September 26, 2022
Return Stroke, by Dora Dueck
In 2019, I founded a pretty sweet boutique bookselling operation called BRINY BOOKS, and Dora Dueck’s most recent novel, ALL THAT BELONGS, was part of our second lineup of titles, a novel I loved, just as I’d loved her previous book, the story collection WHAT YOU GET AT HOME, and I’ve also enjoyed her nonfiction over the years, at her blog and in literary journals, and so I’ve been looking forward to her most recent release, RETURN STROKE: ESSAYS AND MEMOIR, published by Canadian Mennonite University Press, and it’s everything I was hoping it would be. Dueck reflecting back from her 70s on her girlhood growing up in Alberta, her marriage and years of intensive motherhood, which included a stint living in her husband’s native Paraguay, and all the wonder and culture shock that experience entailed, and then her own evolving thinking about feminism, and faith, and her relationship to her church after her daughter comes out as queer, and she writes about getting older, the lightness of aging, and the heaviness too in an essay about the final days before her husband’s death, a gorgeous evocation. This is a book that brought me to tears more than once or twice.
What I love so much about Dueck’s writing and her thinking is that nothing is fixed, and she is eternally curious, taking notes and learning, about the past and the presence, much of her work concerned with memory and history, but in such a vital, living way, not as an affirmation but a process of discovery. The first half of the book is a series of essays, and the second (roughly the same length) is a work of memoir about her time in Paraguay in the early 1980s, and she writes about the revelation, as she returns to the letters and diaries that are her primary sources, “I’d been thirty-two…, which was, I suddenly noted, the current age of our youngest child, and that child seemed—well, young!” An entire page about how relative are the ideas of old and young—which was a mirror image to the revelations of Emma Straub’s protagonist in her latest novel This Time Tomorrow—and then this beautiful paragraph:
“That I was young is the truth, and yet, in the memoir-writing-effort of existing out of time, my youthfulness at thirties-young seemed an invention. And having coaxed this fiction/truth into text, I found myself suddenly standing next to my thirty-something children and in the flashes—swift and jaggedly stunning as lightning strokes—of knowing myself then and my children now, we seemed to meet as age-equals. As if we’d bumped into each other on some magnificent high bridge. The meeting amazed me, made me dizzy too. I was proud of these children, of who they were at the moment, and it pleased me more than I can express that the Me of the Chaco could, in this moment of meeting, be compared to them.”
Though I’m pretty sure the pleasure is entirely mutual, seeing what a privilege and a most illuminating delight it is to bump into Dueck in these pages.
September 13, 2022
The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging, by Debra Thompson
Debra Thompson’s The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging is an excellent and bracing work of memoir and social science, providing a Canadian lens on topics explored in the works of Isabel Wilkerson and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Thompson writes about being a Black Canadian and her relationship to America, the land from which her once enslaved ancestors had escaped for Canada, which makes it a curious kind of homeland. And then about what kind of “escape” Canada offered after all, Canada’s own legacy of enslavement and racism seemingly muted in contrast to its southern neighbours, but that legacy lives. Growing up in Oshawa, ON, during the 1980s, Thompson was so often the only Black person, “[which] didn’t make me feel particularly unique or successful or special. It made me think that there was something inherently wrong with Black people and that I had to fight against it every day to defy what the fates had in store for us.”
After completing her doctorate (with experiences in academia rife with anti-Black racism), Thompson arrives at Harvard on a post-doctoral fellowship in 2010, just as the hopefulness of America’s first Black president was beginning to crest, and the story of her decade to follow traces a powerful trajectory in American history and politics, particularly in regards to race. She writes of her own ambivalence towards notions of American democracy, an ideal that has forever failed to live up to its potential and was imagined for the white men who have long been its beneficiaries, a process in which “African Americans are perpetual losers.” Her connection to American is further complicated as she moves on to teach in a town in rural Ohio, then in Chicago, and finally Oregon, as American moves from Obama to the election of Donald Trump, and then the “reckoning” of Black Lives Matter throughout the entire decade and public demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. (She wonders if racial justice, for many white liberals, wasn’t just another Covid hobby to cut through the boredom, up there with Tiger King and sourdough.)
n 2020, Thompson moves—with her American partner and their children—back to Canada, to Montreal, which offers a whole additional layer of complexity to her lens, as she takes on notions of Blackness in the very specific context of Quebec. And throughout all of this she’s mindful of her place on Indigenous lands, with teachings by Indigenous scholars such as Eve Tuck and Leanne Betasamoske Simpson underlining her approaches to political science and being a human in the world.
The Long Road Home is a sparkling and engaging work, and also a demanding one, for white readers. Not that it’s difficult to read (see previous sentence on “sparkling and engaging”; I read it in two days) but that it’s literally demanding something of us, white readers—our discomfort, our willingness to see the white supremacy inherent in our systems, to wake up to the realities of racial injustice and begin to imagine a better, fairer world.
September 9, 2022
Blue Portugal, by Theresa Kishkan
To those of us who’ve been following Theresa Kishkan on her blog for many years, the preoccupations of her latest book, the collection Blue Portugal & Other Essays, will be familiar, the quilts, the homesteads, the memories, the blue. But it’s the stunning craftsmanship of the book, the fascinating threads that weave the pieces together and also recur throughout the text, that make this book such a pleasure to discover. How quilting squares are analogous to the rectangles from which, one by one, Kishkan and her husband literally constructed their home on BC’s Sechelt Peninsula, and the blueprints, and the blues of dye, and of veins, and of rivers, and of how one thing turns into another—how? How does a body get old? How do children grow? How does a family tree sprout so many new branches? And from where did it all begin, Kishkan going back to seek her parents’ nebulous roots in the Czech Republic and Ukraine, in a 1917 map of lots in Drumheller, AB, in everything that was lost in the Spanish Flu, and how we’re connected to everything our ancestors lived through.
Kishkan, as she tells us in her preface, came to writing via poetry, which she put aside when her children arrived, and when she picked up her pen again, she wasn’t a poet any longer: “I had the impulse to write, I had ideas to explore, material accumulating in my mind as my quilting basket accumulated scraps of cotton, but I didn’t have a shape for my thinking any longer. The lines I wrote continued past the point where a poet would consider the stanza, the lyric, complete. At first I tried to wrangle them, contain them, but one day I just let those lines continue, as prose maintaining a certain rhythm but given the freedom of the wide space on a page, One line led to another, then another. Their purpose was not to create fiction but instead to make a map of my own reflections, main roads and secondary roads, river systems, mountains, an beautiful circled stars for settlements. One line led to another, a threads leading me into the heart of meaning I hoped would be there, a little knot at the centre.”
And the meaning is there, but the poetry is too, still, (but not still!), this book a heartful, artful offering.
September 2, 2022
All of This, by Rebecca Woolf
Rebecca Woolf (formerly of Girls Gone Child) is the only blogger on the planet whose sponsored posts I could actually stomach.
She once wrote a post sponsored by an almond company, and I still remember it.
So it’s not exactly shocking that her beautiful, gutting, raw, and awesome memoir, All of This, has proved to be unputdownable, a brave and visceral story of marriage, death, and widowhood from someone who has made a career out of making the unvarnished truth shine.
As a long-time reader of Woolf’s blog and instagram, I was wholly invested in her family life, in her marriage, and the story of her husband’s painful death from pancreatic cancer. And because part of that investment involved my admiration of her ability to hold two truths at once—that, say, her own decision to proceed with an accidental pregnancy at age 23, and her staunchly pro-abortion feminist politics are not incongruous—that the story of her family life, marriage and Hal’s death turned out to be far more complicated and tumultuous than it appeared from the outside only seems to be only adding texture to the story we’d been reading all along.
I remember the rats in the walls. I remember her commitment to telling the story until it came true. I know how hard she tried.
And I’m awed by her capacity for truth telling, and growth, and learning in public.
What does it mean when your husband dies and you feel relief? To be a widow who wants to fuck? To be a mother of four children who’ve just lost their father, and also a mother to one’s own self, one’s own soul? Beginnings and ends all at once. Everything is a circle.
Extraordinary writing, candour, courage and generosity is on display in this beautiful memoir, and also so much raw and bloody love.
August 30, 2022
More Vacation Reads
For the second summer in a row, we’ve gotten away for two one-week-holidays at a cottage, and I feel so lucky that this is possible for us and will go out of my way (if necessary) to continue to make it so because it’s just the very best thing, so relaxing and restorative, which has been the theme of my summer in general, and what a gift. And not just because I got nine whole books read!
The first was The Smart One, by Jennifer Close, which I stole from the resort library of the cottage we stayed at in July (though I left two books in its place, so that’s okay, right?). Since reading Marrying the Ketchups in July, I’ve been wanting to launch a Jennifer Close kick, because I enjoyed it so much. The Smart One, her second novel, is similarly a book about adult children coming home again after failures to launch, and it started out fine enough, very typical commercial fiction fare, I thought, but then I started to notice the thread of thoughtfulness that wound the different parts of this story together, and the questions the book asked about what it means to be “the smart one” or “the pretty one,” and the impossibility of any woman making the right choices. Surprise pregnancies, Catholic guilt, people called Cla(i)re and the ties that bind were introduced in this novel, themes that would appear in subsequent books I read.
In Watermelon, by Marian Keyes, the pregnancy is not, in fact, a surprise, but what is a surprise is that Clare’s husband announces he’s leaving her right after their child is born. (He didn’t want to mention it before, because it might have been a risk to her health then.) And so Clare decides to pack up her London life and head home to Dublin, to the house that she grew up in with her legion of sisters, and there she proceeds to drink away her pain and then plot her way toward a better life, so that when her husband finally appears to win her back he’s not really sure what’s happened. I will confess that this is not the best Marian Keyes book I’ve ever read—and I found it in a Little Free Library anyway, so no matter. It was entertaining enough but also utterly implausible—Clare’s newborn baby seems remarkably independent and leaves her mother with plenty of time and space to explore her own needs, which was certainly not my postpartum experience. I also found it very amusing when everyone in this book from 1996 worries that their bum looks big from the vantage point of the 2020s when big bums are all the rage and unflattering jeans are where it’s at. This book was something of a relic but also a perfect diversion for a summer’s day.
Next I read Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura, which was the odd man out of these books in many ways (such as, I didn’t find in a Little Free Library), but had more in common with Marian Keyes’ Watermelon than you might imagine (and intersected with Aminatta Forna’s Happiness in interesting ways). It’s true that this is not a novel about ties that bind, instead it’s about being free of those ties, which doesn’t always feel like freedom. Intimacies is a novel about exile, about belonging nowhere, and features a protagonist who’s dating a man whose wife has left their family, inviting some of the parallels to the Keyes. It’s a curious and alienating novel, one just a little too cold and precise for my liking, but that’s not a criticism, just taste.
After that I read Siracusa, by Delia Ephron, who I’ve never read before, and I think I found this book as a secondhand bookshop. It’s a novel, like Intimacies, with an atmosphere that feels oppressive, but far more revealing, and actually intimate. Could be described as a taut thriller, but it’s weirder than that, about two couples who travel to Italy together and whose lives seemingly unravel on the journey with players being played and too many secrets threatening to be revealed. Quick and eerie, I really liked it.
And remained by the Ionian Sea for my next book (or at least it’s beginning), Julia Glass’s Three Junes, which I knew nothing about, except that it won the National Book Award in 2002, and my friend Marissa recommended it to me (and she never steers me wrong). I loved this book, which comprises three distinct sections—the first of Scottish widower Paul on a Greek holiday months after the death of his wife; the second from the perspective of Paul’s son Fenno, a NYC bookseller coming home to Scotland after the death of his father five years later; and the third set five years after that when a character we glimpse in the first section meets Fenno on Long Island where she is accidentally pregnant (and there’s a pro-life activist; curiously, there is not an abortion in any of the books I read in this bunch, truly a holiday indeed) and waiting for her boyfriend to return home from Greece so she can tell him about the baby. This novel is a bit strange, and its connections aren’t always clear, but I found it utterly absorbing.
And then I read Frankie and Stankie, by Barbara Trapido, which blew my mind. I read Trapido’s reissued debut, Brother of the More Famous Jack, when we were in the UK in April, and while I enjoyed it, it was so unlike anything else I’ve read before that I had trouble placing it in my mind. This novel, written more than thirty years later, is helping me do so, however, because it’s brilliant. Ostensibly a coming of age novel set in South Africa during the 1950s and 1960s, it manages to be a fascinating (and hilarious) character study, story of a family, but also the most interesting history of South Africa I’ve ever read at once. (In her notes at the end of the book, Trapido explains that the forty years that she’s spent in the company of her husband, Stanley Trapido, a professor of South African history at Oxford, certainly informed her point of view.) I learned so much from this book, but it was also delightful, and now I am officially Barbara Trapido-obsessed.
All the while we were listening to Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express in the car on audiobook—it was so good!! We all kept coming up with reasons to go somewhere just so we could get in the car again and hear what happened next. Truly a delight for the whole family, even Stuart, who had watched the movie recently so had a good idea of what was coming.
And then I read Happiness, by Aminatta Forna, which I purchased at the Toni Morrison event I attended at Luminato in June, and like everything associated with that event, it was just so fantastic. As unfathomable as it seems, a novel about urban foxes in London, coyotes in the northeastern United States, and PTSD from war in Sierra Leone, amongst many other things, the novel becomes a study of wildness, of humanity, of love and goodness. Part of it also spoke directly about my own anxiety, my fear of hardship and suffering, a fear of trauma which is seemingly a condition of white, middle class, privileged people in the West, which might cause us to turn our backs on those for whom trauma is lived experience. And trauma also doesn’t have to be destiny—it changes one, but it doesn’t necessarily leave one damaged, as psychiatrist Attila explains. There’s so much to unpack here, but I’m looking forward to reading it again and getting to work.
And finally, Maine, by J. Courtney Sullivan, which I’d saved for the end, something light and easy, another seaside book with Catholics, accidental pregnancy and someone called Clare, though it was probably the most forgettable of the bunch, so I’ll leave it at that.
Hooray, hooray for holiday reading.
July 29, 2022
Summer Reading
I would say that time’s gotten away with me since my week in Muskoka earlier this month, but that’s not strictly true. In fact, time has very much been on my side these last two weeks, which means that I’ve not been very busy, had enough time to do the things I need to do, and haven’t pushed myself to accomplish very much extra, such as recapping my holiday reads. But I’m finally going to get it done right now, because the reading was just so excellent.
I started with a reread of Judy Blume’s Summer Sisters, which was published in 1998, and I don’t recall the circumstances under which I read it the first time, except that I think it was a book I enjoyed along with my mom and sister. And when I read it again, I was surprised to find out how much of it was still so familiar to me, even though I probably haven’t read it or even thought about it much in the last twenty years. Such a great summer book, rich and sweeping and just a little bit trashy. Holds up entirely, except for Vix’s reference to that Cherokee ancestor who’d gifted her those cheekbones, because we just don’t do that anymore. Lots of swimming in the pond on Martha’s Vineyard.
And next was Black Cake, by Charmaine Wilkerson, which I found absorbing, even if the storytelling style didn’t really work for me, skimming a (too) broad surface instead of plumbing depths. But it was still really fascinating, first with lots of ideas about food and colonialism and culinary history, and one of the characters is even an ocean scientist—there’s a whole lot going on. My favourite part, though, was the swimming, which I wasn’t expecting, because most Black characters in Caribbean-set books don’t get to swim so much, but swimming is a big part of the storyline here, as well as surfing, and I loved that.
And then I read Ghosted, by Jenn Ashworth, which I bought when we were in the UK because it was shortlisted for the Portico Prize for Northern English writing. I also bought her novel The Friday Gospels, and loved it, so expectations were high—and oh, she delivered. Ghosted is about a woman whose husband disappears, and she doesn’t tell anyone, which is kind of suspicious, plus she leads a pretty isolated life anyway and has a complicated relationship with her ailing father. There are secrets, but just like in Gospels, they’re not what you think they are, and Ashworth has such a gift for crafting suspense and writing sympathetic characters who are heartbreakingly human. No swimming, but scenes set in Morcambe and Brighton mean beaches definitely factor.
Following that, I read Tara Road, by Maeve Binchy, whose books I always dismissed with literary snobbishness, but I’ve come round, though hers is a curious kind of storytelling, very much telling. But what a wondrous tapestry of family and community Binchy weaves here, and I was utterly absorbed in this story which sweeps decades and continents, with women at the centre. Wasn’t expecting much swimming in this one, but there is a scene at the beach which inspired the opening scenes of James Joyce’s Ulysses!
Another Irish novel up next, Love and Summer, by William Trevor, the third novel I’ve read by him, and the least subversive, though it was in its own way, just more subtly so than the others (Miss Gomez and the Brethren and Death in Summer, both of which had evil lurking on its fringes and such wonderful dark humour). I think I love the works of William Trevor, and want to read them all. No swimming here, but there is a lake where Florian Kilderry walks his dog, and this is very much a novel about the pains of restraint and so nobody dives in.
I’ve already written about What Storm, What Thunder, by Myriam J.A. Chancy (SO GOOD!), which is definitely not a swimming novel. The one character who ventures into the sea ends up in a tsunami, so consider that a warning, but oh, what a book.
And finally, Every Summer After, by Carley Fortune, which is a much hyped book of the summer, perhaps too hyped for my liking, but I enjoyed it well enough, and its main character swims across the lake every summer, which is the kind of project I can get behind.
July 20, 2022
What Storm, What Thunder, by Myriam J.A. Chancy
In June, I attended the second of a two-night spectacular in downtown Toronto celebrating the works of Toni Morrison and Black women writers (and had even contributed a short written piece about Morrison in anticipation of the event!) produced by Donna Bailey Nurse who, that night, was interviewing Myriam J.A. Chancy, Aminatta Forna, and Dawnie Walton, and I purchased Chancy’s latest novel, What Storm, What Thunder, which I read it on holiday last week, and it really is the very best book I’ve read in ages.
To read this novel, set in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti that killed 350,000 people, is to feel humbled. By the power of Chancy’s prose, first of all (I couldn’t help but read aloud an entire passage about leatherback turtles hatching on the beach: “They’d survived the Ice Age, continental drift, volcanoes erupting below and above ground, asteroids. They were the first superheroes. All that, and still, like most things, they began puny and fragile, scared and scrambling.” SO GOOD.) Humbled also by how puny and fragile are the lives we build in contrast to the destruction the earth might yield, as it did on January 12 2010, buildings collapsing, thousands of people trapped beneath the rubble. And finally humbled by how little I’ve thought about the Haitian earthquake in the years since it happened—how easy it has been to have the stories of lives lost fly beneath my radar.
Chancy, who is Haitian-Canadian, was not in Haiti when the earthquake struck, but in the months and years that followed, as she travelled and campaigned for organizations supporting Haiti and its recovery, she heard so many stories of people who had been. “Listening for years, I realized later,” she writes, “was a big part of the process of writing this novel.”
And so, fittingly, this is a novel constructed of a variety of voices—Ma Lou, the old woman who sells fruit at the market; a young boy makes money delivering her produce to the fancy hotel where Sonia, who works as an escort, runs into Leopold, a drug dealer, just moments before the hotel collapses. The boy’s mother is Sara, left traumatized by the loss of her three children, and her desperate existence in a camp after her home is destroyed. Ma Lou’s estranged son, Richard, a wealthy executive of a bottled water company, has returned to his home country from Paris in hopes of outrunning his own demons. Sonia’s younger sister Taffia tells her story of life in the camps, where rape is a common occurrence and resources are scarce, donations from other countries inappropriate and useless. Taffia’s older brother Didier is living in Boston, driving a taxi without a license, and he experiences his country’s tragedy from afar. Sara’s husband Olivier has left Port au Prince to follow rumours of factory work in other parts of the country. And Richard’s daughter, Anne, an architect who works with NGOs, leaves her placement in Rwanda to come home and volunteer in the camps.
Chancy writes in her acknowledgements, “In the end, what I wanted to capture was the way in which lives were disrupted, what those lives may have been life, before, what might have remained after.”
What Storm, What Thunder is vivid, brutal, gorgeous, devastating, its pieces so artfully woven, its storytelling invested with immense beauty and power. Haunting and mesmerizing, it’s the novel I’ve been trying to urge everybody to pick up since I read it, an extraordinary testament to what fiction can be and do.
July 5, 2022
Summer Read Supreme
I’m happy to kick off my summer reading this weekend with Jennifer Close’s Marrying the Ketchups, which my friend Marissa recommended and which I loved so fully completely and devoured in a day. (Being able to read a novel in a day is my definition of a proper holiday, in addition to buttertarts.) I loved it so much, and it is the kind of book that, if a man had written, people would be heralding its emotional acuity and literary genius. Plus it was blurbed by Katherine Heiny and she was thanked in the acknowledgements, which is pretty much my literary catnip.
July 4, 2022
A Convergence of Solitudes, by Anita Anand
When I was on the radio last week talking about great books for REreading Canada, Anita Anand’s A Convergence of Solitudes was the one title I hadn’t yet finished reading, so I’m happy to report that I finished it this weekend and it lived up to my expectations and then some.
How do you tell a story that connections Quebec nationalism in the 1970s to the Partition of India in the 1940s, weaving in threads about Operation Babylift during the Vietnam War, colonialism in Ireland, and the experience of growing up as a person of colour in Montreal, creating a novel that’s not hitting its readers over the head with symbolism and parallels, but creating an organic and realized narrative that also remembers to run on its own steam?
Why, by structuring the novel as a double album, of course, this structure an homage to one of the story’s main characters, Serge Giglio, who headed a Quebec nationalism progressive rock band in the 1970s that never exploded like it might have because he refused to compromise and sing in English. So that the book becomes a sort of novel in pieces, but the pieces are drawn together compellingly and satisfyingly, moving between decades and characters and continents to culminate in what feels like an epic.
Rani grows up in 1970s’ Montreal, the daughter of immigrants, and finds herself drawn to Sensibilité, Serge Giglio’s band, to the point of obsession, though her relationship to its lyrics are complicated as a brown woman in Quebec who was barred from French schooling because she wasn’t baptized. When she meets Serge’s young daughter Mélanie, adopted from Vietnam, she’s drawn to the child because of her affinity for her father’s music, but perhaps it’s more than that. And when she connects with Mélanie again almost two decades later, this is affirmed for her, and she begins to wonder for the first time about her own parents’ experiences in Partition-era India and if she might be any more connected with these stories than she is the ideas Serge sings about in his songs.
While Rani serves as the main point of convergence between the various solitudes explored by Anand in her novel, the other characters—Sunil and Hima, her parents; Serge; his English wife Jane; Mélanie herself—are just as central to the text, the narrative portraying their various points of view and how these unfold over decades and between nations and continents, the connections between them (and also disruptions) serving to complicate notions of solidarity and independence and colonialism in a way that’s illuminating and fascinating, enlivening and unravelling ideas that might sound neat and tidy as political slogans but are more difficult to contend with in actual fact.
June 20, 2022
Susanna Hall: Her Book, by Jennifer Falkner
“July 11th, 1643: It is the summer of her 61st year. A year of turmoil up and down the country. The King has abandoned his seat in London and his army charges about fighting his own people. A year of exorbitant taxes. Poor harvests. Neighbours turning against each other. A year in which Susanna wonders how many years are left to her.”
For fans of Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell, I recommend Jennifer Falkner’s Susanna Hall: Her Book, a gorgeous and haunting novella inspired by another Shakespeare woman, this time the poet’s eldest daughter, Susanna. Physician’s widow and respected healer, the tensions of England’s civil war have arrived to roost within her home.
With historical fiction that reads as timeless and achingly relevant, Falkner manages to have 150 pages contain the broadest emotional spectrum, and lets just three days tell the story of one woman’s remarkable lifetime.
I loved this book, out now from Theresa Kishkan and Anik See’s Fish Gotta Swim Editions, indeed a pleasure to read and to hold. If you’re intrigued, check out the posts on Falkner’s Pinterest page!
