July 29, 2008
Rereading Emily of New Moon
I reread Emily of New Moon this weekend, still riding the wave of recent L.M. Montgomery mania (which Steph at Crooked House rounds up here). I was surprised (but then not overly) to discover that my paperback copy was actually stolen goods, my then-school library’s ownership stamped on the inside cover, and with no evidence of a “discard”.
I don’t remember how old I was when I first encountered Emily, but she never entranced me the way that Anne did. I do remember enjoying the books, but also how difficult I found them, and I could never quite explain why, and Emily-lovers never really understood what I meant, but I see it now. First being that I read all of Montgomery’s books really young, and any of my understanding of Anne of Green Gables was probably due to having watched the Kevin Sullivan film, which came out when I was six. There was never an Emily movie, and so I was unfamiliar with the story. (This is interesting also to consider how the cinematic Anne influenced my impressions of that novel, considering how different it was to read Emily without such pictures in my mind).
That I had no “template” for understanding Emily might read a bit strangely, considering this story of an incorrigible orphan girl in PEI with romantic dreams and literary leanings, who is sent to live with bachelor/spinster strangers and changes their lives, investing a lonely old house with the heart it had lost, and bewitching every single person in town. That the novel is so remarkably like Anne, however, only shows Montgomery’s progression as a novelist between 1908 and 1923 (nine books later). Emily is a longer book, her character drawn with so much more detail, we get inside her head the way we never really did with Anne, her perspective maintained throughout the text. Her own progression is less a series of scrapes and lessons learned. She has not Anne’s fiery temper– her own outbursts are usually in protest to some injustice instead. She has a certain steadiness uncanny for a child. Emily grows up, but she never changes, she never relents.
This depth of character would have been what tripped me up back when I first read this book. The complicated nature of the others too– I remember being confused by Mr. Carpenter, who tormented the students who had potential in order to draw it further from them, and their ambivalent feelings towards him, and how I couldn’t comprehend it. Though I remember finding Dean Priest’s feelings for Emily a bit creepy, and I still do. Class issues– what it meant that Perry came from a place called “Stovepipe Town” and I remembering picturing a village full of men wearing top hats.
This time around, the book was a pleasure, to discover what I’d been missing. I liked the novel’s engagement with the wider world– stories of immigration, with history. As with Anne, I loved Emily’s bookishness, her passion for writing and how she’d have to do it anyway even if she’d never make a penny. The wise advice that she is given:
“If at thirteen you can write ten good lines, at twenty you’ll write ten times ten– if the gods are kind. Stop messing over months, though– and don’t imagine you’re a genius either, if you have written ten decent lines. I think there’s something trying to speak through you– but you’ll have to make yourself a fit instrument for it. You’ve got to work hard and sacrifice– by gad, girl, you’ve chosen a jealous goddess.”
July 25, 2008
Fire in the Blood by Irène Némirovsky
Fire in the Blood by Irène Némirovsky is a funny little book. Although twisting in its plot, it is rather straightforward in its twists, and I thought I had it all figured out when I finished reading. I had its two main points summed up, but there was just one problem– that these two main points were entirely contradictory, and so I delved further into the text to try to solve this problem, and discovered there is a whole lot going on in this novel than what I’d first assumed.
My experience being quite analogous to the story, a similar theme to Suite Française— that rural tranquility can belie all variety of human drama, and that even in Arcadia, there be– in addition to death– murder in particular, and love, and lust, and secrets and lies.
Fire in the Blood is narrated by Silvio, structured as a notebook, as he observes the passage of time during the autumn of his life. The novel beginning upon his young niece Colette’s engagement, and he reflects upon her happiness, “the fire in her blood” that he remembers from his own youth. That seems so distant from him now, so much so that he supposes if he ever happened to meet his young self, he wouldn’t even recognize him. The past is past, and he is old, and, as his cousin remarks to him, “My god, if only one could know at twenty how simple life is…”
This is a novel quite obvious in its imagery, full of images of burning and fever, of fire and flame. This sort of energy similar to “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower”, I suppose, Silvio’s cousin remarking to him, “Ah, dear friend, when something happens in life, do you ever think about the moment that caused it, the seed from which it grew?… Imagine a field being sowed and all the promise that’s contained in a grain of wheat, all the future harvests…”
When Colette’s husband is murdered, however, and the points of a complicated love triangle become clear, notions of “promise” become dark and ominous. Raising questions of chance or destiny, what happens to our fire, how the past changes as it gets away, and that youth is eternal, always the same, that promise. Silvio asking, “But who would bother to sow his fields if he knew in advance what the harvest would bring?” but still we do, knowing full well what the end is.
This story’s simplicity is deceptive, and perhaps undermined by the fact of this book’s history. Némirovsky’s own story being well known, as well as the story of Suite Française and its remarkable discovery. Fire in the Blood has similar origins, part of it thought missing for years and only found quite recently among the author’s other papers. And it is clear to me that this novel wasn’t finished, wasn’t quite polished, for though the writing is strong (this partly due to translator Sandra Smith, of course), the novel’s structure is clunky and fragmented. Not to the point where the reading is compromised, but the effect is not that of the greatness that was so evident from Suite Française. This being wholly understandable within its context, and so the context becomes necessary, enhancing. This reader being grateful for the author still having sowed her seeds.
July 22, 2008
So much can slip on by
I’m now rereading Joan Didion’s Where I Was From, which is a very different book from the one I first encountered last May. Partly because I’ve visited California since then, and therefore have a more concrete image of what she describes. Which is not to say Didion’s descriptions are inadequate, but rather now I see something different. In addition, I just finished Sharon Butala’s The Garden of Eden, which has provided Didion’s consideration of California agriculture-culture with a context. I’ve also found that Joan Didion is always worth a trip back to, for she is so subtle that much can slip on by.
Good things on the web of late: I also thought Feist singing “One Two Three Four” on Sesame Street was truly lovely, and will link to Carl Wilson’s post about this because it contains some other vintage Sesame Street counting hits. My new favourite website is Fernham, by Woolf scholar Anne E. Fernald. Writer Margo Rabb’s struggles upon discovering she’d written a YA book, and Laurel Snyder understands.
July 20, 2008
Skim by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki
That a book has pictures, in my opinion, makes it no less a book, particularly if that book’s language still matters. If the images are enhancement and not just a flashy stand-in for story, and in Skim, a graphic novel with words by Mariko Tamaki and pictures by Jillian Tamaki, images are certainly the former. The images so vivid in their own right that they stand alone effectively when necessary, in individual panels or full page spreads, so perfectly conveying a moment– with expression, posture, that single perfect object standing in for a whole scene. Otherwise the language and images integrated– words stamped out in the snow, chalked on blackboard– in a perfect synchronicity.
But the language still matters– I was part of an audience that heard Mariko Tamaki reading from Skim on Monday evening, and rushed to buy the book between the sets. I almost fought someone for what I thought was the last one, but luckily they had another box. Reading from a comic book— I didn’t even know this was possible. Part of this is that Tamaki is a spectac performer, she did her work true justice. And the structure too– the voice bubble dialogue being terrible funny to listen to, but so much of Skim is written in a diary format, meat and substance as you like.
Skim is the story of Kim, called Skim because she isn’t, and she attends a private girls’ high school and it’s 1993. Always somewhat of a misfit, her isolation from her peers is only exacerbated after a local suicide when classmates establish the Girls Celebrate Life Club (“Teenage Suicide– Don’t Do It”). Skim is disgusted by feigned concern from girls who’ve spent years as her tormentors, and now they’re relishing the drama, discussing her in hushed tones– she wears a lot of black, says she’s a Wiccan, she can’t think of anything that makes her happy. And they don’t even know that she’s in love with her English teacher, Ms. Archer.
Skim is marketed as a children’s book, and will serve this demographic well, I think, assuring other misfits (nearly everyone) that they aren’t alone. Holding great appeal to older readers too, and not only because they’ll have it confirmed how incredibly lucky they are to be grown up, but also for such an engaging story, told with a great deal of insight and dark humour. Further, the acuity of its characterization, of Skim– that a comic book character could be bestowed with such a voice. Even in her most desperate moments, this girl’s company is a delight.
July 18, 2008
Home by Marilynne Robinson
It seems strange now, having just quoted Marilynne Robinson on “show, don’t tell,” and then going on to read her new novel Home (out in September), which doesn’t contain a single bit of “tell” as I understand it, and perhaps contains lack of telling as its very essence. This makes more sense, however, upon focusing on a different part of the quotation: “People are to an incredible degree constituted of what they never say, perhaps never consciously think. Behaviour is conventionalized and circumstantial. In many cases, the behaviour that in fact would express what someone thinks or feels is frustrated, cannot occur.”
Home, Robinson’s third novel, appears to function as in exercise in fiction under these constraints, in which characters are constructed by what they do not, or cannot say. Glory Boughton, thirty-eight years old and the youngest of six has returned home to her ailing father, returned after a long and failed engagement in something of disgrace. She has just settled into life with her father, a retired minister, when her brother Jack comes home also, suddenly, the prodigal son. Jack, that black sheep, the subject of a great deal of family worry and shame, has been gone for twenty years and appears no less troubled than when he left, in fact worse, having not worn his experiences altogether well.
The story of these three characters living together is a quiet one, subtle. Made doubly obscure by their strangeness to one another coupled with the intimacy of family, meaning that even more than usual goes unsaid– the circumstances of Glory’s heartache, just where her brother has been. And just as Robinson doesn’t rely on characters “showing” the answers to these questions, neither does she tell in a cheap way. As readers we don’t get much access into characters’ heads, Jack and his father not at all, and little with Glory because she can’t bring herself to think so much.
And so the story is revealed by what the characters choose to tell one another, and by their silences, and by other words underlying everything they say. Our own lack of insight providing another kind, a certain objectivity illuminating how intentions can be misread, the limits of perspective, and a realistic experience of these characters as actual people without their details written on their sleeves. Their true natures requiring not so much decoding as careful reading, almost listening. This bringing forth an engagement with the novel that renders the quietness and subtlety absolutely no such thing, magnifying every single event.
Marilynne Robinson is a majestic writer. Of all the bits I underlined, my favourite remains, “They sat on the arms of their mother’s overstuffed chair while she read to them, and they huing over the back of it, and they pinched and plucked at its plushy hide. If the nub of a feather poked through, they would pull it out and play with it, a dry little plume of down, sometimes unbroken.” Or when, after a lot of thought about dumplings good or bad, Glory concedes that perhaps the word dumplings is better than dumplings themselves.
Robinson’s new novel is a gorgeous story of homecoming, exploring the nature of home itself, our histories, and the stubborn nature of family love– the bond that just can’t help itself.
July 16, 2008
Chaos Continues
Bibliochaos continues– the house is in shambles, and I’m covered in paint. Luckily so are the bookshelves (paint-covered, that is), and they’ll get a second coat tomorrow, and it’s not so unreasonable to assume things will be back to normal by Thursday. Meaning that I will be able to find time to post a rave review of Marilyn Robinson’s Home, among other things. I’ve just finished rereading Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays— I read it wrong the first time, and am glad I came back to find out just how wonderful it is.
July 6, 2008
Flirt by Lorna Jackson
My review of Lorna Jackson’s Flirt: The Interviews will be a mini review, because I really feel I ought to read it again. And perhaps one more time after that, Jackson’s linguistic acrobatics and underlying humour not immediately so easy to get one’s head around. But I post about it now because you should know about it, about its remarkable conceit. One that I was interested in immediately, as a person who reads interviews and aspires to write them (well). Jackson’s stories playing tricks with the form, playing tricks on the form, tricks on the reader too with fiction and fact.
Lorna Jackson’s unnamed interviewer is far more interested in plumbing her own depths than anybody else’s. Throughout the book she (fictionally) interviews characters including Ian Tyson, Bobby Orr, Alice Munro, Janet Jones-Gretzky. The book’s best line (though there could be many of these) being, “Jesus, Alice. I’m so sick of that anecdote. Can’t you give me something better?”
Our interviewer is suffering from a much-broken heart, a long-ago loss, a mixed-up today and unsure tomorrows. Seeking counsel in those she is supposed to be examining, much digressing, even her real questions shaded by her personal experience. She becomes a character, the entire book encompassing a sort of trajectory. Each interview standing alone as a most innovative kind of short story, relying on language alone for effect.
July 6, 2008
Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig
Having lived away from Toronto from 2002 to 2005, I found a very foreign city depicted within Maggie Helwig’s Girls Fall Down. This city under siege, by paranoia underlined by strange happenings. The falling girls, the first one collapsing on a streetcar, and others follow, but no answers can be found. Authorities rule out poison– well, as much as they possibly can, which is not entirely. There are no significant abnormalities: “‘What does that mean…? What is an insignificant abnormality?'”
The first girl is the template, the precedent, for escalation. People whispering about bioterrorism becomes brown-skinned people beaten in the streets.
I do remember Toronto the morning of September 11th 2001. As Helwig writes, “Everyone waiting, almost wanting it, a secret guilty desire for meaning. Their time in history made significant for once by that distant wall of black cloud.” The week I left the city, about nine months later, a garbage strike was just beginning. The SARS epidemic outbreak during the year that followed, and that massive blackout the year after that– I missed it all, the brink of chaos. My city has always functioned in an orderly fashion, as much as possible with so many people in one place. This is the land of reason, logical explanation, and everything has always happened elsewhere.
And so I would suspect Helwig’s Toronto would be more familiar to those who were here then. Here is a fiction steeped in reality, Helwig’s Toronto so actualized that it fooled me, made me disoriented, but the problem was mine. All the part of the city I’ve not paid attention to– references to The Cloud Gardens, for instance, which couldn’t possibly exist, but it’s just that I’ve never been there. To Bloor Supersave, which I thought might be standing in for Dominion, or the ManuLife Valu Mart, but of course it’s its own place, right at the top of my road.
Against the city backdrop, is Alex, to whom a chance meeting has brought the past back in the midst of this chaos. Reconnecting with Susie-Paul, who broke his heart more than a decade ago, and she’s got him all wound up (the way she always could do) in a quest to find her missing schizophrenic brother. She accompanies him on his nighttime rambles through the city, photographing the city’s dark side (this theme, albeit in a very different style, reminding me of Haruki Murakami’s After Dark).
The particulars of the story at this novel’s heart weren’t its strongest aspect. Connection and significance somewhat tenuous at times, but all this is strengthened in the context of the novel as a whole. The atmosphere that Helwig creates, and the greater connections between the people that live in this place. Moreover Helwig’s fascinating exploration of girls, “the things that girls do.” Their secret lives, never entirely uncovered, and their power, however unconscious, the novel’s true heart. With such far-reaching ripples, the implications immense.
June 30, 2008
The Vows of Silence by Susan Hill
There is a precedent for me appreciating crime fiction turns by literary writers, and her name is Kate Atkinson and so I was intrigued to read The Vows of Silence by Susan Hill. I’d read Hill’s 1973 novel In the Springtime of the Year quite recently, she has run her own press Long Barn Books since 1997, and is a very prolific blogger.
I also suspect that it’s true that I’d like crime fiction full stop, but I’ve not read enough of it to be sure of this. The rush to the end though, pieces fall together– it’s my favourite part of reading anything.
The Vows of Silence is fourth in a series of Simon Serrailler novels (and a fifth is in the works). Though the book stood alone just fine, back story illuminated whenever necessary, but not so that detail was superfluous. I had all the tools I required to follow the story of Detective Simon Serrailler, on the case when random sniper starts shooting young women in the Cathedral town of Lafferton. The first victim a new bride shot dead just inside her apartment, then a group of girls out at a club for a hen night, and a wedding dress designer who’s been advertising in town– and all this with an upcoming wedding at the cathedral, with the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall scheduled to be in attendance.
I’m not sure this is the case with most crime novels, but it is in my limited experience that neither the crimes themselves, nor their solving are what first and foremost propels the narrative. Perhaps in the last fifty pages, yes, who done it will keep you reading late into the night, but there has to be more to drive a whole book. Here it was the characters, the lives of the people of Lafferton, and their interconnectedness, their various connections to the crimes. Hill’s background as a literary writer evident as she populates this community with such vivid characters– people– and the different ways these peoples’ lives are cast in the shadow of the crimes taking place around them.
Hill has stated writing crime fiction appeals to her as an opportunity to address contemporary life and its issues, and this engagement is well reflected here. Also themes relating to love, marriage and togetherness continue– Simon’s sister husband’s diagnosis of a brain tumour, a widow falling in love again, Simon’s father’s new partner becoming part of their family. Simon juxtaposed with all of this, a loner, whose own story is hard to decipher from just this one book out of a series, and what would probably send a curious reader back to the previous three. Who also hasn’t the time much to analyze his personal life, what with just days until the cathedral wedding and the gunman still out on the loose…
I do wonder, what in a literary writer’s background makes the foundation of a good crime writer? Strength in plot-building, definitely, and I could see how short story experience would be beneficial to compressing much into little, and it would take a novelist’s deft hand to bind all these pieces together. Certainly Susan Hill’s apprenticeship must have served her well, for The Vows of Silence is a pleasure.
(By the way, in terms of genre-crossing, an interesting post on Hill being welcome or otherwise in the exclusive world of crime fiction.)
June 17, 2008
The whole thing
We went to Ottawa this weekend, which was brilliant all around (cousins, markets, barbeques), but I was particularly appreciative of a good ten hours spent train journeying, which of course makes for good reading. I did Fever and Prodigal Summer, and also CNQ. This is my second issue of the magazine– I raved about Issue 72 back in December. This issue lived right on up to my heightened expections: so much learning in one package seems a miracle. So much to challenge me, whether to understand, to be enlightened, or even to disagree. If you’ve got an interest in Canadian literary matters and you’re not reading CNQ, you’re missing out on something extraordinary. Serves as an example of what a magazine can truly be. It sounds like I’m overstating, but I’m really not. Robyn Sarah’s “Delivered to Chance” and David A. Kent on Margaret Avison were my favourite bits, but really (shhh…) I liked the whole thing.
