Tag Archives: canadian literature

October 13, 2014 · 1:56 pm

The Rehearsal: Unravelling (form and content) (real from artifice) (my memory)

The whole point of this blog is to not forget what I’ve read. Listening to NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour on the way to Thanksgiving, one of the commentators described his memory of books – impressions, phrases, characters – and that he didn’t ever remember plots because plots didn’t matter to him. I’d like to believe that my own absent recollection of plot is due to a similar disinterest (or perhaps lack of active interest), but I do enjoy a good plot when I’m reading it, so it seems more likely the case the I just don’t have a memory that supports linear recollection (ask my friends and they’ll tell you the frequency with which I have to be reminded that we’ve done X or Y together – thank god (not really) for FB and its timeline to tell me where and what I’ve been doing). Do plots matter? Do our recollections (or lack of) impact our ability to retrospectively appreciate a book? If all I can tell you about *The Corrections* (pre-blog era read) is that I loved it and that there’s a scene with a frozen fish down someone’s pants, I’m not much of a reader, or am I? Maybe it’s my saturation with novels – that at some point I hit critical mass and my memory couldn’t be bothered accommodating another. Let’s go with that.

All this to say I neglected to write this review right away. I waited ten days and in so doing started another novel (and did the usual daily things of work and play) and in the in between have lost the thread of Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal. Let’s ascribe some of the blame to the book itself. Seems fair. From what I remember there are two interwoven plots both preoccupied with sex, moral maturation and above all what we act for others and what is true to ourselves. Or more, that it’s impossible to separate “who we really are” from the face we put on for others. That much as we’d like – now and in our formative years – to believe we have an inner self and the self we project to the world around us, we are all entirely artifice and surface. Peel away the layers of acting and acted-upon and you’ll just get to further obfuscation. So the one thread is a young boy, enrolled in an avant garde acting school where the teachers deliberately break down the accepted walls between theatre and life (staging all sorts of instructional interventions wherein the students themselves can’t be sure what is acted and what is real). The other thread has a young girl sorting out her personal and sexual identity amid a sex scandal (her sister has had an affair with the high school teacher) – her story becomes the plot for a play developed by the young boy’s acting class.

Catton achieves this well executed thematic punch (you’re only ever artifice!) through brilliant interplay of content and form. As the two disparate narratives pull together this reader found it increasingly impossible to determine what was “on stage” and acted from what was “real” (that is, the main thread of the plot). In fact, this novel – as I recall – has one of the best demonstrations of the power of the novel’s form to exaggerate or illuminate the novel’s thematic content. I harp on about form and content in historical fiction all the time, but in this instance it was the ability of narrative point of view, short sentences, absent chapter divisions, quirky tense shifts and misplaced modifiers to make this reader uncertain about the nature of the chapter: was this real? was it part of the play? did it matter?

So read this one if you like formal play and a single note theme (I admit to being sufficiently saturated with the all-is-artifice theme by the end). Or if you’re into avant garde theatre. Or if you want to help me remember what it was about – feel free to send me a plot summary. I promise to read it and then promptly forget.

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June 2, 2014 · 10:04 pm

A Handful of Time: YA comfort food

I lost my book this weekend (don’t worry I found it under a coat in the car). While it was lost,  my partner left the country (he’ll be back), my sister had a baby (not so much upsetting as overwhelming) and I didn’t get the job (though I didn’t expect to, disappointment is disappointment). Heady times for this reader. Hardly a time to be book-less. Time, you might think, to turn to the failsafe: the young adult fiction bookshelf (and yes, it has its own bookshelf).

Among the Beverly Clearly (there is a lot of Beverly), Gordon Korman and E.B. White I found my Kit Pearson collection. Pearson, if you’re not familiar (you should be – go get her) is a Canadian author made famous (or Canadian famous) for The Guests of War trilogy – a series that follows British Home Children (British children sent to live in Canada for the duration of WWII) – and for her Newbery winner A Handful of Time. While I remembered loving – and reading and re-reading – the Guest of War, I couldn’t remember – at all – reading A Handful of Time. I sort of thought maybe it was the same as Tuck Everlasting? You know how sometimes YA gets confused in your mind as just one big happy bit of comfort read?

Anyway, much to my delight I don’t think I’d *ever* read (or at least I have no memory of reading) A Handful of Time. And so the story unfolded like so much delightful discovery mixed with comfort and reassurance (something inherent to the genre? I’m beginning to wonder). Our protagonist is lonely, misunderstood and awkward (*cough* not at all like anyone I know or feel like). She encounters a setting – family cottage – and characters – family members – who exacerbate her feelings of lonely-awkward. And then! As if by design she discovers something (only a little magical) that allows her to understand herself better, to grow into her sense of being, to communicate who she is and what she wants: to become her better self. It is the kind of reminder and lesson every 29-year-something (I’ll refuse 30-something as long as I can) should get: that the scale of our problems  and challenges may feel monumental (“I don’t know how to steer a canoe!” or “I can’t afford to retire! ever!”) but the resilience we need to meet and grow through these challenges can be accessible to us if we think to ask, or look within.

Of course this is a problematic trajectory for the many, many kids who don’t have that kind of support network. Who don’t have ways or means to look within to find that strength and fortitude. Who meet challenges only to be met by a challenge they can’t meet. And I don’t mean to diminish these by saying, just read some YA and it will all be okay.

I just mean to say that sometimes in reading these stories – and this was certainly the case for me this weekend – by reading this story it was okay. I was comforted by the familiarity and associations of the reading practice: quiet, bathtub, introspection. I was comforted by the narrative itself: challenges overcome! I was comforted by the genre that allowed this reader to recall that the feeling of being misunderstood isn’t confined to our teenage years, that we continue to need the reminder that this, too, is shaping who we are. And that often it just sucks. And is hard. And lonely.

Less lonely, I guess, when you have a brilliant author like Pearson who gives you a story and a character to fall in with, to live with and to triumph with – if only in its pages.

(aside: when did ‘resilience’ become the catch-word for kids?)

 

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May 24, 2014 · 3:13 pm

Annabel: Bridging Difference

The question in Kathleen Winter’s debut novel, Annabel, is not what is the novel about, but who. I don’t mean that because the protagonist Wayne is born intersexed and so the novel explores his dual identity as both Wayne and Annabel: both-and. No, I mean the question who is this novel about because while the text is ostensibly occupied with exploring Wayne/Annabel’s sense of identity, it is even more preoccupied with how his father Treadway, her mothers (both biological and metaphorical) Jacinta and Thomasina, and his friend, Wally navigate their identities in relation to one another.

In other words, the novel asks readers to think about how they, too, are formed and reformed in relation to others and how our ideas about who and how other people should be shapes our behaviour and sense of self. That is to say, how I understand myself will always be an understanding (pre)deteremined by who you are and how you (re)present yourself. The novel makes sure readers understand that this complicated way of being – in relation to others and in negotiation with the self – comes with material and psychological challenges and consequences. To be, to understand yourself, as flux and shaped by others and your surroundings, is painful and messy; it is also, in this book at least, the only honest way to live, the only way to live at all.

Beyond relations-between-people, the novel explores how self is shaped by place, history, occupation, heritage. By broadening the scope of focus from Wayne/Annabel’s discovery-of-self to encompass (in a much richer way) the negotiated identities of Jacinta, Wally, Thomasina and Treadway, the novel shows how it is not simply those with overtly or demonstrably complex identities who must work at identity, but rather is is all of us who must negotiate and navigate who we are, how we are received and shaped by the world, and how we want to be both seen and identified.

The novel achieves this broadened understanding  through shifting narrative point of view, but also through the deliberate choices and plot sequences of each of these characters that allow the reader to wonder who the novel is really about (and I suspect it’s meant to be about each of us as readers).

While I was clearly taken with the characters and thematic questions, the writing is a demonstration – for anyone taking their first creative writing class – of the proverbial “show, don’t tell” (don’t tell me someone is angry, show it to me by describing the way they make tea). Usually you want authors to do this sort of showing – you want character to be unfolded in action and scene, not in overt description. That said, this novel tipped just a little too far (for me anyway) in the “showing” in that it read – on occasion – like the first year creative writing exercise. A bit too showy. Which isn’t to say the writing is lacking – no, there are some poignant, beautiful descriptions. The showing of character through action really does make for rich scenes. All this to say it’s good writing, but good writing trying very hard to be great writing (without letting you think that it’s trying to be great writing) (perhaps this is commentary on Can Lit? Or first novels?).

The “bridge” metaphor that weaves through the text asks readers to think about the ways we each cross (mix, overlap, traverse and confuse) and join ourselves to ourselves, to one another and to our place/space. The novel operates as its bridge metaphor demands: it offers a bridge to think about and question our sense of self, our relationship to history and place, and our commitments to understanding and shaping one another.

Annabel was up for Canada Reads this year, and lost out to Joseph Boyden’s The Orenda. I don’t know how I feel about national reading campaigns generally – I think there are probably some books that most people should read (what are these books? question for another post) and that the criteria for this proclamation of “you should read this!” should include whether the book tells us something about how to be… better to one another, how to contribute to our communities and how to understand ourselves and others. Annabel does these things very, very well. So while I don’t carry the same force as Jian Ghomeshi (alas) I do urge you to read Annabel and to think about who the novel is about (and to recognize, perhaps, that it’s also about you).

 

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April 23, 2014 · 12:30 am

Medicine Walk: Time Out of Time

What makes for a great storyteller? What makes us listen? What can stories reveal about ourselves and others that allow connection and understanding? Richard Wagamese’s novel Medicine Walk explores these questions through the quasi-quest, quasi-bildungsroman narrative of Franklin Starlight. As Franklin accepts the task of helping his estranged father, Eldon, to his death, he also accepts the role of listener. Just as readers assume this position each time they open a new book, Franklin is unsure what to expect, but committed to the hearing.

This metafictional thread is softly woven, but bears consideration: what do we, as readers, assume (both in the sense of ‘to take on’ and ‘suppose to be the case’) when we begin reading? Genre, narrative point of view, diction and phrasing, author biography and context give us the rudimentary tools in the early pages of a story to position ourselves, to ease into a work and find where we sit vis a vis the story we’re hearing (nevermind that our particular readerly moment is one where books come laden with existing expectations – and reviews like these). Whether a story adheres to or troubles these expectations, and whether our expectations predetermine and limit what we’ll read/hear gets played out as Franklin grapples with reframing his feelings about his father and whether and how much he will accept the stories as true or sufficient recompense. These questions get echoed in Franklin’s confrontation with his own expectations of his father and of his own and Eldon’s separate and twinned identities and histories.

It’s an unusual (narrative) relationship. Eldon, an alcoholic and absentee parent, brings his story to Franklin with the ostensible purpose of telling Franklin about his birth, name, and family, but with the attendant – and mutually recognized – hope of earning, through the telling, Franklin’s forgiveness and some kind of reconciliation. The novel, in its exploration of this relationship, brings forward questions of what can be forgiven, what forgiveness entails, what we owe ourselves and our broadly understood family. Whether knowing the cause of an unforgiveable act, whether recognizing the cause as societal or historic or simply not our fault, can lessen the violence of the unforgiveable.

It also exposes the deeply moving selflessness of love, while still worrying about the difference between selflessness and selfishness. It explores the contours of this division in the character of Bucky in one of the more surprising and rich representations of humility and grace I’ve read in recent memory. He is a complex, if oddly unexamined, character in the book. Complex I suppose in that he performs key plot functions and occupies a layered character position; unexamined in these sense that his thoughts and reactions are obscured to us, accessed only in brief dialogue. Still, a poignant character.

One element of the novel that bothered me – at least for the first half – was that I couldn’t seem to place it in time or place. There were references to wars – World War II and Korea – that let me loosely place it but in an ahistorical (or perhaps extra-historical) way; and (stunning and beautiful) descriptions of place that left no doubt of a fully realized setting – just no setting with a corresponding place in reality that I could quickly identify. But as I latched on to the themes of storytelling I recognized that my desire to pin this narrative down in time and place was to try and evacuate it of its catholic impulse. This story of guilt, mortality, paternity, loyalty and love should, and does, move us regardless of place or time.

Which is not to say it isn’t also particular. It is a story of domestic violence, of poverty and of colonialism while also being a story of one boy making sense of who his father is, his (a)filial responsibilities and his capacity for forgiveness. I’d suggest it is also a book for readers of all stories to think about the responsibilities of listening and our capacity to be moved and changed by what we hear. It is certainly a book you ought to read; a story you ought to attend to.

 

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