7,000 words . . . and then some

that title, you'll see, refers to the 7 pictures, presumably worth 1000 words each . . .

So it's three weeks or so since I last wrote here. Thanksgiving weekend, I burrowed my way through the Jeffery Deaver mystery The Bodies Left Behind, while I wasn't serving turkey, washing dishes, making pumpkin pie, or marking papers. Satisfying if not especially memorable, lots of tension and all the plot twists we expect from the author. No Lincoln Rhyme, but a very resourceful female character I quite liked.And sometime in October I also read George Pelecanos' The Night Gardener. Again, satisfying if not especially memorable. Pelecanos wrote and produced for The Wire, and I suppose I picked this book up hoping for an extension of that experience. Not a fair way to approach a new writer and it probably contributed to my ho-hum response -- I was looking for more of the series' density and complexity, and this book didn't give me that. I'd definitely read something else by him, however, but I'd probably wait to pay paperback rather than trade paperback format price.

Meanwhile, you might remember these books, from this post. I'm still waiting to read the Martha Grimes novels.And to read these, recent arrivals from Chapters.

I have been reading which can make me a somewhat tiresome companion for Pater, whom I try to convince of everything that is terribly wrong with this world, in this case a frighteningly distorted foodway.
and I've been reading Ondaatje's beautiful novel -- when I think of Ondaatje, I think of a certain haunting tone, beautifully bruised, circling the past from various perspectives, bringing to bear a mesmerizing wealth of apparently arcane data that turns out, surprisingly, to be precisely relevant. This time that data comprises gambling, the history and geography of California, French post-war gypsy lore, 13th-century architecture, just to begin. It's one of those novels in the middle of which one pauses to contemplate the next reading. Actually, I'm thinking I have to schedule time to read Ondaatje's oeuvre over a relatively compact period to let some of his bigger themes coalesce more clearly for me.

Meanwhile, though, I'm mostly reading these -- a set of summary/synthesis papers from my first-year students. About 80 papers at 750-1000 words, all to be marked, if humanly possible, within a week. Next week they hand in their proposals and annotated bibliographies for their final papers, and, again, I'll be aiming at a turnaround time of a week. But then that's the last marking I'll do until the research papers come in, three weeks away. So perhaps there'll be a little reading catch-up time. . .

What about you? Reading anything interesting?

Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn

It was purely coincidence that the novel I read directly after I read Sebald's The Emigrants should be Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn, but the two invite some worthwhile comparison. Although the reasons for the diaspora of the Jews from Europe should never be minimized by comparison with widespread economic diaspora such as that from Ireland, Tóibín's novel does explore the sad terrain of emigration, however its title might suggest the draw of the new land. And while its narrative structure seems much simpler, more straightforward than Sebald's memoir-imitating work, it echoes some of the earlier work's techniques -- primarily, the focus on what I will call "the small," as well as in the layering of details to create an intimate effect that is, at the same time, surprisingly distancing. We get, for example, many details about the other boarders at Mrs. Kehoe's, the house that serves at em/immigrant Eilis' home in New York, and many details about the food she has there, the way her room is furnished, the store she works at, but we never feel especially invested in her life there.

In trying to think why this should be so, I have to speculate that while these quotidian domestic details build to grant us an intimate portrait of Eilis' life in Brooklyn, they also recall the details offered in the opening pages of her home in Ireland, her impatience with, yet loyalty to, her girlfriends from childhood, her admiration of her older sister, Rose, her wish that her brothers could come home from England where they've gone to earn their living, and her frustation with the stifling limits of her very small community. Wrenched away from this home by a loving conspiracy that sees her sent to try her fortune in a new land, unbearably homesick but determined to repay her family's kind sacrifice, Eilis will now always be divided. As she gradually builds a new life, doing her best in her retail position while taking courses at night toward eventual promotion, she has had to integrate some kind of compromise at her core. Some feelings have to be put away for others to flourish, and learning to put feelings away so thoroughly has consequences. Eilis learns to separate here and there, then and now, and when, after her sister Rose dies suddenly, she makes the dreadful Atlantic crossing again, the reality of her newfound happiness in America is subject to an odd metaphysics such that . . .

Well, I can't tell you that, can I?!

And what I am telling you suggests a rise and fall of plot which is certainly in the novel and which certainly does keep the reader turning pages, but there's something Tóibín does that mutes the drama. Small elements of apparent sub-plots--upsets in the boarding house, for example--get as many pages as supposedly important elements of the novel's romance. The courtship Eilis enjoys in Brooklyn is described alongside her progress at work, and her pursuit of law texts to help her better understand the college course she's taking is balanced by her visits to church and her work feeding and entertaining the displaced men at the church's social evenings. All these threads weave an image of Eilis as an independent, strong, thoughtful, moral, hard-working, and rather ambitious young woman -- teasing us, really, to expect, even to want, a Horatio Alger story for women. Not what we get!

To return, before I'm done, to my opening comparison, I also find something comparable in the tone of both novels, although The Emigrants is suffused with something more tragic than melancholy. But there's a gentle quietness in both; both employ loveliness to observe and to think, honestly, rigorously. Both deserve a second reading, on my part, and I recommend them for a first on yours. Let me know what you think once you've read either. . .

a little light reading? NoT!

I hope to get to a very brief review, soon, of Colm Toibin's Brooklyn, a wonderfully slow-and-careful examination of em/immigration that compares in some interesting ways with my last book, Sebald's The Emigrants. Have any of you read the Toibin? the Sebald?

A neighbour commented the other day that she'd found her way to my site, had seen the photo on the right of me at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and wondered if I'd gone there, as she once did, because it was such an important site in another book by Sebald, Austerlitz. In fact, I hadn't, and haven't yet read Austerlitz, but I will, and before long too, I hope.

Otherwise, around here, most of my time is caught up with prepping and marking for my 3 sections of English 115, a basic Writing for University course with a reading list of non-fiction (I'm once again using Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You, hoping to squeeze one more term out of the prep I did for teaching with this text). But once again this year, I'm making time, one Friday afternoon a month, to attend a Literary Theory discussion group -- this year we're reading Giorgio Agamben's The Coming Community. We met this past Friday to try to make some sense together of the opening few pages -- trying to come up with a workable notion of "whatever" and "singularity" and "particularity." I haven't read many, if any, of the texts which form the conversation Agamben is joining, nor have I read anything else he's written, so I am very much in the student position. I try to trust, as I ask them to, to process, simply putting the words past my eyes, then mouthing them, swivelling back over particularly difficult sentences, just accepting that I don't yet have a framework for understanding, but that it will begin to assemble itself if I'm patient enough. Sure enough, as I listened to those of my colleagues who are more versed in this particular conversation tease out the difficulties, the implications, the sense, I occasionally felt comfortable enough to express a tentative response. Sometimes I could articulate the difficulty I was having with a sentence -- which, I think, is a positive starting place. Difficulty can be productive, right?
I even made a connection with something I'd read in Zizek's Enjoy Your Symptom many years ago, and I had some thoughts about Limbo, drawn from my Catholic upbringing, that I think were useful in wondering what Agamben's recourse to theology was about.

I can't help but think of something I read many years ago in Nancy Mairs (was it in Remembering the Bone House?, I'm not sure . . . ). Speaking of having successfully defended her dissertation, she rejoiced that she never again had to "get" Lacan or Derrida or whomever, that now she was free to read them for whatever she was able to get from their writing. On a sunny Friday afternoon, with a beautiful scene of mountains and sea laid out before us, together with a few colleagues, students, members of the community, I have the chance to think-- ethically, rigorously, playfully, and productively -- about Agamben's words, trying to move as close as possible to what he means, but without anyone grading my understanding. At one point, I couldn't help but interrupt the play to say to my 8 or 9 conspirators, "Isn't this fun? Isn't this a great thing to be doing! I'm so glad I made time for this!"

In other book-ish news, I loved this post at Jane Brocket's blog wherein she contemplates how to arrange her books, what system might govern their organization. It's a dilemma I can easily relate to, and it's one that hasn't been dealt with 'round these parts. Maybe when I retire . . .

Sebald's Emigrants

When I began this blog, it was primarily intended as a commitment to myself to take time to record and, hopefully, to reflect on my reading rather than simply to chomp through pages that I could soon only barely remember. But during the teaching year, this quickly results in an unhappy imposition -- reading, which is one of the ways I relax, now carries the obligation to write, and my free time is so limited these days . . . So once again, I'm behind with my recording and the books I have ready to read are piling up impatiently.

That preamble seems necessary today as context for how I can possibly review W.G. Sebald's very important The Emigrants (translated by Michael Hulse) as cursorily as I'm going to. Granted, there are so many places you can go to get a satisfactory account of this . . . novel? memoir? Nevertheless, I can't help but feel humbly apologetic as I record my few brief comments.

First, I'm struck by the title, struck at how the emphasis on emigration (a result of Germany/Europe's history, particularly during the Third Reich, but also throughout the 19th and 20th centuries) is so different from our experience in North America. Here we're much more likely to use the word "immigrant." Despite having read a fair bit around diasporic studies, I hadn't ever meditated on this difference, and this title's simple weight seemed to insist I do.

Having taught a course, last term, on the city in Canadian fiction, I was struck by a passage describing the narrator's response to a city he moved to in his youth, in 1952. He remembers finding in this city the "unmistakable signs of a new beginning" and thinking it "particularly auspicious that the rows of houses were interrupted here and there by patches of waste land on which stood ruined buildings, for ever since I had once visited Munich I had felt nothing to be so unambiguously linked to the word city as the presence of heaps of rubble, fire-scorched walls, and the gaps of windows through which one could see the vacant air" (30). Think of a generation who make this link, "unambiguously": cities and war damage. Think, also, that this is not just history, but is the case in many of the world's cities today. Sobering, yet the linkage is made in the same tone of gentle, fact-recording melancholy that infuses the text.

Describing a photograph album he looks through in trying to retrace the life of his former schoolteacher, the narrator comments that since first looking at it he has, "returned to it time and again, because, looking at the pictures in it, it truly seemed to me, and still does, as if the dead were coming back, or as if we were on the point of joining them" (46). I've read widely on theories of the photograph -- Barthes, Sontag, Benjamin, Batchen, all the usual suspects -- and this comment adds something ineffable I want to hang onto.

The last narrative in the book is almost unbearably sad, but somehow not maudlin. The narrator's attempts to recover, for his last subject Max Ferber, the experiences of Max's mother, to follow her to the grave, so to speak, are marked by an infinitesimal attention to details, the details of materiality accumulating in layers as if to somehow balance the inexorable move to the nothingness of the graves -- yet the graves themselves are far from nothing. I know that hardly makes sense, but there is an insistence on details mattering, and on the matter of details, that sets a pace throughout the text. Perhaps this has something to do with the way Sebald's theory of memory so subverts that of Proust. In Proust, the madeleine moves one into the detailed richness of the past, and is part of a nostalgia for the time remembered. Here, memory defies the details -- they pile up, these specifics, but so too do the gaps. So many killed, so many moved away, so many separated, so many afraid to speak . . . In such a world, one would fear tasting the madeleine -- involuntary memories become something to guard against, rather than to invite . . .

So there it is, my inadequate response to Sebald's The Emigrants. Perhaps you've already read it and we could chat about it? If not, you truly need to -- I suspect it will be recognized as one of the, say 100, most important books of the last century. I'll definitely be re-reading it and will also be reading his other titles.

A Trio of Mysteries

Now that classes have started, it's less and less likely that I'll ever get round to writing anything more than a mention of my most recent reading -- in the last few weeks of summer, I scarfed down some mysteries, just because I could!

What mysteries? Well, one of them you see in the photo above as part of the loot I found put out curbside by a fall-cleaning neighbour -- yippee! Besides the three books, I also scored the pyrex lasagna pan which will replace a 30-year old model I broke a few years ago. Both the Martha Grimes have been tucked away for future reading, but I couldn't wait to read Minette Walters' The Chameleon's Shadow, on my list for a while now. It was soooo satisfying -- her character development is always so nuanced with not-easily-likeable characters whose redeeming features nonetheless are gradually revealed.

Similarly, I was quickly caught up with the latest Simon Serrailler mystery by Susan Hill -- the relationship between Simon and his sister is enjoyable to watch, but both characters face some major emotional upheaval. The terrain of grief is tentatively explored here as it was in Elizabeth George's Careless in Red. Hill is also interesting for her willingness to introduce theology -- both the Anglicans and the atheists have room for their two cents here, as does a young lad caught up in a more fundamentalist version of Christianity.

After reading these two examples of very satisfying British mysteries, I found Kathy Reichs' latest-in-paperback, Devil Bones, competent but not particularly gripping. The main character seems much less complex to me than does Patricia Cornwell's Scarpetta (at her best, at least) with her alcoholism-under-control struggle appearing a bit formulaic as does her on-again-off-again relationship with a Montreal detective. I wonder sometimes about the demands of publishers for another book in a bestselling series and what it must be like to keep these characters fresh and the plots satisfying. Walters is wise, perhaps, to have resisted writing the same characters over and over again. Much as I look forward to the character development that can happen over the broad canvas of a multi-novel series, I can understand why writers might want several years in between -- as George seems to take -- or why they might choose to focus on more peripheral characters in some books as is the successful approach of others (Connelly, Robinson, Kellerman).

I've also just read W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants, which absolutely deserves its own post, however short that will be. Marvellous. Sad. Dream-like. More later . . .

Thoughts on Knitting Inefficiency

I posted this over here, but also want it here as part of the record of my reading. Sorry for the duplication:

Last summer, I quoted from a BC Bookworld review of Shannon Stratton's essay "Getting Things Done: On Needlecraft and Free Time," published in Volume III of Craft Perception and Practice: A Canadian Discourse, edited by Paula Gustafson, Nisse Gustafson & Amy Gogarty. At that time I ordered the book, later received it, and then laid it on the coffee table from whence it has called me occasionally throughout the year. Finally last week I sat down and read the essay whose excerpts had so impressed me, and I was delighted to find how much relevance it has to my recent musings on my leisure activities.
Stratton places her discussion of knitting within the context of "slow activism" -- as she describes that term, "practices that counter fast-paced, turbo-capitalist culture with life practices that turn back the pace of living to a slow, methodical pace of enjoyment and sensory indulgence . . . privileg[ing] practice over product." To the better-known Slow Food and Slow City movements, she suggests we consider adding knitting, especially in its more public manifestations, as an activity that critiques and resists market forces. Stratton cites Michel de Certau's The Practice of Everyday Life which suggests that tactics arising in the domestic sphere provide opportunity for slow activism.
Perhaps it's merely self-serving of me to suggest that my own insistence on knitting, gardening, playing with my granddaughter, cooking for my family, and reading not-immediately-relevant texts are small gestures exercising agency against the current market rationalization of academe. Perhaps. As Stratton points out, it "is certainly too generous to claim all knitters are engaged in political activity directly through their handicraft." Whether or not the activity is subversive depends on its ability to "subvert hierarchy, specialization, and non-communication" and in "a capitalist culture, subverting that system requires the redirection of energy away from the (direct or indirect) production of capital. . . . public knitting. . . . demonstrates a redirection of energy, action and labour away from sanctioned activities--paid work, capitalist productivity or passive assent--and towards dissent." Similarly, by not only spending some of my time on non-sanctioned activities in a system that rewards only certain kinds of research and publication, but futher, by writing about this choice, worrying about it, and insisting that I'm" not giving up any more of myself to climb arbitrarily-assigned-or-chosen ladders, I like to think I share, to some small degree, the aims of slow activism.
Again, I say, possibly a self-serving rationalization. But serving my self, I suppose, is itself a subversive act. Reading Stratton, knitting, writing blog posts about my life beyond academe, all for myself, rather than reading the latest journal in my field or writing an article for publication. Stealing back bits of my life in a system that insists I "Publish or Perish."
Let me close with Stratton's words, some of which I quoted here last summer:
[Knitters] represent a broad group of people who demonstrate the value of their time and personal agency. Whether or not the popularity of hobby-craft provides widespread evidence of a general, conscious interest in slow-activism is debatable, but the surge of interest in needlecraft as a means to foster community and as a vehicle for political expression is notable.
Perhaps what makes knitting important is its stubbornness. It refuses to be pinned down. It is neither an economically efficient way to clothe people, nor are knitters overtly challenging oppression and stopping war with fuzzy scarves. But what it does undo, one stitch at a time, is the idea that efficiency is a cultural value. In the absence of being able or even remotely wanting, to return to archaic, pastoral time, knitting does reunite the body with the product of its labour and a sense of natural time. It forces the individual to slow down and savour each second in a stitch, watching something grow and evolve, and marking each minute. It makes tangible the actions of our hands in a way the keyboard for the average office worker, accountant, copywriter, lawyer or cashier will never do. As a form of symbolic agency, it points to a burgeoning desire for reconnection with the physical, a reconnection that provides an authentic, inalienable experience, despite being unable to completely transcend the market.
In a culture that expects us to be busy and productive, time is something that we are afraid to waste. Perhaps that is why public knitting has become a prevalent performance: on trains and in coffee shops, on park benches and in classrooms, alone and in groups, the exchange of ideas and patterns, advice and conversation both related--and unrelated--to the hat taking shape on the needles. Public knitting proclaims openly: 'If time has to be spent, why not be thrifty?" Why not increase the value of one's own time by marking and savouring it, changing the terms for and exchange value of our free time. Knitting may be one of the provisional solutions, a gesture for the here-and-now, which, while blatantly slow (or at least inefficient), savours time rather than spends it.

That Summer in Paris

Fiction-writing often seems to be a ventriloquist's game, the writingwriter throwing a voice into a narrator with varying degrees of credibility. Perhaps as with ventiloquism, we are swayed to find the act more convincing if the dummy's appearance and demeanour reflects that of the puppeteer on whose knee it sits. After all, it's difficult enough for a middle-aged man to throw his voice from his own larynx to the artificially-moving lips of a large doll without having to make that voice belong to a young girl. Similarly, any writers working across an age or race or gender gap must research meticulously, imagine broadly, and craft thoughts and words carefully and subtly if they want their readers to relax their reservations and consider openly the propositions being made.


Abha Dawesar, the author of That Summer in Paris, is a relatively young female writer whose 3rd-person narrator claims knowledge of the thoughts and feelings of both a young female writer on the brink of her career and an aged Nobel-winning male writer, as well as numerous other characters of both sexes, young and old. She writes so well and raises such engaging questions about writing, life, love, and sex -- the latter as a nexus, really, for the former three -- that I was willing to accept her narrator's representation of these characters, except at several points where the ventriloquism was simply too obvious. I love her thoughtful imagining of old age, the limitations that Prem is facing as his body fails to keep pace with his still very active and capable mind. Having always imposed a physicality on his writing, demanding of himself that he write while standing at a high lectern, he has, for example, begun to find that process "arduous [feeling] his body getting slower and slower each day as if it were preparing for the full stop."


I'm intrigued by Prem's reservations about writing sex into his novels, his conviction that sex "only worked, was only good, when it was fluid, but words were all about fixing" and that "Moreover sex, unmediated by language and the morality necessarily innate in language, was the only way to have it. The spoken word was more fluid than the written; it could be modified with new words and adapt itself to the situation." Remembering back to words he used with an early love, Prem raises a provocative question: "Were words the opposite of sex?" How close Prem's thoughts are to Dawesar's, how obvious the ventiloquism, doesn't matter to me here because I'm busy with an entertaining question.


Similarly, I am captivated by the relationship between Prem and his friend, Pascal, the way they discuss their love lives and sexual activities (or lack of) with each other, on a foundation of trust and understanding that has been decades in the making. I'm much less interested in their rhapsodizing over female body parts, not because I'm prudish, but rather because here is where the ventriloquism reveals its weakness. When the two men talk about the beauty of female genitalia, I don't feel as if I've learned something about how men think, but rather I wonder whether Dawesar has got it right. How could she know this? If the implicit claim that men speak this way is to have any weight, what is the authority on which it is based? I'm suddenly very aware that the voice coming out of the narrator's lips is that of a young woman, and the information the narrator presents is thus based on research or a writer's imagination. Fair enough, but just as when an older male writer envoices a female protagonist, my willingness to suspend my disbelief is lessened, particularly since our thoughts about sexuality might reasonably be assumed to be tied to our gender.

These are not the only places in the text where I find the narrator's representation of the characters' thoughts weak. Besides wondering how closely these characters' response to sexuality mirrors that of "real" men, I found suspect the music Prem and Pascal listen to on their road trip. Composers' names get thrown about -- Wagner, Mahler, Strauss, followed then by specific pieces which might be included on any introduction to classical music: Symphonie fantastique, Saint-Saëns' Le carnaval des animaux and Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé and then Mozart's Jupiter Symphony. It sounds to me, in other words, more like the Music Menu a young, admiring writer might attribute to older learned and cultured male writers than what those of us who have been listening to classical music for decades and decades might actually choose to play.

I find the discussion of art sometimes reflect this kind of gap as well, although while there's a hint of Art 101, Dawesar seems to have a stronger base of her own knowledge here. I love the description of Prem's progress through the Orsay, the way that the museum's floorplan influenced his perception and appreciation of the paintings so that "one painting led to the anticipation of another. Rousseau's magnificent blades of grass in the forest made him anticipate Gauguin . . . [which] prepared him for Seurat's Cirque." I've only been through the Orsay two or three times, but Whistler's Mother made sense to me because of its placement in a sequence, and I envision paintings in the context of the museum layout.

And, of course, I enjoy travelling through the various museums and galleries in Paris. Dawesar's Paris is a well-observed, beautiful city of specific streets, parks, cafés, and, above all, of art. Visits to the Panthéon, the Rodin museum, -- and especially the Musée Zadkine, one of my own recent discoveries -- are convincing, gratifying, and a charming way to visit or re-visit the City of Light.

Overall, though, as much as I admire this novel and did enjoy reading it, I wonder if it's the gap between my age and the author's which alienates me from it -- is it my place in an older generation of feminists that makes me question the eroticism so many have found in this book? While there are undeniably erotic scenes -- the cheese-tasting is a wondrous melding of food and sex -- I find it hard to understand why a young woman would want to repeat the age-old theme of older man-- younger woman. I understand that part of the attraction here is for the older man's writerly abilities, especially as this text is so concerned with writing, but having tired decades ago of those male writers who fill pages with the young women who lust for their charms, I'm -- what, bemused? puzzled? disappointed? -- to have a young woman writing that yes, this is exactly what young women want. To have the male fantasy appear as a young woman's fantasy, and to read over and over that this is erotic -- I must admit this makes me feel much as I do when my young students tell me that we don't need feminism anymore because we've achieved equality.

Finally, I wonder what motivated Dawesar to imagine this story -- why is it easier or more desirable for her to imagine a young female writer having an affair with an old man (an old man who, in his 60s, had an affair with two teenagers simultaneously; whose childhood and adolescence were marked by an incestuous relationship with his sister, whose son he may have fathered) than to, for example, imagine what that female writer's old age might have looked like. I suspect that the latter is much less interesting for reasons which might suggest that we shouldn't throw the feminism baby out with the bathwater anytime soon.