April 18, 2009
The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway
Certain novels might not immediately appeal to me, aren’t exactly “my kind of book”, but then upon hearing nothing about one but exemplary praise, I really can’t help but read it. Which was the case with Steven Galloway’s novel The Cellist of Sarajevo, nominated for the 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize, finalist for the 2009 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, a Globe & Mail Best Book, and praised by many book lovers I hold in esteem.
This book could be classified as historical fiction, if you consider the early 1990s history. Though “historical fiction” also reads as a kind of slight, and one that is not intended here. The label is a slight, if only because so many works in the genre do the “fiction” part of the equation so very badly. History is the point, the facts are, and the reader comes away quite gratified, feeling as though they could pass an exam at school.
But facts are not the point of fiction, and in particularly not the point are lessons to be learned. If you want a lesson, read a textbook, but we turn to fiction for something more nuanced than that, more complex, and not to come away with certainty. Certainty, anyway, is some kind of illusion.
I didn’t come away from The Cellist of Sarajevo with an understanding of the conflict at its heart. I didn’t get a sense of the politics involved, the history even, of who was good and who was bad. These aren’t details I’d look for in a novel anyway, and Galloway has no desire to deal with them, or with with the perspective of the military commander who says, “I will tell you the reality of Sarajevo. There is us, and there is them. Everyone, and I mean everyone, falls into one of these two groups. I hope you know where you stand.”
But as readers we aren’t told where any of the characters stand, and that we can’t even tell makes clear Galloway’s point– that such distinctions are meaningless. People are people, and the reality of their lives in a war zone is remarkable for reasons beyond which side their affinities lie. The quotidian details are what we take away here, and they’re powerful in their general nature– that these are the kind of lives being lived each day in places all over the world. The struggle of a man to cross the city and fetch water for his family, another man who has sent his family to safety and is attempting to get to work, the task given to a sniper called Arrow. She is to protect the cellist who has been playing the same adagio every day in honour of the 22 people killed below his window, hit by shelling while standing in a lineup for bread.
The stories of these people, of these individual lives, are what fiction is made for. To quietly and without great sensation (for this is daily life after all) demonstrate what such days and lives are like, the implications of living under terror– to cross a street where you know that snipers are aimed, and whether or not you’re hit, they’ve got a hold on you. Even when nothing happens, characters are seized by the knowledge that an explosion is always imminent. Such details as that all the women have grey hair now, because no more do they have access to dye, or what it is to see an overweight person, what that means when resources are so limited for everyone.
This novel is also the story of the streets, the story of a city ravaged by war and rendered unrecognizable. How the characters reconstruct the city in their memories, these places they’ve always known. The devastation obliterates lives, but not the lives of those still living, and it becomes these citizens’ struggle to resist losing their humanity. Galloway shows the magnitude of this struggle, but also the power retained by those who succeed. That civilization is everywhere and forever always a work in progress.
April 13, 2009
Advice for Italian Boys by Anne Giardini
“There is a saying I like very much,” explains a mentor to a young man in Anne Giardini’s novel Advice For Italian Boys. “One that can be expressed two contradictory ways, but somewhat paradoxically both of them are abundantly true.” The two expressions being “God is in the details” and “The devil is in the details,” both of which are also abundantly true in relation to the novel.
For indeed, it is the details, each one singularly considered, exact and perfect, that render the prose so evocative– the description of a man’s testicles, for example, or the Italy the grandmother still sees in her dreams, the intricacies of barbering, the shape of a woman’s body. But it is also such a focus on details that distracts from other matters at hand, such as plot or character. Details are not enough to grow these things organically, and so this novel reads patchily in parts.
Part of this problem, however, is deliberate and due to a protagonist who has not yet achieved “self-actualization”. He is probably someone who wouldn’t spend much time considering “self-actualization”, except that he’s recently enrolled in a continuing education psychology course. And for this protagonist– Nicole Pavone who is in his early twenties, first-generation Canadian happily ensconced at home with his Italian parents, employed as a personal trainer at the local gym– the world around him is a place comprising details and lacking a cohesive whole. In short, he’s got some growing up to do.
The solution, he believes is to take advice, and fortunately he finds it aplenty. His Nonna’s old Italian maxims are always close at hand, cryptic in their meaning, but also flexible enough to have wide relevance. He turns also to this two brothers, both called Enzo, who offer their respective takes on fraternal support. And while his clients at work turn to him for fitness advice, they’re also willing to offer Nicolo their own bits of wisdom. So that in the end, he is receiving so much advice, he’s as much abuzz as ever with total confusion.
Advice for Italian Boys was a read that held my attention, particularly by virtue of its wide perspective– the glimpses we get into the minds of other characters, and the opportunity to see Nicolo from the outside. I appreciated Giardini’s presentation of suburban Toronto, the ethnic enclaves on the northern fringes which are usually ignored in contemporary literature. Also her portrayal of an immigrant community whose cultural identity and status in a new land is not necessarily the paramount occasion of the novel.
This is a slow story, made up of moments instead of momentum, in that I mean nothing terribly dramatic ever happens. Which is certainly not a flaw, because the moments Giardini captures are done so with great acuity. She also performs curious tricks with chronology which don’t seem ultimately realized, but they suggest there’s more to this simple narrative than what at first meets the reader’s eye.
April 10, 2009
The Private Patient by P.D. James
Apart from the plot twists and the suspense, of course, one of the best parts about P.D. James’ The Private Patient was its unabashed bookishness. That not only is Commander Adam Dalglish that unique combination of published poet/murder investigator, but every suspect he meets is assessed by the state of their library. Whether the books are carefully ordered with their heights fitting carefully into the shelves, or cluttered in piles about a room, or falling down where gaps in the collection have arisen. Character further established by literary references (or lack of), and self-conscious references to detective fiction.
This was my first “Adam Dalgleish Mystery”, and I was pleased that my lack of background didn’t undermine the reading experience. Though I could discern the basics– Dalgliesh leads and elite team of murder investigators, his fiancee Emma is esconced at Cambridge and he keeps her apart from his working life, that he is growing wary of murder scenes, and perhaps his retirement is nigh?
But we don’t meet Dalgliesh until a third of the way into the book, the initial chapters focussed on staff at Cheverell Manor, a private clinic for cosmetic surgery, and the eponymous patient, investigative journalist Rhoda Gradwyn. She’s booked in for a routine operation, albeit not an easy one– the removal of a conspicuous scar from her face. But the proceeding goes as expected, she is sure to recover, and then the morning after she is discovered strangled in her bed. Suspects a plenty– her toy-boy who stands to inherit from her will, his cousins who live at Cheverell Manor and have their own stories to protect, anyone who might have it in for Mr. Chandler-Powell and his clinic (and private medicine?). Gradwyn’s own assortment of enemies, people she might have exposed throughout her career, or perhaps any one of the clinic’s staff whose alibis might be too convenient. (There being no butler, he was not a suspect).
I will admit that I found the beginning of the book a bit plodding, and thought that any book so literarily aware of itself, employing such an expansive vocabulary could well have taken better care to avoid expository dialogue in lieu of plot. But once Dalgliesh and his team’s investigation began, I was hooked, surprised by twists and revelations, intrigued by the psychology shown here of detective work, and the dynamics of the police team. It was clear to me why James is cited as a master of crime fiction, why Dalgliesh has enjoyed such enduring popularity, and how disappointed will be readers if his career has really come to an end.
April 5, 2009
Battered Soles by Paul Nicholas Mason
The protagonist of Paul Nicholas Mason’s novel Battered Soles is a man called Paul Mason who is surprised to hear of a famous religious pilgrimage taken from the city of Peterborough to St. John’s Anglican Church in Lakefield, a nearby village. “It didn’t seem likely to me. I did not then expect the miraculous to reveal itself in a turf that was to some degree familiar.”
But then miraculous revelation in familiar places is the jurisdiction of fiction in general, really, and Mason plays with this further by situating the familiar (which is himself, or someone like him) inside a story wholly imagined. Moreover, through such imagining, Mason has also managed to re-imagine Peterborough and Lakefield, rendering these seemingly ordinary locations (at least to those of us who’ve lived there) as places to be considered anew.
The fictional Paul Mason is familiar with Peterborough, because he’d attended university there at Trent in the 1970s. And he’s intrigued by the idea of the pilgrimage, being someone who has “long felt drawn to religious questions, even if [he’s] in short supply of doctrinal answers”. The story that follows is Mason’s account of his journey towards the blue-skinned Jesus sculpture in the basement of the St. John’s church. The sculpture was created by a lesbian artist called Daz, who used to follow the pilgrimage route to her lover’s home in Lakefield. After Daz is killed, struck down by a car on her bicycle, the church’s caretaker cleaning around the statue suddenly finds his arthritis cured. Word of the miracle gets around, and the pilgrims begin arriving from around the world.
As might be expected by a novel whose title is a pun, the humour throughout is a bit goofy, the wisdom folksy. I frequently laughed out loud as I read (it occurs to me to note: there is no other way to laugh, is there?) and enjoyed traveling alongside Mason and the colourful characters he meets. The story as much a meditation on faith as the pilgrimage is meant to be, Mason’s incidental asides providing Battered Soles with an additional great deal of charm. Faith itself meant in an ecumenical sense, as suggested by an Anglican pilgrimage towards any Jesus painted like a Hindi deity (with Baptists along the way). This becomes a story about people of all kinds. With no doctrinal answers, but indeed the questions open wide, underlining the very point: journey matters more than destination anyway.
April 3, 2009
Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff
Stunning, stunning, stunning, let me sing the praises of Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff. I fell in love with her novel The Monsters of Templeton last year, but anything so extraordinary could well have been a trick of hype. By “anything so extraordinary”, of course, I mean Groff’s literary talent, and so it thrilled me as I read her short story collection to realize she’s definitely credible, and her work is enduring.
The stories are remarkable, but just as much is their collection. And not simply because of the gorgeous cover design (whose theme of loveliness is continued through the book entire). I will say, however, that this is a book worth judging by its cover, for the reader will not be disappointed. The cover’s bird motif appearing throughout the collection, joining these stories otherwise so disparate by style, narration, location, characterization. But the birds are there, and so is water, bodies of big and small, and swimmers, and poolside loungers, and drownings and rain. So that to ponder all these stories together after the fact is to draw surprising connections, new conclusions. Here are nine stories that belong together, but not in ways that one might suspect.
Lauren Groff is a storyteller in the old-fashioned sense. Her intention is not to cultivate realism, but rather atmosphere, fully steeped. Her narrators take on a nineteenth-century kind of omniscience, have a sweeping way about them, and the storytelling is really as much of the point as the story itself. Characters sometimes taking on fairytale proportions, particularly male ones who are devious and dastardly, which might be regarded as limited dimensionality, but I think it’s just another kind of dimension altogether.
The nine stories collected here are long and developed with slow subtlety. “L. DeBard and Aliette” tells the story of a poolside romance between a determined polio victim and a poet against the background of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. That its ending is wandering yet still shocking shows its force is much more than a trick. “Majorette” traces the life of a baton-twirling girl fenced in by limitations thought to be hereditary, but then shows this is not the case. I loved “Blythe”, which traces the story of a high-maintainence friendship, and the plight of the friend called on for saving time and time again. “Watershed” was a tragic romance dark and never saccharine. And while “Majorette” reminded me of Revolutionary Road, “Delicate Edible Birds” had something of Suite Francaise about it, and what kind of a span is that? Her tropical locations were also a wee bit Joan Didion.
Which is not to say that Lauren Groff is derivative, and I mean these references as compliments rather than explanations for. Because stunning, stunning, stunning, I’m still singing– that all these works can come from one author, particularly one still young, is incredibly impressive. That the short story form is celebrated here with such deftness, and confidence, is terribly exciting. And the whole career Groff still has before her– it’s exciting to contemplate all that lies ahead for us to read.
March 25, 2009
Strange and sordid
I’ve spent the last few evenings so outrageously tired that I was seeing double, and the mornings drinking excessive amounts of orange juice. I’d self-diagnosed with diabetes, but now I think I just happen to be cranky and craving vitamin C. I no longer feel like sitting at a desk to type, but when I lie down on my back, I’m unable to breathe, and I don’t yet know how to type on my side. Baby is currently kicking my computer, having spent the entire day pummeling me from the inside, which makes me happy actually, nothing to worry about. I slept better last night (except for strange sordid dreams involving Tom Selleck and fondue), and feel tonight I might not actually lapse into a coma at 9:00. Also it is raining=spring.
I am now reading Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist. Her books are never actually so enjoyable, and always take me an age to get done, but they’re worthwhile and so various. Last night I finished reading Doubting Yourself to the Bone by Thomas Trofimuk, as recommended by Melanie. It was a beautiful, strange book, a poet’s book, I think, which might not be everybody’s thing, but I liked it, and didn’t even get bothered that it was mostly in second person. I think she’s right that this is one that leaves you thinking for a while. And now I’ve got a zillion other books lined up on my to-be-read shelf, and I really ought to step up because my wee kicky baby’s due date is just two months away.
March 23, 2009
The Believers by Zoë Heller
As a novelist, Zoë Heller’s tendency has been to write against her readers’ expectations. Certainly, readers accustomed to her “single-girl-about-town” newspaper columns during the 1990s were uneasy embracing Willy Muller, the nasty piece of work/wife-murdering protagonist of her first novel Everything You Know. Readers were hard-pressed to find sympathy for either of the two main characters in her second novel Notes on a Scandal, which all the same went on to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and received acclaim as a film.
Her third novel The Believers has something more of convention about it than the other two. Reminiscent of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty in that it is a domestic novel of ideas written by an English novelist about America, Heller this time has created an ensemble piece about the Litvinoff family, crusading left-wing lawyer Joel, his wife Audrey, their daughters Rosa (who has recently converted from athiest socialist to Orthodox Jew) and Karla (who has started cheating on her bland Union official husband), and their adopted son Lenny the deadbeat. When a stroke puts Joel into a coma, the family must realign itself without its centre of orbit, and each character is significantly changed in the process.
The novel begins in 1962 London when Joel and Audrey first meet at a party. He stands apart from the crowd, older and American. She notices that as he’s listening to others talking, he’ll periodically lean back onto one foot and mime throwing a ball. He notices her too, intrigued her seeming sense of dignity, “[b]ut he was anxious to have it done with now– to be told the trick of it. A girl who could never be talked down to would be exhausting in the long run.” And it is through a series of misunderstandings that these two people, within a day of meeting one another, end up signing on together for the rest of a life. Near the end of which is where the novel formally begins a page later, in New York in 2002.
The Believers is a book about faith, about the nature belief, though of course like any truly successful novel of ideas, it is also a book about people. Joel is only slightly dealt with before the coma writes him off, but we get a sense of his charisma, of perhaps its obsolescence, and that, for a multitude of reasons, he mightn’t have been the easiest man to be married to. This is underlined by the woman Audrey has become forty years after meeting him, the latest of Heller’s “nasty piece of work” characters. She’s the kind of woman who “tells it like it is”, even when it isn’t, doesn’t suffer fools gladly, or pander to anyone, and carries a sense of superiority for all of these traits. She’s disappointed in her daughters, indulges and enables her deadbeat son, and is in general quite impossible, offensive, and an absolutely marvelous character construction who absolutely rings true.
That the other characters are less realized in comparison really says more about Audrey. Their characters also formed in such reaction to hers that they will be more predictable, understandable, while Audrey might be compared to that proverbial bull in a china shop or a ticking time bomb. This would especially be the case now that she’s lost an anchor to her self in Joel, and more over their entire marriage has been undermined by a woman who’s turned up claiming to be Joel’s ex-mistress, the mother of his three-year old son. The revelation shattering illusions about Joel, and forcing his wife and children to redefine themselves in light of this now altered sense of who he was.
In The Believers, Heller illuminates the faith necessary to try to live a life without faith. The way in which politics and even family can become a surrogate religion, filling up the void. And also the faith required to sustain a marriage, to raise a child, to save the world, and the strange nature of the kind of belief in that such things are even possible.
March 19, 2009
In addition
I’m now reading The Believers by Zoe Heller, who I’ve loved a long long time. On the weekend I read Anne Fleming’s Pool-Hopping, which, in addition to being swim-lit, was a stellar collection of stories. In light of her latest book Life Sentences, the remarkable Laura Lippman’s top ten memorable memoirs. Today I was sent a link to Based On Books, an interesting review site of books-based films. The Flying Troutmans is named to The Orange Prize longlist. Charlotte Ashley’s Tangential to a History of Reading points to significant flaws in Sydney Henderson’s literary character. And on literature and returning soldiers.
March 16, 2009
Life Sentences by Laura Lippman
Laura Lippman is a remarkable writer, and I come bearing proof: she is a female writer of popular fiction who garners New York Times reviews. She is an established crime writer successfully expanding her literary horizons (when lately we’ve often seen it the other way around). In her latest novel Life Sentences, her main character is a fifty year-old silver-haired woman with a (beside the point) voracious and oft-satisfied sexual appetite, and how often do we encounter such women in popular culture at all?
I first encountered Lippman with her 2007 novel What the Dead Know, a stand-alone book (Lippman is known for her Tess Monaghan PI novels) that was critically acclaimed and won the 2007 Quill Award, and I read her short story collection Hardly Knew Her not long ago. I’ve been impressed by her ability to cultivate suspense, to challenge her readers with unsympathetic characters, to effectively use language and literary references, and by her blunt and unflinching prose.
I wasn’t as immediately drawn into Life Sentences, however, perhaps due to the fragmented nature of the narrative. Eventually, however, this method made sense. The centre of this story is Cassandra Fallows, best-selling author of two memoirs, and poorly-selling author of a new attempt at fiction. The story begins with her catching a news story on television about a woman who refuses to disclose the whereabouts of her missing child. The reporter referencing a similar story from twenty years before, about a woman called Calliope Jenkins in Baltimore. Cassandra, a Baltimore native, realizing that Calliope Jenkins had been one of her school mates, and deciding that within this coincidence, the buds of a new book might lurk.
Lippman constructs her own story with Cassandra’s pursuit of this bud (in third-person), excerpts from her memoir Her Father’s Daughter (about growing up in the shadow of her formidable academic father, who abandoned their family for a woman he met in the race riots following the 1968 murder of Martin Luther King), and third person accounts by others involved in the Calliope Jenkins case– her lawyer, the detective, old school friends of both Cassandra and Callope–none of whom have any interest in talking to Cassandra at all.
There are two reasons for their reticence, and for the school friends in particular, it’s because they don’t trust Cassandra. They’d been portrayed in her previous memoirs, in ways they claim are grossly inaccurate, and resent Cassandra’s tendency to make herself the centre of every story she tells. They don’t remember their unit being as tight as Cassandra does, picturing her more on the periphery of their experience. Particularly galling, they find, is how Cassandra had taken the story of King’s death and ensuing riots, making these events the backdrop for her tenth birthday party.
But some of these friends also have something to hide, as do the officials involved in the Calliope Jenkins case, who have never recovered from the experience of dealing with this woman who refused to talk. From the knowledge also that somewhere out there is a dead child, and that nobody was ever able to find him. Like much of Lippman’s crime fiction (and interestingly enough in relation to Cassandra’s own relationship with fact and fiction), Calliope Jenkins’ story is based on an actual case. Lippman has Callie living now an anonymous life in Delaware, having been freed after seven years in prison. Cassandra Fallows is determined to find her, and though sources try to thwart her at every turn, such thwartings are telling of the characters committing them, and Cassandra only presses on.
Lippman accomplishes not such a sleight of hand in crafting this story, the revelation being less-than startling, but the story’s own substance in the point instead. Metafictional dealings with fact and fiction, the nature of memoir and memory, a main character whose reliability is undermined from the very start (and complicated by the fact that she’s oblivious to this). Cassandra Fallows who talks too much, and Calliope Jenkins who doesn’t talk at all, and yet somehow between them the story must be told, which Lippman manages deftly.
March 12, 2009
A Brief History of Anxiety (Yours and Mine) by Patricia Pearson
Though I’ve never considered myself laid back (or at least not since I faced a chorus of laughter this one time when I suggested that I was), I’ve never known anything like the anxiety I’ve faced during the last six months since finding out I was pregnant. Numerous times I’ve remarked how fortunate it is that I’ve had no real problems during my pregnancy, seeing as I’ve managed to drive myself absolutely crazy with the imaginary ones. Concocted, I think, because for some reason I’m unable to believe that things are going well without physical evidence of that fact, or any real control over its occurrence. That I’ve never been so powerless has sent me into a semi-permanent state of panic, and so I decided to read Patricia Pearson’s book A Brief History of Anxiety (Yours and Mine)— now out in paperback– in order to make some sense of what I’ve been feeling.
It is sort of ironic, however, that I turn to a book in order to understand anxiety, a book whose thesis is that anxiety is so prominent in our society because rational thought sells us short. Because we’re the kind of people who think our thoughts and emotions can be summed up and explained in a book, just say. But still, Pearson manages this. Her book’s effectiveness partly due to its unique approach– part memoir, part history, all readable and fascinating.
Pearson contextualizes her own experiences with anxiety through a close cultural and historical analysis of the phenomenon. And phenomenon does tend to be the right word– incidences of anxiety are unprecedentedly high in the Western world at this point of time, and Pearson seeks to make sense of this. Suggesting the culprit might be that “implausible myth: that we can assume mastery over our fates.” Which began out of the middle ages with the development of “reason as a new mechanism for keeping anxiety at bay… Reason– or rationalism, more specifically– evolved out of a need to impose order on a world that was both fraught with danger and haunted with ghosts.”
But the ghosts creep in, or rather, the holes in rationalism are all too apparent. Life in its randomness can be absolutely terrifying, particularly for those of us privileged to have become far more accustomed to order and control.
Pearson’s personal experiences colour this history– she writes of her first breakdown, of childhood incidence of fear and anxiety (which occurs, Pearson explains, because of the amygdala (“which act as the sensory headquarters of mammalian fear, [sending] out five-alarm panic signals” to the cerebral cortex, which in a child is “a work in progress, [so] she cannot yet rationally assess the threat…”). She writes of our acknowledgment of anxiety disorders, which weren’t diagnosed years ago, though there have always been people suffering from “nerves” (so-called to in order to make mental problems physical, and eliminate the stigma). Pearson uses her experience as a crime reporter to illuminate our relationship to fear, as well as our attraction to certain versions of it. She also deals with her reliance on anti-depressants, which became an addiction, asserting that these medications are over-prescribed by doctors who are sold by big drugs companies, and have no real understanding of what these medications do.
A Brief History of Anxiety made me feel better. Though hardly a self-help guide, or a typical memoir at all, it was such a pleasure to read, such a relief to see my own experience reflected, and to understand that it takes place in a context outside of myself. What a pleasure also to learn so much in general, a fascinating education. Plus, it’s funny– Pearson is an excellent writer.
