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.
December 1, 2009
Anticipation will get you nowhere
Today was a smaller day than projected. First, we got to the doctor and found out that our appointment wasn’t actually scheduled (which wasn’t my fault, for once). And then the Canada Reads 2010 lineup was revealed, and I’m not so excited now. Though it’s not all bad– Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner is on the list, and I’m pretty passionate about that novel, so I’m pleased it’s going to get wider exposure– it was one of my favourite books of 2008, and you can read my review here.
But I find the rest of the lineup distinctly blah: I read Generation X years ago and might like to revisit it, particularly as it’s such a reference point, but I don’t know how satisfying that reread would be. I read Good to a Fault last year, and though many many people loved this book, I didn’t. Which was odd, because its domestic realm is a place where I spend a lot of my literary time, but the story needed a good edit and didn’t come alive for me. I have never read Fall On Your Knees, though I’ve started it a thousand times but never got very far in (oddly, however, McDonald’s The Way the Crow Flies is a book I absolutely adore). The only book of the bunch that was new to me is Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony, which I’m going to read now.
Participating in Canada Reads this year would involve me buying two books I used to own but gave away, and that’s never a good sign. So I suspect I’ll not be taking part, and I’m really disappointed about that. Last dear I so enjoyed reading all the books, looking at them critically, attending the Canada Reads Panel at the Toronto Reference Library, and listening to the broadcasts in March. Last year, however, I was inspired to get involved by a list of book I had a genuine interest in visiting (or revisiting, in one case). In particular, I liked the inclusion of a quirky book from a small press (Fruit), and that I got to discover an important Canadian writer I’d been neglecting (Tremblay). I am not so convinced that year’s list would reap similar rewards.
I’m also not convinced that any of these are books I’d recommend for all Canadians to read, though does any book, I wonder, hold such general appeal?
December 1, 2009
A Big Day
Tomorrow is a big, big day. Biggest of all, Harriet goes to the doctor for her six month checkup, so she’ll get shot up with powerful poisons and we’ll find out how many point how many pounds of enormous she is. What this means, however, is that I won’t be able to head down to the CBC to see Canada Reads 2010 unveiled. I’m honestly sad about this, and looking forward to finding out this year’s books (which I may or may not read, depending on what they are). In related news, Julie Wilson is guest-hosting the CBC Book Club. In Julie Wilson-related news (and there always is some. I am sort of a Julie Wilson fanatic, actually), tomorrow also starts Advent Books— a book a day to satisfy your holiday shopping-recommendation needs.
I am now reading Gaudy Nights, and I’m surprised to find that it is a fairly demanding read in terms of length and content. Maureen Corrigan also ruined the ending, but I think I’ll still enjoy the ride.
November 30, 2009
Help Me, Jacques Cousteau by Gil Adamson
On the back of Gil Adamson’s success with The Outlander (a popular novel even before it became a serious contender for Canada Reads 2009), House of Anansi has republished her first work of fiction, Help Me, Jacques Cousteau (published in 2000 by The Porcupine’s Quill). Which is kind of strange, actually, seeing as Help Me, Jacques Cousteau has little in common with The Outlander— they’re siblings a decade apart, after all. Somehow, I just don’t see Nicholas Campbell getting behind this one, but the very good news is that I can. While The Outlander was not quite my cup of tea, I delighted in this story collection.
Essential to note, however, that Help Me, Jacques Cousteau is a linked story collection, which follows a character called Hazel from young childhood into her late teen years. And though episodic, these stories do come together to create a narrative arc that would satisfy a reader with a craving for a novel. A little bit like Emma Richler’s Sister Crazy, but not quite as leaden in the end, and with a dash of the spirit of Adrian Mole, what Help Me… has in common with The Outlander is prose constructed with a poet’s deft hand, attention to each sentence, and the paragraphs. Rhythm, cadence, alliteration, precise imagery and perfect word choice. Two sentences stuck together like these ones: “My mother is physically fantastic. She’s long, tall, elastic.”
But what Help Me… also has is wry humour, and a remarkable narrator in Hazel, who is blessed with remarkable powers of perception. Her voice is an anchor in this text of eccentric characters and bizarre goings-on, a voice unchanging as the world around her spirals out of control. This unchangingness works, however, because what does change are the things that Hazel perceives with her remarkable powers as she grows older– eventually, her parents’ fallibility, the strain in their marriage, that things fall apart, that no one (including herself) is quite who they’re supposed to be.
Adamson attributes to Hazel a peculiar deficiency of long-term memory which keeps the collection from being an exercise in nostalgia. Also notable, that Hazel is not the stereotypical misfit, in that she has friendships (however fraught, but this is high school) and boys willing to make out her (plenty of them actually, which is a novel plot device for a poetry-loving teen) so that we’re not taken down that familiar road that always ends with bulimia and somebody’s initials carved in a thigh.
So though its formula is tried and tested, Help Me… is infused with originality. Hazel’s family and her neighbours come to life through her eyes– her fantastic tall mother, strong enough to open any spaghetti jar; her brother and his solar curtains; her experience pet-sitting for a neighbour in a house of tropical fish; a grandfather who frequently turns up unexpectedly, and makes himself comfortable in a bath; a bevy of uncles and aunties; a bed full of cousins; a father who rewires the house when he’s anxious.
Help Me… begins with an epigraph from the Talking Heads’ song “Heaven”: “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.” Hazel’s life, on the other hand, is a place where something always does, and though Hazel might desire a bit of a reprieve, at least we get the good fortune of reading all about it.
November 28, 2009
On James Wood on Byatt, and the Universe
Too many magazines come to my house, and after I had a baby in May, I didn’t get around to reading any of them for ages. So it’s only just now that I’ve read “Bristling With Diligence”, James Wood’s review of A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book (because I’m superstitious about reading my periodicals and their contents out of order).
Like all of James Wood’s reviews, this one was as fascinating to read as the book it pertained to. There was not a single point upon which I really disagreed with him (except for “Byatt is a very ordinary grown-ups’ writer”), he got the book right on, and yet I loved The Children’s Book and James Wood distinctly didn’t. And this is where an objective approach to criticism breaks down, I think, or where I cease to understand it. Wood lets his evidence speak for itself, but what that it says something quite different to me?
I realize that Wood has an agenda of sorts, or rather an “approach” to fiction, and that I’ve not been paying much attention to what that is, so let us not make that the point. Instead, I want to point out the curiousity of Wood taking down Byatt for characters who are “dutiful puppets, always squeezed and shaped for available meaning.” That as author, Byatt “dances, with leaden slippers, around the thought-sleep of her characters… [with] that teacherly, qualifying, authorial judgment.” That “an atmosphere of historical typicality drapes the stories’ individual forms.” That “Whenever a detail could be selected at the expense of another one, Byatt will always prefer to buy both, and include the receipts”. (I love that sentence. Honestly, that every book review could be so vital and engaging, but I digress…)
To all of which, I reply, “Yes, yes, yes! And isn’t it marvelous?” Because it occurs to me that what I like best about fiction is not its realism (sorry, James Wood), but the way that a novel or story can be its own little universe. I confess: I like witnessing Byatt’s manipulations. I like writers that move their characters around like pieces on a boardgame, and I like omniscience, and I like a guiding hand. Ruby Lennox at the beginning of Behind the Scenes at the Museum: “I exist! I am conceived to the chimes of midnight on the clock on the mantelpiece in the room across the hall.” Realism, this isn’t.
I like Margaret Drabble, her novel The Radiant Way, and how “an atmosphere of historical typicality draped… individual forms.” Perhaps fiction is not so informed by history, but I think it works especially well the other way around. Also, I like how in Drabble’s novel The Gates of Ivory, a character from The Needle’s Eye appears out of nowhere, and how these novels are seemingly unconnected otherwise, the character is minor in both novels (which were written nearly two decades apart), but how this connection gives impression of a Drabbleverse, and that I am privy to it.
I think all of this is now old-fashioned, though it was once so modern they made an “-ism” of it. For I think Mrs. Dalloway was that kind of book, and so was To The Lighthouse. Whose characters stood for things, and knew things they didn’t even know they knew (though Mrs. Ramsey did). I think Zadie Smith’s fictional worlds are like this too (though I don’t this has to do with Wood’s “hysterical realism”, but I could well be wrong. I often am about things like that).
By chance (or for some deeper reason as determined by a guiding force, who knows?), I read Wood’s review as I was reading Penelope Lively’s novel Cleopatra’s Sister. Lively (who won the Booker Prize in 1987 for her extraordinary novel Moon Tiger) is a critically-underrated writer (which doesn’t mean she doesn’t get good reviews, but that is something different). Her novels– and this one in particular– deal with ordinary lives intersecting with history, the trajectory of destiny, teleology. Her recent novel Consequences is about what it sounds like; her pseudo-memoir Making It Up is a fictionalized autobiography, supposing different paths she might have taken in her life.
Cleopatra’s Sister is about history as random or inevitable, and Lively shows that it is both or n/either as she brings her two main characters together through a series of events that begins with Gondwana (and rapidly does proceed to the present day, do not fear; Clan of the Cave Bear this book is not). “These events are chronological; they take place in sequence and are in some senses contingent upon one another. Remove one– extract a decade, or a century– and the whole historical ediface will shift on its foundations. But that ediface itself is a chimera, a construct of human intellect. It has no bricks and stones– it is words, words, words. The events are myths and fables distortions and elaborations of something that may or may not have happened; they are the rainbow survivors of some vanished grey moment of reality.”
Which has a double-meaning, of course, in that this is fiction, but reality as we make sense of it is only “words, words, words” too. Which makes the concept of realist fiction sort of absurd to consider.
Achieving reality itself as the goal of fiction is one thing, but I think the construction of a fictional self-contained universe (like the Drabbleverse, the Livelyverse) is just as noble a fictional pursuit. However, not so much in the realm of the fantastic (excuse me, my bias is showing), where in order to be authentic, you just make everyone sound a little bit Welsh. But rather, universes that so resemble this one, but which are consciously constructed. Because what marvelous constructions these are, I always think. The details required in such creation (which is exactly why Byatt would get both, and receipts). It’s like rebuilding the whole world again, brick by brick, and guiding its people up and down the streets. Controlling traffic. And setting in play a chain of circumstances, like say, the New Years Eve during which Archie Jones tries to kill himself, fails, and then meets Clara, the Jamaican daughter of a devout Jehovah’s Witness, and then we’re off! for a few hundred pages.
Of course, all this, like everything, is a matter of taste. I was discussing Amy Jones’ story collection What Boys Like with a friend the other day, and she told me that her least favourite story was “The Church of the Latter-Day Peaches”– which had been one of the ones I liked best. (Note: We agreed our mutual favourite was “All We Will Ever Be”, but I digress. Again.) My friend felt “Church of…” wasn’t as strong as the rest of the collection due to its storiedness–its cuteness, its beginning, middle and end, such a tidy shape, the patterns, how it contained its own lore, how parts of it meant something other than what they were. That it didn’t stand for life itself. And when all of that had been what I’d enjoyed so much about it– there really is no accounting for other people, is there?
What I’m slowly getting around to then is questioning the assumption that fiction has to be real. Which is hardly original, I know, but I wish to point out what a feat still is an excellent novel without realism as its intention. That such a novel
November 27, 2009
Pym Up A Ladder
As I’ve written already, I’m having a terrible time finding Barbara Pym novels, and it seems I just have to wait for her fans to die because there’s no other way they’re going to let her go. I sort of fancied just walking into any old used bookshop and buying up her library for a dollar or two, but alas, no dice.
This is bothersome because I fell in love with Pym just a few weeks back (via Excellent Women), and then Maureen Corrigan kept going on about her, and now DoveGreyReader has just posted a marvelous ode. In which she notes Pym’s A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters, which is available at Ten Editions Bookstore, at the end of my street, no less.
So I had no excuse not to go and fetch it, and why not the Pym novel No Fond Return of Love while I was at it? It was a hardcover, in excellent condition and with a gorgeous dust jacket (that put me in mind of Persephone Books) and not too expensive. So that’s done, and it’s fine, because I’ve shown excellent book buying restaint this past month. Except A Child’s Christmas in Wales that I bought yesterday, but that doesn’t count, because it’s illustrated with woodcuts by Ellen Raskin and she wrote The Westing Game.
The very best part of all of this is not my purchases themselves, however, or even my supposed restraint, but that the books I bought today were to be found high up a ladder. The kind that slides along the shelf of course, and I sought permission before I felt free to climb it. Permission granted, and I’ve never found a book in such a fashion in my bookbuying life. Such a monumental moment, to be commemorated with a photograph of course. The whole thing was very exciting.
