June 27, 2007
ReReading
Just days until the Second Great Summer Rereading Project begins, though the rules are slightly different this year. Last year I (almost) exclusively reread from June to August, and found the experience invaluable. If you read as quickly (and therefore sometimes as thoughtlessly) as I tend to, revisiting a book is essential to truly having grasped it. It’s also wonderful to judge your own progress by how a book has changed for you, and it’s fun to find lost objects in the pages (last year I found many cryptic phrases by my own hand, and also a two dollar bill). This year I felt like one month would do for rereading for me, as I had managed to get to so many books last year. But then I realized I’ve got too many new novels to be read, and if I stopped, I might never catch back up again. And so the project will go on for two months, alternating new reads and rereads. I look forward to books I’ve not read in ages, some of the ones which I reread every year, rediscovering forgotten things, and making all kinds of connections. First up is Portrait of a Lady. I am feeling brave.
June 26, 2007
Call For Submissions
I know there are more than a few among you who write short fiction. As Fiction Editor of echolocation (the Literary Journal of the Graduate English Department at the University of Toronto), I’m sorting through our submissions right now, narrowing down the batch, and if you would like to add your work to it, I would really love to see it. We pay $10 per page, and our coming out with issues I’ve been really proud of. Submission details are on our website, though summer means the process has slowed right down. It would be best to email me at my echolocation address (find it here) so I get it directly. And please contact me if you’ve got any questions.
June 26, 2007
Making It Up
Time has been running away from me lately– a symptom of June. I am now reading Lionel Shriver’s Double Fault and loving it. It’s my take-out book (paperback) whilst I’m reading A Memoir of Friendship, which is too big to carry around with me and really I’d just like to stay home until I finished it.
And last week I had the great pleasure of reading Penelope Lively’s Making It Up. I’ve never read anything else like it, nor was I originally compelled by the premise, but I had to read it anyway because, after all, Penelope Lively is one of my favourites. And fail me she didn’t– she never has.
Billed as “an anti-memoir” in our very age of memoirs, and I loved that idea. Lively takes pivotal points in her life and contemplates could-have-beens. What if her family had escaped Egypt via another route, and gone down in a boat sunk by the Germans? What if she’d gotten pregnant at eighteen? What if she had emigrated to America? But I was concerned as to how this would function in practice; how could this stand up as a book beyond the novelty of it all? And really I just wanted to read a Penelope Lively novel. Why couldn’t she just have written one?
But as I’ve already said, Penelope Lively is not in the business of disappointing. What the anti-memoir tag fails to convey is how truly “anti” these memoirs are; Lively herself is peripheral in most stories, absent from others, long dead in one. In fact this is more a collection of short stories, each with differerent characters, no continuity, and Lively herself as a character doesn’t ever appear. She understands that different versions of herself along other roads would have been someone else altogether. And so she has invented these people, as well as the people surrounding them.
These fictions are build upon the very opposite of fact, and are therefore the ultimate feat of imagination. Conjuring notions of story, of fate, what we are constructed from and where we go, as well as being a solid collection of stories in their own right. And I loved them for that, and for everything. For their authenticity, and for Penelope Lively’s nerve– to tell stories– which are more honest that any truth I’ve ever been told.
June 25, 2007
Perfect Day
For me, today really was the best way to spend a day. After brunch, afternoon was spent lazing. I spent a good while reading in a hammock. I baked scones and served a tea party on the porch (with my own strawberry jam, which had successfully set!). We had a bbq tonight with Jennie and Curtis, with Stu-made burgers, my very favourite watermelon feta salad, and a green salad from the garden. Topped off with an ice cream cake. Dreams come true. I’m off to have a bath now, and so far twenty-eight is grand!
June 24, 2007
Assemblage
We get all celebratory come June, and today is my birthday. I made a project of keeping it quiet this year, which I thought would be somewhat mature of me and worthy of a woman of twenty-eight years. And so this weekend has been easy and sunshine, and full of the things we like best. We’re just back from brunch and are set for bbq tonight. And with all our celebrations, we’ve got a regular shrine going on at our house. A lovely assemblage of cards here, as well as the two splendid flower arrangements which were such a surprise. The tall, gorgeous wild one was courtesy of my sister, and the other in the magnificent vase was from Bronwyn. They’re not normally side by side, and it’s rather glorious to have flowers all around the house. In none floral news, I received so many lovely things (incl. a Miffy umbrella!), but one in particular I’ve got my nose stuck in. Stuart got me A Memoir of Friendship: The Letters Between Carol Shields and Blanche Howard. But then that much goodness is certainly overwhelming, and I have to put it down for a breath every moment or two.
June 24, 2007
Before I Wake by Robert J Wiersema
There are numerous conclusions which can be drawn by the fact I read Robert J. Wiersema’s Before I Wake— a 366 page novel– in the space of a moderately busy 24 hour period, but it’s the cliche I must emphasize beyond anything else: I couldn’t put it down.
Wiersema has an article in this weekend’s Globe Books discussing the comatose in literature in which he makes what he notes is an “obvious statement”: that “Characters in comas don’t lend themselves well to dramatic conflict”. Yet, in spite of this hindrance, Wiersema has created in his first novel dramatic conflict aplenty– between husbands and wives, wives and lovers, mothers and daughters, the media and the rest of us, the needy and the blessed, good and evil, God and Satan. Indeed the gamut is run, conflictually speaking, and at the centre of all of this is Sherry, a beautiful three year old who has been struck by a truck and lies comatose. The accident aggravates cracks within her parents’ already fragile relationship, but they are forced to work together when it is discovered that Sherry has been invested with healing powers– she cures her carer’s arthritis, two cases of cancer, and then the word gets out and the rest is a media blitz.
Not everybody is particularly pleased by Sherry’s miracles. “The Stranger”, dressed in black of course, sets out to disprove Sherry’s powers by any means necessary, recruiting others to his cause and placing Sherry and her parents in great danger. The man who’d been driving the truck that hit Sherry finds himself wandering around the city in a kind of limbo, finding some solace with others in his situation at the Public Library, where wisdom is sought in the obvious place (bookish delights). Meanwhile the crowds gathered outside Sherry’s window are getting larger– pilgrims who’ve come looking to be healed and protesters alike. Tensions build, forces collide, culminating in a supernatural showdown.
Though my own tastes tend toward realism, I readily accepted the world Wiersema had offered me. I was won over by its cinematic scope and ordinary emphases. The narrative was constructed just so, and I couldn’t rest without finding out what happened next. In spite of all the magic. And, yes, I do suppose, perhaps, because of it.
June 22, 2007
The authenticity of fiction
From Penelope Lively’s Making It Up
To write fiction is to make a succession of choices, to send the narrative and the characters in one direction rather than another. Story is navigation; successful story is the triumphant progress down exactly the right paths, avoiding the dead ends, the unsatisfactory turns. Life, of course, is not at all like that. There is no shrewd navigator, just a person’s own haphazard lurching from one decision to another. Which is why life so often seems to lack the authenticity of fiction.
June 21, 2007
Antimacasser turpitude
I really enjoyed Ian Brown’s consideration of vocabulary in the paper this weekend. It was a great article, with points of view from those who see the benefit of a large vocabulary, and others who see large words as just pretension. I also liked the new words the article taught me, including “Struthious”, which means relating to ostriches and has been removed from the COE. Which is terrible, because it’s the best word I’ve ever heard.
My love of struthious might make clear that I tend toward logophilia. Though I have accepted that in order to be alive, language must grow and change, I relish in new words, terms obsolete. I like words that allow me precision of expression. But I am a very poor logophile too, as my vocabulary is not extraordinary. In most ways it is decidedly average, and too peppered with utterances of “brilliant” and “fuck.” But I make the effort to make mine grow. During the year before I started graduate school, convinced I was too stupid to actually go, I noted every new word in everything I read. Which I do much less now, regretfully, because I do so value that massive document on my computer now full of wonderful words I’d collected, like “xanthic”, “lugubrious” and “soporific”.
Teaching English had me thinking about language in a new, subjective kind of way. I learned the word “avarice” listening to “Astral Weeks”. But I mostly credit Margaret Drabble with expanding my vocabulary during that year– those battered second-hand penguins whilst we lived in Japan. Aware that I would never learn Japanese, I set myself instead the task of English, and I will never ever be done.
June 21, 2007
Carry Me Down by M.J. Hyland
I’ve written here before about my interest in young protagonists, or perhaps “my uninterest” would be a more applicable term. So many young protagnonists grate on my nerves and I’ve done my best to try to figure out why they do while others don’t, and I think M.J. Hyland’s Man Booker-Shortlisted Carry Me Down may have pointed me toward the answer.
Hyland’s young protagonist is John Egan, an eleven year old Irish boy who has suddenly found himself with a grown man’s body, and who is convinced that his ability as a human lie-detector will one day win him a place in the Guinness Book of Records. John’s parents are loving, but they have troubles of their own, and socially he is isolated at school. Similarly to Clare Allan’s Poppy Shakespeare, this is a novel written from the perspective of a mentally disturbed character. However without Allan’s agenda (which was satire, and provided some sort of guideline for interpreting said perspective), there is no choice but to trust in the character and seek the clues where they turn up.
John Egan’s perspective is so thoroughly convincing that the reader buys into his sense of reality quite easily, examining a disturbing world through his filter. In the instances where that filter becomes apparent, that world is made disturbing all the more. And it is this convincing nature which makes John Egan function so effectively as a young protagonist. That there is no space at all between his character and the narrative voice, and his eyes are all we get, and the spell never breaks.
The novel is written in the present tense, which of course adds to its immediacy. So much is withheld from John, and from his own perspective, that a kind of suspense unfolds over the most ordinary occurrences. In a related way, the extraordinary is interpreted as rather banal from his point of view, particulary at the novel’s climax, and the true extent of John’s troubles become especially clear. The book reads quickly; there is a sense of unfolding, although into what I was never entirely sure. As a whole, the structure of the novel is not perfect, though I don’t see how a novel from John’s point of view ever could be. But it was that point of view, I thought, which made the novel worth it anyway. It works as a character study and as a story that stands up in its own right.
