March 26, 2009
This morning's sweet delight
Oh, I know I’ve left all two of my avid readers hanging. I know you’ve both been asking, “What HAS Kerry received in the post of late?” Well, I can tell you: not much. Recent haulage has been pathetic, really. Until this morning’s sweet delight. Descant 144. An “Irish Writers” postcard sent from my best friend Britt, who is currently back in the Old Country. A gorgeous thank-you note from our friend Carolyn, that made me cry. And another postcard from my fabulous sister, who saw fit to think of me on her recent sojourn to sunny Mexico. My credit card statement was not as fun as the rest of the pile, but alas. I love the idea of these little items being placed into mailboxes all over the world, specially aimed right to my doorstep.
March 26, 2009
Rebecca and the Penguin: On Trends
The marvelous Rebecca Rosenblum, interviewed at the Pages website. Her delightfulness is evident. Best, I like:
Q: What trend in the world of contemporary Canadian letters would you like to put on ice?
R:I mainly miss trends–I have a lot on my personal agenda to read, andwhen I look around for something new, I want what my friends arereading and writing, not necessarily what’s new and popular. Besides, the nice thing about trends is that they are optional: I don’t personallywant to read about hot vampire sex, but I guess a lot of people do,and more power to’em. Although I did think things were going a bit farwhen I confessed that I’d not read any of the Harry Potter novels andsomeone said, “Really? But I thought you loved books!”
March 25, 2009
Strange and sordid
I’ve spent the last few evenings so outrageously tired that I was seeing double, and the mornings drinking excessive amounts of orange juice. I’d self-diagnosed with diabetes, but now I think I just happen to be cranky and craving vitamin C. I no longer feel like sitting at a desk to type, but when I lie down on my back, I’m unable to breathe, and I don’t yet know how to type on my side. Baby is currently kicking my computer, having spent the entire day pummeling me from the inside, which makes me happy actually, nothing to worry about. I slept better last night (except for strange sordid dreams involving Tom Selleck and fondue), and feel tonight I might not actually lapse into a coma at 9:00. Also it is raining=spring.
I am now reading Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist. Her books are never actually so enjoyable, and always take me an age to get done, but they’re worthwhile and so various. Last night I finished reading Doubting Yourself to the Bone by Thomas Trofimuk, as recommended by Melanie. It was a beautiful, strange book, a poet’s book, I think, which might not be everybody’s thing, but I liked it, and didn’t even get bothered that it was mostly in second person. I think she’s right that this is one that leaves you thinking for a while. And now I’ve got a zillion other books lined up on my to-be-read shelf, and I really ought to step up because my wee kicky baby’s due date is just two months away.
March 23, 2009
The Believers by Zoë Heller
As a novelist, Zoë Heller’s tendency has been to write against her readers’ expectations. Certainly, readers accustomed to her “single-girl-about-town” newspaper columns during the 1990s were uneasy embracing Willy Muller, the nasty piece of work/wife-murdering protagonist of her first novel Everything You Know. Readers were hard-pressed to find sympathy for either of the two main characters in her second novel Notes on a Scandal, which all the same went on to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and received acclaim as a film.
Her third novel The Believers has something more of convention about it than the other two. Reminiscent of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty in that it is a domestic novel of ideas written by an English novelist about America, Heller this time has created an ensemble piece about the Litvinoff family, crusading left-wing lawyer Joel, his wife Audrey, their daughters Rosa (who has recently converted from athiest socialist to Orthodox Jew) and Karla (who has started cheating on her bland Union official husband), and their adopted son Lenny the deadbeat. When a stroke puts Joel into a coma, the family must realign itself without its centre of orbit, and each character is significantly changed in the process.
The novel begins in 1962 London when Joel and Audrey first meet at a party. He stands apart from the crowd, older and American. She notices that as he’s listening to others talking, he’ll periodically lean back onto one foot and mime throwing a ball. He notices her too, intrigued her seeming sense of dignity, “[b]ut he was anxious to have it done with now– to be told the trick of it. A girl who could never be talked down to would be exhausting in the long run.” And it is through a series of misunderstandings that these two people, within a day of meeting one another, end up signing on together for the rest of a life. Near the end of which is where the novel formally begins a page later, in New York in 2002.
The Believers is a book about faith, about the nature belief, though of course like any truly successful novel of ideas, it is also a book about people. Joel is only slightly dealt with before the coma writes him off, but we get a sense of his charisma, of perhaps its obsolescence, and that, for a multitude of reasons, he mightn’t have been the easiest man to be married to. This is underlined by the woman Audrey has become forty years after meeting him, the latest of Heller’s “nasty piece of work” characters. She’s the kind of woman who “tells it like it is”, even when it isn’t, doesn’t suffer fools gladly, or pander to anyone, and carries a sense of superiority for all of these traits. She’s disappointed in her daughters, indulges and enables her deadbeat son, and is in general quite impossible, offensive, and an absolutely marvelous character construction who absolutely rings true.
That the other characters are less realized in comparison really says more about Audrey. Their characters also formed in such reaction to hers that they will be more predictable, understandable, while Audrey might be compared to that proverbial bull in a china shop or a ticking time bomb. This would especially be the case now that she’s lost an anchor to her self in Joel, and more over their entire marriage has been undermined by a woman who’s turned up claiming to be Joel’s ex-mistress, the mother of his three-year old son. The revelation shattering illusions about Joel, and forcing his wife and children to redefine themselves in light of this now altered sense of who he was.
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.
March 20, 2009
Spring Delight
Thanks to Baby Got Books for pointing out this glorious Eric Carle creation on the google homepage in celebration of SPRING.
March 19, 2009
In addition
I’m now reading The Believers by Zoe Heller, who I’ve loved a long long time. On the weekend I read Anne Fleming’s Pool-Hopping, which, in addition to being swim-lit, was a stellar collection of stories. In light of her latest book Life Sentences, the remarkable Laura Lippman’s top ten memorable memoirs. Today I was sent a link to Based On Books, an interesting review site of books-based films. The Flying Troutmans is named to The Orange Prize longlist. Charlotte Ashley’s Tangential to a History of Reading points to significant flaws in Sydney Henderson’s literary character. And on literature and returning soldiers.
March 19, 2009
Get Excited
Via BoingBoing, which came to my attention via Stu. Though we could all use a stiff upper lip, of course, this strikes me as much more fun.
March 18, 2009
Dispatches
Via Crooked House, I came across a post about pregnancy at Moonlight Ambulette with an excerpt from the short story “Another Marvelous Thing” by the wondrous Laurie Colwin. “For the past two months her chief entertainment had been to lie in bed and observe her unborn child moving under her skin. It had knocked a paperback book off her stomach and caused the saucer of her coffee cup to jiggle and dance.”
My unborn child is not yet so mighty, but staring at my fascinating stomach has already become a kind of pastime, and I don’t think I’ve really come across any other literature yet that so encapsulates the experience of being pregnant. Or at least in a way that doesn’t border on the nightmare, and I’m aware that pregnancy can indeed border on nightmare, but so many of these books and stories exploit pregnancy for its literary effect rather than capturing the moment for itself. I’m thinking even of very good novels– Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins, for instance, The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing, or The Edible Woman does a bit of it. Of course there are also numerous books in which woman dies in childbirth or botched abortion (which I seem to keep picking up unknowingly), or where she miscarries at three or four months (or whatever month I happened to be at when I was reading said story or book [writers beware: a miscarriage is not a plot device.])
Oh, but Laurie Colwin. I should go back and read A Big Storm Knocked it Over and Happy All the Time, both of which depict pregnancy, I remember. The baby kicks punctuating The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant managed something of it too. Perhaps Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer, but there pregnancy was more a metaphor than anything else.
Anne Enright has called motherhood “the place before stories start”, describing her surprise at finding it was not the sort of journey that one could send dispatches home from. Is this the problem then, I wonder? Who else has managed to send home some dispatches all the same?
March 18, 2009
The post in literature
Though I make no bones about literature in the post being my very favourite thing, a close second has to be the post in literature. Two such highlights lately (and by UofT creative writing grads) being Laura Boudreau’s story “Strange Pilgrims” in The New Quarterly 109 (out now), and Naya’s brilliant post “Stamping and Stomping”. Clearly, clearly, after my heart.
March 16, 2009
Long Weekend Chocolate Banana Cake
Very experimental, and driven by my ceaseless craving for banana-full baked goods. Eggless “wacky” cake on the bottom, and banana bread recipe from my breadmaker (except cooked in the oven) on top. Iced, rather unfortunately, with store-bought Betty Crocker as all my icing recipes have a raw egg beaten in and I’m not permitted such indulgences in my condition. Product is perfect though, and absolutely delicious. Promptly sliced into four, and distributed amongst my neighbours in order to prevent hastening of my immediate-onset obesity. With plenty still left for us to finish tonight during Midsomer Murders, accompanied by big glasses of (organic) milk.
