I feel like the weather has gotten crisp a lot faster this year than it has in the last few years, so I'm already fully out of my summer reading blitz and firmly entrenched in fall reading. For me, that means books that I can spend time with. I'm stubborn, so even though it's chilly out my windows are still open, and since I get cold quickly I wrap myself up in a blanket to read. Once I'm cocooned, I like to stay that way, so the book I'm sitting with needs to suit the mood created by a cool breeze and a mug of tea. There are lots of books that do the trick, and although I admittedly read Helen Humphreys The Reinvention of Love in August, I think it would be one of them because there's nothing like tragedy to pick up on the nip in fall air.
The Reinvention of Love tells a fictionalized version of the true story of the affair between Adèle Hugo (Victor Hugo's wife) and the author and critic Charles Sainte-Beuve. As many literary affairs are – and this one was certainly literary, even in life – Charles and Adèle's is doomed. Charles is a family friend. Years before the affair began, when Victor Hugo was still new on Paris's literary scene, Charles wrote a favourable review of his poetry and the two became friends. From then on, as Victor became richer and more famous and Charles remained relatively poor, Victor would send Charles his work to review. Charles became a regular guest in the Hugo household and Victor named his second son after him. Then Charles and Adèle began their affair, which was short-lived because in a fit of guilt, Charles, assuming Victor already suspected, confessed the whole thing. Of course, Victor had no idea, and despite his stated desire to remain friends with Charles, that relationship fizzled quickly.
At least, that's how Humphreys tells it. I am not a scholar of either Charles Sainte-Beuve or Victor Hugo, so I'm not entirely sure what is true and what is fiction filling in gaps, but it certainly reads with a kind of straight realism that gives the historical setting a familiar and vivid feel. The novel is written mostly from Charles' perspective, although there are sections written from Adèle's point of view, as well as later ones that come from Adèle's youngest daughter, Dédé, as well.
I had a piece in the National Post's Saturday Books section about Helen Humphreys and her hew novel The Reinvention of Love. I plan to write about the book here sometime in the next few weeks, but until then, here's a bit of my feature.
When Helen Humphreys stumbled across Charles Sainte-Beuve, it was a complete accident. She was reading something else, and then there he was, mentioned in a passing reference to his affair with Adèle Hugo, wife of Victor Hugo. It wasn’t much, but Humphreys’ interest was piqued and she started to research Sainte-Beuve’s life and his love for Adèle.
After nearly five years of writing and researching and rewriting, Humphreys’s novel The Reinvention of Love tells the story of Sainte-Beuve and Adèle.
Unlike Humphreys’ previous novels, which stay in a specific moment, The Reinvention of Love is set over several decades in 19th-century Paris, and recreates not only the affair, but also what came after, allowing it to billow out from France to the Channel Islands and then to Nova Scotia.
This is not the first book to be written about the affair: In 1834, Sainte-Beuve himself published his autobiographical novel Volupté, and although his novel was written shortly after the affair ended, and all the memories and emotions were still fresh, Humphreys describes Sainte-Beuve as feeling that his time with Adèle was less real after having written about it.
“When you write about something it becomes a story,” Humphreys says. “When you’re in the midst of your life, in the chaos and the swirl of all of the things that are happening simultaneously, there’s a reality to that experience that is not present when you write about something, because the moment you put something in order, you’ve essentially made it a narrative, fiction. That takes it away from you; that removes it a little bit from yourself.”
When I found out about that the Twin Towers had been hit I was in form 4 (grade 10) English A class at St. Joseph's Convent in Saint Lucia. I was thousands of miles away, and I didn't really understand what my teacher was talking about. Admittedly, I couldn't even picture the World Trade Center. When I got home that day, I watched the planes hit and the smoke unfurl and the towers collapse over and over again. It was so beyond what I thought was possible that I couldn't process it. At that moment, on the little Caribbean island we were living on, I had no real idea of what it meant. Fast forward a decade and all of that sounds naive – 9/11 changed everything, and when we moved back to Canada a year after it happened, I started to realize it. The commemoration of the tenth anniversary of Sept. 11 is coming up, and the media coverage started weeks ago. It seems like an impossible task to quantify what 9/11 meant (and continues to mean), but with New York about to open Ground Zero to the public, understanding how the Twin Towers were taken down seems like an important place to start when looking for renewal.
American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center is comprised of the three long articles William Langewiesche wrote for The Atlantic Monthly about his time on "the pile." Langewiesche went to the site of the World Trade Center and within days of the attack managed to get himself unprecedented access to the site and everyone on it. He spent the next several months with the rescue workers, city planners, and unbuilders to document what happened at Ground Zero after the buildings the fell. For the life of me, I cannot begin to imagine how he wrangled all his notes into a book barely more than 200 pages, but if you read one book about 9/11, I would recommend it be this one.
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 moved this week, and in the chaos of boxes and moving trucks and no Internet, I didn't have a chance to post. I will be back next week, but in the meantime, here's a piece I wrote for the National Post about Randy Bachman and his new book Vinyl Tap Stories. It's in today's paper, or you can read it online.
The first time Randy Bachman heard himself on the radio, he cried. He thought he’d made the big time.
Of course, that was back in 1962 and Bachman was only a kid, and his band, Chad Allan and the Reflections, was still years away from becoming The Guess Who. Nevertheless, when the local after-school radio program played the band’s first single, Tribute to Buddy Holly, it felt like the real deal.
“You actually sit and listen to it and you’re in awe and disbelief and you actually cry,” Bachman says, his voice slowing down as he remembers. “We actually had tears. This is your Elvis moment or your Beatles moment or your Madonna moment.”
Bachman has come a long way since then, both musically with The Guess Who and BTO, and with his radio presence. In 2005, Bachman started hosting Vinyl Tap on CBC Radio. Although it started as a summer replacement show, thanks to the CBC strike that year it got replayed and became a hit. Small wonder: Bachman pours his years of experience and anecdotes into weekly themed shows, playing music and telling backstage stories on topics from everything to girls’ names to transportation.
The show, which also has a podcast on the way, is the basis for Bachman’s new book,Vinyl Tap Stories. The project collects the anecdotes and insight Bachman offers up on his two-hour show and distills them into themed chapters, each of which ends with a suggested playlist.
