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Colm Tóibín‘s excellent book of short stories, The Empty Family, cements his presence as one of the writers working today whose prose I covet, envy, and ultimately am awed by. The title, as his interview in the National Post points out, reflects the idea that there’s a dichotomy to family, in all its inclusiveness, there’s also a separateness for those who move beyond the traditional, who haven’t got family to depend upon, or who choose to abandon and/or create families from non-blood ties. All of the protagonists in these stories leave home, leave their families, leave the relative safety of their immediate lives for change whether it’s necessary (in one story, a young Spanish girl who is involved with the communists goes abroad after being arrested) or simply for an adventure (another character lives and loves with abandon in Spain in 1975). And the results, are terrifically life altering.

Of the stories, my favourite would have to be “Two Women,” where Frances Rossiter, an aging, successful art director who returns to Ireland to dress a film and has a chance encounter with the widow of her most enduring lover. The scene, set so simply, has so many underlying emotions that evoked, for me, Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” where the real action remains in what’s not being said instead of the actual conversation between the two characters. In fact, this is a particular stylistic affectation of Tóibín’s writing, that there is so much left unsaid, awkward pauses melting between beautiful prose that illuminates the characters in ways that lesser writers would leave hanging. He can infer, and that’s a talent that doesn’t go unnoticed by me.

The stories are all vastly different; however, the ones where he uses “I”, I couldn’t help but imagine them linked in some way, the narrative giving voice to a protagonist that seems always to be at odds with the story itself in a way, like a literal interpretation of the book’s title. As in the opposite of what “I” usually means: strong, individual, like Bob Marley’s Rastafarian reinterpretation, his refusal to use anything but “I” — these characters are not lacking but they are separate, outside in a way, alone, but not necessarily lonely, yet still feeling an ache. Funny, I can relate, in a way, it’s kind of how I’m feeling these days, a distinct loss of “I” with the creation of my family. I am not, yet, in anyway empty, though.

My other favourite story from the collection would have to be “Silence.” Lady Gregory fills up her life, a relatively happy life as a widow, with stories she tells, in secret, in code, to Henry James hoping that he’ll turn them into prose. It’s fascinating how she absorbs her guilt over an act of betrayal by slowly leaking the truth out in pieces that are overt lies to the writer. As if his written words will absolve her of her sins, should she actually think of them that way. But more so, to bring her feelings to the surface, to have them talked about in real society would be impossible, and so she makes up interesting ways for them to bubble to the surface that only she knows. The power of society, the impregnable rules for women, and the idea that marriage is simply a contract, regardless of how rich and/or happy it makes you, are all fascinating themes within.

In the National Post article that I linked to above, Tóibín mentions that there’s a sentence from “The New Spain” that he’s been holding on to for 23 years, that it took him that long to find the right place for those words. In a way, I find this so freeing — as a writer who holds on to sentences for ages and consistently goes back to old notebooks for new inspiration, I can understand how it might feel to wait for just the right place for just the right words. And I am glad that Tóibín takes his time with these sentences, because the end result is nothing short of remarkable.

The moment you read the first few pages of Michael Cunningham’s excellent novel, By Nightfall, you are reminded of Virginia Woolf. It’s in his sentence structure, in the simple, effective way he uses description, and the way that time defines itself by almost disappearing throughout the narrative — I can’t help but think of Woolf when I read Cunningham and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

By Nightfall, the story of Peter and Rebecca Harris, a middle-aged couple grappling with the state of their lives, their marriage and how they ultimately want to live, not just in the world but with each other, seems simple at first. But it’s full of complex human relationships and the politics of family — which is often just as dramatic than the politics of every day in the House of Commons. Rebecca’s youngest sibling, Ethan, called “Mizzy” as he was a mistake (their mother was 44 when she got pregnant), is coming to stay. Troubled, addicted, and having lost sight of what he wants out of life, Mizzy has come to NYC to stay with Rebecca and Peter to find himself. Apparently, he’s clean, but not for long, and a strange, awkward relationship evolves from his visit, something that changes Peter’s life irrevocably.

Peter and Rebecca have jobs in the arts — she runs a failing literary magazine and he a small gallery — and the premise of Mizzy’s stay is that he wants to investigate a career in the arts too, only it doesn’t come to that. He remains terribly lost throughout the entire novel and seeing the very gentle way he manipulates everyone around him is one of the most effective strains in the narrative. You know, in your heart, that you can’t trust an addict to tell the truth, to keep his word, to not fall off the wagon, but it’s an impressive way that Cunningham weaves Mizzy’s own capacity as a true deceiver into the novel. He’s a beautiful boy, one that can’t be resisted.

The moral conflict in the novel, the decision that Peter must make, for his relationship, for his livelihood, for the future, confounds him. He simply can’t move from the one place that seems to be forcing him to go. The crux of the novel, how simple it seems at the beginning, a book about a brother coming to visit, becomes so much more as it explores the past and present of Peter and Rebecca — how they met, what their days are like, what their marriage is like, and how they’ll continue after Mizzy’s eventual departure — truly feels complex by the end. It’s a quiet narrative but the writing is just so superior, so effective, that this novel might just end up being one of the best I’ve read all year.

I’m a bit late finishing up my Canadian Book Challenge this year (technically I finished on July 4th, but that’s entirely the wrong birthday). Anne Michaels’s The Winter Vault represents the last title in my “For the Ladies” theme that I was working within. Like so many of the books that I read over the course of the year, I found the writing strong and engaging in The Winter Vault. But I also have to admit that I have mixed feelings about this novel. In a sense, I can’t decide whether or not I love it or find it extremely frustrating. Maybe I’ll come to a conclusion at the end of this review.

I purposefully started reading the novel on June 30th. Knowing that we had Canada Day off, and knowing that I am a fairly quick reader, I figured that I’d have no trouble finishing it by sundown on July 1st. But the novel didn’t grab my attention as I thought it would, the plot didn’t seem to shake itself out early enough to pull me in, and the dialogue felt more like philosophical treatise than how people actually talk. Yet, every few pages there would be a sentence that would stop me in my tracks in terms of its beauty, its innovation (word use) and its utter writerly-ness. The story feels simple at first glance: a young couple who meet accidentally find themselves in Egypt during the building of the Aswan Dam. Avery works as an engineer and Jean has accompanied him. While there, a tragedy threatens to overwhelm them both as a couple and as individuals. Back in Canada, they attempt to put their lives back together, each in different ways, and suriviving becomes more about recognizing their bond as much as what separated them in the first place.

There are so many important parts to this novel. That Michaels imagines and integrates the loss of community, of culture, of landscape in terms of the pulsating forward motion of society into the novel is commendable. That she makes the setting of the beginning of the novel so foreign (Egypt) and the people so familiar (Canadian/British “colonial” interlopers with a heart) instills a political discussion of what progress actually means. It’s heartbreaking for Jean to experience the loss of the displaced Egyptians, the Nubians whose culture had remained by the river for thousands of years, as the river swells up to create the power that will charge an entire country. It’s thought-provolking for Avery to participate in the moving of the giant pyramid, recognizing the irony of destroy and saving culture at the same time. These discussions that the book seems to have through its characters, through their long rambling conversations, are so typical of the genius of Canadian literature. Of our writers’ ability to insure that issues are crafted as parts of a story and are separated and exposed from more than one point of view, this is something I respect very much in terms of Michaels’ The Winter Vault.

However, unlike a truly brilliant book like Camilla Gibb’s Sweetness in the Belly, some of the overarching socio-political discussion gets lost because it isn’t integrated well enough into the characters and/or the pacing of the novel. Great, vast swaths of text are narratively separate and sit outside the experience of Avery, Jean, and then later Lucjan (a man who befriends Jean while she and Avery are separated). There’s no consistency of story within the text, and while the central relationship between Avery and Jean, their marriage, their love, is what binds everyone together, it might have been even more interesting to have them actually experience the more political parts of the novel. They seem apart from the action in a way, and even though they are there in Egypt, their personal experience in a sense seems beyond the more political observations the narrator makes on their behalf.

And this brings me to my last pickle: the dialogue. I had a conversation with a co-worker last week who fought vehmently for the side that people do exist in the world who are as intense and thought-provolking as Jean, Avery and Lucjan. That they do speak in two-three page long solioquays that underscore the meaning of life and the essence of human interaction — all the time. But I’m not sure I agree. I will forever harken back to something a teacher once told me: “dialogue must seem ordinary but not be ordinary.” Anne Michaels writes conversations that feel extraordinary — long, rambling passages that feel like philosophical dialogues more than pure discussion. They seem to lecture rather than actually converse and each character remains alarmingly introspective. Their stories come out slowly, revealing the characters over time, instead of having the dialogue move the plot forward. This is not a fast-paced novel. It’s a slow read, a book that forces you to pay attention to its details, to its every word.

All in all, I think I’ll continue to sit on the fence about this book for a few more weeks. The Winter Vault is a novel worth studying, worth maybe even reading it alongside In the Skin of the Lion to see how the two compare (I really felt as though Michaels was writing back to Ondaatje with this book), and worth every moment of the time it’ll take to read it.

READING CHALLENGES: The final book in this year’s Canadian Book Challenge! Now I just have to think about what I’m going to read this year. Bestsellers? YA? Classics? I don’t know! What books are your list? Any suggestions?

WHAT’S UP NEXT: Currently reading Guillermo del Toro’s utterly spooky The Strain.

Our computer is down for the count — hence the radio silence. Fingers crossed it gets fixed soon because I have a half-dozen book reviews to post!

Last night Fionna and I went to go see Changeling after having a pit stop at the Bloor Street Diner (very helpful in letting you get to the movie on time). First off, after cancelling (or not renewing) my EW subscription because I’m trying to be more fiscally responsible (and the redesign sucked; and I don’t ever care about the Jonas Brothers) and I get plenty of magazines through work, I feel very left out of the whole pop culture world. So when I saw the trailers for this film I sort of thought that there was a supernatural element to the film — you know, because it’s called Changeling. But there’s not, and because I don’t want to give away the gist of the film, I’ll just leave that observation at that.

Angelina Jolie plays Christine Collins, a single mother living in the 1920s in Los Angeles. She works for a telegraph / telephone company. She raises her son, Walter. She gives sage advice: “Never start a fight but always finish them.” And explains that her husband left after opening up a big box of responsibility he just wasn’t prepared to face. Torn between her responsibility at work and spending the day with her son, who is her whole world, Christine goes into work one day only to discover upon her return home that her son’s missing. The police are called. Weeks go by and then he’s returned to her in a glorious (and heavily photographed moment) by the L.A.P.D.

Only there’s just one catch: he’s not her son. He’s three inches sorter and antatomically, ahem, different in many, many ways. And the more the police want her to say that it’s her son, the more she resists. She kicks up just enough fuss that the missing children chief simply tosses her into the looney bin because she won’t play along. Shocking, abhorrent, and utterly upsetting, despite her treatment in the hospital, she refuses all along to sign a paper saying that the boy the police returned was indeed her son.

It’s a complex, long film that not only addresses the mistakes the police made with respect to her case, but also the legal and sociological ramifications of their actions. Jolie’s excellent, but she usually is, and her role in this reminds me a lot of A Mighty Heart rather than her more kick-ass-type characters. All in all there’s just something about a Clint Eastwood picture: they’re a little bit too long but they never drag; he elicits strong performances from his actors, especially the ladies; and they just seem to wholly embody the time and place they’re representing. The art direction, the costumes, the general tone of speech — were all pitch-perfect.

Honestly, I enjoyed this picture so much more than I thought I would. Kind of like Pride and Glory. Huh, eh?

After a long and extremely profound illness stemming from a car accident over twenty years ago, my mother passed away. She had been incapacitated and living in a chronic care hospital for many of those years, and we are all deeply saddened by the loss, but comforted by the fact that she isn’t suffering any longer. I promise I’ll get back to blogging at some point.

Yes, almost 11 month and 14 days after the actual event, the RRHB and I finally booked our “honeymoon” yesterday. We’re going to Cuba for a week, spending 5 days in Varadero and 2 in Havana. True that I want to see the country before Castro’s reign comes to an end, but my goodness did I get a shock when the charge went through to my credit card. Ouch!

1. As discussed by Tara, as relating to Kirsten Dunst, on Fametracker. I giggled so loudly at work yesterday that one of my coworkers said, “Are you okay?” I have one thing and one thing only to say: “Cuba!”

2. Even though it’s not stated explicitly, but it was me who actually sent this package to George at Bookninja, and this post makes me feel good. I know, I’m not supposed to blog about work but how often do you get a shout out on Bookninja?

3. So Misguided also links to Heat, which I’m reading right now too. And she even adds to the awesomeness of the post by linking off to the WWF’s current Living Planet report. I heart this blog very much.

The true title of this post should be “IFOA IV – Thursday” but that’s so boring when last night was probably the best evening of readings I’ve ever had the pleasure of attending (with the exception of John Irving, which shall stand alone as the single most literary inspiring event I’ve seen; oh wait, and I saw Michael Ondaatje once, and he inspired me to write this, oh, nevermind).

Like the all-girls event Zesty and I went to last year, last night four inspiring, talented and lovely women read from their latest books of fiction: Madeleine Thien, Claire Messud, Jane Hamilton and Janet Fitch. All four of the readings were complimentary, three of which had more traditional themes of war (Second World War, Terrorism, War on Terror, respectively), and the forth, set in the heyday of the punk rock scene in LA, is perhaps war of a different kind (mosh-pit inspired), and all four women were great readers.

More often than not, I’ve read the book when I’ve gone to see an author at the IFOA. I’m thinking that maybe next year I’ll do the opposite and go and see people where I haven’t read their work. It’s a fresh perspective, so inspiring to hear what books actually make the leap from the page into your imagination as told by the author herself. It’s impressive, and I would absolutely read every single one of the books from last night.

And I really like how the IFOA balances the commercial-type fiction, like Fitch’s, with the more literary fiction, like Thien’s, showing that as diverse as the subject matter and styles actually are, the books fit together on that imaginary shelf like peas in a pod. And hell, going and supporting authors at the IFOA makes me feel good, like they deserve the giant round of applause at the end just for sitting in a room for hours, weeks, months, days, years, with their thoughts and a pen, maybe a keyboard, just toiling away to create something that matters.

Tonight, it’s Margaret Atwood, one of my own personal literary icons, which should also be inspiring and all that other touchy-feely stuff I mentioned above.

I have caught the cold. I’m running a fever, have a sore throat, and my chest feels weighted down by lead balloons. What can you do? It was bound to happen. I’ve been hyper-lucky with colds this year (read: I haven’t really had any) so I suppose I was due.

But, of course, it comes on the heels of other more pressing issues. I can tell you shuffling around the house in my pajamas is one of my favourite things to do. Shuffling around the house while having a cold in my pajamas, not so much. You can’t enjoy anything when you have a cold: not TV, not a book, not the internet, nothing.

You really can’t enjoy peeing in a jug for 24 hours when you have a cold. Yes, you read that right, I’m peeing in a jug. It’s the most hated of all the clinical tests I have to do for my damn kidneys: the 24-hour urine test. While I understand that they need to see how much protein is being leaked from my poor, beleaguered organ, I absolutely hate this test. I mean, who wants a jug of their pee in their fridge for 24 hours? Who?

Wait, don’t answer that.