April 22, 2007
The Horseman's Graves by Jacqueline Baker
“…or so it was supposed,” writes Jacqueline Baker in her new novel The Horseman’s Graves, “since no one ever did learn for certain and it was all pieced together in the usual way, as history always is, by hearsay and supposition and outright imagination”. Such is the tale Baker tells, and clearly this is a “tale”– old-fashioned and unselfconscious. The story is filtered through various points of view of members of a prairie community close to the Alberta/Saskatchewan border, and it is this union of voices that allows the story to function differently than so many other prairie stories with their isolated first-person narrators.
Though of course this community is no neighbourly idyll. I cannot pinpoint one character at the epicentre of this story, but the characters who come together to fulfill this role are each alone in their own way– the Schoff boy who is hideously scarred after an accident; his parents who are so isolated in their grief; Lathias, the Metis hired man who caused the accident and becomes devoted to the boy; the bizarre character of Leo Krauss (whose family had been feuding with the Schoffs since “the old country”); Leo’s first and second wives, whose union to him is unfathomable to the rest of the community; and Elizabeth, the daughter of Leo’s second wife who arrives in town with her mother’s marriage and casts various spells with her bewitching looks and her strange behaviour.
And the tangled web of all of these characters (whose ties are not substantial enough to render any of them not lonely) is conveyed by each of them, and by their neighbours with a wonderfully limited omniscience on the narrator’s part. It’s so effective to come to understand a character through what others see. Baker writes beautiful descriptions of landscape, reveals so much with dialogue and weaves something lovely with humour and darkness together. She develops her tale in such a roundabout way that makes it feel like a yarn, and yet momentum is present all the while. Her pacing yields a fabulous suspense, and she holds back enough to allow her realism a decidedly ghostly edge.
I liked the unfashionableness of this book, and I am not entirely in the habit of being contrary. I like what seemed to be Baker’s utter concentration on a story for the sake of itself, and the manner in which the narrative seemed to be “crafted”. That with a genuine skill with language and story, Baker successfully realizes her vision without having to try to be clever.
With The Horseman’s Graves Jacqueline Baker has written a real-live story with legs, and it runs and it runs and it runs.
April 22, 2007
Go outside
Lionel Shriver, you are so famous these days! And I am rather pissed that when I went to see you a few weeks ago I only brought your new book to sign, and not your very first book which I own and, according to this profile, is worth a good sum. I find people who arrive at signings with stacks and stacks a bit obnoxious, but perhaps there is method? Our national paper shamed me with its lameness this weekend, although Rex Murphy’s column was extraordinary. Celebrate Muriel Spark.
Now go outside.
April 20, 2007
Sign of the times
Yes, it’s true. I saw it with mine very own eyes.
The Big Chill is back open for business!
April 20, 2007
Greetings
Greetings from the state of things! From the land of green grass, blue skies, painted toenails, sandals and cropped trousers. Exposed tattoo courtesy of the University of Saskatchewan Women’s Studies Program (no relation). Today I am going out in the sunshine to drop off the marked-essays and then get my hair cut. Tonight I’ve got a party with my creative writing comrades. I just spent a half hour on hold with Passports Canada, during which I put in a load of laundry and cleaned out my closet. The sullen woman on the line assured me I would get my passport in time for my trip, even though one of my references has moved to Antigua. Hooray!
The season has begun. We’re having an ice-cream van turf-war on our street. I have totally got the fever.
Oh, please do check out Patricia Storms’s Art Imitating Lit comic strips. In terms of good things that woman creates, Booklust is just le tippe de le iceberge.
April 19, 2007
Take another chance on the prairies
I’m starting to read The Horseman’s Graves today and I’m feeling nervous, which you might understand if you’re aware of the problems I’ve had with prairie fiction. Prairie fiction makes me absolutely crazy.
However I was somewhat reassured by this (rave) review of the book from The Globe this past weekend. Particularly by this bit: “Though the geographical, cultural and temporal setting of The Horseman’s Graves might generate comparisons to early 20th-century practitioners of “prairie realism,” Baker displays little of their inclination to romance, nor does she set up the prairie landscape and community to represent oppressive forces to be succumbed to or transcended. Her judicious plotting avoids parable and object lesson, and insists that the story of these people in this place is worth telling for its own sake.”
I do hope so. And I suspect my long-suffering husband hopes so too.
April 18, 2007
That's some couch
Introducing the new couch– the most exciting item to pass through our door since two weeks ago when we got a salad spinner.
And so clearly things have been a bit dull around here domestically, but it’s all looking up now. The essays are marked and ready to be sent away, and the sun is shining for the first time in weeks. The weather forecast for the weekend is promising. Now reading Open by Lisa Moore, and each story seems like a package wrapped up just for me. And of course, there’s the couch. Reclining has never been so much fun.
April 17, 2007
Have you heard the news?
My feelings for the Hip Hop Wordsworth Squirrel have moved from abject pity to resigned amusement, but now I am totally in love. I love the Hip Hop Wordsworth Squirrel, and I love his beats. Come our trip to England in June, we’re totally going to Cumbria. I truly am rap’s MVP, though if I were publishing this on the Lake District’s website I’d have to call it “rap” as per their style guide, apparently.
April 17, 2007
Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky
Suite Française is such an intriguing text. I read it in the context of Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (upon which I’ve been marking many an essay during these last two weeks), thinking about Ondaatje’s artful blend of of history and story which foregrounds the latter. Némirovsky’s text goes beyond that, though during her writing she did have a similar blend in mind– as she remarked in her notes: “the historical, revolutionary facts etc. must be only lightly touched upon, while daily life, the emotional life and especially the comedy it provides must be described in detail.”
In fact it is only Némirovsky’s own circumstances (she died at Auschvitz in 1942) that have allowed history bear so much upon this work. Suite Française comprises two novellas, as well as two appendices, the first being notes and journal entries by the author during her composition, and the second letters and telegrams which illuminate the perilous situation for her and family between 1936 and 1945. And so what fascinates me continues to be the question of what we should make of this work in its entirety– this blend of story against history, against the history of its author, and the story of the text itself (that the novellas must have been written almost contemporaneously to the events which they describe, and that the work was saved by one of Némirovsky’s daughters in a suitcase whose contents she did not discover until the 1990s). The result is fragmented (as you might expect of the unfinished work of an unfinished life), but there manages to be something of a wholeness all the same. Story upon story compounded upon history, and it all hangs in a balance which tells us of not-so-long-ago.
But we need not examine Suite Française within so broad a context. Here I will echo what every review I’ve read of this book has said: the story stands up. Némirovsky was famed in France before her death; she’d written numerous novels as well as a biography of Chekhov. News of her talent should not be news at all.
“Storm in June” and “Dolce” are the first two of what was to be five novellas telling the story of France at war. “Storm in June” takes place against the chaotic events of June 1940 before the fall of France as residents of Paris fled the city. The range is sweeping which I resisted at first (I am not so fond of being swept) but I soon became comfortable with the many perspectives (one whole chapter from the point of view of a cat!), the contrasts between classes, the furious pace. In the beginning the characters seemed like types more than people, but I soon came to know them and their connections intimately. I also came to understand why Némirovsky might have created types consciously: in her book it is people which are the cogs in the war machine. Says one character, “What we’re going through is down to people and people alone.”
Though of course her main focus is the people who have no control over this machine, which is seen particularly with “Dolce”. The second novella takes place in a German-occupied French village during 1941. Here we see regular people operating under extraordinary circumstances: “It’s a truism that people are complicated, multifaceted, contradictory, surprising, but it takes the advent of war or other momentous events to be able to see it.” And indeed the characters are people now– even the German soldiers. Némirovsky creates a marvellous tension throughout the novella, and, as with “Storm in June”, she wraps her tale in the most wonderful prose (brilliantly translated, or so it seemed to me, by Sandra Smith). Evidence of humour, tenderness and love abounds throughout this work, rendering the author’s fate particularly tragic.
But as her daughter stated in a BBC interview: “For me, the greatest joy is knowing that the book is being read. It is an extraordinary feeling to have brought my mother back to life. It shows that the Nazis did not truly succeed in killing her. It is not vengeance, but it is a victory.”
April 17, 2007
Short Orange
Announced: the Orange shortlist. And we will be cheering for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie all the way.
April 17, 2007
Or both
Curtis is back, and man, did he ever bring candy. We are pleased. In less pleasant news I’m in a state of high-agitation regarding my thesis defense next week, the undergraduate essays which are trickling in slowly conspiring to ruin the time I have left before my full-time job begins, wondering indeed about my passport application (“up to ten weeks” they’re saying? Well, we’ve arrived), arrangements for our trip to England in June, how I’ll manage driving on the wrong side of the road. Plus the sun has yet to make an appearance this April, which is sort of rubbish. I would prescribe myself a stiff drink, or a hot bath, or both.
I’m also bothered that I can’t find Miffy books anywhere in this city. I even ventured into the mean blue bookstore that dares not speak its name, and no dice. If anyone can tell me where I can find some Bruna lit, I would love the tip because I know two babies (newborn and about-to-be) whose libraries need starting.
Good lit-news: Lionel Shriver in The Globe, CanLit in Hungary, and UofT makes its contributions to the Internet Archive.
