February 29, 2012
Bookends: Joan Didion's Blue Nights and "On Keeping a Notebook"
As I read Joan Didion’s 1966 “On Keeping a Notebook” today, it occurred to me that this essay is the piece that is the bookend to her new book Blue Nights, and not The Year of Magical Thinking as so many critics have suggested. (I also don’t understand why no one talks about Where I Was From. I think it’s my favourite book of all of hers.)
But first, Blue Nights is not a book about Didion’s daughter Quintana Roo. So many readers have got that wrong too. As Didion writes in “On Keeping a Notebook”, “however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of what we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I’.” Like everything Didion has ever written, Blue Nights is profoundly about herself. She’s not even opaque about it, but some readers are still so unable to get around the fact of a woman writing honestly about motherhood than they’ve been hypnotized into thinking motherhood is all that Blue Nights is about.
But yes, to read “On Keeping a Notebook” after Blue Nights is to invest the essay with a whole new level of meaning. “Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singular blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up.” And then later, “…I have always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.” In Blue Nights, Didion writes, “How could I have missed what was so clearly there to be seen?”
And then further on the essay when she addresses her notes, her compulsion to maintain these notebooks in order to keep in touch with the people she used to be, “paid passage back to the world out there”. She was 32 when she wrote this essay, which is the age I am now, and it’s an age at which you feel there are whole lifetimes behind you, and it’s so fascinating to consider these. 32 is an age where your preceding decade has changed life beyond all recognition, and you’ve finally sensed an order to it all. How, as the older woman in Didion’s essay tells her, “Someday it all comes.” And none of it has started to leave you yet; the future is all promise, and it’s here.
Blue Nights is a 77 year old Didion looking back at her 32 year old self who’d supposed herself older than she’d ever be again. In Blue Nights, she notes the boxes and drawers in her apartment stuffed with history, the notebooks, the stuff she’s been acquiring through her years, all items she’d once blithely advertised as “paid passage back to the world out there.”
She writes, “In fact I no longer value this kind of memento./ I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted./ There was a period… when I thought I did./ A period during which I believed that I could keep people fully present, keep things with me, by preserving their mementos, their “things”, their totems.”
She writes, “In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment./ In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.”
“It all comes back,” Didion writes in 1966, unaware of the shallowness of what she’d lost so far, convinced by the rhythm of her words. And Blue Nights is her realization more than 40 years later: there comes a day when it doesn’t anymore.
February 28, 2012
The Vicious Circle reads How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
We liked this cover the best.
Last Sunday, the Vicious Circle met again for brunch, every one of us in attendance. We wouldn’t say we got right down to it because Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe was a strange old book, not quite our thing. So we kept putting it off, because we had to talk about Mad Men, gossip, other books and ghastly things we’d read on Twitter. And then finally we started, the conversation began, and it flowed, and flowed, one of the most insightful book club discussions we’ve ever achieved. (Or maybe it just looks that way because the secretary among us took down some really extensive notes.)
We began with the central idea of the book, of the main character being stuck in a loop and how we could recognize that. That even before the part of the book where the character is both writing and reading his story at once, we had a sense of projecting ourselves and our experiences onto the story. (Which is perhaps the way that most of us read stories.) We talked about the books perceived depth versus its actual depth, and how it tricks you into thinking that there is a technical complexity to it but the complexity is emotional. This is shown when the father reveals his theory of time travel, which turns out not to be accomplishable by technology at all but by intellectual force instead, by the power of the mind. But that time travel was also a physical voyage– you don’t just appear in another place, but you have to get there. Which is sort of the way of everything.
Some of us loved TAMMY, the operating system of the main character’s time machine. But others of us were disappointed– TAMMY lacked emotional depth, one of us said. “She’s a computer program,” said another. “That’s not the point,” was the rebuttal, and that was rebutted with, “Yes, it is!” Some of us who’d read Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxywere disappointed by elements of the book such as TAMMY, which seemed to have been done better many times before. Perhaps it’s a homage though, one of us suggested. That its connection to other works was quite deliberate. (Two of us didn’t finish the book. We just couldn’t see the point.)
But this is the one most of us ended up with.
We loved the twist of “science fiction” being substituted for physics here as the laws of which the universe must obey, and how the laws of science fiction opens up the possibilities for so many things. We found the mother’s story compelling, stuck in a sixty minute loop and her son feels guilty because he didn’t spring for an hour and a half. We thought this book reminded us of The Raw Shark Texts in terms of how it treats loss, creates its own universe, and considers the book as object.
We had trouble situating the book in time, kept stumbling over logic problems– how long as the main character been away from his life? It’s tricky to figure out, this universe corresponding to the laws of science fiction after all, which are hard to gets one’s head around. And then we starting thinking about movies the book reminded us of– “Moon” by Duncan Jones, “Another World”. Also the book Among Others by Jo Walton, for its employment of fantastical elements. We remark that this isn’t a book that exists in a vacuum. But does this compromise its literary quality, we wonder? There is a shallowless to it, but no. It’s actually highly literary on a mechanical level, and we note how much of the novel is about how books and novels are put together, the nature of existence in the science fiction universe is determined by tenses. And though the book seems shallow upon first reading and requires skimming to get through, we note that the book itself is a loop and that meaning becomes deeper upon subsequent readings.
And it is literary– we remark upon the good writing, the emotional resonance of the scene with his father. And that the writer exercises a great deal of restraint in order to feed the loop structure– the nature of a loop is shallowness. That TAMMY stands for the fact that so many people spend their entire lives contemplating narratives that don’t really exist. That TAMMY is his projection of self. And we end on this note: TAMMY is Google, and everything it is we’ve ever fed to it.
Then we go back to the buffet for seconds.
February 27, 2012
On The Berenstain Bears
As the death of Berenstain Bears co-creator Jan Berenstain was announced today, I thought it would be a good time to finally write the Berenstain Bears post that I’ve been thinking about writing for ages. About how the Berenstain Bears were some of my favourite books as a child, and I wanted to live in their tree house more than I wanted to live anywhere else on the planet. I did think it was weird that Mama Bear was always in pyjamas, and also that Brother Bear kept turning up randomly dressed as a hobo in Dr. Seuss books, but I loved these books so completely, and their details are forever contained in my brain– the sitter with Cat’s Cradle, the messy room (I wanted a peg-board!) and Brother’s bird’s nest connection, Sister’s polka-dots, that they lived in a cave before they moved into the tree house, and their various dealings with the medical establishment. It never occurred to me that these books weren’t the very best that literature had to offer, and I read them over and over again.
And though it’s unfashionable to say, as an adult and a parent, I still like them a lot. In fact, I’ve found them enormously useful as a parent. We read …Go to the Doctor over and over before we got our flu shots last Fall, which made the experience a breeze. When faced with the prospect of a giant needle, Harriet felt secure in the knowledge that this was just like what happened to Sister Bear. When Harriet went through her whole “Big Bad Wolf’s going to get me and there are skeletons under my bed” phase, Papa’s lines from …in the Dark were perfect with which to explain that the pictures in our imagination are harmless, and moreover that they’re even good for us. I’ve also tried to pull out …Get the Gimmes to battle meltdowns with, though I haven’t had as much luck with that, but the fault is with the girl and not the book, I think.
Of course, I see now that the books are so sexist, are preachy and boring, that the later books in the series are terrible, and I know there is a whole world of books out there that are ever so much better. (I am also driven crazy by inconsistencies in the illustrations– the tree house and vicinity are remarkably different in every book, undermining the verisimilitude!!)I don’t consider them books proper and in our house they’re relegated to the box in the living room with truck-shaped board books and picture dictionaries, the kind of books we’d never lower ourselves to read at bedtime. But I also appreciate them when I see Harriet loving them as much as I did when I was little, their simple formula reflecting elements of her world and helping her begin to understand it. And the connection she feels towards them is showing her how magical reading can be.
February 27, 2012
Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman
As I was almost unequivocally the craziest, most anxious pregnant woman who ever lived, I had been particularly nervous what would happen to me when my child was out in the world, the whole “heart on the outside of one’s body” cliche. I’d expected to become neurotic, hovering, unable to sleep at night lest my child succumbed to SIDS, but then I met Harriet, was bowled over by the sheer force of her vitality, her fierceness, and I never really worried again. It was clear to me from the start that she was an actual person separate from me, so absolutely possessed of a distinctive self I’d have very little control over shaping, and it’s been with such fascination that I’ve watched that self developing into the someone she was destined to be from the first ear-piercing scream she ever uttered.
Which is to say that I’m laid-back as parents of 3 year-olds go, which is surprising because I’m laid-back about absolutely nothing else. Though I’m laid-back within certain parameters (which I’ve been lucky enough to have success with): I’ve been maniacal from the get-go about cultivating good eating habits in my child and nurturing an appreciation for healthy food and good flavours. Harriet is usually a pro at eating in nice-ish restaurants. It’s also important to me that Harriet learns to entertain herself and enjoy her own company, which is essential for my sanity as a mother who works from home (and makes it a priority to carve out a good deal of “me time”). And in many ways, these are the priorities that have shaped whatever “parenting philosophy” I’ve established for myself, so when I heard of Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, I thought, “Hey, that’s up my street.”
Because it’s important, of course, to only ever read parenting books that affirm your worldview and what you’re doing already. (And I’m not being facetious. The alternative is to be driven insane.)
Druckerman’s book, about her experiences of pregnancy and motherhood as an American expatriate in Paris, is being marketed as this year’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Druckerman herself as a “parenting expert”. Which is misleading, because Bringing Up Bebe is certainly no manifesto, and it has much more in common with the best book about babies that I’ve ever read, which is Dream Babies by Christina Hardyment, a history of baby advice “From John Locke to Gina Ford”. Hardyment’s book instilled in me the empowering knowledge that there is no such thing as a baby expert, and that ideas of baby advice and parenting philosophies (scientifically based or otherwise) have been faddish since the 16th century. So that in those brutal early days of new motherhood when I had no idea what I was doing, at least I could be confident that nobody else really did either.
In her book, Druckerman similarly shows how notions of parenting and parenthood (and also children and childhood) are cultural constructs, and her approach is far more anthropological than “how-to”. She shows how French notions of pregnancy are so different from what she experienced as an American engrossed in week-by-week manuals with advice about how every morsel of food that goes in her mouth should be good for her baby. French women around her worried far less about their pregnancies, eat whatever they want (though Druckerman points out that French women don’t eat a lot in the first place), are encouraged to “nurture their inner woman”, and are not only told that they can have sex in pregnancy but are provided with a list of comfortable positions to do it in.
The book goes on to show how babies in France begin sleeping through the night very early, how they are taught patience and independence by their parents not always responding immediately to their needs (but rather, their parents observe those needs from afar to discern how they can best be met). French babies are considered rational people, albeit small ones, who can come to understand the world around them with reasoned explanation (and can understand the needs of their parents and family as well). French children develop independence by entering day care from an early age, and parents can have confidence in the state-funded institution with rigorous standards, instructors with university degrees who’ve chosen their work as a profession (and are well-compensated for it), and healthy meals brought in by chefs.
Parents maintain authority over their children, have high expectations for good behaviour, and yet also don’t run their children’s lives (or allow their children to run theirs). Children are allowed significant freedom and develop higher abilities and a greater sense of responsibility in accordance. Many of the differences in parenting are subtle, and can be understood through differences in language– instead of “Be good,” French children are told, “Be wise” (or “Show good judgement”). Instead of “discipline”, French parents talk about”education”. There is a set of parameters which parents are unbending about, but their children are offered a great deal of freedom within these.
Though Druckerman shows a clear bias towards the French approach to parenting, her book is not a polemic. She wishes her own children to retain a sense of themselves as Americans as they grow up in France, she devotes an entire chapter to breastfeeding not being a priority for French mothers, she admits that though French women have greater support in furthering their careers, they split household roles with spouses more unevenly than American parents do, and are paid lower wages for their work. She shows that until the 1960s, the French approach to parenting was rigid and cold, that effects of this remain, and that some French people (and American expats) are absolutely starving for American ideas of self-affirmation. And she also shows that being a French parent is not easy, that you can’t figure out how to be one by following a guide, and that like any parent, they’re ever responding to new challenges thrown their way. It’s just that, philosophical approaches to parenthood being what they are, French parents respond to those challenges very differently.
What Druckerman doesn’t give enough credit to, however, is the role of institutionalized daycare in France in creating her institutionalized Frenchness. (She concedes, by the way, that life in France outside of Paris and even outside her social circle in Paris is different from and more varied than what her book portrays.) A few times, she mentions that the mothers of the children with such sophisticated palettes don’t even cook themselves, for example, which leads me to conclude that school lunches have a greater role in shaping children’s food tastes than family meals do. It’s not surprising that French children fall into line in institutional settings along with their peers with such rigorous standards and expectations upon them. Perhaps if we all have the benefit of such a system, all of us could have children so obliging.
So Druckerman’s book is not that useful if you’re reading it in the hope of cultivating a little French-person of your own. (It’s also not useful if you wish to be not fat. French mothers, apparently, spend a lot of time baking with their children, but exercise restraint enough not to eat the result, which is a skill that is beyond me.) But what Bringing Up Bebe is useful for is challenging our ideas about childhood and child-rearing, broadening our perspectives to see the different ways these ideas are approached, and allowing us to see our own approaches as the cultural constructions they are. Druckerman’s writing is also light, funny and engaging, and her book is as informative as it is a pleasure to read.
February 25, 2012
Dimwits and numbskulls
“The universal, yet unique experience of motherhood creates an immediate bond with other women, Cusk explains, and, paradoxically, an unchallenged platform from which to pass judgment, a contradiction she experienced at both a local and a professional level. ‘I didn’t know that that kind of cruelty and criticism you encounter among mothers at the toddler group could find its way into written media until my book came out,’ she says, with force. ‘Then suddenly, I have women like Gill Hornby and India Knight writing articles about me, in effect saying, “Well, I love my children and they’re the best thing that happened to me, I don’t know what’s wrong with you”. I’m not remotely afraid of what that kind of person thinks of me. I have no respect for them and I wouldn’t have given them a second thought had not motherhood grouped us all together in the Venn diagram, which is very big and full of all kind of dimwits and numbskulls.'”–from “Mum’s The Word”, Rachel Cusk Interviewed in 2003
February 22, 2012
Afflictions and Departures by Madeline Sonik
In her essay collection Afflictions and Departures, which has been shortlisted for the 2012 Charles Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction, Madeline Sonik stitches her personal stories to the fabric of her time. Her narrative voice is blessed with startling omniscience, with the benefit of hindsight, and with an acute awareness of both how the extraordinary can be illuminated by ordinary detail, and also of how the ordinary and extraordinary are so often intricately connected. Sonik’s prose reveals her poet’s skill, as does these essays’ use of imagery and symbolism, but the broadness of her vision and the deftness with which she fits together surprising pieces of reality is evocative of Joan Didion’s masterful non-fiction.
In “First Passage”, Sonik imagines her parents’ passage on the Queen Mary in 1959, a glamorous voyage toward hope and possibility that would stand out in contrast to the disappointment of the rest of their lives. As the journey is a point of departure for the collection, it is also such a point for Sonik herself whose conception takes en-route. And so the voyage is also envisioned as a point of departure for absolutely everything that follows after: “It is 1959, a year before birth control pills are made available to women, twenty-three years before the AIDS epidemic makes condoms available everywhere and politically correct. The sun is rising through a starboard hatch.” That the Queen Mary’s rudder weighs 140 tons and that in 1970, and that Sonik’s father will become a violent alcoholic is given equal emphasis, and by the end of 1959, the USSR will have taken satellite photos of the far side of the moon.
In “Korean Moon”, Sonik reflects on her father’s war, The Korean War, humanizing and showing sympathy for a character who’s such a monster in the rest of the book.
“Shadows” is a short study of the dark side of the late ’50s and early ’60s, before the darkness became omnipresent for a while and veneers were cracked once and for all (or for a while). A typical paragraph: “I am whisked away, swaddled in pink flannel, and tucked into a hospital nursery crib far from my mother’s ward. In future years, irreversible brain damage and mental retardation will be linked to the lead-based paint that coat baby cribs. A decade from now, ninety percent of children under the age of six will have elevated lead levels in their blood and the government will ban the use of lead-based house paints. Studies will show that newborns who do not bond with their mothers in the sensitive period after birth risk emotional despondency and insecurity. But right now, as a nurse prepares my first bottle and my mother, still numb, prepares to light a cigarette, the daffodil sun is still shining and we are all blithely ignorant.”
In “For Posterity”, Sonik begins with a ride on The Maid of the Mist, considers Niagara Falls and concepts of love and romance, which brings a connection to the nearby Love Canal (whose name has surprising origins) whose contaminated ground’s toxins are leaking into the Niagara River and turning up scores of dead fish along the shores which they don’t see from the boat, so busy are they marvelling at the majestic power of the falls. She then thinks about suicides, Niagara Falls’ underside, about her parents’ own troubled relationship, and about all she didn’t yet know about love and everything that life would teach her.
In “Easter”, Sonik explores the inner lives of families, what goes on behind the row-on-rows of tidy doors that line their neighbourhood streets. This idea reappears in other essays, the sounds and signs of child abuse going unremarked upon, broken marriages, the inner lives of mothers, the secret worlds of cemeteries and the play they inspire.
“Fetters” deals with her own teenage drama juxtaposed against the backdrop of her father’s slow and painful death from cancer: to the boy who’s just broken her heart, she asks, “‘Just say with me until my father dies.’ It’s a ridiculous request and I don’t know why I ask it…. It shouldn’t surprise me in the least when he says, “No,” but it does… I can’t stop myself from babbling and pleading for him to reconsider. My father is dying. He’s not expected to live beyond the week.’
“Flush” begins with Sonik noting that she was born in the year the toilet made its cinematic debut (in Psycho), and marks the pivotal points in her life at which a toilet has functions as a surprising centre. Containing a line that would be fitting as this entire collection’s subtitle: “I didn’t know then, and it would be years before I learned…”
Afflictions and Departures is a beautiful book, fusing fact and feeling, the specific and universal, the domestic with the whole wide world, and the effect is a dazzling synergy.
February 21, 2012
Big Day: Welcome to The 49th Shelf!
Canadian Bookshelf launched in beta last June, and officially arrives today with a whole host of new features and a brand new name: The 49th Shelf. The selection of books on our front page this week is blowing my mind (including Madeline Sonik’s Afflictions & Departures, which I just finished yesterday and loved), our new I Love Books campaign is excellent, and you can find out more about what’s going on in our latest blog post (and we’re talking giveaway!). We’ve also got an interview with Maggie Helwig whose Girls Fall Down has just been selected for the One Book Toronto program (and which Stuart is currently reading and enjoying).
It’s good news all around and so inspiring to see so much love and support for Canadian books. I’m so thrilled to be a part of it and hope you’ll be a part of it too.
February 20, 2012
Guacamole by Jorge Argueta and Margarita Sada
A couple of years ago, I was totally obsessed with literary avocados, so it was no surprise really that I’d find Guacamole: A Cooking Poem appealing. The kids on the cover live in a hollowed-out avocado, for crying out loud, with a purple bird on the window sill. And the illustrations really are what’s immediately appealing about this book, the sheer delight of the children in the story as they make literal the story’s metaphors about pits so slick you can slide down them, or a spoon you drive like a tractor.
The poem is Spanish poem is translated into English, and both texts appear here. The poem emphasizes feeling and sensuousness, and portrays cooking as a profoundly emotional experience. And experience itself is profoundly about imagination, the text here doing what the illustrations do with metaphors: with your apron on, you feel like a great chef, salt falls like rain, lime juice is a river, and a lime’s seeds are “Little pearls that look like eyes…”
The very best part of the book is that it’s as much recipe book as picture book, and the results are delicious. Our pages are already splattered with food in the very best way. The poem’s recipe is simple enough that Harriet and I could make the guacamole together with neither of us losing patience, and she particularly enjoyed stirring with her tractor spoon. We also took care to involve singing and dancing in the process as instructed (with is always important when you’re working in the kitchen), and I love the way this book shows cooking as something we can do with our family, and also something we can do for our family, and regardless, is connected to togetherness.
Guacamole is part of a series of cooking poems by Argueta which also includes Bean Soup and Rice Pudding. I look forward to trying the others.
February 19, 2012
R is for Rink
Location: Nathan Phillips Square
Many years ago, before there was a Harriet, our good friend (and onetime downstairs-neighbour) Curtis promised that when Stuart and I had a child, he would teach it to skate. These days, Harriet is nearly three and Curtis is just weeks away from the birth of his own baby, but he still honoured his commitment and we all went skating this morning at Nathan Phillips Square in front of City Hall. Harriet has been talking about Curtis taking her skating for months and months, but the reality failed to live up to the promise– I think we have to get her bob-skates to really make this happen. She had fun though, but the real success of the day was that I skated! I’ve only skated once in the last 20 years and I remember hating it, but perhaps there was something about the particular dullness of the City Hall rental skates and how they don’t really go, because I did really well and I loved it. It still ached my ankles and I looked like an idiot, but not a complete idiot, and I wasn’t even terrified. And how nice to be outside on a beautifully sunny winter’s day, right in the centre of the city at such an essential Toronto landmark. I think we might have to do it again.
February 16, 2012
Leaving Berlin by Britt Holmstrom
Leaving Berlin by Britt Holmstrom opens with an epigraph from Carol Shields’ The Stone Diaries: “It is inevitable that each of us will be misunderstood; this it seems, is part of twentieth-century wisdom.” Which sets up two expectations that Holmstrom takes care to meet, the first that these are stories about (dis)connections between people, and also that we’re entering a Shieldsian universe.
And indeed, Holmstrom writes with a similar approach to the short story to Shields’. Her narrators are omniscient, she’s an orchestrator, she doesn’t go in for plot and explosions, and her stories aren’t linear at all. Instead they’re structured like nesting boxes, each story holding other stories inside to be unpacked, and inside those are stories more. So that an single story here can consist of two women sorting their laundry who’ve never had an intimate conversation, or strangers sitting in a train station waiting room, or two women sitting beneath the Eiffel Tower who don’t say a word to one another, and yet feelings, misapprehensions, misunderstandings, and prejudices cause characters to delve deep into their own histories, and whole stories are spun (and stories upon stories). Much like, just say, a story can be written about the absurd sight of an older woman in short-shorts unabashedly mowing her lawn.
These stories are connected by their characters, who are usually unassuming women whose simple theories of the universe are being tested; by their geographies, which are usually small Canadian cities, or European cities as envisioned by the inhabitants of small Canadian cities; by the references to art, artists, music and musicians which recur throughout; and by the marriages, which are usually passionless and horrible. And the connections between women, positive or otherwise. And I absolutely knew I loved this book with “The Company She Kept”, about a group of office mates who become obsessed with a colleague who spins preposterous stories about her exotic life which can never be quite proven false, though the women all know she’s lying, of course. But why does she go to so much trouble to do so? Why would you borrow a punch bowl if you were never going to use it? And as these questions are endlessly fascinating, these women’s fascination takes them beyond limits of their comfort, changing the course of their lives in the process.
“Under the Eiffel Tower” is an exercise on the distance between the way we see ourselves and how others see us, about Carol, a woman whose fear of heights kicks in at the last minute and she’s left to sit and wait as her husband and their party ride to the top of the Eiffel Tower. On a nearby bench is a woman who is probably a Gypsy, though that idea makes Carol uncomfortable. Is it racist to suppose someone is a Gypsy? And thoughts of this woman take her back to a story her mother told from her own childhood in Denmark about playing with Gypsy children, which leads Carol to a story from her own life about a brief (and uncharacteristic) love affair years ago with a fellow traveler who gave her a St. Christopher medal she wears around her neck (though the story of why he gave it to her is not so straightforward). And it’s the medal now that a small boy has his eye on, a Gypsy boy who’s already had the never to ask her for her change, a boy who Carol assumes must belong to the woman on the bench beside hers. Though is that a racist thought too? And as Carol gets up and finally walks away, it is revealed that Carol’s judgments of the woman and boy have been right and wrong in the most shocking ways.
I also loved “The Rebel Doll”, about a Canadian woman who goes to visit her sister in the northwest of England, and forges a connection with a young girl in the train station waiting room. When the woman’s sister makes a casual statement about the woman’s mothering of her own children, however, the nature of the woman’s connection to the young girl is illuminated in ways that surprise us as much as it does the woman.
I loved the characters who were summed with lines like “…an alcoholic misfit who at the age twenty-eight had drowned his litter of ambitions to avoid the tiresome responsibility of having to look after them.” Holmstrom pulls no punches, takes no prisoners, which at best gives her prose a most delicious biting effect, but at worst renders some characters and plots as one dimensional. I really enjoyed “The Sky Above Her Head” about a woman who’s trapped in the ties of her family and takes the sweetest revenge at a prairie gas station (to a Mungo Jerry soundtrack, no less), but I wondered if anyone could be so unrelentingly unsympathetic as that sister was? The effect is decidedly amusing, and I certainly smiled, but such touches lacked the depth of others.
Leaving Berlin is a bit different from most Canadian short story collections I’ve read lately (and I’ve read plenty) in two significant ways that have to do with its author’s biography. First, that Holmstrom was born in Sweden, and her collection reflects such an international awareness of the local, and also what it means to be foreign, even though the foreigners here are usually Canadians abroad. And second, that this isn’t her first book– Leaving Berlin is her fourth book since 1998, and the book lists Holmstrom herself as having been born in 1946. And you sense that with this book, that here is a writer with experience in both writing and life, and who is not striving in the same way as a young writer still learning and yearning to prove herself might be. Which is to say that there is sureness here in Holmstrom’s voice, a real maturity, and what a pleasure it really is to encounter a writer in her prime.
