June 6, 2011
Wild Libraries I Have Known: Vanessa's Bedroom
In which Nathalie Foy tells us about a wild library she has known:
It’s not a library, exactly, but I did borrow books from Vanessa’s bedroom. It was a large, cool and quiet space, with the hushed and reverential atmosphere of a library, and from its shelves, I borrowed many books. When Kerry asked me to contribute to this series, it was memories of Vanessa’s books that came most powerfully to mind.
Port-au-Prince, 1977. We were seven, and Vanessa was my best friend. We lived in Haiti, and attended Union School in Port-au-Prince. Vanessa was an only child and adopted, her pigtails were perfect ringlets and never fell out; I had an annoying younger brother and a boring pedigree, my poker-straight hair sought any means of escape from braids, ponytails or hair bands. Vanessa had a four-poster bed with a canopy in her bedroom, all frills and luxury. Bright pink bougainvillea bloomed outside her window, and in golden rows on her bookshelf sat the complete set of Nancy Drew mysteries. Every single one. All arrayed in numerical order, the yellow spines each had the cameo profile of the girl detective holding her magnifying glass: a vast, crisp expanse of potential. Even the school library did not have the whole set.
Oh, how I envied her that collection! I borrowed and read the books in sequence, but even at the time, I was aware of a definite taint to the experience. There was a limit placed on my pleasure by greed: I wanted the books to be mine. I am certain that the book buyer in me was born in that bedroom, because I do like to own books.
Somehow, at the impressionable age of seven, I conflated the wonders of that complete set of Nancy Drew mysteries and the four-poster bed with being an only child and adopted—all of which were to be envied. It was all so exotic; it was what I was not. I’ve met other only children and adopted children since then, none with complete sets of Nancy Drew, and I like my brother considerably more today than I did when he was five and a pest. I have since learned that Carolyn Keene is a pseudonym for the stable of anonymous writers who wrote the Nancy Drew mysteries for $125 a pop. My life experience has not cured me of my covetousness when it comes to books, though.
I love libraries. I love what they do and what they stand for. I love that they open up the world for us. I am humbled each time I see the crowds outside of the Toronto Reference Library, and I feel a surge of joy when I see the noble griffin protecting the doors of Lillian H. Smith branch of the Toronto Public Library, the branch I use most regularly. Most of the time, I check out books for my three boys, being more reliable with getting things read by the due date with them than for myself. But if we read a book and love it, I itch to buy it. My boys have the luxury of a childhood lived in one place. I moved to a new country every two or three years, and precious few books from my childhood survived the moves. I’m making up for lost time and making my own rows of delicious books to devour.
June 5, 2011
The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright
“You think it’s about sex, then you remember the money,” notes Gina, the narrator of Anne Enright’s fabulous new novel The Forgotten Waltz, and that statement just about sums up the book. Though it’s hard to forget about the money, the embarrassment of riches, real estate fortunes (characters who feel inadequate about not owning four houses)– it’s there from the very beginning of the novel, whose story unfolds from the turn of the century with Ireland’s economic boom, and comes crashing down with its eventual bust (which I, with my minimal interest in economics, learned about in this fantastic Vanity Fair article “When Irish Eyes Are Crying”).
The Forgotten Waltz is all about real estate, in the tradition of Howards End. And like The Last September, another Irish novel which I read last week, a personal story is cast against a national backdrop. The personal story is about another kind of real estate, about taking what isn’t your own. Still suffering from the fallout of her extramarital affair, from having fallen in love with another woman’s husband (who is somebody’s father too), Gina recounts the story of her own journey from boom to bust. The story, however, just like the story of the economic boom, is hardly straightforward: “I can’t be too bothered here with chronology. The idea that if you tell it, one thing after another, then everything will make sense./ It doesn’t make sense.”
Enright won the 2007 prize for her novel The Gathering, though I found her memoir Making Babies and her short story collection Yesterday’s Weather much more resonant. The way these two books zeroed in on domestic detail, on objects and what her characters did with them, and Enright’s doing that here once again. Quite different from the focused detail itself, however, is her conversational, meandering prose, with issue-skirting and repetition, and the effect is to cast a spell of its own. And how this woman can craft a sentence: “The Danes who did the refurbishment put in irrigation the way you might do the wiring so the place is a thicket, and though I am cynical about these things (the idea that a few plans makes us more ‘green’) I even voted for the canaries, at some meeting, only to be outvoted on the grounds of canary shit.”
Enright is funny, in particular when considering tender things, as anyone who’s read her mothering memoir is already aware. She writes with more sympathy than Rachel Cusk, whose writing is similar (I just read her The Bradshaw Variations, and there are all kinds of connections between the two novels.). Enright is fully attuned to the strange dynamics of modern society and all its accoutrements– the mobile phone text messages that are integral in Gina and Sean’s affair are perfectly worked into the novel’s weave. And she is careful to include more traditional methods of obsessive love, Gina sitting outside his house at night, for example, watching the lights inside go off one-by-one.
Each chapter is titled with the name of a pop song, whose musicality complements the nature of Enright’s prose, but also serves to contrast perceptions of love with its more sordid realities. Sure, “It’s in His Kiss”, agrees Enright, but then she examines what “it” is exactly, and the possibility that one kiss can take a character places she never intended to go and won’t be able to turn away from.
June 2, 2011
Slave Lake Library
Slave Lake Library Staff
As many people already know, when much of Slave Lake Alberta was destroyed by wildfire a couple of weeks ago, the town lost its library. The tragedy of this is underlined by the fact the library was less than two years old, and had been built after years of local fundraising efforts. And because we’re library enthuasiasts around here, and because we’ve been delivered much good fortune of late, we decided to pass some of that fortune along with a donation to the library and its reconstruction. I’d like to encourage the library-lovers amongst you to do the same, or perhaps make a bid in the Slave Lake Book Auction, which is a fantastic campaign run by Lavender Lines.
June 1, 2011
Mini Review: Look at Me by Anita Brookner
Can you blame me for having kept Anita Brookner’s Look at Me on my shelf for years? Seriously, the cover is hideous. But because it started with B, I got to it finally, and though the start was slow, it grew on me. Which is unsurprising, because the book is so Barbara Pymmish– spinster librarians, their tea rituals and lonely lunches. But only superficially, actually. In her book Felicity and Barbara Pym, Harrison Solow writes that Brookner “lacks the insularity which makes the English, English” and that her heroines “struggle incessantly, never in balance”. There is no charm to Anita Brookner, but this, of course, is why her books seem more literary. (I am not sure that they actually are, or perhaps what I mean is that Pym’s unliterary-ness is only understood by those unschooled in Pym.)
Look at Me is the story of Frances Hinton, spinster librarian, who feels she’s finally glimpsed what life is, what the world is, when she is befriended by Nick and Alix Fraser (who Jonathan Yardly writes “could just as well be Tom and Daisy [Buchanan]’s British cousins”). The couple, however, plays with her affections, and at the end of the story she’s left with her same lonely life, though I wonder about Frances’ own role in her fate. She has cast herself as an observer, but as a result, we have very little understanding of her character, of how she comes across to others. We must put the pieces together with statements by the malicious Alix Fraser, and it is left to us to decide which character is more unreliable. Frances, who is also beginning a career as a writer, may have more control of her narrative than she appears to.
June 1, 2011
The Vicious Circle reads: Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel
All forecasts called for things to get really vicious last night as the Vicious Circle assembled to read a book that nobody seemed crazy about. The book was Emily St. John Mandel’s Last Night in Montreal, which we were prepared to go a little bit easy on, considering it was a first novel, but still, the book was hard to take in places. Viciousness did not ensue, however, mostly because the book failed to find a fervent defender for the rest of us to rail against.
It was thought that this was the kind of the book a character in the book might have written (and these were the kind of characters who like to sit in cafes and talk about the art they’re not making). We thought that this book’s author was robbed by her copy-editors, who did an atrocious job (and don’t even get us started on the semi-colons). And also by editors who would have picked up indescrepencies such as how Eli knew about what Lilia did when her hair got too long, except they weren’t together long enough for her hair to have got too long more than once. Or there wouldn’t be a ship in Montreal harbour in the dead of winter.
Montreal didn’t seem realized to us here. Two of us thought that Elise Moser’s novel As I Have Loved and Hidden It was a much better realized version of this novel. One of us though that the author was trying to cast the same spell that Claudia Dey cast in Stunt (with tightrope walkers and all) but she failed to. We failed to engage with the characters. And though Mandel did a good job in places of creating suspense, the big reveal was a bit anti-climatic. We didn’t get a sense that these were characters who lived in the world (which might have been okay if the spell had worked, but it didn’t). We thought that the idea of Montreal as a city unpenetrable to French non-speakers wasn’t realistic, we wondered about Eli taking travel advice from a woman who hadn’t lived in Montreal since she was 9, we didn’t buy the idea of Montreal as a sinking garrison, as a place where a dead language lives. It also made no sense that Eli only spoke English, because most PhD programs have a second-language requirement (and surely an aptitude for languages is an aptitude for languages, whether dead or alive). These were the practical considerations that kept bogging us down– like who was paying Christopher to drive around America for years and years? Or why was Michaela so consumed by her father’s accident when she’d lost him so many years before it.
In lieu of viciousness, we took up eating cheese, and then conversation drifted away and never managed to come back. Which was okay. It was the end of a hot summer day, and the sun was down, the air was cool. It seems every home we gather in is a particularly lovely, comfortable one, though we’re not sure if this is just a coincidence, or we make it that way. Nevertheless. We ate cupcakes, and strawberry pie, and we kept on drinking wine, and we kept having to lower our voices because the windows were open and we didn’t want to horrify the neighbours.
May 31, 2011
Magic Cities at the Osborne Collection
I wish I’d written this post weeks ago, because it would have given you more than four days to make your own visit to the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books (at the Lillian H. Smith Library) to see the Magic Cities Exhibit, which closes on Saturday (June 4). But I couldn’t have posted it, because I only went to the exhibit yesterday, but I’m putting this post up anyway in order to urge all those who can to go and see it for themselves.
I’ve written about this before (scroll down), but I love houses, and literary houses in particular: Howards End, To the Lighthouse, Anne of Green Gables (and the girls of Lantern Hill. New Moon, Silverbush etc. Clearly LM Montgomery loved houses too). Most of my favourite books have a house at their centres, and it was the case when I was little too– I loved the way illustrations showed houses with a wall removed so that you could see life going on inside it. (I still feel similarly when the outlines of rooms from a demolished buildings are visible on the wall of the house still standing next door). I loved Virginia Lee Burton’s The Little House, as well, and now so too does Harriet.
So it was with great joy that I discovered that the Magic Cities exhibit is all about houses. Pop-up books with castles inside, picture books about how houses are built, and the parts of houses, and the early ways that children learn about architecture. (Though, surprisingly, I did not see reference to A House is a House for Me). Novels about houses like Green Gables, and Green Knowe, that Little House on the Prairie, and books about neighbourhoods, and different kinds of cities and towns. Lovingly curated with every wonderful book you’ve ever forgotten, the exhibit features books old and new, original artwork, and plenty to reflect on and delight in. So glad I got to take a look at it before it turns over to the summer exhibit (which is Turtle Mania! I’ll be checking that one out too).
May 30, 2011
Today I went to the bookstore
Today I went to the bookstore and purchased these fine volumes: Margaret Drabble’s A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman, Carolyn Black’s The Odious Child, and Granta 115. The occasion? Well, after finishing up his contract on Friday, Stuart was offered a new job this afternoon, and starts on Monday. We are thrilled. Further celebrations were had via ice cream cones and sushi take-out. What a lovely, lovely day.
May 30, 2011
Mini Review: The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen
I’ve almost made it through the Bs, and it’s amazing how much I’ve loved these books. Puts me in the right too for having kept these books around even though I wasn’t bothering to read them– there was a reason after all. The Last September is the third book I’ve read by Elizabeth Bowen– the first was The House in Paris and the second was The Heat of the Day which I found awfully strange and difficult. Unsurprisingly, as it was only her second novel, The Last September is more accessible than the others, more straightforward, but this is also a very mature book for a second novel by a writer who was only thirty when she wrote it.
The Last September takes place in rural Ireland in 1920 during the Irish War of Independence. The setting is wholly domestic, and minor dramas take place between various characters who are so compelling that all of this would be absolutely enough, but for the war taking place in the background. The war is still distant enough that characters don’t take it seriously, or feel that it has anything to do with them. English soldiers stationed nearby are seen as useful for even numbers dances, and the Irish girls fall in love with men, much to their families’ consternation. There are random-seeming bursts of violence, surprising knowledge that familiar neighbours are involved in the cause of independence, but largely, life goes on with its tennis games, afternoon teas, dances, and walks in the woods steeped in import.
It is not that Bowen plays with the juxtaposition, but rather that the background informs the foreground and vice versa. The connections are subtle (as is so much in this novel of manners) and it’s just that the characters don’t notice them, and the reader unversed in Irish history mightn’t either. Which will only make the story’s ending all the more shocking, and cast the entire novel in a whole new light.
May 30, 2011
Wild Libraries I Have Known: Binbrook Library
There are only so many wild libraries one person can know, so it is fortunate that some lovely writers are going to continue this series now that I’ve exhausted my own supply of library loves. First up is my dear friend Rebecca Rosenblum, award-winning author of Once, whose second story collection The Big Dream will be published in September.
I have to admit that my original draw to the Binbrook Public Library was the very unliterary plastic slide. I was about 4 I suppose, and this indoor slide, made out of what seemed to be orange Tupperware, was thrilling. Even better, the slide could be inverted to form a very safe version of a teeter-totter. It was hard for a four-year-old to flip this heavy thing, even with the help of her two-year-old brother, but we could do it—a very satisfying feat.
So from a young age, Binbrook Library was always challenging and rewarding me. I’m not from Binbrook—I’m from the next town over, where there’s a very nice, if slightly smaller and less modern library. That one is in a house, and when I finally went there, as an older child, I was concerned that it didn’t look like a library. Binbrook Library will always remain my prototypical library, my library-of-the-mind, and it is a good standard. Opened in 1982 (it replaced an older structure that my parents apparently visited in that pointless time before they had kids), the one-story rambling building had lots of windows, 100% wheelchair accessibility that necessitated an excellent ramp I liked to run up and down. There was also a large, light-filled open area for the afore-mentioned orange slide/rocker, as well as story times, plants, and two large decorative quilts hanging from the wall. The quilts were made by children at the local school.
I did eventually take an interest in the books in the children’s section, though I was especially keen on how many I might be permitted to take home. The librarians and pages all seemed to know who I was, and always greeted me as Becky, though I did not have my own card until I was older. An oblivious child, I did not know who they were until I was much older than that.
Obvious to any former country dweller would be that my parents always drove me to the library—there was no other way for a rural kid to go anywhere. So I guess they were there when I was running up and down that ramp, but I don’t remember their presence except for the final check-out battle over what (how much) I could take. I was sometimes left for library programs and on other occasions just to read. I guess that’s a 1980s thing parents don’t do now, but seriously, the Binbrook library was the safest place in the world.
A favourite library memory, though only loosely tied to the actual library: I was bolting across the gravel parking lot one day, anxious to get inside, and my father waved at an elderly woman walking down the drive from the retirement home behind the library. Then he turned away to do or say something, and when he turned back, she had disappeared. He sent me into the library while he investigated; it turned out she had fallen into a long-grassed ditch, invisible to the drive or the parking lot. She was quite embarrassed when my dad retrieved and righted her, but better than remaining as she was in the grass.
It was a good bit more country back then. Changes since I moved away include subdivisions, and a school friend of mine who is now a librarian walks from the subdivision to work everyday—I haven’t been back in a while, and can’t quite picture that. The other change is that the Wentworth system, which the Binbrook library was part of, has now been folded into the Hamilton one. I wish they’d done that when I lived there; when the two were separate collections, if you wanted a book that wasn’t in the Wentworth system, you had to physically go into Hamilton.
To be honest, I was scared of the big central library in downtown Hamilton—it not only had more than one room, it had half a dozen floors on which to get lost in. Worse, none of the librarians knew my name, which (obviously!) precluded my speaking to them. In grade school, I only went there for extremely demanding school projects; I continued to use the Binbrook library for most of my personal and scholastic reading needs well into my teens. I was quite happy to wander the Dewey-decimal aisles and take my research materials to the long study tables behind the librarian’s desk. As a little kid, I had only wanted to tally up how many, but as I got older I remained convinced that more is better when it comes to books—more resources, more ideas, more points of view. Binbrook’s collection was (and, I assume, is now even more) substantial for a small-town library, but eventually my schoolwork got more specialized and I had to go more often to the city library, or even subject specific ones at McMaster University. I had the Dewey Decimal system almost by heart by that point, and the discovery of the Library of Congress system was one of the many things I held against big strange libraries.
Of course, I eventually learned to use, and even love, a wide variety of libraries. But none of the others ever felt quite like home.
May 29, 2011
Uncustomary Blogs
“It is now customary for authors to have character blogs…” someone tweeted from the Writers Union of Canada AGM this weekend, which made me think a bit. And then some more after I’d attended the AGM’s “speednetworking” event and spoke to a number of writers with questions about blogs and how to use them. “My publisher told me I should have a blog,” said one of them, but she had no idea what to do with that advice. What I thought about all of this finally is that the most successful author blogs have nothing customary about them.
Madeleine Thien’s blog was noted as the “customary” author blog, but I haven’t seen many other blogs like it. Set up to complement her latest book Dogs at the Perimeter, the blog uses her novel as a platform to launch further and deeper into Cambodian history, to expand upon the research she used for her book, and to round out her characters with a bit of metafictional fun. That her novel so nicely intersects history and story offers great potential for both of these to work together on the blog, to further engage readers who want to know more about the story’s background, to use visual materials that wouldn’t have worked in the novel, and to create a blog that is a work of art onto itself.
Sean Dixon has created blogs for both his novels that work in a similar way. I remember finding The Lacuna Cabal blog once I’d finished reading his novel The Girls Who Saw Everything and being so thrilled that these characters I’d been following could live beyond the page (and it’s not that the page wasn’t enough. It’s that I liked it so much, I wanted more). Unlike with Thien, Dixon is straightforwardly the author of his blog, but his work similarly blurs lines between fact and fiction and the blog is a great place for such blurring to continue. Dixon’s characters are so real to him that he’s happy to tell use more about them, and to provide more background information on how his story grew into an actual book. He’s having similar fun with the blog for his new novel The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn, using photographs of locales depicted in his book, and making connections between his book and the world through links to various things.
What makes these blogs work (and Ami McKay also did a fine job of this with The Birth House, also Amy Lavender Harris with Imagining Toronto), however, is that clearly their authors are enjoying what they’re doing, they’re invested in the project, the blog for its own sake instead of as a marketing tool. The blogs work because the authors find links they want to share with us, the blogs become compendiums of fascinating stuff, and their eclectic-ness is a reflection of the authors’ personalities. That personality is what makes readers keep returning, a blog as unique as the individual who wrote it. The chief attraction of blogs, of course, are the glimpses they offer into the people behind them.
But not all authors need to create blogs of such scale. Perhaps their books don’t lend themselves, or (importantly) the author is a not a big appreciator of blogs and has no idea (or interest) in how they work. It would sort of be like someone who’s never read a book trying to write one– inevitable disaster. Successful bloggers, I think, never have to try that hard– if it doesn’t come naturally, if it doesn’t seem fun, then it’s not worth it.
Blogs are useful for keeping websites current, however, and having a blog but calling it “News” is an easy way to get that practical benefit but not have to pour one’s heart into it. I also like the idea of a blog as a limited project, as with Anne Perdue’s road trip blog, so that the challenge of maintenance is no longer an issue. Establishing at the beginning that a blog will not be updated too often is also a simple way to keep it sustainable.
The nice thing about a blog is that it can be anything, and a writer can adapt the form to suit her needs and interests (and can further adapt as needs and interests change). She can decide how much of her personal life she wants to share, how much focus she wants stuck to a specific book, if she will take the voice of a mentor, an expert, or a friend, if she will focus on herself or her work, or other stuff in the world. She can create a blog that is not only of interest to her readers, but is also useful to her as a writer and a reader. She can–like Madeleine Thien did–choose not to make what is a customary blog, and it’s probably a wise choice. Because who wants to read the blog that is like everybody else’s? (Which, incidentally, is the blog that eventually fizzles out anyway.)
