October 9, 2007

Late Nights shortlisted…

Yes! Elizabeth Hay has made the Giller Shortlist for her exceptional novel Late Nights on Air. Let’s bring it on home now…

October 8, 2007

Thanks

Tropical Thanksgiving went on a brief hiatus yesterday, and we even got to put coats on. Took an autumn walk over to Riverdale Farm, because it’s never a holiday until you’ve talked to a goat. We even saw autumn leaves, which are scarce this year. And so a successful weekend, even if it was thirty five degrees today. Even if I got sprayed by the garden hose and it was nothing but a pleasure. We saw plenty of family inc. cousins, read books, reclined. Ate our leftovers, and even finished them tonight. There are two slices of apple pie left, and we intend to savour them.

October 8, 2007

Hating with a blanket

Cheers upon cheers for Zoe Whittall’s review of Douglas Coupland’s new novel The Gum Thief. (And I would be cheering even if I weren’t voraciously devouring the novel at the moment.) No, Whittall has done something brave with her review. She writes:

Coupland is often criticized for being pop culturally literate, as though this somehow detracts from his work having true literary merit, as though it is somehow suspect to be too current. But he really did originate a type of contemporary literature that is not being afraid to engage with up-to-the-minute technology as it relates to our everyday emotional and cultural lives. I don’t shed a tear for his trillion-dollar advances. I’m just saying we could stand to be less hard on him for being so suspiciously popular.

With no fear whatsoever of undermining her cool indie cred, Whittall admits to liking a book, to liking an author. I’m not being facetious– a lot of critics never get this far. Which is not to say that all books and writers should be fawned over, but the flipside of this is active-hating which is something I find baffling. Not the hating so much: myself, I hate a lot of things, and though indeed “hate is a strong word”, so it should be. But it’s the activeness that is strange. The time and energy some people expend loathing things must eat up their lives, I wonder.

It’s also so easy to hate things: you don’t even have to read Douglas Coupland’s books to hate him. The same goes for Margaret Atwood, and I will quote my favourite-ever overheard conversation, first posted last year:

When I was at the Vic booksale on Monday, two undergraduate-appearing students were sorting through the CanLit table. One held up a copy of Survival to her friend, and said, “How about this one?” The other, sounding like she was repeating something she was very sure of, said, “Oh no, not Atwood. Can’t stand her novels. She just writes the same book over and over again.” Her friend said, “Survival isn’t a novel.” The anti-Atwoodian said “oh” and then rapidly changed the subject.

If you have read Atwood or Coupland, and you still don’t like their work, why not just not read it anymore? Though of course your caustic and bitter references to these figures will become less current, and you may have to talk about something else, but might that even do you some good?

Of course we need critics and criticism, absolutely, but hating mainstream with a blanket hardly constitutes criticism. And even if your criticism is legitimate, devoting your whole life to things you hate seems a bit sad to me. It is often more interesting listening to someone on what they do like rather than what they don’t anyway. Or rather the latter gets old soon and the former can be infectious.

October 7, 2007

Damage Done by the Storm by Jack Hodgins

Reading Jack Hodgins’ collection of short stories Damage Done by the Storm was something of a disorienting process. He writes stories about loggers, skewing my rather shoddily-constructed moral perspective through which loggers are regarded as evil-doers (and yet I cherish books as I do. Hmmm). Hodgins writes even of compulsive loggers, amusingly in “The Drover’s Wife” and so touchingly in “Inheritance”. Place is fundamental to most of these stories, usually Vancouver Island which I know so little of. And these stories go about in ordinary directions, until a sharp turn one way or the other, though so subtly written you mightn’t even know you’re off the path, and then you are, and here is a place you’ve never before.

The final three stories of this collection are connected, and together demonstrate the power of the short story form. “Promise”, “Inheritance”, and “Astonishing the Blind” tell the story of a family over forty years, from multiple perspectives. Each of these stories is brilliantly rich (though “Atonishing the Blind” in particular literally took my breath away), but together they manage to tell more about this family than even a triology of epic novels could. Moreover they tell us so much with such peculiar details, and we fill in the blanks ourselves– a brilliantly personal and engaging process which renders a book our own.

Short stories are unostentatious; they do what they do without calling attention. Of course I only saw the power of these three stories in particular because they were stuck right together, but all the stories in this collection have the very same force. What one incident can tell you about a lifetime: the woman who is waiting for a ferry to dock in “The Crossing”, the retired senator braving a snowstorm to get to his grandson in “Damage Done by the Storm”, the Faulkner scholar and her son travelling through Mississippi in “The Galleries”.

Hodgins also writes well about what it is to be getting old– not to be quite old yet, but to have those days just ahead, and he also writes of the strange predicament many people are experiencing now in still having their parents living at this time in their lives. I remember reading in Carol Shields’ and Blanche Howard’s letters that there weren’t enough old people in fiction, enough room for oldness (beyond, you know, “the grandmother” in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” or something) and I feel Hodgins’ people in Damage Done by the Storm would satisfy what they were looking for. Which would be something like reality.

Short stories are tough because you can’t pick them up and put them down, but rather you have to make time: they’re not as portable as they seem. But they’re worth it. One story before bed went down very well, this collection perfectly complementing my recent bout of nonfiction, and altogether providing me with a satisfying reading week.

October 7, 2007

Style and me

Lately something strange has been happening between me and The Globe and Mail Style section. Once a source of inordinate wrath on my part, now Style is one of the parts of the Saturday paper that I enjoy most. Part of this could be down to the fact that I’ve become older, less poor, and less wrathful over the years. I’m still not really interested in fashion, skipping such features, but I do regularly read Style for the articles. Ha ha. But I do.

This also says a lot about Focus— namely that it’s disappointing usually. But Style seems to have become more substantial. And of course it’s no coincidence that Leah McLaren’s writing appears to have improved as my own knee-jerk bitterosity has decreased, but still some weeks McLaren’s articles are quite well-done. And nearly every week I find myself appreciating Karen von Hahn’s columns, this week in particular with “Why are women so angry? Pull up a chair”. I like Russell Smith’s column. I love the restaurant reviews. Even the gardening page, which pops up from time to time.

And okay, maybe I am becoming more interested in fashion (or at least less interested in perpetually resembling a hobo) because I took Leah McLaren’s advice a couple of weeks back and started wearing eyeliner daily, and I feel significantly more attractive as a result– and not just due to those who have informed me that I might be. This weekend Style celebrates my most favourite colour in the world, informing me that “red is the new neutral” and I feel as though my whole way of being has been validated. Today I even purchased the hat which Leanne Delap featured in her “Knock-off” column last weekend “Cloche Call”. (Which is a really tacky thing to do, now that I set it down in words, but it is truly a wonderful hat. See photo below).

So I have changed. It’s one of the best things about growing up, actually: you don’t have to so angry at everything. You also can afford to go shopping. And maybe all this constitutes selling out, but I am way less ugly these days, and Style is too. I don’t know if I’ve come down to their level, or they’ve come down to mine, but something is eerily synchronous. Which I’d worry about a whole lot more, if I weren’t so happy with my hat.

October 7, 2007

Happy Thanksgiving

Our very first turkey dinner: this is totally a milestone. Deliciousness intaken. Everybody is sleepy. Hooray hooray for harvest time.

October 6, 2007

Certainty wins

The best book wins again. (We’ll find out this week if it could happen for the Gillers too). Yes, because Madeleine Thien’s Certainity has won the Amazon Books in Canada First Novel Award. Deservingly– her novel is wonderful, and if you haven’t read it yet you should do so. I read it earlier this year and its power hasn’t left me yet.

October 6, 2007

Lunch

I had some marvelous lunches this week, and would like to pass on some recommendations. Dessert Trends Bistro at Harbord and Brunswick is as lovely inside as it looks from without. I had a roasted eggplant and tomato sandwich on olive bread, which came with a side salad and figs. Dessert was too much to choose from, which only means I now have to return again and again. I had a chocolate pear cake, which did not disappoint, and next time I shall go for the mango raspberry tart. And then yesterday I had lunch at Mangiacake on McCaul just south of Baldwin. As temperatures remain especially not autumnal, we sat out on the back patio, and I had a roasted vegetable sandwich, and a mediterranean salad (I do love feta). The food was amazing, service could not have been friendlier/more efficient, and we had their brownies for dessert, and everyone was particularly satisfied. Lunches are such a pleasure, and if you take yours at either of these establishments, they won’t be wasted.

October 5, 2007

Tropical Thanksgiving

Tomorrow night I’m scheduled to be roasting my turkey just as the temperature outside “feels like” 40 degrees. Hmm. Some October. Perhaps we’ll just sweat off the calories?

October 5, 2007

The Search for the Secret River by Kate Grenville

Australian writer Kate Grenville was sure The Secret River was going to be nonfiction. The story of her great-great-great Solomon Wiseman, sentenced to death for stealing in 19th century England, but sent to Australia instead. Though was she going to be entirely faithful to the facts, or would memoir creep in? Eventually Grenville would understand that answering such questions wasn’t going to be up to her, and that in order for her story to be invested with life, it would have to become a novel. When names are changed, history is freed, and suddenly the story grows wings, though this winged-creature is very different from what Grenville started with, which, with books, it seems, is often the way.

There was a memoir in all of this after all, though, with Grenville’s new book The Search for the Secret River. Though I haven’t read The Secret River I was attracted to The Search for… by promises of an exploration of the lines between fact and fiction, thoughts on writing by one seasoned in the art (who had written writing guides previously), and by a consideration of the implications of history. Grenville didn’t disappoint, and I do imagine that for fans of the novel, The Search for the Secret River will provide rich insight into its creation, a sort of fly-on-the-wall perspective, which is rare with authors and books.

I approached this book foremost as a writer, and found it valuable in this respective. The deftness with which Grenville slips her wisdom into the narrative, avoiding didacticism and alienation of those to whom such advice might not be applicable. Her “mantras”: Never have a blank page one; Don’t wait for the mood. “Never mind. Fix it up later”. Words which might ring emptily, were it not for their contexts. She deals with practical matters of reimagining dialogue, investing characters with life, how to write “the other”.

Divided into three parts, the first deals with her research into her family background, her understanding of the facts of her ancestors as colonials, the impossibility of uncovering history at all, let alone bringing it back to life. How “history” can take us so far in the wrong direction, and how often the answers are always in places we’d least expect them, and found usually by chance. The second part of the book is a fascinating recounting of how nonfiction turned into a novel after all, and the final third considers the practical matters of this process.

This was a most enjoyable memoir, the sort of narrative that only a novelist could write. And I use the term “narrative” quite deliberately, for this what Grenville manages to create, out of her fact, her fiction, and so many moments of her own confusion. She’s written another story, no more or less powerful for the truth at its core, but rather for the strength of its parts and construction alike.