Category: ragdoll reads

#54 – October

When Richard B. Wright’s Clara Callan won both the Governor General’s Award and the Giller in 2001, I devoured it like the rest of Canada, in one fell swoop sitting on the world’s most uncomfortable couch in our old apartment with its fabulous windows and loud College Street traffic. The novel both inspired and saddened me, with its echoes of A Bird in the House, and its epistolary format, which just seemed to work, Clara Callan haunted me for years.

Fast-forward many seasons and I’ve just had my hip surgery. Zesty‘s utterly wonderful mum gave me a copy of Adultery. And maybe I shouldn’t have read it then because sometimes when you expect an author to write the same book twice, it’s more your fault than theirs when you’re disappointed. Right?

Regardless, I’m thrilled, thrilled to say that October, Wright’s latest novel coming out in a few weeks, has me enthralled all over again. It’s a short, tightly written book about James Hillyer, a retired professor (of literature, natch), who learns that his daughter, the headmistress of a prestigious girls’ school in England, has aggressive breast cancer—the very same disease that killed her mother around the same age. When Hillyer flies to England to see her, he runs into Gabriel Fontaine, an old friend from childhood.

Hillyer drifts with swift strokes down memory lane as he describes his friendship with Gabriel during the summer he spent with his uncle at a resort town in Quebec: the rivalry he felt towards the boy despite the latter being wheelchair bound because of polio; the love he felt for Odette, a French-Canadian maid and Gabriel’s girlfriend; and the coming of age he endures in that moment when he realizes that wealth and privilege will always allow for a certain latitudes that James can never experience. All these themes and events swell together and capture that feeling of childhood, you know when you’re free for those two weeks the Americans show up at the cottage and it’s not just you, your brother, and your cousins, but a whole gang of kids with adolescent emotions and feelings, adventurous spirits and a crushing reality that it all will come to an end just a mere fourteen days later. That’s the essence of this book: that feeling when the vacation comes to an end and things have happened to change your life forever, only James doesn’t know it at the time, he doesn’t realize it completely until he looks back, which is the simple brilliance of this book.

Wright’s narrative style reminded me so much of Hugh MacLennan’s The Watch That Ends the Night, which can never be a bad thing, and he has such a skill for crafting the scenes between Gabriel and James. Their voices drifting easily between the high pitched tones of young adulthood to the more defined, fully grown mature tenor of elderly men, Gabriel and James, whether they like it or accept it or not, have deeply impacted each other’s lives.

I know the fall remains the single busiest time when it comes to the more commercial forms of art (novels, films, television). But sometimes, a book comes along that reminds you why we all work so hard, for me, this fall, it might just be October. But ask me again after I’ve maybe read a few more of the new releases…

#53 – Annie John

Finally, a novel from my Around the World in 52 Books challenge that truly captures the setting where the author herself was born. Jamaica Kincaid’s utterly lovely Annie John, a bildungsroman to match, I think the masters like Joyce or Richler when it comes to imbibing the story with a strong sense of narrative voice and intention, takes place in Antigua, and tells the semi-autobiographical story of a young girl growing up and coming to terms with a difficult relationship with her mother.

While Kincaid’s prose may be straightforward, her intentions are certainly not, as Annie John is a rich, vibrant novel where the protagonist, who grows from being an awkward but brilliant pre-adolescent to young woman setting off into the world on her own for the very first time, refuses to move seamlessly from the arms of her mother into her own generation. It’s such a real book, and gave me such a rich reading experience, despite (as with The Accidental) getting through half of it months ago only to pick it up again last weekend. I could smell the salty air of the island, feel the hot sun, imagine her crisp school uniform, picture the richness of the setting, and wanted to taste all the food I had never heard of, all the while thinking that there are common themes with any girl: getting her period (oh, how very different from Margaret), finding true friends, reacting to boys, and enduring a sickness (okay maybe this one applies just to me). But Kincaid’s ability to ensure that we find Annie John different, if only from the place she grew up, moves this book from a novel about a foreign place into a book that displays bits of post-colonial brilliance.

Yet, it’s the private, personal, behind-closed-doors warring, back-and-forth relationship that Annie has with her mother that truly forms the backbone of this story. As Annie firmly moves beyond her safe embrace, and into that stage where all you do is fight, push back, and fight some more, the whole of her existence is described in opposition to the woman who raises her carefully and lovingly. Metaphorical maybe if you want to think in those cliched terms of countries being women and all that, but it struck me as powerful, as life-affirming, as honest and real. Of course a bildungsroman, technically (and correct me if I’m wrong) tosses out the hero into the social world, forcing his change to come about because he leaves home; but here, if we think about it in the world of these women, the social order of the family most definitely comes from Annie John’s mother, and the conflict with her society truly brings about our hero’s changes.

Kincaid’s writing reminds me of Abeng by Michelle Cliff or the non-Wide Sargasso Sea novels by Jean Rhys in a way; she has the same kind of lilt to her sentences, but Annie John remains her story from beginning to end, influences or no influences. On the whole, I think I rather enjoyed this book, and if I were still in the essay writing mode of university, I think I would have gotten great pleasure out of deconstructing it and putting it all back together in a paper.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: I shot this while reading, of course, but you can see the water and the boat, plus a bit of Tina’s lovely boyfriend Mimoun lying in the sun with his own book. His was in French. He is from Paris, you know. Totally irrelevant details but they make a wonderful couple. I’m just sayin’.

#52 – The Devil and Miss Prym

As I revamped my Around the World in 52 Countries challenge to better fit with the 1001 Books list, the Paulo Coelho book that came off was The Zahir, which was replaced by his The Devil and Miss Prym simply to kill two goals with one stone. More parable than novel, The Devil and Miss Prym was intended to be the Brazil stop in my reading around the world, but as it’s set in a small, mountainous French village named Viscos, it again proves the point that so many of my books are not set in the countries where the author themselves was born, and don’t really tell me a whole bunch about life in his or her original setting.

Regardless, it’s a short, swift read that focuses on the battle between good and evil. The devil, a fallen businessman who propositions the tiny enclosed town (population 281) into testing not only their faith but their very humanity, walks into Viscos and chooses the local barmaid Chantal (Miss Prym) to be his messenger. At once the entire town becomes aware of the man’s plot: to prove that human beings are essentially bad by forcing them to murder a member of their village in exchange for gold.

A philosophical debate charges back and forth through the pros and cons of taking some one’s life in exchange for the social and financial security offered by the gold. As the centre of the town’s focus (blamed for bringing the terrible decision to them; gossiped about for the choices in her life; and sleepless over the problems her role in the decision creates in her life), Miss Prym moves through various emotions before coming to her own conclusions about the morality offered by this businessman haunted by the devil and his own tragedy.

It’s been a while since I’d read anything where philosophy and theology were so cleanly mixed up in fiction. In fact, the last time I remember thinking about “big picture” ideas not over beer or cards, honestly, was in university, when I took quite a few philosophy classes. I’m not going to give away the ending but I would like to add that Coelho’s simplistic prose and straightforward storytelling made this slim novel extremely compelling, even if I wasn’t one hundred percent convinced of the story’s moral and religious underpinnings.

Should it be included on the 1001 Books list? Well, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did The Alchemist, when I read it all those years ago after finishing my undergrad degree (you know that fairy tale time when you rediscover reading for reading’s sake, sigh.) and I certainly think that there are far better novels out there (why is Margaret Laurence not on that list, seriously?), but I think I’m richer for having read it, if only to have done some thinking about the great never-ending battle between good and evil in my own infallibly human mind.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: The cover of this book is grand, isn’t it? Anyway, it’s a close up snapped on the sun deck before leaving the cottage to come back to the city in a panic of “is it really over my extra-long weekend?”

#51 – The Accidental

As much as I enjoyed Absolution, am I ever glad that I put Ali Smith on my Around the World in 52 Books challenge. The Accidental is one of the best books I’ve read this summer, with its echoes of Mark Haddon and David Mitchell (I still think his Black Swan Green has never gotten the attention it deserves; it’s a brilliant book), Smith’s novel quickly sucks you in with her switching voices, intuitive point of view and tumbling prose. And while she’s officially my Scottish writer, and this book is set in England, it’s hard to assess whether or not it’s an accurate reflection of the chosen country’s literature. I’ll probably have to delve into Smith’s backlist to find out if she’s written a book set in Scotland, but after reading The Accidental I’d be surprised if it wasn’t on the 1001 Book people’s radar and might be included in an updated version years in the future.

Annnnnywaaay.

The story of the Smart family (daughter, son, stepfather, mother) is told chapter by chapter in each character’s voice starting with Astrid (aforementioned daughter), as they spend the summer away from London in a “substandard” vacation house. When a stranger named Amber who has absolutely no connection to anyone in the family, regardless of what everyone in the house thinks, simply walks into their life and starts making changes, she becomes the catalyst that skyrockets the family into a whole other world in terms of their physical and emotional lives.

Each character has a specific, overriding emotional issue: Astrid’s being bullied at school; Magnus suffers through a tragedy somewhat of his own making; Michael, the step-father, needs to deal with his, ahem, indiscretions; and Eve, the mother, suffers from a writer’s block that bleeds into all aspects of her person. But when Amber bashes into their lives and mashes up their thoughts not only about each other but about the various issues that are pulling them apart and in all different directions. Amber is a hippie, a charlatan, a psychic, a seductress, and her presence finally makes everyone come to terms with the facades that structure even the purest of lives.

On the whole, it took me a long time to get through this book. I picked it up months ago and read 30-odd pages and then put it down. Picked it up again a few weeks later, started from the place I stopped, got confused and gave up. But this weekend at the cottage, after a particularly intense game of multi-language Scrabble, I relaxed before swimming and read the entire book from cover to cover. And I loved it. I really did.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: I’m proudly displaying the book on my grandmother’s sideboard-thingy that has pictures of her tucked into that totally creepy print of my uncle’s. Oh, and I think I have the US version of the book because I ordered it through my old work…

#50 – Absolution

Sometimes the heat makes life absolutely unbearable and I find it hard to concentrate, which means it’s necessary to pick up a mystery. At first, Caro Ramsay’s Absolution presented such a gritty and realistic portrait of Glasgow that I considered making it, instead of The Accidental, my Scotland stop in the Around the World in 52 Books challenge. I have since come to my senses just knowing how much Maylin loved that book makes me want to sit down and finish it this weekend (which I just might do having an extra day to spend up at the cottage on Monday). I’ve been half-way through Ali Smith’s book for about four months now and there’s no good reason why I am procrastinating finishing it.

Annnnnywaaaay, I did finish Absolution up this morning before work, having but a few pages to go after putting it down last night when my eyes refused to stay open for a moment longer. The story starts off really strong and introduces the book’s main detective, DCI Alan McApline, in a clever way. Smart, rugged, and handsome, he’s forced to reckon with his past when a case that’s been haunting him for twenty years becomes the focus point of a current investigation. A young woman named Anna, pregnant but hideously scarred from an acid burn, lies in the hospital, and McAlpine, then a young policeman, is assigned to the case. Her killer is never found but her scarred face, known to McAlpine only through pictures, consumes him. As all good investigators do, he gets on with it, has a successful marriage to Helena (who becomes the subject of an unfortunate number of dropped plot threads) and tries to forget all about Anna, which we all know is impossible.

Fast-forward twenty years when McAlpine is transferred back to the unit he left after the double trauma of Anna’s death and his brother’s untimely drowning in the line of duty. The Crucifixion Killer, known to the cops on McAlpine’s crew as ‘Christopher Robin’ (a quirky profiler’s idea of a good code name), starts murdering women, and McAlpine’s charged with finding him. The two cases intertwine until they come to a shocking conclusion, which makes this a little anti-Alexander McCall Smith, if I had to compare this book to my favourite mystery series, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency.

While I found the plot somewhat muddled in places, and got a little frustrated with the fact that there are simply too many characters, I did like Ramsay’s book overall. It’s fast-paced, and way more Cracker than the bland American mysteries I usually watch on television (ahem, Law and Order), which I totally appreciated. While I didn’t actually guess whodunnit by the end, I had figured out some of the clever twists Ramsay drops in throughout the narrative. All in all it’s a perfectly satisfactory summer mystery for a foggy-headed girl on an August afternoon.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: I read half the book here and half the book up north, I took the picture on my desk where you can see the remnants of my tax forms and the corner of my next abridged classic source material peaking in at the corner.

And if you’re feeling particularly brave, check out the book’s trailer. Ohhh, it gives me creeps just hearing the music in my head.

Quick Updates On The Fly

Our hot water tank broke this morning so my dream of having a lovely hot shower after four days up north at the cottage spilled out all over the cold, basement floor. This did not start off my day well.

As a result, no bike ride in because I was so late that my RRHB had to drive me to work. I hate driving to work.

I did not manage to finish a single book this weekend although I did watch Zodiac and half of Perfume. Well, that’s not exactly true, I read Dramacon, my very first manga, which was super-cute although I felt old just flipping the pages. Oh, and I also felt old because I had to learn how to read the books. Yes, even reading manga is a new experience for me. But the Tokyopop website is just so cool, isn’t it?

Now I’ve got conditioner in my hair, I’m exhausted because I just couldn’t sleep, and I wish I was still up at the cottage because the weather was just so luscious this weekend I didn’t want to leave.

How are all of you? I feel like the summer is whizzing by so fast that I haven’t had a moment to catch my breath.

#49 – A Golden Age

I thoroughly enjoyed Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age. Set in Bangladesh just as the war for their independence broke out in 1971, the novel centres around Rehana, a woman in her mid-thirties with two grown children (a son and daughter), and her struggle to keep her life together during the difficult times.

A Golden Age takes place in the town of Dhaka, which is technically East Pakistan to begin with before it Bangladesh. Tahmima Anam has a talent for bringing rich detail to the page that not only truly reflects the time and place, but also builds up an atmosphere around Rehana herself. She loves to garden, and therefore the landscape reflects that fact. She’s a widow, and despite having some hard times, manages to keep her family together throughout the struggle by building a house on her property that she rents out. But most of all, Rehana’s a mother, and the entire story with the novel bears witness to this fact.

One of the most interesting aspects of war fiction, if that’s even a genre, for me when it’s told from a female perspective, is how different the story remains. War on the home front may be worlds apart from where the front-line action might be (although the war touches Rehana and her friends directly), it still changes lives in ways that make it impossible to ignore. There is a subtle strength in Rehana’s character that reminds me of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsay in a way, and the argument was made to me, many years ago during an undergraduate class in modernism, that To the Lighthouse should be considered a war novel. While I’m not sure if it’s an accepted reading of Woolf’s novel or not, the idea stuck with me, and that’s how I approached my thinking about A Golden Age, as if it too was a war novel in the purest of senses.

Like To the Lighthouse, there’s a building that Rehana rents out on her property called Shona that becomes a central character in the novel. As life in war is reflected by its inhabitants, and the house itself takes on a new personality. It’s a fascinating idea, I think, to imagine not only how characters feel the impact of war, from the blankets the women sew on top of Rehana’s roof for the refugees, to the pain and anguish she feels when her children become involved in various ways, but to also see what changes in the physical landscape beyond just craters made by bombs (Khaled Hosseini, I’m looking at you). Even a detail as simple as a bed that used to be used for a child has now been appropriated for other things makes you imagine war permeating every aspect of a life, and not just those lives on the front lines with the bullets.

Regardless, I wanted to read this novel because I didn’t have Bangladesh on my Around the World in 52 Countries list, and I’m so glad I got a chance to experience it. For a first novel, it’s really quite wonderful. It’s also exciting because HarperCollins Canada will publish the novel in Canada this January, and even though you could order it from Amazon, it’s actually worth the wait.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: I left the book on the dock when we drove home and had to call my aunt to rescue it. The cover got a bit water marked (as it rained a bit, just a few drops) but I wanted to show the poor abandoned novel where it would have ended up had my family not shown it a little bit of kindness. And what a cold, cloudy day it was! Shockingly, it was first-thing in the morning when I took the picture. And the bits of wood everywhere are from Gordie, the dog, who loves sticks so much that it’s almost impossible to understand.

#48 – The Double Bind

Wow, this book threw me for a loop. There are so many reasons why I appreciate Chris Bojhalian’s writing, in a way, he’s like an old-school moralist, not that he preaches, but that each of his novels have a way of showing you, like a good philosophy teacher, the limitations of your own thought. The Double Bind is no different, and with every novel, Bojhalian’s skill as a novelist seems to improve, and this book is on par with my very favourite of his, The Buffalo Soldier.

The novel’s protagonist, Laurel Estabrook, is attacked while riding her bike down an abandoned logging road in Vermont. As she copes with the tragedy, we’re pulled further and further into her world. We see her become obsessed with the photographs of Bobbie Crocker, a homeless man she helped at the shelter where she works, as she uncovers a world of secrets around the story of Jay Gastby.

I don’t want to say much more than that because to give anything away with this novel would be to ruin it, for like the Lippman, the ending really makes the entire reading experience. Let me just suffice it to say that not everything is as it seems, and that’s the true quality in the writing of this novel, Bojhalian’s skill in exploring or, rather, plunging the depths of the young woman’s despair over her attack.

See how it was hard to get any work done this week? The reading was just so good.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: It’s quite fitting, again, that I read a lot of this book on the old-school psychiatrist’s chair we have in the cottage. The book is sitting upon it on an old plaid blanket that I adore—even though it’s the itchy kind. And can I say that the cover of my ARC is way, way better than the cover of the finished book? It’s so blah, that other cover, compared to the vibrant images on the advance reader.

#47 – What The Dead Know

Before picking this book as one of our Facebook The Reading Group titles this month, I had seen Kate’s capsule review of Laura Lippman’s What the Dead Know and immediately put it on my TBR pile.

Let me say it this way: I could not put this book down.

Here are all the things that I did not do because I was engrossed in the story of two sisters who disappear one sunny pre-Easter afternoon from a mall in Baltimore (yes, where The Wire is set, fab):

1. Entertain my nephew. I rocked him so he’d go to sleep and then let him sleep on me for almost a half hour after he sort of semi-woke up so that I could keep reading. I didn’t put the book down until he made it absolutely clear he was having no more of it.

2. Swim in the lake. It was one of the few beautiful days and I put off going swimming although it was a million degrees out because I was obsessed with finding out if the woman who has an accident and leaves the scene of the crime actually was one of the missing Bethany sisters.

3. Eat. Seriously, I skipped lunch and was absolutely starving until I had finished.

4. Talk. Really, I cloistered myself in my grandmother’s cottage while my cousins and all the rest of my wonderful family were doing all kinds of fun outdoorsy-type stuff.

5. Finish the seventeen other books I had started. All of my other reading, including two or three books that were half-done took a back seat until I had read the very last word.

And I’m telling you, it’s a hell of a good last few words. Do you need any more then that? I don’t think so.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: The very chair where I sat for four hours on Tuesday reading this deliciously addictive little novel.

#46 – Love In The Time Of Cholera

I find it perfectly fitting to be writing about Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece, Love in the Time of Cholera, while I have a fever. As there’s nothing new that I can possibly add to the world’s discussion of this text other then to say that I came to it for many reasons: the first of which would have to be its inclusion on the 1001 Books list; the second, because I’d read One Hundred Years of Solitude after finishing my undergrad at Queen’s and fell hard for it; and I read Ben McNally’s Valentine’s Day column over at Booklounge.ca where he said it was the ultimate book to read for that holiday. See, lots of good reasons to pick up this book.

Regardless, could there be a more expressive book about love ever written? Probably, but this book took my breath away more times then I could possibly count. Full of every single type of love story, from an unrequited affair that lasts the length of the book itself to the hills and valleys of a long, successful marriage, from the physical to the spiritual, from the epistolary to the serenade, it’s impossible not to appreciate love in all its forms after finishing this novel. The sentences are exquisite, complex and meandering, almost to the point of getting lost down the cobblestones of the author’s mind, until he brings you back to the apex, which lands in exactly the right place.

The Columbian port in of call for my Around the World in 52 Books, I can’t think of another novel I could savour like this, as if it’s a sweet cheese or a fine glass of wine. I was all rosy for love after finishing this book up north, and ended up watching Before Sunset for the fourth or fifth time. My own story ended up with a lot of long sentences as I thought about the main love affair that forms the center section. Of course, I ended up editing half of them down over the last few days I was there because they didn’t make much sense, as I was all drunk on Columbia, the Caribbean, the food, the smell of almonds, and the like. Ahem.

In the end, the craziest analogy I can come up with that describes the reading experience of Love in the Time of Cholera is this: a few years back when I was still working at the evil empire, I was having a discussion with my coworker Lynne, where we were imagining what life would be like if we were cats. Go with me here. It’s okay as it’s not as kooky as it sounds. Beyond the pale ass licking jokes we got from the cheap seats, we were thinking of how cats don’t really know time as we do, how their days are measured by their senses, by things that they smell, by places they visit. In a way, Márquez’s novel is set out by the senses as well, but it’s also defined by one emotion, in a way, it’s all measured out by love. Love sets the pace and brings the action. Love defines the characters and their motivation. Just like a cat smelling its way through the day, this novel imagines an entire book not set about by the plain, banal chronology of the weeks, days, months, years in a life, but by love itself, as real as the grass, the trees, and yes, the ass, that my cat uses to define her day. In a way, it’s the essence of everything. And aren’t we just dumb enough never to realize it.

And there. I’ve jumped the shark now by mentioning my cat in my blog. Sigh.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: Of course I finished this novel while in bed. If you look closely enough you can see the tip of my grandfather’s paint-by-numbers on the wall.