April 1, 2012
Sweet Devilry by Yi-Mei Tsaing
Sarah Yi-Mei Tsaing is author of the picture book A Flock of Shoes which we’ve adored for ages, and I’ve wanted to read her book of poetry Sweet Devilry ever since I read her poem “How to dress a two year old” (which begins “Practice by stuffing jello into pants./ Angry jello.) As A Flock of Shoes has autobiographical elements (the story’s main character has the same name as Tsaing’s daughter), there is some delightful overlap between it and Sweet Devilry, though they’re directed at different audiences. I love in particular the reference to Abby’s shoes flying high in the sky in the book’s final poem (though there’s no mention as to whether they sent her postcards).
I’ve added Sweet Devilry to my list of essential Motherhood books. The first poem begins, “On the morning of your birth…” and contains the wonderful line, “Learn a good latch, kiddo–/ it pays to hold on/ to someone you love.” And from then on, the book was unputdownable– I read it walking away from the bookstore all the way to the subway, even though my hands were cold. The first section includes poems about ultrasounds, various perspectives of pregnancy tests, poems about two year olds, tantrums and starting daycare.
The next section riffs on other texts, namely government-issued household manuals from the 1920s and well-known fairy tales, to reinvest familiar tropes with narrative. Section 3 is a long poem reworking The Little Mermaid. And finally, Section 4 explores the various corners of contemporary family life, including the joys of home-ownership in a “transitional neighbourhood” (“We find a pair of shat-on men’s underwear/ sitting at the back of our yard,/ casually, as though it’s always been there,/ as if it’s not embarrassed by its own/ telling state”). The rest are poems about loss (in particular of a parent), and how elements of loss and tragedy co-exist with ordinary life, and about the painful fact that love itself is always about letting go.
March 25, 2012
Impact by Billeh Nickerson
I started reading Billeh Nickerson’s latest book Impact: The Titanic Poems last week in preparation for a feature next month on 49thShelf. I’d picked up the book before I went to bed, and certainly hadn’t planned on what happened next: that I wouldn’t be able to turn out my light until I’d read the book entire, and that the book would make me cry. I had figured that my capacity for crying about the Titanic had been exhausted in 1998 with my teenage melodrama, and also Kate, Leo and Celine. As though by its gigantic cinematic rendering, the tragedy of the Titanic had ceased to be real or have meaning, but it turns out that one hundred years later, poetry was what was required– the opposite of gigantic– to re-instill the story with solidity.
Though what is solid is surprising. The ship itself is a ghost from the start, with rumours of a worker lost in its construction, and in “The Clothesline” the Titanic is an absence, the great ship launched and a Belfast housewife noting the space where it had been, how she’d grown it accustomed to watching it as she hung out her laundry. In four different poems, however, Nickerson describes the riveting process,the rivets themselves,and the teams of men required and their particular skills that put the ship together.
The book’s sections follow the ship from “Construction” to “Maiden Voyage”, in which we learn that the Titanic had 40,000 eggs in her provisions, 800 bundles of asparagus, that the ship’s iconic fourth smokestack functioned solely as ventilation from the First Class smoking room. Nickerson’s poems originate from photographs, official record, anecdotes. He is as much curator as poet, his items unadorned, which seemingly mask the craft at work behind them, but such subtlety is an art itself, the way he lets his items speak. The asparagus stands for itself, for instance, and Captain Smith’s beard, and the photograph of the boy with the spinning top.
And with the next section, “Impact”, it’s the people who speak, the woman being lowered into the lifeboat, the man who must deliver news to the captain of the damage below, the piano player whose instrument couldn’t be carried on deck and whose fingers imagine ghostly keys as the rest of the band played on. With “Voices”, a series of eyewitness accounts from survivors. And then “Impact” again, but this time emotional. Nickerson’s poem “Carpathia” tells of the ship that happened to receive the Titanic’s distress signals and rushed to the rescue to discover the shock of the same emptiness first glimpsed by the housewife in Belfast. The mother recounting her sons being torn away from her body, the carver who’d handcrafted the First Class staircases, various explanations for a dead man’s watch being stopped ten minutes after all the others, and the piece of wood found floating amidst the wreckage which sanded down to become a rolling pin, solidity’s essence.
And then finally, “Discovery”, the ship found and explored in the 1980s, the legacy of its Halifax cemetery, and poem called “The Last Survivor”. In which Nickerson writes, “how strange that the last survivor/ is the Titanic herself.”
March 20, 2012
Among Others by Jo Walton
Jo Walton’s Among Others begins with a story that is already over. Twin sisters in South Wales who can see and communicate with fairies were brought to battle with their mother who used magic for ill. One sister was killed and the other was injured, left with a maimed leg, the fragments of her life, and only the books she could carry. Readers are dropped into the story abruptly, right in the middle of a conversation between the surviving sister, Mor, and her aunts. Since the accident, we’re told, she’s run away, spent time in a children’s home, then was given up to the guardianship of her estranged father. And now she’s been enrolled in an English boarding school where her vow to cease practicing magic should be easy to keep as there is little magic there to come by.
Here is a story with its own mythology, though the background is not laid out for us. As the novel is structured as Mor’s diary, she feels no need to illuminate facts and details, and so much of what’s gone on is hazy, vague. There is also the question of Mor’s own reliability– approaching this book from a literary angle, the sense is that she is so steeped in the tradition of science fiction that she’s ceased to understand what is impossible in reality. Except then there come these moments where the magic is undeniable, and genres are blurred: science fiction and English boarding school lit (and of *course* Jo Walton has read Charlotte Sometimes), realism and fantasy, children’s stories and adult novels. The magic is undeniable, yes, but the story itself is also so absolutely rooted in the world that I was as hooked as everybody said I would be.
It is books that save Mor from her dismal life (and oh, how Walton illuminates this, the pain of what she’s lost), and also the friendships she discovers through books and reading. She is pleased to learn that her father is also a Sci-Fi fan and he lets her borrow from his library– this becomes the one connection between them. An outcast at school, she’s excluded from games due to her disability, and spends hours in the school library where she appreciates the warmth of the school librarian. She’s also asked to join a Sci-Fi book club at the bookshop in town, where she finds friendship, intellectual stimulation, and even love. The perfection of this happy ending is perhaps the most fantastic element of all, but it’s everything we hope for her.
The straightforwardness of this narrative is complicated by Mor’s own insistance that good things have only come her way because she’s conjured them, however. She notes that so much of her recent fortune is too good to be true and puts it down to a spell she’d cast when she was most lonely. Of course, this can be read as a typical teenage approach to reality– that the universe exists to serve you only, that there’s doubt that other people even exist except in terms of their relationship to you. Is her reality any less real though because she believes it’s magic? Does it really matter if the result is the same?
To Mor, lines are blurred between worlds real and imaginary, which is fitting for someone who quite literally lives in a book, I suppose. Tolkien’s universe is as real to her as her own is– she’s convinced he saw the fairies too– and so are countless other literary worlds referenced that I was less familiar with. To those who know these worlds well, Among Others will be a pleasure, and to those (like me) who are absorbed by books, are grateful for their company, or even for those who just appreciate a good story, the novel will also ring true.
(Also, my favourite line in the novel was, “They weren’t evil after all, they were just odd in a very English way.”)
March 15, 2012
Virginia Wolf by Kyo Maclear and Isabelle Arsenault
Kyo Maclear is author of the beloved 2007 novel The Letter Opener and is, with illustrator Isabelle Arsenault, the force behind the acclaimed Spork. Her latest picture book with Arsenault is Virginia Wolf, a story loosely based on the Woolfian one of the similar name and her relationship with her sister Vanessa.
There is precedent for a literary rendering of the child Virginia– those of us steeped in Woolf lore know well the stories of Virginia, Vanessa and their brother Thoby of 22 Hyde Park, and their childhood family newspaper was published in book form in 2006. And it is those of us steeped in Woolf lore who will seize to these connections, though Maclear herself emphasizes the looseness of her basis. So what is its point then? The Woolf connection is not a necessary element of the text, but it provides the book with additional texture, literary and otherwise.
In this story of two sisters, one of them, Virginia, overcome by the doldrums, is captured by a wolfish mood. This mood has an effect on the whole household: “Up became down. Bright became dim. Glad became gloom.” The other sister, Vanessa, tries to cheer Virginia up, but nothing works. Finally, Vanessa lies in bed with her sad sister and listens to her describe the world she longs to escape to, called “Bloomsberry”. Virginia is freed from her wolfish mood after Vanessa creates a version of Bloomsberry on the bedroom walls, and by the story’s end, she’s well enough to go back into the world. Down is up again.
(Must point out connections between this and another wonderful book from KidsCanPress about painted gardens and their restorative effects– Andrew Larsen’s The Imaginary Garden is much adored at our house.)
Very young children (and their parents) will be delighted by the book’s illustrations– Harriet is particularly taken with Virginia’s transformation from wolf to girl on the book’s final pages. They will also come to understand the plot at its most basic level– that there are times when we all feel a bit wolfish. It’s a name to put to what happens on those tantrum-filled days, or when Mommy’s patience is particularly limited. Wolfish moods happen, there’s no real reason for them, and they pass. We feel better.
For older readers who’ve had family members suffering from depression, I imagine this book would be particularly valuable. Yes, it is a simplified depiction of the disease but that simplification is essential for a child to obtain any real understanding what’s going on around them. The reader will understand that nothing they have done has caused their loved one’s suffering, and also that there is little they can do to relieve it.What Vanessa does to help her sister is be near her, to listen to her talk, to lie in bed beside her and look out the window to see the world through her eyes.
Of everything Vanessa paints in Bloomsberry though, most essential is the ladder, “so what was down could climb up”– a recognition that the journey will be Virginia’s alone to make. To her painting she adds also room for Virginia to wander, because wandering is what wolves like to do. And while Maclear has Virginia feeling much better the next morning, the ladder and the wandering space function on a metaphoric level to acknowledge the true complexity of her character’s experience.
The elephant in the room of course is Woolf’s own suicide, and that any child who comes to know the author through Virginia Wolf will discover a very different end to the story. Though I would argue this point by resisting the notion of reducing Woolf’s life and her legacy to her mental illness and the circumstances of her death. Yes, she suffered substantially through her life, but anyone who knows her work well will understand that she had a capacity for joy as great as she had for sorrow. There is so much more to Woolf than the stones in her pockets, and I love that this book celebrates that. She survived her bouts in the doldrums over and over again, and that she finally didn’t in no way undermines the achievement of her life, all 59 years of it. Further, rather than overlooking the circumstances of Woolf’s death, I think that Maclear is using it externally as a fitting counter to her book’s sunny ending. It doesn’t belong in the book, but the connection is there for the reader to make, and I think it is an important one.
March 13, 2012
Never Mind the Patriarchy: Three Books for International Women's Day
Renee Rodin’s Subject to Change was recommended to me via Anakana Schofield’s list of her favourite Vancouver books, and I fell in with with the cover, its light, those clothes. And though Rodin’s approach is very different (these are essays, not short stories), I was reminded of Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes at the Last Minute all the way through, and not just due to similarities in title. Also of Madeline Sonik’s Afflictions and Departures, which more overtly links the personal and political in a collection of essays. Like Paley, Rodin writes about an eccentric, passionate, left-leaning single mother, who is dare-to-be-errant, who scrambles to balance motherhood with writing, and who sees motherhood as a role that comes with political responsibility, and knows a good neighbourhood like Jane Jacobs does. Rodin writes of her upbringing in Jewish Montreal, begins one essay with “…when I was a teenage beatnik”, recounts her experience as a bookstore owner in the ’80s and ’90s, accosts BC Premier Gordon Campbell in the street, serves on a jury, takes care of her father at the end of his life, watches the twin towers fall with her sons in New York City, becomes a grandmother, confronts grief and the unimaginable reality of violent death with the murder of her son’s fiancee– the irresolvable nature of such things, and writes, “It is hard to be consoled and it is hard to console.” These essays are familiar, engaging, and unforgettable, kitchen-sink feminism as written from the trenches. 
The best of Michele Landsberg’s Toronto Star columns have been collected as Writing the Revolution, which I heard about because when her launch took place around the corner from my house, lines of people stretched all the way down the street. To read these columns (from the 1970s to early 2000s) in our current climate is to encounter a bizarre sense of how far we’ve come coupled with being stuck in a time warp. It feels like a different country from one in which bookstores were being firebombed (also around the corner from my house, just a different corner), there was no such thing as maternity leave, and rapists went free due to a variety of reasons women were “asking for it”. But not too far south from us, they’re letting a lunatic who wants to outlaw birth control imagine he’s a serious contender for US presidency, women’s organizations in Canada are no longer publicly funded, and there was that charming police officer whose wardrobe advice inspired the Slut Walks. Landsberg writes, “Because our history is constantly overwritten and blanked out…., we are always reinventing the wheel when we fight for equality.” Landsberg’s passion for and hope for the future of feminism is inspiring and this book is essential reading, providing the kind of perspective that’s entirely necessary if feminists want to keep moving forward.
And then there’s Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman, which I discoverered here. Germaine Greer meets Adrian Mole in this book that had me literally howling with laughter, and reading entire chapters aloud to my husband in bed, which is difficult when one is howling. Howling and honking, even. Yes, here is the book I’ve been waiting my whole life for and which I’m going to buy a copy of so my daughter can read it herself as soon as she cares to. So she will know from the start that there’s one woman who dares to say that brazilian waxes are stupid, high heels are crippling, who asks why no one makes porn in which women are enjoying themselves, and points out that no man really cares what your underpants look like. Liberator of obsessively-masturbating teenage girls! Not remotely sorry for her abortion! Who wants to take back the strident in strident feminist! She writes, “So here is a quick way of working out if you’re a feminist. Put your hand in your pants. a) Do you have a vagina? b) Do you want to be in charge of it?”I want to read you entire chapters too, or maybe the whole book, but that will take too long, so why not just read it? You’ll howl too, and you’ll also be uplifted by the fact that the voice of reason is fucking hilarious.
Oh, to read three brilliant, engaging, non-academic feminist books in a row. It did something to me, though spring and sunshine might deserve some of the credit too, but by the end of Caitlin Moran, I felt amazing, unstoppable, and gorgeous without caveats. As radiant as Renee Rodin in the sunshine. Enormously proud to be carrying on the feminist tradition, and content to be as strident as they come.
March 11, 2012
"A Sister and a Brother" by Elizabeth Hay
“The snow had gone lacy, its surface melted and worked into very fine patterns like old leaves on a forest floor. In places broken twigs had slowly descended through the snow so that when a few feet away you saw what appeared to be a twig-print, then looking straight down you saw the beautiful black twig itself.”
There is something about the intimacy of Elizabeth Hay’s narrative voice and the specificity of her details that makes it difficult to really understand that her stories are imagined. In her short story “A Sister and a Brother”, which appeared in Issue 34.4 of Room Magazine, this point is underlined by her story’s structure, which moves between past and present with such fluidity, and is presented in a casual tone of reportage (“I am laying this out, because of what happened next…”) that at first glace suggests that the story has very little structure at all. Similarly with the story’s final sentences: “My brother is downstairs in the kitchen while I am up here at my desk. All is well between us.” What kind of story would you want to read that delivered you to that point? What is a story at all?
What a story is not is tidy, beginning, middle and end. Ruth narrates from a vantage point of now, able to pick and choose scenes from her past to create the effect she is intending. There are the explosive moments from her childhood (with undertones of wider violence), and the peaceful ones, and each of these is situated within its own particular contexts, which Hay alludes to (“It’s the Easter before our family comes apart in ways that I long for…”). And in the present day, in her relationship with her brother and the dynamic between them, she notes tracks of past resentments, long simmering outbursts. And then peering down into those tracks, as in the scene with twigs in the snow, the past is still there, vivid and real, just fallen down beneath the surface and out of sight.
Ruth never really liked her brother as much as she liked the idea of him, the ideal of him, and he never had any regard for her at all. She is self-aware enough: “And no doubt I am genuinely annoying as is anyone who is hesitant, bothersome, unsure of herself.” And theirs is a perpetual motion machine of Ruth provoking Peter’s ire by simply being, Peter’s ire diminishing her, Ruth resenting this diminishing and thus provoking his ire further. Driven by the hope of reaching him, which once in a while he lets her do, only to push her away again as soon as she lets her guard down.
It’s a complicated, precarious dynamic, and Hay has created in Ruth a character who mulls these things over and over, analysing questions of character and motivation in a way that it would never occur to her brother to do. She tries to see things from her brother’s point of view, sees herself from the perspective of an outsider through a friend’s story about her own detested sister, understands that it’s possible that she just doesn’t understand Peter’s sense of humour, as her parents tell her. That she has that put-upon-ness that so many women take on in middle age in their relations with their families, and her problems with Peter are no perhaps more complex than that. Not that she’ll leave it at that, because she wants something specific, and she’ll keep unpacking her baggage over and over: “How do we build a love out of the dark timber of the past?”
She says, “To hear an honest something, that’s what I live for.” But even as she’s listening, she’s pleading her case.
March 4, 2012
Arcadia by Lauren Groff
I fell in love with Lauren Groff in 2008 with The Monsters of Templeton, a crazy novel with its own sea-creature. When I read her short story collection Delicate Edible Birds in 2009, I discovered that I’d actually been in love with her since 2006 when I first read her work with the short story “L. DeBard and Aliette” in The Atlantic. And it has been a pleasure to love a current author so unabashedly in a time when so many books disappoint, though her latest novel Arcadia would make or break our winning streak. So it with great joy that I find I’m able to repeat word-for-word an excerpt from my Monsters of Templeton review four years ago: “I finished reading this last night near 1am, and couldn’t sleep for a long time, just thinking about it, and smiling.” Groff is not only as good as ever, but she’s better and better.
Lauren Groff is a rule-breaker, a boundary-pusher, a genre-blurrer. There’s nobody else quite like like her writing right now, and she writes on the shoulders of those who came before her, with references in her latest book to Greek myth, Melville, the Brothers Grimm, and Eliot. She also writes with a deep appreciation and awe for history, for the role of story within history, and for the epic. Her first novel had a larger-than-lifeness about it, which is not so unusual for a book a writer has been working her life for, but it’s less usual for a second novel and for it to be pulled off so successfully too.
Arcadia starts at the beginning of the world, Arcadia, a hippie commune in New York State near the end of the 1960s. It’s the only world Bit has ever known, Bit short for “Little Bit”, tiny from the day he was born, his early life spent with his loving parents Abe and Hannah in the Arcadia bakery truck. As the community grows and progresses, we see the Arcadians unable to isolate themselves from the evils of the outside world– even in Arcadia, Hannah suffers from profound depression, there is infighting among the community leaders, problems with drug-addicted runaways who keep turning up, and trouble getting enough food and resources to keep everybody fed and healthy. Bit and his peers suffer from extreme deprivation, and yet are also granted the security that comes from being so firmly knit into a community fabric and feeling a sense of belonging. When the balance tips too far the other way, however, Bit’s parents finally make the decision to leave, and he’s cast out into the world for the first time at the age of 14.
I was having a discussion with my husband yesterday about the difficulty of settling into science fiction or fantasy novels whose whole worlds have to be created in order for the story to finally start, and I had similar difficulty getting into Arcadia, coming to understand the specificity of this singular place, its peculiar vernacular, social and political structures. I like my fiction very much here and now, and Arcadia seemed so far afield from both these things. I wasn’t always altogether sure what the point was, what the payoff of my efforts would be. I’m not a sci-fi/fantasy person, and while Groff is not a sci-fi/fantasy writer, she plays with the tropes and structures of genre in her literature– she’s the one who put the sea-monster in her novel after all (but then she is also the writer who made me love a novel with a sea-monster in it. Miracles will never cease).
So although I enjoyed the book from the very start, I wasn’t swept away by it until half way through when we find Bit grown, twenty years since we saw him last, living in New York City with a young daughter. And suddenly, I had a sense of everything Arcadia had been working toward, and Groff’s method became apparent, this novel’s massive sense of scale and its ambition. Bit has married and had a child with Helle, an Arcadian he’d grown up with who’s been troubled for years, and has recently disappeared leaving him responsible for the care of their 3 year-old daughter. He is left to navigate his grief, the practical matters of single-fatherhood, and the fact of his still-alienation from the world around him, his idealization of his childhood. He’s still close to the other Arcadian children he grew up with, in fact they’re the only people he’s close to in the world, because no one else understands the peculiarity of his situation. He goes out on a date with a perfectly nice woman, but is unable to take things any further when she tells him, “I read Atlas Shrugged in college and thought, Oh my God, everything’s coming into focus, finally. You know what I mean?”
And of course he doesn’t, but he’s not entirely alone. He does feel a profound sense of connection with the city and its inhabitants. He notes that New Yorkers did not recover from the Twins Towers attacks in the the way he had expected, that what they had lost was
“not real estate of lives. It was the story they had told about themselves from the moment the Dutch had decanted from their ships…: that this place was filled with water and wildlife was rare, equitable. That it would embrace everyone who came here, that there would be room, and a chance to thrive, glamour and beauty. That this equality of purpose would keep them safe. “
Bit understands, Groff writes, “that when we lose the stories we have believed about ourselves, we are losing more than stories, we are losing ourselves.”
When we find Bit again, it’s 2018 and the entire world is in peril. Low-lying nations are being swept away, Venice sunk, and an epidemic is sweeping the world, drawing closer to New York City. Ordinary life goes on against this backdrop, however, and when his father dies and his mother is left alone to suffer the last stage of ALS, he must return with his daughter to Arcadia where his parents had returned to build a home for their final years. And it is here where Bit must make peace with where he came from, forgive his parents for their mixed legacy, and find a way to finally begin facing forward in his life, his own story, even as the end of the world seems to drawing nigh.
February 27, 2012
Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman
As I was almost unequivocally the craziest, most anxious pregnant woman who ever lived, I had been particularly nervous what would happen to me when my child was out in the world, the whole “heart on the outside of one’s body” cliche. I’d expected to become neurotic, hovering, unable to sleep at night lest my child succumbed to SIDS, but then I met Harriet, was bowled over by the sheer force of her vitality, her fierceness, and I never really worried again. It was clear to me from the start that she was an actual person separate from me, so absolutely possessed of a distinctive self I’d have very little control over shaping, and it’s been with such fascination that I’ve watched that self developing into the someone she was destined to be from the first ear-piercing scream she ever uttered.
Which is to say that I’m laid-back as parents of 3 year-olds go, which is surprising because I’m laid-back about absolutely nothing else. Though I’m laid-back within certain parameters (which I’ve been lucky enough to have success with): I’ve been maniacal from the get-go about cultivating good eating habits in my child and nurturing an appreciation for healthy food and good flavours. Harriet is usually a pro at eating in nice-ish restaurants. It’s also important to me that Harriet learns to entertain herself and enjoy her own company, which is essential for my sanity as a mother who works from home (and makes it a priority to carve out a good deal of “me time”). And in many ways, these are the priorities that have shaped whatever “parenting philosophy” I’ve established for myself, so when I heard of Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, I thought, “Hey, that’s up my street.”
Because it’s important, of course, to only ever read parenting books that affirm your worldview and what you’re doing already. (And I’m not being facetious. The alternative is to be driven insane.)
Druckerman’s book, about her experiences of pregnancy and motherhood as an American expatriate in Paris, is being marketed as this year’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Druckerman herself as a “parenting expert”. Which is misleading, because Bringing Up Bebe is certainly no manifesto, and it has much more in common with the best book about babies that I’ve ever read, which is Dream Babies by Christina Hardyment, a history of baby advice “From John Locke to Gina Ford”. Hardyment’s book instilled in me the empowering knowledge that there is no such thing as a baby expert, and that ideas of baby advice and parenting philosophies (scientifically based or otherwise) have been faddish since the 16th century. So that in those brutal early days of new motherhood when I had no idea what I was doing, at least I could be confident that nobody else really did either.
In her book, Druckerman similarly shows how notions of parenting and parenthood (and also children and childhood) are cultural constructs, and her approach is far more anthropological than “how-to”. She shows how French notions of pregnancy are so different from what she experienced as an American engrossed in week-by-week manuals with advice about how every morsel of food that goes in her mouth should be good for her baby. French women around her worried far less about their pregnancies, eat whatever they want (though Druckerman points out that French women don’t eat a lot in the first place), are encouraged to “nurture their inner woman”, and are not only told that they can have sex in pregnancy but are provided with a list of comfortable positions to do it in.
The book goes on to show how babies in France begin sleeping through the night very early, how they are taught patience and independence by their parents not always responding immediately to their needs (but rather, their parents observe those needs from afar to discern how they can best be met). French babies are considered rational people, albeit small ones, who can come to understand the world around them with reasoned explanation (and can understand the needs of their parents and family as well). French children develop independence by entering day care from an early age, and parents can have confidence in the state-funded institution with rigorous standards, instructors with university degrees who’ve chosen their work as a profession (and are well-compensated for it), and healthy meals brought in by chefs.
Parents maintain authority over their children, have high expectations for good behaviour, and yet also don’t run their children’s lives (or allow their children to run theirs). Children are allowed significant freedom and develop higher abilities and a greater sense of responsibility in accordance. Many of the differences in parenting are subtle, and can be understood through differences in language– instead of “Be good,” French children are told, “Be wise” (or “Show good judgement”). Instead of “discipline”, French parents talk about”education”. There is a set of parameters which parents are unbending about, but their children are offered a great deal of freedom within these.
Though Druckerman shows a clear bias towards the French approach to parenting, her book is not a polemic. She wishes her own children to retain a sense of themselves as Americans as they grow up in France, she devotes an entire chapter to breastfeeding not being a priority for French mothers, she admits that though French women have greater support in furthering their careers, they split household roles with spouses more unevenly than American parents do, and are paid lower wages for their work. She shows that until the 1960s, the French approach to parenting was rigid and cold, that effects of this remain, and that some French people (and American expats) are absolutely starving for American ideas of self-affirmation. And she also shows that being a French parent is not easy, that you can’t figure out how to be one by following a guide, and that like any parent, they’re ever responding to new challenges thrown their way. It’s just that, philosophical approaches to parenthood being what they are, French parents respond to those challenges very differently.
What Druckerman doesn’t give enough credit to, however, is the role of institutionalized daycare in France in creating her institutionalized Frenchness. (She concedes, by the way, that life in France outside of Paris and even outside her social circle in Paris is different from and more varied than what her book portrays.) A few times, she mentions that the mothers of the children with such sophisticated palettes don’t even cook themselves, for example, which leads me to conclude that school lunches have a greater role in shaping children’s food tastes than family meals do. It’s not surprising that French children fall into line in institutional settings along with their peers with such rigorous standards and expectations upon them. Perhaps if we all have the benefit of such a system, all of us could have children so obliging.
So Druckerman’s book is not that useful if you’re reading it in the hope of cultivating a little French-person of your own. (It’s also not useful if you wish to be not fat. French mothers, apparently, spend a lot of time baking with their children, but exercise restraint enough not to eat the result, which is a skill that is beyond me.) But what Bringing Up Bebe is useful for is challenging our ideas about childhood and child-rearing, broadening our perspectives to see the different ways these ideas are approached, and allowing us to see our own approaches as the cultural constructions they are. Druckerman’s writing is also light, funny and engaging, and her book is as informative as it is a pleasure to read.
February 22, 2012
Afflictions and Departures by Madeline Sonik
In her essay collection Afflictions and Departures, which has been shortlisted for the 2012 Charles Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction, Madeline Sonik stitches her personal stories to the fabric of her time. Her narrative voice is blessed with startling omniscience, with the benefit of hindsight, and with an acute awareness of both how the extraordinary can be illuminated by ordinary detail, and also of how the ordinary and extraordinary are so often intricately connected. Sonik’s prose reveals her poet’s skill, as does these essays’ use of imagery and symbolism, but the broadness of her vision and the deftness with which she fits together surprising pieces of reality is evocative of Joan Didion’s masterful non-fiction.
In “First Passage”, Sonik imagines her parents’ passage on the Queen Mary in 1959, a glamorous voyage toward hope and possibility that would stand out in contrast to the disappointment of the rest of their lives. As the journey is a point of departure for the collection, it is also such a point for Sonik herself whose conception takes en-route. And so the voyage is also envisioned as a point of departure for absolutely everything that follows after: “It is 1959, a year before birth control pills are made available to women, twenty-three years before the AIDS epidemic makes condoms available everywhere and politically correct. The sun is rising through a starboard hatch.” That the Queen Mary’s rudder weighs 140 tons and that in 1970, and that Sonik’s father will become a violent alcoholic is given equal emphasis, and by the end of 1959, the USSR will have taken satellite photos of the far side of the moon.
In “Korean Moon”, Sonik reflects on her father’s war, The Korean War, humanizing and showing sympathy for a character who’s such a monster in the rest of the book.
“Shadows” is a short study of the dark side of the late ’50s and early ’60s, before the darkness became omnipresent for a while and veneers were cracked once and for all (or for a while). A typical paragraph: “I am whisked away, swaddled in pink flannel, and tucked into a hospital nursery crib far from my mother’s ward. In future years, irreversible brain damage and mental retardation will be linked to the lead-based paint that coat baby cribs. A decade from now, ninety percent of children under the age of six will have elevated lead levels in their blood and the government will ban the use of lead-based house paints. Studies will show that newborns who do not bond with their mothers in the sensitive period after birth risk emotional despondency and insecurity. But right now, as a nurse prepares my first bottle and my mother, still numb, prepares to light a cigarette, the daffodil sun is still shining and we are all blithely ignorant.”
In “For Posterity”, Sonik begins with a ride on The Maid of the Mist, considers Niagara Falls and concepts of love and romance, which brings a connection to the nearby Love Canal (whose name has surprising origins) whose contaminated ground’s toxins are leaking into the Niagara River and turning up scores of dead fish along the shores which they don’t see from the boat, so busy are they marvelling at the majestic power of the falls. She then thinks about suicides, Niagara Falls’ underside, about her parents’ own troubled relationship, and about all she didn’t yet know about love and everything that life would teach her.
In “Easter”, Sonik explores the inner lives of families, what goes on behind the row-on-rows of tidy doors that line their neighbourhood streets. This idea reappears in other essays, the sounds and signs of child abuse going unremarked upon, broken marriages, the inner lives of mothers, the secret worlds of cemeteries and the play they inspire.
“Fetters” deals with her own teenage drama juxtaposed against the backdrop of her father’s slow and painful death from cancer: to the boy who’s just broken her heart, she asks, “‘Just say with me until my father dies.’ It’s a ridiculous request and I don’t know why I ask it…. It shouldn’t surprise me in the least when he says, “No,” but it does… I can’t stop myself from babbling and pleading for him to reconsider. My father is dying. He’s not expected to live beyond the week.’
“Flush” begins with Sonik noting that she was born in the year the toilet made its cinematic debut (in Psycho), and marks the pivotal points in her life at which a toilet has functions as a surprising centre. Containing a line that would be fitting as this entire collection’s subtitle: “I didn’t know then, and it would be years before I learned…”
Afflictions and Departures is a beautiful book, fusing fact and feeling, the specific and universal, the domestic with the whole wide world, and the effect is a dazzling synergy.
February 16, 2012
Leaving Berlin by Britt Holmstrom
Leaving Berlin by Britt Holmstrom opens with an epigraph from Carol Shields’ The Stone Diaries: “It is inevitable that each of us will be misunderstood; this it seems, is part of twentieth-century wisdom.” Which sets up two expectations that Holmstrom takes care to meet, the first that these are stories about (dis)connections between people, and also that we’re entering a Shieldsian universe.
And indeed, Holmstrom writes with a similar approach to the short story to Shields’. Her narrators are omniscient, she’s an orchestrator, she doesn’t go in for plot and explosions, and her stories aren’t linear at all. Instead they’re structured like nesting boxes, each story holding other stories inside to be unpacked, and inside those are stories more. So that an single story here can consist of two women sorting their laundry who’ve never had an intimate conversation, or strangers sitting in a train station waiting room, or two women sitting beneath the Eiffel Tower who don’t say a word to one another, and yet feelings, misapprehensions, misunderstandings, and prejudices cause characters to delve deep into their own histories, and whole stories are spun (and stories upon stories). Much like, just say, a story can be written about the absurd sight of an older woman in short-shorts unabashedly mowing her lawn.
These stories are connected by their characters, who are usually unassuming women whose simple theories of the universe are being tested; by their geographies, which are usually small Canadian cities, or European cities as envisioned by the inhabitants of small Canadian cities; by the references to art, artists, music and musicians which recur throughout; and by the marriages, which are usually passionless and horrible. And the connections between women, positive or otherwise. And I absolutely knew I loved this book with “The Company She Kept”, about a group of office mates who become obsessed with a colleague who spins preposterous stories about her exotic life which can never be quite proven false, though the women all know she’s lying, of course. But why does she go to so much trouble to do so? Why would you borrow a punch bowl if you were never going to use it? And as these questions are endlessly fascinating, these women’s fascination takes them beyond limits of their comfort, changing the course of their lives in the process.
“Under the Eiffel Tower” is an exercise on the distance between the way we see ourselves and how others see us, about Carol, a woman whose fear of heights kicks in at the last minute and she’s left to sit and wait as her husband and their party ride to the top of the Eiffel Tower. On a nearby bench is a woman who is probably a Gypsy, though that idea makes Carol uncomfortable. Is it racist to suppose someone is a Gypsy? And thoughts of this woman take her back to a story her mother told from her own childhood in Denmark about playing with Gypsy children, which leads Carol to a story from her own life about a brief (and uncharacteristic) love affair years ago with a fellow traveler who gave her a St. Christopher medal she wears around her neck (though the story of why he gave it to her is not so straightforward). And it’s the medal now that a small boy has his eye on, a Gypsy boy who’s already had the never to ask her for her change, a boy who Carol assumes must belong to the woman on the bench beside hers. Though is that a racist thought too? And as Carol gets up and finally walks away, it is revealed that Carol’s judgments of the woman and boy have been right and wrong in the most shocking ways.
I also loved “The Rebel Doll”, about a Canadian woman who goes to visit her sister in the northwest of England, and forges a connection with a young girl in the train station waiting room. When the woman’s sister makes a casual statement about the woman’s mothering of her own children, however, the nature of the woman’s connection to the young girl is illuminated in ways that surprise us as much as it does the woman.
I loved the characters who were summed with lines like “…an alcoholic misfit who at the age twenty-eight had drowned his litter of ambitions to avoid the tiresome responsibility of having to look after them.” Holmstrom pulls no punches, takes no prisoners, which at best gives her prose a most delicious biting effect, but at worst renders some characters and plots as one dimensional. I really enjoyed “The Sky Above Her Head” about a woman who’s trapped in the ties of her family and takes the sweetest revenge at a prairie gas station (to a Mungo Jerry soundtrack, no less), but I wondered if anyone could be so unrelentingly unsympathetic as that sister was? The effect is decidedly amusing, and I certainly smiled, but such touches lacked the depth of others.
Leaving Berlin is a bit different from most Canadian short story collections I’ve read lately (and I’ve read plenty) in two significant ways that have to do with its author’s biography. First, that Holmstrom was born in Sweden, and her collection reflects such an international awareness of the local, and also what it means to be foreign, even though the foreigners here are usually Canadians abroad. And second, that this isn’t her first book– Leaving Berlin is her fourth book since 1998, and the book lists Holmstrom herself as having been born in 1946. And you sense that with this book, that here is a writer with experience in both writing and life, and who is not striving in the same way as a young writer still learning and yearning to prove herself might be. Which is to say that there is sureness here in Holmstrom’s voice, a real maturity, and what a pleasure it really is to encounter a writer in her prime.
