November 7, 2007
Non-fiction commitment
I’ve decided to push myself to read more non-fiction. Not just because of what Ken McGoogan said (of course not, I am just as disagreeable as he is), but more because of Jared Diamond. Because my diet of constant fiction is like eating solely chocolate when there is ice cream in the world. When I say that Guns Germs and Steel has grown a layer of dust on my bedside, I wish I was employing a figure of speech. Let the facts stand: I am an atrocious housekeeper, and terribly neglectful of all things non-fic. As a purported book lover, I shouldn’t have the nerve to fall asleep at night.
Carol Shields read Guns Germs and Steel. I learned this from the essay her daughter Anne Giardini wrote about her in The Arts of a Writing Life. To me it reads quite obviously from her fiction that Carol Shields must have appreciated non-fiction, for though her imagination was potent enough to dream her into the head of characters so disparate as Larry Weller and Daisy Goodwill Flett, something more would have been required to fill in the worlds around them. And to read Shields is to be immersed in these worlds, their details: mazes, mermaids, quilts and stones, and late night radio. See the quote below, on characters and jobs– that gap between what the novelist knows and what characters do, I think, is best bridged by reading. And gaining an understanding of how the world works, of course, is important not only for writers.
November 7, 2007
Work to do
“I passionately believe a novelist must give her characters work to do. Fictional men and women tend, in my view, to collapse unless they’re observed doing their work… I’ve read novels about professors who never step into the classroom. They’re always on sabbatical or off to a conference in Hawaii. And artist-heroes who never pick up a paintbrush, they’re so busy at the local cafe, so occupied with their love life or their envy or their grief. Does the brilliant young botanist with the golden back-swept hair, one wisp loose at her neck, wander up a brilliant hillside and fill her pockets with rare species? No, we see her only after work or on weekends when she goes to parties and meets young novelistic lawyers who have no cases to work on, no files, no offices, no courtrooms in which to demonstrate their skills. That husky young construction worker does all his sexual coupling between shifts, and with a blonde-headed graduate of Mount Holyoke as his partner– what about that? Just once I’d like to see him with the pneumatic drill hammering against his body, shaking him stupid. But what if the novelist is a Yale grad, and his father before him? What would he know about how that drill kicks and jumps and transfers its nerves into the bones and belly of a human being? We might see the poor guy reach out for humanistic understanding, discovering Shakespeare-in-the-Park or French cinema, something like that, but chances are against seeing him work.”– Carol Shields, Unless
November 6, 2007
Tenterhooks
Ooooh, tenterhooks. The Giller Prize winner is announced tonight, and we’re still endorsing Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air.
UPDATE: Late Nights on Air takes the prize. Pickle Me This is dancing merrily.
November 6, 2007
Narratives and Polemics
I begin by noting that I like the redesign of the Saturday Globe & Mail. Everything I like best is still there, and then there are additional surprises. I like that Books now starts on its front page; somehow the section reminds me just an ickle bit more of Guardian Review (though of course it’s still nowhere as good). The “Endpapers” essay is interesting too: this week’s was “Tilting at the windmills for literary non-fiction” by writer Ken McGoogan. An engaging piece, as he offended me terribly, but then he won me over by the end.
My offense stemmed from McGoogan’s initial dismissal of fiction, and stemmed for two reasons. One: that fiction is my religion (I am not being facetious) and so I’m bound to get a bit defensive. In my whole life I’ve never found anything closer to magic than fiction, and I’m sorry but non-fiction has never done that trick. I truly believe that slowly surely works of fiction can change the world, and in very different ways than either of these books did.
Second, I was troubled by McGoogan’s assertion that fiction readings were dull, that he “vastly prefer[s] an on-stage conversation or interview, or better still a no-holds barred panel discussion.” He gives the example of Edmonton’s Litfest at which “Audience members challenged speakers and presented arguments. By crikey, they had come to participate”. Yes, but. I personally feel that a book is best enjoyed in one’s own company, but what is wonderful about a public reading is the opportunity to listen. I don’t get that very often myself. No challenges, arguments, thinking of clever questions and retorts, but just listening: passivity is not always a bad thing and many more people should practice it. The world is not always ours to be attacked, or critiqued, but some meet it this way perpetually. With fiction, not so much, and I think this is only positive.
I will have more to say this week on appreciating non-fiction (in regards to Carol Shields), but for now I am not sure I agree with McGoogan that the genre is always the underdog. Indeed non-fiction receives less attention, but aren’t sales doing just fine? Aren’t non-fiction writers sought after by publishers, or at least much more so than fictioneers? Does good non-fiction really need the promotion McGoogan is suggesting it lacks? This I do not know for sure.
What I do know is that McGoogan’s synthesis is perfectly wonderful, as he calls for his revolution. “First step: We divide fact-based literature into two broad categories– narrative non-fiction and polemical non-fiction…. Second step: We abandon non-fiction… We cease to define countless literary works by what they are not”. He sees the necessity for these genres to stand up together with fiction, for each to complement one another. No longer the dichotomy : “Where today we have two main categories, Fiction and Non-fiction, tomorrow we have three.” How positively healthy that sounds, how refreshing. I love that idea, and how fortunate that I read far enough past the disagreeableness to get to it: a patience I learned, perhaps, from my life in fiction?
November 6, 2007
Expansion
They call it a “booktique” but I’m not frightened (yet); that Type Books is opening up a second location can only be seen as a good thing.
November 5, 2007
It's always tea-time
“‘And ever since that,’ the Hatter went on in a mournful tone, ‘he won’t do a thing I ask! It’s always six o’clock now.’
A bright idea came into Alice’s head. ‘Is that the reason so many tea-things are put out here?” she asked.
‘Yes, that’s it,’ said the Hatter with a sigh: ‘it’s always tea-time, and we’ve got no time to wash the things between whiles.’”
—Alice Adventures in Wonderland
November 5, 2007
Tone lowering
Today is my favourite day of the year– the day with twenty five hours in it. Happy birthday to my sister! Just about to finish Larry’s Party (in the bath), which has been everything I wanted it to be. Next up is Alice Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, which I’ve been meaning to get to for ages. I’m ‘xausted now after a busy weekend, but I’ve got lots of blog posts budding my head. Until tomorrow, I suppose, and the days that follow. In the meantime, Tom Perotta profiled at the CBC. More on favourite short stories (and have you read the lists of Rebecca and Steven?). Here for Giller commentary. On literary non-fiction (and I’ll have more to say about this tomorrow). And, um, in sharing a link to Canada’s Cutest Trick-or-Treaters, I have lowered the tone of this blog, but how else can I convey my obsession with very small children dressed up like kangaroos?
November 2, 2007
A literary map more than a person
From The Globe & Mail on Helen Oyeyemi: ‘Two books into the sport of novel writing, Oyeyemi still doesn’t think of herself as a writer because “I don’t write every day and isn’t that what a real writer is supposed to do?” Instead, she “would just as soon be called a reader because that is something I do every day.” She laughed. “I’ve gradually built my identity around books. I’m almost a literary map more than a person.”‘
November 2, 2007
Remembering the Bones by Frances Itani
My husband can be very astute at times. Whilst reading Frances Itani’s Remembering the Bones I was raving about the book and he said, “So you like it the same way you like obituaries then?” Exactly. Nothing to do with death at all, but rather for such a celebration of life. It’s The Stone Diaries without the ghost, but also something original, beautiful, gentle and lovely in its own right.
The book begins with Georgina Danforth Witley, 80 years old and on her way to meet the Queen. She has won a contest open to all of those in the Commonwealth who share Queen Elizabeth’s birthday, and this is an unlikely event in the life of a seemingly ordinary woman. Seemingly, of course: if we’ve learned anything from obits it’s that nobody is ordinary. Georgie with her 103 year old mother still living, with the memory of her eccentric salt-of-the-earth grandmother Grand Dan, with her ability to name all the bones in the human body, memorized from her late Grandfather’s Gray’s Anatomy. She has talked to Queen Elizabeth like a friend for all her life. Georgie had a “polio honeymoon”, she understands why people laugh at funerals. Once she witnessed her husband in an act of love and fell in love with him for all time.
All this she remembers while she is supposed to be lunching with the Queen. On her way to the airport, not even far from her own driveway, Georgie loses control of her car and crashes down into a ravine. Broken in the wreckage, unable to move or shout and with nobody coming to find her, Georgie tells the story of her life, from childhood to widowhood. Putting the pieces together, struggling to keep her brain active. Struggling to “remember the bones” she once knew so well, to name them and thus reconstruct herself, and her story. The story of her most extraordinary ordinary life, and my heart was wrung by the joy and the sadness alike.
What happens to Georgie in the end then? Definitely a talking point, with some interesting ambiguity, but I would argue that the ending is the least important thing about all of this. Though I devoured this book rather greedily, it was for the journey all the while. For Georgie’s voice, and Itani’s prose. For this narrative so constructed that the pages fly by like those on a cinematic calendar, whizzing past faster than days go, until you’re at the end, and you’re finished, but what you’re left with is a life.
November 2, 2007
Remarkable Things
So many remarkable things have come to pass in the last day. That I was shat on via avis for the second time in my life, and as the luck that arrived after the first time was epic, I’ve got high hopes for the hours ahead. (Though perhaps my luck was that I was hit on my hand, which was wearing a mitten, which I was able to remove then, and continue on my way.) That I joined Facebook and then unjoined six hours later, without even adding a friend, for it was altogether clear that Facebook would have destroyed my life. That today I purchased The Journey Prize Stories 19— a real book, from a real bookstore, which contains a story by my ridiculously exceptional friend Rebecca Rosenblum. And lastest, but certainly not lamest, that we are going to California!! Yes indeed, tickets bought. I’ve always wanted to go to California, for I love Joan Didion and the Beach Boys, who are worlds apart, but have been telling me its stories for years now. For me, California is the most mythical place in the whole universe, but the fact of it is about to prove me otherwise, I suppose, when I set foot there. In San Francisco, to be specific, come February, and I am terribly excited, for that is the way one tends to be when lifelong dreams come true.
