Category: can lit

#9 – Once

I think I tweeted last week about being so caught up in one of Rebecca Rosenblum’s stories from Once that I completely missed the fact that our VP was standing right next to me on the subway. He laughed and said, “Good book?” when I finally realized he’d been there for almost my entire ride. And they are just that addictive, drawing you in from almost the first sentence, creating a world that sits slightly askew of the one you live in everyday, and then finishing completely.

I’m consistently amazed by the innovative ways young writers have when looking at the world. Rosenblum’s characters — people waiting for the bus heading to awful jobs, young immigrants, a family struggling to make sense of their situation — are atypical. And yet, how often do you sit on the bus completely oblivious to the girl wearing three inch heels who carries on up Landsdowne after we all pile off and into the subway? But those people, sometimes lonely, sometimes burdened, always intriguing, make up the core of her characters. There’s always something to explore in Rosenblum’s world, and her keen writer’s eye leaves little untold.

In the end, I suppose picking out one or two favourite stories might be the way to go, but it’s hard when they’re all so different and so, well, good. If I had to choose, I’d say my absolutely favourite would been “Linh Lai.” A young immigrant girl who lives with her relatives tries to navigate her new world, holding tight to some very special talents, she gets a part-time job at a restaurant that is frequented by more than a few characters in the book. Charming, whimsical and full of great sneakers, the story stood out for me. But I honestly enjoyed every single story, their sad undertones, their slightly awkward protagonists, and the thorough ache of lives bursting with the kind of promise that never seems to quite bubble to the surface as it should.

READING CHALLENGES: Rebecca Rosenblum lives and writes in Toronto, so I’m counting Once as a part of this year’s The Canadian Book Challenge. I’m way off in terms of books I picked at the outset but I don’t think it matters as long as I’m still within my “for the ladies” theme.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: Blogging Lee Gowan’s Confession, which I might leave until tomorrow so I can think about the book a little more… For now, I think I might start my Harlequin assignment for this week and then watch a movie. Foggy-cold-head makes for very poor book reviewing.

#8 – The Almost Archer Sisters

I’ve been felled like a giant dead tree these past two days by the same nasty virus that took a hold of my RRHB last week. I slept ALL day yesterday. Didn’t move from the couch, ran a fever, and read when I could keep my eyes open for more than fifteen minutes. I did manage to crawl out from under the duvet, have a shower, and accompany my family to the Marlies game, which was piles of fun. After we got home, I crashed on the couch again and was in bed two second after Lost was finished (does anyone understand what’s going on with that show?). So, on top of disease crap I’ve caught whatever bug is going around. It’s winter, it’s to be expected. But I’m telling you, the only thought that’s been going through my head all week is quitting my job and living in California for the next three months to write. Annnywaay. Three books. Three reviews. Here’s the first.

#8 – The Almost Archer Sisters

Way, way, way back in the day when I actually went to a book club (a terribly scarring experience, truly), Lisa Gabriele came to meet with us and talk about her book Tempting Faith DiNapoli. She was lovely and it was a really nice experience (I, of course, had not read the book, but I did go back and read it afterwards). Fast-forward many years and I have been thankfully freed from book club for some time now. But I did want to read The Almost Archer Sisters for a few reasons: 1. the fond memories of talking with her about her first book; 2. the great review the novel got in the Globe and Mail and 3. because of the lovely note my friend Randy had attached to the book when it showed up in my mailbox. He said, “it’s just the ticket when these cold winter months are upon us.”

Peachy has always lived in the shadow of her older sister Beth. Both scarred by the death of their mother from a young age, how they’ve grown up and around the gaping hole left behind by her non-presence rolls itself out predictably: Peachy clings to safe and stable things, she wants to be a social worker, she’s got a solid marriage (even if she did get knocked up at 20), and two great kids (one of whom suffers from seizures). Beth rumbles around her life like a constantly breaking wave, causing trouble for all the swimmers in her wake, ruining lives and always hurting those who love her the most. All of this leads to the action (plot device?) that spurns the rest of the novel: Peachy stumbles downstairs late at night to find her husband and sister having sex. Peachy’s husband, Beau Laliberte, was once Beth’s boyfriend, and she left him behind all busted up and broken, too. Peachy decides then and there that Beth needs a dose of reality — she leaves her sister behind with her family while she goes off to enjoy a weekend in New York alone.

The novel’s premise, while terribly contrived, enables the author to explore the ins and outs of Peachy’s life from an emotional standpoint that could only be accessed after the kind of shocking event that tends to force someone into change. Her insights are open, honest and heartbreaking at times. And there are parts of the novel where you couldn’t find a better writer describing the inner workings of long-term relationships and motherhood. The novel remains cinematic from start to finish and even includes a ‘big city shopping montage’ that makes it impossible for me not to compare The Almost Archer Sisters to some of the better chicklit out there, think Gemma Townley and not Sophie Kinsella. I will, however, say that there’s a part of the novel I liked so much that I read it through about six times before finally closing the book. Yes, you can imagine it’s the end, so I’m not going to spoil it except to say that Gabriele’s story was just what I needed this week.

READING CHALLENGES: Lucky for me that Gabriele is Canadian, which means I’m counting this novel towards my Canadian Book Challenge. That makes nine books (and I’m just about to write up #10 too!).

#1 – A Hard Witching

Happily celebrating the new year, I read most of this book in between bewitching viewings of The Wire and during a sleepless night on the day before New Year’s Eve. I enjoyed Jacqueline Baker’s novel, The Horseman’s Graves for my Canadian challenge last year, and when I was cleaning off my shelves (have you noticed the trend?) I found a copy of her book of short stories. We were at writer’s group yesterday discussing the merits of short books, quick reads of under 200 pages — books just like A Hard Witching.

Comprised of eight stories, surprisingly not-interlocking, the sharp edges and hard lives of the characters are softened only slightly by Baker’s expert eye when it comes to detail and storytelling. While the easiest comp that one could make about Baker’s writing would be to Annie Proulx, but A Hard Witching lacks the “gothic” edge that colours many of Proulx’s stories (this is not a bad thing; I count Annie Proulx among one of my favourite writers). Set exclusively in or around Sand Hills, Saskatchewan, it’s impossible for the people within not to be affected by the landscape. It’s a popular, familiar Canadian theme, but Baker allows herself to take it a little further, to flush out the emotional lives of her characters in ways that feel fresh and not simply a reaction to their environment.

In terms of my “favourites,” I’d have to say that I enjoyed the title story most of all, for its somewhat strange, utterly compelling main character, a widow caught between the idea of how to lead her life post-her husband’s death and who she was while she was married, and for its stark, captivating ending. I loved this line to death: “Oh, trouble comes in threes all right, Edna would say generously, but it’s the weak who let it stay.” As Omar from The Wire would say, “Indeed.” An echo of sadness runs through many of the stories as well, not that it becomes overwhelming and certainly not to the detriment of the writing. They’re real honest people within these pages and Baker tells their stories without unnecessary frills. In a way, a nice compliment to A Hard Witching might be Tim Winton‘s The Turning and I’m so glad I found this little volume just waiting to be read on my newly organized bookshelves.

READING CHALLENGES: As Jacqueline Baker is Canadian and a lady, A Hard Witching counts toward my Canadian Book Challenge. I’m going to swap out Gil Adamson’s Help Me, Jacques Cousteau because my copy is buried in our closet and my RRHB convinced me those books would be out in the open soon enough that they didn’t need to all be pulled out for the sake of me finding it and Moby-Dick. I’m also going to count this as Canada for Around the World in 52 Books because it’s so evocative of our prairie landscape.

COMPS AND OBSERVATIONS: Baker has a talent for writing adolescent characters and their stories, similar, I think, to Kate Sutherland’s excellent All in Together Girls. Not exactly YA, they do capture the awkward and utterly alienating time one spends as a teenager and both explore how your teenage years stick with you well into adulthood.

OTHER REVIEWS: Melanie also read A Hard Witching for her Canadian challenge last year.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: I finished Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare this morning and pulled Sometimes a Great Notion off the shelf to start this evening.

#74 – The Boys in the Trees

After finishing Mary Swan’s Giller-nominated novel, The Boys in the Trees, this morning I started again from the beginning, flipping through passages and re-reading the first few chapters because I was not the least bit ready for the book to be finished. The structure of the novel is unique, the bits and pieces of the lives of the main characters, William Heath and his family, are sewn together slowly by alternating points of view in and outside of the family.

The novel starts off with a young William running from an awful home life and hiding up in the trees. A view that allows both the boy his imagination and us foreshadowing for only trepidation should set in when characters boldly state, “…that one day people would know his name.” The narrative shifts forward in time to William with his family in London, to illness, to their emigration to Canada, to hard times, and then the book takes their perspective away and starts handing it to other people.

To Sarah and Alice, spinster-sisters, the latter a temperance worker who stumps for her cause and the former, a school-teacher who has Heath’s two remaining children in his classroom. From here we move to Dr. Robinson’s point of view, through his ex-servant Abby, to Eaton, the doctor’s son, much older now and well removed from the tragedy. The action that forms the impetus for the heinous act that no one truly understands: why William commits the crime that he does, and the ramifications of his actions.

It’s a swift, sure-footed novel that talks around the main action, spares the reader the gory bits, but discusses the implications regardless. Set just before the turn of the century, it’s also a picture of immigrant life, of the harsh nature of what it meant to leave everything behind and still find your life no better. I think the part of the novel that captured my attention, the two characters I would have liked to have spent a bit more time with, were the two sisters, and I’d happily read an entire book about the pair.

Swan’s writing style reminded me a little of Richard Wright’s Clara Callan, not that it’s epistolery, but rather the idea of indirect story telling and how effective it can be when done with a delicate grace. On a personal note, the book also gives me hope for my own novel, in the sense that I’ve been hearing plenty of industry talk that there’s too much fiction coming out of Canada with the same themes of “death, immigrant experience and back to the land.” Even if we, as a collective writerly conscious, move in similar ways, it’s still possible, as Mary Swan has shown, to create something hauntingly original.

READING CHALLENGES: I’m counting The Boys in the Trees towards my 2008 Canadian Book Challenge. I’m seven books in with six more to go by July 1st. I am confident that I’ll make it.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: The tally for the 2008 Race to the Finish Line Reading Stack so far: “Here’s my stack: “A Christmas Carol, The Other Queen, The Given Day, The Plot Against America, Lush Life, Through Black Spruce, The Origin of Species, The Boys in the Trees, The Double, The Almost Moon and Middlemarch.” I’m not sure where I’ll go next, but it’ll be something from the above list.”

READING COMPS: Clara Callan, Afterimage, Effigy. This is also a novel I would recommend to my friend Sam.

#70 – Through Black Spruce

My head has been pounding all day and my stomach just won’t settle. I’ve been peeing in a jug — the test that I hate the most when it comes to disease maintenance — and this morning the blood tech took forever to draw out what she needed. All of these petty insufferables, the annoyance of the snow blowing around, the pain in my sinuses that just won’t seem to go away, the same pain that woke me at 3 AM and held on tight until 6 when I managed to fall back asleep for an hour, were simply swept away when I finished Joseph Boyden‘s amazing Through Black Spruce.

Easily one of the best novels I’ve read this year, entirely deserving of its Giller crown, and utterly unstoppable in its narrative, the novel echoed around my heart like sweet poetry and made me fall hard for the words between its covers. Carrying forth with the descendants of Xavier and Elijah from his first beloved book, Three Day Road, the novel’s protagonists, Will Bird, son of the former and his niece Annie, take turns spilling out their stories in interchanging chapters. The novels reads as though they’re telling one another all of their secrets. Bits and pieces that need to be put together for either to move on with their lives. Annie, back from the south, back from searching for her lost sister, Suzanne, tends to her uncle who lies in a coma in a hospital in Moose Factory.

Back and forth from past to present, the pair unravel the reasons why and how they’ve ended up where they are — Annie’s found trouble of her own in Toronto, in NYC, in Montreal; Will’s been out in the bush for reasons that I won’t spoil. Their lives, far more intertwined and complex than simply saying they share the same blood, spill over into one another’s over and over again as the story pushes forth, as reliable as the weather, as the seasons.

The ending, oh, the ending, moments ago, me, crying like a baby wrapped up in my bedcovers, wishing for my headache to go away but silently thanking it for giving me a whole day to experience this book. I’m gushing, I know, but phooey to those who say that Through Black Spruce isn’t as good as Three Day Road. I remember reading the latter when I first started working in publishing, a tattered ARC broken almost entirely apart in the 24 hours it was in my possession, a ridiculously long transit ride sped by in what felt like minutes as the narrative simply swept me away. The same happened here. And while the first book, if I had to boil it down to just one theme (and how dare I, really), I’d say it was about change — both on an epic as well as a more personal level. This novel, while continuing that general idea, is also about loss, both on a grand scale, in dealing with an entire culture, and on a personal one, in dealing with the acute pain that comes with the absence of loved ones.

One of the best books I’ve read this year, hands down. I just adored it, all of it, flaws and all.

READING CHALLENGES: I could count this novel towards my Canadian Reading Challenge but as Joseph Boyden’s not a lady…I’m afraid it’ll just have to be another in the list of books I’ve read this year.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: Here’s my stack: “A Christmas Carol, The Other Queen, The Given Day, The Plot Against America, Lush Life, Through Black Spruce, The Origin of Species, The Boys in the Trees, The Double, The Almost Moon and Middlemarch.” I’m not sure where I’ll go next, but it’ll be something from the above list.

#65 – Oryx and Crake

When I first started reading Oryx and Crake about five years ago, I was still working for the evil empire and being bullied by the Boss From Hell. It seems that misery in real life isn’t a good bed fellow for post-apocalyptic fiction, so I never made it past the first chapter. Enter the 2008 Canadian Book Challenge and the need to clear out my reading shelves. I cleared off my shelves by creating the For the Ladies series for this year. And after reading Blindness and Hunger, why not throw in a little speculative Canadian fiction?

Atwood’s story takes place in the not-so distant future when all of human society is split up and defined by different sets of walls. The chosen few, the scientists, the gene-splitters, the evolutionary experts, work in compounds for huge companies cloning and creating new animals, new foods, new drugs that are then sent out into the pleeblands where society is less evolved. Fast forward to the years after some sort of disaster (that’s explained throughout the narrative) has almost wiped out the entire human race save for quasi humans called Crakers, and Snowman, the one charged with taking care of them.

Jimmy aka “Snowman” lives in a tree, scavenges the detrius for food, gets loaded as often as possible, and posits all kinds of pseudo-philosophy into the heads of the children of Crake. Crake, a brilliant if not utterly misguided scientist, was Jimmy’s best friend growing up. Oryx, also of the book’s title, was a young girl they first discovered on the internet after she held their budding sexual attention. She was someone neither Jimmy nor Crake could never forget. One of those people who wraps themselves around your mind and refuses to leave — no matter what the cost.

As Snowman’s supplies dwindle, he knows he needs to venture out and away from his safe zone, his tree in the park where the people of Crake live, back to the compound to pillage for more supplies. As he sets out on this journey, the story unfolds: how he got there, what happened to the world, what his life is like now with no other true human contact. The narrative as inventive as it is compelling, feels not unlike Atwood’s first novel, The Edible Woman (in ways). Jimmy’s a bit of a misfit, he likes words, he works in advertising, all things that sort of make him comparable to Elaine. Although in her world, she rebels against (am I remembering this correctly?) all of the pressure put upon her by turning it inside and then by literally eating herself (oh, that cake!). Here, Jimmy’s problems, his difficult relationship with his parents, his own mediocrity, and his love for Oryx, all manifest themselves in a true-to-life horror show. How come he still can’t let it go when the entire world has collapsed in front of him? Why does he continually play the loop of his life in his mind? What makes his story important?

The answers to all of the questions are woven through the narrative and the telling of them isn’t remotely disappointing. I have to say that I enjoyed this novel by Margaret Atwood more so than any of her work I’ve read in ages (Alias Grace and Surfacing are my other favs). It makes me wonder what took me so long to get back to it. And what I really enjoyed about the book was its imaginary elements. The pigoons and the rakunks. The social experiments. The ways in which Atwood extrapolates the world is heading. Frightening, yes. But also really addictive in terms of interspersing it with the more traditional parts of the narrative. Maybe we’ll all end up eating 100% soyo products with pet rakunks in the next 10 years. Maybe we’ll suffer through daily storms and live in the pleeblands. Who knows. But it sure makes for good reading.

READING CHALLENGES: My sixth book in this year’s Canadian Book Challenge!

#60 – Whetstone

As life returns to its normal cadence and rhythm of work and sleep and TV and work and sleep and TV, I managed to finish Lorna Crozier’s lovely book of poetry, Whetstone. I had taken the volume with me to read in Tofino but was still struggling through American Pastoral (more tk on that). So I went back to my poetry in transit and started the book on the Friday I returned to work.

Crozier’s poems have their roots in the natural world and are almost conversations over the course of a life. Some of them are meditations on a life in the process of being lived (like “Autobiography: Birth” that opens the book). And some are lovely pieces of almost Romantic-like poetry that express an almost whimsical yet utterly grounded adoration for the natural world (“Winter Birches”). Overall, my favourite poems in the collection were the three all with the same title, “Drought” sprinkled throughout the book. The first begins, “Water is suddenly old. / It feels stiffness, / a lessoning deep down.”

I found this idea, this image, of water growing old with whiskers and wrinkles and weathered utterly fascinating. I couldn’t help but think about our whale. About how my RRHB said that it’s no wonder he/she came up to see us at the side of the boat because they must swim to some of the loneliest places on earth. Some of the places where even the water, the ocean itself, must feel old and aching. As each takes the idea of drought in a different direction, the opposing wetness of it, the ache for that same wet, and the dusty, dirt-hemmed skirtness of it, the poems are nice compliments to one another.

Even if Crozier’s language remains simple and straightforward throughout, her thoughts, her comparisons and her poet’s eye is complex, and more often than not, I went back to re-read many of the pieces, underlining phrases that caught my breath and left me alone with my own thoughts.

READING CHALLENGES: Listed as #10 in my “For the Ladies” 2008 Canadian Book Challenge, finishing Whetstone brings me up to #5!

#55 – The Flying Troutmans

At first, I wasn’t so sure. Not sure about the story, not sure about the characters, not sure about anything. And then I was. Sure about it all. About how much I loved Hattie and Thebes and Logan and all the crazy characters they meet on the way. About Min and her tenuous grip on reality. About the road trip and the broken down van and the desperate journey Hattie takes before truly finding out who she is and why she’s doing what she’s doing.

Miriam Toews writes in an almost Beat-like fashion in this novel while obviously putting her own touches on it and ending up with a truly original road book in The Flying Troutmans. To say anymore would be to give something away. I don’t even want to link to the cover copy because I think it’s better not to know anything other than the fact that Miriam Toews is one hell of a writer before cracking the spine. Trust me.

But I will say this: the whole book reads like a road trip. Strange and kind of uncomfortable at first then after so many kilometres it finds its own rhythm. Places whiz by and your mind goes off on a trip of its own. And it’s all good. Things always happen on the road. Things you don’t expect. People you don’t think you’re going to meet. Places you have no expectations about seeing. And despite the circumstances behind Hattie’s road trip (she takes off with Logan, her 15-year-old nephew, and Thebes, her 11-year-old niece, after her sister’s admission to the psych ward), it’s a good experience. That doesn’t mean it’s not hard or bittersweet or painful or funny or difficult or gut-wrenching or sad or blissful or any number of adjectives. It means that the end result is satisfying.

And the ending. Well, the ending truly rocks. And right now I wish there was a Thebes in my life making me a huge novelty cheque.

READING CHALLENGES: The Flying Troutmans is part of my “For the Ladies” version of this year’s Canadian Book Challenge. I’m pretty sure I’m at #4 now. Only 8 more books to go!

#51 – Quick

For some reason, when I can’t bike into work and am forced to take the subway (read: when I’m under the weather for various illnesses), I like to read poetry. The books are often smallish so they fit nicely into pockets and purses and it’s a nice way to be eased in or out of your day. Anne Simpson’s collection Quick was my companion for a good month — as the days were far and few between where I wasn’t riding my bike. I actually finished the book up the Friday of the September long weekend and simply haven’t had a chance to blog about it yet.

The sky softens with the end of light. Reaching for something solid when there’s nothing to hold. The woman slips deeper in the water, swims, snatches up her hand. A jellyfish has stung her. She gazes at its lurid pouch, fringed with cream: doll-sized weapons. Mute and deaf and blind, the creature glides forward as if this was what it wanted all along. Lifted on a wave, dropped on sand. A spilled sack. It’ll lose its sheen, begin to stink. Later, a boy will poke it with a stick, just to see.

Chorus

Did you think you could miss this part? Everything is sharpened around you.

The above is taken from the almost prose-like epic poem that makes up the later half of the book. “Ocean, Ocean” is a sharp and visceral exploration of human interaction with the body of water and its many metaphors aren’t so much spelled out as inferred through the beautiful two line chorus that accompanies each one paragraph stanza. I was captivated by this poem and read it many, many times. The beginning of the collection wasn’t as arresting for me but I was consistently impressed by the themes: the most basic in literature brought to soaring new heights by Simpson’s wonderful poetry. Man versus nature, man versus man, nature in its most primal, effortless state.

I am ever glad to have ensured that my Canadian Book Challenge not only included the ladies, but poetry as well. It’s not as if I have to force myself to read poetry as much as remind myself how much I love it. Funny, too, as I had a conversation with someone at work who mentioned that they never, ever thought about poetry, that they couldn’t care less. I was saddened by this statement only because poetry, while endlessly important, seems to never sell as well as much of the schlock that crowds out the shelves of the bookstores.

Everyone should at least buy a book of poetry. I don’t even care if you ever read it. Well, maybe I care a little bit.

READING CHALLENGES: Quick is #3 in terms of my For the Ladies Canadian Book Challenge.

#48 – Runaway

When you finish reading an Alice Munro book of short stories, you honestly feel as if you’ve accomplished something. You feel as though you’ve put yourself in a long line of people that will be reading Alice Munro short stories from now until hundreds of years from now. They may be reading them in a slightly different world, one that’s a little more polluted and with many more people, but they’ll be reading the stories none the less. Why? Because there’s no way to deny that they’re great art — wonderful glimpses into the lives of extraordinarily ordinary women who make mistakes — and they’re simply marvelous.

Runaway was in the very first package of books I ordered when I first started my job at Random House. The book, in its first hard cover edition, sat on my shelf for weeks, then months, then years. It summered up at the cottage. It wintered there as well. Until I finally committed it to the reading pile as a part of the latest Canadian Book Challenge (Runaway represents #2 in my For the Ladies Challenge) and actually managed to finish it.

Comprised of eight short stories, three of which are linked, the collection has a consistent theme: each of the female protagonists run away in some form or another. Perhaps it’s in how they dress or how they act, in how they think or in a physical event that motivates them to make a change in their lives, but its escapism in its different forms. The three linked stories follow the life of Juliet, from when she’s a young woman still studying who takes a train trip and meets a man, until she’s an older woman, who lives three distinct lives in each of the stories. All three are ridiculously effective and utterly engrossing as Juliet’s life takes a marked and unexpected turn that contains such sharp edges as only Munro can write them. But I think my favourite story among the eight would just have to be the penultimate one, “Tricks,” for its climax actually made me pull the book to my chest and hug it tight, feeling every inch of the words as if they were a part of my own life, a pain I felt instead of the protagonist, Robin.

The towns are small, but nameless (for the most part), and the setting seems secondary to the inner life of each of the women. They are rich, rich, rich pieces of literature, so perfect in every way that I don’t have a single constructive thing to say. For some reason, I always leave Munro on my shelves, I collect her books like they’re pieces of china, bits and bobs to be admired in a long line of Can Lit adorning my bookshelves. And every time I actually pull one of the books off the shelf and spend some time with it, I chastise myself for never spending more time with them. They’re not to be admired. They’re to be enveloped and digested, and then put back on the shelf to age with you, for Runaway is a book never to be given away or loaned to a friend, it’s just that good. Oh, sure, I’ll recommend it, and then direct you all over to Amazon to get your own copy.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: The first few lines of my favourite story, up close and personal.
READING CHALLENGES: As above, #2 in my Canadian Book Challenge for this year.
WHAT’S UP NEXT: Finishing Wally Lamb’s mammoth (and ridiculously engrossing) novel on my Sony Reader for work.