September 22, 2007

I have to hope

~Before I could say anything, she declared, ‘Personally, I have an ignorance towards books. Don’t ask me nothing about books. I only read magazines.’
‘I write for magazines,’ I said at once. ‘That’s my job.’
‘Kidding me,’ said Mrs. Shaw. ‘What ones?’
I hoped I wouldn’t lose cachet by showing her. I have an unfiled heap of them on one of the counters right there in the kitchen, where they sit like beached jetsam above a swill of more mobile rubbish.
…[I]t pleases me to know that, technically speaking, ‘jetsam’ is the matter you throw out of a ship when you’re afraid it’s going to sink, whereas, if the ship sinks anyway and is destroyed by the tides, ‘flotsam’ is the debris of the smashed vessel itself.
I have to hope my work is jetsam.~
Rebecca Gowers, When to Walk

September 21, 2007

RR on Rosie

Writer Rebecca Rosenblum has kindly filed her book report on Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls:

The nice thing about Rosie Little is that the central character is often wrong. Chicklit these days (ok, I haven’t read most chicklit, but what I come across) mainly has central characters who are never wrong. Rosie Little’s is far more interesting than a character created in order to alleviate some girl-power discrepancy. Rosie Little just lives her life, and more importantly, watches others live theirs. She is empathetic and reflective, and stupid about certain things. The men in this book are mainly one dimensional and often idealized (or demonized)but I’m not sure that was the writer’s failure of skill or the character’s failure of perception. Which is an interesting question, I think.

This book is billed as a novel [but…] I didn’t think it was much like one. I still don’t, but it is much like a life,
episodic and puzzling and unlikely to climax with a big prize.

I liked it, and I liked it despite the fact that the narrator refers to an erect p*nis as a “sweetmeat” quite early on, which would normally qualify the whole thing for disqualification outright.

September 21, 2007

I am right

While we’re on the topic of feminism, and women’s choices, how about the reponse to this rather silly article in The Globe today about whether women should change their name when they get married. 115 comments, last count. My friend Jennie, who often contacts me in a fury tearing her hair out about idiotic online comments, must be bald tonight. How can so many people be absolutely sure they’re right about something that is absolutely none of their business? How, especially, considering that I am right: women should or shouldn’t change their name based upon what that name is, what their partner’s name is, if they like their dad, love their family, if they are established professionally, if they are especially fond of their name (as I am), if they want to change their name, or if they don’t, or if they can’t be bothered, or if they can, because they think names make a family or because they don’t, or based upon the weather report, if they damn well want it to be. It’s none of my business, and neither is it Matt M’s from Edmonton, or Nancy’s from Toronto. Good night.

September 21, 2007

Cloud of Bone by Bernice Morgan

“She hears a sharp crack… Ian is dead. In that instant Judith Muir knows that every thought she has ever had is wrong. All the answers, those grand possibilities, the carefully constructed theories delineating the upward curve of civilization– all false, all a disguise for what we humans are, what she is.”

Here, within the final 100 of pages of Bernice Morgan’s Cloud of Bone, is the point upon which this novel turned for me. On page 335 to be exact, when three remarkably disparate stories were fused into something solid, stories braided together. Until then I’d found these separate narratives rather curious in their connection. The first is the story of Kyle Holloway, a young deserter of the Canadian Navy during World War Two, traumatized by his wartime experiences. Followed by the story of Shanawdithit, who had been the last of the Beothuk people of Newfoundland, more than a century before on the same land Holloway now treads. And finally Judith Muir, a forensic anthropologist whose husband Ian is killed as they are investigating a genocide site in Rwanda.

Kyle Holloway’s story is brief, curious in its casual brutality. The next part of this book, about the last Beothuk girl, is more detailed, chronicling her people’s desecration at the hands of Europeans, “the Dogmen”. Shanawdithit’s role in this novel is similar to George Cartwright’s in The Afterlife of… by John Steffler, though of course this is the other side of the coin. Though well-evoked with Morgan’s magnificent prose, this part went on long for me. I was struggling a bit as I began the third part of the novel, Judith’s portion, when Ian was dead. Here, I felt on more familiar ground, with writing that reminded me of my favourite British novelists Drabble, Lively, Mantel. Their same preoccupations with history, bones and cities underfoot. “Memory dissolving into the earth”. And the whole project suddenly made sense to me, these stories connecting to say something quite profound and disturbing about “what we humans are.”

The brutality here is not gratuitous– Morgan is far too fine a writer. These tales are carefully spun so that reality is not so off-putting, so that the reader is less overwhelmed by violence than what the violence means. Each of these stories functions in their own right, but in their connection is where the possibility of hope lies: “our stories cross over and break away, drift into a future we cannot see, will never know.” Morgan has engaged with the world, with history, to produce a work that is massive in its scope. She has built a bridge from the rather self-contained world of CanLit out into the rest of the world, allowing different stories and voices to engage with one another in a brilliant conversation.

September 21, 2007

You must

Because I read so much, so fast, I am quite well-versed at moving on. Books end, books shut. But one book has been positively haunting me since I read it more than a month ago. You might remember that I wasn’t so impressed as I read Vendela Vida’s Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. I didn’t know where the tale was leading, and the narrative seemed lacking in complexity. The prose was good, but it was all so weird. Intriguingly so, though, and I read to the end. That end. It shocked me, as it was meant to. Not with horror, but with power. Vida took everything I’d ever supposed about fate, family, obligation, story, history, and she turned it on its head. The phrase still resonates: “And when I hear people say that you can’t start over, that you cannot escape the past, I would think You can. You must.” Nothing else has ever been so wise, and the power of that moves me to tears if I think too hard. Of course you must, and I cannot wait to reread the book, galvinized by its now-inevitable close.

September 21, 2007

Friends

Ah, friends– the sugar on my berry. I received an envelope in the post today from one of my oldest friends (“since we were girls” I am nearly old enough to say), inscribed with the same symbolism we used to affix to notes passed in grade nine math. Indeed, I am a great appreciator of history. But then also of new friends: what kind of a miracle are they? Is it not enough that I met brilliant people when I was twelve and was smart enough to discern they’d be good to know, but that I continue to meet brilliant people to this day? How could such a miserable bloody world manage to be so brilliantly peopled, and bloody all the same? That I do not know, but I do know that I came home tonight from an evening with a new friend, quite hysterical with joy. My new friend. All right, I’ve known my new friend for two years now, but for me most friendships require a while to bud. And in the last few months this one has bloomed, positively. La la la my new friend. Our conversations set the world on fire.

September 19, 2007

Forward

It’s always exciting to have a new author before me! I’ve never read Kate Christensen before, but I took note of Maud Newton’s recommendation awhile back. Today I picked up her first novel In the Drink from the library. She’s also got a new book out: The Great Man. Oh there is always something to look forward to.

September 19, 2007

My song remains the same

(On her website, writer Rona Maynard has written an interesting post in response to my reading of her book. I’ve responded there, but her ideas have brought to mind arguments I’ve made before. My song remains the same, and so why don’t I reprint it? This post was first aired in 2004 on my early-twenties dirty-laundry angst blog which, thankfully, no longer exists.)

Longer than I’ve been alive, women have arguing for their superior lifestyles, zealously attempting to convert the masses in order to justify their own choices. This debate is not so much meandering as a run-around, and the fact of the matter is that it continues because cat fights sell papers. Those who balk at feminism are surely pleased by the civil war in the ranks, and their cause is furthered when the women inevitably fail to come to any conclusion or truce. This is by no means cause to stem debate, but perhaps a good reason to examine the debate more carefully.

The false dichotomy is the first issue. Women talking about choosing not to have children vs. mothers of many; working women vs. stay-at-home moms; women opting out of careers vs. women who never had one in the first place vs. women who choose not to have have children. There is a sense from every one that she is being let down by the others. We see already this is more than a two-sided issue, but then you have to realise also that all these women are talking about the very same thing. Women are not always free, do not always have the appropriate support, to make the same life choices that men can. This is not simply a natural burden of femininity, but rather an injustice that severely compromises the potential of half a nation’s population, and thus the potential of the nation itself.

External forces have to change. Companies have to adopt more family-friendly policies- free childcare, flexible hours, parental leave and such. People who happen not to be women, or who are women without children have to not look upon these changes as a threat. Women have to stop throwing accusations of selfishness at each other, because making lifestyle choices is inherently selfish regardless of your choice. Further, the right to these choices is something no woman should abase or take for granted.

Women without children have to realise that someone has to have them, and that these women are altogether noble for instituting the next generation- surely a a necessary process? Women who have children but work are no less noble for this, and every family works differently and so there is no reason why their arrangement is inferior. Women who stay at home with their children have to understand that working women are doing them a service while they exercise their noble choice. Women who opt out of work in order to raise their families owe something to all of these women and their blazed trails which have allowed for their own choices, and the “opt-out women” themselves are blazing a trail no less important. Finally, women who are privileged enough to be making these choices at all have to realise how fortunate they are.

So the dichotomy looks just as two-sided as it ever was but now it’s man versus woman and it’s certainly easy to see it that way- a man will never be asked if he can handle the double burden of a family and a career. His choices will be made so much easier and without the layers of guilt most women wear like a girdle. However this polarity is equally false. No man benefits from a society in which half the population is underutilized and undervalued, and most men realise this. Most men today were raised in families where the mother’s capabilities were not compromised as well, and in fact all sons and daughters have benefitted from that vantage point. So there is hope after all, more than there ever was.

Women need to stop being threatened by others who choose differently than they. It is paramount that they support each other, and understand the richness and importance of a wide range of lifestyles, in order that women in the future have such a wealth of options still available to them.

September 18, 2007

Bay window

The very best thing I’ve read lately is R.M. Vaughan’s “Dominick’s Fish: The things we leave behind when we die” in the latest issue of Walrus, which uses an amazing story about aquarium fish to demonstrate that “the concept of disposibility is itself false, a convenient conceit.” And writers’ rooms continue at The Guardian, with two of my favourite writers: Sue Townsend and Margaret Drabble (photo borrowed here [and oh I wish I had a British bay window to call my own]). For more good reading, go here for Ben McNally, and then go to his new shop (which is just up the street from my husband’s building- as if he needed yet another place to be sent on errands to). Rona Maynard gets a great review, and a review of Cloud of Bone, the book I’m reading right now. Giller Prize Giller Prize Giller Prize. Hooray.

September 16, 2007

Life on the Refrigerator Door by Alice Kuipers

Stuart and I are quite dependent on one another, rarely apart, and we once spent four straight months together when we were between jobs/countries, and never tired of the company. We’re lucky, I think, but then there is a certain something that comes from distance. Soon after that four months, we returned to real life and one morning I left a message for him on our whiteboard, returning home later to find his reply to me. The exchange was hardly profound, but it struck me– this physical evidence of our relationship, the different ways you communicate when you’re not side-by-side. How much words can do when they stand up on their own, which is the power explored by Alice Kuipers in her new book Life on the Refrigerator Door.

Life on the Refrigerator Door is a funny little book, part YA, a bit novelty. Composed simply of notes from mother to daughter, some just a few words or lines long, but then it made me cry. That is something. Kuipers has demonstrated that a series of notes on their own can assume a narrative structure, convey character, humour, emotion. This is one of those things, I suppose, that would be much harder in practice than it may seem. And it’s also a risk for a new writer to take, when grandiosity is all the rage. A writer must have confidence to create a work like this, a lack of ego to send something so deceptively simple out into the world. This book has left me much intrigued as to what Alice Kuipers will get up to next, and now I am excited to go there.