In the 1500s, Danish nobleman Tycho Brahe dismayed his wealthy family by taking an avid interest in mathematics, astronomy and all things fascinatingly planetary. A preternaturally gifted observer of the heavens before telescopes were refined and in common use, Tycho’s passions for geometry and celestial study were so intense that they led him at times to equally passionate disputes, one of which escalated into a duel during which he lost part of his nose. Tycho inspired and welcomed other mathematicians, scientists, astronomers and more to his estate, where guests participated equally enthusiastically in stargazing sessions and lively parties attended by Tycho’s court jester and his tame elk, who was a bit of a tippler. Johannes Kepler, a famed astronomer who is one of two protagonists in Stuart Clark’s vivid The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth, was inspired by Tycho’s observational prowess, though somewhat less enamoured of his lively banquets.

That Tycho leaps from the pages of The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth with such Falstaffian verve is testament to one of the great strengths of Clark’s imaginings of the lives and work of the great astronomers: strong character development that allows the reader to relate to the real people behind discoveries and revelations that for many are shrouded in the mists of history, if known at all. German mathematician and astronomer Kepler and his contemporary, Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei, are vibrant, fully rounded characters, complete with egos and frailties, balanced by passion and commitment in the face of personal challenges, political and religious roadblocks and often dire threats to their safety and life. The friends, family members, colleagues and adversaries who aid and abet Kepler and Galileo on their missions are all brightly etched, no matter how brief or extended their presences are in this absorbing historical fiction rendering of real lives.

Another great strength of The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth is that the book distills the technical complexities of what Kepler and Galileo struggled with, decoded and brought to light, all without dumbing down or compromising the immensity of their discoveries. With a PhD in astrophysics, and as a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and a former Vice Chair of the Association of British Science Writers (1), Clark has the credentials to be both awe-inspiring in his knowledge, and potentially intimidating and obscure in how he conveys it. That he has taken that impressive pedigree and devoted it to science and astronomical journalism lays a foundation for The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth and its two planned follow-up novels (2) to be clear and accessible. That the book is also highly entertaining is a delightful surprise that also ameliorates how one retains the story’s technical underpinnings.

Clark also lays out the social, religious and political minefields into which Kepler and Galileo interjected their theories. That both astronomers were also men of their respective churches (Kepler was part of the burgeoning Lutheran church, Galileo was Roman Catholic) highlights the struggles of conscience they both faced to bring forth the fruits of their intellectual labours. One church official observes the fundamental constraint with which both astronomers had to contend with the mere suggestion that the Sun and not the Earth was the centre of the universe:

“We cannot go rearranging the heavens. God placed the orbs just as he placed each and every one of us in our correct stations. After our lifetime of faithful service, we receive our reward in Heaven. If we start rearranging the planets, what’s to stop people rearranging their lives? No one will know what to believe. There will be mass panic. Society will break down. What will prevent the peasants demanding land or riches? They could reject our authority altogether. … Even if these observations are correct, we must suppress them. There’s no sin in concealing a truth if it serves a higher purpose. The simple folk will not know how to interpret this.”

As Kepler later responds:

“Though it’s hard to believe at the moment, there must be harmony in the world; God’s perfection cannot allow it to be otherwise. It must be a harmony so grand that it reduces all earthly woes to triviality.”

As Clark so convincingly captures Kepler and Galileo as forthright but very human individuals simply striving for and wishing to share knowledge, so their struggles to convey that knowledge in the face of such at times monolithic resistance, opposition and threat is that much more moving. The reader most assuredly will come away from The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth with eyes more widely opened and perhaps gazing to the heavens with refreshed curiosity, respect and awe

Thank you to Polygon, Ruth Seeley and the author for providing a review copy of The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth, by Stuart Clark.

Notes

1. Stuart Clark’s Universe – www.stuartclark.com/

2. Volume II, The Sensorium of God, features Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley. Volume III, The Day Without Yesterday, recounts the story of Albert Einstein, Edwin Hubble and George Lemaitre.

See also:

Skeptically Speaking – Science as Fiction – a podcast in which, by the way, the interviewer also expresses her admiration for the lively Tycho!

I’m very excited to welcome another guest book reviewer to the Bookgaga blog. This time, I’m delighted to swing the spotlight over to Isabelle Giraud, a dear book friend I met on Twitter and with whom I’ve since been up to Canada Reads-related mischief (but that’s another story). You too will fall in love with ebullient Isabelle when you follow her on Twitter @BlueShoes55, where she waxes in rhapsodic and heartfelt fashion on books and other lively subjects.

Anne Tyler was born in 1941 in Minneapolis, Minnesota but grew up in Quaker communities around North Carolina. After graduating at age 19 from Duke University, she majored in Russian studies at Columbia University. She married Iranian psychiatrist Taghi Modaressi and the couple had two daughters. Tyler and her husband lived in Baltimore, Maryland whose streets and neighbourhoods, especially the historical suburb of Roland Park, provide the background of most of Tyler’s novels.

Tyler won the 1989 Pulitzer prize for Breathing Lessons and the 1985 National Book Critics Circle Award for The Accidental Tourist which was made into a film starring William Hurt and Geena Davis – and has a strong cult-following although she is not a literary household name. She taught English studies at Duke and is a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Tyler creates narrow domestic universes within the confines of a few streets, sometimes a few rooms, where she minutely dissects, with a light hand and infinite compassion the lives of slightly off characters. Her characters are so deeply beloved, their behaviour so factually recounted, readers are forgiven if they take a while to realize they are in fact witnessing people affected with various personality disorders trying to muddle through life.

The Amateur Marriage is one such novel. Pauline and Michael meet the day of Pearl Habour and fall passionately in love. The story of their courtship, Michael’s wound, the subsequent story of their marriage is told in Tyler’s deceptively simple style but it gradually emerges that everything is not right and the contrasting upbeat tone sounds more and more desperate as years go by. There are and have been scenes, painful ones. Incidents, humiliating ones. The reader comes to the gradual realization one of the pair suffers from a form of mental disorder, not socially debilitating enough to be treated or even diagnosed in those pre-Prozac days but that in the long run catastrophically erodes the fabric of family life.

Tyler’s secondary characters manage either by daily denial or by vanishing. She is at her best describing her characters’ coping with the unendurable – here a daughter’s prolonged disappearance:

Amazingly, Michael began to have mornings where Lindy’s absence was not his first thought upon waking. Instead he would travel towards the realization in a kind of two-step process, floating contentedly upward into the warmth of the summer sunlight, the chug-chug of a neighbor’s car starting, the musical murmur of voices elsewhere in the house until all at once – ‘Something’s wrong.’ And his eyes would fly open and he would know. Lindy’s missing.

We recognize fragments of ourselves in Tyler’s stories. Personality disorders are but the pathological manifestation of general character traits and she touches tenderly on this universality of our human condition without ever using “big words”. Astonishingly her contribution to modern American literature in general – and the narrative of mental frailties in particular – is not more widely recognized. Psychiatrists have been known to remark that writers, Dostoyevsky or William Styron for example, are far better at describing mental illness than medical manuals. One can only wish that one day Anne Tyler will be given her rightful place in the literary pantheon. She definitely is a reigning goddess in mine.

Favourite books by Anne Tyler – Saint Maybe, Morgan’s Passing, Celestial Navigation, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Tin Can Tree, A Patchwork Planet.

I’m not a competitive reader. I don’t typically sign up for the “read 100 books in a year” challenges et al. The prospect just leaves me a bit intimidated, a bit bewildered, and a little worried that the unalloyed joy of reading would go right out the window if I set myself on a path like that. Kudos to you who try them – they’re just not for me.

That said, a couple of reading challenges have come across my radar that had me thinking about how I stacked up without being conscious of setting out to meet those specific challenges. I made some interesting discoveries.

The 5th Annual Canadian Book Challenge
from The Book Mine Set blog, by John Mutford

The concept of this challenge is to read and review at least 13 Canadian books (of any genre or ilk) in the period from July 1st (Canada Day, of course) to the next July 1st. Participants share links to their reviews on Mutford’s blog. Yes, there are prizes, but Mutford emphasizes throughout that the main point is to share one’s delight in Canadian literature and have fun.

If I was part of this very worthy challenge, how would I fare? From July 1st, 2010 to July 1st, 2011, I read and reviewed 24 Canadian books of fiction (novels and short stories) and poetry, as follows:

• The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, by Alan Bradley
• Coal and Roses, by PK Page
• Pigeon, by Karen Solie
• The Certainty Dream, by Kate Hall
• The Heart is an Involuntary Muscle, by Monique Proulx
• The Imperfectionists, by Tom Rachman
• Migration Songs, by Anna Quon
• Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems, by Randall Maggs
• Far To Go, by Alison Pick
• Fauna, by Alissa York
• Sandra Beck, by John Lavery
• Annabel, by Kathleen Winter
• The Death of Donna Whalen, by Michael Winter
• Room, by Emma Donoghue
• Ghost Pine, by Jeff Miller
• L (and things come apart), by Ian Orti
• The Bone Cage, by Angie Abdou
• Windstorm, by Joe Denham
• The Water Rat of Wanchai, by Ian Hamilton
• Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, by Zsuzsi Gartner
• The Canterbury Trail, by Angie Abdou
• The Year of Broken Glass, by Joe Denham
• Lookout, by John Steffler
• The Guilty Plea, by Robert Rotenberg

In that period, I read one more Canadian book of short stories, Up Up Up by Julie Booker, for which I haven’t yet written a review. I adored that feisty, ebullient collection of indelible characters, many of whom seemed able to simultaneously squeeze the heart and tickle the proverbial funnybone. I know I was extremely busy with the day job around that time (and Up Up Up probably buoyed me through that patch), but I do need to go back and fill that gap in what I know I wanted to review this year. Till then, here’s a review that I think captures quite nicely what that charmer of a book is all about. (1)

So far, from July 1st, 2011 to the present, I read and reviewed 7 Canadian books of fiction (novels and short stories) and poetry, as follows:

• Ossuaries, by Dionne Brand
• The Cat’s Table, by Michael Ondaatje
• The Ghost Brush, by Katherine Govier
• Hooked,by Carolyn Smart
• Short Talks, by Anne Carson
• Elimination Dance / La danse eliminatoire, by Michael Ondaatje (trans. Lola Lemire Tostevin)
• Making Light of Tragedy, by Jessica Grant

I’ve read, but not yet reviewed, the following. Since I haven’t reviewed them, I’ve found and linked to some other interesting and astute reviews.

• Girlwood, by Jennifer Still
  Review from The Canadian Book Review (2)
  
• Practical Jean, by Trevor Cole
  Review from Reading for the Joy of It blog (3)
  
• Cool Water, by Dianne Warren
  Review from The National Post (4)
  
• Indexical Elegies, by Jon Paul Fiorentino
  Review from Quill & Quire (5)
  
• The Antagonist, by Lynn Coady
  Review from Pickle Me This blog (6)
  
• A Good Man, by Guy Vanderhaeghe
  Review from The Globe and Mail (7)

 

So then … I’d say I’m pretty enthusiastic about literature from my home and native land. That’s not such a bad thing, eh? In the July, 2010 to July, 2011 period in which I read 25 Canadian books, I read a total of 39 books – 64% CanLit.

If I wanted to spawn a personal challenge from these findings, I could go in different directions. Do I challenge myself to read yet more CanLit, or do I challenge myself to venture further outside Canada’s borders for my reading choices? How conscious/premeditated/planned versus unconscious/spontaneous/instinctual should my reading list be? Fellow readers, how much do you think about, plan or not plan your reading in this regard?

Here is another reader challenge that was promoted this year:

Year of the Short Story

As it states on the web page, YOSS (Year Of the Short Story) aims to unite fellow writers and readers everywhere in one cause—to bring short fiction the larger audience it deserves.

So far this year, I’ve read 4 short story collections:

• Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, by Zsuzsi Gartner
• Up Up Up, by Julie Booker
• The Empty Family, by Colm Toibin
• Making Light of Tragedy, by Jessica Grant

I’m still hoping to read at least two more this year:

• The Odious Child, by Carolyn Black
• The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

In 2010, I only read one short story collection:

• Ghost Pine, by Jeff Miller

In 2009, I read four short story collections:

• 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa, by Stephanie Nolen
  (Question: Can this be considered a non-fiction short story collection, perhaps?)
• Margaret Lives in the Basement, by Michelle Berry
• Blackouts, by Craig Boyko
• The Grandmothers, by Doris Lessing

I do think I want to both read and review more short story collections. I’ve certainly enjoyed the collections I’ve encountered in recent years … so yes, why not more?

It’s been interesting to step back a bit and assess the patterns or trends or inclinations in my reading, to see if I want to consciously adjust them in any way. Are you doing that with your own reading? Is that a good thing to do from time to time … or should reading just be an uncatalogued, spontaneous, follow your heart/go with the flow kind of thing?

Notes

1. Book Review: Up Up Up by Julie Booker, by Katherine Laidlaw, This Magazine, September 14, 2011

2. The Canadian Book Review, March 9, 2011

3. Reading for the Joy of It blog, Janet Somerville, October 3, 2010

4. The National Post, Katherine Govier, March 20, 2010

5. Quill & Quire, rob mclennan, November, 2010

6. Pickle Me This blog, Kerry Clare, September 15, 2011

7. Globe and Mail, review by Andrew Pyper, September 17, 2011

Jessica Grant has reminded me to exercise some long-neglected, or perhaps never fully understood or appreciated muscles. Throughout the exhilarating journey through the short stories of Grant’s Making Light of Tragedy, I sensed something charmingly, arrestingly askew in each story’s setting, interplay of characters and/or narrator’s voice … but could not quite zero in on what it was, and why it felt pleasantly dizzying, but not queasy-making.

Then I came to “Milaken”, the final, most extended and quirkily warmest story of a heart melting series, and I had my answer:

“Tad shuts his eyes and convinces himself his bed is in a different part of the room. This requires a certain muscle, which not everyone has, and which must be exercised regularly and built up, over time. It is not just a matter of visualizing. It is a matter of believing.

Tad trained himself as a kid by rearranging the furniture in his bedroom. Every Sunday, he pushed his bed into a new position – up against a different wall, into a new corner. He bisected the room four different ways, blocked the closet, blocked the door. Until he could move the bed around in his head, with himself in it, and believe in each new position, one hundred percent.”

You don’t just picture the fate of the Olympic ski jumper – Grant convinces you of it, through the grammatical certainty of his bewildered but unwavering wife. You don’t just see the cozy dinner party circle with the Dean of Humanity and imagine theorizing about where in the world you would take a war criminal – Grant forever alters that place in your world. You don’t just immediately see and hear the familiar faces and voices of Peter Mansbridge and Chantal Hebert – Grant has made you certain that Chantal will indeed give Peter a friendly punch the next time you tune in to the At Issue panel. Grant doesn’t just make you see, she makes you believe, however vaguely off-kilter each story’s world is. On one hand, you might find it over the top that a young girl at a birthday party would precociously declare herself suicide bomber O-Sara bin Laden, but then on the other hand, mere pages later, when Peter’s newcast includes an abrupt, segue-less report of a female suicide bomber who seems to have changed her mind … well, you’re convinced and it’s very real.

Tad illustrates what Grant does with each story in Making Light of Tragedy. As he rearranges his furniture (and later teaches his daughter to do the same thing, a gift as wonderful as her marvellous name), so does Grant take characters and keeps reinserting them back in their own, slightly altered stories, with the elements moved around just a touch (oh, a Tad!) … and checks again to see how they’re coping. The steps to falling out of love and then into unattainable or implausible love to cope makes strange, mad but then oddly feasible sense. An entanglement of complicated multisexual office romances escalating to possible threats of violence suddenly boils down to two people trying to sort it out in an office cubicle, perhaps a cubicle that you walked past at work today.

Jessica Grant came to popular and critical attention in 2009 with her first novel, Come, Thou Tortoise. This short story collection predates the novel by about four years, and the story “My Husband’s Jump” was a Journey Prize winner in 2003. Having read Making Light of Tragedy first, this reader is now eager, ready and willing, with the seeing and believing muscles suitably trained, to move on to the novel and to look forward to more from this preternaturally assured author.

Thank you to The Porcupine’s Quill for providing a review copy of Making Light of Tragedy, by Jessica Grant.

La Danse Eliminatoire (Traduction de Lola Lemire Tostevin)

This exquisite little gem of a book is a pointed marvel. The words, the translations and even the illustrations (including the sardonic maps at the end) all provoke laughter – much of it delighted, some of it more than a bit pained.

In 1998, filmmaker Bruce McDonald produced a short film vividly and wistfully interpreting Elimination Dance.

Thank you to Brick Books for providing a review copy of Elimination Dance: La danse eliminatoire, by Michael Ondaatje.

Each piece in Anne Carson’s Short Talks is a startling gem – some disorienting, some intimate, some wry, some wistful, many bright and impish. My favourite, combining almost all of those states, is:

This volume, slender in multiple dimensions, will be so easy to go back to again and again.

Thank you to Brick Books for providing a review copy of Short Talks, by Anne Carson.

It’s actually fairly easy to compose a review – be it for a book, concert, what have you – for something that didn’t meet expectations or just didn’t really click for you. You can clinically delineate the disappointing elements or ingredients, sum it up, be done with it. No joy in that – perhaps no point in that – but there you go.

It’s even fairly straightforward to compose a review for something that didn’t make the grade, at least for you, but in which you try, however painfully, to say something constructive or useful. There is maybe some grim satisfaction in at least offering suggestions for improving the experience next time out. Maybe the artist will see your review and take note, and/or someone else will take note, and/or you’ll adjust your expectations accordingly or just not make a return visit to that artist’s offerings, life being too short and all that.

And of course, light, happy, effusive reviews for the delightful … well, are clearly delightful, to revel in, to share with others, to be part of the collective joy.

What hurts and doesn’t work and won’t come out right is when you try to write something about a work that you love, when you know quite rightly that not everyone will love it or care … or should, because you know it isn’t for everyone …. and especially when you know it is the last thing you will hear from a beloved artist. So I’m just going to write what has been percolating for weeks and weeks since I rather unwillingly finished the last page of this book, and be done with it, however inadequate it’s likely to be.

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace is the author’s most intimate and courageous work in a body of work characterized by much intimacy and courage, viewed both from what is within the book’s covers and viewed externally, in terms of its place in Wallace’s oeuvre and in the context of what happened while the work was in progress. When editor Michael Pietsch gathered and attempted to shape what his friend had left behind upon his death, one can only imagine the intimacy and courage attendant in that unanticipated and daunting mission. While a nascent bone structure of plot, theme and character is clearly evident, even the final product with which Pietsch leaves us is not and couldn’t possibly be fully formed. Interestingly, it doesn’t feel like it needed editing and paring, but likely as if it would have blossomed and grown even more complex, but would have had more elements come full circle, connect and resolve in what Wallace would have considered and delivered as the finished work.

The Pale King is ostensibly about the backgrounds and somewhat intertwined experiences of a cross section of employees of the Internal Revenue Service in Peoria, Illinois. Through their experiences, the reader learns about and, if the reader can bear to stick with it, absorbs the intensity and seeming futility of boredom, especially boredom bred of layers and layers of unquestioned rules, regulations and process. Amazingly, that boredom somehow becomes transcendent, counterpointed by a sense of the nobility of contending with boredom for seemingly greater causes, personal, social and even spiritual.

I was astonished at how Wallace made dealing with boredom so heroic, poignant and spellbinding. The standout sequence featuring IRS co-workers Shane Drinion and Meredith Rand is hypnotic, because Drinion is so arrestingly zen, compassionate and invested, listening so attentively to the story of Rand’s troubles, even though it was tedious, repetitious and self-absorbed. But it was still an absorbing sequence. And it showed what compassion and incredible attention to detail Wallace had himself. Perhaps it was that same intense sympathy and empathy that – who knows – drove him to what he did. So, the whole reading experience was both gorgeous and immensely bittersweet on numerous levels.

This is by no means the book with which readers should try to introduce themselves to David Foster Wallace – that could be anything from This is Water (which you can digest in a relative blink online), Consider the Lobster, possibly even Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. However, it is a wrenching and essential, albeit sadly premature last installment for Wallace devotees.

See also:

THE PALE KING: Monologues From The Unfinished Novel By David Foster Wallace
(a PEN benefit from April, 2011)

A Reunion with Boredom, by Charles Simic
(from New York Review of Books, August, 2011)