Category: reading challenges

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.