Tag Archives: Wars of the 20th Century

October 19, 2011 · 3:26 am

What is Left the Daughter: Undecided.

                     So if we’ve spent any time together you’ll know that I (occasionally) refer to the book I’m currently reading as “the best book ever.” I recognize I have a problem with hyperbole; I’m conscious of my excesses (most of the time). And so it happens once again that of late I’ve been talking up a novel as perfect and exquisite, in this case, Howard Norman’s What is Left the Daughter. But then! Circumstances conspired such that I boarded a bus, finished the last three pages of the novel, and had an entire hour and a half WITHOUT A BOOK with nothing to do but stare out the window and contemplate the book. And the more I sat and thought about What is Left the Daughter the less satisfied I became, the more contrived the ending, the more affected the tone, the more moralistic the plot (as if morals were, in their own right, dissatisfying).

And so I find myself at something of a loss writing this review.

Norman does tremendous, really tremendous, work grafting small, quotidian moments together to form rich, idiosyncratic yet utterly believable characters. Tiny scenes, like that of eating lunch on a bus, paradoxically distill and explode character in ways typically reserved for the best short stories.

On the other hand the setting of small town – Middle Economy – Nova Scotia during WWII reads as a cliche of every small town you’ve ever read (think of a blend of Richard Russo, Alistair MacLeod and Anne Tyler), complete with tiny diner and eccentric neighbours (so much so, in fact, that for the first 30 pages I wondered – truthfully – whether I’d read the book before).

The plot, too, balances the brilliant with the bland. I won’t spoil the climax – as it is – but I was left gasping, shocked, and yet, convinced that it should happen that way (and so brilliant). But then the ending falls short. Another case of an author unwilling to do what is necessary in order to be truthful to the plot that’s preceded and to the created characters. And with that said, the last two sentences are thematic perfection.

And Norman’s book raises all kinds of interesting questions about a national literature: is it setting that determines national lit? author’s nationality? duration of an author’s visit? thematic preoccupations? what’s the point of national literature anyway? I’ll not answer any of those questions, because I don’t have to anymore. 

So without being able to articulate a decisive reaction to the text I’ll ask instead ‘when do we stop reading?’ as I have a suspicion the characters of What is Left the Daughter and their decisions will continue to populate my waking thoughts for days to come – and maybe that means I’m still reading? And so I can hold out hope that I’ll make up my mind about the text sooner or later – except not wanting to actually have to decide. Maybe this is what we readers owe the brilliant (or the almost-brilliant in this case) books in our lives: that we take them around with us after, never wanting them to feel wholly settled, but rather perched just this side of comfortable.

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October 16, 2011 · 9:12 pm

Leviathan: WW1 caused by Germans

       Steampunk! It’s a genre distinction I’d never heard named before, or if I had, I’d never connected it with those novels that imagine the past and the future melded together, or imagined the past as if the future had already happened, a future the present doesn’t know about yet. A sort of past-future? Maybe because “steampunk” doesn’t really describe or evoke those webbed chronologies? Whatever. The name for the genre far less exciting than the genre itself, which is, to put it simply, terrific. Terrific for me anyway, one who adores all things historical (all of it, you understand? if it happened in the past, I adore it.) but who also admires, appreciates, nay, celebrates, those bastardized histories that don’t feel any more allegiance to “fact” than necessary to be historical (okay, a tautology if there ever was one – stuff it). And so I get really excited when I read a history that is historical in all the ways that matter, but includes – get this! – battles between aircrafts made of whales and other organic business and cyborgesque monster machines made of metal.

Leviathan is the first in Scott Westerfeld’s trilogy narrating some of the events of WW1, particularly those that pertain to the (fictional) son, Alex, of the assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his team of allies, whom include a cross-dressing fourteen year old girl-pilot who you just *know* is going to end up madly in love with Alex, because it wouldn’t be a fun story if she didn’t (how/when will he discover she’s really a woman? When will she recognize the tingles she feels when he’s near as hormonal reactions and not a rash?). Add in stellar descriptions of battles between organic and metal, headstrong and meddling adults, and descriptions of journeys that require eating over fires (!) and you have yourself a winner of YAF.

Also a winner in the category “wars of the 20th century,” if you ask me. Of those books I’ve read in the category, this one does (by far) the most entertaining and soothing job of introducing senseless destruction and death. It also does a fine job drawing out the sometimes opaque causes of World War One, and concludes, as do so many eighth grade history teachers, that while no one can be blamed, the Germans can probably be blamed. So let’s blame the Germans! and keep reading this terrifically entertaining, smart, and well paced series. In January.

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October 15, 2011 · 3:27 pm

Night: Uncomfortable

     Elie Wiesel’s Night is my cousin’s favourite book. My cousin who has read, I’d guess, somewhere in the neighbourhood of five novels in his lifetime. But he read Night because it’s one of the book we’re all meant to read. And so I read it, too, anticipating it as depressing and unsettling. What I couldn’t have anticipated – and this causes me great discomfort to admit to myself, let alone on a public forum like this – was that I also found it boring. 

My familiarity with the events and tropes of Wiesel’s book arise, no doubt, both from the years I spent absorbed by Holocaust fiction (13-18?) after reading The Diary of Anne Frank and from a culture saturated with the story that, with minor variation, we are all meant to know. But simple familiarity should not so fully dull my emotional reactions, right? And so the way I’ve been able to understand my reaction in a way that doesn’t cause self-loathing or deep concern about my continuing existence as an empathetic and affective individual is through philosophies on boredom (principally Heidegger) that suggest it is when confronted with the profoundly meaningless that individuals resort to a passive indifference: when set against an existential void a (reasonable?) response is boredom.

I’ll also understand my reaction as one to literary form. The narrative tone is, appropriate to the subject matter, flat. The same diction, pace and tone is employed in describing rations of food as is the death of Wiesel’s father. Perhaps it is the case that as all events are treated and narrated as equally affect-less the reader might find the form of the text, if not the content, dull.

This ambivalence, then, is how I’m prepared to understand the book and my reaction. And I’ll entertain conversations with those of you who might have read the book, too, or who might want to comment on my apparent lack-of-feeling. Perhaps I just want to be reassured that I am not callous and am not maliciously, only defensively, indifferent.

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October 9, 2011 · 6:01 am

Two Generals: Poor

    A poor showing by Scott Chantler, who is by all accounts (if awards are to be thought of as accounts) something of an accomplished graphic novelist. This graphic novel, Two Generals, reminds me of stereotypes of Can lit as suffering from such an inferiority complex that it feels the need to do everything in a painfully dull and sincere way so as to assure readers that it can in fact be taken quite seriously because it follows as the Rules and Decorum of Serious Fiction.  As a result there are panels like the one pictured above where we readers are informed by the (terribly subtle choice of red) colour scheme that something is amiss outside the building. The colour scheme throughout – green is “narrative,” black is “memory” and red is “blood and death” – is so simplistic as to be obnoxious. Similarly, the text of the novel reads as if it were borrowed wholesale from the recorded minutes of the local historical society when the very dullest and driest speaker was at work – e.g. “At 1:30Pm, with the men of the HLI back aboard, the first of the landing craft began to make their way out of the port of southhampton” (56 – and I swear to you, I turned to a page at random) and so lacks any (any) sense of character or a compelling plot. I mean the plot is the INVASION OF NORMANDY and I was bored. And I certainly didn’t care a whit about the death of one of the Generals. Perhaps because I had repeatedly been told that “this would be his last Christmas,” or “not all of them would be alive at the end of the day.” I’m not an uncaring person, but really, I feel an instinctive defense toward indifference and scorn when I’m prompted with such terribly written lines.

Maybe the silver lining here is that in identifying this work as terrible I’ll earn your trust as a reader of Can lit. So while you’d be pressed to find a bigger booster of Canadian history, or a more defensive champion of the triumphs of Can lit, you can know that when I’m praising national works I’m not doing so (just) because I’m a little nationalist, but because often times Canadian authors are busy writing truly remarkable, and often under-recognized, work. This is certainly not the case with Two Generals, which I would hope – despite it’s purported mission of helping us all remember – will quickly be forgotten and not integrated like so many other poorly crafted historical fiction (*cough* Paul Gross’s Psschendaele) into the school curriculum just because the Historica-Dominion Society thinks its a good idea. Oh wow, so turns out I have a lot of hostility toward this particular book. And so as a good Canadian, let me just say: Sorry?

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