June 15, 2011

Second Rising by Catherine M.A. Wiebe

Second Rising by Catherine M.A. Wiebe appealed to me as the perfect intersection between two books I’ve enjoyed in the past: Alayna Munce’s novel When I Was Young and in My Prime (about a young woman contemplating her grandparents’ decline), and Diane Tye’s food studies book Baking as Biography (which I love, love, loved). Though Second Rising wasn’t immediately resonant with me: the poetic language was hard for me to decipher, and though I worked hard to permeate the metaphors to get to the meaning underneath, I couldn’t find it, and this frustrated me. I persisted, however, mostly because of the evocative way that Wiebe writes about food. I had to shake off the urge to go and bake a loaf of bread, to fill my house with the fresh smell Wiebe recreates with her prose, and partake in the ritual of margarine-slathered heels. She writes about squash soup, and pickles, and ham sandwiches, and it was made me hungry, but also perfectly illustrated the connection between her narrator and her grandmother who are particularly close when the former is small (when therefore, according to the grandmother, the two are particularly close in age).

With the second half of the novel, however, the method of the first became clear to me. I began to understand that the language and metaphors of the first half had been so difficult to understand because they were spoken by the grandmother as she suffered from dementia. These wonderful ideas, this language with so much magic at its root, seemingly, is nonsensical, and yet in preserving it, Wiebe makes it otherwise. She writes about decline not as decline, but as a mode of still-living, with connections and singular moments just like in any life. Her grandmother’s’decline actually reawakens the narrator to the closeness she’d experienced with her grandmother when she herself had just been young, except that it is the narrator, now-grown, who is chief cook in the kitchen while her grandmother sits on the stool and watches. The relationship, however, is complicated by the narrator’s own ambivalence about her relationship with her grandmother, about her own absences while her grandmother was in the final throes of her illness.

This is a different kind of book than others about Alzheimers I’ve encountered– Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles or Michael Ignatieff’s Scar Tissue, both about the early-onset of the disease, would refuse to so give dementia its place, but at the end of a long life, there is poetry to the process of shutting down, the loss is not far removed from a natural process. And yet, Wiebe still addresses the practical matters of the disease– the notes the grandmother leaves, and how she preserves these notes and reuses them so that nobody notices her handwriting’s decline. About what it means when a woman who bakes is not permitted to bake any more, and there is a particularly poignant scene in which the granddaughter contemplates how the disease has altered the dynamic of her grandparents’ relationship.

Second Rising is a book about memories,about memories of memories and what distance does to our stories. And it’s about the role food plays in nurturing our family connections, linking generations as it feeds our bellies and souls.

June 14, 2011

Mini Reviews: What I've been reading lately

I put Kyran Pittman’s collection of essays Planting Dandelions: Field Notes from a Semi-Domesticated Life on hold at the library after reading the Globe and Mail review of it. I was interested in the book because I’m also a stay-at-home-mom who does not exactly self-define that way, and who feels a bit unsuited to the stereotype, however perfectly happy I am in this life. I also liked the way the author celebrated blogging in this profile. And as I read the book, during the whole of last Sunday when I was sick in bed, I also loved that this is a blogger-turned-author who can really write. (Though she’s got literary pedigree.) It was a wonderful collection of essays, and I particularly enjoyed her reflections of new parenthood from the vantage point of ten years down the line, her sympathetic examination of the attachment-parenting, organic-fooding, toddler-breastfeeding Mama she used to be, fierce in her judgment of others (and herself)– the perspective was refreshing, and illuminating. But the book is about more than that– though I was wary of her “party-girl turned housewife” persona (mainly because I was never a party-girl, and have a natural distrust for anyone prettier than I am), she kept it mostly understated. I loved her piece on raising boys, on her family’s financial struggles and its effect on her marriage, on raising her kids in the American South and the contradictions inherent in their pride in the place, and her own contradictory experience of being a Canadian in America, on her unwillingness to admit where she belonged. It was a great read.

Before that, I’d read Rachel Cusk’s latest novel The Bradshaw Variations. Rachel Cusk is one of my favourite authors, but we have an odd relationship, her and I. First, I’m never entirely sure that I’m enjoying her novels until I’ve finished one. Or perhaps I mean that “enjoying” is not what one does with a Rachel Cusk book, which is also the reason I’ve never been able to write a proper review of one either. Instead of being critically attuned to the text, I have to turn myself off and be completely immersed. It is in this way that she’s like Virginia Woolf– you’ve got to let the text take you where it needs to. Sometimes, the prose is so heightened (also like Woolf) that it gets to be too much, but then you realize that realism was never her intention. The story is beside the point, which is annoying, but then this is Rachel Cusk and the point is so so important, never mind the story. Anyway, I loved it, but perhaps I have to. What I don’t have to, however, is to point out that the second-last chapter of this novel is one of the best short-stories I have ever read. Disturbing, dark and hilarious, and absolutely perfectly executed.

The Soul of the World by Christopher Dewdney has been sitting on shelf for years. And no wonder– it is a book about the nature of time. Which is not something I’ve ever been moved to pick up, but nor to get rid of either, though I wondered as the dust-jacket became particularly dusty. But I am a girl who came of age on A Wrinkle in Time, Back to the Future, Tom’s Midnight Garden, A Handful of Time etc. And because I’m reading by to-be-reads from A-Z, I’ve made it to the Ds, and it’s time for Dewdney now: the book was wonderful. I rode the subway home from the NMAs on Friday whilst reading about the invention of hours, minutes, and clock faces. I loved the line that we are to time as owls are to air. I loved the paragraphs that were completely indecipherable to me, and then went to say, “And here’s where things get complicated…” Or, “Here’s where things get weird”. And it was all weird, because it’s about physics, wormholes, De Loreans, photography, the telephone, movies, seasons, Toronto, our expanding universe, the past, future and the present. Which is now. No, now. Absolutely ungraspable. As is so much that I encountered in this book, but didn’t worry too much about the details, and therefore just enjoyed the ride. Dust or not, this is a book I’ll be keeping.

June 9, 2011

The Odious Child by Carolyn Black

I’m very happy that Carolyn Black has agreed to be next up at Author Interviews @ Pickle Me This. First, because it’s been awhile, this mostly because it’s been awhile since I’ve read a book that’s made me curious enough to go search the author out for some illumination. Second, because her book The Odious Child has left me so curious, most of all to discover who Carolyn Black’s influences are. I can’t figure them out. (Although she is thoroughly umPymmish, however, her characters do work in Pym-like occupations I find infinitely fascinating– indexers, librarians, museum cataloguers. Yum). She writes like no one else I’ve ever read, like a writer who’s standing on the shoulders of nobody, her stories’ own foundations are so very solid. There is a fantastical element to the stories, but nothing whimsical. You might call some of the stories’ structures “experimental”, but it’s not the right word because it suggests the author didn’t know her outcomes beforehand and Carolyn Black’s “experiments” are so incredibly, impeccably controlled.

The story that kept me up in the night thinking about it, and wouldn’t get out of my head the following day, was “Baby Mouth”, which is the very best illustration of maternal ambivalence I have ever read. Lionel Shriver also did it well, but she forgot to put the love there, and Carolyn Black doesn’t, with a story that so much echoed my own experience that the similarities made me shiver with every page I turned. About a mother who’s not perfectly suited to the new baby in her care, and how those dark early days come back to her almost a year old when her baby still hasn’t smiled. Wondering, but unable to confess, if a violent moment of abandon could have led to her baby’s problem… (Here is my obligatory clarification: we had no violent abandon at our house, except for the time I punched the wall [but not through it! There is restraint, albeit the wall’s, and not mine, but alas…])

The story is funny, as Black satirizes the absurd industry of modern parenting, but it’s also sad as the mother’s desperation mounts, and the love is tender, and Black’s empathy with her character is remarkable, which is the case through the whole book, even in the stories that are completely out there. And it’s where the solidity comes from, I think, from a writer who is so completely invested in her people and their points of view. Which, you’d think, would go without saying, but I’ve read a lot of books where this is not the case. Particularly not when the author’s people include, for example, a disembodied head…

Anyway, though Carolyn Black’s first book is one of the strongest debuts I’ve ever encountered, I’m not sure this is a book for the short story novice: it demands close attention and several leaps of faith, and these readers might not be ready for it yet. But for those who are already admirers of the form, The Odious Child will prove remarkably rewarding.

June 5, 2011

The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright

“You think it’s about sex, then you remember the money,” notes Gina, the narrator of Anne Enright’s fabulous new novel The Forgotten Waltz, and that statement just about sums up the book. Though it’s hard to forget about the money, the embarrassment of riches, real estate fortunes (characters who feel inadequate about not owning four houses)– it’s there from the very beginning of the novel, whose story unfolds from the turn of the century with Ireland’s economic boom, and comes crashing down with its eventual bust (which I, with my minimal interest in economics, learned about in this fantastic Vanity Fair article “When Irish Eyes Are Crying”).

The Forgotten Waltz is all about real estate, in the tradition of Howards End. And like The Last September, another Irish novel which I read last week, a personal story is cast against a national backdrop. The personal story is about another kind of real estate, about taking what isn’t your own. Still suffering from the fallout of her extramarital affair, from having fallen in love with another woman’s husband (who is somebody’s father too), Gina recounts the story of her own journey from boom to bust. The story, however, just like the story of the economic boom, is hardly straightforward: “I can’t be too bothered here with chronology. The idea that if you tell it, one thing after another, then everything will make sense./ It doesn’t make sense.”

Enright won the 2007 prize for her novel The Gathering, though I found her memoir Making Babies and her short story collection Yesterday’s Weather much more resonant. The way these two books zeroed in on domestic detail, on objects and what her characters did with them, and Enright’s doing that here once again. Quite different from the focused detail itself, however, is her conversational, meandering prose, with issue-skirting and repetition, and the effect is to cast a spell of its own. And how this woman can craft a sentence: “The Danes who did the refurbishment put in irrigation the way you might do the wiring so the place is a thicket, and though I am cynical about these things (the idea that a few plans makes us more ‘green’) I even voted for the canaries, at some meeting, only to be outvoted on the grounds of canary shit.”

Enright is funny, in particular when considering tender things, as anyone who’s read her mothering memoir is already aware. She writes with more sympathy than Rachel Cusk, whose writing is similar (I just read her The Bradshaw Variations, and there are all kinds of connections between the two novels.). Enright is fully attuned to the strange dynamics of modern society and all its accoutrements– the mobile phone text messages that are integral in Gina and Sean’s affair are perfectly worked into the novel’s weave. And she is careful to include more traditional methods of obsessive love, Gina sitting outside his house at night, for example, watching the lights inside go off one-by-one.

Each chapter is titled with the name of a pop song, whose musicality complements the nature of Enright’s prose, but also serves to contrast perceptions of love with its more sordid realities. Sure, “It’s in His Kiss”, agrees Enright, but then she examines what “it” is exactly, and the possibility that one kiss can take a character places she never intended to go and won’t be able to turn away from.

June 1, 2011

Mini Review: Look at Me by Anita Brookner

Can you blame me for having kept Anita Brookner’s Look at Me on my shelf for years? Seriously, the cover is hideous. But because it started with B, I got to it finally, and though the start was slow, it grew on me. Which is unsurprising, because the book is so Barbara Pymmish– spinster librarians, their tea rituals and lonely lunches. But only superficially, actually. In her book Felicity and Barbara Pym, Harrison Solow writes that Brookner “lacks the insularity which makes the English, English” and that her heroines “struggle incessantly, never in balance”. There is no charm to Anita Brookner, but this, of course, is why her books seem more literary. (I am not sure that they actually are, or perhaps what I mean is that Pym’s unliterary-ness is only understood by those unschooled in Pym.)

Look at Me is the story of Frances Hinton, spinster librarian, who feels she’s finally glimpsed what life is, what the world is, when she is befriended by Nick and Alix Fraser (who Jonathan Yardly writes “could just as well be Tom and Daisy [Buchanan]’s British cousins”). The couple, however, plays with her affections, and at the end of the story she’s left with her same lonely life, though I wonder about Frances’ own role in her fate. She has cast herself as an observer, but as a result, we have very little understanding of her character, of how she comes across to others. We must put the pieces together with statements by the malicious Alix Fraser, and it is left to us to decide which character is more unreliable. Frances, who is also beginning a career as a writer, may have more control of her narrative than she appears to.

May 30, 2011

Mini Review: The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen

I’ve almost made it through the Bs, and it’s amazing how much I’ve loved these books. Puts me in the right too for having kept these books around even though I wasn’t bothering to read them– there was a reason after all.  The Last September is the third book I’ve read by Elizabeth Bowen– the first was The House in Paris and the second was The Heat of the Day which I found awfully strange and difficult. Unsurprisingly, as it was only her second novel, The Last September is more accessible than the others, more straightforward, but this is also a very mature book for a second novel by a writer who was only thirty when she wrote it.

The Last September takes place in rural Ireland in 1920 during the Irish War of Independence. The setting is wholly domestic, and minor dramas take place between various characters who are so compelling that all of this would be absolutely enough, but for the war taking place in the background. The war is still distant enough that characters don’t take it seriously, or feel that it has anything to do with them. English soldiers stationed nearby are seen as useful for even numbers dances, and the Irish girls fall in love with men, much to their families’ consternation. There are random-seeming bursts of violence, surprising knowledge that familiar neighbours are involved in the cause of independence, but largely, life goes on with its tennis games, afternoon teas, dances, and walks in the woods steeped in import.

It is not that Bowen plays with the juxtaposition, but rather that the background informs the foreground and vice versa. The connections are subtle (as is so much in this novel of manners) and it’s just that the characters don’t notice them, and the reader unversed in Irish history mightn’t either. Which will only make the story’s ending all the more shocking, and cast the entire novel in a whole new light.

May 22, 2011

Mini Reviews: English Journey and Nightwood

This reading alphabetically thing is working for me, forcing open books that have been languishing on the shelf for far too long. The only problem is that I got three new books on the weekend (plucked out of a box on the sidewalk), which does make me fear that the alphabet will never be got through. The other problem is whatever weirdness will ensue by me following Djuna Barnes with Erma Bombeck, two writers with nothing in common except the letter B. In fact, I think that Djuna Barnes might be the opposite of Erma Bombeck. We shall see…

Anyway, I read Beryl Bainbridge’s An English Journey: Or The Road to Milton Keynes last week, which I acquired for $1 at the UofT Bookstore sidewalk sale back when my life was as such that I’d push a stroller for miles in miles in aimless pursuit of a nap. I’d never read Beryl Bainbridge, but I like England, and I’d just read this review of  JB Priestly’s English Journey, a book commemorated by Bainbridge 50 years later in the television program recreating Priestly’s travels out of which her book was born. And I loved it, first because Bainbridge is a fabulous prose writer, with a marvelous dry wit. And because the contrast between her “modern” England of 1983 and today has made this book an historical document onto itself. Because of lines like a girl “with thighs shaped like cellos”, “It seemed there was neither time nor room for pedestrians. We were literally a dying breed”. How she describes her family: “Class conscious, [everyone was] either dead common or a cut above themselves. And “I’ve never worn a hat since my mother bought me on at the Bon Marche and I carried home potatoes in in when my carrier bag bust.” That this is a writer who can write, “I was in Coronation Street more than twenty-five years ago. I played one of Ken Barlow’s girlfriend’s before he married Valerie.” Which I appreciate, and I don’t even know Valerie.

***

I don’t know that there is a book that has sat longer on my shelf than Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, which a friend of mine gave to me in 1997. According to a note on the inside cover, I’d read it in 2001, but I couldn’t remember having done so, and no wonder, really. With apologies to T.S. Eliot, I think I‘m just an ordinary reader. I’m not going to say that this is a bad book, but only that I was almost wholly unable to penetrate its goodness. Almost wholly, because there were certain parts of the book where I felt things had really got going, but then Dr. Matthew O’Connor would open his mouth and start talking again. (In his intro, T.S. thought the Doctor was the best part. This is one of the reasons I suspect T.S. and I are not meant to be kindred souls.)

Apparently, Barnes is quite Joycean, which might be part of the problem. Eliot wrote that the novel would “appeal primarily to readers of poetry”, and I get that, in particular because of how much Nightwood reminded me of “The Wasteland”. But even “The Wasteland” rendered as 170 pages of prose would be too much. In Nightwood, if I just let the words fall the way I do whilst reading a poem like “The Wasteland”, I would find myself having drifted entirely away. So then I read more carefully, get to the bottom of every line, which is also unsatisfying because the prose makes no sense at all except in a very general sense, sounds pretty, washes over, but then, oops! There I’ve gone away again. You see? For me, there was no joy in the exercise. And I don’t think it’s every a very good thing when one of the best bits of a novel is its brevity.

May 19, 2011

Mini Review: Pleased to Meet You by Caroline Adderson

Remember Caroline Adderson? She popped up on a list of underrated writers last year, and it occurred to me that I’d never read her. Which was timely, because she had a new novel coming out, The Sky is Falling, which I read and loved, and then Nathalie gave me  Pleased to Meet You for Christmas, and I’d been saving it ever since then.

I enjoyed the book entire, though it wasn’t until about half way through that the stories became really vivid to me. Beginning with the story “Knives”, which was the first of my two favourites, about a group of house-sharing university students whose new housemate disrupts their lives, managing to see inside their souls, steal those souls, and multiple knife sets in the process–he gives them weapons to destroy themselves with. Such a smart, funny story whose characters are idiots, but the dynamic between them invests them with multiple dimensions. And then with “Mr. Justice” about a family of miserable people, about losing a father you’ve never had, and about the breaks some of us have to make in order to find happiness. There are no good guys in this story, but we see its characters from every angle, most essentially these glimpses when they’re going on like they don’t even know that we’re there.

May 15, 2011

Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien

It is impossible not to notice how much Madeleine Thien’s latest novel Dogs at the Perimeter resembles her first novel Certainty, which was one of my favourite novels of 2007. Both novels are tapestries, of fact and story, of art and science, of grudges and absences, of history, the present, and ghosts. If is not that Thien has written the same book twice, but rather that both novels have been fashioned via similar technique, of the same-shaped pieces, that Thien continues to have the same pre-occupations, and now she’s transferred them to another set of characters, to another time and a different place in the world.

Dogs at the Perimeter opens with the disappearance of Hiroji Matsui, a Montreal neurologist, his absence noted by his friend and colleague Janie for whom such vanishings are familiar. In fact, this familiarity has been one of her connections to Hiroji, who has lost people as well–his father at a very young age, soon after their family had immigrated to Canada, and his brother James who’d disappeared in Cambodia while working as a doctor for the Red Cross in the early 1970s.

As a child, Janie had lost her own family in her native Cambodia, her translator father taken from the family soon after the Khmer Rouge came to power. The rest of the family was moved away from Phnom Penh, forced to work in agricultural communes, and eventually Janie becomes separated from all of them. Between this time and her eventual arrival in Canada, she experiences considerable trauma which is forced back to the surface of her consciousness after Hiroji disappears. And then Janie becomes a missing person herself, living apart from her son and husband for reasons that don’t become clear to the reader until close to the end of the book.

Dogs at the Perimeter is a strange blend of dream and reality, one often blending into the other. Characters partake in others’ fantasies, encourage and support one another in delusions, which makes sense in a country being driven into the ground through a revolution sustained via these very same methods. Everything is fluid–to save themselves, characters adopt different names, different identities, slip in and out of the world, giving and taking what they can. So that there are so many identities each person holds within herself, plus the selves of all the people she’s lost, and everything gets lost in the chaos of it all, but also nothing ever really goes away.

Thien’s prose is equally invested with strength and lyricism, and Thien’s characters are sympathetically rendered. With this novel, however, she has taken on an ambitious project, and while she should be commended for containing so much story within a volume that is relatively thin, at times the story itself thins out as well. Though this is a story about trauma, much that is traumatic happens out of the scene, which undermines the brutal realities of the history the novel depicts. Part of this, of course, is due to Janie’s suppression of her experiences, which is where much of the novel comes from, and I’m not sure I would have wanted the novel to be so unflinching, but this is still a remarkable gap in a story that is all about remarkable gaps anyway.

It’s also very much a novel made of pieces (and fragments of pieces), which requires the reader to have faith in the eventual construction of a coherent whole, but this is faith that comes with a pay-off. Madeline Thien knows what she’s doing. And perhaps the Madeleine Thien Novel is a form onto itself, and anyway, I’m just happy for the chance to read another one.

May 11, 2011

Mini Review: All the Little Living Things by Wallace Stegner

I was so conscious of the fiction’s construction in Wallace Stegner’s All the Little Live Things, but only because I was so amazed that Stegner had constructed something so realized. How had he done it? And it’s not often a reader can ask these kinds of questions and not be pulled out of the story, but the spell was never broken here. Stegner pulls of other impossibilities: a story about the land and environment as a symbol, but the literal facts of the land (and those who inhabit it) are never minimized for this; a sad, sad story so invested with hope, and love; a masculine book full of senses and emotion; a book firmly set in its time but which does not feel remotely dated fifty years later.

All the Little Live Things is the story of the Allstons, a couple who, after the death of their son, escapes the world by building their own little Eden, a paradise in the California wilderness, though the world creeps in– poison oak, gophers, snakes and rotten neighbours. A young man begins camping out on their property, embodying the spirit of 1960s’ youth rebellion (and having a passing resemblance to the couple’s late son). The Allstons befriend a neighbouring woman who they discover is both pregnant and dying of cancer, the competing forces within her body a microcosm for forces at play in the community, and society at large.

It’s a heavy book, but a brilliant, absorbing read, with wonderful moments of humour and insight. Wonderfully plot-driven as well– Stegner certainly does a fantastic ominous. He’s was a masterful writer who doesn’t receive a lot of credit these days, and I’m so grateful to have discovered him.