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 And because the contrast between her “modern” England of 1983 and today has made this book an historical document onto itself.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 22, 2011
A prose that is altogether alive
“But I do mean that most contemporary novels are not really “written”. They obtain what reality they have largely from an accurate rendering of the noises that human beings currently make in their daily simple needs of communication; and what part of a novel is not composed of these noises consists of prose which is no more alive than that of a competant newspaper writer or government official. A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel-reader is not prepared to give.” –T.S. Eliot, in an introduction to Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, which I love for the honesty of a paragraph beginning, “When I first read the book I found the opening movement rather slow and dragging…”
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 19, 2011
It's the houses, not the people
“For years, my route has been in Kerrisdale, the neighbourhood to the west of Shaughnessy, where I grew up. Like Shaughnessy, it’s affluent. The streets are pretty and tree-lined, with many of the original stucco and shingle houses. This makes Kerrisdale an unusual neighbourhood in a city with a propensity for destroying and remaking itself. Because I grew up in an old house, and because I live now in Fairview Slopes where in the eighties virtually all of the original houses were demolished and replaced with leaky condos, I feel protective of the houses that remain. It’s the houses I deliver mail to, not the people, whom I hardly ever see. It’s happening here too now. The dismay I feel climbing up the steps to an Arts and Crafts bungalow, depositing The New Yorker and Architectural Digest in the box, then turning and glimpsing from the corner of my eye an orange fence halfway down the block. Did I process a Change of Address? This was when I might have taken warning.” –Caroline Adderson, from “Mr. Justice” in Pleased to Meet You
May 18, 2011
The great Canadian cottage novel
On the (near) eve of this long weekend, check out my new post at Canadian Bookshelf, and help us answer the question: does the great Canadian cottage novel have yet to be written?
May 17, 2011
Knowing the story before the story was told
“Every night, after tea, his mother took him on her lap and read to him. It was the moment in his day above all others which was understandable to him, one where he lived in coherent companionship and liberty. there, horses, ducks, rabbits, foxes and other animals talked, had adventures, and were friends. His mother read well. She read slowly and clearly. She let him see the book as she read and since she re-read the same books many times, he came to memorize the story on each page, cued by the illustration on it or on the facing page. And knowing the story before the story was told was security, power, delight and beauty.” –Pete Sanger, “Leaping Time” in The New Quarterly 118
May 17, 2011
Book Blogospheres
The most important thing I’ve learned about blogs since I’ve been thinking really hard about them in the last six months is that there is no such thing as “the blogosphere”. (Also interesting, if unsurprising, is that the first person who said “the blogosphere” meant it as a joke.) Instead, there are many blogospheres in separate orbits, all oblivious to the other bodies sharing the same outer space. This fact is not entirely understood in the mainstream media, however, which also has the impression “blogger” and “political blogger” are synonymous terms. They also publish stories with shocking headlines such as “Canada’s political bloggers are predominantly male”. (Do note: so are Canada’s political everythings.)
Anyway, I have spun out of my own orbit. The point of this post is that I need help. Even the book blogosphere is broken down into many, many sub-spheres– reviewers, fetishists, librarians, collectors, scholars, writers, illustrators, designers, etc. etc. etc. What are the spheres you like to read? Who is writing the best online reviews these days? What are your favourite book blogs? Please share your favourites (and all links are welcome, though an emphasis on Canadian sites would be most helpful to me). Thank you.
May 16, 2011
On the resistance: books, e-books and the future
Natalee Caple anticipates my reaction to her essay “Resisting borders”, noting that to be the e-book doubter that I am, I am therefore “an unforgivable elitist who really fears becoming antiquated and so losing [my] bragging rights”. And I’m not sure about that, putting my doubting more down to me being the kind of person who carried a Sony Sports Walkman until 2002, and only stopped buying VHS a couple of years ago. But yes, it’s also about my love of books, and while I am as concerned as Caple about current threats to literary culture, I remain unconvinced that e-books are the answer to our prayers and not just cause to say another one.
First, because if we’re going to talk about “elitist” (and let’s face it, I don’t want to. As soon as anyone uses the word “hegemonic”, I start tuning out. I didn’t do that well in grad school), I’m not sure books are the culprit. Sure, e-books are accessible to writers, but in order for somebody to read one, they have to spend a couple of hundred dollars on an electronic device (that has potential for bugs in hardware and software, is going to end up obsolete in a matter of months, then live forever more in a landfill, leaking toxins into the ground). A book, on the other hand, is accessible to anybody for has the good fortune of literacy and a couple of bucks. Plus, books can live long, long second-hand lives that the e-book will only ever dream about.
For writers, on the other hand, I am not entirely convinced I want publishing to be quite so accessible. In “A Room of One’s Own”, Virginia Woolf wasn’t writing about publishing. She was writing about what a woman with the appropriate brains and talent requires to actually get down and write, and she certainly wasn’t prescribing the writing life for everyone. (You want an elitist? Introducing Virginia Woolf. I think she’d also fear being tarred as a supporter of “midlists” out of disdain for anything “mid.”) Yes, traditional publishing structures have kept diverse voices from telling their stories, and mechanisms have to be in place for this to keep changing, but I do value traditional structures for keeping truly terrible writing at home in the drawer where it belongs. My strong feelings in this area come from an experience I had which involved me having to read ten self-published novels which were so unbearably, unequivocally awful. And whose writers were so unbelievably arrogant that they believed they could publish a book even though they evidently had never read one, and certainly had no idea how to use the materials a book is constructed of (like plot, character, words, grammar, layout, etc.). This kind of access is good for nobody (and enables self-deluded would-be writers to waste extortionate amounts of money). Natalee Caple has a noble dream of re-inventing democracy, and that’s fair enough, but I wonder if she’d have a different point of view had she had to have read those ten books I did.
I am however (and so would be Virginia) fully on board with Natalee Caple’s plea for the midlists, that publishers’ drives for best-sellerdom does literature a disservice. That Lynn Coady’s Play the Monster Blind is out of print, for example, is ridiculous and tragic, but at least I found a second-hand copy that will now live forevermore on my bookshelf. Would I have had such fortune if Play the Monster… had been an e-book, however? If Play the Monster… had been an e-book, wouldn’t it have been published in a format that no device would be able to read now? (I always find myself thinking of the laserdisc at times like these).
Natalee Caple is so right, right, right in her enthusiasm, in her hypothoses about technology breaking down borders, and in her faith in the future of books in general. It’s not all about us and them though, or this and that, or about throwing out babies or bathwater. (It also isn’t about how the average reader is on Twitter, because most people really aren’t on Twitter. Broadly speaking, this is a fact.) But it’s about treading ambitiously (as Natalee is doing), and carefully (as I am inclined to do), breaking down the right borders and ensuring that the way forward will only make our literature better.
