November 1, 2010

November bits and bobs

CBC Books’ Monthly Book Report Podcast is now online, and at about 8:40 you can here a panel discussion with me, Jen Knoch of the KIRBC, Ron Nurwisah from The Afterword (moderated by Erin Balser) about what’s going down with Canada Reads 2011. Admittedly, I was feeling a bit more optimistic about the Top 40 that day than I was last Friday, but you’ll be happy to know that I’ve come around a bit. That it might be the journey and not the destination that matters– if what I love best about Canada Reads is obscure recommendations, then here is a list of 20 books I haven’t read yet, and why not pursue those avenues? What if the authors pushing their books are not so much saying, “Win me a prize!”, but “Read me, read me, read me!” Which is the kind of plea I tend to listen to. You know, it was never so much Canada Reads itself and the panel discussions I cared about as much as the reading that led up it (and the conversations online with other readers), and perhaps this changed format is just going to extend that whole experience.

That said, have you voted for Sean Dixon’s The Girls Who Saw Everything yet? If I’ve got to have a reread in the final five, might as well be the one that I brought to the table.

Anyway, I’ve officially decided to bring on Canada Reads Independently 2011, because it was a great deal of fun last year, and complemented the actual Canada Reads in all kinds of interesting ways. And also because it was the Canada Reads subject to my whims, and how brilliant is that? I’m already a-thinking about panellists, and I think we can come up with something amazing. Watch this space.

Watch also for news of my work appearing in all kinds of interesting places– I’ve got essays and reviews coming out this month that I’m very excited about, and though I still have to keep my mouth shut about them, I look forward to soon when I no longer have to. I’ve finally got started on a blog for Literature for Life, and am going to visit their new digs tomorrow to get an update on where we are at. I will also be giving a guest lecture at Ryerson later this month about “Bringing Children’s Books to Life” and I’m wholly enjoying the preparation, looking forward to the delivery, but there’s still plenty of work to be done in the meantime, and so onward.

October 31, 2010

Fundamental Energy: Happy Halloween!

“Sugar is an all-natural way of making most everything we eat taste better. Commonly found in plant foods, it’s also an excellent source of carbohydrates, the fundamental energy that powers our bodies.” — copy found on bag of Lantic Icing Sugar. Rock on.

October 29, 2010

About Canada Reads 2011: The good and the bad

So, I am excited that Sean Dixon’s The Girls Who Saw Everything has made it into the CBC Canada Reads Top 40 list. It’s a fantastic book that you should probably read, and I’m not the only one who thinks so– it received a lot of support. This does mean, however, that we all have to vote for the book again to get it into the finals– go here and do so.

I’m a bit conflicted though, or maybe just confused. I think a lot of us having been coming at Canada Reads from a multiplicity of angles, and the whole thing might be turning into a convoluted mess. Because, for example, my understanding is that Canada Reads is a great opportunity to highlight a book one is particularly passionate about, to bring the public’s attention to something they might not have read before, but something they will probably love, which is why I picked Dixon’s brilliant, quirky, book that was published by an independent press.

But I realize that I’d missed the point, or that my understanding of Canada Reads is different from another’s– say, Perdita Felicien, who last year was a panelist championing Anne Marie McDonald’s Fall on Your Knees. Quite simply, she picked a book she loved, and that was that. Other critics have demonstrated they understand Canada Reads to be an opportunity for panelists to promote books that Canada should read, in order to better ourselves. And this year, CBC has made Canada Reads something a bit different altogether– a chance for us to revisit the best books from the past decade, as nominated by the readers who loved them.

Oh, and as nominated by writers too, which is kind of awkward. I love the idea of readers pushing their favourite books, the conversation that ellicits, the passions fuelled, but surely an author in the fray isn’t going to have the same kind of conversations, the same interests. If your book really was one of the essential books of the past decade, couldn’t you rely on your passionate readers to promote it? And if you don’t have those passionate readers, then, um, maybe your book wasn’t one of the essential books of the past decade? It sort of kills the fun, actually, and you can’t blame the authors really, because they were encouraged, but it all seems quite contrary to the spirit of the game.

When I first saw the top forty list, I was thrilled. Not only had Dixon’s book made it, but so many other books I’m passionate about are there as well– The Way the Crow Flies by Anne-Marie McDonald (so underrated– I love this book), Unless by Carol Shields (which is my favourite book ever), Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb (which is wonderful, and award-winning, but I don’t think we could be done talking about it yet), Skim by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki (a graphic novel– such a twist!), and Lisa Moore’s February (swoon). I guess all of these are books we’re not finished talking about already, or at least I’m not.

But there are two problems, and I only realized this a while after I first saw the list. 1) All the best books here, the books I most want to win, I’ve read already! So there goes 99% of the fun for me, really. [And there’s only book here that I’ve not yet read that I’ve been moved to pick up, and that’s Essex County by Jeff Lemire. I’ve read 20 of the others already, and the final 19 haven’t appealed to me yet.) 2) The books I most want to win probably won’t win– a lot of readers’ understanding is that we should vote for the most essential books of the last decade, and in general terms these probably are The Book of Negroes, Late Nights on Air, Lullabies for Little Criminals etc. Books we’ve already read to death, however– and I can’t imagine that I’d find myself reading these again.

I’m still hopeful that the CBC will come up with something excellent– the list does bode well for interesting, but if you’re like me and come to Canada Reads to encounter something new, things may not work out exactly as planned. Which is why, I think, I am probably going to do Canada Reads Independently 2011, CBC shortlist pending. So we’ll have to see what happens, and at least things aren’t boring (yet).

October 29, 2010

Mariella Bertelli performs The Frog

We’re lucky enough to have Spadina Road as our closest Toronto Public Library branch, where Mariella runs the children’s programming. Since Harriet was eight weeks old, Mariella has been delighting our whole family with her storytelling, her games and songs. And now she’s on Youtube– Mariella for everyone! Here is Mariella performing The Frog.

October 28, 2010

A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert

Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women has been declared a novel, and certainly it functions with a similar narrative arc, but it’s a novel comprising 15 distinct sections, some of which have been previously published as short stories. The book spans over one hundred years, and four generations of one family, and though there are echoes of her predecessors in each woman’s experience, it is the disconnects between the women that are in some ways more significant. Each woman even disconnected from her own time and place– minds wander back into the past and turn the same pages over and over, all the while the present is overwhelmingly present, but never seems to be the point. The point never the point either– Walbert’s prose is slippery, no sentence or paragraph ever taking you where think that it will go.

If this were a more straightforward book, I’d tell you first that it’s about Dorothy Trevor Townsend, who attended Cambridge University at the turn of the century, but had to get permission to attend lectures with male students (with the promise that she wouldn’t speak), and couldn’t earn a degree, but a worthless certificate instead. She falls in with an Anarchist, but that all falls apart when he quits anarchy to rejoin his class, then fast-forward to fifteen years later when the whole world has fallen in with war. Desperate to give voice to the suffragette cause, which has lost support as the nation turns to the war effort instead, Dorothy goes on a hunger strike, relentlessly, and eventually loses her life.

The heartbreaking postscript to this story being the rest of the story, which is that Dorothy has two children, and they’ve already lost their father. Her son Thomas is sent to live with relatives in America, while her daughter Evelyn makes her own way, surviving WW1 in the wilds of Yorkshire, and then earning a scholarship to study mathematics at Bernard College in New York City. The invisible underscore to the rest of her life being her mother’s sacrifice, which had been her sacrifice as well, but not a willing one. She lives a life that is rich in its own peculiar way, but is also sadly stilted. Her own sacrifice was that she could only ever have one thing or another, and her story ends with a glimpse of a life that could have been more whole than that.

Evelyn never reconnects with her brother or his family, and years later his daughter Dorothy (who grew up estranged from Thomas) is surprised to discover her extraordinary family history. Throughout the book, we see her make conventional choices of marriage and children, and even flirt with second-wave feminism in the most suburban sense, but her awakening doesn’t come until later in life, until after forty years of marriage when she realizes she’s never been who she’s meant to be. Like her grandmother before her, this realization come with its own sacrifices, but there is a freedom with her age, and a world with mechanisms to support her.

Less supportive are her daughters Liz and Caroline, each different from the other but connected by disdain for their mother’s behaviour. Caroline is discovering that her efforts have not culminated in the life she was expecting, Liz is overwhelmed by quotidian demands, and both of their lives are dominated by fear. Both see promise, however, in their daughters– the possibility of hope. But perhaps there is something inevitable, as Caroline writes:

“I find it is the dark of night when you least expect it… regret, perhaps, but not, it is bigger than that, more epic, somehow, padded and full and weirdly historical: this restlessness, this discontent. You’ve done it wrong, again, and you were going to do it perfectly. You’ve lost the forest for the trees.”

A Short History of Women is a demanding book, in which the reader has to create her own space, take some time to find her feet. However, once accessed, the story opens wide with avenues to consider, new questions, connections made. The women’s experiences resemble one another, but not in ways predictable or parallel, and a reader who comes away with conclusions (if she manages to at all) will have had to wholeheartedly engage with the story in the process, with questions of how far these characters have actually come, and where there’s left to travel.

October 27, 2010

Do the Grandpa

Stuart was excited to discover the 20 Awesomely Untranslatable Words from Around the World, in particular “Iktsuarpok”, which is an Inuit word meaning, “To go outside to check if anyone is coming.” Iktsuarpok actually is translatable, at least into our family shorthand, in which “to go outside [or to the window] to check if anyone is coming” is to “Do the Grandpa”. Both of us remember pulling up to our grandparents’ as children, and seeing Grandpa appearing at the window because he’d been listening for our car. Which is to say that both our Grandfathers had either keen ears, or rather empty days, or maybe they had both sometimes, or traded one for another as their lives got longer. Or maybe it’s to say nothing in particular at all, because both of us from time to time find ourselves Doing the Grandpa too.

October 27, 2010

That's what I call bad novels.

“To make a long story short, let’s imagine something called “industrial literature.” It’s job is to reproduce, ad infinitum, the same types of stories, to grind out assembly-line stereotypes, to retail noble sentiments and trembling emotions, to seize every opportunity to turn current events into docu-dramas, to conduct market studies in order to manufacture, according to demographic profile, products designed to tease the imaginations of specific categories of consumers.

That’s what I call bad novels.

Why? Because they’re not creations. Because they reproduce pre-established forms. Their enterprise is one of simplification (lies, in other words), whereas the novel is the art of truth (complexity, in other words). Because by provoking knee-jerk reactions, they lull our curiosity. Because the author is absent, and so is the reality he or she claims to describe.” –Daniel Pennac, Better Than Life

October 25, 2010

10 Reasons to be Happy

1) The odds of an amazing book winning The Giller Prize is remarkly high

2) I heard on the radio (via the Inuit) that polar bear populations are rising, not falling. They’ve just gotten better at hiding from scientists.

3) I know two awesome babies born in the past two weeks, and two more are still abrewing. Odds of at least one of them changing the world for the better is quite high.

4) Unfit, angry people without karma on their side are at greater risk than the rest of us of dropping dead at any time

5) America elected Obama president

6) Those Chilean miners, remember?

7) Dairy Milks in the post, and leftover pumpkin pie

8) Message to My Girl by Split Enz

9) The Sunday after next has 25 hours in it

10) Drawing close is Winter Solstice, the darkest day of the year, and I’ve chosen to regard this as a harbinger of spring.

BONUS: My next door neighbour just brought a huge box of fresh fruit to my door– 3 pints of strawberries, melon and grapes.

October 25, 2010

El Anatsui and Margaret Drabble, via Heather Mallick

Photo courtesy blog.rom.on.ca

When I Last Wrote to You About Africa, the retrospective of Ghanian sculptor El Anatsui now on at the Royal Ontario Museum, was one of the most exciting, beautiful and powerful exhibitions I’ve ever seen. So you can imagine my delight upon reading Heather Mallick’s column last weekend, as she draws a parallel between the show and Margaret Drabble’s ideas as expressed in her latest book The Pattern in the Carpet. Marvelous worlds colliding!

Mallick writes of the exhibit:

I visited this weekend for the second time, for the pleasure of being shocked by beautiful acreage. The possible meanings leap out at me, what El Anatsui is saying about the way we live now.

I like to tell fellow ROM visitors (strange how they back away from me) about my theory, borrowed from the novelist Margaret Drabble, about why people are so angry and unhappy now. Suffering from the illness known as “affluenza”, they are told to view life as an economic ladder, a vertical clamber to success. But people are falling off the ladder now, or are stalled mid-rung, and it hurts.

Drabble says life is not a ladder but a jigsaw. It moves sideways and around, no one event knocking you into the abyss. Suddenly a job loss or a sick child or a bad divorce is just another piece in the broad jigsaw, part of a pattern in the carpet. No section of the jigsaw is more important than any other. This is a comfort when the wheels come off.

That’s what El Anatsui’s metal curtains say. The bigger ones do look like Canada, well-assembled and prosperous, with random wrinkles representing our national miseries.

October 24, 2010

The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of his friend Marilyn Monroe by Andrew O'Hagan

I am sure I could get to the bottom of whether Marilyn Monroe’s dog (a gift from Frank Sinatra) really had been previously owned by Vanessa Bell, but maybe the joke would be on me then. Or it would just demonstrate that I’d missed the joke altogether, the punchline to a question like, “How do you write a novel about a dog that belongs to Marilyn Monroe, and make it implausibly literary?” If if were to tell you a joke right now, it would probably be something about how I wasn’t quite smart enough for the book about Marilyn’s dog, which is The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of his friend Marilyn Monroe by Andrew O’Hagan.

Most remarkable about this book (and how I could start any number of different sentences this way) is not its pop-culture references, or its grip on Mad Men era current events, but its doggishness. Which is unsurprising for a novel written from the perspective of a dog, but then how many novels have been narrated from the perspective of a dog? Well, quite a few, actually, including Virginia Woolf’s Flush, which is referenced on Page 5, and so here is a novel quite aware of itself and its tongue-in-cheek literary tradition.

“A dog’s biggest talent,” so says Maf, “is for absorbing everything of interest– we absorb the best of what is known to our owners and we retain the thoughts of those we meet. We are rentative enough and we have none of that fatal human weakness for making large distinctions between what is real and what is imagined.” A narrator who borders on omniscience then, which makes Maf the Dog… not such a jarring departure as novels go, dog or no dog, but then this is no “no dog” and O’Hagan never falters with his dog’s eye view, of shoes and pantlegs, and whatnot. The dog stays in the picture– a visit to Marilyn’s analyst raises Freud’s dog Jo-Fi, Maf references other literary dogs including Flush, and Steinbeck’s Charley, from Civil Rights we go to Abe Lincoln’s dog Fido who “gave the future president his love of the untethered”,  and so on, and so on. The novel is peppered with footnotes containing such fascinating facts, one of these notes beginning, “A dog is bound to like footnotes. We spend our lives down here…” On page 164, Maf finds part of a journey boring, and so devotes his energy to compiling a list of the Top Ten Dogs of All Time. (Greyfriars Bobby, Lassie, Snoopy, Laika…)

After leaving his home in England with Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, Maf travelled to Los Angeles and Frank Sinatra via Natalie Wood’s eccentric mother. Kennedy had just won the presidency, and spirits were high– Sinatra presents the dog to Monroe was a gift, she christens him “Mafia Honey”, and they spend the rest of her life together. Monroe had just come off the tail-end of her breakup with Arthur Miller, had become determined to prove herself as an actress and as a person, carried a thick Russian novel around in her bag, and insisted on trying to read it. She’s studying Method Acting with Lee Strasberg (and O’Hagan’s scene of Marilyn reading from “Anna Christie” is incredible, deep and affecting– a seamless weaving of her lines and her conjuring from her own experience to underline them). She has lunch with Carson McCullers, goes to parties with Lionel Trilling (who notes how “[w]hen Henry James was old and tired… he could be seen moving down the High Street in Rye with his dog Maximilian trotting behind him”), meets President Kennedy (and it’s much less sensational than you’d think– “A lot of depressing shoes at the party,” reports Maf. “I mean Mules.”)

Oh, and Mafia Honey is a Trotskyist, and delivers line about how some people think being themselves is a fine alibi for not being something better, and considers Montaigne “my personal friend”, and pees in Frank Sinatra’s backseat. The Marilyn Monroe he presents to us is a complex character, fascinatingly and lovingly rendered, and more interesting than I’ve seen her in any other tribute. The novel is original, surprising, intelligent, full of brilliant insights, and shows that O’Hagan is a novelist with plenty of tricks up his sleeve.