materfamilias reads

7,000 words . . . and then some

2009-11-01T15:01:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-12T16:12:00.001-07:00

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!

2009-09-27T19:01:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-20T10:39:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-08T07:02:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-07T17:33:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-01T17:11:00.000-07:00

Fiction-writing often seems to be a ventriloquist's game, the ~~writing~~writer 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.

A Trio of Girls and Miriam Toews' The Flying Troutmans

2009-08-20T16:50:00.000-07:00

I had hoped to write about Miriam Toews' The Flying Troutmans, but one of my daughters (who counts Toews' A Complicated Kindness among her favourites) has borrowed it. Without pages to turn, passages to look up, I am limited to impressions, but you already know I do more quick and dirty than protracted review anyway.

By the way, for those readers who have asked for recommendations re Canadian literature, I am proud to say that Toews is Canadian and although this novel begins in Paris and travels through the US, it still captures some of the flavour of small Prairie-town/city teen life that is such a strong element in Kindness. Both well worth reading!

So quickly, impressions: The coincidence, on the first page, of "Min" and "Thebes" (nicknames, respectively, of the narrator's mentally ill sister and that sister's daughter) somehow set me up to think of the labyrinth, although I know that "Theseus" is the proper "Th" name for that association. Still, the idea of journeying into a dangerous centre of potential self-discovery and of journeying back out again to rejoin life is an idea that the novel's road-trip plot supports.

Painful, gentle, funny, dark, wry, quirky family dysfunction is familiar territory for Toews; overall, this novel is perhaps more redemptive, even upbeat, than Kindness, I think because the adult narrator engages more usefully with the children than the father was able to in Kindness. And the kids themselves are, oddly, less damaged, despite the cost their mother's condition has exacted. They are great kids, funny, real, recognizable despite Thebes' oscillation between precocity and naiveté.

And that would lead me to the last response I had to this novel which is to connect Thebes to the young girls in Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog and Kate Atkinson's When Will There Be Good News. In all three cases, the girls are barely or early adolescent, very bright, but alienated or isolated socially from their peers and/or from their families. They manifest an independence and competence side-by-side with a vulnerability that they have learned to shrug off and are very endearing because of that combination. I contrast this figure -- the bright 12-16-year old girl -- with the young women who puzzled me in so many literary novels a decade or so ago. At that time, with my daughters in their late teens and early twenties, I found the use of this figure suspect; I had difficulty with the "willing suspension of disbelief" required to attribute wisdom, patience, selflessness or whatever to 19-year old protagonists who often seemed to have stepped off the pages of a Harlequin novel.

So I wonder if this trio I've spotted marks a larger pattern and if I were searching for an interesting thesis, I think I'd dig into this question for a while. For example, the three young girls, as presented, have almost no interest at all in their sexuality -- they manifest no preoccupation with boys, either singular or plural. The young women, on the other hand, generally worked through love and/or sexuality to do some kind of thematic work for their authors. As I say, if I were less a dilettante, I think this might be worth some protracted exploration of what might be "an emerging cultural phenomenon." Dilettante, however, I seem doomed to me, so I will merely throw the question out for my readers to ponder. I will commit, though, to tracking down another recent mystery which apparently features a young girl who might make a quartet of my trio -- Flavia, the heroine of Alan Bradley's The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. The reviews look very appealing, so this will eventually work its way up my book order list.

What do you think? Any heroines or narrators or characters you can think of from your recent reading that fit my description? And if you've read The Flying Troutmans and want to comment on any aspect of it, I'd love to hear what you think.

David Adams Richards speaks out

2009-08-15T17:59:00.000-07:00

Today's Globe and Mail includes an adapted excerpt from David Adams Richards' new book, God Is, an excerpt that I think is important, controversial, and well worth reading. The headline for the essay suggests its boldness: "Canada's literary community gets religion all wrong, argues David Adams Richards in his new book, God Is."

Here's a sample, but I think the essay deserves to be read in its entirety, and I hope to get to the book soon, for a fuller exploration of what Richards has to say -- already, I find much to agree with here.
within Canada's writing and intellectual community, many people I know will not consider the idea that skepticism toward the existence of God may not be absolutely progressive.
It is a credulity of thought that is almost prerequisite in much of our literary culture. Darwin proved it, or someone proved it, and now our literary quest is to make such proof absolute. The derision toward anyone who believes is swift and non-negotiable among many writers today, or at least in their writing. It is as if a doctrine has been set in motion in which not to demean religion is sacrilegious.
That is not to say I want anyone to write religious books. Far from it, let me tell you. Anyone who thinks that misses the point entirely.
I am simply reflecting on the plethora of anti-religious elitism that passes for both comedy and concern among people who lecture from the stage. It is a kind of swaggering doctrine that in its own way is as rigid in its essential belief as the evangelical or Catholic dogma it mocks.

I know that I am often dismayed at conversations among academic colleagues who abandon their training to make sweeping, unexamined statements about religious beliefs that they would never make about race, ethnicity, or gender. I'm not alone in this dismay, but often those of us who feel these way tend to stay silent rather than be misunderstood as apologists for religion. Certainly, my own cultural background is Catholic and there is still much about the faith that resonates with me very powerfully. At the same time, I recognize the Church's failings -- my family has experienced abuse at its hands, abuse which was recognized and punished by a court of law -- and have found myself unable to participate in/attend Mass for years now because of the teachings regard sexuality and gender. My objection, which I'm so pleased to have Richards help articulate, is to the unproblematized tarring of so much with such a widely-applied brush -- after all, my grandmothers and grandfathers, my father particularly, all gone now, lived in a profound and loving and nurturing faith that I am hurt to have derided as merely feeble-minded.

That's enough. I'll encourage you to read Richards instead -- he says it so much better than I do.

Best-sellers I'm Not Sold on

2009-08-10T17:28:00.000-07:00

I've almost forgotten to mention that I recently read Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Luis Zafon after reading several enthusiastic references. I ordered it thinking it would be the perfect summer escape reading -- something like Elizabeth Kostova's wonderful The Historian of several years back. By the time of my daughter and granddaughter's visit two weeks ago, I was halfway through Zafon's book, but I admit that it seemed to take forever to finish, and my reading was beginning to feel like a duty. I had very little compulsion to find out what would happen -- the mystery was too overwrought for me to care very much. Even more, I felt no connection to the protagonist who scarcely seemed credible in his precocity at twelve and barely seemed to change as he moved through his teens and early twenties. Only one other character caught my interest for long, and that wasn't enough compensation.

A further disappointment is that the book left me with no real sense of Barcelona. Comparing it, for example, to Pascal Mercier's Night Train to Lisbon (similar in its bibliocentric mystery and connection to Portugal's dark military and political history), Robert Wilson's A Small Death in Lisbon, or Richard Zimler's The Last Kabbalist in Lisbon, I couldn't help find Zafon's novel wanting.

That said, the book is well written, and there was something there that kept me going 'til the end (as was the case for my daughter who commented, when she saw me reading it, that she'd just finished it, but wouldn't recommend it particularly). At least, it didn't irritate me the way that The Da Vinci Code did -- that book I couldn't get beyond the first chapter despite the number of people who found it a gripping page-turner. So take my criticism of Shadow with a grain of salt. As with Da Vinci, many, many people have kept this historical mystery on bestseller lists for months. Feel free to ignore my dissenting opinion.

At Death's Door with Sandra Gilbert

2009-08-04T07:35:00.000-07:00

I'm reading Sandra Gilbert's Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve and it's helping me articulate something of what I experienced intensely through/at Pater's vasovagal episodes (fainting) last week. She uses Georges Batailles term, "disintoxication," which she summarizes as "a brief awakening from the 'projects' of love and work that function, thought Bataille, like 'narcotics' to help us repress the consciousness of our own mortality. On these occasions, [Gilbert explains,] the fearful knowledge that we're usually (and rightly) good at evading erupts into our dailiness as death's door swings so . . . dramatically open that we can't look away" (xvii). Yes, indeed. Dailiness one minute. Dinner. Wine. Putting the grandchild to bed. Watching TV. Then the eruption as death's door compels me to peer inside . . .

A bit later, speaking of her own precipitous move through that door at her husband's sudden death, she speaks of how she and her daughters found themselves "star[ing] at the silent stone version of himself that he had become, in a space that was bleakly filled by corporeal substance. This death that had suddenly, gigantically, opened around us . . . . forced me, horrifyingly, to confront the metamorphosis of a body I had loved into a dead thing that now appeared to be the substance of fate itself" (5-6).

She speaks of the way her husband "wasn't there, but he was there. And his thereness, his presence at the center of massive absence, was what made death plausible, what flung it open like a door into an all too easily accessible space. . . into which it would be frighteningly simple to step" (6).

Gilbert is describing the mourner's temptation, no, compulsion is perhaps a better term, to follow the loved one into that space. I have not yet tested the truth of that perception although I am quite convinced by Gilbert (never mind by Freud's foundational essay, "On Mourning and Melancholia" as well as countless elegists and psychoanalysts and theorists throughout history). But what resonates with me is the image of my own husband's body, stilled, signifying death at least as much as it pointed to life. I am almost back now to the place where I can say, intellectually, "yes, of course, we are always only one incident away from death" while nonetheless being inured from that common-sense "knowledge." But for the moments I tried to pat him awake, urge him back, all while trying to call for help, I lived in a place where his death was the reality it has always already been. Several times a day, but each day with less frequency, thank God, I gasp out loud again at the intruding image of his body falling straight through space to the floor, to the grey pallor and sightless eyes of the corpse he one day will be. Disintoxification indeed. I need a drink, a narcotic, a drugged pretense, something to keep me from knowing what I know . . . what I never truly knew until last week, a knowledge I will soon, I hope, begin to forget, for now . .

Tiger, tiger . . .

2009-08-02T11:39:00.000-07:00

Pater's recent enjoyment of Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies guided his choice, in an airport bookstore several weeks ago, of Aravind Adiga's Man Booker-winning, The White Tiger, and I'm so glad that was the case. For many years, I made a point of reading the Booker winner each year, and usually also managed a few of the other contenders. Sadly, I haven't been keeping up as well lately, and I'd like to remedy that. This novel is a great incentive to reading more Booker books!

First, the narrative has an inescapable lure from the first page -- an epistolary novel, it's not at all, however, stylistically arch or tiresome in any way as such novels can sometimes be. The framework didn't get in the way at all, but rather added a fascinating argument -- the inevitable solidarity between the "brown" and the "yellow" man, and their twinned triumph over the White -- to an already-compelling tale. White readers "overhearing" this conversation, reading over the shoulder of either correspondent, are simultaneously amused, entertained, and, if they're at all alert to globalization and its relationship to the security of their way of life, alarmed perhaps, alienated at least from a narrative which hopes for their demise or enslavement or irrelevance.

Rather than inviting sympathy, then, as many novels about life in the Indian sub-continent do, this novel throws down a gauntlet, delivers a strident warning. Yet the effect of the epistolary address -- the confessional intimacy of the tone -- is to allow the reader to position herself as the intended reader even though she is a white, middle class North American, rather than a Chinese male Premier (the letter-writing narrator's intended addressee). We imagine ourselves as the narrator's confidante and erase the boundaries between us, adopting his point-of-view. Although there are many clues that he is not to be admired, that the writer keeps his own distance from Munna's morality (or amorality, in certain actions), we somehow sympathize with the cold-blooded choices he makes in order to break out of the Rooster Coop of the Indian social structure.

In fact, it is the seemingly logical appeal of Munna's choices that makes the novel so devastating along with its often-comic delivery. The narrator works effectively in the first 30 pages or so to establish that there is really no way for himself or anyone he knows to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" only by dint of hard work and honesty. Rather, advancement depends on corruption, thievery, and/or violence, and only once he accepts this knowledge and decides to act on it does the narrator have any chance of bettering his conditions. A white North American or European reader must find it hard to deny this apparently likeable character the kind of lifestyle the North American/European takes for granted. Thus we must then consider -- in a world where governments and justice systems are immoral, unjust, and corrupt -- what saves us from those who, like Munna, decide to go the next logical step and make these systems work for themselves.

Like Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, this novel is both comic and devastating, compelling entertainment and wake-up call for social justice on a global scale. We would be foolish to ignore the world these novels represent -- for despite the illusions we cherish, it is our world too, after all.

Winter view from a Summer Perspective

2009-07-27T15:37:00.000-07:00

Summertime and the paddling is pleasant! View from my deck yesterday afternoon

A few years ago, I commented to a neighbour, during a third rainless week in mid-September (which followed a dry, hot August) that although I was enjoying the glorious weather, such drought always aroused some primeval anxiety -- to which she replied that she had a simple answer: "November, December, January."

I thought of this exchange when I came across this evocative passage in Michael Redhill's Consolation (which I referred to briefly here):

The steepest decline in light always came in the middle of November. There was a point every night now when the sun suddenly plunged below the horizon and dropped the city into a blunt, grayling light. The shock of darkness before five-thirty snapped the cord that connected people to the vain dream of summer, and confirmed that the only way back to daylight now would be to put one's head down and push on through December, January, February. But it was really February--that month of wet lungs and bird-choking fog--that November's
desolation looked forward to. They were bookends, these two months, one buried in a dead year that said abandon hope, and the other in a fresh one that said what hope?

Of course, here on the West (Wet!) Coast, we don't have the tough winters to get through that Torontonians and other Easterners do, but the combination of wind and rain and short days are hard on the spirit as well. Indeed, such resonance had this passage for me that I've decided to get out in that sunshine -- anxious though it makes me, and our drought is early and long this summer already -- and soak up some Vitamin D! Soon enough we'll be back to this . . .

Reacher in Paris

2009-07-26T16:26:00.000-07:00

If you've spent any time reading here, or especially if you've spent any time reading over here, you'll know that I'm a bit of a francophile, and also that my husband and I have been spending time in Paris each year.

As well, you might have noticed that Pater and I both enjoy Lee Child's Jack Reacher mysteries.

So putting these two bits of knowledge together, can you imagine how pleased I was to discover, while reading Child's 2004 book, The Enemy, that Reacher's mother is French, that she lives in Paris, that Reacher and his brother read and speak French, if rustily, AND that they travel together to Paris to visit their mother, whose health is in jeopardy. It's always a pleasure to move through the streets of Paris guided by a writer one admires, and to walk alongside a character one has come to like, respect, or at least be intrigued by, is a treat indeed.

I picked this paperback up from the pile of free hand-me-downs in our island's ferry waiting room -- a bonus on a hot sunny day, a bonus that seemed to be urging me to go sit in the shade with a mystery. We probably began reading this series a year or two after this book was published, so we've missed it. This serendipitous find has reminded me that I should go back and check out what Reacher was doing in his earlier years. If only for that filling-in of his background, this novel was worth it, but added to that aspect was a very satisfying plot AND, of course, the added benefit of a visit to Paris. Which, the narrator tells us at the end, is the last visit Reacher will ever make.

Pater's been waiting impatiently for me to pass this one along to him, so I'll give it to him today as a birthday treat. Let me know if you read it as well.

Don Domanski and metaphor

2009-07-24T10:23:00.000-07:00

I've just read Canadian poet Don Domanski's Ralph Gustafson lecture Poetry and the Sacred, published as a beautiful hand-stitched chapbook. As I was recently thinking about metaphor while reading Ghosh's Sea of Poppies and Dickens' David Copperfield, I thought I'd quote Domanski on metaphor. Noting that language can act as an impediment to reaching a pre-verbal or beyond-verbal knowledge, he says of metaphor that it

is one way to re-establish our relationship with the textual possibilities; it
sidesteps many of the pitfalls that lock language in a low, weak orbit around
the individual. If the cliché that poetry allows us to see with fresh eyes is
true, metaphor, to paraphrase [Dominican mystic Meister] Eckhart, is the eye
that both the world and the poet use to see each other. It creates sight where
there was none; it releases us to new expectations. Reality shifts and we are
carried along with the movement. "Metaphor," to quote Cynthia Ozick, "is the
mind's opposable thumb." It allows us to grasp meaning in one of the mind's
darkest places, in that gap between the meanings themselves, in that fissure
created by polarities, where light falls to blackness. To find the connection
between dissimilar things is to place a flame there. In that deep chasm lies the
consecrated space, the sacred ground of all spiritual traditions. The poet can
bring back to our modern consciousness much of what has been lost during our
journey towards mechanized existence. From the pilgrimages poets make, we are
reminded of the heart's great need for wonder, its longing for a transpersonal
dimension in our lives. Inside each of us is a desire for expansion outside of
our ordinary self, to extend our understanding of nature, the universe and other
people. Poetry is one way that this can be realized.

Domanski closed his lecture by reading one of his poems, "All Our Wonder Unavenged," which is also included in the chapbook, and from it, I'll close this post with a stanza that harbours one of the most captivating metaphors I've come across lately, one I think of many evenings now, as the sun begins to set . . .

late afternoon and the western sun-door still ajar
some hours to go before it
closes
shadow hours
for the food gatherers to return to their mounds
for chickadees to follow their old ways

fables without end

A Reading Medley -- mystery, Canadiana, knitting et al

2009-07-10T16:32:00.000-07:00

It's a long while since I last posted -- three weeks? I know that part of the reason is that my last post mentioned wanting to follow up on my discussion of Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies by thinking about some metaphors he uses and how my students might respond to them. But try as I might, I can't find the brilliant examples I thought I'd seen in the text. Oh, there are many lovely and effective and startling metaphors -- one character's "length and leanness" of limbs "suggest[] the sinuosity of a shade-seeking plant; a young woman's hair, tied back "in a severe little knot" is likened to "a corset for her skull"; and another character has cheeks that "hung down as if weighted with gloom" and "dark shapeless ears that stuck out from his huge head like outgrowths of fungus on a mossy rock." But none of these seems quite as striking an example as I remembered, and I've spent many, many minutes skimming the book repeatedly trying to recover what I had in mind. Meanwhile, I was reluctant to write about anything else. Time to move on, though, it seems to me, and so I'll point these out and ask my question: How well-trained or prepared are today's students to perform the mental gymnastics required by such metaphors?

Because there are gymnastics required. For young people so much exposed to visual images, these kind of verbal descriptions demand that they create their own image, building on a complex series of comparing possibilities. To assemble a sense of someone's appearance by having to detour through a mental exploration of a plant that sinuously moves toward the shade takes some experience, not only with the verbal-mental process of imagination, but also with the world -- one has to have a repertoire of mental images, in this case, of shade-loving plants, in the other examples of a corset and of fungus, moss, and rocks. As well, the entire process of deciphering these descriptions requires not only patience but also an ability to enjoy the puzzle. Young people have often learned their patience at the video game console where they also certainly learn to couple persistence with puzzle-solving, but the subsequent rewards, perhaps, come more quickly there and are more dramatic.

I thought of this as well when I was reading David Copperfield where every page offered some passage or other that I wanted to grab someone nearby to listen to and appreciate -- the intricate descriptions relied on layer after layer of metaphors, taking the reader through all kinds of twists and turns and wit galore to finally arrive at a composite image. So much work for the reader to do -- well-rewarded work, in my opinion, but a lot of work for too little return to many of my students. Would they, with more experience, and perhaps by practising in smaller doses, begin to acquire both the skill and the taste to enjoy such complexity? And when I say "they," I reluctantly have to admit that it's not just my students, but rather the general population who find it more and more difficult to find the time for complex and challenging pleasures. Oh dear, I'm wandering into the territory of trite generalizations and I should probably stop. But really, where do you stand on this crusade?

As you know, I also love a good mystery and Peter Robinson always provides. I just finished his very satisfying All the Colours of Darkness, and came away with another list of music to seek out. Inspector Alan Banks impresses me very much with his eclectic taste in music -- if it's good, he seems to know and love it, whether it's classic rock, blues, opera, avant-garde classical, or punk. I'm pleased to note that Banks and Cabot's relationship (still a Platonic one throughout the novel) continues to build and to hold the reader's interest.

Now I'm reading Michael Redhill's Consolation and very much enjoying the Toronto he builds images of, across a century and a half. Also interested in seeing some gender issues sketched -- masculinity within families is something that we have to tread so carefully in discussing outside of fiction that I'm grateful to novelists who are willing to explore the territory. Here, at least as far as I've read, there's some masculine solidarity across the generations in the face of some expectations by the women in the family. To a certain extent, these expectations as limned here make my feminist hackles rise a bit, but I can't completely deny them. And, as I say, I think it's very much worth laying them out and discussing them.

I'm also reading Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's (aka The Yarn Harlot) Knitting Rules. Somehow, I've never read her books although I read every single one of her posts. This book has so much helpful information in such an entertaining package that it will have a prominent spot in my knitting book collection, after I've finished chuckling my way through it.

Reading for Planes, Trains, and . . . Ferries

2009-06-20T16:44:00.000-07:00

We're back from our vacances and almost adjusted to the time change, so it's time to catch up here. As I mentioned in my last post. oh so long ago, I tend to stick to light reading while travelling, mainly mysteries from series Pater likes as well so that we can share books and keep our packing light. (We did our whole month away with only a carry-on case each!)

Besides the Deaver I referred to in that last post, I also packed Lee Child's latest-in-paperback Nothing to Lose. While this wasn't my favourite Jack Reacher mystery, neither was it disappointing -- I think I just found the plot a bit too tightly focussed with notably fewer characters for Reacher to interact with. But the book achieves a decent sense of landscape, which I always like, there's a strong female character -- a consistent and pleasing feature of Child's mysteries, and some thought-provoking commentary about the state of the American military and its role in federal politics (seems to me a number of best-selling mystery writers have done some of this consciousness-raising over the past several years -- possible topic of an interesting article?).

Reading the same mysteries further intensified the closeness Pater and I experienced while we were away and provided additional fodder for mealtime conversations -- a worthwhile consideration when together 24/7, as the kids say, for 3 weeks solid. Noticing this, and seeing a paperback copy of Ghosh's Sea of Poppies at a WHSmith in London for a dirt cheap Buy One, Get One 1/2 Price (Oh, if I hadn't been worried about packing limits, I could have brought home so many great books from Britain!), I bought it even though I had left my hardcover copy behind in Vancouver. After the two mysteries, I was glad to turn back to a novel that provided a very different rhythm, different language, and, especially, a different landscape. I'm not done with writing about this book -- I want to think a bit about the kinds of metaphors Ghosh creates and how prepared today's young readers are for working through them -- but for now I'll just say that Pater was intrigued enough by my account of the claims Ghosh makes -- about England's role in creating a legacy of opium addiction and its disruption of Indian agriculture to profit from that addiction -- to want to read the book himself. He's paying it more attention than I've seen him give a literary novel for a long time, testifying to its compelling narrative, and we've had some conversations about Ghosh's ear for diction and about the role of Indian speakers in the development of the English language. Sadly, the paperback version is probably not going to be available here for a while, but the hardback has a beautiful cover and I know you'll enjoy reading this.

I might also mention that I've had fun this trip comparing the latest issues of VOGUE -- my favourite so far, as I found last summer, is the British version, but I've only just started the French one, so the verdict's still out.

And finally, right now I'm reading Fred Vargas' Un Lieu Incertain, having picked up a copy at the Bon Marché. I was so frustrated with my French this visit, not having made any time at all over the past year to refresh it, other than watching the occasional French movie (and even then, relying on the English subtitles -- if only I could find versions with French subtitles, that would really help!). So I resolved to get back to my earlier practice of reading a few French novels over the summer, possibly even through the year, although my workload is so heavy during term that that's unlikely. At any rate, Vargas makes this task a very pleasurable one -- I love these romans policiers, which are always unpredictable, always both puzzling and satisfying, and always with very quirky crimes, often pointing toward the supernatural yet not, finally, of it. And, having caught you up on my month's reading (pretty thin, wasn't it!) I'm heading back to my armchair to watch Adamsberg and Danglard tussle with the latest tueur. How about you? Any summer reading to share?

from my montreal hotel room-- a little light reading

2009-05-26T12:49:00.000-07:00

Travelling now, which will mostly mean reading mysteries -- we try to pack lightly, so I bring along books we'll both enjoy but won't mind leaving behind. I did think I might have packed my secondhand copy of David Copperfield but it was far too heavy. Might pick up an inexpensive copy in London.

Meanwhile, I'm reading Jeffrey Deaver's latest, The Broken Window, and finding it sufficiently diverting to get me through plane and train rides. Its focus on data mining, though, has me a bit anxious as I cross the country, and soon the Atlantic, dropping bits of digital information here, there, and everywhere. As with his other mysteries, I'm enjoying the results of the background research and I also quite like the characters -- this one gives more glimpses into Lincoln Rhyme's past, and also lets young cop Ron Pulaski develop. As well, there's some engaging goings-on between Amelia Sachs and her young charge/mentee -- one especially satisfying moment which suggests how much teen girls can benefit from a strong female role model.

Before I left home, I finished Carol Windley's Breathing Under Water. I enjoyed its gentle, thoughtful description of life in a small town on Vancouver Island in the 50s from a woman's perspective, but I have to admit that I can't help but feel not only that this territory has been covered, but even that it has limited relevance. I feel guilty even suggesting that, quite frankly, yet I found myelf being the tiniest bit impatient, and I can't imagine teaching the novel and having the students relate. Yes, there's much in it that I can relate to, and/or that illuminates some of what my mother might have experienced/felt, but the recently-deceased Marilyn French covered this terrain so well in The Women's Room that it's difficult to say much new about it, especially as late as 1998, when Windley's novel was published. It does capture that hermetic quality of small towns, though, and something about the mother-daughter relationship -- the estrangements and similarities and desires, all confused.

Rush, rush, rush, but there's always time for more books!

2009-05-19T09:37:00.000-07:00

Very quickly as I'm packing and trying to finish my conference papers.

Quick treat mystery: Harlan Coben's Hold Tight. Pater had started it but couldn't get into it for whatever reasons. I picked it up, then, with reservations, but found it quite satisfactory for ferry-reading diversion.

Finished Kathleen Flinn's The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry, and both Pater and I enjoyed it. In fact, we're going to try to work through the recipes when we get back from our holiday. They appear challenging enough to be interesting but also quite practical and manageable -- and they look delicious! This was a great book for me to read aloud to Pater while he's driving or cooking -- two situations we've found well-suited to this practice. Do any of you read aloud to your partners? Or are you read aloud to? Under what conditions? A friend of mine reads to her husband while he paints (pictures, not walls) . . .

And I'd left my novel behind this weekend so had to pick up something else (of course, can't be without a good book!). Grabbed the hardcover of Amitav Ghosh's The Sea of Poppies. When I have a minute, I'll photograph it for you -- the above, taken from Ghosh's own website, doesn't really do it justice. I'm about 120 pages in and wondering whether I'll be able to finish it before leaving at the end of the week. I won't take it with me as it's too heavy and I wouldn't be willing to abandon it anywhere along the way. Wonderfully written with attention paid to words, the formation of English from all its colonial borrowings/thefts. The writing style -- descriptions especially and their dependence on metaphor and a certain commitment and nimbleness of mind on the part of the reader -- is really making me think about what I expect of my students and what training they do and do not bring to the task.

Sorry, got to go. Out of time. Papers must be polished!
Do comment, though. I'd love to hear from you.

Congratulations, Randall!

2009-05-08T10:48:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to Randall Maggs who was presented Wednesday with the E.J. Pratt award for his book Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems which I've written about here and here. The book won the Winterset award earlier this year. I was fortunate enough to meet Randall this spring and hear him read his poems to an enthusiastic audience, and have a recent e-mail from him awaiting response. We've talked about getting together in the future and I hope that happens-- he has a wealth of hockey stories I know Pater would love to hear. Meanwhile, I look forward to introducing his hockey poems to students and other readers in the future -- let me know if you come across them, would you?

Kellerman's Bones, Flynn's Knife, and Wiseman's Crackpot

2009-05-05T07:40:00.000-07:00

I wonder if I'm doomed to keep apologizing for cursory posts here -- I do hope that, once I've got these two conferences behind me, I'll be able to be a bit more expansive here, or at least a more frequent poster, but that won't be 'til the end of June.

Meanwhile, I have done a bit of reading, including the latest paperback by Jonathan Kellerman, Bones. Ho-hum, yawn, snore . . . oh, sorry, were you saying something? These are always fairly credibly written, but the characters aren't developing appreciably. Even the little French bulldog, Blanche, is a snooze here, and I'd rather enjoyed the sketch of her in the last book. The set-up has become too predictable in this series, sadly, with there inevitably being an episode in which "the good guys" are in physical danger in the second or third-to last chapter, but, of course, always emerge victorious by the end. The "bad guys" haven't been interesting or even particularly convincing for several years. When Kellerman gets it all working, his novels really entertain, but there have been a number of ho-hums in the last few years and I'll think twice about bothering next time.

I'm still dipping in and out of The Sharper your Knife, the Less You Cry and enjoying it very much, especially since it's set in Paris and I'm getting ready to head there in a few weeks.

And I just finished Adele Wiseman's The Crackpot after picking up a New Canadian Library secondhand edition for $3.00. Such a bargain for this novel which I should have read years ago. How do these classics slip away from us? After all, I'm supposedly a Canadianist and have done all that required reading through coursework, comps, etc. Written in the 1970's, set during the 1930's and 1940's primarily among Winnipeg's Jewish community, the novel creates a character who cannot easily be described. Born to a blind father and crippled mother who were married to save their Old World village from a pogrom, Hoda grows up fat -- cherished at home but ridiculed everywhere else. The solution she finds to keeping her and her father from poverty after her mother dies -- gradually becoming her community's prostitute after an accidental beginning -- invites the reader to view her as pathetic, at first, but her acceptance of what life hands her, her perseverance and defiance and, especially, her determination to enjoy what's possible to enjoy make this, incredibly, a stunningly redemptive and inspiring book. Without spoiling a central element of the plot, I will just say that Hoda's story has Biblical proportions and with Danile's blindness and what happens at a central point, Greek tragedy is also suggested. For some, then, the ending might seem too convenient, even banal, yet I found it congruent with Hoda's overall approach, her ability to "block[ ] life's kicks and [try] to catch a glimpse of life's butterflies."

Potpourri -- mystery, chicklit, memoirs, theory

2009-04-17T07:00:00.000-07:00

Okay, this is going to be one of those quick catch-up posts -- if I have a minute, one of these days I'll take a photo or two of the stacks and stacks of unreads 'round here -- so I think I should concentrate on reading them rather than writing about, just for the next wee while anyway.
First up, some reading from a genre I don't usually spend much time with -- Chick Lit -- and I guess even more specifically, Chick Lit for the "Mature Chick" (if that's not an oxymoron, then I'm not an English prof!). At Chapters quite a few months ago I picked up a remaindered hardcover whose reference to The Friday Night Knitting Club caught my eye. While I haven't bothered yet to buy or read the latter, I'm a keen knitter and thought another in the same vein might be fun at that remaindered price. And it was an enjoyable quick read when I was sick a few weeks ago and couldn't have managed anything much more demanding --Kate Jacobs' Comfort Food -- but it wasn't about knitting and without that hook, I'm afraid there wasn't much else for me to recommend about it. Competent writing, yes, although I'm not a fan of "upon," preferring the simpler "on" -- you know what I mean: "Upon arriving at the door . . . " "Upon seeing her friend, she . . ." etc., etc., (and no, these aren't examples from the book, but they'll suffice to make the point, won't they?)

No, if I'm reading formula or genre fiction, it's pretty much going to be the mystery novel (although I used to very much enjoy good SF as well). When classes finished earlier this month, I celebrated by cracking out the latest Peter Robinson paperback, Friend of the Devil. I do like our Inspector Alan Banks with his strengths and inevitable frailties and his impressive knowledge of music. I have a weak spot for the bad boys, the Rebuses and the Bosches, but Banks is someone you could imagine having over for dinner and enjoying his company -- and you wouldn't be too worried he'd end up swearing and walking out. DC Annie Cabot is walking closer to that bad boy line, but again, she's bright, interesting, and has a background in art -- between the two characters, I always pick up an interesting fact or two, sometimes even a new favourite musician or artist. Plot was satisfying enough here and Robinson's supporting cast of characters are as complex as always, even the bit players -- caricatures make me impatient except in really spot-on satire (which is seldom what I'm looking for in a good mystery).

I've also just finished reading Mark Doty's The Dog Years and very much admired what he's able to pull together in this memoir about the lives and deaths of two beloved dogs. He manages to create a structure which alternates between anecdotes -- funny, charming, poignant, sad -- and meditations on life and death. It's a fine line, it seems to me, between keeping the overall tone light enough to suit the reader who is primarily attracted by the "dog story" and treating the existential-metaphysical aspects with the weight they deserve. He does that so well that I keep wondering if I could dare teach this to my 1st-year students. There's much more indulgence in language (lyrical descriptions, more adjectives and adverbs than many of them like, many words they'd have to look up) and philosophizing than I'd usually try with them, and he even quotes other poets! (primarily Emily Dickinson) but I do think that the subject matter would keep most of them reading (well, that and the comprehension quiz I could give them!). Certainly, the students in my 1st-year Poetry class this year appreciated Doty's sonnet, "Golden Retrievals" -- do click on the link and take a minute to read this poem and you'll see why.

Right now, I'm reading Kathleen Flinn's The Sharper the Knife, the Less You Cry, another memoir, but this one about a woman who takes the loss of her job as an opportunity to fulfil a lifelong dream to study at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. So far, I'm enjoying it very much -- more later!

As well, I've picked out my Dickens for this summer. As I wrote last year when reporting on Bleak House, I decided in summer 2007 to refresh my familiarity with Dickens' novels after decades away from them. For the cost of $3.00, I picked up a secondhand Riverside edition of David Copperfield yesterday -- cost per word will be infinitesimal.

But right now, it's back to Kristeva -- I've been reading her chapters on Louis-Ferdinand Céline in anticipation of our theory group's last session of the year -- it's this afternoon and we have a visiting speaker, so I'd better go prepare.

Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog

2009-04-10T14:11:00.000-07:00

Right now, my reading is divided primarily between a stack of student essays and, more happily, some guidebooks on London (I'm looking for a decent, affordable place to stay for a few days at the end of May). But a few weeks ago, I discovered a lovely novel -- or perhaps more accurately, it discovered me. At least, there was more serendipity than design in my coming across this real treat of a read -- I was tutoring in our Writing Centre one afternoon, and chatting with another tutor between students. She's also a neighbour on my wee island and we often chat about books, travels, opera and frustrations with Administration. She had just finished reading Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog and asked me if I'd read it. "No? Well, you should. Here, you can borrow my copy." And I did, and I loved it, and soon I'll not only have my own copy but I'll also be giving it away as birthday and Christmas gifts.

It's the most charming tale (translated, in my edition, from French to English by Alison Anderson -- translators really deserve more credit than they often get, in my opinion) about a concierge employed at a hôtel particulier in the very bourgeois 7th arr. Against all the expectations of her banally bourgeois employers (the inhabitants of the eight luxury apartments at number 7, rue de Grenelle), 54-year old Renée, a "short, ugly, and plump" widow with bunions, as she describes herself, loves Mahler, reads Death in Venice when she's not reading philosophy, has a love of cinema eclectic enough to embrace both "American blockbusters and art-house films," and almost gives herself away by blurting out "You ought to read The German Ideology" in response to "the Pallières boy" and his smug claim about how Marx changed his worldview.

As soon as she makes her impulsive comment, Renée regrets it, because she has built a life around conforming to the image of "what social prejudice has collectively construed to be a typical French concierge . . . old, ugly, sour . . . [with] rather large dithering cats who sleep all day on cushions covered with crocheted cases . . . while [the concierges themselves] watch television interminably" in rooms that "smell of pot-au-feu, cabbage soup, or a country-style cassoulet." In fact, Renée was hugely relieved at having been forbidden the cooking of her supposedly favourite foods and faked the reluctance of her compliance. She keeps her television on constantly so as to allow the residents their mental image of her sprawled in front of the TV; meanwhile, she's free to hide out in the back room, listening to Mahler, her eyes tear-filled at its beauty, or reading her beloved Tolstoy.

The novel offers twin narratives, one told by Renée and the other told by Paloma, a twelve-year old girl who lives with her family in the building. Her father is a parliamentarian; her mother has a PhD in literature so that she "writes her dinner invitations without mistakes and spends her time bombarding us with literary references." Paloma is exceptionally gifted, but not wanting to stand out, knowing her parents would impose exhausting expectations, she works hard to scale back her academic performance, managing to make being first in her class at school seem the result of effort. Paloma has decided, on the available evidence, that life is rather pointless, indeed absurd, and she's resolved to commit suicide on her 13th birthday. But since she recognizes that her assessment might be flawed, she's decided to keep a journal of observations, looking for something that might convince her that life is worth a chance. (I do wish she could have the opportunity to discuss her decision-making with another bright teen girl, equally isolated in her intelligence, and to do so, she'd only have to slip into the pages of Kate Atkinson's When Will There Be Good News)

Just as the reader suspects, these characters eventually pierce each others' veils, getting behind the fronts they present to the rest of the world to build a welcome companiability. Their relationship is enhanced and augmented by the addition of a new tenant, an elegant older Japanese man, Kakuro Ozu, also widowed, who quickly discerns Renée's true worth. I won't tell you more, plot-wise, for fear of spoiling your own enoyment when you (and you must!) read this novel, but I'll share a few of my favourite quotations from it.

First, although it exposes me as a punctuation pedant, I love Renée's rant against the horrid comma she encounters in a note from one of her wealthy tenants, a woman who "sits on the selection committee of a very prestigious publishing house. Here's the offending comma: "Would you be so kind as, to sign for the packages . . ." Reading it, Renée declares that she "was not prepared for such an underhanded attack [and] collapsed in shock on the nearest chair" at the "dribbling scribbling on vellum . . . this comma slicing the sentence in half with all the trenchancy of a knife blade." Renée goes on to say that she could easily forgive such an error if it came from someone with less opportunity to have learned the correct punctuation, but considering the source, she has no such patience. As she says, and I'll quote the better part of a paragraph here (and probably trot it out from time to time for my poor students!),
For those who have been favored by life's indulgence, rigorous respect in matters of beauty is a non-negotiable requirement. Language is a bountiful gift and its usage, an elaboration of community and society, is a sacred work. Language and usage evolve over time: elements change, are forgotten or reborn, and while there are instances where transgression can become the source of an even greater wealth, this does not alter the fact that to be entitled to the liberties of playfulness or enlightened misusage when using language, one must first and foremost have sworn one's total allegiance. Society's elect, those whom fate has spared from the servitude that is the lot of the poor, must, consequently, shoulder the double burden of worshipping and respecting the splendors of language. Finally, Sabine Pallières's misuse of punctuation constitutes an instance of blasphemy that is all the more insidious when one considers that there are marvelous poets born in stinking caravans or high-rise slums who do have for beauty the sacred respect that it is so rightfully owed.

Clearly, you need another selection to convince you that the novel is as charming as I've claimed -- a rant against poor grammar might not be as endearing as I'd hoped! So I'll leave you with this little anecdote wherein Renée and her friend Manuela, the Portuguese woman who cleans for some of the tenants, are trying to answer Kakuro's request for the "two major inventions of French and British culture." For France, Renée offers "the language of the eighteenth century, and soft cheese," but it's England they really have fun with. Manuela suggests "pooding-ghe," and then, "the roog-eby," to which Renée adds "Habeas corpus and lawns." At this point, their laughter is interrupted by a knocking at the door, which turns out to be Paloma's mother asking to leave her with them for an hour or so. Once they "send [Madame] gracefully on [her] way," and get Paloma comfortably sitting with a cup of jasmine tea and some madeleines, they ask her the same question: "What did the English invent, do you think?" -- and her answer is the best of all: "The hat, as a symbol of stubborn resistance to change."

I know you can't resist a novel that offers such a brilliant line -- you want to see what other lovely aperçus you'll find within its covers. Let me know! Meanwhile, I'll leave you with some images of a favourite bit of Paris graffiti, found, surprisingly, not too far from 7 rue de Grenelle. Below, you can just see the image, above and slightly to the left of the car; a close-up view is just below.

Dionne Brand's What We All Long For

2009-03-29T19:06:00.000-07:00

Mater in Toronto last summer, in front of the Royal Ontario Museum's

Michael Lee-Chin Crystal

As I mentioned last post, I've been teaching Dionne Brand's What We All Long For. My students are finding much to discuss -- they're an all-white class, still grappling with a growing realization that Canada's claims to tolerance and multiculturalism and lack of racism are not always reflected in the reality of immigrants' lives, nor, even, in the lives of second-generation Canadians and/or visible minorities. Occupying the position of "other," even if only through the imagination and on the page, is a challenge for them, but they try their best, most of them, to rise to it.

Only a few of my students have ever been to Toronto -- not as surprising as you might think, given that we on the West Coast tend to believe our own hype about living in "the best place on earth" (yes, it can get tiresome!). Re-reading the novel, I was pleased to be able to picture the places Brand describes after my visit there last summer. Obviously the book can be understood and appreciated without having seen Toronto -- that was the case for my first reading, several years ago, but the city is a major character and knowing it firsthand gave an extra dimension to this reading. It's not the Toronto of Bloor Street or Yonge or City Hall or the University, however, but one of immigrants, of Kensington Market, of subways and demonstrations and nightclubs and art installations. Perhaps most significantly, it's a city which operates as a hub or node for an ever-shifting population in a globalized world, a population with pasts in other places, pasts that intrude and interrupt and continue. . .

While the ending of the novel is challenging, disturbing, overall we agreed as a class that the work has a redemptive energy -- many of the students said this was their favourite reading of the term, and they were keen to recommend it to others. I'd agree: I recommend it to you!

(again, I have to say, especially in regards to a novel so deserving of a fuller treatment as this one, that my intention in this blog is not to provide book reviews, but rather to keep track of my own reading, and when lucky, to exchange ideas about books with those of you who might want to respond -- I simply haven't the time to do more here!)

Too much sex? Stephen Henighan's The Streets of Winter

2009-03-15T17:15:00.000-07:00

Got your attention? Thought I could risk a catchier title!

Last week I re-read Stephen Henighan's The Streets of Winter in preparation for teaching it in my 4th-year urban Canadian fiction class. Once again, noting its many graphically-detailed sex scenes, both homo- and hetero-sexual, I wondered how crazy I'd been to put it on the reading list. Even by the 4th-year level, undergrads can be surprisingly prudish -- I'm not sure if it's the sex itself that bothers them, or if there's something about it being written down, or if it's the discomfort of having to acknowledge it in the presence of a woman older than many of their parents.

Instead of hoping that topic wouldn't be raised, I began the class by telling them about the pedagogical struggle I'd had, the reasons I'd overcome my apprehensions to put the novel on the list. I invited their participation in the potentially-awkward discussions by distinguishing them from 1st-year students, faking the confident assertion that since we were all adults, we could surely perform close readings on these passages just as on those which described other interactions between characters. I also pointed out that no credible writer with literary aspirations would gratuitously add graphic sex to a novel in hopes of selling more copies -- given the sales figures for most literary novels, sadly, that would be a false hope indeed. There are simply too many simpler ways for the general public to get their titillation these days; few folks will wade through a novel with that as their primary goal. Therefore, we should proceed on the assumption that the writer's recourse to so much representation of sex might have something to do with the themes of the novel overall.

And once I opened the discussion, I was gratified by the students' responses. One brave young man admitted that he'd felt put off by so much graphic description -- he couldn't see the point, and it made him feel really uncomfortable, altho' he liked the book overall. Then another brave fellow agreed that he'd feel awkward, even a bit annoyed, at first, until he noticed that a graphic detail from one sex scene was echoed in another -- and both the detail and its echo pointed out the emptiness in one relationship, the cheating in another. Bingo! Exactly the kind of analysis I'd hoped for, but had hardly expected. From that, we went on to discuss how sex might offer itself as a metaphor/analogy in so many ways in a book about the longing and belonging being played out in a city's many spaces.

As for my own reading, I'm always curious to see what a novel will yield the second (or third, or . . . ) time 'round. I'd read Streets last summer, but didn't find it tedious to re-read -- I've visited Montreal numerous times, but found myself getting to appreciate more about it and its politics and its separatist history as well as its multicultural population through this reading. What also energized this reading were the connections I'm now able to make with the other works on this course's reading list -- I'm alert to the way parks are depicted, for example, in a variety of urban fictions, especially since I've also been reading about them from an urban studies and landscape architecture perspective. And finally, I'm fascinated by the similarities and differences between Henighan's novel and Dionne Brand's What We All Long For, published around the same time, which similarly sets in motion several intersecting characters in a big city, Toronto. In both novels, the city takes on an important role, almost an additional -- or, perhaps, central -- character. I'll be interested to see what the students make of this comparison.