December 14, 2009

Carol Shields: Evocation and Echo

I once wrote a story in response to Carol Shields’ story “Scenes” (from Various Miracles). The story was rather niftily structured as a “prose glosa” around four lines of Shields’ story, and I fell completely in love with it. I submitted it only once for publication, however, receiving a rejection remarking upon how Shields’ prose next to my prose only made clear that I was no Carol Shields. And that was sort of devastating, of course, though it was nothing I didn’t know already.

There is something about Carol Shields, though. How her death seems to have left a conversation hanging, unfinished in the air. How impossible it seems to consider her work, and that we’ll have no more of it. And this is the reason I’ve been so eager to get my mitts on anything that’s been published about her since she died– Eleanor Wachtel’s book Random Illuminations, Blanche Howard’s letters A Memoir of Friendship. To discover more about Shields is to gain deeper access to the work she left behind. This is also the reason why I so enjoyed using her work as a starting point for my own story. And all of this not just because we don’t want her literary life to be finished, but rather because her literature is such that it never will be– begging to be reread, picked apart and put back together, toyed with, read again, examined from a different angle, a few years down the line. With Carol Shields’ signature generosity, she’s created a legacy that refuses to be left alone.

Carol Shields: Evocation and Echo is a collection of reader responses to Shields and her work. Edited by Aritha van Herk and Conny Steenman-Marcusse and published throught the Association for Canadian Studies in the Netherlands, the responses range from critical takes on Shields’ work and her feminism, to fiction and poetry using her work as a springboard. Susan Swann writes from the point of view of Mary Swann regarding Shields as her creator; one of my favourite pieces “Moving On” by Charlotte Sturgess has one of Shields’ creations reporting to a rather inspired fictional bureaucracy called the Character Complaints Office; several writers created fictional amalgams of ideas presented in Shields’ incredible collection Various Miracles, Alex Ramon advances the story of Larry Weller. Typical for a writer for whom the domestic and professional were so closely linked, two of Shields’ daughter make appearences. Friends and associates have presented eulogies, some of which were first published in newspapers around the time of Shields’ death.

As with my little prose glosa, a response to Carol Shields is a long way from Carol Shields, but these “evocations and echoes” are still very effective– her spirit is evoked in these pieces, and her work opened wider by the echoes they’ve inspired. I particularly appreciated the European focus, writers and scholars who put a different spin on Shields than I’m used to, examining her outside of the Canadian Literature context. This curious scrapbook is a tribute to the engagingness of the work of Carol Shields, and a celebration of readers and reading.

December 12, 2009

A masterful essay by Rachel Cusk on women's writing

Rachel Cusk’s “Shakespeare’s Daughters” is a masterful essay on women, women writers and women’s writing. I’ve just read it and feel blown away by the craft of it, how she has articulated a muddle of thoughts that have been clouding my head for years. I urge you to read it in its entirety, and I’ve also copied some excerpts below:

“The future, of course, never comes: it is merely a projection from the present of the present’s frustrations. In the 80 years since Woolf published A Room of One’s Own, aspects of female experience have been elaborated on with commendable candour, as often as not by male writers. A book about war is still judged more important than a book about “the feelings of women”. Most significantly, when a woman writes a book about war she is lauded: she has eschewed the vast unlit chamber and the serpentine caves; there is the sense that she has made proper use of her room and her money, her new rights of property. The woman writer who confines herself to her female “reality” is by the same token often criticised. She appears to have squandered her room, her money. It is as though she has been swindled, or swindled herself; she is the victim of her own exploitation….

It may be, then, that the room of one’s own does not have quite the straightforward relationship to female creativity that Woolf imagined. She, after all, had by dint of circumstance always had a room and money of her own, and perhaps being the eternal conditions of her own writing they seemed to her indispensable. Yet she admits that the two female writers she unequivocally admired – Jane Austen and Emily Brontë – wrote in shared domestic space. The room, or the lack of it, doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with writing at all. It could be said that every woman should have a room of her own. But it may equally be the case that a room of her own enables the woman writer to shed her links with femininity and commit herself to the reiteration of “masculine values”. The room itself may be the embodiment of those values, a conception of “property” that is at base unrelated to female nature….

Some of the most passionate writing in The Second Sex concerns the ways in which women seek to protect their privileges and property under patriarchy by condemning or ridiculing the honesty of other women. This remains true today: woman continues to act as an “instrument of mystification” precisely where she fears and denies her own dependence. For the woman writer this is a scarifying prospect. She can find herself disowned in the very act of invoking the deepest roots of shared experience. Having taken the trouble to write honestly, she can find herself being read dishonestly. And in my own experience as a writer, it is in the places where honesty is most required – because it is here that compromise and false consciousness and “mystification” continue to endanger the integrity of a woman’s life – that it is most vehemently rejected. I am talking, of course, about the book of repetition, about fiction that concerns itself with what is eternal and unvarying, with domesticity and motherhood and family life. The sheer intolerance, in 2009, for these subjects is the unarguable proof that woman is on the verge of surrendering important aspects of her modern identity.”

December 11, 2009

On book club questions

I enjoyed this Guardian blog entry about why “back matter” in novels (author q&a, book club questions, suggested reading lists etc.) is “a waste of space”. I’ve actually found some of this content worthwhile in my reading, but usually just author interviews or a list of the author’s favourite books. In general, however, I skip over the stuff, and in particular when it’s questions for book clubs.

Here’s what I don’t understand about book club questions– doesn’t the fact that someone else had to come up with them undermine your reading of the book in the first place? Surely if you read in an engaged fashion, you should be able to come up with your own? And if you aren’t engaged enough to do so, that’s either a discussion in itself or your book club is reading the wrong books?

In her blog piece, Imogen Russell Williams makes a good case for how limiting back-of-the-book book club questions can be– one discussion topic requires readers to argue a particular take on an ambiguous ending, undermining the fact that the ambiguity itself is pretty remarkable. It seems these discussion questions seek to nail a book down rather than open it up wide, and therefore I can understand how such discussions could certainly be less than scintillating.

I’d probably quit that book club.

December 10, 2009

Pathos and other things

If I look tired here, it’s because I am! It’s been a hard, hard, hard few weeks. I think I’m blaming it on teeth, as there are two teeth apparent but remarkably sloooow at coming in (it’s been two weeks now, and they’re just creeping past the gums). There’s been a lot of screaming all the livelong day, and a lot of not sleeping all the deadlong night, and now I’ve just learned the joy of pushing a stroller along snowy sidewalks that people don’t shovel. Today I was a lesson in pathos as I shoved my stroller up over snowy curbs, the rain cover ripped and flew up in my face, my boots were leaking, buttons dripping off my coat, and I got splashed by a taxi-cab. The whole thing was very sad. And I won’t even get started on the middle of last night, when the baby would only stop crying when she was throwing up in my bed.

Motherhood is not always as romantic as I dreamed it would be.

There are good things: wonderful books to read, of course. I’ve been doing ongoing Christmas baking. I’m knitting Harriet a Christmas stocking. I finally completed a short story for the first time since Harriet’s birth. My short story contest win. Friends to spend afternoons with. Yesterday’s visit to the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books. That Harriet’s intensive lessons in waving hello and goodbye are starting to pay off. Advent calendar fun at every turn.

Speaking of, I’m loving The Advent Books Blog. I love reading the recommendations for books I have no intention of reading even, I love that different kinds of books that readers are so passionate about, and I like the linky places the recommenders’ biographies are taking me.

I love this post about Christmas shopping at the library. DoveGreyReader on readers vs. critics. Maureen Corrigan on passionate books for the holidays. Rebecca (delightfully) on names and naming. And I found this old interview with Allan Ahlberg, which was interesting. (Peepo is a favourite around our house.)

Now must go eat… something. And begin reading An Education by Lynn Barber.

UPDATE: For those who care, the second tooth is finally in, and we’ve got a bit of peace around here. Hurrah! I’ve also found a cheap second-hand jogging stroller online that will make my pedestrian life a little less pathetic this winter.

December 9, 2009

On reading in 2009

It’s been a funny old year for me, reading-wise and otherwise. I don’t even know how many books I read in total, because my Books Read Since 2006 list was lost in the (Un)Great Hard Drive Kaputment in late June. I’d wager I’ve read about 100 books in total though, and I’m quite pleased with the fact that I’ve read 53 of them since my baby was born in May. Many of these books have frustrated me, however. Something has changed in the way I read– either the books have gotten worse, or I’ve become more demanding/less patient. This has been ongoing since I first got pregnant, and all the books I read in the first trimester made me nauseous. Since then, I’ve had no time for a book that does poorly what it has set out to do.

I think there’s a connection in that lately, most of my literary fiction (apart from big name authors) comes from small presses. Last year, I made an “indie list”, that was sort of an off-the-beaten-track best ofs, but this year small press books make up half of the books I liked best. My impression is that the big publishing houses have been focusing less on literary fiction, in producing it and promoting it. And perhaps this been an opportunity for small presses to pick up their slack, or at least receive more focus on the wonderful books they’ve been publishing all along. It just seems remarkably clear to me for whom the bottom line is something other than profit.

I’ve also seen less incredibly polished popular fiction with a literary bent– it’s been derided, but last year I loved The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, or The Flying Troutmans and American Wife which managed to be delicious and literary at the very same time. The pop/lit. divide has seemed wider lately, much to the detriment of popular fiction in general.

Anyway, where have I discovered the books I liked best this year? I was been coaxed to read many after newspaper reviews– Caroline Adderson on Lisa Moore, and Lisa Moore on Lorrie Moore in particular, neither of which disappointed. And then there are bloggers: I read The Spare Room after DoveGreyReader’s review, and I read The Incident Report because of Melanie’s review (which was before its Giller longlisting). I read The Children’s Book after Steph wrote about it at Crooked House. The Lydia Peelle book after Lauren Groff recommended it on her blog. I only read The English Stories because I wanted to buy something from Biblioasis at Eden Mills, and that goes to show you never know, because it was one of my favourite books all year. Apart from that, my point is that bloggers sell books, oh, yes they do!

Surprising: so many short story collections here. I root for the short story, but I adore novels, but maybe short stories have better suited my focus lately. Unsurprising: all my favourite books were written by women. This doesn’t mean the men are rubbish, but I think I’ve only read two novels by men in the last six months, so better broaden my focus in the new year.

This list doesn’t mention The Girls Who Saw Everything by Sean Dixon (which is called The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal in foreign lands like America). Read my post on it: the book was absolute magic and blew me away, but alas, as it was not published this year, it doesn’t fit the bill. You should read it anyway, though.

My other favourite discovery was Barbara Pym. I can’t imagine what my life would have been had I not picked up Excellent Women at the Vic Book Sale and discovered how incredible her novels are. They’re so funny, smart and modern. I just finished read my second, No Fond Return of Love, and I liked it even better than Excellent Women. But I’ll be writing more about that later.

December 9, 2009

Pickle Me This Top Books of 2009

• The Believers by Zoe Heller. From my review: “In The Believers, Heller illuminates the faith necessary to try to live a life without faith. The way in which politics and even family can become a surrogate religion, filling up the void. And also the faith required to sustain a marriage, to raise a child, to save the world, and the strange nature of the kind of belief in that such things are even possible”
• Delicate, Edible Birds by Lauren Groff. From my review: “I will say, however, that this is a book worth judging by its cover, for the reader will not be disappointed. The cover’s bird motif appearing throughout the collection, joining these stories otherwise so disparate by style, narration, location, characterization. But the birds are there, and so is water, bodies of big and small, and swimmers, and poolside loungers, and drownings and rain. So that to ponder all these stories together after the fact is to draw surprising connections, new conclusions. Here are nine stories that belong together, but not in ways that one might suspect.”
• The Spare Room by Helen Garner. From my review: “This is a perfect novel. It’s also quite short, but… there is substance, layers and layers of. At its root about friendship, which Garner refers to here as a “long conversation”. As well as family, and belonging, and imposition, understanding, and proprietorship of each other and ourselves. Garner’s narrator fascinating to consider, her motivations, what her words and actions reveal. This novel is quiet in its force, and enormous for the space it gives to ponder.”
• The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt. From my review: “The Children’s Book is a big book in which time passes quickly, and the reading is gripping. Similarities to Byatt’s best-known work Possession have been made for good reason, though this doesn’t mean the author is simply replaying an old game. She has embarked upon something sprawling here– a story about the invention of childhood, about artistry and artfulness, about motherhood, and the status of women, all with an enormous cast of characters, most of whom are made to be tremendously alive. The novel also stands up as historical fiction, though I don’t like to use that term about books I like and I loved this one– there is nothing dusty, sepia-toned about it. The Children’s Book is decidedly vivid and surprising.”
• February by Lisa Moore. From my review: “February is a novel about moving forward, about never letting go and doing the right thing. Its characters are vivid and wonderful, their thoughts positively “thought-like”– twisting, interrupted, irrational– as Moore’s style continues on in the same surprising vein, her technical innovation perfectly realized. The story is as funny as it is sad, and that sadness has meaning beyond itself. It’s a rare thing– a perfect book. I would call it one of the best books published in Canada this year, but I’m taking my chances on it being one of the best books from anywhere”
• The Incident Report by Martha Baillie. From my review: “Miriam’s strait-laced recounting of library incidents is very often amusing, but also poignant, this underlined by Baillie’s exquisite prose. The every-day becomes captured for its singular moments, its eccentric characters, and the library as a marvelous backdrop. Baillie goes further, however, with excellent plotting, this potentially gimmicky book distinctly a novel, with romance, mystery, suspense, darkness, and tragedy (oh god, the gasp I uttered near the end, I could not believe it, I wanted to turn back the pages and have it happen a different way, but alas, there is only going forward).”
• The Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore. From my review: “Yesterday I went into the bookstore to check out Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America. Another shopper saw me reading the back and said, “That book is amazing. Buy it.” I said, “I’m going to. I’m reading her new book right now.” She said, “That’s just what I’m here to get,” and I pointed her towards its spot on the new hardcovers table. “It’s fantastic,” I said, because flawed or not, it is. And that is the story of how I came to join the legions of those in love with Lorrie Moore.”
• The English Stories by Cynthia Flood. From my review: “With mere words (though there is nothing mere about her words), Flood has recreated a time and a place and an atmosphere so steeped, I could trace my finger along the patterns in the wallpaper (and she doesn’t even mention the wallpaper). These stories are challenging, tricky, ripe with allusionary gateways to the wider world of literature. And so rewarding, for the richness of character, the intricate detail, and careful plotting that holds just enough back, keeping us alert and anticipating what’s around every next turn.”
• What Boys Like by Amy Jones. From my review: “And how engaging is that, I ask? To read so far into a story, that it wraps itself around me, and then I get all wrapped up in it too, and the whole thing is an untenable knot? What Boys Like is a lot like its cover. Though its tone is not upbeat, the colours are so vivid that you’d never find these stories bleak. And yes, the girls are often steeley-eyed, dangerous, tough as nails…”
• Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing by Lydia Peelle. From my review: “Where Peelle is like O’Connor, however, is in these moments in which she digs in her knife and twists it, and then you realize that the story you’ve been reading is darker, its people more awful, what has happened is even more tragic th
  an you’ve ever imagined. I mentioned the end of “Kidding Season” already, and can’t get explicit or I’ll ruin it, but Peelle manages to synchronize her readers’ awareness of dawning horror with that of her protagonist in a way that is absolutely masterful. “Phantom Pain” has a similar impact. Everything is loaded.”

December 7, 2009

"Georgia Coffee Star"

My story “Georgia Coffee Star” has won first place in UofT Magazine‘s alumni short story contest. You can read it online here.

December 7, 2009

Then the worm turned

“The seventh and eighth grades were for me, and for every single good and interesting person I’ve ever known, what the writers of the Bible meant when they used the words hell and the pit. Seventh and eighth grades were a place into which one descended. One descended from the relative safety and wildness and bigness one felt in sixth grade, eleven years old. Then the worm turned, and it was all over for any small feeling that one was essentially all right. One wasn’t. One was no longer just some kid. One was suddenly a Diane Arbus character. It was springtime, for Hitler, and for Germany.”– Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions

December 4, 2009

Laying down among the tea cups

“At which point the much-tried Wimsey lay down among the tea cups and became hysterical.”

I am adoring Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, which I’m reading because I’m interested in literary Harriets (Harriet Vane, in this case) and because of Maureen Corrigan’s recommendation. At first, I supposed Corrigan having given away the ending might have ruined the experience, but it hasn’t actually– the thing about detective fiction is that even if you know the final piece of the puzzle, it doesn’t matter until the rest of it is put together.

I do find it remarkable how difficult the book is, however. I thought there would be something of a breeze about it, and maybe it’s just that I’m incredibly tired, but there are entire passages I don’t understand no matter how I try. Part of it is that the book is bursting with allusion, the characters make a game of literary quotation, but I don’t pick up the allusion at all or know where it came from. Who knew that detective fiction could make one feel wholly ignorant? Also, the novel takes place at Oxford University, which seems to be a foreign country for all its customs, rituals and own peculiar language. None of this is detracting from my enjoyment of the book though, but I must admit there has been some skimmage.

And also remarkable is how Sayers treats the “work” of writing. Maureen Corrigan wrote considerably of her own search for “work” in The Novel (whose characters are usually writers who never write and banks who work off-page, etc.). But here we find it– Harriet Vane is a crime writer, though various circumstances have led her to be sleuthing on the side. And throughout the book as she seeks to get to the bottom of goings-on at her old Oxford College, she is plotting her latest novel. We see her actually working– as well as being distracted by all the parts of being a writer that keep one from actually writing. For Harriet Vane, plotting is an actual occupation, sort of akin to moving furniture around a room, and it’s so rarely that we see this kind of intellectual activity enactioned. It has been fascinating to encounter.

Oh, and yes. Like all the English novels I’ll ever love, there are obligatory tea references. Delight.

December 4, 2009

Canada Reads 2010: Independently

I continue to swear by the aphorism, “the best antidote to the disappointment of the literary life is to read”, but the literary life must be something disappointing because this comes up a lot. Lately, it’s the whole Canada Reads 2010, which I’m not going to knock because I love the spirit behind the whole thing, and I’m going to be following the campaign, but it just wasn’t the reading list for me. What I wanted was what I found from (most of) the 2009 lineup– book recommendations out of nowhere, books I’d never pick up otherwise, that challenge my sensibilities, and that I might just fall in love with.

And so in deciding to go seek those recommendations myself, I am thrilled to bring you Canada Reads 2010: Independently. In which I’ve enlisted my own awesome celebrity panel of five– authors, illustrators, critics, publishers, editors among them (one of each and some of both) who’ll each be selecting a book to champion. And I will be reading each of these five books, which I expect will be various, some out of my comfort zone, and examining them from my own critical perspective. Ranking them in order of my personal preference to pick my favourite of the lot. I am very excited.

I would love also if some others might follow along, as to find out how my tastes compare with other readers’ only will enhance my own reading experience. I’ll be posting reviews throughout the winter of the books I read, and I’d appreciate any comments.

I realize that my being excited and letting you know that in just two weeks my celebrity panelists and their picks will be revealed somewhat contradicts my earlier assertion that “anticipation will get you nowhere.” Pickle Me This, however, makes a point of being inconsistent.

In this case, also, I really don’t think I have much chance of disappointment. So stayed tuned. Cool things are indeed afoot. And thanks to my husband for the logo on demand.