December 12, 2007

Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital

Last month I read Janette Turner Hospital’s new novel Orpheus Lost, and have followed up with a “critical duet” of sorts with Steven W. Beattie at The Shakespeherian Rag. I enjoyed the book a great deal, Steven did less so, and what results is a pretty interesting dialogue, I think. I will post the beginning, and then you can follow the link over to read the rest.

Kerry Clare: I’d never read anything by Janette Turner Hospital before, and she definitely surprised me. I was aware that she is as American as she is Canadian, and that she is Australian first and foremost, but somehow I still expected her work to be representative of the sort of fiction Canada’s female writers seem to write best. The sort of fiction that I like best for that matter, of kitchens and caves, mothers, daughters, and divining.

The premise of Orpheus Lost would suggest otherwise though, wouldn’t it? This story of Leela, who studies the mathematics of music and falls in love with Mishka in the subway as he plays Gluck’s “Che farò senza Euridice” on his violin. Mishka, whose strange disappearances begin to coincide with terrorist attacks in Boston. Soon Leela is snatched off the street on her way home and taken to an interrogation centre where she is confronted by Cobb, a figure from her past, and questions of Mishka being a terrorist.

Thrills and chills, international crime and intrigue. What a treat, I discovered quickly. To read a plot-driven book for once, and have it be so good. To be unable to stop turning the pages until I’d reached the end. I was choking on my heart a number of times, and one day this book extended my lunch break by an extra half-hour. There was no other way.

I do love it when literary fiction manages to surmount the limits of “genre.” To borrow the best of other genres, using it to great advantage. And indeed Turner Hospital does sufficient borrowing here — with the Greek allusions, musical references, spy plots, and romance. Orpheus Lost is a veritable stew, but reads quite originally, all its ingredients measured.

I found the story throughout quite compelling, but Turner Hospital’s depiction of the Australian rainforest was striking in particular. Of course the rainforest is a place that lends itself to story, and Turner Hospital properly invests it with elements of the fantastic, but that somewhere so unknown to me could emerge so vividly is still a testament to her achievements. Conversely the story lagged just a bit for me with Leela’s backstory, which takes place in a small Southern town I felt I’d read about already.

Leela and Mishka’s relationship was hard to understand at first, though with two such eccentric characters, this is unsurprising. Some of the woodenness of their dialogue is easily attributed to the fact that they’re both so unconventional, and so too would be their romance. Words are neither of their fortes. Turner Hospital conveys their respective passions (math and music) well, and also marries them together. Though not so easily — nothing is easy here, and I respect that. The Orpheus story never exactly matches this modern version, piece for piece. Many characters do remain insoluble equations.

So I could continue here, picking the pieces of Orpheus Lost apart, but I will conclude now instead by stating this book is much more interesting as a whole than these pieces are in isolation. That Orpheus Lost is altogether riveting and well-orchestrated, and that it works. Or at least it worked for me.

How about you?

***

Steven W. Beattie: I’m going to be the dissenting voice here. Orpheus Lost was, for me, a major disappointment… Read the rest.

December 11, 2007

Ramona Forever

My splendid holidays begin next Wednesday (!!) and go on long, and I’ve got nothing planned but reading sweet reading. However this article revisiting Beverly Cleary (via Kate) has inspired me to reread my copy of Ramona Forever over the break. I used to have all the Ramona books, but that was probably twenty years ago and I’ve so stupidly let all the others get away from me in the meantime. So terribly stupidly that that I’ve still got one left is a bit of a miracle and means those books must have been special– and they were. (Did anyone else notice the inaccuracy in the article though? Because not just “Ralph Mouse” has made it to TV, as I have very vivid memories of rushing home from various places in time to watch the 1988 Ramona TV series on CBC starring Sarah Polley).

Another children’s book lined up for the holidays is The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy M. Boston.

December 10, 2007

The Mitfords Edited by Charlotte Mosley

Here is not a book for the common reader: you have to know and “get” the Mitfords in order to appreciate Charlotte Mosley’s collection of their letters The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters. My journey towards such knowing and getting began about five years ago when I read Mary S. Lovell’s biography The Mitford Girls. I’d plucked it off a shelf in Waterstones one day whilst on a lunch break, and I can’t remember now what possessed me to do so, but I was enthralled by these sisters, their family and their story. Nancy, the lady novelist; Pamela, who had her Aga custom-painted to match her blue eyes; Diana, who married a Guinness heir and then left him for the leader of the British Fascists, was fond of Hitler and never repented; Unity the Nazi, whose own fondness for Hitler led to her suicide attempt two days after England declared war on her beloved Germany in in 1939, where after she lived brain damaged until her death in 1948; Jessica the Communist, who ran away to the Spanish Civil War and then to America where she made a career for herself as a “muckracker”; and Deborah, who would become the Duchess of Devonshire.

Only England could have made them, and only in the twentieth century at that. Their story is the century summed up, from society balls to “Well Lady, the inevitable has occurred, Dinky is going to have a baby by a black man”. Their relationships best understood by the phrase: “I naturally wouldn’t hesitate to shoot him if it was necessary… but in the meanwhile, as that isn’t necessary, I don’t see why we shouldn’t be quite good friends.” I’ve written plenty here about my Mitford leanings. How I’ve loved the other volumes in my Mitford library since the Lovell: Nancy’s novels, Jessica’s memoirs, even Debo’s book (I visited in Chatsworth House in 2003 and would have enjoyed it much more had I not been terribly ill at the time and having to keep collapsing on the grass amidst sheep poo). I read Decca’s letters earlier this year and absolutely adored them.

This collection of letters is essential, and I found them fascinating– though I didn’t enjoy them as much as Decca’s. Perhaps a collection between six people wouldn’t have the same narrative arc? And also that Unity’s and Diana’s letters were so disturbing, the latter right up until the very end as she perpetually viewed herself as victim (though the years she spent imprisoned during WWII for her relations to the Germans must indeed have been traumatic). But I learned so much new stuff here, about Debo and Pamela in particular and how interesting (but not inter-esting) each one was in her own right. Debo is also as fine a letter writer as her far more literary sisters. That though Jessica and Nancy were terrible liars, this trait was not unendearing somehow. That the homeliest sister turned out prettiest in old age (I think, at least– Pamela). How impossibly hard is one life, and any life, even one which is most extraorder.

What an amazing bond is sisterhood, which these letters demonstrate. The jokes, secret languages, grudges, traumas, and joys. Collections of letters also manage to represent death like no other literary form I’ve encountered (as I found when I read Carol Shields’ letters in June) –the absolute silence of a writer’s cessation is incredibly powerful, and real. With Nancy’s and Pamela’s in particular, and then in the end that blank page. To think of all the life that created these, which is as palpable as the page upon which they’re printed.

December 10, 2007

Charred bottoms

We’ve had a perfectly marvelous weekend, though there was drama and disaster. But before that we had our friend Kim’s birthday part at the Danforth Bowl, which was fun beyond wildest bowling dreams. I didn’t even know I had wild bowling dreams. Another birthday party for our friend Andrea Saturday night, and though they hadn’t bowling, they had Guitar Hero, and it was pretty spectac. And tonight Erin came over to help supervise our tree decorating and have dinner with us. The house is terribly Christmassy now, and we’re happy to have had fabulous company all weekend. I’m on page 175 of Guns Germs and Steel and still going strong. And even the drama and disaster wasn’t that bad: I did my Christmas baking yesterday but was too lazy to actually start doing it until 5:30. I made gingerbread, which was vv good so that was fine, except we realized just as the dough finished that we didn’t actually have a gingerbread man cut-out, and so they’re all stars and trees, which is less fun. We’ll remember for next year. But I didn’t cry, or at least not until the sugar cookie dough failed to actually become dough and was just meal instead. The first batch was a double batch and I threw it all into the garbage. Second batch was just a batch but still didn’t work and I don’t know why, as I’ve used the same recipe the last two years. I was able to pat the cookies into shape and so they’re cookie shaped rather than Christmas-fun shaped, though they were delicious, though the sprinkles from the first batch (which I didn’t wash off the cookie sheet) had caught on fire by the last batch and the smoke alarm went off for a good twenty minutes straight, and the bottoms are charred but we’ll eat them anyway. Merry Christmas!

December 10, 2007

The letters

“Thinking it over, in my case it’s the letters that I miss mostly– why, obviously, comes from living so far away from most dead people I really adored. (Oh for the writing on the env[evelope]!) Much love, Henderson” –Jessica Mitford to her sister Deborah, 1994

December 9, 2007

On books lists

Read about my hate/love relationship with Books of the Year Lists at the Descant Blog.

December 7, 2007

Any day

Any day with brand new red shoes on one’s feet is such a fine day. This is a scientific fact.

December 7, 2007

Freedom

I thought the essay “Caught Between Two Languages” by Jowita Bydlowska from today’s Globe & Mail was absolutely perfect. “I learned to love language again. I found that words like rustle, fruit, rain and beloved are as melodic in English as they are in Polish. I wrote again and it was freedom. But it wasn’t – and still isn’t – total freedom.”

December 7, 2007

Now reading finally

I’ve been a bit deranged lately, and Stuart says I’m missing fiction. He keeps trying to foist novels upon me because I’m annoying to live with, but I am bloody minded and as I resolved to read six non-fiction books in a row, surely I will. I am not really convinced the derangement has to do with the non-fic anyway– more instead with Seasonal Mania (which I do seem to come down with every single season).

Anyway, finally, after ages and ages, I am reading Guns Germs and Steel. It has been sitting on my bedside for ages– for so long in fact that the person who lent it to me (Curtis) moved away months ago. 56 pages in, I am enthralled and learning so very much about things I can’t believe I don’t know or never thought to ask. Today as I read it on my lunch break, two strangers stopped me to tell me what a great book it was. Which was strange, really, because the only other time that has ever happened to me was way back when I was reading The Selfish Gene and nobody would leave me alone with it. Strange because you wouldn’t think these unliterary books would be the ones to inspire such bookish enthusiasm. What to make of that?

I am wary though, as both people who stopped to rave about Guns Germs and Steel admitted they hadn’t been able to get all the way through it. And both Curtis and Stuart said pretty much the same, though they enjoyed it still a great deal. Doesn’t bode well though, does it? What if nobody has ever finished this book ever? And as I’m so bloody-minded, what if I end up reading it for the rest of my life?

December 6, 2007

Post in books

My love of post is so unabashed, and I’ve still got that tremendous crush on our mailman, even though I am sure it’s unrequited because during my previous incarnation as student/ housewife I used to meet him at our door each morning wearing track pants. But I don’t care much– I get excited at Canada Post vans, I covet pen pals, I subscribe to far too many periodicals, I make out with postboxes in airports, I’ve got an in the post label here on my blog.

On Sunday I sent out my Christmas cards– 43 of them, and at least one to every continent except Africa (where unfortunately I don’t know anybody), and when I say every continent I really mean it. What a treat indeed to post a letter to The South Pole. Doesn’t post make the world so delightfully small and in a way not even the internet could ever manage?

At Crooked House Stephany Aulenback has been celebrating postalness lately, in particular the very best thing since “books in the post” which is, of course, “post in the books.” I’d never made the connection before, between my love of mail and how much I enjoy reading collections of letters (which I’ve only really discovered in the past year actually with Decca and A Memoir of Friendship. ) But there clearly is a link, and Stephany has made me think back far to the postal books I’ve been loving for a long time. The Jolly Postman, of course, but also Beverly Cleary’s Dear Mr. Henshaw which I read over and over again when I was little. When I first moved to England I found a book called Dear Exile in my hostel (and stole it, I think) and loved this story of friends separated by continents. I am very much looking forward to reading A Celibate Season, the epistolary novel by Blanche Howard and Carol Shields. “For Esme– with Love and Squalor”. Stephany mentions the wonderous 84 Charing Cross Road.

It’s not really such a stretch, is it? That those of us who love books and love letters might be the same people in the end?

~She is always delighted by the arrival of the post, though it ought to be routine by now because the postman comes each day at three. But no, she anticipates the tip tap of his shoes, the thunk in through the letterbox and the footsteps’ retreat. A bundle of ephemera waiting on the floor. There is always something, a stack of something.~