January 2, 2008
On A Celibate Season
Carol Shields writes to Eleanor Wachtel: “Mail in Montjouvent is always welcome. (On the odd mail-less day the postman knocks and gives me his condolences.)” From Random Illuminations.
I just finished reading A Celibate Season, and enjoyed it so much, to my relief. For I hadn’t been sure: this was co-authored with Carol Shields and Blanche Howard, as well being an epistolary novel (and I don’t think I’d read such a thing since Heloise and Abelard in an undergrad survey course). Also that it was the last Carol Shields novel I’d left to read, which has me less sad than I thought I’d be, for I am grateful instead that I got to read it at all.
I enjoyed A Celibate Season as much as I’ve loved any book by Carol Shields, which is a lot, and it was especially interesting to read in light of A Memoir of Friendship, which was the collection of Shields’s and Howard’s real-life letters. Friends and letters seem to have been twin stars in Shields’s life, and how wonderful to see their intersection in both these books.
January 2, 2008
The Best Way
“For now, books are still the best way of taking great art and its consolation along with us on a bus.” –Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer
December 31, 2007
2007 I liked you
And not just because you were the year in which we drove across a European country with the top down.
Happy New Year and all the best for 2008.
December 31, 2007
The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff
Very exciting news– though it’s still 2007, I have already read one of the best books of 2008. The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff comes out late January, and it’s absolutely extraordinary. A first novel you won’t believe, with all the qualities so many people liked about Special Topics in Calamity Physics, but not annoying, pretentious or gimmicky. Anything the least bit gimmicky about The Monsters of Templeton, I considered a gift actually. Lauren Groff is a bloody brilliant writer and tangible proof of this is evident in that her book contains the term “Potemkin nipple”. There is nothing more I need to say.
But of course I will continue on, because I haven’t loved a book this hard in ages. American in its scope (by which I mean big) Groff is good enough to handle her material, which begins with her narrator Willie uttering her mighty opening sentence, “The day I returned to Templeton steeped in disgrace, the fifty foot corpse of a monster surfaced in Lake Glimmerglass.”
Now normally monsters don’t turn me on, but Groff has done something quite original here. The magic not even questioned amidst such a solid realism, but a realism so bizarre that no magic could be contested. And also magic and realism so original– could there be anything more entrancing than a ghost like this one: “To my mother it had looked like a bird; to me a washed-out inkstain, a violet shadow so vague and shy that it was only perceivable indirectly, like a leftover halo from gazing at a bare bulb too long.”
Willie has returned to Templeton (a fictional version of Groff’s own hometown, Cooperstown, NY) “in disgrace”, her mother taking her mind off her problems with the revelation that Willie’s father is not who she’d thought he was. But who he is exactly, Willie’s mother won’t say, and it is up to Willie to solve the mystery, tracing her complicated family history back to her ancestor, the founder of Templeton. Characters from the past get their own chapters, Willie’s world also filled out by exceptionally brilliant secondary characters– her best friend and her mom, the male joggers who run through town first thing in the morning in particular. Willie herself is an amazing creation– gutsy, smart, funny, weak and strong.
The main character in the novel is Templeton, however, and Groff invests the town with such beauty. 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.
December 31, 2007
Year-End Reading Recap
I do my best not to be a passive reader. To select what I read carefully, to engage with what I’m reading through my blog, to read carefully and critically, but also joyfully, and to keep track of what I’m reading. I’ve been reading most actively during the last two years, since I started my list “Books Read Since 2006”. The list from which I was able to discern last year that I read hardly any books by men and/or writers not from three certain countries whose names start with A, B and C. And that though a book or two had been written pre-1900, you’d be hard-pressed to notice from my list.
At the beginning of 2007 I resolved to read more slowly, and to read a “classic” monthly. I was sort of untriumphant on both counts, though the first one I couldn’t really help. I tried. The second, I ended up reading about six classics, falling in love with Middlemarch and Huckleberry Finn in particular. I never did get to Anna Karenina and maybe I never will, but once again I intend to (and will that eventually cease to mean something?). Though I got around to Guns Germs and Steel so anything is possible.
I am also sorry to have not yet read Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park, which I read described as “If Virginia Woolf were alive in 2007…what she would be writing”. Did you know that I nearly bought it in the Southport Waterstones, but bought a hat down the road instead? And they didn’t have it at the airport bookstore, and back in Canada it could hardly be found at all, and I wanted the paperback, but I think I might spring for the hardback now. If I’ve wanted something for six months, it must be worthwhile.
Regrets aside, it’s been an awfully good year though. Before we go out to dinner this evening, I’ll have finished reading Kate Sutherland’s utterly enjoyable story collection All In Together Girls, which will be #339 on my grand list. (Though I will not enter it until the book is done– the one thing in the world about which I’m superstitious). Which means I’ve read 166 books this year, not bad since I spent 7 months of this year working full time. Not bad in particular since so many of the books I read were brilliant.
This year my reading resolution is quite simple– to read with a pencil. For notes, to underline new words, to deface my books and make them mine. An active reader would do that. Oh there are so many fine books just ahead. And I will start the new year just like I started the old one, with Francine Prose’s wonderful Reading Like a Writer.
Oh and also– not only is my novel entitled What Comes Down, but it is finished.
December 30, 2007
Paranormal
Though I’m not sure what kind of higher power I believe in, I know there is something peculiar about books. I know that the language in books can do things their authors never even considered, and that a relationship between one random book and another can transform both works into something entirely new. I know that books take on their own power, and so can libraries. Even a library filed alphabetically like mine can get a bit mystic, as I noticed the other day when I saw this little collection of eyes peering out at me. Creepy, really, these part-faces, and all hanging out together. Thankfully I’ve not noticed the eyes following me across the room.
December 29, 2007
A necessary enlargement
“For a long time, I’ve felt that reading novels is not escape; it’s a necessary enlargement of my life. I always think our lives are so sadly limited, even the most fortunate of us. We can only work at so many jobs, we can only live in so many places and experience so much. Through fiction we can undertake these journeys and yet remain at home and enormously expand our comprehension of the universe.” –Carol Shields, “Art is Making, from Random Illuminations
December 28, 2007
Indulged
This Christmas my bookishness certainly benefited from my proximity to my husband. Or in particular, from my husband’s office’s close proximity to Ben McNally Books, which meant that by listening to me carefully, he was able to satisfy my heart’s desire with remarkable ease. Which was how I came to receive Kate Sutherland’s All In Together Girls and Eleanor Wachtel’s Random Illuminations this year. Stuart is also the reason I am finally going to get my mitts on a copy of The Gathering, as he needed to tack another book on his own online order-via-gift-cards to go postage-free– hurrah! Though I have my dear Bronwyn to thank for delivering me The Uncommon Reader, which is truly a book most extraordinary. From my parents I received George Street Stories, The Annex: Story of a Toronto Neighbourhood, and a gorgeous book of Czech Fairy Tales.
Though of course my heart’s desire can extend beyond books, and some know this very well. Which is how I received a Miffy calendar and Marks and Spencer’s things from my English family. And how I got an elephant tin of tea from the Banff Tea Co. (via my sister). Lots of other lovely things from my friends, family and husband. Oh–and the print by Michael Sowa of flying penguins that I’ve been long long longing for. Am I ever indulged?
Amidst the manic gift receiving, I did manage to give some too, and moreover to have a lovely couple of days with friends and family. I do hope that you experienced something very much the same.
December 28, 2007
What she was finding also
“What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.” –Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader
December 28, 2007
Random Illuminations by Eleanor Wachtel
“… I think the more we know about a writer, the more we understood how the novel was put together and why and what it means. And maybe we don’t need to know this. Maybe we don’t need to know anything about the writer. Maybe it’s better for us to enter blindly into the reading of novels, but, of course, I’ve I am always curious about the person behind the voice, behind the writing hand”– Carol Shields, “A Gentle Satirist”
The more about I read about Carol Shields, particularly in her own words, it is clear to me why her friends have been moved to honour her: Blanche Howard’s Memoir of Friendship (which was how I spent the end of June) and now Eleanor Wachtel’s Random Illuminations. Shields’s mutual engagements with fiction and the world (both absolutely intertwined) were so deeply considered, original and brave, that her death left a gaping hole, and not only for those who knew her. Carol Shields’s own generosity of spirit– that which gave her her talent for friendship in particular– meant that her loss would be exponential.
There are some people who’ve never read Carol Shields, which I find baffling. But maybe you have to have read her to know what you aren’t missing. I think, however, that anyone who’s never read her might be surprised by what they find here, by the vastness of her thought, her wisdom, her curiosity, her insight, her embrace of the actual world. In many ways she was a philosopher, which might sound hyperbolic, but this was a woman who was asking singular questions of humanity in even the most ordinary letters to her friends. (Who never actually seemed to write an ordinary letter come to think of it.) Who dared to declare issues of womanhood and motherhood issues of personhood after all, the very fundamentals of personhood: how are we meant to be?
Eleanor Wachtel wrote her essay “Scrapbook of Carol” after Shields’s death for the Canadian journal A Room of One’s Own, and that essay opens Random Illuminations, Wachtel’s collection of letters from and interviews with Shields, who was a friend. This collection reads much like a scrapbook also, chronological, layered, touching back upon the same ideas and taking stock of their development. Like everything Shields touched, it seems, the book is most vibrant and full of joy. Fascinating for writers and readers alike, and I mean readers in general too. How terrible, it underlines the loss of Shields, but also suggests that she chose friends as generous as she was, who are now so willing to share her with the world.
