February 5, 2024

As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow, by Zoulfa Katouh

It is impossible to read As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow—the debut by YA author Zoulfa Katouh, a 2023 CCBC book award-winner, an OLA White Pine nominee, and a finalist for the 2023 Governor’s General Awards—and not think about what’s happening right now in Gaza. Set over a decade ago in the city of Homs, during Syrian Civil War, the novel is about Salama, who—by virtue of having completed a year of pharmacy school—has stepped up to volunteer at a local hospital, removing shrapnel from people’s bodies, performing amputations without anaesthetic, saving whatever lives she can manage to save, which will never be enough, because she can’t save all of them.

Salama welcomes the distraction of her work at the hospital, which at least feels useful, and takes her mind away from not only the existential threat of death by bombs or snipers at any time, but also the figure of Khawf, an embodiment of her PTSD since the death of her mother and her father and brother’s capture by government forces. But she also feels responsible for her pregnant sister-in-law, who is also her oldest friend, and has not forgotten the promise she’d made to her brother to keep Layla safe, and she is trying to secure passage for her and Layla to make the journey across the Mediterranean Sea for asylum in Europe, though the journey is fraught with risk and Salama is ambivalent about leaving Syria behind, and abandoning the revolutionary cause that had inspired uprisings throughout her homeland.

Woven into this story—almost impossibly, and so gorgeously—is a beautiful love story, as well as a brilliant ode to the transportive powers of imagination in general and the works of Hayao Miyazaki specifically, works that have shown how love and magic are possible in the most unlikely places.

And I do not want to gloss over the book’s specificity, in terms of place and story—this novel is a powerful ode to Syrian culture, a love letter to the place itself, and to the possibility of Syrian emigrants one day returning to the freedom that so many have rallied, fought, and died for.

But it is also such an urgent call for the necessity of a ceasefire in Gaza right now, a testament to the suffering through which so many people are living…and dying. A few weeks ago, I read the words of a doctor in Gaza who’d amputated his own child’s leg on his kitchen table, and I just fell to pieces imagining being in such a situation myself: my child, my table. What’s the difference between him and me? What’s the difference between *this*—caring for children who are victims of chemical attacks, patients whose homes have been reduced to rubble, with babies left to die in their incubators because there are not arms enough to carry them all when the hospital has moments to evacuate before the building is bombed—and that one? This novel is a testament to the absurdity of there being any excuse for human beings to have to live this way, for any person to be so dehumanized that such depravity and barbarism is somehow justified. (Our current moment in which migrants are being vilified at border crossings around the world makes Salama’s story doubly, and even more tragically resonant.)

“If we weren’t in such a dire situation, this place would be beautiful. The blackness stretches out in front of us, with the moon casting his silvery glimmer, dimming the light of the stars nearby. It’s the same sky other people see in their countries. But while we watch it here, hiding, not knowing if our next breath is our last, others sleep safely in their beds, bidding the moon a peaceful good night.”

January 29, 2024

Interesting Facts About Space, by Emily Austin

I adored Emily Austin’s debut Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, which I recall reading during the sad pandemic summer of 2021 and being surprised by its capacity to delight me when not much else was doing the trick, and perhaps it was the mordant dread of its depressive protagonist that did it, her willingness to stare the absurdity of life’s darkness in the face—and be funny and achingly human all the while.

Austin’s sophomore novel, Interesting Facts About Space, is even better, the story of Enid, an information architect who works for the National Space Agency who texts her mother interesting facts about space whenever she worries about her, which is always. Because Enid’s mother has long struggled with her mental health, since Enid’s father left them when she was just a child, and Enid has made herself responsible for her mother’s well-being ever since, a Sisyphean task. Just one of many such tasks in Enid’s life, including finding connection on dating apps, overcoming her inexplicable phobia of bald men, resolving her fears that somebody is watching her and moving things around in her apartment when she’s not there, as well as establishing a relationship with her half-sisters, who she’s only just met since her estranged father’s recent death and who have no idea that she’s a lesbian and might react badly if they did. (She also recorded her entire adolescence on Youtube and lost the password so she can’t take the channel down, or resist watching her younger, naive self over and over again.)

Enid is not well, the impacts of trauma in her past finally catching up with her after years of avoidance, and following her along on this journey (while the narrative voice remains breezy and bright) verges toward agonizing. Except that it never gets there, because of how carefully Austin holds her reader’s heart, all the while it’s threatening to break into pieces. This novel is an emotional roller-coaster, about mothers and daughters, sisters, and lovers, and friendship, and what it means to show up for each other, and also to show up for one’s self.

January 22, 2024

A History of Burning, by Janika Oza

While A History of Burning arrived in my mailbox months ago, it’s taken me some time to finally get to it, because it’s a big book, in terms of scope and word count, and the literary autumn is always overwhelming, and so I’ve been glad for the slowing-down-ness of January and the chance to finally get to dig in to this book that’s garnered so many accolades from writers I admire, plus an honoured spot among finalists for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction.

Spanning almost 100 years, the novel begins with Pirbhai, aged 13 in 1898, tricked into leaving his mother and sisters and boarding a boat for Kenya where he spends the next few years as an indentured worker building a railway for the British. Eventually he marries Sonal, another Indian in Kenya, and together they set off for Uganda in pursuit of a better life, which they achieve, and their son, Vinod, grows up happy and hale. He has dreams of pursuing a university education, but his parents don’t have the means for that, and so he does the best he can with his marriage to Rajni, who doesn’t want to marry a stranger, but Karachi in 1947 is dangerous, and Rajni’s parents feel she’ll be safer in Uganda, so she goes, and the two build a life upon the foundation of Pirbhai and Sonal’s big dreams for life and prosperity, though it’s not long before their world is disrupted by Uganda’s independence, a movement embraced by the Vinod and Rajni’s spirited eldest daughter, Latika. And in 1972, as Asians are expelled from Uganda under the brutal tyranny of Idi Amin, the family loses everything, forced to begin all over again in a new life in Toronto.

The narrative moves between these family members, as well as others, to paint an ambitiously broad picture of this family’s story, the exiles they’re forced into together and apart. And while there were moments I wished the story had drilled down deeper into specific characters’ experiences, the story’s broadness and grand sweep were necessary to show the ways in which the same patterns of loss, heartache and exile recur so many times over a century, the unrelenting violence of colonialism and its echoes. The many ways too in which human beings are able to other their neighbours, regard them as inferior, fall under the spell of autocracy. Such gorgeous writing: “They held their voices low, because they knew: how a dictator’s word becomes the world, how he bends reality before him, how it was not the facts that would determine their lives, but the whispers, the rumours spilling between.”

January 19, 2024

Who’s That Girl?, by Mhairi McFarlane

“The Midlands were in-between, just like she was, and the landscape, flat and unassuming, suited her needs. Low and soft, just like a heath, an ideal place for her to land.” —Asking for a Friend

I didn’t know how much it would mean to me to open the pages Mhairi McFarlane’s Who’s That Girl? and be transported back to the city of Nottingham. I haven’t been this excited to be back since I first read Saturday Night, and Sunday Morning, except back then it had only been a handful years since I’d lived there, and now it’s been more than 20. More than 20 years since the last time I walked down Mansfield Road, and then up Sherwood Rise on my way to my little house in Basford. More than 20 years since I’ve been to a Goose Fair, visited the Old Trip to Jerusalem Pub, or contemplated the spiritual distance between West Bridgford and The Meadows. 20 years ago, there wasn’t a burger joint in The Lace Market, but I was so excited when McFarlane’s protagonist, Edie, goes to The Broadway. Her best friend gets divorced and moves into a depressing bachelor pad in Sneinton. She hangs out at the Arboretum. A picnic at Wollaton Hall! I was only disappointed that she doesn’t actually realize her dream of finding ducks to feed on her birthday, because I was very into ducks when I lived in Nottingham, and she wouldn’t have had to search so far to find some.

That, for very personal reasons, I was captivated by this novel about a young woman who slinks into Nottinghamshire with her whole life in shambles (Edie has just attended her work colleagues’ wedding in Harrogate [it becomes Harrogate-gate] and been caught snogging the groom, even though the groom was snogging her, but no matter, she’s on the verge of losing her job as well as her social standing, and her only chance at redemption is coming back to her hometown and ghostwriting the autobiography of a pampered movie star, who is also a Nottingham native) doesn’t mean that this isn’t a story that anyone might enjoy. This is the third novel I’ve read by McFarlane, and I think I love her. She writes romance in which the romance itself takes a backseat to complicated and difficult stories of living through and overcoming trauma, complete with vivid characterization and sparkling humour.

PS A McFarlane has just announced that a sequel to Who’s That Girl? is coming out this year!

January 17, 2024

Off the Record, edited by John Metcalf

I’ve written before about my aversion to self-mythologizing male writers, how much space such hot air takes up in so many rooms, a logical counter, of course, being more women encouraged to see themselves as subjects of grand narratives, to tell their own stories in their own voices, and so enter Off the Record, an anthology of essay-interviews with six writers who’ve worked with editor John Metcalf over the years. Metcalf continuing the editor’s work of self-effacement in this volume, his questions removed from the interviews so just the writers’ voices remain, each interview telling the story of one writer’s becoming, followed by a short story by the writer in question, the fiction as a kind of arrival.

Keep your pencil handy, for this is an underlining, notes (and hearts) in the margins kind of book, with highlights like this from Kristyn Dunnion: “Good writing often embodies a numinous quality, sifting through echoes of other lives lived, connecting clues in an attempt to find meaning: ghost hunting.” Dunnion, along with Elise Levine, two of the writers included here whose work I’m not familiar with, but I appreciated their pieces just as much as those by Caroline Adderson, Cynthia Flood, Shaena Lambert, and Kathy Page, all of whom have written books I’ve loved. The ways in which each of their journeys have been different, but the commonalities too (quite a few backgrounds in activism informing the imagining of fictional worlds). Complicated relationships with parents, publishing journeys that affirm something my friend Marissa Stapley shared not long ago, about a writing career as a marathon, not a sprint, rife with as many downs as ups. The publishing business has always been fraught, and a book deal has never been the end of the story, but maybe we’d be sorry if it was.

From Shena Lambert: “Showing makes our worlds more believable. But this is a secular way of understanding what is actually more like a magical question. In fiction, anytime you press into the five senses, you will write something specific, something, precisely because of its singularity, which will begin the strange work of making meaning. Things of the earth want to be doors into something greater.”

THINGS OF THE EARTH WANT TO BE DOORS INTO SOMETHING GREATER. I don’t know a better explanation of fiction-making, which is to say meaning making, than that.

January 11, 2024

Penelope Mortimer: About Time (Too)

“Of all the Penelopes, Mortimer is my favourite,” I wrote in 2018, though I don’t think I’ve read her since then, and need to refresh my memory, especially now that I’ve just read her two memoirs, ABOUT TIME and ABOUT TIME, TOO. Penelope Mortimer is a standout in my library for being the only author whose books I own in editions from Virago Modern Classics, Persephone AND NYRB (plus two regular old orange-spined Penguins, even though THE HANDYMAN has fallen to pieces). I first learned about her from Carol Shields’ and Blanche Howard’s collected letters, in which they raved about THE HOME, which I loved so much. I actually have no recollection of reading DADDY’S GONE A_HUNTING, a 1958 novel about a mother procuring an abortion for her daughter. I took THE PUMPKIN-EATER, perhaps her best-known book, on a beach side holiday about ten years ago and found it wholly unsatisfying for the occasion, but I think I will appreciate it better now having read its author’s memoirs, for this novel—like all of her novels—was borne of her experience, and that context might just be essential.

In ABOUT TIME, TOO, she writes about looking back on her childhood as a kind of Eden, though it doesn’t read like that me in her first memoir, instead a middle-class English experience of sexual abuse and emotional deprivation, but she recounts it all so jollily that one might just be convinced. The second paragraph of ABOUT TIME begins, “Fortunately I know nothing about my ancestors, and see no particular reason to find out,” and I actually LOVE that, but it’s also emblematic of Mortimer’s refusal to engage with the heart of things, even if such refusal is why the memoir is a pleasure to encounter. The pain in ABOUT TIME, TOO is much more visceral, immediate (a lot of the book is taken from Mortimer’s journals), mostly surrounding the breakdown of her marriage to playwright John Mortimer, her second husband. In between the two husbands, she had two children with two more different fathers, having six children in total, and between the lines one might read some regret about how her children might have suffered by their parents’ unconventional choices, but not too much, and I admire the way Mortimer never apologizes for her sexual appetites, or for her creative impulses, her need to be writing and creating. “The only way to love it all is to cling to it too fiercely. I don’t want to let anything else, anyone else, in. My comfort is the idea of writing this novel. My aim is to keep alive.”

January 4, 2024

Apples on the Windowsill, by Shawna Lemay

If you’ve been following, you’ll know that I’ve been rethinking a lot of my social media habits with the advent of the new year, habits that I think were defined by the pandemic when Instagram was of one of the few means of connection in a time of stark isolation, and also gave me a real sense of what everyone was going through (which is to say, a lot). And one of the great joys of my online life in more recent years has been the vicarious excitement of seeing people returning to the world, doing those things that they were baking bread instead of doing in 2020, all of the adventures and connections the loss of which they’d been profoundly grieving. I knew what it meant when Shawna Lemay finally returned to Rome, is what I’m trying to tell you—I’d become that invested in the story she was telling. And now I’m thinking of all of our pandemic Instagrams as still lifes, these windows into each other’s worlds which seemed especially essentially when the life had gone completely still.

Shawna Lemay’s new essay collection is the first book I’ve read in 2024, and while it’s called Apples on the Windowsill, it’s as much about lemons, not only about how the light falls on their unwinding rinds, but also what we do when life gives them to us. Which is to say, put them in a bowl and take their picture, and notice them, how they absorb the light, and how they change, the same way that Lemay documented a series of still life images throughout 2020-22, images that included such various items as pop tarts, Kraft dinner, a crystal bowl filled with strawberries, and various arrangements of grocery store flowers that Lemay’s husband, a painter, would use in his own work. As will come to no surprise to anyone who has been following Lemay’s blog for the past few years, Bruce Springsteen is referenced again and again throughout this collection, and this quotation from an interview comes close to summing up Lemay’s focus in her book: “What do you do when your dreams come true? What do you do if they don’t?”

Apples on a Windowsill is a meditation on being human, and on staying human (soft and porous) in a world that makes this difficult. These are essays about marriage, and being an artist, and being the wife of an artist, working at a library, and about finding inspiration in the ordinary. As I begin a new year, I also find these essays are a helpful guide for how to be, and how to see, and I underlined all kinds of passages: “The magic trick of art, and perhaps particularly still life, is to remind us above all that there is beauty at the same time as evil. Evil is a given, but beauty persists. The magic trick of still life is that it reminds us that we’re not alone. The magic trick of still life is that it’s really not a trick at all.”

December 31, 2023

204!

For a long time, or at least as long as I’ve been keeping track of books I’ve read, I’ve had a vague desire to reach the milestone of 200 books read in a single year, a milestone that proved elusive again and again as I clocked in around 175 books year after year, more or less. But 2023 began, in these terms, most promisingly, as I managed to read more than 20 titles in the month of January (thanks to a week of holidays after New Year’s, and a few short titles [Annie Erneaux, hello!]). And I’ve been able to build on that momentum ever since, my goal looking more possible than ever by mid-December, and so I decided to buckle down and get ‘er done while partaking in my absolutely favourite holiday reading ritual, which is finally getting around to all the random titles on my shelf I’ve been acquiring from secondhand bookshops and little free libraries and other serendipitous places over the past few months. My other reading goal, in addition to achieving that 200 books milestone, is curating a book stack that’s weird and surprising and looks like nobody else’s. And I did it! In fact, I did both its, and take a look at this book stack that has filled my days over the past two weeks as I’ve done almost nothing else but read, aside from some delightful holiday fun with my family. (Signs I’ve perhaps stayed too close to home include a journey up to Dupont Street yesterday, for which I decided it was necessary to take a train.)

I love this book stack, the last books I’ll have read in the year 2023, such a rando stack of titles:

• White Noise, bought secondhand after an essay in the New York Times about its relevance to our current moment, which was absolutely true, but also I didn’t love it so much, and also it’s one of so many books that I read in my 20s and didn’t understand was mostly supposed to be funny.
• Jewels, because what is a rando book stack without actual Danielle Steel. January 2024 will herald the launch of my substack, which will replace my newsletter, but be much of the same, except for a featured essay every month for paid subscribers, and the first one will be about Jewels—and you’ll be able to read it whether you’re paid or not because I’ve decided to make the first three essays free.
• Small Things Like These, because novellas are necessary when you’re scrambling to finally reach your goal of reading 200 books in a year for the first time ever, plus it was for sale by a new bookseller at one of my favourite cafes, and a Christmas book to boot. I loved it.
• Business as Usual, an epistolary novel about a young woman making a career in a London department store during the 1930s, a gift from my friend Nathalie, and I found it ridiculously delightful. (Epistolary novels are also good when you’re trying to rack up an impressive number of reads.)
• Our Town, which I’d never read or seen performed (I think you have to be American for that…) but was interested in after reading Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake, as Patchett herself intended with her novel. Also a play, very short, you know where I’m going with this.
• The Colour of Water, which I found for $2 after reading MacBride’s latest, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. This 1996 memoir is so remarkable, and connects interestingly to the novel.
• Agua Viva, by Clarice Lispector, whose strange books I can appreciate because they’re short, and I actually liked this one a lot, though it’s not completely my cup of tea.
• Treasure Island!!!, which I’d been wanting to read for years. I think this one used to be Nathalie’s too, and I stole it when sorting books donated for our school book sale. It was totally bonkers and nutty and I will probably never think about it again, but it was fun and horrifying, which is an unusual combination.
• Time Will Darken It. I just love William Maxwell so so very much and look forward to making my way through all this books. I love their subtlety, their play with form, their tenderness, how well he writes women and also how beautifully he writes men. (The bad thing about immersing one’s self in old books, however, is the frequency with which “the n-word” appears, and this was the first in the stack, would not be the last. For someone for whom that word is deeply personal and as wounding as that weapon-word could be intended, reading old books must be an absolute minefield.)
• A Cupboard Full of Coats, purchased secondhand in cottage-country this summer. I’d loved Edward’s second novel, which I was turned onto after her interview with Donna Bailey Nurse. Her debut was nominated for the Booker Prize and I found it enormously moving, strange and surprising.
• The Mind Has Mountains was one of two books I purchased at the Victoria College Book sale by Mary Hocking, an author I’d never heard of, and it was so weird and interesting…though I eventually ran out of patience. It’s part horror story, part bureaucratic tale of the reorganization of municipal government. Published in 1974. Hocking has always been sort of obscure, I think, though I managed to find a Facebook group called “Mary Hocking readers” and I became its 35th member.
• Black Faces, White Faces, another Little Free Library find. Jane Gardam’s first book for adults, about British expatriates in Jamaica. I loved it.
• The World Below, which I read all day on Christmas (my children having received video games, you see). I love Sue Miller SO MUCH and this might be my favourite of all of hers that I have read. Adored it. Even better, I found a beautiful new edition of her novel Family Pictures at the used bookstore yesterday, which means I still have more Sue Miller before me.
• Emotionally Weird was a Kate Atkinson book I read before I (and the world) properly understood what Kate Atkinson was, but after I’d fallen in love with her brilliant debut Behind the Scenes at the Museum AND I DID NOT LIKE IT and gave my copy away. It was too precocious for its own good. But having read so so much more Kate Atkinson since and having a better idea of what her literary project was in general, I wanted to revisit it, and guess what: I STILL DID NOT LIKE IT. Even brilliant writers miss the mark sometimes.
• The Wren, the Wren. I got this book for Christmas. Truly a book to be savoured, Anne Enright’s best yet? I loved it so much.
• Have His Carcase was a Harriet Vane/Peter Wimsey mystery and it’s so so wonderful but should also be 100 pages shorter, but maybe I’m just saying that because I didn’t actually care about precisely how the mystery was solved—there was about fifteen pages devoted to decoding a letter, deciphering broken down in mind-numbing detail. Either you like this stuff or you don’t, but if you’re the latter, there is always skimming, thank goodness, and so I also had a very good time.
• Tracks, which I bought at a yard sale in October, Erdrich’s third novel, rich and compelling.
• And finally, After the Fire, which I stole from a cottage library the summer before last (or maybe I actually rescued it, because it had become a habitat for mildew). I liked many things about it, and Jane Rule is a really interesting writer, but it also had mildew growing in it in a metaphoric way. Still, I am really glad I read it, especially since I found inside it a bookmark from Long House Books, which I’d never heard of, but which was located just metres from my house at 497 Bloor Street West, and—according to this blog post—stocked exclusively Canadian titles, which is such a wonderful idea (and not the least bit limiting).

December 7, 2023

We Meant Well, by Erum Shazia Hasan

“The fire became its own story. The great fire. People spoke of it as a temporal event, “before the fire,” “after the fire.” It wasn’t linked to anything other than to itself and time. There was never any blame, only mention of misfortune. Everything happened in such fragmented pieces that seldom were connector strings drawn between events. It was its own monster. People would talk of where they were during the fire. They recounted the miracles, the people who survived. They relived the losses. They have anniversaries. And time kept going. The fire had nothing to do with the Todds and the Toms, their umbrellas and baseball caps, or the fact that a mass movement of people had been forced, increasing risks and pressure in a small dense location. It had nothing to do with the fact that my mutual funds back home, which I’d set up when I was eighteen, had investments in the mining company that Todd worked for. No, the fire was what it was. An unfortunate event. Like Lele’s rape.”

Erum Shazia Hasan’s WE MEANT WELL (longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize) begins with a phone call in the middle of the night received by Maya at her home in Los Angeles. There is an emergency in the unnamed African country to which Maya has been tied to for years through her work in International Aid, work she is yearning to leave behind for a fresh and less complicated start so that she might be able to be more present (both physically and otherwise) for her husband and young daughter. But it’s work that has changed her, and so has the place, Likanni, creating what seems like an unbridgeable distance between Maya and those who’ve never known the struggles of life in the Global South—her husband in particular, a high flying corporate lawyer. Who, Maya is aware, is having an affair, just one of the reasons—she realizes—he so easily lets her leave again, but she also knows that he knows that she’d be going regardless, because Likanni—and the ways that life there seems real in a way that her sanitized American existence so rarely does—has become a compulsion that’s unshakable.

The stakes are always so high—maybe that’s it? And perhaps they’ve never been higher than now as a colleague has been accused of raping a local woman who’s worked in their charity’s office. And now Maya has arrived to deescalate the situation, to smooth things over to keep their donors happy while also maintaining trust from the community, with whom she’s always had strong ties through her work. The matter boiling down to a simple he said/she said situation—but of course there has never been anything simple about that, WE MEANT WELL examining the space between all things (B)lack and white, a space embodied by Maya herself as brown-skinned woman, an American adopted as an infant from Bangladesh, a person who ever benefits from white privilege in a place like Likanni.

WE MEANT WELL is a novel of ideas (as well as part of a developing canon of works by Canadian writers about the complicated reality of NGOs), but also a terrific, fast paced, plot driven work that’s horrifying, fascinating, and absolutely gripping at once.

December 5, 2023

The Clarion, by Nina Dunic

I really loved The Clarion, a strangely shaped novel about loneliness and connection, a quiet story of two siblings launched into the world from a difficult childhood whose adult trajectories (told in alternating chapters) are very different, the narrative reflecting that. Peter’s world is small, and his story takes place over a handful of days, beginning with a monumental one as he auditions for a spot playing trumpet in a part time gig at a local restaurant. Peter is an unlikely performer—he’s nondescript, unassuming, and while he plays the notes, discerning listeners can tell that he doesn’t feel them. He works behind the scenes in a restaurant kitchen—a job his sister got him—and finds connection and release at a local bar whose DJ’s tracks are mesmerizing and allow Peter to be absorbed into the crowd, to become part of something larger than himself.

Whereas his sister Stasi feels she is too much of the world, and has lost herself within it, in serving its goals and spending so much of her life caring for first her troubled mother, and then her brother. Striving to succeed in the corporate world, the hollowness of all this becoming apparent when she’s passed up for a promotion. Her story—reflective of its larger scale—take place over several weeks as she contemplates her grief and listlessness, tries out therapy, and continues an affair that threatens to put her domestic life at risk, all the while just as lonely and lost as her brother is.

Are we all different or are we the same, is a question the novel returns to several times, a question of nature versus nurture, and the idea of a clarion call haunts the story too, a longing for a song to summon everyone, a common humanity. And the beauty of this book are the fleeting moments of connection where such a thing almost seems possible. However meagre, and also everything.