March 9, 2008

Better late than nevah-evah

I’m now reading Michael Redhill’s Consolation, the book chosen for Keep Toronto Reading One Book 2008. Which, of course, was in February. I am never terribly good at these communal reads– like Canada Reads, just barely mentioned here though it went on last week (and was very well documented by others). Though I do delight in them– bookishly saturated media and all that– and so I’m a bit ashamed to never take part.

But then not ashamed enough to start (alas the Tournament of Books will have to go on without me.) I blame the weather, mostly. I use up too much energy trudging through snow and slipping on sidewalks to be so focussed. I suspect that any Bookish Extravaganza during sunlit months might enthrall me, but now I’m just too tired. Further, I’m pretty choosy about what I read. You may notice the overwhelmingly-positive nature of my reviews, which is a product of me never ever reading books I don’t want to read, or books I think I should.

Finally, my t0-be-reads are stacked to the roofbeams (note: oh wow, in my new bedroom roofbeams will no longer just be metaphorical!). I’m pretty inflexible when it comes to said stack (someone once loaned me a book without asking and I almost had a nervous breakdown). I don’t have a lot of space to play with bookwise, my life span being limited and the number of brilliant books out there decidedly not.

So yes, I am blaming my own mortality for me not having read Consolation when I should have. And indeed, I should have read it in February, not only because The Toronto Public Library is my world favourite institution, but because the book is wonderful. I was a bit apprehensive because I’d thought it was historical fiction. (I don’t like historical fiction. This annoys people, as does the fact that I refuse to read books containing dragons. I am way more willing to bend on the historical fiction, however.)

However Consolation turns out to be about the engagement between modernity and its history– my most beloved literary pre-occupation! (The reason I love British fiction). And you get so little of that stuff, really, in CanLit, perhaps there not being quite enough history yet to go around yet. (The few exceptions I can think of are books I didn’t like). Sure we are focussed on our past here– you can’t go 5 miles without falling over a pioneer house– but only in the sense that it’s “there”, set up behind a velvet rope. Whereas in Consolation, history is right here– almost literally, in my case. Which is something I find tremendously exciting.

March 8, 2008

Glorious Girls

To honour International Women’s Day, at the Descant blog I’m thinking about the girls in the feminist YA novels I came of age on.

March 8, 2008

How the world is to be saved

Perhaps somebody already thought of this, but it just occurred to me. How the world is to be saved, not by crackpot TV psychologists, or even books (particularly this one). If your self and spirit are in such dire straits, wouldn’t it do wonders to quit watching TV in the afternoon?

March 7, 2008

I don't want money

“By temperament I’m a vagabond and a tramp. I don’t want money badly enough to have to work for it. In my opinion it’s a shame that there is so much work in the world. One of the saddest things is that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours– all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.” –William Faulkner, Paris Review Interviews Volume II

March 6, 2008

Tired of snow

Did you know I’ve never read Harriet the Spy? I don’t even know why, especially since I had this peculiar obsession with its sequel The Long Secret. Anyway, recent events have inspired me to give Harriet a try at some point soon. And Kate’s post has inspired me to add The Stone Angel to my list of summer rereads. I’m now reading Brighton Rock, and I get excited every time it mentions the hotel where I spent my honeymoon. Yesterday was Allan Sillitoe’s birthday and on why he’s still an angry young man at 80. (Indeed, his Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was one of the most powerful books I read last year.) And I am terribly tired, as well as tired of snow.

UPDATE: Holy Louise Fitzhugh! Lizzie Skurnick on The Long Secret. And then read more on our YA favourites. (This via Kid*Literary).

March 5, 2008

Collecting Pieces

The three of us kept these scrapbooks back in high school, called “Nothing Books” or “Anything Books”— an indication of their contents’ specificity. I was partial to transcribing copy from sportswear ads into mine, penning bubble letters in rainbow hues: “Seek the Goal” or “Run Fast in the Direction of Your Dream” which I thought was inspirational and I wasn’t even athletic.

Pop lyrics were prized like they were poetry— excerpts from “You Gotta Be” by Des’ree (“Listen as your day unfolds/ Challenge what the future holds”), the entirety of “Forever Young” by Alphaville. We preferred our illuminations encapsulated, entirely divorced from their contexts: lines from novels we’d not yet read by Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde. We had a thing for speeches by Kennedys, and Martin Luther King Jr. I had a quote by Sappho on the side of one page, and a lyric by Bob Geldof on the other.

And amongst all these wise words were pasted photographs of ourselves, and pictures cut from magazines of the dreams we hoped to one day embody, the kind of people we hoped we’d become. Also, ticket stubs from movies, plays and concerts. Shiny labels peeled off juice bottles. We’d make lists with such headings as “Things I Like” and “Future Children’s Names”.

We were partial to a premature nostalgia, this furious attempt to contain the present exactly as it was. Entirely self-absorbed, perhaps, but I would argue our scrapbooks were more about the world around us. Assembled more in homage to the future than to the present or the past.

Because in high school, although the world was just beginning to show its face, it certainly didn’t belong to us yet. There we were, as grown as we’d ever be (or so we figured), both capable of and yearning for real life, but with most of it still out of reach.

So in lieu of our lives and in lieu of the world, we turned to collecting the pieces instead. Life’s rule was chaos, as we were beginning to understand, but if we could write down its maxims, perhaps we might tame it. Imagine various butterflies, pinned by their wings, encased under glass, and such were our pieces of the world, these scraps and clippings— our desperate need to contain in order for understanding. But imagine scotch tape instead of the pins.

The truth was that apart from these sloppy collections of stuff, the three of us had nothing. Oh, of course there were the usual teenage trappings; we’d been born lucky, each of us blessed with bicycles and bedrooms. But so little of it was actually our own, things we’d chosen ourselves as reflections of our tastes. Usual trappings were all well and good, but we were after something more essential.

For we didn’t even have our selves yet, and perhaps we knew that. That in so many ways we were still in utero, and how terrifying it must have been to be alive and unsure of who we’d ever grow to be. Exciting too, but it made for constant insecurity, this explaining such lists as “Things I Like”. We had spent our whole lives ever-changing; our very souls only ephemeral, fluid, impossible. So it was no wonder that we self-defined in bits and pieces, down on paper in point form. When you’re sixteen years-old in the world, you see, you take what you can get.

Though of course over time we would get much more. Teenagedness was an affliction to be cured of, finally, as life started offering us three-dimensions. Bringing with it actual things, experiences, and none of it cut from magazines. So we could be living the life un-tape-downable, learning new lessons that couldn’t be contained on a page.

And though we are still not so old now, these days we’re old enough that it’s remarkable we’ve been friends for half our lives. Remarkable too, for it seems that between the three of us, somehow, we’ve acquired the trappings of adulthood. We have husbands and fiancés, a beautiful house, two cars, a dog, a couple of successful careers, six degrees and we’ve traveled to 20 countries. We’ve made a wealth of new friends, good memories, smart decisions, proud mistakes with lessons learned and stupider ones with stories.

Though none of this is entirely essential either; of course we know that. All these things we hold now— whether literal or figurative in their three dimensions— they might one day appear as insubstantial as our scrapbooks. We know that we’re probably still assembling our pieces.

But this makes them no less a creation, these lives of ours. Like the treasures our books were— how we’d marvel that we’d made them. Like the treasures the books still are, and how far they show we’ve come. So we can keep marveling at the world’s knack of making wholes out of pieces, and at friendship as the very foundation.

March 5, 2008

Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner

Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner– much acclaimed when published in Quebec in 2005 and now translated into English by Lazer Laderhendler– is a wonderfully rich puzzle of a book. Which must be explained in vague terms, for vague terms are all it presents us with. Three characters, their lives barely intersecting as they all end up in Montreal, loosely linked by blood ties and a strange “three-headed book”. These barely-intersections filled out by fish, pirates, various islands and rising water. Dickner performing strange and wonderful feats with parallels and opposites: wheat fields and oceans, the Aleutians and the West Indies, orphans and their ancestors, of nomads and imagined home.

The book itself is gorgeous, fish throughout its pages. Throughout the story too, which reminded me of The Raw Shark Texts, but only in that this is a bookish story much concerned with fish– quite a strange preoccupation for one writer, let alone two. But then bookish coincidences seem commonplace after reading this story, which is based around one. The “three headed book”, which connects our three main characters– the unnamed narrator who is a clerk in a bookshop, Noah the disinterested archeologist obsessed with garbage dumps, and Joyce the modern-day girl pirate. Oh, I could add more vague details, the maps, the fish shop, Grampa (a trailer) and Granma (a boat), the compass perpetually pointing towards the Alaskan town of Nikolski, a mouldy library in Venezuela, a couple of mysterious girls.

Nikolski is analogous to the three-headed book of which it speaks: “These are fragments, literally. Debris. Flotsam and Jetsam… It’s a piece of craftsmanship, not a mass-printed object.” And the reason for such a thing? “A passion for puzzles, maybe.” But definitely maybe, for here every word and detail means something. As soon as I finished this book, I couldn’t help but begin it again, and the significance of every sentence I’d read was just compounded. Which is not to say that I read solely towards a solution, which might prove only elusive, I think. But rather that Nikolski‘s puzzle itself was compelling enough, and– no matter the way each bit just “clouded the issue rather than clarifying it”– never ever unsatisfying.

“Nothing is perfect,” so goes the next line in the story, but I really might put forth that Nikolski is. Cheers to Knopf Canada for championing literature in translation in general, French CanLit in particular, and a marvelous CanLit twist as their New Face of Fiction. Dickner has married cleverness with depth, sustaining his ideas with a tireless deftness. His characters are pieces of a puzzle, but they be characters all the same, Dickner somehow choosing exactly the right fragments with which to make this so. Indeed, the novel itself an item of craftsmanship– not quite life but something next door to it– and surely worthwhile in the sum of these parts, more than I have yet comprehended. A sum I still don’t have my head around yet, but I look forward to rereading this book until I do.

March 4, 2008

So there was every reason

“So there was every reason for me not to write fiction. In fact, there was not a single reason why I should write fiction. Not least of which was the fact that those early stories I was writing about African men in prisons and lust on North African beaches? They were absolutely terrible. Not a single one of them– thankfully– was ever published. But I carried on because I simply couldn’t stop. If you ask most writers why they write? The answer is usually that simple.” –Camilla Gibb, “Telling Tales Out of School”

March 3, 2008

This weekend I read

This weekend I read Descant 139, and loved in particular “In the Time of the Girls” by Anne Germanacos, the “Synchronicities” section, and poems by Changming Yuan– “delicately hung is this earth/ a bluish cage in the universe.” I also read the February 7 issue of London Review of Books, and “Derek, please, not so fast”— a review of As I Was Going to St. Ives, a biography of Derek Jackson (to whom Pamela Mitford was but a footnote! I had no idea: “To call his carry-on goat-like would be grossly unfair to goats, who seem celibate, faithful, and even tempered by comparison”). The William Faulkner interview in The Paris Review Interviews II was stunningly awful, brilliant and profound. I will soon be starting to read Nikolski, and after that I’ll get to Brighton Rock.

I also began culling my library in preparation for our move. A shedload will be donated to the Victoria College Library Booksale on Thursday, but anyone who wants to can drop by before then is welcome to sort through the stacks. Assuming you know where I live, in which case you’re probably my friend, and I’d be happy to see you anyway.

March 2, 2008

Belong to Me by Marisa de los Santos

It is a curious thing to consider, just what a good book is meant to do. Though anyone who’s ever loved a book, I believe, would know there are a thousand answers. That some books are meant to be enlightening, others amusing, or educational, playful, iconoclastic, challenging, illuminating, inspiring, confirming, terrifying, reassuring, mirrors, windows and the like. For it all depends on the book, of course. And there are some books meant to be curled up in, just like a blanket.

During this past week, Marisa de los Santos’ Belong to Me was that book for me. This past week, as February sunk its long claws in deeper, I looked for apartments, the sky was grey, I lost a mitten, all my trousers were salt-stained, and the temperature approached -30. So it was a joy to be able to turn away from that, to curl up inside this novel who wears springtime on its cover. To be absorbed by a sunny suburb, the ties of family, friendship, love and all its mini-soap operas. To experience the guilty pleasure of a soap opera, but not to have my mind put on autopilot. You see, that I’m tired and weary does not mean I’m undeserving of a good book– one that is well written, employing interesting language, with well-formed characters, and, while not altogether too much, still has the power to get into my head.

Cornelia Brown has just moved to the suburbs, a surprisingly strange and foreign country. Her instincts are all wrong there, she feels out of place, and she’s mystified by how hard friendships are to come by. A particular source of vexation is her neighbour Piper, Queen Bee of the local of Stepfords. Cornelia is soon befriended by waitress Lake Tremain, however, a single mom with mysterious past.

Cornelia’s voice is the core of this novel, wonderfully intimate, insightful and funny. Her first person narration so clearly defines her character, literary allusions and all, utterly engagingly, for we come to understand why she is loved. Piper’s chapters are told in second person, perhaps fittingly for one who knows herself so little, and de los Santos allows sympathy to build for this often vicious character, heartbreakingly so through the death of her friend. And the third central character is Dev, Lake Tremain’s boy-genius son, deciphering his mother’s secret past to discover the truth of his own origins.

As is the nature of any small community, suburbs in particular, these three characters’ stories come to intersect one another in surprising ways. Sometimes not always as surprising as they’re meant to be, and the plot twist here was just a bit much, but plausibility is never really the point of a book that is a blanket: I just wanted to get away for awhile. By late February I’m wanting comfort, warmth and a mini-holiday, and with all of these requirements, Belong to Me delivered.