December 28, 2006

About Alice by Calvin Trillin

What lies behind my fascination with memoirs by widowed spouses? There is something terribly indulgent about reading these books. Why do I cherish The Year of Magical Thinking and The Escape Artist, am looking forward to reading Love is a Mix Tape and have been anticipating About Alice by Calvin Trillin for months now? I have narrowed it down to the fact that I like reading about happy marriages, which are near-impossible to capture in fiction, and require a death in non-fiction in order to be considered book-worthy.

I spent a lovely bit of time tonight with the awaited About Alice, a love letter from Calvin Trillin to his wife. Expanded from his essay “Alice Off the Page”, which was published in The New Yorker last March, this small and perfect volume tells the story of an extraordinary woman, of the man who loved her, and the story of their life together until her death from cancer in 2001. Typically for Trillin, the writing is funny even when it’s sad, though the ending can’t help but break your heart a little. But what is most powerful about this book is Alice herself, or the way in which she is presented in the light of her husband’s love.

A seriously gorgeous woman (as the photo on the book’s back cover attests), Alice Stewart Trillin was also brilliant. Fiercely principled and protective of her camp, she exemplified a life well-lived and served as a force for good. It’s good to read about people like that– a dose of the positive, even with the awful ending. It’s good to know there are marriages like that– such strong foundations in our often dismal world. And it’s hope too, for those of us who want to keep on being happy for as long as we possibly can.

Trillin writes that one of Alice’s signature phrases was “We’re so lucky”. And she was especially lucky to have a husband who writes so well and loves her enough to create such tribute. And the rest of us, of course, are so lucky just to get to read it.

December 22, 2006

Special Topics etc.

I will be brief about Special Topics in Calamity Physics as so many reviews have said so much already (I’d link to more reviews, but my internet is dial-upily slow today, who knows why). As always, I would dismiss the opinion of all those who couldn’t get through it because this book’s ending was my favourite thing about it. I also would not accuse the novel of pretentiousness, but rather it is meant to be a critique of pretentiousness– not an entirely successful one, however. Similarly, the novels gestures toward an extreme bookishness, which a reader can’t quite buy as many of the books discussed within this one aren’t even actual books. Comparisons to Donna Tartt are made easily, but Pessl’s characters are not as interesting (in fact, Blue van Meer’s teenage peers are incredibly boring). Comparing anyone to Nabokov is a bit unfair. In typical American styly, the book is big as a brick and I’m not sure it has to be (though I’m hardly one to talk– my attempt at brevity is already failing). The inevitable however. The first third of this book is hardly a slog, but it’s annoying in parts. I think that fake bookishness might be worse than pretentious bookishness. The second third of the book is better, but far too focussed on the secret life of teenagers, which of course is boring. The third part of the book, however, is golden. It’s what I imagine that DaVinci book might be like for people who liked it. Murder mystery/thriller/race to the end/gutting twist etc. Marisha Pessl is trying to do far too much with her debut novel, but the upside of that is that I think most people could find something to like in this book.

Now rereading Jane Eyre, which I read last eleven years ago when I was in grade eleven English. “I hate English!” is written on the title page in my handwriting, but I do remember liking this book and I’m loving it now. Continuing with uTOpia, which actually has many more good essays than bad ones, and I’m learning a lot. I particularly like the way essays unconsciously counter and disagree with one another, which fits the complexity of the issues this book is addressing. Oh, and Curtis bought me a subscription to Vanity Fair, which I’ve been dreaming of for my whole life. He and Erin came over for dinner last night, and my risotto debut was a giant success. We all drank too much wine, and had inordinate amounts of good conversation.

December 19, 2006

The Sea Lady by Margaret Drabble

The necessary disclosure is that I’m in no way qualified to review anything written by Margaret Drabble with objectivity. It’s no secret that she is my very favourite author, and that I would read a phone book so long as it was written by her. So it’s no surprise that I loved The Sea Lady. Which is not to say that The Sea Lady has anything in common with the phonebook at all (apart from some fine names), but I am not fully convinced that it might be everybody’s cup of tea.

I have determined three marked periods in the career of Ms. Drabble. From her first novel A Summer Bird Cage until Jerusalem The Golden, she wrote about very fashionable, fabulous, modern people. This continues to some extent into The Needle’s Eye and The Ice Age as well. Though the characters begin to engage more with the wider world, the world is telescopic. I love these books very much, but due to their 1960s modernity, they come across as a bit dated today.

With The Realms of Gold and The Middle Ground, Drabble begins to develop the style of her middle period which culminates with The Radiant Way Trilogy (which was how she and I fell in love, you see). These books, written from the late 1970s into the early 90s are concerned with vast themes and are sprawling projects, and here she invents her universe, the wonderful Drabble universe where I would love to take up residence and chat with Kate Armstrong and Alix Bowen, and meet Liz Headleand’s cat. Through this period, Drabble wrote the whole world, and captured contemporary England in a sad and desperate way. Rather than appearing dated, these works have managed to capture an era.

Since 1997’s The Witch of Exmoor, I get the impression Drabble has been bored by the confines of the novel, and has tried to push the form in different ways. She has also shifted her focus from “now” to “then”, delving much into the past– her own past in The Peppered Moth, or the life of a historical Korean Queen in 2004’s The Red Queen. Narratively speaking, she does funny things to her texts and leaves ends untied. I am not sure that critics universally love her later works, and I can’t begin to imagine how these novels might read to one who has never read Drabble before. But to me, who is so in love with Margaret Drabble’s writing, these works fit into a scheme whose development I understand by looking at the evolution of her work. I am not sure her intentions are always ultimately realized, but this is the same universe. Its writer is just looking in a different direction.

The Sea Lady is labelled “a late romance”. The story of Ailsa and Humphrey, who meet as children, meet again as adults and fall into a young love doomed to end badly, and the heart of this novel is their encounter in their sixties, after forty years apart. Humphrey is a marine biologist, and fish permeate the novel’s symbolism, but I didn’t find it tiresome. It seemed appropriate. The biological focus was particularly interesting, due to my interest in scientific literature. Ailsa is a media personality/feminist/art historian/sociologist, and a theme of the novel is the merging of science and the arts– if such a thing is possible, and what is that entity? The novel is structured around Ailsa and Humphrey’s return to the place of their original meeting, and their minds drift backward on their respective journeys. The ending of the novel is strange, twisting a bit shockingly/tidily, and the presence of the Public Orator, which many critics considered the novel’s real flaw, wasn’t troubling as much as it was weird.

But this is Margaret Drabble– her voice, her people, her universe. In some ways, this novel blends her three eras as much as any book she’s ever written. She is smart and the novel is bursting with facts– but not to prove her erudition, rather her passion for knowledge drives her to create a story from it. I think for the first time Drabbler, The Sea Lady would be perplexing in parts, but certainly not unenjoyable. And as a Drabble devotee, I will add it to the long line of Margaret Drabble novels on my bookshelf– a collection which means as much to me as all the other books in the whole library.

December 15, 2006

Half of a Yellow Sun

I can’t imagine what a writer must be fighting with when she sits down to write about a war. How do you fashion a narrative that is not simply an excuse for the backdrop? How can you have characters in all their multiplicity? How do you write about brutality and deprivation, and love, and beauty, all within the same book? In Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has crafted an extraordinary tale, and craft is truly the word. This novel tells the story of Biafra, an independent state formed within Nigeria in 1967, and the civil war that followed before the Republic’s fall in 1970. I’d never heard of Biafra before, and the reason I will never forget it is Ugwu, Olanna and Richard, for this book is their story as much as it is Biafra’s. And this is Adichie’s feat, for it is their stories which awoke Biafra to my ignorant mind. The brutality within this book would have been unrelenting, were it not for broken chronology and alternating narrators with every chapter. The result is a structure which accomodates the vastness of this project, but also facilitates the reader’s engagement with the narrative and each character. What I found most incredible was Adichie’s capacity to generate sympathy for characters who did terrible things, which is essential, in that broken couples had to go on together, and that Biafrans and Nigerians had to learn to live together again once the war was over.

I come away from this book with a similar impression to that I had after reading Sweetness in the Belly— that I had gained an education as much as a story. I remain startlingly ignorant about Africa, and I don’t claim that a novel is any sort of tool toward substantial identification, but I still think that fiction is the best place to go for knowledge. It’s not about empathy, but it’s about learning. That this happened in the world, but I never knew. And thanks to Adichie, I don’t think I’ll ever forget.

December 11, 2006

Not the End of the World by Kate Atkinson

After I had read just three of her novels, Kate Atkinson was added to my list of favourite writers, and I am currently exploring the rest of her work with glee. Her collection of short stories Not the End of the World(2003) was a brilliant read, fun and a bit mind-bending. My favourite thing about this collection was its collectionness. These stories belong together, linked through different characters’ relationships. A passing reference in one story might become the main character in another, which makes for an engaging reading process (and much rereading to understand the emphasis of what you might have passed over the first time). The stories are also link through a theme of “end of the worldness”, though this is interpreted in such various ways that the collection is entirely diverse and at times surprising. She is remarkably adept at portraying lost and loneliness, and she is so edgy, and yet humour ever-present. Some of the stories straddle a strange place in between magic and realist, but I soon found myself trusting Atkinson and her universe entirely. She is a distinctly literary writer, as evidenced by the numerous classical allusions woven throughout the text, but these stories are also heavy in terms of Buffy-content (the vampire slaying variety). These contrasts underline Kate Atkinson’s fundamental unclassifiability, and so we’ll just have to file her (and this book) under “wonderful”.

December 10, 2006

Heartburn/Not the End of the World

Reading Nora Ephron’s Heartburn was a treat. Like her essays, the novel straddles an “in-between space” that doesn’t quite fit into any genre, but she’s such a funny woman and the story is hilariously absurd. The novel is like candy, but really expensive well-made candy. And it’s one of many novels I’ve read lately that have made me wish I knew more Hebrew. So it goes. Now reading Not the End of the World by the brilliant Kate Atkinson and I expect it will be “bloody marvelous”.

December 7, 2006

The Remains of the Day

I just finished reading The Remains of the Day, which in its subtlety just snuck up on me and stole the ground. I’ve lately been thinking about negative capability, and I think this book answered so many questions. A most powerful whisper, and I’m not quite myself as a result of having overheard it.

December 3, 2006

Remarkable Voices

And so it continues. The papers are slowly getting marked, my essay is slowly getting written, and my creative work too. Everything is on schedule, plus I sent all my Christmas cards yesterday and my shopping is done except for Stuart, which is easy anyway. Today I am taking a lunch break and we’re going out for sushi with two lovely new friends we’re quite excited to see again. History of Love was magnificent, though the ending was not quite what I would have liked but the rest of the book was so amazing, I wasn’t really bothered. Oh, the voices she made. Quite remarkable, I think, and so remark I do. I’m starting The Remains of the Day and I’ve not idea what to expect. I am sorry that all of this is duller than even usual, but this is it at the moment.

November 30, 2006

The Uses of Enchantment

I don’t know what to do with Heidi Julavits’ The Uses of Enchantment. I mean, what a strange book. I’ve not read Julavits’ two previous novels, but the customer reviews I’ve read for them usually mention general weirdness and Julavits biting off more than she can chew. I get the sense that Julavits is chewing better now, but still, it’s quite a mouthful (this metaphor ends here, I say).

So, we’ve got the mysterious disappearence of a teenager, all right. Whose mysterious disappearence is repetitious of another teenager’s disappearence ten years before. Both girls obsessed with a seventeenth century story of a girl abducted by Indians, whose rescuer was subsequently hanged as a witch. And the first girl is apparently descended from a Salem witch. And she returns home fifteen years later after her mother’s funeral, in order to resolve what happened to her. And most of the narrative is played out through the rivalry of two psychotherapists with opposing missions. Incredibly intertextual, though the only text I was familar with was Dora. And that’s about it, I think. All in one book. It really doesn’t make sense until you read it.

And so I’m mystified, but I still enjoyed this book. There is a race to the end, and I think Julavits’ climax is worthy of the suspense she creates, and I found the ending satisfying. The main character (the derivatively disappeared girl, Mary Veal) is impossible to pin down, though this is created more by Julavits narrative than what the characters says or does. In fact, sometimes too much explanation is given and I wished the story had remained a bit more “enchanted”. Which is the problem. Julavits introduces so many fascinating avenues in her story, that of course many remain insufficiently explored. This isn’t completely annoying, because on a whole this book manages to function (I have no idea how though).

My confusion is somewhat akin to enchantment though. Whatever Heidi Julavits did, she did it right. I also like how when you remove the dust jacket of this book, in gold script on the black cover it simply says, “A Novel”. Indeed it is. Sort of.

November 28, 2006

Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures

I’m not sure if it’s common to race to the end of a short story collection, but last night there I was, way up past bedtime reading Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures (winner of this year’s Giller Prize). I wasn’t expecting to find this book enthralling; it had been pitched like an episode of ER. But Lam’s stories work, they really do, and they are connected in a way that provides this collection with a gripping narrative arc.

I’ve mentioned before that I find literature about science interesting, but the science wasn’t what hooked me here. I think more so, I appreciated a glimpse into the consciousness of a scientist, or more-interestingly, the aspiring scientist– the student desperate to get into med school. I knew people like this in university and Lam has provided good insight into their motivations and mindset with Ming’s character in the story “How to Get Into Medical School Part 1”. Her portrayal is so convincing, and at once sympathetic and awful, but this effectiveness is also the product of a well constructed short story. Similarly, in the story “Winston”, a patient’s mental health problems cast a mesmerizing spell and the twist at the end was shocking, particularly in the context of a dry and measured medical account. Purple birds do appear throughout this book in some of the most surprising places. I loved the SARS story “Contact Tracing”, which was full of action, suspense and human emotion. Not one story here could have been considered a dud, though a few did begin to drag a bit before they ended.

I had a problem with the didacticism of the text, however. Suggested by the book’s title and chapter titles beginning with “How to…”, but I didn’t take these clues all that seriously. Here we have a book of stories, I thought. I can read stories, and I did, and though it was about a world somewhat unfamiliar to me, I trusted my intelligence enough to fill in the blanks and get the gists. And then at the end of the book, I was gutted to find a “Glossary of Terms”. Seemed somehow patronizing, and unnecessary. I wasn’t reading this text as a tool, and I don’t think stories require indices usually. The stories should stand well enough on their own (and they do), but the inclusion of a glossary suggests Lam is second-guessing that they do, or he is second-guessing my own ability to read his stories without assistance.

I suspect, however, that the glossary is provided to emphasise this collection’s unique pigeonhole: from the point of view of an emergency room physician. Though it is notable that such an emphasis had previously led me to dismiss this book pre-reading as gimmicky and perhaps dull. And I was wrong. Here is a work of literature; they could be about the lives of doctors or dustbins, but these are stories and they’re good. Perhaps what was most disappointing about the “Glossary of Terms” was that I had figured I had a whole other story still ahead, and then was unhappy to find the book so suddenly done. Which does say something about the collection Lam has managed to create.