March 30, 2008
Isn't twenty-first century marriage just grand
The very best thing I’ve read lately is Andrew O’Hagan’s “Iraq, 2 May 2005” in the LRB, and it seems to be available online. A stellar piece of journalism, standing as evidence but not of anything too obvious.
This week I was interested to hear Diane Francis on The Current talking about her new book Who Owns Canada Now, for these are the details my job concerns.
Margaret Atwood on Anne of Green Gables (which I’m looking forward to rereading this summer). Lizzie Skurnick on Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game (which is one of very few of my YA books that came with with me into adulthood, even surviving through the age in which I thought I was over all that.) Middlemarch celebrated. Justine Picardie guests at Dovegreyreader’s today.
Must get up now. My husband has just cleaned the whole of oven/stove and I’m still in bed (oh– but isn’t twenty-first century marriage just grand! He’s even brought me my tea. Can’t take this for granted though, or he’ll leave me for a cleaning lady).
March 30, 2008
At a Loss For Words
Governor General’s Award-winning writer Diane Schoemperlen’s latest novel At a Loss for Words is deeply referential. Its tone in the tradition of Lynn Crosbie’s Liar and Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. (I wonder, is “Spurned Lover Narrative” actually a Can-Lit sub-genre?). And Schoemperlen certainly doesn’t couch these references– using Crosbie’s “There is some truth to this, like all lies” from Liar as her epigraph; later she writes “But I did cry at the train station… I had an epiphany about the fact that there are a goodly number of public places in which crying is acceptable, train stations definitely being one of them…”.
But by far, Schoemperlen’s most intriguing reference in this work is to herself. And though usually I find biography a tiresome approach to fiction, the clues in this direction are marvelously intriguing, (perhaps?) intentionally integral to the work. Actually, this story of a writer with writer’s block (“a writer who cannot write”) references many works, the narrator eager to distract herself from not writing, preferring to quote from other books instead (books on writer’s block among them), and at one point she tells us she is quoting herself: “If I may be so bold… here’s a sentence I like: It is only in retrospect that I understand that obsession has nothing to do with love and everything to do with anxiety, insecurity, uncertainty and fear.” This being a line from Schoemperlen’s Our Lady of the Lost and Found, so how positively meta.
And obsession is central to this “post-romantic novel”, the narrator recovering from the end of a long-distance love affair. Thirty years after her first love breaks her heart, she meets him again and dares to imagine things will be different. Decides that “being with him again would erase every rotten thing that had happened to [her] in the meantime”. When this proves not to be the case, she’s left shattered, “at a loss for words.” The last point proven otherwise as she writes this novel instead, recounting her romance with hindsight. The story at times tragic, altogether cringe-worthy when it hits close to home. Structured in the second-person, employing recounted emails, a “he said/she said” volleying back and forth, but then it’s “I said/you said”– objectivity is hardly Schoemperlen’s intention after all.
Marketed as “a bittersweet comedy for anyone who has ever loved and lost”, such a description seems to me to be undermine the “bitter”. Because the tone here strikes me as more venomous than sweet, and though the comedy is present, there is nothing light about this book. So much is going on– the blurring of fact and fiction, an exploration of writer’s block, an illustration of the writing life, a social satire. Most essentially though, At a Loss for Words is an exercise in revenge and herein lies its triumph.
March 28, 2008
On the attack
I read Rachel Cusk’s memoir A Life’s Work this week, after reading this piece on its reception. How curious the way some people read– I cannot fathom. To have your judgment on a work come down to whether or not your liked its characters, for example. Which is even more ridiculous in the case of fiction, but strikes me as dangerous all the time. To read a memoir is not to stage a character assessment. Maybe I just don’t read enough books that are enraging so I can’t understand why you’d write a letter to an author that read “Frankly, you are a self-obsessed bore: the embodiment of the Me! Me! Me! attitude which you so resent in small children.”
It seems that some people so ready to judge are incapable of grasping any point of some complexity. It isn’t even ambivalent, Cusk’s portrayal of motherhood, but something richer, truer in its depth. And then that she is accused of coldness, of being unloving, all the while love shines through in every word. When she writes, “I realise… that the crying has stopped, that she has survived the first pain of existence and out of it wrought herself. And she has wrought me, too, because although I have not helped or understood, I have been there all along and this, I suddenly and certainly know, is motherhood; this mere sufficiency, this presence.”
It is interesting also, “self-obsession” being knocked about when it was the very point of the exercise. I’ve also just read Diane Schoemperlen’s At a Loss for Words, which could probably pick up some of the same criticism. But what you miss, I think, reading on the attack. People’s capacities to miss the point are quite remarkable.
March 28, 2008
Things
My grad-school classmate Lindsay is published today in the The Globe‘s Lives Lived. And listen to Dr. Seuss on The Current.
March 28, 2008
As in everything
For all those fearing that the end is near, I wish to put forth that once upon a time, a child raised on Archie comics, YM and The Baby-Sitters Club actually grew up to me. Which might be dispiriting, but not, at least, for the future of literacy. Though my mother would take care now to remind me that my literary diet was also certainly well stocked with all the childhood classics, that I was well supplied with fine contemporary novels too. But the fact is, I would have tossed them all out of bed in order to to curl up with the latest from the Animal Inn series, or Sleepover Friends. So atrocious literary taste doesn’t necessary lead to the same. I also think that the 11-14 year age-range is tough going all around, when you’re too old for most things, not old enough for others, and no one is experiencing any of it at quite the same rate. In books, as in everything, it eventually gets better.
INCIDENTAL UPDATE: And thanks to my friend Jennie for sending on the news that in their latest editions, the Sweet Valley Twins have been shrunk from their identical perfect size six figures down to size fours.
March 27, 2008
Salvage by Jane F. Kotapish
Convention is insufficient with which to discuss Jane F. Kotapish’s first novel Salvage. I could try to think of analogous works– This Novel meets That Novel, say– but an appropriate hybrid refuses to be imagined. I could stick with plot, but really, which one would I choose? Centrally, this is the story of one woman’s tenuous grasp upon reality after experiencing a traumatic event. Or, this is the story of a woman who spent her childhood speaking to her dead sister in a closet. Or, here is the story of one house, and the story of another. An exploration of mother/daughter relationships utterly unreliant upon precedent. About what happens when maybe-actual saints start appearing in one’s back garden. Each thread a bit of the story here, but each one singularly giving readers the wrong impression.
Perhaps I can get to the point by explaining that I read this book over two days, finished it last evening, and only just now realized that the narrator/protagonist goes unnamed. It is significant, I think, that such a detail could be so unremarkable. Also significant, that indeed in this book, the protagonist speaks to her dead sister in a closet– a detail that might have tripped up my reading in the hands of a lesser writer, but the rest of the story carried me right through this. Or that this story of a communication breakdown between mother in daughter, its origins in childhood trauma, could be so invested with pure love. That love can ever be so aching.
I have selected these details to demonstrate Kotapish’s firm control of her narrative, everything exactly as it should be, nothing as you’d think it is. The narrator lacking a name, but I don’t even notice, so sure is her voice, so essential are the details with which we’re provided. Which are that this woman has witnessed something traumatic, something so awful that it’s torn her right out of her life, and she’s returned home again, purchasing a house not far from where her mother lives. Such familiar ground, however, reawakening troubling childhood obsessions, and this woman must navigate the narrow ground between her demons as she edges towards recovery.
But all this might give the wrong idea still, for Salvage is terribly funny. Darkly funny, naturally, but ultimately this is an uplifting book, caustic and ironic throughout. Its disparate plot threads and various tones all contained by a brilliant use of language, of imagery, both of which are surprising and edgy. Lines like, “The only reason I can recollect my father’s face at all is because I saw it catch fire in our back yard when I was three.” Lines like every other line as well, and the dialogue, which maps relationships’ whole histories. All recounted in the same even tone, a curious perception, both of which are the effects of damage, of trauma undeniably, but are no less for this, casting the ordinary world in a light entirely new.
It is this same even tone, this perception, which keep the trauma from seizing the narrative. Preventing sensation from taking over, from spiraling out of control. Kotapish’s language keeps her narrative in line– the perfect container. The scene in which the woman recounts the event that drove her towards breakdown manages to be so beautiful and awful, a horror perfectly choreographed– a memory after all.
Salvage is an astounding first novel, challenging the bounds of a novel’s capabilities, demonstrating the startling complexity of emotion. Language employed with the utmost exactitude, bending reality in fascinating ways.
March 26, 2008
Poetic April
I was a poet first, before I’d ever written a line of prose. Which I might tell you to make myself sound interesting, prodigious, but I was actually 8 years old in the time of which I speak and the poem was stupid. Though it’s true that I’ve wanted to be a writer ever since then, and that it was poetry that inspired that yearning. I wrote poetry quite regularly in the years that followed, much of it cripplingly teenage. Some of the better stuff I’ve even posted here. But I don’t write poetry anymore. I thought it was better to concentrate my talents where they seemed to lie, and I felt I didn’t know enough about the stuff to make it my own.
But there is something about April. We’ve just passed a long, hard winter, all poetry seemingly sucked out of life, and so during next month I aim to inject some, in large doses. Even if it has to be in lieu of real spring. I’ve been inspired by writer Laurel Snyder (one of my favourite bloggers for years now) to write a poem per day, for it will be National Poetry Month after all. To be posted here. Just small poems, and I make no promises of them being any good, but I think the exercise will be interesting. In fact, some under-stimulated muscle somewhere in my head is absolutely crying out for this.
In addition, of course, I plan to read quite a bit of poetry. Once our boxes are unpacked in the new house, twill be a perfect time to embark upon the unread books on my shelf by David McGimpsey and Carol Ann Duffy. To reread The Octupus by my favourite poet Jennica Harper. To memorize my favourite poem Portrait of a Lady, which I’ve been wanting to do for years (though this is unlikely). I’ll also pick up Snyder’s book (as she’s started this after all).
With spring comes such inspiration.
March 26, 2008
Just in
I’m just in from the Exile launch, which I left all too soon as I have 600 impossible things to accomplish before bedtime. Had the great pleasure of hearing Rebecca Rosenblum read though, and I picked up the new issue of the Quarterly— it’s beautiful.
In others, I am thrilled that writer Justine Picardie has started blogging. I fell in love with her writing when I lived in England, particularly her memoir If the Spirit Moves You and I look forward to reading her new novel Daphne. Maud Newton on Laura Lippman (whose What the Dead Know made for a perfect cottage read last summer). The Great Gatsby celebrated in The Globe & Mail. And Steven W. Beattie reads Nikolski.
March 25, 2008
Coming Home
I am now reading Salvage by Jane F. Kotapish, and I am totally hooked. Her language is mesmerizing, and the story is edge after edge.
And now living amongst gargantuan chaos, as perhaps two thirds of our apartment is packed up, and only a narrow path is cleared to walk from room to room. I keep thinking of new reasons to break into the boxes I sealed two weeks ago, and of new boxes to fill with things I’d forgotten we owned. I keep thinking of new things to own, and other things to shed. Of the light in my new kitchen, which I’ve only ever seen in February, and how they’ll get the sofa out the door.
I think about losing our big storage closet, and where will we store our baseball gloves now? The exposed brick and the fireplace, and the roof beams in our new bedroom. The ugly carpets, for which we’ve traded our hardwood, but then the Mexican tiles in the kitchen, the cupboards in the bathroom, the two decks, and the premise of laundry without coins or going out of doors. The “spare room” and “library” and that they’ll be one and the same doesn’t make me swoon about it any less.
And to be settled down again. This is how I function best, how I write best, and for the past month, we’ve been positively in-between. My brain moved out the day we gave notice, and I hope it’s packed somewhere too, in a box I’ve just forgotten to label. I’m looking forward to being home again, to the day the apartment stops smelling like someone else’s, to the familiar sound of rain on that roof, to the lazy easy light of Sunday morning. And not only to being home, but I’m looking forward to coming home, day after day. Counting the stairs, my key in the lock, somebody’s already put the kettle on to make a cup of tea.
March 21, 2008
The Letter Opener by Kyo Maclear
After nearly a week of reading through short zippy novels in a flash, there was something meditative about settling down with Kyo Maclear’s first novel The Letter Opener. It’s a slower read, rumination more than narration, quiet in its power, and subtly sharp.
With such an intriguing premise: Naiko works for Canada Post at their Undeliverable Mail Office. Her job is to direct items stranded in transit, where this is possible. Incorrectly addressed envelopes containing school photos, love letters, birthday money. And “the rubble”, items sprung loose from their packaging: “Lesser goods… Boy Scout badges, vacation photos, Magic Markers, teeth moulds. A medical X-ray. A book of Sufi poetry. A Leonard Cohen audio cassette. Nothing was too small to matter to someone, somewhere.”
This emphasis on things comes to link the story’s various threads: the strange disappearance of Naiko’s colleague Andrei, a Romanian refugee; Andrei’s own history and that of his mother, a Holocaust survivor; the story of Naiko’s fractured family, particularly her mother who is in the early stages of Alzeimers Disease; Naiko’s own problems with intimacy, as she navigates her relationship with boyfriend Paolo; even the end of the Cold War. Such a wide range of subject matter, some of it heavy and loaded, but Maclear uses these ideas effectively, in new and intriguing ways– her deftness with facts perhaps making clear her creative origins in non-fiction.
The narrative sounds crowded, but Maclear’s expansive prose creates the effect of ample space. The novel is also carefully structured to accommodate all these threads, which through Naiko’s own perspective are tied more tightly than they seem. And it is through this perspective that we come to understand a twist on the problem of materialism: not that our society cares too much about “things”, but rather we don’t care enough. How much we lose spiritually from failing to invest our objects with proper meaning, and how much we take for granted.
Though of course conclusions are not so straightforward as this– this is rumination after all. The Letter Opener is primarily the story of Naiko’s own self-discovery, as she realizes her constructions of others through their objects tells more about her own self than anybody else’s. And this story is fascinatingly beautiful, a satisfying read.
