Category Archives: Prize Winner

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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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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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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September 15, 2023 · 2:22 am

Lucy By the Sea (and My Name is Lucy Barton)

I had brunch with S. recently where she reminded me of the amazing-ness of Elizabeth Strout. So I promptly ordered My Name is Lucy Barton and Lucy by the Sea. In no small part because of my own L. Minor hiccup about 2/3rds into My Name is Lucy Barton when I realized I’d already read it, but no matter, it was a good refresher before Lucy takes to the sea.

And off she goes at the start of the pandemic and the book is so beautiful. It captures painfully and brilliantly the uncertainty of March and April 2020 for rich people living in North America. The dread and loss and fear. Reading it knowing how the course of the pandemic runs (and runs) it takes an extra sort of writerly magic to find a way to suspend that knowledge for the reader – to bring right back the ways time folded and expanded, compressed and ballooned.

I did find some of the writing grating – don’t get me wrong: extremely beautiful – but also the short sentences and declaration of feelings or thoughts just a bit much. Maybe only because I read the two so closely together that Lucy became a claustrophobic mind to occupy (though again it’s probably a credit to Strout that we so fully occupy Lucy’s perspective).

Anyway, it’s a fast, beautiful read, if you’re ready to revisit those days.

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