Bloody Brilliant Barbara

Last night Zesty and I met for our usual foray into author events at the Harbourfront. While I didn’t end up in tears like the last time after seeing Colm Toibin, I certainly felt the wit and wisdom of Barbara Gowdy was well worth the price of admission. But first, the readings.

Up first was Nuruddin Farah, who read from his latest novel, Knots. Suspenseful and mysterious, the piece he read followed a young Somalian woman Cambara (pronounced “Ambara”) who ends up in Mogadishu looking for answers (in this piece in a mysterious house where a stranger has given her water) or even meaning behind a great tragedy in her life. The second book in a trilogy, I’m inclined to order the first book, Links, as the Somalian entry in my Around the World in 52 Books challenge. Farah had a lovely aura about him: soft, supple, yet smart and exceptionally serious. It was a good reading, even if it didn’t hold my attention firmly throughout.

But the superstar of Wednesday night was absolutely Barbara Gowdy. Trim, with her hair tucked back by a barrette, she approached the podium and read a section from her new novel, Helpless. Never one to disappoint, Gowdy, instead of reading any of the more sensational aspects of the novel, read from a portion of the book that delves further into the backstory of Ron, the man who steals young Rachel away from her mother. The short reading described Ron’s life after his mother died tragically on his birthday, moved into how Ron coped with her absence, and described how everything changed once his father’s lover and her daughter moved into their home. A touching bit to read especially when all the audience knows of Ron is that he’s the man who is responsible for the unpardonable action within the novel.

Once the reading was finished, after the break, we were treated to an on stage interview between Gowdy and Now magazine’s Susan G. Cole. The most interesting parts of their discussion revolved around Gowdy’s own point of view when it came to the complex and conflicted character of Ron. In Gowdy’s mind, he’s an almost-pedophile. A man not unlike Lewis Carroll who felt “urges” but didn’t act on them, never taking his obsession too far, as if the act of kidnapping Rachel, because of its motivations, didn’t necessarily cross the line. It’s an interesting distinction, and sort of what I was trying to get at in my review of the book, that while Ron’s actions are abhorrent, he maintains a certain level of control over his deplorable urges. In short, Gowdy insists, his actions are driven forward by love.

When asked about her own writing process, Gowdy told Cole that it was a long, painful process. She agonizes over ideas for almost a year until finally finding an anchor for a new book and describes her writing work as “putting the hours in.” Her house is spotless for all of her procrastination, something all of us aspiring writers can most certainly relate to. All in all, it was a great old literary evening.

#17 – Theft: A Love Story

Peter Carey’s magnificent Theft: A Love Story is the Australian entry in my Around the World in 52 Books challenge. Set in the early 80s, the novel tells the story from the perspective of two brothers, Michael and Hugh Boone, who each swap the narrative point of view back and forth like thunder and lightning.

Michael “Butcher Bones,” an infamous artist who is both in and out of favour, is on the edge of his own sanity throughout most of the novel. Defeated by an acrimonious divorce, he falls in love with Marlene, a mystery woman who turns out to be the daughter-in-law of a famous artist, Jacques Leibovitz. The master is long dead, and the central theft of the novel’s title revolves around one of Leibovitz’s paintings going missing from northern New South Wales where Butcher and Hugh are staying.

Hugh, or “Slow Bones” as he’s called, piledrives his way through the novel breaking baby fingers and using capital letters. Always in his older brother’s care, Hugh provides a dissenting voice in the book, at once within the narrative but decidedly outside most of the story. Not unlike Benjy from The Sound and the Fury, Hugh’s most poignant moments are when he’s storming around New York City noting the inherent differences between it and Bacchus Marsh in Australia where he was born.

Before I even picked up this novel, so much of what I had heard about Carey’s book revolved around the explosive portrayal of his ex-wife, Alison Summers. For a moment, that turned me off, a literary revenge, despite how enduring, grows tired after a while. Thankfully, the love story of the novel’s title doesn’t refer to the Plaintiff, as Butcher’s ex-wife is referred to, but to Marlene, the younger, Australian-bred, New York living lover he picks up part way through the novel.

Through her courtship to Leibovitz’s son, Olivier, and subsequent marriage, Marlene has developed quite an eye for art. She exploits her connections and broadens Butcher’s own horizons, as the novel moves from rural Australia to Japan, where he has a show. From Japan, they’re in New York, and when the penultimate moment of the novel arrives, Hugh and Michael make their way back to Australia.

Like a bucket of cold water dropped on your head on a hot day, Theft shocks you into submission with its bold, slashing strokes of brilliant prose that belt out the story. The novel burns on the way down just like the whiskey that seems to be Butcher’s constant companion. One part mystery, one part obsessive love story and two parts good, old-fashioned yarn, I can’t begin to tell you how hard I fell for this book. If I were indoctrinating new titles into the 1001 Books list, this one would be at the top of my list.

Stephen Henighan Slays The Gillers

I can’t remember exactly how I came across Stephen Henighan’s Kingmaker’s column in Geist 63. But it’s certainly stirring up the pot in terms the Canadian literary world. I’m probably late to the party (it’s a bad habit I have, of never being on time, but I digress), but I read the article this week and thought, “what Mel Gibson-inspired bee’s up his bonnet?”

Although Henighan does have a point with this idiotic decision by Chapters / Indigo:

But the real future of Canadian writing lay on the banquet tables of the 2006 Giller dinner, where each guest was invited to take home an individually wrapped party favour provided by Chapters- Indigo. When the guests opened their favours, they found that all the packages contained the same remaindered Stephen King novel.

Oh. My.

There’s probably a good reason why there were all those Stephen King books remaindered anyway. But should they be on the tables of one of the most prestigious literary events in Canada of all places? Perhaps not. Smarten up people!

But I really don’t think that Giller prize is “the most conspicuous example of corporate suffocation of the public institutions that built our literary culture.” If anything, it’s a symbol of the random and relentlessly confusing individuality of the jurors chosen to pick the winners. And I still think that Three Day Road should have won last year; I’ll viciously tell anyone who’ll listen that Consumption is a far better book than Bloodletting, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be just as excited this year to see what the Giller comes up with.

If anything, the Giller, like Canada Reads (yay! Heather O’Neill), is an opportunity for Canadians to not only read books written by and for Canadians, books that will, inevitably contribute to our culture, but also to then debate and discuss the choices made by the judges. I mean, if this year’s Oscars are any indication (how many times was Scorsese denied before now?), it sometimes takes awards a long time to get something right. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s wrong, or by extension, bad. But perhaps that’s not what Henighan means. I know he’s making the point that the awards are serving the giant conglomerate steamroller of Canadian publishing but does that necessarily equate that Lam didn’t deserve to win?

But in a day and age where people are reading less, and choosing the Giller winner simply because it’s an easy pick when it’s all over the media, maybe I kind of see his point. Or maybe I’m just too naive because I think that these kinds of prizes are done with a level of honesty and integrity, that those three jurors truly felt that of the books they read last year, Vincent Lam’s debut short story collection was the best. Obviously, Henighan doesn’t share my rosy outlook.

#16 – Helpless

No, not the Neil Young song that’s part of my soundtrack, but Barbara Gowdy’s latest novel. I devoured Helpless (which could have been in one sitting if that necessary evil called “work” hadn’t gotten in the way) in just over 24 hours, somewhat echoing the breakneck pace of the police on the hunt for a missing child, which forms the central storyline of the novel.

Rachel, the uncommonly beautiful daughter of Celia, a single mom who plays piano and works in a video store, is taken during a blackout. The man who whisks her away in the night, Ron, is an overweight, hapless mechanic who works on small motors. He sees Rachel by chance one day and falls deeply in love with her. Nancy, Ron’s girlfriend, a former crystal meth addict with a spasming leg, becomes his reluctant accomplice as they hold Rachel in his basement for an extended amount of time.

Gowdy portrays all of the characters brilliantly, from the angelic and even mystical voice of Rachel herself, to the deeply troubled and supremely frightening man who loves her enough to silent her away in the night, the novel is both suspenseful and terrifying at the same time.

I don’t know if I’ll ever fall as much in love with Gowdy’s work as I did when I finished The Romantic, a book whose characters stay with me and that I still recommend to people to this day. But I did enjoy Helpless thoroughly, and think that she has such a lovely way of approaching subjects that might be too hard for other writers to put their heads into, like Ron. Gowdy manages to get so deep into him where regardless of how wrong his (for lack of a better term) impure thoughts are, you still feel sympathetic.

I hate to compare Gowdy’s lovely written book to the film Happiness but it kept coming to the top of my mind as I was reading yesterday. I kept hoping for Ron to redeem himself because I couldn’t endure the crushing weight of the worst in human kind as that film demonstrates. Thankfully, the novel is richer and softer at the same time than Solondz’s film. In a way, it’s like comparing apples to oranges, where Helpless explores the mind of a pedophile on the verge of betraying everything he knows to be right, Happiness simply wants to squeeze you with the violence and betrayal of the molester’s actions. It’s an interesting distinction.

Annnywaaay. This book broke my heart in so many different places, not the least of which was the mother Celia, who while listening to the police around her talk about the mundane details of their private lives, “…reflects without resentment or envy—it’s simply a stray thought—that these are people whose lives have never hung, as hers does, by the thread of a single human attachment.”

And I thought, quite simply, that I am the luckiest girl in the world to be surrounded at all times by more than one person, if I were to go missing, that would miss and/or worry about me. I have entire spools of human attachments that may come unraveled from time to time but never go missing entirely. I don’t want to give away any of the novel, so forgive me if even this is too much detail, for the pacing and the thrill of it all is really the book’s core power, so that’s all I’m going to say…

#15 – Don’t Move

Margaret Mazzantini’s critically acclaimed and prize-winning Don’t Move is an apt book to have finished today, as a great snowstorm falls upon Toronto rendering the city motionless. Well, truth be told it’s just the title that’s fitting because the guts of the novel have little to do with either snow or Toronto…

Annnywwaaay. Told in something akin to exposition, Don’t Move lets the narrator and main character, Timoteo, a successful, married surgeon tell his own story. His daughter Angela has been involved in a very serious accident while riding her scooter to school, and Timo sits and waits for her to come out of surgery. He’s a cold, exacting character; and if I were being completely honest, I’d admit that I found him utterly unlikeable.

In fact, despite the obvious and real tragedy of his daugther’s accident, I ended up feeling little for Timoteo past disgust as the main thrust of the novel involves a very abusive affair he has with a poor, thin, wisp of a woman named Italia. The two meet just after his car breaks down in a rural area of Italy, and their surreptitious affair begins shortly thereafter.

Including as selection from Italy on my Around the World in 52 Books challenge, I felt that I got little from the story about the setting. With the exception of the time Timo and his wife Elsa spend at their summer beach house, very little of his surroundings are described in detail. With the majority of the action taking place in Timoteo’s mind as he sits in a hospital waiting room, which is by its nature both cold and sterile, and uncomfortable and bland, much of the other settings take on this same atmosphere.

This is a novel that tells you everything, that leaves little to conversation, and forces the reader into the position of the dying daughter by his consistently addressing her within the story. And I really didn’t like being coerced into a sympathetic position where I had to like the main character, after all, who can despise a man who is obviously in so much pain?

“Dear Angela…let me tell you about the time I cheated on your mother and ruined a poor, desperate girl’s life…just because you don’t have anything else to worry about as you lie there on the operating table half-dead already.”

But, alas, I am paraphrasing.

On the whole, I struggled through this book, forcing myself to finish it, and wondering why Don’t Move was included in the 1001 Books list. It tells it is a “multilayered novel of love, loss, and desperation, set upon the affluent backdrop of Northern Italy.” Beside the write-up is a giant picture of Penelope Cruz, who starred in the, again award-winning, film adaptation.

For me, it’s an intensely cold novel, and a lot of the times, I had a hard time believing the character was even a man. In places, the author uses odd metaphors that just didn’t work: “A rain as fine as face powder was falling.” Not that metaphors need to be gender specific or should even be so, it just felt wrong in this case, something that this man wouldn’t notice and/or care to know. Anyway, it’s a small point, and maybe not even a relevant one, but things like that pulled me out of the novel time and time again.

Mazzantini is obviously a talented writer, and moments of the novel are really quite brilliant, but I prefer to take my cold, calculated protagonists with a bit of redemption, which should never be confused with pure confession.

Tragic Right Update

1. There is a lot of snow outside.

2. This is not good for a girl with a tragic hip.

3. This is especially not good for a girl with a tragic hip who didn’t listen to the weather reports this morning and wore her Frye boots to work.

4. This meant the girl slipped all the way home from the subway and almost killed herself approximately 67 times.

5. But it sure shows the power of weather-appropriate footwear.

(PS – The first week of my new job has been awesome but busy).

TRH Movie – The Queen

My week off of work was supposed to be punctuated by seeing a lot of movies, but I was felled by a damn cold, and so the only day I did actually make it to the theatre was yesterday when Tara and I went to see The Queen. The last of the Oscar films I’ll actually get to go and see before the Awards tomorrow night, I have to say that I enjoyed it very much, and was impressed by the performances, both by Michael Sheen (love him) and Helen Mirren (goes without saying that she’ll win).

But on the whole, other than The Departed, I’m really uninspired by this year’s crop of Best Picture nominees. I haven’t seen Letters from Iwo Jima, but I have now seen the other three, and I still think that Scorsese’s picture is the best out of all of them. And two movies I’ve seen since, The Children of Men and Half Nelson, are better pictures than the other nominees. But I’m not on the voting committee and I don’t share the lovefest over Babel, so who knows. I also think that Little Children should have had more nominations, and that Jackie Earle Haley should win in his catagory, even though my vote will probably go to Eddie Murphy.

But it does make me think that with all the money Hollywood spends to make money, I’m surprised that better movies simply don’t come out. Or maybe I’ve just watched the wrong ones lately. We did watch The Prestige yesterday, and it was really good, better than Dreamgirls, better than Flags of Our Fathers, better than (shhh) Babel, and still nothing in the way of recognition.

I’m guessing that my radar is really off the mark in terms of what Hollywood finds to be good and I what I think truly is exceptional. But isn’t that always the case?

#14 – Blind Submission

I missed yesterday and the day before I think with my Book A Day challenge. I’ve got one for today though: Blind Submission by Debra Ginsberg. Angel Robinson (seriously, that’s her name) finds herself out of a job when the bookstore she works for in Southern California shuts down (damn the fate of independent bookstores everywhere). She ends up, upon the insistence of her aspiring novelist boyfriend, landing a job with Lucy Fiamma at her literary agency.

There’s a lot of bookish insider stuff going on in the novel, the role that agents play, how they do a good deal of editing and building up the books before they get pitched, how it’s like being a salesman, etc. But Angel finds herself really good at it, until Blind Submission arrives. Written by an anonymous author and strangely echoing Angel’s own life (the main character is called “Alice” for heaven’s sake), it’s the central mystery of the book, who wrote it and why?

As Angel goes somewhat mad trying to figure it out, the Devil Wears Prada-esque relationship with her boss escalates. Oh, and there’s some aspects of chicklit thrown in too, will Angel choose Malcolm, her gorgeous but somewhat unstable boyfriend or will she end up with a fiery Italian writer-slash-pastry chef? (It sounds so ridiculous when I write it out here…)

In the end, I enjoyed the insider-type stuff with the book, and I did read it quickly; it’s that kind of novel, where the prose isn’t particularly inspired (and the sex scenes are embarrassing, as were the setups, dropping towels in hotel rooms, you get the picture, yawn) but I got sucked in regardless. Anyway, it’s a good vacation book, perfect for beach reading and/or something light and fluffy for when you’re tired from a long day of real life. But no hearts were broken, squished or otherwise, which is okay sometimes too.