October 21, 2008
Slacks for Ella Funt
I am very excited, as this weekend I get to discover if my new sewing machine works. I picked it up at a yard sale about a month ago for $10, but have no clue how to use it, so am not sure if I wasted my money or not (credit crunch). However, a sewing savvy friend is going to give me lessons Saturday, and then after we’re going out to our local Hungarian to commemorate the 52nd anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution. An exciting Saturday is destined then, though I am still not sure what kind of useless cloth item it is I am going to (dare I dream?) create.
What I really want to do make is slacks for Ella Funt:
Ramona tugged and tugged at Ella Funt’s slacks, but no matter how hard she tugged she could not make them come up to the elephant’s waist, or to what she guessed was the elephant’s waist. Ella Funt’s bottom was too big, or the slacks were too small. At the same time, the front of the slacks seemed way too big. They bunched under Ella Funt’s paunch. Ramona scowled.
Mrs. Quimby considered Ella Funt and her slacks. “Well,” she said after a moment. Slacks for an elephant are very hard to make. I’m sure I couldn’t do it.”
Ramona could not scowl any harder. “I like to do hard things.”
October 21, 2008
Dad-Lit, it seems
This weekend I read The Child in Time by Ian McEwan, which I was surprised to see acknowledged itself as indebted to Christina Hardyment’s Dream Babies. I’ve not read my copy of Dream Babies yet, but will do soon due to the rave reviews I’ve seen by others. Anyway, the McEwan book was really wonderful, and perhaps my favourite of his since I read Saturday. (I really didn’t like Atonement that much; is there a terrible place where they put away people like me?). I don’t know that I’ve read such a thoughtful book by a man about parenting and childhood. And then without even thinking, I picked Adam Gopnik’s Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York to read next. It seems I’m really on a Dad-lit kick, but I am loving the perspective. “Whatever the origins– and I leave it to some meatier-minded cultural historian to trace them all– what child rearing is, when you live it, is a joy. It should be seen as we really do feel it– less as a responsibility imposed than as a great gift delivered up to us… [Children] compel us to see the world as an unusual place again. Sharing a life with them is sharing a life with lovers, explorers, scientists, pirates, poets. It makes for interesting mornings.”
October 17, 2008
Entitlement by Jonathan Bennett
I’ve been trying to think of a more suitable avenue into Jonathan Bennett’s novel Entitlement than the fact while I’ve been sick in bed these last two days, it’s been my dearest companion. But you see, as I’ve been sick in bed for two days, my capacity for thinkage is stunted. Which is unfortunate because as much as “the book’s got plot” (a quote from Bennett, interviewed at Bookninja), Entitlement offers much more to remark on.
Interestingly, however, that the book would be so plot-driven was not so obvious until about two thirds of the way through. What hooked me from the very start was premise– an outsider’s perspective onto absolute wealth and affluence. “The rich are different from you and me.” Which was, of course, a bit Fitzgerald, but also reminded me of one of my favourite paperback guilty pleasures which is A Season in Purgatory by Dominick Dunne. Except, set in Canada– what a twist indeed for Canadian Literature. Do we even have rich people in Canada anyway?
The “outsider” is Andy Kronk, who enters private school through a chance hockey scholarship, and becomes swept up in the drama of the Aspinall family. An awkward triangle forming between Andy with the Aspinall children, Colin and Fiona. When his father dies, Andy becomes a surrogate brother, privy to the intimacies of the Apsinall world. Discovering the heightened power of the wealthy in Canada– a country determinedly blind to class distinctions. This blindness allowing the rich to have control unchecked, without notice or acknowledgment of the extent of their reach.
This reach has been apparent to those who’ve tried to touch the Aspinall’s before. Biographer Trudy Clarke is having trouble getting interviews for the book she is planning, and she is warned to abandon the subject altogether– of the father, Stuart Aspinall, she is told, “He ruins people he doesn’t like.” However, Trudy will not be deterred. When she is granted a connection to Andy Kronk, she sees it as a prime opportunity, leaving her daughter and all other responsibilities behind to travel north to Kronk’s isolated cottage. Andy proving particularly candid, for his own reasons. Bennett’s multiple points of view showing both characters believing themselves fully in control, but we soon discover that neither is at all.
It is from this point on that plot takes hold, complete with twists, audible gasps (mine) and crooked cops. Clues from the beginning I hadn’t even picked up on becoming significant, and this book of so many points of views taking on a cohesive shape. A race to the end, for sure, but then this is a plot-driven book written by a poet, so this isn’t a guilty-pleasure either. The very best of all number of worlds and influences, and so thoroughly enjoyable. Fiction to get lost in, and once you’ve found your way out, there’s much to reflect on about where you’ve been.
October 16, 2008
Oh, but do forgive?
Oh, but do forgive my slow progress in coming back to life. I spent a good week in a magical land, and since returning home I’ve been everywhere and nowhere, and often not where I am supposed to be. Getting over a cold, very tired, excuses, etc. blah blah, previous Liberal government– you know how it is. More interestingly, check out a special IFOA Readers Reading at Seen Reading this week. And I aim to be more interesting soon.
October 14, 2008
Attending
Tomorrow night I’ll be attending the Toronto launch of What It Feels Like for a Girl by Jennica Harper. Will be way more interesting than election returns. From 8-11 at Clinton’s (693 Bloor Street W.). See you there?
October 13, 2008
My turn for Whats and Whys
Rebecca Rosenblum ponders why she reads the books she reads, the last ten books she has read specifically, concluding that reading is social, however solitary in practice. Her post inspiring Naya V. to consider some of her own bookish choosings. And inspiring me as well, though findings may not be so revelatory as I’ve written here about how I came to some of these already. Nevertheless.
- Forms of Devotion by Diane Schoemperlen (now reading), because Rebecca Rosenblum gave it to me for my birthday and now it is time.
- The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard, because it was a paperback portable for vacation, and because it came recommended via the impeccable taste of Rona Maynard.
- The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan, also because it was a paperback. Because it was longlisted and shortlisted for the Giller. Because it was Rona-recommended, and recommended by Maud Newton and Stephany Aulenback as well. (Oh, and now by me too. This is the best book I’ve read in ages).
- Between Friends: A Year in Letters by Oonagh Berry and Helen Levine. I picked this up at the Victoria College book sale not just because it was a collection of correspondence but because reading a newspaper feature when the book came out inspired me to embark upon a similar writing project with my friend Bronwyn.
- Good to a Fault by Marina Endicott, because I wanted to all the books on the Giller list by women (which was easy as there were only two).
- Flowers for Mrs. Harris by Paul Gallico. Also bought at the book sale, and I was originally attracted by the gorgeous (only slightly damaged) pink dust jacket, and then I remembered that I’d read writer Justine Picardie raving about this novel on her blog.
- What It Feels Like for a Girl by Jennica Harper. Jennica is my favourite poet, and her first book The Octopus kept me up all hours the first time I read it, and so naturally I would read her new book the second I could get my mitts upon it.
- Babylon Rolling by Amanda Boyden. I don’t remember why I read this book at all, perhaps for no real reason, which is probably the reason I was so surprised to love it.
- When Will There by Good News? by Kate Atkinson. Um, because Kate Atkinson wrote it. And everything she touches is gold– except for Emotionally Weird, but I’ve forgiven/forgotten already. Everything else though.
- The Diving Bell and Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby. My spectacular Amy Winehouse costume won me this book as a prize at an Oscar Party back in the winter, but I hadn’t got around to reading it. My husband had, however, and was obsessed with it, and insisted that I read it too, and it was as wonderful as he promised. And now we can finally rent the movie.
October 4, 2008
En Vacance!
We are going out to Alberta; weather’s good there in the fall.
Back in a week!
October 4, 2008
Babylon Rolling by Amanda Boyden
“We choose New Orleans,” begins the prologue to Amanda Boyden’s second novel Babylon Rolling. “We choose to live Uptown on Orchid Street inside the big lasso of river, though we rarely look at it, churning brown, wide.” The novel’s employment in the prologue of first person plural narration suggesting already that this will be story composed of stories, of voices.
Babylon Rolling tells of a year in the lives of the residents of New Orleans’ Orchid Street, beginning from Hurricane Ivan to just before the devastation of Katrina. Such disparate characters, these neighbours, black and white (and Indian); young and old; long-time residents and newcomers; good people and people who’ve somehow found themselves in more than a spot of trouble.
Though the first-person plural narration ends with the prologue, its spirit continues in the construction of the chapters ensuing. Written in the third person, but very close and in the various singular voices of the characters, within these chapters one voice turns into another in the space of a paragraph break. No other divisions between them, here are the different voices of Orchid Street, one after another as these people go about their separate lives.
The danger of this sort of structure, of such a broad approach to a story (in terms of chronology and character) would be a tendency for glossing over substance. For these characters to be “voices” but little more, and certainly not people, for how do you fit another entire life into a novel that is already so crowded? Which might happen in the hands of a lesser writer, but it struck me soon as I was reading Babylon Rolling that something quite different was at work.
As I read the story of Ariel, the transplanted Minnesotan working overtime managing a New Orleans hotel. She is on the verge of being unfaithful to her husband, and then of course we meet her husband Ed whose own story has nothing to do with that (though of course it will come to, but not entirely). Ed who saves his elderly neighbour Roy after an accident, in which a local drug dealer is to blame and Roy’s wife is seriously injured. The drug dealer’s younger brother Daniel, aged 15, calling himself “Fearius”, and anxiously following in his brother’s footsteps. A hurricane is approaching (but no, not “that” one, not yet). Some will stay, some will go. One of the former being Philomenia whose cooking up something poison in her kitchen and whose grasp on reality is becoming more and more tenuous, though it’s pretty hard to tell.
The point being that none of these characters– like nobody ever in his or her life– is a peripheral character. Every one of them, including those who don’t get to speak so directly, able to claim a part of the prologue’s “we”. And it dawned on me as I read that Babylon Rolling isn’t actually a novel at all, but is a book of short stories all broken into pieces and put back together, a very different kind of puzzle. Which says something about the short story, I suppose, how its surprise appearance here so serves to elevate the novel. That these characters’ stories and lives run so deep, not just into each other but in and of themselves. That their stories stand for their own sakes, complementing as they rub shoulders (and they’re actual shoulders, blood and bone), and that rubbing of these shoulders can create an effect so incredibly rich.
So the structure of this novel is really quite remarkable, but even more so are the voices themselves. That Boyden can bring to life characters so different from herself and from each other as, for example, Philomenia Beauregard de Bruges (whose presence lends a touch of the Southern Gothic) and Daniel “Fearius” Harris (“But Fearius, he be patient. He learnt it. He waited to make fifteen full years of age inside juvey, waiting four months sitting in there.”) Fearius in particular a leap, a risk, that this author could imagine her way into the mind of a black fifteen year old drug dealer, but it is a leap that Boyden makes deftly. I was uneasy with Fearius’s voice at first, not for political reasons as much as grammatical ones, but I became accustomed to it soon, as much as all the others.
Boyden writes in her Acknowledgments that she started the novel in Toronto after having left New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina, which had “reduced our city, and me, to something whipped and dispossessed. I thought I might try to write a swan song for New Orleans.” The result being a song certainly, even if not so entirely swannish. Because, as her author bio notes, Boyden lives in New Orleans “still”. And the novel’s epilogue returns to that very same “we”, such collectivity a suggestion of hope amidst such destruction.
October 3, 2008
More encounters with books
Over at the Descant blog, I’ve written about my Encounters with Books: At the Book Sale.
