January 23, 2013
Mini Reviews: Crusoe's Daughter & Stupid Boys Are Good to Relax With
Jane Gardam always catches me off-guard, one of those authors who operates without real precedent and so whenever I pick up one of her books, it’s never what I’m expecting. I read Old Filth about two years ago, and found it incredibly bizarre–so traditional its Englishness and its subject matter, but its treatment was a bit like a fun-house mirror. I’ve made more sense of what Gardam is up to since reading this wonderful essay on Crusoe’s Daughter, which posits that Gardam “has, more successfully than most novelists, navigated the narrow stream between the stingy shores of modernism and the grand cliffs of the nineteenth century novel.”
I bought Crusoe’s Daughter (though was disappointed not to receive this edition, whose cover I adore) after Martin Levin noted it as one of his top reads of 2012. I wish to better understand Gardam and her work because it intrigues me so, and also because her admirers tend to be really brilliant readers. It’s the story of Polly Flint, the daughter of a sailor who is sent to live in a yellow house by the sea with two eccentric aunts. The first passage in the book I underlined was a description of a view of trees from a train carriage: “The light showing through them made them look like loops of knitting pulled off the needles.” Oh, can Jane Gardam ever write. And then the line appears again, inconspicuously, closer to the end of the book. There is real method in the construction of this book, which reads as old-fashioned from a distance. Crusoe’s Daughter is actually a novel about novels, or one in particular. In her isolation in that strange house beside the sea, Polly finds escape and company in Robinson Crusoe, whose character’s own isolation she identifies with: “He didn’t go mad. He was brave. He was wonderful. He was like women have to be almost always, on an island. Stuck. Imprisoned. The only way to survive is to say it’s God’s will.”
There was so much going on in this book that I didn’t wholly understand or appreciate, and I’ve never read Robinson Crusoe which probably means I missed even more than I’m aware of. But I was still captivated by the oddness of Gardam’s narrative, by the oddness of Polly herself (who does go mad but only for a little while. She eventually finds salvation teaching Robinson Crusoe and English Literature at a boy’s school). I’m not wholly converted to Jane Gardam yet, but this novel was as such that I’m not going to stop reading her until she finally takes.
**
I don’t know that I’ve ever been as stupid than the year I was twenty-one, when I came across Susan Swan’s Stupid Boys Are Good to Relax With while shelving books at the university library. I was drawn to the title immediately, of course, as stupid boys were a habit of mine at the time, not just because I was stupid myself (though this was part of the reason) but also because I hadn’t realized I could do any better. Perhaps I thought the title might justify so many of my life choices at the time? But I was so stupid the year I was twenty-one that I didn’t even know how to read a short story collection. I think I was too young to appreciate what Swan was up, and I don’t think I got very far with the book at all.
The best thing about re-encountering a book is that it can be a testament to how far one has come. I would love for this momentum to continue, for my intelligence to be increased by the time I am 45 to the same extent it has improved in the last 12 years. Though that might just a peculiarity of one’s twenties; is there any other learning curve so great? Yes, my taste in men has come a long, long way, but I am also such a better reader now.
Stupid Boys Are Good to Relax With is remarkable for being a book published in 1996 with a laptop computer on its back-cover, with a whole section of the book called “Cyber Tales”, written as a conversation on the internet. In 1996, I wasn’t as stupid as I was when I was 21, but I don’t think I’d ever used the internet. How amazingly forward thinking was Stupid Boys…, which walks a very fine line of being very much of its time but not being dated. I was trying to explain the difference between the two, and I think it comes down to Swan having been aware of the use of technology in her work, and intending it to mean something other than just “modern” (which it most definitely wouldn’t be just a few short years along).
Stupid Boys… is a collection of stories about the way women construct their lives and identities of men undeserving of such an honour (and who are often even unaware they’re so being honoured). Using traditionally structured stories (including some narrated by the famous Mary Beatrice Bradford), and more unconventional tales peopled by characters from classical literature and pop-culture, Swan writes about the compromises women make, and the pleasure and pain of such choices. It’s also a surprisingly remarkable complement to Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman, which is the book I read immediately afterwards.
January 23, 2013
Do you know how to be a woman now?
‘”No–I’m talking about the common attitudinal habit in women that we’re kind of…failing if we’re not a bit neurotic. That we’re somehow boorish, complacent, and unfeminine if we’re content.
The way women feel that they are not so much well-meaning human beings doing the best they can but, instead, an endless list of problems (fat, hairy, unfashionable, spotty, smelly, tired, unsexy, and with a dodgy pelvic floor, to boot) to be solved. And that, with the application of a great deal of time and money–I mean a great deal of itme and money. Have you seen how much laser hair removal is?–we might, one day, 20 years into the future, finally be able to put our feet up and say, “For nine minutes today, I almost nailed it.”
Before, of course, starting up the whole grim, remorseless, thankless schedule the next day, all over again.
So if I was asked, “Do you know how to be a woman now?” my answer would be, “Kind of yes, really, to be honest.” ‘
–Caitlin Moran, How To Be A Woman
January 22, 2013
The opposite of this scattered post would be an empty space.
1) A friend emailed recently as she was doing a clear-out and wondered if I wanted any of her books on babies and birthing–Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Birth, Sheila Kitzinger, Alison Gopnik’s The Philosophical Baby. And it was such a pleasure to tell her no. I’d read these books already. I remember poring over Gopnik’s book when Harriet was six weeks old, desperate for some kind of understanding of this creature who’d arrived in my life. I remember the hours spent on internet forums trying to work out a pattern in the pieces of brand new life as a mother. I remember a lot of talking about talking about motherhood, the desperation of these conversations. How important they were for me to have at the time, but how there came a time eventually when I didn’t need them anymore. I have this fantasy that when our new baby arrives in the spring and my life becomes all-baby again that literature might be my one escape from the haze. That I might spend my summer reading about everything except babies, even if it has to be done in the middle of the night while the rest of the world (except the baby) is sleeping. But I’ve never had a second child before. I do not know if my fantasy will come true.
2) Motherhood still interests me, but on a broader level than the whole strollers on the bus brouhaha and whether breast is really best. The conversations I appreciate most about motherhood are those that don’t usually appear on the pages of glossy magazines, which rise above the Mommy Wars to broaden notions of what motherhood is and can be, and the ways in which different women’s lives are affected by various experience of maternity, and the elusiveness of “choice” (which is so often another fantasy, no?). Anyway, I’ve got more to say on the topic and the most exciting news ever forthcoming in the weeks ahead. Stay tuned.
3) We took a picture of my baby bump! How positively first-pregancy of us! It is not altogether flattering, as I’ve no make-up on, lighting is poor and I’ve had a cold for three days and it shows. But this is me at 22.5 weeks pregnant, which is kind of remarkable. I know many people find pregnancy pictures obnoxious, but as someone who has spent most of my life feeling fat and the last three years in particular trying to hide an unfortunate abdomen post c-section (3 years later, it is no excuse, I know, but still…) it is awfully refreshing to embrace and celebrate the shape I’m in. And it’s a remarkable thing, however ordinary, to have happen to one’s body, to change so much in such a short time, different every day.
4) I keep vague tabs in my mind of how my blog content is divvied up, the grown-up things, the kid things, the women things. I always have this notion that I’m doing terribly well when a string of posts doesn’t reference children or motherhood at all, and yet I don’t fully believe this either. My blog has always been a reflection of life as it is, and small children (and the books they read) have been a huge part of my life for some time now. I could pretend otherwise, but then I’d be left with not much to write about. Anyway, all of which is to say that I’m feeling self-conscious and babyish posting about pregnancy and belly-shots, but then here is where I’m at right now. The opposite of this scattered post would be an empty space.
January 20, 2013
Some Great Idea by Edward Keenan
For the sake of full disclosure, I’ll inform you that I actually appear as a character in Edward Keenan’s new book Some Great Idea: Good Neighbourhoods, Crazy Politics and the Invention of Toronto. Keenan, a Senior Editor at The Grid, writes in his book about how the Rob Ford spectacle has galvinized a whole segment of the population to take an interest in city politics, of this effect on his own career: “…before, my regular readership consisted largely of insiders at city hall, and political activists. Since Ford was elected, tens of thousands of readers click through online to soak up anything I write about the mayor.” And that’s me, one of tens of thousands. (I’m the one waving.) I didn’t even vote in the 2006 municipal election, the only election I’ve ever sat out since I came of age, but I remember being busy that day, not seeing the point. That election result seemed inevitable, but since Rob Ford took office in October 2010, nothing is inevitable anymore. It suddenly seems worth paying attention to what’s going on around us.
I think I’d be compelled to pick up any book whose author acknowledges that his thinking about Toronto has been influenced by Amy Lavender Harris’s Imagining Toronto. Amy has since become a dear friend, but we’d only met in passing when I fell in love with her book back in 2010, marvelling at how markedly she demonstrates that a city is constructed of stories as much as concrete and steel. Keenan takes this as the premise for his book, whose opening line is, “I have this notion that cities are just a collection of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.” Near to the end of the book, he writes, “The answers, then, are in the process, just as the themes and lessons of any story lie not in its conclusion but in the unfolding of the plot.” So there you have it: plot. This is not some dry polemic. There is movement here; we get somewhere. Which is exactly what you would expect from a book with a subway on its cover.
Some Great Idea is the history of Toronto since amalgamation in 1998, the story of mayors Lastman, Miller and Ford. Though Keenan emphasizes that Toronto has always resisted being defined by its leadership, so the story goes beyond these three figures. Which isn’t to say that the city hasn’t been marked by personalities, and Keenan selects William Lyon Mackenzie, RC Harris (who was apparently very different from the figure Ondaatje portrayed him as), and Jane Jacobs as three individuals who resisted convention, rebelled against the system and helped to shape the city we live in today.
It’s also the story of Keenan’s own engagement with civic life, in the last ten years in particular (and in this way, Some Great Idea is a nice companion to Samantha Bernstein’s memoir Here We Are Among the Living which documents this same period in Toronto). He’s been in a privileged place, telling urban stories at a time when an awareness of urbanism had taken hold of the city like never before: this was the birth of Trampoline Hall, Spacing magazine, Richard Florida, the Dufferin Grove Park pizza oven, and Keenan ties these factors all together as the story of this place. It’s his place, where he lived in an industrial loft with the woman who is now his wife, where his children were born, where he and his wife became homeowners. It’s a story too that is more complicated than the personas of the men in power suggest–there was a great deal of progressiveness in the city under Mel Lastman thanks to figures on council like Jack Layton; David Miller’s legacy was far more positive than most of us remember; Rob Ford’s “leadership” has engaged Torontonians like nothing before.
Keenan shows that Toronto too is a much larger place than the downtown core highlighted in most civic discussions. He gives the example of Woburn, a neighbourhood within this supposed “city of neighbourhoods”. Except that Woburn isn’t a neighbourhood at all, but it’s the name given to the area where Keenan spent his teen years, near Markham and Lawrence in Scarborough. He has it stand for the inner-suburbs in general. It’s an area that grew up entirely differently than the downtown neighbourhoods, with different interests and priorities, whose populations no longer live the lifestyles the area was so rigidly planned for. You have to understand a neighbourhood like this, its strengths and weaknesses, in order to understand how Rob Ford was elected into office, to understand why someone who lives in that part of the city might see themselves as as taxpayer before citizen, if they even define as citizen at all.
The book’s title is taken from a quotation by Benjamin Disraeli: “A great city whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea.” The peculiarity of this diction, the vagueness of “some” great idea unspecified points to the book’s one weakness, a kind of muddled conception of itself and its purpose. I longed for Keenan to grasp his narrative with more confidence, for less journalistic objectivity. It wasn’t always clear where the story was going, but then Keenan himself was the one who wrote that unfolding not conclusion is the very point. And I will take it.
Because I learned so much about Toronto from this book, its history and its present. Keenan posits diversity as the city’s great strength, and goes on to define a city’s “diversity” as being about so much more than the ethnic backgrounds of its people. He closes with his theory of a city as something ever in the process of being born–“Inventing Toronto”, then, in addition to imagining it. The city as a story each of us is telling every time we stroll, cycle or drive down one of its streets.
Other Toronto links:
-My review of Rosemary Aubert’s Firebrand, “Loving the mayor is a bit like that.”
January 20, 2013
A bad year to be a woman with a reproductive system.
I want to take a few moments to delineate the many ways in which 2012 was a spectacularly depressing year to be a pregnant woman. We’re only a few weeks into 2013 so it’s still too soon to say, but so far I haven’t had to listen to that jangly Rick Santorum song with the lyrics, “We’ll have justice for the unborn/Factories back on our shores…” one single time, and that is progress. Neither have I noted once that a panel of old men (too many of whom with more children than fingers on one hand) have been provided a international platform from which to debate just how much American women’s access to contraception should be curtailed.
And speaking of “debate”, so far in 2013 I have not once had to endure the insult of 91 members of Parliament (including the Status of Women Minister) voting for a say as to the contents of my uterus. I was five-weeks pregnant at the time, and I was absolutely horrified, as well as confused as to why I had not been brought in to provide expert consultation. Surely some expertise might have been necessary. Did you know that there are actually 233 members of Parliament who have not a single uterus among them? The input of a living, thinking pregnant woman into this conversation might have provided some much-needed perspective.
So far, 2013 has been an improvement. It’s been at least a few weeks since a group of Ontario MPPs (not a uterus among them either, note) staged a press-conference supporting a move to stop public-funding of abortion in this province. And while I am sure that several women worldwide actually have died this year because they’ve lacked access to abortion and other maternal health procedures, there has not been a story with the level of tragedy of Savita Halappanavar‘s, who died in Ireland after miscarrying at 17 weeks pregnant when a fading fetal heartbeat was privileged over an actual human life.
2012 was a bad year to be a woman with a reproductive system. I’m talking Handmaid’s Tale territory. When I got pregnant, it was immediately apparent to me that my body had become a national concern, that my womb was now somebody’s territory for staging a shouty “debate”. A woman who was pregnant in 2012 owned herself just a little less, and it was total madness. I really can’t believe we put up with it. My resolution for 2013 is that we not do that anymore.
January 16, 2013
On Elizabeth Mitchell, Blue Clouds, and storybook discovery…
I discovered Elizabeth Mitchell a few months into Harriet’s life, and her music has been our family’s soundtrack ever since, the serenity of her voice making me a better mother and a happier person, her songs providing us all with a solid grounding in folk music, and their stories becoming the basis of so many of our own. And this year was a very good year to be an Elizabeth Mitchell fan–her album Little Seed came out in July and had the honour of not only being the soundtrack to our summer roadtrips (along with Carly Rae Jepsen), but was also nominated for a Grammy, and then Blue Clouds came out in October, and we managed to save it until Christmas, but we’ve been listening steadily ever since.
Blue Clouds is brilliant: a new version of “Froggie Went a Courtin'” that is Harriet’s favourite song on the album; my favourite track is her cover of Van Morrison’s “Everyone”; covers of David Bowie’s “Kooks”, Jimi Hendrix’ “May This Be Love”, Bill Withers’ “I Wish You Well”, “Blue Sky” by the Allman Brothers. We love new songs “Rollin’ Baby”, “Hop Up My Ladies”. And we love the song “Arm in Arm”, based on the verse by Remy Charlip: “Two octopuses got married and walked down the aisle, arm in arm in arm in arm in arm in arm in arm…”
I’d never heard of Remy Charlip before Blue Clouds, but his artwork graces the album and its liner notes, and a letter inside by Brian Selznick introduces him further: “If you don’t own any of Remy’s books, you owe it to yourself to find as many as you can.” Which is the kind of guidance I’m always happy to take, and so we’ve been borrowing Remy Charlip books from the library like gangbusters over the last couple of weeks. And we didn’t quite know what to do with them at first: they weren’t stories to be read as much as books to be used, to be engaged with. It turned out that only the first line of the “Arm in Arm” song was Charlip’s, the line all the text on a single page, and the whole Arm in Arm book is made up of similar wordplay, riddles, play and whimsy. Harriet is in love with Mother Mother I Feel Sick Call For the Doctor Quick Quick Quick, and also the cowboy story Little Old Big Beard and Big Young Little Beard. We brought home Thirteen from the library yesterday, and it blew our minds! So many stories in a single book, a book you’ll read over and over and never the same way twice.
I absolutely love art that takes you somewhere, and artists who collaborate. Getting to know Remy Charlip via Elizabeth Mitchell has been like getting to know a friend, and so when I discovered tonight via internet search that he’d died in August, both Stuart and I were oddly saddened. His work is so much the definition of life that it seems impossible that his own could be over, but then the books live on, and how they do, over and over and never the same way twice.
January 15, 2013
More on bad/good reads, and almost-didn't reads: Olive Kitteridge
I had some thoughts about Olive Kitteridge before I read it. I don’t know if I’d noticed that it had won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but I’d noticed the endorsement by Oprah on the over, which in my mind is a different thing entirely. My anti-Oprah bias is part of the reason that I’d never picked the book up even though it’s been sitting on my shelf for ages. Also, it was the sort of book like A Complicated Kindness whose blanket popularity had left me uninterested–the boring cover didn’t help either. I’d remembered that the popularity wasn’t so blanket and those who didn’t love it absolutely hated it. I could never remember who of Olive or Elizabeth was the title or the author either, “Strout” seeming as unlikely as “Olive Kitteridge” from certain angles. But I’ve been making serious progress through my to-be-read shelf, to the S’s even (because indeed, Strout Olive’s author was) and so it was finally time.
I must confess an enormous affinity for the “novel in stories”, though I confess it quietly because lovers of the novel are so often disappointed and/or frustrated by this strange hybrid form, and calling attention to it as a form at all makes short-story lovers furious in its undermining of the greatness of stories on their own, or side-by-side but unconnected. But then haven’t you read A Visit from the Goon Squad? The Juliet Stories? Lives of Girls and Women? The Elizabeth Stories? Then surely you get the point that the form is really something onto itself?
Carrie Snyder is quite illuminating on the “novel in stories” form: “The definition on the back of my book may be a marketing tactic, but it’s also accurate. I did structure each chapter as a story that could stand on its own. I did so very deliberately. I did it because I’m comfortable with the form. I did it because I like the gaps and leaps that stories permit. I like the cleanness of the form, the circularity, the interior singular coherence.
But just because each chapter works individually as a short story doesn’t alter the fact that the larger book is its own whole universe. It’s meant to be read from beginning to end, not piece by piece. It needs all of its parts to be complete. It unfolds chronologically. Its overarching plot-line tracks the development and changes of the same characters. It has themes that are woven throughout. It has peaks and valleys. Does all of this make it a novel? Probably. Sure. Why not?”
Olive Kitteridge is probably less novel than stories, and unlike Juliet its pieces had been written/published separately over a large span of time, but I still admire the sense of wholeness that comes from such a many-sided shape. The slight discrepancies in point of view, the inconsistency that brings the book its verisimilitude. Because people change over time, and they change depending on who is doing the watching, and a novel in stories shows all of that. A character from near and far, within and without and I love that.
Olive Kitteridge is a “good-read”, the kind that Kyo Maclear would like to stretch her muscles and read less of. But I do believe that Strout’s book in all of its lyrical realism can do everything that Maclear’s “bad-reads” recommends. However quietly and without intention to improve its reader, Olive Kitteridge shows that “life as dynamic and unsettling, full of moments of absurdity and disorientation, at times startling and unreal.” Just as rare and remarkable as the successfully-realized fictional invented universe is the fictional universe that looks exactly like the one I know. I’m still not done being disturbed, startled, and awed by the sight of life itself.
January 13, 2013
Is speculative fiction my "can't read"?
In June, I wrote this:
“Against Domesticated Fiction, or The Need for Re-Enchantment” was an essay by Patricia Robertson in Canadian Notes & Queries 84, in which Robertson decried contemporary writers in general for their failure to imagine the world beyond the individual, and the failure of contemporary writing to be anything but tedious. Hers was an inspiring argument, even stirring, and yet… I’m not yet tired of the kind of novel she’s maligning. Domesticated fiction remains what I most want to read, and I’m not nearly finished with it yet. And I don’t even have a good argument as to why this should be the case, except that I think that with the reader taking an imaginative leap, domesticated fiction can do as well as the fantastic, or any other kind of literature, to “incorporate some of the wildness, the strangeness, the mystery of the world around us.” To show that we are indeed “participants in a vast web of being.”**
Last week, Kyo Maclear published a fantastic essay at 49thShelf shelf about embracing “the bad read”, celebrating the kind of fiction that doesn’t go down easy. She wrote, “Yes, bring on the bad reads. Bring on those lousy good-for-nothing novels that embrace novelty, possibility, and surprise. Let’s hear it for god-awful fiction that believes anything can happen—that captures the weird, the awkward, the complicated, the downright bizarre…you know, the really real…in all its ghastly glory.”
Her argument was not dissimilar from Robertson’s, but Maclear came at it from a different point of view that made me less defensive. First, because she does that brilliant thing that critics never do wherein she celebrates one thing without necessarily denigrating another. And also because her point of view is similar to mine, as a reader and writer of “lyrical realism.” Her rallying call stirred my heart, and every part of my brain registered how completely right she was. How could I feel any other way, considering how often I am frustrated by readers’ refusal to be challenged by fiction? And yet, I could only be stirred so far. I don’t know who or what could ever compel me to pick up a porcine allegory, let alone an erotic one. (I’m still too afraid to read Tamara Faith Berger’s Maidenhead, for heaven’s sakes.) I want to be challenged, but I don’t want to be that challenged.
And isn’t that what we all find ourselves saying? When we throw up our arms and plead, “I’m 21 weeks pregnant with a small child and I only get the tiniest blocks of time to read in every day. Kindly leave me to read what I like. No sex pigs, please.” So yes, part of it is that I’m perpetually tired, as perpetually tired as every single human being on this planet is, but another part is that I cannot bring myself to be interested in a story unless human beings on this planet are what it’s addressing. Not just with books either–I can’t watch animated films unless its characters are people. I just don’t care. And I just don’t care about books depicting other worlds either, or other versions of this one. I liked A Wrinkle In Time, but only when they were at home, for example. The only part I liked in The Princess Bride is when Fred Savage is reading with his grandfather.
So now I’m doing that thing, denigrating an entire genre, but I’m not actually. I’m just clarifying the enormous gulf that lies between me and the kind of “bad reads”, anything’s-possible book that Maclear recommends. Perhaps if I weren’t too tired, I might do well to pick up some books from Leah Bobet’s Speculative Fiction Titles for Literary Readers list. Maybe what I’m suffering is not so attitudinal as a lack of a bridge? Why am I so afraid to take a leap?
But it’s not fear altogether. I’m not scared of speculative fiction necessarily (though the sex pigs, yes, sound terrifying) but I just don’t quite see the need for it. I’m still not finished with this world yet, and I don’t know that fiction is either. And while it’s a stunning achievement to construct a new universe, I think that any fiction writer does that whenever she sits down to write. I think that realism is perfectly capable of “embrac[ing] novelty, possibility, and surprise”. That last year, books by Anakana Schofield did this, and Zadie Smith, and Lauren Groff (though yes, she’s a genre blurrer at heart), and Annette Lapointe did this. Even Carrie Snyder’s book And these are the books I will challenge myself to read, though they don’t go down as easy as, say, A Large Harmonium by Sue Sorensen (which is so so so wonderful. Have I told you that lately?). For me, these books aren’t necessarily “good-reads” and they have passages and sections I have to read over and over to understand and appreciate what’s going on. Maybe one woman’s good-read is another’s bad-read, and speculative fiction is my “can’t read”? And really, what is reading for? And for whose sake? Do we have to save the world with book we pick up? And why ever wouldn’t we want to? And who’d ever have the time?
As ever, I’ve got no answers, but I look forward to more circular arguments and frustrations in a forthcoming post on Olive Kitteridge, naturally.
**Interestingly, there are responses to Robertson’s piece in the latest issue of CNQ. I haven’t read them yet, but look forward to doing so.
January 10, 2013
Short fiction joy, news, and reviews.
We received the most enormous pile of packages on Tuesday, including a magazine each for Harriet and I. Mine was Canadian Notes and Queries, featuring a new short story by Caroline Adderson, and Harriet’s was Chirp, with a fabulous short story by Sara O’Leary (!!), and I loved that both of us were experiencing the joy and goodness of short fiction in fine Canadian magazines, and that Harriet gets to appreciate this fine thing from the age of 3. What a lucky girl.
In other news, I was quoted in this excellent piece by Anne Chudobiak in the Montreal Gazette about the CWILA count and lack of female reviewers in Canadian journals and newspapers. And my review of The Stamp Collector by Jennifer Lanthier and Francois Thisdale is now up at Quill & Quire.
January 9, 2013
Time, Growth and Change: Books for the New Year
This is my latest cross-post for Bunch Family!
We were reading Chicken Soup With Rice by Maurice Sendak on New Year’s Eve because, with all Sendak’s usual mischief and fun, I love how it gives the reader a sense of the span of the year, which is not an easy concept to grasp when one is three-years-old. The book is mostly nonsense, but with verse that has steeped into our family vernacular: where else would Harriet have learned about “old Bombay,” a place she references at least daily in her imaginary play; we’re all fond of exclaiming, “Whoopy once/whoopy twice!” at odd moments; and shouting, “I told you once/I told you twice/ all seasons of the year are nice!”, which is actually true, if you think about it. As a primer of all things monthly, the book is hardly scientific–your child will come away assured that September is indeed the period in which he’ll ride a crocodile down the chicken soupy Nile. But he’ll know what the months are called, which is something, and you will have enjoyed having read this jolly little book to him.
With Chicken Soup and the New Year, I started thinking about other book about time, growth, and change, about the cyclical nature of a year and a life, and Paulette Bourgeois’ Big Sarah’s Little Boots came to mind, illustrated by Brenda Clark. It’s the story of a little girl who loves her rubber boots, which seem to deliver her extraordinary puddle-jumping powers. But one day when she puts her boots on, they no longer fit, and none of Sarah’s attempts to stretch them are successful. Reluctantly, but stoically, she comes to accept that she is growing up and that there is as much to be gained as is left behind with every step forward she takes.
Barbara Reid’s Picture a Tree is always the book I pull out at bedtime when time has got away from us, not only because it’s short, but because it also manages to not remotely be lacking in depth. I am as nearly astounded at the overwhelming bounty of Reid’s creation as I am at nature’s– the fact that she has sculpted every single leaf in the book out of plasticine. And there are so many leaves, as Reid explores the various roles that trees play our life. My favourite spread shows trees as “A tunnel” (century-old branches stretching over a city street that looks like mine) “or an ocean” (a view of the city from a highrise balcony, the trees creating a sea of green). Reid moves through the seasons of the year, eloquently expressing the complicated idea that with every tree, “You may see the end of one thing, or the start of something new.”
Andrew Larsen shows something similar in his latest book, Bye Bye Butterflies, which is illustrated by Jacqueline Hudon-Verelli. On a grand scale, it’s the story of a boy beginning to grow up and make his way into the world, the experience encapsulated in a class project at his school in which caterpillars are raised into butterflies. “Our friends will be with us for just a few days…” the teacher tells the students. When the butterflies are grown and ready to be released, the story tells us, “The children felt a little happy and a little sad all at once.” With great sympathy and nuance, Andrew Larsen is demonstrating that these are the mixed emotions that a full life comprises.
Some of my favourite books to read with my daughter are those that I remember reading as a child, the very books that belonged to me, an experience that connects me to my own history, to the reader and child I used be. This connection is made quite literal in Sara O’Leary’s When I Was Small, illustrated by Julie Morstad. It’s the third book by the duo, about a small boy called Henry whose mother and father view parenthood as an imaginative springboard (and really, isn’t it though?). In this book, Henry wants to hear stories about when his mother was small, and she indulges him with tales of when she so small she went swimming in the birdbath, could feast on a single raspberry, slept in a mittten and used a thimble to build sandcastles. Conventional concepts of space, time and generation are collapsed as she tells her son that when she was small, what she longed for most was a small boy of her own. She wanted a small boy to tell stories to, she explains, “because in stories we can be small together.”
Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius is one of those books I loved when I was small, a book I’ve had kicking around my shelves since long before I had anybody small to call my own. In Miss Rumphius, Cooney evocatively illustrates the span of a lifetime, and also of history, art, literature and geography, and she shows the rich possibilities for what a single life can hold. Most importantly, the kernal of the story is as much a challenge as inspiration: “You must do something to make the world more beautiful.” The book ends on a note of possibility: ‘”All right,” I say. But I do not know yet what that can be.’
I love picture books that show the passage of time, the largeness of history and our relative smallness (but our place nonetheless) in the scheme. And of course, I also love house books, so Emma and Paul Rogers’ Our House, which is illustrated by Priscilla Lamont, was inevitably going to be a delight. The book is made up of four pretty ordinary domestic stories taking place in 1780, 1840, 1910, and 1990, each showing subtle changes in the house and surrounding area, and also the lifestyles of its changing inhabitants. The final story shows an awareness of the people who’d lived in the house before, as the family, whilst searching for an errant pet mouse, finds bits of history under floorboards and in backs of cupboards. (“We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those left behind.”– Tom Stoppard, Arcadia.) There is no supernatural element at work here, but the connection between the child in the first story and the child at the end reminded me of my favourite time-out-of-time childhood novels like Tom’s Midnight Garden, Charlotte Sometimes, and A Handful of Time.
Life Story by Virginia Lee Burton is perhaps the most ambitious picture book project I have ever encountered, the history of the universe as beginning with the birth of the sun. With her usual attention to technical detail (Burton was the daughter of an artist and an engineer, and in all her books, it shows), Burton’s story moves through the ages, the development of the earth and the plants and animals that inhabit it. In terms of time and place, her story because more and more focussed until her final page and a direct address to her reader: “And now it is your Life Story and it is you who plays the leading role. The stage is set, the time is now, and the place is wherever you are. Each passing second is a new link in the endless chain of Time. The drama of Life is a continuous story–ever new, ever changing, and ever wondrous to behold.”
