April 22, 2009
Further excitement
My new issue of The New Quarterly has finally arrived! Honestly, never has there ever been an issue of a lit. journal I’ve so wanted to devour– Elizabeth Hay interviewed, Rebecca Rosenblum on Sassy, even Kim Jernigan’s Editor’s Letter is delightful. And speaking of Rosenblums, this particular one has been nominated for a National Magazine Award for her story “Linh Lai” (published in TNQ). I was also excited to see my favourite poet Jennica Harper up for a poetry award. Further excitement: Margaret Atwood’s Adopt a Word to Create a Story story has been revealed. It’s called “Persiflage in the Library” and it’s very cute (read it here).
April 22, 2009
Short
Lately I’ve been short on bloggish thoughts, too busy, I suppose, shining light on and playing music to my lower abdomen, as well as lying face-down with my shoulders on the floor and my bottom in the air. And ever-seeking the next piece of cake, which is usually around the corner anyway. These things all take time. I’ve also been reading good books, finishing up a number of writing projects, sitting tall in straight-backed chairs, and taking far too many baths. With pleasure. There are good things going on though, as you can see by the “forthcoming” projects listed in my sidebar, and fun things will be occurring here in weeks to come (including a new interview, and coverage of a bookish road trip to take place this weekend). Now must go and run another bath. Thank you for your patience.
April 18, 2009
The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway
Certain novels might not immediately appeal to me, aren’t exactly “my kind of book”, but then upon hearing nothing about one but exemplary praise, I really can’t help but read it. Which was the case with Steven Galloway’s novel The Cellist of Sarajevo, nominated for the 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize, finalist for the 2009 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, a Globe & Mail Best Book, and praised by many book lovers I hold in esteem.
This book could be classified as historical fiction, if you consider the early 1990s history. Though “historical fiction” also reads as a kind of slight, and one that is not intended here. The label is a slight, if only because so many works in the genre do the “fiction” part of the equation so very badly. History is the point, the facts are, and the reader comes away quite gratified, feeling as though they could pass an exam at school.
But facts are not the point of fiction, and in particularly not the point are lessons to be learned. If you want a lesson, read a textbook, but we turn to fiction for something more nuanced than that, more complex, and not to come away with certainty. Certainty, anyway, is some kind of illusion.
I didn’t come away from The Cellist of Sarajevo with an understanding of the conflict at its heart. I didn’t get a sense of the politics involved, the history even, of who was good and who was bad. These aren’t details I’d look for in a novel anyway, and Galloway has no desire to deal with them, or with with the perspective of the military commander who says, “I will tell you the reality of Sarajevo. There is us, and there is them. Everyone, and I mean everyone, falls into one of these two groups. I hope you know where you stand.”
But as readers we aren’t told where any of the characters stand, and that we can’t even tell makes clear Galloway’s point– that such distinctions are meaningless. People are people, and the reality of their lives in a war zone is remarkable for reasons beyond which side their affinities lie. The quotidian details are what we take away here, and they’re powerful in their general nature– that these are the kind of lives being lived each day in places all over the world. The struggle of a man to cross the city and fetch water for his family, another man who has sent his family to safety and is attempting to get to work, the task given to a sniper called Arrow. She is to protect the cellist who has been playing the same adagio every day in honour of the 22 people killed below his window, hit by shelling while standing in a lineup for bread.
The stories of these people, of these individual lives, are what fiction is made for. To quietly and without great sensation (for this is daily life after all) demonstrate what such days and lives are like, the implications of living under terror– to cross a street where you know that snipers are aimed, and whether or not you’re hit, they’ve got a hold on you. Even when nothing happens, characters are seized by the knowledge that an explosion is always imminent. Such details as that all the women have grey hair now, because no more do they have access to dye, or what it is to see an overweight person, what that means when resources are so limited for everyone.
This novel is also the story of the streets, the story of a city ravaged by war and rendered unrecognizable. How the characters reconstruct the city in their memories, these places they’ve always known. The devastation obliterates lives, but not the lives of those still living, and it becomes these citizens’ struggle to resist losing their humanity. Galloway shows the magnitude of this struggle, but also the power retained by those who succeed. That civilization is everywhere and forever always a work in progress.
April 18, 2009
It's Useful to Have a Duck by Isol
It’s Useful to Have a Duck by Isol is one of the best things I’ve come across lately, and not just because ducks are my second-favourite animal (after elephants). Here is a book that is two stories in one, accordion-style, one half the story of a boy and his duck and the various ways he uses it. As a hat, to dry his ears, and after the bath is almost drained, the duck plugs up the hole. A familiar-enough tale, but then turn the book around to read It’s Useful to Have a Boy, the same story but from the duck’s perspective. This duck is not a hat, but uses the boy’s head to see the view, he uses the boy’s ear to wax his bill, and the little duck is not a plug, but is instead seated comfortably in his sleeping hole.
What a delightful book, whose simple drawings will appeal to children, whose story is playful nonsense, who takes such advantage of its bookish form to contort into something quite wonderful. These two mirror stories rendering the “playful nonsense” so much more than that, offering a lesson on perspective that seems miraculous dawning on the adult reader. A child probably would only catch this lesson in glimpses, but how remarkable is any book with depths still to be plumbed.
April 15, 2009
Any day now
For about seven months, people liked to tell me, “You don’t look pregnant,” which I found deeply irritating and kind of perplexing to address. I don’t think I’d want to go back to that one, but neither am I too fond of the current comment, which is, “Any day now!” Because, well, no. Though perhaps in about forty days now, though probably more. My baby bump has ceased to be cute, and I am beginning to look into the mirror with considerable fright, and who knows what the effect will be forty days from now. I could also do with fewer strangers telling me I look “heavy” in the shower at the gym.
Nevertheless, I am excited. Our very good friends had a little girl two weeks ago, which served to make the connection clear, that pregnancy is a means to a miraculous end, for I often forget it’s not an end in itself. And our baby is moving around all the time, so that I feel like I’m getting to know it. Though yesterday I also got to know that baby is lying sideways, so we have to do everything possible during the next two weeks to get that baby upside down. I vote for turning somersaults in the pool, and hope it does the trick.
The biggest news, however, is that the baby’s blanket is done. I started knitting it back in November, before I could acknowledge the baby in any other way, out of fear that wanting too much was unlucky. It’s only been very recently that I’ve been able to start preparing, and indeed now the baby’s nursery is ready(ish). But in November, all I could do was knit, which made me feel that at least I was preparing in some way. The blanket coming together perfectly, with no mistakes, which is previously been unheard of in a project by me. The blanket is beautiful, so soft and warm, and I can’t wait to meet the little person who will be wrapped inside it.
April 14, 2009
On the new Drabble
Margaret Drabble’s new “semi-memoir” The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws is out in Britain now. I’ve ordered a copy, as the North American edition isn’t out until the fall, and I’m not sure just how much time I’ll have for reading then. Right now, you can listen to her reading from it on The Guardian Podcast. In reference to the book, Drabble on occupation and overcoming depression: “We all tackle it in our own ways. I have long been a believer in the therapeutic powers of nature, and had faith that a good, long walk outdoors would always do me good. It might not cure me, but it would do me good.” She also claims to have quit writing fiction for fear of repeating herself, which is not so surprising if you examine her oeuvre, and how she has challenged the novel to be something different every time. Perhaps she thinks she’s exhausted the possibilities? But reviews of the new book have been favourable. I liked this from The Telegraph: “What a puzzle: Margaret Drabble’s memoir cum history of the jigsaw cum paean to her rather dull aunt shouldn’t really work. But somehow, in the end, it seduces.”
Incidentally, Drabble’s feud with sister A.S. Byatt is reported to have stemmed from a dispute surrounding– what else?– a tea set.
April 13, 2009
Advice for Italian Boys by Anne Giardini
“There is a saying I like very much,” explains a mentor to a young man in Anne Giardini’s novel Advice For Italian Boys. “One that can be expressed two contradictory ways, but somewhat paradoxically both of them are abundantly true.” The two expressions being “God is in the details” and “The devil is in the details,” both of which are also abundantly true in relation to the novel.
For indeed, it is the details, each one singularly considered, exact and perfect, that render the prose so evocative– the description of a man’s testicles, for example, or the Italy the grandmother still sees in her dreams, the intricacies of barbering, the shape of a woman’s body. But it is also such a focus on details that distracts from other matters at hand, such as plot or character. Details are not enough to grow these things organically, and so this novel reads patchily in parts.
Part of this problem, however, is deliberate and due to a protagonist who has not yet achieved “self-actualization”. He is probably someone who wouldn’t spend much time considering “self-actualization”, except that he’s recently enrolled in a continuing education psychology course. And for this protagonist– Nicole Pavone who is in his early twenties, first-generation Canadian happily ensconced at home with his Italian parents, employed as a personal trainer at the local gym– the world around him is a place comprising details and lacking a cohesive whole. In short, he’s got some growing up to do.
The solution, he believes is to take advice, and fortunately he finds it aplenty. His Nonna’s old Italian maxims are always close at hand, cryptic in their meaning, but also flexible enough to have wide relevance. He turns also to this two brothers, both called Enzo, who offer their respective takes on fraternal support. And while his clients at work turn to him for fitness advice, they’re also willing to offer Nicolo their own bits of wisdom. So that in the end, he is receiving so much advice, he’s as much abuzz as ever with total confusion.
Advice for Italian Boys was a read that held my attention, particularly by virtue of its wide perspective– the glimpses we get into the minds of other characters, and the opportunity to see Nicolo from the outside. I appreciated Giardini’s presentation of suburban Toronto, the ethnic enclaves on the northern fringes which are usually ignored in contemporary literature. Also her portrayal of an immigrant community whose cultural identity and status in a new land is not necessarily the paramount occasion of the novel.
This is a slow story, made up of moments instead of momentum, in that I mean nothing terribly dramatic ever happens. Which is certainly not a flaw, because the moments Giardini captures are done so with great acuity. She also performs curious tricks with chronology which don’t seem ultimately realized, but they suggest there’s more to this simple narrative than what at first meets the reader’s eye.
April 13, 2009
Then let us drink a cup of tea
“The tea ritual: such a precise repetition of the same gestures and the same tastes; accession to simple, authentic and refined sensations, a license given to all, at little cost, to become aristocrats of taste, because tea is the beverage of the wealthy and of the poor; the tea ritual, therefore, has the extraordinary virtue of introducing into the absurdity of our lives an aperture of serene harmony. Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, lost souls mourn beauty, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea. Silence descends, one hears the wind outside, autumn leaves rustle and take flight, the cat sleeps in a warm pool of light. And, with each swallow, time is sublimed.” –Muriel Barbery, trans. Alison Anderson, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
April 12, 2009
Easter Sunday
Even though we celebrate religious holidays in a secular fashion at our house, there was plenty going on this Easter Sunday. Springtime, first of all, with blue skies and sunshine. Tulips on the table, and a special Springtime cake. The ever-present squirms of our baby, who we’re just weeks away from meeting. A brilliant dinner of delicious lamb and vegetables, and seeing family. The wonderful news of another new baby, to be joining our extended family in October. This whole weekend full of good friends, delightful celebrations, and the week-old baby we got to play with on Friday. (Indeed, our lives are babyful of late. Which is good practice.) And another day off tomorrow. Now reading (the gorgeous) The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and certainly this is life.
