January 8, 2012
This kid blows my mind
This kid blows my mind. I’ve been writing snarky comments on my Facebook wall about parents of “gifted” children, but naturally, I do suppose that Harriet is the funniest, most brilliant child the world has ever seen before. Basically, she is Jesus (who we know all about from the Dick Bruna Christmas Book).
Though we’ve had to stop borrowing Thomas DVDs from the library because Harriet is too obsessed, and has been talking about the episode where James fell in the mud for three weeks now. And she informed us that she’s changed her name to Harriet Tank Engine, her baths are “wash-downs” and she calls her bed her “round-house”. But it’s not just all cartoons, she’s also political: yesterday when The House came on CBC radio, Harriet listened for a moment and said, “They’re talking about Canada. I live in Canada.”
She can recite Hey Diddle Diddle, Little Miss Muffet, The Owl and the Pussy-Cat and Night Before Christmas. She’s totally potty trained, except that she’s afraid of toilets so still has to wear diapers outside of the house. She likes to coax us into playing her games by telling us, “It’s very good game, very fun” but then she yells at us when we do it wrong and the game is always pretty boring. Every day around 1:00, she decides it’s naptime and goes to bed on her own accord (which has only started since we ditched the crib), sleeps for two hours, then gets up and sings or reads in bed for about a half an hour more. She sleeps until 9:00 on the weekend. She eats sushi, pesto, felafels, blue cheese and hummus, and is quite particular about where she gets her croissants. (This is the kind of thing we parents brag about who have too much disposable income for our own good, and live in the city.)
She loves Chicken Pig and Cow, Katie-Morag, Curious George, The Berenstain Bears, Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel, Jon Scieszka’s Trucktown books, the letter H, chocolate, watching DVDs, getting mail, and when it’s garbage day. She displays that marvelous imagination that seems to be innate in all her peers (and where does that go? Why do so many of us lose it?) . She likes to help me bake and sometimes is even helpful. Lately, she’s been asking for definitions of words she doesn’t know: “What means ‘on purpose’?” This afternoon she wondered why there was only one cloud in the sky, and if it was lonely.
So yes, now she is two (and a half!), clever as clever. And I really hope she is two forever and ever. Really. Because there’s never been anything quite as marvelously good. We love her.
January 8, 2012
Man and Other Natural Disasters by Nerys Parry
Update: On Feb. 1 2012, Great Plains Publications became a Featured Advertiser at Pickle Me This. This review was published prior to our relationship. Pickle Me This does not publish sponsored posts, and all opinions expressed on the site are my own.
“I’m reading a really wonderful book,” is something I kept telling people last week as I was reading Nerys Parry’s first novel Man and Other Natural Disasters. Then of course I’d be asked what it was about, and every time I came up short with an answer, never did manage to do the novel justice. Because it’s hard to explain, this book, though it might help if you imagine a diagram. At its centre is Simon Peters, who works in the basement of the Calgary Public Library in Book Repair and Maintenance. He’s a loner, repairing broken books with precision, unable to navigate the ins and outs of society, so suited to the solitude of the job.
Now imagine a series of points around the Simon-centre, each one an idea with an arrow directed at Simon himself. From these various ideas, Parry reveals Simon to us, in all his multifacetedness and impenetrability. The first is Simon’s homelife, lived in an apartment with denim curtains in the kitchen and lined with hundreds of hoarded books. Simon lives with Claude, who we’re told at the outset is in decline and will eventually die of a stroke. It’s not clear what the relationship is between the two men, except that Claude once gave Simon shelter when he was homeless, that he gave Simon work in construction building skyscrapers high over Calgary, and that the two have been companions for over thirty years.
The second point is Simon’s past, which he begins to reveal when he meets a new colleague at work, a young woman called Minerva who bears an uncanny resemblance to Simon’s sister who was lost years ago. The sister had been killed in a fire, the first of three tragedies in which Simon’s family would be devoured by the elements– his father was later killed in a mine collapse, and his mother disappeared by air not long afterwards when a tornado touched down on their prairie ranch. So of course, Simon tells Minerva and us also, he now knows how he himself will die, and we also understand the trauma that caused his unusual shock of white hair.
But here’s the third point: the centre cannot hold. With the resurfacing of his tragic memories coupled with the loss of Claude, cracks begin to show in Simon’s vaneer. Is there a sinister element to his relationship with the older man? What about the violence he hints at in his childhood? What is his attraction to Minerva,. and why does the memory of his sister have such a powerful hold upon him? Could the stories he tells really be true? Is Simon actually dangerous?
Point four: a breakdown occurs when Simon discovers Minerva drenched in blood on his bathroom floor, and an alternate history is revealed through psychiatric records and Simon recounting sessions with his therapists.
And the fifth point is the story of the Doukhobor people in Western Canada, a religious sect whose children were interned and abused in residential schools during the 1950s. This atrocity was thought to be an answer to and (by the Doukhobors themselves) regarded as justification for acts of terrorism by an extremist Doukhobor group against government measures for assimilation. How exactly this story connects to Simon is best revealed by the novel itself, but the connection promises to add a layer of depth to a story that is interesting already.
The first half of the novel is an assemblage of mismatched pieces narrated by a man who seems autistic, which results in strange and stilted pacing. In places, the dialogue is weak, which only stands out because the prose in general is so remarkably good. (Though that a conversation with a man like Simon involves weak dialogue is not altogether surprising, but still, there is too much telling [us] going on here). Nerys Parry’s writing is gorgeous thoughout, passages that beg to be read over and over for the gloriousness of their descriptions, as when Simon puts forth the circumstances of his birth:
After nine months of immersion in the temperate, nutrient-rich fluid of the womb, the first breath an infant takes burns its virgin throat like acid. Then there is the lashing of light, the spanking of cold. To recreate the experience, drink a glass of double strength cidar vinegar through your nose, dive in a bath of ice and stare directly at a hundred-watt light-bulb without blinking. You can see why not too many come into this world smiling.
Following Simon’s breakdown, the pace picks up and the rest of the novel proceeds in a flurry of action. And it’s perhaps this disjointedness that makes the novel so hard to explain, which is not a flaw so much as the result of Parry fitting so many pieces together, of taking on the challenge of documenting psychological trauma, and attempting a novel whose shape is all its own. The effect is curiously imperfect, but impressive. Parry is a richly talented writer, and her first novel is an absorbing, rewarding read.
January 5, 2012
We are pretty impressed with ourselves
Stuart is excited because he built the walls, I am excited because I was the visionary of the floor, and Harriet (who hasn’t seen and/or broken the finished product yet, because it was completed after her bedtime) was pretty enthuasiastic about the opportunity to eat some white glue.
Thanks to Ruth Ohi for the inspiration.
January 5, 2012
Books I'm looking forward to in 2012
I’ve posted my Winter/Spring 2012: Most Anticipated Books of the Season post for Canadian Bookshelf, which I think is impossible to read through without being overwhelmed with some serious book lust. I’m looking forward to so many of these books, which will certainly be enough to carry us through the winter to the spring. In addition to the Canadian picks, I’m longing for Arcadia by Lauren Groff, who is perhaps my favourite American author of the moment– I loved The Monsters of Templeton and Delicate Edible Birds. I’ve already pre-ordered a copy of the latest Penelope Lively, How It All Began— she is wonderful, as is everything she touches. I know that Ali Smith’s There But For The came out last year, but I missed it, a mistake I will be fast to rectify. Can’t wait for Emily Perkins’ The Forrests, her latest book since Novel About My Wife. I’m also looking forward to finally reading Douglas Gibson’s Stories About Storytellers, about Gibson’s adventures in editing some of Canada’s greatest writers (which I’m particularly in the mood for after reading the terrific interview with Robert Gottlieb in The Paris Review Interviews Vol. 1). And then The New Republic by Lionel Shriver, which apparently is a reissue of a book from early in her career, and I will read it because Shriver is such a good writer, even if her novels themselves (save …Kevin) are not always altogether satisfying.
January 3, 2012
A Trick of the Light by Louise Penny
Coming to detective fiction via Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie is a bit like being the kind of person who only goes to church on Christmas Eve. And sure, I’ve tried to make up for it since– I’ve since gotten into PD James and Dorothy Sayers, but I’ll never feel like I’ve got quite enough cred. I’m not a real detective fiction fan anyway– I seem to like the stories in spite of the detection, and though I know this is an unpopular point of view, I’ll tell you that if Atkinson forgot to put Jackson Brodie in her next novel, I’m not sure I’d notice. What I like about murder mysteries is that they bring to the forefront what I like best about novels in general: atmosphere, surprising relationships, back story and plot.
And yes, I like my novels English, and the mysteries in particular. For me, Midsomer Murders is less about the murders than whatever is happening on the village green (which, as it happens, is usually murder, so it all comes out in the wash). And somehow in A Trick of the Light, the seventh book in her Armand Gamache series, Louise Penny has managed to thoroughly infuse a village in Quebec’s Eastern Townships with the English essence I so love in my fiction.
The village is Three Pines, so isolated it does not appear on any maps, but also a hotbed for murder. In this latest installment, a body has been discovered in the garden of Clara Morrow, an artist who has just launched her first solo show at the Musee in Montreal. The dead woman turns out to be a ghost from Clara’s past whose connections to the people in her present are numerous and surprising. Chief Inspector Gamache must untangle the web of intrigue, all the while dealing with his own trauma from a recent incident in which he was seriously wounded and officers working under him were killed.
For two days last week, I was more devoted to this book that anything else in the universe. It was the perfect book to curl up in against the winter darkness, I found Gamache and his second-in-command so compelling as characters, the vicious and incestuous art world served as a sparkling backdrop, and Three Pines was a perfect idyll, even with all the murder going on. Though yes, this books really wants for an edit. Penny writes in short stilted non-sentences that make for breezy reading but don’t completely make sense when you look at them closely. And there were too many slips– how did Clara notice the expression on her husband’s face when he was walking a few paces ahead of her, and the misused “begging the question” twice in five pages was a bit agonizing. The essential bit of Englishness that we’re really missing here is the genre writer with serious command of the language.
But I’m happy to forgive the book for all its flaws, because it made my holiday, and I look forward to acquainting myself with more Gamache in the future.
January 1, 2012
Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Women's Literatures by Elizabeth Podnieks and Andrea O'Reilly (eds)
That Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts has been sitting on my shelf at all is because it marries two subjects that fascinate me: contemporary literature and ideas about motherhood. That it’s been sitting on my shelf for a year or so is because I was intimidated by its academic approach, and had opened it up one day a while ago when the time was not right. The time being righter, I returned to it shortly before Christmas, and was glad I did. Though my enjoyment of the book and success with it is due to me abandoning my usual rule of reading cover-to-cover, and employing that old cliche about some books existing to be dipped in and out of. But I suspect if there’s any such book, this is one of them. Some of the essays were immediately accessible due to my familiarity with the works involved, but I became unabashed about skipping those rendered impenetrable by jargon, theory and/or books I’d never heard of.
Which is not to say that I had to know the books under discussion in order to appreciate these essays in this collection. Quite the contrary, I was surprised to have so many essays pique my interest in literature that is new to me. In “That Was Her Punishment,” Ruth Panoksky’s examination of prostitute mothers in Jewish communities left me wanting to read Adele Wiseman’s Crackpot; my friend Nathalie Foy’s essay on Eden Robinson’s story “Dogs in Winter” was evocative and gorgeously written; I’ve never read the poems of Minnie Bruce Pratt, but Susan Driver’s “I had to make a future willful, voluble, lascivious” brought the poems (and the poet) to life on the page; and I really enjoyed Rita Jones’ “But She’s a Mom! Sex, Motherhood, and the Poetry of Sharon Olds.”
So the book broadened my understanding of how motherhood is represented in contemporary literature, but also deepened my understanding of the works I was familiar with, whose discussions attracted me to this book in the first place. Nancy Peled draws connections between several of Margaret Atwood’s novels to show how each is informed by the roles of absent or powerless mothers. Emily Jeremiah’s “We Need to Talk About Gender: Mothering and Masculinity in Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin” managed to bring something new to a novel that has been discussed over and over again, but also preserves the ambiguity and complexity of Shriver’s novel in its arguments. I also appreciated Joanne S. Frye’s and Andrea O’Reilly’s essays on motherhood memoirs (and in particular, the way that these essays spoke to and contradicted one another). And then into another over-studied book is breathed new life with Di Brandt’s “(Grand)mothering Children of the Apocalypse”: A Post post-modern Ecopoetic Reading of Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners” (and it may not show from the essay’s title, but oh, how wonderful prose stands out in an academic text).
Even with the skipped essays, however, others would prove challenging in different ways. It was due to my own experience that I was exasperated by the simplistic reduction of Denys Landry’s “Maternal Blitz: Harriet Lovett as Postpartum Sufferer in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child.” Similarly, I resisted the conclusions of Andrea O’Reilly’s essays on motherhood memoirs, and found what is termed “new-momism” (see The Mommy Myth by Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels) to be a too-simplified version of most women’s reality. And of course, I would think that, and this is the same argument I have with second-wave feminists every time I identify as a housewife. Anyway, perhaps “new-momism” is over-represented in literature (though I’m convinced much nuance is being overlooked here), but the experiences of most women I know are much closer to what Rita Jones presents as so revelatory in the poetry of Sharon Olds:
This woman determined her own sense of proper womanhood and mothering, but, importantly, she does not do so in some kind of isolation. Instead, she responds to and sometimes imitates contemporary notions of intensive mothering and the new momism. Certainly, she cannot possibly attempt to live her life “off the grid” of mothering. Like the bees, she too tries different arcs of narratives of womanhood and mothering, and we see how tempting she finds the narrative of intensive mothering as she alternates between subsuming her identity beneath that of her children’s and remaking her identity on her own terms… The woman… finds pleasure in her roles as both mother and lover, and she experiences no conflicts in performing both roles.”
But then responding to these essays based on my own experiences would prove to be a very narrow way to read them (or to read anything, for that matter). It’s as necessary as it is difficult to have one’s ideas and sense of relational self properly challenged, and in her essay, Susan Driver provides a wonderful quote from Minnie Bruce Pratt to frame how to rise to this challenge: “I try to say: To acknowledge the complexity of another’s existence is not to deny my own.”
Acknowledging the complexity of existence is what these essays do so well, the complex existence of living, breathing women, and also of the characters in our literature. And the power of this book is found in its acknowledgement of the symbiotic connection between the two, how each one can inform and be empowered by the other.
