October 23, 2013

The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit

I am glad that I don’t have to write a proper review of Rebecca Solnit’s new book The Faraway Nearby, that instead of taking the book apart to understand how it works that I got to simply let its impressions wash over me, to inhabit the narrative instead of examining its joists. The book itself, I found kind of by magic. I’d heard about it but it sounded too esoteric for my tastes, but then I kept hearing about it everywhere and seeing it references on social media, and one morning I turned on The Sunday Edition to hear Solnit saying, “Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds…” and I just kind of knew I had to buy this book.

And so I did, taking in its peculiar construction in the the process. Chapters 1-6, Chapter 7 is “Knot” and then Chapters 8-13 are titled as the first six but in reverse order. We finish where we started, with “Apricots.” And throughout the entire book runs a single line of text, an essay onto itself. I love this because it meant that as soon as I finished reading the body of the book, I had to open it again, go back to page one, and I respect any book that begs to be read twice.

As I said, we start with apricots, an entire tree’s harvest worth. Solnit’s mother is in decline, has entered a care home and the harvest is from the home she’s left. The apricots, Solnit tells us, are her inheritance, perhaps the most generous one she can expect to receive for her relationship with her mother has been fraught, complicated. But this is not just about apricots. “Sometimes the key arrives long before the lock. Sometimes a story falls in your lap. Once about hundred pounds of apricots fell into mine…”

She writes, “The fruit on my floor made me start to read fairy tales again. They are full of overwhelming piles and heaps that need to be contended with…” She writes, “Trouble seems to be a necessary state on the route to becoming.” I want to quote the whole book, really. ” Of the apricots: “It wasn’t that they were so hard to deal with as fruit, but that they seemed to invoke old legacies and tasks and to be an allegory, but for what?”

Solnit writes of books as places we inhabit, and books inside those books, and on and on, a series of Russian dolls. And it’s true that I felt as though my connection to this book was very personal, curious and magically construed. I think the point of this book is that any reader will feel this, which is magic after all. Mirror lead to glass, which leads to glace which is ice, and then Frankenstein. Here is anything you’ve ever wondered about Mary Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft, and mothers and daughters (and apricots) and death. Ice as destroyer; ice as preserver. (Solnit’s mind is amazing. It is a dazzling pleasure to feel as though one is inside it.) In the winter, I worked on a freelance project that involved much reading and thinking about the search for the Northwest Passage, which was fascinating, but did mean that I ended up having recurring dreams about travelling through endless night via sled-dog. And it was kind of a pleasure to be brought back there.

“The self is a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist.” (These were the points in which I started to think that Solnit was the intellectual’s SARK. Imagine this book rendered in rainbow print. Oh, but I don’t mean it. But I do. And don’t love the book any less.)

“In the years she gave birth to all those too-mortal children, she also created a work of ark that yet lives, a monster of sorts in its depth of horror, and a beauty in the strength of its vision and its acuity in describing the modern world that in 1816 was just emerging. This is the strange life of books that you enter alone as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes in which we meet.”

She writes about getting lost in books as a child, about Narnia, and its doorways. She writes about how her own books became doorways, places that other people entered, and drew her into theirs, and how these encounters have changed her life. She writes about the apricots, her mother, deterioration. The coincidences that spark our lives, the coincidences that have shaped hers. And decay as transformation: oh! the places this book goes. She writes about preserving those apricots, canning. Fruit to still-life, and here she is writing all about vanitas, which is a term I’d never heard until I read the essay on Mary Pratt and vanitas. A book inside a book inside a book then.

Oh, what else? The Motorcycle Diaries, leprosy, her own cancer scare. (I am trying to draw you a map through this book. It would probably be easier if you would just read it, please.) “Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger.” On how those with leprosy do not feel pain in affected parts of their bodies, which become damaged as a result, and here she is talking about empathy. “The capacity to feel what you do not literally feel.” A sentence like, “I found leprosy useful for thinking about everything else…” “The self is a patchwork of the felt and unfelt…” I’m only half-way through the book and I’ve written nearly 1000 words.

And so it’s like this, a fantastic journey through a terrain with someone who sees deeper into the world than you’ve ever begun to imagined. Solnit is author of a book with the title A Field Guide to Getting Lost, and she makes digression into an art here, though it always winds back around eventually, the narrative accumulating. Winding, threading, Rapunzel and Penelope, spinning and spinsters. She makes connections between virtual threads and literal threads and fabric, and it all comes down to stories. It always does. “Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds.” What shape should a book be in a world where that is a fact?

October 22, 2013

Gift from the Sky

Donna Tartt’s new novel The Goldfinch came out today, and I’ve been looking forward to it. I remember when The Little Friend came out in 2002 and it was such an event. I was very broke, living on cans of tuna and long-life milk, sleeping on the bottom bunk of a bed in backpackers’s hostel in the Midlands. It seems momentous to be buying her new book all these years later, to measure out my own life by Donna Tartt releases: I own a couch now. The intervening decade has been good. So I trekked to the bookstore just now to pick it up, and also to get Kelli Deeth’s new collection The Other Side of Youth. (Read Deeth’s wonderful piece from yesterday about her devotion to the short story form).

So there I was at Book City, and in a hurry too because I had sweet potatoes in the oven, and what do I discover: Margaret Drabble has a new novel!! The Pure Gold Baby, just out at the beginning of this month. I had no idea! Can you believe it? The universe offering up one of my chiefest delights (to be reading a Margaret Drabble for the very first time) like it was nothing. And it’s even meant to be good, this book, and Meg Wolitzer says so. I am so excited. As if yesterday’s bookish gifts weren’t enough…

October 21, 2013

Harriet and Sheree Fitch at Eden Mills

The most wonderful thing that ever happened was captured on video! Here is Harriet storming the stage to help the great Sheree Fitch read Mable Murple at the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaOX6dValjY&feature=youtu.be

October 21, 2013

Excellent Mail Haul

Today was a very good day for the mail haul. Iris’s passport finally arrived, which is a good thing as we’re off to England in a few weeks. We also received a pair of orange socks for Iris, on the occasion of her first Halloween (thanks, Mom!). And then two books, one the latest collection by Karen Connelly, whose work I’ve admired for a long time now. And then Jennica Harper’s new book Wood, which is oh so exciting, because it’s not every day that you get a new book by one of your favourite writers ever. Very excited about this. Oh, what treasures a mailbox can hold!

October 20, 2013

Animal Stories (including woolves!) at the Gardiner Museum

We went to the Gardiner Museum today to see the Animal Stories exhibit.

“Elephants, leopards, dogs, squirrels and dragons… From exotic creatures, household pets, urban wildlife to mythical beasts, animals have been an active part of human experience, an inexhaustible trigger of the imagination. Animal Stories presents the many tales of our encounters with the animal world, shedding light on how our social, symbolic, affectionate, scientific and utilitarian relationships with animals have been visualized through ceramics from the 17th century to our day.” 

Fantastic events are scheduled as part of the exhibit, and today we were happy to catch the first of the Kids Can Press Reading Series, today with the lovely Kyo Maclear reading Virginia Wolf (with the assistance of her entire family). Afterwards, the kids got to make their own Virginia Wolf ears (which alternate as a big blue bow, depending on one’s mood).

Three readings are left in the series: Wallace Edwards on November 10, Eugenie Fernandes on December 8, and Nicholas Oldford on December 15. (And we got free passes for the museum through the Sun Life Museum and Arts Pass at the Toronto Public Library. Such a great deal!)

October 15, 2013

Watch How We Walk by Jennifer Lovegrove

Jennifer LoveGrove’s first novel Watch How We Walk recalls Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness in that it’s the story of a young girl from a minority Christian sect whose oppressive religious community begins to bear down as her family falls apart. Emily Morrow is ten years old, a fervent Jehovah’s Witness who believes what she’s taught by her elders, swallows her discomfort as she goes knocking on the doors of her classmates, and leaves her classroom every morning to stand in the hall as her fellow students rise to sing the national anthem. She is eager to follow in the footsteps of her older sister Lenora, who had always been an exemplary student and daughter, baptized early at age 14. But lately Lenora has been changing, spending time with “worldly” friends, listening to disturbing music, and skipping meetings at the Kingdom Hall. Meanwhile, her mother is skipping meetings too, something about Uncle Tyler is making the elders concerned, and her father is refusing to acknowledge that anything is wrong, so focussed is he on making the right impression on the community and having his family do so too in order that he eventually can become an elder himself. There is little room for error by any of these characters whose elders will not hesitate to “disfellowship” or shun anyone who fails to tow the line, and the risk is causing Emily enormous anxiety.

Scenes of Emily’s childhood are interposed with those of Emily ten years later, living a lonely life away from her family and attending university, still trying to process some long-ago trauma involving her sister, and carving letters and numbers into her skin. These present-day scenes are particularly compelling and drive the narrative forward, the reader looking to discover just what has gone so wrong.

Young Emily is an empty vessel, taking in the world around her without much of an impression, which makes the childhood scenes come across as not particularly artful, slow in their mundanity. This is exacerbated by the fact that Emily is at such a remove from the world due to her religious upbringing, doubly unable to process what she sees. On the one hand, this makes sense, but still, I yearned for more complexity from this part of the story, particularly as the adult Emily chapters showed just how much depth this character–and this writer–was capable of. I wanted to know more about Emily’s parents, their relationship to each other and to their religion. And yet, there are some fleeting but wonderful scenes where LoveGrove shows us real sympathy for Emily’s parents and their struggles, shows that they are just a powerless against their fates in this system as Emily is herself, whole and flawed people in their own right.

Watch How We Walk is not a perfect novel, but it’s one I couldn’t stop reading, and whose images and metaphors have stayed with me since I finished it. LoveGrove provides fascinating insight into a little-known religious group and their practices, and has crafted a novel with mystery at its core.

October 14, 2013

in this world that is being made all the time

“I am, we each are the inmost of an endless series of Russian dolls; you who read are now encased within a layer I built for you, or perhaps my stories are now inside you. We live as literally as that inside each other’s thoughts and work, in this world that is being made all the time, by all of us, out of beliefs and acts, information and materials. Even in the wilderness your ideas of what is beautiful, what matters, and what constitutes pleasure shape your journey there as much as do your shoes and map also made by others.” –Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

October 11, 2013

On Alice Munro, Short Stories, and Gossip

Alice Munro display at Book City in the Annex

Alice Munro’s Nobel Prize win was the perfect answer to the David Gilmour tomfoolery of a few weeks back. Such a wonderful affirmation of a brilliant career, and of short stories, a form which is dear to my heart. My favourite Alice Munro book is Who Do You Think You Are?, though I read her best-of a few years ago, and discovered that her terrain is deeper and richer than I’d previously suspected. I am fortunate to have so much of her work left to explore.

If the Munro win gets you on a short story kick, may I suggest you check out Shaena Lambert’s Oh, My Darling and Rebecca Lee’s Bobcat, which are two of the best books I’ve read this year. And also The Journey Prize Stories, which I purchased this morning, inspired by short story fever, and a rather fetching window display.

In further news, 49thShelf got a shout-out from Lainey Gossip today. So that was a little exciting!!

October 10, 2013

Breastfeeding Babies in Picture Books

Every week is Breastfeeding Week at my house, which is my best excuse for being a few days late with this post specially designed to coincide with World Breastfeeding Week (which ended on Sunday). But let the festivities continue by picking one of these great picture books that celebrate and normalize the image of nursing mothers. These are not books about breastfeeding, but instead stories with breastfeeding taking place in the background, with breastfeeding as part of ordinary life, just like it is in the real world.

Kisses Kisses Baby-O! by Sheree Fitch and HildaRose: Baby love is bursting from the pages of this board book whose story narrates the pattern of a baby’s day. And a part of that day is “Shhh. Hushtime. Slurping Burping Snuggle Huggle Sleepy Sleepy Baby-O”, the accompanying illustration of the nursing baby from its Mama’s point of view. Even better: families of all different races are depicted in the book, which exists also in French and Mi’kmaq translation. (And do check out a the scene about expressing milk into a bathtub in Sheree Fitch’s novel for adults, Kiss the Joy as it Flies, which includes the line, “Holy shit… you’re like a goddamn cow”).

Everywhere Babies by Susan Meyers and Marla Frazee: This beautiful book with its bouncing rhythm never ceases to be a joy to read aloud, and I especially love that the babies in the book belong to so many different shapes of family. But this book is most remarkable for featuring my favourite image of a breastfeeding mother ever, for she is reading, and as far as I am concerned, that’s the only way to do it.

The Baby’s Catalogue by Janet and Allan Ahlberg: My copy of this book is disgustingly battered and covered in food splatters because we took it everywhere when my older daughter was little. It’s one of the lesser known books by the Ahlbergs, the creative team behind Each Peach Pear Plum and The Jolly Postman, and is full of several stories through images of different babies and families going about their day. A day which involves mealtimes, of course, and breast-milk is just one of many items on the menu.

Hello Baby by Jorge Uzon: This is the first in a series of four board books by Toronto photographer Uzon which document the first year of his baby’s life. That baby is brand new in Hello Baby, which documents the baby’s tiny fingers, tiny toes, and his very first feeding at his mother’s breast.

Cinnamon Baby by Nicola Winstanley and Janice Nadeau: Cinnamon Baby tells a story that’s familiar, as a new baby cries and cries but nobody knows why. Breastfeeding in just one of the soothing methods the baby’s mother attempts, along with puppetry, juggling and walking on her hands, but nothing works. The solution to Baby’s woes turns out to be its mother returning to her essential self by going back to work at her bakery–the child is finally quieted when the smell of cinnamon bread fills the air.

Dogs Don’t Eat Jam (and Other Things Big Kids Know) by Sarah Tsiang and Qin Leng: This is “What to Expect When You’re Becoming a Big Sister” in the  guise of a guide to babies that’s written from Big Sister’s perspective. “So you’ve been born! Congratulations…” it begins, and goes on to outline to the newborn all he/she has to look forward to. “You’re learning to drink milk,” Big Sister patiently explains, with an accompanying illustration of Mom with baby at her breast, before going on to show that Baby will learn new things every day.

Note that Sarah Tsiang is also the poet Yi-Mei Tsiang whose award-winning collection Sweet Devilry includes some of the best poems about motherhood I’ve ever encountered: “Learn a good latch, Kiddo–/ It pays to hold on/ to someone you love.”

Katie Morag and the Dancing Class by Mairi Hedderwick: I love the Katie Morag series for a million reasons, including the map of her island village at the beginning and end of every book, how the characters challenge gender binaries, the clutter in the corners of every illustration, and Katie Morag’s irrepressible spirit. These books are so vivid in their realness, and accordingly, breastfeeding is depicted. In this story, Katie Morag’s mother is shown breastfeeding Baby Flora Ann (as Little Brother Liam tries on a pink tutu), and the chaos of their household is all a-swirl around her.

Have Milk, Will Travel: Adventures in Breastfeeding by Rachel Epp Buller (Editor): Not a picture book, but a brand new anthology from Toronto’s Demeter Press, a collection of short essays and anecdotes from breastfeeding mothers in the trenches (and some who were lucky to escape with their lives). Breastfeeding is often presented as an all-too serious, divisive issue, but these essays are light and humorous, and will provide any expectant mother with great perspective, and makes a fun read for those of us who’ve been there.

October 9, 2013

Sadness and Rainbows

It’s hard to believe that it’s been only a year since Malala Yousafzai was shot, propelling her into the public consciousness, because I feel like I’ve always known her name. It was a name that solved a small problem of mine, the problem of why we no longer name our babies for heroes. I think we no longer name our babies for heroes because there are so few heroes, and heroes are so fallible that their names could become a burden. But it was different with Malala, whose miraculous recovery made her story a triumph. Now there’s a hero, I thought–somebody brave, smart, articulate, young and inspiring. I love that she is living proof that nonviolence is more powerful than a gun is. I was early in my pregnancy when Malala’s story landed on newspaper front pages around the world, and we decided that if our baby was a girl, we would name her after her.

Malala is a big name for a little baby to live up to, particularly our little baby, who is small, bald and funny-faced. It is Iris’s middle name, and we call her both names sometimes because the name is so melodic, but it doesn’t entirely suit her yet. I wonder what her connection to the name will come to be, though already it means something to Iris’s big sister. She knows the story of Malala, how bad men tried to hurt her because they didn’t believe that girls should go to school. She knows about Malala’s bravery, the force of her nonviolence, and, most importantly, she knows that life isn’t the same for girls everywhere as it is for her. Perhaps even that freedoms are not to be taken for granted.

The name “Malala” means “sadness” in Urdu, and even Malala Yousafzai herself has confessed that it is a hard name to carry for that reason. The meaning had me considering whether this was a suitable name to give my baby–particularly as her sister’s second name is “Joy”. But we decided to name her Malala anyway, because three remarkable women have had this name even with the sadness entailed: the 19th century poet warrior whom the modern-day Malalas were named after, Malala Yousafzai, and also former Afghan MP Malala Joya who Malala Yousafzai claims is an inspiration.

We gave her the name because sadness is part of the story, as an acknowledgement that there is still much to be overcome. But the sadness doesn’t negate the light, the hope. The world is big enough to contain all of this.

But we did call her Iris too, which means rainbow. It’s a fascinating name–a flower, a part of human anatomy, a song by not only the Goo Goo Dolls but also Split Enz (which I listened to over and over again while we waited for her to be born), Dylan McKay’s mother, and a Greek Goddess. A good counter and complement to the sadness, I think, and she suits it (though has been perhaps unfortunately nicknamed Aye Aye, while she does not possess a special middle finger to fulfil the same ecological niche as a woodpecker).