October 25, 2007
Point Form
Anansi‘s 40th Birthday is amusingly recapped at the Descant blog.
A new Mitford book is out today– a collection of letters between the sisters, edited by Charlotte Mosely, which I can’t wait for. Remember how much I loved Decca’s? On here for how “no one will ever write letters like this again”.
Kate Christensen, whose first novel I enjoyed last month upon introduction by Maud Newton, is interviewed by said Newton. Of the bits I loved best: “In my late teens and early 20s, when I was developing my idea of how I wanted to write, I glutted myself on twentieth-century English novelists. It seemed to me that, en masse, Drabble, Pym, Spark, Mantel, and Wesley, as well as quite a few equally brilliant Englishmen, had signed a British-Writer Pact agreeing to foreswear heavy-handedness, egotistical earnestness, and didacticism and to embrace instead black humor, deft social insights, wit, lightness, and a float-like-a butterfly sting-like-a-bee verbal dexterity. I wanted to sign that pact, join their gang and live in London and drink in their pub.”
I used to enjoy Maud Newton’s Friday Blogger Stephany Aulenback, and so I was happy to find out she was blogging again. And even happier when I saw she’d published an interview with Sara O’Leary. She is the author of When You Were Small, which is one of the most beautiful children’s books I’ve ever seen.
October 25, 2007
The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta
In Tom Perrotta’s new novel The Abstinence Teacher, Ruth Ramsay is asked if her daughter’s soccer coach is cute. “‘What difference does it make?'” she answers. ‘”He’s a drunk married Christian.'” To which her friend responds with, “‘Nobody’s perfect'”.
And indeed “nobody’s perfect” would be a fitting epigram for most of Perotta’s characters, Ruth Ramsay in particular. She is divorced and longing, struggling with her adolescent daughters, and facing trouble in her job as sex-ed teacher at the local high school. The year before her comment about orl sex (that “some people enjoy it”) had sparked an outcry by a fundamentalist Christian group, resulting in Ruth now being required to teach an “abstinence education” program. And so she is none too impressed when she catches her daughter involved in a group prayer at her soccer game, led by her coach, the aforementioned imperfect Tim Mason.
The novel moves between Tim and Ruth’s points of view, demonstrating the oddly ambivalent attraction developing between them. Tim is just as struggling as Ruth is, a reformed drug addict who was saved by Jesus, but lost his wife and daughter along the way. He tries to live in a way that would make his God proud, but temptation keeps finding him at every turn, and he can’t help questioning his faith. Both he and Ruth deal with their mutual attraction with distraction, and these distractions become the story. Tim trying to stay on the straight-and-narrow, Ruth’s attempt to rekindle an old flame. What happens when Ruth can’t bear the propaganda, and advises her class to look up Planned Parenthood’s website? How will Tim respond to his pastor’s urging to continue leading the soccer team in prayer, even though he’s not altogether comfortable with the idea and it may well drive him apart from his own daughter?
This is the stuff of suburban soap-opera, American satire, and Perrotta’s Election and Little Children have already established him as a master of these forms. The Abstinence Teacher is written with its broader implications in mind (namely the growing power of America’s religious right) but still focuses on the small, the details, on the roundedness of his characters. Perrotta does not resort to stereotypes in this story where it would have been easy to, and he draws no firm lines of good and evil. “Nobody’s perfect”, nobody at all. And though this story’s conclusion is perhaps not one as satisfying as its thunderous momentum truly deserves, the distractions along the way are altogether worth the while.
October 24, 2007
How positively picklish!
Picklish, and exciting. Thanks to my dear husband for the celebratory image. And to the millions and millions of loyal pickling fans– how would I ever would-be pickle without you?
October 23, 2007
I vow
Lying there with her head on his chest. “I vow to never forget the Robin’s Rest,” she said. “Or the tartan of its bedspreads.”
October 23, 2007
Cancel intellectualism
Now devouring The Abstinence Teacher by Joe Perrotta (who wrote Election). Oh, I wish I could take a holiday from the rest of my life, and crawl under a duvet with a flashlight to finish it.
I am very looking forward to reading Eleanor Wachtel’s new book Random Illuminations: Conversations with Carol Shields.
Today I was flattered to read that The London Review of Books is “an esteemed, small-circulation literary periodical read mainly by academics and bookish intellectuals.” See, we get it at our house. But then I suppose any bookish intellectualism may well be cancelled out by Spice Mania.
I thought Anne Enright’s piece was fair, thoughtful, and honest, by the way. And I am also looking forward to reading The Gathering.
October 23, 2007
The world is good
I can’t remember where I read it– in a letter, an interview, an essay or a novel– Carol Shields writing about reading obituaries, the stories you find there. The closest thing I can find now is the passage from Unless. Reta and her husband are walking through the cemetery: “Here is an inventory of relics and fashion and a sentimental embrace of death, invoking what may well be the richest moments in a lifetime, the shrine of tears and aching history”.
I don’t read celebrity gossip anymore, but I do read the death notices in The Globe every Saturday. It’s a bit morbid, I realize, and I do end up getting tears on the newsprint, but really I find what lies in the obits such an antidote to the rest of the paper, such marvelous stories. There are people in the obituaries who stay married all their lives. They leave behind their spouses, children, nieces, nephews, friends. They are proud, beloved, missed. And oh the details: they fought in wars, moved across the world to call this country home, had multiple careers, made great discoveries, loved their families, loved their pets, enjoyed their cottages, changed the world, taught school, told jokes and stories, and were the bravest, strongest, most loving, kind, hilarious, unique and vibrant person many people ever knew. Of course not all of these stories are so satisfying: young people whose deaths must leave irreparable holes in a family, those who leave behind partners and children after so little time. But still, there is so much love here, and it’s heartening. So little else is, and so I savour these things.
I love that due to brevity, how cryptic and mysterious these stories become– and how beautiful. On our trip to England in June we went walking through a churchyard in the Lake District, and I was so intrigued by the gravestone of a man who had been “village postmaster and pharmacist for 30 years”. And the man from the photo, that “observer of rainfall.” And these are ordinary lives. The last two weeks in the paper I’ve read about the woman who “never failed to stay in touch”, the longtime resident of Leaside who pursued his love of painting, the top-ranked junior ski racer, the man whose Parkinson’s prematurely ended his brilliant legal career. “She was a renowned expert on the history of children’s books and lectured widely on the topic.” “His top priority in the spring was that his son son raised his beautiful Royal Canadian Air Force Ensign to fly proudly on the beach.” She whose husband “was executed by the Soviets in 1945 during the siege of Budapest” and moved to the US to run her uncle’s hotel. “A great lover of family, friends, good music and a glass of red wine.” The woman who will be remembered “for her kind heart, generous spirit, wonderful sense of humour and her beautiful voice.”
And that this is the stuff of an ordinary life is really quite remarkable– perhaps there really is no such thing? Real life sends delicious shivers up my spine, and the world is good, or at least it can be.
October 22, 2007
Umm, yes
Umm, yes, Pickle Me This is going to see the Spice Girls. (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
October 22, 2007
The Door by Margaret Atwood
I do not possess the authority necessary to fairly review any book of poems, let alone Margaret Atwood’s The Door. First, I picked up the collection and read the poems straight through, the way you aren’t supposed to. I need to read them again, I need to read the book backwards, or upside-down, or something. However that one such as I, not possessing poetic authority, can pick up this collection and enjoy it– “accessible” has become such a bad word, but what about “appreciatable” with its various connotations?
Many people will read these poems for their poet, which might seem troublesome, but then I find nothing troublesome about people reading poems. Atwood has been prolific of late, with her story collections Moral Disorder and the more unconventional The Tent, her retelling of The Odyssey in The Penelopiad, and Writing With Intent, a collection of nonfiction, all published within the past two years. But Atwood was a poet first, so her poems should not be overlooked, and this collection seems very in keeping with the general sense of her other recent work. In “Another visit to The Oracle”, she writes: “There’s so much I could tell you/ if I felt like it. Which I do less and less./ I used to verbalize a mile a minute,/ but I’ve given it up. It’s/ too hard to turn the calories into words,/ as you’ll find find out too if you live/ long enough.”
Indeed physically Atwood’s once-sprawling texts have grown very slim. The poem goes on, “So I’ve had to edit. I’ve taken up/ aphorism. Cryptic, they say./ Soon I’ll get everything down to one word./ All crammed in there, very/ condensed you understand, like an/ extremely small black star. Like a black/ hole.” Lately Atwood seems to have banished superfluity, and in its place has appeared such a broad canvas of considerations that conciseness is only necessary. Her latest poems range from the personal (“My mother dwindles…”) to the political (“A poor woman learns to write”). She writes of environmental disaster, war and destruction, of art, aging, life and literary celebrity. She writes, “The dog has died./ This has happened before./ You got another;/ not this time though.”
Throughout this volume we receive glimpses of that titular door as it swings open and shut. “The door swings open,/ you look in./ It’s dark in there…” Death, it seems, is what lies behind, and it seems also that her own glimpses are driving Atwood forward. No time for epics, with so much to say. And so perhaps a poem is the perfect package for a message, the whole world rendered tiny and wrapped up in words. To be unwrapped and unwrapped, again and again, in a thousand different ways.
October 21, 2007
A book's right time
“There is only one way to read which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag– and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is a part of a trend or a movement… Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.” Doris Lessing, 1971. Preface to The Golden Notebook.
Which is a wonderful thought and entirely true. However, like all truths, I can poke holes in this.
On “dropping books which bore you”– a contentious point in reading circles. I rarely do it myself, can think of two or three books in the past year, and why don’t I drop books which bore me? The Golden Notebook is a case in point: last Tuesday afternoon I was pulling my shopping trolley through the Roxton Road parkette, dispairing that The Golden Notebook had ever been written. “I hate it,” I was wailing, as the trolley bumped along. “I’m 192 pages in, and I don’t think I can take 400 more.” Why not drop it, it was suggested to me? “But what a waste of those 192 pages,” I cried. (These are the problems, clearly, of the more fortunate people in the world). “What am I ever going to do?”
Indeed, the book was a slog. Structurally the problem is obvious: essentially broken up into four sections, the first one takes up half the book. The currency of the book was also a problem, as it was not so current nearly fifty years later. Its politics were obsolete, its structure made me wonder if I was being made fun of, I was bored bored bored, there on page 192.
But then I turned to page 193 when I got home, and the whole book changed. Suddenly it made sense to me, and from then on I was enjoying myself. Nothing dramatic had shifted, but the pieces now fit. I understood what Doris Lessing was trying to do with her fragmented, enormous novel. I understood what she was saying about men and women, idealism, writing, the point of art at all. But not completely– so much of this went over my head. I truly believe that Anna and Molly might have had a better time had they spent time with men who weren’t horrible. Indeed a lot of the book was still a bit tedious, but what The Golden Notebook is attempting to capture is life. Or life at a a time, and it does, I think. Not since Woolf have I ever read a text more Woolfian. “I have only to write a phrase like ‘I walked down the street’, or take a phrase from a newspaper ‘economic measures which lead to the full use of…’ and immediately the words dissolve, and my mind starts spawning images which have nothing to do with the words, so that every word I see or hear seems a small raft bobbing about on an enormous sea of images”.
I try to read the books I “should” or “ought”, whose authors have just awarded Nobel prizes, because I am not as effective a self-educator as Doris Lessing. I need a bit of help every so often, to fill in my gaps, to fill out the world. And I tend not to drop the books which are boring me either, because so often page 193 is waiting just around the corner.
October 21, 2007
Very officially
It’s very offically autumn. I know this not because of the food we eat, for we’ve been in squash-mania since September. No, I know it because today I turned up “Do They Know It’s Christmas” and danced around my living room. People were staring from the sidewalk. I love that song, and mostly because it reminds me of being five years-old. Though I know now that that things do grow in Africa, that in fact rain and rivers actually flow, that a lot of people do know it’s Christmas, and probably a whole lot more don’t care if they do. I also know that trans-Atlantic concerts will fail to change the world, but I love that song anyway. From December 1st I play it so often no one dares to come over to my house, and in October I am allowed 1 (one) sneak preview. Today was the day.
It’s also very officially autumn, for I have a new knitting project on the go, thanks to a trip to the wool shop yesterday with Erin. I am seven rows into this cardigan. Having a pair of socks under my belt, it’s time to make something with sleeves, I think. No doubt it will turn out terribly wonky, but at this point I still am permitted hope. I also have knitting needles with sparkles, which were very cool and tres on sale.
