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
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.
