February 20th, 2012
#9 – Up, Up, Up – Stories
The one bright spot that I pulled off my shelf of “Bs” in the last week or so has got to be Julie Booker’s incredibly adept story collection, Up, Up, Up. I like, first of all, how she puts “short” back in “short story,” with many of the tales clocking in at less than ten or so pages. I also like the whimsical package, the pretty colours, and how the word “twee” never once entered my mind as I raced through the collection.
By far my favourite stories are the ones taking place in a natural setting. And by far by far, the one I enjoyed the best was the very first one, “Geology in Motion.” Because, how could you not love a story that starts like this: “Lorrie and Kate tended to say too much.” You see, they talk themselves right into an Alaskan vacation, two over-sized ladies in an under-sized kayak — woman against nature. And immediately the story brought to mind the infamous line from one of my favourite Flannery O’Connor stories, “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” where Julian accompanies his mother to the Y for her reducing classes. (more…)
December 19th, 2011
#84 – Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan
I’ve been sitting here for a few minutes trying to think of how to write about Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues. Firstly, it’s an amazing alternative history or, rather, underwritten history of the Second World War. A group of jazz musicians in Paris, a young half-German boy among them, a gifted musician, perhaps the most gifted among them, is taken by the Nazi’s while simply on a quest for milk. His companion, Sid, his friend, another musician, perhaps not as gifted, watches as the Gestapo carts Hiero away. This is the moment that haunts Sid for the rest of his life, through multiple wives and multiple lives, it’s not something that he’ll ever forget.
Yet, Edugyan’s story isn’t so straightforward. Yes, it’s a novel about musicians during the war. It’s about displaced people and a how a burgeoning art form creates families among the young men who eat, drink and live jazz. It’s about betrayal and loyalty as much as it is about cowardice and making hard choices in impossible situations. Sid is an amazingly conflicted character — he acts, well, human in situations where one would think that morality needs to have a higher purpose. Life, in times of war, is not to be taken for granted and, yet, he seems unable at times to move beyond his own jealousy about the music, about his own inability to come to terms that the gods have not necessarily bestowed him with the same kind of gifts as his fellow musicians.
#80 – #83 – Review Catch-Up
Getting caught up with book reviews might be an impossibility at this point. There are a few that I think deserve full, thoughtful reviews. But for some of the books that I’ve finished over the last little while I just want to note that I’ve read them, you know?
So, here’s my lesson: do not buy multiple books by the same author if you a) have never read the author and b) don’t know if you’d like the author’s voice in the first place. Way in the way back, I bought a copy of The Polished Hoe because it won the Giller. Then, because I thought to myself, Clarke was a Giller-winner and therefore must be a great writer, I bought a copy of another novel of his, More, before actually reading The Polished Hoe. And I found More an exceptionally hard book to get through. I’m glad I read it — it’s an interesting look at a woman living in downtown Toronto who abandoned her life’s dreams upon arriving here after taking up with a rogue of a man and having a son who becomes difficult to raise as he grows older. Yet the story, told in extreme stream of consciousness over the course of a few days when Idora discovers her son is missing (and she refuses/is scared to go to the police), remains incredibly hard to follow. And the voice, complex, issue-driven, and difficult, yet heartbreaking at the same time — it’s a highly personalized narrative, but it’s also confusing in terms of locating a coherent time/place in terms of the story. And that about did me in, I often found myself wondering where is she, what happened? how long has passed? throughout each of the diversions from the actual time frame of the novel. And then, I discovered that The Polished Hoe is written in much the same vernacular. Oh boy. Avoiding reading The Polished Hoe had me reorganizing ALL of my books in alphabetical order (instead of alphabetical by country/reading challenge) JUST to put it off for a few more days/weeks.
#81 – Make the Bread, Buy the Butter
I read this book over a few weeks on my iPad and enjoyed it immensely. Former EW writer Jennifer Reese. Over the course of many, many months Reese undertook an enormous task: is it actually cheaper to make anythings and everything at home? From butter to cheese to vermouth to chickens to turkeys to you name it, Reese tried to make it. And you know, the results were fascinating. It was an interesting experiment — and wholly interesting in terms of the comparisons. I don’t think I’d ever make a cheesie from scratch but I might actually go back to using our breadmaker in the new year (if I can find it). The only downfall was that the formatting of the ebook was terrible — drop boxes ending up in places that didn’t make sense, strange typos, and odd recipe layouts.
To be perfectly honest, I have no idea how this book ended up on my shelves. I avoided it for months, giving up my British shelf to focus on the Canadian, because I had zero interest in reading this novel. And yet, the novel was a complete delight — the story of a young girl, coming of age, coming out, who has to cope not only with being an awkward, outcast of a teenager, but with her mother’s manic depression. Jesse wants nothing more than to fit in and, after her mother returns from hospitalization, her father moves the family to a new town where she falls in with the popular (cruel) kids. The difficulties of leading a double life, not only hiding her mother’s troubling state of mind from her friends, but also her own sexuality, come to fruition with a somewhat cliched but still utterly engrossing conclusion. This novel completely surprised me, in a good way. Beale’s a strong, empathetic writer, and by the end I was rooting so hard for Jesse that I had to remind myself she wasn’t real.
SJ Watson’s thriller seems to have done the impossible — thrilled literary and non-literary readers alike with an insanely addictive novel that is literally impossible to put down once you’ve started. In many ways, we, as a society are spoiled by the massive amount of entertainment that’s available to us. To someone who consumes a lot of pop culture, surprises are hard to come by. I mean, I can count on one hand how many times in the last ten years I’ve actually been fooled by “twists” in movies. I’m not going to step out and say that Watson’s novel is perfect — there are little inconsistencies that made me a little mental — but here’s the trick, I roared through this novel in less than a day and that’s while working full-time and taking care of a toddler. And that’s saying something about the power of his writing. When Christine wakes up, she has no idea who or where she is, amnesia has taken her life, and not for weeks, for years. Kept carefully and safely by her husband (or IS she?), Christine slowly manages to both overcome her medical condition and discover what really happened all those years ago. The novel keeps you hooked (although, like I said, anyone who knows their pop culture/thrillers/Julia Roberts movies will guess the ending) and it’s a terrific novel for a rainy Sunday afternoon when there are no good films on your PVR .
October 30th, 2011
#78 – Saints of Big Harbour by Lynn Coady
Anyone who might dismiss Lynn Coady’s masterful Saints of Big Harbour as a regional novel would be selling themselves short, I think. Yes, it’s set in Nova Scotia in a small town adjunct to an even smaller hamlet where life resists any change that doesn’t first come in the form of a rumour; and yet, it’s as a pure novel that explores the ideas of love, life, and family as I’ve ever read anywhere. The whole book just swooped in and stole my heart.
Guy wants nothing more than to date a girl “not from around here.” “Here” being the place where he’s grown up, outside of town, with a single mother, a sister who has already escaped, and a half-crazed uncle hell bent on ruining his life all the while claiming to save it. And when the girl of his dreams turns out to be slightly unhinged (or a teenager), his life takes a complex turn. As if being a teenager isn’t hard enough, Guy has to contend with Isadore, his unhinged, alcoholic uncle, whose violent, angry, controlling tendencies keep his family under continual threat of emotional explosion. And when Corinne Fortune makes up a story about him, avoiding violence (from her brother, from his uncle) becomes a way of life for poor Guy.
It’s a multi-perspective novel, and more and more Coady’s writing reminds me of other great Canadian storytellers like Paul Quarrington. There’s an element of humour. An instance of absurdity. And yet, it feels so utterly honest and real, and depicts a life that if I took one step to the right, I could completely see myself living. That’s how real her characters feel to me. The story barrels along and it hums with efficiency — there’s so much truth in the telling, from her portrayals of alcoholism to the unhappiness of a teenage girl, that I was consistently amazed at the evenness of Coady’s storytelling — it never falters, never waivers.
October 27th, 2011
#77 – Mean Boy by Lynn Coady
After reading Lucky Jim for book club, there was chatter about other “set in post-secondary education” novels and whether or not they were successful. One of the books that was mentioned was Lynn Coady’s Mean Boy. As I’ve talked about earlier, I’ve been on a quest this year to clear off my shelves and get through all the books gathering dust in my life. It’s an impossible task — I’ve been reading my “old” books in a haphazard, semi-alphabetical/dewey-like system since a few months into the RRBB’s life. I was, at first, reading “A” titles from Canada, England, etc., and then gave up and just wanted to power through one country before moving on to another. So, I’ve started with my Canada shelf, and I’m at C now (FINALLY) and have three Lynn Coady novels to get through (four if I add the *new* The Antagonist to the list even though I’ve promised myself that I’ll only read one new book for every one from the TBR pile), which means it’s weeks before I get through just this one particular author, sheesh. All of this rambling is to say that I’m knee-deep in Coady these days. I raced through Mean Boy, am half-way through The Saints of Big Harbour, and had actually started The Antagonist weeks ago before I felt too guilty for not reading all of her backlist. In a lesser writer I’d be frustrated by having to read so many of their books in such a short period of time. Lucky for me then to discover that I LOVE Lynn Coady. (more…)
October 20th, 2011
#75 – What We All Long For by Dionne Brand
There’s a definite advantage to being back at work and that’s reading time during my morning and evening commutes. One would think that would have me reading at a furious pace except that now my days are so full that I feel as though we are in a sailboat during one hell of a windstorm with the waves threatening to capsize our vessel at any moment. So, I’m reading but I’m not finishing a lot of books. And I’m still desperately trying to get through my shelves because I’ve started, gasp, collecting all kinds of books again now that they are there and ripe for the picking. I just can’t seem to resist a shortlist these days.
So, I finished Dionne Brand’s novel, What We All Long For, a couple weeks ago, and haven’t had the chance to string any thoughts together until now. The novel opens up with a heartbreaking tragedy: a Vietnamese family attempting to flee their native country loses their son in the mayhem of the escape. Quy’s father thinks his mother has him; his mother thinks the opposite. And it turns out neither does, the boy, just a toddler really, mistakes a pair of shoes, pants, for his father and ends up on a boat that takes him entirely away from his loved ones and into a world of crime, abuse and relentless self-survival. When his family lands in Toronto, they are broken and never truly recover, even the siblings born after the boy is lost feel an emptiness where a there should be a brother.
Quy’s youngest sister Tuyen, whom he never met, bridges the difficult gap between the two worlds. Her parents want her to stay home, to be more family-oriented, and she wants to spread her wings, explore her art and her sexuality, move beyond the sadness that has defined their lives to this point. Tuyen and her friends Carla, Oku and Jackie, are all young, just trying to find a way to live life on their own terms, to battle their own demons. They are the children of immigrants straddling expectations and opportunities with an increasingly split perspective, and writing this kind of dichotomy is something that Brand does exceptionally well. (more…)
October 11th, 2011
#74 – The Communist’s Daughter
I remember reading all about the advance and/or the sale of Dennis Bock’s first novel, The Ash Garden. And when I read the novel, I was completely taken by not only the story but his writing as well. But then, The Communist’s Daughter, despite how much I enjoyed the first novel, sat on my shelves for years and years and years. So I’m glad that I’m reading in alphabetical order because this novel probably would have sat on my shelves for another many years without it.
Years ago, I felt very Canadian as I watched on the CBC or some such, Donald Sutherland’s starring role as Norman Bethune. Who knows why, but in my romantic youth I was obsessed with Bethune. Perhaps I had always dreamed of communist doctors fighting for the good cause in faraway places. Perhaps I had idealized the idea of the Spanish Civil War in terms of all the great minds that participated in the cause. All of this is to say that I’m much older now. No longer a wide-eyed innocent, I enjoyed Bock’s portrayal of Bethune in this novel, even if, as anyone know who reads this blog, the format (it’s epistolary) drove me bananas.
The novel opens with a series of letters, each in a different ‘envelope,’ written on old typewriter with a mocked up old ribbon to Bethune’s daughter, whom he has never met. Born in Spain to his Swedish lover, the girl’s mother passed away in tragic circumstances, leaving Bethune bereft but not dissuaded from his cause. When he begins his tale, truly a record of his life, loves and losses, for his daughter, Bethune’s in China attempting to shore up battlefield surgeries, improve their frontline medical conditions and teach the masses about not only blood transfusions but also the fundamentals of Western hospital care. Struck with tuberculosis while a younger man, his lungs are troubled now and his health is failing. Before he finishes, he needs to tell his daughter everything about his life, from beginning to end, and the narrative skips back and forth from Canada to China, from Spain and the oceans in between. (more…)
October 9th, 2011
#73 – A Trick of the Light
I’m jumping ahead to #73, Louise Penny’s A Trick of the Light (#70 was Sanctuary Line by Jane Urquhart; #71 was Beggar’s Garden by Michael Christie; and #72 was Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis for book club) because if I don’t get something down, I feel like I’ll just be stuck trying to remember books I’ve read months ago and never actually press “publish.”
It’s been a while since I’d read a really good “whack on the head” mystery and Penny’s novel didn’t disappoint. When I got the ARC I’d never a) heard of Louise Penny or b) heard about her Inspector Gamache series. Apparently, A Trick of the Light is her seventh novel in the series and something incredibly dramatic and upsetting happened in the previous novels (which I don’t want to spoil in case I go back and read them) where the ramifications are being felt by both Inspector Gamache, the novel’s main character, and Jean-Guy Beauvoir, his second-in-command.
So, Clara Morrow has her first huge art opening at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal. It’s an amazing opportunity for Clara, a middle-aged artist who has never had a big break before. Her art remains hopeful, energetic, qualities that her contemporaries outside of this show openly mock and deride, even after her big show. As if the thought of a review in The New York Times wasn’t hard enough, Clara awakens on the day after her opening to discover a dead woman in her garden. Suddenly, the sweet, “off the map” town of Three Rivers is once again thrown into an investigation. The locals are questioned; some even step out and conduct their own questioning, which feels so utterly cozy, in order to figure out what happened to the victim. Embedded in the art world. everyone, from the art dealers to the gallery owners, from the artists to the critics, is a suspect. And as Inspector Gamache uncovers who actually committed the crime, lives unravel.
There’s a lot to enjoy about the novel. Penny’s a skilled storyteller. She knows how to keep the pace ticking along while still allowing her characters to reveal a rich inner life. There’s a bleakness to the some of the backstory: Inspector Gamache and Beauvoir endured a real tragedy in, I’m assuming, the previous book in the series. The self-reflexive title, referring both to how artwork can change depending upon who might be looking at it, works its way through the novel. Everyone tricks everyone else — no one tells the truth, no one acts faithfully, except, of course, for our hero. Yet, at times, even he’s fallible, entirely human, and has his faults.
At times, there’s a bit too much going on, maybe a few too many characters to keep everything straight. And Penny has this strange writing tick that drove me a bit crazy. Sentence. Sentence. Dramatic sentence. In most cases, the third (which in many cases because an unnecessary new paragraph) sentence became a case of literary gravitas — a dramatic pause that felt almost overwritten in places. That said, I always judge a mystery/thriller by how hooked I am at the beginning. If I’m dying to find out whodunnit, so much so that it takes everything in me not to flip to the end of the book (and who am I kidding sometimes I do), then it’s a solid novel. The poor victim had barely been found before I was dying to know who killer her — and the answer simply does not disappoint.
September 4th, 2011
#69 – Irma Voth
There’s something about Miriam Toews’s writing that I absolutely adore. It’s quirky, yes. It’s stylistically her own, yes. And yet, even though, as a writer, Toews has such a distinctive voice that you’d think that it would overpower the narrative, the characters, it really doesn’t (at least in my humble opinion). In her latest novel, she revisits some familiar themes and/or characters: young girls with troubled home lives, Mennonite families with conflicting issues, generational problems, bossy-rebellious little sisters, and adventures that are necessary and compulsive. Irma Voth, a young, freshly married Mennonite woman who has married outside of her society, lives with her husband (they are both teenagers) in a house on her father’s compound without electricity or running water. They married in secret. Her father has shunned her — she can milk the cows for her house but in no other way is Irma allowed to interact with her family.
When her husband essentially abandons her for asking too many questions (read: they married way too young and there was no way it was going to work out), Irma takes up with a Mexican film crew, and her life is forever changed. Irma misses Canada, her father absconded with the family when she was young, and she, and her sister Aggie, have fond memories of snow and their older sister, Katie. When the events unfold that drive Irma off the compound and onto the streets of Mexico City with Aggie and another, precious, package in tow, the two transform into the people perhaps they were always meant to be: strong, independent young women who both need to accept and come to terms with what Irma calls her “sins.” (more…)
September 2nd, 2011
Good Gravy, Reviews, Wha?
I am so behind in, not just my reading, but my writing about my reading it isn’t even funny. So, for posterity, I have finished the following books:
#66 – A Gate At The Stairs by Lorrie Moore
Truth be told, I loved this book like a high school crush, I couldn’t get enough of it. The tragedy of it felt a bit forced but the writing remained so fresh and inspiring all the way through that I forgave Moore for the melodrama. Her writing reminds me a little of Miriam Toews (I’m reading Irma Voth right now) and perhaps that’s why I ear-marked about 100 pages of phrases and thoughts that melted my heart as Tassie Keltjin, a 20-year-old university student who becomes a nanny only for the entire situation to go so magnificently awry in the most horrible of ways (no death, nothing gruesome, just sad), suffers through one of the most pivotal years of her life. The book is so, so sad, but that’s what makes it so, so good in my estimation.
#67 – Pulse by Julian Barnes
Personally, and I’ll take anyone to task, I think Barnes is one of the best short story writers working today. It’s an amazing little collection. I liked every story. I love Barnes. I don’t know what else to say. Well, except that the package — the cover art etc., is terrible. Truly.
#68 – Alone in the Classroom by Elizabeth Hay
My, when I started this book I raved and raved to my aunt that Elizabeth Hay was one of the best Canadian writers working today. The story of the young girl’s murder, the narrator’s amazingly intriguing aunt Connie, the setting (Ottawa and Saskatchewan), it all came together and gave me a reason to rip through the pages, and then half-way through the book, the whole thing sort of fell flat, like a ginger ale, really awesome when you first open it, then by the time you get to the bottom of the can, your teeth hurt and your whole mouth feels kind of fuzzy. It’s not her best novel, and that’s all I’m going to say at the moment because I am about to go and play some cards on my last night here at the cottage.