March 9, 2010

Books in the City

Because I only ever read YA for purposes of nostalgia, I’ve probably not read a novel for young readers that’s been published since the early 1990s. I decided to read Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me after reading this piece on it at the Guardian Books Blog, and because it had won the estimable seal of the Newbery Medal. And yes, also because it’s the story of girl who’s reading A Wrinkle In Time.

I’d forgotten how wonderful YA fiction can be– there was nothing simple about Stead’s plot, and though the vocabulary was simpler than I was used to, and the font was bigger, she had me wrapped up in the story and completely baffled as to where it would go next. She wasn’t writing down to anyone.

When You Reach Me turned out to be a nostalgic read all the same, however. Perhaps in itself an ode to the great YA fiction of yore (whose heroines I’ve written about before, actually, on International Women’s Day exactly two years ago). The story takes place in 1979, which means its protagonist needs dimes for the payphone. And all the best YA took place in the ’70s, didn’t it? Which was sometimes weird, especially when girls needed belts for their sanitary napkins, or lost their virginity on unfortunate shag rugs, but there was something in the air then that leaked into these wonderful stories.

Stead’s Miranda is blunt, feisty, awkward, mortified by her mother (“…if she had the slightest idea what she looked like, she wouldn’t be laughing at all.”), gutsy, fearful and vividly drawn. The story was not at all dated (which makes it a bit different from the YA I remember so well– no one refers to anybody as a “woman’s libber”, for example). That Miranda lives in New York City too is only fitting, because everybody did then. With their unabashedly single mothers, in buildings without doormen, and they’d walk around the city with keys strung around their necks. It’s strange how much encountering adolescence in 1970s’ New York City is really a kind of literary homecoming for me.

Another book in the city I’ve read lately is Stacey May Fowles’ Fear of Fighting (which is a Canada Also Reads contender, and [insert “wow, do I ever love the internet!” comment here] available as a free download. Defender Zoe Whittall holds this book up as an example of an urban book set in the present day, the kind of book that cranky people like to complain doesn’t exist, and that many readers too fond of inter-generational prairie family sagas could end up ignoring.

I read Fear of Fighting skeptically, first, because I’m unconvinced that “contemporary urban tale” is necessarily shorthand for good. It’s very often been shorthand for complete crap, in my experience, with storytellers too conscious of what they’re up to, in Toronto referencing Parkdale for the sake of referencing Parkdale (and either not explaining what this means, or explaining too much), getting novel-writing confused with map-drawing, thinking they’re not required to actually do anything as storytellers because this is a “contemporary urban tale” after all.

I also wonder about this demand for contemporary urban tales– is this another way of asking for books about people like us? And I understand why a wide of variety of approaches to fiction is important, but I also know that when girls who collect shoes and go shopping a lot demand fiction that reflects their lives, the rest of us find that a bit disdainful.

Finally (and then I promise, I’ll stop with the provisos), unlike Whittall, I don’t necessarily love “good non-cliché-ridden mental illness narrative” (or perhaps I’ve just never encountered the first two descriptors).

When I started Fear of Fighting, I thought it had a YA sensibility, but having read When You Reach Me now, I realize that I was only recognizing another irrepressible narrative voice. Who doesn’t write down to anyone. Fowles’ work is so wonderful because it doesn’t try too hard, because her narrator is wry and discerning. After Marnie gets her heart broken, she eventually she stops leaving her house, even adandoning her lucrative career filing for a document shredding company. The book is the story of her piecing together what’s happened, and what she’s going to do next, and Zoe Whittall is right– the book is funny. “Fucking hilarious” may be taking it a bit far, but it’s true that Fowles’ Marnie is the most hilarious agoraphobe I’ve ever encountered in fiction, or anywhere.

March 5, 2010

Canada Reads: Independently. It's the Final Countdown

Okay, it’s not exactly a “countdown”, but “It’s the Final Vote” would bring to mind no song by Europe, and so what’s the point of that? I’ve just posted my final Canada Reads: Independently review, and my rankings are set with Hair Hat in the top spot. But my power only extends so far, of course, and the winner of Canada Reads: Independently isn’t up to me. It’s up to us!

For those of you who’ve taken part, reading all or some of these books, you’ve got a vote. Our little poll will close at midnight on Thursday March 11th. Before then, email me (at klclare AT gmail DOT com) your top pick of the Canada Reads: Independently selections, and the winning book will be announced on Friday March 12 (just in time for CBC Canada Reads champion to be unveiled!)

And my bets are on Century, but anything can happen!

February 26, 2010

The Wall of Pickles

At The Grilled Cheese in Kensington Market

May 7, 2009

Please bear

This would be a blog entry, but I am too fixated on cloth diaper brands and securing my next serving of ice cream. Plus everything I do these days seems to proceed in a most dilatory fashion. For example, I’ve been writing this for twenty minutes. Please bear with us, and thank you.

October 7, 2007

Happy Thanksgiving

Our very first turkey dinner: this is totally a milestone. Deliciousness intaken. Everybody is sleepy. Hooray hooray for harvest time.

May 2, 2007

Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje

In the midst of Divisadero, when I was asked if it was a good book, I wasn’t sure how to answer. “It’s a good book,” I supposed, “because I’m not sure Michael Ondaatje is not in the habit of writing bad books.” But I was not convinced from where I stood. Which is not to say that reading Divisadero was not an absolute pleasure, but I couldn’t tell where the plot was going. Where the plot eventually went, I could never have foreseen. Even now, having finished the book, I’m still not sure what to make of it, but then my response to that is to want to read it all over again.

Divisadero has a plot– an unconventional family, their ties forever severed by an act of brutal violence. One sister is researching the life of a French writer whose own story becomes the focus of the latter half of the book. Between the siblings’ separate lives and the life of the writer, Ondaatje draws connections through parallelesque plot lines, recurring symbols, characters haunted by their counterparts. But these connections are not in symmetry– symmetry would be too easy. And nothing is easy here. These connections are only suggestions, some of the story was so inaccessible to me (mainly due to my lack of familiarity with matters as divergent as the work of Balzac and the rules of Texas Hold’em), time shifts, narrative shifts, as a reader you are led you know not where.

And yet I trusted this writer completely. Clearly, I felt, I was in competant hands. This was not based solely on the writer’s reputation either, but rather the strength of the prose, the beauty of the imagery, the structure of the novel which demanded my engagement, no matter what else conspired to shut me out of it. Ondaatje’s ending tied up ends, not neatly of course, but in a way that cast the whole novel in a new light, which is why I so want to read it again. That so much can be obscured but made satisfying is a testament to great work. Similarly, that a book can be an abstraction, and yet well and truly solid.

January 17, 2007

My Wedding Dress

My wedding dress came off the rack. It wasn’t even a wedding dress. I’d set out that day with the sole specification that my dress be the prettiest one I find, and it was only by chance that the one I found was white.

My friend Bronwyn and I went shopping for dresses on Oxford Street in London a month before my wedding. Bronwyn had seen one already that she thought might be right, and I liked it too. A strapless dress from Coast, with red flowers beaded and embroidered around one side. I appreciated that it was white enough to be bridey, and the red was perfect. Red is my favourite colour. But of course, I still wanted to look around a bit. I tried on bridal dresses in a few other high street shops, and other distinctly non-bridal dresses. I don’t remember any of them. I do remember that by lunch time we knew the Coast dress was right, and when we found it in Debenhams with 20% off, we knew the universe was in agreement. We found a matching wrap in the accessories section, a pair of sandals, and got the underthings from M&S. Everything except the hair accessory, which I ended up making myself out of beads and a headband. And so basically, I was outfitted in a day, at a discounted rate no less. This is no romantic tale, but the dress was perfect. Bronwyn has good taste. I had the most beautiful bouquet in the world to match, and the red and white became our wedding theme. It was such a lovely day.

And so of course, I’ve got to weave a metaphor out of all of this. Which would be that I bought my wedding dress off the rack, on sale. The dress was gorgeous no doubt, but absolutely ordinary. The odds are that I will wear it again. And that ordinariness is my point. Our love for each other is so ordinary and absolutely unremarkable (and I mean this in the most romantic way one can), and I would not have to put on a costume to proclaim that. On my wedding day, I was dressed as myself, which was all that I had to be for us to work. It wasn’t a fairy tale, but it was our real life, and one which is wonderful every day.

December 30, 2006

The Monkees – Randy Scouse Git

September 30, 2006

Please insert change

I knew that Every Day is Mother’s Day would cure all that ailed me. It was wonderful and horrifying; Hilary Mantel has such a gloriously sick mind. In this book, Colin is having an affair with Isabel, and, as it’s the mid 1970s, he frequently needs to come up with reasons to nip out to the phonebox and call her. And I couldn’t help thinking about cellphones as a plot device, a topic that has fascinated me, mainly in film actually. There are all kinds of movies, books and television shows that wouldn’t have been remotely plottable before cellphones came into use- CSI would struggle, 24, various ransom stories. However the phonebox is a plot device all its own- I’m thinking Rosemary’s Baby, Superman of course, and obviously Phone Booth. In addition, I can’t help but think of all the old storylines that could have been cleared up in just five minutes, if a cellphone had only fallen from the sky.

September 25, 2006

Monday

I just finished reading City of the Mind by Penelope Lively, who is one of my favourite authors, and every one of her books I like better than the last. City of the Mind is to place, what her Moon Tiger was to history. The city as a symbol, and the very specific history of London. Loved it. I especially love how Lively’s characters always have jobs. A job is vital to good characterization (for example Perowne the neurosurgeon in Saturday, or Reta Winters the writer in Unless) in contemporary work especially. “What do you do?” is so defining. The last Penelope Lively book I read was The Photograph, in which the main character was a garden designer, and in City of the Mind, the character was an architect, and a writer can show so much about a character by showing how he/she performs their job, engages with colleagues, and what led them to their field. It’s fascinating to learn too, about a profession as foreign as another language (neurosurgery anyone?). It just makes that character’s world so much more alive.

And I am back at my part time post at the library, which means I come home with more and more books every day. Today I took out Swing Low: A Life in order to learn a bit more about depression, as a character in my story suffers with it. And also got my hands on new books I was a Child of Holocaust Survivors and Creation by EO Wilson.

Beyond books, ah but not quite. Yesterday was spent at Word on the Street and it was a lot of fun. Echolocation was well-represented I thought and I gave a bookmark to the mayor.

Today’s highlight was an epistle from my epistolary-pal Bronwyn. She has asked me to be her matron of honour, and I don’t think I’ve ever been so honoured. I didn’t even dare to imagine such a thing would happen. I would have been happy just to be there. And now I will be there, but with a dress on. Whoever would have thought, when Bronwyn and I met during the summer of 2001 in Toronto that just a few years later we would be bridesmaiding for each other at our respective English weddings to a wonderful pair of Northern blokes. Life is funny. Hmmmm.

Am obsessed with The Weather Network’s School Days Pages. They tell you what to wear to and from school, which is a service I’ve been longing for forever. Don’t know how practical it really is though. This morning I should have worn snowboots, a parka and gloves, and then wellingtons and a slicker on my home. It’s the winter clothes again tomorrow morn, and then a light spring jacket in the afternoon. I don’t think I own that many clothes. And the winter boots are really quite premature, really. 8 degrees is hardly freezing.