(translated by David Homel & Fred A. Reed)

“Nothing is simpler than to step through the doors of the universe. First, you switch on your computer. Then rapture begins, when you teeter on the edge with the world at your fingertips, gaping open like a gigantic box of candies that your two hands and your one lifetime could never hope to exhaust.”

This description sounds the first note of genuine passion in the voice of the forlorn narrator of Monique Proulx’s “The Heart is an Involuntary Muscle”. That it follows the emotionally stunted heroine’s last moments with her dying father is very telling. That Proulx is able to sustain the reader’s interest in the misadventures of a cynical, often thoughtless, only sporadically motivated and interpersonally inept narrator illustrates how deceptively accomplished and ultimately winning this book is.

Florence is a Web designer whose only other passion apart from drifting into the online ether is Zeno, the owner of the small Web design firm for which she works, and her on-again, off-again lover. Even the presumably most important and most passionate relationship in her life is intermittent at best. But it’s through the Web design business, which specializes in developing online presence for obscure or underappreciated writers and artists, that Florence finally discovers a subject worth abiding focus, interest and yes, passion. As she becomes entangled with a Thomas Pynchon-esque writer and his wife, Florence begins to confront the life she has lived thus far and assesses why she has not really invested in anyone or anything to that point.

“The Heart is an Involuntary Muscle” bogs down ever-so-slightly about midway, but the murkiness is more likely a reflection of Florence’s inarticulate bewilderment at the new feelings welling up as she becomes more enmeshed with the enigmatic writer than any shortcomings in Proulx’s (and her translators’) precision of expression. Overall, the book is very intriguing and insightful in terms of creating some rich, albeit sometimes frustrating but therefore authentic, characters. Surprisingly, the book’s plot grows increasingly suspenseful as Florence’s involvement with the writer and his wife, and her perhaps on-again relationship with Zeno reach interesting crescendos. The book also offers some intriguing asides about people and their personae and relationships or lack thereof as interactions are conducted online, which sit in striking and instructive contrast to the fumbling interactions of the characters in real life.

The Imperfectionists, by Tom Rachman is not just an exquisitely crafted gem of a book – it’s a series of exquisitely crafted gems that each stand and glimmer gorgeously on their own, but have considerable additional power and depth arranged together in one elegant setting.

The book serves up a connected series of chapters or short stories about the people running and contributing to, with varying degrees of effectiveness and dedication, an international English-language newspaper in Rome. The main stories are set in the near present, but each story concludes with a chronological series of sharp snippets tracing the founding of the paper back in the 1950s. In addition to the particular personal or professional challenges of the central character of each chapter, there is a strong undercurrent of the overall challenges of a news organization contending (or pointedly not contending) with social, cultural and technological changes in news gathering and consumption.

Rachman’s own background as a former foreign correspondent with Associated Press gives The Imperfectionists’ clear and confident industry insights. These are coupled with Rachman’s formidably acute emotional sensitivity, gracefully understated and all the more powerful for it. With just a few brush strokes, Rachman captures the essence of each of his wide range of characters, and makes even the supporting players in each vignette well-rounded and memorable. Gerda Erzberger, the aging feminist writer who appears in obituary writer Arthur Gopal’s poignant sequence, is a standout. With just a few words, she becomes a striking presence who adds resonance to Arthur’s heartwrenching story.

Rachman combines his subtle and unforgettable character portraits – much deeper than just character sketches – with often surprisingly riveting storylines. Resolutions range from the comic to the tragic to even the vaguely menacing, but they all ring true as they are grounded in soundly believable people and circumstances.

The fact that this is Rachman’s first novel (or collection, if you prefer to view it that way) makes this reader both impatient and slightly wary of what will come next from him. The prospect of more finely honed delights like The Imperfectionists is delicious, but has he set the bar impossibly high for himself? I’m certain I’m one of many readers eager to find out.

The poems of The Certainty Dream by Kate Hall all have that clear-eyed, precise and utterly wacky conviction about what is right according to the opaque, hilarious and sometimes terrifying logic of dreams. This conviction (certainty, indeed) permeates almost every poem in this strong first collection, but “This is a Dream Letter” is an especially haunting standout.

Bird and flight imagery also pervades much of the work here, just as the inexplicable but perfectly logical ability to fly often shows up in many dreams. However, Hall’s birds are not always soaring and trilling sweet songs. As well, the bird imagery is sometimes slyly and perhaps menacingly counterbalanced by cat imagery.

The Certainty Dream’s inclusion in the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize Canadian shortlist was both charmed and deserving. It was charmed in that Hall shared the shortlist with the late PK Page, who was an early mentor as Hall embarked on what will undoubtedly be a notable literary career … and charmed as well because she shared it with Karen Solie, this year’s Canadian winner who previously appeared on the Griffin shortlist with a lauded and memorable debut collection. And yes, the inclusion is deserving, because The Certainty Dream is singular and assured and explores intriguing territory, as summed up in the Griffin judges’ citation:

“As the dream world and the waking world blur, the body and the dimensions it inhabits become a series of overlapping circles, all acting as containers for both knowledge and uncertainty. At times disarmingly plainspoken, at others, singing with lyric possibility, these poems make huge associative leaps.”

 

Perhaps this snippet from “Suspended in the Space of Reason: A Short Thesis” suggests that Hall intends to hone further her creative acuity and demand much of herself as she embarks on her particular literary journey:

Bats basically scream
until they hear their voices
echo off bugs and trees. Then they know
where they are and exactly what and how large
the thing is they are hunting.
…
Yesterday I yelled at myself and
nothing came back at all.

Plucky, precocious 11-year-old Flavia de Luce is the new Nancy Drew. Her inspiring accomplishments aside, the focus on Nancy’s sleuthing prowess left little for character development and made her pretty unassailably a CSI/Detective Barbie. By contrast, Flavia has all Nancy’s investigative chops and some, and combines them with foibles, mischief, intensity and self-deprecation that skew her charmingly into Ellen Page terrain – well, a post World War II, English Ellen Page. She’s a hoot, and you’d want to hang out with her … if, in her independent fashion, she didn’t rebuff you first for some “me time” in her chemistry lab to work on some new poisons or poison antidotes.

Since author Alan Bradley has already published a second installment of Flavia’s adventures (The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag), she obviously survives the scrapes in her first crime solving foray. That doesn’t mean the story is predictable, nor that it doesn’t have its genuinely suspenseful and surprising moments and twists. The supporting cast of characters is colourful, and the dollops of insight into chemistry and philately are intriguing without slowing down plot momentum. There is also an undercurrent of familial angst, tension and depression in the de Luce household that feels authentic because it’s comparatively understated. Bradley would do well to mine that aspect of Flavia’s story in future installments, and he’d be well on the way to crafting a truly unforgettable and fully dimensional young heroine.

Lionel Shriver’s So Much For That is a jolting experience, but it’s not a rollercoaster ride. That would suggest moments of ascent and exhilaration as well as gut wrenching downward spirals. So Much For That is more a steady descent into hell for two middle class American families: comparatively modestly living their lives, contending with some challenges, experiencing personal and professional triumphs, making some mistakes and errors in judgement along the way, but nothing that would seemingly warrant the misery that Shriver visits upon them.

What reader would perversely stick around for such a dismal journey, one that dredges up the worst case scenario catastrophes lurking beneath and waiting to be unleashed by everyday occurrences that start out benignly enough: a doctor’s appointment, a credit card debt that is starting to get a bit out of hand, an elderly but still independent parent taking a tumble, a reprimand from a perhaps unreasonable boss about some late office arrivals …?

The reader learns quickly that Shriver doesn’t shy away from a single humiliating detail of those situations run tragically amuck, no matter how intimate or grim it gets. Just as quickly, the reader comes to trust Shriver’s laser precise honesty and the fundamental clarity with which she imbues or finally bestows on her central characters (peripheral characters, not so much – they’re irritating foils, albeit rendered with razor sharp wit). That potent, acerbic honesty means you won’t look away either, no matter how much those scenarios are your own worst nightmares.

As unflinching as Shriver is delineating each character’s folly, self-absorption, selfishness or delusion, she is equally generous showing their resilience, courage and tenderness. The result is a story populated with believable, not always likeable or lovable, fully dimensional characters tackling real situations that might still illustrate our own worst fears, but inspire us to approach them with the same ultimate grace.

Still, is patriarch Shepherd too much a literal rendering of his own name, and perhaps an unrealistic modern Job? After the ragged, searing twists, turns and injustices throughout the novel, is the ending just a bit too neatly sewn up? Perhaps, but after the rough ride Shriver takes her characters and readers on, the ending feels reasonable, compassionate and earned, as Shep captures in a moving and candid moment with his terminally ill and finally fiercely undeluded wife:

“You know, these movies …” He was groping. “Remember how sometimes, in the middle, a movie seems to drag? I get restless, and take a leak, or go for popcorn. But sometimes, the last part, it heats up, and then right before the credits one of us starts to cry – well, then you forget about the crummy middle, don’t you? You don’t care about the fact that it started slow, or had some plot twist along the way that didn’t scan. Because it moved you, because it finally pulled together, you think, when you walk out, that it was a good movie, and you’re glad you went, See, Gnu?” he promised. “We can still end well.”