May 31, 2010
The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
It took me about 200 pages to get into Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel The Lacuna. Usually, I would not persevere so much through a book that wasn’t satisfying, but this is Barbara Kingsolver, it’s been shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and I was intrigued by reviewers who’ve had such different reactions and assessments. I’m so glad I kept on though, because the last two-thirds of the novel totally gripped me, I’m now sure that it’s one of my favourite novels this year (or ever), and when it ended, I was absolutely heartbroken.
The Lacuna is the story of Harrison Shepherd, half-American and half-Mexican, a man who is a foreigner no matter where he goes. His lonely childhood spent in Mexico, in the shadow of his errant mother always on the hunt for a new man with some money. Against a backdrop of revolution, Harrison learns skills both in survival and the culinary arts. After a period of schooling back in America (during which he is witness to the Bonus Army riots), Harrison returns to Mexico and becomes a servant in the household of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, mixing paints and making dinners. When Rivera’s friend Trotsky arrives in Mexico, Harrison becomes his secretary, and when Trotsky is murdered, Kahlo helps him get out of the country. Settling down in Asheville, North Carolina– and still traumatized by Trotsky’s death, and unable to leave his house– Harrison becomes a novelist, writing stories of Mexican history from the perspective of the common-man. In the era of McCarthyism, however, Harrison’s ties become suspect, and this tragic period in American history takes Harrison as its victim.
The book is composed of fragments, from Harrison’s diaries, letters and newspaper clippings, all compiled by a mysterious someone called Violet Brown. The fragmentation was what put me off at first, as well as copious description of Mexican landscapes, but as Harrison’s life began to be tied up with those of such interesting people as Kahlo and Trotsky, I got hooked on the plot. And then as the story went further, details of Harrison himself became clearer and I found him to be an incredibly sympathetic and compelling figure.
A lacuna is a hole, an empty place, and Harrison himself is quoted as saying that, “The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don’t know.” Plenty of reviewers have found that empty space to be Harrison himself, that the soul of this novel is hollow, but I thought otherwise. Of course, he is an elusive character, the “eye” much more so than the “I”, but his vision is so clear that we’re given to understand everything around him. That although we’re not treated to a view of Harrison himself, the Harrison-shaped space that’s left out is so well-defined at its edges that he’s real, multi-dimensional. The space ceases to be hollow at all.
What the lacuna is indeed, however, is this whole book itself. These fragments were what went untold from Harrison’s official story, what he– determined that he would not have to justify himself or answer to anyone– persuaded his secretary Violet Brown to burn one afternoon, but she didn’t. She’d gone against his wishes and kept all his papers: “If God speaks for the man who keeps quiet, then Violet Brown be His instrument.” Interestingly though, the book still contains numerous gaps, not least of which being those imposed by Brown herself, the “unimportant” pieces she offhandedly admits to omitting from the whole. A reader can’t help but wonder if she’s the lacuna here, that she might have shaped these records with her own kind of agenda and what particular spin has been the result of this.
Because the lesson of The Lacuna itself is that history is a series of accidents, that what becomes official record is just circumstance. Harrison writes to Kahlo, “The power of words is awful, Frida. Sometimes I want to bury my typewriter in a box of quilts. The radio makes everything worse, because of the knack for amplifying dull sounds. Any two words spoken in haste might become the law of the land. But you never know which two. You see why I won’t talk to the newsman.”
There are obvious parallels made between the paranoia of 1950s’ America, and the American political climate today, and also between the outraged responses to Harrison Shepherd’s work (usually by people who have never read it; “Why does a person spend money on a stamp, to spout bile at a stranger?”) and responses Kingsolver herself has received to her writing. Sometimes these parallels are too obvious, Kingsolver’s history taking on a determinedly teleological bent, but these instances are rare enough to be forgiven, particularly since these connections are the whole point– that we are tethered to history, like it or not.
Kingsolver has rendered history here with such richness and colour, resurrected real-life figures through the wonder of fiction, and with the the astounding power that is her reputation as a novelist, she has imagined her story into a world that is decidedly real.
May 30, 2010
Favourite literary babies
Thank you for the amazing response to my literary babies giveaway! My extra subscription to The New Quarterly has gone to Clare, whose name was that written on a scrap of paper plucked out of a yoghurt container by Harriet herself. Clare wrote, “…I think my favourite baby is Jem, Anne’s baby from Anne’s House of Dreams. It’s easily my favourite of the Anne books (maybe tied with Rilla of Ingleside) and Anne’s ecstasy over her little man is really sweet.”
If you’re really into babies in literature, I do urge you to check out the series of the same name at Crooked House.
Other entries were as follows, all fantastic: WitchBaby from Weetzie Bat, Rosemary’s Baby (and he was adorable), the baby from The Millstone by Margaret Drabble (which I now have to reread), the baby from Laisha Rosnau’s “Boy” from Lousy Explorers, the baby in Sara O’Leary’s Where You Came From as illustrated by Julie Morstad, Ede from F. Scott Fitzgerald “A Baby Party”, Pip from Swimming (yes yes yes!), Baby Nostradamus “from Sal Plascencia’s great, great novel, The People of Paper”, Sophie in novel Baby by Patricia MacLachlan, Baby Stink from The Lusty Man by Terry Griggs (which I haven’t read, but in my experience Griggs writes babies [and fetuses] better than anyone, ever), Egg from Hotel New Hampshire, James in The Cuckoo Boy by Grant Gillespie, Aurora from Latitudes of Melt by Joan Clark, Emily Michelle Thomas Brewer from The Babysitters Club (which was a stunning entry), The Duchess’s Baby from Alice in Wonderland who turns into a pig, Sunny Baudelaire from the Lemony Snicket series and Jordan from Sexing the Cherry.
Before my own literary baby, let me provide a few runners-up. First, I was thinking about Kevin from We Need to Talk About Kevin, who isn’t lovable so much as memorable. I went back and reread passages from the babyhood portion of the book (first time since I’ve had a baby myself) and it stunned me for two reasons– 1) Lionel Shriver has never had a baby, but she *gets* living with a newborn so incredibly right. 2) the nightmare that was Eva’s life with baby Kevin was not so entirely different from mine in the early days of Harriet, somewhat terrifyingly. I’ve come around and Harriet does not appear to be a psychopath, but this adds a whole new texture to Shriver’s book.
Then there is Rilla’s wee soup-tureen baby in Rilla of Ingleside, “an ugly midget with a red, distorted little face, rolled up in a piece of dingy old flannel.”
And Arlo from Novel About My Wife, “He was perfect with his long eyes sweeping to the edges of his little walnut fae, with his beautiful breathing body, the heart fiercely beating under that boxy rhombus of his ribs.”
But my very favourite baby in literature is Glenn Bott, from my Adrian Mole omnibus by Sue Townsend. “I just bumped into Sharon Bott in Woolworths in Leicester, where I was purchasing Christmas presents. She had a strange-looking moon-headed toddler with her. “Say hello to Adrian, Glenn,” she said. I bent over the buggy and the kid gave me a slobbery smile. Is Glenn the fruit of my loins? Did my seed give him life? I must know. The kid was sucking the head of a Ninja Turtle. He looked fed up.”
May 29, 2010
The Birthday Haul
We were inspired by Carrie Snyder and her gift-free birthday idea, because our apartment is small, the planet’s resources are limited, plastic lives forever, and Harriet already has a lot of stuff. And because we had every intention of spoiling her ourselves, of course, as did the rest of our families. But we wanted to celebrate Harriet’s first birthday with our friends as well, so when we invited them to the birthday party, we asked that lieu of gifts, they bring a board book for donation to The Children’s Book Bank.
I know that the Book Bank is in need of board books in particular, and now that I know Harriet, I understand why. Board books are basically edible, which doesn’t bode well for second-hand. And did our friends ever deliver– check out this stack of goods. How wonderful to spend a beautiful afternoon in such splendid company, and have this to show for it. It also gives us an excellent excuse to make a trip to the Book Bank ourselves, because it’s really a magical place.
May 27, 2010
Dear Carrie Bradshaw
I never understood why it didn’t work out with Aidan. My sister has tried to explain it to me, how you and Aidan didn’t have *it*, and how apparently you found *it* with another man who was never very nice to you. This all reminds me a bit of that book that came out a few months back that implored women to “settle” and defined “settling” as marrying someone who is kind, stable, and good. Undermining the value of *it*, it seems. But in your case, didn’t *it* really come down to a closet?
I liked you, Carrie Bradshaw. When I was lonely and sad, I loved that you were a Katie Girl, and it gave me courage to be myself. I know it is pathetic to get courage from HBO, but it was the turn of the century and I was a bit shallow, and so were you, but that wasn’t the whole of it either, was it? I loved your friendships, and I loved your friends. I loved your voice overs, and your laptop screen. Neither of us could have been so entirely shallow, really, because I’ve never known a shoe that wasn’t orthopedic, but I liked you, Carrie Bradshaw, still.
I liked you, though you’ve done harm. You have! The number of women I know who don’t believe it’s love unless it’s tumultuous– that’s down to you, CB. Who believe that tumult=passion. Not to mention a predilection for really expensive shoes and bags, and really expansive debt. I’m not sure that before you, these things were considered normal.
I liked you though, but I don’t think I like you anymore. I’ll never really know, because I haven’t seen your latest movie and I don’t plan to, but I saw a preview and I’m disappointed. Unsurprised, but disappointed. Because in your new movie, you appear to take a look at your life (the not-so-nice, emotionally unavailable man you married, your closet) and determine that the problem is marriage. That marriage is boring, and passion gets stale, and then you run away to become the Sheik of Araby (and here, the preview lost me).
Though I am still a bit green when it comes to marriage, that I’ve been doing it for five years is nothing to scoff at. And I’ve been pretty good at marriage, actually, right from the get-go, when I made a decision to marry a man who wasn’t an asshole. It was him, actually, who took me away from a life in which courage was HBO. So yes, in a way, it seems I required a man to save me, but he saved me from you, Carrie Bradshaw, and your fashionable post-feminism. And I’ve been pretty happy ever since, having put away the angst, the drama, the tumult, and without that baggage, I’ve gotten a lot of really good things done. If he hadn’t come along, I really do fear that I might have whiled away my twenties wearing a necklace with my name on it, and I wouldn’t even have been you because you’re a fantasy. I would have been wearing orthopedic shoes and I would have still been sad.
Marriage is wonderful, Carrie Bradshaw. It is a fine institution, and of course, it’s what you make it. And it’s not for everybody, maybe even not for you, but I resent how you deride it. I resent that the same women who’ve spent their twenties thinking it’s not love unless somebody’s throwing things are going to think that marriage should be more of the same. And that when the throwing stops, that’s boring.
Carrie Bradshaw, you’re boring. You make adolescents look mature. If you were real, I’d throw something at you, and that’s not love.
Yours sincerely,
Kerry
May 26, 2010
On the occasion of Harriet's first birthday– A TNQ Giveaway!
Because it is a truth universally acknowledged that there is nothing more boring than a mother marvelling that her child is actually one year older than she had been 365 days previous, I will sweeten the deal for you with a giveaway (see below). In the meantime, allow me to wish my favourite grass-grazing, scone-eating, bath-splashing, book-chewing, mommy-kissing, tea-pouring (imaginary), scream-uttering, world-charming, fast-crawling, quick-squirming, noodle-devouring, all-night-sleeping baby, Ms. Harriet (who is my prime distraction, main occupation, the one subject of which I will never, ever tire [though I will tire, oh yes I will, and I have]) a very happy first birthday. It has been a year that’s turned my pickled piglet into an honest-to-goodness person, albeit a still-quadrupedal one. It’s simply been an eternity, and it’s all disappeared in a flash.
There. Thank you. And for your patience, A TNQ Giveaway!
I have an one-year subscription to give away to my favourite magazine in the world, The New Quarterly. TNQ is fiction, poetry, features, art, profiles, creative non-fiction and more. TNQ is never the same, but always gorgeously produced, the work is always thoughtful and interesting, containing stories that have absolutely blown my mind. I read Alison Pick for the first time there, and Carrie Snyder, and Terry Griggs, and Amy Jones, and Zsuszi Gartner. I love the “Magazine as Muse” section. The Editor’s letters are always a pleasure to read, and full of treasures themselves. In short, four times a year, TNQ comes into my world and makes it a better place. And now you have the chance to make yours similarly enhanced. (Providing you’re a Canadian resident. So sorry, my international friends!)
To win a one-year subscription to The New Quarterly on the occasion of Harriet’s birthday, email me (klclare AT gmail com) and tell me who is your favourite literary baby. (You don’t have one? Come on…). Deadline is Saturday May 29th at midnight. Winner will be chosen randomly OR I will pick my very favourite, if one is so astounding.
And anyone who chooses Margaret Atwood’s “Hairball” is disqualified.
May 24, 2010
On Shirley Jackson
I’ve not read anything by Shirley Jackson, but her book The Haunting of Hill House was on Sarah Waters’ Top Ten Ghost Stories. And now, my amazing new book club The Vicious Circle (and yes, if I wasn’t in this book club, I’d be jealous of anyone who was) will be reading her novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle. And since I read this article yesterday, I’ve been itching to read her short fiction. I may be the only person ever who hasn’t read “The Lottery”. Life Among the Savages might also be right up my alley. So I’ve just got this feeling that I’m on the cusp of something– all of these books to be read/loved before me. And my love of anticipation is as such that I’d sort of like to have them before me forever. The only thing I might love more than anticipation is a good book, however, so I’ll be picking up some Shirley Jackson sometime soon. I think I am going to ask for a gift certificate for Ten Editions Books for my birthday.
May 21, 2010
Black Water Rising by Attica Locke
Does Attica Locke ever do atmosphere in her first novel Black Water Rising. It’s the summer of 1981 in Houston, Texas, and the temperatures are soaring, along with the oil prices, the one tied to the other as lawyer Jay Porter tries not to overuse the air-con so as to conserve gasoline. His wife Bernadine is just weeks away from giving birth to their first child, and Porter is barely earning a living practicing law on his own, in an office in a strip mall. One night on a boat cruise along Buffalo Bayou, as the two are celebrating Bernie’s birthday, they hear a gunshot and a scream from somewhere on the shore.
Porter’s first instinct is to stay out of it– the FBI file left over from his student activist past in the civil rights movement has taught him as much. Urged on by his wife, however, Jay jumps into the bayou and finds himself inextricably embroiled in a crime that involves some of Houston’s most powerful forces.
Locke ties the strands of this narrative together with ease– how the mysterious white woman Jay rescues from the bayou is connected to the labour unrest over which Houston’s dockworkers are threatening to strike. How Houston’s controversial new female mayor is connected to Jay Porter’s radical past. How Jay’s troubled early life is affecting Jay as he awaits the birth of his first child. What all this has to do with the fact that he’s always packing a gun, terrified of what lies around the next corner. Though he’s been terrified for good reason lately– since he pulled the woman out of the water, other people have turned up dead, threats have been made on his own life and his wife’s, and someone seems desperate for him to keep his mouth shut about what he’s seen.
There is always music playing in the background, or the late night talk-radio going out over the airwaves as Jay drives around town. All of this adding to the heightened atmosphere, sense of impending something, the pulse of the city over those sweltering summer days and nights. Locke creates and sustains terrific suspense throughout her narrative, displaying her screenwriting background. Car chases, gunshots and fights down stair flights drive the narrative forward. Porter is a compelling and layered character, a driving force in his own right. For the last couple of years, I’ve been afflicted with a late-onset thing for crime-fiction, and Porter is everything a reader could want from such a book.
Black Water Rising has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize, perhaps by its un-literary nature a longshot. But I can see why it was included, and how the list is better for it. Locke defies all convention about the kind of fiction women are supposed to write, about what crime fiction is supposed to be like. Her characterization is strong, her prose is punchy, her maneuvering of plot a most impressive feat. This is a really good book, unputdownable, the only Orange Prize shortlister I’ve ever called my Dad about to say, “You’ve got to read this!”. It’s a book that proves that commercial fiction can be amazing, and that in itself is really accomplishment enough.
May 21, 2010
The most beautiful thing I have ever created…
…is this pie, obviously. Whose butterfly cookie-cutter top (idea stolen from a pie at Madeleine’s) breaks my top pastry sheet into pieces, which is what always happens anyway, but at least in this case, I get to do it on purpose. The pie’s innards are Ontario rhubarb, non-Ontario strawberries, and plenty of the one thing that makes rhubarb so delicious– sugar! And the whole thing was so delicious. A fine way to start the Victoria Day long weekend, and just the thing after an afternoon in the sunshine.
May 19, 2010
I receive White Ink in the post
It has been an absolutely bumper week for books in the post. Today delivered my copy of White Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood from Demeter Press. I bought this book for selfish reasons, of course, but it didn’t hurt that my purchase will help to keep Demeter Press afloat. And may I please mention other fine Demeter books Mothering and Blogging: The Radical Act of the MommyBlog and Mother Knows Best: Talking Back to the Experts. As well as the gala event this Friday to raise funds for MIRCI and Demeter Press?
I imagine I’ll be dipping in and out of this beautiful book for some time. For Grace Paley, Sonnet L’Abbe, Rosemary Sullivan, Lorna Crozier, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Ray Hsu (with whom I used to work the Saturday midnight shift at the EJ Pratt Library, I’ll have you know), Leon Rooke, Laisha Rosnau, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath, as well as many poets I have yet to discover.
There is also a Carol Potter. Do you think she is the Carol Potter,the most famous mother of all??
