August 10, 2008

Let's Link

Let’s link, shall we? On the response to Penguin’s recent Canadian short story anthology, with Salon des Refusés upcoming (and me with CNQ and TNQ due in the mail). I am not certain of the politics myself, but I am just pleased that I’ll soon have plenty of stories to read. Steven Beattie has turned August into a short story celebration. And at Joyland.ca, a short story by Claudia Dey. But back to reality (ha ha), on “New Labour’s Terrible Memoirs”. Rona Maynard spreads the word: P. Hilton is funny! Lizzie Skurnick reads Judy Blume’s Tiger Eyes. The Hart House Review goes online. Heather Mallick writes (wonderfully) on John McCain’s lack of internet savvy**. “Summertime” also grew on Sarah Liss. Anne Enright on how she names her characters. And Ten Reasons not to mind the rain.

**So just suppose I was one of those people who likes to go around hating the CBC, and thus finding their content and programming utterly irrelevant/offensive/a waste of tax payers’ money/a symbol of what is wrong with socialism today etc. So wouldn’t the fact that I am always commenting on the CBC’s webforums suggest otherwise? That even I, a fervid decrier of Liberal Media Bias, am wholly engaged with the content of our nation’s public broadcaster? That I in fact cannot get enough of it? Regardless of the tone of my comments, mightn’t I be contributing to a vast majority of the CBC’s online hits, thus ensuring their media domination into perpetuity? I just wonder…

August 10, 2008

Coventry by Helen Humphreys

Helen Humphreys, as I learned when I read her book The Frozen Thames last year, does the most remarkable things with diminutiveness. Her scenes are microcosmic, and this is the case again with her new novel Coventry. Which is, of course, a small novel, the tale of a single night in a single place, but stretching over half a century as well. The story of Britons braving the infamous air attacks on the city of Coventry during the night of November 14, 1940, but then as Humphreys writes in her acknowledgments, “My descriptions of the city are based on the accounts of the citizens of Coventry, as well as on eyewitness accounts of the bombing of Baghdad.” And so it resonates.

Coventry is the story of Harriet Marsh who, by way of a wet floor and a twisted knee, has come to be working on fire watch at Coventry’s cathedral during that fateful night. The attacks far worse than anyone had predicted, and the fires erupting are no match for those standing watch, armed with their hoses and buckets. As chaos ensues throughout the city, Harriet finds herself staying close to Jeremy, the young man she’d been working with earlier in the evening. Dodging explosions, trying to help the wounded, attempting to find their way home, struck by the strange sights around them– the white horse feeding on grass in a city park.

Humphreys’ prose is the point here, spare but evocative with the most solid details. The blackened houses “burnt to nothing but their frames” but with the cats in the windows: “Cats stay with the building, thinks Harriet. Dogs go with the people.” The difficult in comprehending the sights they would see that night, let alone explaining them: “The bombs feel to Harriet like all these things– an earthquake shaking the ground, lightening striking the earth, the deep sonorous toll of a bell./ When something is unnatural, there is no new language for it. The words to describe it must be borrowed words, from the old language of natural things.”

This novel is a rumination on human connections, on love and happiness. Happiness to be seized onto, gripped, even in these terrible times, for these unfortunate people who’d lived through one war and now found themselves in another. And not a stupid joy, not a stupor, but something more pure, something that could be held in one’s memory as the bombs fell around them, tearing their entire lives apart, thus enabling survival. The novel referencing other works of literature as well, bookishness in general. Beatrix Potter’s Jeremy Fisher, “… the awful moment when he realizes his life is not what he thought. He has been operating in the world as a predator and now he understands that he really is prey.”

Coventry is a small book with a great deal of power, comprising images beautiful and so ugly, joyousness and the depths of sadness, of there and here, and now and then, but none of this is juxtaposition. These forces’ opposition ceasing to matter when each is ever present, and so such is complexity, this piece of the world.

August 8, 2008

Rereading Late Nights

I just finished rereading Late Nights on Air, the novel that stole my heart last September. Back then I was reading it outside one afternoon when it started raining, and the book got wet, but I could not find the drop-splattered page this time. I kept expecting the book to get rained on this time, but the clouds kept holding off until I was safely indoors. Anyway, I tried to read it more critically, to reflect on the many different arguments I’ve heard about the book since then– for its worth and otherwise. But I really couldn’t help it, slipping right back into the same sweet dream that held me as I read it the first time, as easy as a paddle dip into a glass-calm lake.

I love this book, and I’ve decided I love its shape more than anything. The paddle dipping almost right, because it’s about water, or I suppose the way that water makes a shape inside whatever vessel is holding it– so absolutely fluid, yet contained. But here contained without a container even, molecules just suspended. That the chapters aren’t numbered, for example, and their construction is not consistent. This is the only novel I’ve ever read whose lack of quotation marks for speech seemed to matter, that lack of containment, and yet held. The lack of division between speech, narration, inner thoughts and the voice in each of the characters’ heads (which is different than their inner thoughts, of course). Utter calm, throughout, or maybe I’m just feeling mellow for once in my life, but it’s the book, I think. As subtle and pointed as a name like “Gwen”, how it slips from your lips. The word “slip” too, it’s the same. Dipping paddles, quiet speed.

August 8, 2008

No difference between stories and real life

“I am a writer and I have been accused of merely writing autobiography in my stories, as if that were somehow easier to do than making everything up. Before I went to meet Lawrence, agitated as I was, it crossed my mind that I would find some way of writing about seeing him after so many years– the things we say to each other, what has become of us– some peripheral telling of lies maybe, or an extension of the fact that will take the encounter from the banal to the cosmic, that will find a universal chord, because that is what good writers do, the ones who know there is no difference among autobiography, biography, fiction or non-fiction, between stories and real life.” –Sharon Butala, “Postmodernism”

August 6, 2008

The Killing Circle by Andrew Pyper

Though at times maligned in literary realms, thrillers are remarkable for exemplifying just what books are capable of doing to us. For demonstrating the book’s incredible power, and how it is strange that we take for granted a stack of paper with printed symbols that is terrifying. Film is entirely different, I think, or at least bad movies are, which take full advantage of their ability to startle us. Whereas literature has to be more subtle. More subtle than even a good film, because writers have less at their disposal– only words. To create a mood, a grip, the twists and terror, and then to do all this, but write well also? For prose to be surprising and inspired, characters well rounded, scenes to be properly evoked, the story fresh and original, and unbearably real and unbearably awful, and all this has been Andrew Pyper’s marvelous feat in his new novel The Killing Circle.

This was a novel that kept me up very late one night, too terrified to turn off my light, and too impatient to wait until morning to see how it ended. The grip beginning with the novel’s prologue, with Patrick Rush, a single father, at a drive-in movie with his son. The son disappearing on his way back from the snack bar and, frantic with worry, Patrick looks for him admidst the maze of parked cars, in the light of the terrifying movie on the screen before him, snippets of sound audible as he rushes from car-to-car. Venturing further out into the farmer’s fields surrounding, with no sign of his son, and however urgent is all of this, Patrick is also somehow resigned: “I know who has done this,” he says. “Who has taken my son. I know its name.”

In the next chapter we’re taken back four years to when Patrick, an aspiring novelist and dissatisfied television critic, joins a creative writing circle. The circle comprising five other rather eccentric souls, and led by Conrad White– the novelist nobody has heard of–, Patrick quickly realizes there isn’t an abundance of talent among them. And yet the story by a member called Angela captures his attention. Angela, whose face “never sharpens into full focus, like an unfinished sculpture in which you can recognize the subject is human, but beyond this, taken at different points of view, it could be a representation of virtually anyone.”

Her story is a ghost story, the story of a girl haunted by “a terrible man who does terrible things”, and the story starts to get inside Patrick’s head. Or rather he plants himself inside of the story, if there is any difference between such situations. The story’s impact upon him only intensifying when a local serial killer’s crimes start taking on eerie connections to the narrative. Patrick begins suspecting a member of the circle may be responsible, sensing himself in danger, and setting himself up as a suspect as well.

The creative writing circle is an ingenious device here, in “reality” the work from such groups often blurring lines of fact and fiction (i.e. “Write what you know.”) The writers’ stories suggesting (or betraying?) odd biographical details, misconstruing perceptions, providing for inadvertent and inappropriate therapy sessions (as well as terrible fiction), and a strange misplaced intimacy. Friendship or rivalry? And no one is ever quite as they seem, sometimes you’re even hoping this is the case. An atmosphere that absolutely fosters Patrick’s Rush’s paranoia.

This blurring of fact and fiction continues throughout the book, explored by Pyper in a variety of ways, also highlighting how it is that scary stories come by their power. By being just possible enough that you’ve can’t disbelieve it, that there really might be a monster hiding under your bed. So heightened was the mood of this story, the depths of its realism, I considered the monster– I really did– and Patrick Rush’s own experience was analogous. Could there really be a shadow following him home through the alley, somebody at the window, footsteps on the stairs? He knows it sounds crazy, and yet…

This novel is functioning at levels I’ve not got a full sense of yet, meta-meta, and I am sure that a character is called “Conrad White” must be some kind of joke I just don’t have the punchline for. Also notable is the Toronto of the novel, as vivid and electrified as Maggie Helwig’s in Girls Fall Down, and as well featured as that in Katrina Onstad’s How Happy to Be. Satirizing literary and media culture, whilst on a deeper level exploring the limits and danger of imagination.

So much is also going on beyond the tension, the whodunit, the fear. Pyper’s novel an exploration of story, the nature of story and our lives as stories. Says Conrad White, “We avoid speaking of stories as stories for the same reason we avoid contemplating the inevitability of death. It can be unpleasant. It can hurt.” Patrick unwilling to admit his own story, perhaps still stunned by the death of his wife, and so in place of his story is a void of sorts. A void he fills by appropriating Angela’s story, that of “the terrible man who does terribly things.” The ramifications of this theft are manifold, and awful, becoming the motivation for whatever it was that snatched his son, leading Patrick into the darkest corners of both society and himself.

August 5, 2008

This Weekend for Me

This weekend for me was four days long, and it was filled with ordinary lovely things like reading and writing, a haircut, dinner out and trip to the movies. Plenty of book buying, a lovely brunch with Moms, peach-pie baking and finding out our good friends are having a bebe! A trip to the ROM, bbqs a plenty, and then today to Toronto Island with the Caserights, and we had a splendid picnic under a tree, went paddling, and then Stuart and I rode our bikes from Wards’ to Hanlan’s Point, and home again, and now we’re absolutely knackered.

This weekend, without consciously intending to, I continued my Westness pick with a rereading of The Stone Angel. So glad to reacquaint myself, so appreciative of my recent reading of Lilac Moon for historical context, but I do think that Laurence’s skills as a novelist increased exponentially with the rest of the Manawaka series. Which, I’d think, is the most we could ask of a writer. And then more Westness with Sharon Butala’s collection of short stories Real Life, which is oh-so solid. And then The Killing Circle, which wasn’t West at all, but it kept me from falling asleep last night due to a) terror and b) I couldn’t stop reading. Review to follow… I’m now rereading Late Nights on Air.

August 1, 2008

On finding math in my book

It’s amazing, rereading, how it takes you back in time. Providing intimate encounters, so unexpected, with the yous you used to be. For example, yesterday I opened my copy of The Stone Angel for the first time since I read it in my grade twelve English class. First, on the first page is written in my (still) best friend’s hand: “I hate this book because I can’t read it because I am illiterate,” ascribed to me, which must have been funny once. (What is funny, of course, is that illiterate was spelled wrong.) And then how about the trigonometry on the inside cover?? At least I think it’s trigonometry, and the most remarkable thing about it is that it’s my handwriting! That once upon a time that gibberish meant anything at all to me, and I struggled over it, slaved over it, vandalized my very own paperbacks with it (and for naught, I think I see now considering I don’t even know what it is. Though did anybody even pretend that trigonometry was going to be useful?). What a strange life I must have lived then, and no wonder I sort of missed the point of the book, and we’ll just add this to the exponentially ever-growing list of reasons why I’m glad I get to be an adult now.

July 31, 2008

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer

Writes Juliet Ashton in a letter to Dawsy Adams, “I wonder how the book got to Guernsey? Perhaps there is some sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true.” But it might be, homing instinct or no homing instinct. That this delightful book was brought to me, full of all the things I like the best– an epistolary novel, begun on the basis of a used book’s passage from one reader to another, full of wonderful literary references, even a bookish mystery of sorts, plus a reference to the joys of peering in windows, and a teapot that’s used as a weapon.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society is a novel comprising a selection of correspondence, primarily to and from Juliet Ashton. Ashton, living in 1946 London with its war wounds still so fresh, is a writer seeking the subject of her next book– she’s previously published a commercially unsuccessful biography of Anne Bronte, and a very popular collection of humorous columns she’d written during the war. Her interest is sparked by a letter she receives from Dawsy Adams, a pig farmer from Guernsey in Britain’s Channel Islands, who has somehow acquired a book that was once hers, Juliet’s name and address inscribed on the inside cover.

Dawsy has written seeking other books, which are proving hard to find where he is– Guernsey still a long way from recovering from 5 years of German occupation. Books, Dawsy explains, have become very important to him, and his friends, far more than it was ever figured they would be during that evening they devised their Literary Society as a ruse to hide a pig from the Nazis.

Letters between Juliet and Dawsy, Juliet and her publisher, and also from the other members of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, come together to form a marvelously engaging narrative, with characters so real their letters shout off the page. Their stories a testament to the power of literature upon all different kinds of people, as solace during hardship, to bring friends together. Portraying also the horrors of life during occupation, Juliet reflecting that all through the war she hadn’t thought much about the Channel Islands, and I don’t imagine many of us since have thought about it more. A fascinating, if awful, piece of history, and Mary Ann Shaffer’s enthusiasm for this subject is evident in her work. Unnatural exposition the risk of any epistolary novel, and where it happens here (which is rarely) is with these stories, these historical details, but we forgive them because they hold such interest.

The novel’s prose lives up to all the great works it references, which is certainly something. Offering such a fabulous critique: Juliet writes, “P.S. I am reading the correspondence of Mrs. Montagu. Do you know what that dismal woman wrote to Jane Carlyle? ‘My dear little Jane, everybody is born with a vocation and yours is to write charming little notes.’ I hope Jane spit on her.”

One Society member writes of The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, edited by Yeats who excluded WW1 poems due to his “distaste” for themes of “passive suffering”: “Passive Suffering? Passive Suffering! …What ailed the man? Lieutenant Owen, he wrote a line, “What passing bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns.” What’s passive about that, I’d like to know? That’s exactly how they do die. I saw it with my own eyes, and I say to hell with Mr. Yeats.”

I would urge this novel upon you, with all its wonderfully funny writing, shocking in places, and in other turns sad. Hardly shying away from the brutal realities of this time period, absolutely and bravely unflinching, but also masterful at capturing the nuances of ordinary life. A certain erudition evident, but always underlined by a joy– in books, in reading, in human relationships, and the connections between all three.

(Read DGR’s Review.)

July 30, 2008

That's what I love about reading

“That’s what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you onto another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It’s geometrically progressive– all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.” –from The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.

July 30, 2008

Tapestries of Place

I’ve been reading a lot of Sharon Butala lately, ever since I read her latest Girl in Saskatoon in April. I’ve read come to know her voice by heart now, present regardless of whether in fiction or non-fiction, her short fiction and her novels, and opening one of her books is like settling down with a new friend. I’ve just finished Lilac Moon: Dreaming of the Real West, an absolutely extraordinary book exploring Canada’s west, its history and its present. Such a compelling read, an essential addition to any Canadian library, so filled with learning, and I would it upon anyone looking to learn more about this part of Canada, or anyone who thinks they’ve learned enough and perhaps could do with some re-examination. And some celebrating too– for Lilac Moon is a celebration, even if a critical one.

“What makes a Westerner?” Butala asks throughout each of her chapters, considering the rodeo as an emblem, relationships to the land, with First Nations peoples, the situation of women. What it means, the pioneering spirit, to be raised in the shadow of this mythology. What this mythology might exaggerate or obfuscate. All this culminating in a beautiful chapter, “Visions of the Prairie West” about how Western Canada has been defined by its artists and writers– “We paint, write, sculpt, dance, film, act, compose and sing and play– however wistful, however tentative– our claims on this place.”

Strange to have read this soon after my rereading of Joan Didion’s Where I Was From. I didn’t plan it, and certainly could have forseen the patterns, though I didn’t. Both writers reexamining mythologies of Westness, the tropes of their childhoods, of pioneering spirits and what such stories belie– Butala explaining that when the Canadian West was settled, “it certainly wasn’t to provide homes… for millions of destitute… Europeans” but because “the federal government feared that the Americans, seeing all that tempting ’empty’ territory, would simply move in and take it over.” Didion clarifying that those intrepid men who pushed the American frontier west towards California were in fact pushing themselves towards what then was actually Mexico.

Both writers weaving their personal histories, their family histories, into the wider stories to develop these tapestries of place, the perfect containers to hold and convey such complicated stories. Of places that both writers manage to combine a certain ambivalence for with a lifelong love. Questioning ideals they’ve held since childhood, those instilled by their parents, and grandparents before that, examining their own feelings of nostalgia. Inserting a woman’s perspective (though Didion would shy away from this distinction, I know) into the narrative of “Westness”, which is so often synonymous with “maleness”. Significant also, I think, the way that both Butala and Didion have shifted between fiction and non-fiction throughout their careers, in these particular books bringing the very best of both of these, blending story and the world into something so close to truth.

(Speaking of Westness, we’re going to Alberta in October!! V.v. exciting.)