October 21, 2007
A book's right time
“There is only one way to read which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag– and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is a part of a trend or a movement… Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.” Doris Lessing, 1971. Preface to The Golden Notebook.
Which is a wonderful thought and entirely true. However, like all truths, I can poke holes in this.
On “dropping books which bore you”– a contentious point in reading circles. I rarely do it myself, can think of two or three books in the past year, and why don’t I drop books which bore me? The Golden Notebook is a case in point: last Tuesday afternoon I was pulling my shopping trolley through the Roxton Road parkette, dispairing that The Golden Notebook had ever been written. “I hate it,” I was wailing, as the trolley bumped along. “I’m 192 pages in, and I don’t think I can take 400 more.” Why not drop it, it was suggested to me? “But what a waste of those 192 pages,” I cried. (These are the problems, clearly, of the more fortunate people in the world). “What am I ever going to do?”
Indeed, the book was a slog. Structurally the problem is obvious: essentially broken up into four sections, the first one takes up half the book. The currency of the book was also a problem, as it was not so current nearly fifty years later. Its politics were obsolete, its structure made me wonder if I was being made fun of, I was bored bored bored, there on page 192.
But then I turned to page 193 when I got home, and the whole book changed. Suddenly it made sense to me, and from then on I was enjoying myself. Nothing dramatic had shifted, but the pieces now fit. I understood what Doris Lessing was trying to do with her fragmented, enormous novel. I understood what she was saying about men and women, idealism, writing, the point of art at all. But not completely– so much of this went over my head. I truly believe that Anna and Molly might have had a better time had they spent time with men who weren’t horrible. Indeed a lot of the book was still a bit tedious, but what The Golden Notebook is attempting to capture is life. Or life at a a time, and it does, I think. Not since Woolf have I ever read a text more Woolfian. “I have only to write a phrase like ‘I walked down the street’, or take a phrase from a newspaper ‘economic measures which lead to the full use of…’ and immediately the words dissolve, and my mind starts spawning images which have nothing to do with the words, so that every word I see or hear seems a small raft bobbing about on an enormous sea of images”.
I try to read the books I “should” or “ought”, whose authors have just awarded Nobel prizes, because I am not as effective a self-educator as Doris Lessing. I need a bit of help every so often, to fill in my gaps, to fill out the world. And I tend not to drop the books which are boring me either, because so often page 193 is waiting just around the corner.
October 18, 2007
Fiction is all right.
I thought Philip Marchand’s article “Why novelists are nervous” was sort of strange, the nervous novelists being John Updike and Philip Roth. Apparently Updike wrote a novel seven years ago that sold poorly and Philip Roth has remarked, somewhat self-deprecatingly, I thought, “The status of literature was much higher when I began writing.”
Oh Philip, fear not! Ben McNally and Book City’s J. Frans Donker are not worried about the status of literature in the slightest. Neither is anybody I know, most of whom devour fiction like it’s pie.
Marchand’s hysteria is the result of the International Festival of Authors now featuring nonfiction writers, Charlotte Gray, Larry Gaudet, David Gilmour and Rudy Wiebe in particular. Which is interesting, I think. One of these writers, Gray, is prolific, acclaimed and, though I’ve not read her work, seems to write nonfiction about as literary as it gets. And then that the other three “nonfictioneers” are novelists first and foremost, which Marchand doesn’t even refer to. Granted we could make something terrible of the fact that market forces have pushed these writers to turn to nonfiction, and the hysteria could continue unabated. But I’d rather take the angle that perhaps nonfiction writers are those who should be nervous. Watch out Margaret MacMillan! The novelists are passing into your ranks. They’re injecting fact with fancy and, I would be willing to bet, the writing has never been so good.
October 17, 2007
Sitcom
Just purchased Sitcom by David McGimpsey. I heard about it on the radio this morning. I am interested in it because I’ve lately had some thoughts about The Facts of Life that might be brewing into something special. Further, because I recently learned that Kimmy Gibbler in real life went on into academia.
October 17, 2007
Clippings
Heather Mallick celebrates Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize. (And The Golden Notebook is a slog, though I’m still going, but it feels like I might be reading it for the rest of my life. More on this later). I look forward to reading Lessing’s The Good Terrorist in the future.
I feel a bit rotten for having slagged off The Globe and Mail‘s “Focus” section last weekend– this weekend I read the whole thing through. I especially enjoyed The Next Very Very Big Things by Lisa Rochon on skyscrapers: that “it’s in our nature… to return to the street”. But otherwise, building skyscrapers into land 1.5 metres above the water table. A building that will consume 946,000 litres of water every day.
Elsewhere in the paper was Ann Patchett and Karen Connelly on reading up on Burma.
And yes, Christie Blatchford gets especially Christie Blatchfordish about blogs and bloggers. She doesn’t like them. “Writing, though, is one of those things that everyone believes they can do, sort of like breathing. Blogdom has only served to fuel that notion.” Isn’t she right though? Of course I believe that my blog is the exception to this rule, but then I imagine that most people do.
See, the other thing is that I love Christie Blatchford. I love her with the same militant obstinacy with which she loathes most things, and I am just as unrelenting. I wrote her a note once when she was writing for the NP (I worked there at the time and got it free, she explains…). A column she’d written in 2001 called “Craving life in the face of death” moved me so much I would clip it out and keep it, and I’ve got it now in front of me, yellowed even. Anyway, she wrote a few lines back and I’ve saved that too. Both the column and the letter meant a lot to me, and so much of what she writes appeals to me, even when our politics don’t coincide, which is almost always.
But it’s also true that I like to love Christie Blatchford because it annoys people. And that I respond by loving her even more might suggest that Christie Blatchford and I have more in common than you’d think.
October 12, 2007
Expedient
Oh, yes. One factual problem with Douglas Coupland’s The Gum Thief (and have you seen his youtube channel?). In the novel Bethany gets a passport in a week, and we can assume this took place in 2007, due to DC’s ulta-currency. But we all know that nobody in Canada got a passport in a week during 2007. But then maybe I’m just looking for holes. Maybe this is fiction, after all.
October 12, 2007
Books write the songs
Colin Murray devotes part of his Radio 1 show to songs referencing literature. (Track listing here). I would also add The Arctic Monkeys, sort of, who named their album Whatever People Say I Am That’s What I’m Not after a line from the best old book I discovered for myself this year, which was, of course, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (though they claim they were referencing the film, which was good too). And Courage by The Tragically Hip, of course, which took some lyrics from The Watch that Ends the Night. Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s Love Over and Over references the Brontes. And I’m sure there’s many many more: what fun!
October 12, 2007
Links and Hijinks
Richard Wright is profiled. They’re going to let Claire Messud be a Canadian (which is v. v. exciting, I think). Doris Lessing’s Nobel win means that now I’ve got occasion to read my new copy of The Golden Notebook. I’m also intrigued by talk of her latest project here. Bookgadget devotee Kimbooktu has started up a new collection of library photos here (and I’m in the archives). Dovegreyreader reads Lucy Maud Montgomery.
October 9, 2007
Late Nights shortlisted…
Yes! Elizabeth Hay has made the Giller Shortlist for her exceptional novel Late Nights on Air. Let’s bring it on home now…
October 8, 2007
Hating with a blanket
Cheers upon cheers for Zoe Whittall’s review of Douglas Coupland’s new novel The Gum Thief. (And I would be cheering even if I weren’t voraciously devouring the novel at the moment.) No, Whittall has done something brave with her review. She writes:
Coupland is often criticized for being pop culturally literate, as though this somehow detracts from his work having true literary merit, as though it is somehow suspect to be too current. But he really did originate a type of contemporary literature that is not being afraid to engage with up-to-the-minute technology as it relates to our everyday emotional and cultural lives. I don’t shed a tear for his trillion-dollar advances. I’m just saying we could stand to be less hard on him for being so suspiciously popular.
With no fear whatsoever of undermining her cool indie cred, Whittall admits to liking a book, to liking an author. I’m not being facetious– a lot of critics never get this far. Which is not to say that all books and writers should be fawned over, but the flipside of this is active-hating which is something I find baffling. Not the hating so much: myself, I hate a lot of things, and though indeed “hate is a strong word”, so it should be. But it’s the activeness that is strange. The time and energy some people expend loathing things must eat up their lives, I wonder.
It’s also so easy to hate things: you don’t even have to read Douglas Coupland’s books to hate him. The same goes for Margaret Atwood, and I will quote my favourite-ever overheard conversation, first posted last year:
When I was at the Vic booksale on Monday, two undergraduate-appearing students were sorting through the CanLit table. One held up a copy of Survival to her friend, and said, “How about this one?” The other, sounding like she was repeating something she was very sure of, said, “Oh no, not Atwood. Can’t stand her novels. She just writes the same book over and over again.” Her friend said, “Survival isn’t a novel.” The anti-Atwoodian said “oh” and then rapidly changed the subject.
If you have read Atwood or Coupland, and you still don’t like their work, why not just not read it anymore? Though of course your caustic and bitter references to these figures will become less current, and you may have to talk about something else, but might that even do you some good?
Of course we need critics and criticism, absolutely, but hating mainstream with a blanket hardly constitutes criticism. And even if your criticism is legitimate, devoting your whole life to things you hate seems a bit sad to me. It is often more interesting listening to someone on what they do like rather than what they don’t anyway. Or rather the latter gets old soon and the former can be infectious.
October 6, 2007
Certainty wins
The best book wins again. (We’ll find out this week if it could happen for the Gillers too). Yes, because Madeleine Thien’s Certainity has won the Amazon Books in Canada First Novel Award. Deservingly– her novel is wonderful, and if you haven’t read it yet you should do so. I read it earlier this year and its power hasn’t left me yet.
