Category Archives: Fiction

July 3, 2012 · 8:57 pm

The Knife of Never Letting Go: This is Why I Blog

      I blog because of my (absent) memory. My ability to read a book, enjoy a book and immediately forget the plot is honed and practiced. Case and point: I finished reading The Knife of Never Letting Go last week. IknowI liked it because I messaged S. who recommended it to me to say I liked it, but do you think when I sat down to write this review I could remember what I liked about it or why I enjoyed it? Nope. Zip. I couldn’t even recall the plot without turning to wikipedia for a reminder. It’s a sorry state of affairs up in my brain.

What I do remember liking – on jogging my memory by way of Wikipedia – is a plot that is neither so implausible as to be entirely fantastic nor so realistic as to be realism. The integration of fantasy elements succeeds in defamiliarizing the real in such a way as to encourage the reader to ask questions about social interactions, use of the environment and those truths we believe to be “self-evident.” The thrust of the plot has our protagonist – Todd Hewitt – drastically reconsidering all he felt to be true about his community’s history, politics and way of life. He’s made to question authority figures, familial trust and received wisdom as he repeatedly encounters evidence that those he trusted lied to him. It’s a masterful plot in paralleling what any young person must encounter as they realize that adults lie and that promises made to children (you can be anything you want to be) are in not mendacious they are at least false.

His companion, Viola, is a charmer too, and I’d like to see her narrative point of view introduced in later books to balance out her character and make her less of an accessory and more of an actor in her own right. Personal preference, maybe.

I liked the fight sense, the quest narrative and the climax. Less settled with the conclusion of the text and the requirement for later installments. I’m a firm believer that a book – even one in a series – should be a selfcontained unit.

So there you go. I’ll likely read the next in the series, but I can’t say it was a memorable read (though admittedly this is more my fault than that of the text…).

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June 18, 2012 · 10:41 pm

The Darren Effect – Really great

      What an unexpected pleasure in finding Libby Creelman’s -The Darren Effect. My brother, I., got it for me for Christmas in a stack of other books – 20 odd or so (I think I may have blogged about the stack already as I’ve slowly been making my way through his selections). In any event, the whole stack has its own shelf and so this time, without reading the back or deliberating on a title, I randomly stuck out my arm and picked a book. And boy was my intuitive snatch rewarded. -The Darren Effect- is smart, funny, challenging, engaging and altogether too unknown for this reader to be satisfied.

The book is set in Newfoundland, follows a small network of people as they navigate falling in love, falling into depression, dying, forgiveness and regret. The shifting third person limited narrators – but usually Heather – are open, honest and uncomfortably familiar. A small town heartbreak, a family drama, but without the kinds of cliches you’d expect and without the saccharine writing you’d find annoying. Just simple, sweet, beautiful and totally engulfing. I read the whole thing on the flight from Vancouver to Montreal and am feeling the delicious hangover of a well-spent read.

Recommend! And recommend it to someone you know. I’m a little embarassed that this hasn’t been on my Can Lit radar, but then maybe I’m also just glad to have been so pleasantly surprised. (Thanks, I.)

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June 16, 2012 · 12:17 am

A Man Melting: I Really Liked This One, But I Still Don’t Like Short Stories

       Everything I knew about New Zealand up until reading -A Man Melting- I knew by way of N. and L. (and The Lord of the Rings). Things I gleaned from these dear friends: flip-flops are jandles and sweaters are jerseys, voting for your favourite bird is Very Important, singing the anthem in Maori for the Zealandish is more important than singing the anthem in French for Canadians, Wellington is windy, the method of electing ministers to parliament is much more civil and rational than in Canada, there are mountains and ocean, exports include sheep and fish, there were some gold rushes, the New Zealand rugby team is a Big Deal, N. wore a uniform to school and might have been the Prefect (I hope he was), cookbooks are better in NZ than here, eggplants are aubergines, walls accrue mould because it is Damp, it is preferable to say “dodgy” and (my favourite) “heaps” than the Canadian “sketchy” and “lots.”

After reading Craig Cliff’s -A Man Melting- I can now report on similarities between Canada and NZ: a certain colonial defensiveness re: America that is manifested in a quiet insistence that Things Are Different Here, an admission that many people are from elsewhere (but dammit we’re still unique) and the all out angst of the 20 something hipster/suburban youth.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed -A Man Melting- and its take on the challenges of figuring out who you are, what you want, what makes you special, what you’re meant to do with your life: these are the questions that preoccupy me (that is, *cough* when I actually stop to think about them) and I expect preoccupy many of my fellows in my cohort. And for the most part Cliff gives fresh, imaginative and inspiring explorations of these questions. Hilarious plot events, unsuspecting character voices, interweaving thematic questions about heredity, aspiration and failure.

I suppose my complaint is one I hold for most (if not all) short story collections and that is that I wish it was a novel. This is entirely my prejudice (and very likely the outcome of a terrible memory that cannot hold disparate plot lines long enough in my head to connect them) and so shouldn’t be read as discouragement for picking up -A Man Melting-. On the contrary the collection offers some zinger sentences of exceptional originality and beauty and some thoughtful character studies. But I was, on the whole, rather disappointed (as I always am) that these characters were so swiftly introduced and then denied me. So hear this, Mr. Cliff, write me a novel, okay? Because you’re one bang up writer with heaps of talent.

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June 12, 2012 · 10:02 pm

The Orphan Master’s Son: Choose Your Own Identity

       So there are a few people who suggest books to me and I immediate go and get the book. Actually only two – my mum and N. And this isn’t because I play recommendation favourites, but more because these two a) consistently take MY recommendations (so it’s a selfish thing, really) b) consistently suggest books that I find fascinating c) happily talk about the book with me when I’m done reading it

In any case, I read The Orphan Master’s Son on the recommendation of my mum. She suggested I’d enjoy it because of its introduction to North Korea. Yeah, stop and ask yourself: what do you know about North Korea? If your answer is “axis of evil” and nothing else, then I can’t urge you strongly enough to pick up this book. While written by an American, the book provides what I think (and granted this is an extremely limited thought given how little I *do* know about North Korea) is a thoughtful introduction to North Korean history and the current political climate in the country. An introduction that covers everything from naming practices, to economic policies, to familial and international relations, to marriage practices and forced labour camps/prisons.

This introduction is accomplished by following the chameleon character Commander Ga/Pak Jun Do as he navigates the worlds of North Korean society. His shifting identity – routinely created and recreated – focuses the thematic interest of the novel: what makes us the people we are? The novel makes a case that identity is something as simple as a chosen declaration: you are Commander Ga, or something as complex as the assembled memories of a person, written down in biography and stashed on a forgotten shelf. The questions of how we determine who we are, how others decide who we are, and how we will remember/retain identity in a world of shifting expectations makes this a novel much more complicated that a simple introduction to NK. 

That said, the novel really only has this one thematic focus and for better or worse (I think for worse) the narrative makes really, really sure that you know that this is the thematic interest. Some passages explicitly calling out: I changed my name and changed my identity. More frustrating is the predictability (to some extent) of plot events given the thematic interest. And while the theme is attacked with some complexity and some nuance, the narrative as a whole lacks a certain depth because it is only (thematically) about identity, and misses opportunities to be asking other kinds of questions.

Is this a minor quibble? I’m not sure. I think so, because on the whole the richness of the setting, the complexity of the narration – switching narrative voices require some dexterity on the part of the reader, but great reward too as the layers of the plot are unpeeled – and the fascinating exploration of North Korea far outweigh any gripes about heavy-handed theme. And it’s not even heavy-handed (all the time) so much as it is overdetermined. Yeah, that’s my beef.


(If I was marking a first year essay right now I’d tell myself that I’ve just arrived at the thesis of this blog post and that I should go back to the introduction and revise, but I’m not, and I’m not.)

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