March 23, 2007
My non-response and my endorsement
I’m not going to respond to Orange Prize hoopla again, because I still feel the same way I felt last year and the year before. This year let me just say that I like anything that promotes good books, and as good books by women tend to be my favourite kinds, this list is usually the one I like best. The longlist is a brilliant selection of books to be read and three I’ve read already that wholly deserve to be included.
I’ve read Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngochie Adichie, Alligator by Lisa Moore, and Afterwards by Rachel Seiffert. Each was extraordinary in its own way, I loved the first and third the best, and I am totally putting my bets on Adichie. If the right people her book, I think it could change the world.
March 20, 2007
Painting a map with stories
I’ve been looking forward to reading The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly ever since I heard her read last year at the Kama Reading Series. Never have I hung so close to the edge of my seat just by listening to a story; the tension in that room was palpable. And so I’ve started the novel, and I’m enjoying it. And I am also looking forward to learning more about Burma. I love the way that fiction paints a map with stories, and that when I’m finished with this book, Burma will no longer be just space to me.
Karen Connelly has a beautiful website here.
March 20, 2007
Reality is Ralph
From Lisey’s Story by Stephen King:
~He didn’t even plan his books, as complex as some of them were. Plotting them, he said, would take out all the fun. He claimed that for him, writing a book was like finding a brilliantly coloured string in the grass and following it to see where it might lead. Sometimes the string broke and left you with nothing. But sometimes– if you were lucky, if you were brave, if you perservered– it brought you to a treasure. And the treasure was never the money you got for the book; the treasure was the book.~
March 19, 2007
Soporific Reads returns!
Pickle Me This devotees will be glad to see the return of an old favourite feature. Last year I worked at the library in the afternoons and kept track of books clutched by snoring undergraduates. This year I work the morning shift and there are far fewer sleepers (I suspect they stay in bed instead) but today I spotted one!
The first soporific read in ages: a young girl dreaming away to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
March 19, 2007
Living Properly
The more I think about About Alice by Calvin Trillin, I realize this tiny memoir is actually a guide to living properly. Seriously, lately I’ve found myself thinking, “What would Alice do?” in a variety of situations. I have a hunch I may be better for it.
March 18, 2007
New books brought home
Last day is tomorrow for the half price sale at Balfour Books (601 College St.). We went yesterday, and I was devastated to find that the Penelope Liveleys and Virginia Woolfs I’d been hoping to buy were all gone. Clearly the shelves have been well picked over this week, but treasures remain. I was pleased to pick up so many books I’d borrowed from the library recently and subsequently fallen in love with. Even Stuart got in on the fun. He got two James Bond novels and The Water Method Man by John Irving. I got The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing, which I’ve never read and I bought mainly because I wanted an old school orange Penguin cover. And the rest, I got Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe, and Huckleberry Finn. Sugoi! The shelves are happy to have them.
March 17, 2007
Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O'Neill
Winner of the recent Canada Reads competition, Heather O’Neill’s first novel Lullabies for Little Criminals struck me as a modern Huckleberry Finn. A child, older than its years and younger than it thinks it is, set out into a brutal world where no adult is really trustworthy or even the least bit good. And like Huck Finn, O’Neill’s narrator Baby possesses the most incredibly convincing, earnest and almost hypnotic voice. I would listen to her stories all day. What she notices and how she describes it is a perfect child’s eye view, and yet what she doesn’t say and the spaces in between her words illuminate the reality of her situation and her vulnerability. O’Neill throws out all the right details to give us Baby’s perspective, and to imagine the world she sees.
Her mother’s dead, her father’s a heroin addict; she’s been brought up amongst junkies and hobos, and Baby is not easily fazed. I found the beginning of this book remarkably funny, actually. Bleaker than pink, but I enjoyed getting accustomed to Baby’s voice and her early experiences are a good mix of light and dark. But of course bad gets to worse, and the reader comes to understand that Baby has bad luck and danger on all sides of her. Spanning two years, time in the book goes slow. All this action, and then she tells us it’s just a few months later– which Baby does remark at one point is like a child’s perspective of time. I did find the plot dragging toward the middle of the novel: the beginning reads like a series of vignettes, and soon I wanted something with more drive. However the plot was propelled with the complications Baby faces once she gets mixed up with a pimp called Alphonse and concurrently falls in love with a strange boy from school called Xavier. There were suggestions of a happy ending, though; Baby deserved one. And I don’t think it ruins the book to let you know that.
And so the subject matter is bleak– drug addiction, poverty, prostitution and child neglect tend to be. But then Baby’s voice is so fresh and her perspective so unique that the read is not as hard-going as a plot summary might imply. Oh then by turns this book is heartbreaking, but it has to be. O’Neill’s fiction stands for true stories that aren’t often told let alone so thoroughly examined. I was taken into a whole other world.
March 17, 2007
On the other hand…
Considering my just-below post, I will consider accusations of hysteria and melodrama. And history will inevitably tell a story so different from what we consider the state of literature to be today.
It reminds me of when today I read “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” by Virginia Woolf, or any of her attacks on Wells/Bennett/Galsworthy. I almost feel sorry for them, with her scathing critiques. Because what is this triumverate really, compared to the Great Virginia Woolf? An unfair pitting, so it seems to modern eyes.
But then back then she was all David, and they were decidedly Goliath.
So the moral of that story is that you never really know.
March 17, 2007
Dangerous Territory
The Guardian Books Blog seems to be all down with everything I wrote papers on in my “Authorship and its Institutions” class last year. Like this on acknowledgements pages (though my paper was way better). And this response. Oh yeah– I also wrote a paper called “Oh No! Not Another Portmanteau!” about blooks, which the Guardian blog has nothing to say about (so 2006) but I justed wanted to let you know about that fine title.
Anyway. A Guardian blogger defended chick lit last week. Oh chick lit, you are indeed “much maligned” and the topic of my final paper “Writing in the Shadow of a Hungry Genre”. Now, I don’t seek out chick lit usually, though I have read some excellent books in my time which fortunately or unfortunately fall into that genre. Just to give you my chick lit cred, I’ve enjoyed books including Don’t You Want Me? and My Life on a Plate by India Knight; Good in Bed by Jennifer Weiner (and I love her blog). I’ve been known to read the novels of Jenny Colgan as well.
So I’m not a complete snob; I’ve read around a bit, and I think chick lit/lit is divided more than anything by the use of language. It is not subject matter, plot or character (though there are patterns relating to these in chick lit). Just because there are similarities between the plots of The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver and Me vs. Me by Sarah Mlynowski does not demean one nor heighten the other. And you know what? I am going to read both these books in the next month and let you know if my hunch is right– that in terms of language, they’re worlds apart. (Thanks Ragdoll for that link). I will let you know.
I do agree with the Guardian blogger that chick lit needs no defending. I think chick lit and lit fic could coexist quite happily, could support each other even, that women deserve a wide range of books to choose from and there’s nothing wrong with a novel you can drop in the tub. But. My title was about “the hungry genre”, because chick-lit is a cannibal! Female literary fiction writers (and their readers) have good reason to be threatened by a genre that tries to force all women’s writing into a narrow pigeonhole for the sake of marketibility (and forget about those who don’t fit). It is this pigeonholing that connects Lionel Shriver to “chick-lit” at all (for her last book, she got “anti-chick lit”; her new book is “the next step after chick lit”). Have you ever read Lionel Shriver? I’ve never read anything less “chicky” in my life! And all of this blurring of distinctions would be not so terrible if there wasn’t so much chick lit churned out that’s absolute garbage. My crux/thesis statement? That chick lit is “no longer just a genre of popular fiction, but instead has become the touchstone by which almost all contemporary fiction written by women is gauged”. And I don’t think that this is good for anyone.
And it’s the garbage that is the main problem, undermining Jenny Colgan’s quite chick-litty but good (I think) books; putting crabby brilliant Lionel Shriver up against writers it would be beneath her to spit on; giving India Knight pink covers and cartoons even though the woman is a serious comic genius; re-doing Nancy Mitford with all the chick-lit frills (and see Shriver spitting point). I just wish that readers would demand more of their reading. I wish that different kinds of writers didn’t need to feel threatened by one another. But as I concluded my paper (and with the aid a thesaurus, I can see): “Anti-chick lit’s corybantic gestures and the force of its criticism are a direct response to chick lit’s literary cannibalism, and a last ditch effort not to be eaten alive”.
