Tag Archives: 10-10-12

August 28, 2011 · 10:09 pm

The Art of Racing in the Rain: Not good.

                               A weekend spent in E. with my parents meant I read a lot. Too bad I finished the weekend with such a terrible book. Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing in the Rain has been widely celebrated, but for reasons I’m struggling to understand.

I suppose it’s a feel-good book. The reincarnated dog returns to his master, the widowed husband gets judicial vindication and his choicest job, the mother who died of cancer died because she didn’t ‘fight’ hard enough. The overarching message is one of terrible cliche and terrible responsibility: if you want it hard enough you can have it.

I say terrible responsibility because how cruel to suggest, (nay, to preach as this novel does) that cancer, or unemployment, or lawsuits are somehow the manifestation – or lack of manifestation – of individual wishes/desires. Karma! The book actually suggests karma to be the source or cause of misfortune and reward. *Note: I am not, at all, taking issue with karma as a philosophical idea; rather, I’m very uncomfortable with the quasi-mystical, entirely uncomplicated use of “karma” and “spirit” used throughout this book.

Combine the uncomfortable (or disturbing) morality of the novel with a dog narrator and excessive use of life is like a racetrack metaphor and you have yourself a terrible novel. 

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August 28, 2011 · 3:26 pm

Missed Her: Or, What is a Story?

     My first introduction to Ivan E. Coyote came in the form of a Christmas gift from K. when she gave me Bow Grip and Closer to Spiderman (see post of ages ago). I loved Ivan E. then and I love her now.

I love that after finishing an Ivan E. collection I’m left considering not just the subjects of the stories – familial bonds, those expectations about identity and behaviour we carry into any encounter with other people, the obligations we hold to one another, the limits we set, define or negotiate about our own identities – but the quality of “story” as a form. That Coyote’s stories read not as fictional tales with made-up protagonists in invented circumstances, but as stories we might hear and share at the pub, make reading a collection feel like a conversation, like I have been invited into an intimate exchange and have been trusted to hear the stories and do with them what I will (hopefully something good).

K. sent me this story last week, and when I got to it in the collection I was outraged, thinking someone had plagarized Coyote on a website, not putting together (sigh) that K. had sent me the very much attributed Coyote story: http://www.xtra.ca/public/National/Ten_steps_to_getting_over_the_ex_who_just_walked_out_on_you-8095.aspx

I liked this one because it made me laugh, and diverged in tone from the rest of the collection that otherwise keeps close to first person narration and generally defines plot around small scale person-to-person interactions. (Also because it offers reasonable advice.)

No favourite story in this collection, just a general sense of appreciation for a writer who creates stories that read as personal and particular, and yet all the same widely understood and shared.

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August 28, 2011 · 2:32 am

The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?: The unexpected play(fulness)

For some reason (let’s call it 20-something-too-little-sleep-and-too-much-wine, and not what it is, which is my terrible memory) but I didn’t remember Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? was a play, until this weary-reader delighted in finding a slim volume on the self and not another (as was feared) 500 page tome (no doubt each page of the 500 page novels I’ve made my way through have been worth it, but I’m just saying, at this point in 10-10-12 I’m taking my slim volumes where I can get ‘em).

Whatever the other outcomes of this reading project might be, I do hope I continue to read more plays, as my heretofore monogomous-with-occasional-cheating relationship with fiction may be (may have been) keeping me from some gems.

The Goat is probably meant to be absurd. If I knew more about drama I’d be able to tell you about the school it belongs to, the history it’s drawing on, the playwrights its responding to, but I have no idea. What I do know is that the play follows Martin and Stevie’s relationship when Stevie discovers that Martin, her husband of 30 odd years, has started to have an affair with a goat – Sylvia – and that he loves Sylvia just as much as he loves her. There’s some other plot details that likely enhance or complicate the thematic questions – things like their son, Billie, and his apparent homosexuality; or, Stevie’s penchant for breaking every material object the two own – but I gave my full attention to the goat-loving, and so have little to say about other, likely no less punchy, symbolic events. 

I have to say that The Goat gets at the heart of (what I understand to be) the confusion for both people in any once-monogmous-no-longer relationship: for Martin, the confusion of how it might be possible to love two souls at the same time with equal vigour and devotion; for Stevie, how her partner could equate their love with anyone (anything) else, how he could degrade its singularity. That the play uses a goat to explore this confusion and sadness only exemplifies the already inherent absurdity of adultery – the impossible to square realization that while love is not finite and it might be given in excess to more than one person, it is nevertheless accepted by individuals who might feel entitled to its exclusive privilege. What difference a goat or another woman? Who is Sylvia, really, but a placeholder for every diversion that alerts us to the precariousness of monogomous devotion? The necessity to consider, if not to reconcile, our investment in singular attachments with boundless love?

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August 27, 2011 · 3:55 pm

A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True: Sentimental

                          Brigid Pasulka’s first novel, A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True, alternates two chronological settings by chapter. The “long, long time ago” follows Pigeon and Angelicia in Poland just before and during World War Two in third person omniscient, and the “present” is narrated in the first person perspective of ‘Baba Yaga’ (a poorly explained nickname with little apparent significance). It isn’t until a good way into the narrative that the relationship between the two chronologies becomes clear, and even later into the narrative that the relationship between Angelicia/Pigeon and Baba Yaga is explained. I suspect this mystery is meant to be intriguing; however, for this reader it was only frustrating and confusing.

Perhaps I missed the pay-off of the big reveal of how the two story lines relate because I was preoccupied with working out how the writing in the ‘long long time ago’ sections could be good, while the writing in the ‘presen’t could be terrible. What circumstances allow the same writer to simultaneously write well and write terribly? I’m going to hazard that it’s point of view that got in the way. The first person sections couldn’t sustain the kind of magical, fairytale quality aimed for (and achieved!) in the “once upon a time” of “long long ago,” and instead fell somewhere between dull and convoluted. Without the motivation to care about Baba Yaga I found myself plodding through her chapters, waiting to return to the intrigue and romance of the world war two narrative. And when the two chronologies eventually merge (as we know from the beginning they are bound to do, because it is that kind of story) the whole thing falls to pieces, as Pasulka can’t seem to find a unified point of view to allow the merged chronologies to read as anything other than stilted.

So… what did I find redeeming? I suppose there’s something to be said for a narrative that takes a longer view of history and introduces readers to the temporal scope of suffering experienced by ordinary villagers between the outbreak of World War Two and the fall of the iron curtain (do we capitalize Iron Curtain? Maybe it ought to be Iron. Curtain. Or Iron! Curtain!). Makes me think of the new history out – Bloodlands – that aims to capture just this kind of prolonged suffering. In any case, I admire the ambitious scope, even if I find the writing itself terribly uneven and without a decided thematic focus (rather a frustratingly contradictory thematic interest: is this a book about breaking from the past? about making choices? about confronting and learning from history? about accepting the immeasurable affect/effect the past has on individual decisions in the present? about the need to commit to one’s history or the need to disavow it?).

(Or are all of my disparaging remarks a consequence of my current scepticism about soul mates?)

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