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.
May 19, 2007
They know about love
“They know after all this time about love– that it’s dim and unreliable, and little more than a reflection on the wall. It is also capricious, idiotic, sentimental, imperfect, and inconstant, and most often seems to be the exclusive preserve of others. Sitting in a room that was slowly glowing dark, they found themselves wishing they could measure its pure anchoring force or account for its random visitations. Of course they could not– which was why, after a time, they began to talk about other things: the weather, would it snow, would the wind continue its bitter course, would the creek freeze over, would there be another power cut, what would happen during the night.” -Carol Shields, “Others”
May 19, 2007
Tempus does not fugit
“And then, suddenly, I realized it meant nothing. Tempus did not fugit. In a long and healthy life, which is what most of us have, there is plenty of time. There is time to sit on a houseboat for a month reading novels. There is time learn another language. There is travel time and there is stay-at-home time. Shallow time and fallow time. There is time in which we are politically involved and other times when we are wilfully unengaged. We will have good years and bad years, and there will be time for both. Every moment will not be filled with accomplishment; we would explode if we tied ourselves to such a regimen. Time was not our enemy if we kept it on a loose string, allowing for rest, emptiness, reassessment, art and love. This was not a mountain we were climbing; it was closer to being a novel with a series of chapters”- Carol Shields, “Afterword” from Dropped Threads
I love this. Though Shields’ own tragically shortened life gives this a sad resonance, I think it still stands. Though there is never enough time, at the same time life is long. Every day is bursting with hours, and weeks with days. That you make the time you have enough. And I love that idea– if I only had a houseboat.
April 25, 2007
Encountering the great unread
“People shouldn’t worryabout disliking books widely accepted as great, or avoiding them for decades. They should wait for that stage when they are ready for the book, for it will come. I have read with such excess all my life that I could always use the excuse that I had another book on the go. I didn’t know this when I was young, but I would still have plenty of time to encounter the great unread.” -Heather Mallick, “Lessing is More”
