August 9, 2007
The non-presence of friends
“I have been careful to give Alicia a few friends. It’s curious how friends get left out of novels, but I can see how it happens. Blame it on Hemingway, blame it on Conrad, blame even Edith Wharton, but the modernist tradition has set the individual, the conflicted self, up against the world. Parents (loving or negligent) are admitted to fiction, and siblings (weak, envious or self-destructive) have a role. But the non-presence of friends is almost a convention– there seems no room for friends in a narrative already cluttered with event and the tortuous vibrations of the inner person. Nevertheless, I like to sketch in a few friends in the hope they will provide a release from a profound novelistic isolation that might otherwise ring hollow and smell suspicious.” –Carol Shields, Unless
August 7, 2007
August
“Every year, the bright Scandinavian summer nights fade away without anyone’s noticing. One evening in August you have an errand outdoors, and all of a sudden it’s pitch-black. A great warm, dark silence surrounds the house. It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a standstilll; nothing withers, and autumn is not ready to begin. There are no stars yet, just darkness. The can of kerosene is brought up from the cellar and left in the hall, and the lamp is hung up on its peg beside the door.” –Tove Jansson, “The Summer Book”
August 3, 2007
An island can be dreadful
“An island can be dreadful for someone from outside. Everything is complete, and everyone has his obstinate, sure and self-sufficient place. Within their shores, everything functions according to rituals that are as hard as rock from repetition, and at the same time they amble through their days as whimsically and casually as if the world ended at the horizon.” –Tove Jansson, The Summer Book
August 2, 2007
Precision
“‘It’s odd that one scarcely gets anything worth having by post, yet one always wants one’s letters,’ said Mr. Bankes.
What damned rot they talk, thought Charles Tansley, laying down his spoon precisely in the middle of his plate…” -from To the Lighthouse
July 26, 2007
Like life itself
In literary happenings, Booklust passes on word of the newDouglas Coupland Exhibit of Penguin Collages– I won’t miss it. And summer is truly here, because out comes The Atlantic Fiction Issue. Now just-finishing April in Paris— review up tomorrow. Also stay tuned for an Animal Vegetable Miracle update. And indeed, Laurie Colwin’s A Big Storm Knocked It Over cured everything what ailed me. “It was magical… that unexpected, magnificent, beautiful release, like the unexpected joy that swept you away, like life itself.”
July 18, 2007
A Certain Definition
“The choreography of many people working in one kitchen is, by itself, a certain definition of family, after people have made their separate ways home to be together”. -Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Vegetable Miracle.
July 13, 2007
ReReading Kevin
I had a feeling that We Need to Talk About Kevin would be an important book to reread. First read two years ago after a whole lot of Orange Prize and political hoopla, I was doubtful I would like it. It had been cast as variously feminist and anti-feminist depending on who was talking, and employed as a polarizing weapon in the mommy wars. But when I started reading, I realized that easy issues of polarity weren’t what Lionel Shriver was on about, and that she wasn’t spouting rhetoric as much as asking questions. What I remember most about finishing this book the first time was an urgent need to find somebody else with whom to discuss it.
And so to approach it two years later would be interesting. First, that I’d know the big twist was coming– could this book be about more than its sensation? And also reading it in the context of Shriver’s other work, which I’ve become familiar with. Nearly halfway in, I am pleased to report that the work has been even more resonant the second time around. A certain poignancy is offered, reading in light of what has not yet been revealed. Eva’s character is easier understood, her tragedy more pointed. And I see also that while this is definitely Shriver’s most accomplished work to date, it is in no way a departure from her usual. In all her books, Shriver has a tremendous ability to make unattractive characters realistic, evocative and impossibly sympathetic, even as you want to punch them all the while. This time I also see that, as with Double Fault and The Post-Birthday World, Kevin is ultimately not about motherhood and murder as much as marriage.
July 5, 2007
The thing with academics
“‘I’ll tell you what my thing is with academics,’ she continued in a harder tone. ‘They take something that is complete, say a story, that is not material to work with– it’s complete; it is to the writer anyway– and they take it as crude ore that they’re taking out of the ground, to suit some purpose of their own, and I find this outrageous.'” -Mavis Gallant in this month’s Walrus.
June 22, 2007
The authenticity of fiction
From Penelope Lively’s Making It Up
To write fiction is to make a succession of choices, to send the narrative and the characters in one direction rather than another. Story is navigation; successful story is the triumphant progress down exactly the right paths, avoiding the dead ends, the unsatisfactory turns. Life, of course, is not at all like that. There is no shrewd navigator, just a person’s own haphazard lurching from one decision to another. Which is why life so often seems to lack the authenticity of fiction.
June 18, 2007
In honour of love
I should post my reading from Bronwyn’s wedding. I have mentioned the trouble I had selecting a reading, but once I saw this one, I knew it was perfect. As I prefaced it before, believe it or not, Virginia Woolf knew a great deal about joy.
Virginia Woolf The Voyage Out Chapter XXII
The darkness fell, but rose again, and as each day spread widely over the earth… this wish of theirs was revealed to other people, and in the process became slightly strange to themselves. Apparently it was not anything unusual that had happened; it was that they had become engaged to marry each other. The world… expressed itself glad on the whole that two people should marry, and allowed them to see that they were not expected to take part in the work which has to be done in order that the world shall go on, but might absent themselves for a time. They were accordingly left alone… driven to walk alone, and sit alone, to visit secret places where flowers had never been picked and the trees were solitary. In solitude they could express those beautiful but too vast desires which were so oddly uncomfortable to the ears of other men and women– desires for a world, such as their own world which contained two people…, where people knew each other intimately and thus judged eacdh other by what was good, and never quarrelled, because that was a waste of time.
They would talk of such questions among books, or out in the sun, or sitting in the shade of a tree undisturbed. They were no longer embarrassed, or half-choked with meaning which could not express itself; they were not afraid of each other, or, like travellers down a twisting river, dazzled with sudden beauties when the corner is turned; the unexpected happened, but even the ordinary was lovable, and in many ways preferable to the ecstatic and mysterious, for it was refreshingly solid, and called out effort, and effort under such circumstances was not effort, but delight.
