December 31, 2010
Great non-2010 books read in 2010
1) Old Books, Rare Friends by M. Stern and L. Rostenberg
2) How the Heather Looks by Joan Bodger
3) The Crack in the Teacup by Joan Bodger
4) Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns
5) People You’d Trust Your Life To by Bronwen Wallace
6) Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman (and also At Large and At Small, which I whiled away a sunny cottage day to)
7) The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym
8) The Tiger in the Tiger Pit by Janette Turner Hospital
9) The Essential PK Page by PK Page
10) Touch the Dragon by Karen Connelly
December 30, 2010
Canada Reads Independently Spotlight: Home Truths by Mavis Gallant
It’s hard to place Mavis Gallant exactly. She certainly holds a position alongside Canada’s best-known writers, the Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood fold, and yet she doesn’t seem to be read with the same exuberance. There are reasons for this: Gallant hasn’t lived in Canada for years, she’s less prolific than the others, she’s almost always a short story writer (and yet this doesn’t seem to have hindered Munro, but Gallant does seem more focussed on the stories themselves than the books they’re collected in). I wonder also if it’s because she’s a generation older than Munro and Atwood, and her works don’t always spark the same sense of self-recognition in her readers.
All this to say that for many of us, there is still much to be discovered in Mavis Gallant’s work. That it makes sense to include one of Canada’s best-known writers in Canada Reads Independently, and for a book that was awarded the Governor General’s Award no less, as Home Truths was in 1981. “Best-known” is very often quite distinct from “most-read”, in fact, very often “best-knowing” makes us think that the actual reading is optional. (It is worth noting that Gallant’s collection From the Fifteenth District was read as part of Canada Reads 2008, but was the first book voted out of the competition).
Of Home Truths as her Canada Reads Independently pick, Carrie Snyder writes:
…the reason I chose it from among Mavis Gallant’s many marvelous collections is its final section: linked semi-autobiographical stories about a young woman, Linnet Muir, who returns to the city of her birth, Montreal, and makes her life up with daring and courage. The character, though still a teenager in the first story, “In Youth is Pleasure,” is completely alone in the world; and yet she is not afraid. Her invention of herself, in “Between Zero and One,” is bold, but she does not consider it so: “I was deeply happy. It was one of the periods of inexplicable grace when every day is a new parcel one unwraps, layer on layer of tissue paper covering bits of crystal, scraps of words in a foreign language, pure white stones.” The Linnet Muir stories do not progress in linear fashion, yet they hold together effortlessly, in the accretion of images that create a lost world, and a remarkable character.
Though the whole collection is compelling. According to Snyder:
“The stories themselves … brilliant, precise, particular, detailed, mysterious, elegant. Each is set in a place and a time rendered in immaculate detail: Montreal in the 1920s and 1940s, Northern Ontario after the second world war, Geneva of the 1950s, Paris, 1952. As with any collection, some stories will grab a reader more than others, but all have something to offer: think of it as a smorgasbord for the mind.”
A 1985 review in Time Magazine calls these stories “unrelentingly bleak”, but notes that “[i]rony serves to sharpen, and humor leaven, the mishaps that befall the book’s eccentric families”. And to be honest, I couldn’t find much more about the collection online. I did see it used in a discussion on Michael Bryson’s blog about the short story, but this is less exciting when we see that it was by Carrie Snyder once again, Gallant’s tireless champion. See Gallant in a fascinating 2009 interview at The Guardian though (which cites her influence on Jhumpa Lahiri), and some not bad biographical detail here. And of course, her Paris Review interview (“The Linnet Muir stories are fiction, but as close to autobiography as fiction can be”).
I read My Heart is Broken so long ago I can hardly remember, Paris Notebooks, and I read From the Fifteenth District seven years ago when I was living in Japan. I have not read Mavis Gallant since I became particularly adept at and in love with reading short stories, and so I have a feeling that my reading of Home Truths will be full of goodness and discovery.
December 29, 2010
Comfort and Joy
One of the reasons I’ve had such a lovely holiday (which I’m still having, actually) is that I received India Knight’s new novel Comfort and Joy, freshly imported from the UK. A fortunate thing, because it’s a Christmas book, and it would have been strange to read it in April or October, but to spend Christmas and Boxing Days stuck between its covers was absolutely perfect. Not least of all because its covers are so lovely– designed by Leanne Shapton of Important Artifacts… fame. And oh golly, those endpapers with sprigs of holly. Of course the story too, and I love all of India Knight’s work, and how she channels Nancy Mitford, comic fiction at its finest, her self-conscious send-up of the English middle class, and that her novels read like her newspaper columns but all spliced together. Referencing Barbara Pym on one page, and Grant Mitchell on another, and I’m not sure the world gets more perfect than that. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel.
I received a few other books for Christmas (Started Early, Took My Dog, The Torontonians, Pleased to Meet You) but I’m saving these for the New Year. In the meantime, I am reading up the unread books on my shelf that are unpressing and therefore I might never get around to reading ever. And this has been a most rewarding experience– it’s why I read Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, and then Andrew Pyper’s amazing Lost Girls, Almost Japanese by Sarah Sheard, and Touch the Dragon by Karen Connelly. I’m now reading The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen, which I’ve been putting off and putting off, because although I enjoyed The House in Paris last Fall, I also remember that it was difficult and sometimes frustratingly abstruse. Once I’ve conquered it, however, I am going to attempt to read a little-known work called The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. But then again, maybe I won’t.
In picture book news, we gave Harriet We Are In a Book (An Elephant and Piggie Book by Mo Willems), The Book About Moomin, Mymble and Little My by Tove Jansson, and The Owl and the Pussycat. My life is now officially complete, because a friend gave us The Jolly Postman. Other amazing books include The Quiet Book by Deborah Underwood, the terrifyingly wonderful Mixed Beasts by Kenyon Cox, and But No Elephants by Jerry Smath.
Our days have been a mix of a whole lot of nothing and a whole lot of everything, friends, togetherness, and copious amounts of chocolate. We are infinitely grateful that Stuart now works in an office that closes for the holidays, as everything is better when he is around, and he’s around all the time. We are also very much listening to the CDs received in our family for Christmas: Dar Williams’ Many Great Companions, The Essential Paul Simon, and Elizabeth Mitchell Sunny Day. Each one is very, very good.
December 23, 2010
Merry Christmas!
Not a perfect festive photo, but will have to suffice right now, even though it’s a bit heavy on the Miffy. We’ve got the tree though, and Harriet hasn’t shut her eyes (which she lately thinks is required when she’s called on to smile). I was just out in the neighbourhood dropping off banana bread (as you do) when I ran into some women from Baby Yoga, and we were reflecting on a lifetime ago when we were all new moms. And then I went on to the library, and we saw our friends there, and I thought about (like I always do) is how blessed we are by the community we’ve found in this big, big city. And on this big, big internet too– the connections I’ve made are such a delight. I am so grateful for your friendship, support and inspiration, and wish each and every person who turns up here (yes, even you who came googling “connect mammoth with god with us an a line mam” and especially you who came via “supporting breastfeeding mothers on the second night”) a very Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year. xo
December 22, 2010
Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns
I read Barbara Comyns’ book Our Spoons Came From Woolworths strictly for fun, with no intention of blogging about it, but then once it was finished I desperately required somebody to talk about it with. And you will do! I first saw reference to the book at the DoveGreyReader blog, where she didn’t mention the book at all, but it was included in a stack of books about eccentric middlebrow families. The title was memorable. And then Stephany Aulenback at Crooked House included some excerpts as part of her (Having) Babies in Literature Series. I also really liked the pink in the cover, then picked up a copy at the Vic Book Sale in September whose spine had never even been cracked. (For those of you who share my aversion to dogs in books, do note that the cover photo is slightly misleading. There is a dog, but he is actually a fox, and only comes in at the end.)
The book’s copyright page states, “The only things that are true in this story are the wedding and Chapters 10, 11 and 12 and the poverty”. Chapter 9 begins, “This book does not seem to be growing very large although I have got to Chapter Nine. I think this is partly because there isn’t any conversation. I could just fill pages like this: “I am sure it is true,” said Phyllida./ “I cannot agree with you,” answered Norman”… That is the kind of stuff that appears in real people’s books.” Chapter 38 is entitled “The Last Chapter”, and begins, “This is the end of my book, but not the end of my story, which will go on until I die…”
All of which is to say that this novel is a delightful blend of fiction and memoir, made up in a whimsical form whose lightness very nearly belies the rawness of its subject matter. Sophia marries Charles at the age of 21 in 1930s’ London, and they set up house together. (This was when poor people lived on Primrose Hill). Charles is devoted to his painting (and his mother thinks he is a genius) and therefore has an aversion to earning a living, so Sophia supports them both with commercial art work and posing for painters. When she eventually becomes pregnant, Charles (along with his family) blames her for ensnaring him into the mess of domesticity, but Sophia is determined to make their situation work. The chapter of her birth (which is the aforementioned Chapter 10, btw) is brutally awful, but delivered in the matter-of-fact chirpiness that runs through the entire story, whether Sophia is dealing with her botched abortion, her infidelity, her husband’s inattention, their poverty, and the eventual death of her daughter. Oddly enough, this isn’t a depressing story at all, because Sophia never fails to be optimistic, to take notice of the rare happy times, because the entire story is delivered in retrospect, so the self-pity and sadness is glossed over.
What we get then is an unconventionally-structured narrative about unconventionally-structured lives, a fast-paced read from the perspective of a unique and captivating narrator. Hooray for Virago Modern Classics, which brings women’s stories back into print (though from examining their catalogue, I see that ought to go about bringing this one back into print again). Definitely, everything the cover would have you expecting (except the dogs).
December 22, 2010
Canada Reads Independently Spotlight: Darren Greer's Still Life With June
Darren Greer’s novel Still Life With June is the little novel that did. 
It won the 2004 ReLit Award,was shortlisted for both the 2003 Pearson Canada Readers’ Choice Book Award and the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction, and was named one of the Top 10 books of 2003 by NOW Magazine. It has also inspired passionate responses from readers, including Canada Reads Indies champion Chad Pelley who previously featured the novel on his website Salty Ink. Pelley writes, “This novel is outright funny and downright grave: not something most writers could pull of so flawlessly.”
From Pelley’s plot summary:
In Cameron Dodds’ take on the world there are two kinds of people: “losers who know they are losers, and losers who don’t know they are losers.” Cameron, a small-time writer, considers himself a loser who knows he is a loser. He works at a Sally Ann drug and alcohol treatment centre, where he steals the file of Darryl Green, a recent suicide case, and gets so engrossed in the file that he translates Darryl’s life into fiction, going as far as befriending the deceased’s sister: a Down Syndrome patient named June, who he regularly visits.
It’s a book about a lot of things: the bonds and tensions unique to blood relations, a truthful and amusing exposé on the life of emerging writers, or even the ways cats have it knocked. But more than anything, it’s a novel about identity, replete with well-crafted and complicated characters, i.e very human characters. Every single character is in denial about who they are, and without giving too much away about the brilliant, page-turner of an ending, Cameron quite literally gets lost looking for himself.
The writer of the blog LiveLiterary called Still Life With June “a gem of a book“, and found it not so much the plot that was compelling as Cameron Dodd’s voice and characterization. My fellow Vicious Circler B. read the book last year, and wrote that it, “thankfully, never becomes too enamored with its own wit; above all it champions the idea that even the most fragmented life can be healed if one has the courage to face one’s deceptions.”
The novel received a critical review in The Journal on Developmental Disabilities, which took issue with Greer’s portrayal of a disabled character, and also with the language about disability used throughout the novel. The reviewer found that this was a novel that got so much right, and moreover managed to cast all kinds of outsiders and misfits in a new kind of light, but casts the disabled character as simple and one-dimensional. Cameron Dodds’ world is a pretty complicated place but June, as all the other reviews I’ve read point out, is “just June”. The reviewer writes that this is “another story in which Down syndrome exists as a metaphor”. And I take note of this review because I think it comes from a different and interesting perspective, is thoughtfully written, and worth keeping in mind.
Still Life With June‘s book trailer is here, and worth a look (though I can’t get it to embed correctly). Cormorant has also posted an audio interview with Darren Greer.
I am heartened by B.’s assessment of this as not your usual book with a cynical main character, attracted to the book jacket, and excited by Chad Pelley’s enthusiasm for Still Life… I am really looking forward to reading it (and hopefully it will be more successful than my last Still Life… attempt).
December 21, 2010
Illustrated literary allusions
Seriously, my head went on vacation three days ago, so please indulge me a little here. Lately, I’ve been obsessed with identifying illustrated literary allusions in picture books. The Ahlberg‘s are all over this, the baby in Baby’s Catalogue actually reading his own copy of Baby’s Catalogue. Elsewhere in the book, Baby’s Daddy is reading old school baby expert Hugh Jolly’s Book of Child Care. In another Ahlberg book, the sweet but kind-of-disturbing Bye Bye Baby, the old Uncle is reading an orange Penguin paperback, but no amount of examination has managed to decipher which one.
Harriet and I both delight in Jorge Uzon’s Go Baby Go when the baby in the book “reads” Teddy Jam’s Night Cars. We also have a book called Book by Kristine O’Connell George, whose illustrations by Maggie Smith show the child clearly reading Richard Scarry’s The Bunny Book. Except that Scarry is uncredited– I wonder if it’s more tribute than plagiarism? Though wouldn’t a more fitting tribute be to have his name on it, hmm?
Updated: We just read Marjorie Flick’s Ping, followed by Sarah Garland’s Going to Playschool in which the children are being read aloud from a book that is quite clearly Marjorie Flack’s Ping. Amazing! What are the odds of these two books coming home from the library with us together?
December 20, 2010
I am going to blame my current lack of focus on
I am going to blame my current lack of focus on David Shields, who thinks that focus is boring, and narrative is boring, and who cares about people or fiction, and that popular music stopped being worthwhile at about the same time he ceased to be young. I just finished reading Shields’ Reality Hunger, which I kept screaming at (“You motherfucking, self-hating book…”), but which I’m glad I read it, because his thoughts about fiction, non-fiction, and memoir gave me a lot to think about. However exasperating, the book is interesting and worthwhile, a collage of various sources intermingled with Shields’ own thoughts and ideas, each numbered paragraph disjunct from what came before it. That there is no whole, just fragments we construct in various ways, but I was left longing for a bit of synthesis. However, that’s just me, the status-quo rally-er cited in the book’s jacket copy. Unlike Shields, who writes books, I really love them, but I just read them so what do I know? I do know that it’s strange that Shields is bored by everything so thinks the entire world should change, rather than just working to improve his pathetic attention span. Also, as an effect of reading his book, my attention span is just a little shot too, and I can’t wait to open up a real book and read it and get my mind back, now that I’m finished with this stomping tantrum of a text. (Which, actually, I didn’t finish at all, but I had had enough of by page 180 and so I decided to put it down, which might be the most David Shieldsian thing I’ve done ever.)
December 20, 2010
"A Simple Poem for Virginia Woolf" by Bronwen Wallace
This started out as a simple poem
for Virginia Woolf you know the kind
we women writers write these days
in our own rooms
on our own time
a salute a gesture of friendship
a psychological debt
paid off
I wanted it simple
and perfect round
hard as an
egg I thought
only once I’d said egg
I thought of the smell
of bacon grease and dirty frying-pans
and whether there were enough for breakfast
I couldn’t help it
I wanted the poem to be carefree and easy
like children playing in the snow
I didn’t mean to mention
the price of snowsuits or
how even on the most expensive ones
the zippers always snag
just when you’re late for work
and trying to get the children
off to school on time
a straightforward poem
for Virginia Woolf that’s all
I wanted really
not something tangled in
domestic life the way
Jane Austen’s novels tangled
with her knitting her embroidery
whatever it was she hid them under
I didn’t mean to go into all that
didn’t intend to get confessional
and tell you how
every time I read a good poem
by a woman writer I’m always peeking
behind it trying to see
if she’s still married
or has a lover at least
wanted to know what she did
with her kids while she wrote it
or whether she had any
and if she didn’t if she’d chosen
not to or if she did did she
choose and why I didn’t mean
to bother with that
and I certainly wasn’t going
to tell you about the time
my best friend was sick in intensive care
and I went down to see her
but they wouldn’t let me in
because I wasn’t her husband
or her father her mother
I wasn’t family
I was just her friend
and the friendship of women
wasn’t mentioned
in hospital policy
or how I went out and kicked
a dent in the fender of my car
and sat there crying because
if she died I wouldn’t be able
to tell her how much I loved her
(though she didn’t and we laugh
about it now) but that’s what got me
started I suppose wanting to write
a gesture of friendship
for a woman for a woman writer
for Virginia Woolf
and thinking I could do it
easily separating the words
from the lives they come from
that’s what a good poem should do
after all and I wasn’t going to make excuses
for being a woman blaming years of silence
for leaving us
so much to say
This started out as a simple poem
for Virginia Woolf
it wasn’t going to mention history
or choices or women’s lives
the complexities of women’s friendships
or the countless gritty details
of an ordinary woman’s life
that never appear in poems at all
yet even as I write these words
those ordinary details intervene
between the poem I meant to write
and this one where the delicate faces
of my children faces of friends
of women I have never even seen
glow on the blank pages
and deeper than any silence
press around me
waiting their turn
by Bronwen Wallace
December 17, 2010
Old picture books we love
In November we started going to the Lillian H. Smith Library, whose building is new but whose collection dates back to Gutenberg (or thereabouts). The highlight of this has been discovering new-to-us picture books that are decidedly not new to anyone else. I’ve been surprised at how many of these I’ve brought home have been wonderful, though I suspect their wonderfulness is the reason they’re still lingering on library shelves. Timelessness is a tricky recipe, however, and I’m still not sure how it is concocted.
One writer who has managed it is Marjorie Flack, who has written the Angus books. Angus gets lost, finds some ducks, has an altercation with a cat. The milkman makes an appearance, so we know that we’ve gone back in time a little bit– these books were first published in the 1930s. But not so far back in time that the pages are dusty. Flack develops a fabulous momentum by having sentences continue onto the following page, she has great fun with all kinds of sounds, and poor little Angus is a just a tiny bit dumb that even Harriet can outsmart him– she liked the part where the cat was hiding behind the corner, Angus couldn’t see it, but she could.
I picked Minou off the shelf, because it reminded me a bit of Madeline. Its author is 
Francoise Seignobosc (1900-1961), who has a bit of biographical detail here. Minou is a small white cat who has gone missing, and the story is about the small girl who owns here going around Paris to ask if anyone has seen her Minou. This book went over particularly well, because we read it at the same time that Harriet had learned to hold out her outstretched hands and look longingly whenever she was searching for something. We look for Minou at the cheese shop, the newspaper stand, the barber, the bakery, and then (spoiler alert) we learn that Minou was last seen on a barge and she’s gone off to travel the world. But we’re assured that she’ll soon come to Paris, because everybody does.
I have loved loved loved Don Freeman for my whole life (mostly because of Corduroy and Tilly Witch), but I had never read Quiet! There’s a Canary in the Library. The story is mildly psychedelic and totally wonderful– a small girl called Cary goes to the library, and starts fantasizing that she has a library of her own, with a special day for animals to come visit. Everything starts out okay– the door is a bit wide for the elephant, the giraffe has to duck, but the lion behaves, and the monkeys stay in line, but when a bunch of mice sneak in because she’s left the door open, things spiral out of control. Luckily, the canary saves the day, and Cary comes out of her fantasy with only a modicum of embarrassment. I loved it, and Harriet liked the animals, and I particularly loved the narrative mostly constructed of a wide variety of greetings, as one animal comes into the library after another– a useful lesson that’s buried underneath a story that is lots of fun.
