September 6, 2007
BiblioTravel
A chance google search led me to BiblioTravel. Do you know it? Plug in the name of a place, and BiblioTravel will generate a list of books which take place there. How cool. Peterborough brings up Battered Soles, and I’m intrigued. Montreal’s list is epic, naturally, though the lists are incomplete, I’ve found. Thankfully you can add and amend, in a wiki styly. I intend to explore much further.
September 6, 2007
October by Richard B. Wright
I’ve never read Richard B. Wright before, somehow missing the whole Clara Callan hullabaloo, but last week my friend, the much astute Rebecca Rosenblum, described him to me as a “journeyman”. And upon finishing Wright’s latest novel October I understand what she means. For there is a solidity evident throughout October, an assurance that all its parts are assembled and functioning as they’re supposed to be, and yet the success of the project is understated. It runs so quietly you can’t even hear the hum. And yet hum it does, weaving two different narratives together seamlessly, grappling with complexities, alluding to great literary works, and, with references to modern and popular culture, managing to be so much of this world.
As with most great novels, what this book is about is not the point of it, but I will recount the story nonetheless. James Hillyer, a widower in his seventies, is suddenly summoned to England upon receiving the news that his daughter who lives there has terminal cancer– the same kind to which he’d lost his wife years before. Whilst in England James has a chance encounter with Gabriel Fontaine who he has not seen for sixty years, not since a pivotal summer when they were friends and both loved the same girl. And from this point chapters alternate between James’s memories of that summer, and his experiences in the modern day when, still adrift by the news of his daughter’s illness, he accompanies Gabriel on a most unusual trip to Zurich.
The solidity is James Hillyer’s calm and even tone, and yet the hum is there– that these disjunct pieces of his life come together to mean something much greater. Further, that this story asks questions, and then dares not to answer: “But what if many things we encounter have no answers? What if they just remain unsolved mysteries?” And so they do remain, but as readers we still come away satisfied. October is more to be pondered than digested, and, I expect, also to be revisited from time to time.
September 5, 2007
New Season
My second summer of rereading proved as fulfilling as the first, though it was not as concentrated. But it was a joy to revisit classics: The Portrait of a Lady and To the Lighthouse, which I’d previously just read as a student, but it was something different to approach them on my own terms. My regular rereads: Slouching Toward Bethlehem and Unless were better than they’d ever been. Books I’d read but forgotten, and certainly not because they were forgettable: The Summer Book, and The Blind Assassin. I have a theory that you’ve never really been anywhere until you’ve been there at least twice, and I think this might very well be the case with books.
But now it is September, and new books are blooming. I’ve been binge reading lately– what else are holiday Mondays for if not a book in a day? Looking forward to the long train journey this weekend to get some more books under my belt. Oh, there are some wonderful books coming out this Fall, so stay tuned here and I’ll recommend the best ones. Watch for my review of Richard B. Wright’s October very soon. I am now reading Turtle Valley by Gail Anderson-Dargatz, who I’ve never read before.
After reading under restrictions for the last two months, being able to read so freely feels deliciously licentious.
September 5, 2007
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
New Zealand novelist Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip tells the story of Matilda, a young girl whose South Pacific island is in the midst of brutal conflict during the 1990s. Against the most uncongruous backdrop of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, Matilda unaffectedly conveys the violence and deprivation she witnessed and experienced, constructing an unlikely bridge between Dickens’ story and her own.
Her island is under a blockade, infrastructure has crumbled, and there is no school anymore, until Mr. Watts takes on the role of teacher. As teacher Mr. Watts– the last white man on the island, eccentric and strange even through Matilda’s eyes, he wears a clown nose and pulls his wife around on a trolley– is unsurprisingly unconventional, and invites the children’s parents into class to supplement his own knowledge. These lessons tell the history of the colour blue, how to kill an octopus, how to cheat the devil, why to have faith. Mr. Watt’s own area of expertise lies with literature, however, Dickens’ novel in particular. Matilda is immediately entranced: “By the end of chapter one I felt like I had been spoken to by this boy Pip. This boy who I couldn’t see to touch but knew by ear. I had found a new friend./ The surprising thing is where I’d found him– not up a tree, or sulking in the shade, or splashing around in one of the fields streams, but in a book.”
Dickens’ story reconstructs 19th century England for this little girl on an island time and worlds away. Pip becomes real to Matilda, and as a character he much brings turmoil to the village– a harsh testament to the power of story. When Dickens’ novel goes missing, Matilda and her classmates reconstruct the story from the fragments they remember, their imaginations enhancing these inevitably. And what follows demonstrates the thin line drawn between our lives and our stories, and the fragmentary nature of both.
Matilda’s cool tone is tragic in the context of her whole story, but it also serves as a most engaging technique. To render the extraordinary as ordinary is a tremendous trick of voice. And what an experience as a reader, to be lulled by even tones, words you know, scenes you think you understand, and then to realize this is something entirely different. That this narrator will not take you where you expect to go, and neither will her story. So it goes with Matilda, allowing the violence and brutality of her recollections to be couched in terms which are easy to ingest, but once we’ve put the pieces together they are all the more horrifying for that ease. It is through these acts of reconstruction that Matilda becomes like Pip to us, demonstrating the way that stories come to life.
September 3, 2007
The dog in the nighttime
Off to Peterborough this weekend, to visit family and friends, which was delightful all around. The summer lingers, but not in a tired way, and autumn seems like a possibility rather than a sorry fate. My dad took us out for breakfast Saturday, and practised our throwing arms. We went camping Saturday night, using our new tent for the first time (a charm). It was a gorgeous night, and we had a brilliant fire, roasted smores, saw fireworks across the lake, the sky thick with stars– we saw the milky way! Retiring to bed with the cricket hum, and then the dog on the neighbouring campsite started barking, howling. The howling kept us up most of the night. From time to time an inhabitant of one of the tents there would call out “Shut the f*ck up Darcy.” Because apparently the dog’s name was Darcy. Dog didn’t understand English, however, and so the language was ineffectual. Someone else came over and tried to kept them to quiet the dog around 3:30 but they just ignored her. We got up then for the bathroom and the moon was so bright we didn’t need a flashlight. Soon the sun rose, and Darcy kept on. Geese were honking. It was morning. I’d slept that night on the cold hard ground, and I had hardly slept at all. This doesn’t mean that camping wasn’t hilariously wonderful, but just that Sunday was shot to hell as we spent the day en-mattress. Mom-cooked dinner, and then out in downtown Peterborough for fatigue-laden hijinx. Fun was had. We came back to Toronto this morning.
September 3, 2007
To be read
Just finished Mister Pip, and now on to October. In both books characters are reading Great Expectations. The universe appears to be sending up flares then, and I found a copy of Great Expectations at my mom’s. Officially to be read.
September 3, 2007
Why Dickens
“People sometimes ask ‘Why Dickens?,” which I always take to be a gentle rebuke. I point to the one book that supplied me with a friend at a time when it was desperately needed. It gave me a friend in Pip. It taught me you can slip under the skin of another just as easily as your own, even when that skin is white and belongs to a boy alive in Dickens’ England. Now if that isn’t an act of magic I don’t know what is.” From Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip
September 3, 2007
Pickle Me This Plea
This upcoming weekend, Pickle Me This goes to Montreal! How exciting! One problem– Pickle Me This has never been to Montreal before. I do know that many of Pickle Me This’s readers are Montreal-aficiondos, however. Any chance you could offer your advice?
Whatever shall we do?
Wherever shall we go?
All suggestions welcome
in the comments box below.
August 31, 2007
The Source
Now reading the Man-Booker longlisted Mister Pip. DGR enjoyed it in July, and reviews have been rave. I am enjoying the story so far, and believe the rest will fulfill. It’s yet another book, however, that I am reading without knowledge of the source material– last, of course, was when I read The Seven Sisters without The Aeneid. Mister Pip, obviously, references Great Expectations, which I’ve never read. And so I suppose that now I have to…
August 30, 2007
If Today Be Sweet by Thrity Umrigar
Thrity Umrigar’s second novel If Today Be Sweet is a worthwhile read, in spite of its problems. Some passages are so beautifully written and suggest to me why her previous novel was so acclaimed. “There’s a limitless, undying love that does not confine, that does not imprison or hold back, but that dances ahead of you like a shimmering sprite, that entices, that beckons you until you follow…” I did enjoy reading about Sorab, the now-American son with India far behind him, and the way “he had longed for his life to be seamless”. However ultimately something was facile: the people too polite, the children too precocious, endings tied too neatly. Everything in these characters’ lives serves as a prompt to start them “marvelling about America”, whether it be good or bad, and the nuances of ordinary life go missing. The ending, also, was a bit implausible. But still, there was a bit of magic here. If Today Be Sweet was something of a pleasant read, though its reality was not all convincing.
