TSR Listmania! Favourite Books of the Year, Part 5

Posted 14 December, 2007 in Favourite Books of 2007 |

Today’s list comes courtesy of Finn Harvor, a Canadian expat living in South Korea. He has appeared on the CBC, and online his work has been published by Rabble, Now, The Quarterly Conversation, LitKicks, The Korea Times, and Standard Hostility Index. Finn blogs at Conversations in the Book Trade.

Those of you who read this site’s comments will already be familiar with Finn. He is an articulate critic of world literature, particularly that of his home country. He provided me with more than I asked for with regards to a list of favourite books from the past year, finishing off with an extended meditation on Canadian parochialism and its effects on our culture on the world stage. Although I don’t entirely agree with him (there are other reasons beyond parochialism to account for the lack of Canadian fiction being published abroad, beginning with the chauvanism of many — though not all — foreign markets, which is something I learned about first-hand when I sold subsidiary rights for a Canadian publishing house), I’ve elected to reprint his comments in full, because they are provocative and thoughtful.

Finn Harvor:

FICTION

The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen. An uneven but necessary novel. An example of the sort of writing about contemporary life that more Canadian writers might consider producing.

The Innocent, by Richard Kim. Found in a used book bin, it is a fictionalized account set during the 1960s of a South Korean army officer who is bystander to an army coup orchestrated by a senior South Korean officer with ties to American intelligence. The book was published over forty years ago. Interestingly, its basic premise — that U.S. intelligence had a hand in establishing a military dictatorship — has remained the stuff of rumours. It is a sign of how divisive some of the underlying history of South Korea is that a shroud of mystery still surrounds some of its key events. Put another way, a lot of people have a vested interest in keeping the truth obscured.

“The Grey Snowman,” by Chae Yoon. Not a novel but a long short-story, this is a dry-eyed account of a university-aged girl who has fled her hometown and is struggling to survive as a deeply impoverished student in 1970s Seoul. The girl is both on the edge of starvation and emotional breakdown. She gets involved with a printer who produces anti-government publications. Apolitical herself, she is drawn into his world. The girl’s loneliness, and cynicism mixed with desperate need for contact with others, makes the story so heartbreaking that by its end the reader literally shivers. Highly recommended.

The Wings, by Yi Sang. A series of surreal short-stories by a Korean writer who lived under the Japanese occupation and died an early death accelerated by imprisonment as an allegedly decadent writer. Reminiscent of Kafka and Bruno Schulz, the stories seem dreamlike, but they are psychologically real enough in their depiction of human relations, especially between the sexes.

Chinatown, by Oh Jung-hee. An autobiographical account of a girl reaching puberty while living in deep poverty in 1950s Incheon. The book focuses on the girl’s relationships with her friends and family, but also illustrates the tension that exists between the townsfolk, who are simple, common people and merely trying to eke out a living, and the American soldiers stationed nearby — also simple, common men whose tragedy is that they often cannot connect to the Korean townspeople except through exploitation or violence.

The Life of Pi, by Yann Martel. This isn’t one of my favourite books of the year. In fact, I haven’t even finished it (and, in a sign of my underlying feelings about the book, am not sure I will). All the same, it’s the only Canadian novel I’ve taken a stab at this year, and that in itself is worth discussing, because it suggests something about some of the challenges facing Canadian writers and publishers who want to take advantage of the international marketplace. More about this below.

NON-FICTION

Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War, by Robert Beisner. An autobiography as well as political history of Dean Acheson, who served as Secretary of State from the end of World War II to the end of the Truman administration. Acheson, although powerful, suffered greatly during the McCarthy period. A vicious campaign to have him ousted from office was launched by McCarthy and his followers.

One reason for the campaign’s venom was Acheson had somewhat odd, starchy manners that made him easy to make fun of. He was the son of Canadian parents, and as a result he seemed to have one foot planted in American culture, the other in the postcolonial manners of the Canadian establishment. (His father was an Episcopal bishop who was born in Britain but had lived for several years in Canada, where he married Eleanor Gooderham, an heiress of the Gooderham and Worts distillery fortune.) This “Canadian connection” of Acheson’s might be stretching it a bit — after all, he was born and raised in America. And Beisner does not dwell on the Canadian angle; if anything, he views Canadians — or at least, successive Canadian governments — with palpable condescension. But the two countries are linked, and, as Canadians well know, the political decisions taken in America often have effects in our own country. Furthermore, the major crisis of Acheson’s tenure as Secretary of State was the Korean War.

The war was termed a “police action,” and its putative purpose was protection of a sovereign state (South Korea). From a geopolitical perspective, the war was part of a much larger game. From Acheson’s point of view, it was a proxy war against Soviet and Chinese power.

The war was primarily an American operation, but was fought under the banner of the United Nations. The Canadian contribution is generally mentioned only in passing.

FDR, by Jean Edward Smith. I’m still in the process of reading it. But its author was a professor at the University of Toronto for thirty-five years, so I thought I’d put it in as partial CanCon. It is a well-written account that, unfortunately, may not be historically accurate in its depiction of the events leading up to Pearl Harbor. However, since it possesses, in the career of its author, a Canadian aspect, I’d like to discuss an issue that it raises in terms of our national identity.

That Roosevelt is seen as one of the towering figures of World War II highlights the degree to which Canada plays a role in its own marginalization: in fact, among the Commonwealth countries, Canada’s contribution to WWII was very great. We were responsible for one of the beaches at Normandy, and we fought in many of its major battles. We had a large industrial base of factories that were Canadian owned. These factories produced Canadian-designed ships and planes. (Canada had a very advanced aeronautics industry of its own until the scrapping of the Avro Arrow in the 1950s.) Yet despite the degree of international power we once possessed, in recent years we have tended to become passive in terms of defining ourselves as having a central place on the world stage. This is true economically, where we have accepted a branch-plant mentality. And it’s true — in my opinion, to an exasperating extent — of our culture, too.

If I may refer back to The Life of Pi: it’s the only Canadian book that I’ve seen over here that is easy to find. There are others, of course — Atwood is in the shelves of the larger book stores, and, depending on where you do your shopping, you have a reasonable chance of finding Munro or Ondaatje (or at least, a DVD of The English Patient). The one exception to all this is Gabrielle Roy’s Les enfants de ma vie, which has been translated into Korean and is something of a phenomenon. (Koreans love books about kids.) I doubt The Big Three of CanLit are translated. Life of Pi might be. It’s the nearest our country has come to producing an international bestseller in recent years.

All this would be neither here nor there except for the following: buying American contemporary fiction is very easy over here. Any book that makes a splash in the West — whether it’s The Corrections, The Road, or The Devil Wears Prada — is very easy to find at a major bookstore in Seoul. This is also true of a fair number of British titles.

It certainly isn’t the case with Canadian titles. While books that win a GG or Giller may be big news among bibliophiles back home, they are largely absent on this side of the pond. And it goes without saying that other Canadian titles — those books deserving attention but not blessed by the wand of media attention — simply don’t exist over here.

And what is true for Canadian literature is true for Canadian film. I have only seen one — count it, one — Canadian movie in a video rental shop (The Red Violin). And I’ve only seen one appear at a local cinema for its just-like-in-Toronto-one-week-run: The Fast Runner. Canadians have become so numb, I suppose, to accepting a movie culture that barely registers, that this sort of invisibility in S. Korea is acceptable because, hey!, our movie culture is invisible at home, too!

Finally, the Canadian literary establishment needs to do some soul-searching about the degree to which we are implicated in our marginalization internationally. As I said at the beginning of this list, The Corrections is an uneven book but it is still worth reading. And the reasons for this are simple: it is about life as it is lived now, and it dares to take on some big themes in part by drawing connections between the past and present.

We don’t do that kind of writing so often in Canada nowadays. I realize I’m generalizing here, and will rankle some writers who do just that. But it seems to embarrass us as a people to think that we are permitted to take on big events. This leads to novels that are either thematically narrow (and therefore unlikely to succeed internationally), or overly staid, and built around clichés of Canadianness. The result is fiction that is, in the words of one writer I know, “worthy.” But the price of this worthiness is a lack of energy and wit. Ultimately American and British literature gain more global attention not simply because they are supported by superior distribution systems, but because they sometimes — note, sometimes — take more chances artistically.

***

I’ve still got some lists in the pump, so stay tuned over the weekend for some bonus posts, and there may indeed be more into the beginning of next week. The complete set can be viewed by clicking on the category link Favourite Books of 2007.

[UPDATE: Earlier this week, Finn sent me a final paragraph to append to his thoughts above, which I promptly neglected to do. With apologies to the author, here it is: “We might find it a little easier to get our books on the book tables at the absolutely massive Kyobo bookstore in downtown Seoul if we were sometimes a little more ambitious in the material we used as the basis for our novels, and allowed our literature to possess increased vividness by defining ‘the literary’ in a more open-minded manner.”]

[UPDATE: The Canadian film that had a brief theatrical run in South Korea was Saint Ralph, not The Fast Runner. Saint Ralph ran in S. Korean theatres under the title Little Runner. TSR regrets the error.]

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