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.
November 2, 2007
And throughout all this time
“And throughout all of this time, each event flew down like a separate pattern threading itself through a bolt of cloth. Each moment hummed with energy, shifted and settled until assured its own space and shape. And then, some unseen hand darted a needle into the entire bolt and drew it together so that all of the patterns merged and no single image could be unravelled or pried off.” –Frances Itani, Remembering the Bones
November 1, 2007
Books before me
My friend Bronwyn once wrote me in an email, “I haven’t read Mrs. Dalloway because then I will have read it and I won’t be able to look forward to reading it.” I understand entirely. Me, I get a frisson of sheer joy every time I remember that I’ve still got unread Carol Shields before me. How I hate that the list is so finite (and ever depleting) but I still haven’t read Larry’s Party, A Celibate Season or her short story collections (except Various Miracles which is one of the most perfect collections I’ve ever read). I’ve been avoiding it all on purpose– what will I ever do when I am through? Read them all again, I suppose, as my annual reread of Unless has never failed to hold new discoveries. But still. Books before me, books which I’m sure to love– is there any greater joy? And Larry’s Party starts tomorrow…
November 1, 2007
Favourite short stories
Top ten short stories in The Guardian. I believe I’ve got ten of my own, in no particular order, because I’ve never met a list I didn’t like.
1) “The Third and Final Continent” by Jhumpa Lahiri
2) “Good Country People” by Flannery O’Connor
3) “Scenes” by Carol Shields
4) “Astonishing the Blind” by Jack Hodgins
5) “Wants” by Grace Paley (and everything by Grace Paley)
6) “True Trash” by Margaret Atwood
7) “Down At the Dinghy” by JD Salinger
8) “Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass” by Carol Shields
9) “Moral Disorder” by Margaret Atwood
10) “Feathers” by Raymond Carver
October 31, 2007
What they are
“My life unknits as I lie here. How many days? How many nights? My stories are my mother’s stories, my grandmother’s, my daughter’s. I did not plan any of them; they became what they became; they are what they are.” –Frances Itani, Remembering the Bones
October 31, 2007
Until asparagus is in bloom…
Once again I’ve got a reason to declare summer officially gone, and I think this time I mean it. Tonight was the final Trinity Bellwoods Farmers’ Market, which we’ve been dutifully attending since July when Barbara Kingsolver changed our lives with Animal Vegetable Miracle. And what a summer it has been: blueberries to blackberries, cucumbers to squash, blue potatoes and black tomatoes. We’ve learned how to cook swiss chard and kale, beetroot and pumpkin. Grilled veg on the barbeque became roasted vegetables alongside chicken dinners as the nights grew cooler. Yum organic sheep’s cheddar, and beef, and lamb. We’ve been so lucky, and beyond as we also reaped our own harvest this year, our garden providing us with lettuce, tomatoes, melon, peppers, and cucumber. This summer we’ve been quite successful at purchasing local produce, and it’s sad to contemplate giving all that up now that the season is over. Our goal for the winter is to confine our fruit and veg to the continent, which is a bit lame I realize, but it’s still going to be a challenge. We’ve got some frozen tomatoes and strawberries in the freezer for the depths of February, to remind us what freshness tastes like. And in the meantime, of course, we’ll be longing for spring. For asparagus season, which, can you believe, I’ve lived through 27 of already, but never knew enough to appreciate.
October 30, 2007
Tomorrow by Graham Swift
Reading Graham Swift’s new novel Tomorrow was for me an exercise in spoilage. The whole story hangs upon an essential hinge, but you see by mistake I’d found out what it was already. I can’t remember where but some review gave the whole thing away, and so I wondered, knowing what I know, would the novel be much good anyway? Will knowing the end ruin the beginning, middle, and perhaps the end in the end? And it didn’t– turns out Swift’s hinge was not so essential after all, but that it swings matters. In fact the swing itself is the point of the entire book.
Tomorrow employs a number of tricky devices, experimenting with the bounds and possibilities of conventional narrative. Swift uses second person narration for starters: middle-aged art dealer Paula Hook is telling this story to her sleeping teenage children one week just past their sixteenth birthday. It is the story of their family, beginning with the beginning of her relationship with her husband Mike and their first encounter “a stone’s throw” from Brighton Beach, and following them through the years to their blissful present. And the narrative trajectory is tricky because nothing terribly story-worthy actually happens– ordinary life is all, in fact a rather idyllic ordinary life. Compelling, yes– but ordinary.
Paula is telling this story because she is unable to sleep, because she is fearful of what will come of the information she and her husband will reveal to their children tomorrow. The information itself isn’t given until late into the novel (and this was what I knew from the start, incidentally), and here is Graham Swift’s third trick: to make the act of withholding engaging. To let suspense be his sole narrative driver, and indeed, as it has been reported, what Paula is withholding is rather anticlimactic, but to Swift it is the very withholding that matters.
Is it enough to sustain an entire book? Almost, I think. Swift nails Paula’s voice perfectly. Written as spoken, with backtracking, aversion, digressions, he conveys her love for her children and her husband, and her complicated feelings about “tomorrow”. He fits a huge part of a life into the span of a night into the span of a book, and this compression reads convincingly. His reverence for ordinary life and love reminded me of Carol Shields’ work (and I am going to read Larry’s Party soon, so I am curious to see how these two books might be similar with authors writing in the voices of the opposite sex). Mike– a biologist– and Paula’s relationship is a marriage of science and art (similar to that put forth by Margaret Drabble in The Sea Lady, and perhaps better realized). I enjoyed how both these characters engaged with the world through their work. And yes, it was interesting to see Swift playing with just what narrative can do.
However this focus on suspense, on withholding, seemed to function in the end to keep the really fascinating questions from being asked. What will happen tomorrow, I wondered, much more than I cared to know everything that was running through Paula Hook’s head. Why had she and husband chosen to withhold this information from their kids? How had they decided to do this? And really, more than anything, what was the big deal? Because if the hinge on which this novel hung didn’t matter to me, why should it really matter to Paula?
I enjoyed reading this book, but what was pivotal really wasn’t the point. Is our experience meant to be analogous to Paula’s then? Will she learn what we do? That instead of the “tomorrows” Swift focuses on, we remember all the other days.
October 30, 2007
Peppermint Twist
It was with real pleasure that I received the latest issue of The New Quarterly in the post today, containing my very own story “The New Peppermint”. Should you wish to purchase a copy of the magazine yourself, here for where it can be found on the newsstands. It’s a beautiful issue, redesigned and so rewardingly. Also contains a piece by Elizabeth Hay, and you can imagine that for me to be published alongside her is a tremendous honour considering the way I feel about her latest novel Late Nights on Air. So obviously I am pleased as a writer, and as a reader I can’t wait to get down to reading the whole issue through.
