March 4, 2012

D is for Deli

The thing about walking to St. Lawrence Market is that the trek justifies a lunch of a sweet cheese bagel, peameal bacon sandwich, banana crepe, cabbage roll, pierogies, a smoothie, a pickle on a stick, and a pepperette made of elk meat. All shared between three people, of course, which is further justification. We spent a splendid morning there yesterday, made even better for a stop at Ben McNally Books en-route, which was the first bookshop in six we’d found to be carrying Kyo Maclear’s Virginia Wolf, which just came out this week. We had big plans to take the subway home, because for Harriet, transit is always a trip’s highlight, but the subway was closed to due a broken watermain, so we had to haul the stroller onto the streetcar. Which turned out to be much more fun anyway because on a streetcar there’s a view out the window.

February 10, 2011

My postal phantom receives a letter from the Undeliverable Mail Office

Kyo Maclear’s 2007 novel The Letter Opener is about a woman who works at Canada Post’s Undeliverable Mail Office in Scarborough, and as I am a postal enthusiast, I devoured the book with delight. I also really enjoyed Maclear’s essay in the back of the book about “Postal Phantoms”– those people who inhabited your home before you and whose mail you continue to receive for years and years. How you come to understand these people’s characters through the return addresses, and they become so familiar that it would almost be disappointing if you one day encountered your postal phantom in the flesh. (I wrote about my own postal phantoms in this post, back in 2008.)

So worlds collided today when my current postal phantom received a letter from the Undeliverable Mail Office! (This phantom is not mentioned in my other post, because I’ve moved since that post was written and left Amanda Lee Hickman behind. In fact, no doubt Amanda Lee and I are now postal phantom-ing it together back at my former address.) I wanted to call up Kyo Maclear and tell her all about it, because it’s really quite remarkable– this means that my postal phantom is out there in the postal phantom netherworld sending mail to undeliverable addresses. What a menace this guy is!

The root of most of his problems, I think, is that his old/my address is still on his cheques, which was how the Undeliverable Mail Office tracked him down (misleadingly) to my house. The whole thing makes me feel quite sorry for that postal employee (and in my head it was Maclear’s Naiko) who took care to open his envelope, redirect his letter, and even include a standard notice about why she had to open his mail that ends with a happy face and the message, “We care”. She must have felt so satisfied, tracing this piece of mail (with no return address, mind you. My postal phantom is so careless!) back to its owner, and I hope she never realizes that she’s only sent it further amiss.

And yes, I do open my postal phantom’s mail. We have been in this relationship long enough that I feel like his letters are really for me. Now I may have to track down the actual person behind the phantom, because it would only be responsible. But then I’d also have to explain why I’ve been opening his mail, which might get a little bit awkward.

*I recently read Maclear’s picture book Spork. It’s awesome.

December 9, 2008

Top Eleven Picks of 2008

That any book was reviewed here during this past year means that I liked it enough to recommend it to you, though my very favourites are listed here. And of that crop, I’ve narrowed to eleven for the sake of conciseness. My top eleven of 2008 as follows:

• When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson: “If this was the first book by Atkinson you’d ever encountered, you’d forget genre and just fall in love with it. You would fall in love with her.”

• American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld: “…this a marvelous achievement of Sittenfeld’s work, that she makes love for a George Bush-y character seem plausible. Not that it’s all sentimental, and throughout the book Alice herself is at times downright unsympathetic, but these aren’t caricatures, or even ‘characters’; they’re people and they’re real.”

• The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews: “…the book is a joy to read, however disturbing and awful. The Flying Troutmans is touching but without compromise, and only a really great writer could do that.”

• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer: “That this delightful book was brought to me, full of all the things I like the best– an epistolary novel, begun on the basis of a used book’s passage from one reader to another, full of wonderful literary references, even a bookish mystery of sorts, plus a reference to the joys of peering in windows, and a teapot that’s used as a weapon.”

• Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith: “But Smith’s language, of course, is always her most marvelous trick. Amidst all the stuff, rendering her thesis quite simple: that in a world where things are changeable, things can change. Innumerable doors swinging open upon this promise, that progress is a way forward after all.”

• Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins: “Perkins has created a puzzle of a puzzle. I read this book in anticipation of the ending the first time, and then the second time I pored over the text in search of clues. But both times I was entirely caught up in both this extraordinary story and its more ordinary concerns.”

• The Girl in Saskatoon by Sharon Butala: “Thriller, novel, historical record, reminiscence, elegy, etc., all contained within one mesmerizingly readable package.”

• The Letter Opener by Kyo Maclear: “…this is rumination after all. The Letter Opener is primarily the story of Naiko’s own self-discovery, as she realizes her constructions of others through their objects tells more about her own self than anybody else’s. And this story is fascinatingly beautiful, a satisfying read.”

• Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner, translated from French by Lazer Lederhendler: “‘Nothing is perfect,’ so goes the next line in the story, but I really might put forth that Nikolski is… Dickner has married cleverness with depth, sustaining his ideas with a tireless deftness.”

• Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk: “So I was prepared for something Woolfian then, which in my experience has always required a different kind of reading. One in which you let the prose lead you where it may, but paying utmost attention. It’s a significant cerebral investment, and necessitates a period of adjustment upon returning to the real world once again.”

• The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff: “With a spirit threatening to fade when the monster dies, when all seems bleakest, but there is so much hope, and such a gorgeous ending: ‘and it is good.’ I finished reading this last night near 1am, and couldn’t sleep for a long time, just thinking about it, and smiling.”

March 21, 2008

The Postal Phantoms I have known

I’ve just finished reading The Letter Opener by Kyo Maclear, which I have absolutely fallen in love with. I’ll fit in a review during my empty tomorrow, but at the moment I want to write a bit about something I read in the “PS…” section of the book (and may I point out how always interesting is the “PS content” in these books).

Maclear writes about the “postal phantom” at her house, the inspiration for her novel– “Mr. Szabo– a man who, for whatever reason, never got around to having his mail redirected.” And of course I know about postal phantoms, though I’d never considered them in such specific terms, never thought of these people as a collective, and it hadn’t occurred to me that such figures could even be given a name.

My postal phantoms as follows: there was Robin Stephenson, in my university apartment on Dundas Street. I can’t remember if it was her or a roommate that received Scientology paraphernalia, but Robin had forgotten to change her address when she finished university, and was always getting alumni notices from the U of T Geography Department.

No phantom, I believe, will ever be as prolific as Mrs. Sandra M. Spencer from our house in Nottingham. We’d suspected she’d died, as she’d left all her cake tins behind, and death is as good an excuse as any for leaving no forwarding address. She owed a ton of council tax, going back a few years, received regular notices for mammograms, and often was summoned to court to come and testify against her son. Note, we didn’t start opening the mail until about after a year, after we’d called the council to tell them she wasn’t there anymore, and they said they’d keep sending her bills anyway, because it was her last known address (which also goes part way towards explaining why there’s no longer a British Empire).

We received a lot of mail for the Moniz family here at our current address, as well for Amanda Hickman (who is on the list of numerous charities) and Michael Popowich (and in case he googles himself, Michael– McGill University is desperate to get in touch with you.) Each of these are characters, wholly present in their own peculiar contexts, which is their absence. And we practically know them, we do, though the foundation of this knowledge is the fact we never ever will.

Further, what about the bizarre idea that somewhere out there, somebody’s postal phantom is you.