2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlist, Part 2

Posted 31 October, 2007 in Literary Criticism, Scotiabank Giller Prize | No comments

Divisadero, by Michael Ondaatje. McClelland & Stewart, $34.99 cloth, 278 pp., ISBN: 978-0-7710-6872-0.

Previous Scotiabank Giller Prize nominations/wins: 2000, Anil’s Ghost, winner

Other awards (selected): 2000, Governor General’s Award for Fiction (Anil’s Ghost)

2000, Irish Times International Fiction Prize (Anil’s Ghost)

2000, Prix Médicis (Anil’s Ghost)

2000, Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize (Anil’s Ghost)

1992, Booker Prize (The English Patient)

1992, Governor General’s Award for Fiction (The English Patient)

1979, Governor General’s Award for Poetry (There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do)

1970, Governor General’s Award for Poetry (The Collected Works of Billy the Kid)

From the publisher: “Breathtakingly evoked and with unforgettable characters, Divisadero is a multi-layered novel about passion, loss, and the unshakeable past, about the often discordant demands of family, love, and memory. It is Michael Ondaatje’s most intimate and beautiful novel to date.”

From reviews: “Truths amply demonstrated by character, imagery, and action are repeatedly double-underlined for the reader with ponderous generalizations such as ‘There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known only briefly.’” — Quill & Quire

“The work is written like a well-prepared meal, with the perfect amounts of appetizer and main course and dessert; just enough and not too much.” — January Magazine

“The more you reread Divisadero, the more you come to understand the sleight of hand that Ondaatje performs here. The sleuthing, for the novel is a detective story of the heart. The craft, for the author blends sex, drugs, and gambling with homesteading, caravans, and war. Every story it tells is really one story; every account of loyalty and betrayal, of people divided, is one account.” — Georgia Straight

“There is something endearingly human about this book, for all its art: who can’t forgive a hopeless romantic?” — New York Times

Representative passage: “There were nights when Lucien startled himself awake at his daughter’s wildness. How had she, the one daughter he had known as obedient and well mannered, evolved into such a person? Was it simply that Pierre was the man she demanded above every other principle? There was this live coal of desire on her tongue that had altered her, so that she could no longer be sheltered by the husk of a family. And he realized he loved even more this proud indelible daughter, his Flammarion companion, who had leapt beyond him into the life of this dangerous stranger, a man he was unable to like except through the knowledge that Lucette had placed herself in the cup of his hand, just as she had bent over and moved back into his body, defenceless with pleasure in the garden shower.”

My assessment: Divisadero is really two separate books, written in two divergent styles.

The first book is about a ranch hand, Coop, who has an affair with Anna, one of the daughters of the farmer for whom he works. When the father discovers the affair, he beats Coop almost to death. The story follows Coop’s adventures as a cardsharp in Vegas and Tahoe, where he becomes a “mechanic” — a cheat who is proficient at dealing stacked cards in such a way as to avoid notice.

The second book focuses on Anna, who flees the farm after the incident with her father and winds up in France, researching the life of a writer named Lucien Segura.

With a title like Divisadero, it is not surprising that the novel features diverging storylines. “Divisadero,” Anna says, “from the Spanish word for ‘division,’ … Or it might derive from the word divisar, meaning ‘to gaze at something from a distance.’” And lest we feel that the two halves of the novel are unconnected, Ondaatje provides numerous parallels between the two stories: both feature rural settings; both involve makeshift families; both feature an illicit love affair that a father discovers; both feature acts of violence in which shards of glass play a key role; and both are touched by war.

The problem is not the substance of these two narratives, the problem is their wildly divergent styles. The first half of the book is tough, direct, and often violent, propelled forward by strong storytelling and a seething undercurrent of menace.

When the focus shifts to Anna and her musings about the French writer, Ondaatje capitulates to the kind of flowery, mannered, purple prose that characterized The English Patient and Anil’s Ghost, and the book comes to a complete standstill. In place of the lean, crisp prose of the first half, this part of the book showcases the Ondaatje who never encountered a metaphor he didn’t fall instantly in love with: a purloined wooden flower retained by the thief is “a stolen thing like a live alouette in his pocket,” and a sexual liaison is described as moving “the heat of her cave onto his coldness.”

This is the kind of writing that has won Ondaatje accolades, but it generally comes off feeling overwrought and cloying. Following immediately upon the much more satisfying, less show-offy first half, it has the net effect of rendering Divisadero one of the most frustrating and disheartening reading experiences of the year.

Next: Late Nights on Air.

2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlist, Part 1

Posted 29 October, 2007 in Literary Criticism, Scotiabank Giller Prize | 5 comments

Effigy, by Alissa York. Random House Canada, $32.95 cloth, 440 pp., ISBN: 978-0-679-31472-1.

Previous Scotiabank Giller nominations/wins: None

Other awards: 2001, John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer

Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher (Any Given Power)

1999, Journey Prize (”The Back of the Bear’s Mouth”)

1999, Bronwen Wallace Award (Short fiction)

From the publisher: “Set on a Mormon ranch in nineteenth-century Utah, and inspired by the real events of the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, Alissa York’s Effigy is a haunting story of a polygamous family united by faith but separated by secrets.”

From reviews: “Exquisite detail in Alissa York’s historical novel Effigy ensures that readers are transported to 19th-century Utah, specifically the ranch of a polygamous Mormon family, where seething tensions do not remain below the surface.” — Globe and Mail

“York’s writing is graphic and impressionistic, sharp-edged and sensual. Though both style and landscape at times bring to mind Annie Dillard and Cormac McCarthy, York’s voice is very much her own.” — Quill & Quire

“York writes with severe precision, each word pounded into place, no give to the language. This makes for slow-going sometimes — Effigy is not an easy read — but it also allows her to capture the casual brutality of frontier life with particular force.” — National Post

Representative passage: “The scene beneath the outcropping entered him with the slow-flowing force of a dream. The pack horse hauling back into its haunches, the black giant thrashing, all hooves and whipping spine. For now, the fight was enough to keep the cat from biting, working its long teeth between bones to snap the hidden cord. It was holding on tight, though, a fat, cream-coloured saddle with a glaring face. Spotting the Tracker, it added its own voice to the squealing song of its prey. The black horse rocked forward, baring the cat’s white chest. On the back-surge the mare’s head and breast obscured the shot. The trick was in the timing. Crooking his finger, loosing the ball a hair’s breadth before the next plunge.

“It was a kill for the telling, the first shot rendering the second one unnecessary. Claws let go, retreating into their sheaths the moment the Tracker’s ball met heart. The lion was airborne on the following buck. It landed in a crease of the outcropping, both horses dancing in the wake of its death. Hammer broke upon the aftermath through the thin smoke drifting from the Henry’s muzzle.”

My assessment: Notwithstanding its Utah setting, Effigy may be a quintessentially Canadian novel. It’s set in the past, on a ranch; it’s about familial strife; it uses animals for metaphorical resonance (in this case, wolves, horses, and crows); it’s relentlessly bleak and depressing; and it privileges a precision of style over a compelling story.

There’s no question that York’s writing is impeccable; she is a master of voice and her polyphonic approach involves numerous shifts in points-of-view, at times incorporating everything from dream narratives to a mother’s letters to her daughter. (York’s stylistic flourishes are often subtle; it took several letters for me to realize that the mother never uses commas.)

However, while the prose is crystalline, it is also — like crystal — inanimate, devoid of life’s seething essence. One telling experience occurred while I was reading this novel: as I opened the book, my bookmark slipped from its spot and fell to the floor, losing my page. I flipped back to what I thought was roughly the spot I’d stopped reading and took up the story. After about three and a half pages, I came across a single sentence that I recognized, and realized that I’d read the entire passage already, but save for that one particular sentence I had absolutely no recollection of it.

This is a dilemma that seems to pervade much of what is lauded in Canadian fiction: although the prose is burnished to a fine sheen, there’s no life to it. It’s all irredeemably beautiful, but in its very beauty the muddiness that is life’s essence goes missing. I’ve quoted Virginia Woolf before, but it seems appropriate to do so again:

We frame our question differently at different times. But it reappears most persistently as we drop the finished novel on the crest of a sigh — Is it worth while? What is the point of it all? … Life escapes: and perhaps without life nothing else is worth while.

Woolf was writing about the novels of Arnold Bennett, but she could as easily have been writing about Effigy. It is appropriate that one of the main characters in York’s novel is a taxidermist for, like the animals her husband brings home to be stuffed, the novel has the surface veneer of life, but none of life’s animating spark.

Next up, Divisadero.

Minor Threat

Posted 25 October, 2007 in Censorship | 1 comment

Pop quiz: Can anyone guess in which of the fifty United States this incident occurred:

A popular English teacher has been placed on paid leave — and faces possible criminal charges — after a student’s parents complained to police that a ninth-grade class reading list contained a book about a murderer who has sex with his victims’ bodies.

Kaleb Tierce, 25, is being investigated for allegedly distributing harmful material to a minor after the student selected Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy’s “Child of God” off the list and read it.

Here’s a hint: it used to be governed by a sitting American president.

This kind of incident is not new, of course — teachers throughout North America have frequently been taken to task for giving students “inappropriate” reading material. There was a case here in Ontario a few years ago of a teacher at a Milton high school running afoul of the Halton school board for assigning his students Joyce Carol Oates’s Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang.

But this is the first case I can think of in which the teacher faced potential criminal charges for allowing a student to read a book.

I wonder if the student’s parents — or any of the other adults who would prevent their children from reading — get as exercised about their kids playing Manhunter 2 or watching any of the Saw movies. I’d wager not.

(via Bookninja)

Cormac and the Coens

Posted 24 October, 2007 in Film | 2 comments

Time has an online link to a transcript of a discussion between Cormac McCarthy and Joel and Ethan Coen, who have just filmed McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. (Which opens in limited release on November 9, then opens wide on November 21. Go see it to remind yourself that American cinema — albeit very occasionally these days — can aspire to the level of art. Just see the damn film. That’s all.)

The discussion covers a number of topics, including an adaptation the Coens wanted to do of James Dickey’s novel To the White Sea,* Joel’s assessment of Miller’s Crossing as “just a damn rip-off,” McCarthy’s admiration for the films of Terrence Mallick, and his feelings about the vicisstudes of writing dialogue:

David Mamet has a collection of essays called Writing in Cafés, or something like that. He says that the ideal venue for a playwright is to write radio plays, because then you have nothing, just–this is what somebody said. That’s it. You have nothing to fall back on. That’s quite interesting. Plays are hard, and I suspect that a lot of people who write plays don’t really know how it’s going to play. I mean, how do you know? Like some years ago, my wife and I went to see Ralph Fiennes do Hamlet. And I’d seen movies of Hamlet, I’d seen kind of amateurish productions, and I’d read the play. But we walked out of that theater, and we stood there, and we went, “Holy s—.” Now how did Will know that was going to happen?

One small note here, slightly off topic. Why is it that major newsmagazines like Time are so timorous when it comes to printing profanity? If one of the great novelists of our time said “shit,” then just print the fucking word. It’s not like he tore open his shirt and exposed a nipple or anything really shocking like that. We’re all fucking adults here, after all, know what I’m saying? Fuck me.

*This is a movie I’d love to see. If Brad Pitt is too old to play the part now, might I suggest Ryan Gosling? No Country for Old Men has no music (except for one very brief scene), so can a movie with no dialogue be far behind?

The CanLit Dilemma

Posted 23 October, 2007 in Literary Criticism | 1 comment

Spent last evening at the IFOA party, where I finally got to meet George “Bookninja” Murray face-to-face; he proved to be as cool in person as he is on his site.

I’m not in the best head space this morning — too much red wine and too many looming deadlines are not an ideal combination, I’ve discovered — so in lieu of reading my blather, I’ll point you in the direction of a Toronto Star article by Stephen Marche, which was brought to my attention by novelist Claire Cameron. Marche compares Brooklyn authors to Canadian authors and finds that while their NY counterparts are relentlessly innovative, curious, and interesting, the Canadian authors, and the books they produce, are, well, boring. In Canada, Marche argues,

Innovation, whether in language or form, is a dirty word. Foer, Krauss, and Eggers always innovate. They always do something new in their books. That’s why they’re called “novels.” Even more significantly, they are celebrated for their boundary-pushing, both by critics and by the book-buying public. Brooklyn’s books are like toys, meant to excite and give pleasure and challenge a little bit. In Canada, we are the oatmeal of world literature. We are on the cutting edge of blandness.

Speaking of which, I’m not making much headway on my Giller pledge, but more of that anon.

The Impecunious Life of the Literary Novelist

Posted 19 October, 2007 in Writing Life | 6 comments

Blake Morrison, writing in the Guardian, wonders how literary novelists can possibly make a go of it:

Let’s suppose that a realistic sale for a literary novel these days is 2,000 copies in hardback and 8,000 in paperback. At current cover prices, that will generate royalties of around £9,000. Serialisations, film or television options and sales of foreign rights might push earnings up to £12,000. But this isn’t annual income, it’s the proceeds from the three or four years spent writing the novel. Two recent surveys have found that 60% of British authors earn less than £10,000 a year - and that median earnings are less than a quarter of the national wage. You wonder how they, and publishers and agents, keep going.

The short answer is: marry rich, or arrange to inherit a whack of money.

The more nuanced answer, of course, is that they don’t, at least not exclusively on the income earned from their writing. Most literary writers in Canada — even established and relatively well-known ones — supplement their income with other jobs. Many teach. A couple are doctors. Others work variously as train conductors, editors, civil servants, bookstore clerks, and librarians. For these people, writing is a vocation, something they are compelled to do, but not something that provides anything close to a living wage.

Mordecai Richler used to talk ruefully about being asked as a young man what he wanted to do with his life. He’d always answer that he wanted to be a writer. To which the follow-up question was always, “Yes, but how are you going to earn a living?” Stopping off at a local bar for an after-work beer last night, the bartender mentioned that her son was receiving an academic award today and that he is in line for a scholarship. She wants him to be a doctor. Her son wants to be a writer. “Great,” she said, “he’ll spend the rest of his life starving.”

It’s an unfortunate reality that our pseudo-sophisticated society loves the products of artists — the paintings and sculptures, the works of literature and film that people consume to feel like cultured aesthetes — but is not terribly enamoured with artists themselves. Sure, Scotiabank will sponsor the Giller Prize and the Bank of Montreal will sponsor the GG’s, but these awards do little on a day-to-day basis to put food on writers’ tables. There is a granting system in Canada through the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, among others, but the system for awarding grants is not without its flaws and the money earmarked for literary work is not sufficient to support too many full-time writers.

Even if a writer is able to scrape by an existence on his or her writing, other things that salaried workers take for granted — such as medical benefits, paid maternity leave, and a pension — aren’t available to them. The Writers’ Union of Canada offers a benefits package, but if you’re not a member, you’re on your own. Russell Smith often talks about his mother’s response to the question of what she thinks of her son being a writer: she wishes he had a job with dental benefits.

And yet writers continue writing, doing whatever they can to supplement their income while still allowing themselves time to create. It should of course be pointed out that the writing life is a choice: no one forces it on anyone, and if material riches are the uppermost desire in a person’s mind, that person would be well advised to look elsewhere when selecting a career.

Personally, I do feel that it wouldn’t hurt if artists were valued more in our society — true, they don’t save lives on a daily basis (okay, Vincent Lam does), but the function of artists is essential to a vibrant society, since, if they’re doing their jobs properly, they act as the conscience and weathervane of that society. However, nowhere is it written that they are entitled to untold adulation and riches.

I, for one, feel privileged to spend my time in literary pursuits; the relatively meagre income I reap from this lifestyle is the tradeoff that I have made in order to keep doing what I’m doing. But don’t think for a moment that this isn’t a conscious choice on my part. And that’s really the bottom line, isn’t it? A writer writes. It’s what he or she is compelled to do. And, like any compulsion, ultimately profit will never be the motivating factor behind it.

The Perpetual Motion Reading Machine

Posted 18 October, 2007 in Bookish | 2 comments

Several stacks of books surround the desk in my office and cover every available inch of surface space. There’s the Giller shortlist pile, which stares back at me balefully each morning, the heavy tomes practically vibrating with a sonorous hum. This pile is the result of a rash and unconsidered promise your humble correspondent made a week or so ago, which is seeming more and more ill-conceived as every day goes by.* There is the pile of books for review, which at the moment is mercifully manageable.

Then there is the to-read pile. Actually, there are two stacks of to-read books, broken down roughly by date of acquisition. The pile that contains Michael Chabon’s novel The Yiddish Policeman’s Union and Leonard Michaels’s Collected Stories has been shifted behind a pile of newer books, including Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children and the paperback edition of Thomas L. Friedman’s The World Is Flat. These will likely be supplanted in coming days by newer books that are acquired at bookstores, through friends, industry contacts, and so on.

The plain fact is, I will never conquer the to-read pile. It’s a simple matter of physics. Too many (far too many) interesting books are published in a given season, there are only twenty-four hours in each day, and there’s only one of me (until I perfect that cloning device I’ve been working on in the back shed). Plus, I have an unquenchable acquisitiveness when it comes to new books: like a siren’s call, I am almost physically unable to walk past a bookstore without going in, and once inside, I’m unable to leave empty-handed. This causes an exhaustive drain on my already depleted bank account, but it also results in a kind of literary perpetual motion machine. I come home from each visit to the bookstore with a new volume (or, more frequently, volumes), which are then lovingly added to the pile in my office.

Unfortunately, space considerations being what they are (another law of physics being that you can’t cram more into a given space than the available space is able to hold), the addition of the new books to the pile means that the older books get shuffled over to the back. Eventually, these older books, which once had pride of place at the top of the to-read pile, will need to move off the floor to make room in the office, at which point they will be consigned to shelves. Once they’re placed unread on the shelves, the chances of my ever getting to them are reduced to about nil.

As I’m writing this, the shelves in my office are bulging with a group of politics and international relations volumes I purchased earlier this year. Noam Chomsky’s Failed States, Kevin Phillips’s American Theocracy, George Packer’s The Assassin’s Gate, Linda McQuaig’s Holding the Bully’s Coat. All of these once sat, shiny and new and inviting, at the top of the to-read pile. Now they wait in vain for a spare weekend that will probably never come.

This is the curse that inveterate booklovers suffer. I once read somewhere (I can’t remember off the top of my head where) that a booklover can immediately identify a non-booklover because the first question the latter will ask when gazing at the booklover’s shelves is, “Have you read all of these?” The obvious answer, of course, being no.

And yet the to-read pile continues to grow and mutate like a living organism. Perhaps one day I’ll find the right balance between setting reasonable goals for what can be read as against impulsively purchasing everything that catches my eye at any given time and deluding myself that I can get to it all by giving up television or by sleeping a couple of hours less each night. (After all, I’ve heard that one can be driven insane by attempting something that one knows at the outset to be impossible.) More likely, though, the to-read pile will continue to grow and change, like a snake shedding its skin every three or four months. There’s a kind of comfort in knowing that if I’m ever stuck for something to read ( ! ), I can always turn to my shelves, where books I’ve forgotten even acquiring sit waiting to be rediscovered, as though they were new.

*As I told one interlocutor about this promise: no, I was completely sober when I issued it, which makes it that much worse.

Now That’s a Surprise

Posted 17 October, 2007 in Uncategorized | 2 comments

Anne Enright has won the 2007 Man-Booker Prize for her novel The Gathering. Enright beat out the establishment favourite, Ian McEwan, and the odds-on bet, Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip.

Before presenting the award, Sir Howard Davies, director of the London School of Economics, said, “I think a little more distance, and critical scepticism, is required by our reviewers, together with greater readiness to notice new names.” I couldn’t agree more.

I’m a Manly Man

Posted 16 October, 2007 in Uncategorized | 1 comment

As if to prove the indiscriminate quality of ye olde internets, it appears my post yesterday has been linked to by a Web publication called Manliness Today. This apparently has to do with my reference to D.R. MacDonald’s Lauchlin of the Bad Heart as being “a whisky-soaked paean to macho masculinity.” I’m not sure that my review is exactly what their readership is looking for, but if it helps put hair on my chest, I’m all for it.

Getting Warmer …

Posted 16 October, 2007 in Uncategorized | 4 comments

Well, the Gillers may be the glitzier and more lucrative Canadian literary awards, but the Governor General’s shortlist is consistently proving to be the more interesting.

Announced this morning at a press conference at Ben McNally Books in Toronto, the seventy shortlisted books in fourteen categories represent a good cross-section of Canadian writing. As noted in the Canada Council for the Arts press release that accompanied the announcement, at least eleven of the finalists are under the age of thirty-five, and forty of the finalists are first-time nominees.

In the coveted English-language fiction category, two of the nominees — Michael Ondaatje for Divisadero and M.G. Vassanji for The Assassin’s Song — are also on the Giller shortlist, but these two are so predictable as to almost beggar comment. The rest of the list is more interesting. Barbara Gowdy’s Helpless and David Chariandy’s Soucouyant were longlisted for this year’s Giller, but didn’t make the final cut. And the fifth title — Heather O’Neill’s Lullabies for Little Criminals — is a real surprise, at least to your humble correspondent.

O’Neill’s book was actually released in 2006, but was too late to qualify for last year’s award. (It is already the 2007 Canada Reads selection, and was a finalist for the 2006 Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award.) That it has remained on the jury’s radar for so long speaks volumes. It is also a testament to the makeup of the GG jury, which this year consists of novelists Austin Clarke, Eden Robinson, and Rudy Wiebe. This is a better-rounded jury, in my opinion, than the Giller jury of Camilla Gibb, David Bergen, and Lorna Goodison, in the sense that there is a real mixture of sensibilities at work, which is bound to produce a more interesting shortlist.

The poetry category features mainstays Margaret Atwood (nominated for The Door) and Dennis Lee (for yesno), along with lesser-known names Don Domanski (All Our Wonder Unavenged), Brian Henderson (Nerve Language), and Rob Winger (Muybridge’s Horse: A Poem in Three Phases).

In the drama category, four of the five nominees are published by Playwrights Canada Press: Salvatore Antonio (In Gabriel’s Kitchen), Anosh Irani (The Bombay Plays: The Matka King and Bombay Black), Rosa Laborde (Leo), and Colleen Murphy (The December Man). Preventing Playwrights Canada Press from a clean sweep is Talonbooks, which published the fifth shortlisted play, What Lies Before Us, by Morris Panych.

In nonfiction, the nominees run the gamut from an examination of gun culture through the ages to a biography of a former Canadian Prime Minister to a polemic about the dangers imperilling songbirds in a modern world. The nominees are Rodrigo Bascuñán and Christian Pearce for Enter the Babylon System: Unpacking Gun Culture from Samuel Colt to 50 Cent, John English for Citizen of the World: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Volume One: 1919-1968, Stephanie Nolen for 28: Stories of AIDS in Africa, Karolyn Smardz Frost for I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land: A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad, and Bridget Stutchbury for Silence of the Songbirds: How We Are Losing the World’s Songbirds and What We Can Do to Save Them.

For the first time this year, the cash prize for each category will be increased to $25,000 from $15,000. This is in honour of the Canada Council’s fiftieth anniversary. (The increased prize levels will remain in place henceforth; sadly for previous years’ winners, the increase is not retroactive.) Non-winners among the shortlisted authors will each receive $1,000.

The winners will be announced on Tuesday, November 27 at La Grande Bibliothèque de Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, in Montreal.

The complete list of nominees in both English and French languages can be found here.