#70 – The Gathering

After hearing Anne Enright read last weekend at the festival, I raced home afterwards and started The Gathering right away (well, after I’d finished with Hemingway, of course). In part because I loved her reading of the work, powerfully spoken with a voice fraught with emotion and a hint of exhaustion, but also because the novel just won the Booker. (I get caught up in awards, I’m not ashamed to say. It’s a good way to discover new writers, right?). Not surprisingly, the book reads in much the same way: it too is powerful, full of emotion, and teeters on the emotional edge that Veronica, the novel’s 39-year-old protagonist, finds herself.

Charged with telling her aging mother, worn out after raising twelve children and enduring another seven miscarriages, that her brother’s body has been found in Brighton, Veronica struggles to cope with his death. As if the absence now of him from her life entirely puts her entire existence into a sharper focus, and until she gets it all down, until she tells the story of what happened when she was eight or nine in the living room of her grandmother’s house, Veronica simply can’t move on. As if the past has finally come up and choked her future, and without blowing it all out around her, she’ll never breath the same way again.

The narrative that spills out over the next few hundreds pages fights with itself at every turn, angry, raw, overwhelmed, Veronica takes hold of what’s left of her life and shakes it, pulls all the pieces down around her and then can’t really tell how to put them back together again. In the end, I’m not clear if she has or not, but it doesn’t really matter because this book is so painfully honest about life, about family, about tragedy, that becoming ‘normal’ again isn’t much the point.

Just before she started her reading, Enright mentioned that now The Gathering had taken the prize, she felt far more tender toward it, considering so many more people were going to read it now with the shiny gold sticker on its cover. And I can see why she might need to make the distinction. Veronica isn’t a character that you feel an affinity for, she’s a character that pulls you into loving her with sharp fingernails and a bitter edge to her voice. She’s at once complex and plain, difficult and bright, and smart and ridiculous all at the same time. But she’s also got to get to the end of this, not her life, but just these feelings hauling her out to the metaphorical sea of her family’s existence.

It’s a book about memory, about the lies we tell ourselves every day, about what family means and what it doesn’t, and about how people don’t change, ‘they are merely revealed.’

Highly recommended.

#69 – Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name

Moments ago, lying in bed trying at long last to finally get rid of this stupid cold that’s been plaguing me for one whole week now, I finished Vendela Vida’s Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. I started this morning. Less than two hours ago, truly. The book pulls you along like a long drive made shorter by great conversation, good scenery and brilliant company. It kind of makes time disappear.

Upon the death of her dad, Richard, Clarissa, 28 years old and engaged to a lovely philosophy professor named Pankaj, discovers that he’s not really her father. When her mother abandoned the family fourteen years ago, she left no clues to Clarissa’s true identity past a never-ending dissertation on the Sami and a birth certificate. Clarissa feels betrayed and abandoned by almost everyone in her life who knew that Richard was not her biological parent, and leaves behind her entire existence one night to travel to Lapland, where she hopes to find her real father, and maybe some clues about why her mother left all those years ago.

To give any more away would spoil the novel, as its prose is so tight, there’s not a wasted word, really, that almost all of the 226 pages carry important bits of story. Vida’s writing is crisp, clean, and echoes the scenery in a way, it too is sparse, complex with history, and utilitarian. So much of the story in the novel comes as a surprise, from beginning to end, and it goes in places that you, as a reader, simply don’t expect. The title, taken from a Sami poet named Marry Ailoniedia Somby, becomes so meaningful once you come to the end of the book, and it’s impossible not to feel a great deal of pain alongside Clarissa, as she takes this incredible journey towards finding out her true identity.

And it’s not what you’d expect.

I also wish that I could bend my rules about my Around the World in 52 Books challenge to maybe count this book as Lapland, if only because Vida does an excellent job of exploring the culture of the Sami without turning her novel into a lesson in anthropology. In that way, it’s like Mister Pip, and I feel richer for having read the book. I am also ashamed at how little I know about the non-Irish and non-British origins of my family. I recognized the glögg that Clarissa drinks in Helsinki only because my aunt once told me her grandmother always made it at Christmas. We’ve now lost all those traditions. But this novel almost makes me want to take a trip to Sweden right now and discover all the things about our family that have been lost over the many years since immigration.

Regardless, the book remains steadfast with Clarissa’s view, and that’s its strength, how she understands and sees the world, and how she sees herself, as one part of her life definitively ends and another begins at a moment she would never see coming. How nothing in life turns out how you would expect on the day before your father dies. How everything changes afterwards.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: Boring, yes, but the book sitting on my desk surrounded by all the various drafts of my longish story that I’m working through at the moment.

EDITED TO ADD: I had totally forgotten about this BookTV interview with Vendela Vida about the book. Isn’t she lovely and well spoken?

The Moment When You Let It All Go

So I’ve been working on this super-long story for about one full year now. Pretty much all last summer and through to this fall, so maybe that’s more like eighteen months. I find that I write so much more in warmer weather that perhaps it’s a sign we need to finish up this house and move to different climes.

I hesitate to call it a book, especially considering that I never finish anything, I don’t want to jinx myself when I’m so far along with one project and have started another bit of school to try and keep my focus.

But I’m struggling because I can write until my fingers want to fall off, typing has never been a problem, and still be unsatisfied with all the bits of the work that I’ve done. Which means I usually abandon the longish stories before they’re really anything other than half-done and start something else.

Cycle meet perpetuity.

So while I’m not 100% at the jump ship stage, I can feel myself keening slowly in that direction. I wrote a short story in class that I quite like and want to clean up for submission, and I’ve got another longish story idea buzzing about in my head.

I feel like a Carrie Bradshaw moment: “How do you know when to stop or when to keep going? Are we all just waiting for the right last words?”

But more importantly, how do I keep going and get to the finish line?

#68 – A Farewell To Arms

Right now, I think I might just be in a Hemingway phase. I mean, I’m not daft in thinking that this is an original phase to be in, but I’m still so taken with his gorgeous house in Cuba, that my curiosity is now officially getting the better of me. I’ve seen how the man lived, now I can’t get enough of knowing what the man wrote.

Annnywaay, I finished A Farewell to Arms this morning on the way to work, and while I agree it’s a great piece of literature that I enjoyed very much, I perhaps might have to disagree with its position in the canon as the defining novel of the First World War. In my humble opinion, there are Canadian books that perhaps come closer to really bringing the experience of the war to life, like Timothy Findley’s The Wars or Joseph Boyden’s excellent Three Day Road, just to name two. But I’d have to say that the parts of the book that I found most effective were those scenes of Frederic Henry, or “Tenente” as the boys call him, in the war zones. The love story, while moving, especially in its tragic conclusions, didn’t feel as authentic as the parts of the book when bombs are exploding and men are heading up to the “show.”

As we get closer to Remembrance Day, I seem to get the urge to learn more and more about the First World War, and Americans in the war in particular. My great-grandfather, G.H. Copeland, came to Canada from Ohio to get into the show himself, and I often think of him running in the trenches with Faulkner or winding up meeting Hemingway on his Red Cross ambulance, although I know G.H. wasn’t in Italy, but mainly in France. Maybe there’s a book in there somewhere?

Up next in my Hemingway phase: The Old Man and the Sea.

Currently reading: Anne Enright’s gut-wrenching Booker-winning The Gathering.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: The novel on my desk beneath its 1001 Books entry.

Two Nights At The IFOA

I’ve spent the past two nights out at the 28th annual International Festival of Authors. Even though I barely made it out the door yesterday, having come down with one awesomely evil cold, I am so glad that I did because it was the best night of readings I’d been to in ages.

But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Friday night was also star-studded, with Michael Ondaatje, whom I adore, ending the evening with his dulcet tones and brilliant accent, reading from Divisadero, a novel I’m still deeply conflicted about despite its multiple nominations this fall. It’s been years since I’d heard Ondaatje read his work, and the last time I saw him at Harbourfront, he read poetry. Small things I noticed this time: he’s so jaunty, floating up to the stage with a bounce in his step, and being very unobtrusive about his own words that it belies the actual age, success and experience of the author himself. He stood with one foot slightly stepping on the other, like a child at a candy counter, shifting his weight back and forth as he read three different sections from the novel.

The other readers that night, including a new part to the evenings, poets “opening” for the fiction and memoir writers, were all satisfactory. And Marina Lewycka stood out in particular. But on the whole it was nothing compared to the brilliance of the readings we heard last night: Shalom Auslander, Amy Bloom, Anne Enright, Vendela Vida, Souvankham Thammavongsa.

Every single reader was excellent, even Souvankham Thammavongsa who seemed terribly nervous, did a good job, even if I might need to read her poetry on paper so I can truly understand the context of her work. Truly, however, it was Anne Enright’s passionate, brittle (she’d had only four hours of sleep since her novel The Gathering “took” [her words] the Man-Booker on Tuesday), and gut-wrenching reading that made the night for me. So much so that I’ve moved The Gathering up on the night stand pile to follow A Farewell to Arms, which I’m enjoying immensely.

As always, it’s such a treat to be at a “classy” (Vendela Vida’s words) festival surrounded by literary superstars who glide up on stage to share their words and their voices with the masses of adoring fans like myself. Oh, and I heard some awesome gossip that I will not share in these pages but would be happy to get into over lunch at some point (insert wimpy emoticon here). And I would have more to say except this cold is forcing my fingers into numbness, fogging up my head, and I’ve still got a pile of editing to do for my latest abridgment.

A writer’s work is never done (insert another lame emoticon here if you’d like and don’t blame me that I’m resorting to them in a time of need). Sigh.

TRH Movie – Gone, Baby, Gone

There must be something in the water in Hollywood this fall, because out of the four pictures I’ve seen (3:10 to Yuma, Into the Wild, Michael Clayton, and now Gone, Baby, Gone), there’s not a bad one in the bunch. Sure, they all have their flaws, but that’s what makes filmmaking so interesting as an art form.

So I refrained from writing a full review of Dennis Lehane’s novel until I had seen the movie. I wanted to really explore the idea (in my head) of how a movie adaptation might work or not work. Gone, Baby, Gone seems, at first glance, to be a strange book to start with, considering it’s one of the middle books in Lehane’s series centering on Dorchester-native and private investigator Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and his partner, Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan). But in the end, I think it was a good choice, although I haven’t read the others, if only for its utterly current storyline and setting.

In this particular story, Patrick and Angie are called upon to help find a missing neighbourhood girl after she’s taken one night from her mother’s apartment. The mother, a drug addict and terrible mother, is forced into a sort of reckoning for her lifestyle by her older brother and his wife, who are the ones who actually hire Patrick and Angie. From the beginning, something’s just not right with the case, whether it’s the involvement of the cops, how the girl disappeared, or the story behind the story that starts to unravel the deeper Patrick and Angie get into it.

The film does an excellent job of streamlining the complex plot for a theatre audience. While plot details are tightened up, the film remains contextually in tact, despite its extreme complexity, which always doesn’t translate easily to the big screen. Affleck pays homage to noir films before him, but sometimes, he takes the elements a bit too far (although not to the crazy degree found in last year’s similar noir-influenced The Black Dhalia). Yet, despite the film’s few shortcomings, it remains tight, riveting and well-acted throughout.

If I have one complaint, it’s that the character of Angie becomes so very secondary in the film. She really doesn’t have a lot to do, she stands beside Patrick, asks a couple of questions, and has one pivotal moment that they took directly from the novel. Yet, in the book she’s complex, troubled, and deeply confused about elements of the case. The movie, I guess to keep it clear on Patrick, turns her into a truly supporting character, a partner in name only, and much less the strong, tough woman in Lehane’s narrative.

But the film’s got amazing art direction that brings the setting to life, fabulous performances by character actors like Amy Madigan and Ed Harris, and Deadwood‘s Titus Welliver and The Wire‘s Amy Ryan, and Casey Affleck, who brings a heart to the film that Lehane’s controlled style and hard-hitting language doesn’t always reflect. Affleck’s deft hand behind the camera and with the script show real talent and promise. And that’s a sentence I never thought I’d write, let alone think. He took everything he could from the book, changed what he needed to, remained faithful to the rest, and created a film that’s poignant, aching, bright, and honestly worthy of praise.

And The Booker Goes To…

The Gathering by Anne Enright, only the second Irish woman in the history of the prize to win. I was intrigued by the chair’s description of the novel as “a powerful, uncomfortable and, at times, angry book…”

Who wouldn’t be interested after that?

EDITED TO ADD: I’m actually going to see Anne Enright and Vendela Vida tomorrow night for IFOA. I will report back on the “angry” discomfort found in the book…

Governor General’s Award Short List

The short list for the other giant Canadian literary prize has been announced. Some surprises, Heather O’Neill‘s wonderful Lullabies for Little Criminals being one of them, on the fiction list. And now the guessing game begins. The conversation around here has Ondaatje winning the Giller and Vassanji winning the GG. Any takers on that action?

#67 – The Septembers of Shiraz

I always feel like Phil Keoghan when I start a post off with, “The Iran stop in my reading trip around the world…” But hell, it’s the truth, I picked The Septembers of Shiraz because I didn’t have an Iranian author on the list and the book got a whoppingly good NY Times review by Claire Messud. But in retrospect, I am certainly glad that any measure of influence got me to read Sofer’s work, whether it was word of mouth because of the review, the Facebook peeps that read the title through our group, or the fact that I got a copy of the novel from work, because The Septembers of Shiraz truly broke my heart in a good way.

For a first novelist, Sofer has a voice that’s assured, strong, and tender at the same time as she tells the story of Isaac Amin, a Jewish jeweler living in Tehran just after the revolution that brought the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power and overthrew (is that the right way of looking at it?) the monarchy. Not a monarchist, but suspected of being a spy, Isaac is arrested just before lunch on September 20, 1981. He spends the better part of the next year in jail being interrogated, beaten, and locked up in solitary. The life of an imprisoned man turns Isaac inside himself as he relives his life, his marriage to Farnaz, and tries to convince the Revolutionary Guard that he has never spied in his life.

As Isaac suffers inside the prison, his family tries to go on living without him. Farnaz tries to track him down, attempts to fight off being taken herself, and comes to terms with why her marriage might have turned stiff, if not sour, in the months before her husbands arrest. Their son Parviz, away in New York studying architecture, broke and unable to pay his rent, must come to terms with the ideas and ideals of his faith while living in the heard of Hasidic Jewish neighbourhood in Brooklyn. Young Shirin, Isaac’s nine-year-old daughter, also copes with the disappearance of her father in her own way, by becoming involved in her own anti-revolutionary cause.

Sofer has a tendency to use metaphoric language to really let the reader into the experience of Isaac in prison. While it might be a bit on the flowery side sometimes, there’s an underlying ache to her prose that remains convincing throughout. As always, Around the World in 52 Countries has opened my eyes to a different world, and made me thankful that I can experience it through the comforts of my warm, dry, half-built house.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: No photo that I took this time around, but just an image of the book cover…

HOWEVER: I’ve got three extra copies of the book sitting here in my office and I want to share. Email me via the blog here if you want one. And then I can’t wait to read your thoughts.

#66 – Half a Yellow Sun

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half a Yellow Sun took me ages to finish. And it’s not because it’s not a good book or didn’t hold my interest, even if it was perhaps just a bit too long, but more because so much other reading came up in the mean time. Work and school reading meant that I had to keep putting the book down and picking it back up again days, weeks, months even, after I started.

On the whole, it’s a complex, well-written story about the grown twin daughters of a wealthy Nigerian couple who profited from the fall of colonialism. As civil unrest tears the country apart, and the nation of Biafra fights for its independence, the two sisters are torn in different directions, both personal and political. The story moves back and forwards in the year or two before the war, and then tells of their struggles during the three years between 1967 and 1970 when Biafra became nation consistently struggling against Nigerian forces that refuse to recognize its status.

Kainene, who falls in love with a British man named Richard, fails to support the cause until an event happens that changes her outlook forever. Then she removes herself from the coastal city of Port Harcourt, and she and Richard run a refugee camp until the end of the war. There are personal difficulties, between Kainene and her sister that run throughout the book. Kainene, plain, tall, thin, regal, is plain compared to her beautiful sister. Not that this defines their relationship, but it sets them on very different paths in the years leading up to and during the war.

Olanna and her husband Odenigbo flee from their home in a university town to places that become harder and harder for them to survive within. They are revolutionaries who believe in the cause, who support the new Biafran government, who teach the noble reasons for the uprising to the children who surround them, starving and malnourished, many of whom die from the lack of food when the relief trucks are stopped at the border. Not without her own personal problems, Olanna fights to keep her daughter, Baby, healthy, and watches as her husband falls deeper and deeper into depression.

The other main character within the novel, concerns a house boy who grows up during the course of the book, Ugwu, who works for Odenigbo and Olanna. His story truly forms the heart of the book, from the girl he loves from a distance back in his village, to the terror he feels each time a bomb stops life in its tracks.

The Nigerian entry in my Around the World in 52 Books, Half a Yellow Sun is certainly a novel about an important (to use such a trite word feels wrong, somehow) time in the country’s history. I learned so much about the struggle, was shocked and saddened by the events in the novel, and felt a quiet strength in the author’s words. The sentences aren’t fancy, symbolism doesn’t fall off the page, but the stark reality of the events themselves drive the narrative in a way that shows the wisdom and tenacious ability of the writer. Epic would be a good word to describe this novel, and I am so glad I finally finished, for it’s the kind of book that truly reminds you of the importance of reading in the first place.