August 21, 2009
Not an alternative
“It is not that I think every person should become a parent, or would claim that childbearing enhances one’s creative capacities (although I do think such an argument could easily be made given that childbirth, perhaps even more than other life-changing experiences, broadens one’s sense of meaning as well as being). It is that being a parent — a mother, especially — should not be narrated as an alternative to having an engaged, creative life, as if one must choose one or the other or be crippled by both.” –Amy Lavender Harris, “Pure Light”
August 19, 2009
Breaking up is never easy, I know.
Now reading Swimming by Nicola Keegan, which wasn’t at all what I expected, which is probably a fine thing. I’m also reading the latest issue of The New Quarterly, which is more than I expected, which is an amazing thing. Its contents are so diverse, surprising, current and consistently excellent. I’m not sure if it’s wrong of me to say it’s more “magazine” than “journal”. And not because it’s less high-brow, but just because it’s interesting. I also just broke up with a trashy novel I was expecting to love and tell you all about, but it was crap, or at least its first 124 pages were, and life is just too short to find out if the rest of it is better.
August 15, 2009
The Incident Report by Martha Baillie
Something happens when you work in libraries for too long, even part-time. I learned this the day a patron came to the circulation desk asking to borrow a stapler, and I had to explain why this was against our policy: “If we gave it out to you, then we’d have to give them out to everyone.” It was a sorry power trip, from up there on my desk-high perch, and I even felt like kind of a hero. Averting mass stapler lending, which really means holding off CHAOS in the library, the foundation of our society. Where would we be without me?
But I was not the worst case. One librarian where I worked had seen fit to apply labels to every object at the circ desk and the place where that object was to rest. “Pencils” said one tin, “erasers” said another. “Paper Cutter” lived in the “Paper Cutter” place. “Coats” on the closet. This was the Dewey Decimal System gone mad!! I wrote “Floor” on a post-it note, and placed it underfoot. My colleagues, being librarians, failed to see the humour.
But I love it. I don’t think I’ve always been like this, but after a cumulative five years of library work, my own books (and CDs) are always in alpha order. Out at the library, I am always made steady by the sureness of call numbers– that everything will be where it is supposed to. I used to relish shelf-reading, and not just because I got to browse the stacks, but whenever I found a volume out of place and put it back where it belonged, I’d performed a task even more worthwhile than keeping would-be stapler lendees tamed. I love libraries. I love cataloguing. May the god of order forever reign.
At the Toronto Public Library, as I now know, employees are instructed to log incidents which take place on their shifts. Martha Baillie’s novel The Incident Report is made up of such logs, Miriam, her protagonist, seeing fit to order her life to fit the confines of these reports. Perhaps a way to order chaos indeed, as her job sees her engaging in bizarre (and sometimes dangerous) interactions with those on the fringes of society. Her incident reports “resembling a pack of cards” stacked in a desk drawer, containing records of what you might expect (and what you couldn’t possibly imagine but some of which probably comes from truth [Baillie is a librarian in the Toronto Public system]), but also episodes from her personal life (which include a man she meets while sitting on a park bench during her lunch break), and from her history (usually about her father, and a tragedy in her past).
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).
This is a clever little book, but not too clever, for it is mostly beautiful. Rich with literary allusions that aren’t the point, but still round out the universe. And rich too with story, which goes to show that you can make stories happen anywhere.
August 14, 2009
Children's Writer Mem Fox
Our next-door neighbours were having a clear-out this week, and found a copy of a book they thought we might be interested in. Harriet, You’ll Drive Me Wild! is a delightful little picture book about a pesky little girl and a mom who loses her cool. Spoiler alert: happy endings in sight. We love it, and I’m quite happy that through this book, I’ve discovered its author, Mem Fox too. She’s an Australian writer of 33 children’s books and a literacy educator as well. Her excellent website features her full bibliography, biographical information, and lots of other fun stuff, including articles and addresses she’s written for parents and teachers about promoting a passion for reading, including “Ten read-aloud commandments”, “If I Were Queen of the World (…on how to read before school)”, and “Winning the War Between Books and Television” (which acknowledges that television is an excellent medium for turning children onto books). Fascinating stuff, all of it, and because I’m so glad to have found it, I wanted to share it with you.
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.
