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.
August 29, 2007
Senseless destruction
Disemboweled remains of a book were spotted on the corner of Harbord and Spadina this morning, torn pages blowing in the breeze. A thorough investigation managed to retrieve the book’s title and copyright page at the scene, identifying said book as The Rise of the Canadian Newspaper by Douglas Fetherling, published in Toronto by Oxford University Press in 1990. Witnesses to the aftermath of this violence reported being “sickened” by the senseless destruction, the book evidently torn to pieces in a fit of rage, page by page stripped from the spine. Front and back covers could not be found. The Rise of the Canadian Newspaper will probably be missed by Neil Reynolds, to whom its dedication page was inscribed.
August 29, 2007
Incendiary vs. harmonic
Now reading If Today Be Sweet by Thrity Umrigar, the story of a Parsi woman from Bombay who must decide whether or not she should move to be with her son in America after the death of her husband. And it’s strange reading this, so soon after Digging to America by Anne Tyler, and not so long after Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake too. Of course I realize that a Parsi family, an Iranian family, and a Bengali family are each entirely separate entities, but what is interesting is the way that together these books might suggest otherwise, forming what seems to be a generic perspective of the American immigrant experience.
In each of these books a widowed woman somewhat acclimatized to America must approach it as someplace new following the loss of her husband. She must grapple with the American-ness of her beloved only son, and find her place within his family and his new life. Son must struggle between his mother and his wife, and their differing values. A grandchild will be the subject of misplaced adoration and expectations. The woman and her husband will have been upstanding, as immigrants themselves working hard and succeeding. Their son will live in an even nicer neighbourhood in Ohio, Baltimore or Massachusetts, and have two cars in the garage. He will sometimes question the American dream, and his mother will wonder if it was all worth it in the end.
The same-ness is phenomenal. Each of these stories has its own merit (and the Tyler and Lahiri in particular are amazing books), but it is almost as though American immigrant fiction has fallen into that proverbial melting pot.
Further, to compare it to the similar British literature I can think of off the top of my head– White Teeth and Brick Lane. These novels are so much more gritty and their narratives take such incendiary turns, in great contrast to the bird-chirping harmony almost audible in the American books. What does this tell us about each country then? Are the stories really so different, or is it just in how they’re told? Do these works function in respective British or American literary traditions?
I may have to sleep on this one. Or you could tell me?
August 28, 2007
Nothing on earth can equal
Curtis is moving to Ireland, and he wants us to come visit him. Last night he told us that in the new flat “we’ll have a spare bedroom”. And there was something in his “we”– I had to get down To the Lighthouse and get Virginia Woolf to explain:
“‘We went to look for Minta’s brooch,’ he said, sitting down by her. ‘We’ — that was enough. She knew from the effort, the rise his voice to surmount a difficult word that it was the first time he had said ‘we’. ‘We’ did this, ‘we’ did that. They’ll say that all their lives, she thought…”
It was the second time in the past while that I’ve needed Virginia Woolf to sum up love– in June, you might remember, I read this passage from The Voyage Out at Bronwyn’s wedding, and nothing has ever been more appropriate. And Mrs. Ramsay was able to describe what made Curtis’s “we” so significant, far more succinctly than I ever could have. I love the relevance of VW’s words, not long from a century after they were written. A room full of ordinary people, ordinary conversation on a Sunday night, and that Virginia Woolf mattered there. It surprises people, I think, what she knew about love. What she knew about joy.
What then, for the whole story? How do we reconcile that beautiful passage from The Voyage Out with what happened to Rachel? Paul Rayley’s “we” with what happened to “the Rayleys”? With what happened to Mrs. Ramsay? Should the inevitable darkness in Woolf’s work necessarily obliterate the light? I like to think not. Yes, Woolf is dangerous out of context, but there is nothing wrong with pushing the darkness back sometimes– this is what life is. This is what hope is.
Hope is moving away to Ireland on the trail of a girl, and even knowing what I know, twentieth century aside and all, I look forward to hearing Curtis say “we” all our lives. To Bronwyn and Alex, and the refreshingly solid ordinariness of their love, whose power can bring tears to my eyes. It is seeing the world all around us, and venturing forth anyway, and hope is, surely, as Woolf knew, a most heroic act.
