January 20, 2010
Books in Motion #2
Today was a girl in her twenties, carrying a shoulder bag with a picture of a golden retriever puppy on it, racing across Bloor Street on foot and then heading south on Robert Street. Didn’t even stop to talk, and all the while she had her nose stuck in a copy of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne as if her life depended on it, and maybe it did.
January 19, 2010
Family Literacy ALL WEEK LONG
Next Wednesday (January 27th) is Family Literacy Day, but we’re turning it into a week-long celebration here at Pickle Me This. Stay tuned for lots of children’s literature love, including an interview, a party and a fieldtrip. Check out their website to find an event where you can take part, or register your own.
January 19, 2010
Plenty of novels to choose from
“As with most [Lorrie] Moore characters, her dialogue– witty, allusive, never merely expository– is less a reflection of how real people speak than how they should. (This is sometimes said as a criticism of Moore, but it shouldn’t be. For readers who prefer their narrators to be drearily realistic mediocrities, there are plenty of novels to choose from).” –Deborah Friedell, “The Family That Slays Together” (review of The Gate at the Stairs) in the London Review of Books, 19 November 2009.
January 18, 2010
Canada Reads 2010: Independently UPDATE 2
I’m going to be reading Carrie Snyder’s Hair Hat in just a book or two, which I’m looking forward to, particularly to seeing how another collection of linked stories compares to Century. Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this kind of exercise is having to compare books that are worlds apart, and yet it is looking for commonalities that opens up all kinds of avenues that might not otherwise be explored. It is definitely, I think, a worthwhile exercise.
Though it’s going to be tough– last year, when I read the Canada Reads books, at least I had the benefit of hating one book, and not being terribly impressed by two others, which made deciding my favourite not altogether difficult. Probably my feelings towards this year’s picks are going to be a little more passionate, and rankings will be infinitely more brutal to decide.
My other updates are fairly close to home– my husband is currently reading and loving Moody Food. This week, my mom has read How Happy to Be and Wild Geese, and was pretty crazy about the latter. Steven W. Beattie dares to offer a bit of support to Ray Smith’s Century with a wonderful comment on my review. Century champion Dan Wells’ responds to my Century reaction. And I know some other marvelous readers with the Canada Reads Independently stack just ready to be delved into; are you one of them?
If you’re reading along, do email me your reactions to the books and I’ll include them in the weekly updates, or leave a comment on the blog. And stay tuned for details of how to vote for your favourite Canada Reads Independently pick to decide who comes out on top.
January 18, 2010
Kiss the Joy as it Flies by Sheree Fitch
Two and half days of my last week were spent in the absolute bliss of reading Sheree Fitch’s first novel Kiss the Joy as it Flies (shortlisted for the 2009 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour). I’d previously only read Fitch’s wonderful children’s book Kisses Kisses Baby-O!, but love it so much that when I discovered Fitch had written a novel for adult readers, I had to read it. Though I began reading with a degree of uncertainty: the story of Mercy Beth Fanjoy, who receives a troubling medical prognosis and decides to stage a clear-out of her messy life in the time she has left. This sort of formula could go either way, and very quickly in, I was pleased to find Fitch had gone in the right one, with sprightly prose and a narrative packing a punch. The novel is wonderfully original, although if pressed, I’d have to call it as Fannie Flagg meets Miriam Toews.
In Kiss the Joy as it Flies, it’s not so much plot that accelerates as the language itself operating on sheer gumption, and the spirit of Mercy Fanjoy picking up speed as she comes into her own. Though things happen– people die, hopes are dashed, love is born, battles are fought, illusions are shattered, triumphs are won, and lessons learned. The stuff of life with a wacky cast of characters who are constructed as types– religious zealot mother, loyal friend, hippie daughter, enigmatic dead father, sex god– but each of them excellently crafted with the most remarkable ability to surprise you.
Mercy Fanjoy is wholly embodied by Fitch’s prose. The fact of the disease that lurks inside her, and her buxomness, and her sexuality, and when she expresses milk from her engorged breasts into the bathtub during a flashback in which she remembers her teenaged, single-mothered, basement-apartmented self. Two decades on, Mercy has come a long way– she’s reconciled with her difficult mother, earned a university degree, she pens her own column in the Odell Observer, has raised her daughter, bought her own house, teaches a creative writing course, and has maintained a lifelong relationship with her best friend Lulu. She still holds a grudge against horrible Teeny Gaudet (who has since gone onto fame as bestselling author of the “Burt the Burping Bear” series of children’s books), but you can’t win them all.
Over the week she seeks to put her life in order, Mercy finds herself becoming unhinged, and emerging from a rut she’s been stuck in too long. In the end, just about everybody in her life surprises her, but she manages to shock them right back, tenfold. And while it’s raw, we’ll get our hearts warmed, and Fitch also pulls of a satire so slick, we can’t help laughing, and I suppose that this is what she means by “the sheer mad joy of all of it.”
January 16, 2010
Clearest, starkest brilliance #1: When Randy Bachman held my heart
Harriet is pictured here in her very early days, back when a moment of daytime peace was worth a photo for posterity. But lately, actually, I’ve been thinking of a certain moment of nighttime peace, when Harriet was about five days old.
For the first few weeks of her life (how long exactly doesn’t matter, suffice it to say, it was an eternity), we had to wake her every three hours for feeding, as she’d not yet returned to her birthweight. (This was when I was reading Tom’s Midnight Garden and “Only the clock was left, but the clock was always there, time in, time out.”) And once the alarm went off, we’d leave the radio playing while we fed her, and so we discovered that CBC at night subscribes to programs by other public broadcasters. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation at 1:00am, and 4:00am would be Swedish, and something uptight and BBC close to the morning.
This one night in particular was not so late, however, and I remember waking up to Randy Bachman’s Vinyl Tap. So there we were, up with our baby daughter in this weird, wide world that was the size of our bedroom’s four walls and we hadn’t thought outside of it in five whole days, which might have been a lifetime (and they were). So that, in effect, Randy Bachman was coming at us from the farthest reaches of outer space.
Fittingly, his show that night had a stars and planets theme, and Canada felt very small as Randy’s wife Denise introduced the next track, by Randy’s son Tal. Surprisingly, it was not “She’s So High”, and Denise reported that she’d always felt so envious of Tal’s talent. And then after that they played music that wasn’t by anyone related to Randy Bachman, which I think was “Blue Moon”(and according to the program log, I’m remembering this in the wrong order, but that doesn’t change the way it was). They played “Good Morning Starshine”, and we marvelled at the lyric “Gliddy glub gloopy, Nibby nabby noopy, La la la lo lo.” It was midnight, but it might as well have been the middle of the night, and the baby was sucking sustenance out of a tube stuck to my husband’s finger, but anyway, we were happy.
But no more so than when they played “Little Star” by the Elegants. Our own peculiar lullaby, to which we found ourselves relaxing for the first time in days. Twinkle, twinkle to a doo-wop beat, and the moment was so beautiful, it shone. We were a family. And I wouldn’t take back any of the awfulness of those early days, if I had to give that song back with it, and what it was like to be listening, and finally not anxious, and to be connected, in touch with a calm, blissful world.
January 15, 2010
Can-Reads-Indies #1: Century by Ray Smith
Its sombre cover coupled with my misunderstanding that Ray Smith had eschewed story for higher principles would have kept me from Century: A Novel, were it not for Dan Wells’ recommendation. I thought this was a book that wasn’t for me, not only in a “not my cup of tea” sense, but that it was meant for a more erudite kind of reader for whom the act of reading is not meant to be a pleasure cruise (“Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song… Wallala leialala“).
So it is my surprise to find I love this book, that it contains everything I look for as a reader, including that most unfashionable self-contained universe. That Smith may have eschewed traditional narrative structure, but he has done so only to compress a 500+ page novel into his first 98 pages, to represent the disintegration and disorder present in the universe the book contains, to have Century be what it’s meant to represent. And that his writing possesses a sympathy for and understanding of women that I found surprising, and striking, and even (dare I suppose in a book such as this?) somewhat heartening.
Heinrich Himmler didn’t shock me. Perhaps I’m just being defiant in my reactions, but Jane Seymour, the young woman in 197o’s Montreal who receives his ghostly visitations in her bed, the nightmares in which he touches her naked body (but oh, I was struck by the details– “the buttons on the cuffs of his sleeve caught on the sheet when he reached under to touch…”)– there is context for her, precedent. Of course, her friends suppose that she has undergone a trauma, perhaps she has been raped, which has led to the visions, which leads to her suicide. And that may be so, but the whole thing is the extreme end, I think, of how ordinary girls become obsessed with Nazism, which manifests in more usual terms with an Anne Frank fascination and YA books about the Holocaust. As a kind of dangerous experiment in empathy, though of course the Holocaust is so sanitized in such literature, but there is a thin line there, and I just think that Jane Seymour has crossed it for one reason, or for many.
But now I’m off on a kind of tangent. Kenniston Thorson, protagonist of the latter half of Century (and perhaps Jane Seymour’s grandfather) goes off on something similar, its conclusions more succinct than mine, but this result, he is told, “comes not from your mind wandering, but rather from your mind turning its subject round and round as a sculptor considers his piece”. Which is a good way to describe a reading and/or consideration of Century for two reasons: one, because it has so many angles, perspectives that I don’t think it could be taken in all at one time, as one thing; and two, because in reading Century, the reader does become sculptor, a book so fragmented requiring its reader to engage by putting the pieces together, thus coming to recreate it in their own way (so I am very sure that your Century will be altogether different from mine).
“The truth is to be found in the way many different things fit together in relation to one another. In a sense, because the relationship, not the parts, has the truth, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Though Century is doubly complicated in that its parts are so much apart, and yet this makes the relationships between them all the more remarkable. Between the first four stories in the book’s first half “Family”, which in various ways tell of Jane Seymour’s family. The first story about the troubled Jane from the perspective of a male acquaintance who sees her problems as emblematic of women in general during these difficult times, the second story of Jane’s brother and his reunion with his wife following a period of estrangement, the third of Jane’s father after the death of his wife and at the end of a long career in African development and international diplomacy as he ponders what he has made of himself, and fourth about Jane’s mother some years earlier and we learn that her husband truly didn’t know her at all (and that though he suspects he didn’t know her, he has no idea just how much).
The second half of the book “Continental” is in two parts, from the perspective of American Kenniston Thorson, in Paris 1892, and Germany in 1923. Written as a period piece meant to be Jamesian (and where all the women talk like women in TS Eliot poems, sometimes deliberately word-for-word), the pace is different here, story less the point. And though the concerns of Kenniston and other characters intriguingly overlap with those from “Family”, I chose to see this part of the novel as a key to the first half. That is, in Kenniston Thorson’s conversations and deliberations about art, music, history and even French Onion Soup, we achieve an understanding of what Smith is accomplishing in “Family”, of how we might put its fragments together and regard them (or how we might choose not to and why).
But being a reader who seeks story, who traces plot, I did note the connection between Kenniston Thorson and Gwen Seymour, and I seized to that in order to steady myself. And though the plot was moving backward here, it didn’t matter, for we look back at history in just this way. To see that Ray Smith has encapsulated a century (and not just “a” century, but “the” century) in a scant 165 pages, in the story of a family, of a marriage, of just one single woman.
And that woman doesn’t even exist, “there never was a Jane Seymour.” And as a reader who seeks story, who traces plot, this kind of trick didn’t deter me one bit, because I am also a reader who tries with reading to make sense of the world, and such blurred metafictional lines are the best way to do so: “These encounters enable me to hold the phantasm and the reality in my mind at the same time; this is much more interesting than either one alone.”
Century‘s is a pessimistic vision, “a world that bears too much truth”. A world in which the weight of being a woman leads to suicide, where imaginary gardens are not enough to shore against one’s ruins, where politics are an unchanging morass, and rapists are ordinary men, where “if man is only appetite: then all is barbarism…” And yet
.
Always “and yet”, because there is art at all made of it. Because at the beginning of the novel (which is close to the end in a sense, which is “now”), we find men and women finally not in opposition and that there is empathy; and because of the last line of the second story (which just might be the end, this is a novel in fragments after all and we can do with them what we may): “and they lived fairly happily for quite a while afterwards.” Which is really the best we can hope for in this life.
And is Century a novel? I vote yes, because its truth indeed lies in how its pieces relate to one another. Because I read the Gwen story “Serenissima” on its own once upon a time, and it seemed to “just be another piece of improbable pornography”, but it the context of the rest of the book, I knew everything about her and she broke my heart.
Anyway, it occurs to me that this response to Century has done it no favours. That its biggest problem is that no one is ever going to to say, “Hey, read this” with a snappy one-sentence reason why. That it raises questions without answers, and begins an engagement that is unceasing, and it’s more like someone handing you pieces of a puzzle than recommending you a book. Except you get to rearrange the pieces over and over again, which is infinitely more interesting, but frustrating too.
It will be hard to compare this book to others, because its level of engagement is on its own kind of plane. I’m not sure whether this will be points for or against it when it comes time to rank it against the other books. Apples to oranges perhaps (though both are delicious). So I’m glad I read it first, and I’m glad I read it at all, and I do hope I’m passing something on of its spirit, and others are inspired to read it too.
Canada Reads Independently Rankings:
1) Century by Ray Smith
January 15, 2010
i hated wolf hall is it me
I could write a post every day of strange internet search terms that bring folks to Pickle Me This. I don’t do this every day, however, because it’s lame, easy, and gets old fast. These terms are sometimes educational though– it’s only through my stats I realized that people are really interested in Leah McLaren’s marital status and in Burmese sex. But could you please indulge me this one day? This one day in which people arrived searching for “masterful literary blogs” (oh, and have you ever arrived!), “i got an incident report at work how bad is it”, and my very favourite (do you think they found what they were looking for?) “i hated wolf hall is it me” (and I doubt it).
January 14, 2010
A cacophony of strident contention
“Some hours later, the ladies played out, Kenniston took a seat in the library and called for coffee and cognac. As he sipped, he perused several newspapers: how silly, vapid, and hysterical it all seemed somehow. He realized that politics is, of necessity, a cacophony of strident contention, but when one is not personally engaged in it, how unnecessary it all seems; and he threw down the papers in a heap.”– From Century by Ray Smith
January 13, 2010
The library is doing nothing
The library is doing nothing to relieve me of my obsessive compulsive bookbuying ways. Instead, the library is widening my exposure to books I will DIE if I do not own. Lately, in this way, the following books have made their way into my library and into Harriet’s: Kiss the Joy as It Flies by Sheree Fitch (about which more is to come), 365 Activities You and Your Baby Will Love,
Baby Sign Language Basics, Ten Little Fingers Ten Little Toes by our beloved Mem Fox, Everywhere Babies by Susan Meyers, and How Happy to Be by Katrina Onstad. And now I also really think I need a copy of The Sleeping Life by Kerry Ryan. I’m not going to mention the two novels I picked up at the used bookstore this morning (Small Ceremonies and Muriella Pent, borrowed from libraries year ago; how did I live this long without them?) because I don’t want my husband to find out about them. (If he happened to, however, read this far in this entry, he’d be relieved to know at least that I’ve read both of them already so the to-be-read shelf has not grown at all.)
Anyway, that is it. I am cut off. No book buying until March.
