March 20, 2011

The Vicious Circle, from here to November 2012

The Vicious Circle Book Club turned one year old this weekend, and came to the end of our list of selected books. So each of us brought a book or two, or three, to Saturday’s meeting to propose for the meetings to come. We ended up deciding to read every single one (except Great Expectations— long story, both the novel and the reason why it was shut down) so that we’re now set for our next twenty meetings– we’ve tried to read more men, less Canadian, and try to venture out into nonfiction once or twice. Anyway, I sure hope nothing good gets published between now and November 2012, because we’ve got no room to move until then.

April:  The Anthills of Savanna by Chinua Achebe
May: Last Night in Montreal by Emily St John Mandel
June: Every Time We Say Goodbye by Jamie Zeppa
July: Hotel World by Ali Smith
August: Hell by Kathryn Davis
September: The Rachel Papers/Lucky Jim by Amis n’ Amis
October: Saving Rome by Megan K. Williams
November: Imagining Toronto by Amy Lavender Harris
December: SKIP
January 2012: Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
February 2012: TBA
March 2012: Human Amusements by Wayne Johnston
April 2012: My Life in France by Julia Child
May 2012: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
June 2012: This All Happened by Michael Winter
July 2012: Trespass by Rose Tremain
August 2012: Incendiary by Chris Cleave
September 2012: Migration Songs by Anna Quon
October 2012: The First Man by Albert Camus
November 2012: Straight Man by Richard Russo

February 9, 2011

The Vicious Circle reads This Cake is for the Party

We headed out to the west end, somebody brought a chicken, and there was a baby (who never cried). There was also a heart-shaped chocolate cake doused in chocolate glaze, and it was for the party, and we would have it and eat it too, etc. etc. And so we sat down to talk about the book, which was Sarah Selecky’s This Cake is for the Party.

As usual, we were divided, but in a less dramatic way than we’d been with Jessica Grant’s book. Partly because Selecky’s book is a much more even collection, but too even, we decided. Our main criticism that the book was short on action, not as in car chases and explosions, but characters who showed some agency, stepped outside their inertia– and the stories we liked the very best were the stories where characters actually did such things.

The stories we liked the least were those at the beginning of the book, and we wondered if a story like “Paul Farenbacher’s Yard Sale” (which we loved, every one of us) had started the collection, would this book have been easier to embrace? The characters in the first story “Throwing Cotton to the Wind” didn’t seem fully formed to us, and who’s named Sanderson and Flip? Though this story did have a passionate defender among us, who’d read it five times in a row because she found it so moving. She found it hingeing on the moment when Anne and Flip have sex, and how the looseness of these characters allows the reader to slip into their places, this one powerful moment of connection between two unhappy people. Another of us noted how well Selecky writes about animals, and also the greatness of the line about a sound like falling potatoes.

Another criticism was that after the fact, the stories in the collection had blended together. The best exceptions were “Paul Farenbacher…” (and one of us loved the part where she leans back on the ice-cube dispenser, and the fridge starts ringing like a slot machine), and “Where Are You Coming From Sweetheart?” (and of this story, one of us remarked that Selecky had so absolutely nailed what it is to lose a mother, being in that house with the father who has no idea how to take care of you)– we loved the ending to “Where Are You Coming From…” in particular, a powerful image with so much weight to it. Though we wondered about time period– it seemed retro, but references were contemporary. But these stories, like all the good stories This Cake…,  have some weight to them, history, characters who act, and are not mere cardboard cutouts of people.

We noted the book’s strange preoccupations, with organic vegetarian food, and pyramid schemes. We loved the references to the library ball in “How Healthy Are You?”, particularly those of us who’d been to the library ball. We liked that these stories took place in Peterborough, and Sudbury. We thought there were interesting details about these characters’ work (candle making, creating organic household cleansers, etc.), but all these jobs put them at such a distance from the world– we would have loved to see someone driving a bus, or a story that took place in an office.We loved the book’s design, but questioned the blurbs– really Lisa Moore? “Ultra-lush”? And none of us found any of the stories “flat-out funny”.

Sometimes, we think, the hype of a first book raises expectations unfairly. We thought that This Cake is for the Party was a good book, a very good first book. That it’s a promising start to Selecky’s publishing career, a harbinger of greatness to come, and then we decided that was more than enough, and decided to break out the cake.

January 11, 2011

Making Light of Tragedy gets made over

Seriously, there is nothing the Vicious Circle can’t do. We decide we don’t like the cover of Jessica Grant’s Making Light of Tragedy? Fine. Our Patricia makes another one. And we love it.

January 9, 2011

The Vicious Circle reads Making Light of Tragedy by Jessica Grant

Though not essential to our discussion of Jessica Grant’s novel Making Light of Tragedy, you should probably know that it was my turn to host a meeting of the Vicious Circle, and that we had to make it a brunch affair because my apartment is too small to accommodate both such a noisy group of women and the sleeping baby that an evening would require . So the baby was banished to the museum for the morning, along with her father, even though there was an actual blizzard and he had to push the stroller through snow that came up to his knees. And even though there was an actual blizzard, the entire cast of the Vicious Circle made it through, even two mothers of newborn babies, and one of the said newborns too. My kitchen was drowning in a sea of snowy boots.

I’d chosen the short story collection Making Light of Tragedy, because I’d read Grant’s novel Come Thou Tortoise, and I’d heard her first book was even better. And because, while I’d liked Come Thou Tortoise, I’d suspected there was an even better writer struggling to get out there, and perhaps the story collection could shed some light upon her. That Grant’s talent might have been pushed further than the novel itself had permitted her to go.

We all agreed that the collection was an excellent book club book, which was a fine point to start from, but then it all fell apart from there. Incredible, the range of reactions, from a group of people who seemed to like the book all around. But one of us could scarcely get past the first story, for it was so wowing (her Journey Prize award winning “My Husband’s Jump”). And then a few others said if they hadn’t been reading this for book club, they would have abandoned it altogether after the first few stories, which would have been regretful for they so liked the stories that came later. All of us pronounced the book uneven, a bit too long. Unanimously, we decided that the book could well have shed “George the Third Wasn’t Mad Forever”. Some of us loved “My Husband’s Jump” for its rather incongruous grounding, but others determined it far too twee. One of us found “Della Renfrew” particularly tedious, but another defended it with line after, admittedly, hilarious line.

If you like your prose unadorned, this is not the book for you. But there were moments and metaphors that worked, that forced you to look twice but never took you right out of the story. There were experiments that were interesting but never quite worked– “Bellicrostic” (and, tellingly, only one of us bothered to find out if the word was real [and it wasn’t], though each of us meant to), “There I Am”. “The Anxiety Exhibit” also seemed like one of these, until you got to the very end.

The biggest problem with “Plow Man” was that this bereft middle aged man had the exact same voice as all of Grant’s slightly unhinged twenty-something female characters. The similarity in voice a problem throughout the book– the four narrators of “The Loss of Thalia” all sounded identical, for example. Yes, admitted the story’s one defender, but each one added a surprising layer of meaning. The jury was still out on the final and longest story, “Milaken”– a couple of us hadn’t yet finished it, but the story had its defenders too. Some of us had really liked “The Dean of Humanities”, though it was noted that we might not have liked it as much had it not been preceded by the more whimsical tales of the bunch– perhaps we were just relieved to be back in reality? (Some of us still think we would have liked it all the same.) One of us thought she’d got the male voice nailed right in “Taxation”. And “Ugly And” as well, the one story we all mostly liked all around.

We liked the title, though it didn’t bring the collection together (as the Plow Man wasn’t making light of anything, was he?). We thought the cover image was awful and horribly unappealing. That the collection wasn’t brought together by anything at all, and read very much as a collection of pieces that had first been published elsewhere, as opposed to something cohesive. Need a story collection be cohesive (and we thought of Sarah Selecky and Alexander MacLeod’s books)? Not necessarily, but perhaps the problem was that this one was far too long. Out with King George! And a few others we’d never agree on.

We talked about Burning Rock, and how difficult it would be to be in a writing group with Lisa Moore. That everyone’s prose looks crap beside hers. This led to a long, long discussion about the merits of Lisa Moore’s February, which the Vicious Circle appears to be disproportionately fond of.  There was much praise for Jessica Grant’s caustic wit, for the two guns moment. But some of these pieces felt overly workshopped. We talked about how a few of us were going to read Come Thou Tortoise now, on the basis of Grant’s collection, having been previously put off on the basis of the talking tortoise (which works better than it sounds). And we talked about how having read this book, at least one of us wished Come Thou Tortoise had been better.

Aren’t people funny?

And isn’t agreeing to disagree always easier to do over sausages, pancakes and french toast?

December 9, 2010

I love my book club.

I didn’t sum up our latest meeting of The Vicious Circle, because I only caught an hour of it. A few weeks before, we’d realized that my husband would have to work late the night of our meeting, which had brought forth much distress at our house: I love my book club, and my husband knows how much I love it. So we came up with a compromise that suited everybody (except my husband who’d have to come home from an extended work day to put the baby to bed, but alas, he is a kind man): I’d book an autoshare car and dash out the door the instant he came in, and then drive like a law-abiding demon out to the west end where I could join The Vicious Circle for the last hour or so of our meeting. These are the lengths I go to, and if you were a member, you would understand.

I love my book club. I feel the need to voice this after reading “I broke up with my book club” in the Globe and Mail today, and after reading “Behind Enemy Lines: My life in an all-woman’s book club” in CNQ (though I feel the latter would have been better titled “I don’t like women, or most people, and I am smarter than you”). I understand why book clubs are derrided– I used to run them down myself. I was always an annoyingly obstinate independent reader (which is the reason I have still not read A Complicated Kindness), and the idea of being told what to read and then discussing said reading with a group of stupid people never held much appeal to me.

And then one day last winter, a group of distinctly non-stupid people asked me to join their brand new book club, and though my instinct was to run for hills, it was the kind of honour one couldn’t turn down. Some of these people were survivors of bad book clubs, and were determined to forge something different with this new experience. They’d chosen members carefully, each of us passionate about reading and connected to the literary life in various capacities: we have authors among us, of picture books, abridged classics and short stories; an illustrator; most of us blog about books; a lot of us work in publishing, in publicity; one of us is a journalist. Though we are bookish, we are various, and that none of us would be considered a casual reader is probably the one thing we all have in common.

We capped ourselves, because the survivors had learned that book clubs fall to pieces once there are too many to focus on one conversation. We picked our books casually, choosing from a pile of paperbacks we brought to the first meeting, and we’ve read all novels so far, contemporary or less-so. We do enjoy visiting one another’s houses, and snooping through nooks, and crannies, and bookshelves. Wine and cheese is popular, and so is dessert. We’re fond of gossip, and our name isn’t just clever– it’s apt. As the evening grows later, the talk gets louder, and more and more inappropriate.

But the best thing about book club is that we talk about books. Our conversations, our various points of view, approaches, and backgrounds all opening up new avenues in the works we’d never have found whilst reading alone. We challenge one another, ask questions, disagree and shout a lot. No one shuts down discussion: if you don’t like the book, let’s talk about why. We show up most excited for the meetings at which we’ve loved the books, but it’s true that the talk is always best at the meetings where we’ve hated it. There was one meeting where a blah book hadn’t elicited very much response, and admittedly that one time we did focus mostly on the guacamole. But it must be said that the guacamole was really very good.

So the problem is not book clubs, the problem is YOUR book club. The problem is that you’re doing it wrong. Maybe you shouldn’t be in a book club at all? (Book clubs should be the endeavour of choice for those who read already, not those who merely wish they did.) My book clubs exists as living proof that the institution itself is not to blame.

October 13, 2010

Vicious Circle reads: The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson

The Vicious Circle assembled in The Junction last night to talk about Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver. Some of us had read Jansson before, and copies of Fair Play and The Summer Book were passed around. Most us really liked this novel, one of us thought it was okay. Based on Jansson’s photo in The Summer Book, we thought she resembled a Moomin a little bit. And then we talked about the Moomins, which none of us were really familiar with, but everyone we’ve overheard who is familiar had talked in terms that were only glowing.

One of us thought the prose was strange. Not bad, but just weird, but maybe it was the translation? It was noted that Thomas Teal had apparently kept his translation very close to the original. The narrator switched from first person to third person in a such a subtle way you could almost miss it, and this subtlely was the case with everything in the book. Was Katri narrating the third-person sections? We could argue either way. It’s odd discussion a book where everything leads one in a circle.

Some of us really liked the shut-in, isolated, wintry, in-from-the-cold sense that abounded through the story. We wondered which of the two main characters had triumphed in the end– who was the “true deceiver”? Impossible to say, and we argued both ways (and then we ate some dops). We commented on the gaps in the prose, in the narrative– how oddly the perspectives were filtered. Very unconventional, and allowing for such surprising glimpses. We wondered where Katri’s intentions had come from, what had gone on before the novel began. How had she garnered such respect in the village? What were her feelings for Edvard, and what had been the feeling she felt when she changed her mind about what she had told him. We speculated, but were never sure.

Katri was always questioning, doubting, second-guessing her own intentions. Was there good reason for this? Did she really believe in her own honesty, or was she just telling herself, and what’s the difference? When she confesses to Anna at the end that she hadn’t been cheated, is Katri confessing her own deceptions, or is she finally deceiving now having realized the consequences of her brutality.

We were fortunate to have a children’s illustrator in our midst, and so we talked about Jansson’s portrayal of Anna whose job was the same. The same as Jansson’s too of course, and we note the games she played with autobiography in her works (this insight via Ali Smith in her wonderful introduction). Why did Anna stop drawing the rabbits, but it was suggested that the problem had been the rabbits’ cutesiness, that with their flowers they were not honest. That after years and years of drawing the same thing, maybe Anna wanted to try something different. We remarked upon the incredible merchendization of cartoon characters, which led us to Hello Kitty douche.

Somewhere along here, off the rails, there was a joke about radial tires and blowjobs. We went and helped ourselves to more guacamole. Broke out the sweets– YUM: apple pie. The cats came and went as we chatted. Our numbers were fewer, as some of us were elsewhere preparing to give birth, or else working. We kept bringing it back to Tove though– what was it like to live in a small village? Lesbian undertones? And then we talked about Stieg Larrson. Among other things. And it was, unsurprisingly, a most wonderful evening.

Other Books mentioned during our meeting:

• The Summer Book and Fair Play by Tove Jansson
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
• Turtle Diary, novel by Russell Hoban (which became a movie)
• Franklin’s Thanksgiving
• Kiss the Joy as It Flies by Sheree Fitch
• Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading by Lizzie Skurnick
• anything about The Mitfords
• Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl by Donald Sturrock
• As For Me and My House by Sinclair Ross
• A Feather on the Breath of God by Sigrid Nunez
• Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller

September 15, 2010

The Vicious Circle reads: The Comforters by Muriel Spark

Seriously, this book club just gets better and better. We all headed out to the west end this month to read Muriel Spark’s first novel, The Comforters. The brilliant new edition by Virago (which, actually, we don’t think should be available in Canada, but a bunch of us managed to pick copies quite discounted) has an absolutely perfect cover. As with Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the book reads as up-t0-date as the day it was published, and so a stylish modern cover is not trying too hard.

Also much appreciated was Ali Smith’s introduction, which you can read in abridged form here. An amazing example of a book intro– no spoilers, she doesn’t have her own agenda, and she helpfully places the book in its contexts, which were (somewhat incongruously) the realist, angry young men of the 1950s; Spark’s own biographical experiences, her conversion to Catholicism in particular; and allusions to The Book of Job (and yes, one of us discovered that his name should rhyme with “lobe”, and not “lob”, though that wasn’t even remotely embarrassing compared to having shown up one hour early by mistake, but alas…).

Immediate response to The Comforters was a few notches above “meh”. A couple of us liked it, but most of us found it hard to get absorbed. We could understand how the novel was so clever– a character becomes aware that she’s a character in the story, can hear the typewriter clacking and the narrator’s voice, meanwhile her sort-of boyfriend is caught up in his own plot involving his grandmother being a diamond smuggler. We loved the dialogue, we loved Spark’s meta-workings, the prose is amazing, but it was hard to really get invested.

It was suggested that this may have been the point. That Spark was playing with our expectations of what a novel is supposed to do to us, using the novel’s conventions to show these are conventions. “I just couldn’t get lost in it,” a reader might complain, and Muriel Spark might have answered, “It’s a book. Not a cityscape.” That the book’s weaker points (flimsy/no plot, relience on coincidence and connections) were quite deliberate, to make us question how much about novels we actually take for granted. Amazing, we all thought, that this was first novel, and it shows very much that Spark had been a critic who’d considered the novel very carefully. Amazing also that she was a Catholic convert (like Graham Greene, whose Travels With My Aunt we thought was akin to this book), and yet she mocked the process of conversion here, she writes about the occult, she makes fun of Catholics. Also, that Laurence and Caroline had a sexual relationship and were unmarried, which was more than a little risque for 1956.

It was suggested that Caroline’s experience with the voices in her head were analogous to any writer whose hard at work, and struggling not to get lost in her story, to retain herself in the flow of narrative and not be swept away. And this led to a comment about the story as an analogy of Spark’s own experience as a Catholic, the struggle to define her spirituality within and without the confines of organized religion.

We loved Georgina Hogg. Loved, loved loved her. Though we weren’t unhappy about her eventual fate, because she was scratching off poor Caroline’s face (and I just thought of this now– was she trying to rub her out??) and trying to drown her, and it wasn’t like she had an inner life anyway. We loved everything about the enormity of her bosom (and I mean that word the way it is intended). Louisa Jepp was also appreciated, and we commented on the women in the novel having all the strength. Oh, and how the books deals with homosexuality, matter-of-fact, amazing, once again in particular for the ‘fifties. Laurence was sort of sweet, but a bit dumb, though quite patient to put up with Caroline who no longer had sex with him. We also loved the distinction between Eleanor and the Baron’s relationship, with no love lost, versus Caroline’s and Laurence’s, who had love left.

With all of our experiences of the book being suitably enhanced, it was now time to talk about other things, and eat lemon cake, and eat more cheese, and yes, some pumpkin scones too. We talked about babies, and perverts, and how married people have secrets too, and we talked underrated and overrated, books we loved and books we hated, and some of us said Fuck too much, and we laughed a lot, and talked about most other things, and probably at some point, we even mentioned you.

Meeting adjourned. Amazing.

August 11, 2010

Vicious Circle reads: Galore by Michael Crummey

The Vicious Circle assembled again last night in a beautiful backyard in the East End of Toronto to eat cheese, drink delicious wine (and gin), and discuss Michael Crummey’s Galore. Oddly, those of us who’d been dreading this “epic, intergenerational saga, a sweeping tale of two centuries” (which begins with a man being cut out of the belly of  a whale) found that we enjoyed it, while those who’d higher hopes had found it ho-hum. Two of us hadn’t managed to finish the book, and reported that it was not so much “putdownable” as “unpickupable”.

One of us (who was me, incidentally), was hung up on the peniserrific nature of the story (and I took to opening the book at random to spot the penis on the page, and there usually was one). Others confessed to not so much minding the sexy bits, but it was argued that women didn’t have sex in this book as much as simply sit on the enormous penises. Someone wondered at there not being more bad sex in the novel, but we speculated that these lives were so bleak, surely the people were deserving of some kind of compensation.

What is magical realism, we wondered. No one knew, though of course we’d all tossed the term around from time to time. None of us had ever read Gabriel Garcia Marquez either, and everyone felt better (and less alone) once that was out in the open. None of us had a problem with the man from the belly of the whale, though we never quite understood what he (and his various attributes) was meant to signify. All of us wished we knew more about the bible (and Absalom Absalom, though less so with that).

Everyone loved Mrs. Gallery’s story, and we felt that she and Bride were the only women we really felt close to. The other witchy midwife women were more mysterious, but not in a way that was wholly satisfying, as we didn’t understand their motivations. Why was Mary Tryphena allowed to be sacrified? Why was she called Tryphena? The novel took pains to tell us that the men in the story lived in the shadows of their women, but we were not convinced. Some of us were also disappointed at the strands of the story that sailed off into nowhere and were never seen again.

We loved the writing, and how he rendered Newfoundland. Some of us did not love dashes instead of quotation marks, but we came to terms with it. We loved the arrival of the doctor into the community, and the stories told (in biblical begetting fashion) by the Trim brothers, but we also kept losing track of characters and getting names mixed up. We were grateful for the family trees in the beginning, though did they make the narrative too inevitable (but then wasn’t that the very point)? One of us who had been dreading this book has read another Michael Crummey since then, and is looking forward to more. It was also remarked upon that he wrote about breastfeeding in a very realistic fashion, which is unusual for any writer, in particular a male one.

It got very dark outside, and we talked about other things, but about the book mostly, and soon the cheese was nearly gone. At around 10:00, we started to leave, but conversation continued as such that we didn’t get out the door until nearly an hour after that.

August 9, 2010

More new books

Today I used up my gift-card from Ten Editions that Stuart had bought me for my birthday. I initially went in to find The Comforters, which we’re reading next month for The Vicious Circle, but they didn’t have that one. Instead, I got The Viking Portable Library Charles Lamb, because Anne Fadiman inspired me to, and My Friend Says It’s Bulletproof by Penelope Mortimer, who I know nothing about, but it’s by Virago, and Carol Shields and Blanche Howard like another of her books (according to A Memoir of Friendship, which I’m currently [joyfully] rereading). Also, she had a copy of Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris, except that she was currently reading it and couldn’t find it (“it’s not the time of day to find its place in the pile,” is what she said) but she promised to put it aside and it will be there when I go back for it. Amazing! (And then I found The Comforters at another shop along the road).

July 7, 2010

Vicious Circle Reads: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

Amazing, amazing. The Vicious Circle assembled again last night to read Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The place was Patricia‘s back deck, a perfect place for a hot summer night, and conversation was accompanied by a delicious spread, and the coldest beer. There were berries, but Patricia didn’t put sugar on top, or poison, and the keylime pie tarts weren’t fatal either…

Everybody loved this book, which made the conversation a bit harder to come by than at the last meeting. Though this is a book that conveys itself so subtly that we were glad to have extra minds on hand to fill us in on the bits we’d missed– that Merricat was 18, that the novel was a flashback. Jackson is a writer who explains nothing,  her story’s beginning and end wide open to interpretation (and some of the middle too).

We remarked upon the book’s unique placement– gothic, but not Southern-Gothic (for once. New England Gothic? Is this even a thing? Because I wouldn’t mind reading more of it). Asked when the story took place. we responded with 19th century, 1920s, 1950s and 1970s. Any time after the telephone was invented, I guess, though of course the Blackwoods didn’t have one. How the book was nearly fifty years old, but not remotely dated, and now everybody wants to read more Shirley Jackson.

Why was Constance so docile, and so afraid of the world? One of us wanted to strangle Uncle Julian with his shawl. Charles was horrible, and we weren’t sure why Constance didn’t see through him. Was it her one moment of resistance to Merricat’s power? What was up with their dynamic anyway– they were husband and wife, mother and daughter, and sisters? How were they going to get through winter without a roof?

The scene after the fire was terrifying. Interesting how Jackson shifts stereotypes so the village men are the vicious gossips here, and the women are kind behind their backs. We thought that Jonas was one of the best fictional cats ever. We though Merricat was an extraordinary character, escaping every grasp and yet so perfectly captured. We remarked upon the framing of the text– how odd that Jackson situates the book six years after what most would consider the meat of the story (ie the murder of all the Blackwoods except three via arsenic in the sugarbowl). Preservation as a metaphor for Constance and Merricat’s life– yes yes yes!!!

By this point, it was so dark we were in shadows, but it was sort of fitting. When the lights came on, the mood was killed, but it was time to go anyway. An amazing evening had by all. Until next time…