March 6, 2009

I'm glad at least

So maybe now everyone in Canada won’t be reading The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant, but I’m glad at least that I got to.

March 5, 2009

Rumours Afoot

Now reading Come, Thou Tortoise. Now full of banana scones. Rona Maynard (who never misses anything) has referred me to Persimmon Tree (an online literary magazine by women over sixty) and a review by Laura Miller of Elaine Showalter’s new book A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx. Dovegreyreader celebrates her blog’s birthday with an interview with Justine Picardie. Stephany Aulenback contemplates names for her baby (and in case you’re wondering, we’ve got names for our’s already, both boy and girl options lifted from children’s novels that have the hero’s name in the title). Canada Reads is now without Mercy. Zoe Heller profiled (and her new book The Believers is out now). I found the G&M’s discussion of the smutty novel Wetlands far more entertaining than I’m sure the book would be. And over at the Biblioasis blog, read Terry Griggs’ foreward to the reprint of her GG-nominated collection Quickening. The reprint is out this spring from Biblioasis, along with a new work by Griggs, both of which I’m thrilled to read– I encountered her first with the Salon des Refuses, and I’m entranced now. Rumours also afoot that she might stop by for an interview here.

March 4, 2009

On Canada Reads

Unless forgetting to do it counts as participation (however passively?), this is my first experience participating in Canada Reads as either listener or reader. And I’ve written already about how much I’ve enjoyed it, how much I’ve been challenged as a reader by others’ competing viewpoints. I’m also glad to have discovered The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant, which I’ve become a wee bit obsessed with, and can’t stop talking about (and I would like a bracelet that says, “What Would Marcel Do?”). And now the radio debates, which I’m enjoying thoroughly. Which is not to say that some of the panelists don’t irritate me, but they’re a well-rounded bunch with so many viewpoints represented, and they’re challenging one another in all the ways they should be doing. My experience of their five books is being enhanced by the panelists’ perspectives. I love that books are being fought for. I love that any one could win.

Some things: I’m bothered by a lack of bolstering for Fruit, which is far from an insubstantial novel. Part of its complexity is that it can read as such, certainly, but read it again, you’ll find a different book. The book has been slated by YA, but I don’t think it is, or because if you give Fruit to a twelve year old and a thirty year old, they’re going to be reading two completely different books. There is a real darkness to Fruit, in spite of its humour, that nobody has remarked on. Also, stop talking about the nipples already, for they’re the most unremarkable part of the whole novel. And how about we talk about Peter Paddington vs. Sydney Henderson? Doesn’t Peter accomplish much the same goals as Sydney, narratively speaking, but manage NOT to be entirely one-dimensional?

Also, it turns out everybody loves The Fat Woman Next Door… And I can’t help but wonder if its age is part of that. If the thirty years since its publication have established the book within a context, and so we feel more confident supporting it than we might a book like Fruit, for example. I think it’s strange how many recent novels are included in the lot, and so criticisms that we cast upon them could go anywhere, for you never can tell. I also wonder what time will make of The Book of Negroes.

This conversation of what literature should do kind of makes me want to roll my eyes. For literature is a mulitiudinous thing, and sure it should educate (so says Avi Lewis), and confront us with morality (according to Slean), and make us laugh and show us ourselves (says Jen Sookfong Lee), but what I think it amazing about The Fat Woman… is that it does all of these things, and more. Literature should do a thousand things, and astound you at every turn.

I’m impressed by the subtle balance of Canada Reads gender-wise, by the way. Four out of the five books are by men, but many of them take into account women’s lives and experiences. And the panel is three women to two men. I feel that with this kind of balance, gender really ceases to be an issue, and we can get on to more exciting things.

Online, I’m really enjoying debates coverage at That Shakespeherian Rag, Roughing It In the Books, and the Keeping It Real Book Club.

March 4, 2009

Like acid-washed jeans

I really enjoyed Meghan Daum‘s collection of essays, My Misspent Youth. She comes by her Joan Didion comparisons honestly, except I laughed out loud at Daum’s work, and however much I revere Joan Didion, she’s never made me do that. For a sample, could I please refer you to “Music Is My Bag”? “I grew up surrounded by phrases like “rattle off that solo,” “nail that lick,” and “build up your chops.” Like acid-washed jeans, “chops” is a word that should only be invoked by rock and roll guitarists but is more often uttered with the flailing, badly timed anti-authority of the high school clarinet player.” Oh my, yes.

March 3, 2009

Addendum

This occurred to me yesterday as I was making my lunch, as an addendum to the Life-Changing Books list. That I must note Beverly Clearly’s Ramona Quimby, Age 8. Because ever since reading it many years ago, I have been unable to crack a hardboiled egg any other way except slap against my forehead.

March 2, 2009

From the "I should have known better…" file

Do NOT read Andrew Pyper before you go to bed at night. This tip I picked up reading The Killing Circle last year, waking up in the night convinced there was somebody lurking at the bottom of my stairs, even hiding under the bed, or standing over me watching while I slept, so I was not to move a muscle. But I thought I would be safe with early Pyper, with his short story collection Kiss Me. (It had been a gift from the lovely Rebecca Rosenblum after all). And it was the story “Break and Enter” that finally did me in, so that I woke up at 2:30 this morning, not convinced the man was actually gone, the one who’d been standing over me ready to kill me in my dream. In order to shake off the fear, I then had to rouse myself into a state of wake that would last for over two hours. During which I was distracted when the baby kicked, and worried baby wouldn’t kick again when it didn’t. And then when I finally managed to fall back to sleep, I dreamed I was being chased by a wild boar.

I don’t think he had anything to do with the boar, but still– do NOT read Andrew Pyper before you go to bed at night.

March 1, 2009

Women's bylines

One measly sentence in a massive article, but… “At the same time, Ambrose hopes to see more women’s bylines.” Which reads conspicuously on its own– I do wonder what kind of discussion surrounded this point. I wonder too why she thinks it’s a matter of mere wishful thinking. Still, as one who hopes to see more women’s bylines too, I’ll interpret this as a positive sign.

March 1, 2009

Pickle Me This reads Canada Reads: The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant by Michel Tremblay (trans. Sheila Fischman)

I’m sure there are reasons involving the nature of translation and French-Canadian prose which might explain why Michel Tremblay’s novel The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant makes such little use of line breaks, paragraphs and even chapters. My own hypothesis, however, involves Tremblay’s creative intentions, that his book constructs not so much a narrative as a day, a neighbourhood, as life itself (see Woolf’s essay “Modern Fiction”, noting in particular, “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores on the consciousness.”) Life itself, you see, does not come with line breaks, and paragraphs, and neither do neighbourhoods, particularly those partial to scenes of chaos, cacophony and carnival.

Such is the kind of neighbourhood depicted in Tremblay’s novel, the Plateau Mont Royal on the second day of May, 1942. The novel presided over by a Greek-style chorus– Rose, Violet, Mauve and their mother Florence, unseen by all except cats and crazy people– knitting booties on the balcony of a tidy yet apparently abandoned house: “We’re here so that everything will keep moving ahead. What’s knitted is knitted– even if it isn’t knitted right.” And move ahead indeed everything does, as the rue Fabre awakens, its residents starting their days, niece and oncle in one particular house staging a race to the bathroom.

It is in this house that the fat woman lives, too old and too fat to be pregnant, but she is, risking her health. She’s confined to a chair in her room, listening to the sounds of life inside her crowded apartment. She lives with her two sons, her husband and his mother, brother, sister, and her two children, and in such close quarters, tempers flare, dramas are enacted, bodies excrete, are washed, make love, and make life. The woman is ridiculed for the state she’s in, for exercising a degree of agency in her reproductive life. Six other women on the street are also pregnant, but each of them are more burdened than blessed than the fat woman, who is having a baby just because she wanted one. Though this is also WW2, during which men with pregnant wives are exempt from the draft, French Canadian men in particular reluctant to fight a war for the English, or for France who they see as has having abandoned them.

The novel takes place over the course of one day, various plot lines connected by geographical proximity. Following the fat woman and her family, their various neighbours, including the two local prostitutes, and the fabulous cat Duplessis, all presided over by the knitting sisters. The story takes turns both hilarious and tragic, characters marvelously wicked and cruel, driven by whims, driven by passion– there is everything here. Like life itself. The novel actually driven by life, or at least its promise, punctuated by baby kicks: “She rubbed her belly. The baby had just moved and her heart contracted with joy.”

This is a political novel, written during a political time, but even more importantly, the novel is far more than that. It achieves universality even in its specificity, and I read it divorced from its context– I don’t know Montreal well, the history and culture of Quebec I know only in the vaguest terms. What remains, however, is a wonderful piece of Literature, which was not the sense I got from The Book of Negroes once its context was taken away. I did get such a sense from Mercy Among the Children, but that book never came alive to me the way this one did. The way Fruit did too, which was literary in spite of its accessibility, and whose simplicity might have obscured the various planes on which it worked. (I liked Fruit‘s ending, so terribly haunting, not at all what one would have expected for a book that was bright pink).

What counts against The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant is that it’s difficult, work to get into, though once I was hooked it was a pleasure. But reading did require a fair bit of revisiting, maps on the endpages, diagrams in the margins, there were several bits I did not understand, necessitating a rereading. But how engaging is that? A book that can’t be skimmed over, that you have to work to get inside, but once you’re there, you’ve earned it. The book is yours. So I’m going to go along with the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable, that Canadians are smart enough to be so challenged. That we get the kinds of novels we deserve, and so The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant would really be quite the compliment.

Final! Pickle Me This reads Canada Reads Rankings:
1) The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant by Michel Tremblay (trans. Sheila Fischman)
2) Fruit by Brian Francis
3) Mercy Among the Children by David Adams Richards
4) The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill
5) The Outlander by Gil Adamson

March 1, 2009

Prodigy/Prodigal etc.

February 28, 2009

Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos

Stephanie Kallos’ novel Sing Them Home is a little bit of everything. Imagine Alice Sebold meets Wally Lamb meets Fannie Flagg, and then they all get spun up in a funnel cloud. Imagine a 500+ page novel that goes by like a breeze. This is one of those comfortable books you crawl your way into, and linger long inside, happy and warm. But then that the novel is well-written also almost seems like too much to be true.

Sing Them Home is the story of the Jones family, whose three siblings come together after their father’s death– he is killed on the golf course, struck by lightning. The family having long ago been left fragmented by their mother’s disappearance, when she “went up” with a tornado and her body was never found. So that the Jones children are practically strangers to one another– art history professor Larken lives her adamantly independent life far from her hometown of Emlyn Springs, seeking solace in eating; her brother Gaelan is a well-known weatherman and bodybuilder who seeks his solace in meaningless relationships; and Bonnie the youngest who has stayed closest to home persists in cycling up and down country roads seeking garbage she interprets as “artifacts” from the ditches.

The novel’s course is the year following their father’s death, during which the Jones siblings struggle to come to terms with their grief, as well as with finally reconciling with the tragedy in which they lost their mother. Emlyn Springs the backdrop for all of this, a small town in Nebraska, quirky characters populating its dying streets, but Kallos does something remarkable in making Emlyn Springs somewhere quite particular. With its Welsh heritage especially– reflected and really outlined here in language, rituals and traditions– as well as characters far richer than small town cliches, the town becomes actually not a backdrop at all, but is as much of a character in the story as its residents.

In similarly dealing with specifics, Kallos also makes each of her characters’ individual perspectives utterly convincing. Larken’s world is seen through the prism of an art lover, all colours and tones, while Gaelan’s profession is fascinatingly explored, clearly an integral part of his life. Bonnie, the more whimsical of the three, is never quite as pin-down-able, always a little bit more flighty, but this is also the very point of her. Kallos’ narrative switching back and forth between these characters effortlessly, encompassing also the perspective of their father’s mistress, and diary entries interspersed representing the voice of their long lost mother.

So the dead speak, which means there is magic here amongst the solid realism. Some bits so utterly fantastic, bordering on sentimental, that indeed it can seem like too much to be true. The ending in particular so perfectly tidy (but perfectly satisfying!), all its ends tied, but then how could we bear any of them to be left straggling? Such tidiness not quite the way the real world works, but then thank goodness we have here a book instead.