August 13, 2009
The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Inevitably, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Orange Prize winning novel Half of a Yellow Sun was going to be a tough act to follow. (We at Pickle Me This adored this book back in 2006). But in a curious way, Half of a Yellow Sun anticipated Adichie’s new excellent collection of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck in its wide range of voices and points of view. We find similar scope in Adichie’s stories, which take place during different points during this century and the last, are voiced by first, second and third person narrators, whose characters are male and female, and young and old, and are convincingly realized for all this variousness.
The voices are all African, however, which makes The Thing Around Your Neck a difficult work to approach. Adichie actually critiqueing this difficulty within her stories, many of which take place in America, dealing with the ignorance Americans view Africa with (and of course, Americans would not be alone in this). In the story “The Thing Around Your Neck”, a Nigerian woman working in Connecticut begins a relationship with a distinctly Africa-philiac man, and notes that, “white people who liked Africa too much and those who liked Africa too little were the same– condescending”. In the story “Jumping Monkey Hill”, a Nigerian writer called Ujunwa attends an African Writers Workshop near Cape Town, and the white instructor critques stories for not being “reflective of Africa, really,” or for being “agenda writing… [not] the story of real people.” (Interestingly, however, the retort to that is that the story actually happened to the writer, and I do know that a story having happened in life does not necessarily make it plausible in fiction, but anyway…)
So I’m not sure if it would be condescending to say that I liked these stories very much. I do know, however, that one of the reasons I do so like Adichie’s writing is that reflecting Africa is not necessarily their agenda. First, because she goes to great lengths to show the variousness of “African” experience (it is an enormous continent after all), and because even when her work tells stories from important points in history (as in Half of a Yellow…), it is the story that makes the history come to life, and not the other way around.
My one criticism being that the voices and experiences of African women in America were a bit samey– they arrive with big dreams, are disillusioned by their visa sponsor, work at dead-end jobs, and remark upon Americans’ obesity. Which might mean that this experience is all too ubiquitous, perhaps, but I was not convinced. The stories themselves were strong, however, and in their perspective reminiscent of those in Jhumpa Lahiri’s collections: immigrants navigating the perplexing foreign land that is the USA, and this reframes the familar for a reader like me. And then that the African stories, even at their most dramatic (and there is certainly action here) show the every-day in a land so far away.
The Thing Around Your Neck sounds like a cacophony, voices on top of voices. And this collection certainly makes evident that Adichie is up to the short story form.
August 13, 2009
The Children's Book's longlisting is good news
My two weeks on maternity leave before Harriet was born were spent so unbelievably well, perpetual sunshine and copious ice cream. Lots of reading and writing too. She was scheduled to be born on a Tuesday, and the Friday before AS Byatt’s The Children’s Book arrived in the mail. At more than 600 pages, the book was a rather daunting prospect for the final weekend of my wonderful, self-indulgent baby-free life. But I also knew that if I didn’t get the book read then, it would sit unread for months and months. (I didn’t know much then, but I knew enough to know that was true). And so into the book I plunged, 200 pages a day (in addition to all the other things that had to get done that weekend). It was such a brilliant way to read the book, to become so steeped inside it, and I enjoyed the experience thoroughly. And it stayed on my mind during those first few weeks of Harriet’s life, when my mind was tied up on knots for various reasons, and the book is the one thing from that whole time that I remember vividly.
All of which is to say that I’m glad it’s on the Booker Prize long-list, and I’ll be happy if it wins.
August 10, 2009
T is for Toronto books
Oh, no one tagged me, but I want to play too. To join Rebecca and Kate in compiling their top Toronto books. I’m not sure I can come up with fifteen, but this is the best I can do off the top of my head. (Update: Fourteen. I’ll do my best to think of another. Update Update as inspired by Rebecca: YES! BOOKY! Update 3 see below).
1) A Big City ABC by Alan Moak: I have the original edition of this book, with Exhibition Stadium instead of the SkyDome under “B is for baseball”. And I is for island ferry indeed. The illustrations are beautiful, and I remember spending considerable time examining them closely when I was small. (This book was re-released in 2002, and will be coming out in paperback in October).
2) The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood: I love the depictions of Ward’s Island (I is for island ferry, see above) especially, but the entire book captures the city’s neighbourhoods brilliantly. I was also quite fond of the university setting when I was getting ready to become a student in Toronto myself.
3) Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood: Shows the fringes of the city back when the fringes were newly constructed bungalows in a sea of mud up around St. Clair Avenue. And the ravines! And then revisits to find the city changed by the 1980s, with grey skyscrapers that were like tombstones.
4) Headhunter by Timothy Findley: For a course I took called “Reading Toronto” in university, I read works including some Morley Callaghan, Fugitive Pieces, Alias Grace, The Swing in the Garden by Hugh Hood, and this book. I’m not cheating by stocking this list with my course syllabus, but Headhunter has to be included as it’s stayed with me ever since I read it, particularly the scenes in the Toronto Reference Library.
5) Stunt by Claudia Dey: I is once again for island ferry, and P is for Parkdale. Eugenia Ledoux’s narrative is Toronto as an underwater dream.
6) Muriella Pent by Russell Smith: The reason I ever took a walk to Wychwood Park, Smith’s most recent novel is Russell Smith the novelist coming into his own. Also notable for Brian Sillwell’s basement apartment.
7) Helpless by Barbara Gowdy: Once again, the neighbourhoods. Here is Cabbagetown, the dodgy end, portrayed as a place where people live and where community happens.
8) Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig: Toronto underground, in the deepest ravines and down in the subway’s depths. Helwig creates an unfamiliar city out of Toronto in the grip of panic.
9) When I Was Young and In My Prime by Alayna Munce: P is still for Parkdale, and for poetry too, Munce’s poem/fiction hybrid an extraordinarily rendered feat. Toronto stands for onward and away as the narrator grapples with her grandparents’ decline.
10) The Killing Circle by Andrew Pyper: Terrifying! And you could plot it on a map, which is Terrifying! doubly.
11) How Happy to Be by Katrina Onstad: Here is great urban fiction, undeniably set in its place. Which is Toronto ’round the turn of this century as lived in by a media/culture/cool savvy journalist who’s less savvy about where her life is headed.
12) Minus Time by Catherine Bush: I found this to be an imperfect novel with so many perfect components, one of which is its depiction of Toronto. Particularly a Toronto not-too-long-ago already lost, the Robert Street tennis courts/ice rink which had been the home of the narrator’s now-demolished childhood home. And not just because it’s around the corner from my house.
13) In The Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje: I know it’s cliched, we’re supposed to hate this book, and though I’ve loved it less with each reread, it still makes the Bloor Street Viaduct magical to me, as well as the majestic RC Harris Water Treatment Plant (which I despair they no longer offer tours of).
14) Unless by Carol Shields: Much of it takes place in a fictional small town north of the city, but the heart of it is set on the corner of Bloor and Bathurst, just across from Honest Ed’s.
15) The Booky Trilogy by Bernice Thurman Hunter
15.5) Jonathan Cleaned Up and Then He Heard a Sound (or blackberry subway jam) by Robert Munsch
August 10, 2009
Not my bag
I hate jazz. I’ve never liked it, there was a time when I pretended I did and tried to learn to like it behind the scenes, but I never managed. I gave up pretences and decided to just hate it hands down the day a jazz-loving former co-worker walked into the staff lounge where someone else had put a bit of The Great Satan on the stereo, and co-worker waggled his head in a be-bop style, looked confused and said, “Hey, I thought this was my bag.” Which summed it all up for me, and that was the end. My beloved Tabatha Southey illustrates her jazz-hating experiences in this week’s column.
August 7, 2009
Now reading/not reading/etc.
I am now reading Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading, and I’m loving it, loving it, loving it. The “book reports” it contains remarkable, not just because Lizzie Skurnick indulges in good nostalgia, but because of the subtext she unearths the second time around– her treatment of classics, including Daughters of Eve, Harriet the Spy, Nothing’s Fair in Fifth Grade, and The Cat Ate My Gymsuit demonstrate something wildly substantial (and subversive) going on in YA literature back in the day.
I’ve not managed to read through a single magazine/periodical since my daughter was born, and so I’ve got a stack beside me on my desk right now and no clue when I’m going to get to them. (FYI: my “desk” is now an end-table beside my gliding chair in the living room, which actually works out quite handily.) There are so many books and so little time that periodicals hardly seem to factor into the equation. I should probably make a new blog label called “Not Reading” and then I could write about it all the time.
Last Friday I had to spent two hours waiting at the Passport Canada office, and they’d probably never seen anyone happier to wait. Mostly because I HAD A BOOK IN MY BAG and BABY WAS ASLEEP IN HER PRAM. Baby stayed asleep for two hours (and then, having exhausted her patience/goodness resource, proceeded to be horrible for the rest of the day, so much so that I was destroyed by evening, but alas) so that I had more uninterrupted reading than I’d had in 2.5 months. It was extraordinary, particularly as I was reading the marvelous Between Interruptions: 30 Women Tell the Truth About Motherhood. Only problem with that being that the book was so engaging, I felt like I’d lived the lives of 31 mothers that day, which probably contributed to my destroyment by 5 pm.
Anyway, speaking of waiting, Rona Maynard on waiting-room lit and Marilynne Robinson’s Home. Rebecca Rosenblum’s submission tips for aspiring writers is also worth a read. The great Lauren Groff, illuminatingly, on rejection notices. What’s wrong with charity book shops? is an interesting (though not conclusive) response to questions raised in the thought-provoking article “Selling Civilization” from Canadian Notes and Queries.
Now, must wake baby, feed baby, change baby. For we’re off to a program at the library that promises songs, and stories and “tickle rhymes” for all. (I’m not sure if it’s sad or amazing that this is my life now.)
August 5, 2009
Family Fun
Harriet can’t wait to learn to read so that she can join in the family fun.
August 3, 2009
Weed whacking?
From Alex Good’s piece on negative book reviews: “Critics in this country are often accused of enviously cutting down our tallest poppies. For the record, I don’t see a lot of this happening, but even if I did, I would be inclined to think it good horticulture rather than conduct motivated by one of the seven deadly sins. The tallest poppies are precisely the ones that need the attention of a critical weed whacker. They suck up all the oxygen and take the most nutrients from the soil, crowding out all of the up-and-coming green. Better to pull such plants out of the ground, shake the dirt from their roots and toss them on the weed pile.”
Inarguable. The problem, however, is that Good’s metaphor is all too apt, and “whackage” seems to all too often pass for literary criticism in Canada, all clumsiness, frantic motion and violence implied. Is a poppy always necessarily a weed either? All thoughtfulness and consideration go out the window, and we’re left with paragraphs such as the following (from here):
“For Atwood, despite her dowager status in Canlit, is a writer who, with very little in the way of linguistic flare and visionary intensity, writes (or wrote) a kind of period poetry that gives the impression of having long passed its “best before” date. As with most of the characters in her novels, so with the words in her poems: predictable, unvarying, wooden, truncated, connotatively flaccid, oddly nasal in their timbre, and devoid of real signifying power because relying for their effect on a near-perfect correlation with the cultural temper of an audience desperate for corroboration. Owing to this bizarre resonance, Atwood was spared the labour of development as she was exempted from the struggle with language. She had only to be herself as she was – facile, clever, priggish – for the reader’s easy identification with a recognizable and idealized self to occur – but a self not qualitatively different from the one already in place. Atwood owes her success to the fact that the reader does not transact so much with the poetry or the fiction as with a privileged double with whom she or he merges and assimilates, doubt assuaged and dispossession overcome, whether as a woman, an intellectual or a Canadian. Readers of Atwood merely impersonate themselves at a slightly higher elevation but undergo no spiritual change or evolution whatsoever.“
I have chosen this one example (which, admittedly, comes not from a review, but from an essay about Canada’s critical climate) because it’s so typical. The writer engages not at all with said poppy’s work, but instead their reputation. One could get the sense from these generalities and such immediate dismissal that the writer has read very little Atwood, actually, or none at all, relying instead on quipsy barbs overheard at literary dinner parties. This sort of thing is boring, lacking substance, and also alienating to readers who will read it and, no doubt, regardless of where their sensibilities lie, will then “merely impersonate themselves at a slightly higher elevation but undergo no spiritual change or evolution whatsoever.“
Whacking, no. Pruning, perhaps, which in lacking bombasticism will earn the reviewer far less attention, but might begin a literary conversation that actually takes us somewhere.
August 3, 2009
No one told me how crazy
“No one told me how crazy you can become in those first few months, when your body chemistry is changing, when your entire life has been altered from the moment the baby was born and nothing will ever, ever be the same again. People don’t talk about these things, perhaps because they don’t want to scare you. Perhaps they don’t tell you because these things fall away so quickly after the baby arrives that those who would tell no longer remember. And if they do tell you these details before you have had a child, they have no meaning, and no context. These are truths you must seek and know alone, in the quiet late-night hours when you are rocking the baby, breathing in the tender newborn scent.”– Christy-Ann Conlin, “Wired at the Heart” from Between Interruptions: 30 Women Tell the Truth About Motherhood
July 31, 2009
New feature: songs blasting by outside my window #1
An ideal feature for a nursing mom, and short enough for one-handed typing. Even if today’s track is a little less than remarkable: Blue Rodeo’s “Till I Am Myself Again“.
