Two Not-For-Me Novels: ‘Gardening at Night’ and ‘Suddenly’

As a long-time reader, my eye has often been caught by a single short review, or by a cover design. I am not always sucked in by such things, and tend to do a bit more research into a title before I decide whether it is for me, but occasionally, I take a chance. I did so with the two novels which I will be reviewing in this post – Gardening at Night, by South African author Diane Awerbuck, and Suddenly, by Canadian author Bonnie Burnard. Neither of these novels lived up to what I hoped they could be – something, I am sure, which every reader has gone through at one point or another in their literary life. I have tried to be as objective as possible here, and not too negative, but I feel it is important not to just focus on books which I have loved.

Gardening at Night by Diane Awerbuck

I took a chance on this novel mainly because I haven’t read anything set in South Africa for quite some time, and I am so interested in the period – the 1980s and 1990s – in which it is set. I am also a sucker for a coming-of-age story, particularly when it features a young girl railing against what surrounds her, as Gardening at Night purports to do.

The narrator of the piece, also named Diane Awerbuck, lives in a South African town named Kimberley, a former mining area, where ‘the only tales are those of leaving’. The novel is told in a series of vignettes, which feel a little muddled at first, but then take on a more chronological structure. Throughout, we follow different individuals whom the Diane of the novel knows; there are quite a few of these characters. There is a lot of sadness and difficult occurrences within the pages of Gardening at Night, and suicide and violence form just two of the trigger warnings.

Awerbuck’s prose is strange, and can sometimes be a little confusing. Stretches of time pass between vignettes, with children far older from one segment to the next. At first, I found Awerbuck’s writing beguiling, but this cooled for me after a relatively short time. Due to the structure, the narrative often has a broken quality, and it is not always – or even often – the easiest book to read. I can see why this has so divided opinion; on Goodreads, it is definitely a love-hate book, with barely anyone seeming to fall within the middle.

I really liked the inclusion of local slang and products here, which allowed me to gain more of a view of what life in South Africa was like during this period for ordinary people. However, there are a few too many pop culture references which are very specific to the region, and which are not explained. Given its publication in 2003, and its setting of the two decades beforehand, the novel does feel rather dated.

Although I was mildly interested in Diane’s story during her childhood, I found myself becoming less so at the point at which she moves away to college. Sections of Gardening at Night are rather dull, and much of the narrative seems concerned with Diane climbing into people’s cars, and driving around with no real purpose in mind. This seems fitting, given the story; although Diane grows up during the narrative, she never really gets anywhere.

Suddenly by Bonnie Burnard

I stumbled across Bonnie Burnard whilst browsing books published by Virago, undoubtedly one of my favourite houses. I was drawn to the storyline of Suddenly, which deals with a woman who has terminal cancer, and is trying to live fully during her remaining days, whilst remembering those which have passed. I was also most interested in the fact that Suddenly was blurbed by both Alice Munro and Carol Shields, heavyweights of Canadian authors whose work I love.

At first, I really enjoyed Burnard’s writing style. In the first chapter, she writes with insight about how it must feel to know that your life is limited, and that you face incredible amounts of pain. She writes: ‘What she is finally beginning to understand is that all these years of talk, the pleasure of idiocy, the bouts of worry, the complaints, the humouring of memory, even the offhand, underdone affection, these are the least of it. The best of it is being known. Known over time.’ Burnard has real strength here too, in showing how Sandra’s illness progresses.

Sadly, there is no sense of constancy within Suddenly. The consequent chapters have rather plain, matter-of-fact prose, and a great deal of the author’s thoughtfulness and exploration into terminal illness, both on an individual level and within the wider family unit, seems to vanish. There are many secondary characters here, and they are introduced in quick succession, which becomes rather confusing. None of these characters is particularly interesting, either; even a couple of days after finishing the novel, I found myself unable to remember much about any of them aside from protagonist Sandra’s husband, Jack.

My interest in the present-day story did hold somewhat, but the forays into the past, which are made with no delineation between time periods, I found boring. The structure feels a little disorienting at times, and the main threads of the story are lost, entangled in a dull recounting of mundanity. Burnard also has a habit of switching from one character to another without mentioning the new character’s names; instead, she merely uses pronouns, which tend to make everything so confusing.

Suddenly held promise at its outset, but I found it to be poorly executed on the whole. I had to keep stopping myself when I was reading, in able to try and orient myself – to work out who was related to who, and what their relationship consisted of. Suddenly is a disappointingly muddled novel, which I had hoped to enjoy, but which did not continue as I expected. The story is bogged down in ordinary details and bland conversations between flat characters, and there is also a curious lack of emotion throughout, particularly given the present-day storyline.

‘Helpless’ by Barbara Gowdy ***

Helpless is the first book which I have read by Barbara Gowdy, a monthly author who was selected for the book group which I run on Goodreads.  Despite the fact that Gowdy is a bestselling author in her native Canada, and has written quite a few books (one of which was selected for the Man Booker longlist!), I had never heard of her before she was selected.  Of her work, Helpless – described as ‘a haunting, provocative story of heart-stopping suspense’, and called ‘a thumping thriller’ by The Independent – appealed to me the most, so I elected to read and review it.

Helpless follows a struggling single mother named Celia, who lives in a shabby top-floor apartment in downtown Toronto.  She has one daughter, a ‘beautiful’ nine-year-old named Rachel, who is the focus of the novel.  Rachel disappears on a hot summer evening during a blackout, taken to the house of a local repairman named Ron, and kept in a purpose-built bedroom in his basement.  Although Ron and Rachel have never met, he falsely convinces himself that she is being abused at home, and that she should be his responsibility, rather than her mother’s.  Ron’s feelings for Rachel are ‘at once tender, misguided and chillingly possessive.’

Helpless is an uncomfortable book to read almost from the very beginning.  In the first chapter, in which thirty seven-year-old Ron is introduced, lurking outside a school, she writes: ‘He waited.  Really young girls have never interested him.  Neither have girls whose faces and bodies are starting to show their adult contours.  His type is skinny, with olive to light brown skin and features that through some fineness of bone structure promise to remain delicate.’  He takes this journey to a local school around once a week, sitting in his van and watching the young girls who pass him.  On this occasion, he spies Rachel, and quickly becomes obsessed with her.  He begins to follow her everywhere.  Gowdy writes: ‘Everything about her thrilled him: her thin brown arms, the insectlike hinge of her elbows, her prancing step, the shapely bulb of her head, her small square shoulders bearing the burden of her backpack…’.

Gowdy appears to be hyper-aware of how both a mother and daughter in this situation would feel.  She writes the following when the police have become involved in the case: ‘Celia’s dread amplifies.  She doesn’t really think that Rachel is out in the open, but she doesn’t rule out the possibility, either.  Not knowing where she is turns every place, every house and garage and abandoned store, every trunk of every car and now every ditch and field, into a place she might be.’

The novel provides quite an involved character study of Celia.  Regardless of the depth which Gowdy went into, and the exploration of her past – her unplanned pregnancy at the age of twenty-one, and her mother’s death occurring just before Rachel was born – however, did not quite turn Celia into a believable protagonist.  Rather, she remained flat, and had very little agency.  I did not warm to Rachel either, who again felt two-dimensional.  The only character who came across as vaguely realistic was Ron.  His girlfriend, Nancy, serves a purpose in the storyline, protecting Ron from those who suspect him and the like, but I found her quite an irritating character.

The similarities which Jane Shilling in the Sunday Telegraph draws between Helpless and John Fowles’ The Collector were, I felt, relatively unfounded.  Yes, there are similarities in terms of the plot, but I found Helpless far less chilling and engaging.  The novel reminded me rather of Lolita in the feelings of discomfort which it produced in me, and the disgust which I felt towards its main male protagonist.  I was also reminded of Beth Gutcheon’s Still Missing, told in quite plain prose, which deals with the disappearance of a young boy, and his mother’s reactions.

The prose style of Helpless surprised me; it was largely nondescript and matter-of-fact, and I was not blown away by any of Gowdy’s descriptions or scene-building.  However, what did work well was the present tense which Gowdy employed; it enabled the novel to have an immediacy, an urgency.  There was a good level of pace, and a nice rhythm to the novel’s structure.  The storyline did not seem quite consistent, though, and I wasn’t satisfied with the book’s ending, as it seemed to finish rather abruptly.

In some ways, Helpless was interesting and absorbing, but I did find that it became bogged down with detail and drawn out after the first few chapters.  It lacked the impact which I would have expected from any book which deals with similar themes.  I was not entirely impressed with Helpless, and did not find it particularly satisfying.

After reading quite a few reviews by those familiar with the rest of the author’s work, however, it seems to be her least liked novel.  I would definitely like to pick up another book by Gowdy in future, in order to see how it compares.  Helpless does not feel like a wholly accomplished work for such a respected author to have written, particularly given that this was her seventh book.  Regardless, it does give the reader a lot to consider.

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‘Heart Berries’ by Terese Marie Mailhot ****

Roxane Gay has deemed Terese Marie Mailhot’s memoir, Heart Berries, ‘astounding’, and it ranks amongst the favourite books of both Kate Tempest and Emma Watson.  The New York Times calls it a ‘sledgehammer’ of a book, and believes that Mailhot has produces ‘a new model for the memoir.’  I had heard only praise for the book, Mailhot’s debut, and was therefore keen to pick up a copy myself.

Heart Berries is described as ‘a powerful and poetic memoir of a woman’s coming of age on an Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest.  Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalised and facing a dual diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar disorder, Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma.’  It sounded incredibly hard-hitting, and indeed, that is the overarching feeling which I have of the memoir.

As well as a form of therapy, Heart Berries was written as a ‘memorial’ for the author’s mother, as a way of reconciling with her estranged father, ‘and an elegy of how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame.’  In the book, Mailhot finds herself able to discover ‘her own true voice, [and] seizes control of her story, and, in so doing, re-establishes her connection to her family, to her people and to her place in the world.’

Mailhot married for the first time when she was a teenager, and living on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in British Columbia, Canada.  Her husband was violent, and took their young son away from her.  She writes of the way in which this led to her entire life collapsing: ‘We mined each other, and then my mother died.  I had to leave the reservation.’  Mailhot goes on to declare, ‘It’s too ugly – to speak this story…’, and then to ask, ‘How could misfortune follow me so well, and why did I chase it every time?’

From the outset, Mailhot’s voice is authoritative and firm.  She begins by writing: ‘My story was maltreated.  The words were too wrong and ugly to speak.  I tried to tell someone my story, but he thought it was a hustle…  I was silenced by charity – like so many Indians.  I kept my hand out…  The thing about women from the river is that our currents are endless.  We sometimes outrun ourselves.’  Some of the imagery which she goes on to create is nothing short of startling: ‘That’s when my nightmares came.  A spinning wheel, a white porcelain tooth, a snarling mouth, and lightning haunted me.  My mother told me they were visions.’

I found the memoir insightful, particularly when it came to explaining the place in the world of the First Nations community, and the author’s comparisons drawn between her people and the whites who live around them.  She also considers how the First Nations people have had to adapt to the modern world: ‘Our culture is based in the profundity things carry.  We’re always trying to see the world the way our ancestors did – we feel less of a relationship to the natural world.  There was a time when we dictated our beliefs and told ourselves what was real, or what was wrong or right.  There weren’t any abstractions.  We knew that our language came before the world.’  Her wider culture helped her to overcome, or at least to work through, some of the abuse which she suffered: ‘The only thing, the right thing – the thing that brought about my immunity – was the knowledge that something instinctual would carry us back.  The awareness that our ancestors were watching was vital.  I don’t feel the eyes of my grandmother anymore.’

So many things form an integral part of Mailhot’s story: poverty, anger, being viewed as ‘Other’, objectification, vulnerability, self-perception, motherhood, heartbreak, loss, and mental health, to name but a handful.  The structure which she has used throughout Heart Berries, which is made up of a series of loosely connecting essays, works well; it demonstrates that one’s memory is never exact, but can be warped and moulded.  The almost stream-of-consciousness prose, and turns of phrase, allow the reader to keep in mind just how troubled Mailhot was when writing.  She shows this in harsh, heartbreaking phrases, such as ‘I feel like my body is being drawn through a syringe.  Sometimes walking is hard.’  She comes across as brusque yet sincere, laying her grief bare upon the page: ‘I fit the criteria of an adult child of an alcoholic and the victim of sexual abuse.  I reiterate to the therapist several stories about my eldest brother’s abuse and my sister’s.  I often have felt, in proximity to their violations, that I mimic their chaos.’

Heart Berries is a slim memoir, filling just 130 pages.  There is so much to be found within its pages, however, and I feel that I got more from it than I have in memoirs three or four times its size.  Heart Berries presents a searing and honest portrait of a troubled life.  It is both brutal and bitter in what it portrays.  What is included here is presented as the prose which she wrote whilst receiving help for her diagnosed disorders, and is addressed to her husband, Casey: ‘I’m writing you from a behavioral health service building.  I agreed to commit myself under the condition they would let me write.’  There are many trigger warnings throughout Mailhot’s memoir, but she never goes into detail about the kinds of abuse which she suffered; rather, she has kept this part of her story hidden.  Heart Berries is a dark yet admirable book, which has a real sense of poignancy.

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2018 Travel: Books Set in Canada

I thought that I would prepare a week-long series of books which I would recommend in the countries which I have been to so far in 2018.  I have copied the official blurbs, and have also linked my review if I have written anything extensive.  I will be including seven books per destination, so as to showcase the best of the work which I have read, and not to make the posts too lengthy.  Our first stop is Canada.

1. The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence (1964)
‘In her best-loved novel, The Stone Angel, Margaret Laurence introduces Hagar Shipley, one of the most memorable characters in Canadian fiction. Stubborn, querulous, self-reliant – and, at ninety, with her life nearly behind her – Hagar Shipley makes a bold last step towards freedom and independence.  As her story unfolds, we are drawn into her past. We meet Hagar as a young girl growing up in a black prairie town; as the wife of a virile but unsuccessful farmer with whom her marriage was stormy; as a mother who dominates her younger son; and, finally, as an old woman isolated by an uncompromising pride and by the stern virtues she has inherited from her pioneer ancestors.  Vivid, evocative, moving, The Stone Angel celebrates the triumph of the spirit, and reveals Margaret Laurence at the height of her powers as a writer of extraordinary craft and profound insight into the workings of the human heart.‘

2. Shelter by Frances Greenslade (2011; review here)
‘A gorgeous, poetic literary debut from award-winning author Frances Greenslade, Shelter is a brilliant coming-of-age story of two strong, brave sisters searching for their mother.  For sisters Maggie and Jenny growing up in the Pacific mountains in the early 1970s, life felt nearly perfect. Seasons in their tiny rustic home were peppered with wilderness hikes, building shelters from pine boughs and telling stories by the fire with their doting father and beautiful, adventurous mother. But at night, Maggie—a born worrier—would count the freckles on her father’s weathered arms, listening for the peal of her mother’s laughter in the kitchen, and never stop praying to keep them all safe from harm. Then her worst fears come true: Not long after Maggie’s tenth birthday, their father is killed in a logging accident, and a few months later, their mother abruptly drops the girls at a neighbor’s house, promising to return. She never does.   With deep compassion and sparkling prose, Frances Greenslade’s mesmerizing debut takes us inside the extraordinary strength of these two girls as they are propelled from the quiet, natural freedom in which they were raised to a world they can’t begin to fathom. Even as the sisters struggle to understand how their mother could abandon them, they keep alive the hope that she is fighting her way back to the daughters who adore her and who need her so desperately.  Heartwarming and lushly imagined, Shelter celebrates the love between two sisters and the complicated bonds of family. It is an exquisitely written ode to sisters, mothers, daughters, and to a woman’s responsibility to herself and those she loves. ‘

3. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (1996)
‘It’s 1843, and Grace Marks has been convicted for her involvement in the vicious murders of her employer and his housekeeper and mistress. Some believe Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Now serving a life sentence, Grace claims to have no memory of the murders.  An up-and-coming expert in the burgeoning field of mental illness is engaged by a group of reformers and spiritualists who seek a pardon for Grace. He listens to her story while bringing her closer and closer to the day she cannot remember. What will he find in attempting to unlock her memories?  Captivating and disturbing, Alias Grace showcases best-selling, Booker Prize-winning author Margaret Atwood at the peak of her powers.‘

4. A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews (2004)
‘In this stunning coming-of-age novel, award-winner Miriam Toews balances grief and hope in the voice of a witty, beleaguered teenager whose family is shattered by fundamentalist Christianity.  “Half of our family, the better-looking half, is missing,” Nomi Nickel tells us at the beginning of A Complicated Kindness. Left alone with her sad, peculiar father, her days are spent piecing together why her mother and sister have disappeared and contemplating her inevitable career at Happy Family Farms, a chicken slaughterhouse on the outskirts of East Village. Not the East Village in New York City where Nomi would prefer to live, but an oppressive town founded by Mennonites on the cold, flat plains of Manitoba, Canada.  This darkly funny novel is the world according to the unforgettable Nomi, a bewildered and wry sixteen-year-old trapped in a town governed by fundamentalist religion and in the shattered remains of a family it destroyed. In Nomi’s droll, refreshing voice, we’re told the story of an eccentric, loving family that falls apart as each member lands on a collision course with the only community any of them have ever known. A work of fierce humor and tragedy by a writer who has taken the American market by storm, this searing, tender, comic testament to family love will break your heart.‘

5. The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields (1993)
‘The Stone Diaries is one ordinary woman’s story of her journey through life. Born in 1905, Daisy Stone Goodwill drifts through the roles of child, wife, widow, and mother, and finally into her old age. Bewildered by her inability to understand her place in her own life, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography. Her life is vivid with incident, and yet she feels a sense of powerlessness. She listens, she observes, and through sheer force of imagination she becomes a witness of her own life: her birth, her death, and the troubling missed connections she discovers between. Daisy’s struggle to find a place for herself in her own life is a paradigm of the unsettled decades of our era. A witty and compassionate anatomist of the human heart, Carol Shields has made distinctively her own that place where the domestic collides with the elemental. With irony and humor she weaves the strands of The Stone Diaries together in this, her richest and most poignant novel to date.‘

6. Selected Stories by Alice Munro (1985)
‘Spanning almost thirty years and settings that range from big cities to small towns and farmsteads of rural Canada, this magnificent collection brings together twenty-eight stories by a writer of unparalleled wit, generosity, and emotional power. In her Selected Stories, Alice Munro makes lives that seem small unfold until they are revealed to be as spacious as prairies and locates the moments of love and betrayal, desire and forgiveness, that change those lives forever. To read these stories–about a traveling salesman and his children on an impromptu journey; an abandoned woman choosing between seduction and solitude–is to succumb to the spell of a writer who enchants her readers utterly even as she restores them to their truest selves.‘

7. Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature by Margaret Atwood (1995)
‘Margaret Atwood’s witty and informative book focuses on the imaginative mystique of the wilderness of the Canadian North. She discusses the ‘Grey Owl Syndrome’ of white writers going native; the folklore arising from the mysterious– and disastrous — Franklin expedition of the nineteenth century; the myth of the dreaded snow monster, the Wendigo; the relations between nature writing and new forms of Gothic; and how a fresh generation of women writers in Canada have adapted the imagery of the Canadian North for the exploration of contemporary themes of gender, the family and sexuality. Writers discussed include Robert Service, Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, E.J. Pratt, Marian Engel, Margaret Laurence, and Gwendolyn MacEwan. This superbly written and compelling portrait of the mysterious North is at once a fascinating insight into the Canadian imagination, and an exciting new work from an outstanding literary presence.‘

 

Have you read any of these books?  Which ones appeal to you?

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Snapshots: Toronto [2] (January 2018)

The second part of my clip video from my fantastic trip to beautiful Toronto.

Featuring: The CN Tower | Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) | Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library | University of Toronto | Casa Loma | Niagara Falls (Canada and USA) | Toronto Music Garden | Harbourfront | Lacrosse (Toronto Rock vs. New England Black Wolves)

Music: ‘Float On’ by Modest Mouse | ‘Little Bribes’ by Death Cab for Cutie

Snapshots: Toronto [1] (January 2018)

The first part of my Toronto clip video from my wonderful trip in January.

Featuring:
Lake Ontario | Graffiti Alley | Financial District | Nathan Phillips Square | Sugar Palm Beach | Toronto Light Festival | Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada

Music:
‘Gone’ by Tokyo Police Club | ‘Home Versus Home’ by The Xcerts

Snapshots: Niagara Falls (January 2018)

Footage from my January trip to both the Canadian and US sides of spectacular Niagara Falls.

Music: ‘Great Expectations’ by The Gaslight Anthem

‘The Orange Grove’ by Larry Tremblay ***

Prolific French Canadian author Larry Tremblay’s The Orange Grove is number 23 upon the Peirene Press list, published as part of 2017’s series, East and West.  It has been translated from its original French by Sheila Fischman, and has sold over 25,000 copies in Tremblay’s native Canada.  Longlisted for the 2017 IMPAC award, and the winner of eight others, The Orange Grove looks at ‘personal costs of war in the Middle-East’, and engages with ‘themes of the family and grief in general’.  Meike Ziervogel, founder of Peirene, says of the novella: ‘This story made me cry…  [It] reminds us of our obligation to forgive – ourselves as well as others’.

The Orange Grove focuses upon twin brothers, Ahmed and Aziz, who are living on their grandparents’ orange grove in an unnamed Middle Eastern country.  When their grandparents are killed on their homestead in a bombing attack, the boys ‘become pawns in their country’s civil war’, leaving their parents with the devastating choice of which son they should save. Soulayed, an acquaintance of Ahmed and Amir’s father, takes the boys away from his family with their father’s permission, after saying just how important the small boys are to the war effort.  He tells them: ‘”Do you see now what you’ve accomplished?  You found a road to lead you to that strange town.  You’re the only ones who’ve done it.  Others who’ve tried to do so were blown to smithereens by the mines.  In a few days, one of you qill go back there.  You, Aziz, or you, Ahmed.  Your father will decide.  And the one who is chosen will wear a belt of explosives.  He will go down to that strange town and make it disappear forever.”‘

The writing, particularly that which deals with violent scenes and aftermaths, is rather matter-of-fact; sometimes, it is even rendered coldly, and is almost entirely devoid of emotion.  This can be seen when the twins discover the mutilated bodies of their grandparents: ‘Their grandmother’s skull had been smashed by a beam.  Their grandfather was lying in his bedroom, his body ripped apart by the bomb that had come from the side of the mountain where every evening the sun disappeared’.

Much of the prose, in fact, is simplistic, but sometimes deceptively so.  There are flickers of beauty at times with regard to descriptions.  Of the twins’ mother Tamara, for instance, Tremblay writes: ‘Some nights the moon made her think of a fingernail impression in the flesh of the sky.  She liked these moments when she was alone before infinity’.  The novella’s dialogue, on the other hand, is often rather profound.

I was reminded of another of Peirene’s publications, Hamid Ismailov’s The Dead Lake, whilst reading The Orange Grove.  Whilst the novella undoubtedly tells an important story, there is the same simplicity to it at times, and the same kind of detachment.  I never felt as though I truly learnt much about the characters who people Tremblay’s work, which comes across almost like a contemporary fable.  The boys are both naive and knowing; an interesting contrast, which I cannot help but think more could have been made of.   Regardless, The Orange Grove is a timely work, which raises questions about choice, family, religion, society, grief, loss, revenge, and deception.  A lot is packed into the pages of this very human novella, and the whole could easily be extended into a much longer novel.  Overall, I found The Orange Grove an important read, but ultimately a slightly underwhelming one.

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The Book Trail: Swinging to Nightbirds

We begin with a very thoughtful and compelling work of Miriam Toews’ for this particular Book Trail!

1. Swing Low by Miriam Toews
‘One morning Mel Toews put on his coat and hat and walked out of town, prepared to die. A loving husband and father, faithful member of the Mennonite church, and immensely popular schoolteacher, he was a pillar of his close-knit community. Yet after a lifetime of struggle, he could no longer face the darkness of manic depression.  With razor-sharp precision,Swing Low tells his story in his own voice, taking us deep inside the experience of despair. But it is also a funny, winsome evocation of country life: growing up on farm, courting a wife, becoming a teacher, and rearing a happy, strong family in the midst of private torment.  A humane, inspiring story of a remarkable man, father, and teacher.’

 

2. Better Living Through Plastic Explosives by Zsuzsi Gartner
‘From an emerging master of short fiction and one of Canada’s most distinctive voices, a collection of stories as heartbreaking as those of Lorrie Moore and as hilariously off-kilter as something out of McSweeney’s. In Better Living through Plastic Explosives, Zsuzsi Gartner delivers a powerful second dose of the lacerating satire that marked her acclaimed debut, All the Anxious Girls on Earth, but with even greater depth and darker humour. Whether she casts her eye on evolution and modern manhood when an upscale cul-de-sac is thrown into chaos after a redneck moves into the neighbourhood, international adoption, war photography, real estate, the movie industry, motivational speakers, or terrorism, Gartner filets the righteous and the ridiculous with dexterity in equal, glorious measure. These stories ruthlessly expose our most secret desires, and allow us to snort with laughter at the grotesque world we’d live in if we all got what we wanted. ‘

 

3. Open by Lisa Moore
‘Lisa Moore’s Open makes you believe three things unequivocally: that St. John’s is the centre of the universe, that these stories are about absolutely everything, that the only certainty in life comes from the accumulation of moments which refuse to be contained. Love, mistakes, loss — the fear of all of these, the joy of all of these. The interconnectedness of a bus ride in Nepal and a wedding on the shore of Quidi Vidi Lake; of the tension between a husband and wife when their infant cries before dawn (who will go to him?) and the husband’s memory of an early, piercing love affair; of two friends, one who suffers early in life and the other midway through.  In Open Lisa Moore splices moments and images together so adroitly, so vividly, you’ll swear you’ve lived them yourself. That there is a writer like Lisa Moore threading a live wire through everything she sees, showing it to us, warming us with it. These stories are a gathering in. An offering. They ache and bristle. They are shared riches. Open.‘

 

4. Luck by Joan Barfoot
‘Philip Lawrence, a robust and pleasure-loving furniture-maker, dies suddenly at the age of forty-six. Though that’s terribly young by most standards, he’s lucky to have passed presumably peacefully in his sleep. Less fortunate, however, are the three women he leaves behind to make sense of his loss.  There’s Nora, his wife of seventeen years, who wakes up next to his dead body. A fiery visual artist, Nora’s feminist re-interpretation of biblical themes stoked fundamentalist outrage from her small-town neighbours. Now, as her emotions run the gamut, she must confront solo life in a place she despises.  Nora shares the house with Sophie, a buxom and bossy redhead, who works as the couple’s housekeeper and personal assistant. A recovering virtue addict, Sophie turns to menial tasks as a way to suppress painful memories of her two-year stint as an overseas aid worker. Philip’s death leaves her quietly reeling.  And then there’s the pliable and vacuous Beth, a former beauty queen, who serves as Nora’s live-in muse and model. She mourns not Philip so much as the loss of a haven from her own creepy past.  The novel follows the three days immediately after Philip’s death. Privately, each woman deals with memories and emotions, secrets and uncomfortable revelations, while at the same time preparing for the public rituals of mourning (including a funeral like no other). The narrative moves seamlessly from one perspective to another with delicious dark humour and wry insight into the nature of death, love, mourning, fundamentalism and luck.‘

 

5. Barnacle Love by Anthony De Sa
‘At the heart of this collection of intimately linked stories is the relationship between a father and his son. A young fisherman washes up nearly dead on the shores of Newfoundland. It is Manuel Rebelo who has tried to escape the suffocating smallness of his Portuguese village and the crushing weight of his mother’s expectations to build a future for himself in a terra nova. Manuel struggles to shed the traditions of a village frozen in time and to silence the brutal voice of Maria Theresa da Conceicao Rebelo, but embracing the promise of his adopted land is not as simple as he had hoped.  Manuel’s son, Antonio, is born into Toronto’s little Portugal, a world of colourful houses and labyrinthine back alleys. In the Rebelo home the Church looms large, men and women inhabit sharply divided space, pigs are slaughtered in the garage, and a family lives in the shadow cast by a father’s failures. Most days Antonio and his friends take to their bikes, pushing the boundaries of their neighbourhood street by street, but when they finally break through to the city beyond they confront dangers of a new sort.  With fantastic detail, larger-than-life characters and passionate empathy, Anthony De Sa invites readers into the lives of the Rebelos and finds there both the promise and the disappointment inherent in the choices made by the father and the expectations placed on the son.‘

 

6. The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan
‘At the turn of the twentieth century, newly arrived to the countryside, William Heath, his wife, and two daughters appear the picture of a devoted family. But when accusations of embezzlement spur William to commit an unthinkable crime, those who witnessed this affectionate, attentive father go about his routine of work and family must reconcile action with character. A doctor who cared for the young Lillian searches for clues that might penetrate the mystery of the father’s motivation. Meanwhile Rachel’s teacher grapples with guilt over a moment when fate wove her into a succession of events that will haunt her dreams.  In beautifully crafted prose, Mary Swan examines the intricate and unexpected connections between the people in this close-knit community that continue to echo in the future. In her nuanced, evocative descriptions, a locket contains immeasurable sorrow, trees provide sanctuary and refuge to lost souls, and grief clicks into place when a man cocks the cold steel barrel of a revolver. A supreme literary achievement, The Boys in the Trees offers a chilling story that swells with acutely observed emotion and humanity.‘

 

7. The Assassin’s Song by M.G. Vassanji
‘In the aftermath of the brutal violence that gripped western India in 2002, Karsan Dargawalla, heir to Pirbaag – the shrine of a mysterious, medieval sufi – begins to tell the story of his family. His tale opens in the 1960s: young Karsan is next in line after his father to assume lordship of the shrine, but he longs to be “just ordinary.” Despite his father’s pleas, Karsan leaves home behind for Harvard, and, eventually, marriage and a career. Not until tragedy strikes, both in Karsan’s adopted home in Canada and in Pirbaag, is he drawn back across thirty years of separation and silence to discover what, if anything, is left for him in India.‘

 

8. Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? by Anita Rau Badami
‘Set against the tumultuous backdrop of a fragmenting Punjab and moving between Canada and India, Can you Hear the Nightbird Call? charts the interweaving stories of three Indian women – Bibi-ji, Leela and Nimmo – each in search of a resting place amid rapidly changing personal and political landscapes.‘

 

Have you read any of these books?  Which have piqued your interest?

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Two Non-Fiction Reviews: Elizabeth McCracken and Margaret Atwood

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken *****

‘”This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending,” writes Elizabeth McCracken in her powerful, inspiring memoir. A prize-winning, successful novelist in her 30s, McCracken was happy to be an itinerant writer and self-proclaimed spinster. But suddenly she fell in love, got married, and two years ago was living in a remote part of France, working on her novel, and waiting for the birth of her first child.This book is about what happened next. In her ninth month of pregnancy, she learned that her baby boy had died. How do you deal with and recover from this kind of loss? Of course you don’t–but you go on. And if you have ever experienced loss or love someone who has, the company of this remarkable book will help you go on.With humor and warmth and unfailing generosity, McCracken considers the nature of love and grief. She opens her heart and leaves all of ours the richer for it.’

I reread An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination for my Reading France project this year.  McCracken, whom I first discovered back in 2007 when a kind human in Waterstone’s recommended the fantastic The Giant’s House to me, is one of my favourite contemporary authors.  She is consistent, thoughtful, and striking in her prose.  This is the only piece of non-fiction which she has released to date, and it is a heartbreakingly honest work which details the stillbirth of her first son, Pudding.  The fragmented prose style, with its many short chapters made up of different memories, hopes, and dreams, is incredibly fitting, whilst giving the whole such depth.  An Exact Replica… is a beautiful and brave memorial to a lost son.

 

Strange Things by Margaret Atwood ****

‘Margaret Atwood’s witty and informative book focuses on the imaginative mystique of the wilderness of the Canadian North. She discusses the ‘Grey Owl Syndrome’ of white writers going native; the folklore arising from the mysterious– and disastrous — Franklin expedition of the nineteenth century; the myth of the dreaded snow monster, the Wendigo; the relations between nature writing and new forms of Gothic; and how a fresh generation of women writers in Canada have adapted the imagery of the Canadian North for the exploration of contemporary themes of gender, the family and sexuality. Writers discussed include Robert Service, Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, E.J. Pratt, Marian Engel, Margaret Laurence, and Gwendolyn MacEwan. This superbly written and compelling portrait of the mysterious North is at once a fascinating insight into the Canadian imagination, and an exciting new work from an outstanding literary presence.’

I found out about Margaret Atwood’s Strange Things whilst reading through Kirsty Logan’s blog, and noting down all of those books which she has loved.  I have read – and largely enjoyed – several Atwood books to date, but this marked my first taste of her non-fiction.  I am rather obsessed at present with accounts of northerly snow-covered spaces, in which barely anyone lives.

Strange Things, which is subtitled ‘The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature’ therefore seemed a perfect tome for me.  It is comprised of four essays, which were originally given at the University of Oxford.  Her rendering of these essays is incredibly readable, and each, as anyone who is at all familiar with Atwood’s work, is so intelligently written.  The essays, which focus upon four core stereotypical representations of Canadian life and literature, are varied and memorable, and this is a volume which I would recommend to any world traveller.

 

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