March 25, 2014
How Little Lori Visited Times Square
The best thing about the Lillian H. Smith Library is that its collection was born out of the Toronto Library’s Boys and Girls House, which opened in 1923, and therefore a trip through the stacks reveals all kinds of vintage gems. Our favourite fruit of Saturday’s visit is How Little Lori Visited Times Square by Amos Vogel and illustrated my Maurice Sendak (which I came across whilst browsing for Viorst).
It’s a book with a warning label: “This is a very funny book and should not be read while drinking orange juice, or you will spill it!”
This is the only picture book by Vogel, who was known for his work in cinema and as author of the book, Film as a Subversive Art. Maurice Sendak is, of course, Maurice Sendak. And oh, this book is weird and terrific.
It’s about a little boy called Lori whose bedroom decor suggests a strong affinity for vehicles of all kinds. He decides one day to go to Times Square, but every route he takes brings him to somewhere different. This is a frustrating process for him–a helicopter delivers him to Idlewild Airport; the elevates subway to his Uncle’s house in Queens. The city in the background is a crowded place, populated by curious characters and decorated with billboards and signs whose words add a marvellous subtext and might be some kind of comment on consumerism but I can’t quite decide which. Potato Chip stores and Peanut butter stores, signs exclaiming, “Buy Now!”, and an ad on the side of the bus: “Don’t walk on the pigeons.”
He ends up crying on the 25th floor of Macy’s (after a trip up the elevator), but then is rescued by a slow-talking turtle who offers Lori a ride on his back. Lori agrees and off they go. But, um, that was four months ago.
“And nobody has heard from them since.”
The warning label is not unjustified then.
Another best thing? The book has been brought back into print where it remains. Because it’s totally totally brilliant.
March 23, 2014
The Age by Nancy Lee
My review of The Age by Nancy Lee appeared in The Globe and Mail this weekend:
It seems fitting, if sinister, to suggest that something in the air could be responsible for a strange tension emanating lately from the nation’s western edge. The Age – the long-awaited first novel by Nancy Lee, who won acclaim with the short-story collection Dead Girls– joins terrific recent fiction by Zsuzsi Gartner and Caroline Adderson to form a subgenre of Vancouver literature that puts the “domestic” in domestic terrorism. These works explore female characters’ relationships to extremism to complicate notions of home and family.
Lee’s title refers to two pivotal ages, her plot born of their intersection. The first is the age in which her story takes place, 1984, which, thanks to Orwell, was always going to be a storied year, even if Soviet warships hadn’t been gathering in the Atlantic with the Doomsday Clock ticking close to midnight. It would be a peculiar time in which – and here’s the second title reference – to come of age, seemingly on the brink of annihilation, as is the case for Gerry, Lee’s misfit protagonist.
Read the whole thing here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2BviXN6yhk
March 22, 2014
The M Word is here!
The M Word arrived on my doorstep yesterday morning, a whole box of beautiful books. It’s all a bit overwhelming and underwhelming at the very same time, and anyone who has ever published a book probably knows exactly what I’m talking about. Though I am lucky to have the support of 24 other writers who are as excited about this book as I am, and so grateful that they’ve lent not only their talents, but their enthusiasm. I’m grateful too for the enthusiasm of Emily Schultz, Ann Douglas and Miranda Hill, who were kind enough to read the book and offer endorsements. And finally, I’m grateful for friends and family who have been looking forward to this book for a while now. If you’d like to know how to best support The M Word, I’m happy to refer you to Carrie Snyder’s Practical Guide to Selling a Book. You should be able to get the book in your hands in the next few weeks, and I do hope you really enjoy it.
March 19, 2014
New Kids’ Books We’re Loving
The Most Magnificent Thing by Ashley Spires: Harriet is big into Ashley Spires’ books, in particularly, Binky the Space Cat, which got her started saying, “Holy fuzzbutt!” But with this latest picture book offering, Spires has truly outdone herself. It’s got everything. It’s got a dog, a girl who builds things, appealing illustrations that stand out against simple line drawings of an urban street-scape. It will appeal to both sexes. It’s got words, so many words, terrific verbs employed in the act of construction. It’s about coming up short, making mistakes and getting angry–the acknowledgement of such experiences is incredibly profound and has echoes of Sendak. Perfect tongue-in-cheek humour too that kids and adults will get–Harriet likes to note that the girl’s “out of the way” workspace is in fact in the middle of the sidewalk. I love delivering the understated line, “It was not her finest moment,” when the girl finally loses it. And that wonderful image when she hammers her finger, Spires’ skill as an comics artist translating so perfectly into picture book form. What a truly wonderful picture book, coming quite close (dare I say it?) to perfection.
The Tweedles Go Electric by Monica Kulling and Marie Lafrance: As a feminist and a troublemaker, I’ve long admired Kulling’s books for their subtle subversion of gender roles. She’s up to similar tricks in this one, her latest, which seems influenced by her experience as author of a series of picture book biographies of scientists. For this is a picture book about technology, the electric car at the dawn of the new century. The twentieth century, that is, the Tweedle family deciding to finally get with the times and joined the automotive race. But they don’t want a steam engine, or a car that runs on gasoline. It’s the electric car for them, a model which is smart, green and economical indeed. Young daughter Frances, however, is not so invested in her family’s new purchase, for “like most young girls”, her interests were more in the direction of higher education. She’s forever got her nose in a book, until she gets her chance behind the wheel and discovers that she has got a sense of adventure after all. Lafrance’s detailed drawings are delightful, and as humorous as the story itself. I do love that penny farthing!
March 18, 2014
On Omens and the Dangers of Reading Too Much
One of the most wonderful things I’ve read lately is “Odds and Omens: Superstition and IVF” by Terri Vlassopoulos, not least of all because it is an M Word kind of story, the kind of tale that gets told and makes so many women feel less alone. And even those of us who’ve not struggled with fertility can identify with what she’s writing about, because anybody who’s ever tried to get pregnant knows what tricks mind and body can play on one another during the two weeks or so before a pregnancy can be detected. I wonder sometimes if it’s a problem particular to those us who read too much, who imagine the world can be interpreted through signs and symbols just like a book.
Terri’s essay also meant something to me, as I’ve been waiting for test results on my thyroid lump for the past two weeks. The good news, we learned this morning, is that the lump is still benign, which always comes as a relief. This is my third round of this, and I am definitely getting used to it. I didn’t really go insane with anxiety (though I am also not pregnant this time, and can drink!), and all the sleep I lost last night (which was plenty) is on account of my evil children. When I did it last August, I didn’t do too badly either, though the night before my results was this extraordinary evening so golden that I was quite sure I’d receive a fatal diagnosis in the morn, just for the sake of juxtaposition.
The morning of my biopsy appointment two weeks ago, in which I learned that my lump is ever-changing, I’d happened upon three accounts of women with terminal cancer diagnoses. That evening, with my biopsy much on my mind, I checked Facebook to inquire after an old friend of mine who has been living with metastatic breast cancer for the past three years, and discovered that she’d died the day before. Which was perspective, of course, a sign for me to suck it up because I’ve got it lucky in oh so many ways, but also pretty devastating and incredibly sad. Odds and omens indeed.
In some ways, I’m learning how to live with uncertainty. I no longer imagine “biopsy” to be a synonym for “death sentence”. I’ve had so many, and I just call them “tests” now. I have much cause to be optimistic that everything will be fine, and I very nearly am, and then. “What if it’s a trick? What if the universe is screwing with me, getting me all complacent so that when the bad news finally comes, I am so far from ready?” (Though who is ever ready? Sometimes I imagine that worrying is preparation of a kind, though I think I’m fooling myself.)
This is the point at which my husband reminds me that I am not the centre of the universe, that the world has not specifically arranged itself with my interests in mind. That if I’m in fact a character in a book, as I seem to think I am, it’s a book I haven’t finished reading yet, and that there’s no way really to ever know what comes next except to turn the page and see what happens.
March 17, 2014
After Alice by Karen Hofmann
What a pleasure is spending a weekend devouring a book, and for me this weekend, that book was After Alice by Karen Hofmann, which I absolutely adored. It was the most unCanLitty CanLit I’ve encountered in ages, the story instead calling to mind English novelists like Anita Brooker and Daphne DuMaurier, and then Wallace Stegner, Barbara Kingsolver and Joan Didion in its evocation of place. This is a debut novel by Hofmann, whose previous poetry collection was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Prize in 2009, but she writes with a touch so rich and deft that there is nothing of the debut about it.
There’s a lot going on here: Sidonie Von Täler has retired from her academic job in Montreal designing computer models for psychology experiments. Sidonie herself is something of a cold-fish, so this seems a job to which she’d be unusually suited. We’re locked into her point of view, and it soon becomes apparent that something is just askew–she is a synesthete, displays some symptoms of Aspergers in her perception of the world. Which is not to say that Sidonie’s point of view is the point of this story, that this is a novel or that she’s a protagonist we’d ever refer to as “quirky” ala Come Thou Tortoise or the Dog in Nighttime, but just that she’s a bit peculiar. Her point of view is fascinating, and her voice is sharply defined.
She’s returned to the Okanagan Valley where she’d fled from years before. In her childhood, her family’s orchard had been one of the biggest in the area, their land defining every circumstance of their existence and their status in the community. Sidonie, ever awkward, had been raised in the shadow of her beautiful sister, Alice, whose tragic later circumstances we’re not made aware of until later in the book. Upon her return, Sidonie gets to know her sister’s sons and their own family’s. She’s also close to her niece, Cynthia, whom she’d raised after Alice’s death, and Cynthia’s son, Justin, though much goes unsaid between all of them, Sidonie choosing to believe that she prefers her independence to the complications and niceties of family ties.
And you can’t blame her–Sidonie is brilliant, accomplished and self-succificent, having left a life rich with culture and a couple of close, rewarding friendships back in Montreal. She’d married well–an architect who built Habitat 67 in Montreal, where they’d lived until their marriage ended. She looked upon her marriage not warmly, but as coolly as she did everything. Some might find her life lonely, but there is no sign that she does. But something has driven her to come home, to a past that refuses to stayed packed away in boxes.
After Alice has mystery at its core, and while its approach is most literary, Hofmann has combined that approach with well-tuned plot that makes this book a page-turner. It is also very much a book about place, though not sentimentally so–Sidonie doesn’t do that–but instead the details of the land and what grows there, what it means to work that land in terms of economics and physical labour. It’s a novel that might take a place on the shelf beside Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Miracle or The Hundred Mile Diet in its consideration of the terroir, what the land does to its people. And what times does too, Hofmann weaving past and present together, Sidonie’s family home casting a spell that makes it difficult for her to tell where one of them finishes and the other begins, though it’s really that points like this just don’t happen.
Hofman’s prose is lyrical and effective, if a little in need of tautness. And her ending is a little bit too tidy and choreographed, though still with its surprises. But these are minor quibbles for a novel so ultimately satisfying, and so I welcome Hofmann’s refreshing voice with this wonderful book, one of the most interesting and exciting that I’ve encountered in ages.
March 16, 2014
Spring Break
I totally get March Break now. I never really did before. But the weeks leading up to it were threatening to destroy me. Compared to others, we didn’t have it so bad, but we’d had three straight weeks of sick kids, too much going on on the weekends, and the mad scramble that is every day. This year, February didn’t really seem so bad, but I think it was just saving itself for March, which hit with such a wallop. And oh, this long winter. We’ve really had enough, and so, this was the week that came along to save us. Stuart took the week off too, and we did what we do best: a few splendid things, plenty of lunch, a whole lot of nothing, and precious precious time.
Monday was lunch at Caplansky’s, which never ever fails, followed by a visit to the Lillian H. Smith Library for a brand new stack of books. On Tuesday, we took a road trip to the McMichael Gallery to see the Mary Pratt Exhibit, which was oh, so extraordinary, definitely worth a visit. We felt a bit guilty (not really) as we drove past the sign for Legoland, but luckily Harriet can’t read yet, and the Mary Pratt exhibit was engaging for her as well, with all its bright colours and familiar objects. (She likes the hot dog one the best). On Tuesday, we actually wore shoes instead of boots, but any indication that spring was in the air was packed away with Wednesday’s snowstorm, which we walked through to get to lunch at Fanny Chadwick’s and it was totally worth it, even with the snow so wet and awful that my face was burning with cold and so soaked I had to be mopped off when we arrived. Thursday, the sun came out, and we went to the AGO, which was no crowded and had totally excellent stuff on for kids (so I felt better about Legoland), though I have no photos of any of it because I smashed my phone on the streetcar floor (which is made of rubber. How is that possible?). And then on Friday, we had afternoon tea at the Windsor Arms Hotel, and Harriet and Iris were both so totally good—with the former, this is due to her being excellent, the latter is pure luck. It was Iris’s first afternoon tea, and we threw scone pieces her way to keep her happy, and it worked. As ever, it was nice to do something so special.
And now with tomorrow, we’re back to reality, though it will be reality with extra crazy because The M Word is in the world! Which will bring me out of my hermetic existence, which I am slightly dreading, but which I’m also committing to enjoying, because this is such a dream come true.
March 13, 2014
Little You
Little You by Richard Van Camp and Julie Flett is the first book whose content interests Iris just as much as its flavour. This makes me happy because I love it too, and so delight in reading it over and over. The line, “You are mighty/ you are small” describes our littlest girl so perfectly. And then then next line, “You are ours after all,” and I love that too, because ours is what she’s always been, belonging to our whole family, and I’ve loved her even more for that.
At first glance, Julie Flett’s illustrations are simple, though they’re made interesting with different prints and patterns throughout, and I notice new details all the time. Like the Mother’s bright red tights in this in image as she dances with her baby.
And then I looked even closer upon my 180th read to see a hole in her big toe, which is pretty much the story of my life.
Just when I thought I couldn’t like this book any more…
It’s so absolutely perfect.
- Learn more about this book here, how it was inspired by Eddie Vedder, and how it was distributed across the Northwest Territories and published also in Cree, Chipewyan and South Slavey.
March 11, 2014
Bark by Lorrie Moore
I’m still discovering Lorrie Moore, which is a pretty lucky place to be in as a reader. The first book I read of hers was Anagrams, and I just thought it was weird. I really liked The Gate at the Stairs, and then I read Birds of America but I mustn’t have been reading carefully because I don’t even remember it. So when I opened up her latest collection, Bark, I didn’t have the same expectations that her much more devoted readers might have had. I wouldn’t have been able to tell if it was a good Lorrie Moore or a middling Lorrie Moore. As I read it, all I could think was, “So, this is Lorrie Moore,” which was a pretty fantastic revelation.
The stories themselves are many-angled, surprising, full of perfectly articulating revelations. On divorce: “It’s like a trick. It’s like someone puts a rug over a trapdoor and says, ‘Stand here.’ And so you do. Then boom.” Or, “It was like being snowbound with someone’s demented uncle. Should marriage be like that? She wasn’t sure.” And, “A life could rhyme with a life—it could be a jostling close call that one mistook for the thing itself.”
No super-narrative tricks or sleights of hand are going on here. As short story shapes go, these ones are mostly standard, riddled with quirk, but then there is this extra-perspective at play in which characters call out surreality of their situations. “He had never been involved with the mentally ill before…” it is noted of a character in the first story, “Debarking,” a guy who’s dating the bizarre quirky kind of woman who turns up in many a short story, a manic pixie dream girl gone very very wrong. All of these are stories of a world gone askew, and its people definitely know it, however powerless they may be against its forces.
The surrealism and sense of askewness is unsurprising. These are stories of America in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the first story situated sometime in the months after 9/11 and before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The final story begins the day after Michael Jackson died in 2009, and doesn’t offer much hope for the decade to come: “I tried to think positively. ‘Well, at least Whitney Houston didn’t die,’ I said to somebody on the phone.” Foreclosures, banks and big-box bookstores, both. War, fear and Abu Grahib are the backdrop to these smaller stories of domestic disappointment. It got to the point where I was underlining references to decapitation, and there were more than a few. I got the sense that this is a book haunted by the story of Daniel Pearl.
While many of these stories have been published elsewhere, they’ve been collected seamlessly into a curious, fascinating whole that is as much worth remarking on as the stories themselves. The stories are linked by weird decapitation references, and the word “bark” which comes up again and again in a variety of contexts. Trees for one, the bark their protection, as is the case with dogs (which also come up again and again). The question of whether bark is, in fact, worse than bite—just one of many things we’re told that’s patently not true. I wonder if Moore’s bark, our bark, is in fact humour—what saves us from this savage life.
March 9, 2014
The M Word in Waterloo!
Carrie Snyder will be reading from The M Word at Waterloo Indie Lit Night on April 14, along with some other fantastic authors. It’s going to be great.
