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.

October 7, 2010

Two factors

Harriet is ill! And I am reading Emma Donoghue’s Room! These two factors conspiring to eat up all my time, take away my sleep, and make me incredibly conscious of how everything I say and do shapes my child’s world.

September 28, 2010

When Fenelon Falls

I wrote about my adventures this summer in the land of (almost) no bookshops, and had determined that this area of the Kawartha Lakes region was about as unliterary as they come. And then, this Sunday at the Word on the Street Festival, I discover hot off the Coach House Presses is When Fenelon Falls by Dorothy Ellen Palmer– somehow this unliterary land has generated a book of its own. Having spent about fifteen childhood summers in the vicinity, in addition to a week in August, this book is now a must-read, and though Palmer’s story takes place long before I came along, I am sure some bits will still be quite familiar.

September 28, 2010

On rereading Nikolski

During Canada Reads 2010, I was championing the champion Nikolski, but of course I was a little bit concerned because I’d read the book two years before, and what it if had changed in the meantime? Because books do that, of course, or at least their readers do (which I had to discover with a great deal of nausea once the day I sat down to reread that once-beloved Priscilla Presley autobiography Elvis and Me, but that is another story). So I decided that I would reread Nikolski, to ensure that my championship remains appropriate, and it’s with a great deal of pleasure and relief that I can announce that it has. I will say, however, that it’s not a book that is necessarily better the second time around (as Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin is, which is why I’ll be reading it for a third time in the next week or so) but it’s just as good, the prose just as rich, the text just as, um, textured. It’s a puzzle of a novel whose pieces fit together absolutely perfectly, the sum of its parts less remarkable than the fact of the summing itself, which is brilliant. In short, Nikolski is a book about books, the spells they cast, the paths they travel, and the paths they set us on.

September 22, 2010

Congratulations

“The idea that as a literary person there are a certain set of books you must read because they are important parts of the literary conversation is constantly implied, yet quite ridiculous. Once you get done with the Musts — the Franzens, Mitchells, Vollmanns, Roths, Shteyngarts — and then get through the Booker long list, and the same half-dozen memoirs everyone else is reading this year (crack addiction and face blindness seem incredibly important this year), you have time for maybe two quirky choices, if you are a hardcore reader. Or a critic. And then congratulations, you have had the same conversations as everyone else in the literary world.” –Jessa Crispin from The Freedom World