September 16, 2007

Life on the Refrigerator Door by Alice Kuipers

Stuart and I are quite dependent on one another, rarely apart, and we once spent four straight months together when we were between jobs/countries, and never tired of the company. We’re lucky, I think, but then there is a certain something that comes from distance. Soon after that four months, we returned to real life and one morning I left a message for him on our whiteboard, returning home later to find his reply to me. The exchange was hardly profound, but it struck me– this physical evidence of our relationship, the different ways you communicate when you’re not side-by-side. How much words can do when they stand up on their own, which is the power explored by Alice Kuipers in her new book Life on the Refrigerator Door.

Life on the Refrigerator Door is a funny little book, part YA, a bit novelty. Composed simply of notes from mother to daughter, some just a few words or lines long, but then it made me cry. That is something. Kuipers has demonstrated that a series of notes on their own can assume a narrative structure, convey character, humour, emotion. This is one of those things, I suppose, that would be much harder in practice than it may seem. And it’s also a risk for a new writer to take, when grandiosity is all the rage. A writer must have confidence to create a work like this, a lack of ego to send something so deceptively simple out into the world. This book has left me much intrigued as to what Alice Kuipers will get up to next, and now I am excited to go there.

September 16, 2007

Tomato Soup

This weekend was less than remarkable, but more than enjoyable. I’ve been tired for ages and now I’m not, and I’ve read a zillion books, and scrubbed my tub. Finally. Yesterday I read memoirs Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy, and Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty. Both were extremely well done, but I was also surprised at how much Patchett’s book was a writing memoir more than anything else more controversial. Last night we went to see The Great Space Debate. Should we send people to Mars? It was more hilarious, particularly when Robert Zubrin (president of The Mars Society) became enraged at the premise of colonizing Mars being a sorta bad idea. We also got freeze dried ice cream, which tasted like real ice cream but made us thirsty. Sunday has been such a Sunday, but also v. cool as the abundant tomatoes from our garden were turned into a delicious tomato soup thanks to my husband. And it’s a beautiful day outside– the sun has been pouring in through the windows deliciously.

September 16, 2007

Gifted by Nikita Lalwani

Upon first page, I found the Nikita Lalwani’s first novel Gifted absolutely enthalling, and this spell stayed cast until the very end. What a remarkable book, this story of Rumi, the daughter of Indian parents, growing up in Wales. Rumi’s gift for mathematics becomes apparent when she is five, and from that point her whole life is a strict study regimen dedicated to getting her into Oxford. She has no time for friends or play, consumed with exercises and mock-exams staged by her father. When plans comes to fruition, however, and Rumi gets to Oxford in the end, her entire life subsequently implodes. The end of Gifted is the stuff of parental nightmare, and a dramatic way to cap off such an excellent story.

Two points about this book are particularly notable. First, though Lalwani effectively constructs her narrative from multiple points of view, her portrayal of Rumi herself is really fascinating. As a young girl her perspective is convincing as from a child’s eye, but is also distorted by her “gift”. Rumi calculates radii to pass the time, views the world as a series of angles, when she fancies a boy she likens him and her to amicable numbers. This was not so overdone, but offers a worldview that I’ve never been privy to.

I also found that Lalwani’s portrayal of Rumi’s parents Mahesh and Shreene was extremely effective, avoiding predictable opposition and cliche. Mahesh in particular demonstrates the motivation for an immigrant to have his child succeed in his new country. We see the distance between him and the people around him, his disdain for those “deluded enough to think that the world is full of choices.” Our glimpses into his own point of view attribute him some sympathy. Similarly with his wife Shreene, whose behaviour is at times monstrous, we are given an understanding of her situation, raising a daughter in a society whose value system is very often at odds with her own. And that Lalwani lets these parents “go too far”, in spite of their best intentions, is a brave narrative choice, what ultimately makes this book so compelling. This takes the plot beyond a simple set-up, and explores character behaviour under extraordinary conditions.

I also really like the cover design of this book. I didn’t find it immediately appealing, but soon fell in love with its retro simplicity. Though is the picture supposed to look like, well, what it looks like? See, we could talk about this for hours….

September 12, 2007

My Mother's Daughter by Rona Maynard

It’s not clear to me why I wanted to read former Chatelaine editor Rona Maynard’s new memoir My Mother’s Daughter. I am hardly the target demographic and I often have problems with memoirs– usually that they fail to be Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood. But Maynard was familiar to me– she and Sally Armstrong, whose letters would grace the magazines that came into our house while I was growing up. I was also intrigued to discover that her sister was Joyce Maynard, she of the controversial memoir and JD Salinger fame.

And so I read My Mother’s Daughter, Maynard’s account of her relationship with her difficult mother. Though I found their relationship less interesting than their respective experiences as women in the twentieth century. Their struggles are not those I would identify with (Maynard’s mother had to leave her job as an academic when she became pregnant; the conflict Maynard faced as a working mom) but that lack of identification is the very point. It’s important that women my age know what not to take for granted.

Maynard’s family dynamics were more difficult to read about– references to her sister as “The Adorable One” were a bit painful, and I’m not sure if they was supposed to be. Further, the episodic nature of the work meant that parts of the story felt glossed over. But Maynard is a really wonderful writer, deft with prose, and her life has been inherently interesting (if not always where she thinks it should be). I enjoyed reading this book, and I imagine fans of Maynard’s Chatelaine work will find much with which they can identify.

September 10, 2007

Turtle Valley by G. Anderson-Dargatz

Gail Anderson-Dargatz’ latest novel Turtle Valley reminded me of Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook. No small words are these. Though their books remain worlds apart in sensibility and accessibility, Anderson-Dargatz writes similarly to Watson of desperately stunted people rendered smaller amidst a harsh and aggressive environment. She evokes the same ghostly presences, ambiguous in their nature, and she can also write downright spooky. Anderson-Dargatz’ book has far more popular appeal than Watson’s, but she practices the same art of witholding, letting what can be sensed tell the story. A quick internet search reveals that Anderson-Dargatz has been inextricably stuck with the tag Northwest Pacific Gothic, which is dramatic but makes sense to me. In tone I found Turtle Valley was also reminiscent of Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach.

I’ve not read Gail Anderson-Dargatz’ earlier novels A Cure for Death by Lightning or A Recipe for Bees, but I do know that Turtle Valley is a descendent of the former. Beth Weeks’ daughter Kat is the subject of this new book, which takes place against the backdrop of a mass evacuation due to forest fire in BC’s interior. Kat has come with her husband and son to help her parents clear out their home before the fire comes down into their valley, and in the course of sorting through her parents’ accumulations, she discovers things about her family’s past that she never knew. History is thus disturbed, but Kat’s present is also in need of sorting, as she struggles in her relationship to husband Ezra who has become a different person since his stroke. To complicate matters further, she finds herself having feelings once again for a man from her past.

The fire metaphors are hard to resist: rekindling, old flame. Fire is pervasive throughout the text, and provides perfect imagery– particularly at the book’s conclusion. Anderson-Dargatz’ writing is strong, absolutely beautiful in spots. Her treatment of everyday objects is particularly admirable, and underlined by the photos of said objects accompanying each chapter, showing the reverence with which simple things can be treated, and the meaning that is invested in them with time. To understand Kat and her family’s history through these things is a fascinating process, and yet in the end something about it troubled me. The same thing that troubles me with any narrative in which a character finds a box of stuff that tells her all the answers. Now Kat is certainly in need of clues– her mother is entering the initial stages of dementia, her father is terminally ill– but somehow it seems too easy for her to assemble stories of such gravity. Tidiness is perhaps my most frequent gripe with fiction, and I was disappointed to have to call it here, however slightly, for a book I enjoyed so much otherwise.

September 6, 2007

October by Richard B. Wright

I’ve never read Richard B. Wright before, somehow missing the whole Clara Callan hullabaloo, but last week my friend, the much astute Rebecca Rosenblum, described him to me as a “journeyman”. And upon finishing Wright’s latest novel October I understand what she means. For there is a solidity evident throughout October, an assurance that all its parts are assembled and functioning as they’re supposed to be, and yet the success of the project is understated. It runs so quietly you can’t even hear the hum. And yet hum it does, weaving two different narratives together seamlessly, grappling with complexities, alluding to great literary works, and, with references to modern and popular culture, managing to be so much of this world.

As with most great novels, what this book is about is not the point of it, but I will recount the story nonetheless. James Hillyer, a widower in his seventies, is suddenly summoned to England upon receiving the news that his daughter who lives there has terminal cancer– the same kind to which he’d lost his wife years before. Whilst in England James has a chance encounter with Gabriel Fontaine who he has not seen for sixty years, not since a pivotal summer when they were friends and both loved the same girl. And from this point chapters alternate between James’s memories of that summer, and his experiences in the modern day when, still adrift by the news of his daughter’s illness, he accompanies Gabriel on a most unusual trip to Zurich.

The solidity is James Hillyer’s calm and even tone, and yet the hum is there– that these disjunct pieces of his life come together to mean something much greater. Further, that this story asks questions, and then dares not to answer: “But what if many things we encounter have no answers? What if they just remain unsolved mysteries?” And so they do remain, but as readers we still come away satisfied. October is more to be pondered than digested, and, I expect, also to be revisited from time to time.

September 5, 2007

New Season

My second summer of rereading proved as fulfilling as the first, though it was not as concentrated. But it was a joy to revisit classics: The Portrait of a Lady and To the Lighthouse, which I’d previously just read as a student, but it was something different to approach them on my own terms. My regular rereads: Slouching Toward Bethlehem and Unless were better than they’d ever been. Books I’d read but forgotten, and certainly not because they were forgettable: The Summer Book, and The Blind Assassin. I have a theory that you’ve never really been anywhere until you’ve been there at least twice, and I think this might very well be the case with books.

But now it is September, and new books are blooming. I’ve been binge reading lately– what else are holiday Mondays for if not a book in a day? Looking forward to the long train journey this weekend to get some more books under my belt. Oh, there are some wonderful books coming out this Fall, so stay tuned here and I’ll recommend the best ones. Watch for my review of Richard B. Wright’s October very soon. I am now reading Turtle Valley by Gail Anderson-Dargatz, who I’ve never read before.

After reading under restrictions for the last two months, being able to read so freely feels deliciously licentious.

September 5, 2007

Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones

New Zealand novelist Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip tells the story of Matilda, a young girl whose South Pacific island is in the midst of brutal conflict during the 1990s. Against the most uncongruous backdrop of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, Matilda unaffectedly conveys the violence and deprivation she witnessed and experienced, constructing an unlikely bridge between Dickens’ story and her own.

Her island is under a blockade, infrastructure has crumbled, and there is no school anymore, until Mr. Watts takes on the role of teacher. As teacher Mr. Watts– the last white man on the island, eccentric and strange even through Matilda’s eyes, he wears a clown nose and pulls his wife around on a trolley– is unsurprisingly unconventional, and invites the children’s parents into class to supplement his own knowledge. These lessons tell the history of the colour blue, how to kill an octopus, how to cheat the devil, why to have faith. Mr. Watt’s own area of expertise lies with literature, however, Dickens’ novel in particular. Matilda is immediately entranced: “By the end of chapter one I felt like I had been spoken to by this boy Pip. This boy who I couldn’t see to touch but knew by ear. I had found a new friend./ The surprising thing is where I’d found him– not up a tree, or sulking in the shade, or splashing around in one of the fields streams, but in a book.”

Dickens’ story reconstructs 19th century England for this little girl on an island time and worlds away. Pip becomes real to Matilda, and as a character he much brings turmoil to the village– a harsh testament to the power of story. When Dickens’ novel goes missing, Matilda and her classmates reconstruct the story from the fragments they remember, their imaginations enhancing these inevitably. And what follows demonstrates the thin line drawn between our lives and our stories, and the fragmentary nature of both.

Matilda’s cool tone is tragic in the context of her whole story, but it also serves as a most engaging technique. To render the extraordinary as ordinary is a tremendous trick of voice. And what an experience as a reader, to be lulled by even tones, words you know, scenes you think you understand, and then to realize this is something entirely different. That this narrator will not take you where you expect to go, and neither will her story. So it goes with Matilda, allowing the violence and brutality of her recollections to be couched in terms which are easy to ingest, but once we’ve put the pieces together they are all the more horrifying for that ease. It is through these acts of reconstruction that Matilda becomes like Pip to us, demonstrating the way that stories come to life.

September 3, 2007

To be read

Just finished Mister Pip, and now on to October. In both books characters are reading Great Expectations. The universe appears to be sending up flares then, and I found a copy of Great Expectations at my mom’s. Officially to be read.

August 30, 2007

If Today Be Sweet by Thrity Umrigar

Thrity Umrigar’s second novel If Today Be Sweet is a worthwhile read, in spite of its problems. Some passages are so beautifully written and suggest to me why her previous novel was so acclaimed. “There’s a limitless, undying love that does not confine, that does not imprison or hold back, but that dances ahead of you like a shimmering sprite, that entices, that beckons you until you follow…” I did enjoy reading about Sorab, the now-American son with India far behind him, and the way “he had longed for his life to be seamless”. However ultimately something was facile: the people too polite, the children too precocious, endings tied too neatly. Everything in these characters’ lives serves as a prompt to start them “marvelling about America”, whether it be good or bad, and the nuances of ordinary life go missing. The ending, also, was a bit implausible. But still, there was a bit of magic here. If Today Be Sweet was something of a pleasant read, though its reality was not all convincing.