lydia’s overwhelming postpartum anguish. Her body is “swollen and slashed”; her breasts fill with milk, even without a baby to feed. She also feels aching emptiness when she hears the cries of other healthy newborns in the maternity ward.

Lydia’s husband, John, is a surgeon; though saddened by the death of his infant son, he cannot fathom Lydia’s primal feelings of loss. Approaching his fortieth birthday, John is caught up in midlife uncertainties and the guilty intrigue of an extramarital affair. Yet during Lydia’s hospital stay, he becomes conscious of her absence and his closeness to her. His relationship with his independent-minded mistress deteriorates into contempt.

John and Lydia also experience commonality and discord through their shared Greek heritage. While John’s prosperous family is better assimilated, Lydia was born in a Greek “seaside village” with “cobblestoned streets and olive orchards.” She immigrated to Canada as a girl and maintains a strong emotional connection to her heritage, even speaking Greek with poignant reflexivity after her baby’s death. Lydia’s deep, almost mystical cultural resonance is undermined by the snobbery of her mother-in-law.

The eloquent, impressionistic novel Tunes for Dancing Bears evokes the devastating void left by a stillborn child.”