January 29, 2009
On reading challenges
Over at the Descant blog, I’ve written a post about the fascinating world of reading challenges.
January 28, 2009
Difficulty is artistically desirable
“Gaming is a much more resistant, frustrating medium than its cultural competitors. Older media have largely abandoned the idea that difficulty is a virtue; if I had to name one high-cultural notion that had died in my adult lifetime, it would be the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable. It’s a bit of an irony that difficulty thrives in the newest medium of all – and it’s not by accident, either. One of the most common complaints regular gamers make in reviewing new offerings is that they are too easy. (It would be nice if a little bit of that leaked over into the book world.)” –John Lanchester, “Is it Art?”
January 28, 2009
Hardly Knew Her by Laura Lippman
Though I am not sure if Laura Lippman is so literary, it must mean something that from her writing I learned the word “postprandial.” Her novel What the Dead Know was absorbing, well written and a treat to read, so deserving of its many accolades. Unusual for a genre writer, Lippman has won significant mainstream critical acclaim, and the position of her books on various bestseller lists is a demonstration of her popular appeal. And perhaps my indecisiveness in regards to Lippman’s literary-ness is more to do with the vague boundaries of that genre than the genre Lippman herself is writing from.
The latter genre is crime fiction, detective fiction. Lippman is perhaps best known for her series of novels featuring Tess Monaghan, Baltimore P.I., though she’s written other strand-alone books too. Her novels are plot-driven, fast-paced, page-turners thick with popular appeal, and so (pardon my bias) I was surprised to find such substance there too when I read her What the Dead Know.
In his essay “Trickster in a Suit of Lights”, Michael Chabon discussed “the modern short story.” Pointing out the form’s roots in genre, in that, “As late as about the 1950s, if you referred to “short fiction”, you might have been talking about… the ghost story; the horror story; the detective story; the story of suspense, terror, fantasy, science fiction, or the macabre; the sea, adventure, spy, war or historical story; the romance story.” This as opposed to the kind of story dominating the form today, which he terms “the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story.” (Whether or not his assessment is fair is an argument for another day.)
Chabon posits that many great contemporary novelists have “plied their trade in the spaces between genres, in no man’s land.” That some of the more interesting short story writers at work today are toiling away in similar locations. He writes, “Trickster haunts the boundary lines, the margins, the secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore. And that is where, if it wants to renew itself in the way the way that the novel has done so often in its long history, the short story must, inevitably, go.” (And if I remember some of the best of the Salon de Refuses correctly, the short story is often there-going already).
And so I was pleased, upon finishing Chabon’s essay, to remember that I had a book of Laura Lippman’s short fiction just waiting to be read. Though Lippman’s own straddling seems mainly just on the border between “genre” and “actually good,” this collection would be different from any other collection of short stories I’ve read lately. And I was interested to see how a collection with such decidedly popular appeal might serve to inform my thoughts on short stories in general.
Lippman’s Hardly Knew Her contains a novella, numerous crime stories, two Tess Monaghan stories, as well a fake news profile on Monaghan whose byline is Lippman’s, and is headlined “The Accidental Detective” in homage to Anne Tyler (who, like Lippman, lovingly renders Baltimore in fiction). The crime stories in particular are riveting, employing sleights of hand near-impossible to see coming. Most remarkable are Lippman’s ordinary narrators whose homicidal tendencies are as surprising to the reader as they must have been for the victims. The ruthlessness of these characters, complicated by the fact that we’re not always called on to sympathize with them, or we simply can’t, or (even worse) we find that we do! Suggesting the many ways in which ordinary people do terrible things in their lives, and that ordinary is just a veneer after all.
The thing about a book like this is that it takes the form right back to its roots, and could make any ordinary reader fall in love with the short story. The ordinary reader who thinks he doesn’t like short stories, doesn’t get them, hates being left hanging, how they’re not quite his money’s worth. (These people exist; we don’t hang out with them much, but I’ve met them. They’re the people not buying your latest story collection). But any reader seeking entertainment, amusement, distraction will find herself caught up in these stories, one after another, and perhaps realize the form is alive, vibrant, and altogether relevant to their reading experiences. Opening up the form, so perhaps the reader might seek some more of it, in admiration of the short story’s so neat and so sprawling containment. Of how every short story is really such a trick all along.
January 27, 2009
tolls like a bell for miles
“…because I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain. Period. Oh, I could decoct a brew of other, more impressive motivations and explanations. I could uncork more stuff about reader response theory, or the Lacanian parole. I could go on about the storytelling impulse and the need to make sense of experience through story. A spritz of Jung might scent the air. I could adduce Kafka’s formula: “A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.” I could go down to the cafe at the local mega-bookstore and take some wise words of Abelard or Koestler about the power of literature off a mug. But in the end– here’s my point– it would still all boil down to entertainment, and its suave henchman, pleasure. Because when the axe bites the ice, you feel an answering throb of delight all the way from your hands to your shoulders, and the blade tolls like a bell for miles.” –Michael Chabon, “Trickster in a Suit of Lights” from Maps and Legends
January 26, 2009
Amazingly above-average
Today’s postal haul wasn’t huge, but was mostly amazingly above-average (or at least way not just bills and flyers). The Good: two letters, one from the Governor General and the other from The South Pole. The Bad: another issue of magazine whose subscription I’m definitely not renewing because, once again, upon perusing table of contents, I see the editors have forgotten that women can write.
January 26, 2009
Pickle Me This pivots
I’m thrilled by the fine company I’ll be joining once I’ve read at Pivot at the Press Club this Wednesday. I’ll be reading a short story called “Squash Season”, and sharing the mic with Stuart Ross and James Sandham. Come early to get a good perch; the show starts at 8:00. The Press Club is located at 850 Dundas Street West here in Toronto.
January 26, 2009
Living in the memory of a love that never was
I loved Orlando, unsurprisingly. It was so terrible funny and fresh, and relevant, exuberant. I could read it again and again, and each time discover the book anew. And so now I’m reading Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon (the gorgeous McSweeneys hardback, though it’s coming out in paperback in Feb.), and Laura Lippman’s collection of stories Hardly Knew Her (which I look forward to finishing in the bath this evening).
Online and periodically, I’ve been up to my nose in Oliver Jeffers interviewed in The Guardian; on Obama as storyteller and one of the many Midwesterners who’ve explored their identity through story; Rebecca Rosenblum’s Once finds another ideal reader; my doppelganger Gwyneth recommends “amazing, transportive novel[s]” (via Jezebel); LRB underlines why I’ll be renewing my subscription with Hilary Mantel’s memoir on life in Jeddah, and John Lanchester’s “Is It Art?” on video games. Lisa Gabriele is profiled in The Star (and have you seen her touting her book on Dragon’s Den?).
This weekend I grew out of my pants, knit some, helped entertain friends, sang “Long Long Time” whilst strumming my guitar, read a lot, wrote some, slept in, visited family member daily in hospital (who is going to be okay!!), baked a cake, ate a lot of spinach, drove a really large cargo van, danced around the kitchen, and inherited a bumbo seat and a jolly jumper.
January 22, 2009
The taste for books was an early one
“The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away, and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder. To put it in a nutshell, leaving the novelist to smooth out the crumpled silk and all its implications, he was a nobleman afflicted with a love of literature.” –from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
January 21, 2009
On the new Globe & Mail Books
Last August I was one of many hysterical book lovers contacting The Globe & Mail about its books section’s two week “summer vacation” from the Saturday paper. My email received a rapid reply assuring, “This is only a two-week pause before the fall season. There is no plan or intention whatsoever to discontinue the Books section.” Which was totally a lie! Kind of nervy, but at least then I wasn’t surprised in December to learn that the paper’s freestanding Books section would be no more in 2009. The section emerged reborn two weeks ago combined with the Focus section, partnered with expanded online coverage.
Now that I’ve finally figured out how to view the RSS feeds, I find that I’m enjoying the new Globe & Mail Books online section more than I thought I would. Though the now-shrunken print edition disappoints– I really love getting newsprint ink all over my fingers on Saturday mornings, and no amount of online coverage could replace curling up on the couch with the paper and a cup of tea. I also don’t love the thematic reviews– books on film the first week, Obama-esque books last week in honour of the inauguration. The theme is to hook, I realize, but I really do prefer books in general. Fabulous, however, that last week’s section included a poem, and I also adored the new feature on underrated books we should know about.
Online, I am enjoying the daily reviews (though I’m never very interested unless it’s fiction and there isn’t enough fiction!). As well as pieces such as Lisa Gabriele’s (whose The Almost Archer Sisters I’m a fan of) on writing fiction autobiographically, and Julie Wilson on well-worn books. In Other Words is interesting, frequently updated, and various– I liked Ben McNally’s response to Jane Urquhart’s underrated text and the fact that his bookshop sold both copies of The Blue Flower the following Monday. And Martin Levin’s Shelf Life is delightful.
So I’m happy, even though I hate change. I just hope the Globe Books follows on with its momentum. And that I never open my paper on a Saturday morning to find a print books section that’s just a page or two long.
January 21, 2009
Pickle Me This reads Canada Reads: The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill
It was monumental to finish reading Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes on the same day the United States’ received its 44th President. Though I understand how President Obama’s own ancestral history varies greatly from Aminata Diallo’s, to have read this book is to understand the significance of what he represents. To trace the path of Aminata’s life is to understand the early history of blacks in America– how this history is fraught with complexity, its terrible legacies, how this history refuses to sit down in the history books where it belongs, and all the reasons why it never should.
Lawrence Hill has created a story in the “sweeping epic” genre, crossing over years, languages, continents, and oceans. The story of Aminata Diallo, who is telling this story herself close to the end of her life, in England where she is campaigning for the abolishment of the slave trade. She begins at the beginning, her childhood spent in the village of Bayo with the security of two loving parents. Their family life is idyllic, but danger lurks beyond its bounds. One day whilst out assisting her midwife mother, twelve year-old Aminata is kidnapped, her village is burned, her parents are killed. She spends the next three months walking with other prisoners towards the Atlantic Ocean, deprived of food and comfort. Her precocious nature, however, in addition to the midwifery skills she has garnered from her mother, serve to make her useful to her captors. This becomes even more pronounced on the journey she takes from Africa to America by slave ship, where she survives by her formidable wits.
Aminata continues to distinguish herself as a slave on an indigo plantation, then as a “servant” in Charleston (where she is taught to read and write). She escapes from her owner on a trip to New York City, realizing the freedom she’d never stopped yearning for. Her reputation grows, and she is asked to help the British compile The Book of Negroes— a record of Black British loyalists promised freedom and passage to British North America. The reality of life in Nova Scotia once she arrives, however, proves much different than the promise, and soon Aminata has nothing to lose by an arduous voyage back to Africa as part of a Black settlement in Sierra Lione.
“Honey,” says Aminata Dialla, “my life is a ghost story.” A ghost story she prefaces with the following “caveat”: “Do not trust large bodies of water, and do not cross them. If you, dear reader, have an African hue and find yourself led towards water with vanishing shores, seize your freedom by any means necessary.”
The scope of this novel is stunning, its details so pointed and perfect that readers will have trouble distinguishing from non-fiction, which is the impact Hill is trying to achieve. To re-imagine what really happened, to let Aminata’s life stand for the experience stand for the experience of all of those who had no such voice. To fill in gaps in our own sense of history– on the (brutal) details of the slave trade, the (brutal) history of Blacks in Canada, all of which is widely known in a vague context, but without specificity and almost taken for granted. Slavery evokes countless symbols and ideas, but the humanity gets lost, and the concrete fact of it forgotten. There is so much learning to be had within these pages, and a fascinating life story that moves with a furious momentum.
The story is the point of this book, its facts and details, and realities. What gets lost, however, is the life itself. Though secondary characters are drawn with some complexity, they never entirely function as real people. And this is particularly the case with Aminata herself, though I know many would disagree with me. But to me, she read as a vehicle for the story she had to tell, rather than an actualized character. That she never changes through the years demonstrated that for me– she makes references to aging, to her looks changing, but her behaviour and convictions never seem to alter over sixty years. Though of course we’re hearing the story through the prism of her own perspective, but it was telling to me that I never got a sense of what she looked like (though we’re told many times details of her appearance).
The story is the point of this book, told in Aminata’s steady voice, but such steadiness comes at the expense of exquisite prose. There are moments, of course– the chapter titles highlight these– but in general, the prose was quite unremarkable. The story was riveting, but as a novel, the book failed to take flight. Scope is part of the problem, when years pass in the space between paragraphs. There is nothing artful about a line beginning with, “The days came and went…”, for example.
The Book of Negroes is an important book, an essential book even, but not wholly satisfactory as a novel. Still, it is a triumph in all number of ways, as I hope I’ve illustrated, and I am glad that I finally read it.
Canada Reads Rankings (so far):
1) The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill
