October 13, 2008
My turn for Whats and Whys
Rebecca Rosenblum ponders why she reads the books she reads, the last ten books she has read specifically, concluding that reading is social, however solitary in practice. Her post inspiring Naya V. to consider some of her own bookish choosings. And inspiring me as well, though findings may not be so revelatory as I’ve written here about how I came to some of these already. Nevertheless.
- Forms of Devotion by Diane Schoemperlen (now reading), because Rebecca Rosenblum gave it to me for my birthday and now it is time.
- The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard, because it was a paperback portable for vacation, and because it came recommended via the impeccable taste of Rona Maynard.
- The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan, also because it was a paperback. Because it was longlisted and shortlisted for the Giller. Because it was Rona-recommended, and recommended by Maud Newton and Stephany Aulenback as well. (Oh, and now by me too. This is the best book I’ve read in ages).
- Between Friends: A Year in Letters by Oonagh Berry and Helen Levine. I picked this up at the Victoria College book sale not just because it was a collection of correspondence but because reading a newspaper feature when the book came out inspired me to embark upon a similar writing project with my friend Bronwyn.
- Good to a Fault by Marina Endicott, because I wanted to all the books on the Giller list by women (which was easy as there were only two).
- Flowers for Mrs. Harris by Paul Gallico. Also bought at the book sale, and I was originally attracted by the gorgeous (only slightly damaged) pink dust jacket, and then I remembered that I’d read writer Justine Picardie raving about this novel on her blog.
- What It Feels Like for a Girl by Jennica Harper. Jennica is my favourite poet, and her first book The Octopus kept me up all hours the first time I read it, and so naturally I would read her new book the second I could get my mitts upon it.
- Babylon Rolling by Amanda Boyden. I don’t remember why I read this book at all, perhaps for no real reason, which is probably the reason I was so surprised to love it.
- When Will There by Good News? by Kate Atkinson. Um, because Kate Atkinson wrote it. And everything she touches is gold– except for Emotionally Weird, but I’ve forgiven/forgotten already. Everything else though.
- The Diving Bell and Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby. My spectacular Amy Winehouse costume won me this book as a prize at an Oscar Party back in the winter, but I hadn’t got around to reading it. My husband had, however, and was obsessed with it, and insisted that I read it too, and it was as wonderful as he promised. And now we can finally rent the movie.
October 4, 2008
En Vacance!
We are going out to Alberta; weather’s good there in the fall.
Back in a week!
October 4, 2008
Babylon Rolling by Amanda Boyden
“We choose New Orleans,” begins the prologue to Amanda Boyden’s second novel Babylon Rolling. “We choose to live Uptown on Orchid Street inside the big lasso of river, though we rarely look at it, churning brown, wide.” The novel’s employment in the prologue of first person plural narration suggesting already that this will be story composed of stories, of voices.
Babylon Rolling tells of a year in the lives of the residents of New Orleans’ Orchid Street, beginning from Hurricane Ivan to just before the devastation of Katrina. Such disparate characters, these neighbours, black and white (and Indian); young and old; long-time residents and newcomers; good people and people who’ve somehow found themselves in more than a spot of trouble.
Though the first-person plural narration ends with the prologue, its spirit continues in the construction of the chapters ensuing. Written in the third person, but very close and in the various singular voices of the characters, within these chapters one voice turns into another in the space of a paragraph break. No other divisions between them, here are the different voices of Orchid Street, one after another as these people go about their separate lives.
The danger of this sort of structure, of such a broad approach to a story (in terms of chronology and character) would be a tendency for glossing over substance. For these characters to be “voices” but little more, and certainly not people, for how do you fit another entire life into a novel that is already so crowded? Which might happen in the hands of a lesser writer, but it struck me soon as I was reading Babylon Rolling that something quite different was at work.
As I read the story of Ariel, the transplanted Minnesotan working overtime managing a New Orleans hotel. She is on the verge of being unfaithful to her husband, and then of course we meet her husband Ed whose own story has nothing to do with that (though of course it will come to, but not entirely). Ed who saves his elderly neighbour Roy after an accident, in which a local drug dealer is to blame and Roy’s wife is seriously injured. The drug dealer’s younger brother Daniel, aged 15, calling himself “Fearius”, and anxiously following in his brother’s footsteps. A hurricane is approaching (but no, not “that” one, not yet). Some will stay, some will go. One of the former being Philomenia whose cooking up something poison in her kitchen and whose grasp on reality is becoming more and more tenuous, though it’s pretty hard to tell.
The point being that none of these characters– like nobody ever in his or her life– is a peripheral character. Every one of them, including those who don’t get to speak so directly, able to claim a part of the prologue’s “we”. And it dawned on me as I read that Babylon Rolling isn’t actually a novel at all, but is a book of short stories all broken into pieces and put back together, a very different kind of puzzle. Which says something about the short story, I suppose, how its surprise appearance here so serves to elevate the novel. That these characters’ stories and lives run so deep, not just into each other but in and of themselves. That their stories stand for their own sakes, complementing as they rub shoulders (and they’re actual shoulders, blood and bone), and that rubbing of these shoulders can create an effect so incredibly rich.
So the structure of this novel is really quite remarkable, but even more so are the voices themselves. That Boyden can bring to life characters so different from herself and from each other as, for example, Philomenia Beauregard de Bruges (whose presence lends a touch of the Southern Gothic) and Daniel “Fearius” Harris (“But Fearius, he be patient. He learnt it. He waited to make fifteen full years of age inside juvey, waiting four months sitting in there.”) Fearius in particular a leap, a risk, that this author could imagine her way into the mind of a black fifteen year old drug dealer, but it is a leap that Boyden makes deftly. I was uneasy with Fearius’s voice at first, not for political reasons as much as grammatical ones, but I became accustomed to it soon, as much as all the others.
Boyden writes in her Acknowledgments that she started the novel in Toronto after having left New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina, which had “reduced our city, and me, to something whipped and dispossessed. I thought I might try to write a swan song for New Orleans.” The result being a song certainly, even if not so entirely swannish. Because, as her author bio notes, Boyden lives in New Orleans “still”. And the novel’s epilogue returns to that very same “we”, such collectivity a suggestion of hope amidst such destruction.
October 3, 2008
More encounters with books
Over at the Descant blog, I’ve written about my Encounters with Books: At the Book Sale.
October 3, 2008
The real English class
You begin the real English class:
O, Lolita, The Happy Hooker.
Even a few pages from Danielle Steele,
copied, folded and ready
for customers to put in their backpacks,
take-home tests. Taken to beds.
No muss, no fuss. Just the best
sexy scenes literature has to offer.
There are those who
find you ridiculous
or disgusting. But you know
they’re afraid. You don’t blame them– just feel sorry
they don’t recognize
your skills.
Thirteen is young and old, depending
on who you know.
–Jennica Harper, from “Burning Up” in What It Feels Like For a Girl
October 1, 2008
Boydens
Currently reading the like-nothing-I’ve-ever-read-before Babylon Rolling by Amanda Boyden. Boyden and her husband Joseph Boyden are profiled at the CBC.
September 30, 2008
A Tower of Books
Courtesy of the Victoria College Book Sale Half-Price Monday, I come home with Jamaica Inn by Daphne Du Maurier, According to Mark by Penelope Lively, Flowers for Mrs. Harris by Paul Gallico (original hardcover!), Glass Houses by Penelope Farmer, Best Way You Know How by Christine Pountney, Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived by Penelope Lively, Rainforest by Jenny Diski, Gates of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerland, Diaries of Jane Somers by Doris Lessing, 84 Charing Cross Road and The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street by Helene Hanff, Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee, Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard, Liar by Lynn Crosbie, Child in Time by Ian McEwan, Good in Bed by Jennifer Weiner, Regards: Essays by John Gregory Dunne, Between Friends: A Year in Letters by Helen Levine and Oonagh Berry, The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing, and Cleopatra’s Sister by Penelope Lively. Indeed, 25% written by various Penelopes, which is something, no?
September 28, 2008
Once by Rebecca Rosenblum
Rebecca Rosenblum is too close a friend for my opinion of her book Once to be considered impartial, and so however much I loved her book (which is very much), you needn’t be concerned with that. In lieu of my own opinion, however, I give you some from a few less biased sorts:
My husband Stuart says, “I don’t know if I’ve ever read short stories before that so stayed on my mind for days afterwards. “Linh Lai”, and “Pho Mi 99″, they’re stories, but they’re also whole worlds and I couldn’t stop thinking about them.”
The Globe & Mail’s Jim Bartley writes, “Plot is the least of this intricate story. What matters, tickling the sense memory, is the prickling pleasure of Isobel’s tired feet freed to the air at bedtime; the sugary baklava stuck to its crumpled carton; the florid, chewing face of the tax teacher as he negotiates a wad of honey and nuts. Rosenblum builds and subtly rounds off a story arc, but the sustaining life humming all through this tale comes straight from the sensory input. In Isobel’s word-picture ramble, Rosenblum’s meanings arrive on the reader’s intuitions. Her art remains veiled. The quotidian is rarely so riveting.”
Daniel Baird writes in The Walrus, “Rosenblum can also register the aching and melancholic, but with a remarkable lack of sentimentality… These young characters’ futures are a sea of uncertainties. But what we can be certain of is that Once is a first by a young author of singular talent.”
From Christina Decarie in The Quill and Quire, “Each story stands alone, but Rosenblum sometimes weaves the characters in and out of each other’s lives, and when, say, the restaurant in “Route 99″ is revisited, it feels as good for the reader as it does for one of the characters, a single dad with kids in tow: ‘The buggy’s thin wheels wobble over every lump of snow, salt, ice, and Jake whined unintelligibly through his scarf. But it was worth it … I could smell fish sauve and cilantro, hear Koenberg’s rusty mutter’ … Fantastic and realistic, sad and unnerving, these stories are a delight.” — Christina Decarie
September 25, 2008
Astrobiology
From our Rap Songs Commissioned to Drum Up Interest for Unfashionable Topics file (see Hip Hop Wordsworth Squirrel), we bring you “Astrobiology”, NASA’s rap about the search for life in outer space.
September 24, 2008
Links for Wednesday…
…whilst dinner is in the oven. DGR meets Penelope Lively. Stephany Aulenback’s “Words that Would Make Nice Names for Babies…”. Deanna reads The Flying Troutmans. Becky Rosenblum on Writers Reading. No link, but I heard Pamela Anderson on the radio the other day and she said she was reading The Shock Doctrine. The Guardian has found its way into my hands this week (in print), and the Weekend magazine includes an extensive feature on books and fashion: check out the gallery of Emily Mortimer as several literary heroines here. Must now go bbq corn.
