September 24, 2007
When to Walk by Rebecca Gowers
Rebecca Gowers’ first novel When to Walk, which earlier this year was longlisted for The Orange Prize, is a week in the life of Ramble, a character whose narration reminded me of Poppy Shakespeare‘s, but whose story I found much more satisfying.
The story begins as Ramble’s husband tells her that he’s leaving her, she inferring that he regards her as an “autistic vampire”. Where it goes from there is anywhere you can’t imagine, as Ramble deals her own feelings in reaction, but also with her senile grandmother, difficult mother, her gay best friend who fancies her, and the woman downstairs who is a common thief. Ramble’s own world is very narrow, due in particular to arthritis which makes walking distances painful. She is also a writer, employed to write travel pieces about places she has never been. And she has been balancing on the verge of a breakdown for sometime, which becomes clear as the story progresses. Her husband’s departure sparks crisis, but also provides Ramble with the impetus she needs to make necessary changes in her life.
Where most books have plots, this book has a voice, a character, and a much intriguing one. Ramble’s husband claims that she is impossible to reach, and even to those of us privy to her stream of consciousness, she is elusive. She hides in the shadows. As the novel progresses, however we come to see her in all her multiple-dimensions. Unknowingly she begins to let down her guard, disclosing the experiences which have led to her present situation.
Gowers’ fashioning of Ramble’s voice is a great achievement. First, it is rare to find a disabled character whose disability is secondary to her story. Gowers also creates a convincing point of view of this woman who spends her days watching pigeons out the window, fascinatingly portraying Ramble’s inner-life. It is unsurprising that Gowers’ previous book was non-fiction, as Ramble spends so much time delivering facts herself. She has her own peculiar fixations: etymology, Edward Lloyd, pigeon ailments. She is preoccupied by her own rather cryptic family history. Some people find a novel so bursting with “stuff” tiresome, but it is usually a mark of the kind of book that I like best. A question of taste, I suppose, but all this was much to mine.
September 24, 2007
Someday could be soon
Burma in the news. Do you want some context? Read Karen Connelly’s The Lizard Cage, which took the Orange Broadband Prize for New Writers earlier this year. I read it last winter and found the book so enomously powerful. “Someday the government of Burma will change…,” Connelly writes in her acknowledgements with such faith, and dare we hope that someday could be soon?
Update: read The last public voice of democracy in Myanmar.
September 23, 2007
Where you live with who
This morning I conducted a scientific study. (How exciting!) A study which is made a bit questionable by the limits of my own library, and the fact that my library has many more books by women then men. But still, I looked through my contemporary novels at author biographies and found the following results.
– 50 books did not make reference to the writer’s partner or family, and 24 books did.
– the 50 books with no reference were split evenly along gender lines.
– Of the 24 books that mentioned partners/families, 1/3 were by men, which was more than I had supposed.
– None of the authors who I knew were gay and lesbian made any reference to spouses/partners
– Writers with famous spouses who are less famous than the writers themselves mention their partners by name
– Writers with spouses who are more famous than they are either don’t mention them at all, or don’t name them
I’ve been wondering lately about this sort of information being included in author biographies– why it is important or relevant? I understand why husbands/wives/partners are so gushingly regarded in book dedications and acknowledgements. (Author acknowledgements are my most favourite extra-textual feature). Of course the writer wants to give due credit, but is this necessarily important to the author biography? One might argue that readers want details of authors’ lives, but these details are so vague, there’s little point. They basically say, “Oh, and yes, she is married.” Or is “…she lives with her husband and children” just another way to say that although she’s smart and writes books, she’s not turned her back on femininity altogether? Which would make me uncomfortable.
I’ve had to write three little writer bios this past while, and in none of them have I noted that I live in Toronto with my husband. Though I would have liked them to. If my novel ever sees its way into the world, I would like my biography to end just like that. But I am not sure why– why does it matter to my professional life? (It is also important here to note whether or not authors actually write their own biographies on published books– this I do not know). I suppose for many female writers, it’s a question of marketing– readers might like a writer they can relate to, and domestic details make an author seem more accessible. I think also that many writers would argue that their family is an essential part of their life, whose support makes writing possible, and therefore the family deserves a place in their life story. I would assume that a writer of children’s books would note if they were a mom or a dad.
And so my scientific study was just as inconclusive as “Do Plants Need Air?”– my famous experiment at the grade eight science fair. There are just too many variables, and so still I am curious. Why is where you live with who important? Is it really important at all?
September 23, 2007
13 Ghosts of Halloween by Storms and Muller
I’ve loved Patricia Storms’s blog for ages now, and have come to admire her bookish enthusiasm, her humour and intelligence– not to mention her artistic talent. (Her bookslut is one of my favourite images ever). And so last week I was quite excited to purchase 13 Ghosts of Halloween by Robin Muller, which Patricia has so beautifully illustrated. A singable tale of a group of friends exploring a haunted house, the book was delightful. Pictoral highlights were the twelve werewolves howling, the redhaired girl with glasses, and cool effect created on the thirteenth stroke of midnight. I loved it. This book is adorable, and I am so pleased it has joined my children’s library, to be pulled out in October for many years to come.
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.
