I don't know why, but I haven't been reading well lately. That isn't to say I'm having a hard time with the words or anything – it's something about my choices. I've been reading and enjoying a lot of non fiction, but the novels have been feeling a little meh. There hasn't been anything wrong with them, but they haven't grabbed me the way books usually do, and I'm not sure if that's because I've been distracted lately (work is crazy) of if it's the writing or some combination of the two, but it's frustrating. The one bright spot in all of this has been Life After Life, the new novel by Kate Atkinson. I actually read it a month ago while on holiday and, even though I love it, I hesitated to write about it in case my recent literary doldrums interfered. But I've kept thinking about it, and Atkinson is everywhere at the moment, so I to put it out there and see if it breaks whatever fiction-meh I've caught.
The idea behind Life After Life is fairly simple: Ursula, born in England in 1910 (a year that makes keeping track of her age very simple) lives over and over again. That is, each time she dies, she is brought back at some pivotal moment before her death, and given a chance to do it again. For example, as a child at the beach, she and her older sister go wading in the water and are caught by a wave; they drown, but then a few paragraphs later they're saved by a man who was painting farther up the beach; at yet another return, Ursula has a bad feeling about the water and convinces her sister to build sandcastles instead. These deja vu feelings are basically all Ursula retains from life to life – although she gets a seemingly endless number of do-overs, she doesn't have the luxury of knowing what mistakes led to her death (or even that she died), just a feeling that she shouldn't be somewhere or do something. Furthermore, she does actually have die in order to get a do over, which is to say, sometimes excruciatingly bad things happen to her and the storyline continues and, because she doesn't know that death won't be permanent, she has no choice but just to continue.
Of course, not every do-over is successful. It takes Ursula several attempts to survive the Spanish influenza epidemic after the First World War, for example. This leads to a lot of repetitive story telling, which in short bursts can be a little much, but later on can prove immensely satisfying as you watch for the small changes that will affect the outcome 10 or 20 years down the road. It's an unusual way to get to know a character, since you get to see how she will react to various situations and also realize that, whether X happens or not, she sometimes ends up in the same place. For anyone who has wondered what if I hadn't/had done that? Where would I be now? Atkinson has done some of that thinking for you.
I'm not sure it should be called time travel, since that suggests an agency that Ursula doesn't have (how are the pivotal life moments decided, and by whom, are never explained), but I think this continuous cycle of life and death and sometimes literal rebirth would be tedious if it weren't for the time Atkinson chose to set her novel in. Nearly half the book is set during the Second World War and much of it during the Battle of Britain. Ursula's roles vary, but Atkinson's look at wartime London (and elsewhere) is gripping. Ursula's multiple experiences of the war, furthermore, allow Atkinson to explore various aspects of wartime life, which bring a richness to the experience of reading it. I feel like I've read a lot books (both fiction and non-fiction) about the war recently, but Ursula's was a unique perspective.
Life After Life is a perfect escapist novel. It's the kind of book you both want to keep to yourself and talk about with everyone. I will admit that sometimes I just hoped Ursula would die so she could get out of some situation or another, but Atkinson is tough on both her readers and her character, and no one gets off the hook that easily. It's a proper literary page-turner, and I'm not sure I've ever read anything quite like it.
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson Published 2013 (Bond Street Books edition)
It will shock approximately no one when I say that I am a public reader. That is, I do most of my reading in public, especially during my work commute, although I also happily read in cafés, on the street corner, and while waiting in line. I read everywhere, and generally, no one notices. Or, at least no one obviously notices. I do see people peaking at my book cover from time to time, but only very, very rarely does anyone ask me about my book, or try to use it to start a conversation. (This is where I should add that every single time someone has asked me about my book, it has been a man. I'm not saying they're trying to pick-up, but it does seem fishy.) Anyway, all of this is to say that I rarely get interrupted when reading in public; that is, until I started Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. Apparently it's a sort of seminal text for men of a certain age, because in one week I had at least three men tell me what a good book I was reading. One guy didn't even stop: I was standing on the subway platform and, somehow he caught the cover and timed his "that book is awesome" comment for just when he was walking down. It wasn't a conversation starter, it was a commendation, and while it was surprising, it was kind of nice. Who doesn't like a little positive reinforcement every now and then, after all?
Anyway, enough of that. The novel, written in 1985 but set well into the future, presents an Earth that has barely survived two massive wars with the extra-terrestrial buggers and is on the verge of a third. It is the fear of this third war that has led them to start training children – some as young as five or six – to be soldiers. These potentials are connected to a monitor (and by connected, I mean it's attached to their brain stem and thus records both what they see and what they think and feel) so the adults in command can determine whether the child has potential. The book opens with Ender Wiggin, age 6, having his monitor removed. He assumes this means he was a failure and is simultaneously pleased – it means his older brother Peter (also a failure) might stop bullying him – and disheartened (he is a Third, the third child born to his family despite the two-child policy, and the only reason his birth was permitted was because of his brother and sister's potential). Of course, this wouldn't be much of a novel if Ender wasn't recruited, so when it turns out that the military merely removed his monitor to then see how he would handle himself when no one was watching, it all makes sense. Ender is recruited and taken to military school in space.
Sometimes the time at which a book makes its way to the top of my to-read pile is downright eerie. This week, for instance, during the "Frankenstorm" that was Hurricane Sandy – possibly the worst natural disaster to hit New York City in the last century – I was reading The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker. I would have thoroughly enjoyed this book even if I hadn't been reading it with the backdrop of a hurricane and days and days and days of rain, but all of that gave the novel a kind of spooky feeling, as if I'd stumbled upon some kind of weird prophecy. I know it isn't really possible for a book to decide when it should be read, but I've had The Age of Miracles on my shelf for four months, so picking it up now makes me wonder a little.
Anyway. Thompson Walker's novel is set in more or less present-day California, where everything is just as it is now, except that the Earth's rotation has started to slow down. At the beginning of this slowing, days get longer by a half hour or forty-five minutes, and people start stocking up on canned food. When the news is broadcast for the first time, the narrator, 11-year-old Julia, runs outside to see if she anything looks different, but everything is just the same. Soon, though, the slowing becomes more noticeable. The days and nights start to stretch out until the clocks cease to make sense – 3 a.m. falls in the middle of the afternoon, noon in the morning, etc. The start time for school is announced each morning – that is, after sunrise – and a lot of kids stop showing up. Then birds start getting sick and falling dead from the sky.
The slowing, it seems, has started to affect the magnetic field, causing what is dubbed gravity sickness in people, and wreaking havoc with birds' navigation. In barely a month, there are almost no birds left in Julia's California town, and she's heard that it's like that elsewhere too. The longer days and change in gravity have also served to play with the tides, which are larger and fuller than ever. People have been forced to abandon their seaside mansions, which are now covered at every high tide.
Eventually, the days and nights grow to such exaggerated lengths that the government announces the country is going back to clock time. The rise and set of the sun will no longer have any bearing on what is day or night, they decide, on starting on a Sunday, the U.S. and countries all over the world, return to the clock. Floodlights are set up around Julia's school to when the students have to attend during dark days; quilts are hung over windows to block the sun on white nights, and soon the light and dark periods stretch to 48 hours each. Crops start to die, trees whither, and people begin to invest in green houses; Julia's mother's emergency stash of non-perishables spreads to the guest room.
As if all this weren't enough to try and deal with, Julia is in Grade 6, at that liminal age between being a kid and being something more grownup. Julia's best friend Hannah is sleeping over when the slowing is announced, and after she goes home that morning Julia doesn't see her again for months. Hannah's family is Mormon, so they return to Utah to prepare for the end of the world. When the rapture doesn't happen, Hannah comes back, but she has a new best friend now, leaving Julia more alone that ever. Julia's mother is sick – with gravity sickness – and as the slowing continues, Julia feels increasingly isolated. Until one day, when Seth Moreno, a boy from two streets over who Julia has been watching, invites her to the beach after school. A pod of whales has beach itself, and he wants to go and see and try to help. Although it doesn't happen right away, Julia and Seth become friends, best friends, half in love the way you only can be at 12 years old.
Thompson Walker so completely captures what it's like to be in Grade 6 – strangely aware of yourself and insecure and unsure and defiant – that even if you haven't thought about that time in years, Julia pulls you back there. It's this hyper-realistic experience that grounds the novel, making the other half of it seem not only plausible but frighteningly possible. This gives the title a dual significance, as The Age of Miracles is both the time of the Earth's slowing and puberty, when your body and emotions and everything seems to change both incrementally and overnight. It almost makes you wonder if the slowing is just a metaphor for what Julia is going through personally, but, of course, that it isn't makes the novel all the more fascinating. It is, I think, one of the most inventive novels I've read this year, and I can't imagine that you wouldn't enjoy it as much as I did.
The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker First published in 2012 (cover image shown from Doubleday Canada edition)
Last year, my friend Wendy and I went to the New Yorker Festival. The first event we saw was a panel discussion with the New Yorker's books editor and Jhumpa Lahiri, Geoffrey Eugenides, and Nicole Krauss, about what it meant to be a writer's writer. While the entire discussion was really interesting, one of the things I remember most was Jhumpa Lahiri talking about the power of the first novel. It is, she said, a book you write only for yourself, often for years, sometimes without anyone else knowing, and that kind of hard work and lack of outside pressure can make for a kind of purity. She went on to say that writer's writers were authors who were able to get back to the mindset of writing only for themselves, but I have to say that her idea that there is something pure about a debut novel (as opposed to tortured and agonized over, I suppose) has changed the way I read first novels. When I picked up Marie-Renée Lavoie's Mister Roger and Me, translated by Wayne Grady, I didn't realize it was her debut, but knowing that now makes me think Lahiri was really on to something.
Mister Roger and Me is set in Montreal in the early 1980s, and is the story of Hélène – although she would prefer you call her Joe – and her family and their neighbourhood. The story is told by the grown up Hélène (who is okay with being called that), and although there are a few times when she steps out of the timeline to reveal a detail about what happens in the future, the novel is a mostly linear account of her childhood, between the ages of 8 and 11. To begin with, I'll explain the name. Hélène is obsessed with a TV show on the Family Channel that features a young woman who, disguised as a man named Oscar, serves as one of Marie Antoinette's guards. For Hélène, Oscar is the absolute role model, and exactly the kind of man/woman she would like to be: brave, strong, in disguise. To begin her transition to an Oscar-type character, Hélène convinces people to call her Joe. She is quite disappointed by the lack of suffering and hardship in her life, but she does notice that her mom doesn't always have the money to purchase the necessary dinner items, so she lies about her age and gets a paper route.
Not that long ago, I listened to a Radiolab podcast about colour and it blew my mind. Now, I'll be the first to admit that their brand of science-y storytelling can often do that, but this was different. In the show (which I highly recommend you listen to), they talked not only about how colour works and where it comes from and that sort of thing – they also talked about the language of colour. Specifically, they spoke to a linguist Guy Deutscher about William Gladstone's reading of The Odyssey and how, even though that book takes place mostly in locations surrounded by water, the word "blue" is never used. Not once. The conclusion? That blue didn't exist for Homer. He didn't have a word for it, so he couldn't express it (he instead describes the sea as "wine-dark"). Colour words, it seems, develop in stages that are consistent across cultures, with blue being the last major one to come into play. Crazy, right?
I have been thinking about this a lot since I listened to that podcast, so when Carrie MacMillan contacted me about being part of the S.T.E.L.L.A.A. blog tour, the two ideas meshed. S.T.E.L.L.A.A. works to eradicate poverty in Africa by providing literacy and educational tools to communities. It's a small thing, but it can have a huge impact. One of the ways S.T.E.L.L.A.A. provides these tools is through books donated in Canada and delivered to various African communities (part of their philosophy is to promote environmental responsibility, and reusing books is a great way to do that).
When I was a kid, I was lucky enough to grow up in a house filled with books. My parents were (and remain) readers, so from the word go I was surrounded by books. I was read to, I was encouraged to pick up books and flip through them (and later, of course, to read them myself). For me, books were a way to go somewhere else. I was never going to experience 19th century Prince Edward Island or the pioneer days in the U.S. for myself, but Lucy Maud Montgomery and Laura Ingalls Wilder could take me there. I was never going to take a boat past Patagonia, but thanks to Sue Scullard's Miss Fanshawe and the Great Dragon Adventure I not only got to see the mountains of Patagonia, but also to follow along as the heroine discovered dragons at the centre of the Earth. I still have never been to the Netherlands, but because I was read (many, many times) The Cow Who Fell Into the Canal by Phyllis Krazilovsky, I was given a way to imagine it anyway.
That's the point, really. Reading, and being read to, as a child feeds your imagination with a world of images and and situations and places that you might never experience first-hand, but can dream about nonetheless. As kids, my sisters and I weren't allowed to watch much TV, so our free time was spent reading and playing, and the vast majority of our games were fuelled by our incredibly active imaginations. Even though there were certainly times when, like Homer I suppose, we lacked the word for whatever it was we wanted to describe, we had the imaginations to come up with something else.
In Orwell's 1984 there is the suggestion that if we lack the word for something, we can't think it; fostering active imaginations in children defeats that, because if you have an imagination, there is always a way to express yourself. (No word for blue? Fine then, I'll say it's "wine-dark.")
As my contribution to the S.T.E.L.L.A.A. blog tour, I'd like to encourage you to donate your (gently) used books to their cause. Local libraries are certainly deserving as well, but even if you put every second or third book aside, it makes a difference. In addition to picture books and fiction, S.T.E.L.L.A.A. needs text books. Subjects such as math and basic science – in which not a lot really changes between editions – are greatly appreciated, and put to excellent use. Education and imagination are extraordinarily empowering, although it's easy to forget that living as we do in a society where both those things are so normalized.
Now, it's tempting to say that every book will be appreciated, but it's important to remember the context in which these books will be read. Cookbooks, books about home decor, etc. are of little use to communities looking to improve education. Yes, they can be tools for imagination, but they depict a reality so incredibly different that at best they are useless and at worst, insulting. S.T.E.L.L.A.A. also stays away from evangelical and political work, so please consider that when planning books to donate (an illustrated book of parables may have been a family favourite in your house, but may not jive with a community it's sent to, and respecting that is important). The full list of guidelines for donation are here – for the most part, your books are welcomed with open arms.
All the drop-off points are in Toronto; however, I asked about sending books by mail, and was given this address:
STELLAA
9200 Weston Road
PO Box 92092
Vaughan, ON L4H 3J3
If it's a big donation, though, they ask that you get in touch with them about sending it.
Although I often have the opportunity (both through this blog in in my day to day life) to champion books and literature, it's rare that I get the chance to do more than simply recommend a book or encourage someone to shop at local independent bookstore. If you feel similarly, consider donating books S.T.E.L.L.A.A. – Allegra Young is planning to run a book drive in the New Year, so perhaps I'll talk to her about co-hosting. Either way, stay tuned!
Stories about con artists, hustlers, and small-time thieves are usually pretty happy go lucky. I remember picking up Paper Moon as a kid and being totally fascinated by the world of tricks and sleight of hand that saw a father and daughter travelling around the country to make their fortune. For the most part, their crimes seemed victimless, and you just knew everything was going to work out. If this is what you're expecting when you pick up Billie Livingston's new novel One Good Hustle, prepare yourself: her perspective on cons is totally different.
The novel is the story of Sammie, the 16-year-old daughter of hustlers, and takes place during the summer between Grades 11 and 12. Sammie is living at a friend's – almost more of an acquaintance at the beginning – because her mother is depressed, suicidal, and has substance abuse problems. When Sammie decided she couldn't take it anymore (her mother could kill herself, but she didn't want to be there to watch), she left. Of course, that doesn't mean she isn't thinking about her mother, or worrying about her, or wondering where her dad is (her parents split up years ago), or hoping he'll come and take her away with him.
It's strange how, sometimes, a book you really want to talk about leaves you without the words to do so. Certainly there are books that leave you so shellshocked that the very idea of starting a new one seems crass and somehow inappropriate. It's too soon, you think. At the opposite end are those books most often referred to as "beach reads," which hold you in their thrall until the last page, at which point you toss them aside and pick up another, typically only remembering their finer plot points when walking home by yourself late at night (assuming, of course, that your beach reads are terrifying, which mine almost always seem to be). There are, I'm sure, lots of kinds of books in between these two extremes, but the two I most often seem to encounter are books I can't stop talking about, and books I want very much to talk about but can't manage to do in a sensible way. Even that sentence borders on what I'm talking about. It's as if you want your words to be so precise, to do the book justice, but in the face of this author you feel yourself unworthy. Bare with me, because this is how I feel in the face of Lisa Moore, and most recently about her short story collection Open.
Open is so hard for me to talk about, I think, because Moore's style is so distinct, and her characters so full, that it's very hard to step away and shake your head clear in order to engage in any kind of critical thinking. The layered descriptions, the scraps of memories, the various characters, all continue to play through your imagination long after you've finished reading. This is something I love about Moore's writing, but also something that frustrates me. The through-line that binds the stories in Open together is relationships. In each story, a relationship – and often more than one, with friendships balanced against marriages – is in flux; in all the stories, characters' memories are overlaid with their present circumstances, which creates a swirl of images that can at times be disorienting for both the character and the reader.
Generally speaking, when I start reading a book, I keep going until I finish it. Lately, I've had the excellent luck to pick up one good book after another, but it doesn't always go like that. Like most avid readers, the sheer number of books I read means every once in a while I'm going to get a dud. For some reason, I don't like with the characters, I don't care about the plot, or whatever. It happens to everyone. For a lot of people I know, if they aren't hooked by a certain point, they stop reading; there are too many good books out there, they reason, to keep going with one that isn't keeping them up at night. Fair enough. I, though, usually stick it out. I have faith that something is going to happen (someone saw something in the book to make it worth publishing), so I plow on, and sometimes I'm rewarded and sometimes I'm disappointed, but very rarely are unfinished books left in my wake. Somehow, though, a really good one was. For the life of my, I cannot remember why I left Miriam Toews' A Complicated Kindness after only a dozen pages – I was probably distracted by something else – but I am so glad I picked it back up, because my goodness what a wrenching, funny, hoot of a book it is.
A Complicated Kindness is the story of Nomi Nickel, a teenage Mennonite living in East Village Manitoba in the late-'70s/early-'80s, I would guess. Half of Nomi's family – the better looking half, according to her – are gone, which leaves just her and her dad, Ray. Her mother, Trudie, has been gone for a while, and her older sister Tash left before that. Their whereabouts is a mystery, which leaves all possibilities open to Nomi's imagination. Ray is quiet, religious, and affectionate in a buttoned-up sort of way. He writes Nomi notes suggesting she go to school that day, he appreciates her system of cooking dinner based on an alphabet system (m-day might mean macaroni, or meat, or mushrooms, or whatever). Nomi runs wild.
Not that long ago there was an interesting discussion on Twitter about how (or if) knowledge and experience with the setting of a novel affected the way you connect with the story being told. (If you aren't on Twitter and this seems to go against everything you've heard about the medium, let me just say that it all depends on who you interact with and that, yes, there are a lot of interesting literary discussions being hashed out in 140-character bites.) Personally, I love finding a book that's set somewhere I'm familiar with. Reading Ami McKay's The Birth House, for example, was a thrill partially because it's set in my home town (albeit nearly 100 years before I lived there). Likewise, as I become more comfortable with the idea that I now live in Toronto, books set in neighbourhoods I'm familiar with pop out at me in way they perhaps would not have five years ago. Nonetheless, the geography of a novel is, in some ways, incidental to whether or not I'll enjoy it, because even if I'm reading about somewhere I'm familiar with, I'm still experiencing it through the eyes and emotions of a fictional character, which means, in a way, that my experience doesn't matter. I had to remind myself of this a few times while reading Grace O'Connell's gorgeous debut novel Magnified World, though, because not only do her descriptions mimic the way I remember certain places, but her character Maggie feels wonderfully familiar, as if I've bumped into her before.
Magnified World is set, since we're on the subject, mostly in Toronto's West Queen West/Trinity Bellwoods neighbourhood. Queen Street, certainly, figures into the story a lot, as does College Street and Kensington Market. If you are familiar with these places, reading O'Connell's descriptions offers a warm buzz of recognition; if you aren't, though, be assured that this is not an insider's look at Toronto: the descriptions are vivid and accurate in the way that lets you unconsciously map out a character's movements, without feeling overwhelmed by comings and goings. It's my favourite way to read about cities, really – detailed without becoming clinical.
I recently realized that, although I've read a lot of books, I rarely get the chance to read multiple books by the same author. It's kind of weird, actually, because I distinctly remember choosing books specifically because of their author when I was a kid: Janet Lunn, L.M. Montgomery, Jean Little – all authors whose catalogue I plowed through with delight. I'm not sure when that stopped. I might be just that I'm reading more contemporary authors now, so there's less of a back-catalogue to devour, or, perhaps, that I find myself increasingly drawn to first novels. Whatever the case, when I was reading Alone in the Classroom by Elizabeth Hay I was struck by the fact that it's the third book of hers I've read, and that it's felt like a while since that was the case, and that being familiar with an author changes the way you read his or her work.
The last Hay novel I read was her Giller-winning Late Nights on Air(the first was A Student of Weather), which also gave me the opportunity to interview her for the Journal (the Queen's student newspaper, which I was very involved with as an undergrad). Hay has a lovely voice – simultaneously soft and strong – a fact I would never have remembered except that when I began reading Alone in the Classroom it took up residence in my head. It wasn't quite as if Hay was reading the novel to me (I didn't talk to her long enough for that to happen), but every once in a while, a bit of description would so remind me of Late Nights on Air, or the way she talked about writing, that there it was. Anyway, none of that really says anything about the novel, I suppose, but perhaps it's part of why I responded so well to it.
It's Easter this weekend, and even though ours isn't a family prone to big family get-togethers (we're too spread out), it is nonetheless a holiday steeped in family memories of egg hunts time together, so perhaps that's why I've been feeling the family nostalgia lately. When we were kids, for example, my parents, and my dad in particular, used to tell us stories about when they were little kids. Even now when we get together with our extended family from one side or the other, the evening or weekend or whatever inevitably (and wonderfully) becomes all about retelling the same big stories and, if we're lucky, a new one will slide in amongst all the familiar ones. A lot of these stories are ones I know so well that I'm sure I'll tell them to my kids, albeit in a heightened, more exaggerated form, because that's what tends to happen when family stories get passed down. In Touch, Alexi Zentner's debut novel, he ups the ante of the family story in dark and thrilling way to tell a story that is both familiar and completely his own.
Touch is set in the backwoods of B.C., in the (I assume) fictional gold rush/mill town of Sawgamet. The story is told by Stephen Boucher, now in his mid- to late-40s, who grew up in Sawgamet, left for Seminary school at 16, and has now returned to replace his step-father as the Anglican minister and to bury his mother, who is on the verge of death. It's winter in Sawgamet, but not the kind of cruel, punishing winter he remembers. Things have gotten better in Sawgamet, in part thanks to the demand for lumber instigated by the Second World War, which is raging in the far-away background of this novel (Sephen served as a chaplin during the First World War, but that details doesn't figure much into the novel). Stephen has returned home, and as his mother lays dying and he and his wife and their three daughters begin to settle into the rectory, he is understandably drawn to memories of his childhood and the family stories he heard growing up.
This is quite a woe-is-me thing to say, but I miss France. I lived there for a year five years ago and I've never fully recovered. Oh sure, dogs poop on the sidewalks, but that's a minor inconvenience when you consider that good wine costs €3 and delicious breads and pastries are available from nearly every street corner in a city, and that it's France. That being said, there are things about France that can be quite problematic. For all the government aid (as a student, I got half my rent back every month), there is still a quite an entrenched class system, and although it's shrinking a bit, it is certainly felt among the older generations. That divide is one of the most intriguing aspects of Muriel Barbery's novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and although I didn't quite buy how she dealt with it at the end, I very much enjoyed getting to spend some time in Paris.
The novel is comprised ostensibly of two diaries. The first is written by Renée Michel, the widowed concierge at 7, rue de Grenelle, and an autodidact in hiding. The second is kept by Paloma Josse, the 12-year-old daughter of a wealthy family living upstairs. Paloma has decided to kill herself on her 13th birthday because she doesn't want to grow up to be an adult caught in the fishbowl of life; her diary entries consist of self-described profound thoughts, based on various events she witnesses or is involved in, as well as an attempt to document the "masterpieces of matter" through their movement. I realize this makes Paloma sound kind of intolerable, but really, think back to when you were 12 – didn't you think you had it all figured out, could see everything clearly? Then, of course, puberty kicks in and all that certainty disappears, but for a brief time things are clear, and Barbery captures that really beautifully.
In the last month or so I've been thinking a lot more about kids' books that I usually do. Firstly, a good friend of ours became an uncle and has been talking about wanting to prioritize giving books to his adorable new niece; secondly, my cousin's son turned 1 a couple of weeks ago; and thirdly, I spent the weekend at home in Nova Scotia (hence no post last week) and it's pretty much impossible to sleep in my childhood bedroom without being reminded of all the books I enjoyed there – especially the bedtime stories my parents read to me as a kid.
On top of all that, I've been knitting like crazy, which means that my Aunt Pat is constantly on my mind. She was an incredible knitter and sewer, but she was also a wonderful book-giver, and worked as a librarian when my mum was a kid (she is, technically, my Great Aunt Pat, but we never called her that). Aunt Pat had a list of books she felt it was important for her nieces and nephews to read and so, each Christmas, along with a gorgeous piece of handiwork (always accompanied by an identical, Barbie-sized article) came books. I can't remember all the books Aunt Pat gave me over the years, but I do remember getting classics like The Wind in the Willows and The Secret Garden and somewhere I have a scanned copy of the handwritten list she kept that let her know she was on track.
Anyhow, all of this has combined to make me start thinking about what I would consider my essential childhood reads. I loved, for example, the Anne of Green Gables books and the Little House on the Prairie books – both series my parents read me – and I gobbled up the original yellow hardcover Nancy Drew books, but before that, when I was reading picture books, there were some definite household classics.
Beatrix Potter's books, for example, were a staple. Both my parents have an English background, and so knew about her world of talking mice and frogs in waistcoats, so when the gas station had a promotion (something like: fill your tank and pay $1 for a hardcover Beatrix Potter book – don't you wish that still happened?) they took advantage and eventually amassed the entire set. I still love those books. The Little Critter books by Mercer Mayer were also a big family favourite, and although I remember liking the Berenstain Bears books by Stan and Jan Berenstain ("no space grizzlies at the table" remains a Hickman saying to this day), I also remember my dad not liking them so much, but still.
Here are some more of my favourites (although I'm sure to miss a few):
In the two-and-a-bit years I've been writing Books Under Skin, by far my most blogged about author is Roald Dahl. It's strange, really, since this isn't a blog specifically for YA or remember-when literature, but it was through reading his books that I think I first became aware of what he was doing as an author. I'm not talking about a formula – those were revealed to me through the may yellow-spined Nancy Drew books I read – but rather the idea that he was trying to pass on a notion of how the world could be. Although most of his stories ended happily, that was only brought about by a character's ingenious plan and/or hard work, suggesting that more than just luck was involved. Anyway, I loved it and I'm pretty sure I've read every one of his children's books as well as some of the ones he wrote for adults. I also read both his "autobiographies" – quotation marks because, true to style, Dahl wasn't against flubbing some of the details to make a story more fantastic. All of which is to say that when Donald Sturrock's biography of Roald Dahl, Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl came out, I went right out and bought it.
An authorized biography, I discovered in a Q&A I did with Charles Foran (author of Mordecai: The Life and Times), means that the subject or his/her estate has a say in the final product. That is, in return for access to all the personal documents and letters and whatever, they can theoretically veto something they don't like. I only mention this because, as an authorized biography, Sturrock's not only seems remarkably thorough but also not all that pandering. Dahl was notoriously reclusive when it came to his writing life and shy about talking to the press, and, considering how watered-down (though hilarious) his autobiographies are, it's quite something to see his life laid out like this.
Through no kind of strategy or planning, it seems I have read more memoirs and biographies in the last month or so than in the rest of the year combined. I could probably dig into this and find some sort of psychological reason (you can always find one if you look), but I would prefer to chalk it up to my to-read pile having its own logical sieve (the tigerposts, for example). Including one book that I have not yet written about, in the last month I have had the great privilege to spend time with some extraordinarily different women – first, Mrs. Delany and Molly Peacock in The Paper Garden, then writer Therese Kishkan in her memoir Mnemonic: A Book of Trees, and capping it all off, Joan Didion in Blue Nights, her follow-up to The Year of Magical Thinking.
Where The Year of Magical Thinking focused on the death of Didion's husband John Gregory Dunne and the devastating illness of their adult daughter Quintana Roo. Shortly before that book was published, Quintana died. Blue Nights is Didion's lyrical attempt to deal with her daughter's death – and to some degree her life – and also with her own mortality and aging in the face of her family's death. If readers found Didion cold or clinical in A Year of Magical Thinking, mere pages into Blue Nights you can tell that this is a different Didion: her defences are down, her own fragility is realized, and her world is filled with memories of the people she thought she would have forever. To say this book is devastating does not come close to grasping its emotional impact, but it also implies that there are no moments of joy, which would be unfair.
I have mixed feelings about books in a series. When I was a kid, I loved them: Little House on the Prairie, Anne of Green Gables, and, later, Emily of New Moon – I read an reread those books because I loved getting to know the characters over the arc of their life and experiencing their different ages and phases as I grew up. For similar reasons, I loved Harry Potter. Mystery series, though, can be something quite different. Either you have a number of different cases written entirely independently of one another, so it doesn't matter what order you read them in because there's no over-arching character development, or you have ones that string you along – a detective haunted by a killer who got away, his or her paranoi growing with each book as glimpses of the bad guy come and go. For me, the former usually becomes unrewarding and I typically end up resenting the latter. What's a reader to do? Well, for now anyway, read Alan Bradley's Flavia de Luce books – the third of which is A Red Herring Without Mustard – which combine just enough of the two basic kinds of mystery series with a dash of the series I loved as a kid.
A Red Herring Without Mustard opens with a scene at the church fair. Eleven-year-old Flavia is having her palm read by a Gypsy fortune teller when the woman gives her a fortune that sounds very much like the story of how Flavia's mother Harriet died. In shock, Flavia stumbles out, knocking over a candle and sending the entire tent up in flames. Naturally, Flavia feels awful; she invites the Gypsy, to camp on part of the Buckshaw grounds know as the Palings, in the bend of the river. Harriet, it seems, once invited them to stay there as well, because the Gypsy woman is familiar with the area and, when the red-headed and rough Mrs. Bull yells at them on the way by, accusing the Gypsy of stealing her baby, it's clear she's been that way before. But Flavia doesn't have much time to ask her questions, because the older woman is sick and needs to be left in peace. In the middle of the night, though, Flavia wakes up and can't get back to sleep, so she decides to go and check on the Gypsy – she finds her bludgeoned nearly to death inside her caravan.
Probably the biggest perk of writing a blog is that I can get books directly from the publisher. I don't make any money, but receiving review copies is certainly saves me some. It also means that I often get to read books before they're available in stores. Typically, I try to arrange my reading so that I finish a book just before it comes out, which allows me to blog about it shortly thereafter (I don't like to recommend books that aren't available in stores or the library, for obvious reasons). Anyway, every once in a while I mess up and read a great book weeks before I can write about it and then have to sit on it. Most recently, that was the case with Ami McKay's The Virgin Cure, the follow-up (but not sequel) to her 2007 novel The Birth House.
The Virgin Cure is set in the tenements of lower Manhattan (mostly in and around the Bowery) in 1871, and the title refers to the vile belief that a man could cure himself of venereal disease (especially syphilis) by having sex with a virgin (I should note that this belief continues in parts of the world, although McKay confines her story to a very specific time and place). Anyway, the story centers around Moth, a 12-year-old girl growing up in the Bowery. Her mother is a Gypsy fortune teller and her father ran off not long after she was born. They are desperately poor and their neighbourhood is rough. At least two girls Moth's age went missing and were found dead in recent memory. As typical of most cities, mere blocks away from the slums of the tenements is a street filled with rich homes, where Moth often walks and imagines a rich future for herself.
The farthest I've ever traveled by boat was when I took a ferry from Italy to Greece. It was and overnight trip, and we left Italy in the mid-afternoon and arrived in Greece mid-morning the next day. I tend to be nervous on boats (I get seasick), but it was a remarkably smooth ride, and mostly I just couldn't believe how big the ferry was. I'm not sure how many passengers it carried, but it was big. It was actually pretty shocking to realize that it was nowhere near the size of the cruise ships we used to see towering over the buildings in Saint Lucia. How either of these boats compare to the size of the steamers that traveled between Sri Lanka and England in the 1950s, I'm not sure, but it's easy to believe that they would have been big enough to entertain an 11-year-old boy. On the surface, that's what Michael Ondaatje's new novel The Cat's Table is about: a boy on a ship, and everything he gets up to.
It's amazing the way a three-week period can completely alter the course of someone's life. In this case, the journey from Colombo, Sri Lanka, the only home our narrator has ever known, to England, where he will reunite with his mother, takes 21 days. Although he has a "guardian" in first class and discovers his cousin Emily is also on board, Mynah (whose real name is Michael) is mostly on his own. He is seated at the Cat's Table, which is described as the least desirable table in the dining room because it is the furthest from the captain, but it is populated by an assortment of interesting people who add just enough intrigue and adventure to the journey to keep Mynah from becoming too bored. Two of his table-mates are boys his age, and although they're initially shy, soon he and Ramidhin and Cassius are fast friends.
The novel is told in retrospect, so although the story is mostly chronological, it moves around a little because memories don't always connect in a linear way. For example, we meet all the important players in the story fairly quickly, even though in real time it seems that Mynah wouldn't have met certain people, or known details of others' lives until later in the journey. Memory works in a weird way, and The Cat's Table unfolds in a natural way, as though the adult Michael is only now properly considering how his life was affected by those three weeks at sea.
Every spring, Toronto hosts Doors Open, a weekend where a on of interesting buildings in the city open their doors to the public and offer tours or at least access of their facilities. This year, our first stop was the National Ballet School. It's a gorgeous building and the tour took us through a number of the studios while the guide talked about what the classes were like and how the school worked and where the students went on to after finishing. It was a fascinating look at a kind of elite and off-limits world, and Martha Schabas' debut novel Various Positions offers something very similar, only darker.
Various Positions is mostly set at the National Ballet School, but rather than sticking to the hallways and the large and bright studio spaces, Schabas takes you into the locker rooms and the residences as well as the studios, which somehow seem less airy than I remember them being. Georgia breaths ballet, and after years of intense study and practice, she gets an audition to the school and then gets in. She's 14, and when she starts at the school she is going into Grade 9. Ballet is the primary activity, but she and the other girls (there are only two boys in the class and Georgia barely glances at them) have two hours of school a day.
It is a rigourous program and Roderick, their teacher and one of the most senior instructors, is very hard on them. I don't mean that in the way Victorian novels describe teachers as hard on their students only to have them turn around and pass out ice cream on the last day of class. Roderick is a realist and has no problem telling a 14-year-old girl that her thighs are too big and therefore unattractive in a ballet context, or that she's too tall and if she doesn't start excelling she won't make it. He is blunt and straightforward and Georgia, who resembles the balletic ideal, thinks he's wonderful. Initially, she sees Roderick focusing his criticism on the girls who go out to the nearby Coffee Time to meet boys from the local high school, who Georgia calls the sex girls, and she decides his criticisms are based on his disdain for their sexuality. So Georgia decides to be sexless, to be more serious, to be perfect.
But then something changes and she decides that sex is in everything. Any time Roderick touches her to adjust her position, she reads into it, and the feelings she doesn't understand or like in her body become something she anticipates with a kind of longing. Georgia lives at home and her parents' marriage is a mess, so instead of turning to her mom or her step-sister Isabel for answers, she turns to Google. And instead of helping, it gives her school girl themed porn, and Georgia decides that is how she can get Roderick. Although Georgia does have friends, she remains mostly a solitary figure, and she lives a lot in her own head, mapping out scenarios and then becoming distraught when they don't work out.
Eventually she takes things into her own hands, actively pursing Roderick, and everything crashes down around her. As the reader, you can see this coming. At 14, Georgia is unable to comprehend the potential consequences of her actions, but the tension Schabas creates between the reader who can see and Georgia who cannot propels the novel forward. I could barely read some parts because I am a wimp and I could barely stand to know what Georgia was going to do, but the story was so compelling I couldn't put it down.
Various Positions raises a lot of issues that are not normally talked about when it comes to young girls: questions of desire and bodies and responsibility. Placing these problems at the forefront of Georgia's story makes this book much darker than you might expect, for reasons that are not strictly ballet-related. Schabas has integrated a lot of contemporary feminist issues into the novel, which gives the story a relevance that separates it from many other stories about girls this age. Georgia is not blameless here, but neither is she entirely to blame, and Schabas works beautifully with that uncertain space.
Various Positions by Martha Schabas First published in 2011 (cover image shown from Doubleday edition)
I really like alphabet posters. I don't actually own any, but I love the idea of celebrating letters in their individual form and I'm also a fan of typography. Children's alphabet books take this idea one step further, and the letter-inspired illustrations are usually incredible. The very basic idea of letters driving a narrative is wonderfully obvious, and it becomes a great teaching tool for children and people learning languages. For adults, though, the world of alphabet-inspired literature is pretty thin, but James King's Étienne's Alphabet fills that void with its dictionary-style story.
Étienne's Alphabet is the story of Étienne Morneau, a man who was orphaned shortly after he was born and subsequently brought up by nuns. His early life was spent entirely in Montreal, but then the orphanage closed and he was moved to Toronto, which is where he is when the story begins. In the present day of the novel (1967) Étienne has been out of the orphanage for several years and is working as a bank teller at Royal Bank. He rents out an upstairs room from the Beaulieu family, other Montreal transplants. And that is essentially his life. Étienne moves between work and his home life – he becomes quite close with the family – and everything goes along as usual.
And then he's sent to Shanghai by his boss. Étienne has never traveled and all he knows about China is based on Tin Tin comics, so it is rather skewed. Nonetheless, he boldly buys a camera and sets off for foreign lands. He's there for several weeks (working on wheat imports or something) and he and his guide Chang spend off-work hours visiting different parts of the city, where Étienne takes photos. Sadly, but the end of the trip, his camera is smashed and his work is all destroyed, but he returns to Canada with a newly-discovered creativity and a friend in Chang, someone who Étienne worries about constantly.
At home, Étienne starts to draw. He keeps his hobby secret, but little by little, it becomes a passion that takes over his every spare moment. Étienne ties each painting to a letter of the alphabet, and after his death (which is announced at the very beginning of the story) Madame Beaulieu is so overwhelmed by the work that she calls the Art Gallery of Ontario. Étienne is declared an undiscovered genius, which gets the ball rolling for the publication of his autobiography (which makes up the bulk of the novel). It seems that not only was Étienne holed up in his room drawing and painting, but he was also writing his life story. And, because of his obsession with letters and the alphabet, his autobiography took the shape of a dictionary, with pieces of his life scattered through each of the different letters.
This is really my favourite part of the book. At the beginning of each new section, Étienne describes the personality of the letter he's about to embark on, and each one becomes its own sort of character, colouring all the vignettes and anecdotes that follow. It's strange to read a novel with a structure that isn't primarily chronological, but it works because the dictionary format is so familiar. Not that this is a straightforward dictionary; rather, it's an alphabetical breakdown of Étienne's life, with key words used to introduce important moments and memories that he feels are defining. In that way, it isn't definitions of individual words, but definitions of him.
Étienne's Alphabet is a strange book to read because it is just so very different than most novels you come across. But King has a background in biography and knows just what sorts of snapshots will make a life compelling, which smoothes over the choppy form so that you don't even notice it after a few sections. Really though, it's the descriptions of the individual letters that tell Étienne's story because they offer so much insight into his character. I'm not sure I ever quite buy him as an artistic genius, but he is nonetheless someone worth spending time with because of his ideas about the emotional life of letters – those little characters we use so frequently we cease to think about them. Étienne forces us to pay attention, colouring our reading of his life and then giving us something to think about when we put pen to page (or finger to keys).
Étienne's Alphabet by James King First published in 2010 (cover image shown from Cormorant Books edition)
