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”.
March 16, 2007
Ephemera is forever
You’ve got to wonder about ephemera. How a word whose Greek root means “lasting only a day” could be used to classify the bits and pieces of printed matter we cherish as our keepsakes. And I mean letters, theatre programs, postcards, ticket stubs, brochures, greeting cards, and all such various things which stuff my drawers and cupboards. That these items we save forever could possibly bear an etymological link to the mayfly— any insect of the order ephemeroptera, of course, and noted for its life span of just a few hours— is yet another example of the English language’s perplexity.
But then I have to wonder also about ephemera on my own terms. Because my drawers and cupboards are truly stuffed, and chances are that I’ve got a few good years before me still. From time to time I grow concerned that my desire to keep everything will one day find me buried up to my eyes in printed matter.
In particular, I have a big box in my closet filled with cards of all sorts— birthdays, anniversary, Christmas, Valentines, engagement, bridal showers, wedding etc., as well as a fat stack of postcards I’ve acquired over the years. And I cull this box from time to time; whenever I find a card from a name I no longer recognize, I force myself to toss it in the recycling. But in spite of these efforts, the box’s contents continue to amass at an alarming rate. I rarely even look through this box, but I can hardly bear to part with anything inside it.
I do pity the poor somebody who is left to sort through my ephemera once it has outlived me. Sometimes I wonder if I should just toss the lot of it now to make it easy later, and whether perhaps these things were meant to be ephemeral after all. Did I miss the point, going through my life-so-far hoarding such an abundance of stuff? Maybe there is another word for ephemera, and that word is “crap”, and my suspicions will prove correct that none of it is of interest to anyone but me.
But then I was recently gratified to have it confirmed otherwise. To learn that ephemera can be forever.
When my grandfather passed away recently at the age of 94, of course all of us who will miss him were terribly sad, but there was some relief to be had. In an end to his suffering, and that he would no longer have to live without his wife— she had predeceased him in 1998 after 63 happy years together.
But for us there was further consolation, as the extended family went back to my Aunt and Uncle’s house to visit together following the funeral. And we spent a wonderful afternoon sorting through black and white photographs of familiar faces, and also a box of cards, notes and letters which have lasted much longer than only a day. Some of them were over 70 years old.
I never knew that my grandmother had collected postcards, just like I do. And some of the postcards she saved were truly works of art, with “This is a real photograph” stamped on the back as proof of authenticity. Many of the postcards we found were purchased as souvenirs and never sent, shut up in a box all these years so they still look brand new. Beautiful black and white images of British seaside towns, presumably collected by my grandfather while he served in the navy.
One postcard is labelled “A Rough Sea at Brighton”— a photo of waves crashing up against the long-gone but once-spectacular Palace Pier. The night shots are tinted in reds, yellows and blues for a carnival effect. Some of the postcards were sent through the mail with just a brief note. Usually my grandfather apologizing to his wife that it had been too long, but a letter was to follow. During the war he was away for six years.
The greeting cards in the box were equally fascinating, and not only for the notes they held in store, but as objects in themselves. As with the postcards, there seemed to be a superior quality compared with contemporary cards. They were either very elaborate, with fabric pieces, pop-ups, ribbons, bows and gorgeous art, or they were hilariously cheeky, and just so much more interesting than your average happy birthday.
But the messages inside were what won our hearts after all, whether it was the hastily scrawled signature of someone who hadn’t been remembered in years, or that my grandmother was called “Mom” in quotations in her baby shower cards because momhood was still weeks away then. A third birthday card for my aunt from her dad, or a message from my own dad to his mother pencilled in a shaky childish hand.
It was amusing to see the number of belated-occasion cards exchanged between my grandparents, with their humble notes of “Sorry, I forgot.” Though forgetfulness never undermined the sentiment these cards were expressing.
How amazing to find a card from my grandmother dated 1935 with “Happy Birthday to my Boyfriend” on the front. All the cards from the years they had to spend apart during the war, making clear that they were counting down the days. I especially adored the card my grandfather gave my grandmother for their third anniversary in 1939. He noted that if the rest of the years were as good as the first three had been, then he was a very lucky man.
And he was.
And then so too are we, for having all these treasures to remember him by.
March 15, 2007
The Birth House by Ami McKay
All right, so I am the very last one to get on The Birth House train, but even still it wasn’t what I expected it to be. Which isn’t surprising, the novel is not quite what it seems to be. CanLit written by a (transplanted) American. Nova Scotia regionalism with the feel of a book by Fannie Flagg or the Ya Ya Sisterhood series. “A novel” it is proclaimed to be, but then after all it is a “literary scrapbook”. There is something truly original at work in this book, and thus classification is difficult. What Ami McKay has set out to do, she does very well, and this is a remarkable debut from a talented writer.
The plot seems sort of secondary to all the “stuff” within the book, which would matter in most novels, but then the stuff here is so good. McKay uses historical fact, local lore and a dash of magic to render a catalogue of midwifery– not so different from “The Willow Book” which Dora Rare, the midwife in the novel, consults herself. McKay’s novel is constructed from Dora’s journal entries, letters, clippings and advertisements. As a result of this structure, character development can be stunted in places, but then the characters as “types” seem to conform to these as stories a woman might tell over her back fence. A very authentic sense of “this was how it was” without affection.
McKay creates this sense of simplicity, however, whilst employing prose not short of exquisite. Nothing is clumsy and not a line rings untrue. Anyone who composes the line “But I’m so far from home and everything I know that even my prayers feel like sinning” is well on the road to mastery.
And speaking of sinning, McKay doesn’t shy away from the sordid, the brutal, or the brutally honest. Women’s sxual health is provocatively examined throughout, and no punches are pulled, and yet still there manages to be a spirit of lightness. Similarly does the novel treat motherhood and mothering, and womanhood in general. As Dora Rare struggles personally and professionally with restrictions on her freedom and the pressure to conform to societal expectations, the reader becomes her champion and when Dora triumphs– well, her triumphs are so sweet.
