November 2, 2007
Remembering the Bones by Frances Itani
My husband can be very astute at times. Whilst reading Frances Itani’s Remembering the Bones I was raving about the book and he said, “So you like it the same way you like obituaries then?” Exactly. Nothing to do with death at all, but rather for such a celebration of life. It’s The Stone Diaries without the ghost, but also something original, beautiful, gentle and lovely in its own right.
The book begins with Georgina Danforth Witley, 80 years old and on her way to meet the Queen. She has won a contest open to all of those in the Commonwealth who share Queen Elizabeth’s birthday, and this is an unlikely event in the life of a seemingly ordinary woman. Seemingly, of course: if we’ve learned anything from obits it’s that nobody is ordinary. Georgie with her 103 year old mother still living, with the memory of her eccentric salt-of-the-earth grandmother Grand Dan, with her ability to name all the bones in the human body, memorized from her late Grandfather’s Gray’s Anatomy. She has talked to Queen Elizabeth like a friend for all her life. Georgie had a “polio honeymoon”, she understands why people laugh at funerals. Once she witnessed her husband in an act of love and fell in love with him for all time.
All this she remembers while she is supposed to be lunching with the Queen. On her way to the airport, not even far from her own driveway, Georgie loses control of her car and crashes down into a ravine. Broken in the wreckage, unable to move or shout and with nobody coming to find her, Georgie tells the story of her life, from childhood to widowhood. Putting the pieces together, struggling to keep her brain active. Struggling to “remember the bones” she once knew so well, to name them and thus reconstruct herself, and her story. The story of her most extraordinary ordinary life, and my heart was wrung by the joy and the sadness alike.
What happens to Georgie in the end then? Definitely a talking point, with some interesting ambiguity, but I would argue that the ending is the least important thing about all of this. Though I devoured this book rather greedily, it was for the journey all the while. For Georgie’s voice, and Itani’s prose. For this narrative so constructed that the pages fly by like those on a cinematic calendar, whizzing past faster than days go, until you’re at the end, and you’re finished, but what you’re left with is a life.
September 30, 2007
Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay
So often, unsurprisingly, we find ourselves employing metaphors of artistry when it comes to a well-crafted book. Writers “weave” narratives, “paint” images, and, yes “craft” at all. Similarly, I recently wrote about a book’s machinery. And all this is high praise, really, to liken a writer to an artisan. But then Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air manages to surmount such praise– “seamless” is the best crafting metaphor I can think of. This book feels too whole to have been created, too perfect. Late Nights on Air is an entity unto itself, its own world, and a truly magnificent literary achievement.
The story is set among a group of people working at a small Yellowknife radio station in 1975. Indeed this is the True North, but not like we might imagine: “It was north of the sixtieth parallel and shared in the romance of the North, emanating not mystery but uniqueness and not right away. It had no breathtaking scenery. No mountains, no glaciers, in the winter not even that much snow.” Sound, not sight, becomes the salient sense, which is natural with the radio, and Hay creates this effect beautifully. Admirably too, for it is hard to write sound. And not just those voices in the night, but also snow crunching underfoot, paddles in the water, crackling fires and birdsong. Truly, this is the most audible novel I have ever read.
The story, quite simply, tells what happens when a various group of people come together in this strange and isolated place. The enigmatic Dido, whose voice causes some people to fall in love with her, and whose presence does others. Harry Boyd, a washed-up has-been, managing the station as part of his demotion. Gwen, who is too young and arrives in town with a bruise on her throat. Eleanor Dew, the station receptionist, the steadying force. Relationships are entered in and out of, loyalties shift in surprising ways. Each of these characters come with their own unwavering backstories, and point-of-view shifts between them with such fluidity. Similarly the story moves back and forth in time in a way that feels only natural, demonstrating Hay’s remarkable skill without actually making us aware of her at all.
The final third of the book tells of a modified version of our original group heading out on a six week canoe trip through the barrens. Though the travellers are light-hearted in their preprarations, a sense of foreboding pervades and clearly something bad is going to happen. And though what does happen is as devastating as one might expect, I found myself quite impressed with how deftly this event had been established, with a lack of emotional manipulation or gratuitous sensation. Also with how rivetted I remained to the story as the group made way along their journey– I tend to like stories that happen in places, usually urban places, but so attached I was to these characters that my attention never faltered as they portaged and canoed for days, sometimes seeing no other living creature but a single ptarmigan or a caribou.
Such is the story then, though what’s it about? It’s about people, and all that their presence entails. It’s about love and longing, otherness and belonging, bookishness and radio, seasons and change. It’s about Canada, and universality, and goodness, and less-than goodness. It is also an absolutely beautifully designed book, and I’d encouraged you to pick it up in hardback if you could. A nice compact shape and gorgeous cover art. And what’s inside is stupendous. Such a fitting title as the narrative felt weightless, but yet simultaneously substantial. Reading was an absolute pleasure.
September 24, 2007
Someday could be soon
Burma in the news. Do you want some context? Read Karen Connelly’s The Lizard Cage, which took the Orange Broadband Prize for New Writers earlier this year. I read it last winter and found the book so enomously powerful. “Someday the government of Burma will change…,” Connelly writes in her acknowledgements with such faith, and dare we hope that someday could be soon?
Update: read The last public voice of democracy in Myanmar.
August 28, 2007
Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls by Danielle Wood
It is written, in my rather crazed declaration in the post below, that my love for Danielle Wood’s Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls began at the first line. The first line? “The trouble with f*llatio, in my view, is its lack of onomatopoeia”. By all rights I could end this book review right now, but then that would be cheating.
I would like to take Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls and wave it in the faces of those who claim that fiction by women for women is stupid. I would like to take Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls and throw it in the faces of women who write stupid fiction for women, in an attempt to make them stop. Stop. Rosie Little is “the next Bridget Jones” for which we’ve been longing for ten years. But Danielle Wood is a sucessor to Helen Fielding only in that her writing is startlingly original, intelligent, honest, hilarious, sparkling, raw and full of life. Rosie Little Cautionary Tales for Girls is a successor to Bridget Jones only in that never has there been a book quite like this. If we must draw comparisons, may I suggest, somehow, Helen Fielding meets Sheila Heti?
A collection of short stories, but one which would convert even the short story’s most reluctant reader, Rosie Little is their teller. Sometimes she is the protagonist, elsewhere a bit character. In the stories where she does not appear at all, she interrupts in brief stops entitled “A Word from Rosie Little”, whether to quote “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” in Latin, to expound on aqualine noses (see below), or just for a word on, hilariously, p*nises. Rosie is witty, well-read, wary of wolves but only after a fashion. She and her entourage learn the hard way, such is the way learning goes, and their stories are recounted less as a precautionary measure (for it is too late for most of us I think), but rather to put real life on display in all its absurdity.
The relentless drive of a bride on “her day” leads to considerable embarrassment in “Vision in White”. “Elephantiasis” tells the heartbreaking story of a reluctant collector of elephant knickknacks, and ends hilariously (though not for the character) with male strippers dancing to Henry Mancini. “The Anatomy of Wolves” about a woman who goes back to the man who hits her, and she goes back again. “Rosie Little in the Mother Country” about English pervs, and the impossible youngness of being abroad for the first time. Each of these stories stands up on its own, and yet together they make a collection which reads almost seamlessly.
Rosie Little is rare narrative voice: smart, literary, funny, naive. Her confidences win friends, and her cautionary tales underline universal experience. And somehow she doesn’t become confused with her author in the way you might imagine– Rosie remains distinct, vividly real in her fictional realm. In Rosie and her tales, Danielle Wood has created something incredibly important. Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls raises the standard for women’s fiction, establishing the presence of greatness, and so wouldn’t it be nice if readers refused to settle for less anymore?
August 28, 2007
Rosie Little blew my mind
(I will write a composed post in a moment, for now, can hysteria guide my way?)
Love at first line– that was all it took. And then Danielle Wood’s Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls managed to grow more fulfilling with every line that followed. I’ve absolutely fallen in love and so wholeheartedly. I will tell you, as it goes, that I thought I’d known love, but now I realize…. Oh but now…
Yesterday morning I sent out an Emergency Book Recommendation urging friends to obtain this book. When informed yesterday evening that a friend of mine had purchased it that afternoon, that I was responsible for just one copy of Rosie Little being sold was immensely gratifying. And my friend will like it. I can’t think of any youngish woman I know who wouldn’t (except the horrible ones, but even they might). I will become this book’s champion. You may receive it as a gift from me in the future, and you will not receive a gift receipt because I know that you most definitely will not need it.
Oh the perfect book– these come along so rarely. I kept waiting for Rosie Little to let me down, because there is no such thing as a free lunch or life isn’t fair, or other such pathetic reasons, but Rosie never faltered. Would it be way too ridiculous to say that RLCTFG blew my mind? Because after all when you begin with what appears to be the pinnacle of pleasure which only intensifies, isn’t that what happens?
Do you remember that first line to which I fell in love (and I will quote it in my review-to-come). From that to the last line? Particularly if you are me? “In a moment, I would take a bold and good-sized step, out into the woods again. But first, I would finish my tea.” Yes yes yes. I finished this book on my lunch break today and returned to my desk unable to function. Symptoms of this are lingering as this post probably makes clear.
The one problem with Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls is, interestingly, in regards to one of the coolest things about it– design. A little black hardcover with a red spine, polka dots and a red shoe on the cover, black endpapers and flyleaf, fairytale fonts. A bit of whimsy, like Rosie herself– small but fierece in mean red boots. Ingenius, I think, but then when I was at Book City on the weekend, I saw it on display beside the cash register with novelty books. I was aghast. Mean boots indeed, this book is substance incarnate. As its champion I may be forced to complain to store management, and really, at this point, I wouldn’t put it past me.
August 8, 2007
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida
“People assume those in mourning aren’t thinking clearly,” explains Clarissa, the heroine of Vendela Vida’s novel Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. “Ha! My brain was a razor. A flesh-eating predator.” With prose stripped so bare, this spare and understated narrative follows Clarissa on a journey to Lapland after she learns the man she called her father wasn’t her father at all. Her other relationships are similarly hollow: her brother has Down’s Syndrome and doesn’t communicate; her fiance says he loves her and she pretends to be asleep; Clarissa’s mother disappeared when she was fourteen, leaving her in a bakery because, as the woman at the counter reported, “she got tired of waiting.” Clarissa is incredibly alone, but all the while this thought runs through her head like a mantra: There must be someone else… There must be someone I’m closer to.
Seeking this “someone” Clarissa escapes to the north of Finland, directed by clues to her real father’s identity. What follows is a quest of sorts, but one much diverted, exhausted. It’s fascinating, however, to learn more about this part of the world so unknown to me and Vida paints a sense of place so well– a place which lends itself to this “razor-sharp prose” in its own barreness. Reading this story was a curious experience however– I was not ultimately sure that I liked it. The prose, the choice and spare details, the traumatized voice all seemed much like what would be found in a short story, and to have it sustained for the length of a novel didn’t feel quite right. A certain superficiality seemed the result, but then, oh, I read the end. The end of this novel is magic spun out of gold– surprising, risky, realized and incredibly satisfying. Casting the entire novel in a different light than I’d been viewing it in all along, and the fact was I loved it. Which I couldn’t have told you twenty pages from the end, but from the final sentence, clearly it was so.
~And when I would hear people say that you can’t start over, that you cannot escape the past, I would think You can. You must.~
*Check out Tim’s review of this book at Baby Got Books.
July 19, 2007
Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
I’ve got no qualms about saying that Animal Vegetable Miracle is one of the best books I’ve ever read about science and nature. I’ve only ever read two other books as good, and they were Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and so a triumverate now, of these books which have shown me how little I know about the world. But they’ve also invested that blank space of my ignorance with such wonder, and the very beginning of knowledge.
Animal Vegetable Miracle is not so much a lifestyle guide. Novelist Barbara Kingsolver (who has a graduate degree in biology, for the record) recognizes that most families do not have the means to do what hers did: to spend a year of self-sufficiency, growing all their food on their farm. No, she is not saying to do as they did, rather her message is “Here is what we did, and all that we learned.” And so the reader learns in turn– about the vegetannual (seen here). I never knew how early greens like lettuce come up in the growing season, or why. I didn’t know why green peppers come into season before the red ones. With the same ignorance Kingsolver notes at the beginning of her book, I never realized that potatoes grow with stems and leaves. I was aware that tomatoes in the winter weren’t the best thing, but I’d never thought too much about it.
I gleaned practical tips from this book– to prevent rotting in the soil, stick a paperplate underneath my watermelons (and indeed we’ve got another one coming in in the garden!). The book contains seasonal recipes, instructions about canning and preserving, a helpful bibliography and list of resources. Alongside Kingsolver’s beautiful prose, her husband and daughter have contributed articles on areas of their own expertise. And such is the story of a year in a family, though it spans more than a year, certainly. It takes three years before an asparagus plant is ready to eat after all. Planting must be carefully planned well in advance to allow for enough harvest to see them through the winter. For people with all the means that they have, Kingsolver’s family still finds that sustenance to be a full time job, out of reach for most of us. But then, writes her husband Steven L. Hopp: “If every US citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we could reduce our country’s oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels every week.” That’s small steps, and for most people very possible.
However infinitely educational, didacticism is not at the forefront of Animal Vegetable Miracle. The story (and it is a story) is by turns touching, hilarious, spiritual and rabble-rousing. How lucky when brilliant writers have the best stories to tell. It was a pleasure to read, and I’d urge it upon you as something so terribly important.
June 30, 2007
A Memoir of Friendship by Howard and Shields
The thing about a book of letters is that it’s usually going to end with someone dying. And perhaps there is no better metaphor for the death of a writer than the blank page which follows the end of her text. That that writer’s voice has been inside your head for 400+ pages at her most natural and free will only have that page’s silence resound. This week reading A Memoir of Friendship: The Letters between Carol Shields and Blanche Howard, I had the same problem I had with Decca. Both were big books I was intending to read in in bits and morsals but somehow the chronology, the voices, the spirit proved too sweeping and I was entranced. Reading became a race to an ending I knew very well would be a sad one, but the story was too good to take slowly. And that one blank page could be so devastating is certainly a testament to what came before it.
For nearly thirty years Blanche Howard and Carol Shields exchanged letters, beginning in 1975 when Shields wrote seeking advice on a book contract from the more experienced novelist Howard. Of course both women had a particular flair for the written word, and their relationship grew around such commonalities, including their love of books, their interest in CanLit in particular, feminism, politics, marriage and family. As the letters progress, the women become grandmothers, never stop being mothers, discuss aging, seek “the meaning of life”, exchange book reccomendations. Typewriting, to PCs, to email. Shields comes to achieve enormous success as she takes home one literary prize after another, while Howard’s own career progresses more slowly, and she often struggles to get her work into print. Her husband begins a long decline with Parkinson’s Disease, and later Shields is diagnosed with the cancer she died of in 2003. And amidst all this life, overwhelmingly, there is such joy. Inevitable, I suppose, from two women doing what they loved best (writing) and sharing their ideas all the while with an old, loved, cherished friend.
I suspect that there is something about my gender which makes me particuarly fond of collections of letters. It’s the same thing that makes me an assidious evesdropper, missing my streetcar stop, for example, so as not to miss the end of a stranger’s conversation. I find something so delicious about other people’s lives, but when these people’s lives are extraordinary, and when their expression of their lives via the written word is so particularly vivid, the resulting book can’t help but be gripping. And bookishly speaking, what a thrill I get being privy to the genesis of their own works, to their exchanged thoughts on Margaret Drabble’s “latest” The Radiant Way, Shields’ response to Joan Didion’s “On Keeping a Notebook”, to their critical admiration for M. Atwood, and feelings toward other giants in the CanLit scene.
Howard, along with her daughter Allison Howard, has edited these letters wonderfully. Divided into approprate chapters introduced by Howard, and interwoven with other relevant writings to flesh out the context, there is a wholeness to this work. Functioning on so many levels, truly it is a celebration. And not just of Shields and her powerful voice (whose power is undeniable here), and its silence too soon. But a celebration also of engagement with the world, of women, their lives, and, most of all, their friendships.
June 14, 2007
Remember when the boys were all electric?
What a good lunch break I had today, dropping out of a brilliant game of catch to read in the grass until the boys were ready to go back in. Sunny with a breeze. Now reading So May Ways to Begin by Jon McGregor, which connects me to the England I’m missing furiously post-vacation*. The book is wonderful so far. I read McGregor’s first novel If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things a million years ago, and though I enjoyed it and McGregor himself was doing something remarkable, the book wasn’t perfect. Whereas the sense I’m getting so far is that in his second novel, he’s finding his feet. Which is so exciting, and it’s wonderful to think of his career still ahead of him and books books to read. It will be nice to follow along, just as it has been so far.
And I was very happy to see that Madeleine Thien’s Certainty was nominated for the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Pleased that Heather O’Neill’s much-deserving Lullabies for Little Criminals is on the list as well, but I’m rooting for Certainty. O’Neill’s had plenty of fun already, and Certainty is the very best book I’ve read this year.
*Ah, missing furiously. I listen to BBC Radio1 at work, and every since Monday have heard the songs we listened to as we drove across the North of England with the top down, and never in my life have I felt such nostalgia for a last week.
May 21, 2007
28 by Stephanie Nolen
The one thing of which I am certain is the power of story, and Stephanie Nolen’s 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa is a testament to this power. I’ve been reading this book for a few weeks now as it was too much to take in all at once. Not that it depressing, or overly bleak, but rather there is just so much here. Unsurprisingly, as each of Nolen’s 28 stories is to represent one million people in Africa with HIV/AIDS, a structure which does something toward making 28 million a comprehendable number– no small task. The subjects of these stories come from a variety of backgrounds, and their situations are different: the young Ethiopian girl whose parents have died of AIDS who supports her younger brother; the Congolese doctor who braves civil war violence to keep her clinic operating so patients can continue to receive their antiretroviral drugs; the South African activist who refused ARV drugs, coming close to death, until they were made widely available for those in his country who needed them; the twelve-year-old who began taking ARV drugs and became healthy for the first time in his life; the Ugandan doctor working toward an HIV vaccine; the HIV-immune prostitute who must work to support her family; she who wears the crown of Botswana’s Miss HIV Stigma-Free.
Stephanie Nolen is a phenomenal writer, as anyone would know who has read her work in The Globe and Mail. She allows her subjects dignity and writes with sympathy, making extraordinary stories out of ordinary lives. Nolen has been reporting on AIDS in Africa since the late 1990s, and is equipped with both knowledge and the skills to impart it. I found her introduction to this book fascinating, as I learned of the origins of AIDS in Africa, and how it spread. Nolen’s insight that, “The problem with HIV is that its transmission, in blood and sexual fluids and breast milk, preys on our most intimate moments,” seemed to me a wonderfully straightforward expression of so many complicated issues, and informed the way that I would read her book. And as much as 28 taught me about AIDS, it also showed me Africa: AIDS is the story, but in the background is political upheaval and Civil War in various countries; ordinary lives amidst all this, and in more peaceful places too; the societal constructs and family units. Nolen gives us many of the notorious stock-characters of the AIDS epidemic: the truckers, prostitutes, cheating husbands, betrayed wives. And these characters are never true to type, perhaps the very point. Their situations are far more complicated (and in some cases sensible, in their own contexts) than they are usually portrayed. And as readers, we come away with an understanding– the proof of stories’ power, and Nolen’s stories in particular.
