Tag Archives: canadian literature

July 9, 2010 · 2:14 pm

De Niro’s Game: Not about the actor

I checked out Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game from the library because I had spent an hour or so checking out “best book lists” in an effort to overcome my recent spate of terrible reads. It showed up on several lists, and without reading a plot summary, I decided I’d give it a try. I think from the title I expected that the book would be about a game show, or maybe the actor – Robert De Niro. Wrong!

The novel centers on the first person protagonist, Bassam, as he tries to escape Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War, and his best friend, George – who also goes by the name “De Niro” (one part of the title explained). The two begin the novel messing about with a casino – stealing money and what not – and so you might at first expect the titular “game” to be related to gambling. Not so! The game, as it turns out, De Niro’s game in The Deer Hunter: both Bassam and George literally and symbolically play Russian Roulette as the two try to navigate the politics of the Civil War and the psychology of having been raised as “hunters”.

I did enjoy the story, and I appreciated Bassam’s narrative voice – not an entirely reliable narrator, certainly not very sympathetic in his actions, and yet someone, I still cared about him and wanted him to be okay – but what I enjoyed most was the use of extended similes and metaphors. Scenes are described with one rich simile which is then compared to something else, and compared to something else, an on, until you’ve reached the end of a breathtaking sentence that really does wonderful work with the imagination and in conjuring the sensory and emotive registers of the scene (that sounds  a bit like an ad for perfume, but I do mean it – the similes are mind-blowing, and not in a Tom Robbins “what does this have to do with anything” kind of way, but in a melding of all kinds of different experiences). The metaphors – hunting, dust, cannibalism, games, smoking, the moon – carry throughout the novel and interweave with one another to a degree where I found it difficult to be sure what one alluded to, or whether the whole point was a collapse of clear meaning. In any case: full points for narrative style.

If nothing else De Niro’s Game  breaks the cycle of bad writing and reminds me that a good book can make you forget just about everything (including a heat wave of temperatures in the 40 degree Celcius range, a thesis that refuses to write itself) and if it doesn’t help you forget, it at least puts into perspective so-called “problems”.

Leave a comment

Filed under Book I'll Forget I Read, Canadian Literature, Fiction, Giller prize, Governor Generals

Tagged as , , ,

May 24, 2010 · 2:34 pm

The Book of Negroes: Second time, Still terrific

                            When my supervisor suggested I read Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes I was delighted. Delighted because I had already read the book in 2007, and enjoyed it a great deal; and delighted because the narrative aligns nicely with ideas about historical fiction I am working on. So this post begins with the caveat that I already liked the book when I read it, and that I wanted to like it again while I was re-reading it. No surprise: I liked it.

The novel has won spades of awards and garnered Lawrence Hill the kind of critical attention he has deserved for years (his novel Any Known Blood is also terrific and well worth the read). The protagonist, Aminata Diallo, speaks with a captivating voice as she recounts her experiences being captured and kidnapped in Africa, transported to America, enslaved in the indigo fields and later in a domestic setting, escape to New York and then Nova Scotia, a return to Africa (Sierre Leone) and finally a journey to England to work with abolitionists. The epic journey is signaled from the first few pages, so it is not necessarily the particular destinations that strike the reader as remarkable, but rather the tenacity and grace of the speaker.

I did find the first time that the section on Aminata’s return to Africa dragged because there was no close relationship between Aminata and anyone else to follow; and perhaps because unlike the other sequences, time passes very quickly, whole years disappear in pages. In the earlier sections a year or two is given a fairly large chunk of text, allowing the reader to become fully immersed in the setting and relationships. This second time through I did not find the section dragged as much, but it still stood out because of its different narrative scope.

The descriptions are vivid and detailed; the voice is consistent and engrossing; the plot is painful, yet important for bringing to readers a story not often told in popular fiction and for doing so with great effect.

4 Comments

Filed under Canadian Literature, Fiction, Governor Generals, Historical Fiction, Prize Winner

Tagged as , , , , ,

April 26, 2010 · 1:53 pm

The Trade: Dressing up colonialism

                           Fred Stenson’s 2000 novel The Trade was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, which I think is pretty neat considering the novel focuses on the fur trade, and as you might well imagine, the fur trade is not usually a sexy or glamorous topic. I say “usually” because Stenson does include some sexy-glam, but not nearly enough to titillate a Giller jury (though maybe I’m projecting here, as the Giller has recognized a fair number of novelists writing historical fiction: Margaret Atwood, Michael Crummey, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Anne Michaels, Wayne Johnston, Jane Urquhart, John Bemrose, Elizabeth Hay, and most recently, Joseph Boyden). So maybe my point is less that historical fiction is unpopular and unrecognized, and more that it is a triumph of the Canadian h.f. novelist. In this case Stenson takes what grade seven history turned into a mind-numbingly-dull exercise in remembering that the NorthWest Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company merged in 1822, and turns it into a fascinating and engaging narrative of deceit, violence, betrayal and madness. 

My favourite part? When a cat adopts orphaned bunnies only to watch while the bunnies get eaten. A microcosm for the rest of the narrative that sees (somewhat unconvincingly innocent) good-hearted and sincere men turned violent, or become objects of extreme and disproportionate violence. Stenson ultimately lays the blame for the violence of the fur trade at the hands of “colonialism,” but does so by personifying the ruthless economy of colonialism in the HBCo governor. This sleight, whereby colonialism is not blamed for the devastation of the land, the buffalo and indigenous people, but rather the governor is, remains a problem for me.

That said, Stenson does well to draw attention to the complexity and pervasiveness of colonial violence by including a missionary and an artist-in-the-field-reporter (I should say that the epistolary narratives of the missionary and artist are distracting and awkward inclusions at the end of a narrative that has otherwise been third-person omniscient) as a way of gesturing to the ways colonialism, Christianity and archival “truth” (in the form of paintings and written histories) sustain one another.

1 Comment

Filed under Canadian Literature, Fiction, Giller prize, Historical Fiction

Tagged as , , , , , ,

April 19, 2010 · 2:13 am

The Man Game: Really about women

      M. introduced me to Lee Henderson’s The Man Game. He read it for fun this summer and it ended up part of his comprehensive exams (Canadian literature). I’m not sure why, but unless my mum recommends it, I have a hard time reading “suggested” books. The problem is a combination of doubt and arrogance: doubt that other people know books; arrogance that I do. In any event, M. was right, and The Man Game is terrific (though it has some difficulties, the least of which is unnecessary length – 500+ pages could have been trimmed to 400).

A work of historical fiction (set in both 1885-87 and 2008) The Man Game is unusual because it does not attempt to cover a sweeping period of history, but rather chooses to focus on a limited period of time and a limited location (downtown Vancouver). At first this limited scope bothered me, but once I stopped waiting for events to speed up and more “time” to be covered, I settled in and enjoyed the vivid descriptions of naked men fighting one another.

The fight descriptions are remarkable for the complexity of the physical movement described. While most of the fight scenes are accompanied by an illustration, these illustrations actually detract more than they add: forcing the reader to try and reconcile the imagined image with the illustration. That said, the fight scenes are long, detailed and rich.

The fight scenes, or perhaps better termed dance scenes, are the physical expressions of “the man game,” the ostensible focus of the novel. The background for the game – invented and choreographed by a woman (Molly Erwagen) – is the fictionalized 1886 Vancouver Riots (perhaps a fictionalization of the 1886 Seattle riots (?) – Vancouver did not have major race-related riots until 1907) and the immigration of Chinese labourers to Vancouver. The novel introduces the idea that white settlers did not like relying on inexpensive Chinese labour, but were in fact, reliant upon it for construction projects and industrialization. It points out that the contemporary Canadian nation continues to function on a two-tiered labour market and that considerable tension continues in the present between non-racialized and racialized Canadians. But while the elements of race, immigration and nation building deserve attention, I found the women in the novel to be the most interesting and complicated element.

There are six noteworthy women in a novel of thirty-two characters listed on “The Cast” page (a page that nods to historiographic metafiction and that I could have done without). The women fall into two groups: the hapless and the fierce. Mrs. Litz (imprisoned in a cabin in the woods by her hero man-game winning husband, Litz), Mrs. Alexander (who, despite the school-marm lecture she gives rioters, remains dependent on her husband for everything – including her opium supply) and the Whore-without-a-face, allow others to dictate the terms of their movement, desires, and satisfactions. Whereas Molly (the inventor of the man-game), Minna (the contemporary female protagonist who directly mirrors Molly, to a degree that the two might be thought of interchangeably) and Peggy (the whore-house madam) routinely use the promise (or threat) of sex and love to manipulate men. Such is the power of female seduction and manipulation in this novel that the men perhaps only ever fight in the “man” game for the purpose of proving their manliness to Molly (or Minna) and in so doing to earn their favour. The fierce women know the power they wield, and do so with exacting precision, and, I think, with little care or remorse.

Molly joins the ranks of Cathy (East of Eden) and Xenia (The Robber Bride) in the category of “manipulative women in fiction.” For while she is strikingly beautiful and devoted to her (paralyzed-not-paralyzed husband), I can’t help but feel that every action she takes, every thought she has, originate from her desperation to being loved and needed. The novel (problematically) suggests this does not make her cruel or selfish, just, a woman. 

Next book? Maybe I’ll take another suggestion. But I’ll whine about the length. I’m tired of propping up 500 pages in the tub. (Wa.)

Leave a comment

Filed under Canadian Literature, Erin's Favourite Books, Fiction

Tagged as , , ,