Category Archives: Reviews

Yann Martel’s thoughtful, thankless mission

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What is Stephen Harper Reading? by Yann Martel

R.K. Narayan’s The Financial Expert is the 71st of a series of titles selected by writer Yann Martel to provide to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, to encourage an appreciation of the arts and literature in particular in the PM, and to also help Harper with his stillness and thoughtfulness. Martel has regularly sent books from a wide range of literary traditions to Harper. Martel has devoted a Web site to the reading list and his kind, considered and often poignant covering letters with each volume. (All of his letters can be read at http://www.whatisstephenharperreading.ca/. They are also now in printed form, in a book entitled, not surprisingly, What is Stephen Harper Reading?)

Martel’s thoughtful persistence in this quest, started in April 2007, is both heartwrenching and highly commendable. He has never received a direct acknowledgement from Harper, and only some fairly form-letter responses from Harper’s staff, and even one from Industry Minister Tony Clement (although it wasn’t directly related to any of Martel’s book selections).

I’m sure Martel will continue to send well-considered choices (although if I was him, I’d be tempted to send “Going [Pro]Rogue” …) accompanied by articulate letters. I so admire his steadfast commitment.

P.S. Congratulations to Yann Martel for the inclusion of Life of Pi in the National Post’s top 10 Canadian books of the past decade.

Another P.S. There’s a great interview with Yann Martel about the What is Stephen Harper Reading? project on the January 9th episode of CBC Radio’s The House, at www.cbc.ca/thehouse.

Yet another P.S. (added February 1, 2010) – Yann Martel has outdone himself, recommending the amazing Eunoia by Christian Bok: http://www.whatisstephenharperreading.ca/2010/02/01/book-number-74-eunoia-by-…. For some reason, that just gets me utterly jazzed, although it’s no more likely than any other book presented by Martel to actually attract Harper’s attention.

Yet another P.S. (added March 1, 2010) – Stephen Harper might not have the good graces to acknowledge Martel, but someone else does.

Another delighted P.S. (added March 17, 2010) – While Yann Martel is off promoting his new book Beatrice & Virgil, Steven Galloway, author of The Cellist of Sarajevo, is keeping up the momentum, with the exquisite choice of Paul Quarrington’s King Leary.

The Journals of Susanna Moodie, by Margaret Atwood and Charles Pachter

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The Journals of Susanna Moodie, by Margaret Atwood and Charles Pachter

Margaret Atwood’s poetic reimagining of the hardscrabble life of Susanna Moodie, a British settler who emigrated to Canada in the 1830s, is vivid unto itself. It groups Moodie’s experiences into three sets of poems: the first covers her arrival in Canada and primitive subsistence on a farm near what became Peterborough, Ontario, the second covers her somewhat more civilized existence in the town of Belleville, and the third is actually a posthumous set of reflections that concludes with her spirit inhabiting that of an old woman on a bus travelling along St Clair Avenue in Toronto in the late 1960s. Throughout, Atwood gives Moodie a grittier and more emotional voice than what comes through in Moodie’s prim accounts in “Roughing it in the Bush” and her subsequent memoirs.

While Atwood’s poetic account of Moodie’s adventures and experiences is vibrant by itself, it is further enhanced and animated by the typographic and graphical innovations of artist Charles Pachter, a longtime friend and collaborator of Atwood’s. Interestingly, Atwood and Pachter originally applied for a grant in 1970 to allow him to design a special edition of the collection of poems, but the application was turned down by the Canada Council. Atwood went ahead and got the poems published by Oxford University Press, but she and Pachter held onto the hope that they could one day collaborate on a more fully realized rendition incorporating his ideas and work. Several years later, the University of Toronto Library financed a venture that saw Pachter and two Spanish master printers, Abel and Manuel Bello-Sanchez, bring Atwood’s poems to life in a 120-copy limited edition that combined complex silkscreening, calligraphic and typographical effects. In the early 1980s, examples of this unique work were exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada. By the early 1990s, it had also been translated into French.

Finally, in 1997, an edition was produced capturing the original text and graphics, with an account by Charles Pachter and a foreword by noted University of Ottawa English professor David Staines. This edition effectively encapsulates the history and collective heft of this work, and puts it in context with Staines’ enthusiastic framing of the work as a uniquely Canadian livre d’artiste. Topping it all off is Pachter’s ebullient account of being inspired by the genius of his friend Margaret Atwood to produce a work of genius of his own, to which the poems are inextricably linked.

2009 reading list

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Here’s what I read in 2009, with links to reviews where I have them. (Actually, I’ve commented at least a wee bit on most of what I read this year.)

  1. Letting Go of the Words
    by Janice (Ginny) Redish

  2. The Scream
    by Rohinton Mistry

  3. Great Expectations
    by Charles Dickens

  4. Catching the Big Fish
    Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity
    by David Lynch

  5. Soucouyant
    by David Chariandy

  6. The Importance of Music to Girls
    by Lavinia Greenlaw

  7. Old City Hall
    by Robert Rotenberg

  8. The Other End of the Leash
    by Patricia B. McConnell

  9. Sideways
    by Rex Pickett

  10. 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa
    by Stephanie Nolen

  11. Northanger Abbey
    by Jane Austen

  12. Master of Reality
    by John Darnielle

  13. Crabwise to the Hounds
    by Jeramy Dodds

  14. Margaret Lives in the Basement
    by Michelle Berry

  15. Revolver
    by Kevin Connolly

  16. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
    by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

  17. Rising, Falling, Hovering
    by CD Wright

  18. The Book of Negroes
    by Lawrence Hill

  19. The Family Man
    by Elinor Lipman

  20. Primitive Mentor
    by Dean Young

  21. In the Land of Long Fingernails
    A Gravedigger’s Memoir
    by Charles Wilkins

  22. The Sentinel
    by AF Moritz

  23. What the Body Remembers
    by Shauna Singh Baldwin

  24. The Dog That Pitched a No-Hitter
    by Matt Christopher

  25. go-go dancing for Elvis
    by Leslie Greentree

  26. The Complete Winnie-the-Pooh
    by AA Milne

  27. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
    by Jonathan Safran Foer

  28. Middlemarch
    by George Eliot

  29. Brooklyn
    by Colm Toibin

  30. The Dangerous Book for Dogs
    by Rex & Sparky

  31. The Winter Vault
    by Anne Michaels

  32. Stripmalling
    by Jon Paul Fiorentino

  33. The Cure for Death by Lightning
    by Gail Anderson Dargatz

  34. Then We Came to the End
    by Joshua Ferris

  35. Blackouts
    by Craig Boyko

  36. Homesick
    by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  37. The Cellist of Sarajevo
    by Steven Galloway

  38. Solomon Gursky Was Here
    by Mordecai Richler

  39. The Incident Report
    by Martha Baillie

  40. A Bend in the River
    by VS Naipaul

  41. This Shape We’re In
    by Jonathan Lethem

  42. The Grandmothers
    by Doris Lessing

  43. Frozen in Time
    Unlocking the Secrets of the Franklin Expedition
    by Owen Beattie and John Geiger

  44. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
    by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

  45. A Gate at the Stairs
    by Lorrie Moore

  46. Paper Radio
    by Damian Rogers

  47. Negotiating With the Dead
    A Writer on Writing
    by Margaret Atwood

  48. The Disappeared
    by Kim Echlin

  49. February
    by Lisa Moore

  50. You Don’t Love Me Yet
    by Jonathan Lethem

  51. The Journals of Susanna Moodie
    by Margaret Atwood and Charles Pachter

  52. The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out
    by Rosemary Sullivan

You Don’t Love Me Yet, by Jonathan Lethem

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You Don't Love Me Yet, by Jonathan Lethem

How interesting that author Bruce Wagner makes a fleeting cameo appearance in a party scene in Jonathan Lethem’s “You Don’t Love Me Yet”. Lethem’s slim novel about romantically adrift twenty-something Lucinda Hoekke, bass player in a fledgling alternative band, bears some resemblance to Wagner’s largely Los Angeles-based collection of novels and TV and movie screenplays. The title “You Don’t Love Me Yet” even echoes Wagner’s “I’m Losing You”, “I’ll Let You Go” and “Still Holding”, even though Lethem’s title doesn’t double as a typical telephone stock phrase/excuse. Actually, you would think he might have tried something like that, since Lucinda also answers telephones for a faux complaint line in an art installation.

Like Wagner’s stories, Lethem’s story is set in Los Angeles. His characters stumble (usually under the influence of one toxin or another) through the same decadent, emotionally parched terrain on the fringes of stardom, seeking and usually not finding professional, artistic or personal validation or fulfillment. While Wagner’s stories have Dickensian complexity, Lethem at least musters some Dickensian names – influential radio host Fancher Autumnbreast is a favourite – but isn’t able to match Wagner’s absorbing depth and insight, with one exception. Lethem’s characters are unsympathetic to a person, and their connections with each other don’t ring true, particularly Lucinda’s inexplicable and messy hookup with an enigmatic crafter of slogans that she meets when he starts calling the complaint line. The one exception is that Lethem captures vibrantly the alchemy of how individual musicians collaborate and cohere to make beautiful music.

Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, by Carl Wilson

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Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, by Carl Wilson

“Through democracy, which demands we meet strangers as equals, we perhaps become less strangers to ourselves.”

This book is a fascinating exploration of artistic and aesthetic taste, and a kind, intelligent and moving defence of sentiment and sentimentality, using Celine Dion as the perhaps unlikely touchstone. Oh, and it’s cool and even laugh-out-loud funny.

 

This is a very cool endorsement:

 

Bestivus, a “best of” list for the rest of us

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As 2009 comes to an end, many publications and pundits are offering their assessments of the best whatevers of the decade just past. Inspired by the best books of the decade list from Salon magazine, I’ve listed those from their list with which I agree, and I’ve added my own. These are the books that left the greatest impressions on me as a reader, through the authors’ craft, imagination and that magical je ne sais quoi that makes for a memorable reading experience.

The best books of the decade
A tribute to the fact and fiction we wouldn’t stop talking about in the 2000s
By Laura Miller

From the Salon list, here are the ones I’ve read that I agree are “best of” the last decade:

  • A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers
  • The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
  • Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
  • The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathem Lethem

Additionally, here are other books I’ve read since 2000 that I think are “best of’s”, including links to previous reviews on this blog. (I’ll aim to add reviews for the others in, well, the next decade.)

Darkmans, by Nicola Barker

 

February, by Lisa Moore

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February, by Lisa Moore

This moving book captures powerfully the sheer physicality of enormous, yearning grief. Lisa Moore has forged a memorable portrait of a brave, no nonsense individual on her journey to a form of peace after devastating loss. Moore traces in plain-spoken but evocative prose Helen O’Mara’s happy, passionate early life as a wife and mother, to the shattering loss of her beloved husband Cal in the Ocean Ranger disaster, to her struggle to raise her family and keep herself emotionally afloat. Moore engages the reader simultaneously on many levels, from the sensory to the functional aspects of getting on with one’s life to hints of the spiritual. While the focus is on Helen, the subplot involving John, her oldest child and only son, is also absorbing, tracing his development from childhood to adulthood, his career path and his acceptance of unexpected new responsibilities in his life. Throughout, the feisty resilience of the entire cast of February and their ability to even find rueful humour in life’s challenges is both diverting and inspiring.

February by Lisa Moore has been selected as a finalist for Canada Reads 2013. The book will be championed by comedian Trent McClellan, and represents the Atlantic Provinces region in the “turf war” themed competition.

February 14, 2013 – 31 years ago today, the Ocean Ranger sank. How fitting that today, February has been recognized as the book that all Canadians should read. What a fine way to honour the memory of the 84 men who perished in that disaster.

Suite Francaise, by Irene Nemirovsky

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Suite Francaise, by Irene Nemirovsky

This is an engrossing and sensitive depiction of the complexities of human lives lived during the German occupation of France during the Second World War. It’s made all the more poignant by the fate of the author, who was arrested and died at Auschwitz in 1942. Her notes accompanying the manuscript reveal that she had envisioned an even more sweeping and ambitious work, but that she sensed that her time was running out. The novel’s appendices, detailing her notes and the correspondence of her last days and that of her family and colleagues as they tried to find and rescue her, are as riveting as the novel.