Category Archives: Book I’ll Forget I Read

August 10, 2014 · 5:06 pm

Six Books; Seven Days: The Vacation Edition

                                     If you asked my mum I spent the entire cottage week reading and avoiding conversations about weddings, houses and jobs. To be fair I *did* avoid those conversations, but I didn’t spend the *entire* week reading. I also played a lot of hearts, chess, ticket to ride and euchre; made dinner; paddled a canoe and cuddled my nephews (though the photographic evidence suggests I did a fair bit of this cuddling while also reading). 

I should probably blog each book individually, but instead I’ll give you the highlights reel. Thanks to those who made suggestions in advance of cottage week, most of the reads here are terrific and well worth seeking out. So, in the order that I read them (and so with descending memory of what they’re about):

The Cat’s Table – Michael Ondaatje

Basic Plot: Young boy sent on his own on a three week sea voyage; meets other kids; woven passages of how the boat trip does (and does not) influence his later life. Highlights: Ondaatje does so much well here – sweet slices of poetry, characterization, atmosphere and mood. It’s a novel that takes a “small” story (a slice of one man’s life; a trip) and makes it resonate with large themes and a wide audience. Gripes/Grievances: The climax didn’t feel sufficient, not an anti-climax, but a sort of “oh, that’s it?” and a wish that it was more. Overall: Beautifully written; not my favourite plot.

Salvage the Bones  – Jesmyn Ward

Basic Plot: Never a good sign that I had to flip through the book to remember what it was about. But then it all comes back: poor family in the lead up to Hurricane Katrina; the kids in the family are (on the surface) trying to raise pit-bull puppies (to sell; to fight) and trying to conceal a pregnancy; the father in the family tries to prepare the house/kids for the coming storm. Highlights: The scenes during the storm itself are gripping, tense and well written. Gripes/grievances: The plot reads a bit “out of time and place” in that its hard to imagine (though maybe this is the point?) this family existing. But they do and their suffering reads as real and poignant. Overall: I could have done with less time obsessing over the puppies. 

Tenth of December – George Saunders

Loathe as I am to admit it: this collection moved me. Like my experience of all short story collections, I struggle to recall exact plots of the stories (though the story of the experimental drug testing and the other about the human garden gnomes linger), the overall impression of the collection is fresh: fresh narrative voices, images, plots and characters. The whole thing reads like a genius writer from the future has arrived in our present to share how writing will be: imaginative, funny, poignant and challenging. I know I’m late to the bandwagon (and that I’m hardly credible when it comes to recommending short story collections): but go get this one. It’s really, really great.

The Good Lord Bird – James McBride 

Basic Plot: Henry Shackledford (Henrietta aka “Onion”) narrates his history disguised as a girl in the company of abolitionist John Brown as he (Brown) campaigns for the end of slavery. Highlights: I suppose it was getting a sense of this aspect of American history – the raid on Harpers Ferry contributing to the beginning of the Civil War. Gripes: I just didn’t like Henrietta/Henry. At all. I found the character to be annoying, so my patience with the plot stretched. On the plot it was ploddingly paced, overburdened with description and scenes that didn’t add to character. Hard to pinpoint larger thematic questions: just seemed to be a straight-up retelling of history. Overall: It’s rare that I don’t like something N. recommends, but this one fell a bit flat. Sorry, N.

Defending Jacob  – William Landy

It’s probably a rule that you can’t go to the cottage without reading at least one pulp mystery novel. And so I did. I intended to read the first in the series by Mo Hayder (on the suggestion of A.), but couldn’t get a copy from the library (I’m now halfway through a copy – stay tuned!), so settled for this one brought to the cottage by mum. Basic Plot: District Attorney’s son is the prime suspect in the murder of another teenager. DA has to defend his son. Highlights: Pages turned quickly. Gripes: The ending  – promised by the front cover to “chill and thrill” was… disappointing. Not that I saw it coming (surprise!) but that it wasn’t a satisfying outcome to the moral questions the plot tried to ask (a much, much better answer to these questions can be found in the brilliant *We Need to Talk About Kevin*). Overall: I’m enjoying the Mo Hayder so much more. But if you’re stuck on a plane, or holding a sleeping nephew, it does make the time go by quickly.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane – Neil Gaiman

I love the way Neil Gaiman writes about the importance of reading and libraries. I love the idea of loving Neil Gaiman. And I did like The Ocean at the End of the Lane well enough because I love reading about other people who forget all of the things that they ought to remember. But I just don’t *swoon* the way others seem to over this book. Anyway, Basic Plot: boy returns to childhood home and remembers magical/fantastical experience when  otherwordly things wreak havoc, saved by neighbour girl, has remembered/forgotten the experience before. Highlights: I have a terrible memory; it’s comforting to be reminded that our memories alone can be tricked with, played with and held in other places by other people. Gripes: Slow getting going. I worried about the kitten. 

 

So there it is. The cottage week is done for 2014. I’m now returned to conversations on weddings, houses and jobs. Routines of work, play and reading in the bath with wine. I’m still very open to book suggestions – though be warned that the next six weeks rival that time I moved across the country, started a new job, ran a marathon and co-chaired a conference all at once. So send me gentle reading suggestions. Or free books. Or hugs. 

 

 

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Filed under American literature, Bestseller, Book Club, Book I'll Forget I Read, Canadian Literature, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Mystery, Prize Winner, Short Stories

July 6, 2014 · 5:09 pm

Look at Me: Conceptually rich; Practically dull

We’re fat, we’re image obsessed and we hate ourselves. The irony at the heart of Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me is that we’re all so busy looking at ourselves and imagining other people looking at us that no one is properly seeing anyone. Obsessions with image and identity collapse under the surfaces, glosses, mirrors and refractions that reveal nothing but continued obfuscation. Impermeable even to – or especially to – themselves, the characters in Egan’s novel complete Odyessian searches (complete with siren calls and tortured transformations) for a core sense of self that might anchor their choices and relationships. 

Central to the plot is the New York fashion model Charlotte’s experience of radical physical transformation: after a car accident, her face is reconstructed to such a degree she goes unrecognized by her friends, coworkers, lovers and family. In this way Charlotte enacts the fantasy of beginning again, the chance to re-form an identity without the cumbersome logistics of fleeing to a far off island or buying a fancy car. What she discovers – as do the supporting characters who experience their own sorts of attempts at beginning again and reforming past selves (both in the sense of forming anew and correcting for poor behaviour) – is that without exteriority, the recognition of others, the self-itself collapses: to be unrecognized is to cease to be. In place of “I think therefore I am,” Look at Me posits: “I’m seen, therefore I am.”

While there’s a conceptually rich idea here the pace of the novel and the complexity of the characters and their interaction fall under the weight of the premise. Too busy insisting that the reader “get” this message, the novel misses opportunities to look at many possible layers of spectacle. There are passing nods to the way gender and class shape the way we are viewed, and a fuller exploration of racial politics in the character of Z. Z, we learn, is a would-be terrorist on a mission to destroy the image-obsessed America and who carries out his mission by trying on identities as one tries on bathing suits: not effortlessly or enjoyably, but with a sense of purpose (note the book was written pre-9/11). Yet these treatments feel – perhaps appropriately – cursory and surface, throw-away lines rather than meaningful dialogue. 

Which is not to say it’s an arduous slog. Egan writes genius sentences of arresting beauty (I suppose there’s another irony to be found in the lushness of writing that demands the reader stop and re-read (look again) at the marvel of its beauty) and there is enough interest in how the wayward characters will all meet in climactic wonder. Interest, too, in the prescience of Egan who seemed to anticipate both 9/11 and Facebook in one masterful rendering.

All the same it was decidedly not the perfection of A Visit From the Goon Squad, but it is certainly a great book to teach about performativity and metaphor. And the advantageous of a good moisturizing regime. And the perils of binge drinking. And strangers. Except for Egan, we’re all strangers: most particularly to ourselves.

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April 11, 2014 · 1:18 pm

Vernon God Little: What we avoid

There’s no question DBC Pierre’s first novel, Vernon God Little, is an excellent piece of fiction. The book takes a school shooting in Texas (is it Texas? Somewhere near Mexico, anyway) and explores the community reaction to the event – spectacle, denial, scapegoating – through the darkly comedic story of Vernon, falsely accused and prosecuted for the crime. The first person narrator of Vernon is masterfully represented in his fixation on shit and young women, as well as use of diction, phrasing, pace and image that moves past conjuring a character to allow the reader to fully accept and inhabit him (if not identify with – a problem to come to). The narration also does well to explore his complicated feelings around the massacre, the (failure) of adults to take responsibility or engage with grief, his expectations of justice and the justice system and his attempts to reform himself and his relationship with others.

Despite the brilliant narration and the timely thematic questions (what is the role of the press in perpetuating/perpetrating crimes? how does collective culture sublimate grief? how do we understand and make sense of the senseless? what are the effects of poverty on access to justice?) I read this book knowing it was great, but feeling at a remove. If literature is great because (and if) it can allow (or require) the reader to adopt different perspectives, to explore experiences unavailable in lived experience AND because it is masterfully constructed in literary technique, Vernon God Little shines in the latter and wavers in the former.

I should say this book sat on my shelf at work for eleven months before I finally read it. And not because I lacked time or opportunity. I tried reading it twice before. It wasn’t until I’d forgotten my book at home and it was a choice between no novel (a gasp of impossibility) or Vernon God Little that I gave it sufficient time (the 60 minutes of my lunch break) to get invested enough to read the whole thing. It wasn’t a novel that grabbed me. Is it that the first person narrator repulsed me a little? Maybe. (and maybe he’s meant to) It’s not that the experiences in the book are too far removed for me to care about – all kinds of my favourite books are those that I love precisely for their ability to take a seemingly distant experience and make it relevant and poignant for me and to let me see my world and relationship to it differently – it seems more the case that Pierre didn’t do enough to make these foreign experiences connected to this reader. There wasn’t opportunity for empathy, or even sympathy, no chance for identification or care.

So I read the book with a respect for the writing, an understanding that it was an important topic and explored with great literary skill. And yet I found myself unmoved and unchanged in its reading. Uninterested in what becomes of Vernon. Is that a problem of this reader or of the book? You read it and tell me what you think.

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March 14, 2014 · 12:57 pm

All the Broken Things: Seeing

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s All the Broken Things centres around the bildungsroman story of Bo, a boy who wrestles bears  and other boys, cares for his sister (Orange) and mother and navigates Vietnamese, refugee identities in 1970s Canada. Bo’s coming of age is as much about coming into his own sense of self as it is (and perhaps this is always the case in this genre) coming to understand that the people around him are as complex and flawed as he is.

As the title suggests, the novel is occupied with exploring questions around what/who is broken and whether these broken things and people need and want fixing, and also, whether such repair is ever possible. These questions get taken up in by the character of Teacher who attempts, over and over, to atone for her involvement in the production of Agent Orange by “saving” Bo and his family (in a somewhat heavy-handed move, Teacher works with a Church organization so that the ‘saving’ is as much about providing material shelter as it is rescuing of souls). At one point Bo remarks on Teacher’s efforts, noting that her attempts shame him – not in the actual acts, but in the idea that what is broken ought to be, or can be, fixed.

The relationship mirrors others in the novel – a classmate, Emily – in the paternalism of the white Canadian rescuing the refugee from his trauma and poverty. It is refreshing then, to find a character like Max – the owner of a carnival freakshow interested in employing Bo as a bear-fighter – who (at first, at least) nakedly exploits Bo. The reader finds this exploitation oddly refreshing as it’s not couched or obscured by rhetoric of benevolence and rescue. The ideas of rescue get further complicated in the relationship between Bo and Bear as the needs of the two and the reliance of each on the other explore exploitation and power in human-animal relationships.

Much like the heavy-handedness of Teachers allegiance with the Church, the metaphors in the novel feel a bit heavy: Bo’s fear of water; the parallels between Bear and Orange; the demand that Orange be kept hidden, inside. These are metaphors that get, at times, overplayed in ways that made this reader feel less inclined to think carefully about their meaning. It’s as if the predictable arrival of a water/drowning metaphor that in some ways exonerates the reader from having to think too carefully about the implications and effects of the metaphor because it gets recognized as “the water metaphor” instead of the thing it is meant to be signifying (helplessness, loneliness). This heaviness comes about in part, I think, from overuse and from a sort of ponderous, solemic introduction of the metaphor, a quiet-on-the-set feel that interrupts, rather than deepens.

The one metaphorical space that I did feel compelled by was the carnival. The layering of spectacle, the ideas of who watches and who is seen, the confusion of expectations/reality of what we think we see and how the object of our viewing sees her/him/itself gets exploded and refracted in exciting and unsettling ways.

In the Author’s Note that precedes the novel the reader is alerted that the most “fantastical” moments in the novel are those that are “really true” – the production of Agent Orange in Elimra, Ontario; the freak-shows at the CNE until the late 70s; bear-wrestling. In an odd parallel to the  “Believe it or Not” rhetoric of the freak-show/carnvial itself, the author’s note serve as an (uncomfortable) call to the reader to be amazed (and entertained?) by the spectacle of historical fiction. While it’s clear from the narration and characterization of Bo that we are not, in fact, meant to be entertained by the history so much as troubled and unsettled, the Author’s Note in juxtaposition to the carnival metaphor/theme did, for me at least, raise questions about the spectacle – see history different! – elements of historical fiction that I had not considered before.

All this to say it’s a provocative novel with a rich exploration of Canadian history, individual identity, human-animal relationships and how we see/do not see, fix/do not fix those we imagine to be “broken.”

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