Category: can lit

The first book in my For the Ladies Canadian Book Challenge of 2008-2009 is Jane Urquhart’s Away. The first few moments of this book truly captivated me. I started reading it and didn’t want to stop, not for work, not for my favourite TV shows, not for my RRHB, anything. The multi-generational tale of Irish-Canadian settlers powers along like a captivating storm on a summer day. An important story needs to be told, from grandmother to granddaughter (which we find out cryptically that this is new knowledge; for a lot of life the granddaughter believes herself to be a grand-niece) about the history of the family.

The book’s title refers to the matriarch, Mary, who becomes Moira one morning after she discovers a young man washed up on the shores of a small island off the coast of Northern Ireland. The experience of him, of his perfect shape and lovely form just before he dies, carries Mary “away.” The man whispers, “Moira” to her just as his last breath leaves him, and she falls in love with him, in love with his voice of the sea, in love with this other person she becomes, in love with the water from which he comes. The rest of the first half of the novel concerns itself with the ways Mary comes back from being away. She marries and then has a child they call Liam. And then the famine hits. Her husband, Brian, a schoolteacher and farmer, agrees to let their landlords, two English quasi-fops, send them to Canada.

The pair has another child, a girl named Eileen, and she and Liam become the focus of the story once they’re in Canada. The landscape has changed but the epic nature of the novel hasn’t and the journey for Eileen and Liam to their new farm near Lake Ontario. There’s so much mixed up in the novel that sometimes I think it gets a little lost in its own epic-ness. Characters get swept up in politics and then conflicts are completely forgotten, entire generations are skipped, whole backstories are simply lost, and main characters go off on long journeys and are never heard from again — but somehow, the novel holds your interest.

On the whole, I enjoyed this book terribly, as my mother would say, warts and all. The mystical nature of being ‘away’ — of being at once lost and found to your inner self, is an interesting theme around which to circle a novel. The dichotomy between the old world and the new, of Irish and English, of men and women, of right and wrong, all shift in Urquhart’s book. In a way, that’s what makes Away such a perfect product of Canadian literature. If I were well back in my M.A. and still studying post-colonial writing, I would probably write one hell of a paper about this book. But I’m not, I’m doing my Canadian Book Challenge and it’s a pretty darn perfect title to include in said challenge.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: I have a beautiful, collector’s edition of the novel that McClelland & Stewart released for their 100th anniversary. While I’m not crazy about the dust jacket design, I do love the cloth treatment with its tender title stamp and pretty grey colour. (Blogger’s giving me trouble uploading the photo, so I’ll have to try again later — the link above is to Flickr).

READING CHALLENGES: #1 for the Canadian Book Challenge. I’m already well ahead of last year.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: A review of Kerry Cohen’s Loose Girl, and Runaway by Alice Munro.

THE SOUNDTRACK: Currently playing, “You Don’t Understand Me” by The Raconteurs. Oddly fitting, I think. The recording of the song allows you to hear the cool, almost-squeaking like sound of fingers going up and down the neck of the guitar (I think?) to hit the different chords (I think?) which kind of reminds me of all the beautiful flaws in the book itself.

There are few books these days that can honestly be called epic. Many that aspire to be so, and many writers who set out to be “epic” without really understanding that it’s not just page count that matters when a book stands up and marks its place in time. Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes is epic and it surely marks its place in time.

Over the past weekend when we were in NYC with my RRHB’s parents, he was the Author of the Year at the Libris Awards. That says a lot, it’s an award decided upon by booksellers and not a jury. Last year, Ami McKay won for her haunting, beautiful, and uplifting The Birth House. The books that win please readers and booksellers alike, a little bit commercial, a lot literary, and with a story that seems endless in its scope and telling, I’m not surprised at all that The Book of Negroes, and Lawrence Hill, won this year.

The novel finds Aminata Diallo, a young African girl aged about eleven, growing up as many generations before her have grown up. She has a mother, a father, a religion (she’s Muslim), a village, and is in training to follow her mother into midwifery. But everything changes the moment she’s captured by traders and sold into slavery. Transported by ship to the southern colonies before they’ve become the United States, she barely survives the journey. After she arrives, she’s branded, sold, and taken under the wing of a woman who ensures she comes back to health. And the story simply doesn’t stop there, she’s sold to a Jewish man who treats her well, but keeps her enslaved.

More skilled than many, especially other women, Meena, as she’s known, can write and read. Skills that serve her well and help her to survive the many injustices life tosses her way as easily as paper carries on the wind. The second half of Meena’s life finds her freed, a member of the new loyalist colony in Nova Scotia. Still unhappy at the crown’s treatment, a group of Nova Scotians travel back to the motherland and settle in Freetown, on the coast of Sierra Leone.

I read this book to satisfy my Nova Scotia requirement of the Canadian Book Challenge. I had planned on reading a Lynn Coady novel, but once this novel won the Commonwealth Prize, I figured I should probably read it sooner rather than later. And wow, what an achievement for Hill, it’s a wonderful and important book. The sadness of Aminata’s story is tempered by her own words, her strength and her amazing sense of herself in the world. Despite the hardship, despite her children being taken away from her at different stages in the book, despite being bought and sold and then bought again, despite the aches in her bones, she tells her stories again and again, all in aid of ending the terrifying and awful trade in humans.

Honestly, I enjoyed every moment of this book, even if it did take me three weeks to read. Now, I’ve got two provinces/territories to go before July 1st and only one slight problem. Anyone have an idea about reading Nunavut?

David Bergen’s lyrical, gut-wrenching and tragic novel surprised me. I picked it up on a whim, trying to satisfy my Manitoba requirement for The Canadian Book Challenge, from a pile of books that were about to be sent back to the warehouse. Am I ever glad that I did.

The story of a middle-aged man who lives in small-town Manitoba, See the Child begins with a tragedy, as do so many good, Canadian literary novels. A knock on the door wakes protagonist Paul. He comes downstairs and expects to see his missing son at the door; instead, Harry, the local police officer, stands in front of him to say that Stephen’s dead. The rest of the novel deals with Paul dealing with the loss of his son. Stephen’s girlfriend, Nicole, was pregnant at the time of his death and when she and his young grandson come to live with him at his apiary, the young boy, named Sky, becomes his lifeline.

A couple of years ago, I read Bergen’s The Time in Between, and it took me months to finish. The book just didn’t capture my attention, so I was reticent to try more Bergen. However, this novel had me from the first few pages, I read the book up until the last moment of having to babysit, walked with it home down Lansdowne, and went to bed early so I could finish it after I got home from my cousin’s. The narrative stays close to Paul. And it’s not that we feel his suffering, we see it, in his actions, in his conversations, in how he almost abandons his life from before when his son was alive. It’s a novel about small town life, and has strong resonances of Margaret Laurence, which is probably why I liked it so much.

READING CHALLENGES & WHAT’S UP NEXT: As I mentioned, this is Manitoba for The Canadian Book Challenge. That’s 10 out of the 13 to make my cross-country reading adventure. I’m still a bit stumped by Nunavut, but I’ve got Nova Scotia (Saints of Big Harbour) at the ready to dive into after I finish Donna Tartt’s exceptional (so far) The Secret History.

When I was creating the list of books for The Canadian Book Challenge, I thought it would be prudent to include a title from L.M. Montgomery because of the whole 100th anniversary of Anne celebration. The book I originally picked was Anne of the Island, which I had chosen because I thought it was the one about the First World War. Obviously, my memory’s a bit murky, considering I read all these books when I was about 10 years old, because the book I really wanted to read was Rilla of Ingleside (as I discovered in the bookstore).

Of course, I remembered next to nothing about the book, so the whole reading experience was quite a surprise. It’s easy to see how all of the Anne books are so beloved, Montgomery has a way with characters and plot that flow like good conversation. You don’t care if the point of view flops all over the place, aren’t bothered by the funny little quirks in her writing, don’t mind that people float in and out of Ingelside with alarming frequency. There’s a heart to the books that’s so warm, inviting and, frankly, comforting that they act like the best of one’s childhood memories. You know those parts of you that were shaped by the person you were when you read Anne in the first place.

Rilla of Ingleside follows Anne’s youngest child, a free-spirited, surprisingly (in her words) unmotivated young woman from just before the war starts, through her miraculous changes otherwise known as growing up, to the months following the Armistice. Rilla’s adventures, her war baby (adopted), her Junior Red Cross moments, the lively cast of characters that inhabit her family home, they all combine to create a whimsical world I was happy to be lost in this week. The landscape reveals as much about the book as the spirit of the people in it, and I think it’s a huge part of the success of these novels.

I was listening to the CBC on Saturday afternoon when Ian Brown and guests were talking about Allison Pick’s poetry collection, The Dream World. While I haven’t read it, I was intrigued by their discussion around a line in one of the poems that describes the narrator knowing how she all about condoms and but not trees (I am doing a terrible disservice to Pick’s work right now and I do realize that; I’m sorry), and that idea stuck with me. It’s exactly the opposite in Montgomery’s work. She knows the plants, the trees, the hills, the water, the birds, the flowers, the bushes, the rocky paths, and that’s what brings the landscape to life, what makes it seem alive. In truth, it’s the heart of the books.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: Just the cover, I’m afraid, and how very 1983. Awesome.

READING CHALLENGES: As I mentioned, it’s PEI, and the 8th book I’ve read for The Canadian Book Challenge. That means 5 to go!

Consolation, Michael Redhill’s compelling novel with its story within a story, was the book all of Toronto should have read back in February. I think it was part of that whole “Keep Toronto Reading” promotion that went on for the month. As I am generally behind when it comes to city-wide celebrations, I have just managed to finish Consolation, which is also my Ontario selection for The Canadian Book Challenge. I realize it’s April. I hope that it still counts.

The book starts off with a bit of a shocker, one that I don’t want to spoil, so I’ll skip talking about it, and go straight to what I liked best: the balancing of the story of old Toronto, with its central character an apothecary named Hallam who comes from England in the mid-1850s to open up a pharmacy here in the city, with that of the modern day (well, 1997) as told around an urban geologist named David, whose family becomes involved in the very last project he was trying to unearth, a set of very early photographs of the city taken by our historical hero. Is that confusing? It shouldn’t be — the book’s epic storytelling makes it quite easy to flow from one time period to the next.

The history in this book, the detail, and the exquisite storytelling, all had me on the edge of my seat more than once. In both cases, the parts of the book that takes place in 1997 and that in the 1850s, the narrators are outsiders. Men on the cusp of something, of success, of family, of their own careers, which make their experiences unique and engaging. It’s a hefty book, but the pace is swift, and Redhill’s obvious skill as a poet means his prose is both lyrical and inventive at the same time.

I did find the ending a bit muddy but by that point I didn’t care as much about the perfection of the story; I was already embroiled in the absolutely delicious tale of Hallam and his cohorts. In the end, I’d say that I enjoyed the historical parts of the novel a touch more than the parts set in a more modern age. But Redhill’s book can absolutely stand the test of time in terms of becoming a quintessential novel about this city in which we live. It’s up there with In the Skin of a Lion, with Fugitive Pieces, with Cat’s Eye, and others. Highly recommended.

READING CHALLENGES: As I mentioned, I’m through Ontario! That leaves six more books to go before July 1st. Goodness, I’d best pick up the pace.