May 6, 2008
Elaine Dundy
From Maud Newton’s blog, I discover that the writer Elaine Dundy has died. Except that I’ve never heard of Elaine Dundy before, but being currently afflicted with an obsession for the alligator pear, her novel The Dud Avocado caught my attention. Though I don’t know what the book has to do with avocados, but my obsession doesn’t really have much to do with them either (more their essence, naturally). And so I’m going to read this novel, which means I’m jumping onto a just-deceased author bandwagon again, however I feel less bad about it than usual. Elaine Dundy, who once wrote a book on Elvis, is quoted on the source of sources as saying, “I didn’t know that Elvis was alive until he died”.
May 4, 2008
Unmistakably hers
In the Paris Review Interviews, II, from Toni Morrison: “There is no black woman popular singer, jazz singer, blues singer who sounds like any other. Billie Holiday does not sound like Aretha, doesn’t sound like Nina, doesn’t sound like Sarah, doesn’t sound like any of them. They are really powerfully different. And they will tell you that they couldn’t possibly have made it as singers if they sounded like somebody else. If someone comes along sounding like Ella Fitzgerald, they will say, Oh we have one of those… It’s interesting to me how those women have this very distinct, unmistakable image. I would like to write like that. I would like to write novels that were unmistakably mine, but nevertheless fit into African-American traditions and second of all, this whole thing called literature.”
Defining what to me are “the two kinds of books in the world”. How extraordinary it is as a reader to come across those “unmistakable” books. To be turning the pages and think, I’ve not read anything quite like this in my entire life. And how vastly different that is from “Oh we have one of those…” These derivative works have their own place of course, they are made to be read, but more easily forgotten.
There is a certain energy you get whilst reading something entirely new. A frisson of infinite possibility, of personal discovery. I felt that way as I read Emily Perkins’ Novel About My Wife. Here was something I could not explain away by anything I’d read before. This feeling only intensified as I went back and read her previous novels, and gained an understanding of that voice that was “unmistakably hers.”
It’s happened before– the first time I read Grace Paley or Laurie Colwin are two examples I can think of. Immediately afterwards, entire back catalogues have to be explored. And these explorations become journeys into whole worlds we’ve only glimpsed yet. My own literary universe expanding again.
May 1, 2008
Woolf on book blogs?
“But still we have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print. And that influence, if it were well instructed, vigorous and individual and sincere, might be of great value now when criticism is necessarily in abeyance; when books pass in review like the procession of animals in a shooting gallery, and the critic has only one second in which to load and aim and shoot and may well be pardoned if he mistakes rabbits for tigers, eagers for barndoor fowls, or misses altogether and wastes his shot upon some peaceful cow grazing in a further field. If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people reading for the love of reading, slowly and yet unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.” –1926, Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?”
April 30, 2008
Anything at all
“‘What are you reading?’
‘A pile of things. Books on stuff, you know how there’s always a new one, on tomatoes or love songs or the secret history of buttonholes.’ He grinned at her. ‘I’m waiting for the book on books on stuff to be published. Perhaps I should write it, I’ve read enough of them. Ask me anything you want to know about coriander. Anything at all.'”
–Emily Perkins, The New Girl
April 30, 2008
MacMillan on history
One of the highlights of my whole life has been an undergraduate history seminar with Margaret MacMillan, but I’d think she was amazing anyway. I’m looking forward to reading her new book Uses and Abuses of History, particularly since reading this interview: ‘I don’t think history teaches us clear lessons. I think it’s very dangerous to say that history demands certain things.’
April 25, 2008
We lay no claim…
Today’s Globe F&A essay “Degrees of Separation” is reaching towards the ideas so deftly explored by Sharon Butala in her brilliant new book The Girl from Saskatoon (read my review here). Writer Bob Levin writes, “This isn’t our tragedy, of course – it’s her family’s, her friends’. We lay no claim to it…” But then, what do we do with these connections?
The Girl in Saskatoon is currently #7 on the Globe & Mail Bestseller list for non-fiction.
April 23, 2008
Listenings
Tonight my friend Jennie and I had the great pleasure of going to see Jhumpa Lahiri at Harbourfront reading from her new book The Unaccustomed Earth (recently read). It was a great event, fascinating to see these masterful stories are made by such a young and slightly nervous person– for me, they’re a bit richer for that, of this earth. She was a wonderful reader, reading from her story “Hell/Heaven”, and having heard it in her voice, I do want to go back and read it again.
I’ve written before about my feelings towards readings– that I’ve long found it difficult just to listen, and they force me to use un-exercised muscles. Though being bad at listening is certainly no desirable trait, and I always striving to become better at this, and some readers and some stories definitely make it easy. Of course it’s not all about self-improvement– I do enjoy readings. I like the idea of bookish gatherings, and they do make me feel better about the world in general– a whole room full of people who’ve shown up to be read to. It all can’t be so bad after all…
I haven’t mentioned yet that Michael Ondaatje was also reading tonight. I mightn’t have mentioned at all– I was there for Lahiri. But his reading was stunning. I’ve read Divisidero and found it not unsatisfying but baffling, and all the baffling stuff ceased to matter tonight when I heard the story in his voice. Perhaps his stories are meant to be told more than read, where they are just dissected, may fall apart, his images failing to withstand much scrutiny. But it was such a marked difference when I was listening, the kind of difference I’ve never really experienced at a reading. When I couldn’t perform dissections, refering to previous paragraphs, underlining points and pencilling question marks. Instead it was forward momentum, unstoppable, and I could only go along for the ride. The niggly problems didn’t stand out then, the bits and pieces, but they culminated into something larger, washing over me to cast a spell under which the story was perfectly reasonable. His last line took my breath away, and I don’t even mean it figuratively.
April 22, 2008
Life is too short
That I’ve never read Eat Pray Love doesn’t mean I’m not amused by furious tirades against the book: lately, “Eat Pray Love Shut the Fuck Up” and “Eat Pray and look at me.” Stephanie Nolen’s blogpost: “one tiny source of levity amidst the heartbreak… the Zimbabwean flare for names.” Ivor Tossell’s, “They’re never gonna give you up Rick Astley” is brilliant. How your home library is a real estate selling point (via Stuart, though I’m not sure why he was reading The Telegraph‘s property section). Though at said paper, I came across this fascinating Doris Lessing interview. The work of the great Grace Paley surveyed (and I am excited, for I’ll be rereading her collected stories soon!): “”Art is too long, and life is too short… There’s a lot more to do in life than just writing.”
April 20, 2008
The whole world is out of doors
Though the weekend’s weather has been nothing short of summer, I’ve felt no desire to sit out on a restaurant patio. Mostly because I’ve got case of beer in my fridge, and my own deck just outside my door– such luxury! I’ve never known this before, and we can also open up the double doors into our kitchen and the whole world is out of doors. There’s been plenty of barbeque.
This weekend I picked up Lois Lowry’s The Giver for a quarter at a yard sale. We were in the mood for a walk and got to Type Books, where I picked up The Emily Valentine Poems. I finished reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which was amazing. I like well enough every Bronte that I’ve ever met, but the characters here were dead ringers for people I know, 150 years later. This is disturbing for my sake, but quite an astounding literary achievement and certainly qualifies as “timelessness, so far”. I am so pleased to have followed this bookish recommendation.
April 10, 2008
My bookish friend
I am now reading The Girl in Saskatoon by Sharon Butala, which combines my loves of literature and True Crime respectively, the latter borne out of the paperbacks my Dad has always kept precariously stacked by his bedside. I finished reading Rose Macaulay’s My World my Wilderness, which read like such a precursor to the more contemporary British novels I adore so much– in particular a few by Hilary Mantel, Esther Freud and Penelope Lively. Also fascinating that it shares an epigraph with Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing, and considerations of good and evil that tie in so well with Brighton Rock (both recent reads of mine). Oh books…
And oh, bookish friends: I’ve got many of those, with varying degrees of obsessions, but all of whom appreciate the pleasures. My friend Bronwyn, though, might be my one relationship that completely began and grew with a love of reading. We worked together as editorial assistants during the summer of 2001, our first conversation was about The End of the Affair, and we used to go out on our lunch breaks and spend too much money at bookshops like Nicholas Hoare, and (the late) Little York Books. We also shared a love for John Cusack, and were especially enamoured of the scene in Serendipity in which he went into Little York Books. We both moved to England in 2002, which only served to cement our bookish bonds, as bookishness is hard to avoid in England.
And I am so thrilled that in a month or so, Bronwyn is moving back to Toronto. With her darling husband in tow, of course, and she’s home again. We’ve been living oceans apart since 2004, and it will be a pleasure for our togetherness to once again be ordinary. Our bookishness live and in person, and Bronwyn’s not lost any of hers– in her email today she reported that she’s “packed up eleven boxes of books and barely made a dent”, and keep in mind that she is relocating continents. What a formidable book lover. Whenever I report any classic book that I’ve fallen in love with lately, she’ll usually be able to say that she was obsessed with it when she was eleven.
Anyway, I am doubly excited, because not only will she be back in town, but when I reported my absolute failure to turn up any copies of Rebecca at used book shops, she told me that has two in her collection (she was apparently obsessed with this one at age thirteen) and that I am more than welcome to one of them. How lucky!
