January 28, 2015
The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King
“You see my problem. The history I offered to forget, the past I offered to burn, turns out to be our present. It may well be our future.” –Thomas King
Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America is a curious contender for the Canada Reads debates, which this year is mixing fiction and non-fiction for the first time. Its scope is outsized compared to the other books. It comes with a moral imperative so great that a reader might be shamed to offer up a different book instead, a book championed for, say, its aesthetic concerns. It’s a book that might be difficult to discuss in its own right, outside of its subject matter.
But let’s for just a moment do such a thing.
For in all my years of reading, I don’t know that I’ve ever read a more curious “curious account” of anything. A history whose narrator shrugs away any claims of authority, chronology abandoned, national borders ignored, a narrative tone that’s sarcastic and a bit snarly. Plus haunted by the spirit of King’s wife, Helen, much esteemed, offering her own feedback from somewhere in the background: give examples, don’t generalize, and other editorial suggestions. What is the historian who offers up lines like, “I don’t know. I wasn’t there”? King’s supposed insouciance, his humour, his edge—with wry understatement—all rhetorical devices. There is a begrudgingness here, King offering up a book his readers have done nothing to deserve except be ignorant. This history is painful and terrible, and to tell it all chronologically, straightforwardly would be to be writing the same thing over and over again. The way he’s done it, at least, King gets to have a little bit of fun.
“I never knew,” I said to my husband, when I finished reading this book on Sunday afternoon, “what they meant when they said that we stole their land.” I’d assumed it was in a general sense—Europeans arriving on these shores and planting a flag, the First Nations people displaced with that one gesture. What I never knew, and only learned from reading The Inconvenient Indian, is the way in which First Nations land has been stolen over and over again. First Nations people moved and moved again, and displaced and relocated. This in itself traumatic—I’d known about the Cherokee Trail of Tears from reading King’s novel Truth and Bright Water—but then there was more, one example being the General Allotment Act of 1887, which broke up Indian reservations into individual pieces. Though to divide that land evenly between its inhabitants would make for too much land per person, the government decided, so they came up with an arbitrary amount, split that, and the rest became surplus land—theirs. Or the golf club in Vancouver whose land came from the Musqueam Nation, via agents in Ottawa—the Musqueam never even saw the agreement—with a long-term lease far below value. Later, the government signed a deal with developer to turn 40 acres of Musqueam land into a subdivision, also at rock-bottom prices fixed without increases for decades. When the Musqueam were eventually able to raise the rents to market rate, the homeowners refused to pay and took the case to court.
I knew about Indian Residential Schools, a terrible tragedy whose effects are trickling down through generations. But I never knew that one in two children in residential schools lost their lives there. King asks, “What would have happened if the residential schools had been public schools instead? Schools in Toronto, San Francisco, Vancouver, New York? What would have happened if the children who were dying were White? What would have happened if one of them had been your child?/ Sure It’s a rhetorical question.” King also asserts that “tragedy” is the wrong term with which to describe the residential schools. “It suggests that the consequences of residential schools were unintended and undesired, a difficult argument to make since…the schools were national policy.”
The underlying argument in The Inconvenient Indian—when casinos and garbage dumps become rare economic opportunities for First Nation communities; when land and rivers on reserves is ravaged by industrial waste from corporate neighbours; when it’s argued that the Indian land wasn’t being “used” anyway; when Native people are seen as unable to manage themselves without government handouts, all the while “Air Canada, AIG, Bombardier, Halliburton, General Motors, and the good folks at Alberta’s Tar Sands Project manage on their own without relying on government handouts”—is that capitalism is the problem. King writes, “there is little chance that North America will develop a functional land ethic until it finds a way to overcome its irrational addiction to profit.”
And there is so much more—on racism, historical perceptions, First Nations men murdered by police, First Nations women murdered by… well, who knows who, because no one can be bothered to investigate, the history of the AIM and activism throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and Oka and Ipperwash, the dots connected, pieces fitting, a shocking context, the same patterns, disregard and abuse repeated over and over, a hundred years ago, a decade ago. Which is why history is a slippery thing here, and why some critics would prefer the past be forgotten altogether—it’s simpler. King writes, “Using this approach as a template, one could write a book about the United States dropping two atomic bombs on Japan without having to mention World War II.”
I was thinking about this as I read the newspaper on Saturday, an editorial about the death of a Native child after her parents had halted her chemotherapy. “So far, no one has stepped forward to appeal the decision [to halt the treatment], probably because of an oversensitivity to the native rights issues that the judge allowed to cloud what should been a simple decision to protect the life of a child.”
An oversensitivity to native rights issues.
Has there ever been such a thing?
Which is not to say that the death of the child is not tragic, that she should not have been protected, that there are any easy answers in this situations, that there are any easy answers at all. But it is a failure to acknowledge complexities that has always been the problem, a tendency to fit people into boxes, for the human part of the matter (humanness, with all its foibles) to be disregarded. For someone, like say Christie Blatchford writing about Caledonia, or whoever wrote that editorial, to think that some matters are simple, that the weight of history might be sloughed off altogether. Hence the reason King subverts history, authority, chronology in his book—this is a story that has to be told another way.
The Inconvenient Indian has been sitting on my shelf for three years. I bought it for my husband who is an immigrant and wanted context to what he was hearing about First Nations issues in the news. He read it but I hadn’t. I’d been meaning to get around to it, and am pleased that Canada Reads has provided me with the incentive to finally do so. (Though I do wish a book by First Nations woman writer had been on the list this year—I learned by a campaign in November that in its history, Canada Reads had never featured such a book. I’m going to make an effort to seek out books by First Nations women for myself this year.)
I do wonder if the other books selected for Canada Reads are going to be unfairly pitted against this one, if there will be an unequal distribution of importance—it seems obviously slated to win. Who’d argue that? But someone will, and I wonder too if that will seem to trivialize The Inconvenient Indian when that happens. It seems like potentially an awkward exercise. But if the point is that the book gets read, then I think it’s a good thing. For me it’s always been the reading more than the debate that’s been the chief appeal of Canada Reads anyway.
- Update: Check out this list of books by Canadian First Nations and Inuit women writers. Lots of great reading suggestions.
January 27, 2015
Loving the Difficult
“In a time of cutbacks to services for women and children, for the arts, the difficulties faced by young mothers today who also want to write are enormous. But they do have, as generations before them didn’t, literary mothers who have been mothers themselves and given us a literature richer for that experience. They have transcended or changed the meaning of “women’s literature.” Canada’s voice in world literature is, as often as not, a women’s voice, a mother’s voice, now being joined by the voices of women around the world.” –Jane Rule, “Our Mothers,” from Loving the Difficult, which I finished reading last night while overlooking the swimming pool observing my daughter’s bizarre inability to float.
I liked this book a lot, although overlap between essays was a bit repetitive, and some were far more insightful than others. I was intrigued by details of Rule’s childhood in California, details that reminded me of Joan Didion’s biography and autobiographical essays—they are near contemporaries. Their writing styles are not the same, but they seem to have a similar eye on the world. I’d be interested to read Rule’s posthumous autobiography, Taking My Life, to see how it might connect with Didion’s Where I Was From. I also liked the book as a piece of swim-lit—Rule was a lifeguard throughout her life, and one of her final essays on her pool (yes!) is one of the very best in the book. Other good pieces were on grief, losing her partner of many decades, on gay marriage (“You be normal, or else…”), on writing, on writing and money, a piece on parallels between being a lesbian and being left-handed, and so many passages that begged to be underlined.
January 19, 2015
Born Out of This by Christine Lowther
Christine Lowther’s essay collection, Born Out of This, is a wild book about life on the margins, in terms of geography, culture, and environmental activism. It also reads like notes in a margin, rich with references to literary texts, song lyrics, poetry (in particular, works by Lowther’s mother, the poet Pat Lowther), and musings on life and nature, the view from her window. Which is not just any window. Christine Lowther makes her home on a house float off the Clayoquot Sound, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, anchored just off shore. A greenhouse sits on an accompanying float, where bees buzz and somehow slugs appear. After the pleasure of reading Sarah Henshaw’s The Bookshop That Floated Away last month, I was pleased to encounter another woman who makes her life on the water. And what a life it is, Lowther partaking in the labours required to keep her house maintained and sound, commuting to work via kayak (and later, motorboat), watching wolves from her deck, swimming with a seal, and (yes) shitting in a bucket. She writes wonderfully about her views of nature, of being immersed in it and still apart from it at once, about the complex and difficult relationships between humans and wild things, between people and place. She writes about the freedom and claustrophobia of rural life, and also about how her idyllic surroundings are not so at odds with her punk roots: “if anyone thinks it’s not punk to live out in nature they should visit during a storm.” Nature is teeming too with death as much as it’s full of life, the opening piece in the collection presenting a stream choked with the bodies of dead salmon, though it’s not strictly a system of binaries: “This landscape of gore nourishes and fertilizes the trees and berry bushes.” And so too is death a shadow in Lowther’s own life; in “Gifts from Lands So Far Apart,” she explores the ways in which the loss of mother was connected to landscape, and this loss subtly haunts the rest of the collection. (The following essay begins: “An infant harbour seal cries for its mother…”) Lowther also explores the roots of her own environmental and political activism, her essay, “We Tremble in Response: Famished for Grief,” an excellent complement to Nancy Lee’s recent novel The Age, both works exploring Vancouver in the early 1980s and a sense of inevitable catastrophe in the nuclear age, the sitting perched on the edge of the world in more ways than just one. Other essays, about community gardening in Vancouver and wildlife in the city, underline Lowther’s connections between here and there, her principle that the rural and urban are not so much at odds, and that indeed their sensibilities mingle.
January 14, 2015
Her by Harriet Lane
UPDATE: I can’t believe I forgot to note the extraordinary ends to which Lane uses the sinister implications of classic children’s literature, including Goodnight Moon and “James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree”. So very good.
There is such a descriptor as sippy-cup sinister.
“I’m reading a terrifying book about a woman with a newborn,” I told my husband, who went pale then, because a woman with a newborn is the most terrifying thing he’s ever known.
“I’m tired of female pain and also tired of people who are tired of it,” write Leslie Jamison in “Grand Unified: Theory of Female Pain,” from The Empathy Exams, and I sometimes feel similarly about the reading of the burdens of motherhood.
It’s a burden documented in vivid detail in Her, the second novel by journalist Harriet Lane. The novel is a mash-up, one scene after another presented from two points of view. One from Emma, recently a mother of two, in her late thirties, struggling to get the stroller up the steps as her three-year-old clamours for her attention, and the baby cries, and she contemplates her life, wondering where her once-self—a successful journalist, happy and carefree—has got to. And then the other, from Nina, who spies Emma from a distance, knows her from long ago, and becomes determined to work her way into the other woman’s life to enact some form of revenge.
To Emma, hoever, Nina—a successful painter, her own daughter nearly grown—is a saviour, always turning up at the right time, offering Emma exactly what she needs, providing a glimpse of the world outside, of the life she’d like to have. Nina is a respite from the drudgery of a schedule Emma describes as full of tasks all both so urgent and tedious, breaking the day into useless pieces, rendering the whole thing as just scraps. But why is Nina so interested in her? It’s a nagging question, but one that Emma pushes to the back of her mind, which is already overwhelmed by lack of sleep, stress, financial worries, marital strife, and general ennui. She’s so vulnerable, which Nina recognizes instantly, and realizes she can prey on.
Which makes Her so compelling, so beyond those other narratives which tire me whose only virtue is their honesty, is that the truths revealed about new motherhood are just the starting point. From here, Lane has created a psychological thriller so convincing in its reality, so ominous in its mundanity, so sippy-cup sinister in a manner I last recall reading in Emily Perkins’ excellent 2008 book, A Novel About My Wife.
Nina gets closer and closer to Emma, welcomed into her home, caring for her children, and while we know along she has nefarious intentions—presented in the alternating chapters which, like Emma’s, are written in first-person—we don’t know why she’s out to exact revenge from Emma, who doesn’t remember her at all. We don’t know either which form her revenge will take, though as the novel progresses, indicators emerge, signs and signals that are so terrifying, all hurtling towards the novel’s very end, which is completely and utterly devastating. Not to mention amazing. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.
It’s a page-turner, but the reader will be slowed by Lane’s prose, the pitch-perfect imagery and descriptions, which are to be savoured. By the nuance too, suggesting the motherhood (and everything) is a many-sided reality after all. And the reader will be chilled by Lane’s suggestion that danger lurks even in the safest of places, that the most heightened maternal vigilance might never be enough.
January 11, 2015
The Devil You Know by Elisabeth de Mariaffi
The stakes were high for Elisabeth de Mariaffi’s The Devil You Know. On Wednesday morning, I walked 2km at -25 degrees to get a copy, because I’d been hearing such good things about it and it seemed like exactly the kind of book you want to hang out with curled up warm while the blizzard howls. A mystery, a thriller, a book set in Southern Ontario during the 1980s and early ’90s, during which a series of young girls were kidnapped and sometimes found murdered, otherwise their faces depicted on posters for years afterwards under the heading, “Missing.” Years later, “aged-enhanced” images of these children would be updated, but we’d still recognize them. I’ve noticed that reviewers have been responding to the book personally, viscerally. There’s a whole generation of us haunted by these missing girls—I could plot my own history by theirs, from Nicole Morin to Alicia Ross. (I was too young to know about the disappearance and murder of Sharin’ Morningstar Keenan in 1983, though she was taken the very playground where my children play.)
Evie Jones, rookie reporter and protagonist of The Devil You Know is similarly haunted, not least because she’s currently covering the Paul Bernardo case as he and his wife are arrested for the murders of Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy in 1993. But also, in particular, because her own childhood best friend was one of the dead girls, Lianne Gagnon, whose story is a fiction conflating the cases of Keenan and Allison Parrott, who was last seen getting into a car with a strange man near Varsity Stadium eleven years before. Leanne’s killer was never found. And when a strange man begins appearing on Evie’s fire escape and elsewhere, a dark figure skirting on the periphery of her life, she begins to wonder if it’s Lianne’s killer returned and if there’s something that he wants from her. Her fears are dismissed by those around her, but she can’t shake the feeling that she’s under threat, and no wonder—her own history, and the stories of women in the world that she covers in her job, do absolutely nothing to suggest otherwise.
It is suggested—perhaps too strongly, my one criticism of this book, for the signs are there and the reader surely can read them—that Evie’s job as a crime reporter is part of her need to control the forces in her life, that she seeks out stories like Bernardo’s and the stories in missing and dead girls, in order to be in command of the narrative for once. And by those concerned for Evie’s wellbeing, it is suggested too that her need for control is a bad thing, that it’s detrimental to her mental health, and that it’s this desperation making her imagine the footsteps at the door… I mean, never mind the actual footsteps at the door.
But with Evie, de Mariaffi dares to posit instead that female agency is a salve instead of a symptom. Evie Jones is far from perfect, but she’s smart, unflinching, shameless, and brave. The hero of her own story, certainly.
In her research, employing a brand new tool called the internet, Evie starts looking back at the records of what happened to her friend, and learns that there is more to the story than she ever knew. The big picture that emerges as she puts pieces together begins to suggest that the story of Lianne’s disappearance is less random than Evie ever supposed, and that she can trace the case back to a place that’s closer to home than she can bare to imagine. And that all the trouble (and the footsteps) might not be in her head after all.
The Devil You Know is a gripping, fast-paced book that I had to be torn away from, an excellent crime book with strong female protagonists, in scintillating company with those by Laura Lippman and Gillian Flynn. But there is more to it than that. More than just nostalgia too, though it’s a part of it. de Mariaffi was long-listed for the Giller prize a couple of years ago for her short story collection, How to Get Along With Women, which included her acclaimed short story, “Kiss Me Like I’m the Last Man on Earth,” which I first read in The New Quarterly. And while it seemed like a leap for a writer to go from literary short stories to a thriller, once I began reading The Devil…, the connection seemed quite straightforward to me. Partly because of the nostalgia that infuses both the novel and the story, 1980s Toronto in startling specificity. But also because of how much short story writing sets one up to write a plot driven novel—this has never occurred to me before.
Short stories are all about atmosphere and their scenes, one moment standing in for many, representative of a broader picture. Nothing is extraneous, and so too is it with a crime novel, plot-driven, which just really means one scene after another. Though perhaps with some writers and books, the reader doesn’t notice the scene, so preoccupied is she by plot, but the scenes stand out in The Devil You Know. A gripping, fast-paced book that I had to be torn away from, and I kept noticing the scenes, which were like tiny short stories contained within. The plot is the book’s foundation, but the story rises far and large above it.
It was terrific, and definitely worth a walk in the cold.
January 8, 2015
Vacation Reads Part 2: All the Best/All the Rest
I don’t actually care about the weather, or the accommodations, or the buffet. If the books are no good, then the vacation is ruined. And this is never more important than when one is vacationing at home, as I was over the holidays. I finished reading Marilynne Robinson’s Lila on Christmas Eve, confident that the flat rectangular packages under our Christmas tree would yield great reading, and was I ever right.
The first book I set to reading was An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, by Elizabeth McCracken, which I read in a day, and this meant that I spent all day Christmas being discovered hiding with my paperback, weeping, and exclaiming, “This book is just so good.” Stuart felt bad at first: “I got you a book that makes you sad.” But I shushed him. The sadness was important, but not the point. That I was weeping was a testament to this book, whose resistance of sentimentality is most remarkable. And it was also funny. Plus, brilliant. A memoir by the author of Thunderstruck and Other Stories, which was one of my top books of 2014. It’s the story that bridges the stillbirth of her first child with the birth of her second, a healthy boy, a year later, and it probes the edges of motherhood and humanity in a way that’s so important because few storytellers go to these places, where so many people go all the time. I’d recommend this book to anyone who is literate—no experience or interest in the subject matter required. It is a truly extraordinary memoir. I can’t wait to read McCracken’s other books.
The other book I got for Christmas was the essay collection The Unspeakable, by Meghan Daum, which tied into the McCracken memoir in its probing of edges. (Daum is also editor of the essay anthology Selfish, Shallow & Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids, out in March.) These essays are also about the things nobody talks about—what really happens when your mother dies, particularly if your relationship has always been fraught; what we’re looking for in dating and relationships, and in marriage; about nostalgia (though, truthfully, everybody talks about that) and about how the soundtrack to your twenties becomes “unbearable to listen to in twenty years…not because they…sound dated and trite but because they…sound like the lining of your soul”); about filling the supposed space in one’s life by not having children; on being “an honorary dyke”; playing charades with Nicole Kidman and Nora Ephron; being in a coma (last two examples in which “unspeakableness” becomes literal). Truthfully, some parts of these pieces flirted around the edges of the mundane, and really the guiding principle of these essays is their singular point of view, by the contrarian misfit, Daum, an excellent writer who examines everything critically, including her own insatiable thirst for discovering an authentic way to be in the world. There is a point to everything.
Next, I reread The Witch of Exmoor by Margaret Drabble because, while she is one of my favourite authors, most of her output has in fact faded into a blur in my mind and I need to revisit many of them to remember what was what. It is possible that the books that had faded aren’t her best—that the fading is a mark of the books rather than my reading. Exmoor didn’t blow my mind. It received some poor reviews when it was published in 1996, James Wood contending that her Dickensian project lacked the depth of the original, that her characters were never allowed to be fully developed human beings and rather were pieces their author moved around on a game board. Though this is actually what I love best about Drabble’s work, her command of her fictional universe, the metafictional elements. I wonder if the novel was a victim of timing though: a year later was Labour’s election victory on the UK, the advent of the internet would also bring about rapid change. Her portrayal of “the way we live now” was almost so much on the cusp of something that the cusp itself seems less relevant in retrospect.
And then I read Man at the Helm by Nina Stibbe, the first novel by author of the epistolary memoir Love, Nina. It’s possible that my aversion to the Drabble was too much heavy for holiday, and Man at the Helm was a perfect counter. Nancy Mitford meets Sue Townsend, the story of Lizzie Vogel, a young girl whose wealthy parents divorce in the 1970s, the children and their mother relocating to a Leicestershire village whose inhabitants are hostile to newcomers, in particular households without “a man at the helm.” And so Lizzie and her sister hatch a plot to find their mother a new man, a plan that has the unintended consequence of their mother sleeping with half the husbands in the village, doing her reputation not much good. Oh, it was so funny, and I loved it.
And then my final holiday read was The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa, which I plucked off the shelf at Book City because I liked the cover, and I loved the book for that reason very much before I read it, and then I read it, and there were other reasons. That it was a translation, first, which meant I was succeeding at my New Year’s Resolution before the New Year had even started. I also like that it was another book I read in a day, which is one of my great pleasures. It’s the story of a housekeeper who works for a former professor of mathematics with a brain injury that means he has a short-term memory of only 80 minutes, but the professor is taken with her young son, he teaches them both about the poetry of numbers, and the three of them together form a tenuous family unit for a while, a remarkable equation, the opposite of their previously lonely lives.
January 6, 2015
Vacation Reads Part 1: Marilynne Robinson
And now I am going to lay down a path, book by book, of how I made my way through a vacation packed with spectacular reads. It helped that I went on reading vacation a week or so before my actual vacation, abandoning myself to the task of reading all Marilynne Robinson’s novels in order. I really loved Housekeeping, and was taken by its magic and gothic sensibility. I was wary of Gilead though, as I always have been. It just didn’t seem like a book for me. But while I found it slow to start, I eventually came to appreciate it very much, and found John Ames’ worldview so admirable and beautiful, but then I was wary of that too—was I reading this like an old-age New-Age self-help guide to understanding how the world is? It is possible that I actually read all novels this way, but Gilead was so conspicuously in its, well, preachiness. Which I don’t mean as a criticism, actually. John Ames would have been an extraordinary preacher. But it is okay that I was underlining lines like they were delivered by a deity? Doesn’t this make me not far from someone who puts post-its in Chicken Soup for the Soul? So I am conflicted, but then so is Ames, which is the power of his point of view, actually. There is much subtlety at work here. That makes me nervous too. Anyway, I liked this book.
I moved on to Home, which was a reread, and which turned out to be the book I liked least of the lot. While I did find it interesting to read the two books side-by-side and see how differently characters’ behaviour was interpreted by the others than what they’d intended (and the idea that came to me while I was reading KD Miller’s All Saints last summer: that we are all figments of one another’s imaginations after all), I found Home to be a bit agonizing in its repetitiveness and melodrama. Due to being on vacation and sick, I watched the stupid by entertaining movie, “They Came Together” starring Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd as I was reading Home, and maybe it was partly the head cold, but when I picked up the book again, it similarly seemed to be a spoof of sentimentality, just one darn thing after another. I don’t know if an Amy Poehler vehicle has ever been used to critique a Marilynne Robinson book before, and maybe this is my one real act of originality in this life. It is possible that reading Home and Gilead so close together wasn’t a great move after all, and perhaps I was just bored of the storyline? I do find it interesting that Gilead won the Pulitzer and Home won the Orange Prize, and I’m thinking, come on women’s fiction prize, you’ve got to up your game.
And then I read Lila, and I am so glad that I read all the others before because they really are a cycle, bringing us back to womanhood, daughterhood, motherhood, transiency, and a certain wildness. If The Grapes of Wrath married Gilead, this is what they’d come up with. I think what I like about Lila and Gilead over Housekeeping is that both are so engaged with the world instead of apart from it, and engagement does not require certainty. Ames and Lila really are such perfect companions, even if gaps in language and emotion keeps this from being articulated from one to the other, which is certainly a kind of faith. I suppose any marriage is.
And I started underlining John Ames’ sermons again: “Life on earth is difficult and grave, and marvellous. Our experience is fragmentary. Its parts don’t add up. They don’t even belong in the same calculation. Sometimes it is hard to believe they are all parts of one thing. Nothing makes sense until we understand that experience does not accumulate like money, or memory, or like years and frailties.”
I think I will definitely have to read Lila again, this time while not so doped up on Marilynne Robinson, because it’s certainly a novel that deserves to be considered in its own right. Confession: I didn’t adore it. I don’t think I’ve quite cracked its surface yet. I also find myself at a distance from it, as I do Gilead. Both books find me unsteady as a reader, but I think that is a good thing. So I will return to it, which is the best thing about books, how you can do so over and over.
Now stay tuned for Part II of my Vacation Reads which includes (get ready for it!) the books I got for Christmas. So good.
January 4, 2015
Rose’s Run by Dawn Dumont
Well, if a holiday has to eventually end, Rose’s Run by Dawn Dumont is a pretty good book to go out on, a book that’s funny, breezy and heartwarming, and then manages to include a terrifying demon in the mix who feeds on the strength of women, so I was hooked in a cannot-turn-out-the-light-until-I’m-done kind of way, an I’m-going-to-have-nightmares kind of way (and I did!), and I haven’t been so gripped a scary book since I read The Troop by Craig Davidson/Nick Cutter a year ago.
But let’s back up a bit. The novel begins with Rose Okanese, a First Nations woman living on a reserve in rural Saskatchewan, catching her husband bonking her cousin (and his), and then him taking off with their car so she has no way to get to work at the pig-farm. She loses her job, and has also just caught her teenage daughter doing drugs—troubles compounding. And to further compound them, Rose—through a series of misunderstandings—starts a rumour that she’s going to be running in the reserve’s annual marathon. More than a few pounds overweight and a heavy smoker, Rose is an unlikely candidate for the race, but she eventually starts training, one foot in front of the other, a seemingly insurmountable challenge, but perhaps the one thing in her world she has any control over.
If things could get any worse, it seems that her daughter and her troubled friend have managed to raise a demon from the dead, a spirt called “The Dream Woman” who feeds on the strength of the women around her and seeks vengeance for the many wrongs done to them by men. One by one, the women on the reserve become possessed by the woman’s spirit, but somehow Rose remains immune—perhaps because of the extent of her own strength as she begins to get stronger, and also somehow due to the ghost of her mother who remains a protective presence.
Soon, the marathon is the least of Rose’s problems as she is forced to battle with The Dream Woman, freeing the local women from her power (and the local men from their brutal justice), protecting her daughters in the process and sending the spirit back into the earth where she came from.
Kind of preposterous, yes, but Dawn Dumont (a comedian and broadcaster whose first novel, Nobody Cries at Bingo, was shortlisted for two Alberta book awards) balances the supernatural elements with real emotional connections between her characters, Rose’s down to earth point of view, and a wonderful ribald sense of humour. I’ve never encountered a book that managed to be hilarious and terrifying at once—and the humour never ceases, even when the suspense is at its height, but it never gets too silly either. Which makes for a really fantastic and engaging read.
While Rose’s Run would have benefitted from a stronger edit (I stumbled on a few typos and errors; the prose could have been tighter), any problems didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the novel. I read the book with an awareness of Julie Flett’s recent comments on the importance of First Nations literature:
“Our First Nation, Métis, and Inuit communities vitally need books with text and artwork that reflect our cultures and realities. Our works are also critical resources for increasing awareness and understanding in Canadian society, contributing relevancy to literacy programs, improving curricula, at all levels, across Canada, and adding significantly to the body of Canadian literature.”
There is nothing polemical about the novel at all, but not far beneath its breezy style and humour, it certainly is political, depicting the complicated reality of life on First Nations’ reserves, and in particular the status of First Nations women (whose problems at their most extreme and not so rarely either have led to the disappearance and/or murder of more than a thousand of these people in the last two decades). Now is certainly a time in which Canadian First Nations women seem to be finally starting to receive what they’re due—see the recent critical response to the television show, “Mohawk Girls“‘; the potential for a book by a First Nations woman to be part of the Canada Reads lineup for the very first time; the Native Women’s Association of Canada receiving the 2014 Vox Libera Award from Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, and more—and a book like Rose’s Run is an inspiring part of this cultural wave.
But it’s also just a really good book, and one I read avidly. A very good way to begin a new reading year.
December 9, 2014
The Bookshop That Floated Away by Sarah Henshaw
The trouble with being a little bit odd is that my book recommendations are not always universal, and so it is useful when I encounter a book as odd as I am, to which I can point and say, “This book is not for everyone. BUT.” Say, if you are the type who can identify with a woman who finds an injured pigeon (while travelling on her canal boat, which she has converted into a financial under-performing bookshop) and then decides to uncover all references to pigeons in the Western canon, then The Bookshop That Floated Away by Sarah Henshaw is definitely for you. It is definitely for me. My husband is a bit relieved that I’ve finally finished it, because for the past few days, I’ve been reading him passages from every other page, and while he conceded that they were indeed quite funny, he found the whole thing rather strange.
Last night in particular was the part in the book that was narrated from the perspective of the boat itself (oh yes—and its narration replicates Black Beauty, with which the boat [called Joseph] shares a colour) in which Henshaw comes home traumatized by having found “a discarded sanitary towel pressed between the pages of a reference book on cowboys… [S]he said that book vandalism was the devil’s own trade mark, and if we saw any one who took pleasure in leaving menstrual paraphernalia between pages, we might know to whom he belonged, for the devil was a murderer from the beginning and a tormentor to the end. On the other hand, where we saw people who loved their books and were kind to hardback and soft cover, we might know that was God’s mark; for ‘God loves books.'”
To be fair, that’s probably the oddest part of the book. I don’t want to give you the wrong idea. But still….
The premise of this book initially put me in mind of Penelope Fitzgerald, with the offshore and the bookshop, and everything, and while Henshaw doesn’t reference Fitzgerald, The Bookshop That Floated Away still did not disappoint. It’s not really a book about a premise anyway, but instead very much of itself, about the curious incidents that transpire when the strange and insular worlds of books and canal boating connect. The latter is not always romantic—in Burnley, they have to navigate over a sofa, and then she fears a human head has become stuck on her propeller. And then there are the locks, so many locks, mostly manual, which is no small business when you are a solo journeyer and your boat is sixty feet long. It’s a different kind of off-roading, which results in travel book that reminded me of Beryl Bainbridge’s English Journey, if Bainbridge had been travelling by canal boat and had a propensity for hosting book clubs on her boat and imbibing far too much wine.
Henshaw’s journey comes about when her plans for opening a bookshop on a barge aren’t as lucrative as she’d supposed, the problem perhaps exacerbated by a conspicuous lack of business savvy—her one qualification for the gig is a voracious appetite for books, and the ability to see the whole world through a bookish prism. So she decides to go on a six month journey from the Midlands to London, then to Bristol, back through the Midlands to Leeds and Manchester, and then home, bartering books for Victorian sponge cake and spreading the word about the importance of independent bookshops.
On the way, she has good days and catastrophes, the boat indeed floats away, people vomit on its astroturf roof, she finds three injured pigeons, the boat is stolen, vandalized, the Mayor of Bath calls Joseph a “she”, and they are banned in Bristol. She tells her own story, and is so deft with allusion that she successfully navigates a Heart of Darkness meets Scuffy the Tugboat set-up. The narrative is further powered by other references to boatish and adventure books—Treasure Island, and The Wind and the Willows, plus Anna Karenina, The Count of Monte Cristo, Dick Whittington and His Cat, Our Mutual Friend, but not The Complete Guide to Starting and Running a Bookshop, because Henshaw couldn’t get into it.
The book is crazy wonderful, if you’re a certain kind of reader, though I suspect that if you’re reading this, you might well be. I discovered The Book Barge (which is misnamed, Henshaw tells us, and is actually a narrow boat, the discrepancy causing much consternation among boating purists) from The Bookshop Book, and was pleased to find out (spoilers!) that Henshaw decided not to jump ship at the end of her journey, determining that there was indeed nothing else worth doing as messing about in boats, as both Mole and Rat will attest.
- Discover The Book Barge online.
- learn more about The Book Barge
- PS In an ironic twist of fate, The Bookshop That Floated Away is not available outside the UK (or not here at least), so I was unable to order it through my local independent bookshop, and had to get it through The Book Depository instead. But I am so glad I did…
December 7, 2014
The Return by Dany Laferriere, and books in translation
For all kinds of reasons, I am so pleased to have finally read Dany Laferriere’s The Return. Not least because Laferriere is one of Canada’s most internationally celebrated writers—in its original French, The Return won the Prix Médicis (France) in 2009, the International Literature Award (Germany) in 2014, and Laferriere was elected to the Académie française a year ago, the first Haitian and Canadian writer to receive this honour. It was kind of ridiculous that I’d never read him before.
I’m pleased mostly to have read The Return because I liked it so much, a novel that blurs boundaries in all kinds of ways—between fiction and autobiography, poetry and prose, home and exile, belonging and displacement, and also bridging the extremes in common perceptions of Haiti. It’s a novel whose prose is both stirring and lulling, easy to read and rich with wonderful lines. It begins when Dany, our protagonist, receives a phone that tells him his father is dead, a father he hardly knew, and even still, this begins a journey out of exile, back to the Haiti that Dany had fled decades before, to bring the spirit of his father home. So he goes back to a home that is no longer home, driven by a relationship with his father mostly constituted of absence and silence. It’s not a straightforward journey, and nothing is ever merely one thing or another, and I love that.
I love also how the book is so curious in its construction, how it tears down and reconstructs all my ideas of just what a novel is shaped like, which is what I wanted to have happen when I resolved to read more books in translation in 2014. And so I am also glad to have read The Return because it’s one more translation on my reading list, to which I can point now and say that my 2014 goals were met in a way that was not entirely half-assed. Just a modest success, but I did so appreciate the books in translation I read this year—and I like that most of them were Canadian, translated from French (The Return, by David Homel), French via Inuktitut (Sanaaq), and Chiac, an Acadian-French dialect spoken in New Brunswick (For Sure). I also read The Dinner by Herman Koch, translated from Dutch, which I liked a lot, and Viviane by Julia Deck, translated from French and first published in France.
So 5 books out of a hundred and some, which is a bit meh, but alas. I’m going to keep seeking out books in translation in 2015, and I already have a copy of Dany Lafferriere’s I am a Japanese Writer waiting to be read.
- Further: if I could read French, I would pick up a copy of “Les tranchées: Maternité, ambigüité et féminisme, en fragments” by Fanny Britt, who wrote the award-winning graphic novel, Jane, the Fox and Me. This other book is also illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault. The very poor translation in this article gives the book’s title as “Trenches – Maternity, ambiguity and feminism into fragments .” It sounds very much like a Francophone companion to The M Word and I would really love to read it. It sounds wonderful.
- Read JC Sutcliffe’s translations of excerpts from Michel Noel’s In Search of the End of the World, which won last year’s TD Children’s Literature Prize.
