December 31, 2009
The very best decision
The very best decision I made all year was to choose Laurie Colwin’s A Big Storm Knocked It Over as the first book to read after Harriet was born. Harriet herself and her birth having been that big storm that knocked it (me) over, and did it ever. Like everybody else, I had no clue how hard those days (and endless nights) would be, but somehow I knew that Colwin’s lightness and humour would be a kind of balm. That this would be the kind of novel I’d actually get through at a time like that. And what a comfort it would be to read what Colwin wrote about motherhood, and its early days, attesting to the awfulness of it, validating my experience, but with a touch that assured me that things would get better. Underlining the joy that was there, and please, may I quote the passage again that said it all?
“Motherhood is a storm, a seizure: It is like weather. Nights of high wind followed by calm mornings of dense fog or brilliant sunshine that gives way to tropical rain, or blinding snow. Jane Louise and Edie found themselves swept away, cast ashore, washed overboard. It was hard to keep anything straight. The days seemed to congeal like rubber cement, although moments stood out in clearest, starkest brilliance. You might string those together on the charm bracelet of your memory if you could keep your eyes open long enough to remember anything.”
Truly, truly, books can save our lives, and make our lives. All the very best for a joyous 2010.
December 31, 2009
Preview of Canada Reads 2010: Independently
Please excuse the fact that one of these books is not actually one of these books, and instead get very excited about this being a sneak preview of the Canada Reads: Independently lineup! You’ll find out more about these books and their champions in an official post this weekend, but I was too excited about this stack not to tell you about it right now.
December 30, 2009
The Glass Room by Simon Mawer
I love a novel with a house at its centre, as its core. To the Lighthouse, most books by L.M. Montgomery, Rebecca, Virginia Lee Burton’s The Little House, and I mean all that. I love a novel in which the house is the main character, and the rest is just rearrangement of the furniture, and how the house is the constant through history and time, changing and unchanging. The present, the future, and the past.
The house in Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room (shortlisted for the 2009 Man-Booker Prize) is Landauer House, built on the eve of the 1930s for wealthy newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Landauer. Set on a hillside overlooking the fictional Czech city of Mesto, Landauer House (which has a real-life precedent; see here) is a stark, modern building without adornment. Designed by an architect who doesn’t call himself one: “‘I am a poet of space and form. Of light… Architects are people who build walls and floors and roofs. I capture and enclose the space within.'”
To the Landauer’s, and to everyone, their house represents modernity, which seems to be synonymous with “the future”. In the newly formed Czechoslovakia, with the old order overthrown, to believe that now is the future is not entirely naive. Now is a time of idealism realized, when people live in glass houses, entirely trusting of peace, and live their lives in the open, with nothing to hide. In such an era of freedom and inhibition, the Landauers’ marriage bonds begin to unravel early on. Viktor begins an affair with a common seamstress he meets on the streets of Vienna, Liesel’s passionate relationship with her best friend Hana grows deeper. In the Glass Room of their house, overlooking the city, these two live a new kind of ordinary life that is without precedent.
History is the culmination of such quotidian details, however, and history eventually arrives to show how precarious their peace has all along been. Viktor Landauer, who is Jewish, pays close attention to political events unfolding in Germany and Austria, and though Liesel has protested that these events have nothing to do with them, Viktor is proven right when the Germans invade Czechoslovakia in 1939. However he’s been squirreling money away to Swiss bank accounts and he and his family escape just in time, but they leave Landauer House behind, of course. And so the house continues through history without them to the present day and a satisfying (perhaps too much so?) epilogue.
The story loses some momentum once the Landauers and their associates have parted from it, but the house as an achor is compelling enough. The house is abandoned, used as a labratory by Nazi scientists, and then as a physiotherapy clinic during the 1960s and the Velvet Revolution (and here it begins to read like a Milan Kundera novel, but maybe I’d think that about any narrative containing a Tomas).
The prose is devourable, with smart dialogue, and interesting in that English is used to stand for a hodgepodge of languages and dialects spoken in that part of Europe at that time. Mawer is able to bend English to differentiate between these different ways of speaking, and apart from some conspicuous Britishisms, this is effective. (Or maybe it was only conspicuous because I don’t speak British-English myself, but a few “bloodys” and “jolly-well”ish lines read a bit oddly for people who were supposed to be speaking Czech or German.)
I had reservations as I read this book– initially, its characters seem all too conscious of their places in history. Of course, the personal is political, but never once did the Landauers or their friends have a dinner party conversation that didn’t have massive implications. I sincerely doubt that anyone has ever uttered a line like, “Viktor, you are losing your nerve. It was you who wanted a house for the future and now you seem to hanker after the solid ideas of the past.” There is no subtlety as to these characters’ places in time (and let us just say that James Wood would hate this book). There is also a scene that eroticizes breastfeeding, which I’ve never seen before, and I just couldn’t buy it. But maybe that’s just me…
As I read the book, however, I gave up the reservations. Yes, its characters stood for too much, but that’s why they’re characters and not people, and this is a story after all. A story that sweeps, and it did it to me, and so I was enthralled by all its twists and turns and coincidences as I followed the Landauers through the years, through History:
“The coincidence might seem some kind of predestination but he knows that it is not so– it is pure caprice. You can call it malicious if you like but in fact it is neutral. Things just happen. One country occupies another; people flee, scatter across the countryside, some here, some there, like thrown dice… What was one chance in a million suddenly becomes a certainty. Because it has happened.”
December 29, 2009
Bookish Christmas
Not only did I have a wonderful Christmas, but I received some wonderful gifts for Christmas. Not least of which were the bookish ones, including a gift certificate that will buy me several Barbara Pyms (exciting). In books unvirtual, I had several wishes granted: Penelope Lively’s latest Family Album (which was one of the New York Times‘ notable books of the year), Bugs and the Victorians (which was my heart’s desire), and Karen Connelly’s Burmese Lessons, which I just finished reading and was everything I wanted it to be.
I am also going to become card-carrying member of the Barbara Pym Society. This is very, very exciting.
December 29, 2009
Adolescent Poetry
“I don’t know why Jung made such a big deal about dreams. The important ones are obvious. They are the adolescent poetry of the subconscious.” –Karen Connelly, Burmese Lessons
December 29, 2009
Book of the Decade: White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Mostly due to the fact that this decade has had no name, it never occurred to me to try to experience it definitively. And really, how could one define a decade that begins with one (not) drunk (enough), falling down, pissing in a doorway, and ends with that same one married to the love of her life, with a seven month-old baby, and plans for a quiet-night-in with old friends? A decade that contained three continents called home, two degrees, new friends made and old friends kept, writing and reading that has inspired me and made me proud, a variety of jobs in interesting places. The decade during which I most definitely grew up (so far); it contained multitudes. And I could not possibly sum it up in a list of ten things or more.
But if I had to choose just one book, for reasons personal and even wider, I’d pick Zadie Smith’s first novel White Teeth. I first read this during the summer of 2001, and it was the first contemporary novel that I really got excited about. It was the first time that I really realized that amazing literature was being written right now, and by young people too. This novel was big, packed, funny, and gorgeous. Some people love to hate it, but most of them have never read it, and I maintain that it’s a magnificent construction.
White Teeth is also important for the way it anticipated the decade-to-come. When I reread it during the summer of 2006, it was hard to believe that it had been written before September 11, 2001. The whole clash of civilizations thing as enacted by British-born youths was quite prescient, and the racial tension in general. That the book had come true and didn’t read any less true was really something. That White Teeth was relevant even before it was relevant. And that it would even be a marvelous read, regardless.
December 22, 2009
Lately
I’ve been making stuff lately. I’ve also been spending money at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore which is in dire financial straits and accepting donations. And there’s just three more shopping days until Christmas!
December 21, 2009
A great big teapot all sizzling and piping hot
“And now”– here he suddenly looked less grave– “here is something for the moment for you all!” and he brought out (I suppose from the big bag at his back, but nobody saw him do it) a large tray containing five cups and saucers, a bowl of lump sugar, a jug of cream, and a great big teapot all sizzling and piping hot. Then he cried out, “A Merry Christmas! Long live the true King!” and cracked his whip and he and the reindeer and the sledge and all were out of sight before anyone realised that they started.”– from C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
December 21, 2009
On The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Though I suspect my aversion to all things science-fiction/ fantasy might be genetic, I can also trace it to having to watch a cartoon version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe during one rainy indoor recess back in grade one. That witch, the way one character spoke about “strangers in these woods”, what a strangely terrifying thing is whatever is “turkish delight”, and then when they cut the lion’s mane off! I remember it all vividly, and with such a frisson of horror (and don’t even get me started on the indoor recess where we watched The Neverending Story and the horse drowning in the quicksand).
I’ve had a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe sitting on my shelf for a while now, and this weekend I finally got around to reading it. Because it’s a children’s classic, and you can’t judge a book based upon a cartoon adaptation you watched when you were six (as the adage goes). And I can see why I was creeped out all those years ago, but I did enjoy it and will pass it along to Harriet to read when she is bigger. Christian allegory or not, it was an absorbing story, I loved the role of the Professor who confirms that Narnia is not just the children’s fantasy, the obtrusive narrator, the complicating nature of Edmund’s treachery, connections to Lewis Carroll and Wonderland, and idea of a world where it is always winter and never Christmas (which sounds a little like February).
It was an absorbing story indeed. If I were ever to give advice on how to start a novel, I’d advise a writer to have a character discover a secret world (“ok, I’m intrigued), explore it, and very quickly return back and then discover the world’s portal has shut (“ok, I’m reading this book to the end now just to figure out what this is all about”). It’s a double-bait, and it’s excellent.
I’m also now thinking much about book titles that are itemized lists of what the book contains. There are plenty with one item, many with two, but how many others with three items? (Off the top of my head, I can only think of an old YA book called Maudie, Me and the Dirty Book.) Such a title would hardly be inspired, would it? Though alliteration certainly works in its favour here.
I don’t imagine I’ll be reading further chronicles of Narnia, because not being a small child, I’ve come to these books much too late. But I’m glad I finally read this one, particularly in order to discover that (SPOILER ALERT) Aslan doesn’t die!! Or he is reincarnated, or… something. I don’t know how I missed that during Indoor Recess. Perhaps I was so traumatized by him being shorn of his mane that I missed the rest of the film? Nevertheless, I was much relieved by this happy ending.
