March 17, 2011
Irma Voth, and that is so not my colour
Bizarrely, during the summer of 2008, I realized that I had dresses that perfectly matched the covers of two Miriam Toews’ novels: here is my Flying Troutmans dress, and here I am suited up for Summer of My Amazing Luck. So I’ve been curious about the look of Toews’ upcoming novel Irma Voth, and just how it would fit into my wardrobe (which now is mostly jeans and black t-shirts, plus the two other dresses, as I’ve been too fat to wear them the last two years. I think they fit again, but I also think I need to go shopping).
And though I like the cover, the fact is that it really won’t look good on me– blue is so not my colour. I have a feeling that my string of Miriam Toews dresses may have finally come to an end.
March 17, 2011
And a fourth remarkable thing
This year, I was one of the provincial judges for the Ontario Secondary School Teacher Federation’s Student Achievement Awards, which gives prizes for creative works (this year around the topic “Words into Action: Become the Solution”). It was heartening to read the finalists’ works, particularly after reading Lemon and becoming convinced that the whole world was going to hell. These students’ optimism, determination and spiritedness was uplifting, and I’ve been a bit in love with teenagers ever since.
I also learned a lot: one thing in particular from the story whose character suddenly turns up her music on her headphones, though there has been no indication she’s been listening to music or wearing headphones. Perhaps an slip-up in the story’s construction, though I wonder if the headphones’ presence is just entirely too standard to be mentioned. The same way a writer doesn’t need to explain that a character is wearing a shirt before he tugs on its sleeves, or that the house has a telephone before that telephone rings (or perhaps maybe you do now. Maybe the landline is now remarkable. But anyway…).
But anyway indeed, I loved reading these poems and stories, and I loved meeting the winners at the awards ceremony on Saturday. You can check out a video about the winners and their works here, and I recommend it in particular if you are interested in falling in love with teenagers too.
UPDATE: Booklet of the prize winning works is available here as a PDF.
March 16, 2011
Three remarkable things
1) I’m quite excited about the YOSS Manifesto, which went live today on a spiffy new website rigged up by my favourite outfit, Create Me This. It’s a wonderful celebration of the short story form, and I couldn’t think of a better year to dedicate to short stories with so many stellar collections coming out.
2) My course is starting in a few weeks! Sign up for The Art and Business of Blogging at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. I am in the midst of planning, and things are turning out marvelously.
3) We’ve got a tie for the Canada Reads Independently popular poll. Somebody break it, please? Email me your top pick of this year’s selections (even if you haven’t read them all…).
March 15, 2011
Canada Reads Independently 2011: Update 3
I’ll admit that Canada Reads of all stripes have lacked the momentum of previous years, but this did not mean that I loved my reading any less. I was happy to have saved for last my favourite pick of the five, which was Lynn Coady’s Play the Monster Blind. And I’m even happier to have enjoyed all five books immensely, and I think they complemented one another in delightful ways.
Buried in Print enjoyed Play the Monster Blind also. She writes, “Obliquely contrasting emotions and experiences characterize many of the stories in this collection: euphoria and desperation, celebration and regret, stagnancy and propulsion, triumph and loneliness. It’s an unsettling but also powerful device…”
Rebecca Rosenblum read Mavis Gallant’s Home Truths. My favourite part of her review was: “Sometimes it feels like a story is just a random collection of notes and memories, but you get to the end and the weight on your brain is, in fact, story-like. How does she do that?” She notes the humour in these stories, which I claimed didn’t exist in my previous CRI post. And I suppose Rebecca is probably right, but it’s just not the kind of humour that has me laughing hysterically in bed over a reference to day-cake.
So I liked the Lynn Coady best. What say you? Email me at klclare AT gmail DOT com with your top Canada Reads Independently Pick, and we’ll see who came out on top this year. And feel free to send in your choice even if you haven’t read all the books, because every book deserves a little bit of love.
March 14, 2011
Ephemeral, yet eternal
My husband told a story at dinner the other day that involved a coyote and a mountain lion. “Like in Fauna,” I said, and we talked about the characters in this book we both read months ago, then we marvelled at how much the book had stayed with both of us. It’s not every book that does that, taking over dinner conversation as you put the pieces of the plot back together in your memory, and I continue to believe that Fauna is a really exceptional novel. That it is exceptional and never won any big book prizes, however, is to my mind no contradiction.
Fauna was exceptional for many reasons as a book, but not as much as an example of the novel form, and I think this is the reason it did not win any prizes. That it didn’t win prizes is not to say that it’s not a worthy book, but that a worthy book didn’t win a prize is also not to say it was robbed. Prizes are not the sole determinate of worthiness. And I’ve been thinking of this lately, considering the number of books I read that are considered unrecognized because they’re not short or longlisted by Giller and the like. The notion of the “snub”, the entitlement behind that notion, as though everyone deserves to be a winner. As though prizes were handed out on an assembly line, when really sometimes it’s the books that seem to be produced that way, so can you really be surprised when yours isn’t a winner?
But what I really mean to say is that there is a place for these books, all those books I read last year, for instance, that will never win a prize and should never win a prize, but that I thoroughly enjoyed reading anyway. That to be read is to be recognized, and I know it doesn’t come with much of a paycheque, but it’s everything, even without a gala. The ordinary couple discussing your story over macaroni is what you’re writing for, and the shelves upon which your book will forever dwell, and the dust that will gather on its pages over time to be blown away the odd time the book is opened– this is what you’re signing up for. The way the story will live on in readers’ minds, the connections they’ll draw between your story and others, and world outside the bookshelves, even. Something oddly ephemeral, yet eternal, less quantifiable than a grand prize win, but it matters, and it means your book matters, even if you didn’t win.
March 13, 2011
Canada Reads Independently 5: Play the Monster Blind by Lynn Coady
There were two stories in Lynn Coady’s Play the Monster Blind that ended so unsatisfyingly that I was able to perfectly understand the sentiment of those people who say they don’t like reading short stories. I like stories that are a kernel of a bigger idea, stories which (however ambiguously) contain all the answers to any questions about what happened before or what’s going to happen next, but one of these ended with a boy about to descend down a slope whose precariousness may or may not kill him. I mean, it’s a testament to the story that I cared so much either way, but still, I thought, come on now
But it is a testament to this book’s all-round wonderfulness that it was these two stories that were linked to stories that came later in the collection, stories that answered my questions about precarious slopes, and invested their characters with whole other dimensions. And then the other stories, the ones that stood on their own– they stood so well, so perfectly contained and yet entirely expansive.
It is also a testament to this book’s all-round wonderfulness and alleged funniness that it met my personal funniness benchmark, which is that I was compelled to read two pages of it to my husband beside me in bed while I laughed so hard that tears ran down my cheeks. This was from “In Disguise as the Sky”, a story that otherwise was not particularly funny, but no matter. It was the part about “day-cake”, and what “muffin” means, and “the sudden appearence of a tall woman with large breasts screaming ‘muffin'”.
A woman who has just met her fiance’s brawling, sprawling family and is now travelling with them through Cape Breton on a road-trip gets out of the car at one point and looks out at the ocean: “She didn’t know if this was beautiful or not”. Which is the kind of response a reader will have to these stories, with their moments of tenderness amidst ugliness, humour and desparation, their ribald gentility. A character like Cookie Sloane, a cross-eyed, drunken, lumbering thug, and how he managed to make the line, “I’m a known snatch-sniffer” kind of charming. When he smiles with his dirty teeth, and said, “God love ya, dear!” and I kind of wanted to jump his cross-eyed bones. I’m really not sure if Cookie is beautiful, but Coady makes me understand why Bess thinks that he is.
I was fairly sure I was going to love this book, which surely benefited from being championed by the exuberant Sheree Fitch whose exuberance was entirely justified– it was a pleasure to read this book from start to finish. Many of these stories are concerned with inhabitants of rural communities who have disgraced themselves and find shame within and without (or sometimes not at all with the former, as in the case of “Jesus Christ, Murdeena” who begins to walk through the town barefoot and convinced that she’s the second-coming). Sometimes these communities are seen from the outside as in the title story, the girl who can’t decide what is beautiful, and ends up with a split lip and a broken tooth after an elbow in the mouth from her future sister-in-law. In another, a woman returns after years away and numerous accomplishments racked up, and finds the past is either inescapable, or getting away from her so quickly she hasn’t even noticed it’s gone. In “Look, And Pass On” , a man “from away” becomes involved with a woman whose “wholesome sexiness” belies a darker past (and a terrible pair of underpants)– everything under these simple surfaces is always more complicated than it seems.
These are sad stories, but most funny stories are sad underneath (and this is the case with every other book I’ve encountered this year for Canada Reads Independently, except the Mavis Gallant, but only because she wasn’t funny). And underneath the funny, and underneath the sad, there is ballast here, stories rooted in place, in character, and emotion. They were so realized that their form was entirely secondary, and I could devour these one after the other. There wasn’t sameness, but this collection was a readable book, and I haven’t devoured any other of the Canada Reads Independently picks quite like it. And so this is my top pick, a book like this the whole point of the exercise, because it’s out of print even. When else was I going to read it? But now I am just so terribly glad that I did.
As I reflect upon all five books, Coady’s is the least fragmented of the bunch. Though a collections of stories like Gallant’s, it doesn’t play the games the three novels played with fact and fiction, truth and lies. And though I love these kind of games, I do wonder if they’re redundant sometimes when we’re reading fiction after all. If in accepting that I’m reading a story, I’ve already leapt through those hoops of what is real, and what is art, what is artifice, and the problem of fictional realities. The questions these stories ask are clever, but it is the rootedness of Coady’s stories that will stay with me, I think– the ballast. Her characters walk on ground that seems as solid as earth, and something quite like life plays out upon it.
1) Play the Monster Blind by Lynn Coady
2) Still Life With June by Darren Greer
3) Truth and Bright Water by Thomas King
4) Home Truths by Mavis Gallant
5) Be Good by Stacey May Fowles
March 11, 2011
After the third earthquake (2005)
After the third earthquake
I began to devise my own tremors
Cautious nerves alert
to pseudo seismic sensations
I fathomed near-death possibilities
via waves in a coffee pot.
Mistrustful of any stirring
You can be too in tune
with your house’s vibrato
Too inclined to begrudge men
who drill holes in the street for their living
For fear of what they might disturb
I could not take a step in case
of rattling plates threatening
killer tsunamic swampings
After the third earthquake
those beats pounding in my ears
made the room shake.
March 11, 2011
Subarashii kuni desu
Today, thoughts are with Japan, a most wonderful country that was good enough to give us a home for a while.
March 10, 2011
I Think I Love You by Allison Pearson
20 years late, as usual, I fancied David Cassidy in 1992 when The Partridge Family reruns were played on Much Music, and I am always happy to have “I Think I Love You” in my head. So that is one reason I wanted to read Allison Pearson’s latest novel, and also Michiko Kukatani liked it, and so did Maureen Corrigan. I’d never read Pearson’s first novel I Don’t Know How She Does It, but the premise of this one really appealed to me.
That premise is Petra, a thirteen year-old girl growing up with South Wales in the early ’70s, mad about David Cassidy with a passion only teenage girls are capable of. She and her friends collect his posters from The Essential David Cassidy Magazine (which come broken into pieces– there is a particularly disquieting scene involving Cassidy’s beheaded torso and unbuttoned jeans), kiss the posters with vasalined lips, practice writing their Mrs. David Cassidy signatures, and love their idol in an absolutely, utterly true way that Allison Pearson is insistent about taking seriously.
Meanwhile, we get alternating chapters from the point of view of Bill, fresh out of university and working as a rock journalist, or so he tells his girlfriend, when really he’s working for The Essential David Cassidy Magazine. Composing the monthly letters from David that Petra and her friends pore over hoping to find personal messages of undying love embedded between its lines.
Bill and Petra’s paths collide at a David Cassidy concert in London at which Petra’s friend Sharon nearly gets trampled. Twenty-five years later, they meet again, when Petra wins a chance to meet the former teen idol in Las Vegas in a concert sponsored by a magazine Bill runs. Petra is now a professional cellist, years away from the screaming girl in the crowd, but she’s just lost her mother and her marriage, and her daughter is on the cusp of teenagehood, which Petra finds completely terrifying. She can’t help but be immersed in a little nostalgia.
The first half of the novel is a bit awkward in the transitions between Bill and Petra’s stories, and Pearson writes Petra’s story so brilliantly that Bill’s part pales in comparison. Her portrayal of teenage girls is worthy of Judy Blume (and one character even seems lifted straight from Deenie), her respect for their feelings and intelligence makes these characters so compelling, and she nails it– the evil social dynamics, the insecurity, the desperation for everything the whole world seems to just be withholding. The second half with grown up Petra and Bill is basically a fairy tale and runs down a predictable road, but the characters remain so fresh, and Pearson is such a good writer that the whole book is a joy to read. In particular, her insights about mother/daughter relationships, and her ideas of teenage girlhood as expressed by Petra remembering her own adolescence and now contemplating her daughter’s.
I Think I Love You is a novel that manages to balance a little fun with a little subtext, and is well worth a read if you don’t mind the song stuck in your brain.
