Category Archives: Fiction

December 22, 2023 · 4:08 pm

Home: Slow and beautiful

I have tried a couple of times to read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead but each time gave up with boredom (despite it being routinely included on best-of-all-time lists). So what made me think I’d fine the second book set in the town of Gilead and focused on religion to be more captivating, I’m not sure. But I was! More captivated that is. Still not going to run away with any prizes for being enthralling or Utterly Engrossing, but definitely a winner here in the slow burn of character development and theme.

The book follows Jack and Glory, siblings returned home to care for their dying father – a retired minister. I guess Jack didn’t really come home to care for him, or Glory either, both sort of find their lives falling apart and return home, conveniently to care for the dying dad. For Jack it’s a return after a long exile/absence and for his father this is something of a chance to redeem Jack (who’s soul he has been Very Worried About).

Unfolding over many scenes of making tea, or standing in a garden, or rocking on a porch bench, Glory and Jack reconnect and cautiously share and build trust. It asks readers to figure out where the limit of familial bond might be, how we carry/negotiate/give up/fail/rebuild familial expectations, and when – if ever – we might be allowed to start our lives again when they Go Wrong.

If you are tired, sleepy, exhausted, even a bit likely to doze, I’d say make this a Morning Book as you will almost certainly fall asleep within a paragraph as the lyrical writing and slowwww pace are very… lulling. But if you’ve got your 8 hours and a cup of coffee, you could do much worse for a book to read and contemplate What It All Means.

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Filed under American literature, Book I'll Forget I Read, Fiction, National Book Award, Orange Prize, Prize Winner

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December 14, 2023 · 7:16 pm

What Strange Paradise

I had such resolve to blog this one quickly because I had thoughts on the ending, but December, man, is just too much between gastro illnesses and parades and who’s turn is it for the chocolate calendar.

Onwards we go, regrets about time aside: Omar El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise oscillates its chapters between two perspectives one of the young boy Amir, who is the sole survivor of a shipwrecked group of refugees, and of Vänna, a girl on the Greek island where Amir washes ashore. Vanna is doing her best to help Amir – for reasons that aren’t exactly obvious other than perhaps young people, not yet made assholes by the world, are better able to empathize and respond to the vulnerability and need.

At a time of year where the Christmas story surrounds – that of a refugee taken in with hospitality and care etc – and while the world heaves with displaced, erased, violently taken humans it is hard to read this one and probably necessary (maybe why it was in the short list for Canada Reads?).

And if this book is a reminder of why we read fiction – to be in this space of empathetic connection both with those running and those who feel overrun – it is also for its speculative possibilities. The end of the book calls us to question not only what has happened in the preceding pages, but also if and when. With the alternating chapters those of ‘before’ and ‘after’ our final chapter is ‘now.’ In that final chapter the reader can read into the ending multiple paths of possibility at once – those of hope and loss simultaneously. Wanting a satisfying conclusion you could join the thousands of others who have googled “what does the ending of What Strange Paradise mean, or you could, I suppose, approach it as a question of what you do now to shape that and the broader ending.

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November 21, 2023 · 2:50 am

The Invisible Life of Addie Le Rue: Improbable, Excessive Adjectives and Many Smoky Eyes

People on Goodreads really like V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie Le Rue and so do all the readers that kept it on the bestseller list for ages. I do not. Heretic!

Sure it has some of the vibes of The Time Travellers Wife (which against my better judgement I loved) and a little bit of The Shadow of the Wind in that the devil features alongside used bookshops, but despite these cousins in delightful bath reads, this one is a dud.

Following Addie Le Rue after she makes an ill-advised deal with the devil for “freedom” but finds herself cursed to live forever without ever being remembered by anyone (making it impossible to do all sorts of practical things like earn money or have an apartment or write things down – all these petty annoyances catalogued over hundreds of dull pages), the novel is something of a romance when Addie meets the also-cursed Henry and falls in love (Henry’s curse is for anyone who meets him to fall in love with him – which doesn’t sound so bad if you ask me). Then we have to spend several hundred pages attentive to whether Addie will find a way to convince the devil who BY THE WAY has become her lover over the past three hundred years (which doesn’t seem nearly long enough for the eternal being of the dark, but quibbles) to let Henry go.

No, the most annoying part? Like all these sorts of epics – let’s call The Hundred Year Old Man syndrome – Addie finds herself in altogether too many improbable historically significant moments and meeting altogether too many historically significant people. I mean she’s only three hundred years old. There aren’t that many wars and revolutions and discoveries and Moments in 300 years and yet she finds herself in the middle of all of them. Literally hanging out at the cafes with Voltaire and then watching Franz Ferdinand get shot – though strangely quiet all through the Depression.

I know this is not a book premised on being believable, and surely there has to be a way to keep a reader engaged through 300 borning years of history that are otherwise just her waiting for her annual date with the devil and for her eventual meeting with Henry. But – stick with me – let me suggest then that this would be much better rewritten as a short story, or maybe a 200 page novel with a couple of choice historical scenes. As it is… bloated and boring.

And this reader wanted to like it for its faintly feminist whisper at the outset of a 17th century woman not wanting to marry and have children. But the of course, we couldn’t have this be a Good Romance without having her give it all up three hundred years later for a man – with bewitching green eyes and rumpled bedsheets. GROSS. (not that I have anything against green eyes, per se, but you get what I mean).

Oh – final point of complaint. It is the kind of writing that finds the only way to describe something is to describe it with three adjectives – always. Like the air is always moist, dank and dreary. And Henry is always charming, witty and kind. Enough!

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September 15, 2023 · 2:42 am

Real Life: It’s (not) fine.

Brandon Taylor’s Real Life follows Wallace as he tries to decide whether to stay – in life, in his graduate program, in relationships – and while he wanders grief for his dead father. A grief that lurks but that Wallace insists – over and over – is fine. It’s all fine. And while I’m still not sure what Wallace wants (out of life, out of his sexual/friendship/relationship with Miller, from his friends) or that Wallace knows.

What Wallace does know is that being a gay, black man (the first black graduate student in something like thirty years in his program) is an exercise in indignities – the small and the grotesque – and that each time he waits for his white friends to Do Something and they Do Not he is never surprised, but again disappointed.

Taking place over the course of a weekend, the narrative packs in so much in the compressed time, a case study of ‘show don’t tell’ where we learn so much from the small and subtle moments, and come to want for Wallace anything other than where he is, but like him, can also hardly imagine what else he will do.

It is beautiful, wrenching writing. And maybe a little bit hopeful in the way it imagines that maybe friendship and connection can improve (not just improve something for Wallace, but just as a thing-itself improve).

And yet novels have no obligation to be uplifting (this is not a kid’s climate change book that ends with how you can help the planet! in! five! easy! steps!). It isn’t fine. None of it is fine. Except maybe the novel itself, which is excellent.

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