March 23, 2007
Dreams
I implore you to read The Lizard Cage but you’d best not finish it right before bedtime, or your dreams will be strange. Mine certainly were. Otherwise, I have to cram some CanLit into my weekend as my TA office hours start next week and I’ll be marking the week after. I shall be reading Obasan and Elle. And now it’s totally spring, so we’ll spending this weekend throwing open the windows and roaming outdoors.
March 23, 2007
My non-response and my endorsement
I’m not going to respond to Orange Prize hoopla again, because I still feel the same way I felt last year and the year before. This year let me just say that I like anything that promotes good books, and as good books by women tend to be my favourite kinds, this list is usually the one I like best. The longlist is a brilliant selection of books to be read and three I’ve read already that wholly deserve to be included.
I’ve read Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngochie Adichie, Alligator by Lisa Moore, and Afterwards by Rachel Seiffert. Each was extraordinary in its own way, I loved the first and third the best, and I am totally putting my bets on Adichie. If the right people her book, I think it could change the world.
March 20, 2007
Painting a map with stories
I’ve been looking forward to reading The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly ever since I heard her read last year at the Kama Reading Series. Never have I hung so close to the edge of my seat just by listening to a story; the tension in that room was palpable. And so I’ve started the novel, and I’m enjoying it. And I am also looking forward to learning more about Burma. I love the way that fiction paints a map with stories, and that when I’m finished with this book, Burma will no longer be just space to me.
Karen Connelly has a beautiful website here.
March 20, 2007
Reality is Ralph
From Lisey’s Story by Stephen King:
~He didn’t even plan his books, as complex as some of them were. Plotting them, he said, would take out all the fun. He claimed that for him, writing a book was like finding a brilliantly coloured string in the grass and following it to see where it might lead. Sometimes the string broke and left you with nothing. But sometimes– if you were lucky, if you were brave, if you perservered– it brought you to a treasure. And the treasure was never the money you got for the book; the treasure was the book.~
March 19, 2007
Soporific Reads returns!
Pickle Me This devotees will be glad to see the return of an old favourite feature. Last year I worked at the library in the afternoons and kept track of books clutched by snoring undergraduates. This year I work the morning shift and there are far fewer sleepers (I suspect they stay in bed instead) but today I spotted one!
The first soporific read in ages: a young girl dreaming away to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
March 19, 2007
Living Properly
The more I think about About Alice by Calvin Trillin, I realize this tiny memoir is actually a guide to living properly. Seriously, lately I’ve found myself thinking, “What would Alice do?” in a variety of situations. I have a hunch I may be better for it.
March 18, 2007
New books brought home
Last day is tomorrow for the half price sale at Balfour Books (601 College St.). We went yesterday, and I was devastated to find that the Penelope Liveleys and Virginia Woolfs I’d been hoping to buy were all gone. Clearly the shelves have been well picked over this week, but treasures remain. I was pleased to pick up so many books I’d borrowed from the library recently and subsequently fallen in love with. Even Stuart got in on the fun. He got two James Bond novels and The Water Method Man by John Irving. I got The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing, which I’ve never read and I bought mainly because I wanted an old school orange Penguin cover. And the rest, I got Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe, and Huckleberry Finn. Sugoi! The shelves are happy to have them.
March 17, 2007
Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O'Neill
Winner of the recent Canada Reads competition, Heather O’Neill’s first novel Lullabies for Little Criminals struck me as a modern Huckleberry Finn. A child, older than its years and younger than it thinks it is, set out into a brutal world where no adult is really trustworthy or even the least bit good. And like Huck Finn, O’Neill’s narrator Baby possesses the most incredibly convincing, earnest and almost hypnotic voice. I would listen to her stories all day. What she notices and how she describes it is a perfect child’s eye view, and yet what she doesn’t say and the spaces in between her words illuminate the reality of her situation and her vulnerability. O’Neill throws out all the right details to give us Baby’s perspective, and to imagine the world she sees.
Her mother’s dead, her father’s a heroin addict; she’s been brought up amongst junkies and hobos, and Baby is not easily fazed. I found the beginning of this book remarkably funny, actually. Bleaker than pink, but I enjoyed getting accustomed to Baby’s voice and her early experiences are a good mix of light and dark. But of course bad gets to worse, and the reader comes to understand that Baby has bad luck and danger on all sides of her. Spanning two years, time in the book goes slow. All this action, and then she tells us it’s just a few months later– which Baby does remark at one point is like a child’s perspective of time. I did find the plot dragging toward the middle of the novel: the beginning reads like a series of vignettes, and soon I wanted something with more drive. However the plot was propelled with the complications Baby faces once she gets mixed up with a pimp called Alphonse and concurrently falls in love with a strange boy from school called Xavier. There were suggestions of a happy ending, though; Baby deserved one. And I don’t think it ruins the book to let you know that.
And so the subject matter is bleak– drug addiction, poverty, prostitution and child neglect tend to be. But then Baby’s voice is so fresh and her perspective so unique that the read is not as hard-going as a plot summary might imply. Oh then by turns this book is heartbreaking, but it has to be. O’Neill’s fiction stands for true stories that aren’t often told let alone so thoroughly examined. I was taken into a whole other world.
March 17, 2007
On the other hand…
Considering my just-below post, I will consider accusations of hysteria and melodrama. And history will inevitably tell a story so different from what we consider the state of literature to be today.
It reminds me of when today I read “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” by Virginia Woolf, or any of her attacks on Wells/Bennett/Galsworthy. I almost feel sorry for them, with her scathing critiques. Because what is this triumverate really, compared to the Great Virginia Woolf? An unfair pitting, so it seems to modern eyes.
But then back then she was all David, and they were decidedly Goliath.
So the moral of that story is that you never really know.
