December 20, 2010

I am going to blame my current lack of focus on

I am going to blame my current lack of focus on David Shields, who thinks that focus is boring, and narrative is boring, and who cares about people or fiction, and that popular music stopped being worthwhile at about the same time he ceased to be young. I just finished reading Shields’ Reality Hunger, which I kept screaming at (“You motherfucking, self-hating book…”), but which I’m glad I read it, because his thoughts about fiction, non-fiction, and memoir gave me a lot to think about. However exasperating, the book is interesting and worthwhile, a collage of various sources intermingled with Shields’ own thoughts and ideas, each numbered paragraph disjunct from what came before it. That there is no whole, just fragments we construct in various ways, but I was left longing for a bit of synthesis. However, that’s just me, the status-quo rally-er cited in the book’s jacket copy. Unlike Shields, who writes books, I really love them, but I just read them so what do I know? I do know that it’s strange that Shields is bored by everything so thinks the entire world should change, rather than just working to improve his pathetic attention span. Also, as an effect of reading his book, my attention span is just a little shot too, and I can’t wait to open up a real book and read it and get my mind back, now that I’m finished with this stomping tantrum of a text. (Which, actually, I didn’t finish at all, but I had had enough of by page 180 and so I decided to put it down, which might be the most David Shieldsian thing I’ve done ever.)

December 14, 2010

Literary Intersections

I haven’t read Anne Michael’s Fugitive Pieces in years and years, but I am still buzzing from Amy Lavender Harris’ Imagining Toronto. Having read that book recently means that I was familiar with the passage from Fugitive Pieces displayed on the Project Bookmark plaque on the Northwest corner of College and Manning Streets, which Harris also excerpts in her book to give a sense of that neighbourhood’s international quality. Context upon context. Books make neighbourhood roaming a most satisfying pursuit on this cold and snowy day.

December 13, 2010

Advent Book Blog recommendations

The Advent Book Blog has been going on for the last two weeks, its second season as proving to be as effective as its first. As in, what happens when wonderful people recommend the books they’ve best loved lately? And what happens is something along the lines of got, need, need, got, need, need, got, got, need, need. etc.

My “needs” have been as follows: Reality Hunger by David Shields recommended by Sean Cranbury, Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. by Sam Wasson recommended by Natalie St. Pierre, The Death of Donna Whalen by Michael Winter recommended by Samuel Thomas Martin, A Village Life by Louise Glück recommended by Beth Follett, What It Is by Lynda Barry recommended by Sarah Selecky.

A lot of my “gots” are there too, and you’d probably be well served to get them for yourself.

December 13, 2010

On "discovering" Bronwen Wallace

I read Bronwen Wallace’s People You’d Trust Your Life To this weekend, and I’m still a bit overwhelmed by the experience. As a first book, it reminded me of Alexander MacLeod’s Light Lifting (an anchronistic reference, I realize, but humour me)– a writer who has been saving up the goods, writing that is remarkably assured, and doesn’t have to even try. A collection of short stories and not a dud in the bunch. I suppose if one had to publish just one book of fiction in one’s life, it would be tremendous for it to be this one. But then how tragic for a reader to get to the end and realize it’s all there is. (Wallace died shortly before the book’s publication in 1990.)

Not that there is not enough, no. There is everything here, a web of characters and relationships, and the stories become illuminated by moments of connection, between characters, and between the reader and the work. These connections so acute that, for example, you will be reading this book in line at the crowded supermarket on a Sunday afternoon and the cashier closes her till and you’re left standing there with your groceries, and you won’t even notice and, moreover, you won’t even care.

Funny, these are stories of their time (references to Michael J. Fox on television, girls with bright green hair clips, when Swiss Chalet waitresses had to dress like Swiss milkmaids [which I’d forgotten]), which serves to locate them but not to date them. Probably due to the universality to the experiences they depict– mother/daughter relationships, the anguish of having a child with food allergies, negotiating terrain with a new partner, processing nostalgia and what we’re to do with memories we’re holding on to.

I loved the stories of Lee Stewart, which recur throughout the collections, and whose whole life we come to understand, her childhood, early motherhood, life post-divorce. I loved the recurring image of her enormously pregnant, floating in an inflatable pool and sipping a beer. I loved the Carol Shieldsian illuminations of the lives of ordinary people. I loved the multitudinousness and contradiction the collection embraced, and once I got to the end, I reread the epigraph, and I completely understood, and I was stunned by the solidity and coherence of Wallace’s message and this collection.

From Adrienne Rich’s “Integrity”: Anger and tenderness: my selves./ And now I can believe they breathe in me/ as angels, not polarities.

November 21, 2010

Viorst-a-thon completed

My week of Judith Viorst was radically different from what I’d expected. Sadly, her novel Murdering Mr. Monti was kind of dreadful– it turns out that Viorst can do wrong. Reading it was not entirely a lost cause, however, because it was a book by Judith Viorst and her main character was a version of herself, but the novel was trying to fit in too many plots and the whole thing fell apart (or maybe it didn’t? I skimmed the end. I’ll never know).

However it was fascinating to read the novel after reading her book Grown-Up Marriage: What We Know, Wish We Had Known, and Still Need to Know About Being Married. I really hadn’t supposed that a non-fiction book about marriage would the highlight of my Viorst-a-thon, and never realized I’d find a marriage guide so useful. I rolled my eyes through the chapter about couples who had second thoughts at the altar, who’d never talked about having kids until after they were hitched, who didn’t actually love their spouse but thought it was something they could work through… But then I got to the chapter about extended family and in-laws, and how to fit these relationships into our lives. Viorst writes of the necessity of married people separating themselves from their families of origin, but also how intergenerational ties are the foundations of and entire point of our marriages. How we all need to be grown-ups in order to have these relationships work. Then I read the chapter on how children affect marriages, and it underlined that Judith Viorst knows everything (except maybe, in her exuberance, how to structure a novel).

The marriage book is structured around Viorst’s poetry from her “decades” collections, and the novel plays with these same ideas about family and relationships,  its narrator a nationally syndicated columnist who writes with the authority Viorst assumes in her self-help books. That the narrator is a version of Viorst is underlined by reading her memoir Alexander and the Wonderful, Marvelous, Excellent, Terrific Ninety Days: An Almost Completely Honest Account of What Happened to Our Family When Our Youngest came to Live with Us for Three Months. Viorst is the control freak she satirizes in her novel, and coping with the chaos of her son’s return how with his wife and three children is a lovely little book with plenty of reflections on the delights of grandparenting, the trials of adult parenting, and the frustrations of parenting full-stop. I particularly liked her chapter on the nonsense of modern parenthood, which includes not letting children cry, complicated car-seat straps, and getting rid of playpens (and of this point she throws her fist at the sky and demands of the universe, “Why, god, why?”).

In her poetry, her fiction, non-fiction and picture books, Judith Viorst is a chronicler of the foible. She sees the humour and tenderness of people at their worst, in their no-good, very bad days, the kind of days everyone has (even in Australia).

November 17, 2010

More thoughts on Emma Donoghue's Room

I liked Emma Donoghue’s Room when I read it last month, though I valued it less as literature than as a plot-driven novel constructed from an amazingly rendered point of view. Though Jack as narrator was key to the book’s stunning spell, his limited perspective also kept the book from achieving multiple dimensions. I said as much in my review, but I’ve come up with a few things to say since. And I will say them now in point form, because a certain small child kept me up most of last night and I am really, really tired:

• The Britishisms– did anybody notice these? I know Donoghue is Irish, so maybe it’s Irishisms I mean, but I know them from Britain. Throughout the text, I’d come across them and wonder where these people were supposed to live, their figures of speech so various. “Dead spit” I thought was a Jackism for “spitting image”, because I’d never heard of the former, until I came across it in another novel recently. And there are other examples of ways that Americans don’t talk– I wonder why an editor never picked up on this?
• I wanted to see what a man would think of this book, and I had a feeling that the gripping elements of the plot would pique my husband’s interest, so when I finished the book, I handed it to him and told him to give it a read. Do note that he knew nothing about the book, and he never saw its dust jacket (which was put away for safe keeping, of course). He finished the book and said that the first half of the book was amazing, the suspense was killer. Where were they? Had their been a nuclear holocaust or an environmental disaster? Was Old Nick a protector from a now unsafe world, and she was paying him with sex for the shelter? He had no idea what was going on. Which is so interesting to me, who went into the book knowing the entire plot beforehand thanks to publicity, friends’ reports, and ye old dust jacket. I wonder which of us got Room more the way it was intended to be?
• I read James Wood’s review in The London Review of Books, and he highlighted something I’d never considered: “Does anyone really imagine that Jack’s inner life, with his cracks about Pizza Houses and horse stables and high-fives, is anything like five-year-old Felix Fritzl’s? The real victim’s imaginings and anxieties must have been abysmal, in the original sense (unimaginable, bottomless), and the novel’s sure-footed appropriation of this unknowability seems offensive precisely in its sure-footedness.” I don’t know if I’m offended, but I’d never considered how utterly unrealistic the story is, how much it is unabashedly a fairy tale. Because so many elements of the story are startlingly realized (the maternal bond in particular), we forget that such a bond being fostered in that situation would be tremendously unlikely. Donoghue has taken a very particular story to tell us something very general, but I think the lack of particularities may be a serious weakness.

November 8, 2010

On reading Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris

I realize I’m being startlingly unoriginal in loving Anne Fadiman’s books of essays, not to mention about a decade late, but you see, I spent that decade entirely unaware that Anne Fadiman’s books were in the world, and I now see it as my duty to deliver any other readers from such similar darkness.

I first encountered Fadiman in August when I took her book At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays away with me on vacation. Tragically, its adorable front cover was marred when I used it to kill a mosquito against a log wall, and I was determined that a similar fate would not befall the even more adorable cover of Fadiman’s Ex Libris.

Ex Libris is a book of essays about books and reading, written with Fadiman’s signature exuberance. Though her book’s subtitle is an understatement; she is just about as “common” a reader as Virginia Woolf was. Fadiman’s bookish cred is serious: her parents are both writers, she grew up in an apartment with 7000 books, her husband is a writer and the progress of their relationship can be traced by the dedications on the fly leaves of books they’ve given each other over the years. One of her essays begins, “When I was four, I liked to build castles with my father’s pocket-sized, twenty-two volume set of Trollope.”

Still, however, there is common ground between her and us, which is partly aspirational thinking on our part, but also the result of Fadiman’s generous spirit. And she does have a knack of summing up experience just right: “I’d rather have a book, but in a pinch, I’ll settle for a book of Water Pik instructions”, she writes of her incessant need to always be reading something (which once a 1974 Toyota Corolla manual, twice, in an otherwise literature-barren motel room).

She writes hilariously about she and her husband eventually taking the plunge after some years of marriage, and finally deciding to merge their libraries, about the courtly and carnal approaches to how we mistreat our books, about gender and the evolution of language, compulsive copy-editing, and a wonderful essay about reading aloud with the perfect title: “Sharing the Mayhem.” Some of the book’s best bits feature her hapless husband, and her parents and brother who with her comprise a family like no other. A family that is an institution onto itself, with new word acquisition, literary references and allusions, and compulsive bookishness wholly integrated into everyday life– they are a fascinating window onto a world.

Anyway, I left this book on the kitchen table and something dripped on it, and there’s also now a rip on its upper right edge, but none of this makes Ex Libris less than perfect still, really. And how lucky was I this weekend to be discovering it for the very first time– delight and joy and wonder abound. My life is richer for it.

November 5, 2010

Books wrote our life story

“Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated  on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of the refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves. How could it be otherwise?”– Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of  a Common Reader

October 24, 2010

My Secret Summer Reading Project (which is no longer a secret)

It’s all out in the open now, what I spent my summer reading (in addition to everything I’ve already told you about). This summer my own rereading project was waylaid because at the beginning of June, I began my duties as one of three jurors for the Quebec Writer’s Federation First Book Prize. I had twenty-five books to get through, a stack that did seem quite daunting, but also exciting to consider– some of the books were so incredibly beautiful, others looked fun, and others fascinating.

And their diversity is the first thing I want to talk about– what it was like to evaluate novels, short story collections, memoirs, current-event nonfiction, history books and poetry against one another. Every book had been written with its own singular intention, and it was my place to deem how successfully these intentions had been realized. It had me considering the works far more broadly than I would have otherwise. And what joy it was to read so many of these, breaking me out of my own stiff reading habits. A pleasure indeed (and an honour too).

What was even more  a pleasure, however, was to spend my summer visiting Montreal. Which, of course, I only did through the books I encountered, but it was enough. Amazing. I’ve actually spent very little time in Montreal myself, and have always known it best through books (like I do most places), but these books had me so steeped this summer in the city’s culture, history, and geography that I feel I know it almost well now. And from where I sit, it’s one of the most vibrant, beautiful cities in the world, and I do look forward to visiting again.

Anyway, I had a marvelous time. Too bad you weren’t there! And congratulations to the stellar shortlist.

October 20, 2010

Harriet has a meta moment

Okay, I’ll admit to not being exactly capitivated by the plots, but 17 month old Harriet is absolutely obsessed with the Hello Baby Board Book series by Jorge Uzon. These books have only lived in our house for a very short period, but Harriet keeps taking them off the shelf and demanding they be read to her. When she isn’t demanding they be read to her, she is struggling to walk around the house holding all four books at the very same time. Clearly, Uzon has found an audience for his beautiful photography.

Our favourite part of all the books, however, is in Go Baby, Go! when the baby discovers another baby within the pages of his book. And the amazing thing about this is that he has discovered the Night Cars* baby! We love Night Cars, and pointing to the baby (who, when he finally falls asleep, has an adorable tendency to stick his bum into the air) is Harriet’s favourite part of the book (except for the fire truck). So to see the baby in her book pointing to the baby in her book, and then to point to that baby herself– I think Harriet is discovering that the bounds between fiction and reality are ever-blurry. Or maybe I’m just projecting.

*Do you know Night Cars? The absolutely gorgeous urban bedtime book by Teddy Jam, who was aka the late novelist Matt Cohen? I bought this book for Harriet when I was four months pregnant, and signed the inside cover “from Mommy and Daddy”, which was kind of amazing then. And still is. Its rhymes punctuate our days– “Garbage man, garbage man, careful near that dream. It could gobble up your garbage truck, and then where would you be?” Also notable for being a book about *Daddy*. And donuts.

Anyway, I didn’t know this book either until I heard Esta Spalding reading it as part of Seen Reading’s Readers Reading almost two years ago. And I am very glad I did.