June 25, 2012
The Vicious Circle reads Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Comparing covers is one of my favourite parts of being in a book club, and I was overjoyed at our meeting last week to see that one of my comrades had brought along the crazy psychedelic edition that I read in university and had completely forgotten the look of. This time around, I’d bought a very respectable Modern Library edition (see below) whose previous owner had only yellow-highlighted a few random lines in chapter five.
Anyway, I’m off track already, which is okay, because Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a bit heavy on the preamble anyway. (I made a chart: there are at least five stories in a story in this story, maybe six.) We didn’t have a roaring fire to gather ’round last Tuesday night, but we didn’t need one because it was so hot you’d sweat sleeping. We met up in the East End in one of the finest backyards in the city, and ate cheese, cherries, and strawberry bread, and drank just as much as we should have.
We got to talking about this book and Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, about a person dealing with the implications of having created a murderous monster, and considering whether or not the monstrousness was innate or the result of the creator’s lack of naturing. (You, my creator, abhor me; what hope can I gather from your fellow-creatures, who owe me nothing??” says Frankenstein’s monster at one point.) We spend a long time arguing about whether we were talking about Frankenstein or his monster when we said “Frankenstein”, and 50% of the time, we meant the other. Which is funny because of how they became the same creature eventually, how Mary Shelley might have planned that confusion.
Is Victor Frankenstein sympathetic? And we were fortunate this night to have a Frankenstein scholar in our midst, who has written actual books on the subject, so we ended up talking about blow jobs a lot less than usual and instead discussed Victor as a man who truly doesn’t understand the consequences of his actions. We talked about the monster as self-taught (and how we loved that he took fiction as history, what it means to see the world that way), as representative of the limits of what one can do with one’s self, analogous with what a woman could do with herself in the early 19th century. And Mary Shelley herself, her biography, kept coming into this conversation. Author’s biography means more to a classic than to a contemporary work. Or does it… How we keep comparing the book to contemporary novels, because there was nothing else like it in its time, how it was a pointed response to the Romantics.
We talked about Walton the Polar Explorer, and Victor Frankenstein, of their senses of themselves as loners, as heroes, but that they’re both self-indulgent and controlling, messing with other people’s lives. It’s only their complete disregard of others which allows them to cast themselves as selfless heroes at all. How the miracle of Victor’s singular creation is something that women do all the time. Frankenstein and motherhood– apparently Shelley wrote the novel while she was pregnant. In a few weeks. Though novels are always becoming engulfed in these sorts of legends– it’s just another ring around the kernel of the story.
We talked about how Victor and the monster’s voices become more and more alike as the novel progresses, about how Victor seems set up for some of the monster’s crimes and how they’re so connected by that point that it doesn’t matter who killed who, their crazy symbiotic relationship in which neither can live without the other and Victor virtually sacrifices his bride as bait for his obsession. How the monster’s own dawning consciousness was like a baby’s, but that he’s never allowed to evolve into a human being. How you can never escape what you look like, how monsters bring out the monstrosity in others. We wondered about Mary Shelley whose own mother died in childbirth. Who was her monster?
And then the very last note I took was without context, “Hemingway was the John Irving of his time” and we’d lost the plot by then. We started yelling about 50 Shades and the state of publishing, and so it seems most appropriate just to leave it there.
June 25, 2012
Summer summer at 49thShelf
I’m in love with the main page of 49thShelf this week, with its Summer Summer list front and centre. Images of docks, beaches, summer reading, barbecues, the Beach Boys and a swing. I’m looking forward to reading Tricia Dower’s Stony River in the next week or so– I enjoyed her first book and interviewed her in 2008. Right now I’m reading Emily Perkins’ The Forrests, which starts slow but becomes enthralling. Also, I received Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl for my birthday, which is my cottage reading set. She’s got blurbs by Kate Atkinson, Kate Christensen and Laura Lippman, which is some pedigree, I think. Can’t wait to be beach-side with this one.
June 24, 2012
On slow-reads, and Robertson Davies' The Rebel Angels
I spent most of last week reading Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels upon the recommendation of my book club-mate Patricia, who mentioned it after we’d read Lucky Jim and talked about campus lit. And it is just a coincidence that I’d read it after Sue Sorensen’s A Large Harmonium, which was another campus satire, and also mentioned Patient Griselda, who I’d never even heard of (and which is really a terrible story, actually). It also mentioned Cornelius Agrippa, who I’d read about in Frankenstein, the other book I’ve just finished. And then there were the references and allusions I didn’t get or didn’t pick up on, and there were plenty. But I still enjoyed The Rebel Angels very much, my first Robertson Davies beyond the Fifth Business I read in school. It’s a slow read though, slow to start and packed with detail. And because I’m a notorious speedy reader, it was a bit hard to get used to the pace. To just let myself give into it, to stop thinking that slowness was a problem, or a sign of one. To be patient and realize that I really do have all the time in the world to get through it, that the other books can wait. To realize that this book was demanding time and patience of me, but delivering richness in rewards. And it did.
Whereas Frankenstein, the book I read before it, was a book with a deadline, to be read before our book club meeting last Tuesday. On Saturday evening, when I’d only read 30 pages, it wasn’t really looking likely that I was going to get it read, and so I got down to it. I read most of Frankenstein in 24 hours, and what a joy to get so solidly inside a book, to take it in in almost one gulp, without distractions. Speedy reading can be wonderful.
But yes, there is a place for slowness, for stories that have to steep. I’m grateful to Robertson Davies for reminding me of that.
June 21, 2012
The Girl Giant
Kristen den Hartog’s novel And Me Among Them was one of my favourite books of last year, and my admiration for its author was only intensified when I met her in November for an interview. It’s a quiet book but, like its protagonist, And Me Among Them has made an impact on the world– it was shortlisted for the 2012 Trillium Book Award, and was just awarded the Alberta Trade Fiction Book of the Year Award. And now it’s coming out in the United States published by Simon & Schuster with a new cover and a new title: The Girl Giant.
I met up with Kristen recently and she gave me a copy of the new book. It’s small and square and lovely, but I’ve already got my gorgeous edition from Freehand Books, so I’d like to pass on The Girl Giant to one of you. If you leave a comment below before the end of Sunday June 24 (my birthday!), your name will be entered in a draw and I’ll send the copy of the winner. Good luck, and thanks to Kristen, with congratulations too for all her book’s success.
Update: Congratulations to Deborah! I will be in touch.
June 20, 2012
Cars Galore!
We’ve had Cars Galore by Peter Stein and Bob Staake out of the library for about six weeks now, and it’s starting to look like we’ll have to get a copy of our own. It’s a pretty simple concept, slick retro drawings of automobiles with accompanying rhyming couplets (and how we do love rhyming couplets). Some of the cars are pretty ordinary– fast and slow, on the go, but then the old car is wearing band-aids, which is fascinating if you happen to be three years old, and there’s a fort car, a shark car, and a Noah’s Ark car! “Honk cars! BEEP cars! At-a-creep cars. Miles of piles of in-a-heap cars.”
We’re a car-loving, road-tripping family, and we’ve never let not owning a car come between us and our love of driving. In fact, it’s probably a big reason for that love because we only get in a car about once a month, and so it’s always a special event when we do. And because we’re Autoshare members, it really has been cars galore around here. Harriet knows more about car brands than the average child from a carless household. We drove the Matrix for a long time, then the Prius, and were getting to be regular drivers of the Mazda 3, when we got a brand new car in our lot. (More about that new car in a sentence or two.) I especially love the “share” in Autoshare, that we get to show Harriet an example of sharing in action (keeping the car tidy, returning it on time, getting excited when we see other Autoshare cars out in the world) as she works hard to learn this vital skill for herself.
But yes, the car. How we do love “our” Fiat 500, whose awesomeness makes it entirely worth the effort required to get a car-seat into that tiny backseat. It’s red!, sporty, stylish, comfortable, fun to drive, and we like to shout, “Fiat 500!” whenever we’re on the road, to which the rest of the family responds with cheers. Indeed.
And we especially like that its radio seems to be playing Carley Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe whenever we want it to be, which is always.
June 18, 2012
Books here and there
In the latest issue of UofT Magazine, I’ve got a short piece about Katrina Onstad’s new novel Everybody Has Everything:
“Katrina Onstad ( MA 1999) might be best known for her national newspaper and magazine columns, but her debut novel How Happy to Be was celebrated for its satire, wit, and examination of loving and working in the 21st century. In her new novel, Everybody Has Everything, Onstad takes a similar approach, once again considering the isolating aspects of contemporary urban life. Through her characters James and Ana, she uses the perspective of a longchildless couple to take a provocative look at modern parenthood, illuminating the absurdity of a culture that has turned “parent” into a verb.” (Read the rest)
And my review of the picture book David Weale and Pierre Pratt’s Doors in the Air, which I loved, has just gone online at Quill & Quire:
“In one of the final illustrations, the boy is perched atop an orange door like a flying carpet, on a journey to the moon. The accompanying text suggests there is no doorway more important than one’s limitless imagination, and drives home the book’s subversive and powerful message: ‘Remember, you don’t have to stay where you are.'” (Read the rest)
June 18, 2012
7 Years
We’ve got a sitter! Looking forward to dinner out tonight to celebrate 7 years since “I do”, and the success of not being remotely itchy.
“They would talk of such questions among books, or out in the sun, or sitting in the shade of a tree undisturbed. They were no longer embarrassed, or half-choked with meaning which could not express itself; they were not afraid of each other, or, like travellers down a twisting river, dazzled with sudden beauties when the corner is turned; the unexpected happened, but even the ordinary was lovable, and in many ways preferable to the ecstatic and mysterious, for it was refreshingly solid, and called out effort, and effort under such circumstances was not effort, but delight.” –Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out
June 18, 2012
How to avoid being a spam-bot and change the world in the process
This is Jessica Westhead. Basically, what I’m saying is: “Do it like she does.”
Two of the things I complain about most often in public are terrible examples of authors promoting their work online and women writers’ lack of representation in the media and in the world, and so it is amazing to me that both of these annoying things can be addressed with one solution.
But I will address the former problem first, those head-bangingly awful incidents in which it’s clear that authors don’t understand that the opportunity to shill their stuff an offshoot of social media engagement and not its primary purpose. Though I’ve met writers who go the other way, who get a poem published in a national magazine and think it’s bragging to put a link on Facebook. It isn’t. Linking to cool stuff is what people do on Facebook, on twitter and on blogs. But it’s when writers cross a line from, “Look at this!”” (link to published poem) to “Look at me!!” (link to published poem posted on twitter five times daily for months at a time, and also spamming link to other people’s feeds) that it gets to be a problem. When you’re a human who’s a spam-bot, you’ve clearly gone too far.
So how do you avoid becoming a human spam-bot? Easy: don’t post the same link more than twice. If you run out of links, do something new, something better. And in between those links, how about you talk about somebody who isn’t you? A book that isn’t yours? If you’re part of a literary community, you can talk about what your peers are up to. If you aspire to be part of a literary community, deposit yourself within it by engaging with that community’s literature online. If you’ve got nothing to do with any literary community, talk about the best books you’ve read lately and– ka-pow– you’ve just situated yourself in (close) relation to those books, those authors. It’s amazing. From these references, your readers will be able to figure out what you’re about.
When you have promotional opportunities– to write guest blog posts, to write your own blog, when you’re talking to a reporter or answering a Q&A– share your attention with other deserving writers and books. When someone puts a call out for book suggestions, resist to the impulse to chime in with “Mine!” and suggest somebody else’s. If there is a readers’ choice award going on, take a risk and champion a book that you didn’t write (which is the point of these things anyway. It’s not a “writer’s choice” award). If your book is up for a readers’ choice award, sit back and let the readers choose. (If you win a readers’ choice that you rigged, you didn’t win anything at all.) Engage with social media not just as a writer, but as a reader. It broadens your approach, and makes you that much more interesting.
And it also serves to promote a culture of readers, of reading. If you’ve already got someone’s attention, they know about your book, so why not suggest another? It increases the odds that whoever is listening will buy two books instead of one. And as a writer, you certainly stand to benefit when people start buying more books. When you reference other people’s books, it becomes less about your book than about reading in general, which is a terrifying leap to take, I know, but if your book is really good, it will only thrive in that healthy bookish eco-system. It means that you’re taking the opportunity to support other writers, and not in that annoying “rah-rah we all stick to together” way, but in that you have a platform from which to promote the work you really believe in, the books you’d like to see growing up alongside your own, the writing you admire.
And if you are a woman (and even if you’re not) and if the writing you admire happens to be written by women, then herein lies your chance to be part of the solution to the problem of women’s lack of representation in the media and the world. You don’t have to be a book reviewer or an editor to do something about it. You just have to be a reader as well as a writer, a reader/writer who champions the work of worthy women writers. Use your power as someone with a platform to shine a light on other books, other works. Support great work, be vociferous in that support, and understand how that support has greater impact when it’s a woman’s great work you’re supporting, that you’re helping to change the game for the better.
June 17, 2012
Sue Sorensen's A Large Harmonium
Please, let me tell you about Sue Sorensen’s A Large Harmonium, though it’s distinctly possible that I already did because I spent last week telling everyone about it, urging them to read it, this smart, hilarious book that delighted me so. “I say I will buy the Jiffy Markers myself,” is the novel’s first line, and I was hooked for Woolfish reasons and because I had no idea where a line like that might take me.
The line is delivered by Janet Erlicksen, a university English professor who’s on the cusp of a mild mid-life crisis. The novel begins in April with the school term ending and she must contemplate a summer before her without the scaffold of routine– what then to hang her days on? She considers writing an academic book about bad mothers in children’s literature, or penning a murder mystery in which her mother-in-law is the victim, or starting an online academic journal, but none of these ideas gets far off the ground. She’s also distracted by a sense that her husband Hector is in love with another woman, and she’s ever distracted by their three-year old son Little Max for whom distraction is a main occupation.
In 12 chapters, the novel takes us through Janey’s year month-by-month, incidents in her life, and those of her family and her friends, and it’s Janey’s voice and her humour that drives us, as well as turns in the plot that are never quite what you’d expect. And I love this novel quite simply because it’s doing all my favourite things: it’s funny, it shows a mother for whom motherhood is just part of a complex identity, it shows a rock-solid marriage (in spite of Janey’s suspicions), abortion shows up in the life of secondary characters but as a sad and ordinary thing rather than a plot-point, unabashed feminism shows up too, children’s literature is taken seriously, and it’s an academic satire that really is. (Janey presents a paper on the absence of talking animals in Canadian children’s literature. “It is far more fun to present a research project about something that is not there than something there is. I can get people riled up, outraged. Where are the talking animals? Who has repressed the talking animals? I could make my scholarly reputation.”)
Winnipeg resident Sorensen has much in common with Carol Shields, who was another, except that her tone is darker and more overtly hilarious. The novel’s pace is brisk and easy, which is not to say “light”, because there is depth here, but the story goes down just as well. Just as Shields did, Sorensen’s got a grasp on joy and how it factors amidst life’s absurdities. This is a wonderful novel with broad appeal. It’s absolutely the funniest and one of the best books I’ve read in ages.
June 14, 2012
I'm thinking about chick-lit circa 1995
I do wonder what it would have been like to publish a novel in 1995 about a flighty woman who works in an office and the tragic details of her romantic life. Especially if this was your second novel, the first having won the Whitbread First Novel Award. Think about it: Candace Bushnell was still a newspaper columnist, and Bridget Jones was just being born as the subject of an anonymous newspaper column. “Chick-lit” was nothing but the title of an edgy anthology of “postfeminist” fiction published by a university press.
Though there is not much about Rachel Cusk’s The Temporary that is chick-lit as we’ve come to know it. The writing, for starters. Chapter 3 begins: “Francine Snaith was lodged in the gloomy oesophagus of the Metropolitan Line, where her enjoyment of the single customary pleasure of underground travel– that of observing her reflection in the dark windows opposite her seat– had been obstructed since Baker Street by the disorderly herd of standing passengers which had been driven by overcrowding down the narrow corridor in front of her.” And that’s just a single sentence.
The book’s beginning is wonderful too, a strange and wonderful scene with Francine Snaith answering a ringing public telephone: “…being possessed of the conviction that destiny had it continually in mind at any moment to summon her, felt it was intended that she should answer.” Eventually, she decides that her destiny is Ralph, a man she meets at an art gallery launch who she imagines to be worldly and successful, though not as much as his friend whom she really fancies. It’s Ralph who calls her, however, this time on her own phone (and how much better is plot set in a pre-mobile phone world, don’t you think?), and from then on, the two are entangled.
Francine is a temp, and Ralph regards her as much of the same, a temporary salve for his loneliness, but once she sinks her paws into him, she’s reluctant to let go. Never mind that Francine doesn’t love him exactly as much as he disregards her, but he fills a vacuum in her life and she makes him do. Cusk illustrates the curious fact of how entire relationships can be enacted out of boredom. The book is told from both their points of view, in alternating chapters. Ralph himself is a bit pathetic but created with some sympathy, while Francine is stupid and a bit evil, and here is another chick-lit diversion, because how can a female protagonist not be lovable? But she isn’t.
There’s a lot of great work detail throughout the novel about the realities of life as a temp, about the uncertain foundation of one’s early twenties during which roommates and apartments are as fluid as identities. And like most of what Cusk writes, the book is also about class, about the enormous gap that exists between Francine and Ralph (or at least seems to. When Ralph’s humble origins are revealed to Francine, we see how baseless are the clues to these things, and yet what important signifiers they continue to be). It’s also a book about the city, about sweeping down streets with the tide, about being stuck in traffic, about being seen and being invisible, about being lost.
The Temporary these days would come complete with a pastel cover. But then so does Nancy Mitford, Jane Austen, Barbara Pym, all of these brilliant writers’ works reduced to their simplest most common denominator.
