This is an influential, visionary milestone work on information design and information overload. Originally published in 1989 (reissued in 1990 and 1991, and updated in 2000), it is still very relevant today.
Rosemary Sullivan does a superb job of balancing her portrait of the young Margaret Atwood in her childhood, young adulthood and early career with a solid critical assessment of the burgeoning Canadian literary scene and canon. Sullivan also ably dovetails Atwood’s place in the Canadian literary realm, as well as Atwood’s precocious and always growing potential at that point to influence and shape it. Sullivan also captures Atwood’s own sense of balance, grounded in a loving and supportive upbringing, between personal and emotional health, artistic exploration and integrity, and professionalism. Here is an excerpt that expresses it well:
“Margaret made a distinction: personally, art was a vocation, a gift, which required all her imagination and commitment. But publicly, it was also a profession, with rights and responsibilities. Ironically, the romantic notion of the artist confronting demons alone in an attic freed society of any responsibility for art. The artist suffered, by definition, and was placeless in a culture where he or she had no social role. Margaret was beginning to see the artist as completely different from the romantic cliche. The artist was meant to actively shape society, and not be its victim. When the artist actually spoke out, though, society often felt threatened.”
Atwood is and continues to be engaged and impressive (for example, the Globe and Mail just named her Canada’s Nation Builder of the Decade in Arts, and she tweets voraciously at www.twitter.com/MargaretAtwood), and Sullivan is impressive in her portraiture and context setting. Even if one does not particularly care for Atwood’s works (although there is a range of genres and subject to please most omnivorous readers) or politics, “The Red Shoes” is still an absorbing and inspiring examination of a life and a calling well, healthily, optimistically and fiercely lived.
The Red Shoes is one of the Canadian non-fiction titles I’ve recommended for Canada Reads 2012: True Stories. If you’d like to support this book as a possible Canada Reads finalist, you can vote for it here, as well as perusing some other great recommendations.
Meredith Quartermain’s “Matter” has some interesting echoes amongst its selections: Sylvia Legris’ fascination with birds and birdsong, Don McKay’s veneration of the natural world, Erin Moure’s sprightly dissection of the construction of words. Quartermain’s premise of examining words as if they were species and genera is intriguing, but seems to prove overwhelming over the course of this slim volume. Her concern with sticking to the constructs and constraints of the theme of physical and etymological taxonomies regularly bogs her poems down. The results are just too dense and intricate at times. When Quartermain relaxes and just lets the words flow, as she does in “Matter 18: An Albumen of Absence” and in the whimsical “Life List of Words” at the end of the volume, the premise retains its charm but becomes much more accessible.
Amazingly visionary satire on the chemical and electronic hum that surrounds us all, clouds our reasoning and distracts us from what should be important in our lives … but doesn’t distract us enough to ameliorate our base fears. Sometimes downright hilarious and often very touching, this is a stunning book.
Paul Auster’s “Invisible” is a compelling, delicious, nasty read. The reader needs to adjust expectations and be reconciled to not really caring about or identifying with any of the characters, as none of them can be trusted to have an accurate picture of the central story and circumstances, and at least two of the characters are likely guilty of monstrous acts. Auster treats his characters more like moral chesspieces than people, and the book is more a puzzle for the reader to solve than a milieu in which the reader can imagine him or herself. In fact, a reference late in the book to “a laboratory of human possibilities” probably captures it best.
This is a pleasant, lightweight read, competently written with a likeable cast of characters and notable devotion to the heroine’s Airedale terriers
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.
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.
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.)
Letting Go of the Words
by Janice (Ginny) Redish
The Scream
by Rohinton Mistry
Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens
Catching the Big Fish
Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity
by David Lynch
Soucouyant
by David Chariandy
The Importance of Music to Girls
by Lavinia Greenlaw
Old City Hall
by Robert Rotenberg
The Other End of the Leash
by Patricia B. McConnell
Sideways
by Rex Pickett
28 Stories of AIDS in Africa
by Stephanie Nolen
Northanger Abbey
by Jane Austen
Master of Reality
by John Darnielle
Crabwise to the Hounds
by Jeramy Dodds
Margaret Lives in the Basement
by Michelle Berry
Revolver
by Kevin Connolly
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
Rising, Falling, Hovering
by CD Wright
The Book of Negroes
by Lawrence Hill
The Family Man
by Elinor Lipman
Primitive Mentor
by Dean Young
In the Land of Long Fingernails
A Gravedigger’s Memoir
by Charles Wilkins
The Sentinel
by AF Moritz
What the Body Remembers
by Shauna Singh Baldwin
The Dog That Pitched a No-Hitter
by Matt Christopher
go-go dancing for Elvis
by Leslie Greentree
The Complete Winnie-the-Pooh
by AA Milne
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
by Jonathan Safran Foer
Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Brooklyn
by Colm Toibin
The Dangerous Book for Dogs
by Rex & Sparky
The Winter Vault
by Anne Michaels
Stripmalling
by Jon Paul Fiorentino
The Cure for Death by Lightning
by Gail Anderson Dargatz
Then We Came to the End
by Joshua Ferris
Blackouts
by Craig Boyko
Homesick
by Guy Vanderhaeghe
The Cellist of Sarajevo
by Steven Galloway
Solomon Gursky Was Here
by Mordecai Richler
The Incident Report
by Martha Baillie
A Bend in the River
by VS Naipaul
This Shape We’re In
by Jonathan Lethem
The Grandmothers
by Doris Lessing
Frozen in Time
Unlocking the Secrets of the Franklin Expedition
by Owen Beattie and John Geiger
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
A Gate at the Stairs
by Lorrie Moore
Paper Radio
by Damian Rogers
Negotiating With the Dead
A Writer on Writing
by Margaret Atwood
The Disappeared
by Kim Echlin
February
by Lisa Moore
You Don’t Love Me Yet
by Jonathan Lethem
The Journals of Susanna Moodie
by Margaret Atwood and Charles Pachter
The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out
by Rosemary Sullivan
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.