January 22, 2008

Stuff and Links

Now reading Four Letter Word, which is really lovely, and fascinating as anthologies go– more to come on that. I finished reading The Gathering last night, though I’ve not yet formulated my reaction. Too bogged down in hype and expectations for clarity yet, but my sense was that it was very good. Perhaps the story itself was more ordinary than I would have liked, but then: “Because, just at this moment, I find that being part of a family is the most excruciating possible way to be alive.” And challenging language in a way that was most rewarded. Yes then, I think I liked it.

Taking my thoughts about abortion’s inherent boringness and narrative challenge a bit further, Tabatha Southey dares to make it all a comedy with brilliant results. On why we should go back to myths (for it seems that snazzy modern takes do not suffice). My friend K. has a new blog called The Pop Triad. Dictators don’t do it better.

January 18, 2008

The Senator's Wife by Sue Miller

There was a moment whilst reading The Senator’s Wife by Sue Miller when I just knew I was not only reading a readable novel, but also a very good one. When Delia Naughton steps into her front hall and is greeted her husband Tom, who calls her “Darling”. What Tom can’t see, however, is their daughter’s friend, already halfway up the stairs, but Delia can. Delia sees the girl turn at Tom’s voice, her face lit up and expectant. “And she knew, she felt it as an undeniable certainty, that something had already begun between them.”

This is the sort of moment upon which stories hang. This is plot, this is life. For it is too easy for revelation to come via google search, a conversation overheard, mis-answered cellphone calls, etc. Very rarely do we find an old tin box hidden under some bed, containing all the answers. Revelation more often does come in a glance, in a breeze, the turn of a head and the expression on one’s face. The sort of thing you can hardly put your finger on, and certainly cannot explain.

And so by such a moment I become confident of this story’s construction. This story about women’s lives, wifedom and motherhood, and that it could be told well. As it is. This is the story of a house, which is always a conceit I enjoy. Two halves of a house, actually, with two families. Meri and Nathan are newly married, new in town. Next door is Delia Naughton, “The Senator’s Wife”, who has been living apart from her husband for some time. A contrast then, between two couples. One together, and another apart (but not wholly), one newlywed and another with a history behind them. Meri finds herself unexpectedly pregnant, and Delia has wisdom to impart from her own years of motherhood. Having missed out on a strong maternal relationship herself, Meri is drawn to her new neighbour. And as Nathan and Meri struggle to adjust to one another and to parenthood, Delia is forced to make her own changes when her husband suffers from a stroke and she must bring him home again to care for him.

There are many fine things going on in this novel, and not just the moments. Here is not just an exercise in contrasts, as Meri and Nathan are so much characters in themselves. First, that Nathan is a nice guy, which is hard to write (for it’s far easier to plot a book with a slimeball). Second, they’re a bit older than average newlyweds. Meri is thirty-seven with her own history behind her, with a job, with experience. Moreover she’s a bit goofy, which you don’t see much with protagonist. As a character she is entirely whole.

It’s a subtle novel, but solid– what you’d imagine of a book about houses. And more than just an exploration of family and marriage, both of which are dealt with beautifully. The Senator’s Wife is not just a rumination, but a story, and with a fine plot to guide it, and an ending that will take you by surprise.

January 17, 2008

Uncommon

My upcoming Descant blog post will be a celebration of the commonness of reading, but I want to briefly celebrate The Uncommon Reader before then. (Which doesn’t seem to be available on Amazon.ca, and I don’t know why, but I am sure it’s out in Canada). Oh, the book is extraordinary and perfect, and not just because of its gorgeous endpapers. Or because Alan Bennett wrote The History Boys (who knew?). Rather I love the book for its acknowledgment and celebration of what I call “serious reading”.

The uncommon reader in question is Queen Elizabeth, who stumbles upon a mobile library by mistake. Not much of a reader is she, but she soon finds that one book leads to another. That books can inform the whole wide world, rendering it more complicated, perhaps. Reading, she finds, is a muscle, and she exercises it by reading with a pencil in hand (which you might recall is my New Year’s resolution). And as a reader she becomes “uncommon” not by her pedigree, but by her devotion to bookishness. By treating reading as a most serious task, not reading willy-nilly, by exploring through the doors books open for her, thinking about connections, ideas, suggestions that books bring forth, and indulging the curiosity towards the world that books awaken within her.

There are so many of us “uncommon readers”, at various levels of uncommonness– with our books clubs, book logs, book blogs, reading challenges etc. Though Steve Jobs may suggest otherwise, in my experience uncommon reading is remarkably common. But then this, of course, is a post for another time.

January 17, 2008

What is the What by Dave Eggers

There is so much to say about Dave Eggers’s novel What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. First: read it, it’s good for you. Good by the fact of being extraordinarily well-written, well-plotted, challenging, long long but you won’t bemoan that, tragic but not so much that you’re put off the story. For the very point is the story, the story of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the fabled “Lost Boys of Sudan.” Good for the reason that you’ve probably heard of the “Lost Boys” and Sudan, and it’s all mixed up with Darfur, and when you think of Africa anyway, you think of Africa. You think “over there.”

Or at least I thought for a long time, until I started seeking books and stories that would make the stories clearer, make the places and people of this vast and varied continent distinct. What is the What was good for me because I came away with an education. An incredible story too that perhaps allowed the lessons to “take” so well, but the very best thing for me about the book was not its point, its story, but its didacticism. I’ve come away with the facts, and I know a little bit more about the world.

But then the story is by no means incidental. And how well it is spun, beginning in the present and going back to the past, setting up a circular pattern, and then moving back and forth in and out of time. It’s a giant story, nearly twenty years in Deng’s life, and I respected its length. Perhaps one could have cut a few hundred pages to no great narrative loss, except to undermine the fact of this life. Talk about length, try spending ten years in a refugee camp. The shape of the narrative suits its content incredibly well, and makes for a gripping read.

Beginning with Deng in his apartment in Atlanta and a knock on the door just before his home is invaded by thieves and he is assaulted. Certainly not the standard set-up for such a story, “refugee boy makes good etc. happily ever after”. What is the What shows how hard it is to make good, how elusive is “ever after”. Ever after what?

Deng’s early life is established beautifully with an idea given to him as a young boy marching across Sudan with an army of boys. A march upon which armies, rebels and lions are a threat, as well as hunger, sickness, and exhaustion. Imagine your favourite day, he is told by their guide. A collection of all the perfect memories he’s ever known, and Achak remembers his loving family, his village, his friends, a brand new bicycle. Certainly, there is a “before”. Until Civil War breaks out in Southern Sudan, young Achak witnesses unimaginable horror, and, unsure what has happened to his family, joins the other boys on their walk toward some sort of safety in first Ethiopia, then Kenya, and then later to America.

Certainly when we talk about What is the What, we must mention Dave Eggers, but then it’s hard to even find him here. Eggers has stated that the reason he wrote a novel rather than a non-fiction book was that Deng’s voice was the great strength of the story, and the voice Eggers has recreated here certainly underlines that. One could only recreate a voice like this by listening intently, projecting nothing, and clearly this is what Eggers has done. Capturing the rhythms of this particular speaker, the trajectory of his stories, the kinds of lessons he cares to impart.

What I find so incredible about Dave Eggers, and what I respect about him, is that he’s never done the same thing twice. (He’s also an admirable philanthropist, but we shall stick to literary matters.) With all his early success, he wasn’t required to do what he’s done. But he has challenged himself, taken risks, proved his literary chops. The proof is here– the once-ironic indulgently-self-aware memoirist has written an epic tale, and all that remains of him here is the warmth, the humour, the generosity of spirit and insight.

Of course I do wonder about the political implications. What does it mean that this African man has had his story told by someone else? Why couldn’t Deng have told it himself? What is lost as we smudge the bounds of a literary life, and I am curious to see what history makes of all this. For this is a hugely significant work, and I am sure what it means will change with time, but in the meantime I would hope that the power of the novel addresses some of these concerns. That Deng’s voice wasn’t “stolen”, rather he sought out Eggers to tell the story, acknowledging that he wasn’t a writer. That Eggers tells the story masterfully, in a way a simple memoir by a lesser writer mightn’t have done. That Eggers’ name catches attention, directs it towards a worthy cause, and Deng receives the proceeds from the novel, which he is using towards his foundation.

Checking out the previous link today, looking at pictures of Deng’s visits back to Sudan and the work he is doing in his village of Marial Bai, I was moved by the beauty of the place. The greenness, the vastness, the vibrancy were not what came to mind before when I thought of Sudan, of a country that had been wracked by war for years and years. My perspective has been coloured, indelibly I would hope. And this is what reading can do, fiction in particular with all universality it implies. It’s quite simple (though not much else is)– I read this book, and it was good for me.

January 9, 2008

We all prefer the magical explanation

Have been reading/catching up. Penelope’s Way by Blanche Howard. Am just about to start What is the What by Dave Eggers, which I’ve been putting off for too long. Put off by prospect of the headiness, perhaps. Though Dave Eggers has never let me down before, and certainly the book has been buzzed about by many people I respect. I suspect I will be incredibly impressed.

And speaking of fictional autobiographies, I’ve just finished reading The Last Thing He Wanted by Joan Didion. “Speaking of…” I say, for Joan Didion’s fiction similarly seems to challenge the fic/non-fic divide. Now I am such a fan of Joan Didion, and partly because she’s a bit preposterous. I don’t enjoy preposterousity universally, but I adore any woman who can embody the trait and still come off as brilliant. (This caveat thus explaining why I don’t love that Coulter person). I love Didion’s migraines, and that she went to the supermarket in a bikini and wanted a baby, and cried in Chinese laundries. And if one more person tells me that although they like her non-fiction, her fiction is disappointing, I will yawn.

Not because they’re entirely wrong– I’m not sure about that. Certainly I’ve never read a Joan Didion novel that stirred in me anything like what I felt for Slouching Towards Bethlehem, but that to me is beside the point. Which it might not be. It is distinctly possible instead that I am just feeling awfully protective of Didion, but still, I think, to dismiss her fiction is tiresome.

Whether or not her fiction is enjoyable (and it can be, but in a slightly uncomfortable way) something fascinating is going on with it. Joan Didion is the one writer who completely defies my theories of fiction’s truth having more bearing on reality than that of non-fiction. I am not sure I fully understand it, but it’s something in her coldness, her acuity. In her non-fiction Joan Didion assembles the world and lets it speak for itself and it’s in this speaking that the life creeps in. Whereas in her fiction when she attempts the very same thing (for this is what she does), the made-upness is pervasive. When she assembles these made-up things, whatever speaks is more an echo than a voice. An echo of what, I don’t know. All of which is really odd. And doesn’t necessarily mean that her fiction is unsuccessful; Didion is too smart for that. Rather I think of her as treating fiction as a project I’ve still not got my head around.

January 4, 2008

Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips

Ultimately, Marie Phillips’s God Behaving Badly is a very silly novel. Which I do not mean as a dismissal, as, for two reasons in particular, it is also a very useful novel.

First, because silliness has its uses. Silly is not the same as stupid, nor stupid-making. What Phillips has set out to do in this, her first novel, she has accomplished with aplomb. Imagine the ancient gods and goddesses of Greece alive and, though not-so-well, living in modern-day London. Apollo, the god of the sun, turning into trees those women who won’t satisfy his sexual whims, and, with whatever is left of his dwindling powers, causing the sun to rise and set each day. Artemis is a dog-walker, Aphrodite a phone-sex worker, they’ve locked Zeus in the attic, and Demeter just tends her garden– though her clematis has died. No one can understands a word Athena says, and their house is absolutely filthy. Clearly the gods have come down in the world, and indeed, they’re behaving badly.

Silliness transpires, inevitably. When Apollo falls for their cleaner (thanks to a trick played by Eros, who incidentally is trying to be a Christian), cleaner ends up dead (struck by lightening), her sometime-boyfriend must go down to the Underworld (via Angel Tube Station) to bring her back. Premise is key here– there is no room for character development. Even plot is not the point (particularly in a world where characters can simply be “inexplicably drawn” towards their destiny, thanks to some kind of spell). But premise alone manages to be enough to sustain this novel, which is a snappy, funny, light read.

Gods Behaving Badly is useful for more didactic reasons however, though I know many classicists will pour scorn on my theory. But silliness aside, Marie Phillip’s project is enormously well-executed. Her story of these gods and their own stories is positively bursting with facts, details. However irreverently, she has made thousand-year-old stories relevant to modern-day readers. And I realize this book has got nothing on the texts from whence it sprang, but the thing is that I’ve never read those texts. There are massive gaps in my education, which is my own problem of course, but I didn’t really know about Artemis. Certainly not that she was Apollo’s twin, and I’d forgotten about Ares since I learned about him in my grade nine mythology unit.

Which means that the next book I read now in which these timeless tropes are used (albeit with subtlety) I will pick up on the allusion. I felt similarly when I read Orpheus Lost: grateful that a writer has seen fit to bring these stories (back) to life for me. And it means that the original stories (which for so long have seemed to me from so far back as to be arcane) are now accessible– so close I could actually pick one up and read it. And perhaps I just might.

January 2, 2008

On A Celibate Season

Carol Shields writes to Eleanor Wachtel: “Mail in Montjouvent is always welcome. (On the odd mail-less day the postman knocks and gives me his condolences.)” From Random Illuminations.

I just finished reading A Celibate Season, and enjoyed it so much, to my relief. For I hadn’t been sure: this was co-authored with Carol Shields and Blanche Howard, as well being an epistolary novel (and I don’t think I’d read such a thing since Heloise and Abelard in an undergrad survey course). Also that it was the last Carol Shields novel I’d left to read, which has me less sad than I thought I’d be, for I am grateful instead that I got to read it at all.

I enjoyed A Celibate Season as much as I’ve loved any book by Carol Shields, which is a lot, and it was especially interesting to read in light of A Memoir of Friendship, which was the collection of Shields’s and Howard’s real-life letters. Friends and letters seem to have been twin stars in Shields’s life, and how wonderful to see their intersection in both these books.

December 31, 2007

The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff

Very exciting news– though it’s still 2007, I have already read one of the best books of 2008. The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff comes out late January, and it’s absolutely extraordinary. A first novel you won’t believe, with all the qualities so many people liked about Special Topics in Calamity Physics, but not annoying, pretentious or gimmicky. Anything the least bit gimmicky about The Monsters of Templeton, I considered a gift actually. Lauren Groff is a bloody brilliant writer and tangible proof of this is evident in that her book contains the term “Potemkin nipple”. There is nothing more I need to say.

But of course I will continue on, because I haven’t loved a book this hard in ages. American in its scope (by which I mean big) Groff is good enough to handle her material, which begins with her narrator Willie uttering her mighty opening sentence, “The day I returned to Templeton steeped in disgrace, the fifty foot corpse of a monster surfaced in Lake Glimmerglass.”

Now normally monsters don’t turn me on, but Groff has done something quite original here. The magic not even questioned amidst such a solid realism, but a realism so bizarre that no magic could be contested. And also magic and realism so original– could there be anything more entrancing than a ghost like this one: “To my mother it had looked like a bird; to me a washed-out inkstain, a violet shadow so vague and shy that it was only perceivable indirectly, like a leftover halo from gazing at a bare bulb too long.”

Willie has returned to Templeton (a fictional version of Groff’s own hometown, Cooperstown, NY) “in disgrace”, her mother taking her mind off her problems with the revelation that Willie’s father is not who she’d thought he was. But who he is exactly, Willie’s mother won’t say, and it is up to Willie to solve the mystery, tracing her complicated family history back to her ancestor, the founder of Templeton. Characters from the past get their own chapters, Willie’s world also filled out by exceptionally brilliant secondary characters– her best friend and her mom, the male joggers who run through town first thing in the morning in particular. Willie herself is an amazing creation– gutsy, smart, funny, weak and strong.

The main character in the novel is Templeton, however, and Groff invests the town with such beauty. With a spirit threatening to fade when the monster dies, when all seems bleakest, but there is so much hope, and such a gorgeous ending: “and it is good.” I finished reading this last night near 1am, and couldn’t sleep for a long time, just thinking about it, and smiling.

December 28, 2007

Random Illuminations by Eleanor Wachtel

“… I think the more we know about a writer, the more we understood how the novel was put together and why and what it means. And maybe we don’t need to know this. Maybe we don’t need to know anything about the writer. Maybe it’s better for us to enter blindly into the reading of novels, but, of course, I’ve I am always curious about the person behind the voice, behind the writing hand”– Carol Shields, “A Gentle Satirist”

The more about I read about Carol Shields, particularly in her own words, it is clear to me why her friends have been moved to honour her: Blanche Howard’s Memoir of Friendship (which was how I spent the end of June) and now Eleanor Wachtel’s Random Illuminations. Shields’s mutual engagements with fiction and the world (both absolutely intertwined) were so deeply considered, original and brave, that her death left a gaping hole, and not only for those who knew her. Carol Shields’s own generosity of spirit– that which gave her her talent for friendship in particular– meant that her loss would be exponential.

There are some people who’ve never read Carol Shields, which I find baffling. But maybe you have to have read her to know what you aren’t missing. I think, however, that anyone who’s never read her might be surprised by what they find here, by the vastness of her thought, her wisdom, her curiosity, her insight, her embrace of the actual world. In many ways she was a philosopher, which might sound hyperbolic, but this was a woman who was asking singular questions of humanity in even the most ordinary letters to her friends. (Who never actually seemed to write an ordinary letter come to think of it.) Who dared to declare issues of womanhood and motherhood issues of personhood after all, the very fundamentals of personhood: how are we meant to be?

Eleanor Wachtel wrote her essay “Scrapbook of Carol” after Shields’s death for the Canadian journal A Room of One’s Own, and that essay opens Random Illuminations, Wachtel’s collection of letters from and interviews with Shields, who was a friend. This collection reads much like a scrapbook also, chronological, layered, touching back upon the same ideas and taking stock of their development. Like everything Shields touched, it seems, the book is most vibrant and full of joy. Fascinating for writers and readers alike, and I mean readers in general too. How terrible, it underlines the loss of Shields, but also suggests that she chose friends as generous as she was, who are now so willing to share her with the world.

December 27, 2007

Le Bal Irène Némirovsky

Though quite a slim volume, the latest work by Irène Némirovsky to be translated into English, Le Bal, will be welcomed by all those who so enjoyed Suite Française (which I read earlier this year). Le Bal also provides a new way to approach Némirovsky’s work, which here is less touched by the tragedy of her death (though is still influenced by events and circumstances in her life) and has to stand alone without the trappings of a story like Suite Française‘s amazing rediscovery and publication.

This book comprises two short novellas, “Le Bal” and “Snow in Autumn”. The former is a story to whom I’ll apply the adjective “wicked”– not something I do often to anything. Antoinette’s loathsome mother is an aspiring socialite whose riche is altogether nouveau. She treats terribly Antoinette, who herself is no prize but then Antoinette has the excuse of being 14, the very worst age ever. What happens then, when Antoinette finds herself entrusted with the posting of invitations to her parents’ first ball? What happens when Antoinette throws the invitations into the Seine instead? “Snow in Autumn” is told from the perspective of a servant following the Russian family she’s devoted her whole life to, from their flight from Russia during the Civil War to their exile in Paris. What is her place in this family whose circumstances have so changed?

Here was a wonderful read. It is a combination of Némirovsky’s uncommonly good writing, and excellent translation by Sandra Smith which has allowed the language to so retain its vibrancy. I also enjoyed the opportunity to read this author performing a closer treatment than Suite Française, which, of course, was exceptional in its sweep, but Némirovsky has more than one trick. She was an incredible writer, I can’t to read more, and I would also welcome more works in translation by other writers being promoted with a similar fervor.