Best Canadian Stories 2012

I’m not sure if these were the best short stories in Canada from 2012, but some of them are very, very good.

The anthology includes 10 stories, and I would like to celebrate what I consider the best of them.

Caroline Adderson’s “Poppycock” opens the book. Holy cow. This story will have me quivering for the rest of my life. It wouldn’t be out of place alongside the stories of Thom Jones’ The Pugilist at Rest. Paragraph by paragraph, it terrified me. The protagonist is a woman, a divorced mother of two, whose has been alienated from her family (father and sister, mother deceased) for over two decades. Her daughters are young adults and moved out. One day, her father shows up. She hasn’t seen him in 20+ years. He’s extremely unwell. Is this a chance for redemption? A corrective? A chance for explanation?

The whole thing tore my heart out. Unbelievable.

Or as Justin would say, Unbeliebable.

Lynn Coady’s “Dogs in Clothes” is another boot shaker. Ostensibly the story is about a young female publicist who shepherds a famous male (deep thinker) publicist around a metropolitan city (which seems a lot like Toronto during the G20 summit, when there were fences all over downtown and paranoid security apparatus[es] all over). Meanwhile, the publicist is texting a (female) friend and (married-to-someone-else) boyfriend and her brother (who is at the hospital where her father is under the knife for heart surgery). Grace under pressure? Is this Hemingway all over again? Are Coady and Adderson taking the same drugs?

Once again, a story about full catastrophe living. And not a Buddhist in sight.

Shaena Lambert’s “The War Between Men and Women” seems, at first, more straightforward. We’ve all lived through Phase I, II, III, IV, V, VI Feminism(s), so we all get this, right? Well, this is more like Faulkner’s “the human heart in conflict with itself” Nobel Speech (1949). [And isn't that great? Isn't the internet useful for something, once and a while?] “Endure and prevail.” Words post-Boston. Post-catastrophe. Eternal.

Lambert’s story starts: “It was 1968, and there was a war between the men and the women.” Holy crow. The story is told from the point of view of the child of two parents at war. As readers, we are once again in the middle of it all. In the middle of a war of all against all. Is it total destruction? Is there a chance for safety? Is peace an option?

What does all of this have to do with Canada, circa 2012?

“The story is constantly changing,” says the back cover, “and readers have to change as well.”

Well, okay, but why does it all seem so 1918?

Douglas Glover’s “The Sun King and the Royal Child” offers historical context as respite. In perhaps the “deepest” story in the collection, Glover offers (again, like the others) a narrator under pressure. Here is a young man who has had an long-running affair with another man’s wife. The other man is an archaeologist who has become famous as a researcher of pre-European contact Iroquois history/cosmology in southwestern Ontario. The “Sun King” and “Royal Child” of the title are Iroquois “artifacts,” except maybe they’re not, as the story eventually explains. Like much of the Glover-opus, the “present” of the story is both now and “then.” Or, to quote Faulkner again, “the past is never past.” (Though the quote is often paraphrased, as I have done here, according to Wikipedia: the real quote is from Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”)

Oh, Hemingway. Faulkner. Canada. 2012. What gives?

I don’t know. But it makes for a startling collection of short fiction.

Check, that.

Could use something by Tony Burgess, though. A little zombie ice fishing.

Just sayin.

Julian Barnes

Levels of Life
by Julian Barnes
Random House, 2013

Early in life, Barnes writes, the world divides crudely into those who have had sex and those who haven’t. Later, into those who have known love, and those who haven’t. Later still — at least, if we are lucky (or, on the other hand, unlucky) — it divides into those who have endured grief, and those who haven’t. These divisions are absolute; they are tropics we cross.

He also writes, “There is the question of loneliness.” Then a few sentences later, “Nothing can compare to the loneliness of the soul in adolescence.”

Together, these quotations seem to beg the question, Is loss of a spouse like a return to adolescent confusion?

Yet, he is unambiguous. Adolescent loneliness is the worst.

Before I address this question, I should say something about the book as a whole. It is slim, a mere 118 pages. A quick read, it is divided into three sections. Ostensibly, it is about grief; specifically, it is about Barnes’ grief for his wife of 30 years who died in 2008, after a 37 day illness. Cancer in the brain.

But to say the book is a memoir would be mistaken. It is part memoir, part essay, part fiction. The three sections are titled: The Sin of Height, On the Level, and The Loss of Depth. Levels of life, as the title says.

The balloon on the cover is another hint. There is a survey of 19th century balloonists, and also 19th century photographers. This is all interesting, well told, precise in description, alert in metaphor, and … all preamble to Barnes’ use of the first person to describe his experiences following the death of his life-partner.

There is the question of grief versus mourning. You can try to differentiate them by saying that grief is a state while mourning is a process; yet they inevitably overlap. Is the state diminishing? Is the process progressing? How to tell? Perhaps it’s easier to think of them metaphorically. Grief is vertical — and vertiginous — while mourning is horizontal.

Me, I like this distinction. Grief has nausea; mourning, sadness.

Let’s get back to the question of adolescence, which Barnes doesn’t develop, but which I would like to push deeper. In my own case, as my wife approached death (and I mean her final months, so there was a period of extended awareness of doom many times longer than Barnes had), I had feeling I hadn’t felt in a long time. When you are living with the awareness of doom, yet trying not to be consumed by doom, you focus on the day-by-day. Watch the flowers grow. Take pleasure in the laundry. The future goes blank. You cannot plan. You cannot take for granted that you will be together six months from now. Maybe not even two months from now. “I’ve been here before,” I told Kate. “I know this feeling. I feel twenty-two again.”

History did not record what she said in response. I don't remember. I don't think she said anything. "Do whatever you need to do, honey," or something along those lines.

The future, then, was blank. Full of possibility, yes, but blank. Lonely, too. One quests for love, to relieve the loneliness. Having found love, one can always lose it. It is part of the marriage contract. One must go first. The marriage contract becomes a caregiver’s contract. I will look after you. I will not abandon you.

Barnes writes, “There were 37 days between diagnosis and death.” In my case, there were 21 months. Grief is not competitive, and I don’t mean to be stern; however, the structure of this book is limiting, where it could be broadening. Barnes is careful to say each grief is specific, each experience is unique, yet the book reaches for general conclusions also. Levels of life.

I was not married for three decades, yet I inherited two step-children (and a new partner in her ex-husband), and the future is blank. Full of possibility. It must be. The children demand it so.  As they should.

At one point, near the end of Kate’s life, I was speaking to a psychologist. She asked me how I was doing. I said I was listening someone compulsively to the music I used to listen to when I was 15 years old. I told her that for some reason I felt it important to reconnect with that adolescent. He had the whole world in front of him. He had all of his options open. I needed to live like that, I said. I needed to be ready for anything, and I trusted my 15-year-old self to get me through it. She was disagreeable. “We’ll see how that goes,” she said. I would like to report now, in that regard, things went just fine. I have been horribly, horribly sad, but I survived adolescence, and I’ll survive this. (At least, until I don’t. Time comes for all of us.)

I would have liked to have seen Barnes develop this line of thought (find arguments that contradict his absolutes), yet he is fanciful and metaphoric, an auteur, and, let it be said, brilliant. Earnest to a fault. Besotted with love. A true hero. Bravo.

I saw him once, at the Harbourfront Reading Series in Toronto. Late-1980s I would guess. It was the slightest of connections, yet I bleed for him, having read of his heartbreak. I wish him happiness, and healing laughter.

Keep passing the open windows, Julian. You know what I mean.

Primo Levi

Already a well known classic, this book needs no introduction.

Primo Levi trained as a chemist in Fascist Italy, and managed moments of a career despite his Jewish ethnicity before being removed to a Nazi concentration camp. He has written about his time at Auschwitz elsewhere, but this book includes a couple stories from the camp also.

The main narrative, however, recounts his professional career as a chemist, most of which involves paints and varnishes. As the title hints, Levi provides a tour of different elements: carbon, silver, mercury, lead, etc. "Matter," he reminds us, the building blocks of life, which in the ancient stories the gods breathes with "spirit," giving life.

As so it is with Levi, storyteller. He breathes life into the inanimate, rejoices in the human spirit, even as he reminds readers of the horrors humans can inflict on one another and their world.

Levi writes in an after-the-catastrophe tone. He is writing at the end of his career, and also decades after "the camp," and he presents a narrator both weary and alert with curiosity. The narrator takes a teaching tone, recounting the particulars of each element, but not a pedantic tone. He knows what he knows and he also outlines what is unknown. There is a persistent moderation, recalling that other scientist, Artistotle, and "the mean."

It's a tone our tabloid culture finds hard to replicate or embrace, even. What a pity.

Auster & Coetzee

When I was reading this, I found it compelling. I wanted to keep going, find out how it "ended," but it (of course) never really ended. It just ended. It had, a la Julian Barnes, the sense of an ending.

As I was reading it, I liked it. Upon reflection, not so much.

My disappointments outnumber my pleasure points. As such, dear book, I think we should break up. It's probably me, not you, but this is a review of you.

Thus, I had admiration for each of these authors before I read their correspondence, yet my admiration for them is diminished, not amplified, by seeing them all up close and personal.

Why so much discussion of sports? Why so clueless about the 2008 economic collapse? Why so little disagreement or pressing of the other into greater unknowns?

I wish now to read a similar correspondence between Carver and Bartheme, or Didion and Sontag. Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney. The genre has possibilities that have been only faintly outlined here.

Coetzee plays the pessimist to Auster's optimist. This gives them a point of conflict but it's also cliche. Auster is the bubbling American, ever hopeful, and Coetzee is old-world rogue, confirmed in his near-cynicism by perpetual disaster.

These tropes play to neither author's advantage. Ultimately I felt that too many opportunities of interest were lost. Coetzee is reflecting on mortality (his own) and "late style". He makes some general observations and Auster offers a series of examples that contradict Coetzee's drift, but the topic is not run to ground.

This book is superficial! That is my conclusion, though it surprises me to say so. Neither of these men is superficial, and their work is full of complexity, but I wanted more from their interaction.

It just is what it is. Play it again, Lenny Bruce.

Pause

I am going to officially pause this blog for an indefinite period.

I have done a couple of posts since this past May, when my wife died.

I've tried to stay connected to some essential part of me that enables me to read and write, to critique, but I think the writing I need to do right now is not for public consumption.

I don't know how else to say it, because it seems as simple as that.

I'll be back here, I believe. Eventually.

Mo Yan

Congratulations to Mo Yan for winning the Nobel for literature, 2012.

I saw this writer once at the Toronto Reference Library and mentioned him in a 2009 blog post here about Richard Van Camp, connecting Mo, Richard and William Faulkner.

I saw Richard talk about his writing once, at a First Nations cultural festival at Harbourfront in Toronto, and he spoke about the stress of modernity on Aboriginal communities in the north. His stories attempted to capture that. I told him afterwards that I had seen Mo Yan say something similar about his work. It was about capturing the stress of modernity on rural communities in China. Yan had said he had learned to write about that partly from William Faulkner.

Strange connections? Not at all.

When I saw Yan, he didn't read. He didn't speak English. He was interviewed by translator. He spoke about how the Communist government allowed him to publish his novels while also requiring him to write detective drama for television. His novels sold in the multi-millions, but mostly in pirated copies. He shrugged.

So it goes, as Vonnegut would have said. Did say.

It's a moment I will never forget. Here was a guy writing with a market audience, but without a market payoff. Writing detective dramas for TV, not because his novels didn't sell, but because he was given no alternative. His novels sold, but he didn't reap the profit.

What's to say, except good job Nobel Committee, but don't jinx the guy.

Hemingway kept a couple of novels in draft in a vault in Havana, I once read. Because he didn't want to sell them because they could be sold. He wanted to be sure that they were good. Wanted them to rest and test the tides of time.

Compare and contrast with J.K. Rowling.






I have the above newspaper headline clipped to the wall above my desk.

Every time I read that I shudder.

How much larger could you get?

So, Mo, resist the urge to go for the gold. Resist the urge to be all Nobelesque.

Stay in the groove, man. Just, go.

A summer of reading

I started the summer of 2012 by reading Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

These were the first two books I read following my wife's death from breast cancer in May.

I wrote an essay about "returning to reading," and it was published by the literary blog Numero Cinq in July.

Other books I read over the summer:
- Off Book by Mark Sampson
- Hamlet by Shakespeare
- Fathers and Sons by Turgenev
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- Flaubert in Egypt by Gustave Flaubert
- The Victim by Saul Bellow
- Widower's House: A Study in Bereavement (or how Margot and Mella forced me to flee my home) by John Bayley

I'm also poking my way through:
- A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain
- Essays and Aphorisms by Arthur Schopenhaur
- Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert
- This Side Jordan by Margaret Laurence
- Saints of Big Harbour by Lynn Coady
- Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Long, Last, Happy by Barry Hannah

Do you see a pattern? I don't see a pattern.

Some of these books are works I've "meant to get to" and now find myself seeking out. Some I've picked up in used book shops. Others have been on a shelf in my house, ignored.

There's a lot of ribald reveling in the oddity of humanity in the above, but there's also some earthy earnestness.

I found in Turgenev cynicism that was starkly contemporary, and in Huck Finn's Mississippi adventure a freakishness consistent with the current U.S. election cycle.

I felt Hamlet's pain as my own, and, like Sampson's protagonist, remembered how wild and liberating the internet seemed in the 1990s.

Bellow's early novel contains both his trademark singing souls and bureaucratic absurdity of a Beckettean order.

But Flaubert in Egypt? Twain in Germany? Alien and eccentric. The diversity of human weirdness is duly noted.

Schopenhaur? I read the first paragraph and laughed. Likely not what he intended, but there is a dark humour there that I've seen before and like. I went to Schopenhaur after reading The Pugilist at Rest by Thom Jones. Schopenhaur is referenced throughout that book, and I was curious for more. The introduction compares Schopenhaur to "our own great pessimist" (Shakespeare), and I hadn't thought of the Bard that way before. I'd thought of him as a poet of chaos (like Bob Dylan). But pessimist? Hmm.

A Sentimental Education I'm drawn to, I think, because it's other worldly. Most of my life I've felt more akin with 20th century literature and not much desire about the 19th century so-called masters. But this summer that has changed. The contemporary has become fraught and I want to read the back catalog.

Early Margaret Laurence, set in Africa. Curious. Barry Hannah, the selected. Wild and wonderful. Lynn Coady just because I haven't got around to that one yet.

I started my essay on Woolf and Beckett without a voice, or with the most meager of voices, and with the faintest of ears. I was only getting one frequency, and I couldn't make out the full signal.

I can hear more now. I can speak more now. But the world is different. There has been a break from the past that will never heal.  Beauty, however, remains, and much else. A deeper recognition of the mixed-up-ness of everything. A recognition that there is no resolution, no end to the storytelling.

The mighty river of literature just rolls on and on.