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.
November 19, 2007
Love Falls by Esther Freud
Though I have always enjoyed Esther Freud’s novels, I must admit that until her latest Love Falls I have never found them altogether satisfying. The writing is lovely, the description mesmerizing, the realism shockingly embedded in the romance, but for me the adolescent point of view of a book like Hideous Kinky left something to be desired. I love Freud’s Englishness, whether abroad or at home as in Peerless Flats or The Sea House, but the latter– her previous novel– faltered in its vividness.
Whereas with Love Falls, Freud appears to have assumed a brand new confidence. She is back in familiar territory– touches of travelogue, the young English girl abroad, this time in Tuscany– but in the creation of this particular girl, Freud has found her strength. Perhaps because Lara Riley is just old enough, but still not yet altogether. On a cusp: she looks into a wishing well, and dares to wish for her whole life.
During the summer of her seventeenth year, in 1981 as Britain is absorbed by the Royal Wedding, Lara embarks upon a journey to Italy with the father Lambert. As he had left her free-spirited mother when Lara was young and she has only even known him peripherally, Lara envisages the trip as a bonding experience, and she is disappointed when reality proves otherwise. Lambert, a writer, remains as consumed with his work as ever, and their host, his friend Caroline, Lara finds forbidding. She begins to take more of an interest in their neighbours the Willoughbys, impressed by their exoticism, wickedness and sophistication, and drawn in by her increasing attraction to Kip, their teenage son.
In the UK Love Falls was published this July, and how I wish it could have been a summer book here too– its heat is palpable. I adore the cover art, which seems a perfect depiction of the vividness Freud truly achieves. The stirring water too hints at dark undertones which she never shies away from. Lara’s coming of age is no cliche, and the novel’s disturbing climax fits perfectly within Freud’s context. Within the context of teenageness in general too: how much you get away with when you’re that young, if you’re lucky, and how far one can go without consequences (which is often frighteningly far).
November 11, 2007
The Frozen Thames by Helen Humphreys
Walking past the Royal Ontario Museum on Thursday, it occurred to me how accustomed I have grown to the Lee-Chin Crystal. So accustomed that surely it has always stood there, but of course I know otherwise. On Thursday it was raining but I stopped a moment anyway and tried to reconstruct the museum I used to walk by daily when I lived in the neighbourhood nearly ten years ago– the Terrace Galleries, knocked down for the Crystal after just 25 years of service. Oh the solidity of the city is most deceptive. But even though the streetscape has changed and I’m a decade away from that girl I used to be, when I fix my mind just right I can go back there. And so the city’s fluidity is also most deceptive, isn’t it? In the midst of constant change, the same moments seem to happen over and over again.
Helen Humphreys considers this dichotomy in The Frozen Thames, a book which she terms as “a long meditation on the nature of ice”. And indeed there is no better image than ice to encapsulate such flux and fixity. The Thames freezing is a perfect example of an extraordinary moment in time, having occurred just forty times in its history and Humphreys links these moments together in this small beautiful book, which is distinguished both by content and design.
The Frozen Thames comprises forty “vignettes”, one for each time the river froze from 1142 to 1895. From a man struggling to persuade his oxen to cross the ice to the wife of a publican who wakes up to find her house collapsing, these stories tell of people and stories both ordinary and otherwise. Of the spell that is cast over a city when something extraordinary happens, of the river’s centrality to London life. Humphreys writes of The Frost Fairs which were held for hundreds of years, when those who relied upon the river for their livelihood would make use of the ice for money instead. The bonfires, fortune tellers, cannons, skating, and the pig roasts.
That the voice stays the same throughout the book serves a purpose: a constancy, analogous to the river itself, as the backdrop changes. Various plagues descend, Kings are beheaded, power shifts hands, and still the wonder of the ice remains. Humphreys allows her reader to engage in this wonderment, presenting small moments so vividly: I never supposed an oxen’s step could be this compelling. And that such an ending could be so devastating: “…the nature of the river had been changed by the destruction of the old London Bridge and the building, in 1831, of the new one…. The new bridge did not work as a dam, the way the old bridge had, and the Thames would never, will never, freeze solid in the heart of London again.”
November 2, 2007
Remembering the Bones by Frances Itani
My husband can be very astute at times. Whilst reading Frances Itani’s Remembering the Bones I was raving about the book and he said, “So you like it the same way you like obituaries then?” Exactly. Nothing to do with death at all, but rather for such a celebration of life. It’s The Stone Diaries without the ghost, but also something original, beautiful, gentle and lovely in its own right.
The book begins with Georgina Danforth Witley, 80 years old and on her way to meet the Queen. She has won a contest open to all of those in the Commonwealth who share Queen Elizabeth’s birthday, and this is an unlikely event in the life of a seemingly ordinary woman. Seemingly, of course: if we’ve learned anything from obits it’s that nobody is ordinary. Georgie with her 103 year old mother still living, with the memory of her eccentric salt-of-the-earth grandmother Grand Dan, with her ability to name all the bones in the human body, memorized from her late Grandfather’s Gray’s Anatomy. She has talked to Queen Elizabeth like a friend for all her life. Georgie had a “polio honeymoon”, she understands why people laugh at funerals. Once she witnessed her husband in an act of love and fell in love with him for all time.
All this she remembers while she is supposed to be lunching with the Queen. On her way to the airport, not even far from her own driveway, Georgie loses control of her car and crashes down into a ravine. Broken in the wreckage, unable to move or shout and with nobody coming to find her, Georgie tells the story of her life, from childhood to widowhood. Putting the pieces together, struggling to keep her brain active. Struggling to “remember the bones” she once knew so well, to name them and thus reconstruct herself, and her story. The story of her most extraordinary ordinary life, and my heart was wrung by the joy and the sadness alike.
What happens to Georgie in the end then? Definitely a talking point, with some interesting ambiguity, but I would argue that the ending is the least important thing about all of this. Though I devoured this book rather greedily, it was for the journey all the while. For Georgie’s voice, and Itani’s prose. For this narrative so constructed that the pages fly by like those on a cinematic calendar, whizzing past faster than days go, until you’re at the end, and you’re finished, but what you’re left with is a life.
October 30, 2007
Tomorrow by Graham Swift
Reading Graham Swift’s new novel Tomorrow was for me an exercise in spoilage. The whole story hangs upon an essential hinge, but you see by mistake I’d found out what it was already. I can’t remember where but some review gave the whole thing away, and so I wondered, knowing what I know, would the novel be much good anyway? Will knowing the end ruin the beginning, middle, and perhaps the end in the end? And it didn’t– turns out Swift’s hinge was not so essential after all, but that it swings matters. In fact the swing itself is the point of the entire book.
Tomorrow employs a number of tricky devices, experimenting with the bounds and possibilities of conventional narrative. Swift uses second person narration for starters: middle-aged art dealer Paula Hook is telling this story to her sleeping teenage children one week just past their sixteenth birthday. It is the story of their family, beginning with the beginning of her relationship with her husband Mike and their first encounter “a stone’s throw” from Brighton Beach, and following them through the years to their blissful present. And the narrative trajectory is tricky because nothing terribly story-worthy actually happens– ordinary life is all, in fact a rather idyllic ordinary life. Compelling, yes– but ordinary.
Paula is telling this story because she is unable to sleep, because she is fearful of what will come of the information she and her husband will reveal to their children tomorrow. The information itself isn’t given until late into the novel (and this was what I knew from the start, incidentally), and here is Graham Swift’s third trick: to make the act of withholding engaging. To let suspense be his sole narrative driver, and indeed, as it has been reported, what Paula is withholding is rather anticlimactic, but to Swift it is the very withholding that matters.
Is it enough to sustain an entire book? Almost, I think. Swift nails Paula’s voice perfectly. Written as spoken, with backtracking, aversion, digressions, he conveys her love for her children and her husband, and her complicated feelings about “tomorrow”. He fits a huge part of a life into the span of a night into the span of a book, and this compression reads convincingly. His reverence for ordinary life and love reminded me of Carol Shields’ work (and I am going to read Larry’s Party soon, so I am curious to see how these two books might be similar with authors writing in the voices of the opposite sex). Mike– a biologist– and Paula’s relationship is a marriage of science and art (similar to that put forth by Margaret Drabble in The Sea Lady, and perhaps better realized). I enjoyed how both these characters engaged with the world through their work. And yes, it was interesting to see Swift playing with just what narrative can do.
However this focus on suspense, on withholding, seemed to function in the end to keep the really fascinating questions from being asked. What will happen tomorrow, I wondered, much more than I cared to know everything that was running through Paula Hook’s head. Why had she and husband chosen to withhold this information from their kids? How had they decided to do this? And really, more than anything, what was the big deal? Because if the hinge on which this novel hung didn’t matter to me, why should it really matter to Paula?
I enjoyed reading this book, but what was pivotal really wasn’t the point. Is our experience meant to be analogous to Paula’s then? Will she learn what we do? That instead of the “tomorrows” Swift focuses on, we remember all the other days.
October 27, 2007
The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer
No doubt I let the physical beauty of Dalia Sofer’s novel The Septembers of Shiraz pervade my impression of the story, but also for the very first time I found myself longing to call up a book designer. (Her name is Claire Vaccaro, according to the copyright page). The same way you might want to ring an author whose work you’ve just enjoyed, I wanted to tell her, “Yes– that indigo. If a story ever had a colour… Just vivid enough, and somehow homespun, not exotic, or foreign. Just the way that Sofer paints Iran.” I would have raised the issue of the endpapers: their delicacy, subtlety, and the very poetry of their pattern– so much like Sofer’s gentle prose. I wanted to tell Claire Vaccaro that she’d read the very same book as I had, and praise her for multiplying its beauty exponentially.
Dalia Sofer’s first novel The Septembers of Shiraz takes place in Iran in the early 1980s, during those unsure and chaotic days just after the revolution and in the midst of the Iran/Iraq war. The novel begins with the sudden arrest and imprisonment of Isaac Amin, whose only crimes appear to be that he is a Jewish businessman who had lived well under the Shah. During the year that follows his arrest, Isaac and his family exist in a suspended time, the future unsure. They are forced to reevaluate their values, future plans, and their sense of themselves in a world once familiar turned completely upside-down.
Isaac lingers in prison, unsure of what each day will bring. Sadistic guards play their mind games, he is tortured and the threat of execution is omnipresent. Isaac is urged again and again to confess, but to a crime he could not answer to even if he knew what it was. His wife Farnaz has had no word from him, unsure whether Isaac is alive or dead, and her efforts to help him only demonstrate her powerlessness within the new regime. Neglected in light of her parents’ problems and as confused as anyone by this game in which all the rules seemed to have changed, daughter Shirin becomes embroiled a mess too big for her to handle. And far away across the sea their son Parviz, studying at university in New York City, confronts the hard fact of his loneliness, and the distance between him and his family now during this time of need.
The Septembers of Shiraz is Sofer’s first novel, and it is the sort of first novel that I like best. It is not masterful: the plot is flimsy in places, dialogue is rampant with exposition. But then I think mastery is a heavy burden for a young writer to bear. I much prefer promise, and Sofer’s work just explodes with it. With moments in which truth and beauty marry: “The human body is like that. It needs a constant flow of nourishment, air, and love, to survive. Unlike currency these things can’t be accumulated. At any given moment, either you have them or you don’t.” Who we are and where we belong, and where do we go when we don’t anymore? The sympathy with which family ties are drawn, and that the family ties complicated– when Isaac is taken, Farnaz and he had not truly connected in years. Such complications give the story its dimensionality. That real life goes on outside, all the while one family is in turmoil. The burdens and expectations of revolution, of history, and fallen empires.
The Septembers of Shiraz is worthy of its physical beauty, and no doubt served as that beauty’s inspiration. Dalia Sofer has created a work that is quietly extraordinary and quite deserving of a cover you can tell that by.
October 25, 2007
The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta
In Tom Perrotta’s new novel The Abstinence Teacher, Ruth Ramsay is asked if her daughter’s soccer coach is cute. “‘What difference does it make?'” she answers. ‘”He’s a drunk married Christian.'” To which her friend responds with, “‘Nobody’s perfect'”.
And indeed “nobody’s perfect” would be a fitting epigram for most of Perotta’s characters, Ruth Ramsay in particular. She is divorced and longing, struggling with her adolescent daughters, and facing trouble in her job as sex-ed teacher at the local high school. The year before her comment about orl sex (that “some people enjoy it”) had sparked an outcry by a fundamentalist Christian group, resulting in Ruth now being required to teach an “abstinence education” program. And so she is none too impressed when she catches her daughter involved in a group prayer at her soccer game, led by her coach, the aforementioned imperfect Tim Mason.
The novel moves between Tim and Ruth’s points of view, demonstrating the oddly ambivalent attraction developing between them. Tim is just as struggling as Ruth is, a reformed drug addict who was saved by Jesus, but lost his wife and daughter along the way. He tries to live in a way that would make his God proud, but temptation keeps finding him at every turn, and he can’t help questioning his faith. Both he and Ruth deal with their mutual attraction with distraction, and these distractions become the story. Tim trying to stay on the straight-and-narrow, Ruth’s attempt to rekindle an old flame. What happens when Ruth can’t bear the propaganda, and advises her class to look up Planned Parenthood’s website? How will Tim respond to his pastor’s urging to continue leading the soccer team in prayer, even though he’s not altogether comfortable with the idea and it may well drive him apart from his own daughter?
This is the stuff of suburban soap-opera, American satire, and Perrotta’s Election and Little Children have already established him as a master of these forms. The Abstinence Teacher is written with its broader implications in mind (namely the growing power of America’s religious right) but still focuses on the small, the details, on the roundedness of his characters. Perrotta does not resort to stereotypes in this story where it would have been easy to, and he draws no firm lines of good and evil. “Nobody’s perfect”, nobody at all. And though this story’s conclusion is perhaps not one as satisfying as its thunderous momentum truly deserves, the distractions along the way are altogether worth the while.
