I participated in a literary reading series in 2010, and Mark read from his manuscript in progress, which later became Sad Peninsula (Dundurn, 2014).
It was impressive in progress, and it remains impressive in final form.
The sad peninsula is Korea, and the story cleverly riffs on John Donne's famous line, "No man is an island," noting on a peninsula you are always connected to something larger.
Connection and its challenges is a theme deeply engrained in the two main stories that alternate chapters in the novel. In one, the first-person narrator, Michael, tells of his two plus years in Korea as an English teacher. He eschews the dance clubs and fast sex chased by many of his North American colleagues and instead recounts his slow moving romance with a young professional Korean woman, Jin. They bond initially over a common admiration for the work of Milan Kundera.
The second story reaches back in history to tell the story of a teenaged girl taken from Korea by the Japanese military during the Second World War. She becomes one of many "comfort women," who exist in stalls in compounds to be raped by Japanese soldiers upwards of 35 times a day, day after day. According to Wikipedia, "Estimates vary as to how many women were involved, with numbers ranging from as low as 20,000 to as high as 360,000 to 410,000."
Spoiler alert. Ultimately, the two stories converge. It is Jin's great aunt who was forced into sex slavery.
But there's more than this neat narrative hookup that connects the parallel stories. For one thing, the entire novel is saturated with sex, from the extreme torture of multiple rape, to the casual pickup culture of the dance clubs, to the slow burn sexuality of Jin and Michael as they date for months and months before consumating their forbidden love.
Forbidden? Not really, but the tension between the modern and the traditional is never far away. And here, of course, is where Korea is struggling with its soul. What to be? Which is the second thing that connects the two narratives. Before WWII, Korea was a colony of Imperial Japan, and its identity was weak. Following WWII, Korea was divided between the West and the Communists. After the Korean War, the South is strongly aligned with the USA and implements a ferocious capitalism. The modern and the traditional, at the macro and micro levels, struggle to co-exist, caught in an endless feedback loop.
As narrator, how much of this does Michael understand? He is smart, sensitive, caring, alert, but also sometimes in over his head. Jin brings him into her life, into her family, tells him things she has told no other, but - spoiler alert - ultimately decides she cannot stay with him: "I need to be Korean."
The reader can only wonder what she means by this. She is approaching thirty, and she tells Michael she will never marry because she has had relations with too many men. She is laden with shame. This is the third thing that connects the two stories, because shame is what burden's Jin's great aunt, though - it must be noted - she does find a husband following the war, and she has a complicated marriage that fails. Eun-young's experience is extreme, yet Jin says she is caught in the same tide of cultural expectation and control ... a control she chooses to remain tied to (she decides not to go to Canada with Michael when he returns home).
Sad? For Michael, yes. For the reader, sure. For Jin, who knows. One wonders what will become of her. Will her retrenchment into a cultural nationalism make her life happier, more meaningful? Or is she just repeating the errors of her family, her mother in particular?
Interestingly, it is Eun-young, the one who is most broken, most alienated, who moves farthest to reconciliation at the end of the novel. She visits, finally, the institution set up in Seoul to house aging comfort women, a place that includes a museum and the thing that Eun-young had been lacking all of her adult life, community. On a peninsula, you are always connected to something larger than yourself.
How Should a Person Be?
by Sheila Heti
Anansi, 2012
So I liked this book, quite a lot, but as I've thought about what I would write about it, I've become muddled about why.
What should a review be?
Clear? Concise? Searching? Uncertain? Open to interrogation? Defiant?
Enough with the question marks.
First off, the fact that the protagonist is named Sheila and the author is named Sheila is a fact that I am not going to consider from this point forward, but readers beware. Something is afoot.
What? Don't ask me.
Sheila (protagonist) is pretty fucked up. She's graduated high school, plus quite a bit more, and she doesn't know how to "be." Poor her, except not really.
Sheila's pretty stuck up, she's pretty self-involved, she's narcissistic as all get out. At least she is at the beginning, where she tells us she entered a three-year marriage for not the best of reasons. Ended it without really explaining why, either to the readers or her husband. And this is where we find her, divorced, twenty-something, lost, seeking an ideal state of "being," discovering a female best friend, something she's never had before, Margot.
Margot is a painter, brilliant by all accounts, and she enters an "ugly painting" competition with another young painter. This competition frames the book. The painters seek beauty in their work, and they challenge themselves to make the most ugly painting they can. Margot's competitor (male) doesn't think she can. She delays doing so for nearly the entire length of the book. He yanks it off quickly.
When I was at the University of Toronto for a Master's Degree in English, I took a seminar on teaching at the university level. It was really for the PhD students, but I was interested. One of the senior academics, a world-renowned critic, told a story about how she had put a book on her syllabus that she hadn't read. On the first day of class she asked the students: "What can we learn from the first page?"
For some reason, this story came back to me as I was reading Heti's book. You can tell a lot about this book from the first page. It's a fantastic first page. But on page three, there's a phrase that rivals the "prostitute" quote at the beginning of Catcher in the Rye: "We live in an age of some really great blow-job artists." Except the use of prostitute is explicitly metaphorical, and the use of blow-job artist is not quite. But should be read that way. But not quite.
Read the first page, and BAM! You're on your way. And what the fuck is up with Sheila? I mean, really. Is it all in her head?
Dickensian this novel is not. The sensory details are all but absent. You want description, sights, smells, taste, touch, any sensory details at all ... this novel is not for you. Existential dread is what this novel is all about. And THANK GOD someone else in Canadian literature has done THIS. Heti is not alone, but THANK GOD ALMIGHTY AND THE SEVEN DWARFS that she undertook this project. Break free of memory, loss, and historical realism, please, please, please the rest of you.
Okay, I've gotten another glass of wine, and I've calmed down.
Yes, there is sexual frankness in this book. Heti told the Guardian she loves "reading people who write well about sex. I love dirty books! I think
there's a way of talking about the human that can be quite profound. I
tried Fifty Shades of Grey but three pages in I realised I just couldn't read it. It was like every sentence was written by a different writer."
That quotation begins with the four words: "I love Henry Miller." The Guardian apparently loves Sheila Heti, because what a trove of links! Here's a complete summary of the book under review. And a quotation from that summary:
Email from Israel to Sheila. 1) I want you to gag on my cock again. 2) I want you to show off your pussy to a tramp. Email from Sheila to Israel. 1) OK, but on one condition. 2) You let me put my head up your arse.
Oh, Israel. What are we to make of this? Metaphor? Hot guy?
He's hot. He's misogynistic. Sheila repeatedly complains about "another man who wanted to teach me something." She also compares herself to Moses, who is her leader, not Jesus, who is the leader of the Christians. In case you were confused about that.
WTF?
Ah, there's something going on here that is above me. I've decided to just flounder. Floudering is a strategy often deployed by Sheila. I can't say it often works for her. She leaves her husband without much explanation, then she leaves Margot without explanation either. Sheila takes herself to New York (from Toronto, yay), deciding it's best for her and everyone else that she leave. Not that she discussed this with another else.
Did the burning bush tell her? Are we expected to think so? Briefly, I think. Then Sheila realizes not. Margot is really fucking pissed off at her. Sheila begins to realize that her identity is not cast in some idealized sphere, but it is dependent on her closest, most loving relationships.
But I may be projecting my own crap on that.
Judaism. Let's not lose sight of that. This is a diaspora novel, which I didn't expect. It's not a "late-capitalist" novel, as one back cover quotation claims. Well, maybe it is, sort of. But while Sheila has some money anxiety (she works for a while in a hair salon), she frames even that experience as an opportunity to "be" in the best possible way, and the best possible way is to be Jewish. Like Moses. Lost in the desert. Called to greatness but ill-suited for it. Driven to exhalation and struggle.
Wow. This book goes from the lowest of lows to the highest of highs. Henry Miller? Whatever.
Heti has pulled something off here that is unique and remarkable. What? Fucked if I know. *** Bonus track: Jeanette Winterson on Henry Miller. What?!
Oh, I read the "new and expanded paperback edition." Thought I should note that.
Also, my buddy who teaches Cegep in Montreal assigned this book to his students without reading it. I told him my UofT story. His students were only 16-17. I said, Oh, boy. Look out.
Funny story, I noted on Goodreads that I'd started to read this book and a couple of days later I got notice asking if I wanted to take part in a forum or something about Heti's new book, women's clothes or something. No, thanks. Freaky.
What should I wear? I dunno. We live in an age of some really great dressers.
So Rob Ford, mayor of Toronto in name only for another five weeks (until the election), has cancer. His cancer may or may not be lethal. He started chemotherapy this week, and from what his doctors have told the media, I gather no one knows what is going to happen. I wish him well.
Ford's doctors have told the media that his cancer is aggressive (which is bad), but it generally responds well to treatment (which is good). Three years ago I sat in small clinic room at Princess Margaret Hospital and heard a doctor describe the exact same scenario to my wife, who had breast cancer.
"What would you rather have," he asked, "a non-aggressive cancer, or one that doesn't respond to treatment?" (We agreed that having a cancer that responds to treatment sounded better. Not having cancer, wasn't on the menu.)
The best article I've read that describes this impossible-to-be-in dilemma is a piece called "Living with Cancer: Truthiness" by Susan Gubar (NY Times, April 4, 2013). The disjunction between feeling all right and not knowing what verdict
will come down causes all sorts of disruptions in the lives of the women
in my support group. Judy finds herself fragmented by anxiety: whether
she is watching a movie or dining out, part of her mind wanders off,
worrying about a recurrence. Diane engages in “serious culling”: she
keeps on going through her closets, bagging the stuff she hasn’t worn,
and hauling it to Good Will so “the kids won’t find a mess afterwards.”
Alison, no longer trusting her body, finds her world narrowing as the
house becomes “her nest.” Like Sarah, I fear the interminable lining up
for security surveillance and the coughing crowds at airports. But now
at take-off, when (as always) I picture the plane crashing in flames, I
joke to myself, “Not a bad way to go!”
Not knowing, sometimes called denial, sometimes called normal.
My wife died in May 2012. The aggressive cancer responded well to treatment, but it also never went away. Cancer is ingenious. It evolves to evade the poison. As my brother-in-law said after his sister died, "I take some satisfaction from the fact that the cancer died, too." There wasn't anything else that could kill it. Not for nothing, is cancer The Emperor of All Maladies.
Among other things, as Mr. Ford is now experiencing, cancer is an interference of the best made plans, and it is only one of the interferences that play like flies to wanton gods with a collection of neighbours in Michelle Berry's powerfully quiet new novel, Interference (ECW, 2014), set in a town very much like Peterborough, Ontario, where the author lives.
Truthiness is a common element among the cast of characters Berry introduces us to in this ensemble novel. There is no single protagonist, and no straight through line. As a novel, it resembles another newly released creative work, Richard Linklater's movie Boyhood, which is framed around the life of one character (boy, ages, from 6 to 18), but is really a portrait of a collective, the family. Interference takes place over a winter, and it is rife with anxiety, often related to the safety of children. Violence often appears to lurk around every corner, but the slasher (figuratively speaking) never appears.
Any parent will recognize these feelings as par for the course. Berry's brilliance here is to make us care about so many people all at the same time. She speaks truth about the prevalence of fear, and also battens down the anxiety with a flavour of hope that doesn't resort to sentimentality or naivete.
I could give more plot summary, but why give anything away. Here's how the publisher frames it:
From fall to spring, the inhabitants of Edgewood Drive in the small town
of Parkville prove that the simplest lives can be intricate and
complicated. The interwoven, layered narrative of Michelle Berry’s
Interference moves between Senior Ladies Leisure League hockey, the
unsure and awkward life of pre-teens and teens, suspected pedophilia,
disfigurement, and cancer. In Interference, there is always someone
watching, biding their time — and as this suspense builds the
vivaciousness of a congenial neighbourhood, full of life and happiness
as well as fear and sorrow, becomes at once more humorous, frightening,
and real.
Does the empty swing and the splash of red on the cover make your stomach churn? Good. Berry explores that churning with a sensibility fine tuned with calm reality (which is different from truth). She displays a sensitivity that is as large as it is remarkable.
Each of the chapters begins with a "found text." An email. A note home from school. A message to the team of female hockey players who stumble to a winning season over the course of the book, no matter how few pucks they put in the net. The tone of these notes is frequently jovial, and contrapuntal to the gist of much of the other action. The humour enlivens the book, and serves as a reminder, too, that even in the midst of catastrophe (or the fear of catastrophe) the beat of the absurd stampedes on.
Please check out the magazine, and send them funds to cover an annual subscription - from now until the end of time.
I reviewed Moore's novel February in 2009 on this blog.
*
Caught
By
Lisa Moore
Anansi,
2013
Fifteen
months ago I was sitting outside Sunnybrook General Hospital in Toronto with my
wife. She was in a wheelchair. She had just had a chemotherapy treatment, her
last. She was in a wheelchair because her breast cancer had spread to her liver
and then her bones. Her T1 vertebrae fractured. She took a series of high
powered pain killers and that day was streaming hydromorphine (seven times more
powerful than morphine) into her abdomen through a catheter. She could stand,
but barely walk. The chemotherapy was for a resurgence of cancer in her liver.
It was a last ditch effort to extend, not save, her life, however briefly.
Before the chemotherapy, Kate had pulled up her blood results from that morning
on her ipad (yay, e-health). They were not good. The one number we’d been told
to watch, that we were hoping was at least stable from a week earlier, that we
were hoping most of all would go down, had doubled.
“I guess this is it,” she said.
“Do you want to go through with the chemo?”
I asked.
“Might as well,” she said. “We’re here.”
She had the treatment, then I wheeled her
out into the sunshine and called the private ambulance company I’d hired to
transport her that day. I have 24 steps from the sidewalk to my front door.
Kate couldn’t do it anymore. I needed someone to carry her up the stairs.
The ambulance didn’t come until three hours
later.
It was the last time we were alone together.
It was a Friday. She died the following Wednesday.
It was the time to say those things. I can
tell you there isn’t much to say at that point, except reiterating love. I
said, “I wish this moment would last forever. Just you and me, right here,
right now. It’s not the disease that’s the enemy. It’s time.”
We can’t stop tomorrow from coming.
We said some other things. It was a lovely
moment. A grain of sand in the ocean of time.
Lisa Moore’s fiction, all of it, is full of
such moments. She is an expert at stopping the clock and forcing the reader to
focus on the intense swirl of details locked into an instant.
In a review of Moore’s Giller-nominated
short story collection, Open
(Anansi, 2002), I wrote: “Moore's stories are fragmented like memories. They
have a coherence from beginning to end, but in the middle the reader is often
jarred by the sudden, apparently random, thoughts of the characters.”
In a review of Moore’s novel, February (Anansi, 2009), I wrote of
what I called “Moore’s genius”: “The structure of time, the implications of
time, is perhaps Lisa Moore's primary narrative obsession. ... Moore's style
and attention to the details of her character's specifics, focus the reader's
attention on the here and now, while also allowing the past and future to
resonate.”
Which is to say that I disagree with the
pull quote on the cover of Moore’s new novel, Caught (Anansi, 2013). The quote, by Patrick deWitt, calls the new
novel, “A propulsive and harrowing read.” Harrowing is okay. Propulsive,
however, the novel is surely not.
Nor should it be.
Though let’s first judge a book by its
cover. The girl in the red bikini, standing in the big-waved surf, sailboat on
the horizon, large red italicized CAUGHT weighing down on the ocean like a
primeval sun. Yum. Propulsive. But that’s not what this book is about.
This book is about David Slaney, a
24-year-old convicted drug smuggler, who breaks out of prison after four years
on the inside and is on the run on page one. Where is he running? To find his
old mate, Brian Hearn, who skipped bail on the original charges and is now
living under a false identity and, get this, studying to become an English
professor.
The largest part of the book focuses on
Slaney’s trek, east to west, as he seeks to meet up with Hearn, who has a new
smuggling operation planned, one that doesn’t include getting caught. Slaney’s
job will be to lead the operation on the sailboat (see cover), meet up with a
militia in South America, trade cash for a whack of marijuana, and slip back up
the (west) coast (this time). Millionaires, they will be. Set for life on the
lam.
The frame of the plot is high adventure, but
for all of the revving of engines, it never picks up speed. Slaney’s journey
west is episodic, as Moore deep dives into scene after scene. The writing in these
scenes is sharp and intense. As discussed above, Moore is able to stop the
clock through an expert use of repetition and a journalistic eye for detail.
Like Jeff Wall, she takes miniature moments and blows them up to enormous
scale. The scenes are also often highly cinematic.
For example, Slaney stops at a hotel where
he trades labour for room and board. On the eve before he’s scheduled to leave,
he catches wind that there are police in the building. He doubles back and
seeks escape. He travels along a floor that houses guests from a wedding. A
door opens and the bride, inside alone, asks him to enter and help zip up her
dress. They hear the police pounding on doors along the hallway. Slaney hides
and the bride assures the officers that all is well within. Slaney wishes the
bride well on her journey, and she wishes him well on his.
“It’s only pot,” is repeated more than once.
To which the refrain is, boys, you knew the
risk.
But as the bride story illustrates, Slaney
is no gangster. In fact, the arc of the story is more folk tale than novel.
Slaney doesn’t go through a transformative learning curve, reaching a climax of
confidence that leads to crisis and resolution. He gets batted around like one
of Lear’s flies to wanton gods. He’s just a good old boy, never meaning no
harm. He’s not even a red neck.
Women, it must be said, love him. He gets
laid with rapid frequency.
Is he a kind of idealized boy-man?
Slaney is the one the title refers to. He is
the caught one. But he is also the one who is most free. He makes no
compromises. He never negotiates his integrity.
He is like Pretty Boy Floyd, except he
lives.
Hearn, on the other hand, skips bail,
bankrupts his father, lives a notoriously open life for a “most wanted” man. He
grew up with Slaney, and they were best buds, but the connection between them
is never proven; it is only asserted. Readers will have no trouble
understanding the attractiveness of Slaney. Hearn, however, reeks of a slime
ball, however well read. Why does Slaney risk it all for this man? Why is it
Slaney who is always the one putting himself at the forefront of harm’s way?
The questions are never answered satisfactorily.
The girl on the cover, for example, is a
passenger in the sailboat. There wasn’t supposed to be a passenger. There
wasn’t supposed to be a girl. Hearn isn’t as in control of the details as he
should be as a hands on project manager. Slaney is the muscle; Hearn,
logistics. Slaney trusts Hearn implicitly, but his trust isn’t earned.
So let’s get to the end. Spoiler alert. Stop
here if you would prefer not to know.
The rendezvous in South America succeeds.
Along the Mexican coast, they hit a hurricane, which they are lucky to survive,
but the sails are torn to shreds. They need to go into port. They are held by
the authorities. The gig is up, surely, except, no, it isn’t, because Hearn’s
operation has been infiltrated by the police, and the police want Slaney back
in Canada, so they can complete their arrest. Deals are made, and the Mexican’s
release the crew and their cargo, and out to sea they go, but they know
something is up because a cop talks to the girl and tells her she can get off
if she cooperates.
Slaney decides on a bold move. They will
reverse course, go through the Panama Canal, and head home, to Newfoundland.
This is a brilliant plot twist and it had me riveted, but by this part of the
novel Moore had dropped the time pause techniques and only a few pages later
Slaney was in handcuffs in the back of a squad car. Hearn got off on a
technicality. Slaney did 20 years and in 1998 he gets out and heads back to the
Rock to whittle away his days.
He visits the local university and the
English Department, which is the new home of Dr. Brian Hearn.
I didn’t like this ending. It came too
swiftly. It came because of betrayal, the girl’s. Slaney, as a character, I
felt, deserved better. He deserved to at least reach Newfoundland and have a
taste of success. One roaring party on the beach, say. I would have held in
there for another 100 pages for that, even if he got caught in the morning,
hung over and stoned. Instead, he and his mates are swiftly rounded up upon
arrival and the prospect of a Grand Finale fizzles, and I closed the book
feeling sour and disappointed, despite enjoying most of it and admiring same.
To add insult to injury, Hearn, the bastard,
gets to teach iambs to undergraduates.
When
Bob Dylan told us, “It’s doom alone that counts,” he might have been
anticipating Melia McClure’s tragicomic debut novel. In the first
sentence, the narrator, Velvet, hangs herself; all subsequent action is
post-mortem. Like Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which opens with
the narrator waking up as a bug, the plot’s trajectory goes straight
down. McClure’s protagonist has more self-determination than poor
Gregor, but not much.
After hanging herself, Velvet wakes up naked in a room that is
decorated like her childhood bedroom and resembles a jail cell. The
closet contains a single set of clothes. Besides a bed, there is a
mirror, a desk, and a pad of paper and a pen. Is this heaven, hell, or
somewhere in between?
Soon she discovers she’s not alone. A neighbour, named Brinkley, is
in the next cell, and they pass notes back and forth under the door. The
mirrors in their rooms show scenes from each other’s lives. Velvet and
Brinkley start off as strangers, but move toward something resembling
intimacy.
Despite this growing relationship, Velvet is often alone with her
thoughts, and we learn much about her sad, tragic life. She is an
engaging narrator: cultured, self-aware, and often funny despite the
disturbing circumstances. Existential and philosophical questions are
inevitable in this context; McClure addresses them directly and wisely
avoids simple solutions.
A clever novel with a unique approach, The Dephi Room both
challenges and entertains. Though the story takes place after Velvet’s
death, the characters are full of life, painted with emotional depth and
affirming the wild complexity that is the human condition.
- See more at: http://www.quillandquire.com/reviews/review.cfm?review_id=8143#sthash.FJoDdt6p.dpuf
When Bob Dylan told us, “It’s doom alone that counts,” he might have been anticipating Melia McClure’s tragicomic debut novel. In the first sentence, the narrator, Velvet, hangs herself; all subsequent action is post-mortem. Like Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which opens with the narrator waking up as a bug, the plot’s trajectory goes straight down. McClure’s protagonist has more self-determination than poor Gregor, but not much.
After hanging herself, Velvet wakes up naked in a room that is decorated like her childhood bedroom and resembles a jail cell. The closet contains a single set of clothes. Besides a bed, there is a mirror, a desk, and a pad of paper and a pen. Is this heaven, hell, or somewhere in between?
Soon she discovers she’s not alone. A neighbour, named Brinkley, is in the next cell, and they pass notes back and forth under the door. The mirrors in their rooms show scenes from each other’s lives. Velvet and Brinkley start off as strangers, but move toward something resembling intimacy.
Despite this growing relationship, Velvet is often alone with her thoughts, and we learn much about her sad, tragic life. She is an engaging narrator: cultured, self-aware, and often funny despite the disturbing circumstances. Existential and philosophical questions are inevitable in this context; McClure addresses them directly and wisely avoids simple solutions.
A clever novel with a unique approach, The Dephi Room both challenges and entertains. Though the story takes place after Velvet’s death, the characters are full of life, painted with emotional depth and affirming the wild complexity that is the human condition.
When
Bob Dylan told us, “It’s doom alone that counts,” he might have been
anticipating Melia McClure’s tragicomic debut novel. In the first
sentence, the narrator, Velvet, hangs herself; all subsequent action is
post-mortem. Like Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which opens with
the narrator waking up as a bug, the plot’s trajectory goes straight
down. McClure’s protagonist has more self-determination than poor
Gregor, but not much.
After hanging herself, Velvet wakes up naked in a room that is
decorated like her childhood bedroom and resembles a jail cell. The
closet contains a single set of clothes. Besides a bed, there is a
mirror, a desk, and a pad of paper and a pen. Is this heaven, hell, or
somewhere in between?
Soon she discovers she’s not alone. A neighbour, named Brinkley, is
in the next cell, and they pass notes back and forth under the door. The
mirrors in their rooms show scenes from each other’s lives. Velvet and
Brinkley start off as strangers, but move toward something resembling
intimacy.
Despite this growing relationship, Velvet is often alone with her
thoughts, and we learn much about her sad, tragic life. She is an
engaging narrator: cultured, self-aware, and often funny despite the
disturbing circumstances. Existential and philosophical questions are
inevitable in this context; McClure addresses them directly and wisely
avoids simple solutions.
A clever novel with a unique approach, The Dephi Room both
challenges and entertains. Though the story takes place after Velvet’s
death, the characters are full of life, painted with emotional depth and
affirming the wild complexity that is the human condition.
- See more at: http://www.quillandquire.com/reviews/review.cfm?review_id=8143#sthash.FJoDdt6p.dpuf
When
Bob Dylan told us, “It’s doom alone that counts,” he might have been
anticipating Melia McClure’s tragicomic debut novel. In the first
sentence, the narrator, Velvet, hangs herself; all subsequent action is
post-mortem. Like Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which opens with
the narrator waking up as a bug, the plot’s trajectory goes straight
down. McClure’s protagonist has more self-determination than poor
Gregor, but not much.
After hanging herself, Velvet wakes up naked in a room that is
decorated like her childhood bedroom and resembles a jail cell. The
closet contains a single set of clothes. Besides a bed, there is a
mirror, a desk, and a pad of paper and a pen. Is this heaven, hell, or
somewhere in between?
Soon she discovers she’s not alone. A neighbour, named Brinkley, is
in the next cell, and they pass notes back and forth under the door. The
mirrors in their rooms show scenes from each other’s lives. Velvet and
Brinkley start off as strangers, but move toward something resembling
intimacy.
Despite this growing relationship, Velvet is often alone with her
thoughts, and we learn much about her sad, tragic life. She is an
engaging narrator: cultured, self-aware, and often funny despite the
disturbing circumstances. Existential and philosophical questions are
inevitable in this context; McClure addresses them directly and wisely
avoids simple solutions.
A clever novel with a unique approach, The Dephi Room both
challenges and entertains. Though the story takes place after Velvet’s
death, the characters are full of life, painted with emotional depth and
affirming the wild complexity that is the human condition.
- See more at: http://www.quillandquire.com/reviews/review.cfm?review_id=8143#sthash.FJoDdt6p.dpuf
Peter Roman's The Mona Lisa Sacrifice (CZP, 2013) is the first novel I've read that made me feel like I was playing a video game.
Maybe it was the protagonist, who kept dying and coming back to life, fighting assorted demons (and angels) and progressing to higher levels of complex game play.
But the protagonist isn't Super Mario; he's Jesus Christ. Or at least the soul who inherited Christ's body. Confused? So is he. His name is Cross, as in the Cross, but also angry.
Cross has the biggest case of amnesia in history and a unique problem. He can't die. He wakes up in a cave, rolls away enough of the rock to squeeze out. He has vague memories of being crucified. He remembers his enemy, Judas. No Prince of Peace, he's pissed off.
Over the next two thousand years, he drifts around the world indulging the body's cravings (often simply described as wine and women), fighting in the Roman Coliseum, with King Arthur's Knights, against assorted knaves, rogues and rascals. He has a burning hatred for Judas and a permanent existential crisis. He cannot erase himself (he dies repeatedly, only to dig himself out of various graves). He is propelled forward for a desire to know himself (though he's not much for philosophy) and a desire for revenge (he's convinced Judas is the cause of his fate). Judas, it must be explained, is a lot like Lucifer; he is no mortal; he morphs throughout history, often placing himself at the site of catastrophe and chaos (e.g., Hiroshima et al).
The background of the story is Christ withdrew to Heaven and God withdrew from the world. Judas, essentially, inherits the earth, except he hasn't achieved the complete Doom's Day he expected either. Angels remain, abandoned by God, awaiting his return. A host of other magical creatures also exist, each with different agendas.
Cross is like Moses in the desert, cast out, wandering. How can one not quote Bob Dylan? "Like a complete unknown/ Like a rolling stone." He hunts angels for grace. He kills them and sucks out their power, which restores him. If he died low on grace, he would still be restored, but it would take longer. Being stocked up on grace also allows him to perform magic of various sorts.
While the context-setting is complicated, the plot isn't. The story opens with an angel offering Cross a bargain: find the Mona Lisa (the real Mona Lisa, not the painting) and he will be given Judas. And since his search for Judas is one of the few things that have kept him going for the past two thousand years, of course he says yes. He would do anything for that. And what follows is a series of the odd and improbable. It's also a love story. And everything wraps up tightly, while also setting us up for the sequel.
Part hard-boiled detective novel, part magical realism, part mystic fantasy, part picaresque adventure, this genre bending novel may leave you seeking grace yourself. Though as Cross makes clear, eternal life has its down sides.
I saw her read at Trinity St. Paul's United Church in (I think) 1997 (what fantastic hair!) and walking out afterwards overheard two women:
"You know from a feminist point of view she's interesting."
"Why's that?"
"She doesn't just present women as victims."
*
[This review first appeared in Imprint, University of Waterloo, June 26, 1992]
Jazz
by Toni Morrison
Knopf, 1992
Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Aveune. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going.
There is a school of literary criticism that holds to the belief that black women writers are doubly discriminated against in their quest for intellectual recognition. They are, it is said, excluded from the discussions that determine academic excellence first because women's experiences are generally devalued in our culture, and second because white people simply don't try hard enough to understand black people.
Toni Morrison is one of the few writers, along with Alice Walker, to have broken through this cultural barrier. She won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for her novel Beloved and has just released Jazz to somewhat confused critical acclaim. Affirming the notion that institutions of power are unable to understand marginal voices, Time magazine's review of Jazz praised Morrison's literary ability while confessing not to understand her purpose.
The novel's plot is contained in its first sentences, quoted above. Simply put, the novel is about a couple who grow apart as they grow old. He takes a young lover, who leaves him. He kills his lover. Life goes on, somewhat like before. But also radically different. The novel concentrates on its characters, not its plot. It tells us in deeply drawn strokes each individual's quirks and fantasies, and after a while it is difficult to discern the victims from the offenders. Everyone is hurting, everyone is looking for redemption.
Likely this is not what you'd expect from a novel about a love triangle and a murder. But Morrison's point is that there are not easy answers, the roots of the problem run deep. The symptoms may be obvious, but the causes are certainly not. Jazz explores (as a Charlie Parker solo explores; it wanders, but always to the right place) the depth of this theme, celebrating human connections at the same time as it points out the consequences of their failings.
Love's connections may be frail, Morrison is saying, and they are often the cause of much pain and anguish, but they are also life's strongest bonds. Jazz plays with this paradox. The purpose of the novel, then, is simple. Jazz is jazz. That is all. Nothing more, nothing less. And as Louis Armstrong once said, "If you have to ask what's jazz, you'll never know."
As a cultural phenomena, the novel deserves to be discussed within the context of contemporary race and gender relations. A novel about black people in Harlem in the 1920s, Jazz speaks the voices of the marginalized people who feel they've moved up in the world. The readers, however, who know how hollow these dreams of 70 years ago are, can see the tragedy in the characters' ambitions. Just as they can see how little has changed with regards to violence against women.
But Jazz is not an overtly political novel, though in a completely subversive way the novel points out the commonalities that bind all people. These are the connections of emotion, the need to be loved, understood and wanted. And though these connections function on the level of individuals, they are also symptomatic of our culture as a whole.
Says one character: "All kinds of white people are there. Two kinds. The ones that feel sorry for you and the ones that don't. And both amount to the same thing. Nowhere in between is respect."
This is the first book review I ever published, over 20 years ago, and its conclusion still rings true today.
Interesting to read this so much later. I can't remember much about the book now. Forgot all about Imagology. But I did remember the 60-year-old waving to the swimming instructor.
The point being, WC Williams and the imagists were right. The concrete wins out over the abstract every time.
On the same page, above the fold, was Derek Weiler's review of Atwood's Wilderness Tips.
*
[Review first published in Imprint, University of Waterloo, Sept 27, 1991]
Immortality
by Milan Kundera
Grove Weidenfeld
Back after a seven year hiatus, Milan Kundera has published a new novel. Probably best known in North America for the film version of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera has returned with a delicate and delightful novel, a novel very much of its time.
Not that its time, the present, is delicate and delightful. Quite the opposite. The present is paradoxical, as is this beautifully heavy novel with a light touch, Immortality.
Translated from the native Czech, Immortality is Kundera's first novel since the end of the Cold War and the restructuring of Eastern Europe. For an expatriate living in France whose last novel studied the intricacies of modern life on both sides of the Iron Curtain before, after, and during 1968's Prague Spring, these must be significant events. And they are. But Immortality sets them in a broader context.
This is not a novel about the end of communism, though the effects of the recent changes are in evidence. This is a novel about Europe(ans), past and present, a contient too told and too much ravaged by supposedly Great Leaders this century to trust too quickly in another promise of renewal.
The novel explores the relationship between personalities and environments in intricate detail. This is a novel about a continent and its people stuck in time, not Movements or destiny or the Great Future. The characters, including one named Milan Kundera, are metaphors, imaging life in our uncertain age. Each character represents a personality-type whose almost every action the novel explains in continually evolving essays: the novel begins by interpreting the connection between the wave of a 60-ish woman to her young male swimming instructor with her adolescent self. Some people, the novel explains, are better suited to their environments than others, are luckier.
Though most of the "action" (very little happens in any real sense) takes place in Paris, late 1980s, the landscape of the novel includes a couple-three scenes in Heaven, where Hemingway, Goethe, the 19th century German poet, converse about their respective losses of power over their images on Earth now that they are dead. Being dead for Kundera is apparently as unbearably light as being alive.
"Nobody reads me any more," Hemingway complains. "Instead, they read about me."
Goethe, on the other hand, decides that immortality is as much a joke as his first life and zaps himself from eternity.
The relationship between words and reality, a theme explored in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, is picked up again in Immortality. Where the first novel included "A Short Dictionary of Words Misunderstood," Kundera now expounds his theory of Imagology, the theory that the illusion is more powerful than reality because the illusion is what people believe.
Bernard Bertrand's father, Bertrand Bertrand, is a big-time journalist. Bernard chooses his occupation, breaking away from the partri-lineal tradition of politicians of his family because he realizes those who choose the images make the politicians. The power base has shifted.
And power, after all, is what life is all about. Think globally, act locally, the personal is political, and we're all responsible. Deluded perhaps, and more than a little confused about how to act in unity with the rest of the world's population, the environment, History, Time and Space (read, Immortality), but still responsible.
Life is a series of power relations, or at least that's the "image" to believe in these days (Kundera says Imagology has replaced Ideology, as both communism and capitalism have proven themselves morally backrupt).
The Gulf War was still Saddam Hussein's fantasy when Immortality was written, but the century's most destructive one-sided massacre appears only to have provided evidence for Kundera's thesis. Iraq's millions fought the "Great Satan" and the coalition forces fought "Another Hitler." Meanwhile, reality lost once again, along with civilians in both Iraq and Kuwait. The images of hate prevailed.
Immortality is President Bush's New World Order on a literary level. It draws allusions of hope out of destruction. However, like the President's vision of a new and lasting international peace, Kundera's vision of immortality is based on his own politics, not universal truth (the situation of very real death and destruction in Yugoslavia is proof enough that peace and renewal will take more than American rhetoric, or another novelist's sweet despair). His exclusive use of male pronouns reveals the walls of only one of his illusions.
The novel is a fine work of art and great reading, but any attempt to pull definitive truths from its pages will only meet frustration. We have no way of knowing how events are going to turn out, and nothing is new about that!
Cigar Box Banjo: Notes on Music and Life by Paul Quarrington Greystone, 2010
The Perfect Order of Things by David Gilmour Thomas Allen, 2011
Beauty & Sadness by André Alexis Anansi, 2010
Three gentlemen of Canadian literature. Three memoirs. One of them framed as a novel. One of them a celebration of life and critique of music. One of them a hybrid short story /essay collection.
One of them published posthumously.
Paul Quarrington wrote Cigar Box Banjo in the 12 months his doctors gave him after his lung cancer diagnosis. He'd already started it, but what had started as a reflection of his life-long interest (and career in) music became a reflection on the significant moments of his life and the strange space of his final year.
If you knew you had a year to live, what would you do? Quarrington makes it clear that he took his diagnosis as a gift. Of course he would have liked to live longer. Of course he was angry. But it could have been worse. He could have left with no chance to say goodbye, with no chance to do some of the things on his bucket list (such as record a song in Nashville with his childhood friend, Dan Hill).
And without that final year, we wouldn't have this book, which is imperfect but also more than charming. It resonates with life-force, and it serves as a reminder that the well-lived life is possible even in the most trying of circumstances.
This blog began in 2008 with a report of The Writers' Union of Canada's AGM. Specifically, it recounted a session on the writing life led by Quarrington, Nino Ricci and Wayston Choy. Quarrington repeated some learned wisdom: "Bitterness is the writer's black lung disease." Quarrington said: At the end of the day, there's the body of work. Be proud of it. Avoid careerism.
It was the only time I "met" Quarrington, and it was enough to understand that he is widely missed by friends, family and colleagues.
Reviewing his memoir in the context of other memoirs of the Canadian writing life, it is easy to conclude that Quarrington's is the cheeriest. Matt Cohen's Typing: A Life in 26 Keys, also written as its author was dying of lung cancer, for example, is rife with bitterness, though also interesting reportage from the publishing front lines.
David Gilmour's The Perfect Order of Things (Thomas Allen, 2011) trawls a series of traumatic events in its (unnamed, first-person) narrator's life. The reader is informed early that the book's 10 chapters will return the 60-ish-year-old narrator to the geography of a significant (usually suffering) event in his life.
The events include his father's suicide, his mother's death, lovers' quarrels, drug trips, multiple marriages and divorces, a murder, interviewing George Harrison, punching a book critic, and meeting Robert DeNiro outside the bathroom door at a Toronto International Film Festival after party. The Perfect Order of Things also recounts a life well-lived through trying circumstances, but its narrator is (a) masked by the armor of fiction, and (b) not dying. Trauma is portrayed in relief; it is distant and manageable. But let's not be glib. This is a narrator who knows what it means to endure. And he is also enthralled by life.
By which I mean, love. Both romantic and filial. Love makes all things endurable, and his enduring good relations with his ex-wives is commendable. The wound of the suicide and the parental abandonment masks all. There is no bosom to return to and the narrator grasps at alternatives.
Again, let's not be glib. The theme of this novel is suffering, and its resolution is the ordering of chaos. That is, its aesthetic ambition is true. And, I submit, its ambition is achieved. Though there are some truths I wished the narrator had come cleaner on, such as his relationship with mood altering chemicals.
Why the drugs? It's unexplained. They're just there, a comfort where comfort is needed. At one point, a new wife gives him two conditions: no women, no pills. Later he remembers there was one pill bottle he didn't dispose of. Not sure why. Not sure why he's remembering it now. But, boy, how handy.
I don't mean I wanted a more fulsome confession. That is delivered and unambiguous. What I wonder about is a different word: addiction. An acknowledgement of a deeper mystery. I didn't want a presentation of a 12-step cure, and I wasn't looking for a Naked Lunch tangent from reality, nor any Oprah-like restoration to the greater good.
I guess what I'm saying is that the drugs were not revisited as a geography of their own. They are simply there, and they seemed a topic (an activity) that needed a little more explanation.
But explanation isn't what this book is about. There is only, This is what happened and I'm still trying to make sense of it all. This reader was engaged and sympathetic. Others may be less inclined.
The controversy surrounding André Alexis's Beauty & Sadness began prior to its publication with the appearance of an excerpt in The Walrus in July 2010 called "The Long Decline" and subtitled: Canada used to have a vibrant critical culture. What happened?
The sharpest point of the controversy regarded Alexis's claim that John Metcalf was the source of all that was wrong with Canadian literature.
Okay, let's not exaggerate. Here's a direct quotation: "If I had to blame any one Canadian writer for this state of affairs, I'd blame John Metcalf" (209).
To this notation, the blogosphere erupted. And, frankly, I don't blame them (it?). Laying the fault of a culture at the feet of one individual is a silly claim. Though let's also reference the footnote attaches to this sentence: "It is, of course, rhetorical to blame any one person for attitudes that spread through a population. Metcalf is the purveyor of ideas that, at a certain time in our literary history, met with certain approval…"
An odd, uneven collection, Beauty & Sadness contains short stories, essays and first-person memoir. The disparate pieces are held together by the author's claim that this is the best way to present his aesthetic growing up; that is, coming of age; that is, progressing from the age of innocence to the age of disappointment.
And it is disappointment and anger that dominate this book, not beauty and sadness (though, fair play, those concepts get a lot of time on the field also).
David Gilmour's narrator is buoyed by love and infuriated by bureaucracy and meanness. André Alexis is buoyed by beauty and saddened (and infuriated) by ugliness and nastiness, a darkness that he identifies in others, but also within himself:
Worse, literary society -- the world of grudges, launches, and festivals -- is anti-literary in a surprising way. First, there is the petty gossip and the secret enmities. Here, it would be easy to point out the pettiness of others, but I'd like to admit to my own enmities. There are a number of my fellow writers whom I loathe. And, just to we understand each other, I'm not proud of my feelings. In fact, I'm dismayed to confront my dislikes, dismayed that I can still feel loathing at all, now I'm in my fifties, a time by which, unless I was misinformed, I should have acquired at least some wisdom. What is anti-literary about the loathing I feel is that it keeps me, in one instance, at least, from reading work that is demonstrably good. Demonstrable by me, I mean, despite my dislike for the writer (184-5).
The reader does have the feeling of being hectored at. (The Globe and Mail review calls this section of the book "stark.")
Yet, the short stories are good. The essays on Beckett and Ivan Illych are engaging, well-argued, cogent, and worthy of recommendation. There are also tantalizing moments of criticism that beg for expansion. Alexis's close readings of Russell Smith and Christian Bök, for example, are interesting, but they also beg for more.
As a memoir, this book frustrates. There is much brilliance here, but ultimately, it left me sunk with a feeling of disappointed incompleteness.
Quarrington's book, on the other hand, is less brilliant, but more satisfying, despite the fact that the author died before being able to complete it.
Gilmour's book, like Alexis's, is unconventional in structure, but it delivers more robustly on what it promises.
Some of the reviews of Beauty & Sadness have suggested that Alexis blames Toronto and the city's literary/media culture for his own experience of disappointment with the literary life. But I disagree. I don't think he blames Toronto; I think he is engaged in an honest attempt to capture the source of his feeling of disappointment, of his hope (dashed) that Toronto would be a better, more welcoming place to be a contemporary man of letters. And that analysis, in part, turns (bravely) in on himself.
However, as others have pointed out, the publishing world has transformed in the past quarter century. Alexis complains about the shrinking book review coverage in Toronto newspapers without providing the context that this is a global phenomena. But, yes, it's happening here, too. Or, more specifically, Alexis's disappointment is specific. His experience of loss happened here.
But the lack of global awareness is a weakness. It's as if Alexis's attempt to chart the local specifics of his experience has blocked avenues of analysis that would have added richness and relevance to the narrative.
It's a cliché, but still true; we live in an increasingly global world. Alexis's short stories and literary essays are alert to that fact. However, his memoir is too local and is over-burdened with personal grievance.
The current global mentor of the fiction-memoir is arguably Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee. Trying to think about these three books in international terms leaves me wondering what foreign audiences would make of these titles.
Quarrington's memoir is warm hearted and deeply felt, but it's not genre bending. Despite it's introduction from Roddy Doyle, it's appeal is limited. Gilmour's novel is episodic and insightful, but muted. Alexis's mixed genre approach is interesting and often compelling, but the long whine about literary culture in Toronto is degrading and, at times, disturbing.
Coetzee cuts to the bone examining self and others, personal and social history, linguistic assumptions and traps. He shies away from nothing and can leave readers frightened and exposed. A memoir is not just an opportunity to learn about its author, it's also an opportunity to be challenged to look at oneself, one's world, one's narrative-making.
Gilmour's narrator mines a deep emotional vein, though the path he follows is quirky. The Perfect Order of Things is a novel, but it has the feeling of a life lived. It is a life well examined, but it also contains many loose ends. Of these three books, it is closest to Coetzee in spirit.
Which brings us to Beauty & Sadness. Yes, Alexis lays himself bare. But, to meet his starkness with directness, his complaints about the anti-literary struck me as anti-literary, and I'm left, ultimately, with the simple subjective. While there is much (brilliance) in this book I admired, in the end, however, I was left frustrated.
This isn't a life presented as well-lived; it's a life presented as having gone off of the tracks. "[N]ow I'm in my fifties, a time by which, unless I was misinformed, I should have acquired at least some wisdom," he writes.
Misinformed by whom?
If the word addiction is missing from Gilmour's book, the word depressionis missing from Alexis's. The last sentence in the book, however, is "Drowned but still living is exactly how I feel."
The Globe and Mail review concludes that Alexis's subject is himself. "It is a vast, fertile terrain, its landscapes varied and surprising, and well worth exploring alongside him."
This is a conclusion I would like to agree with. However, Alexis doesn't strike me as one who welcomes fellow travelers. Or, any more, expect them.
A novel of immigration. A narrative that transacts with Canada, but it is not about Canada. A novel that explores multiculturalism, but it is not bound by Trudeau- or even Mulroney-era pieties. A novel about the New Quebec that doesn't mention nationalism (or at least Quebecois nationalism). A novel of immigration that speaks to the world.
Niko is a boy born in Lebanon during that country's civil war in the 1980s. His father owns a camera shop. It's bombed. His mother writes scripts. She's killed. The boy is six, and what is the father to do? They scramble to find a way out. They make it first to Cypress, then a small Greek Island. Nobody wants them, and their money is running out.
Taking advantage of the best offer available, Niko's father ships him to Montreal to live with his late-wife's sister. He promised to come for him as soon as possible, then he takes a job on a cargo boat. The job provides money, but it doesn't get him any closer to Montreal. His passport has long since expired. He seems permanently cut off from his son, so he signs up for the first boat heading for the Americas. If he can only get across the Atlantic, he will walk the rest of the way. The boat, heading for the southern hemisphere, sinks and Niko's father drifts in the ocean until he is rescued.
There are other major plot points that I won't give away. As you can see, however, while the book may be titled after the boy, a great part of the story is about the father. Once the father is lost in South America, though, the reader's focus returns to Niko, now a teenager and shoplifting food in Montreal. His aunt and uncle are anxious to secure their citizenship, so that they can finally begin anew in their new country. Eventually, they all conclude that Niko's father is dead, but an unlikely reunion is on the horizon.
Written in swift, clear prose, this book clips along nicely, covering vast personal, political and geographic territory. It is also a tremendously tender book. Love pulses from cover to cover. The pain caused by the separation of individuals, both physical and ideological, is the subject and cause of the book. Niko and his father are separated by geography. The warring factions in Lebanon (and elsewhere) are separated by the failure to recognize each other's humanity. In the various diaspora's around the world, these differences do not disappear, but they are more easily contextualized, minimized, and set aside in favour of more essential human bonds.
Niko is a lovely novel and a significant achievement by a young writer with much to say.
