Category: trh books

#62 – Mister Pip

When civil unrest comes to a small Solomon Island and all the white people who were running the government, schools, and copper mine, abandon the indigenous people and flee to higher ground. Without a proper teacher, the children, including the narrator of Lloyd Jones’s excellent and Booker short-listed Mister Pip, Matilda, among them, run wild. With no lessons, their days stretch out in front of them like a million Sundays, until finally Matilda’s mother announces that the island’s one remaining white man, Mr. Watts, will begin to lead the lessons.

With no curriculum to guide him, Mr. Watts reads aloud from the Charles Dickens classic, Great Expectations. Immediately, Matilda is hooked, on Mr. Dickens as Mr. Watts refers to him, on Pip’s journey, on the sheer impact the words have upon her life. As they make their way through the story, life continues around them, the fighting between the island’s guerrilla forces and the army carries on, and the violence escalates. The impact of the war on the people can be seen in the obvious ways: some are killed, their homes are burned, but as the novel moves to its tragic and heartbreaking penultimate moments, their human strength remains fortified.

Matlida’s special relationship to Mr. Watts comes out as well—they have an obvious connection, not just in their mutual love and admiration for Mr. Dickens and for Pip, but in their faithful need to love and respect the fact that words can sometimes make all the difference to a life. In a sense, words themselves represent a kind of power in this novel, whether they’re from the Bible or the novel, they are literal objects that can change your life.

The main conflict within the novel, outside of the obvious physical violence, is generational, between Matilda and her mother. With her father having escaped to the mainland years before and turning into a ‘white’ man, Matilda and her mother scrape by together. As she falls deeper and deeper under the spell of the imaginary Pip, Matilda and her mother move further and further away from an understanding of one another. It’s not an unfamiliar theme, any daughter of a mother will know it intimately, yet with the added layer of the civil war, their petty arguments and fundamental differences run a course that will ultimately have an deep effect upon both of their lives.

I read much of this book in an airport and on a plane; two times where despite being surrounded by people, I felt incredibly lonely and alienated. In this sense, it was a perfect book for that moment in my life, uplifting and generous, lovely and tragic, heartbreaking and momentous. The ending sucks the breath right out of your body (in a good way) and it’s one of those books that just stays with you for hours, days, months, years, after you’ve finished reading.

READING CHALLENGE ASIDE:Mister Pip now graces my Around the World in 52 Books challenge, as I didn’t have an author from New Zealand on the list, and I certainly have never read another novel set in the Solomon Islands. The setting is crucial, and if I were teaching post-colonial literature, I would absolutely insist this novel be on any course list. And I think if pushed, I could probably write one hell of a paper comparing this novel to Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.

#61 – All In Together Girls

Let me confess, first of all, that I don’t read a lot of short stories. So while I’m a huge supporter of short fiction, I don’t necessarily pull it off the shelf and read it as much as I probably should. Like my friend Metro Mama always says, sometimes it’s good to read short stories simply because, well, they’re short.

But I also feel like it’s important to buy and read the work of people you know. Not just because you know them but to show your solidarity in terms of their art. I go to plenty of indie rock shows for this reason. And after finally meeting Kate Sutherland in person at the beginning of the summer, I had been meaning to read her book for months. Well, am I ever happy that I did. Wow, is All in Together Girls ever an excellent collection. Some of the stories are linked, some not, but all feature riveting characters who transcend, in a way, their more humble circumstances.

Of the collection, I’d have to say that the majority of stories with the teenage girls were the ones that stood out for me. Not only because I was that teenage girl, because I knew the skids, the rockers, the preps, and fell in love with the boy on the lake, not necessarily across the street, who was certainly all wrong for me. But more because how can you not love a story that begins, “Saturday night started off like usual—just us girls and Mitch, drinking in the parking lot behind the Pentecostal church.”

Immediately, I’m walking down Winston Churchill Blvd with Lesley, drunk on beer that Katrina bought, having left an awful house party where I felt, as always, awkward and out of place, until the cops stop us and kindly mention that isn’t it about time we got going home. The tone of Sutherland’s stories reminds me of Prep, but with a cooler edge, of a necessity to push the boundaries of the words to an edge that she isn’t afraid to explore, even if it makes the reader feel uncomfortable.

In a way, I wish I was reading provincially as well as globally this year, and then I’d count this collection as Saskatchewan, long-winded places populated by everyday people who get out and get back in with alarming regularity. The prairie towns, like the town near my cottage, where kids wander off into the night with a sense of recklessness that feels utterly necessary at that age. What else are you going to do?

Regardless of my own emotional connection to many of the stories in the collection, I’d still highly recommend it to anyone who might ask.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: I read the majority of Sutherland’s book in transit to work this week. I snapped the picture as quickly as I could before the bus picked up speed again.

Short List, Long List, Any Old List

We’re back from another weekend at the cottage, which starts off an incredibly busy span of time for me: I leave on Wednesday for NYC for work and I’m not back until Sunday night where I’ll be visiting friends, doing other fun stuff like shopping, and hopefully seeing a Broadway show…oh, and attending some meetings too. Then it’s Word on the Street the following weekend, then Thanksgiving, then I think we’re home before going up north again to close up the cottage. It doesn’t leave time for a lot of reading, does it?

Regardless, there’s an incredibly solid Giller longlist that’s just been announced this morning here. This year, compared to most, I’ve actually read 4 of the books on the list so far: October, Effigy, Helpless, and Divisadero. And it’s always exciting to see who actually makes the shortlist.

Anyone pick their front runner just yet?

And while we’re on the subject of prizes, there’s a really interesting article in The Guardian about the ‘tussle’ behind the scenes over the Booker shortlist here. I’m certainly not as prepared to offer an opinion on that literary giant of a prize as I’ve only read one of the books listed, and that’s On Chesil Beach, by McEwan.

It’s such an exciting time of year for books, lots of events, plenty of big tomes hitting the stores, and loads of prize announcements to keep people talking.

#60 – Out Stealing Horses

Norwegian writer Per Petterson’s outstanding work of fiction, Out Stealing Horses, had me enthralled from beginning to end. Having won this year’s most monied international award, the IMPAC Dublin, the novel tells the story of a man called Trond who approaches his old age with one goal in mind: to learn to be alone. And it is in this journey of self-discovery, this coming to terms with spending time completely cut off, in a way, from the society of one’s life, that the story unfolds.

Returning to the county where his happiest memories as a boy happened, Trond slowly lets the reader in on the real reason he decides to retire there (without a phone, without a television, without an inside, working bathroom): he needs to truly understand and come to terms with his relationship with his father. The book meanders as slowly as a seasonal change from Trond’s current situation as a 67-year-old man to the summer he spent at a similar cabin with his father as an adolescent. That summer, marked both by tragedy (an awful accident at the neighbour’s that involved his only friend Jon) and utter happiness, ends up, in retrospect, the moment in time that defined him. To give away more of the plot would not necessarily ruin the novel, but I enjoyed the story as it unraveled so much that I am hesitant to say anything further should I spoil the reading experience for someone else.

The prose, long lavish sentences that flow seemingly endlessly from start to finish, sometimes over half a page, reflects the main character’s voice so utterly that I also had to wonder how different it would have been to read the novel it its native Norwegian. Not that the translator, Anne Born, did a terrible job, just that Petterson’s writing is so lyrical that it must simply read like poetry in his native tongue. For the most part, this is an interior story, with much of the action taking place in Trond’s mind, his memory. But there’s an active core too: the acrid, rich smell of the horses they “steal,” the feeling of the hot sun during his glorious summer, the crunch of the snow fall, it all adds up to an author that has an almost unbearable talent for writing landscape and situation.

For the first time in a long while, I felt like I truly experienced life in the “host” country of my reading travels. The Norway he describes, both in the late 1940s, during the war, and in his modern time, remains vivid all throughout the book, even if the setting (the county where each cabin sits) itself remains unchanged throughout. And for a person who herself grew up at a cottage, understanding the connection to a place that feels like home, means that there’s an added level of emotional involvement for me. Bloody brilliant, there are precious little other words to describe it, well-deserved win, in my opinion.

I know that I’ve only read two of the other nominees (Slow Man and No Country for Old Men [humm, quite a pattern there actually, as each have protagonists coming to terms in different respects with the lives they’ve chosen to lead]), but in terms of my Around the World in 52 Books challenge, I’m so glad this book won so I had the chance to read it. I doubt I would have picked it up otherwise if it weren’t for the short blurb in a Publisher’s Weekly newsletter. Funny, now I can’t imagine a life where I haven’t read this novel.

Time is important to me now, I tell myself. Not that it should pass quickly or slowly, but be only time, be something I live inside and fill iwth physical things and activities that I can divide it up by, so that it grows distinct to me and does not vanish when I am not looking.

People like it when you tell them things, in suitable portions, in a modest, intimate tone, and they think they know you, but they do not, they know about you, for what they are let in on are the facts, not feelings, not what your opinion is about anything at all, not how what has happened to you and how all the decisions you have made have turned you into who you are. What they do is they fill in with their own feelings and opinions and assumptions, and they compose a new life which has precious little to do with yours, and that lets you off the hook.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: Setting the book down on a messy pile of papers while I cleared off enough desk space to finish up my freelance assignment. The cover’s beautiful, isn’t it?

#59 – Little Men

For those of you who know my extra-curricular freelance activities, you can probably guess why I was reading Louisa May Alcott’s sequel to Little Women, Little Men. Not one of her go-to classics (apparently, those are the aforementioned original and Jo’s Boys), I still enjoyed it, and remember reading the novel years and years and years ago during my Louisa May Alcott period spanning an entire summer when I was 11 or 12.

The adventures of a grown Jo as she navigates motherhood and a school she and “Father Bhaer” have set up in Aunt March’s old estate, Little Men roams around the adventures of the rag-tag bunch of students they take in over the course of the novel. While I sometimes found the “messages” of Alcott’s fiction dated, I still truly enjoyed the journey each of the children take during their unusual residency at Plumfield.

And it’s hard not to have just a little crush on the imaginary Dan, even if you’ve made the mistake of trying to watch the abysmal movie version starring Mariel Hemingway and Chris Sarandon. Seriously. It’s awful.

I will say one thing, however, I bought an omnibus that included all three books, and after finishing my work with Little Men, I sort of said to myself, “Am I really done?” I almost started working away on Jo’s Boys just so I could remember what happens to Demi, Nat, Dan and the lads. Who knows, maybe I’ll create another reading challenge for myself called ‘books I wished I’d abridged’ and put it at the top!

#58 – Life on the Refrigerator Door

Alice Kuipers’s new novel, Life on the Refrigerator Door, is a quick, easy and heartwarming little book about a single mother whose relationship with her daughter and subsequent illness plays out over a series of Post-It notes left on the fridge door. In all honesty, I read the book in about twenty minutes, which isn’t necessarily a comment upon the quality of the prose but, rather, of the shortness of the notes and their ability to pull you along seamlessly.

However, after interviewing Alice via email for work (you can read it here), I wanted to share this:

1. What was your inspiration for the novel?

Two events inspired the writing of this novel. One was a note that my boyfriend left me in our house. If someone else had seen his six words, they would have known so much about us and our relationship. I wanted to explore the idea that so few words could reveal so much. As a writer, this idea was quite compelling to me: how little can I write and how much can I say. The other event was witnessing my friend lose her mother to breast cancer. The way she coped was a true inspiration.

Now, I’m totally hooked and kind of fascinated by those six words that inspired an entire book. And I’m interested in trying to sum up my own life in six words, like the six-word stories that were all floating around the Internet a few month’s back. But I don’t think I could do it, I mean just typing up Wegener’s Granulomatosis seems like a lot, let alone fitting four more words around it.

I know it’s a pretty timid question that I asked her, but I do find the idea of actually writing less to reveal more pretty inspiring. I mean, has anyone else been watching Mad Men? (Sorry, I know, I’m obsessed!).

#57 – Bel Canto

Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto took me a few weeks to finish. I kept starting it and then stopping it and then starting it, forgetting where I was, stopping, sleeping, and then starting again. Finally, after finishing up my manuscript and having true free time for the first moment in what felt like a summer of hectic classes, tonnes of other manuscript revisions, and loads of my own writing, I took an afternoon to finish the book while RRHB fiddled about and before my aunt and I set out on a Scrabble marathon to end all Scrabble marathons (she bingoed, and then won; I put up a noble fight).

Annnywaaaay. Bel Canto. This book won all kinds of awards six years ago: the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction, as well as becoming one of the most beloved books around. Set in an unnamed country (I think) in South America during a birthday party at the Vice President’s house for a Japanese business man who loves opera, and adores the opera star Roxanne Coss who is paid to perform for him, a group of revolutionaries burst in an take the large group hostage. When they discover that the President himself was absent from the party (he stays home to watch his soap opera), the terrorist sequester the group away for months on end waiting for their demands to be met by an increasingly uncooperative government.

The group bides their time, first in terror for their lives, and then in a quiet kind of acceptance of the terms of their imprisonment. They have little freedom, but are fed; they have no rights, but soon adjust to their new life as captives. It seems as with any group of people shut up in close quarters with their fellow human beings, lives change in ways that are irreversible. People fall in love. People change. People become a truer version of themselves.

Now, I’m not about to say that I didn’t enjoy Bel Canto, because I truly did—it’s a novel deserving of its prizes, but my emotional response to this novel wasn’t even remotely close to that of Run. It’s well written, the plot if fascinating, and the characters are meticulously drawn. Yet, there’s a chill that runs through this book that I wasn’t expecting regardless of the beauty in Patchett’s voice.

If anything, it made me think that above and beyond listening to classical music a lot these days, I should really also give opera a try.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: I am sad to say that, again, I left the book up north without taking a picture so I give you a fuzzy shot of me and my nephew Spencer. Just because.

#56 – No Country For Old Men

There’s something about Cormac McCarthy’s attention to the sparseness of punctuation and sentence structure that works exceptionally well in No Country for Old Men. It’s as if one comma would ruin the flow of the language and pull your attention away from how the characters’ voices are conceptualized. And I’m consistently amazed at how he manages to ensure the flow of dialogue without quotations, or truly, any way of knowing who’s speaking beyond the voices you create for them in your own head.

As a youngish man goes for hunting in the back country near the Rio Grande, he discovers the spoils of a drug deal gone bad: lots of product, even more money. Leaving the product and picking up the cash, Llewelyn Moss turns around and makes his way out of the back country. He gets back in his truck, and drives home to his bride, who’s but a wisp older than sixteen.

[And I’m paraphrasing]

She drawls, “What’s in the bag”

“A pile of money.”

And at that moment, whether they know it or not, their lives change forever.

The blunt force trauma of this story follows as such: Llewelyn, having stolen the money from an active drug cartel, is hunted down by the killer Anton Chigurh on one side of the law and by the old-time police chief Ed Tom Bell on the other. Seen from either direction, the story is sure as sh*t not going to come down in the favour of poor Lleweyln, nor is it going to turn out alright for Carla Jean, his wife. The chase on either side is brutal, dedicated, bloody and violent as hell.

It’s hard to say but I’m not sure if there’s a living writer (non-Canadian) that I admire these days as much as McCarthy—but only, truly, for these latest few books. All the Pretty Horses, with its majestic first sentence, as I’ve said here before, remains one of my all-time favourite books. Now, as you know, I was completely captivated by The Road. But No Country For Old Men blew me away. No one writes violence like McCarthy, and turns something that’s often mocked in the popular media, or blown out in ways that ensure any impact of it gets lost between big guns and lots of useless fake punches, into literature.

The character of Ed Tom, the local police chief charged with not only unraveling the mystery of all the dead drug dealers, but also attempting to find Llewelyn before he’s got no life left to live, remains a moral compass behind the entire book. Each chapter begins with a long, almost internal section from his point of view, where you can truly see how the country has started to make the changes into society as we know it today. It’s a very particular vantage point, sitting on the cusp just before the world completely changes, and he seems bittersweet at best when coming to terms with the end of his life.

Ed Tom, as with many of the characters, acts stoically when faced with a situation that seems quite simply beyond the grasp of what everyday life prepares you for. The novel openly contemplates the idea that a secret, life lesson, sense of karma, or fairness itself will truly be obliterated by the sheer force of the universe. So much of the narrative plays out this philosophical ideal by the scenes of truly brutal violence, but also in the sheer fact that, as McCarthy proposed in his Oprah interview, some people are simply born luckier than others.

Of course I’m preparing myself for the movie adaption. By all accounts it’s apparently bloody brilliant, the Coen brothers at their finest, but I still think the story will lose something that only the inner workings of Ed Tom’s mind can relay. So before everyone heads out during Oscar season to work out their picks, I highly recommend reading this book before thoughts of Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin fill up your imagination.

Oh, and there’s a slight error in the cover copy that bugged me all through the book, it says something along the lines of ‘set in our modern time’ or something when it’s actually a period piece (to an extent). The book actually takes place in the early 1980s (or just 1980), which is just another reason to pay homage to McCarthy’s talents as he doesn’t have to come right out and say this, but it’s totally inferred by the cars the characters drive and the technology they use.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: I left the book up north and feel very strongly that it belongs in the cottage library (should there ever truly be one), and so I’m posting a photo of the moon on the night I finished reading the novel. I’m telling you, as lame as my picture is, it was one of the most beautiful moons I had ever seen. I stood outside and took a dozen pictures trying to find just one that captured the tenor of the clouds and the songs of the night, and honestly think I failed—but I sure hope you get the picture.

#55 – Divisadero

Like so many of these reviews, sometimes it’s necessary to start with a confession. There are no limits to my admiration for Michael Ondaatje’s work. He’s one of my favourite living writers. In the Skin of the Lion remains one of my all-time favourite books, right up there in the top ten at least. One night, when I was still slaving away at the worst job ever, even before I ended up at the evil empire with the boss from hell, I managed to get a free ticket to hear him read at Harbourfront. That night inspired me in ways that few other readings ever have. I came home, haunted by the sound of his voice, and wrote a prose poem called “Bittersweet”. When I showed it to a creative writing teacher who actually knew Ondaatje, she sent him a copy, and I’ve still got the note he sent back—in fact, the thin scrawl telling her it was a ‘lovely piece’ sits on my desk to this day.

It’s hard then to critique Divisadero from any where other than the pedestal of this affection I feel for a man I have clearly never met. The pure skill he has in crafting every single sentence, of creating characters that are broken and blue even before they are born, and of drawing a reader in as purely as one craves the sun, are uncompromising in this novel, even if the book itself might not necessarily be as successful as either The English Patient or In the Skin of a Lion. But how am I judging the success of the book? Much like Kerry, I felt a little bit lost as the tenuous threads of the novel hold two very different, yet equally complex stories together.

The first half of the story deals with how a tragic act of violence breaks up a patched together family in northern California. The two girls, Anna and Claire, sisters in every way except blood, are split apart forever, and Coop, a farm-hand who grew up on the farm since he was four, is chased away from the only home he has ever known. As they splinter, the novel removes itself from their primary narrative, and unfolds into the story of a Lucien Segura, a French writer at the turn of the century, who Anna studies as she lives in his house and sleeps with his neighbour (who he had known when he was just a boy, obviously), and whose tragedies (the loss of a great love, the splintering of family) echo those of her own.

Yet, by the end, I craved more about Coop, Anna, and Claire, somehow knowing that might be the point, that there was no more of this story for me to know. That the author, in firm control at all times, needed to explore tragedy in a different light halfway around the world from where he began, realizing that these are common themes that hold humanity together: loss, love, language. And wondering how it all fits together in ways that might not make entire sense to me right now, might just be the very point that I’m missing.

Regardless, it’s a bloody beautiful book with prose that soars and touches you in ways that only he knows how to do, where prose melts with poetry, where longing remains far after the love has passed, and where two entirely different stories, narratives, and characters can fit together in one book as if they had meant to be that way all along.

I’ve added Michael Ondaatje to my Around the World in 52 Books challenge as the Sri Lanka entry, regardless of the fact that this book is set mainly in California and in France, and he’s lived in Canada for over 40 years, that’s where he was born, and those are the self-imposed rules of my challenge. Maybe that’s wrong of me to organize the challenge in that way but I’ve started it along those lines and am committed to finishing!

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: I love the photo on the cover of this book so much that taking another picture of a book on my bed wouldn’t be remotely as interesting as imagining the woman lying there on a bench in an old French kitchen, bread, cheese, tea, pen nearby, creating a world that I am as desperate to know as any I have imagined in my reading life.

#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…