Category Archives: Prize Winner

February 24, 2025 · 3:09 am

The Wren, the Wren: It might be brilliant; it might be boring

Honestly? I’m not sure. There were moments reading Anne Enright’s The Wren, the Wren that I was convinced it was genius. Sublime writing that catches you and holds you. Simple thematic question – what do we owe our inheritance, what do we blame the fathers and men. Rich, rich, imagery and poetry and playful form.

And then moments where I just didn’t care very much what happened to the characters, or couldn’t remember who a character was talking to or why, or whether an image was meant to be Significant or whether it was just there to prove the great writing.

I could let it percolate another few days and maybe I’d be clearer. But I think if I do the likelihood I forget the book entirely is high. There’s just not much there to hang on to; instead, a lot of imagery, a lot of certainty it is Very Beautiful Writing.

So sure – it won the Booker, and – as I Keep On Saying – it’s quite beautiful. And there are scenes I think might haunt me. But would I recommend it? Goddddd. I just don’t know.

Leave a comment

Filed under Booker Prize, Fiction

Tagged as , , ,

February 24, 2025 · 3:02 am

Long Island: Bets on the ending

Put Colm Tóibín’s Long Island in your library cart and you won’t be disappointed when it (eventually) makes it to you (I say eventually because inevitably it will have a wait list as everyone wants to read this one).

*many spoilers ahead*

It’s probably because I’d just finished the Elizabeth Strout, but the style of this one read as similar. Direct, descriptive of character’s thoughts, weighted moments that are not Literary – just excellent, and the interweaving of characters from previous works. Pressed I’d say I liked Strout better, but it would be hard pressed.

Long Island opens with a knock at the door. Eilis opens it to learn that her husband, Tony, has been having an affair. The woman he’s been sleeping with is pregnant, and her husband is at the door to explain that when the baby is born he will be dropping it off with Tony. And for some reason Tony thinks Eilis should go along with this plan. All of Tony’s family seems to think the same. Eilis is not so keen.

So off she goes (home?) to Ireland, bringing her grown children with her. With the unanswered question of whether she’ll return, and if she does return, if she’ll stay with Tony. She makes it seem like it’s his choice – like if he takes in the baby she won’t, and if he doesn’t, she will – but the reader knows (even if Eilis doesn’t) that this will always be her choice. Tony is not a choice maker.

Complications abound when she returns to Ireland. Her mother’s ailing health. Her former flame, Jim Farrel – now engaged to her best friend (but secretly!). Her adult children and what they want and expect from her.

How she can make a choice when so many people Expect So Much of her. What choices are hers, in the end. Well, that is the ending, and it’s a cliff hanger, so buckle up your book club and let everyone have their say.

For me? I want Eilis and Jim together on Long Island. And I want it to be a world where what Eilis wants she can choose. Want, we know, isn’t always get.

Delightful, great writing, absorbing (make it past the first 30 pages) and heart-full. Romance? I don’t know I’d call it that – stop slinging around genre words like you need them. Just read it, ok?

2 Comments

Filed under Book Club, Fiction, Prize Winner

Tagged as , , , ,

January 31, 2025 · 1:09 am

Soldiers and Kings: If you can face non-fiction

Since November I’ve taken a bit of a pause from the news. But I had a problem: years of daily politics coverage on podcasts and newspaper replaced with: what? Surely not my own thoughts. And stipulated that music has its time and place, I’ve always been a talk radio person (for the Canadians in the room think of CBC radio one just quietly droning in the background) So. I turned to non-fiction audiobooks.

Any guys, while my first picked knocked it out of the park in terms of an excellent book, it was – far from – the reprieve from our political moment that I’d half-hoped the exercise might be (though I bear some blame as the title does suggest it may not be the lightest of content). Enter Jason De León’s Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Snuggling.

A cultural anthropologist, De León’s Soldiers and Kings, covers the years De León spent living with and learning from a group of Honduran human smugglers. Over the chapters the book brings the complexity of their lives and choices alongside the crushing structural impossibilities that make their lives what they are.

As the book follows many years we also see how changes to immigration policies, climate catastrophe, and demands on/for labour change – and worsen – the experience of those trying to find safety and to stay there. Which makes it a particularly hard book to read right now and to be reminded – albeit from the privileged distance from which I read – of the concrete lived suffering and death that recent political changes in the US – and the likely changes within Canada – wreak.

It’s beautifully written – with the men De León meets and works alongside full in their complexity and their dreams. While sharing with the reader the contradictions of their livelihood, De León’s manages to at once also describe and analyze the broader social and political context in a way that never reads as pedantic, only as illuminating.

So while it will not be a cheerful read, it is – I think – an important one.

Leave a comment

Filed under New York Times Notable, Non-fiction

January 14, 2025 · 2:16 am

Tell Me Everything: Elizabeth Strout is Not a Unitarian. But could be.

I’ve told so many people recently to read Elizabeth Strout’s Tell Me Everything and I’m desperately anxious that other people won’t love it as much as I did, so if you hated it, or even felt kind of ambivalent about it, just let’s pretend neither of us read it and never talk about it together.

In the universe of Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton this one is a close look at Bob Burgess who cannot see himself clearly. A book about Bob, but a book about how every life – those we know and more those we don’t – has a story (and in that story, matters). And how we try to figure out what a life means (in one heartbreaking and also sideways funny scene Lucy asks Bob exactly that – what does it mean) even when this is a question as pointless as it is pressing.

How Bob saves and doesn’t save – and eats the sins – of all those around him. How he sacrifices what he barely realizes he wants in aid of those around him, knowing, somehow the right thing to do quickly and with exhaustion.

The writing, as always, is this hard-to-explain balance of direct – telling you exactly what a character is thinking, or meaning, or what a thematic moment is “about” – and the evocative – letting a gesture carry the weight of all the possible explanations: Lucy wears odd socks. LUCY WEARS ODD SOCKS.

Take Bob’s wife, Margaret, the Unitarian minister, who only in nearly losing her job realizes the humility with which she must approach the pulpit. And in nearly losing Bob realizes what he needs of her as partner. I loved Margaret for her fullness (all of the characters in these books are full) and the scene that describes her nightgown – which may be the same scene or one adjacent where Bob speculates she is a narcissist – that does this brilliant work of both telling us exactly what is happening and lets it unfold in the scene itself.

(So many Unitarian threads beyond Margaret (meaning in community; community to support individual journey; life is meaningful for the impact we have on others; etc etc and on) I just googled whether Strout is a Unitarian: she is not.)

I’m not sure whether to tell you to start with this one if you’ve not read Strout before, but maybe it doesn’t matter – grab any one of the books and enjoy a universe where the small moments are worthy and your story is, too.

2 Comments

Filed under American literature, Fiction, Prize Winner

Tagged as , , , , , ,