June 18, 2008
A Happy Anniversary
We got married three years ago, far across the sea and on a gorgeous sunny day. Upon which I thought I knew the very heights of love…
but what a thrill now to know that the climb was just beginning.
June 18, 2008
Books at Bedtime
I love England. They’re all in a furor over something called “Books at Bedtime”. (Can you imagine getting worked up over something called that? It would be like throwing eggs at the Teddy Bear’s picnic.) Listeners are upset about a radio broadcast of Barbara Gowdy’s Helpless, because the broadcast gave some of them nightmares. ‘”Helpless is inappropriate for any time of day, least of all at bedtime,” said Helen Thompson. “The subject is tasteless and given the society in which we live totally inappropriate.”‘ Apparently the BBC has been inundated with complaints about this, most on the basis that the broadcast was “frightening”. Though perhaps they just read the book in a really spooky voice? And can we complain whenever anything is frightening now? Further, how on earth do these people know who to call? I wonder if they’ve got a number on speed-dial.
June 17, 2008
A False Inheritance
I was glad to read “Looking Backward: The 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize”, whose link-to lit-blogs had been spitting out wildly about two weeks ago. It’s an essay, I think, that is ill-represented by sensational snip-snippy pull-quotes which read as idle bitching. “I don’t see where’s there’s any room for debating the fact that M.G. Vassanji can’t write,” is one example, and in fact even when this quote isn’t standing alone, I’m not sure Good’s examples substantiate it. Whenever a critic tries to pinpoint badness by tossing out random paragraph, I am rarely convinced. I don’t know much about aesthetics (“quite obviously,” you might be saying), but they sometimes seem as arbitrary as taste.
Like everything in Canadian Notes and Queries, however, the article broadened my perspective. My perspective going into it being this: I don’t like books being slagged off, particularly for their popularity (as what exactly are we masses supposed to be reading? and if we were reading something different, you wouldn’t get to feel so smug). I also thought that Late Nights on Air was magical, the best book I read last year (and I read a lot of books last year). I didn’t read Effigy or The Assassin’s Song from the Giller list, because I knew I wouldn’t like either of them, and I don’t understand why readers who probably had the same instincts went ahead and read them anyway. Prize lists aren’t required reading. I couldn’t think of a more boring kind of martyrdom.
I am also bothered by the Can-Lit criticism that takes down books for being either exactly what they are, or what they aren’t. Particularly when this criticism takes such a limited view of Canadian Literature in order to prove itself, for example the complaint that Can-Lit doesn’t do urban, when 16 out of the 20 Canadian novels I’ve read this year take place in cities and towns. I realize I’m just a small sample, but perhaps it proves that Can-Lit isn’t just any one thing, which I think is sort of wonderful. I have also noticed that this brutal criticism is a kind of brutish criticism, and that aesthetic arguments are turned up to render artless stories women tell.
Finally, I was reading this article at the same time I was reading Sharon Butala’s story collection Fever, which is all the things Can-Lit is supposed to have outgrown– about farmers and farms, about the prairies, so backwards-looking that history is perpetually present or on the verge of such a thing. It’s an amazing collection, which was even more apparent as I read it a second time, and I didn’t see where there was any room for debating that fact. That Sharon Butala is an incredible writer, that she writes about the place where she lives, and where lots of people live, and that our “inherited tropes” are still our stories, because so much never changes and it’s never going to change, regardless of whether we’re deconstructing our fiction or not. That we write about our geography because it’s still important, and history isn’t irrelevant yet, and I don’t think it’s even finished.
I swallowed my petty defensiveness, however, enough to properly come to understood Alex Good’s point of view here– the writers who get praised without even trying, and I get it. I was baffled by Divisidero, and I gave it much more credit than I might have if it had been first time novel (I’ll be rereading it this summer, and look forward to finding out if I see it any clearer). That the dominance of the big presses doesn’t make a lot of sense, nor does it represent the quality Can-Lit that is available (and I see that now, particularly as I’ve read such great books by small presses this year). The limitations of the judges also– their backgrounds, their own connections. That perhaps the Gillers don’t reward the very best of Can-Lit, but I wonder if the complaint isn’t rather than choices are too mainstream. But I don’t know if the Gillers were ever supposed to be cutting edge. Also my favourite book from last year won, but then maybe that’s just me (though it’s not. An awful lot of people loved Late Nights on Air…)
Good’s most salient point, however– what he calls “the Giller’s most pernicious effect” is that that “the Giller presents an influential vision of what serious Canadian Literature should be.” And I see that now, that the problem isn’t this shortlist, but rather a lack of authenticity that is contagious. That we set out to write a Canadian fiction, and so we stick in the prairie, the combine harvester, crop failure and a dissatisfied wife. So that our fiction is put-on rather than organic, that we rely on the same tropes, those “inherited tropes” but the problem is writers who haven’t even inherited them. It would be different if they had inherited them– Sharon Butala has, and her fiction rings true and timeless, it does– but these writers are just trying them on for size. Which is different, and fake and false and boring. Writers not listening to their own voices, telling their own stories, but rather writing within such fixed parameters of what Good Literature is supposed to be. A problem perpetuated by the celebration of the same kinds of work time and time again.
It’s an important distinction, what is inherited and otherwise (though I realize it reads as arbitrary too), and upon it the argument swung round for me. I’m not sure Alex Good meant it to, or if he even meant the distinction at all, but the resulting synthesis seems infinitely sensible.
June 17, 2008
The whole thing
We went to Ottawa this weekend, which was brilliant all around (cousins, markets, barbeques), but I was particularly appreciative of a good ten hours spent train journeying, which of course makes for good reading. I did Fever and Prodigal Summer, and also CNQ. This is my second issue of the magazine– I raved about Issue 72 back in December. This issue lived right on up to my heightened expections: so much learning in one package seems a miracle. So much to challenge me, whether to understand, to be enlightened, or even to disagree. If you’ve got an interest in Canadian literary matters and you’re not reading CNQ, you’re missing out on something extraordinary. Serves as an example of what a magazine can truly be. It sounds like I’m overstating, but I’m really not. Robyn Sarah’s “Delivered to Chance” and David A. Kent on Margaret Avison were my favourite bits, but really (shhh…) I liked the whole thing.
June 17, 2008
Moth Love
How strange are bookish connections, aren’t they? Of course, when I was reading Sharon Butala’s Fever last week, I could sense how it would relate to Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer, which was coming up next. Similar themes of nature, landscape, agriculture, small towns, and the weather. I am two thirds through Prodigal Summer now, and on my knees to Kingsolver, who everybody else already knew was extraordinary, but it just took me awhile to find out. How wonderful to be reading this novel now, with the world around me so blooming, tonight out on my back deck with a cup of tea, and the trees all around, and the birdsong. I disappeared into my head, and into Kingsolver’s amazing imagination.
Anyway, the unexpected connection being the next book I’ve got to read, which is The Sister by Poppy Adams. I’ve got an advanced reader’s copy which betrays nothing of its content, and so was I ever surprised to see that it’s UK title is The Behaviour of Moths. But I would have picked up that title without delay (precedent for good things with moths in their title includes The Peppered Moth and “The Death of the Moth”)! I discover now it’s about an entomologist– and I’ve been obsessed with entomology lit ever since I read “Miss Ormerod” by Virginia Woolf. Anyway, I am excited. Particularly as a third of Prodigal Summer is entitled “Moth Love”, and so I am very excited to see how else these books link up. And then after we celebrate the world some more with Butala’s The Perfection of the Morning.
June 17, 2008
Pea-pods
Spotted today was pea-pods in the garden, which this year is pots up a fire escape more than a garden, but it certainly makes for easy weeding. The pea-pods are a miracle! The lettuce and chard are also ripe for harvest, the herb garden getting bigger every day, and we’re avidly following the progress of the heirloom tomatoes we’ve grown from seed. Inside the house is lots of plants too, which is strange because in our old apartment we didn’t have a single living thing (except the mice). Something about this space just wants green things to be growing.
Also exciting is strawberry season. There was a whole bunch of perfect berries at the market last week. I am sorry that I won’t be able to make it this Wednesday, but hopefully Saturday will make up for it, when I am going strawberry picking. Which means strawberry jam in my near future (though probably just freezer jam, as I’m not sure I’m ready to take on real preserves), as well as a few strawberry pies (frozen, to last throughout the year, once fresh fruit is behind us).
June 13, 2008
Their own body bags
Nathan Whitlock writes that requiring self-addressed stamped envelopes to accompany literary journal submissions is “kind of like making soldiers go into battle carrying their own body bags”.
June 13, 2008
Engleby by Sabastian Faulks
Though it is jarring, the way certain moments in Sabastian Faulks’s novel Engleby kick us right outside of the narration, it is actually more disturbing how often this doesn’t occur. How convincing is the singular voice of Mike Engleby, lifelong loner and the narrator/diarist in whose palm we readers are sitting. And we are convinced by him partly because Engleby is clever– a working class boy winning a place at a prestigious university after all. He comes at us with facts and not nonsense, framing his narrative to show his disdain for others’ ignorance, his superiority over practically everybody. Engleby’s address is broad and general, solidly inclusive, but once in a while it catches us: something is not right here.
But that these “catches” don’t come more often, that our empathy towards Engleby can come so readily, this not only cements his control of the narrative, but also highlights the distance between him and the rest of the world. Because our easy empathy is something of which he is incapable; Engleby is scarcely aware of his own self, let alone that of another. His diary functions as an exercise towards empathy, but usually a failed one: “I wonder if we can ever know what it’s like to be someone else. I doubt whether [his classmates] really know what it’s like to be themselves.” Because, of course, Engleby doesn’t know what it’s like to be himself, and so his diary also acts as a self-by-proxy. An identity pinned down where his actual self can’t be.
So what are the “catches” then? Engleby’s supposed immersion into a group of friends at school that don’t seem to know him, a moment where he approaches two girls in a bar and they “[back] off as though appalled”, his complete lack of impact upon the world around him, and then moments where he lets certain things slip. Like that he was in a mental institution once: “It was like… the centripedal force of Engleby had failed and I began to fly apart, into my atomic pieces.”
It is a particular challenge to create a loner, the mark of a loner being that the world won’t reflect him back. No friends to flesh him out, even family is kept at a distance, no water cooler banter. Moreover Mike Engleby is challenging because while he doesn’t even reflect himself, he is smart enough that this could be quite consciously done, his construction of the narrative altogether deliberate, and so due to his unreliability, what are we meant to believe?
“My memory’s odd like that,” Engleby tells us very early on. “I’m big on detail, but there are holes in the fabric.” Which is some ways is quite convenient for Sabastian Faulks, I suppose, that his character’s gaps come at such moments that propel the narrative right along. And there are some similarly facile points throughout the text. Engleby in the 1980s disagreeing with his one friend about the future: “‘And apartheid,’ I said. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me that’ll soon be all over, too.’ But then these weak points become less so when you consider their veracity, that it is in Engleby’s character to be deliberate about most things (for example the girlfriend he manages to acquire in his thirties, and that he spends long drives rehearsing whatever he will say to her).
This meandering-sounding exploration of lone self-hood has a centre, however– the disappearance of a girl Engleby had had feelings for at university. The terms of their relationship in typically vague Engleby fashion, though there are suggestions something is not right. That he had stolen her diary years ago, his infatuation with her, that we can see him misconstrue her feelings for him, these mysterious “holes” in the fabric of his memory.
There are certain unreliable narrators whose reality seeps into between every other line (I’m thinking The Remains of the Day) and then those unreliability is to deflect reality, to keep something at bay. Engleby being the latter, and so reading becomes an act of decoding, of spotting those “catches” when the world creeps in. The missing girl, discovered murdered years later, and Engleby trying to understand what he may have done, we as his readers faced with the discomforting possibility of our own empathy with someone who’s been a killer all along. There we’ve been all the while, right inside his head.
Engleby’s obsession is with time, with other people’s perception of sequence and causality, which he supposes to be such a limited perspective of time’s dimensionality. And of course he senses that we will try to address his experience with our puerile understanding of cause and effect– that Engleby is this way because he abused as a child, that his father abused him because of his own limitations. That the torture he is forced to endure when he goes away to high school only exacerbates his trauma, culminating in Engleby becoming an abuser himself.
So it is true that Engleby achieves the “heightened” experience of “time as it really is– non linear”, as his experience goes in a circular fashion. Moreover as a victim of trauma, he doesn’t put the past behind him, but rather relives his experiences over and over again, and these holes in his memory are an attempt to deal with this.
Engleby‘s singular perspective is broadened towards the end of the book, as the text begins to include witness statements and psychiatric reports. Which reads as a bit of a cheat, really– I wonder what the novel would have been without these. Though of course they provide a bit of context, resolution for our feelings about and towards this complicated character. It is jarring (but a relief?) to finally read an outsider’s perspective of Engleby, to realize the inaccuracies of his perspective, and then of our own gathered through him.
June 12, 2008
But what if we suppose
“But what if we just suppose for a moment that the author knows what she is doing. That this book exists not just so we can pick it into pieces, but rather because its author wanted it precisely this way. What do you think the author was attempting to accomplish? And then how might you come to understand whatever baffled you about the work, what didn’t sit quite right? How to bridge the gap between the author’s agenda and our own. What can we give to this book in order that we can take away from it everything that we possibly can?”
June 12, 2008
Forgetting to bring a camera
I’ve got a train journey coming up this weekend, and I can’t decide what novels to take. Of course I’ve got a mess of magazines waiting– this week Walrus, London Review of Books, and Canadian Notes and Queries all arrived in the post. I’ll also soon have my mitts upon the New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue. But still, I feel a train trip takes a novel, and that periodicals won’t suffice. Mostly because no journey is complete without a novel irrevocably linked to it.
To and from California in Feb. was Arlington Park and Anagrams. To and from Montreal in Sept. was A Short History of Tractors… and Atonement. The last time I went to Ottawa, I read Sweetness in the Belly. Town House en route to England last June, and Bliss on the way back. Etc. etc. You see what I mean?
It would be like forgetting to bring a camera.
