January 21, 2009
A terrifying prospect
Tonight, after I do five thousand other things, I will begin to read Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and I must admit to finding said prospect a little bit terrifying. Woolf is pretty intimidating at the best of times, and the premise of this book makes me particularly uneasy in its oddness. I’ve been assured by many, however, that Orlando is readable, accessible, and upon reading the Woolf’s preface, I’ve detected an ounce of humour. We shall see how this proceeds, but I’m crossing my digits that all goes well.
January 20, 2009
"Because We Want To" by Alison Smith
The few words that I learn
make reality. No, reality exists.
Words push me
into the moving water.
In the morning
I learn words for Lu Ling
while she brushes her teeth.
She’s said that she laughs
because she is pregnant
and wants to be happy.
Me too, I’ve realised, I do
want to be happy.
Today, I say, are you busy?
She says my Japanese
is good, is good!
I say tonight? dinner? together?
She says pizza?
and I say hai.
This is our common language:
eat dinner tonight yes.
And because we’ve wanted to
we’ve learned how to say next—
these have become feast days
and we will not stop
until we are satisfied.
–from Alison Smith’s gorgeous collection Six Mats and One Year, published by Gaspereau Press, which TSR has informed us recently entered the blogosphere.
January 16, 2009
Alice Munro's Best
I thought I knew Alice Munro. It’s a critical error, I think, so common amongst those of us who’ve been to school. Because we’ve read Lives of Girls and Women, and we’ve read The Stone Angel, and The Handmaid’s Tale, so this CanLit thing is old hat, right? But I had no idea. I’d read The Progress of Love ages ago, though I don’t even remember it, but it still lives on my shelf. I read Lives of Girls… at least twice in my literary schooling, and evaluated numerous undergraduate papers on Who Do You Think You Are? (which, in spite of that, remained a book I love).
I thought I knew Alice Munro, but that was like thinking I knew somebody I hadn’t called up in twenty years. And then I picked up Alice Munro’s Best: Selected Short Stories.
It wasn’t clear from the start that I was wrong, for the first two stories “Royal Beatings” and “The Beggar Maid” were from Who Do You Think Are?, and so this was quite familiar ground. The next few stories followed similar patterns, the retrospective voice recalling a rural childhood and noting complicating factors the child’s perspective had missed. There are hints of sexual transgression, domestic dissatisfaction, marriages go wrong, and whole ways of life now obliterated. All very much what I had expected.
The first real hint of something came with “Miles City Montana”, which wasn’t so much a departure from what had come before, but whose plot twist was so harrowing I had to skip right to the end before reading through. Keeping in mind, the is a short story. And the stories from then on in contained these singular horrifying moments where I could hardly bear to read. When one friend takes another’s lover, a lonely librarian duped by the promise of love, characters that do terrible things to one another for reasons that are never straightforward or explainable. That taxidermist, and what he did behind Bea’s back. The woman who’s heading west, tricked into thinking she’s promised love. The woman alone in her house in the country and the knock on her door in the middle of the night, or the woman driving with her grandchildren in the backseat when a filthy girl strung out on drugs forces her way into the car.
From “Friend of My Youth”, the stories branch out into history, or least further back into history than Munro has been considering all along. Here, no more first person narration, but rather we get pieces from all manner of perspectives. The author herself revoking her own authority– from the end of “Menesetung: “I thought there wasn’t anybody alive in the world but me who would know this, who would make the connection. And I would be the last person to do so. But perhaps this isn’t so. People are curious…./ And they may get it wrong, after all. I may have got it wrong. I don’t know if she ever took laudanum. Many ladies did. I don’t know if she ever made grape jelly.”
These stories take on a strange, uncertain and fascinating shape. I was most struck by “Carried Away”, which told the story of a small town librarian who receives unexpected letters from a soldier at war. Rather than a flowing narrative, the story is made up of blocks like a quilt, or more like sides of a cube because the result is most three-dimensional. I kept noticing points in these stories where the edges of these blocks would nearly connect, but not exactly– slightly altered phrasing, or memory from a different angle. How lives are made, these stories are, with shady corners and lots of questions.
But then these really aren’t stories at all, in a way, but rather novels. There is no narrow scope here, anything left out suggests reams of detail we can fill in for ourselves, and these are the stories of whole lives, entire places, which is not usually within the short story’s grasp. They are not novels only because they’re too short to be novels, which is not be undermine Alice Munro’s status as the short story master, because I’ve never been so mesmerized by 500 pages of stories in my life. She is a master, I think, because in observing these stories written over the course of her career, it is evident that she’s pushed the very limits of the form, changed the shape into something altogether different from what she started with, enabling the story to be stuffed to its capacity, and even further. An Alice Munro story: I didn’t know the half of it. I’m still blown away.
This collection is enhanced by its introductory essay by Margaret Atwood, placing these stories within their literary and geographical context. I would have appreciated dates attached to each story, however, and their places of publication, to give an indication of the book’s overall range. Also some kind of afterward by Munro herself, a retrospective? But then I fear I may be asking too much. With this superb collection, she has already given generously.
January 16, 2009
Reading never goes out of style
I just ordered Rachel Power‘s book The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood, and I’m looking forward to receiving it whenever seamail sees fit to deliver. Last night we heard Jessica Westhead read two short stories, and now we’re dying to read an entire collection of them. Maud Newton informs me that a new novel by Kate Christensen is out in June. “Drink, Cry, Hate”: Jezebel.com engages gag reflex re. Eat Pray Love interview. Rona Maynard on appreciating our lifelong women’s friendships, which were hardly possible just two generations ago. Tricia Dower on why she’s grateful to have never had an aversion to “speculative fiction”. And Julie Wilson celebrates reading in her wonderful and most inspiring article: “While there are seasons in publishing, reading itself never goes out of style.”
January 14, 2009
A Daring Experiment
Tonight, in a daring experiment subtitled “Kerry ventures out on a week/weak night”, I’ll be attending Pivot Readings at the Press Club. Looking very forward to seeing Jessica Westhead, as well discovering the work of Kyle Buckley and Rocco de Giacomo. Also hoping the temperature goes up above -30 Celsius. And I wish I were exaggerating.
January 14, 2009
When my head was not to be trusted
“A writer, if he is any good, does not describe. He invents or makes out of knowledge personal and impersonal and sometimes he seems to have unexplained knowledge which could come from racial or family experience. Who teaches the homing pigeon to fly as he does; where does a fighting bull get his bravery, or a hunting dog his nose? This is an elaboration or a condensation on that stuff we were talking about in Madrid that time when my head was not to be trusted.” –Ernest Hemingway, The Paris Review Interviews, I
January 13, 2009
On those unsympathethic females
Last week I read Christine Pountney’s novel The Best Way You Know How, which– apart from some ghastly clanking similes– was a pretty good read. Though on a personal level, I’d probably relate to any book about a Canadian girl who runs away to England to find a husband (and thank goodness I had better luck with my pick than Pountney’s poor old Hannah Crowe). But I was surprised to have enjoyed the book as much as I did, considering the mixed reviews. For as engaging and witty as Pountney’s writing is, I found Hannah Crowe to be as obnoxious as promised, but it occurred to me to wonder: do we have to like a heroine to like a book?
I wouldn’t have even though of Alice Munro, except by chance I picked up her selected short stories following Pountney’s book, and as I read the first two pieces (from Who Do You Think You Are?), I realized how much Munro’s Rose is like Hannah. Self-destructive, all her evil cards on the table, manipulative, immature, lacking self-confidence and self-esteem, and fascinated by the power she holds over her boyfriend/husband. Desiring to be dominated, but insisting on remaining indomitable.
I suppose it is Munro’s retrospective approach that casts Rose in a more sympathetic light, though if I remember from my most recent read, even in the later stories in the book, she never becomes wholly agreeable. Whereas the immediacy of Pountney’s narrative makes Hannah quite unbearable, and the third person narrative makes us witnesses to her blunders without the benefit of her perspective to cast the incident differently. Though the point is that Hannah doesn’t have this perspective, lacking as she is in self-awareness.
This all made me remember Kate Christensen’s comments about her novel In the Drink, which became marketed as “chick lit,” Christensen supposing all the while that she’d been, “consciously co-opting a predominantly male genre”. She explains, “I trace Claudia’s lineage through an august tradition of hard-drinking, self-destructive, hilarious anti-heroes beginning with Dostoevsky’s Underground Man and continuing through Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, and David Gates’s Jernigan…”
As the chick lit it wasn’t, Christensen’s novel didn’t succeed, and reader responses reminded me of the criticisms of Pountney’s book. Claudia, like Hannah, fails to win our sympathy, and to many readers, that was all she wrote. But now I’m wondering if “loser lit” is an exclusively male domain; is co-opting impossible? Is sympathy required of female characters in a way it isn’t necessarily of males, or does it have to be won differently? Is sympathy a demand female readers make that male readers might not? Are these female characters unsympathetic in a different way than the males, rendering them fundamentally disagreeable as literary characters at all?
No answers of course, as it’s late and I’m tired. But I’m going to be thinking about unsympathetic heroes and heroines this next while, and looking into the different ways they’re constructed. Any of your comments would be most helpful, so do leave some.
January 10, 2009
Me in This
My article on fact, fiction, Jonathan Bennett’s Entitlement and Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife is in the January/February issue of This Magazine, which is on sale now.
Update: Online here.
January 10, 2009
"Someone almost always dies in the end"
I am excited about Roughing It In The Books, a reading project by Melanie Owen and Alexis Kienlen, who are each attempting to read the entire New Canadian Library. It’s easy to take the NCL for granted now, but when the series started 50 years ago, it was unprecedented and it remains important. Certainly Owen and Kienlen will need to blow the dust off some of the texts, and it’s not going to be easy, but they’ll surely find some treasure and some books are guaranteed to be a joy. I’m looking forward to reading along (albeit vicariously), and no doubt they’ll inspire me to pick up a book or two.
January 10, 2009
New (Canada Reads) Books!!
I really believe that Ben McNally couldn’t have picked a better location for his bookshop than right next door to the building where my husband works. And I am very grateful for a husband kind enough to pick up the Canada Reads stack on his lunch break, just because I can’t wait another day for them. Four new books (because I owned Mercy Among the Children already)!! A couple of which I’d never have picked up otherwise, due to a variety of literary prejudices that I’m pleased to be challenging in the coming weeks. And unlike my usual reviews (where I only write about the books I like enough to do so) I’ll be reading with a critical eye, and ranking these five picks to find a winner. Then I’m looking forward to seeing how my opinion compares to the official panelists’, and to opinion at large.
