December 23, 2007
A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam
Like Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie did with Half of A Yellow Sun, Tahmima Anam looks back to not-so ancient history in her novel A Golden Age, which takes place in 1971 during the Bangladesh War of Independence. Anam’s approach also reminded me of Camilla Gibb’s in Sweetness in the Belly, as like Gibb she holds a PhD in Social Anthropology– definitely a valuable background for a creative writer. Which is not to say Anam writes like an academic, for her prose is stunning. Rather, I think, her background serves to underline that she knows well the story she tells.
Adichie and Anam vary greatly in their respective portrayals of war. Whereas Half of a Yellow Sun was exceptional in its multiple points of view, vividness, and unshy brutality, Anam tells a quieter story. Certainly not of a quieter war, of course, but her focus stays with one character– Rehana, a mother. The setting is primarily the family home, through the outside world creeps in inevitably. Rehana’s children, near-grown, are politically active in the fight for an independent Bangladesh, and soon her support for them involves burying munitions in her flower garden, taking care of an injured fighter, giving over her rental house for her son and his friends to use. And though the narrative stays quiet, Anam shows the brutal reality of war in a just a few choice images with an impact that is especially dramatic.
This story twists in the prologue, however. Rehana is a widow, and sooner after her husband died, she allowed her children to be taken away from her. I say “she allowed”, for this was what she felt occurred when Sohail and Maya were sent from their home in East Pakistan to live with Rehana’s late-husband’s brother in Lahore. Rehana gets her children back two years later, having erected a second house on her property to provide her with income and independence. But thereafter she feels indebted to her children for their time away from her, unsure of where to draw the line between their protection and indulgence– a dilemma that is particularly relevant in the heightened atmosphere of war. Further, where does Rehana’s fierce love for them end and selfishness begin?
I enjoyed this story very much, and the writing in particular. Of the Bangladeshi refugees, Anam writes, “And everywhere they went the memories argued for space, so that they forgot to cross the road when the lights were red, or overmilked their tea, or whispered into their newspapers as they scanned hungrily for news of home”.
Of what it was to live in such times: “There was always something… Every hiccup of the political landscape made its way to their door… [and] there was only this time, this life, this fraught and crowded era, to which they were bound without choice, without knowledge, only their passions, their loves, to lead and sustain them.”
Though I would agree that Anam has achieved something remarkable with A Golden Age, I was disappointed not to like it quite as much as the many rave reviews I’ve read of the novel. Though the plot held and the writing was gorgeous, the characters let me down at times. Rehana could be so unsure of her intentions and her feelings that her strength was muted and she could come across as wishy-washy. Also Rehana’s relationship with her daughter more sharply drawn would have illuminated both their characters.
It is notable, however, that Half of a Yellow Sun was Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s second novel, and Sweetness in the Belly was Camilla Gibb’s third. If Tahmima Anam is already so comparable with this novel– her very first– then certainly her career promises a grand future before her.
December 20, 2007
Spending days
I have a talent for spending days. I am also quite good at wasting them too, but I can make the choice now, which is something. Particularly since I am on Christmas vacation. Oh my job is a wee bit dull, but one can’t complain for the pay is good and I don’t need to return there until January 7th. And I spent yesterday so utterly stimulated, reading through my manuscript, reading the entirety of Claire Cameron’s The Line Painter, unable to put down Canadian Notes and Queries, and chatting with the mailman in my track pants. I met my Creative Writing allies in the eve. Today I just finished reading my own manuscript, I’m reading When the World Was Steady by Claire Messud whose books never fail to give me a whole world, and at 3:00 I’m going to get my hair cut. And some people might find such days mundane, but then they just don’t understand magic.
December 18, 2007
The Dirt on Clean by Katherine Ashenburg
There are many marvelous things about Katherine Ashenburg’s new book The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History, not least of all the brilliant design. Outside the book resembles a bar of soap, while the text inside is laid out beautifully, scattered with small graphics and quotations. The book is artful in style and content, the graphics ranging from Greek and Roman images of bathing to 2oth Century soap advertisements. That Ashenburg uses these images and literary evidence as her sources, as well as more traditional historical record, suggests a rich resource. Ashenburg’s prose is compelling and enjoyable to read, the subject matter fascinating and full of illumination, and here we have a book on a most unlikely subject which a wide range of readers is bound to appreciate.
Where I do find fault, though, I do unfairly. For it is unfair to fault a book for being exactly what it purports to be. Simply a history of cleanliness, focusing on the Western world, and arguing that a people’s view of cleanliness tells you much about who those people are. And there is so much stuff with which to work on this subject, as Ashenburg makes clear, but I couldn’t help wishing that she’d worked it a little more. Even the ubiquitous quotations and factoids suggest to me that so overwhelmed was she by the richness of her facts, she could neither harness them completely nor let any of them go. So we get a compendium of miscellanies instead of a book, the kind of trivia so fashionable these days, the kind which gets pulled out at parties whenever knowledge is called for. That changing one’s shirt was once all that was required by way of hygiene, how disgusting Europeans seemed to the rest of the world, and how clean must have been Odysseus considering that the Greeks bathed upon their departures and arrivals.
Have you heard about”Knol”– the the new Google version of Wikipedia? I think they made up “knol”, but the term is supposed to stand for the smaller bits that knowledge can be broken down into. The idea bothers me, for I don’t think that knowledge can really be broken down. Knowledge is the sum of its parts, synthesis being required for an assemblage of facts to mean anything, and such synthesis was what was missing as I read The Dirt on Clean.
But I am being doubly unfair, I realize. For I cannot claim to be so knowledgeable as much as merely “knolly” myself, and if Katherine Ashenburg had written a book called, for example, “An Academic Treatise on European Bathing Practices and Society in the 16th Century” and said book had not been designed to look like a bar of soap, I probably would never have even read it. Ashenburg’s book is undeniably charming, and though its facts left me with questions, I can seek the answers elsewhere. That the book raised questions at all makes it more useful than a “knol” and could well set me on a path toward knowledge after all. Being a popularization of history does not taint that history, and though I maintain that Ashenburg could have pressed her analysis further, that she has written such a good book with such wide appeal is probably healthy for everybody.
December 12, 2007
Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital
Last month I read Janette Turner Hospital’s new novel Orpheus Lost, and have followed up with a “critical duet” of sorts with Steven W. Beattie at The Shakespeherian Rag. I enjoyed the book a great deal, Steven did less so, and what results is a pretty interesting dialogue, I think. I will post the beginning, and then you can follow the link over to read the rest.
Kerry Clare: I’d never read anything by Janette Turner Hospital before, and she definitely surprised me. I was aware that she is as American as she is Canadian, and that she is Australian first and foremost, but somehow I still expected her work to be representative of the sort of fiction Canada’s female writers seem to write best. The sort of fiction that I like best for that matter, of kitchens and caves, mothers, daughters, and divining.
The premise of Orpheus Lost would suggest otherwise though, wouldn’t it? This story of Leela, who studies the mathematics of music and falls in love with Mishka in the subway as he plays Gluck’s “Che farò senza Euridice” on his violin. Mishka, whose strange disappearances begin to coincide with terrorist attacks in Boston. Soon Leela is snatched off the street on her way home and taken to an interrogation centre where she is confronted by Cobb, a figure from her past, and questions of Mishka being a terrorist.
Thrills and chills, international crime and intrigue. What a treat, I discovered quickly. To read a plot-driven book for once, and have it be so good. To be unable to stop turning the pages until I’d reached the end. I was choking on my heart a number of times, and one day this book extended my lunch break by an extra half-hour. There was no other way.
I do love it when literary fiction manages to surmount the limits of “genre.” To borrow the best of other genres, using it to great advantage. And indeed Turner Hospital does sufficient borrowing here — with the Greek allusions, musical references, spy plots, and romance. Orpheus Lost is a veritable stew, but reads quite originally, all its ingredients measured.
I found the story throughout quite compelling, but Turner Hospital’s depiction of the Australian rainforest was striking in particular. Of course the rainforest is a place that lends itself to story, and Turner Hospital properly invests it with elements of the fantastic, but that somewhere so unknown to me could emerge so vividly is still a testament to her achievements. Conversely the story lagged just a bit for me with Leela’s backstory, which takes place in a small Southern town I felt I’d read about already.
Leela and Mishka’s relationship was hard to understand at first, though with two such eccentric characters, this is unsurprising. Some of the woodenness of their dialogue is easily attributed to the fact that they’re both so unconventional, and so too would be their romance. Words are neither of their fortes. Turner Hospital conveys their respective passions (math and music) well, and also marries them together. Though not so easily — nothing is easy here, and I respect that. The Orpheus story never exactly matches this modern version, piece for piece. Many characters do remain insoluble equations.
So I could continue here, picking the pieces of Orpheus Lost apart, but I will conclude now instead by stating this book is much more interesting as a whole than these pieces are in isolation. That Orpheus Lost is altogether riveting and well-orchestrated, and that it works. Or at least it worked for me.
How about you?
***
Steven W. Beattie: I’m going to be the dissenting voice here. Orpheus Lost was, for me, a major disappointment… Read the rest.
December 10, 2007
The Mitfords Edited by Charlotte Mosley
Here is not a book for the common reader: you have to know and “get” the Mitfords in order to appreciate Charlotte Mosley’s collection of their letters The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters. My journey towards such knowing and getting began about five years ago when I read Mary S. Lovell’s biography The Mitford Girls. I’d plucked it off a shelf in Waterstones one day whilst on a lunch break, and I can’t remember now what possessed me to do so, but I was enthralled by these sisters, their family and their story. Nancy, the lady novelist; Pamela, who had her Aga custom-painted to match her blue eyes; Diana, who married a Guinness heir and then left him for the leader of the British Fascists, was fond of Hitler and never repented; Unity the Nazi, whose own fondness for Hitler led to her suicide attempt two days after England declared war on her beloved Germany in in 1939, where after she lived brain damaged until her death in 1948; Jessica the Communist, who ran away to the Spanish Civil War and then to America where she made a career for herself as a “muckracker”; and Deborah, who would become the Duchess of Devonshire.
Only England could have made them, and only in the twentieth century at that. Their story is the century summed up, from society balls to “Well Lady, the inevitable has occurred, Dinky is going to have a baby by a black man”. Their relationships best understood by the phrase: “I naturally wouldn’t hesitate to shoot him if it was necessary… but in the meanwhile, as that isn’t necessary, I don’t see why we shouldn’t be quite good friends.” I’ve written plenty here about my Mitford leanings. How I’ve loved the other volumes in my Mitford library since the Lovell: Nancy’s novels, Jessica’s memoirs, even Debo’s book (I visited in Chatsworth House in 2003 and would have enjoyed it much more had I not been terribly ill at the time and having to keep collapsing on the grass amidst sheep poo). I read Decca’s letters earlier this year and absolutely adored them.
This collection of letters is essential, and I found them fascinating– though I didn’t enjoy them as much as Decca’s. Perhaps a collection between six people wouldn’t have the same narrative arc? And also that Unity’s and Diana’s letters were so disturbing, the latter right up until the very end as she perpetually viewed herself as victim (though the years she spent imprisoned during WWII for her relations to the Germans must indeed have been traumatic). But I learned so much new stuff here, about Debo and Pamela in particular and how interesting (but not inter-esting) each one was in her own right. Debo is also as fine a letter writer as her far more literary sisters. That though Jessica and Nancy were terrible liars, this trait was not unendearing somehow. That the homeliest sister turned out prettiest in old age (I think, at least– Pamela). How impossibly hard is one life, and any life, even one which is most extraorder.
What an amazing bond is sisterhood, which these letters demonstrate. The jokes, secret languages, grudges, traumas, and joys. Collections of letters also manage to represent death like no other literary form I’ve encountered (as I found when I read Carol Shields’ letters in June) –the absolute silence of a writer’s cessation is incredibly powerful, and real. With Nancy’s and Pamela’s in particular, and then in the end that blank page. To think of all the life that created these, which is as palpable as the page upon which they’re printed.
December 5, 2007
Villa Air-Bel by Rosemary Sullivan
Full disclosure requires a note that I know Rosemary Sullivan, and like and admire her very much. But it is just as essential to point out also that no amount of affection and admiration alone could have sustained my interest as indeed it was sustained as I read Villa Air-Bel.
Of course the subject matter only helped. Human nature at its most base and then such courage in contrast. And set in France during the early 1940s, which other books like Suite Francaise and April in Paris have so recently brought to life for me. I had never managed to get a real handle on occupied France until encountering these books, which showed that France during WW2 was more than a place on a map upon whose coasts boys died in droves. That there was life going on there all the while, however bizarrely and this France had the very same Paris we know so well from 1920s’ lore– just one example of incongruity. This France, that France; how can we be expected to reconcile this?
Which was just the trouble as Fascism’s grip took hold during the 1930s. It was perhaps the reason why Fascism took hold at all and nobody noticed, because it certainly couldn’t happen there. The very same reason Soviet dissidents flocked to France under Stalin, and others escaped there from the Nazis in the 1930s. France was an oasis of freedom on a continent where totalitarianism was steadily creeping. That the creeping could pervade France as well seemed unfathomable.
All of this leads to the fact that when northern France fell to the Germans in 1940 and Petain et al took up their puppet regime in the south, the country was full of people who would be persecuted under the new regime. Socialists, former Communists, anti-Nazis, intellectuals, bohemians, artists of a leftist sort (ie most), and Jews as anti-semitism became more blatant (the first round-up of French and foreign Jewish residents of Marseille, Sullivan writes, took place in April1941).
The villa itself– that “house in Marseille”– is not as central to the book as the title would suggest. For in order to tell the story of this house which provided refuge for those looking to escape France (the escape no easy trick, by the way, requiring exit visas, transit visas, a country willing to receive them) Sullivan must go back to the early 1930s to explain how these people got to France at all, how France got to France at all, and where the nerve of their rescuers had come from.
At the centre of the story as much as the house is Varian Fry, an American inspired to anti-Fascism after seeing 2 Nazi stormtroopers impale a man’s hand upon a table in a Berlin cafe in 1935. He is sent to Merseille by an American relief organization to facilitate the removal of refugees from France, but soon finds that he is quite powerless under the law. American authorities are willing to do very little to assist his efforts, eager to comply with the Vichy government instead. Fry must resort to illegal means, obtaining fraudulent visas, smuggling refugees over mountains, black market dealings. With his committee he rents Villa Air-Bel, which becomes home to refugees awaiting their departures– artists and writers including Victor Serge, Andre Breton, Max Ernst and Wilfredo Lam.
Truly the idea of these people living together in a French villa while hell was creeping on all sides around them is compelling. Stories of the surrealist games they played to pass the time, the outdoor art shows they held to raise funds, the dinner party upon which the whole book hinges–this is fascinating stuff, particularly when one acknowledges that these people were perpetually under threat. But as the house was a stopgap, of course, there is so much more to the story.
All of this Sullivan, a poet and a skilled and experienced biographer, is well aware of, as she traces the trajectory of these artists’ lives once they’ve left Villa Air-Bel, following their meandering routes towards safe haven. With suspense and such fine detail, she also illustrates the risks Fry and his associates take to help these refugees, eventually, it is said, enabling the escape of 1500 of them.
November 30, 2007
Beijing Confidential by Jan Wong
A dizzying force of a book, Jan Wong’s Beijing Confidential. I picked it up based on Heather Mallick’s recommendation and was not disappointed. Perhaps the least self-serving memoir ever, Beijing Confidential serves instead to tell the story of China during the last thirty-five years, as an attempt to right wrongs, and as a stunning picture of Beijing today. It didn’t so much make me want to go there, no, but I feel like I was there, which is something.
Throughout her career Wong has discussed her experiences as a third-generation Chinese Canadian studying in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. An ardent Maoist, she was eager to conform to the society she found there, to renounce her bourgeois origins. She describes her young self as “that very dangerous combination: fanatic, ignorant and adolescent.” The extent of her devotion she demonstrated by reporting on a classmate who dared to ask her how she could get to America. In the chaos of the time, such a counterrevolutionary act could have brought forth any range of punishments– even death. And it is this experience which Wong revisits during her trip to Beijing.
Her husband and sons travel with her. She writes, “I am not only planning to chronicle the future of this great city; I also need to come to terms with my own past. For this I need moral support. I need my family to reassure me that I’m not a horrible human being. Or that, if I am, they love me anyway.” Her edges are softened in this context; she displays vulnerability, dares to admit she has made mistakes in her past. This is brave, I think. She has come to Beijing to find her former classmate– a seemingly impossible task in a city of millions– and it is through this quest that we come to discover the city.
Of course for Jan Wong vulnerability only extends so far– she remains gutsy, unsentimental and pulls no punches. Her approach gives us a fascinating perspective on Beijing– what is it to search for your own past in a city so eager to bulldoze its own? For, as Wong finds, Beijing is a bustle of construction. Particularly with the 2008 Olympics ahead, she is aware that this trip maybe her last chance to see that traditional Beijing she remembers from her time there as a student. Already the city is exploding with condo towers, new roads, mammoth shopping malls and uber-development. In this place she once knew so well, she is perpetually disoriented, and so is her reader, though fittingly and not for any lack of control on Wong’s part.
Her story is so deftly woven with past and present, the personal and the political, with the local and the universal. Beijing Confidential is an education as much as a story– fact: Mao banned pets!, for example– but all propelled by her quest for reconciliation. The quest is resolved in storied fashion, involving chance, understanding and some putrid fruit. Such a marvelously constructed narrative, and a memoir with so much worth telling.
November 29, 2007
Youth and Consequences
Non-fiction has taken over the household. Husband is currently reading The New Kings of Non-Fiction, edited by Ira Glass, and keeps proclaiming its greatness from the sofa. And I have begun my non-fiction commitment binge– I just finished Jan Wong’s Beijing Confidential. I must admit that I am yet not suffering from lack of life as I thought I might have been. No, there was life aplenty in Wong’s book, and even if there hadn’t been, I am taking supplements of The Mitfords anyway. I don’t miss fiction yet. But there are five books still to go in my binge, and not all as narratively driven as Beijing Confidential either, so we shall see.
As a reader I will never cease to be fascinated by how unlikely books can inform one another by virtue of being read in close proximity. Though really it’s unsurprising to think about how much a book of letters between six infamous British aristocrats and a Canadian’s Maoist memoir/ travelogue might have in common– I just never considered. But both are in many ways concerned the political impressionability of youth– terrifyingly, really. How much power a young person can come to wield, unknowingly or otherwise. The predictability of it all as well: the twin yearnings for belonging and independence which are so often the root of political extremism. The ways in which consequences are so little considered reminded me of both India Knight’s recent column “The young’s invincibility illusion” and my recent reading of Esther Freud’s Love Falls. Anyway, more on this will be forthcoming in my reviews of both books.
November 25, 2007
The Great Man by Kate Christensen
In my limited experience of Kate Christensen, I have found that she doesn’t conform well. Her novels aren’t easily classifiable, and they don’t have ulterior motives. She seems to me a writer who writes for the sake of her books. Who invests her fiction with the same humour and intelligence one might find within a life. Last month I read her first novel In the Drink, and I’ve just finished her latest The Great Man. Christensen started off promising, and now she is very good, and it’s just like Maud Newton says: she deserves to be better known.
The Great Man in question is Oscar Feldman, five years dead. A famous painter of the female nude, lately two biographers have been poking into his life story, stirring up trouble amongst the women Oscar surrounded himself with. His loyal wife Abigail, his mistress Teddy, his cantankerous sister Maxine (also a painter) and his daughters are forced to confront the legacy of this man whose presence had so overwhelmed their lives and continues to even after his death. Oscar’s “greatness” is re-evaluated after a fashion, and the women reconcile (as best they can) their feelings for each other.
Kate Christensen reminds me of Laurie Colwin, which not a lot of writers manage. Both writers redefining what “greatness” is– namely that it can feature that rare combination of humour and intelligence. With complicated and interesting female characters who have bodies, and jobs, and friends. With male characters in their lives who are just as interesting, and a story that does not rely on convention. An eye for the right details, to create a scene in all its vividness. There is joy here, and there’s goodness, and the whole wide world, which is certainly something for a book.
