October 31, 2007

What they are

“My life unknits as I lie here. How many days? How many nights? My stories are my mother’s stories, my grandmother’s, my daughter’s. I did not plan any of them; they became what they became; they are what they are.” –Frances Itani, Remembering the Bones

October 31, 2007

Until asparagus is in bloom…

Once again I’ve got a reason to declare summer officially gone, and I think this time I mean it. Tonight was the final Trinity Bellwoods Farmers’ Market, which we’ve been dutifully attending since July when Barbara Kingsolver changed our lives with Animal Vegetable Miracle. And what a summer it has been: blueberries to blackberries, cucumbers to squash, blue potatoes and black tomatoes. We’ve learned how to cook swiss chard and kale, beetroot and pumpkin. Grilled veg on the barbeque became roasted vegetables alongside chicken dinners as the nights grew cooler. Yum organic sheep’s cheddar, and beef, and lamb. We’ve been so lucky, and beyond as we also reaped our own harvest this year, our garden providing us with lettuce, tomatoes, melon, peppers, and cucumber. This summer we’ve been quite successful at purchasing local produce, and it’s sad to contemplate giving all that up now that the season is over. Our goal for the winter is to confine our fruit and veg to the continent, which is a bit lame I realize, but it’s still going to be a challenge. We’ve got some frozen tomatoes and strawberries in the freezer for the depths of February, to remind us what freshness tastes like. And in the meantime, of course, we’ll be longing for spring. For asparagus season, which, can you believe, I’ve lived through 27 of already, but never knew enough to appreciate.

October 30, 2007

Tomorrow by Graham Swift

Reading Graham Swift’s new novel Tomorrow was for me an exercise in spoilage. The whole story hangs upon an essential hinge, but you see by mistake I’d found out what it was already. I can’t remember where but some review gave the whole thing away, and so I wondered, knowing what I know, would the novel be much good anyway? Will knowing the end ruin the beginning, middle, and perhaps the end in the end? And it didn’t– turns out Swift’s hinge was not so essential after all, but that it swings matters. In fact the swing itself is the point of the entire book.

Tomorrow employs a number of tricky devices, experimenting with the bounds and possibilities of conventional narrative. Swift uses second person narration for starters: middle-aged art dealer Paula Hook is telling this story to her sleeping teenage children one week just past their sixteenth birthday. It is the story of their family, beginning with the beginning of her relationship with her husband Mike and their first encounter “a stone’s throw” from Brighton Beach, and following them through the years to their blissful present. And the narrative trajectory is tricky because nothing terribly story-worthy actually happens– ordinary life is all, in fact a rather idyllic ordinary life. Compelling, yes– but ordinary.

Paula is telling this story because she is unable to sleep, because she is fearful of what will come of the information she and her husband will reveal to their children tomorrow. The information itself isn’t given until late into the novel (and this was what I knew from the start, incidentally), and here is Graham Swift’s third trick: to make the act of withholding engaging. To let suspense be his sole narrative driver, and indeed, as it has been reported, what Paula is withholding is rather anticlimactic, but to Swift it is the very withholding that matters.

Is it enough to sustain an entire book? Almost, I think. Swift nails Paula’s voice perfectly. Written as spoken, with backtracking, aversion, digressions, he conveys her love for her children and her husband, and her complicated feelings about “tomorrow”. He fits a huge part of a life into the span of a night into the span of a book, and this compression reads convincingly. His reverence for ordinary life and love reminded me of Carol Shields’ work (and I am going to read Larry’s Party soon, so I am curious to see how these two books might be similar with authors writing in the voices of the opposite sex). Mike– a biologist– and Paula’s relationship is a marriage of science and art (similar to that put forth by Margaret Drabble in The Sea Lady, and perhaps better realized). I enjoyed how both these characters engaged with the world through their work. And yes, it was interesting to see Swift playing with just what narrative can do.

However this focus on suspense, on withholding, seemed to function in the end to keep the really fascinating questions from being asked. What will happen tomorrow, I wondered, much more than I cared to know everything that was running through Paula Hook’s head. Why had she and husband chosen to withhold this information from their kids? How had they decided to do this? And really, more than anything, what was the big deal? Because if the hinge on which this novel hung didn’t matter to me, why should it really matter to Paula?

I enjoyed reading this book, but what was pivotal really wasn’t the point. Is our experience meant to be analogous to Paula’s then? Will she learn what we do? That instead of the “tomorrows” Swift focuses on, we remember all the other days.

October 30, 2007

Peppermint Twist

It was with real pleasure that I received the latest issue of The New Quarterly in the post today, containing my very own story “The New Peppermint”. Should you wish to purchase a copy of the magazine yourself, here for where it can be found on the newsstands. It’s a beautiful issue, redesigned and so rewardingly. Also contains a piece by Elizabeth Hay, and you can imagine that for me to be published alongside her is a tremendous honour considering the way I feel about her latest novel Late Nights on Air. So obviously I am pleased as a writer, and as a reader I can’t wait to get down to reading the whole issue through.

October 28, 2007

Sunday Tea

I’m quite proud of the party we held this afternoon, which was a very well-attended tea party with dear and lovely friends. Many of you might know I’ve got a thing for tea and scones, and it was my desire to share my passion with the world. And so this morning I whipped up eight batches of dough which baked throughout the afternoon. The kettle ever-brewing and the smell of scones in the air. I’d baked two cakes in case anybody came who didn’t like scones, but there was no such person. I’d managed to find Devonshire cream at the grocery store, defrosted the strawberry jam I made in June, and I said I would buy the flowers myself. The scones– we had pumpkin scones (with pumpkin butter), banana scones, blueberry and plain– were coming out of the oven all afternoon. I made too many, which was the world’s best tragedy. Our house was full of brilliant people and their brilliant conversation, and I did so enjoy myself. I also managed to spend a day eating nothing but scones, which is nothing short of a dream come true.

October 28, 2007

City Limits

I was born to a woman with a casserole reflex. Kicking in upon funerals, births, or any general time of need, and so it has always been my inclination to be neighbourly. I was raised on television which prized neighbourliness as the surest way to heaven, and I don’t know any other way to be, but recent events have tested my limits.

Or even not-so-recent– this has been coming on for a long time. When we lived in England my neighbourliness was conspicuous in a nation full of people who try to mind their own business. In my row of terrace houses, neighbourliness comprised mainly of twitching lace curtains. Sure we could hear our neighbours making love or peeing, but one didn’t say hello. My husband-the-native tried to warn me the day I decided to help the new neighbours move in: they were unloading their truck and it was raining, and I thought two more bodies would get the job done faster. I didn’t listen and dragged him over with me, offered to help, the offer was accepted and in we carried their van full of crap. But no one spoke to us, or even introduced themselves; when the truck was empty, I said, “Well, I guess we’ll be going” and someone answered, “Off with you then,” and that was the last I ever saw of those people.

Upon our return to Canada, things haven’t gone much better. You might remember that I recently made muffins for the family of my dead neighbour who hadn’t actually died. Well last night something happened that was even more awkward. We have new neighbours down below us– a middle-aged Spanish couple. They have control of our thermostat, so I thought it would be best if we made friends with them. We bought them a plant, and knocked on their door. It took awhile for the man of the house to answer, and once he had it was clear that he was naked. Completely naked, and very very old. He also spoke little English. “Welcome,” we said, and held out the plant. To receive the plant while continuing to hide his naked self behind the door was a difficult maneuver, but he just about managed. At the very least he was smiling. He took the plant, said thank you, and shut the door back up again.

So I’ve had it, really. It’s not so much the lack of reciprocation that bothers me, but rather the social awkwardness that has inevitably ensued from these gestures. Neighbourliness shouldn’t make you want to die, and mine perpetually does, and so I’m through with it. I’m through with the undead nakedness, and I’m not going to take it anymore.

October 27, 2007

The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer

No doubt I let the physical beauty of Dalia Sofer’s novel The Septembers of Shiraz pervade my impression of the story, but also for the very first time I found myself longing to call up a book designer. (Her name is Claire Vaccaro, according to the copyright page). The same way you might want to ring an author whose work you’ve just enjoyed, I wanted to tell her, “Yes– that indigo. If a story ever had a colour… Just vivid enough, and somehow homespun, not exotic, or foreign. Just the way that Sofer paints Iran.” I would have raised the issue of the endpapers: their delicacy, subtlety, and the very poetry of their pattern– so much like Sofer’s gentle prose. I wanted to tell Claire Vaccaro that she’d read the very same book as I had, and praise her for multiplying its beauty exponentially.

Dalia Sofer’s first novel The Septembers of Shiraz takes place in Iran in the early 1980s, during those unsure and chaotic days just after the revolution and in the midst of the Iran/Iraq war. The novel begins with the sudden arrest and imprisonment of Isaac Amin, whose only crimes appear to be that he is a Jewish businessman who had lived well under the Shah. During the year that follows his arrest, Isaac and his family exist in a suspended time, the future unsure. They are forced to reevaluate their values, future plans, and their sense of themselves in a world once familiar turned completely upside-down.

Isaac lingers in prison, unsure of what each day will bring. Sadistic guards play their mind games, he is tortured and the threat of execution is omnipresent. Isaac is urged again and again to confess, but to a crime he could not answer to even if he knew what it was. His wife Farnaz has had no word from him, unsure whether Isaac is alive or dead, and her efforts to help him only demonstrate her powerlessness within the new regime. Neglected in light of her parents’ problems and as confused as anyone by this game in which all the rules seemed to have changed, daughter Shirin becomes embroiled a mess too big for her to handle. And far away across the sea their son Parviz, studying at university in New York City, confronts the hard fact of his loneliness, and the distance between him and his family now during this time of need.

The Septembers of Shiraz is Sofer’s first novel, and it is the sort of first novel that I like best. It is not masterful: the plot is flimsy in places, dialogue is rampant with exposition. But then I think mastery is a heavy burden for a young writer to bear. I much prefer promise, and Sofer’s work just explodes with it. With moments in which truth and beauty marry: “The human body is like that. It needs a constant flow of nourishment, air, and love, to survive. Unlike currency these things can’t be accumulated. At any given moment, either you have them or you don’t.” Who we are and where we belong, and where do we go when we don’t anymore? The sympathy with which family ties are drawn, and that the family ties complicated– when Isaac is taken, Farnaz and he had not truly connected in years. Such complications give the story its dimensionality. That real life goes on outside, all the while one family is in turmoil. The burdens and expectations of revolution, of history, and fallen empires.

The Septembers of Shiraz is worthy of its physical beauty, and no doubt served as that beauty’s inspiration. Dalia Sofer has created a work that is quietly extraordinary and quite deserving of a cover you can tell that by.

October 27, 2007

Books in the Bath

My new post “Encounters with Books: In the Bath” is now up at the Descant Blog.

October 26, 2007

Lighting a Fire

Maud Newton’s interview with Kate Christensen contained only good bits, and I wish I could quote it all here. So many fascinating thoughts about books, writing, about women writing, and it was only a short interview anyway.

I will share with you just one more part I particularly liked.

Kate Christensen on her first book’s reception: “I felt a bit like an underdog/loser with a thwarted ego and an axe to grind in one of my own novels, and in that sense it was ironic, fitting, and really, the best thing that could have happened to me. Sure, it pissed me off at first, because few things are more infuriating than being underestimated, but it also lit a fire under my ass, so to speak, and taught me a few valuable Zennish lessons about writing: Let It Go (you can’t control what people make of your work); Keep Moving Forward Like a Shark (all you can do is write more books); and Ride the Ocean Tides and Stay Your Course (your internal compass, not a glowing or scathing review, is the one authority to be heeded and obeyed).”

October 26, 2007

Now gazing

Now gazing at the gorgeous endpapers of Dalia Sofer’s novel The Septembers of Shiraz. Touches such as these: ribbons, embossing, endpapers, good binding– once so common, to encounter them now is quite extraordinary. Highlighting, I believe, that what lies inside is special, and this book truly is. It came recommended by Deanna, and secondarily through a review by Claire Messud (who I’ve come to respect exponentially). My own review is to follow upon finish, but in the meantime, I am enjoying this, the story of a family’s experience just after the revolution in Iran. The son’s story in particulous is resonating, and showing a side of immigration that I’ve previously noted being omitted from American novels. The loneliness– “And his jokes, when translated, are no longer funny.” That one simple line broke my heart, with all its implications, the tenderness and the longing. Like being cut off from one’s own soul, I suppose.