December 15, 2006
The Ledbetter Serial Arsonist
Before we left Toronto, I had promised postcards home— to Caroline, my friends and even to my mother. But there were no postcards of Ledbetter in existence. You could buy postcards in Ledbetter, at the old train depot museum, but they were actually postcards of the Grantville Town Hall and the Grantville Floral Clock. They used to sell Ledbetter postcards some years ago, I learned from the woman in the conductor’s cap who staffed the museum. But then the postcards ran out and they never restocked, and so many buildings had burnt down by then anyway.
“Have you heard about our arsonist?” the woman asked me.
She led me over to the display in the corner which told the story of serial arsonist Randall Hicks who had destroyed over fifty buildings in Ledbetter over a more than twenty-year spree— from garages and sheds to the Town Hall and Public Library. Hicks was an accountant and a careful arsonist. Only one person was ever injured in one of his fires; a clear case of wrong place at the wrong time, he had been robbing a store Hicks had targeted. And no one had ever managed to catch Randall Hicks either. He’d turned himself in in 1966, one day after his father died, saying he would have done this years ago if it weren’t for the shame it would have brought his dad.
“And that’s why we don’t have postcards anymore,” the woman told me, so I picked up five of the Grantville Floral Clock.
December 15, 2006
Half of a Yellow Sun
I can’t imagine what a writer must be fighting with when she sits down to write about a war. How do you fashion a narrative that is not simply an excuse for the backdrop? How can you have characters in all their multiplicity? How do you write about brutality and deprivation, and love, and beauty, all within the same book? In Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has crafted an extraordinary tale, and craft is truly the word. This novel tells the story of Biafra, an independent state formed within Nigeria in 1967, and the civil war that followed before the Republic’s fall in 1970. I’d never heard of Biafra before, and the reason I will never forget it is Ugwu, Olanna and Richard, for this book is their story as much as it is Biafra’s. And this is Adichie’s feat, for it is their stories which awoke Biafra to my ignorant mind. The brutality within this book would have been unrelenting, were it not for broken chronology and alternating narrators with every chapter. The result is a structure which accomodates the vastness of this project, but also facilitates the reader’s engagement with the narrative and each character. What I found most incredible was Adichie’s capacity to generate sympathy for characters who did terrible things, which is essential, in that broken couples had to go on together, and that Biafrans and Nigerians had to learn to live together again once the war was over.
I come away from this book with a similar impression to that I had after reading Sweetness in the Belly— that I had gained an education as much as a story. I remain startlingly ignorant about Africa, and I don’t claim that a novel is any sort of tool toward substantial identification, but I still think that fiction is the best place to go for knowledge. It’s not about empathy, but it’s about learning. That this happened in the world, but I never knew. And thanks to Adichie, I don’t think I’ll ever forget.
December 14, 2006
World's Tallest Man Saves Choking Dolphins
The prize goes to Jennie for alerting me to this news story: World’s Tallest Man Saves Choking Dolphins. Can that possibly be true? But if it is, do we not live in the best world ever?
Half of a Yellow Sun continues to be extraordinary. Does the fact that my cup runneth over for every book I read make you think I love books lightly? Because I don’t. I just choose the books I read very very carefully. Anyway, I’ll write more about this one tomorrow. Today, I am rewriting one of my chapters and listening to Zero 7’s “Destiny” on repeat and I am in a very good state of mind.
December 13, 2006
Results
I just finished my marking and printed out my own essay! And so the toiling is over. Which is not to say that I get to reenter the world as yet, as I’ve been neglecting my creative project for the last five days, and have a mess of short stories to write over the holiday. It just means my seclusion becomes less intensive and much more pleasant. I am now reading Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which I chose because I never saw a review for it short of raving. And it is an amazing novel so far, but so brutal. I can’t read too much at once.
December 13, 2006
Long Live the BauMaus
Though I require no excuse to rave about my husband, it’s always nice to have one. It was four years today that he came into my life, and ever since I’ve been happier than I ever thought was possible.
December 11, 2006
Not the End of the World by Kate Atkinson
After I had read just three of her novels, Kate Atkinson was added to my list of favourite writers, and I am currently exploring the rest of her work with glee. Her collection of short stories Not the End of the World(2003) was a brilliant read, fun and a bit mind-bending. My favourite thing about this collection was its collectionness. These stories belong together, linked through different characters’ relationships. A passing reference in one story might become the main character in another, which makes for an engaging reading process (and much rereading to understand the emphasis of what you might have passed over the first time). The stories are also link through a theme of “end of the worldness”, though this is interpreted in such various ways that the collection is entirely diverse and at times surprising. She is remarkably adept at portraying lost and loneliness, and she is so edgy, and yet humour ever-present. Some of the stories straddle a strange place in between magic and realist, but I soon found myself trusting Atkinson and her universe entirely. She is a distinctly literary writer, as evidenced by the numerous classical allusions woven throughout the text, but these stories are also heavy in terms of Buffy-content (the vampire slaying variety). These contrasts underline Kate Atkinson’s fundamental unclassifiability, and so we’ll just have to file her (and this book) under “wonderful”.
December 10, 2006
Heartburn/Not the End of the World
Reading Nora Ephron’s Heartburn was a treat. Like her essays, the novel straddles an “in-between space” that doesn’t quite fit into any genre, but she’s such a funny woman and the story is hilariously absurd. The novel is like candy, but really expensive well-made candy. And it’s one of many novels I’ve read lately that have made me wish I knew more Hebrew. So it goes. Now reading Not the End of the World by the brilliant Kate Atkinson and I expect it will be “bloody marvelous”.
