March 5, 2008

Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner

Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner– much acclaimed when published in Quebec in 2005 and now translated into English by Lazer Laderhendler– is a wonderfully rich puzzle of a book. Which must be explained in vague terms, for vague terms are all it presents us with. Three characters, their lives barely intersecting as they all end up in Montreal, loosely linked by blood ties and a strange “three-headed book”. These barely-intersections filled out by fish, pirates, various islands and rising water. Dickner performing strange and wonderful feats with parallels and opposites: wheat fields and oceans, the Aleutians and the West Indies, orphans and their ancestors, of nomads and imagined home.

The book itself is gorgeous, fish throughout its pages. Throughout the story too, which reminded me of The Raw Shark Texts, but only in that this is a bookish story much concerned with fish– quite a strange preoccupation for one writer, let alone two. But then bookish coincidences seem commonplace after reading this story, which is based around one. The “three headed book”, which connects our three main characters– the unnamed narrator who is a clerk in a bookshop, Noah the disinterested archeologist obsessed with garbage dumps, and Joyce the modern-day girl pirate. Oh, I could add more vague details, the maps, the fish shop, Grampa (a trailer) and Granma (a boat), the compass perpetually pointing towards the Alaskan town of Nikolski, a mouldy library in Venezuela, a couple of mysterious girls.

Nikolski is analogous to the three-headed book of which it speaks: “These are fragments, literally. Debris. Flotsam and Jetsam… It’s a piece of craftsmanship, not a mass-printed object.” And the reason for such a thing? “A passion for puzzles, maybe.” But definitely maybe, for here every word and detail means something. As soon as I finished this book, I couldn’t help but begin it again, and the significance of every sentence I’d read was just compounded. Which is not to say that I read solely towards a solution, which might prove only elusive, I think. But rather that Nikolski‘s puzzle itself was compelling enough, and– no matter the way each bit just “clouded the issue rather than clarifying it”– never ever unsatisfying.

“Nothing is perfect,” so goes the next line in the story, but I really might put forth that Nikolski is. Cheers to Knopf Canada for championing literature in translation in general, French CanLit in particular, and a marvelous CanLit twist as their New Face of Fiction. Dickner has married cleverness with depth, sustaining his ideas with a tireless deftness. His characters are pieces of a puzzle, but they be characters all the same, Dickner somehow choosing exactly the right fragments with which to make this so. Indeed, the novel itself an item of craftsmanship– not quite life but something next door to it– and surely worthwhile in the sum of these parts, more than I have yet comprehended. A sum I still don’t have my head around yet, but I look forward to rereading this book until I do.

March 4, 2008

So there was every reason

“So there was every reason for me not to write fiction. In fact, there was not a single reason why I should write fiction. Not least of which was the fact that those early stories I was writing about African men in prisons and lust on North African beaches? They were absolutely terrible. Not a single one of them– thankfully– was ever published. But I carried on because I simply couldn’t stop. If you ask most writers why they write? The answer is usually that simple.” –Camilla Gibb, “Telling Tales Out of School”

March 3, 2008

This weekend I read

This weekend I read Descant 139, and loved in particular “In the Time of the Girls” by Anne Germanacos, the “Synchronicities” section, and poems by Changming Yuan– “delicately hung is this earth/ a bluish cage in the universe.” I also read the February 7 issue of London Review of Books, and “Derek, please, not so fast”— a review of As I Was Going to St. Ives, a biography of Derek Jackson (to whom Pamela Mitford was but a footnote! I had no idea: “To call his carry-on goat-like would be grossly unfair to goats, who seem celibate, faithful, and even tempered by comparison”). The William Faulkner interview in The Paris Review Interviews II was stunningly awful, brilliant and profound. I will soon be starting to read Nikolski, and after that I’ll get to Brighton Rock.

I also began culling my library in preparation for our move. A shedload will be donated to the Victoria College Library Booksale on Thursday, but anyone who wants to can drop by before then is welcome to sort through the stacks. Assuming you know where I live, in which case you’re probably my friend, and I’d be happy to see you anyway.

March 2, 2008

Belong to Me by Marisa de los Santos

It is a curious thing to consider, just what a good book is meant to do. Though anyone who’s ever loved a book, I believe, would know there are a thousand answers. That some books are meant to be enlightening, others amusing, or educational, playful, iconoclastic, challenging, illuminating, inspiring, confirming, terrifying, reassuring, mirrors, windows and the like. For it all depends on the book, of course. And there are some books meant to be curled up in, just like a blanket.

During this past week, Marisa de los Santos’ Belong to Me was that book for me. This past week, as February sunk its long claws in deeper, I looked for apartments, the sky was grey, I lost a mitten, all my trousers were salt-stained, and the temperature approached -30. So it was a joy to be able to turn away from that, to curl up inside this novel who wears springtime on its cover. To be absorbed by a sunny suburb, the ties of family, friendship, love and all its mini-soap operas. To experience the guilty pleasure of a soap opera, but not to have my mind put on autopilot. You see, that I’m tired and weary does not mean I’m undeserving of a good book– one that is well written, employing interesting language, with well-formed characters, and, while not altogether too much, still has the power to get into my head.

Cornelia Brown has just moved to the suburbs, a surprisingly strange and foreign country. Her instincts are all wrong there, she feels out of place, and she’s mystified by how hard friendships are to come by. A particular source of vexation is her neighbour Piper, Queen Bee of the local of Stepfords. Cornelia is soon befriended by waitress Lake Tremain, however, a single mom with mysterious past.

Cornelia’s voice is the core of this novel, wonderfully intimate, insightful and funny. Her first person narration so clearly defines her character, literary allusions and all, utterly engagingly, for we come to understand why she is loved. Piper’s chapters are told in second person, perhaps fittingly for one who knows herself so little, and de los Santos allows sympathy to build for this often vicious character, heartbreakingly so through the death of her friend. And the third central character is Dev, Lake Tremain’s boy-genius son, deciphering his mother’s secret past to discover the truth of his own origins.

As is the nature of any small community, suburbs in particular, these three characters’ stories come to intersect one another in surprising ways. Sometimes not always as surprising as they’re meant to be, and the plot twist here was just a bit much, but plausibility is never really the point of a book that is a blanket: I just wanted to get away for awhile. By late February I’m wanting comfort, warmth and a mini-holiday, and with all of these requirements, Belong to Me delivered.

February 29, 2008

Home

The first house that was ours had been “mine” previously, and we shared it with a roommate. It was a two-up-two-down terrace house in the Midlands, with hideous wallpaper and a carpet that melted when you sat a cup of tea upon it. The door blew open with the wind. And the situation was only meant to be temporary, so we slept on an inflatable mattress, but then temporary turned into six months, the mattress exploded, we had to buy another, and that one had a hole so we were always on the floor by morning. We didn’t even own a kettle and we boiled water for tea in a pot.

Our next house was company accommodation in Japan, barely furnished, but big enough and beautiful. Our bedroom had tatami floors and sliding walls, and still there were no beds for us because we slept on futons. We had a gorgeous balcony with a cherry blossom view, and we could see the mountains and we lived on top of a sushi shop, but then we had to move because the rent was extortionate.

Our next house was a small box. A galley kitchen held a bar fridge and a hot plate, we had one cupboard and a washing machine in the corner. The bathroom had a sliding door and was about the size of a bathroom on an airplane. The main room was sunny, about seven feet wide and five feet long. We had a view of a pachinko parlour The ceiling was high, which was fortunate because we slept on a wood platform just below it. To reach our bed every night we had to climb up a ladder. We were lucky we could sit up on our futons and read without bumping our heads.

We’ve lived in our current apartment since we moved to Canada in 2005. We were attracted to its straight angles, neutral colours, to its gorgeous touches and its lack of quirks. I was coveting drawers and storage closets. It was clean, bright, beautiful, and we didn’t even have to look for it as I’d inherited it from my cousin. It was home, because we’d never really had a home before. We were able to unpack things that had been packed up for years. To live in a place with the intention of staying awhile, to live through multiple sets of seasons, to know our neighbours, grow food in the garden, to become best friends with the guy downstairs, to learn to cook, to write a novel, to have dinner parties and tea parties, watch the struggling tree outside the window hold onto itself for dear life.

But it’s time to go– we’ve known it for a while. The house seems to expand to accommodate each new piece of furniture we stuff inside, but we fear that it may reach capacity sometime soon. And so just a few days ago we set off on a hunt for a new home, which we spotted as soon as it was in sight. The only place we looked at, in truth, but then we also knew exactly what we wanted. We found it, and tonight we learned it’s to be ours come April 1st. A wonderful, weird and beautiful place, the top two floors of a house in the Annex, with two balconies, built in shelves, a second bedroom/office, gorgeous light, and in-house laundry– the latter I’ve not had the pleasure of since I lived with my mom and dad. The apartment has charm, beauty, and seems ready to hold us and our abundance of stuff. And I think we’ve been waiting for each other.

February 28, 2008

Reading without gravity

I was fascinated to read Astronaut Steve MacLean’s blog post on reading in space (from Canada Reads). The wonderfully inspiring Rebecca Rosenblum has written a wonderfully inspiring post on being short-shortlisted for The Journey Prize. I am excited to now start reading Belong To Me, particularly after Deanna’s endorsement. (And not because the cover is of Wellington Boots, which are a few of my favourite things.) A wonderful post at The Pop Triad about the music we find in films.

February 28, 2008

And then I wrote to Jean

“The letter was from me. When I wrote it I was on a train with Gwenny on my way to Paris… Outside there was nothing but rocks and dust. A man with stormy edges was telling me the story of his life. He was only six when I interrupted him.
‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘I must write a letter. Do you have any paper?’
‘And he turned out to be a paper merchant with suitcases filled with paper, papyrus, root paper, paper made from crushed beetles, moist paper, blotting, thin parchment, petal notelets, envelopes made from industrial waste, fried and boiled paper. He displayed his wares on the train seat and I picked a strange mottled shade of handmade parchment which was the most expensive of the range.
And then I wrote to Jean…” –Julia Darling, Crocodile Soup

February 26, 2008

I danced with a girl

“The room was wooden, like a ship, and once in it we were trapped and couldn’t escape. I danced with a girl who had no fingers. Her hand kept slipping out of my grasp.” –Julia Darling, Crocodile Soup.

This happened to me, during a short-lived career as a ballerina during late 1984. It was the sole remarkable feature of this experience, and I can’t quite believe I’m not the only one. Fictional or otherwise. Books are so amazing.

February 25, 2008

No no no

Highlights of this weekend included brunch with Erin and Ivor, diets managing not to start even tomorrow and not cleaning our house. This afternoon I played Scrabble in support of Frontier College with Stuart and Rebecca, and learned how much is too much sushi. Yes, two thirds of us are writers and though Rebecca did beat me, our game was won by the graphic designer with a Bachelor of Science, but ah well. The event put was put on by the Toronto JETAA (and my friend Natalie Bay) and it was tremendous fun. Fun continued into tonight, as we attended an Oscar Party at our friends’ Katie and Alan’s. It was a grand evening, although having seen only one film last year which was Alvin and the Chipmunks, I wasn’t so interested in the show, and really just hijacked the whole event to (rather inappropriately) fulfill my lifelong desire to dress up like Amy Winehouse. Which was perfect because then I won the prize for most creative costume which was the book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. But the very best part of this weekend was the sunshine, and the fact it felt like spring.

February 24, 2008

Julia Darling

I first learned about the poet/novelist Julia Darling in early 2005, when she was instructing a Guardian Poetry Workshop, and something about her voice, even the prose in her instruction was so compelling, that I became interested in her work. Only a few months later Darling died of breast cancer at the age of 48, and the remembrances on her personal website (as well as her own blog) are a testament to her spirit, to the power of her writing.

I’m now reading her novel Crocodile Soup, which I picked up in a booksale ages ago. Oh, it’s such a pleasure. Hard and funny, reminiscent of Kate Atkinson– always a good thing. I’m just getting into it, but I expect to be recommending it wholeheartedly very soon.