May 21, 2008
New books
New books! On the weekend I got Stunt by Claudia Dey, and The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers (ed. Vendela Vida). Now reading In the Springtime of the Year by Susan Hill. Have just come down with an obsessive need to acquire a copy of The Summer of My Amazing Luck by Miriam Toews.
May 21, 2008
Free to Be…
I went to see Free To Be You… And Me this weekend, performed by kids at The Randolph Academy for the Performing Arts. I’d never seen the show live before, I don’t think, though I’d watched the movie plenty of times in elementary school, and I think there was a book, and I had the record too. But of course there was much that I’d forgotten, and it surprised me too how relevant the material still is– which is nice, that it can still be enjoyed, but too bad too, that the message is more necessary than it’s ever been. Of course it’s simplified– I see now that simply giving William a doll and feeding tender sweet young things to the tigers was never going to change the world. The show is a product of a different way of thinking, but still, it lays down a terribly substantial foundation. I’ve always adored it, and was thrilled to discover most of the movie is available online. Check out Michael Jackson and Roberta Flack singing “When We Grow Up” (a video that is only the smallest bit creepy). And Marlo Thomas driving a taxi in “Parents Are People” was always my favourite.
May 19, 2008
Things Go Flying by Shari Lapeña
I chose Shari Lapeña’s Things Go Flying by its cover, and the novel didn’t disappoint. Though I chose it for its first line too, “Harold’s recent hobby of reading obituaries at breakfast was his only new hobby in years.” Setting the stage for an off-kilter story, irreverent and fun. Also as lovely and delightful as the cover suggests.
Things Go Flying is the story of a family at a point of crisis: Harold Walker becoming preoccupied with death and acting strangely, his wife Audrey ambivalent about losing control of her household as Harold breaks down. Their teenage sons doing teenage things. Also Harold is being visited by spirits, and, well, Audrey’s got a troubling secret of her own.
Lapeña’s narrative is dizzying at first, rapidly flipping between the four members of the Walker family. Which gets easier as the book goes on, but also serves to emphasize the radically different spheres each character inhabits, how far apart they are. Harold Walker is the common man we’ve encountered in books before– in Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother, or Carol Shields’ Larry’s Party, for example. An ordinary guy finds himself in some extraordinary trouble, though Harold’s trouble is even more extraordinary than usual. His wife Audrey, however, is decidedly novel in her creation– the overbearing wife and mother, killing herself with martyrdom and the very best intentions, but here so fabulously drawn on the inside and out.
Between Harold and Audrey, and their sons, Lapeña demonstrates the variety of ways in which family members drive one another crazy. Her story engaging in all its twists and turns, and, though undoubtedly fun and amusing throughout, it all comes to take on a deeper resonance.
May 19, 2008
All questions
Post the brilliant The Dud Avocado, I’ve got no answers but all questions over in my post “Encounters with Books: And the trouble(?) with comic heroines”, now up at the Descant blog.
May 19, 2008
Good news
My good news of today is that my short story “On a Picnic” will be appearing in the Fall issue of The New Quarterly. TNQ is an amazing magazine, and I feel so lucky to be included.
May 19, 2008
Sally J.
I continue to be obsessed with Fine Lines by Lizzie Skurnick, but my obsession was mammoth this week as she reread Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, which is one of my favourite books ever. I last read it when I was 24, and enjoyed it more than I ever had. It’s a fascinating book, which I’ve forever linked with Ann Marie McDonald’s The Way the Crow Flies in terms of point of view, dramatic tension, and certain thematic concerns. Sally J. certainly meets my requirement for children’s books worthy of adult rereads: that it becomes a whole new book when you encounter it again, this change providing elusive insight into your childhood perspective. In this book especially, Judy Blume writes from way way up over her readers’ heads, and they end up constructing her world in the same misconstrued (and wonderful) way they approach their own.
I am also excited because Lizzie Skurnick is writing about The Girl With the Silver Eyes next week. I used to love this book, in hope that pharmaceutical-induced mysticism was the key to my social ostracism but alas, my eyes were brown. Further excitement: that Skurnick promises Norma Klein to come (and it is common knowledge that we love Norma Klein here at Pickle Me This).
May 17, 2008
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
I’ve not had much to say lately, suffering from a sudden dearth of original thought. Hoping to ease myself back into consciousness, however, I’d like to touch on Rebecca. The image at right being from the copy I read, a mass-market paperback passed on by my friend Bronwyn (who’d ended up with two).
I knew very little of Rebecca previously– had one impression that it was a ghastly florid romance with no literary worth, and it was also confused with she of Sunnybrook Farm. My interest sparked, however, when one of my favourite book-bloggers began her “Daphne-Fest”. She’d just finished reading Daphne by Justine Picardie, and I’d fallen in love with Picardie’s non-fiction back when I lived in England. I was also intrigued by DuMaurier’s ties to the Brontes, and I was reading Tenant of Wildfell Hall at the time. So round-aboutly, I came to read Rebecca. Quite late too, as everyone else I know who has read it did so in their early teens, and found it somewhat pivotal. I can certainly see why.
I enjoyed the juxtaposition of nineteenth-century gothic with modernish times– like Jane Eyre with automobiles! Naturally, I’d always associated such a narrative sensibility with all things archaic, and so to see it in this context made it new to me. The Jane Eyre references coming often related to this book, though I must assert I thought Rebecca more original than it was made out to be. Connections between the two books were a bit tenuous, incidental– this is a book that stands up on its own. And a fascinatingly constructed novel for a variety of reasons– that we never learn our narrator’s name for one, “the second Mrs. De Winter”, though we learn it’s an unusual name, difficult to spell. The love story’s trajectory less predictable than might be imagined, and the arc of the novel itself, for I have never encountered an ending more perfect. Unexpected and expected at the very same time, and that we do not come full circle. Of all the gaps throughout this novel, particularly this: “And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.”
May 17, 2008
Always being taken for a librarian
“I had always assumed that a certain sense of identity would be strong enough within me to communicate itself to others. I now saw this assumption was false. Tout simplement, in a tarts’ bar, I looked like a tart. I tried to cheer myself up by thinking that after all this was a very good thing for an actress. But it was depressing, anyway. Not so much the thing of looking like a prostitute. I mean, except for the inconvenience of the moment, I found that rather thrilling, but the whole episode was forcing me to remember something that I’m always trying to forget and that is, that in a library as well, I’m always being taken for a librarian. No kidding. My last Christmas in New York, I had an English paper to write over the vacation, and there was this public library I used to go to, and no matter where I sat, people were always coming up to me and asking me where such and such a book was. They were furious too, when I didn’t know. It was eerie I began to feel that I actually was a librarian. The wood growing into my soul and stuff. I suppose I am rather an intellectual.” –Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado
May 16, 2008
The girl still can't dance
The girl still can’t dance. When she’s had too much to drink she still flails her arms, knocking drinks out of hands and poking tall people in the eye. Sometimes she abandons fluidity altogether, and jumps up and down on the spot instead— a terrible legacy of Kris Kross and Cypress Hill. When she’s dancing sometimes, people think she’s kidding but she’s not. Celtic is all the rage right now, but when the girl gets her knees up, someone always gets kicked.
May 14, 2008
Born full grown, or make room for a hero
“For a writer those things are what you start with. You wouldn’t have started a story without that awareness– that’s what made you begin. That’s what makes a character, projects a plot. Because you write from the inside. You can’t start with how people look and speak and behave and come to know how they feel. You must know exactly what’s in their hearts and minds before they ever set visible foot on the stage. You must know all, then not tell it all, or not tell too much at once: simply the right thing at the right moment. And the same character would be written completely differently in a novel as opposed to a short story. In a story you don’t go into character in order to develop him. He was born full grown, and he’s present there to perform his part in the story. He’s subservient to his function, and he doesn’t exist outside it. But in a novel, he may. So you may have to allow for his growth and maybe hold him down and not tell everything you know, or else let him have his full sway– make room for a hero, even, in more spacious premises.” —Eudora Welty, The Paris Review Interviews, II
