TSR Listmania! Favourite Books of 2007, Part 6

Posted 15 December, 2007 in Favourite Books of 2007 | No comments

Today’s list comes courtesy of Alex Good. Alex’s criticism has appeared in Quill & Quire, the Toronto Star, Canadian Notes & Queries, and elsewhere. He administers the literary website Good Reports.

Alex Good:

Here are my thoughts:

Not a bad year for Canadian books, as long as you stayed away from things like the Giller shortlist. Of course it’s impossible for one person to read more than a tiny percentage of what gets published any given year. But here are three worth mentioning.

Time’s Covenant, by Eric Ormsby. It says “Selected Poems” but it has pretty much everything by this major poet. An essential book.

Hitting the Charts, by Leon Rooke. An excellent selection of Rooke’s stories, showcasing his truly unique voice and vision. Together with the Ormsby these are two books that belong on every CanLit lover’s bookshelf.

The Gum Thief, by Douglas Coupland. Nobody’s been harder on Coupland over the years than I have, but I thought this was clever and funny and I really enjoyed it.

Since you open things up to books that aren’t new but were on my reading list anyway, I would also add Mark Ames’s Going Postal, which I thought was far-fetched in places but was the angriest political book I’ve read in a very long time, and Marian Engel’s Bear. I suppose I should have read Bear before this but I finally got around to it this year. And it was better than I expected. A bit obvious, but overall very well-handled.

TSR Listmania! Favourite Books of the Year, Part 5

Posted 14 December, 2007 in Favourite Books of 2007 | No comments

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.]

The Hands-Down Dumbest Comment I’ve Read in Ages

Posted 14 December, 2007 in Uncategorized | No comments

From a BBC news article about a virtual world built around the plays of William Shakespeare:

If you have a theory about human society and it does not survive the transition across the membrane to a virtual world then it’s not a very interesting theory.

Jesus wept. Somebody invent a time machine to take me back to the 1800s. I think I’d be much happier there.

The Life Whose Meaning Comes to Matter Most

Posted 13 December, 2007 in Book Reviews | No comments

Exit Ghost, by Philip Roth. Viking Canada, $32.50 cloth, 294 pp., ISBN: 978-0-670-06729-9.

Philip Roth concludes his autobiography, The Facts, with a letter from his most famous character, the novelist Nathan Zuckerman, addressed to Philip Roth. Zuckerman is responding to the letter that opens the book, penned by Roth to his fictional creation, asking the character to tell his creator whether The Facts should be published.

Zuckerman suggests that Roth refrain from publishing the volume of autobiography, saying that Roth is “far better off” narrating Zuckerman’s adventures than reporting on his own. “Could it be that you’ve turned yourself into a subject not only because you’re tired of me but because you believe I am no longer someone through whom you can detach yourself from your biography at the same time that you exploit its crises, themes, tensions, and surprises?”

The detachment that Zuckerman highlights is a signal aspect of Roth’s approach, as it must be for any novelist who so rigorously plumbs “the facts” of his own life for the source of his fiction, going so far as to include a protagonist named “Philip Roth” in his novels Operation Shylock and The Plot Against America. For such a resolutely “autobiographical” novelist, the process of filtering one’s own life through the machinery of narrative necessitates an intricate navigation of the line between fiction and reality, the former encompassing a careful artistic reworking of the latter.

Zuckerman’s letter to Roth continues:

What you choose to tell in fiction is different from what you’re permitted to tell when nothing’s being fictionalized, and in this book you are not permitted to tell what it is you tell best: kind, discreet, careful — changing people’s names because you’re worried about hurting their feelings — no, this isn’t you at your most interesting. In the fiction you can be so much more truthful without worrying all the time about causing direct pain. You try to pass off here as frankness what looks to me like the dance of the seven veils — what’s on the page is like a code for something missing. Inhibition appears not only as a reluctance to say certain things but, equally disappointing, as a slowing of pace, a refusal to explode, a relinquishing of the need I ordinarily associate with you for the acute, explosive moment.

On the one hand, this is a kind of self-satisfied postmodern conceit: the fictional creation excoriating his creator for the faults he (Zuckerman? Roth?) sees in the creator’s own autobiographical book. It is also a sly end-run around criticisms of the autobiography: if The Facts is, indeed, marked by “a reluctance to say certain things,” “a slowing of pace,” and “a refusal to explode,” if it is devoid of “the acute explosive moment” that characterizes so much of Roth’s fiction — a case could be made — Roth has neatly circumvented this criticism, as much as admitting that he is cognizant of these failings by having Zuckerman vocalize them.

But framing the autobiography with letters to and from a fictional character is a quintessential example of Roth’s habit of blurring the line between fiction and “the facts.” Indeed, the quotation marks around those words are necessary to underscore the irony in Roth’s chosen title, something he himself attests to in his opening letter: “I suppose that calling this book The Facts begs so many questions that I could manage to be both less ironic and more ironic by calling it Begging the Question.”

If The Facts involves a layering of fictional techniques onto what is essentially autobiographical material, the same cannot be said for the Zuckerman novels. Roth himself has been very clear about this: Zuckerman is not a doppelgänger, and the critics who insist on viewing the fiction as a thinly veiled representation of “the facts” of Roth’s life elide the essential aim of the novels, which at its heart is different from that of autobiography. In an interview with Asher Z. Milbauer and Donald G. Watson, reprinted in the essay collection Reading Myself and Others, Roth takes pains to draw this distinction:

Though some readers may have trouble disentangling my life from Zuckerman’s, The Ghost Writer — along with the rest of Zuckerman Bound and The Counterlife — is an imaginary biography, an invention stimulated by themes in my experience to which I’ve given considerable thought but the result of a writing process a long way from the methods, let alone the purposes, of autobiography. If an avowed autobiographer transformed his personal themes into a detailed narrative embodying a reality distinct and independent from his own day-to-day history, peopled with imaginary characters conversing in words never spoken, given meaning by a sequence of events that had never taken place, we wouldn’t be surprised if he was charged with representing as his real life what was an outright lie.

Besides presaging Oprah Winfrey and l’affaire Frey, Roth’s comment is essential for understanding his method as a novelist, and it is a perfect gloss on one of the central themes in Exit Ghost: the inability — or unwillingness — of unsophisticated readers to separate the art from the artist, or, as Zuckerman puts it, “the deadly literal-mindedness and vulgarity that attributes everything to its source in a wholly stupid way.”

Much of Exit Ghost is concerned with the process of creating fiction out of lived experience, and throughout the novel Zuckerman insists on the importance of interpreting fiction through the prism of the fiction itself rather than attempting to impose some artificial correlation upon the fiction and the facts of a novelist’s life.

Unfolding over little more than a week at the outset of November 2004, the novel opens with Zuckerman returning to New York, the city he had fled eleven years previously after receiving a series of increasingly threatening anti-Semitic letters from an unknown correspondent. Zuckerman has spent the last eleven years secluded in a house on a mountain in western Massachusetts; now recovering from prostate surgery that has left him impotent and incontinent, he returns to the big city for a consultation with a urologist who has suggested that there is a procedure that might take care of the latter problem, if not the former.

During his stay in New York, Zuckerman has three interconnected encounters with figures who dredge up events and emotions from his past. The first involves Amy Bellette, whom Zuckerman first met in 1956 when he was an overnight guest at the home of E.I. Lonoff, a famous short-story writer who was Zuckerman’s literary hero as a youth. (That story is told in Roth’s 1979 novel, The Ghost Writer, the first Roth book to feature Zuckerman as a protagonist; its titular echo in the current novel is not at all accidental.) Bellette, who was twenty-seven when Zuckerman first met her, is now seventy-five, and is herself disfigured as the result of surgery to remove a cancerous brain tumour.

The second encounter is with Billy Davidoff and Jaimie Logan, a couple in their early thirties who want to swap houses with someone outside the city for a year. Jamie, a burgeoning writer whose first story was published in The New Yorker, has been shaken by the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and wants to flee the city, which she perceives as a target, for the safer environs of rural New England. When he answers their ad in The New York Review of Books, Zuckerman finds himself captivated by Jamie’s youthful beauty, and begins to experience the kind of erotic feelings he hasn’t had in over a decade.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Zuckerman is thrown on a collision course with Richard Kliman, a young literary upstart who has managed to acquire the first half of an unpublished Lonoff manuscript — the only novel the writer ever produced — that contains what Kliman thinks is a shattering secret about the deceased writer — a secret that Kliman wants to exploit for a tell-all biography of Lonoff.

Kliman, whose pious avowals of wanting to resurrect the reputation of a neglected author serve to mask his craven desire to profit off of a dead man’s scandal — a scandal that may indeed amount to nothing more than salacious gossip — is anathema to Zuckerman; the more persistently Kliman attempts to engage the older writer, the more furiously Zuckerman works to sabotage his nemesis. This antagonistic relationship turns the mentor/adoring acolyte relationship in The Ghost Writer on its head, but it also entrenches Roth’s own stated distinction between fiction and autobiography, and the concomitant warning not to confuse the two. “Spare me the lecture about the impenetrable line dividing fiction from reality,” Kliman sneers late in the novel. “This is something Lonoff lived through. This is a tormented confession disguised as a novel.” Zuckerman replies: “Unless it’s a novel disguised as a tormented confession.”

In case the reader is in doubt as to how the process of fictionalizing lived experience works in practice, Roth helpfully provides us with a practical example woven into the schema of the novel itself. Zuckerman’s encounters with Jamie are fraught with the writer’s longing for her — for her youthfulness, her beauty, her brazen intelligence — but behind this longing is the untenable fact of his impotence. The only kind of consummation the writer can possibly achieve with the younger woman is to return to his hotel room after visiting with her and write down the encounters as he imagines they might have occurred.

What develops is a dramatic pas de deux entitled He and She; the fictionalized dialogues have the same broad trajectories as the actual meetings, but the imagined interchanges read very differently: they are more raw, more honest, more explicitly sexual. In fictionalizing his relationship with Jamie, Zuckerman finds himself able to verbalize all the things he wishes he could say to the real woman, and to have her respond in the way he would like for her to respond to him. The Jamie of He and She has little to do with the actual wife of Billy Davidoff, and everything to do with the imaginative creation of the tormented Zuckerman.

If the actual exchanges between Zuckerman and Jamie display all the faults that Zuckerman identified in Roth’s autobiography — they are kind, discreet, and careful — their dramatic counterparts are anything but. They embody what Roth spoke of as the transformation of a novelist’s “personal themes into a detailed narrative embodying a reality distinct and independent from his own day-to-day history, peopled with imaginary characters conversing in words never spoken, given meaning by a sequence of events that had never taken place.” He and She becomes its own argument against Kliman’s stubborn literalism, and a cautionary note for any reader who might be tempted to ape it.

Exit Ghost — the title derives from a stage direction in Hamlet — is about many things: the dissolution of the body and the mind associated with aging, the divergent perspectives of the old and the young, the terror of engaging with the world as opposed to the blissful oblivion of leaving the world behind to live on a mountain in Massachusetts. But beyond and beneath all that, it is about the process of novel writing — about the acute dangers of creating a fictional universe that is all too easily mistaken for the novelist’s own. It is about readers and writers, about understanding and misunderstanding, about the exquisitely painful experience of focusing one’s own life in all its pain onto the page, and exaggerating it, distorting it, in the noble endeavour of grasping a larger artistic truth. Although he’d doubtless deny it, one can almost see Roth peeking out from behind the guise of his longtime narrator when he has Zuckerman proclaim:

But isn’t one’s pain quotient shocking enough without fictional amplification, without giving things an intensity that is ephemeral in life and sometimes even unseen? Not for some. For some very, very few that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most.

TSR Listmania! Favourite Books of 2007, Part 4

Posted 13 December, 2007 in Favourite Books of 2007 | No comments

Today’s list of favourites comes from Corey Redekop, author of the novel Shelf Monkey. He’s too modest to include Shelf Monkey on his list of favourite books from the past year, but it would certainly have a place on my own.

Corey Redekop:

Sounds like fun, so here we go, the books I read in 2007 that stand out:

The Architects Are Here, by Michael Winter (2007) — Fun, strange, familiar yet totally original. Winter is one of the great new treasures in Canadian fiction.

From the Notebooks of Doctor Brain, by Minister Faust (2007) — A love letter to superheroes from someone who knows the genre inside-out.

Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, by Sam Savage (2006) — A rat who eats books, and a lonely, unsuccessful science-fiction author. What’s not to love?

Damnation Alley, by Roger Zelazny (1969) — Because it’s Zelazny, and because the protagonist’s name is ‘Hell.’ ‘Nuff said.

Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, by Stephen Marche (2007) — Marche is an absolutely exquisite writer.

A Small and Remarkable Life, by Nick DiChario (2006) — The reincarnation of Theodore Sturgeon.

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, by Kurt Vonnegut, jr. (1965) — Because we must never, never forget him.

RUNNER-UPS:

Rant, by Chuck Palahniuk (2007)

Bad Monkeys, by Matt Ruff (2007)

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, by George Saunders (2005)

The Shipping News, by E. Annie Proulx (1993)

The Mysterium, by Eric McCormack (1992)

***

Keep checking back throughout the week for more faves from 2007. The complete collection can be found by clicking on the category link Favourite Books of 2007.

TSR Listmania! Favourite Books of 2007, Part 3

Posted 12 December, 2007 in Favourite Books of 2007 | 4 comments

In TSR’s continuing series of year-end lists, we today spotlight August C. Bourré, whose Reading 2007 project involved him reviewing every title he read over the past calendar year. The complete set of reviews is available on his blog, Vestige.org.

August C. Bourré:

This sounds like fun, and it actually didn’t take me long to come up with a list (mine will have to all go under the category of “classics,” because I don’t generally read books in the year they are published; I don’t often have the scratch to buy hardcover books). Below is a list of my favourite six books from the last year, including comments and a link to my blog post about each.

My list:

1. The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick

My head nearly exploded after reading this one. It has all the classic Dick hallmarks of paranoia, drugs, and alternate realities, but it hit home for me in a way that none of his other have. What could have been intellectual games-playing struck an emotional chord in me, and I found myself excited about this book in a way that I still can’t fully articulate. You can read my initial comments here.

2. Famous Last Words, by Timothy Findley

It’s a truism that Canadians are endlessly concerned about their identity, not just in terms of how we see ourselves, but in how the outside world views us. I have been told on more than one occasion by American bibliophile friends that Canada lacks any truly great works of literature, that no Canadian author can ever stand shoulder to shoulder with even a mid-list American. We lack a solid enough culture to support any such work. Famous Last Words is a book to be thrown in the faces of such people. Not only is it a book that we can acknowledge the excellence of here at home, it’s a book that we can be confident will have a respected life outside our borders. I wouldn’t suggest it’s our “national novel” (if such a thing could ever exist), but it’s a novel that I think calms much of what is most fickle about us. You can read my initial impression of the novel here.

3. Starship Troopers, by Robert A. Heinlein

Despite coming from a family with strong military ties, I have never been one for the military, nor for involving violence in the politics of the everyday. In Starship Troopers, Heinlein makes the case for a more militaristic style of democracy and an abandonment of many of the values and principles that I, as a liberal, hold dear. The book did not cause me to let go of any of my beliefs, but it did challenge them to the point that I no longer feel like I could successfully defend them. This book has affected me in a way that no other book has, which is something I didn’t expect from so-called “pulp” science fiction. I now feel like it’s my responsibility to better understand why I believe what I believe, even if it takes years of hard work and introspection to come to such an understanding. You can read my first impression of the book here.

4. Childhood, by André Alexis

If nothing else, this book proves that authors can experiment with form and remain accessible and emotionally engaging. You can read my initial response here.

5. Who Do You Think You Are?, by Alice Munro

For several years, both publicly and privately, I have spoken out about what I see as the dismal state of the Canadian short story. I have long felt that, as a form, it has become predictable and very conservative. Even “experimental” pieces have become predictable. Having read this book by Alice Munro, however, I see that it is not the short story that needs to be rethought, but rather that there are simply too few masters and far, far too many pretenders. Decades after the stories were published, they still feel new and vibrant, though many of them conform to what I had previously thought of as the most clichéd ideas of what the short story should be. My initial impression of the book can be read here.

6. The Bell, by Iris Murdoch

This book was sophisticated in a way that few contemporary novels seem to be. The characters are sharply drawn and very, very real, but even the worst of them is allowed a certain amount of dignity, even if it’s never exposed to the light of the world. Murdoch seems to care about her characters as much as about writing, and so they are alive and their world is real to an extent that I could never imagine from a Dave Eggers or a Michael Winter. Novels like this are the reason I apply the word “writer” to many, but “author” to only a few. You can read my initial response here. [Ed. note: This review is worth reading especially for the comment from Bourré’s professor about Murdoch’s relation to A.S. Byatt.]

***

Keep checking back throughout the week for more faves from 2007. The complete collection can be found by clicking on the category link Favourite Books of 2007.

But I Go to Hospital: A Dialogue Review

Posted 11 December, 2007 in Book Reviews, Guest Blogger | No comments

Orpheus Lost, by Janette Turner Hospital. Knopf Canada, $32.95 cloth, 358 pp, ISBN: 978-0-676-97942-8.

The second installment of TSR’s dialogue reviews features me in conversation with Kerry Clare, author and essayist, whose work has appeared in The New Quarterly, Hart House Review, The Toronto Star, and The Globe and Mail. She is a regular contributor to the Descant blog, and she is the author of the blog Pickle Me This.

Kerry Clare: I’d never read anything by Janette Turner Hospital before, and she definitely surprised me. I was aware that she is as American as she is Canadian, and that she is Australian first and foremost, but somehow I still expected her work to be representative of the sort of fiction Canada’s female writers seem to write best. The sort of fiction that I like best for that matter, of kitchens and caves, mothers, daughters, and divining.

The premise of Orpheus Lost would suggest otherwise though, wouldn’t it? This story of Leela, who studies the mathematics of music and falls in love with Mishka in the subway as he plays Gluck’s “Che farò senza Euridice” on his violin. Mishka, whose strange disappearances begin to coincide with terrorist attacks in Boston. Soon Leela is snatched off the street on her way home and taken to an interrogation centre where she is confronted by Cobb, a figure from her past, and questions of Mishka being a terrorist.

Thrills and chills, international crime and intrigue. What a treat, I discovered quickly. To read a plot-driven book for once, and have it be so good. To be unable to stop turning the pages until I’d reached the end. I was choking on my heart a number of times, and one day this book extended my lunch break by an extra half-hour. There was no other way.

I do love it when literary fiction manages to surmount the limits of “genre.” To borrow the best of other genres, using it to great advantage. And indeed Turner Hospital does sufficient borrowing here — with the Greek allusions, musical references, spy plots, and romance. Orpheus Lost is a veritable stew, but reads quite originally, all its ingredients measured.

I found the story throughout quite compelling, but Turner Hospital’s depiction of the Australian rainforest was striking in particular. Of course the rainforest is a place that lends itself to story, and Turner Hospital properly invests it with elements of the fantastic, but that somewhere so unknown to me could emerge so vividly is still a testament to her achievements. Conversely the story lagged just a bit for me with Leela’s backstory, which takes place in a small Southern town I felt I’d read about already.

Leela and Mishka’s relationship was hard to understand at first, though with two such eccentric characters, this is unsurprising. Some of the woodenness of their dialogue is easily attributed to the fact that they’re both so unconventional, and so too would be their romance. Words are neither of their fortes. Turner Hospital conveys their respective passions (math and music) well, and also marries them together. Though not so easily — nothing is easy here, and I respect that. The Orpheus story never exactly matches this modern version, piece for piece. Many characters do remain insoluble equations.

So I could continue here, picking the pieces of Orpheus Lost apart, but I will conclude now instead by stating this book is much more interesting as a whole than these pieces are in isolation. That Orpheus Lost is altogether riveting and well-orchestrated, and that it works. Or at least it worked for me.

How about you?

***

Steven W. Beattie: I’m going to be the dissenting voice here. Orpheus Lost was, for me, a major disappointment. In large part, this is because I have been exposed to Turner Hospital’s work before, and so much of it is just so much better: more alive, more potent, more riveting. The new novel, by contrast, was, for me, too mechanistic in its construction, too reliant on coincidence and forced parallels that are used to move the plot along, and without the complexity – both narrative and linguistic — that ignited Due Preparations for the Plague and – especially – Oyster.

I’m surprised that you found the descriptions of the Daintree rainforest compelling: for me they seemed like filler. Indeed, Mishka’s entire backstory positively dragged for me. I’m not sure why it was necessary to include it in such detail. The best sequence in the novel – the sequence that was the most compulsive, that most had me turning the pages in the frenzied manner that you described – was Cobb’s interrogation of Leela, in which he lays out the circumstantial evidence underpinning his suspicions about Mishka’s terrorist connections. The Mishka section that forms the lengthy central portion of the novel was slow, laboured, and unnecessary.

But to return to the descriptive passages for a moment. What frustrated me was what I perceived as their general lackadaisical presentation:

In those days, before the fruit-cropping time, before sugar gave way to avocados and passionfruit and mangoes, the cane stood to attention in green and purple-plumed ranks each morning and saluted as Mishka arrived at school. The cane marched to the very boundaries of the buildings and yard, an invading force, every day gaining ground, every night sending out advance reconnaissance troops, so relentless that children playing cricket or soccer would stumble over spiky green shoots the next morning. This was the growing time. Once the cutting and crushing began, once the cane trains were trundling along the narrow steel tracks to the mill, the air was so heavy with a mist of molasses that the drowsy children would brush soot from their arms and lick sugared air from their lips.

There’s nothing technically wrong with this (although the accidental rhyme in “cane trains” is a bit off-putting), but neither does the prose leap off the page; it’s competent, but uninspired.

By contrast, the description of the outback at the beginning of Oyster is much more vibrant and bracing:

There was also, and still, the drought. More than that, perhaps the worst thing, was a sort of mephitic fog, moistureless and invisible, that came and went like an exhalation of the arid earth itself. We gave it a name. We thought, I suppose, in some primitive way, that if we mocked it, it might decamp and leave us alone. Old Fuckatoo, we called it.

The Old Fuckatoo is roosting again, we would say, pressing handkerchiefs against nose and mouth.

The Old Fuckatoo could brood, close and suffocating, for days, then it might lift a little, depending on the sway and twist of convection in the desert air. Mostly, when it nested and tucked us under its fetid wing, the stink of dead cattle would predominate; or else that particular rank sweetness of rotting sheep. On certain days, when hot currents shimmered off Oyster’s Reef, we could detect the chalk-dust of the mullock heaps, acrid; or, from the opal mines themselves, the ghastly fug of the tunnels and shafts. Sometimes there was almost nothing, just the blackness of the outback heat, and this felt like a grace newly recognised. On other days – there was no escaping it – an altogether more disturbing trace prevailed, some terrible and indefinable emanation that suggested … but no one wished to think about what it suggested.

Some, in retrospect, claimed it was moral decay; though it was probably the simple stink of fear.

The latter passage is much more muscular, more invigorating, than anything in Orpheus Lost. The extended military metaphor describing the cane in the passage above pales, in my opinion, beside the “mephitic fog … that came and went like an exhalation of the arid earth itself,” or the “particular rank sweetness of rotting sheep,” or “the ghastly fug of the tunnels and shafts.” All of which is a shame, because, knowing what Turner Hospital is capable of, I had the impression that this time she was just phoning it in. (I thought the wooden dialogue was not a result of the unconventional nature of the characters, but was merely wooden dialogue.)

But I want to ask you about your reaction to the incorporation of the Orpheus myth as the overarching metaphor in the novel. As you mentioned, the first time Leela encounters Mishka (in the subway, which is not really all that subtle …) he is playing Gluck’s “Che farò senza Euridice.” The Orpheus myth is referred to again and again in the novel, and is turned on its head in the final stages, when Leela goes searching for the missing Mishka, essentially reversing the roles of the original protagonists. Did you accept this as a conceit for the novel, or did it seem overly forced to you?

***

KC: To be honest, I’m not sure it’s fair to critique a book for not being another book. Nor do I think that “leapage off page” is such a measurable attribute for prose that one could draw a line under it, or at least agree with another upon where to do so. I adored the descriptions of Mishka’s Hungarian grandparents’ strange European house in the rainforest, and the rain, the birds, the green. I can see it, though I’ve never seen such a thing in all my life and I’m not even sure if it could really exist.

But I do understand now that I was lucky to have found Turner Hospital with this particular effort, and look forward to Oyster and the impossibility of disappointment. Do you think that without Oyster as comparison, you would have still been so disappointed with Orpheus Lost? Do you think you would have bothered to read it at all based upon its premise?

And speaking of Orpheus and his myth. No, you’re right that there’s nothing subtle about it. It’s right there in the title I suppose. But then subways are places people go and musicians are there and nothing about that in particular seemed forced to me. What I liked about the whole conceit was that nothing about the metaphor is ever easy after Leela encounters Mishka in the subway. The novel doesn’t run parallel to the myth, but rather pieces of the myth are scattered in shards throughout it, and no attempts at reconstruction could make for a whole that I could discover. But my attempts at discovery made for such an engaging process all the same, and my failure to solve the problem has led to the novel’s haunting quality, and a desire on my part to engage with both stories further.

Am I right to suspect that you did not come away feeling the same?

***

SWB: Yes, you’re right. I felt that the Orpheus myth was handled a bit too heavily to be satisfying. Of course it’s not inappropriate for a street musician to be found playing in the subway, but within the larger narrative context, the fact of Mishka’s first appearance there (i.e. in the underground), combined with the piece he is playing, seemed like Turner Hostpital was laying it on a bit thick. I had the same “Oh, come on!” reaction that I had when Al Pacino’s devil character is shown descending the stairs into the subway in The Devil’s Advocate.

There are other unsubtle moments as well. After her meeting with Cobb, Leela has “a fleeting image of Mishka with a ferryman in a boat, crossing to somewhere.” When Mishka is being “interrogated” following his rendition, he refers to himself as Orpheus and to his tormentor as Cerberus. The covert mission that Cobb initiates at the novel’s end is codenamed “Operation Underworld.” There were times while I was reading the novel when I felt as though I was being beaten over the head by the metaphoric resonance.

Similarly, I thought that much of the novel was too neat, too tidy to be satisfying. There is the forced parallelism of having Leela return to Promised Land to find both her father and Cobb’s father afflicted with cancer, for example. And I thought that the epilogue was really superfluous. It makes explicit things that would be better left ambiguous, such as Cobb’s ultimate fate.

As for the comparison with Oyster, you’re right in saying that “leaping off the page” is a vague critical standard; prose that leaps for one person might hobble for someone else. You’re also right that it’s unfair to fault Orpheus Lost for not being Oyster. The comparison I drew above was meant simply to illustrate comparable sections in the two novels in which I felt Turner Hospital was operating at a lower pitch in the new book. Had I not read – and loved – Oyster, I doubt that my reaction to Orpheus Lost would have been much different: I’d still find much of it heavy-handed and contrived. But, knowing how powerful Turner Hospital’s writing can be, my sense of disappointment was surely heightened.

Would I have picked the book up were it not for my previous exposure to the author’s work? Possibly, because the subject – the current climate of geopolitical paranoia (and the effects that has on interpersonal relationships) – is a touchstone of our shared historical moment. Indeed, it’s the subject that artists who engage with the world as it is seem unable to shy away from. Post-9/11 literature has become almost a subgenre of its own, with authors as diverse as Jay McInerney, John Updike, Ken Kalfus, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Don DeLillo having taken it up. There has been debate as to the efficacy of this; my own feeling is that artists are obligated to deal imaginatively with our most pressing emotional issues – love, fear, anger, confusion – and that, given this obligation, 9/11 and its fallout is the one subject that is all but inescapable at this point.

Having said that, the subject alone does not make for a compelling novel. It must be well handled, and my own feeling is that in this instance, Turner Hostpital fell short.

***

KC: There was a neatness to the novel, you’re right, though I suppose that’s to be expected from any book that begins with, “Afterwards, Leela realized, everything could have been predicted from the beginning.” Further, yes, perhaps it was too tidy, though I remain fascinated by how hard it is for us to accept coincidence in fiction sometimes.

Regarding the tidiness, though, what I liked about it was that tidiness could be created from such a mess. To create a tidy book out of myth, music, math, and intrigue (could not find a synonym beginning with “m,” unfortunately) is no mean feat. Orpheus Lost has served to broaden my literary horizons — toward Turner Hospital’s work itself, of course, but also to the myths, music, math, and intrigue I so often fail to consider, so ensconced am I in my usual bookish bliss. I enjoyed that I could be excited about such things at all, and how gripped I truly was.

TSR Listmania! Favourite Books of 2007, Part 2

Posted 11 December, 2007 in Favourite Books of 2007 | No comments

Today’s list of favourite books from 2007 is courtesy of Zachariah Wells, a New Westminster-based poet and critic. He is the Reviews Editor for Canadian Notes & Queries, and has had criticism printed in Quill & Quire, Maisonneuve, and Northern Poetry Review, among other places. His collection of poetry, Unsettled, was published by Insomniac Press. He blogs at Career Limiting Moves.

Zachariah Wells:

Non-fiction:

Colour, by Victoria Finlay

My mom got this as a gift for Christmas last year and I was so intrigued by it that I ordered a copy for myself. I’m a sucker for this kind of focused non-fiction book and this is one of the better examples of the genre I’ve come across.

Little Eurekas, by Robyn Sarah

For many years I’ve enjoyed reading Robyn’s occasional prose on poetry. Wonderful to have the best of it collected in one volume.

God Is not Great, by Christopher Hitchens

Hitchens’ support of the invasion of Iraq continues to puzzle and irritate me, but this book isn’t, fortunately, tainted by it. Devastating logic, wicked-sharp prose and a wealth of Hitchens’ own life experience and exposure to various faiths make this a key addition to anti-theist literature (one of my favourite sub-genres!).

A Natural History of the Senses, by Diane Ackerman

The prose gets a bit purple at times, but this is nonetheless a very stylish and entertaining tour of our connections to the physical world. The chapter on smell alone makes it worth reading.

Everywhere Being Is Dancing, by Robert Bringhurst

Okay, the title makes it sound hokey, but believe me it isn’t. This sequel to last year’s The Tree of Meaning collects essays on a dizzying range of subjects. Bringhurst, a polymath non-specialist of exceptional acumen, writes passionately and eloquently about the interconnection of all things and sciences (in the classical sense of the word).

The Lost Coast: Salmon, Memory and the Death of Wild Culture, by Tim Bowling

A bit erratic at times, but still a very compelling blend of memoir, ecology and B.C. history. Bowling comes from a salmon-fishing family, so this is no detached objective report. His intimate knowledge, combined with the research he’s done, lends this book its urgency and tang.

Fiction:

Hitting the Charts, by Leon Rooke

Rooke’s short stories are really more vocal performances. And they’re virtuoso vocal performances, at that. His warped imagination and intoxicating style make this collection very damn hard to put down.

The Life and Times of Michael K., by J.M. Coetzee

I read a book of Coetzee’s every two or three years, am completely unsettled by the experience and don’t want to read another for some time. He writes with such ruthless, unsentimental economy about some of the more brutal aspects of humanity that it can be hard to love his books even though they’re easily some of the best novels I’ve read. This very compact and experimentally bi-partite story is no exception. I’ll probably read another of his books in 2010 or so.

Notes from Underground, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

I’m a huge fan of Dostoevsky sprawling classics Crime & Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov and I’d been meaning to read this book for years. I’ll probably be rereading it for years. There are few better psychologists in fiction than him.

Being Dead, by Jim Crace

My mother-in-law gave me this book as a birthday gift and am I ever glad she did. Mesmerizing prose and a riveting story that gets to the heart of those two themes — really one two-sided theme — that won’t go away: sex and death.

Poetry:

How We All Swiftly, by Don Coles

I came late to the early work of Don Coles. Kudos to Carmine Starnino for republishing all six of his first books in one volume. Coles is one of our best poets, no doubt.

The Book of Contradictions, by George McWhirter

George is now the poet laureate of Vancouver, and an excellent man for the job. This recent book was my introduction to his work, and it’s full of odd and wonderful things. George comes at nothing directly in person or in his poetry, and its wonderful to watch — and hear — his eccentric intelligence and trickster humour at work in these poems and sequences.

Domain, by Barbara Nickel

I blame terrible jury selection on this book not being nominated for the GG. I reviewed it for Quill & Quire, so I’ll just point you to that review for a more detailed take on the book.

Tyrannosaurus Rex Vs. the Corduroy Kid and The Universal Home Doctor, by Simon Armitage

I include both of these books not so much for their strength as collections, but because of individual poems that each contains. Armitage is one of the Big Names in English poetry and he proves time and again that deserves it.

The Mundiad, by Justin Clemens

This was a fluke find in a remainders store. A bizarre, warped satire in the mode of Alexander Pope (the title being a pretty obvious allusion to The Dunciad), it’s a book that’s both classical and topical — and enormously entertaining, which can be said of very few poetry books, even good ones.

Ox, by Christopher Patton

Another book I would’ve liked to see nominated for the GG. Chris blends the physical and the metaphysical in dense, knotty, formally intricate poems that compel and reward close attention and rereading. Think Marianne Moore meets Gerard Manley Hopkins and you’ve got some idea of what this book is like.

One Muddy Hand, by Earle Birney

Are other countries as bad as we are at keeping our best poets’ work in print? Anyway, this book, like the republication of Irving Layton’s A Wild Peculiar Joy, is not necessarily the best selection of Birney’s work that could be made, but it still contains an awful lot of very good poems.

The Essential George Johnston, by George Johnston, ed. Robyn Sarah

One of Canada’s most underrated poets. I love that The Porcupine’s Quill is undertaking this series of “essential” selections, since most volumes of selected poems published these days are far too inclusive to appeal to readers who aren’t already fans of the poet in question. Robyn’s done a lovely job picking the poems for this book, even if, predictably, there are poems absent that I wish were included.

Recollected Poems, by Daryl Hine

At the time of writing, I’m still not finished reading this, but it’s already one of my favourite books of the year, and probably one of the best books of poetry ever published in this country. Hine is a Canadian poet who wouldn’t be, in many ways, an expat, a classicist (he’s translated several volumes of Latin and Greek verse), and a devotee of intricate stanzas and metres — as a metrist, there are very few contemporary poets who can match his skill. He’s got a significant international reputation, but tends to get ignored here. He shouldn’t be.

***

Keep checking back throughout the week for more faves from 2007. The complete collection can be found by clicking on the category link Favourite Books of 2007.

Get Ready to Lose Your Shit

Posted 10 December, 2007 in Uncategorized | No comments

Stephen Fry has a blog.

How difficult, how exquisitely difficult it is to know where to begin. Anyone who has had the time or disposition to read the comments that readers have submitted to these pages over the last three weeks or so will be aware of a number of issues that need addressing.

Firstly and most crucially: how do Terry Pratchett readers eat soup?

Go there. Now. That’s all.

TSR Listmania! Favourite Books of 2007, Part 1

Posted 10 December, 2007 in Favourite Books of 2007 | 1 comment

It’s the end of the year, which means it’s the season of lists. Best-of lists, must-have-for-the-holidays lists, etc. The arguments against such lists are well known: they are arbitrary, they aren’t truly representative of the “best” in a given area, but merely what’s hot, or au courant, or what the list-maker perceives will make him/her appear smarter, more well-read, sexier, hipper. However, I admit that I’m addicted to them, as much for the joy of picking them apart and discovering unconscionable MIAs as anything else. Conversely, I’ve discovered a lot of really great books that I otherwise would not have picked up save for their appearances on certain year-end best-of lists. Indeed, even people who profess to hate year-end best-of lists admit to a covert attraction to them.

Here at TSR, your humble correspondent felt that if everyone else in the schoolyard is playing this particular game, why should he stand on the sidelines shuffling his feet?

However, I remain wary of a kind of artificially limited selection of “best” books from the past year, proscribed by my own limited reading and individual sensibility. I wanted a wider range of opinion and, perhaps selfishly, wanted some different perspectives that might point me in the direction of books I’d overlooked for whatever reason in the past year.

Accordingly, I recently contacted a selection of people — bloggers, writers, editors — and asked them to provide me with a list of their favourite books from 2007. The rubric was very broad: this was not meant to be a survey of the “best” new books published in the past twelve months, but rather a subjective assessment of people’s favourites. They could be new books, classics, or books that the respondent rereads every year. What were the books that moved people in the past year, that made them think, or made them angry, or made them laugh? What are the books that have stuck with people? (Perhaps unsurprisingly, from the responses I’ve received thus far, not many of these are the ones that appeared on the big prize shortlists this year.)

The response I’ve received has been encouraging, and comprehensive. I’d originally planned on doing a roundup at the end of this week, but the generosity of the people I’ve approached has been such that I’ve now got enough material to fill a series of posts. So, starting today, and continuing throughout the week, I’ll be highlighting a different writer’s favourite reads from the year past. Some of the titles are familiar, some are more obscure, at least one list is composed exclusively of titles published in years other than the current one, and a number of respondents have chosen genre books as their favourites.

The books in these lists provide a wide cross-section of what people read, and enjoyed, in the year past. I’ve already found a number of books to pique my interest; my hope is that TSR readers might have the same experience.

Feel free to throw in your two cents’ worth in the comments, if you’d like.

***

To kick this off, here is the list of favourites from Brenda Schmidt, a Saskatchewan poet, author of the collections More than Three Feet of Ice, A Haunting Sun, and the forthcoming Cantos from Wolverine Creek. Brenda is also the author of the blog Alone on a Boreal Stage.

Brenda Schmidt:

Thanks for this opportunity. I’ve read a lot of books this year, many of which I really enjoyed, but I’ll limit this list to my top five. Here are the books that stuck with me, haunted me, made me think.

1. The Crooked Good, by Louise Bernice Halfe.

This is the hands-down winner. By far the best. Published in the fall of 2007, it’s an outstanding book of poetry that will certainly be recognized as one of the most important books ever published in this country. An overstatement, no.

(Note: This book is by a nationally recognized SK author who I don’t know personally and published by a SK press with whom I have no affiliation. Halfe was nominated for the GG for her last book.)

2. A Worldy Country, by John Ashbery.

What’s there to say? Ashbery is a great poet.

3. Disobedience, by Alice Notley.

The winner of the International Griffin Poetry Prize in 2002.

I’ve read it several times and it always feels new.

4. Shut Up He Explained, by John Metcalf.

I wish more writers of his generation would put forward their memoirs. Risky business perhaps, but the value is immeasurable. Writers need an awareness of their literary history. A context. I learned a great deal from this book.

5. The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins.

So much has been said of this book. I have nothing to add. It’s a book that should be read and talked about, not just talked about.

***

Keep checking back throughout the week for more faves from 2007. The complete collection can be found by clicking on the category link Favourite Books of 2007.