June 4, 2015
Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney
The reason why Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius was one of my favourite books as a child was because of its expansiveness. In terms of geography—we see images from her travels all around the globe, and on a micro level as she winds her way along paths and roads in her New England town so that we see the school, the church, the houses of her neighbours. Images on the horizon and ships on the sea (and the highways that stretch off the page in two directions) suggest interconnectivity, the wider world, a sense of wholeness. And so too does Cooney portray a single life with such largesse, beginning with young Alice as a child painting in the skies in her father’s pictures, and finishing with Alice as an old old lady (as narrated by her grand-neice), as well as everything in between.
As an adult reader, I still admire the hugeness of Cooney’s canvas, but I am most fond of the book for its feminist overtones. Because here we have young Alice who knows exactly what she’s going to do with her life—she’s going to travel to far away places, and then come home to live beside the sea. (There is a third thing she must do, according to her grandfather—she must make the world a more beautiful place.) Here then is the story of a woman’s life that neither begins nor ends with a wedding—in fact, there isn’t a wedding at all. I suppose we’d call her a spinster, but she’s a woman who’s always been called by her own name: Miss Rumphius, The Lupine Lady, Great Aunt Alice. (Admittedly, she is also referred to as That Crazy Old Lady, but she doesn’t appear particularly bothered.)
Here is the story of a woman who goes through the world sowing her seeds, leaving her mark, living precisely as she said she would. She doesn’t stop travelling the world and courting adventure until she hurts her back getting off a camel, and only then does she come home to her place beside the sea. She doesn’t conform to society’s expectations of femininity, but lives by her own rules. (A similar plot is more explicit in Cooney’s picture book, Hattie and the Waves. Cooney has described both books, as well as Island Boy, as as close as she’d ever come to writing an autobiography. Surprisingly though, Cooney was married—twice!)
As a feminist, it’s possible that this was my foundational text.
There are a few troubling points about the book involving cultural stereotypes. See Debbie Reese’s post about what’s wrong with the reference to the cigar store Indian, and I’m also uncomfortable with the colonial feel of Miss Rumphius’s travels throughout the world. Both issues can be the start of worthwhile discussions with young readers though, two of many spurned on by the richness of Cooney’s words and images. These points should not be ignored, but are no good reason to throw the book out altogether.
I love so many things about this book. That it’s an entire lifetime distilled into a few words and pictures, that she works as a librarian, the greenhouse, the cat, that she gets sick and then gets better again, that the story affords that life itself brings bumps along the way. It’s the kind of books whose illustrations I’d get lost in, tracing my fingers down the roads, examining the details of the paintings on the wall. And the light of the sunset on the very last page, the children gathering lupines that Miss Rumphius planted. I love the cyclical nature of the story, it’s open end, which is a challenge to the reader herself.
Throughout summer, I will be devoting Picture Book Fridays to classic picture books I love.
June 2, 2015
Specimen by Irina Kovalyova
It is true that I’ve quite possibly been inspired by the title and exquisite cover of Irina Kovalyova’s short story collection, Specimen (a cover that is so exquisite. When I went on the subway yesterday, everybody was staring at me and then I realized that everybody was staring at my book), but the stories in the collection do remind me of nineteenth-century taxonomy specimens. Something that is pinned to a board in flagrant beauty, luminous, remarkable, but not quite living. Devoid of life for the purposes of examination, but how the examiner is fascinated anyway. The variety of specimens, their perfect detail, lines and edges—I can’t stop thinking about these stories. They’re good enough that I can start this review off with my criticisms, and then move along to why the collection is absolutely worth reading all the same.
Specimen is the first book by Irina Kovalyova, multi-talented holder of a doctorate in microbiology, an MFA in creative writing from UBC, who is a microbiology instructor at Simon Fraser University, and a onetime NASA intern. And it’s the singularity of her point of view (the lines, edges and details, the wideness and wildness of her premises) that exalts these stories, though a few of them aren’t completely realized. Some reveal flat characterization, unsatisfying endings, seem to be experiments that were not entirely pulled off. Not atypical first book fare. And yet and yet and yet.
Reading these stories, I kept thinking about Michael Chabon’s essay, “Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story,” which hearkens back to the days (pre-1950s) when the short story fell into the realm of entertainment: “the ghost story; the horror story the detective story; the story of suspense; terror; fantasy; science fiction, or the macabre; the sea, adventure, spy, war, or historical story; the romance story.” These days, he writes, it is novelists who write (and find success) in that wild space between genre and literary and find much success there, while the short story pines away often unread and boring. And so into the wild spaces, Chabon writes, is where the short story must go, and it’s into these very same spaces where Kovalyova takes her readers.
Which makes for a fascinating ride. “Mamochka” is the story of the Chief Archivist at the Institute of Physics in Minsk who is pining for her grandchild far away in Vancouver, and whose own derangement is manifesting in curious ways. “The Ecstasy of Edgar Alabaster” is a story not quite what it seems, a nineteenth-century record of a patient under hypnosis who confesses to sexual perversions and an incestuous relationship with his sister (and then the whole story collapses into a marvellous hall of mirrors). In “The Side Effects,” a patient’s Botox injections smooth out her psyche as well as her skin, but life without its wrinkles turns out to be lacking in magic.
“Gdansk” is a story of numbered items, a narrative suggesting some pattern in a chaotic universe, a post-Cold-War story of youth, adventure and “anticipating the world.” In “Specimen,” a young woman discovers she was conceived via a sperm donor, and must come to a new understanding about the relationship between genetics and fatherhood (and is saved from disaster by her friend who recognizes that her frontal lobe is not yet developed enough for her to make important decisions). That story takes a dark turn at one point, which steers us directly into “Peptide p,” a story of experiments on two children who’d survived an epidemic (tainted hotdogs) that felled their classmates, a story whose creepiness is subtle and slow, and becomes terrifying by the end.
In “Gonos,” a biology professor considers the troubling product of his own genes as he teaches a lecture on the nature(s) of sex and gender, considering the “correctness” or “incorrectness” of life and coming to a beautiful, hopeful conclusion in the end. And in “The Big One,” the ending is ambiguous but maybe hopeful (?), as a woman and her child are trapped in an underground parking garage after an earthquake, the narrative dividing into two—their dialogue and the woman’s interior monologue. Also a gorgeous ending: “Without imagination, life makes no sense.” A notion that takes us so many different meanings in relation to the stories in this book. The key that holds it all together.
The final story is the novella, “The Blood Keeper,” which I was instantly drawn into. But how could I not be? The first line is, “My father, Viktor A. Mishkin, was the keeper of Lenin’s mummy.” Vera is a biologist studying orchids when her father is sent on a mission to North Korea in 1996 to preserve the body of the recently-deceased Kim Il Sung. She receives a curious letter from him imploring her to follow him to Pyongyang as part of a student exchange where she becomes embroiled in several plots involving love and intrigue. A fantastic read, rich with details and suspense, “The Blood Keeper” reveals Kovalyova as a writer firmly in command of her materials.
So in the end, yes, even with its imperfections (and what specimen does not possess some of these, I suppose) Specimen is a book wholly worthy of its cover. A collection of beauty, light, colour, curios, permitting readers access into worlds that are usually unexamined, those wild spaces in between.
June 1, 2015
Special Occasion
We hung out the Special Occasion Bunting on Saturday on the occasion of Harriet’s birthday.
Our cake came courtesy of the good people at Betty Crocker.
Everything was awesome.
May 31, 2015
Close to Hugh in Globe Books
My review of Marina Endicott’s new novel, Close to Hugh, appeared in the Globe and Mail this weekend. It’s a book so very much about its own style, its words as materials, and I found myself wanting to respond in a way that honoured that. I’m so pleased with what I came up with, which was a pleasure to write, because there is so much remarkable and interesting about Endicott’s huge and sprawling novel. It’s not perfect, but it’s never boring, and it’s so original and ambitious. I read it twice in April, book-ends to our England trip, and now I’ve got nostalgia now for its pages and how they remind me of suitcases and waiting for our taxi to come.
From my review: “Rich with adjectives, the novel addresses huge and general questions about the meaning of life and the universe with remarkable specificity. ‘We are tiny, unknowable, unimaginably unimportant, far from everything, only close to each other,’ one character observes, which on a macro level is the point of Close to Hugh but, as the novel demonstrates, is also totally wrong. Because of how art itself brings the world into startling, vivid focus, and suddenly every little thing has meaning after all.”
May 28, 2015
What’s Inside? by Isabel Minhós Martins and Madalena Matosa
Now that Harriet is older and learning to read on her own, I have a particular appreciation for picture books that are less text-oriented—their game and puzzle nature reminds us that reading is meant to be fun, they’re fun for us to engage with together, and Harriet is content to explore the pages on her own time. But wordlessness makes the stakes are a bit higher—a book like this has to be really good, excellent in both its art and its premise. And What’s Inside? by Isabel Minhós Martins and Madalena Matosa satisfies certainly on both counts.
Published in English by Tate Publishing, the publisher of visual art books associated with London’s Tate Gallery, What’s Inside? was created by the Portuguese duo behind several popular books including When I Was Born. On one hand, What’s Inside? is a kind of inverted Kim’s Game in which readers are delivered a pictorial inventory of interesting vessels and spaces—the hall table drawer, Mum’s handbag, the kitchen counter, my bedroom wall—and then asked to answer questions and find specific details about the objects at hand. Many of these questions are answered on subsequent pages, or lost objects found, separated pairs matched, and broken bits pieced back together.
The questions are great, open-ended, and allow for flights of the imagination (as well as real satisfaction for those who finally locate, for example, just where is Mum’s missing earring after all). What’s really wonderful about the book, however, is how a narrative emerges from all this stuff—we get a sense of who these people are, what are their preoccupations, their quirks and oddities. (Why indeed is there an Ace of Spades in the refrigerator?) Some of the deeper mysteries are never really answered, or at least I have not found the answer to yet, for example to why exactly a wooly hat was brought to the beach—though we have speculated that perhaps the grandmother was knitting it? She had a ball of yarn in her beach bag after all. Perhaps the hat was her finished product? Which is the best thing—how the stories in this story lead us to tell stories of our own.
Readers will delight in the familiarity of household objects, puzzle at the stranger ones, and perhaps begin to think more deeply about what their own stuff says about them. And for those who manage to eventually make their way to the book’s last page, it isn’t finished yet. “Open Your Eyes and Discover More,” the authors implore us, with a list of questions that urge us to go even deeper.
May 26, 2015
On 2190 Days of Harriet
Speaking of words as survival gear, we’ve found it very useful this past while to scroll back through our archives from 2011 to discover if Harriet was anything like Iris is. Iris is so singular and Harriet was never so young, and then I find the post I wrote when Harriet was two-years-old and realize I’ve forgotten it altogether. Which is all the more reason to check in every six months or so and record how it is, how she is, because she never stops changing and she’ll never be quite this Harriet ever again.
The age of five was a pleasure. Wholly. Every other year, my pleasure has come with a caveat—two year olds are annoying, three and four year olds have sociopathic tendencies, but five was amazing. Harriet is funny, interesting, good company and a huge help in our family. Her patience with her sister is beyond anything I’d ever expect, and her love too is incredible and both are helping shape Iris into a really excellent person. I admire her too—Harriet’s strong will is manifesting as self-confidence and a firm sense of who she is and what she wants, and it’s our job to let that happen. Of course, it helps that who she is is someone who thinks deeply about things, who calls herself a feminist, who is curious and generous in her approach to the world around her. She loves music and dancing, and has been ridiculously influenced by the video for “Chandelier” by Sia, and has spent the last six months of her life imagining herself in its starring role. She’s not afraid to go against the grain, and makes a point of making choices counter to what people might expect. She works to defy gender expectations at every turn, but never so much that she doesn’t revel in a twirly dress and fuchsia tights. She loves The Lego Movie, Annie, How to Train Your Dragon 2, and Frozen. She has never been above watching more juvenile fare with her little sister. She can read, though we don’t know how it happened. She writes terrific stories in her journal at school, though her stories from the weekend are never quite the ones I would have chosen (i.e. “On Saturday, I watched Frozen twice in the afternoon…” on the weekend we took her to some excellent and engaging cultural event). She is, as one ought to be, obsessed with the lyrics to Leader of the Pack, and loves Gypsies Tramps and Thieves and If I Could Turn Back Time by Cher (and quite clearly, I have been responsible for the bulk of her musical education).
When things don’t come easily, she has learned to persevere and to be brave—back in January, she swam like a lead weight, but now can glide across the water and has no fear of jumping in. She is happy at school and seems to be in a good place with friends, which we appreciate, because it isn’t always easy to find your place when you’re a strong personality (and obsessed with Cher). She is an appalling joke teller but refuses to have her confidence undermined. She loves making up songs whose rhyme and rhythm are as such that I assume they’re real songs, but they’re hers. She says she wants to be a rock star, or a scientist, and this summer, she’s going to finally take her training wheels off her bike (though this is more our idea than hers). She has a gift for enthusiasm, but can whine like nobody’s business. We wonder about her interior monologue, because the bits we get a glimpse of are so deep and rich (and go on and on and on, and she’s not really even expecting us to be listening). She likes Lego, The Incredibles, superheroes, forces of justice, and toys. Also prone to candy and ice cream and chocolate. She will not eat a leaf, unless its basil. She watches movies and then turns them into elaborate imagination games (some of which involve her dragon, Goldie, who is a Sunchaser but used to be a Screaming Death). She thinks she can make anything out of paper. Often, she can (but then I throw it out and she gets angry). She has her sullen teenager facial expression perfected. She’s usually up for adventure. And we can’t believe that today she is six—six!?—because surely there has always been a Harriet and we’ve always been her parents, but then how come the forever that’s been her life feels like it’s gone by so fast?
May 24, 2015
Trouble and Spaciousness
Am I having trouble reading because I’m unsettled, or am I unsettled because every book I start to read is so darn dissatisfying? This is a question I’ve have to ask myself over and over in my life, and I’ve never once come close to circling round and round about it. All I know is that the last four books I’ve picked up I have abandoned after a few pages, and the book I spent most of last week reading had no impact on me whatsoever. So now book review today. And I had to pull out the big guns because to be reading nothing is to not be me. Last night I started reading The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness by Rebecca Solnit, and I think it’s going to save me.
I think the trouble is the books though because otherwise all is very well here. Last week flew by, a very short week with so much in it. All fun. And after last week’s meltdown (mine) in regards to baby sleep, we shifted gears. I’ve stopped breastfeeding, we moved Iris back into her crib upstairs in our room, and left her to cry at night. The last strategy never worked with her big sister who would only grow more and more hysterical, but Iris settled pretty quickly and by the third night without a peep. She is still not sleeping all night, but everything is much much better and one night she slept until 5, and the idea that putting her to bed is no longer a production (and therefore someone who is not her parent can do it?) is tremendously exciting.
In other now-reading news, I’ve started getting the New York Times supplement with the Sunday Star, which comes with a standalone books section (an abridged version of the real one) and it’s so terrific to read. I miss real, solid book review sections. Anyway, this has added another highlight to my week.
Harriet turns six on Tuesday, and Iris threw up in a parking lot this afternoon, which has freaked me out a bit because we all spent Harriet’s birthday last year completely ill. I have since learned though that there is no rhyme nor reason to my children’s vomiting, so here’s hoping it was just a thing. Especially since Harriet is the greatest child alive and her choice of how to spend her birthday evening is having dinner at my favourite restaurant.
Regarding the photo. At Harriet’s school concert on Thursday, Stuart pointed out a woman wearing bunting shoes. Naturally, I had to talk to her. “Where did you get them?” I asked her, and she only looked a little bit sheepish but mostly proud to tell me she’d found them by the side of the road and cleaned them up so she could wear them. What sweet bunting fortune.
May 22, 2015
My Grandmother’s Rolling Pin
This week at the 4 Mothers Blog, they’re writing posts that tell the history of their families through objects, and I’m so pleased to be their guest-blogger this week. I wrote about the solid wooden things that connect me to my family’s past, in particular my grandmother’s rolling pin, and pie, and how baking is a complicated feminist legacy.
May 21, 2015
This is Sadie by Sara O’Leary and Julie Morstad
I have a special affinity for This is Sadie, the gorgeous new collaboration by Sara O’Leary and Julie Morstad (whose When You Were Small and other books in the Henry series I have loved since before I had my own small people to love them with). I like to imagine it was written just for me. 
It’s got bunting, and swimming, and tea parties, and paper dolls, and even squids, and a spirited girl who gets lost in a whole wide world of books.
It’s got everything that made Morstad’s award-winning How To so wonderful—the mermaid girl, a pair of legs revealing someone hiding in a tree. Plus, O’Leary provides the mischief of Judith Viorst’s and Hilary Knight’s Sunday Morning, the bookish inspiration of Charlie Cook’s Favourite Book by Julia Donaldson, and allusions to Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Book, Little Red Riding Hood, and Rapunzel. It’s a book about passing time. reading books, and how Sadie likes to make “boats of boxes/ and castles out of cushions./ But more than anything she likes stories,/ because you can make them from nothing at all.” We see Sadie in bed reading a book called The Story of a Snail, then by the next page, her boat box has been transformed into a snail shell.
Morstad’s illustrations are full of jokes and details, things to discover—an apple with a bite out of it, Sadie’s abandoned shoes, a toadstool bedside lamp, a mysterious family of tiny foxes. The book reminds me of Carson Ellis’s Home in how things from around Sadie’s room and in her books recur as images in her imaginings—just as Ellis’s own artist uses the things around her as inspiration for the illustrations in her book. Both This is Sadie and Home make connections between the world around us and where we go in our dreams.
And what anyone needs for dreaming is room to explore. “In This is Sadie, it is pretty easy to draw a direct line between boredom and creativity,” writes O’Leary on her blog, underlining the importance of giving kids the opportunity to make their own play, to dream their way into all kinds of stories—the mermaid, the boy raised by wolves, and “the hero in the world of fairy tales.”
“The days are never long enough for Sadie. So many things to make and do and be.”
May 21, 2015
You can win a copy of Mad Miss Mimic!
On Tuesday night, I had the pleasure of attending the launch for Sarah Henstra’s novel, Mad Miss Mimic. It was even more fantastic than the book, if you can believe it, with strings and strings of bunting. teacups, tiered plates with squares and sandwiches, fancy hats, and an entire choir performing. You can check out a couple of photos here, one with me beaming. It was that kind of night.
And naturally, I bought the book. But I already had a copy, which means there is one going spare now, and I’m going to give it away to someone signed up for the Pickle Me This Digest, as determined for a random draw. Sign up by June 15 for a chance to win. And those of you already on the list are automatically entered in the draw.
- Read my review of Mad Miss Mimic.
