June 17, 2008
Moth Love
How strange are bookish connections, aren’t they? Of course, when I was reading Sharon Butala’s Fever last week, I could sense how it would relate to Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer, which was coming up next. Similar themes of nature, landscape, agriculture, small towns, and the weather. I am two thirds through Prodigal Summer now, and on my knees to Kingsolver, who everybody else already knew was extraordinary, but it just took me awhile to find out. How wonderful to be reading this novel now, with the world around me so blooming, tonight out on my back deck with a cup of tea, and the trees all around, and the birdsong. I disappeared into my head, and into Kingsolver’s amazing imagination.
Anyway, the unexpected connection being the next book I’ve got to read, which is The Sister by Poppy Adams. I’ve got an advanced reader’s copy which betrays nothing of its content, and so was I ever surprised to see that it’s UK title is The Behaviour of Moths. But I would have picked up that title without delay (precedent for good things with moths in their title includes The Peppered Moth and “The Death of the Moth”)! I discover now it’s about an entomologist– and I’ve been obsessed with entomology lit ever since I read “Miss Ormerod” by Virginia Woolf. Anyway, I am excited. Particularly as a third of Prodigal Summer is entitled “Moth Love”, and so I am very excited to see how else these books link up. And then after we celebrate the world some more with Butala’s The Perfection of the Morning.
June 13, 2008
Engleby by Sabastian Faulks
Though it is jarring, the way certain moments in Sabastian Faulks’s novel Engleby kick us right outside of the narration, it is actually more disturbing how often this doesn’t occur. How convincing is the singular voice of Mike Engleby, lifelong loner and the narrator/diarist in whose palm we readers are sitting. And we are convinced by him partly because Engleby is clever– a working class boy winning a place at a prestigious university after all. He comes at us with facts and not nonsense, framing his narrative to show his disdain for others’ ignorance, his superiority over practically everybody. Engleby’s address is broad and general, solidly inclusive, but once in a while it catches us: something is not right here.
But that these “catches” don’t come more often, that our empathy towards Engleby can come so readily, this not only cements his control of the narrative, but also highlights the distance between him and the rest of the world. Because our easy empathy is something of which he is incapable; Engleby is scarcely aware of his own self, let alone that of another. His diary functions as an exercise towards empathy, but usually a failed one: “I wonder if we can ever know what it’s like to be someone else. I doubt whether [his classmates] really know what it’s like to be themselves.” Because, of course, Engleby doesn’t know what it’s like to be himself, and so his diary also acts as a self-by-proxy. An identity pinned down where his actual self can’t be.
So what are the “catches” then? Engleby’s supposed immersion into a group of friends at school that don’t seem to know him, a moment where he approaches two girls in a bar and they “[back] off as though appalled”, his complete lack of impact upon the world around him, and then moments where he lets certain things slip. Like that he was in a mental institution once: “It was like… the centripedal force of Engleby had failed and I began to fly apart, into my atomic pieces.”
It is a particular challenge to create a loner, the mark of a loner being that the world won’t reflect him back. No friends to flesh him out, even family is kept at a distance, no water cooler banter. Moreover Mike Engleby is challenging because while he doesn’t even reflect himself, he is smart enough that this could be quite consciously done, his construction of the narrative altogether deliberate, and so due to his unreliability, what are we meant to believe?
“My memory’s odd like that,” Engleby tells us very early on. “I’m big on detail, but there are holes in the fabric.” Which is some ways is quite convenient for Sabastian Faulks, I suppose, that his character’s gaps come at such moments that propel the narrative right along. And there are some similarly facile points throughout the text. Engleby in the 1980s disagreeing with his one friend about the future: “‘And apartheid,’ I said. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me that’ll soon be all over, too.’ But then these weak points become less so when you consider their veracity, that it is in Engleby’s character to be deliberate about most things (for example the girlfriend he manages to acquire in his thirties, and that he spends long drives rehearsing whatever he will say to her).
This meandering-sounding exploration of lone self-hood has a centre, however– the disappearance of a girl Engleby had had feelings for at university. The terms of their relationship in typically vague Engleby fashion, though there are suggestions something is not right. That he had stolen her diary years ago, his infatuation with her, that we can see him misconstrue her feelings for him, these mysterious “holes” in the fabric of his memory.
There are certain unreliable narrators whose reality seeps into between every other line (I’m thinking The Remains of the Day) and then those unreliability is to deflect reality, to keep something at bay. Engleby being the latter, and so reading becomes an act of decoding, of spotting those “catches” when the world creeps in. The missing girl, discovered murdered years later, and Engleby trying to understand what he may have done, we as his readers faced with the discomforting possibility of our own empathy with someone who’s been a killer all along. There we’ve been all the while, right inside his head.
Engleby’s obsession is with time, with other people’s perception of sequence and causality, which he supposes to be such a limited perspective of time’s dimensionality. And of course he senses that we will try to address his experience with our puerile understanding of cause and effect– that Engleby is this way because he abused as a child, that his father abused him because of his own limitations. That the torture he is forced to endure when he goes away to high school only exacerbates his trauma, culminating in Engleby becoming an abuser himself.
So it is true that Engleby achieves the “heightened” experience of “time as it really is– non linear”, as his experience goes in a circular fashion. Moreover as a victim of trauma, he doesn’t put the past behind him, but rather relives his experiences over and over again, and these holes in his memory are an attempt to deal with this.
Engleby‘s singular perspective is broadened towards the end of the book, as the text begins to include witness statements and psychiatric reports. Which reads as a bit of a cheat, really– I wonder what the novel would have been without these. Though of course they provide a bit of context, resolution for our feelings about and towards this complicated character. It is jarring (but a relief?) to finally read an outsider’s perspective of Engleby, to realize the inaccuracies of his perspective, and then of our own gathered through him.
June 3, 2008
Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith
The Myths series has a bit of the gimmick about it. These “contemporary take[s] on our most enduring myths”, with their promises to “shed new light”. The books so lovely and slim, they could almost slip inside a pocket, so there is certainly no physical evidence of their substance. Look at the drawing on the cover of Girl Meets Boy, for example, all delicate lines and flowers. Positively precious.
But what would you say if I told you the drawing was called “Self Portrait as a Small Bird” and the self being portraited was Tracey Emin. Wouldn’t you agree then, that this is a book with tricks up its proverbial sleeve? And so it is, being a book by Ali Smith, whose The Accidental was one trick after another. But now the trick is on me, and it may be on you, because there’s nothing of the gimmick about Smith’s latest novel at all.
“Smith’s latest novel” I say, for this is exactly right. It is a powerful novel and it can stand alone. A slim book, yes, and part of a series, but then there is actually very little uniform about The Myths. Featuring a wide range of writers from various backgrounds who select their own myths and approach these stories in any way they choose. In Girl Meets Boy, Smith working with the myth of Iphis, from Ovid’s Metamorpheses. As she writes in her afterward, “It is one of the cheeriest metamorpheses in the whole, one of the most happily resolved of its stories about the desire for and the ramifications of change.”
And like any novel, this one has its very own story. Beginning, “Let me tell you about when I was a girl, our grandfather says.” Quickly establishing a world of unfixed parametres, of shape-shifting, as young sisters Anthea and Imogen absorb their grandfather’s stories. TV game show Blind Date playing in the background, with host Cilla Black between the panel of boys and the panel of girls. Anthea wondering, “But which is Cilla Black, then, boy or girl? She doesn’t seem to be either… She can go between the two sides of things like a magician or a joke.”
In the future, however, which is the present day, all the magic has been put aside. The girls’ grandparents have long ago been lost at sea, and life is weighty with its disappointments. Anthea has come back home to Inverness to live with her sister, who has been able to secure her a job as a “Creative” for the multinational conglomerate Pure. And Anthea finds herself easily distracted one day during a “Creative” brainstorm session by one certain vandal in a kilt.
In Girl Meets Boy, Ali Smith presents metamorphosis as possibility. Anthea joining forces with the vandal, spreading slogans: “ALL ACROSS THE WORLD, WHERE WOMEN ARE DOING EXACTLY THE SAME WORK AS MEN, THEY’RE BEING PAID BETWEEN THIRTY TO FORTY PERCENT LESS. THAT’S NOT FAIR. THIS MUST CHANGE.” Anthea also falling in love for the first time in her life, with this vandal, who is a woman. Much to her sister’s horror (“My sister would be banned in schools if she was a book.”)
So here is an old story inside inside this new story, which is a love story, and actually no less than two. For such a slim book, this is something, and that the stories sit comfortably amidst so much stuff of ages– from the ancient Greeks to our poppest of culture, allusions, winks, nods and odes. There are lines and lines and lines between these lines.
But Smith’s language, of course, is always her most marvelous trick. Amidst all the stuff, rendering her thesis quite simple: that in a world where things are changeable, things can change. Innumerable doors swinging open upon this promise, that progress is a way forward after all. “And it was always the stories that needed the telling that gave us the rope we could cross any river with.” A most refreshing triumph.
June 1, 2008
Stumbled In
Stumbled into a used bookshop today, and stumbled out after with an arm-full. Some controversial: Birthday by Alan Sillitoe, the sequel to my beloved Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Forty-years on, it is could be one thing or another. I also picked up Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver, for I’ve hardly read her at all. And then I got The Orange Fish and Dressing Up for Carnival by Carol Shields, and though I’ll read one shortly, I’ll not read the other for years and years, for these are the last two I have left to read, and I don’t want to live in a world without more Carol Shields to discover.
Now reading Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith. Just finished Deborah Eisenberg’s majestic Twilight of the Superheroes.
May 30, 2008
Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen
I was the less-than ideal reader for Rivka Galchen’s first novel Atmospheric Disturbances, unequipped with referential tools necessary to place this book within its proper context. I’ve never read Borges, I don’t even know how to say “Borges”. And though I know how to say Pynchon, I’ve never read him either. I also only found out what “postmodernism” was three years ago, and sometimes I’m still not sure (though I take solace in the fact that you’re probably not sure either).
And so the beginning of Atmospheric Disturbances was a bit tough on me, Galchen’s narrator Dr. Leo Liebenstein, a psychiatrist, speaking exactly the way you’d think that the world’s driest psychiatrist might. A driest psychiatrist under psychosis, for that matter. When he becomes convinced his wife Rema has been replaced by a simulacrum, the ensuing narrative has nothing of the lightness I might have expected from such a premise. Instead, for complicated reasons, Leo comes to suspect a meteorologist called Tzvi Gal-Chen is at the heart of this matter, and begins to explore Gal-Chen’s work. Which doesn’t make for easy reading, you might imagine, particularly as it is unclear whether Leo’s own connections make sense, and so we are left to decipher and draw our own conclusions.
The book wasn’t easy, but about 80 pages in, it became clear to me that the effort was worth it. And that Rivka Galchen was actually playing, in innumerable ways and most postmodernly. Leo’s singular perspective an achievement, unflinching and impossible. We learn about him slowly, in bits and pieces from the world around him, as his own point of view reveals not much from “the consensus view of reality”. Leo was probably never considered normal, but in his current state of mind, reality has twisted itself into a nightmare. Which, considering what a nightmare reality can be as straight as arrows, ensures layer upon layer of complexity.
For me the payoff was that each of these layers revealed something essential, important and surprising. Often something beautiful too, and at its very heart, this novel is a love song. From Galchen to her late father, who is the actual Tzvi Gal-Chan and, as Galchen says in her interview with BGB this novel was an excuse for her to write his name down over and over. I love that, and lines she blurs between fact and fiction, in a way that is analogous to Leo’s whole perspective.
Love too, between Leo and Rema. This premise, of her supposed body snatching far more than just a premise, because when Leo looks at the simulacrum, he doesn’t recognize his wife because of this woman’s crows feet, her few extra pounds. That the person we fall in love with gets lost over time, and we have to find ways to fall in love over and over again, even the sanest of us, and how much is that ever possible?
Of course Atmospheric Disturbances works not just in the theoretical, also encompassing elements of mystery and adventure. The plot pushes forward, puzzling in multitudinous ways, but thoroughly engaging and delightful.
May 26, 2008
Stunt by Claudia Dey
I’ve approached Claudia Dey’s novel Stunt so differently from the other books I read, and this has been the case from the very start. Because I must confess that I didn’t actually ever intend to read it. For though I admired it from afar, I like my realism, thank you very much. I didn’t really care to read about tightrope walkers, postcards from outer space and strange-named girls who age in a night. Until I heard Claudia Dey read from her novel, at the Fiery First Fiction fete just a few weeks back. And it occurred to me that my presuppositions were all wrong, and probably yours are too, because I don’t know that I’ve read encountered a book like this before.
Dey read from the beginning of her novel at the reading, and I was immediately entranced by her narrator’s perspective. So solidly fixed inside the head of this small strange person, noting her neighbour, “Mrs. Next Door”: “She matches her lawn ornaments. She walks like she is figure skating. She carries a first-aid kit. She is always calling out the time. Bath time. Suppertime. Homework time. She is the cuckoo bird of mothers…”
This narrator is Eugenia Ledoux, devoted daughter of Sheb Wooly Ledoux who disappears one night leaving a note that says, “gone to save the world/… sorry/ yours/ sheb wooly ledoux/ asshole”. He’s addressed it to her mother, to her sister, but Eugenia’s name isn’t there, and so clearly, she believes, he meant to take her with him. She’s waiting for him to come for her. Find me is her whisper.
And then, of course, her mother disappears, Eugenia and her sister double their ages in one night, Next-Door’s house burns down and there begins a perpetual lawn sale. Eugenia runs away to a houseboat on Ward’s Island, following clues towards her father’s whereabouts, which are contained in a library book, the unauthorized autobiography of a tightrope walker.
Naturally. I was explaining the plot today, and everyone looked confused, and somebody sought a label for it– “magical realism”? But no, not really, though there is magic magic and realism in abundance (all the detritus of the earth) but it’s not the right template. I really have no idea what to compare this to, but I can say that it works. That I think of the tightrope, hovering miles into the air, but how taut it is, how strong and sure. The strength and sureness key– you might call this book a bit of whimsy, but never has whimsy been so controlled, so calculated. The language is so fundamental. Every word, every sentence, every symbol in this book means something, and even the ones that don’t.
My approach to Stunt was different in that I couldn’t break the spell. I couldn’t make notes in the margins, think too much about connections, because I was reading. I couldn’t break this novel down into parts, because it would ruin everything, for now at least. No doubt the parts are essential, but right now the whole seems so complete.
May 21, 2008
Why Women Should Rule the World by Dee Dee Myers
I decided I had to read Why Women Should Rule the World after I heard Dee Dee Myers interviewed on CBC’s The Current last month. Her intelligence and experience made a remarkable impression, but it was her optimism that was so inspiring. Coupled with the absolute sensibility of her message: that empowering women is good for everybody. The title is provocative but Myers means it, defining world-ruling as “[taking] advantage of all that each of us has to offer.”
This book’s strength is its fusion of disparate ideas to form a comprehensive whole– so refreshing. Part of it is the politically sensitive nature of Myers’ material– she’s doing a lot of elaborate sidesteps on the way towards her arguments, in order not to be read as in attack mode.
But more than sidestepping, Myers articulates her ideas well beyond polemics. Part of this is her book’s hybrid nature: part memoir, part treatise. She is able to illustrate her own experiences in politics, the ways in which being a woman hindered her own advancement– as White House Press secretary she was given more responsibility than authority, which seems to be a typical story; how she was told, when she protested a subordinate colleague being paid a higher salary, that he had a family to support; the struggle to be likable in authority, which men are rarely faced with. Myers worked as Press Secretary in the Clinton White House for two years, worked in writing and television afterwards, and then got married and had a family.
She writes, “That’s my story, but…” The “but” being key, that hers is not the only choice. “Women want and deserve not only the flexibility to manage work (and family) from day to day, but also the ability to make choices that allow them to pursue their goals across a lifetime.” Her focus remains on power, however, because “[a]ssuming that women– even women with children– don’t want the top jobs means that too many women will never get the chance to make those important decisions for themselves.”
Myers’ reality is complex, and she asserts that women need to accept and support women whose choices are different from their own. She thinks of herself as a feminist, but from watching her son and her daughter she’s certain– “[it] isn’t nature or nurture: It’s both.” She acknowledges aggressive tendencies inherent in men in particular, but realizes these inherited traits aren’t our destiny. Dealing with the example of Margaret Thatcher: that it is too much to expect one woman to change everything, and surely her position altered the world’s opinion of what women were capable of.
That different can be equal: “That doesn’t mean that every man should be expected to behave one way, nor every woman another. Rather it means that women’s ideas and opinions and experiences should be taken as seriously as men’s– regardless of whether they conform to traditional stereotypes.”
Through her own experiences, statistics, and interviews with other women, Myers illustrates the various ways women can be systemically excluded from power. Showing that this is dangerous, not just in principal, but in terms of economics: she shows women as “the engine driving economic growth worldwide,” and not just with their immense consumer power, as she cites studies showing that Fortune 500 companies with the highest percentage of women on their boards have significantly higher returns on equity, sales and invested capital.
Myers explains that men and women experience the world differently, and she demonstrates how traits typical to women, such as negotiation skills and collaborative strengths, can be highly effective in business. Moreover that women’s own lives are strong training grounds for management experience– motherhood in particular. She cites examples of women playing key roles in peace processes around the world. That in achieving “critical mass”– wherein women are not token, but a strong enough force to actually make a difference– everybody wins.
Myers is not overtly prescriptive– the general nature of her arguments ensures her book’s relevance is wide. Surely different institutions must find their own way towards solution, by Myers’s book is undeniable impetus for them to do so. I would like to think a man would read this, and find it as fascinating as I did– and not get defensive. That women could cease slinging internecine arrows for a little while, and understand that ganging up on each other is part of a game we don’t have to keep playing. The world can be better.
“This isn’t what I think,” writes Myers. “It’s what I know.”
May 19, 2008
Things Go Flying by Shari Lapeña
I chose Shari Lapeña’s Things Go Flying by its cover, and the novel didn’t disappoint. Though I chose it for its first line too, “Harold’s recent hobby of reading obituaries at breakfast was his only new hobby in years.” Setting the stage for an off-kilter story, irreverent and fun. Also as lovely and delightful as the cover suggests.
Things Go Flying is the story of a family at a point of crisis: Harold Walker becoming preoccupied with death and acting strangely, his wife Audrey ambivalent about losing control of her household as Harold breaks down. Their teenage sons doing teenage things. Also Harold is being visited by spirits, and, well, Audrey’s got a troubling secret of her own.
Lapeña’s narrative is dizzying at first, rapidly flipping between the four members of the Walker family. Which gets easier as the book goes on, but also serves to emphasize the radically different spheres each character inhabits, how far apart they are. Harold Walker is the common man we’ve encountered in books before– in Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother, or Carol Shields’ Larry’s Party, for example. An ordinary guy finds himself in some extraordinary trouble, though Harold’s trouble is even more extraordinary than usual. His wife Audrey, however, is decidedly novel in her creation– the overbearing wife and mother, killing herself with martyrdom and the very best intentions, but here so fabulously drawn on the inside and out.
Between Harold and Audrey, and their sons, Lapeña demonstrates the variety of ways in which family members drive one another crazy. Her story engaging in all its twists and turns, and, though undoubtedly fun and amusing throughout, it all comes to take on a deeper resonance.
May 17, 2008
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
I’ve not had much to say lately, suffering from a sudden dearth of original thought. Hoping to ease myself back into consciousness, however, I’d like to touch on Rebecca. The image at right being from the copy I read, a mass-market paperback passed on by my friend Bronwyn (who’d ended up with two).
I knew very little of Rebecca previously– had one impression that it was a ghastly florid romance with no literary worth, and it was also confused with she of Sunnybrook Farm. My interest sparked, however, when one of my favourite book-bloggers began her “Daphne-Fest”. She’d just finished reading Daphne by Justine Picardie, and I’d fallen in love with Picardie’s non-fiction back when I lived in England. I was also intrigued by DuMaurier’s ties to the Brontes, and I was reading Tenant of Wildfell Hall at the time. So round-aboutly, I came to read Rebecca. Quite late too, as everyone else I know who has read it did so in their early teens, and found it somewhat pivotal. I can certainly see why.
I enjoyed the juxtaposition of nineteenth-century gothic with modernish times– like Jane Eyre with automobiles! Naturally, I’d always associated such a narrative sensibility with all things archaic, and so to see it in this context made it new to me. The Jane Eyre references coming often related to this book, though I must assert I thought Rebecca more original than it was made out to be. Connections between the two books were a bit tenuous, incidental– this is a book that stands up on its own. And a fascinatingly constructed novel for a variety of reasons– that we never learn our narrator’s name for one, “the second Mrs. De Winter”, though we learn it’s an unusual name, difficult to spell. The love story’s trajectory less predictable than might be imagined, and the arc of the novel itself, for I have never encountered an ending more perfect. Unexpected and expected at the very same time, and that we do not come full circle. Of all the gaps throughout this novel, particularly this: “And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.”
May 6, 2008
Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins
(Read my interview with Emily Perkins here.)
It was interesting, the many ways Emily Perkins’ Novel About My Wife complemented my recent reading of The Girl in Saskatoon. Both books about the impossibility of recreating life out of words, as well as the struggle to define a line between reality and otherwise. Which becomes doubly interesting in Perkins’ case, the recreating as fictional as its result.
Like Sharon Butala, Perkins’ Tom Stone writes in an attempt to put a life back together, his wife Ann’s: “If I could build her again using words, I would: starting at her long, painted feet and working up, shading in every cell and gap and space for breath until her pulse couldn’t help but kick back into life.”
But Tom is also at a disadvantage: “Some facts are known… Other things I can only take a stab at.” His wife had been particularly elusive, an Australian exile in London content to have long ago cast her past away. Part of what had attracted him– Ann’s mystery what he’d fallen for in the first place. That mystery part of the reason why, after Ann becomes pregnant with their first child, her increasingly strange behaviour is not confronted, ultimately leading to her tragic death.
“She wasn’t one of those women who hate their feet, who hate their bodies… Her body was open for viewing. It was the one of the ways she distracted you from what was inside her head.” And Tom has been happy to be distracted. Now that Ann isn’t there to distract him anymore, he writes to address her unknowability, the fact of which is infinitely underlined by her death. Toms lays out the “known facts” and takes stabs through speculation, drafting several versions of the events he still does not understand that led up to what fell apart between them.
Tom and Ann and what happened to them are singularly emblematic of nothing– this is how I know this is a good story. The endpapers now positively covered in my scrawl, as I noted key points, facts, ideas. All emblematic of nothing, I say. Emily Perkins understanding that nothing is so simple to profess to summation, and instead my notes and ideas are expansions– this is the kind of book that takes you there.
About what it was exactly that happened to Ann, because, like Tom, we get pieces of the puzzle but some are missing and certainly out of order. What Tom knows and what he doesn’t, his detachment disturbing at times, and his subtle address rendering him a complex and interesting first-person narrator. The story itself grappling with issues, but not so much as to make a statement. More so to consider: any illusion of safety in a society fraught with danger, such fraughtness intensified during pregnancy during which danger lurks ’round every corner. How once bad things happen in our lives, the limits of possibility are expanded. What is to be a man, to be a “guardian”, in such a place where any horrible thing is possible. How “space is what we crave and fear”, and it is in this context that we turn to one another.
I am being terribly general, and I could write about this book forever, but I will focus on one thread. Tom writes of his staid, middle class parents from whose existence he escaped into his own: they are “so certain of the parametres of their universe, where normality began and ended.” And whether by choice or fate, Ann and Tom do not inhabit such a comfortable place. Much of Novel About My Wife is about negotiating life within these unsure parametres: where family is distant, the streets are dangerous, God is dead, love is ephemeral, one need never grow up and childhoods can hold traumas so dark and unimaginable.
Perkins has created a puzzle of a puzzle. I read this book in anticipation of the ending the first time, and then the second time I pored over the text in search of clues. But both times I was entirely caught up in both this extraordinary story and its more ordinary concerns. Its exploration of love, intimacy, marriage and parenthood. Perkins’ characters demonstrating as much as anybody does: what it is to live in the world today, and how life happens. A fascinating story on a multitude of levels by an exciting and capable writer.
