January 25, 2010
Canada Reads 2010: Independently UPDATE 3
So here at Pickle Me This, Hair Hat just nudges Century out of the lead, mainly because Century isn’t a book that cares about racing.
Julie Forrest reviews Katrina Onstad’s How Happy To Be, and finds that “while biting and satirical, it’s also tender and sweet, and reads like a coming of age story (34 is the new 24, I suppose).”
Writer Guy reads Hair Hat: “What a wonderful work this is: whimsical, sad, profound, and it captures the not-so-ordinariness of many seemingly ordinary lives.”
Charlotte Ashley is reading Canada Reads AND Canada Reads independently, and pairs Nikolski against Wild Geese. Her assessment of the latter: “Contemporary participants in “Canadian realism” should read Ostenso carefully. If you’re going to make your reader hurt, you ought to give them some kind of release, otherwise what you’ve created is nothing more than beautifully written suffering porn… Ostenso does not punish us in this manner, but instead offers us a very well-considered and beautifully executed climax and conclusion. I can’t recommend this one enough.”
And Wild Geese‘s champion Melanie Owen chats with Julie Wilson about her own Canada Reads challenge, dropping a mention of our humble imitation:”Sometimes, I feel really nervous when people ask for book recommendations. I mean, how do I know the one thing that makes me love a book isn’t going to be the exact reason someone else hates it: like my love for classic, the more depressing the better, Canadian literature? When Kerry Clare asked me to recommend a book for Canada Reads Independently, it took me forever to think of something that I felt I could defend because the book you recommend says a lot about you. And, of course, I want to be liked just as much as the book I am recommending.”
Well, Wild Geese is up next for me, so we shall see, Ms. Melanie Owen! I actully suspect that I really am going to love all five of these books, which is not terrible of course, but brings with it certain complications. I think that Century and How Happy to Be are going to end up treated most harshly in the judging, due to their placements at the extreme ends of the accessibility scale. Hair Hat is indeed in the running for my favourite, but then it’s not all up to me, is it?
January 25, 2010
Can-Reads-Indies #2: Hair Hat by Carrie Snyder
Well-executed books of linked short stories such as Century or Hair Hat have the rare power of making the novel look mere. Mere as in only linear, one-dimensional, and narrowly focussed, which is nothing like life or like the world. Whereas the shape of a book of linked stories is like the world, or rather, like the world if it had edges– polyhedronal. Multitudinous sides, perspectives, but only glimpses of these. And so perhaps the novel has the advantage of providing the reader with more satisfaction in its illusion of wholeness, but for the reader who is seeking something a little more true, linked short stories are as close as it gets in fiction.
The stories in Carrie Snyder’s Hair Hat are linked by a man whose hair is cut into the shape of a hat. A creepy cut to ponder, and even someone standing immediately before Hair Hat Man declares the style only “plausible”. Of course, I had to google it, and this guy seems to be the most famous Hair Hat Man on the internet. Carrie Snyder’s Hair Hat Man, however, looks a little different. In fact, he looks a little different to everyone who encounters him, older or younger, shabby or less so, weary or sinister, friend or foe.
“Yellow Cherries” is told from the perspective of a young girl staying with her Aunt, Uncle and cousins while her mother is having a baby. A later story, “Comfort”, is the Aunt’s perspective of the same events, but the events subtly different, calling into question notions of memory, narrative authority and underlines the gulf between what adults and children understand about one another. “Tumbleweed” and “Third Dog” are both stories of motherhood, the first about a mother taking her children on a disasterous beach outing on the day her husband has (perhaps?) left them, and the second a grandmother taking her grandson for a walk one summer day, pondering her daughter’s unhappiness as she relieves her of her maternal duties for a small time. A most vivid moment is the daughter upon their return home, (the narrative is in second person, spoken from granddaughter to grandson): “Give me the baby!” said your mother, running to the back door to greet us. “
It doesn’t take much: the urgent nature of her exclaimation, that she is running, that it’s the backdoor. Snyder uses her materials with such deftness that she almost makes prose look easy, and indeed Hair Hat is a breezy read. But each word, every sentence is weighted, to be considered. Such a wide range of characters, but Snyder is deliberate in showing the different ways that each one speaks.
The narrator of “Harrassment”, for example, who speaks like he’s spouting off, and then we realize he’s erupting. He’s one of several characters who are loners, for whom the Hair Hat Man is a point of connection. Queenie, the obese doughnut shop employee in “Queenie, My Heart” who has just lost her father is another, and on her second encounter with the man, on the subway, the beginnings of a romance are sparked. In subsequent stories, we view this odd pairing from afar, but there is something heartening about their relationship. We’ve only been watching Hair Hat Man from the periphery, observing him as an oddity, but we’re beginning to connect with him too, and he’s somebody we care about.
As the book progresses, we move back and forth in time to get closer to the Hair Hat Man’s story. When we finally encounter him directly, he is so familiar that the hair is plausible, and perhaps the least remarkable thing about him. But still, this is only an extended glimpse. This story “Missing” is from the perspective of his long-lost daughter’s own daughter now grown, given up for adoption and now returned to find him, Hair Hat Man, her grandfather. “I should have brought along a camera. I should have asked a passerby to take a photograph of the three of us. Next time, I thought. But next time is so rare. It’s a hummingbird in the rose bushes: blink and its possibility is gone.”
Not so much for a book, however, for like Century, Hair Hat is a book that begs for rereading. Unlike Century, it is also a book that I would have found my way to, even if not for Patricia Storms’ recommendation. Carrie Snyder’s book with its distinctive cover had been turning up before me increasinly often of late– at the library, at the Eden Mills Festival in September at The New Quarterly booth where I entered a draw to win it but didn’t win. Carrie Snyder had stories published in the most recent TNQ as well, and I was excited to read more of her work once I’d finished reading them.
All right, this ranking thing is terrible when all of the books in question are wonderful. Like choosing between your children, it is, when none of them have colic and they sleep for twelve hours every night. I am going to have to rank Hair Hat over Century, however, because for being less ambitious in its vision, Hair Hat realizes that vision with more success. Or perhaps that I’ll have to read Century thirty-five more times before I get my head around it finally, or that no matter how many times I read it, I never will. For all my derision of readers “seeking the illusion of wholeness”, perhaps I want a bit of it myself, and Hair Hat offers. But this doesn’t mean, I promise, that I love Century any less.
Canada Reads Independently Rankings:
1) Hair Hat by Carrie Snyder
2) Century by Ray Smith
January 24, 2010
Kettle from a headlight
Today I loved Cut/Paste: Creative Reuse in Canadian Design, an exhibit on at the Royal Ontario Museum until the end of the month. Featuring a gorgeous quilt made out of ugly one size-fits-all t-shirts, a toaster fashioned illicitly in penitentiaries out of a cigarette tin, guitar string and a shingle, a lamp made out of a chair, jewelry made out of skateboard decks, and a coffee table made from a toboggon. But my favourite was the K-42 Electric (tea!) Kettle manufactured by GE in the 1940s. Materials were scarce due to wartime, so the kettle was made from a recycled car headlight, but it would set a standard for kettle design throughout the 1950s, and become iconic in kettlish realms. (Image taken from The Canadian Design Resource).
January 23, 2010
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley
In Alan Bradley’s novel The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, our heroine, eleven year-old Flavia de Luce opines that, “Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.” So that it occurs to me that heaven must also be a narrator like Flavia de Luce, who is perfectly precocious in all the right places and suitably limited in others. The latter point being particularly important, because Flavia is the first fictional detective I’ve ever encountered who solved the crimes slower than I did. Not that she’s stupid, oh no, not Our Lady of the Periodic Table of Elements, but hers is a refreshing perspective when her youth shows through.
And yes, in this, she’s much like Harriet the Spy. Or rather, Flavia is a tribute to Harriet, though I wonder how consciously? At first glance, the connections could be coincidental. Flavia is sleuthy, and keeps a notebook, and that she’s charged with the spirit of her late Mother, who was called Harriet. This last point I doubt Alan Bradley means for us to interpret as Flavia being of Harriet (M. Welch) born, mostly because I don’t think male readers identify with Harriet that strongly. (And this, by the way, I’d love to be wrong about).
But I encounter the following paragraph: “I was me. I was Flavia. And I loved myself, even if no one else did.” And I can’t help but think that Bradley was channeling his inner-Fitzhugh after all.
Flavia lives Buckshaw, a grand home outside the English village of Bishop’s Lacey. Her eccentric father scarcely pays her attention, her older sisters torture her mercilessly, the entire household lives under a shroud of sadness from her mother’s death, but Flavia contents herself mixing poisonous concoctions in her chemistry lab at the top of the house. When a dead bird lands on the doorstep, however, with a postage stamp stuck through its beak, and then then a body turns up in the cucumber bed in the garden, Flavia is aware that life is about to get interesting for the very first time. And when her father is arrested with murder, she becomes all the more determined to solve the crime herself and clear his name.
Bradley writes Flavia tongue-in-cheek, his novel a send-up of detective fiction, but he manages to create a rather intriguing mystery all the same. Involving philately, libraries, English reticence, postmistresses– a whole host of infinitely nerdy pleasures. A whimsical book, Bradley writes gorgeous turns of phrase to match– my favourite was when Flavia steps into her dead mother’s long-undisturbed bedroom and feels as though she were “an umbrella remembering what it feels like to pop open in the rain.”
The Sweetness in the Bottom of the Pie is a book built on a the back of other books, on the back of a whole literary tradition, and its charm lies in its references to a world already much beloved. The connections it draws and its own twisty plot make for a deliciously readable delight.
January 22, 2010
An admission and some understanding
I have an admission to make, one that will win me no friends. And while usually I do not knock the books I hate here, this book is so well-loved, I think it can take it. I HATE The Number One Ladies Detective Agency. I got this book free out of a cereal box in 2003 (true story!), and have received it as a gift no less than three times since then. I read it once and found it so boring, I found it offensive, not credible as literature. And I know this will rankle many a reader now, because people love Precious Ramotswe and Alexander McCall Smith, but for the life of me, I could never undertand why.
Until now. I get it now! I still hate The Number One Ladies Detective Agency, but I think my love of Flavia de Luce and The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is analogous to how other readers must feel about Precious and Number One… And not just because they’re both books with colonial flavour, written by old white men in unlikely voices (whether they be those of Botswanan lady detectives, or eleven year-old English girls). I think neither book is meant to ring especially true, authenticity is not the object, that these books get by on their charm, and charming is most definitely in the eye of the beholder.
Stay tuned for a review of Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie from the perspective of this beholder. I loved that book indeed.
January 22, 2010
Escape the ego
I was surprised to be impressed by Elizabeth Gilbert in her recent Chatelaine interview. I am one of those irritating people who has never read Eat Pray Love but holds strong opinions about it anyway, so the interview was the first time I’d ever been exposed to Gilbert directly (as opposed to via one of her ardent devotees). She seemed terrifically level-headed about the impact of her book upon her fans, noting that readers who’d decided to follow in her eating, praying, loving footsteps were probably insane. She had smart things to say about women and their expectations for relationships, for happiness. But what I noted most of all was the following: “I don’t think women today read for escape; they read for clues.”
I loved that. Because it’s exactly the way I read, I think, to break it down and enable me to see the world in miniature, as manageable. Which, however conversely, is to be able to look at the big picture and regard it all at once, perhaps for the very first time. Fiction is a study in the hypothetical, a test-run for the actual. An experiment. What if the world was this? And we can watch the wheels turn and this bit of sample life run its course to discover. And I don’t mean that literature is smaller than life, no. Literature is life, but it’s just life you can hold in your hand, stick in your backpack, and I’m reassured by that, because the world is messy and sprawling, but if you take it down to the level of story, I am capable of some kind of grasp. Of beginning to understand what this world is, how to be in it. Certainly, I read for clues.
But then Elizabeth Gilbert went and ruined the whole thing, continuing, “The criticism of memoirs is that people read them to be voyeurs. But a lot of people read them for help and answers and perspective.” So she wasn’t actually talking about fiction, which takes the wind of out of my sails, and now she’s relegated reading in general to the self-help rack. Which is boring, troubling, limiting. So there ends my love affair with Elizabeth Gilbert, perhaps because I’m skeptical of memoirs and the kind of truth any reader might hope to find there.
And then I came across this video of Fran Lebowitz on Jane Austen (who Lebowitz says is popular for all the wrong reasons). Lebowitz says, “To lose yourself in a book is the desire of the bookworm, to be taken. And that’s my desire… [which] may come from childhood. The discovery of the world, which I discovered in a library– I lived in a little town and the library was the world. This is the opposite way that people are taught to read now. People are consistently told, ‘What can you learn about your own life from the novel?’ ‘What lessons will this teach you?’ ‘How can you use this?’ This is a philistine idea, this is beyond vulgar, and I think this is it is an awful away to approach anything… A book is not supposed to be a mirror. It’s supposed to be a door.”
Which was something I could get behind. I was finished with Elizabeth Gilbert, and was about to jump on the Fran Lebowitz reading-wagon, when it occured to me, “To lose yourself in a book is the desire of the bookworm, to be taken.” And is that not the very definition of “escape”? Escapism, which is all about stupid women reading pink shoe novels on the beach, with Fran Lebowitz alongside them? I couldn’t see it.
But escapism is surely what she’s advocating, however much “the world” is what she is escaping to. And it occurs to me that Elizabeth Gilbert’s clue-seeking readers are escapists just as much, however in a far more literal sense. That they’re plotting a way out of their humdrum lives, just as Lebowitz was doing back at that small town library. Searching for different kind of place for themselves.
Do I read for escape? I don’t know. Does reading for fun count as escape? Does reading to relax? Interestingly, the books I’d read for fun or relaxation are those that would make me “lose myself” the least, which would make them the least escapist of all. I just finished The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, for example, which was fun and fluffy as you like, but Century is a book that’s more taken me away of late. You wouldn’t call it escapist though, because that’s such a pejorative term, but now that I’ve thought about it, I’m not so sure it should be, and it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that the divide is not so firm at all.
It’s about time for a Diana Athill reference, I think. Though she’s a memoirist like Elizabeth Gilbert, and one that people rave about with just as much enthusiasm, but for some reason I actually do plan to read Athill’s memoir one of these days, and I trust the wisdom implicit in what she has to say. My impression is that by reading Athill, we learn about the world through her prism, where in reading Eat Pray Love, we get Elizabeth Gilbert over and over. (Forgive me as I speculate about two books I haven’t read. And correct me if I’m wrong). Perhaps also it’s important that Athill is old and has years of experience, while Gilbert just once took a really great vacation.
Athill is quoted as saying, “Anything absorbing makes you become not ‘I’ but ‘eye’–you escape the ego.” And so is this the kind of escape we’re talking about? What Lebowitz is after? That with the best kind of books we get the world, get out of ourselves for a while, forget our problems.
Perhaps reading is a bit like love. Just when we’re not actively out looking for “help, answers and perspective”, that’s when we might actually stand a chance of finding it.
January 21, 2010
Apart from the soul
“The fortunate thing about lab glassware is that it boils water at the speed of light. I threw a spoonful of black leaves into a beaker. When it had gone a deep red I handed it to Dogger, who stared at it skeptically.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘It’s Tetley’s.’
He sipped at the tea gingerly, blowing on the surface of the drink to cool it. As he drank, I remembered that there’s a reason we English are ruled more by tea than by Buckingham Palace or His Majesty’s Government: Apart from the soul, the brewing of tea is the only thing that sets us apart from the great apes– or so the Vicar had remarked to Father, who had told Daffy, who had told me.” –from The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley
January 21, 2010
Pre-Swiftian Love Story
Poet P.K. Page, who died last week, has been eulogized aplenty since then, and I don’t really have much to add to the chorus, except that she was certainly an extraordinary person (as demonstrated by this brilliant obituary by Sandra Martin at the Globe & Mail) and I’m glad I got to meet her once. Though I spent only a little time in her presence, that presence was unforgettable and she was everything they said.
Less eulogized, however, has been Erich Segal, author of the novel Love Story, who died the other day at the age of 72. When I was twelve, I found a library copy of this novel in a desk at school (checked out under someone else’s name) and I stole it. Proceeded then to worship it through my unlovable teen years in hope that a hockey-playing, MG-driving, heir to a great fortune might just fall in love with me before I died of leukemia, even though I was neither Ali McGraw nor a musical prodigy. Even though I didn’t love Mozart or Bach, but I did love The Beatles, and I would have loved Oliver too, given the chance.
I haven’t read this book for quite awhile, but I read it so often back in the day that my original copy fell apart and I had to replace it (which wasn’t difficult. Love Story is always readily available used, usually displayed along with poetry collections by Rod McKuen). I am pretty sure that Love Story was not a great book, but I really loved it, and I must give credit to the man who wrote the book I’ve probably read more often than I’ll reread any other book in my life.
Though the book was wrong, and love does mean having to say you’re sorry, as unromantic as that sounds, but seeing as Jenny was only 25 when she died, perhaps she just didn’t have long enough to figure that out.
January 20, 2010
Book charm
On an ordinary day, Old Books, Rare Friends: Two Literary Sleuths and Their Shared Passion would have been the most interesting book of any stack I picked up from the library. (I found out about this book from the Louisa May Alcott bio. It has the best cover I have ever seen. And that I am excited about a book with such a cover really does catapult me into a new league of nurd. Fortunately, I’ll keep it to myself and no one will ever know…).
But today was the day I also came home from the library with the gorgeous Bothered by My Green Conscience, the less gorgeous might be stupid but it was sitting on a table so I picked it up Sleep is For the Weak: The best of the mommybloggers, and Sheree Fitch’s book of poetry for adult readers In this house are many women.
And just when you thought books couldn’t be anymore charming, I’ve just joined the league of people who’ve discovered Flavia de Luce. Now reading the Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley, which I have a terrible suspicion might be a literary love letter only for me: literary Harriets, a nod to Harriet the Spy herself (perhaps not on purpose, but still…), references to tea, and to pie, and literary allusions, and libraries to get lost in, plus she has a bike called Gladys. When I used to have a bike called Gladys, pink with a basket when we lived in Japan. Anyway, the connections are uncanny, delightful, and maybe Alan Bradley and I are long-lost somethings. The book is wonderful. I’m zipping through it and will be posting a review in days to come.
