I mentioned last week in my post about John Vaillant's The Tiger that every so often this (assumably) unintentional trends arise in literature, and that last year's was exotic animals, and especially tigers. Although I didn't read any of the tiger books when they were first out, I still managed to read two back to back almost a year later. You would think this would be tiger overload (I would have thought that if I'd planned things better), but instead it turned out that reading the detailed nonfiction account first meant I entered the The Tiger's Wife with a wealth of knowledge (both on a practical, biological level and on the folk tale, mythology level) that allowed me to sink in to Téa Obreht's novel with a kind of backstory already in place.
The Tiger's Wife is set in an unnamed Balkan country in the years after the war. People are still adjusting to the new countries and the new borders that accompany them. The novel is not really about that, though, so much as that is the condition of life for the characters. The novel opens with a memory: a little girl is taken by her grandfather to the zoo, where they sit and watch the tiger roam the moat (the zoo is in an old citadel). The little girl is Natalia, who in the present day of the novel is a young doctor driving to a much poorer, neighbouring country with her best friend (also a doctor) to administer vaccines to children in an orphanage run by a priest. She is driving to the orphanage when she finds out her grandfather (who was also a doctor) has died in some out of the way town, and that his belongings were not returned with his body. Her grandfather, Natalia is quite sure, was going to find the deathless man; her grandmother insists he was on his way to help her with the orphanage.
Given how long the process of writing, editing, and publishing a book is, it always surprises me when anything approaching a trend crops up. Certainly, trends like The Year of the Short Story are a little manufactured (not that that makes them bad), but what I'm talking about are books that come out with similar themes or central figures. Last year, for example, it seemed tigers (and other jungle animals) were the big thing. Strangely, at the time I didn't read any of the tiger books that came out, but in the space of three weeks recently read both the big ones pretty much back-to-back. I didn't plan it that way, but as it turned out I think I read them in the right order (if such a thing exists), and will therefore write about them in the same way. Up first, John Vaillant's non-fiction award-winner The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival.
I loved Vaillant's previous non-fiction book The Golden Spruce, so when The Tiger came out I was really excited to read it. The hardcover edition was, while beautiful, also enormous, so I ended up waiting for the softcover version, which offered the dual benefit of being much easier to carry around and also post-hype. The Tiger is set up as the story of a man-eating Siberian tiger and the men tasked with hunting and killing it. But, much like in The Golden Spruce, Vaillant uses that narrative arc to weave in a million smaller, farther-reaching details about Siberia, Russia, tigers, hunting and a number of things you didn't even realize you were interested in.
I know I said I was going to be more on the ball, but I'm still a week late on this. So, without any preamble, congratulations to Esi Edugyan, who won the Scotiabank Giller Prize for her novel Half-Blood Blues (Thomas Allen Publishers). She, like Patrick deWitt, was nominated for all the big awards this year and I am delighted to see she (also like deWitt) has won at least one of them. Too often we see authors nominated for at least the Canadian big-three and then not win any of them (last year it was Kathleen Winter, previously it was Annabel Lyon, etc.).
But that isn't what I really want to talk about here. Last week, after the Giller was handed out, Jian Ghomeshi, host of the CBC radio show Q, host a "Q Debate" about whether Canadian literature was too international in scope, and if so, if that means we're missing out on some quintessentially Canadian stories. He held up both Edugyan (whose novel is set in the U.S. and Berlin) and deWitt (whose novel is set in on the American west coast during the California gold rush) as examples of Canadian writers being praised for novels set outside of Canada. Because it was Giller week, attention was also paid to David Bezmozgis, whose novel The Free World is set mostly in Rome, and Michael Ondaatje, whose novel The Cat's Table was mostly set on a ship steaming from Sri Lanka and England. Of the six books on the this year's Giller shortlist, only two were set in Canada: Lynn Coady's The Antagonist and Zsuzsi Gartner's Better Living Through Plastic Explosives.
So, what does that say about the state of Canadian writing? Are we ignoring "Canadian stories" in favour of exotic, cosmopolitan ones? Personally, I say no. Of course, I can't know what these authors are thinking when they come up with an idea and set out to write it, but when the results are as well crafted and interesting as these six books, I'm not worried about it (just for comparison, last year's shortlist was made up of almost exclusively Canada-specific books). I would far rather have a Canadian author (or an author who identifies as such because of birth or immigration) write about something that they find compelling than feel boxed in by the notion that to win an award they must confine their writing to something Canadian. Of course, the other side of the argument is that there is nothing confining about Canadian stories because the country is vast and the population is diverse; certainly, there are an infinite number of stories to be told. However, if what you want to write about is related to the jazz scene in Berlin under Nazi Germany, being told to stick to Montreal would feel confining.
It's tricky though, because I love reading stories set in the places I know. Seeing Toronto or Montreal or Nova Scotia or wherever pop up in a novel is exciting in strange way because I'm so used to reading about elsewhere. If I thought that books set in Canadian locales were truly becoming endangered, I'd be up in arms. But I don't think they are, so I'm not. Canadians have a lot of interesting stories to tell, and if they're set in diverse places, so much the better, I say.
It seems I'm much better at posting shortlists than I am at keeping up with who wins what (or at list posting the winners), but three big awards nights have already passed and with the Giller and the GGs coming up, it's high time I recapped. I could probably pretend that I was planning to do all the Writers' Trust winners in one list (despite the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Nonfiction Prize being handed out in a separate gala last week), but that wouldn't be fair. It did work out nicely though.
Anyway, here are the various Writers' Trust winners: Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Nonfiction Prize:Charles Foran for Mordecai: The Life and Times (Incidentally, I did a whole series of posts on this award for the Toronto Review of Books, if you're interested in reading up on the other finalists as well) Writers' Trust Fiction Prize:Patrick deWitt for The Sisters Brothers (He's 1-1 so far, but with two more awards yet to come we'll have to see how he does) Writers' Trust of Canada/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize: Mirand Hill for her short story "Petitions to Saint Chronic," published in the Dalhousie Review Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award (for a writer in mid-career): Wayne Johnston, from Newfoundland, author Navigator of New York, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, and World Elsewhere, among other titles Matt Cohen Award: In Celebration of a Writing Life: David Adams Richards, author of Giller co-winner Mercy Among the Children, among other titles Vicky Metcalf Award for Children's Literature: Iain Lawrence, author of Gemini Summer, among other titles Writers' Trust Award for Distinguished Contribution: Alma Lee, founding Executive Director of The Writers’ Union of Canada, the founding Executive Director of The Writers’ Trust, and founder of the Vancouver International Writers Festival
And, two weeks late, but nonetheless still noteworthy, Julian Barnes won the Man Booker Prize for his novel Sense of an Ending.
Phew. I will certainly try to keep these more up-to-date as the season roles on.
I'm about a week late on this, but the Governor General's Literary Award finalists were announced last week. The GGs award prizes for both English- and French-language work in seven categories: fiction, nonfiction, drama, poetry, children's text, children's illustration, and translation.
Both Esi Edugyan and Patrick deWitt made the fiction shortlist, which means they're each finalists for Fall's four major literary awards: the Man Booker Prize, the Giller Prize, the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and now the GG. I still have not read Edugyan's book, but I loved deWitt's and it was probably my most recommended book this summer. Apparently, I was not alone in that. Actually, several of these nominated books have shown up on other longlists and shortlists this season, but it really is nice to see that no two lists are the same.
After the longest longlist in the history of the Scotiabank Giller Prize was announced last month, the judges (Annabel Lyon, Howard Norman, and Andrew O'Hagan) had quite the job of narrowing down the 17 titles to six finalists. But, that was their job and they've done it pretty well:
David Bezmozgis, The Free World (HarperCollins Publishers)
Lynn Coady, The Antagonist (House of Anansi Press)
The winner will be announced on Nov. 8, which means you still have time to try and read all five of these titles (if you haven't already). I will admit a certain fondness for The Sisters Brothers, which I absolutely loved, but my record of picking the winner isn't great. Who do you think will win?
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.
The finalists for the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize were announced in Toronto this morning and, since the Writers' Trust doesn't do longlists, this is the first fiction shortlist of the Can Lit awards season (the Man Booker shortlist came out earlier this month and the Giller shortlist doesn't come out until next week). Esi Edugyan and Patrick deWitt are on this list – they've been on all of them so far – but strangely, Edugyan is the only female author up for the Writers' Trust's $25,000 fiction prize.
Here's the full list of nominees:
Clark Blaise, The Meagre Tarmac (Biblioasis)
Michael Christie, The Beggar's Garden (HarperCollins Publishers)
Esi Edugyan, Half-Blood Blues (Thomas Allen Publishers)
Dan Vyleta, The Quiet Twin (HarperCollins Publishers)
Blaise and Christie are both also on the Giller longlist with DeWitt and Edugyan, but Vyleta has yet to come up on any of the lists so far. That's one thing I love about the Fall books season. Not only do a ton of great titles come out, but all the awards spring up to remind you of books you might have missed previously, or that might have been launched more quietly than some of the buzzier books of the season.
The winner of the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, as well as the winner of the Journey Prize and four other awards for a writer's body of work, will be announced on Nov. 1.
I went to a very nice press conference this morning where the finalists for the inaugural Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction were announced. (To clarify, the Writers' Trust has had a nonfiction prize for years, but this is the first prize under the new name, which came about in May when the Writers' Trust announced Weston was the prize's new sponsor.)
Anyway, there were many President's Choice snacks (Weston's son is Galen Weston, executive chairman of Loblaws Companies Limited, who is frequently featured in ads for PC products) and, to add to the drama, before each finalist was named, a CBC Radio personality read an excerpt from their book. It was quite nice, I thought, to get a taste of how different each book's style and content are. And they are perhaps the most dynamic group of finalists for a literary award I've seen.
Charles Foran for Mordecai: The Life and Times (Knopf Canada), which also won the 2011 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. In his Skype session with Eleanor Wachtel, Foran said he didn’t encounter Mordecai Richler’s work until Grade 10, when he read The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, a novel that seemed purposefully rough-edged compared to the others on the reading list.
Charlotte Gillfor Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe (Greystone Books/David Suzuki Foundation). Gill is a veteran tree-planter who planted over a million trees in 17 seasons. Her short story collection Ladykiller was nominated for the 2005 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and won the Danuta Gleed Award in 2006.
Richard Gwyn for Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald: His Life, Our Times (Random House Canada), which is the second volume of Gwyn’s biography of Canada’s first prime minister. The first volume, John A: The Many Who Made Us was published in 2007 and won the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction.
Grant Lawrence for Adventures in Solitude: What Not to Wear to a Nude Potluck and Other Stories from Desolation Sound (Harbour Publishing), which was also a finalist for the 2011 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction. Lawrence is the lead singer in the Vancouver band The Smugglers and hosts several shows on CBC Radio 3.
Ray Robertson for Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live (Biblioasis), is the product of Robertson’s struggle with serious depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. He is the author of six other books including, What Happened Later, which was nominated for the Trillium Award in 2008.
Each finalist receives $5,000 and the eventual winner (who will be announced on Oct. 25) will receive an additional $55,000, which makes this the richest prize in Canadian literature.
It seems impossible that three book prize lists were released yesterday, but they were. I posted the Man Booker shortlist and the Giller Prize longlist when they became available, but I just didn't have the energy to wrangle through the Toronto Book Awards too. I'm going to have to get used to this pace, though, since we're barreling head first into book awards season and that means many lists to come.
Anyway, the Toronto Book Awards. These city-specific awards “honour authors of books of literary or artistic merit that are evocative of Toronto.” It's one of the few inter-genre awards (non-fiction doesn't competes with fiction very often), and it's got a nice twist, and both of those attributes help to keep it fresh. So, here the finalists are:
James FitzGerald, What Disturbs Our Blood (Random House Canada) – non-fiction
Rabindranath Maharaj, The Amazing Absorbing Boy (Knopf Canada)
Nicholas Ruddock, The Parabolist (Doubleday Canada)
Alissa York, Fauna (Random House Canada)
It's a short list, and each of the authors on it will receive $1,000. The winner – to be announced on Oct. 13 – receives an additional $9,000.
here has been a lot of discussion about the value of libraries and reading in Toronto over the last few months, so I'm glad to see the book awards haven't been cancelled.
Well, Tuesday morning are usually much less eventful. But, this is Sept. 6 and that means not only the Man Booker Prize shortlist, but also the Giller Prize longlist. It's a good day to be a reader, is what I'm saying. So, without further ado, here are the longlisted titles for Canada's largest fiction prize:
David Bezmozgis, The Free World (HarperCollins Publishers)
Clark Blaise, The Meagre Tarmac (Biblioasis)
Michael Christie, The Beggar's Garden (HarperCollins Publishers)
Lynn Coady, The Antagonist (House of Anansi Press)
Esi Edugyan, Half-Blood Blues (Thomas Allen Publishers)
Marina Endicott, The Little Shadows (Doubleday Canada)
Zsuzsi Gartner, Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (Hamish Hamilton Canada)
Genni Gunn, Solitaria (Signature Editions)
Pauline Holdstock, Into the Heart of the Country (HarperCollins Publishers)
Wayne Johnston, A World Elsewhere (Knopf Canada)
Dany Laferrière, The Return (Douglas & McIntyre)
Suzette Mayr, Monoceros (Coach House Books)
Michael Ondaatje, The Cat's Table (McClelland & Stewart)
Guy Vanderhaeghe, A Good Man (McClelland & Stewart)
Alexi Zentner, Touch (Knopf Canada)
Having just looked at the Man Booker shortlist, there are two repeating titles: congrats on the double nominations for both Patrick deWitt and Esi Edugyan, both of whom are from British Columbia. Congratulations are also due to the small publishers on the list: House of Anansi Press has two nominated titles (deWitt's being one of them), Coach House Books, and NeWest Press. Many of these books have been on my to-read list for a while, so now it's time to move them up to the top, I suppose.
The shortlist of five books will be announced on Oct. 4 and the winner will be named on Nov. 8. Besides getting a whole lot of prestige, the winner of the Giller receives $50,000 and each of the other four finalists receive $5,000.
The Man Booker shortlist came out today and features two novels by Canadians – Patrick deWitt's The Sisters Brothers, which I loved, and Esi Edugyan's Half Blood Blues, which I have not yet read – which is always exciting. The Booker winner will be announced on Oct. 18, but until then, we'll have six books to be in suspense about.
Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape - Random House)
I'm a little behind, since this list was announced yesterday, but oh well. It will be a little while until this list is whittled down to the shortlist, so you still have time to pick favourites. The shortlist will be announced on Sept. 6. Each of the six shortlisted authors will receive £2,500 and the winner of an additional £50,000 will be announced on Oct. 18.
There are three Canadians on the longlist this year – Patrick deWitt, Esi Edugyan, and Alison Pick – so patriotically speaking, they're the ones to watch (the publishers listed here are for the UK, since that's where the award is based).
Julian BarnesThe Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape - Random House) Sebastian Barry On Canaan's Side (Faber) Carol Birch Jamrach's Menagerie (Canongate Books) Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers (Granta) Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues (Serpent's Tail - Profile) Yvvette Edwards A Cupboard Full of Coats (Oneworld) Alan Hollinghurst The Stranger's Child (Picador - Pan Macmillan) Stephen Kelman Pigeon English (Bloomsbury) Patrick McGuinness The Last Hundred Days (Seren Books) A.D. Miller Snowdrops (Atlantic) Alison Pick Far to Go (Headline Review) Jane Rogers The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press) D.J. Taylor Derby Day (Chatto & Windus - Random House)
Téa Obreht, at 25, is the youngest ever winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, now in its 16th year. She won this year's prize for her novel The Tiger's Wife, which is also her debut novel. This is a bit of an upset, since Emma Donoghue's Room had been bandied about as the favourite.
The Serbian/American writer beat out Irish/Canadian Donoghue (Room), Canadian Kathleen Winter (Annabel), British/Sierra Leonean Aminatta Forna (The Memory of Love), American Nicole Krauss (Great House), and British Emma Henderson (Grace Williams Says it Loud). (The Orange Prize is awarded exclusively to women writers.)
Really, though, this is one of those awards where just being nominated can give you a huge boost in sales. So congratulations to Téa and to everyone else who was shortlisted.
Image shown the cover of the Random House edition of The Tiger's Wife.
Congratulations to Dionne Brand, Toronto's Poet Laureate, who won the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize for her 2010 collection Ossuaries. With the award, Brand also takes home the award's $75,000 purse – the richest in Canadian literature.
The two other finalists for the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize were former Parliamentary Poet Laureate John Steffler for his collection Lookout and Montreal's Suzanne Buffman for her collection The Irrationalist.
Gjertrud Schnackenberg, born in Tacoma, Washington, on the Griffin's international prize for her first collection of poetry, Heavenly Questions.
Other finalists in the international category were Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney for Human Chain, Khaled Matawa for his translation of Adonis' Selected Poems, and Philip Mosely for his translation of The Book of Snow by the late Belgian poet François Jacqmin.
All the finalists received $10,000 at the reading they gave last night and both winners then received an additional $65,000 in tonight's ceremony.
Cover image shown from Dionne Brand's Ossuaries, published by McClelland and Steward
The fourth edition of the Man Booker International Prize – it's given out only every two years – was awarded to Philip Roth last night. The prize is worth £60,000 and honours a writer's body of work. Roth, and American novelist, has been writing since the 1960s and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for his novel American Pastoral, among other big awards.
That sort of literary pedigree may make him sound like an good choice for the award, but Man Booker judge Carmen Callil has withdrawn from the panel because of it. Callil, an author and publisher, said "he goes on and on about almost the same subject in every single book." Not having read any Roth, I can't weigh in, but it is interesting to see some of the controversy that exists on a judging panel come to light.
> Image shown a photo of Philip Roth from The Telegraph.
Whenever I dip in to thinking about getting an e-reader, I get stuck on the problem of how to share a book that way. Besides just being a book person and liking to have books around (evidenced by my need for yet more bookshelves), I like to share books. Lending books out and/or borrowing books in return is one of the best ways to find new things to read, and I'm not sure how that would work without physical books. Case in point: two weeks ago a package arrived for me from a friend in Montreal. He had read and loved Nicolas Dickner's Nikolski and thought I would enjoy it too. Inside the front cover he had included the address for the next person who wanted to read it, like an old-fashioned chain letter, but with a book.
Of all books to do this with, Nikolski is the may be the perfect one. The novel tells the story of three young people, all about 18 when the story begins in 18 in 1989, who all move from their disparate birthplaces to Montreal. They are all related, but have never met and have no idea. Their stories all intertwine though, not in the 'they all become friends at the end' sort of way (that isn't meant as a spoiler), but more so in the kinds of lives they lead and also in the way that, if you live in more or less the same neighbourhood as someone for long enough, your lives will intersect, even if you don't realize it.
The narrator, who is unnamed, is the only child of a single mother. His father was only briefly in her life and kind of a vagabond, although that might not be fair. He was a sailor and, on land, he lacked a base so he traveled around. He ended up in the village of Nikolski, up north on an island in the Aleutians. At the beginning of the story, the narrator's mother has just died, and he is cleaning out her house so he can sell it. He works at a used bookstore in the city, a job he keeps for the rest of the novel. We really don't know much about him. He only talks about himself a few times, being far more interested in Joyce and Noah, the main characters.
Joyce Doucet is from the tiny, remote village of Tête-à-la-Baleine on the St. Lawrence. It is a settlement only accessible by boat and therefore populated mostly by fishermen, which is her father's occupation. Her mother is dead (or maybe not) and Joyce spends her childhood listening to her maternal grandfather tell stories about the family's pirate history, which began with Acadian relatives in Nova Scotia and, with the expulsion, spread all over the East Coast of North America, a trait that became ingrained in the family, who couldn't stay in one place for long. Joyce is fascinated and vows to become a female pirate – the first in her family, maybe. After seeing a newspaper clipping about a Leslie Lynn Doucette who was caught for piracy (over the newly available Internet), Joyce decides her destiny is calling and runs away to Montreal. She gets a job at a poissonerie and starts dumpster diving for computer parts, which she uses to build her own little pirate empire.
Noah was born somewhere in the prairies. His mother is a nomad of sorts, so he grew up living in a trailer and moving from town to town in a more-or-less predictable way, crisscrossing the prairies. His father, a sailor, was almost dead on land because of land sickness before being picked up by Noah's mother, whos' car rocked just enough to help him find his land legs. They parted ways after she became pregnant, so Noah never knew him. Noah, ready to settle down, moves to Montreal to study archaeology at university. He is probably the most present character in the novel, and between taking part in a dig on Stevenson Island and moving to Venezuela for a while, it's fair to say he's the least rooted to the city, although he does return there.
Although the characters do all eventually meet, Nikolski isn't a novel about tying up three distinct story lines with a convenient ending. Instead, it's about the way the characters stay distinct and, while all following their own paths, manage to miss out on each other. Dickner is a very observant and funny writer, and although Noah gets the most face-time in the novel, each character feels like they're at the centre of it. And, of course, it's just fun to see a familiar city depicted with such intricacy, although Dickner is almost casual about it – he doesn't explain it to the reader, it just is, which is nice.
Nikolski won Canada Reads two years ago and can definitely see why. It ties together aspects of Canada's history, from First Nations issues to the Acadian expulsion to the Oka Crisis, as the background of the characters' lives. It's a refreshingly Canadian story in that way, and the narrator, Joyce and Noah all feel like people you could bump into on the street by the time the novel is finished. And it will make you wonder about the chance encounters you've had over the years – how many people have you managed to miss who might hold a key to part of your own life story? If Nikolski is any indication, it probably happens more often than you think.
Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner, translated by Lazer Lederhendler First published in 2005 (cover image shown from Alfred A. Knopf edition)
To say that one of the best ways to revisit the politics of the past is to read old novel about the future. But science fiction - proper science fiction, that is, not space opera - typically takes the social and political climate of its day and transposes it onto a future, fictional world. How do we understand the implications of what happens today? We take them to an extreme and transpose them. Looking back at the beginnings of social movements through their portrayal in fiction may seem overly academic, but usually these subtexts aren't hard to suss out, and changing the lens we read through every once in a while just helps to keep things interesting. Enter Ursula K. Le Guin's 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness, about a planet called Winter and the people who live there.
The set-up for the novel is that, in the future, the life-supporting planets have formed a kind of coalition. They're all pretty far from each other, but with new space travel technology the planets have been accessible enough for contact to exist. Seventeen light years from the edge of the coalition's area is Winter (Gethen in local language, but because it is aptly named for its climate), and Genly Ai has been sent as an envoy to try and convince the Gethenians to join the Ekumen. So, there is an outsider who is working alone on Winter to convince the governments to join up.
There are a few interesting things about this scenario right off the bat: firstly, Genly is not from Earth. He is from an Earth-like planet called Terra, but still, I liked that in Le Guin's future Earth is not the all-powerful colonizing planet. Secondly, Winter is a planet with more than one country on it. Typically, in science fiction, foreign planets are seen as united wholes, without different languages, cultures, or political structures. I really liked that Le Guin complicated things, especially because it lets her play with a lot of Cold War tensions (the planet is called "Winter" for heaven's sake) in a way that creeps up on you.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Winter, though, is its population. Gethenians are all intersex - or hermaphrodites, as Genly calls them. Their sexuality is explained in detail (although it is not explicit) and essentially, once a month Gethenians go into kemmer, which is kind of like an animal going into heat, although also not. Anyway, during this period of kemmer, a Gethenian will find another person to mate with, and as part of their courtship the sexual role they will fulfill announces itself. This means that the same person can, in their life, perform both female and male sexual roles; this is true also in monogamous relationships, both partners can become pregnant and be the impregnator (although not at the same time, of course). The rest of the time, they are simultaneously no sex and both sexes at once.
Throughout all the political intrigue and confusion, Genly has the hardest time truly grasping this aspect of the Gethenian character, and he frequently tries to assign the people he meets with gendered characteristics. Feminist theory was gathering steam at this point in history, and a lot of the details about gender attributes and roles seem like a direct response to that. It's fair to say that female characteristics are seen as overwhelmingly negative by Genly for most of the novel, but it's done in a way that the reader sees the flaws in his logic, which reaffirms feminist principles for the most part.
The most compelling aspect of the plot, though, happens after Genly has been arrested and taken to a prison camp on the far edge of the inhabitable terrain. He is drugged repeatedly and barely alive when an old political ally/enemy rescues him. The two of them must then escape over the Northern ice, a huge glacier alive with volcanoes and crevasses and storms. This storyline makes the book for me, because although this is an interesting theoretical novel, it isn't until the adventure really gets going that I got hooked on the characters.
The Left Hand of Darkness is, in a lot of ways, about balance: between genders, between sexes, between political factions. At its heart, though, it's about the necessity of human relationships and learning to trust someone who you cannot understand. Genly's success on Winter was predicated on this, and whether we're talking politics or gender and sexual identity, that certainly applies to our world today as much as it did in the 1960s. This is not an easy book to become involved in, but it is such a rewarding read that it's worth the time you'll spend with it.
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin First published in 1969 (cover image shown from Ace Books edition)
Family can be a tricky business. Even in the closest families, you can never really be sure that you actually know your parents and siblings. I mean, you know the main things, but inevitably you'll discover things about them that shock or surprise you. Sometimes these are actual character traits, but more often they involve events from their pasts that they either felt weren't worth mentioning or were so hard to move past the first time, they have no desire to revisit them. More often than not, these discoveries happen after the person they concern has died – when you're going through their belongings, old photos, letters, and the like. In Johanna Skibsrud's Giller Prize winning novel The Sentimentalists, though, the previously hidden story of Napoleon Haskell's Vietnam War experience comes out before his death, and as quite a surprise to his daughter.
Napoleon was a soldier, and thus he and his family moved around the U.S. every year or so for all the years that his kids were young, at least until his wife left him. After he left the service and got through alcoholism, he found himself in Fargo, North Dakota, where he bought himself a trailer and went about setting it up to his liking. Skibsrud's writing is not fast-paced, and she takes her time describing Napoleon's home – his castle. There are a lot of character details in her description, and although Napoleon doesn't actually spend much of the novel in Fargo, knowing about his library and his fax machine are the sorts of ordinary details that can speak volumes about a person's priorities and character.
For all that, though, the book's narrator, Napoleon's daughter, is unnamed. We only know a bit about her – she talks about her childhood only in reference to Napoleon, but does tell us that she leaves the big city after discovering her boyfriend is cheating – but I can picture her down to the colour of her hair and eyes. Strangely, by not being overly specific about her characters' looks, Skibsrud makes them easier to picture, because their personalities are so well crafted, coming together as they do from a collection of stories, memories and description; rather than from an explanatory paragraph or introductory chapter.
Although the novel dips into the lives of Napoleon and his daughter in the outside world, its focus is on their time spent together in Casablanca, Ontario, at the lakeside home of Henry, the disabled father of a man Napoleon served with in Vietnam. Throughout all the time family moved from base to base, Henry's home had been their one constant – a place to spend summers and have coherent family memories. When his daughters started to worry about him living alone, they moved Napoleon across the border to join Henry full-time. It didn't take his daughter long to follow him, moving semi-permanently to Henry's after discovering her lover's infidelity.
The time the three of them – Henry, Napoleon, and Napoleon's daughter – spend together at the lake is the crux of the novel, which is many ways is about the quiet routines that we get pulled into without realizing it. The characters' routines are quite independent and the narrator's especially so. These are insular people who are drawn out of themselves when they are left to themselves, allowing trust to build up through actions rather than emphatic declarations.
As their time together wears on, Napoleon – who is dying in installments – learns to trust his daughter and slowly his story comes out. It is a story that is both expected and surprising: he witnessed a brutal and systematic massacre of a Vietnam village by American troops and then testified at a tribunal. He had, apparently, never shared this information with his family, or really even spoken about the war, and the transcript of his testimony that follows the story is in many ways more striking than any one scene in the novel itself.
Overall though, The Sentimentalists succeeds because it feels like a real relationship, filled with its own confusing and passive-aggressive history, is unfolding in front of you. In real life, very little happens in big, splashy moments, and Skibsrud's ability to make day-to-day routines and silent conversations interesting and beautiful is what makes this such a great read. In telling the story of Napoleon, Skibsrud examines not only the legacy of war, but also the importance of language and the way that we talk about and describe it. The Sentimentalists may seem languid as you read it, but despite the carefully paced writing, it sure packs an emotional wallop.
The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud First published in 2009 (cover image shown from Gaspereau Press edition)
Lists like 'The Top-100 Books Everyone Should Read' come out every year, and often feature more-or-less the same sets of (mostly) novels. Sometimes they're in a different order, sometimes they spice it up a little (Sense and Sensibility instead of Pride and Prejudice, of 1984 instead of Animal Farm, etc.). I tease mostly because these lists make me feel a little inadequate – and I have an English degree, which feels like it should mean I've read most of these books.
Anyway, The Guardian has put together a word cloud (see above) featuring the titles of the must-read books from "over 15 notable book polls" and arranged them so that the titles that appear most frequently appear largest and boldest (essentially the same idea as my tag cloud, to the right of this post). Seeing the titles arranged like this makes me feel like maybe the lists are a bit less repetitive than I thought, and also that some stories are widely considered necessary reads. To Kill a Mockingbird is the clear winner, which is interesting because, compared to some of the other titles, it is relatively contemporary. I also find it rather amazing that Le Petit Prince (or The Little Prince) has made so few lists, as well as the fact that Twilight shows up at all. It is so interesting to examine what other people/organizations deem to be must-reads.
What makes this data extra-interesting is that The Guardian also provides a spreadsheet with all the lists on it, which means that if you wanted to read your way through one of them, you certainly could.
