Author: Deanna

#76 – Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

Short stories are epic and amazing things to read on the subway. They give you the false impression that they are “lighter” reading than novels because of their length, but I’ve been finding that so many of the collections I’ve read as of late pack an emotional punch that knocks me out after ten rounds a-la the Ali rope-a-dope, and none walloped me harder than Better Living Through Plastic Explosives by Zsuzsi Gartner.

Like many obnoxious city dwellers, I pride myself on my political correctness. I urge my life forward in terms of pop culture knowledge and feel some pride that I can still scramble in some quality viewing in terms of films, television. I’m achingly earnest about my interest in environmental issues, even if we struggle on a daily basis with our consumption and teaching our families about our feelings about how much stuff there is in the world. But Zsuzsi Gartner takes a machete to pop culture, and slices through it with her razor-sharp prose, like I said on Twitter, and inevitably makes you think about it in a way that consistently questions my own steadfast resolve in my own “goodness” (if that makes any sense).

In many of her stories, there’s an element of the fantastic — a man reverts back to the stone age, becoming more neanderthal by the day, barbecues become open pits, women turn feral, and a young girl rides out of the ravine on a tortoise. The group of neighbours, all healthy, wealthy and utterly politically correct, can’t understand what’s so appealing about ripping open a 2-4 and roasting giant, hulking hunks of meat over an open flame. Houses disappear due to mud slides (I imagine) but never claim a human life. Young, adopted Chinese girls fly up into the air and are no longer human. The stories are awe-inspiring. Both in the sense that Gartner’s awe-inspiring imagination is unparalleled in Canadian writing (I think) but also in how she manages to create a world that’s so utterly familiar and terrifically strange at the same time. I’s kind of like Fringe, in a way, with two realities — the one in which I live every day and the other where it’s not strange to see a blimp floating on by. Continue reading “#76 – Better Living Through Plastic Explosives”

Busted on the Bloor Line: Delayed Reaction

The euphoria of being back at work hasn’t necessarily worn off, hell, I’m still just so stunned that I’m getting a regular paycheque again that I can barely contain a grin when I look at my bank statements. But I’m finding the day-to-day a difficult adjustment being torn between wanting to be at home with the baby and finding myself truly excited to be engaged at work in a way that’s reminiscent of the early days I spent as an internet hack.

So, I cry in the mornings a little bit as I leave. I race to work. Barely take a break. Race home. Put the baby to bed and then collapse in front of the television before heading up to bed to read a little before getting a bit of sleep until the baby wakes up at about 4 AM and I can’t get back to sleep again. Then, here we are, it’s 622 AM and I’ve been up since 4 and am faced with a very long day without naps where I am expected to think and be productive and all I’m capable of doing is writing run-on sentences and drinking umpteen cups of herbal tea.

Continue reading “Busted on the Bloor Line: Delayed Reaction”

#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. Continue reading “#75 – What We All Long For by Dionne Brand”

Busted on the Bloor Line: A Working Mother’s Diary

Today, the RRBB went to daycare for the first time for an entire day. By himself. Without my RRHB as a buffer (he did three transition “days” last week where he left him for a half-hour to get used to the environment). I was crushed. I was immediately struck down with guilt for being excited to go back to work. To be excited to be back at work. And then I had to remind myself that daycare is exceptionally good for the baby. He’s around other kids. He gets to learn in a wonderful environment taught by people who truly enjoy the company of these incredible little critters. But when I picked him up on Monday from his first full day, my heart almost collapsed because he was so upset. His teacher said it’s a fairly typical response: when other parents arrive and a child’s hasn’t arrived, they panic and freak out.

My whole world right now is conflicting emotions. I am elated to have a portion of my life back. The working me loves to be working. I adore using my mind and I have a really interesting job at the moment. Working in publishing has its challenges and rewards, but being on the frontline of the ebook revolution is akin to being on the frontline of the digital revolution when I first started working in websites over a decade ago. I get high from the newness of it all — I like the “wild west” feeling of each day (I know that’s a lame analogy but you know what I mean?).  Yet, I’m completely and totally overwhelmed by how much my job has changed in a year and how much of a learning curve there seems to be. I’m terrified everyone will discover I honestly have no qualifications to do what I’m doing. Well, I have some credentials, a good work ethic among them. And then, I struggle with the emotions I feel on an almost minute-by-minute basis about missing the baby, and not just aching for the physical presence of him, but losing whole days where I used to be in constant contact. I’m not going to lie, every day last week I thought, “Well, now I’ve missed three days of my son’s life.”

Many working mothers I’ve surveyed have felt the same way. The question isn’t whether or not we’ll work. The question is how we’ll cope with the fact that we are working. One friend said that the first week would be horrible and then it would get better. My first day back was actually pretty terrific. That hyper-excited ‘back to school’ feeling permeated the entire day and it whizzed by. People were happy to see me. There’s an ease because, well, after being off for a year, I really didn’t have a lot of work to do. Essentially, it’s not a real work day. It didn’t seem like the transition would be all that hard. Oh, how foolish. Today was pretty rough. I had a late conference call and didn’t get home until after 7 PM. Not only did I miss the baby’s day, but I also missed his bedtime. And bedtime is my favourite time. We cuddle. We read stories. It’s the only time he’s a really cushy baby — for most of the other time he’s romping around like a Sendakian wild thing. And I missed it. All of it. There’s a sadness that creeps in around the time that I’m missing. People keep saying to me that it’s quality time and not quantity but at his age, I’m not sure if he can tell the difference. He needs consistency and calm because he’s a whirligig — he can’t tell that I’m sick or tired or frustrated — he only knows that I’m there to catch him when he turns around after crawling half-way up the stairs and decides he’s had enough.

So, to placate me, I think, my RRHB has agreed to do all kinds of ridiculously fun (IMHO) family-type things that neither of us would have imagined a part of our lives before we had the baby. We’ve been to two farms in three weeks, with petting zoos and tractor rides and bucketloads of kids, and then next weekend we’ll have our very first birthday party. I’m going to bake a cake. I’ve taken a day off of work to bake a cake. I know I’m no Tina Fey but I understand how these two important aspects of your life, your job and your role as mother, can have equal importance. I’m lucky that my workplace is so flexible. I went over to get the RRBB a bit early from daycare because I was worried about him and promptly brought him back to the office. That’s where he had dinner. I feel like it’s acceptable for us moms to do stuff like that — I’ve never seen a working dad bring a baby into the office unless it was accompanied by said baby’s mother. And the whole time we were there, I was telling the RRBB, “here’s where mummy works, here’s the books that she works on, here’s my computer and my window, and make sure you finish this food so you don’t get grumpy on the subway.”

I’m lucky to have a lot of vacation this year, which will help mitigate the guilt I have about only having two full days a week to spend with the baby. I’m already dreaming of taking a great vacation somewhere warm where I can equally introduce him to things that inspire his mummy: the ocean, the sunshine, big, tall trees, cobble-stoned streets and maybe a foreign language. Still, I have a horrible feeling I’m going to be playing catch up with my emotions and my parenting. Consistently trying to make up for the fact that I’m somewhere else for the majority of the day. Consistently trying to give him all of my attention for the few hours I do see him before and after I go to work. Greeting him with a smile and a delicious sense of joy even if he wakes up at 5 AM. Maybe that’s what people are talking about when it comes to quality. Or maybe I just need to take a deep breath and give it a bit more time before making all kinds of crazy pronouncements about my failure as both a mother and a publishing professional. Or, maybe, I just need a good cry.

#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. Continue reading “#74 – The Communist’s Daughter”

#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.

Notes From A House Frau: The Final Edition?

When Life Hands You Lemons: Suck Them, Hard.

Right now, the only fresh fruit the RRBB will eat unfooled is a lemon. This photo’s a bit blurry and disguises his actual enjoyment, which vasilates between, “oooh sour!” to “ooooh delicious!” in a matter of seconds, but it cracks me up beyond belief when he chows down, peel and all, on something most people generally use as garnish or to bolster a shot of tequila. Awesome.

It’s been a very trying few weeks. We closed the cottage, which is always bittersweet. It’s hard work and it’s made even worse by a baby who hates being in the cage of a play yard. The summer feels over. There’s a touch of cool that shades the hot of the days now, and I am this-close (eight business days and counting) to heading back to work after my maternity leave. I can’t believe the year is almost over — I will be going back almost to date to when I ended up in the hospital with my bleeding lungs and I wish, I wish, I wish I was better by now. Yet, I am not. Between the massive amounts of disease meds, and the pummelling of the disease itself, things aren’t desperate or dire (there’s very little active disease in my body and I have few symptoms) but I am sicker now than I have been in months. Continue reading “Notes From A House Frau: The Final Edition?”

#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.” Continue reading “#69 – Irma Voth”

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.