April 28, 2015
Destination Bookshop: An English Journey
And so, with The Bookshop Book in hand, I set out to plan our trip to England. Inspired partly by specific bookshops mentioned in the book, but more so by the notion of an indie bookshop pilgrimage. Not everywhere we went was included in The Bookshop Book, because, while you might hear otherwise, there are still, mercifully, far too many excellent bookshops in England—in the world, even—to all be included in one single book, and we surely missed many a key bookshop in our journey because, believe it or not, we had not arrived in England for just the purpose of visiting bookshops. Oh, no! Because we were there to eat cake too, and merry were the days in which we could combine these occupations.
Silverdell Books in Kirkham, Lancs: We discovered this shop from its mention in The Bookshop Book, and it was just a few miles away from where our family lives. Most remarkable of all: it’s a bookshop/ice cream parlour, featuring award-winning homemade ice cream they make it the back (and you can watch through the viewing window). They also serve tea and cakes, and so I partook in a cream tea in a bookshop the day we visited, and all my dreams came true. The ice cream was delicious, and the children were most enthusiastic about this stop-off. There wasn’t a huge selection of books, actually—ice cream is more the draw, I think. But they had a respectable stock of second-hand copies, some new ones, and many of these signed from their regular author events. The kids book section was also excellent, I picked up The Jolly Rogers and the Ghostly Galleon for Harriet, which we read in a day. A good selection of local interest books too. I love that Kirkham has a literary hub. And the scones were perfectly delicious.
The Grove Bookshop in Ilkley, Yorkshire: This was my second visit to The Grove Bookshop, which I’d like to declare The Most Perfect Bookshop in all of England. After a few days of chain bookstores’ disappointing stock, it was a pleasure to walk into a shop that had all the best books. Plus there was bunting in the window, and the shop is just so beautiful with dark wood and careful lighting. I was able to get a couple of books from the Bailey’s Prize shortlist (prominently displayed), plus some picture books for our children, who we’d left with their grandparents for the day. Browsing, our stack just kept getting higher, and then the pleasure of chatting with staff at the till when it came time to pay for it. Keep in mind that we’d just come from afternoon tea at Betty’s, just down the street, so all in all, the day we went to Ilkley was pretty much perfect.
The Book Barge, Barton Under Needwood, Staffordshire: Finally visiting The Book Barge (which I’d learned about from The Bookshop Book) was surreal in the absolute wonderfulness of the experience—when can a single thing ever be so good? I know I wrote about it already, but I’m going to do it again. It was a brilliant, sunny day at Barton Marina, and the sun shone through the Book Barge windows, illuminating the beautiful space, the gorgeous books, and my children chased the resident rabbit (but of course!) under the sofa while I browsed, and we had tea. The cups were hanging on hooks in a row.
The books were lovingly and carefully curated, collection in odd ways that made perfect sense. Lots of titles were on sale for a pound (and some of these were really good), and the more coveted titles lined the barge’s shelves. It was a pleasure to meet proprietor Sarah Henshaw, who now lives on the barge (which is open Saturdays from 10-4) and who is author of a splendid memoir about book barging—The Bookshop that Floated Away. And having read the book, actually being there was like a story come to life, and so delightful. I bought a huge stack of books, which I enjoyed rifling through as we had lunch at the The Apple Tree Cafe beside where the barge was moored, and the bargeman’s lunch was enormous, weird, and perfectly delicious.
Plackitt and Booth Booksellers, Lytham St-Anne’s, Lancs: I can tell I’m in a really good bookshop by the calibre of conversation I get at the till, and Plackitt and Booth in Lytham St-Anne’s did not disappoint. It was not her shop, the woman working there told me, but she loved it, and she might have been wary when they’d decided to start selling toys as well as books, she’s so happy with how the whole thing worked out. The toys (a wonderfully curated selection) bring people into the shop, she told me, and these same people usually come out buying books. And then we started talking about books, and The Bookshop Book, and she recommended other shops I ought to try on my next trip, and we delightedness in bookishness in general. Certainly, I had found my people.
And my children were just as happy as she was about how the whole half bookshop/half toyshop scheme had turned out. The best bookshop since the ice cream one, they reported, as they played with the toys in the back of the shop (and came out with two girl pirate figurines to their credit). And while they played, I browsed, so impressed by the selection, and pleased to see so many Canadian authors on the shelf. The store was bustling too, which is such a nice thing. I really loved it.
We followed our visit with lunch at The Lytham Kitchen down the street, which was so good. I also heard reports of nearby Storytellers, Inc., which specializes in books for children. We will definitely check it out on our next visit!
The London Review Bookshop, London: I love the LRB Shop! After a week of looking for Samantha Harvey’s Dear Thief all over England, I finally found a copy here. And so many other wonderful books to choose from. Lots of important nonfiction, and books in translation, and best of all? My husband and children were in the adjoining cake shop enjoying themselves while I browsed. Has anything ever been more perfect?
Downstairs, the shelves stretched high, and Harriet and Iris sought out the books that were just for them (which were placed amongst the books for grown-up readers in a way that accorded the children great dignity, I thought). We weren’t actually planning to buy the children books, but we never are, and then we couldn’t help ourselves. Harriet got the fabulous and fun book/game, What’s Inside?, and we also got My Pet Book by Bob Staake, who illustrated Cars Galore, a book we all love. The London Review Bookshop was the perfect way to start our bookish London Day, and I didn’t mind having to to cart around my new LRB book bag (heavy already) for its entirety.
And then finally, Persephone Books, London: Everyone who knows Persephone Books responded to our plans with visit there with a gasp and a frisson of excitement. Persephone is a press with a shop devoted to selling their own books, gorgeous reissues of 20th century books by women (and not just women anymore). All the books are uniform blue, distinguished inside by stunning endpapers whose prints are specially selected (and which also appear of a variety of textiles for same throughout the store—and what I wouldn’t do for a Persephone throw cushion, but alas).
I visited the shop with Iris asleep in her carrier, and didn’t have so long to browse (and browsing is tricky anyway—the book all look the same) so I’d already decided I was going to buy a book by Dorothy Whipple, whose appeal was her Lancashire roots and Harriet Evans’ preface to Because of the Lockwoods: “the case does need to be made for Dorothy Whipple’s entry into the pantheon of great British novelists of the twentieth century. Not just because she can so deftly spin a cocoon of a story around you, swiftly rendering you transfixed (the art of which is severely, crucially underestimated by reviewers and readers alike) but because she wrote books quite unlike any others, for all their seeming “ordinariness”. One might say the time is long overdue for a Barbara Pym type rehabilitation. I am as ambitious [for this to happen] to Dorothy Whipple. Her scope is larger, her own ambition grander, the results hugely satisfying, often thrilling.”
I can’t wait.
October 19, 2014
Ithaca by Susan Fish
Since we’re talking soup—or at least we will be—I’d like to offer the literary ingredients that I’d put to use were I cooking up a novel like Susan Fish’s Ithaca (which I loved). First, half a stack of Barbara Pym novels, since Pym is the original chronicler of the unknown fascinating inner-lives of lonely middle-aged women, particularly those who type indices for academic men. Next, toss in a novel or two by Wallace Stegner, or at least All the Little Live Things and Crossing to Safety, for their depictions of the intimacies of long marriages, late-in-life-garnered insight, and—in the case of the latter book—a cozy look at academic communities. Then season with Barbara Kingsolver, perhaps her most recent, Flight Behaviour, for its illumination of the subtle effects of environmental devastation, and as a portrait of how an activist can be borne of an ordinary woman. Let it simmer. Indeed.
Ithaca is the story of Daisy Turner, whose husband has recently died, leaving her unmoored in a world in which she’d always felt so solidly ensconced. Unquestioningly so. Her husband had been everything to her, their grown son far away living his own life in Singapore, and now with him gone, the sole event on Daisy’s calendar (apart from the trip they’d booked months in advance to celebrate their 40th anniversary—what to do about that now?) is the Wednesday suppers, a longstanding tradition in which her husband’s academic colleagues and students and their families would gather together for friendship and conversation and Daisy’s famous soups. The suppers are all she’s got left now, and she constructs her weeks around them, too ashamed to let anybody know the extent of her grief and loneliness, that Arthur’s death has left her without any solid ground to stand on.
But there is something to be said for unsteadiness, because too much steadiness is to have the world be sure, which it’s not, and something also to be said for how the process of reconstructing a broken life can bring forth growth and change and a new kind of resolve. As with those proverbial butterflies flapping their wings, it all starts with a small thing, Daisy invited by a friend to help harvest honey. The hives bought for his wife years ago, ailing from MS, with the hopes that their royal jelly might succeed where her medicine hasn’t, but it doesn’t and her health has only worsened. She can’t even venture out of her house these days, and so Daisy goes with Henry, instead of his wife, and on the way, she notices the signs protesting “fracking” in their area.
Fracking. She doesn’t know the word, but she understands enough about its context—39 years of marriage to a geologist is some kind of education. Oil companies are planning to drill deep into the shale that surround their community for oil deposits—a proposition that promises to save farms from foreclosure and wreak environmental devastation, depending on who you ask. And then at the next Wednesday Supper, Daisy hears the term again, learns a young professor is teaching a night course on the topic. Uncharacteristically, Daisy decides to enrol, surprising herself, and everybody who knows her. Through involvement in her course, her community widens, the Wednesday night suppers becoming more interesting as her “frackivist” pal starts attending, broadening Daisy’s horizons. And Daisy starts asking more questions, about what changes are necessary in her life, about what she needs to hold onto and let go from the past, and of what possibilities are still before her? Never mind the complicating force of her attraction to Henry, her friend with the bee-hives (and the wife!), he for whom she leaned in close to hear something and he kissed her on her ear. He did. And she keeps encountering women at church who seem concerned she’ll steal their husbands—what if, unbeknownst to her, they’re onto something after all?
Fish’s Daisy put me in mind of another Daisy, Carol Shields’ Daisy Stone Goodwill from The Stone Diaries, another small life with large ramifications and great surprises, a women who reinvents herself over and over again. Another novel steeped in stone and geology as well, rooted in the layers upon layers beneath its characters’ feet. With humour, insight and grace, Fish writes similarly of the “small ceremonies” of ordinary life, of human intimacy and kindness and complications.
Her Ithaca is timely and profound, rich with surprises and delight.
August 3, 2014
All Saints in The Globe
My review of K.D. Miller’s wonderful story collection, All Saints, was in the Globe and Mail yesterday. I enjoyed the book so much when I read it in July, and appreciated its vital links to Lynn Coady’s Giller-winning collection, Hellgoing, as well as its Barbara Pymmishness, and the ways in which outright Pymmishness is subverted.
“…All Saints reads like a collision between Pym and Lynn Coady’s recent Hellgoing, whose epigraph is from Larkin’s “Church Going,” a poem which asks the question, “When churches will fall completely out of use/What we shall turn them into.”
The easy answer is condos – their developers are the only ones still banging on All Saints’s door. As with those in Coady’s collection, Miller’s characters are negotiating existence in a world in which the old rules and morality Pym satirized no longer apply.”
June 15, 2014
Bookish Sunday in the Sun
For Father’s Day, we gave Stuart posh coffee, Jo Walton’s Small Change series (which is probably a gift for both of us), and Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay (because of this recommendation in 49th Shelf’s Shelf Talkers series). Iris has become a full-fledged biped, and it’s no coincidence that her sleep habits have also become transformed in the past week. She has finally started napping in her crib, taking her naps later, and staying asleep for a couple of hours. Her nighttime sleep has also improved, which meant that we’re feeling a little less tired than usual this weekend. It also means that Iris has become a lot less portable, and we’re not going to sacrifice her proper nap for anything. So we went out for a Father’s Day brunch this morning, and then came home so Iris could sleep while Harriet watched innumerable episodes of The Riders of Berk. I drank tea and read my book, and it was bliss.
It meant, however, that it was nearly 2pm by the time we departed for Trinity Bellwoods Park and the Luminato Literary Picnic. We had a splendid walk there, Harriet scootering, walking or being piggy-backed, while Iris was chauffeured in the stroller. We ate gourmet popsicles, and then Harriet went to play in the playground, while Iris and I checked out literary fare. I heard a few writers here and there, but the only writer whose whole presentation I caught was KD Miller’s. She was fantastic, and no surprise–her book got a rave review in Macleans this week, and Vicki Ziegler had been sharing Angie Abdou’s great review in Quill & Quire.
So I was pleased to hear her read, and then to have her arrive at the sale table just as I was about to buy her book, so she could sign it for me. Reviewers have stressed that indeed, a writer can situate interesting stories within the walls of an Anglican Church (the book’s title, All Saints, refers to said church), but seeing as I am a card-carrying member of the Barbara Pym Society, they’d be preaching to the (church) choir.
After that, we hit the bookmobile, which is always an amazing adventure: a bus full of books! A library on wheels! The bookmobile will never cease to be remarkable. We got a book for Iris and Harriet each, and then Harriet wanted to get a comic too. She sorted through the stacks and selected The Wonderful World of Lisa Simpson #1. I think she picked it because Lisa is riding a pink unicorn on the cover, because Harriet has never heard of the Simpsons. But that was the point of the cover I think, and now Harriet has heard of the Simpsons and we had a good time reading the comic together. (It was strange having to introduce someone to Bart Simpson. I also like that it’s a cool comic geared to young girls, whose writers and artists are women.) The best: in the final story, Lisa opens her own Little Free Library to disastrous results. A comic about a lending library? It was dying and going to book nerd heaven.
After that, I went across the street to visit Type Books and pick up some of the books on my list. I got The Vacationers by Emma Straub, which had been included in Chatelaine’s Summer Reading Guide. And I got Based on a True Story by Elizabeth Renzetti, which had an amazing review in The Globe yesterday. And then we walked home along Queen Street and up Bathurst, stopping en-route at Yogurtys because we really hadn’t had enough dessert. Plus, they were giving away free fro-yo for dads, so that was spectacular all around.
December 16, 2013
A World Less Delightful
“If I had to pick just one thing about the English novel, I don’t think I could, but if pressed to pick five things, one of them would have to be the post. Much in the same way that cell phones are pivotal to contemporary plotting, the British postal system is essential to the 20th century Englist novel. As are teacups, spinsters, knitting, seaside B&Bs, and the vicar, or maybe I’ve just been reading too much Barbara Pym, but the mail is always coming and going– have you noticed that? Someone is always going out to post a letter, or writing a letter that never gets posted, or a posted letter goes unreceived, or remains unopened on the hall table.”
Last week it was announced that Canadians are due to lose door-to-door mail delivery. Four years ago today, I wrote an ode to the post–foundation of not only my daily life, but also the plots of my favourite novels–from which the above paragraph is lifted. You can read the whole thing here and I haven’t changed my mind. With the elimination of postal service, we’re basically conspiring to make the world less delightful and this is not insignificant.
Without delight, what’s the point of anything?
December 6, 2013
My Top 10 Books of 2013 has 22 books in it.
It’s been an amazing year for books. And this is the first time I’ve felt like this for a long time. This year, I’ve read books that broke my heart, books that changed my world, books that articulated everything I wonder about, books that changed my mind. This was a year of highs and lows, a year in which I needed certain books more than ever, and these in particular are the books that spoke to me so clearly. It was such an amazing year for books, in fact, that my Top 10 Books of 2013 has 22 books in it. The abundance is the very point, and I have no desire to narrow it down.
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:
I love a book so textured that the answer to my criticisms are contained inside its very pages. I reached page 335 to find a tirade by Ifemelu’s boyfriend’s sister who is about to publish her first book, a memoir about growing up black in America. She explains, “My editor reads the manuscript and says, “I understand that race is important but we have to make sure the book transcends race…” And I’m thinking, But why do I have to transcend race? You know, like race is a brew best served mild, tempered with other liquids, otherwise white folk can’t swallow it.” Explaining an anecdote, she says, “So I put it in the book and my editor wants to change it because he says it’s not subtle. Like life is always fucking subtle.”
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson:
There is texture to a book like this, and the pleasure of seeing secondary characters from a wide variety of angles–Ursula’s mother in particular whose role in the novel’s conclusion was ingenious. Life After Life is a long book, as befitting a life lived over and over again, and I savoured its slowness, the returns to where I’d been before, places and people I was happy to revisit. I appreciated the specificity of its detail, the brilliance of its writing, its genre-blurring, its daringness in reframing the shape of a narrative, and yes, this is Kate Atkinson, so there is going to be that too.
Bush’s novels are always planted much more in concept than narrative and plot, and they are markedly unusual for this. They are also remarkable for their realism, details that plant the stories deep in the ground, on very specific sidewalks and streets, so that a book about a mother orbiting the Earth in Outer Space seems not so far from one’s own experience at all (as in her first novel Minus Time), and so too with this this novel about a journalist driven to explore a(n alleged) crime committed an ocean away amidst a community of street children turned circus acrobats. And this is just one way that this novel turns in on itself as we read it, for it is a story about how we project our own experiences upon those of others (and indeed, as Madeleine Thien read the novel through the lens of race, which never even occurred to me).
What I love best about this novel is that nobody ever changes. There is no great revelation. Claudia’s brother is still the jerk he was when the novel began, there is no fix for her father’s heartache, and even Claudia begins to see that her ex is moving away into a life of his own. But all the same, it’s okay, or it’s going to be. This is not aHow the Failed Housewife Learned to Get Along With the Vacuum kind of tale, but instead it’s about how Claudia learns to draw on her reserves, that herself exactly as she is has the capacity to roll with the punches better than anyone else. When life is messy, bumpy and hard, it’s because that’s what life is, and not because you’re doing it wrong
The House on Sugarbush Road by Meira Cook:
There is no expressway into the Johannesburg of Méira Cook’s novel The House on Sugarbush Road. Instead, the roads are twisting and clogged with traffic, detritus, pedestrians on the roadside calling out in a language you don’t understand. This is a novel that is disorienting to encounter, hard to get one’s bearings in; the reader travels blindly along these foreign streets, trusting in the story and its teller. And as the story progresses, the trust builds. While The House on Sugarbush Road is Méira Cook’s first novel, she is widely published (and lauded) as a poet, she worked as a journalist in her native South Africa, and her prose gorgeously reflects the former while her novel’s approach shows the latter. The effect is brutal, surprising, and provokes an incredibly visceral reaction.
The key to this book, I think, and its usefulness for us, lies in a particular word that occurs at least twice. First, when she returns to her family’s London home and comes upon their back garden in early morning, the sight of a snail making its way across the patio table: “They would be so stirred by this.” Later, she writes about her husband who’d grown up on a council estate in East London, and his first trip to the Natural History Museum when he was six years old. At the sight of a life-sized model of a blue whale: “this was the most stirred he’d ever been.”
To be stirred then, to have our quiet disturbed. Perhaps this is why we should read this, or any book. A gentler version of Kafka’s frozen sea, and I like that. Not fortifying, but instead (and not merely) our reason for being.
The Pure Gold Baby by Margaret Drabble:
It’s such a strange novel: we are taken through the decades of a group of mothers in London and learn which marriages ended, which children succeeded, which others went wayward (and how there was no telling of who would be who). This is a novel about friendship, and how we tell each other stories, about how we become characters in the stories of one another’s lives. It’s about mental health, public health, institutions. It’s a novel full of facts, pages of passages that read like non-fiction. It’s about progress, and the illusion of progress.
Pure Gold Drabble, is what it is. And so naturally, I loved it.
Jennica Harper is the poet whose books I stay up reading late into the night. She has uncanny ability to zero in on my fascinations, articulate questions I’ve vaguely wondered about, to use the very things located in the world around me (songs, cultural lore, television characters, celebrity references) and spin their own mythology. In a recent conversation, she asked, “Is there such thing as a “gateway poet”? That’s what I’d like to be.” And she has certainly succeeded at this, most recently with her latest collection, the beautiful, quietly powerful Wood.
Oh My Darling by Shaena Lambert:
And I love that, that here is a collection where I can tell you about the book, its themes, its shape, rather than just telling you the plots of three or four of the stories I liked best.Oh, My Darling doesn’t actually reference Clementine, which wikipedia has revealed to me is actually a satire (because who would write a song about a drowned girl whose feet were so big she had to wear boxes instead of shoes?) But its preoccupations are just as morbid, and so darkly humorously so at times that I am sure that Lambert knew about the satire. That tireless refrain, powered by blustery, lust-ery, souls laid bare. So much feeling for something seemingly shallow. Sound going nowhere. Just imagine how it would echo in a cavern, in a canyon, excavating for a mile…
Cottonopolis by Rachel Lebowitz:
But most remarkably for this book that uses language to build a museum is that the language itself is easily and unabashedly the work’s most remarkable aspect. I love the stories here, the history, but I can’t help but catch my mind on a line like “The trill of the/ robin, the trickle of the rill.” Or my favourite poem in the collection, “Exhibit 33: Muslin Dress” which turns language inside out in order to sew the whole world up into a tidy purse: “Here are the railway lines and there are the shipping/ lines. Here’s the factory line. The line of children in the/ mines. The chimney lines. There is the line: from the/ cotton gin to the Indian.”
Rebecca Lee’s short stories share the same approach as Sarah Selecky’s, the same intimate first-person narration, close attention to detail that sets these characters as very much of this world (lines like “Lizbet basically knew how to live a happy life, and this was revealed in her trifle–she put in what she loved and left out what she didn’t”)–as well as dinner-party settings and fork on the cover. But on the other side, Lee’s marvelous telescoping endings and ultimate broadness of perspective remind me of the stories in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Interpreter of Maladies. (I think “Bobcat” may join Lahiri’s “The Fifth and Final Continent” as one of my favourite short stories ever.) These stories were written over two decades and accordingly the collection lacks a certain cohesion, except for (and this is significant) the solidity of Lee’s voice.
The Love Monster by Missy Marston:
We come along with Margaret on her trip to rock-bottom, though the omniscient narrator also embraces Margaret’s mother, her co-workers, even the evil ex, the alien, and invests them with a powerful sympathy, an investigation of the kernel of sadness which lives within us all. The lines, the straight-talk, the music that Margaret plugs into her ears, the disasters–this Canadian book is hilarious, and will never, ever win the Leacock Prize (which is some kind of endorsement). It’s funny, and quirky, but not cute, and it’s terribly profound. Really amazing writing.
The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud:
Messud’s novel is also structured as a fun-house, trap-doors and booby-traps springing up if the reader makes the mistake of taking Nora at her word. Which is a difficult mistake to avoid–Nora’s voice is so forceful, persuasive, she perpetually speaks in generalizations and second-person address designed to make us feel comfortable, familiar. “Don’t all women feel the same?” she asks, and you’d be hard-pressed not to respond with a nod, but then, no! There is no such thing as “all women” anyway, and besides, Nora Eldridge is clearly unhinged. On top of being an unreliable trickster of a narrator, she is also blatantly wrong, about so many things, but most notably in her insistence on regarding the world within the limits of gendered binary terms. In this way, the novel recalls Carol Shields’ Unless, another book in which an enraged female narrator stamps her ladylike foot at the systematic repression of womankind, institutionalized sexism which completely exists, but her singular focus upon this obscures a far more complicated reality. Which is not to say that Nora Eldrige’s or Reta Winter’s rage is misplaced, that either should cease their foot-stamping, but just that there is ever and will be ever more to the story.
Are You Ready to be Lucky? by Rosemary Nixon:
So let’s break the silence then, shall we? Rosemary Nixon’s collection of linked short stories is one of the funniest, most original books I’ve read this year. I started reading it on Friday, found it hard to put down, and had devoured it by Sunday afternoon. Are you ready to be lucky, indeed.
This is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett:
But Patchett does channel Didion in Fact Vs. Fiction when she writes, “We all turn our lives into stories. It is a defining characteristic of our species.” And this is the triumph of her book, how it turns the self-help trope inside out. Ann Patchett doesn’t have the answers, but what she has instead are stories and – like life itself – these can be more complicated and unfathomable than we’d ever believe of fiction.
How the Light Gets In by Louise Penny:
What is the attraction of Louise Penny’s novels, my reservations with her prose still being what they are? I think part of it is the intimacy she creates, between reader and place in her remarkably evoked village of Three Pines. And also the intimacy between the characters themselves, so much between them that doesn’t need to be explained, allowing the novels to progress in ways that are surprising. And finally, the intimacy of her narrative, her shifting points of view which enable us to understand her world from a wide range of perspectives. Which is not to say that her readers know everything. In fact, in this book in particular, the plot is operating on a whole other plane that readers are not even aware of until an incredible twist at the conclusion, and I promise that you never see it coming.
The Children of Air India by Renee Sarojini Saklikar:
This poetry collection is beautiful, devastating, difficult and important. Difficult in terms of subject matter, but yet the narrative was so compelling, N herself leading the reader through so many lives and stories, plot and intrigue. Throughout, I needed to take short pauses because it all was a little too much, but then I’d pick the book right up again, the poetry accessible and fascinating, rich with history and voices.
Where’d You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple:
Apparently Maria Semple’s novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette? was one of the biggest books of last year, but perhaps I wasn’t paying attention. Someone who was paying attention, however, was Stuart, who took note when I picked this book up in the store and casually remarked, “I’m kind of interested in this one,” and proceeded to buy me the book for Mother’s Day. I saved it for postpartum, because I had a feeling, and oh, what a good feeling it was. Two nights ago, Iris’s all night eating/fussy fits began, and I was so glad to have this book on hand. My mind is fuzzy and there is no way I could write a coherent review, but it’s an endorsement, I think, that on Saturday night when I was up from 12am until 5am feeding the baby, all I could really think of was, “Yes! I get to read more Bernadette!”
The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit:
And so it’s like this, a fantastic journey through a terrain with someone who sees deeper into the world than you’ve ever begun to imagined. Solnit is author of a book with the title A Field Guide to Getting Lost, and she makes digression into an art here, though it always winds back around eventually, the narrative accumulating. Winding, threading, Rapunzel and Penelope, spinning and spinsters. She makes connections between virtual threads and literal threads and fabric, and it all comes down to stories. It always does. “Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds.” What shape should a book be in a world where that is a fact?
For nearly two weeks, I was reading The Goldfinch, carting it everywhere I went, having to pull out a bigger purse in order to accommodate its heft at 771 pages, my hand cramping as I read it while breastfeeding. I ripped the dust jacket when I tried to tear off a sticker, and then took the dust jacket off altogether when it started getting tatty from the travel. After that, I put the book down on the table on something green, and then the cover started to disintegrate when I wiped the stain off with a damp cloth. I don’t usually treat my books so poorly, butThe Goldfinch is so large and solid, a piece of furniture nearly. It has presence, is lived with, is experienced. And it is interesting to think about my wear-and-tear on the book when I consider how much of the book is about what time does to physical objects. The Goldfinch is about its thingness just as much as it is about its text.
Projection: Encounters With My Runaway Mother by Priscila Uppal:
It has become standard to refer to memoirists as “brave”, but I can’t help doing the same for Uppal, with the caveat that “brave” means something totally different here, something substantial. First, Uppal’s bravery in staring down this woman, her mother, who is clearly unhinged and exists in the alternate reality her love of movies provides. Uppal dares to confront her, but also dares to understand her, however unforgivingly. She is also brave to not forgive, or to have her story not adhere to standard narratives, to have a happy ending. She refuses to compromise, but also manages to see her story from all points of view. She is brave to take a story with so much pain and turn it into art that’s so extraordinary.
The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer:
The structure of The Interestings is fascinating, the novel weaving back and forth through time without great shifts, effortless for the reader to follow and seemingly effortless for the writer too, though I can’t imagine that this was really the case. And yes, it is so interesting, a book so terrific to be absorbed in and whose end (at page 468) arrives too soon.
November 18, 2013
GlobeBooks Review: Ann Patchett’s This is the Story of a Happy Marriage
I had the great privilege of reviewing Ann Patchett’s new book, the essay collection This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, and my review appeared in The Globe and Mail this weekend. The book was an absolute pleasure to read and reread, and to explore in writing.
“Patchett expounds on her craft with the verve of Annie Dillard in The Writing Life, but with both feet on the ground. She also makes explicit her influence by Joan Didion, revealing in Do Not Disturb that she’s been rereading all Didion’s books, which shows, and works to her detriment because she isn’t Joan Didion, which also shows. Though to be Joan Didion (who, it must be noted, got her start writing for Vogue) is a lot to ask of anyone, and some of Patchett’s best essays are of Didion’s calibre. She may well prove to be to the contemporary mythology of Tennessee what Didion is to California, with her own particular bent*.”
Read my review here!
*I kind of see Patchett as the anti-Didion, actually, particularly when she throws out the line, “I didn’t worry much about snakes” in her essay “Tennessee”. If you’ve read much Didion, you’ll know what I mean by that.
October 29, 2013
The Pure Gold Baby by Margaret Drabble
The Pure Gold Baby is Margaret Drabble’s first novel since 2006’s The Sea Lady, and her first book since the memoir The Pattern in the Carpet in 2009. Her first novel since she claimed to have quit writing fiction, with a new publisher after she claimed that Penguin was “dumbing her down”. It’s a novel that it’s impossible to regard outside of the wider context of Drabble’s oeuvre, which even the book itself makes implicit. Page 19 makes reference to “the radiant way” and “a millstone”, which suggest the titles of two earlier Drabble novels. Late in the book, a passage: “A wider view, an aerial view, an uplifting view, a view of the river, a view of time, a view of the shores of the infinite.” Which reminded me of a passage I underlined in The Middle Ground a long time ago: “…London, how could one ever be tired of it?… When there it lay, its old intensity restored, shining with invitation, all its shabby grime lost in perspective, imperceptible from this dizzy height, its connections clear, its pathways revealed. The city, the kingdom. The aerial view.”
One has to take an aerial view of Drabble’s career in order to make sense of The Pure Gold Baby. Because it’s a curious book, and all her books have been curious lately. But let’s start at the beginning, with her first books during the 1960s, usually about young educated women living and working in London. She was a very fashionable writer, the kind Barbara Pym judged herself against unfavourably during her own wilderness years. The fashionableness means these books are dated now, but they have literary merit. Drabble has always been prescient too about social trends–she wrote about single motherhood early in The Millstone, she anticipates the modern media-scape in A Natural Curiosity.
Her perspective broadened during the 1970s and 1980s, much concerned with both the domestic and with wider social trends. Her Radiant Way trilogy is the story of England, the story of everything, a time of great social turmoil and changes, documented in the lives of the characters she made so real.
Since the late 1990s, her books have become very unconventional, stretching the shape of the novel with remarkable elasticity to encompass such largeness: questions of time, genetics, globalization, history. With every book, one gets the sense that she is asking herself again just what the novel is capable of doing. I don’t think Drabble has the credit she deserves as an experimental novelist. She is far from content to write the same book over and over, and seems rather determined to reinvent the book every time, though her preoccupations remain constant.
The Pure Gold Baby reads like a culmination of sorts, the Drabble universe encapsulated. We have a single mother in 1960s’s London, but she takes these characters right up to present day, employing that aerial view, that stunning omniscience she started playing with in the middle of her career. And then the narrative strangeness t00–it’s puzzling. This is the story from the perspective of a woman who pieces together her friend’s history over decades, through stories she has heard, rumours, long and drawn out conversations. Why is she telling this story? We never really know–even she doesn’t know. What do we learn about her, this character who is only named once or twice. Why does she matter?
The centre of this story is Jessica Speight, an anthropologist who a gives birth to a daughter she raises on her own, the pure gold baby of the title. It eventually becomes clear that all is not as it should be with Anna, that she has some kind of unnamable developmental problem–she’s a bit clumsy, a bit simple. Her existence and her affliction come to shape the trajectory of her mother’s life, and here Drabble is pondering motherhood, its questions and problems. Though as ever, her interest is genetic. From where did Anna come from? Jess is not forthcoming with this information, and it causes our narrator to wonder, questions about errant genes.
Or is the origin something else, and here is where the story begins–with a group of children with malformed hands by the side of a lake in Africa where Jess had encountered them years before Anna was born. We’re returned to this point again and again, and Jess makes the voyage back to Africa near the end of the book. It’s kind of an inverse Heart of Darkness, as though Africa were the heart of light, the light that emanates from people like Anna, humanity at its most basic, simple. Which is a bit racist and also reductive in terms of regarding disability, but then whether this is a hypothesis or conclusion is never clear. This is the kind of novel in which characters are allowed to be wrong.
It’s such a strange novel: we are taken through the decades of a group of mothers in London and learn which marriages ended, which children succeeded, which others went wayward (and how there was no telling of who would be who). This is a novel about friendship, and how we tell each other stories, about how we become characters in the stories of one another’s lives. It’s about mental health, public health, institutions. It’s a novel full of facts, pages of passages that read like non-fiction. It’s about progress, and the illusion of progress.
Pure Gold Drabble, is what it is. And so naturally, I loved it.
August 9, 2013
How the Reading Stacked Up
Thankfully, the black clouds that hung over our vacation at the cottage were literal rather than metaphorical. I’m also glad I didn’t have to be on vacation with a newborn in a heat-wave. It was a funny week, each of wearing the one sweater we’d brought with us every single day. Harriet didn’t have as many playmates as in recent summers, and it was also strange to be on vacation when nobody in the family is working. We didn’t get that same sense of glorious reprieve, but we did get a lot of ice cream, Harriet rode a pony, and I got a lot of reading done. We had to settle for a week away that was good rather than miraculously brilliant, and so we did. We are quite heroic.
I read the short stories in the Barbara Pym book in the days before we left. Upon arrival, Russell Hoban’s Turtle Diary was first up, which Jared Bland writes about in the Globe this week. It’s a difficult, funny and terribly sad novel, just the kind of novel you’d think the man who wrote Frances would author. Though I found the ending strangely uplifting, and I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to. I reread Joan Didion’s Where I Was From next, my first reread, and I adored it. It was fascinating to see it in the context of Blue Nights and Magical Thinking, in the context of a trilogy. Her California is my land of dreams. I read The City is a Rising Tide next, the novel by Rebecca Lee whose Bobcat and Other Stories has so enchanted me. Truth was this was really a very long short story instead of a novel, but I loved it because I’ve become quite fond of Rebecca Lee’s writing and there it was. An ARC of Ann Patchett’s essay collection next, and you’ll be hearing more from me on that in the future. And then Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which seems to be the book of the summer in my circles. I really don’t do fantasy, and any exposure I have to fantasy underlines this (A Wrinkle in Time notwithstanding, curiously), but the Gaiman book was short and its realist elements were so compelling. I loved it. Perhaps my problem with fantasy is that all the novels are 800 pages long.
We’d already made our annual pilgrimmage to Bob Burns Books in Fenelon Falls, Stuart picking up a stack of Terry Pratchetts, Harriet getting a couple of picture books as well as a Vinyl Cafe story collection (Stuart remarks that we’re trying to save her from nerdom by trying to undermine her dragon obsession. I suggest her obsession with Stuart McLean is just another kind of nerdom), and I got The Round House by Louise Erdrich, which I’m going to be reading in the next few weeks. And then on Wednesday, it occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to function unless I got my mitts on a Louise Penny book, and so we went back to Bob Burns (just before we had Afternoon Tea at the Fenelon Museum) and I got The Cruellest Month, which was so scary and wonderful. I have become a Louise Penny fanatic, and seem to have overcome my initial aversion to her weird sentence fragments.
I finished The Cruellest Month at home, and then read Pym’s Civil to Strangers. And now all week I’ve been reading The Collected Stories of Grace Paley, as instructed by Ann Patchett, actually. I’ve also been busily writing, which the Paley has aided, I think.
And now we’re into August, which makes September seem almost inevitable. And the truth is, I am pretty excited. This summer has been the sweetest gift, the most wonderful dream. Iris is nine weeks old, growing so fast, and I am so grateful that we’ve had this time in which to enjoy her, her brand new babyhood, and each other. But the transition to September is going to come about naturally, I think, with Harriet beginning Junior Kindergarten, Stuart returning to work and also taking on some pretty cool new opportunities, and me returning to work at 49th Shelf. I’m actually really looking forward to it, and other exciting projects and events I’ll be involved in this Fall. Um, not to mention that I have a book coming out in the spring, which has not been so much at the forefront and I nearly forget it is really happening.
Posting here will remain irregular over the next few weeks as our family works to get the most out of summer (and as I vow to read as many books as possible before Real Life sets in again). We’ve got a trip to Toronto Island still before us, as well as a visit to the zoo, get-togethers with friends, afternoons in the park, patio lunches, the CNE, and a long weekend trip to Grand Bend with our friends. I also have a doctor’s appointment to determine just what exactly what we’re going to do about my enormous thyroid, which I am looking forward to being done with.
But why am I even telling you this? You’re not reading anyway. I know you’re outside drinking up the goodness of summer, or at least if you’re not, you should be.
July 22, 2013
Jumping the Gun
As always, the only prep I ever do before the night before we go away (or morning of, sometimes) is to select my vacations reads. Fingers crossed that Iris is partial to Muskoka chairs. And because 5 books might be a bit ambitious for a holiday with a newborn, I have started my vacation reads a few days in advance. Anyway, there you have it. A mix of fiction and nonfiction, rereads and new. And naturally, some Barbara Pym.
