Category: can lit

My David Bezmozgis Weekend (#8 – Natasha)

Ever since we did the Summer is Short – Read a Story promotion at work, I’ve had David Bezmozgis’s Natasha and Other Stories on my TBR pile. You can read one of the stories from the collection here, at the Globe, from when we expanded our promotion in their online books section. The stories are sparse but not sparing, swift without feeling rushed, and amazing portraits of a family in flux — immigrants new to Toronto managing to balance their lives on the cusp of old and new.

The collection contains seven linked stories and you simply fly threw them. His prose manages to get to the heart of the human condition without feeling preachy. In style, his writing reminds me a little of Alexander Hemon, although I couldn’t put my finger on why. The central characters in Bezmozgis’s stories, Bella, Roman and Mark Berman, are Russian Jews who have come to Canada from Latvia, leaving behind their home, their family (although by the end of the book many have migrated as well), and trying to make their way in Canada. I find these in-between stories, from the perspective of first generation immigrants, absolutely fascinating. There’s something about the in-between perspective that illuminates parts of Canada, of being Canadian, that those of us born here take for granted. I always liken it to the idea of speaking another language — it’s as if it’s a different world.

There are deep similarities between Victoria Day, Bezmozgis’s first feature film, which I also watched this weekend on TMN, and the stories. An only child, Mark (the stories) and Ben (the film) struggle with adolescence, balance parental expectations and eventually find a way to define themselves by being inclusive of everything they are. Victoria Day‘s more of a coming-of-age tale than is contained within the stories. The film resonated because I was a teenager then, and even remember the news stories surrounding the disappearance of Benji Hayward disappeared after a Pink Floyd concert. In the film, Ben loans his hockey teammate some money and then deals with his conflicted feelings once it surfaces that the teen too has gone missing.

The movie has echoes of The Ice Storm and other atmospheric films about teenagers finding their way. Far, far less “teen” than say John Hughes (and I LOVE John Hughes — it’s a comparison point not a criticism), the picture manages to feel Canadian without the earnest-ness of so many of our native pictures (I did love One Week, but man, holy Canadian batman). There are moments of pure beauty within the film making — even if the performances feel a bit stiff at moments. Regardless, I very much like the ambiguity within the picture, something that Bezmozgis imbues in his fiction as well.

If I had to pick a favourite story, it would be the title tale, “Natasha.” But coming a close second would absolutely be “Minyan,” the story that closes the collection. Annywaay, I truly enjoyed my David Bezmozgis weekend, I’d highly recommend you give it a try, maybe next weekend?

READING CHALLENGES: I’m counting this towards this year’s Canadian Book Challenge. At some point I’ll tally up exactly where I am with this but there are other things to write at the moment.

#68 – The Law of Dreams

In a way, I think I’ve been waiting for The Law of Dreams. It’s that kind of book that fills up a void: the missing space after I finished reading Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, another sweeping epic of a book that changed me when I closed the cover. These are stories that stay with you. These are the books meant to be read. These are the ones that you add to life lists.

The Law of Dreams won the GG in 2006, rightfully. It’s a story about the Irish Famine, but like Let the Great World Spin, the event itself serves as a backdrop, as an impetus, for the novel’s protagonist, Fergus, to step out into the world. He doesn’t really have any choice. The famine has devastated his way of life — tenant farmers on a large estate, a roaming father comes home the minute the potatoes turn up black, refuses to leave, and months later, families all across Ireland are destitute, starving, and forced out into the world to not only find a fortune, but to survive.

Once Fergus leaves as his house burns, he joins a rag-tag group of children who beg, steal, and even much worse until one tragic event forces him to leave this second family behind. This pattern continues for the poor boy. He travels, works for a bit, finds a subtle sense of stability until the moment when an act of unprecedented violence forces him in yet another direction. He works the rails for a time to earn enough money for passage to Canada. He barely survives the passage. He manages to set foot on Canadian soil but that doesn’t mean Fergus remains headed for a happy ending. These pedestrian, modern concerns, a quest for happiness in a world where the basics of life are taken for granted, well, that’s just not what’s on his mind.

Behrens writes, “Sometimes your heart cracks and tells you what to do.” Throughout this entire story, Fergus follows his heart, often to his detriment, all the way to Grosse Île, where one utterly heartbreaking moment changes his course yet once again. It’s Homeric, this odyssey, and this young man grows up in a way that the traditional sense of a buldingsroman can’t encompass. There’s no artifice to this story but that’s not to say Behrens use of language and form isn’t beautiful, it is, but it’s not hiding anything either. There’s a plainness to his observations that cuts right to the essence of human nature, of suffering, and of the need to consistently make decisions under excruciatingly hard circumstances.

Epic yet understated, rough yet delicate, honest yet heart wrenching, The Law of Dreams was one of the best books I’ve read in a long, long time. Highly, highly recommended.

READING CHALLENGES: I’m not at all sure where I am in this year’s Canadian Book Challenge. I’m going to try to figure that out by the end of the year. But this book fits the bill and I’m counting it, hoping that it’ll inspire others to pick it up.

Three Books To End November (#s 64,65 & 66)

This cold has lingered, and actually rendered me quite useless yesterday, which meant I did a lot of reading (and watching of movies). I finished Mo Hayder’s latest Walking Man novel, Skin (it’s excellent), Anne Giardini’s enjoyable Advice for Italian Boys, and Twilight (note the lack of adjective).

#64 – Skin
Mo Hayder’s writing scares the living bejeezus out of me. She writes excellent mysteries that keep you guessing to the very end. This book picks up right where Ritual ends, picking up the threads of the story just a couple days after Flea Marley and Jack Caffrey solve the muti case they were working on. There’s a serial killer in this book who will send shivers up and down your spine, and the twists and turns that the book takes will no doubt have you shouting, “No!” as much as I did. Mo Hayder’s writing’s as addictive as her stories are — once I started this book, I didn’t put it down until I was finished. There’s a lovely image of Flea in the middle of the book feeling as if the sky is pressing down on her — squeezing all of the air out of her lungs — and the passage was just so perfect, so indicative of Hayder’s simple prose powers, that even if the book had stopped there I would have been satisfied.

#65- Advice for Italian Boys
Full disclosure — I interviewed Anne Giardini for work the other day and had managed to read half the book before sitting down to talk to her (it was a REALLY busy week). Let’s keep in mind that Ms. Giardini’s a CEO of a giant company in her day job as I tell this story.

1. I forgot the battery to my recorder. And had to race back to my desk to get them.

2. Then I put said battery in upside down and had to fight with it to get the little thingy back open to switch it over.

3. I turned it on and set it down in front of her and started the interview. But I didn’t press RECORD. So we had to start the whole interview over again after I realized that I wouldn’t have a single note because I was relying on the audio… Sigh.

Regardless, she’s lovely, and talks how she writes — in long, luxurious sentences. The novel loosely follows the almost coming of age of Nicolo, a twenty-something Italian-Canadian man whose trying to find his way in the world. He still lives at home, works at the gym, and hasn’t quite had a significant relationship with the opposite sex. The middle child (in between two Enzos), Nicolo has a very special relationship to his advice-spilling Nonna, whose sayings pepper the story and the text with old-world common sense. Giardini said that she wanted to write a book about a good man, a man who isn’t without conflict, but one who at his core has a moral centre that’s just right. She accomplishes this, and it’s a breezy, delightful novel that presents the picture of a lovely family that you’d be happy sitting down and sharing a meal with — and damn, I’d bet the food would be fantastic.

#66 – Twilight
I finished it. And that’s all I’m going to say. More to come via our Undeath Match next week.

#62 – Too Much Happiness

Alice Munro has the ability to describe in one sentence what would take lesser writers paragraph upon paragraph to explore. She can disintegrate a years-long relationship in a sentence and it never feels jarring to the reader. She explores the essence of human experience in a way that highlights the aching, pressure-cooker way that people relate to one another. Nothing seems easy in Munro’s world, yet it doesn’t seem overtly melodramatic or necessarily posed to be dramatic. It’s her innate skill to highlight the utter randomness of life and it’s inherent losses. Secrets that are taken to people’s graves. Lovers that ruin marriages. Short story writers that present a different view of a shared time period. It all sounds so cliche — like the worst of Hollywood’s blockbusters (yawn 2012). Yet at the deft hand of Munro these experiences are concise, cutting and often heartbreaking.

Of the 10 stories in the collection, I’d be hard pressed to pick a favourite. The novel-like depth of the title story, “Too Much Happiness,” its ironic title, its compelling heroine (novelist-slash-mathematician Sophia Kovalevsky), was the weightiest in terms of page count, and somewhat unlike the other stories in the collection with its historical, non-Canadian setting. The day-to-day structure of Kovalevsky’s life was in clear contrast to her academic life. In a way, the more successful she was at her work (regardless of how that success plays out in terms of stature), the less her personal life seemed in order. Regardless, Munro’s story charges forward, driving home until its sad conclusions (I hope that’s not a spoiler).

The underlying irony behind the entire collection, the idea that happiness, in its most cliched, Hollywood form, doesn’t exist. The people in Munro’s stories are content. They move forward in their lives because there’s nothing else but to do — and yet the existence of happiness haunts them all, from the young woman who has suffered an unspeakable tragedy, to the music teacher-slash-hippie-slash-performer. Each of the stories pulls you into a certain precise moment of human bliss, whether it’s the birth of a child, a problem solved, or comfort in a marriage. And then, without being content to have her characters simply enjoy these moments, Munro pulls them out of their reverie, even if it’s an everyday kind of thing, and puts them through the tough times. The opposite of happiness. Where survival means life has changed and change, coping or not coping with it, remains an integral part in what makes us human.

There’s a scene in “Dimensions” that will haunt me forever — it’s a visceral, unthinking reaction that her character has to the horrible events going on around her. And there’s moment in “Wenlock Edge” where the narrator describes another woman’s hair (blonde) as a colour that always meant cheap to her (I’m paraphrasing terribly here; my copy of the book has been leant to a friend). Both of these small, tight sentences that appear not in the end, but in the middle of these two stories, are indicative of the power of Munro’s work. I’ve been thinking about them for days. And once I get my book back I’ll add the proper quotes (how’s that for a lame review).

Masterful yet never manipulative, Munro gives you happiness, and its consequences, in its many forms in this collection. Take your own human heart with you as you read, realizing that it might be broken a little bit long the way.

READING CHALLENGES: Too Much Happiness is book four for this year’s Canadian Book Challenge.

#59 – The Year of The Flood

Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood was a slow burn kind of book for me. It took me ages to read, I think I finished five other novels while I was reading this one, but that’s not a comment on how much I enjoyed this book. A companion piece to Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood is a wholly satisfying story about a world hit by a waterless flood, and those people within who survive. I may be wrong, but I’d classify the book as speculative fiction — it takes place just far enough in the future to make you second guess how we’re living our lives and treating the earth, but it’s familiar enough not to seem too out there (if that makes any sense).

The novel moves back and forth between life pre- and post-flood. For a time, the main characters, Toby and Ren, one older, one younger, despite the different ways they arrived, live together in the Gardeners commune, where traditional religion that we’d recognize as Western in its influence mixes with holistic approaches to health, the earth, and life. The Gardeners, lead by Adams and Eves, don’t put chemicals in their bodies, they eat food that they grow, and many of them survive the waterless flood because of these skills.

At first, Toby resists the world of the Gardeners. She’s survived this long by going underground, as dangerous as it is, and becoming a part of a community wasn’t something she thought she needed to do. But slowly, as her skills as a naturalist, a healer, a beekeeper both evolve and are discovered, it’s apparent she’s found a place where she can belong — whether or not she wants to become Eve Six.

Ren, however, doesn’t have it so easy. As a young girl, her mother drags her away from her father’s house — safely ensconced in the highly programmed, chemical world — as a result of an affair she has with one of the key Gardener men. She’s a flake, there’s no getting around it, and when the relationship goes sour, Ren’s dragged back into the sterile world of her father’s people, sent off to university at Martha Graham, and then out into the workforce, perhaps not in the job she would have once imagined for herself in high school. High school and the Gardeners define Ren (oh how this happens for so many people, ahem) and without these key people in her life, she’s a little lost, a little heartbroken (over Jimmy, you’d remember him from the previous book — Snowman). But both Toby and Ren are survivors and their stories, when woven together, are equally compelling.

There’s nothing to do but be in awe of Atwood’s imagination. But if I were to make one slight criticism — I wasn’t as inspired by the “poems” that started off each of the Gardener sections — they seemed a bit contrived to me, but then, when you look through a hymn book in church, the sentiment is much the same, so perhaps I should just take them at face value. It’s a sad book, a book that makes you appreciate the fact that you can still put a seed in the ground and have it grow into a plant that could feed you, the birds, and the butterflies. And one that perhaps sets a new standard for saint-like worship of unconventional heroes, especially those that survive.

READING CHALLENGES: The Year of the Flood is my third book in this year’s Canadian Book Challenge.

#43 – The Wife’s Tale

Lori Lansens has yet again written an all-consuming kind of novel. Just like her two previous books, Rush Home Road and The Girls, The Wife’s Tale, from start to finish, remains the kind of novel that once you’ve read the first sentence you don’t stop until you’ve finished the entire book. When the whole appendicitis turned from bad dream into nightmare, I’m not ashamed to admit that The Wife’s Tale was a big part of holding on to my sanity that second week I spent in the hospital.

The novel opens with Mary Gooch on the cusp of celebrating her 25th wedding anniversary. She married her high school sweetheart but they’ve drifted apart over the years. And the losses, personal, professional, have manifested in her psychological and physical self. Borderline agoraphobic (she still leaves the house) and morbidly obese, Mary has tightened up her life in such a way that it couldn’t be any smaller. Her menial job at the pharmacy in town is a means to an end (and a chocolate delivery) and her husband Gooch’s isn’t much more satisfying. Once a golden boy, Gooch isn’t apparently unsatisfied with his life, but when he disappears leaving nothing behind but a fat bank account, Mary must face life for the first time alone.

In a way, it’s a novel of discovery for Mary, a long, rambling Chaucer-like adventure that transforms her in ways she never would have imagined. The narrative keeps tight to Mary: you’re on the edge when Gooch doesn’t come home, you feel her pain when she finds herself completely lost without him, and when she takes the steps towards becoming her own person you can’t help but cheer her on. Lansens has a way of writing this character, this woman who could be the butt of so many jokes, without any caricature. While she may come from a small town, she’s not a hick; she’s not a stereotype, and her transformation is kind of movie-esque magical.

There are unsatisfying elements to the story that I’m not going to spoil here. I’m going to leave off with my first impressions of this book, remembered now a month after reading: it takes a hell of a writer to take such a Hollywood plot, “woman abandoned on her 25th anniversary, obese, unsatisfied and unhappy” and turn it into moments that bring tears to your eyes for their honesty, originality and utter good-heartedness. 

READING CHALLENGES: I’m counting The Wife’s Tale as the second book in my Canadian Book Challenge. While I haven’t done my “official” post about the theme I’m going to try just yet because I honestly haven’t decided what I want to read for the rest of the year, I still think a year that includes The Wife’s Tale and February can only be counted as inspiring. 

#42 – February

Hands down, Lisa Moore’s excellent February might just be my favourite Can-lit book of the year. When I read it over about 24 hours in the hospital I couldn’t help but admire both Moore’s storytelling abilities, how her plot drifts around like clouds but with all the purpose of the weather behind them, and her emotional resonance, how each of the characters carry their sadness and happiness around with them in almost equal measure.

In 1982, almost at the start of their lives together, at the very least within the first, happy, happy years, Helen O’Mara’s husband Cal tragically loses his life in a major oil rig accident. Over the course of the novel, moving backwards and forwards from the past to the present (sometimes even within the same paragraph), Moore reveals Helen’s life. How she raised her four children almost by herself, how they grow up, stay or leave, and relate to her as both a mother and then a grandmother. But the astonishing truth about the story isn’t just Helen’s ability to get on with her life while at the same time being utterly unable to forget Cal, it’s more how she manages to fit all of the pieces in without completely breaking down outwardly.

The sharp contrast between the Helen that lives inside her mind and the reality of Helen’s world ensures February endlessly (and easily) drifts between the two pulling the reader closer and closer to the character. It’s impossible not to get emotionally involved with Helen’s life, with the loss of her greatest love, with her difficult relationship to her equally difficult son, with the glimmer of hope when the chance for happiness comes around.

In short, I guess you could say that I loved this novel. And I can’t think of a better book to start off my latest Canadian Book Challenge. That’s one down. Also, I was reminded of Marilynne Robinson’s equally excellent Home while reading February. They both have similar plots in the sense that a son must return home to face up to the consequences of their lives…if you enjoy Robinson’s writing, you would enjoy Moore’s latest.

Summer is Short. Read a Story. (#s 32-33)

I am very excited about a fun campaign we’re running at work called “Summer is Short. Read a Story.” Celebrating much-beloved but hard-to-sell short story collections for the summer months got me thinking about two books I finished recently: Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge and Gil Adamson’s Help Me, Jacques Cousteau. Both books contain a series of linked short stories that have female protagonists: the former centred around an aging (and then retired) 7th grade teacher (the Olive Kitteridge of the book’s title) and the latter around the ever-growing Hazel. Authors Adamson and Stout (who just won the Pulitzer for Olive Kitteridge), while different in terms of their style and substance of their stories, have uncanny talents for characterization. They can sum up a character — their habits, their emotions, their intentions — often with just one heartbreaking sentence that seems to epitomize good writing. It’s something I admired while reading both books over the past week.

Olive Kitteridge lives in a small-town in Maine, her husband was a pharmacist and her son grows up to be a podatrist, and neither truly lives up to her expectations. People in town are as kind to Olive as they are critical, and she’s a presence in every single story, whether it’s from the point of view of her husband or her neighbour. Each perspective adds a little bit more to her character, unravelling Olive like an onion until the final sentences of the book open her up to the core.

Echoes of small-town life can be found in Gil Adamson’s stories as well, Hazel, who we see grow up from a young girl into a young woman, copes with the pressures of family life. Whether it’s crazy uncles, oddish grandparents, fathers who can’t stop tinkering or mothers who feel that they made a wrong turn somewhere, she grows up with a wild and unwieldy cast of characters who inevitably shape who she is as a person.

My reaction to both of these books was emotional — I fell a little bit in love with these two main characters, Hazel for her rough and tumble time with adolescence and the pains that accompany growing up, and Olive for her tough-talking, no-nonsense approach to life that ultimately ends up alienating her from so many people that she loves. Modern life bleeds so many different colours, from rationalizing long-term relationships, their success or failure, from expectations we have for ourselves and how they change to the complex relationships between parents and children, and these two works explore these themes with a keen and affecting eye for detail and determination.

Highly recommended reads.

READING CHALLENGES: Help Me, Jacques Cousteau is the 12th title I’ve read for the latest Canadian Book Challenge. And, well, Olive Kitteridge is an award winner so maybe I’ll create a new challenge for those, unless on already exists?

WHAT’S UP NEXT: I’ve started Denis Johnson’s Nobody Move, Frances Itani’s Leaning, Leaning Over Water and am halfway through Sarah Waters’s latest novel, The Little Stranger. But Vanity Fair also beckons — somehow I can’t resist spoiled rich kids in Sofia Coppolla-inspired photo joints coupled with the Kennedys and more Bernie Madoff revelations. I mean, I’m only human people.

#14 – The Sad Truth About Happiness

First, a confession: I read Anne Giardini’s book because I love the title so much that even before I started, I had already made up my mind that I would enjoy the novel. As Maggie, the narrator, tells us from the beginning, she’s the sober, well-adjusted middle child caught between two stormy sisters, who has never made a misstep in her entire life. For most of her thirty-two years, she’s done the right thing: got good grades, found a stable job (as a mammogram technician), had a few misguided love affairs, and lived her life responsibly. Her older sister Janet and her younger sister Lucy are the drama queens in the family and no one expects Maggie to get up to anything remotely considered wayward. That is until her sister Lucy’s ex-lover comes over from Italy to try and take her newly born nephew back with him (I’m not giving anything away; this fact is in the back cover copy!). Maggie’s actions are rash and the consequences everlasting.

The Sad Truth About Happiness is by no means a perfect novel. Deeply flawed in many ways, the story feels a little far fetched, too movie-of-the-week, especially when it gets into the meaty middle section. Giardini’s writing is often messy at times, she repeats bits and pieces that have no real relevance to the story, and there’s a lot of “telling” in this book.

But, by the end I didn’t care. I didn’t care because life is messy. I didn’t care because there’s so much heart in this book that it’s impossible not to get caught up in Maggie’s life, in her insomnia, in the way that she looks at the ideals of happiness that seem to drive our modern society. I didn’t care because I was hooked from the very first paragraph. I simply couldn’t (and didn’t want) to put the book down. Particularly poignant parts of the book are found within Maggie’s relationship to and description of her aged parents, their eccentricities and obvious love for one another; of her deep understanding and explanation of how she came to her profession, the clarity and emotion from which she writes of disease, especially cancer; and of the tipping point when Maggie is spurned into action and how she copes with the aftermath.

In the P.S. section of the book, Giardini describes her sister Catherine reading some of her work and exclaiming, “put a fire into it,” and you can see the spirited way that the author has interpreted this idea throughout the book. The prose has fire to it and, to add in my own overused cliche, it certainly burns from beginning to end. In the end, I picked up the novel as I said because the title is just so striking and I am so very glad that I did. This is the perfect book for book clubs, for women to hand over to one another over lunch, for best friends to talk about late into the night.

READING CHALLENGES: Anne Giardini is Canadian (and the daughter of Carol Shields) and obviously a woman so I’m counting The Sad Truth About Happiness as the 11th book in my Canadian Book Challenge. And for those of you still looking for titles for your own challenge, it’s good to note that Giardini lives (and writes about) Vancouver. The setting is a very real and very solid backdrop for this book in particular. So, two more to go!

#10 – Confession

Perhaps it’s apt to start off reviewing Lee Gowan’s latest novel, Confession, with two of my own: 1) I’ve taken more than one creative writing class with the author and therefore admire him greatly both as a writer and as a teacher; and 2) I enjoyed the last book of his that I read, The Last Cowboy, very much so when I saw that he had a new book, I was excited.

But now, almost a week after finishing the book, I still have some mixed feelings — not about the quality of the prose (which is excellent) or the fact that I enjoyed the book (which I did, immensely) — about how to write the review. How much do I reveal about the plot without spoiling it? How do I characterize the interesting way the author has created the story? What kind of comps would I suggest?

Confession‘s unreliable and slightly off-kilter narrator, Dwight Froese, has changed his name, found himself a new job, and desperately wants to stay close to his daughter. Trapped by both circumstance and landscape in a life that truly presents him with little options for happiness, Dwight tells and retells the story of how he ended up in Toronto. Raised in Broken Head, Saskatchewan by a young mother and a much older father (a very complex situation if my instincts [and reading ability] are correct), Dwight has always had a particular relationship with God. Whether it was his father seeing Him one day profess his death by the hand of his son, or simply just the comfort he finds in his spirituality, Dwight’s morals are dictated by a higher power. And because he sits outside of conventional society, in a way, Dwight can see, understand and imagine a world that’s not necessarily the norm.

The tragedy in his story comes from the fall, as one might imagine, not necessarily from grace but maybe from reality or, rather, the clash of his own perspective with that of the rest of society. The novel is heady and spends a lot of time exploring Dwight’s thoughts, actions and relationships. As it’s told from his point of view, the book remains intense from start to finish. The voice feels wholly original but also harkens back to familiar characters — pop culture icons like Travis Bickle — in the sense that he’s an outsider. Overall, both the strength and success of the novel lies in the author’s ability to create a character that’s at once as unlikeable as he is compelling. It’s a delicate balance, a difficult one, but one worth the investment by the time the end of the book rolls around.

If I had to think of comparative titles, I’d say there’s a touch of the fierceness from Theft, a little bit of the structure found within The Double Bind, and a fair bit of 1970s-early 80s New York cinema, think Scorsese and Badlands. Keep in mind, the novel opens with a quote from Dostoevsky, and there are existential themes of crime and punishment within as well. But I sure would love to know what anyone else thinks…as you can probably tell, I’m still making up my mind about it all.