#76 – Enduring Love

I remember reading an interview with Ann Patchett this past year (and please don’t ask me to find the reference; I have no idea where I found it) where she said something about each of her novels being somewhat the same in terms of their plot and premise. In a sense, she said, she keeps writing the same books over and over again. When it comes to writers as skilled as Patchett, exploring the same themes, working through similar plots, doesn’t detract from the quality of her prose, and I feel like this is the same with Ian McEwan.

So many of his novels begin with an event that forever impacts the lives of his characters, and you can see that pattern in Saturday, On Chesil Beach, and Atonement. The set-up for Enduring Love would fit as well: Joe Rose steps out of his everyday life to jump into action (a balloon accident; a boy hovering towards death; a helpless tragedy) and this act of altruism ends up changing the course of his life forever. It was a happy moment, a reunion, Joe’s lover, Clarissa, had just returned from a trip to the US and the two were in the park for a picnic. They were about to pop the cork on the champagne when the pair noticed the trouble with the giant helium balloon. The novel starts: “The beginning is simple to mark.” And it’s true: a hulking, and at times literal, metaphor dropped into the beginning, middle and end of the novel in the form of this balloon, meant to symbolize the tenuous state of life’s expectations: they’re blown off course, trumped by tragedy and then chased by a slightly insane man.

As the balloon teeters away, Joe loses hold of it, and runs to help the one man left hanging on (who soon falls to his death), but before he gets there, he’s faced with the odd character Jed Parry. Joe’s life, up until this point, was happy with the usual adult disappointments (his career isn’t what he expected). But the moment Jed becomes fixated upon him, the constructs that kept Joe tethered to his reality, his relationship with Clarissa, his work, his own grasp on his particular existence, fall apart. The further obsessed Jed becomes with Joe, the more Joe copes in ways that feel unnatural to his personality.

One of the blurbs on the cover of my edition says, “Utterly thrilling… as riveting at the finish as it is at the start,” The Globe and Mail, and I’d have to agree. I read the novel in about three hours and simply couldn’t put it down. I loved Joe’s work as a science writer, found Clarissa’s work with Keats reminiscent of one of my favourite good/bad movies of all time, Possession, and didn’t once feel at all like the action was either forced and/or contrived. McEwan, one of the English language’s most skilled novelists, has a way with these dramatic situations, he can use an almost clinical eye to pull them apart from every direction, exploring the impact upon his characters like a coroner would do a cadaver. Enduring Love wholly deserves its place on the 1001 Books list. I’m not sure every single one of McEwan’s novels should be there (I do question Amsterdam but only because I think it’s an utterly forgettable book) but I’m glad this one is, if only because it gave me the chance to read it.

READING CHALLENGES: Another of my “lost” 1001 Books from the master list for 2009. We’re still 12 hours away from the new year and I’m already two books into my 66 book challenge. The odds are looking good for me to make quite a dent in it over the year! Fingers crossed, indeed.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: I’m about to clean out the last upstairs closet (finished the one in the bedroom yesterday) where boxes and boxes of books are hidden. I want to go through these ones too for 1001 Books that I know I have an haven’t finished (Moby-Dick, I’m looking at you) so that I can put them all on the right shelf and update the online list. God, I am LOVING this week off.

#75 – In The Heart Of The Country

There are a few authors I turn to, in a sense, innately. Writers that I know so intently that I might mistake them for old family friends. People I’ve known all my life. Uncles that sit to my right at the holiday table and make intellectual conversation. J.M. Coetzee remains one such author, as does Peter Carey and Jack Kerouac (albeit the latter two are never related to me in my mind, for, ahem, complex and quite strange reasons of an overactive, um, “romantic,” imagination).

Annnywaaay, as I feel I’ll be alive for many, many years (wishful thinking and anti-disease positivity), I tend to stagger books by my favourite authors so I’ll don’t run out, so that I’ve always got something to read during weeks like this one, rare time that’s not jam-packed with everyday life, days I like to spend with people who put words together in the best possible ways.

I finished In the Heart of the Country a couple of days ago. It’s an older novel, first published in 1977, about a lonely spinster named Magda who lives in the heart of the South African veld on a farm with her aging father and a black sheep-herding servant named Hendrik. When Hendrik brings home a beautiful young woman to be his bride, the divisions of race and class rear up and bring to a head the psychological and even psychotic nature of poor Magda. The novel is written from her point of view. The short, diary-style entries waver back and forth between truth and fiction. Magda makes up as much of her life as exists in reality, driven to this madness by desire, by the lack of intensely human experience, and a strange, stilted relationship with a father from whom she desires inappropriate emotions.

When her father takes up with Hendrik’s wife, Magda’s life goes off the rails. A desperate and violent act pushes her further into insanity but it’s never clear what actually happened and what Magda makes up. The fanciful way of creating a life on paper that she could never lead in life. As with all of Coetzee’s novels, the writing is sparse, the violence unexpected and bloody, and the conflict coloured by the unique and systematic effects of colonialism. Of all the Coetzee books I’ve read in the last little while, I have to admit that this is the one that I enjoyed the most. In tone and texture, it’s a lot like Waiting for the Barbarians and a lot less like Elizabeth Costello, thankfully, as I still remember how frustrated I was when reading that book.

There were so many narrative aspects to the novel that intrigued me — how Coetzee has a talent for ensuring that the landscape matches and even mimics the vast, lonely nature of Magda’s own mind. But at the same time, nature mocks her — coupling all around makes the cold, dry experience of her her lack of sexuality utterly apparent. And when race and class fall apart, when the world turns itself on its head, she clings to her gender, to her reedy sexuality as a way of at least trying to stay a conscious member of the world, even if her society soon becomes a population of just one. For such a short book (my copy runs 149 pages), In the Heart of the Country demands attention and reflection. I’m glad I waited a couple of days to blog about it so I could set my thoughts somewhat straight. Magda’s the ultimate unreliable narrator and I have to say sometimes that I really enjoy novels with such protagonists.

READING CHALLENGES: This was one of the 1001 Books titles that was lost on my bookshelves and I didn’t even realize it was there. So it’s on my master list for 2009, and I guess this puts me a little ahead of my reading for next year. I can already cross off two of the titles from that massive list of 66 (review of Enduring Love coming up next!).

STRANGE ASIDES: After finishing up the abysmal The Almost Moon a few days ago about a slightly crazy woman who commits matricide, it’s funny that one of the next books I should pick up is about a seemingly nutty woman who commits unspeakable acts of violence against her father.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: More book lists and more closets to be cleaned out before I’ll really make this decision.

Another Day, Another Pile Of Junk

I’m back at it today, culling, organizing, tidying up, all kinds of busy activities to rid my life of clutter. It’s an ongoing battle. I feel kind of like Henry V at Agincourt but without the poetry of Shakespeare.

Have you voted for your “Obama’s playlist” song yet? I just sent in a note about my RRHB’s song “The City.” Are we taking bets to see how many terribly lame and utterly overused Canadian music will actually end up on the list? To be truthful, the music should be more than simply by a Canadian artist but truly reflect who we are as a country. Not an easy task, I’m sure.

I finally got around to reading the weekend paper this morning only to discover (where have I been?) that Harold Pinter passed away. J. Kelly Nestruck’s tribute was lovely but I was inspired by Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

It’s a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author’s position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can’t dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man’s buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.

So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.

The Reading Master List For 2009

I’ve spent the better part of today, my 3rd anniversary, puttering around the house trying to organize the massive amounts of books we have scattered from pillar to post. I wanted to accomplish a couple of things: 1) be able to find the book I have in my mind to read next, 2) organize some reading challenges for 2009, and 3) make sure that I’ve got my books in chronological alphabetical order outside of the ones set aside for challenge purposes.

Sigh.

It’s never an easy task culling and organizing books but I’ve become overrun with titles after four years of working in publishing at two different houses. I’m being ruthless. Will I read that book again? If the answer’s no, it’s going. Why did I bring that home again? Who knows? Toss it across the room. So I’m still knee-deep in piles and piles of books, but here’s what I’m thinking for 2009:

1. Around the World in 52 Books
I managed to read just 13 books in this challenge last year, so not close to one a week but close to one a month. I’ve got 20 titles on the list for 2009.

2. 1001 Books Challenge
Over the past year, I managed 14 books from my master 1001 Books list for 2008. Today I spent a good part of the day going through ALL of our books and finding every title that we have in the house that’s on the list. We have, um, 66 — so it’s doubtful I’ll manage EVERY one, but I’ve got them all listed according to the reference book’s order. Knowing they’re all there and on the shelf or on my Sony Reader will absolutely keep me from buying any more. Goodness.

3. Cleaning Out My Closet
Working in publishing, loving books, knowing other book lovers, all of this means that I’ve got piles upon piles of books in my house that never seem to get read. I’ve narrowed down the top 20 that I’d like to at least try to crack the spines of over the next year, so here’s my “off the shelf challenge.”

4. A Shakespeare Challenge for 2009
I came across this today (thanks Melanie!) and I’ve been staring at Shakespeare by Bill Bryson for months. The rules are simple: “You can read anything about or related to Shakespeare — fiction or non fiction, straight bio or authorship debate — and you can read the plays and sonnets as well.” The challenge is to read 6 of the above; and so far I’ve got one on my list.

5. The 2nd Canadian Book Challenge
I’m still working my way through the challenge I set out for myself this year: “For the ladies.” I’ve collected a number of books in one place that are all by Canadian women authors. I’ve got 6 more books to read by July 1st, 2009.

6. The Better You Read — The Better You Get
Going through the books I’ve come across a definite theme: I collect all kinds of “green” themed and “self-help” type titles and then NEVER EVER read them.

Now I’ve read 74 books this year, plus a number of titles that I haven’t mentioned (at least 20 Harlequin romances for copy work) and some books that I’ve read for work that aren’t even close to being published yet so I don’t want to blog about them. Next year my goal is to finally get to 100, even though I haven’t once (in the past few years of blogging) even come close, it’s time I stepped up! I suppose that means one of my New Year’s Revolutions will have to be watch less television. But I was headed there anyway. Lately, I’ve been bored to tears by the tube. Haven’t you? Of course, I’ve got to leave room for the 100+ books that’ll probably come in through work, through good reviews, through prize winning, through blog reviewing, through friendly recommendations…but it’s a start.

TRH Excursion – The New AGO

Yesterday morning I went with my aunt and nephew to the new AGO. The cost of admission is quite steep at $18.00 for an adult, and considering you could become a member for under $100.00, I’m guessing they’re keeping the costs high to encourage people to spend in that way. The new Gehry building is breathtaking from the outside, the oblong exterior, the brushed concrete, it’s open and inviting as well as stoic. But the interior honestly took my breath away. The new second floor, with the blond wood and natural light just adds warmth to the collection. I remember going to the AGO back in grade school — it was dark, gloomy and crowded. Not a single of these adjectives apply anymore. The new building is simply spectacular.

We went with a toddler, who was very good at sitting in his stroller and looking (not touching, I was told many times, “not touching Auntie Deanna, not touching!” He was particularly impressed with the ship’s models in the lower floor, as well as the kids’ space, where we spent some time too. We didn’t see enough of the collection, but enough to make me honestly consider becoming a member so I could stop by after work sometimes and simply wander around. Another part of that “becoming a tourist in my own city” new year’s resolution from way back.

#74 – The Boys in the Trees

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.

#73 – The Almost Moon

I finished up The Almost Moon, Alice Sebold’s second novel, this morning. Having read most of this book in a fluish fever, I’m not really sure what to write. Overall? I’d say that the story remains utterly unconvincing from start to finish because I didn’t sympathize in any way with main character, Helen Knightly. The novel starts off with a very strong first sentence: “When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.” But the trouble with a book based around matricide is that despite how Joan Crawford-awful the mother might have been it’s still a book about killing your mother.

Helen’s aged and decrepit mother, Clair (aged 88), has suffered from agoraphobia her entire adult life. All of the usual issues with growing older, and especially the idea of having to leave your house and live in a home, are intensified when the occupant is already suffering from non-age-related mental illness. It’s dementia on top of an already embittered and angst-ridden mind. So, we’re supposed to understand that after years of suffering through her mother’s issues, Helen has simply had enough on this particular day, and without even thinking she kills her mother.

What follows is a strange hodgepodge of events: Helen calls her ex for help, she lands on the doorstep of her best friend to be greeted by her 30-year-old son, her ex shows up, she acts strangely, goes to work the next morning, and then there’s even more odd behaviour. Tangled throughout the present like a vine are various bits of backstory, about Helen’s marriage, her two kids, and of course, her relationship to her parents. In the end, the novel tries to represent the 24 hours after the act in real time, depicting the fragile state of Helen’s own mind, bringing to the surface the reasons why she did what she did. Only, I didn’t really believe it — the whole thing seemed suspended in a haze somehow.

One of the best conversations about writing I’ve ever had was about protagonists. Whether or not a novel can be successful if the reader doesn’t have an emotional reaction to the main character. In The Almost Moon, all of the haunting goodness that I remembered from The Lovely Bones was missing, and while it’s a worthwhile attempt to push the boundaries in terms of mental illness in popular fiction, overall I found the character of Helen simply disappointing. I didn’t care if she got caught. In fact, I kind of hoped that she did, and the ambiguous ending kind of left me thinking that I’m glad I only paid $2.99 for the book. So I’d have to say, “meh.”

WHAT’S UP NEXT: From a previous post: “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.”

#72 – When Will There Be Good News

Having spent the last few days in the whirlwind of the holidays with the added spice of my father’s wedding on Xmas eve, of course I conked out with a touch of the flu yesterday. Spent the day in bed with Vicks on my chest and the added pressure of a hot water bottle keeping everything all warm and probably infected. Love the holiday flu. Spirits refused to be dampened as we trundled over to my cousin’s for our third, and final, Christmas. It was delightful. The nephew continues to be the funniest little fellow ever. Remember what it was like to just scream for joy at the top of your lungs?

Annnnywaaay, the not-sleeping from the prednisone is working in my favour because I’m getting a lot of reading done. Kate Atkinson’s When Will There Be Good News, the third novel to feature Jackson Brodie, kept me company well into Christmas eve when everyone should have been sleeping while awaiting a visit from ye old guy in the red suit. Another brilliantly paced, densely plotted, utterly readable novel from one of the most refreshing writers working in genre fiction today.

Kate Atkinson has a gift with voice. She manages to keep three distinct and different characters alive within the narrative without falling down once in terms of their particular stories. Jackson Brodie’s still bent, still broken, and still having trouble with women in this novel, but there’s an added tragedy that lands him in Edinburgh. This catastrophic event also causes him to land back into the life of DI Louise Munroe and she encounters him in the oddest of places, stuck in the oddest of situations. Tying them both together is Reggie, a sixteen-year-old girl who hasn’t had the easiest of lives, but she’s plucky, resourceful and kind of reminds me a little of Thebes.

As the story barrels along, their personal lives gets mixed up in the mystery, Reggie’s employer, a doctor who suffered an unspeakable tragedy when she was a young girl, goes missing. Reggie needs to convince DI Munroe that she’s actually been kidnapped and Jackson finds himself right smack in the middle after the young girl tears herself into his life. The central mystery in the novel is coupled with a disaster of epic proportions — a train crash — that muddles up identities, destroys lives and propels the action in ways that one wouldn’t expect. The way its described in the novel conjures up Unbreakable in so much as you can hear the metal as much as the terror in your mind as you read along.

Never trite or contrived, Atkinson’s endings are thought out in ways that ensure they’re as pragmatic as her prose. The characters don’t employ any kind of revolutionary change. They get on with life as life gets on with them and it’s Atkinson’s refreshingly unadorned style of writing that ensures the success of this novel.

READING CHALLENGES: For a moment I had thought that Atkinson was Scottish, which meant I could have added a country to the Around the World in 52 Books challenge. But as she’s British and I’ve already got England covered, that pipe dream gets washed away with the tide (how about a mixed metaphor for a lazy post-holiday Saturday?).

WHAT’S UP NEXT: From a previous post: “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.”

STRANGE ASIDES: My RRHB and I watched an old Albert Finney film the other day, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which is mentioned in the book. Had we not seen it at the exact moment when we did (moments before crawling into bed with the book), I would have missed the reference completely. Thank you universe.

#71 – Middlemarch

What more can I possibly add to decades upon decades of criticism about George Eliot’s masterwork, Middlemarch, one of the best novels ever written? Nothing original, I’d have to say. All I think I can do is comment upon why I enjoyed the novel so very much. Set against the “provincial community” of Middlemarch, England, a group of intertwining stories create a pastoral-like landscape peopled by the (somewhat) upper classes. This isn’t the territory of The Duchess per se, but more an extension of Austen’s kind, good, solid people from good, solid backgrounds trying to better their lives.

Eliot’s broad strokes and epic storylines hold all the characters in check. There’s Dorothea, a beautiful girl with a mind of her own who marries poorly and is then trapped into a terrible codicil by her ridiculous husband, Casaubon. Dorothea’s somewhat silly sister Celia, their Uncle Brooke, a landowner, and his “pet project,” Will Ladislaw, a young man of great curls and not much else, who is a cousin of Dorothea’s husband. There’s the doctor, Lydgate, his wife Rosamund (silly, silly girl), her brother Fred and his beloved, Mary (will she ever accept his hand in marriage; will he ever stop being foolish?). And then all the parents and rectors and other doctors and clergymen and their mothers and aunts and so on and so on. Goodness, their stories intertwine almost as much as their bloodlines, indeed. And it’s amazing to me how the author kept it all straight. The ways in which the novel progresses, the scope of the story, and her consistent and unwavering narrative voice all combine for an utterly delightful (there’s really no other way of putting it) reading experience.

But what I enjoyed most about the book is Eliot’s heightened, almost philosophical prose. Her pages of snappish, witty dialogue, the lovely way she has of creating a character by broad, sweeping strokes and then allows the reader to get to know them even better as the 800+ pages trundle on like a good walk through the countryside. Happiness finds some people, but not all of the characters. Distressing, even traumatic events happen, but it all works out in a way as it ultimately should, with grand love stories and well-intentioned elders making way for the next generation to carry on. Leave many hours in front of you if you want to tackle this book — it’s perfect for long days with nothing to do except read so your imagination can picture the dresses, the landscape, Ladislaw’s curls, the horses, Raffles, and everything else in Eliot’s world. It’s a book for the dreamers among us, that’s for sure.

READING CHALLENGES: Another one for the 1001 Books challenge, of which I am going to come in woefully incomplete before year’s end…

NOTES ON MY EDITION: The physical edition I read was the Penguin classic, but I also read a great deal on my Sony Reader with files from Project Gutenberg.

Nattering Nothings

All the freelance is done for now. My latest Classic Start doesn’t need any further revisions (oh yeah baby!). I haven’t heard back from Penguin about the sample chapter I wrote for them so I’m guessing I didn’t get that job (which is totally okay). Got some good feedback from Harlequin about my latest blurbs. Things are slowing down at work-work. We babysat our nephew yesterday which was a ball (there’s a fun picture on Facebook). My RRHB’s over his cold (almost). I’m feeling puffy, tired and crabby about the meds (and the multiple doctors visits and now-starting neverending pokes and prods re: tests). I love the week between Christmas and New Year (our anniversary; lots of reading time; plenty of afternoon movies). The world is about to be dumped in piles of snow (white Christmas, yay!). Spent most of the day catching up on book blogs for work (have been so busy haven’t read any in ages). Am working through a 3 AM to do list and already resenting the prednisone for mucking up my sleeping. Is it 5 PM yet? Am mulling over Reading Challenges and how to organize my sh*t for next year. Wish that I finished another draft of my own novel this year but have decided my two new years revolutions will be: “Don’t live in fear” and “Finish what you start.” Two of my bestest friends will be in Ontario over the holidays (one from Paris; the other Vancouver) and I’ll get to see them both. What’s new with you?