November 6, 2008
Plan Zafoot
There is so much going on right now that it’s really quite remarkable. That a while ago I was having weekends whose highlight was the purchase of track pants, but days lately have been a bit more whirlwindy. Exciting projects on the go, new beginnings on the horizon, and so many unbelievably amazing things coming up. Ok, not *so* many that I can’t count them all on the fingers of one hand, but I assure you I’m using the whole hand. It never rains but it pours, in particular pouring five fabulous things. And slowly but surely, all will be revealed.
November 5, 2008
The only character who really gets to talk
(Via The Pop Triad) Lionel Shriver on quotation marks and why their absence is off-putting: “The appearance of authorial self-involvement in much modern literary fiction puts off what might otherwise comprise a larger audience. By stifling the action of speech, by burying characters’ verbal conflicts within a blurred, all-encompassing über-voice, the author does not seem to believe in action — and many readers are already frustrated with literary fiction’s paucity of plot. When dialogue makes no sound, the only character who really gets to talk is the writer.”
November 4, 2008
Novel About My Wife What Happened?
At least a few times a day, according to my webstats, somebody will land on this site because they want to know “Novel About My Wife””What Happened”. And these poor people must perpetually go away quite disappointed, because neither my book review nor interview with the author are especially illuminating in that respect. I mean, if you’re looking for some plot summary, then I’m your man, but I’ve a feeling these people are seeking something a bit more specific. Something more like, what in heaven’s name was all that chaos at the end?
Full disclosure: I’ve got NO idea. Author Emily Perkins knows, and I know this because I asked her. In the vaguest terms though. What a waste! I had in front of me the only person who could answer that all-consuming “What happened?” question, but I thought it would be rude to pry. I figured if she’d wanted me to know, she would have put it in the book, but I did want to know if she knew. If what happened to Ann Wells was ever nailed down as a fact.
Perkins said, “No, I do have it. And I had written versions where the gaps were more filled in, but in the end I just thought the thing about Tom is that he is trying to investigate or work out the truth of his wife, but the point of the book for me is that he’s left it too late. He had his chance to look her in the eye and be with her in a real way and he was so busy, caught up in himself, romanticizing her and being in love with the mystery and not wanting to know. I didn’t want to let him off the hook for that…”
And so we’re implicated too as readers, because the text is Tom’s creation. His blindness becomes our own, which is annoying for a reader who has been invested in Ann as much as possible, unlike Tom. Annoying that we’re invested in Tom’s point of view rather than Ann’s, but that’s interesting too. A pretty powerful narrative device.
I can be a generous reader. If a book or a story is good enough, I am willing to make concessions. The best lesson I ever learned as a reader was in my graduate creative writing workshop, when we were told to look at what we determine as flaws in our classmates’ stories,
and to try to understand what the writers might have been doing. Not even what they were trying to do, but just imagine everything is deliberate. Imagine this author actually knows what she’s doing, and as a reader that was such a revelation. It wasn’t as though the stories became perfect then, but new doors were opened for analysis and understanding. We learned that just because a story isn’t the way you’d like it to be doesn’t necessarily mean that story isn’t the way it is supposed to be.
Which means that when I first read Novel About My Wife, and when I read it again, though I was not wholly satisfied with so much unknowing, I thought the narrative gaps had some purpose. Of course I had suspicions of what might have happened to Ann, and with the rest of the story so full, I was content with my own speculations. (I have also learned to love short fiction, as I’ve mentioned before, which has well equipped me to be able to make much of pieces I am given.)
Not everybody else was so content though. I started thinking when I read this review, and the following line in particular: “Perkins’s attempt at ambiguity draws the reader in, but does not completely provide the insight needed to satisfy.” Which is entirely right, and I had really failed to consider whether satisfying the reader might be the point. I still don’t think it’s the entire point, but perhaps it’s more important than I considered. Alternatively, could readers be looking for satisfaction in all the wrong places?
Update: for a bit more insight on what happened to Ann, check out the fascinating comments on Rachel Powers’ blog.
October 31, 2008
On Tilly Witch
For Halloween’s sake, I bring you Tilly Witch, the 1969 book by Don Freeman (who was also the author of Corduroy). I had forgotten about Tilly, until I encountered her by chance this summer, and remembered that I had been obsessed with this book as a child. I have a feeling now that being obsessed with a book back then meant being in love with the pictures, pictures you could gaze into for extended periods of time, and detect new entire stories.
The pictures are pretty wonderful, dark and spooky, but made magic by juxtaposition– Tilly’s yellow surfboard, the witch doctor’s mask, the colour from the window in the picture shown here.
The story begins with Tilly Ipswitch, Queen of Halloween, suddenly finding herself in a rather jolly mood. She doesn’t see why she shouldn’t be– after all, “if boys and girls get to have fun pretending to be witches, I don’t see why I can’t play at being happy and gay, just for a change!” But Tilly soon finds that playing at happy is sort of like pulling faces– once in a while, you might stay that way. Tilly dancing around with flowers, and on the eve of Halloween– even she knows something has to be done.
Naturally, and most politically incorrectly, Tilly hops on her surfboard and flies the the tiny island of Wahoo to see a Doctor Weegee. (Walla walla bing bang). He is horrified upon examining her, and writes an emergency prescription to Miss Fitch’s Finishing School for Witches.
Upon re-enrolling at the school where she’d once been star pupil, Tilly’s problems only get worse. The lessons fail to take, she keeps giggling, and finally she is sent to the corner to wear a dunce cap. Such degradation proves too much for the Queen of Halloween, and Tilly begins to get angry. Seething– she is not a dunce! She leaps up from her stool and stomps on her hat. It is Halloween night, and she has duties to attend to.
Tilly flies back home, takes some great joy in frightening her cat, and then sets out on her broomstick to scare children the world over. The story ends with a moral: “For Tilly had indeed learned her lesson. As long as Halloween comes once a year you can count on her to be the meanest and wickedest witch in all Witchdom”.
So the lesson is bad is good– and as a little girl, I think I appreciated such a complex message. The greater lesson being that non-conformity (and rich pictures) can really make a children’s book delicious.
Happy Halloween.
October 31, 2008
Someone left The Good Book out in the rain
On Sunday during a walk in the rain, I came across The Good News Bible lying on a ledge. Perhaps a sign, but I didn’t notice it; I took a photo instead.
October 29, 2008
Links for Today
Sandra Martin’s full-length obituary of Constance Rooke was beautiful, and told the story of an extraordinary person who was an extraordinary reader. GG Nominee Rivka Galchen profiled in The Globe. I loved Lisa Moore’s review of Anne Enright’s Yesterday’s Weather. An interview with John Updike in The Guardian. Where are the woman with big ideas? Claire Cameron thinks they moved to Canada. And “Cut, Kill, Dig, Drill” –on Sarah Palin in the London Review of Books— is terrifying.
October 29, 2008
Upcoming
Well, though I was a little bit concerned, I’ve enjoyed John Updike’s Too Far to Go, though it served to underline my prejudice towards 1970s marriage as Ice Stormy as you like– how boring the suburbs really must have been, that so many unattractive people kept having sx with one another. Did that end with the ‘eighties? As I assume everyone settled down a bit with the advent of interlocking brick driveways and The Twenty Minute Workout. Plus the widespread use of microwaves.
So I’ll soon start reading Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings by Mary Henley Rubio. I can’t remember the last biography I read (and so it is fortunate that I keep track of all the books I read– note, I’ve not read a strict biography in the three years I’ve been keeping track, though I’ve read plenty of non-fiction, memoirs, biographical memoirs, but…) and so this will be a change of pace. Not so much thematically, however, as this has been a very Montgomery filled year– Anne Shirley turned 100 this year with all kinds of fanfare, and this very summer I reread both Anne of Green Gables and Emily of New Moon. But I continue to know very little about Montgomery’s life, particular her later life (except what I picked up from As Ever, Booky). So there is a lot to get to know.
October 27, 2008
Last Night
Last night, after a good ten years of meaning to get around to it, I finally had dinner at Country Style Hungarian Restaurant on Bloor Street. Partly to commemorate the 52nd anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution, of course, but also because I was hankering after an enormous plate of chicken paprikash and dumplings. Delicious. They serve schnitzel at that place that is bigger than your head. Also surprising: that we had to wait a good twenty minutes before we got a table. And we were the youngest people there, which is unusual for a downtown restaurant. It was full of the most normal middle-aged people I’d ever seen in my life– not a hipster in sight! I hope the decor continues to be never ever updated, because it was so perfect. The food was amazing, and since I want to try everything on the menu, we’ll be going back again.
October 26, 2008
Pickle Me This reads about werewolves
I would never have read Living With the Dead had I not heard Kelley Armstrong read as part of the Kama Reading Series last year. “New York Times Bestselling Author” though she is, Armstrong did stick out in this group of literary writers. The first story she read that night had been published in an anthology about Vampire birthdays– “Really,” she had to say, because no one in the audience would have believed in such a thing (in vampires or anthologies about vampire birthdays). We weren’t exactly her kind of crowd, but Kelly Armstrong wooed us. Self-deprecating, hysterically funny, and a wonderfully engaging reader, she was a star of the show that night, which was something for a woman who’d had a problem with her GPS and ended up in Mississauga instead of at the ROM. I was very glad she made it to the right place eventually.
So I wanted to read her latest book, from her “Women of the Otherworld” series, because Armstrong herself seemed terrific. But also because I never would have read it otherwise, and I am eternally curious about my own tastes and prejudices. I have an appreciation for popular fiction, but I avoid “genre” like the plague, which isn’t entirely fair, because I’ve never even been exposed to it.
It’s not strictly bookish, though, my aversion to genre and fantasy. I don’t even like The Princess Bride, which frustrates some people to no end. I think it all stems from when they made us watch The Neverending Story one rainy day in grade one, and after being traumatized by the horse sinking into the quicksand, I wanted nothing imaginary ever again. Which is strange considering how much I love fiction. The truest literary form I know, but I like fiction to recreate the world I live in and not make itself another one.
I never got into watching Buffy or Angel, until we moved to Japan. There was only one English channel on TV, so you could take it or leave it, but even when I left it, my husband didn’t and as our apartment was only one room, I couldn’t help overhearing. I couldn’t stop paying attention either, because Buffy and Angel were really good shows. Well, except for the vampire/fantasy stuff, which I tuned out to. Without those elements, these would have been perfect shows for me.
Which was the way I felt about reading Living With the Dead. That it was a fun, plot-driven novel, and I could even overlook the werewolves and half-demons when they weren’t integral to the story. The story of Robyn Peltier, PR rep. for an obnoxious celebutante for whose death she has just been framed. She enlists her friends– said werewolf and demon (though Robyn doesn’t know this about them)– for support as she tries to prove her innocence, and also tries to avoid a strange violent woman who is determined to stay on her trail. The woman wants something from her, but Robyn does not know what. For there is so much she has to discover– including the true identities of her friends, who she can trust, and who she can’t.
That I wasn’t in love with Living With the Dead isn’t the book’s fault, for I don’t suppose I was ever meant to be its ideal reader. For some people, I think, the demons and werewolves would be main attraction, but I still don’t get that. That I read the book all the way through and enjoyed it, however, is a credit to Armstrong’s excellent plot. So it’s not the book, it’s the genre. Could be that such books require significant investment? Living With the Dead— a pretty long novel at 372 pages, containing a folklore and vocabulary all of its own– demands more effort than I would typically allot to my pop-fic. You really have to want to get this stuff, the werewolf nitty-gritty, but unfortunately I just wasn’t that determined in the end.
