Trapped in a hotel room for a week while at a work function, I couldn’t bring myself to read anything requiring focus or thought (I’ll admit I was also distracted by the availability of cable news: an opportune time to have access to CNN as the world collectively watches the meltdown of American political life). Instead I picked up a copy of P.D. James’ Death Comes to Pemberley from the local used bookstore. Continue reading
The Rosie Project: What to read while the world burns
I’m comfortable with the ‘compulsively readable’ label oft attached to Graeme Simsion’s The Rosie Project. Originally envisioned as a screenplay, the novel has cinematic pacing and a powerful sense of scene (including here both a sense of the setting and a well-defined plot focus for a particular chapter). Taken together with the warm and lighthearted romance plot and you have yourself a perfect stay-up-late, read-on-the-beach, pass-the-time-while-waiting-for____ kind of novel. There is much to enjoy in the characterization of Rosie and Don, the certainty of the romance genre’s happily ever after and the unapologetically optimistic take on the world and the ability for individuals to do right. Continue reading
Filed under Bestseller, Fiction, Funny
Outline: Sometimes you have to be bored by a novel
People seem excited about Rachel Cusk’s Outline because it’s some sort of experiment in form and characterization: the ‘novel’ follows a writer/writing instructor while she is in Greece teaching a writing seminar. The novel narrates her conversations with those she encounters – from airplane seat mates to long time friends – over the course of her trip. There is something to be said for the way her character is revealed in relief – what she doesn’t say, how she lets the conversation be focused on the other person, by the questions she asks and the settings in which these conversations unfold (e.g. on a boat with a person she met on the plan the day before). Continue reading
Filed under Bestseller, Fiction, New York Times Notable
The Parcel: When a novel might be journalism
Anosh Irani’s The Parcel follows Madhu, a transgender prostitute in Bombay’s red-light district, as she delivers on an assigned responsibility to prepare a captured girl, Kinjal, for induction into the sex trade. Woven onto this plot line is a thread documenting the history and culture of the hijra – those of the third sex – in Bombay, including the complex system of governance and authority in this community including what kinds of work are permitted, what kinds of allegiances are owed and how members of this community joined or are exiled. Layered, too, is an exploration of gentrification of this particular city (but cities more broadly) and the economic and social consequences for those displaced by this gentrification (a particularly compelling thread for me as I’m writing from a city that is currently grappling with how these displaced populations are represented both figuratively and literally in the sense of their political representation). Continue reading
Filed under Canadian Literature, Fiction, Governor Generals, Prize Winner
Literary Vice 