I'm going to have to read this one again in order to do it justice. It has so many elements that I enjoyed: some mystery, some romantic intrique, both blunt and poetic prose, a cast of well-developed and slightly lost characters, an unique context(Yellowknife & small town radio)...read it!



Another Canadian novel - how lucky am I? And I found it at a flea market at the university - four books for three euros. Best deal ever considering the bookstore stocks only paper back bodice rippers and mysteries for 12-16 euros. I very nearly put it down. I picked it up and read "On a Canadian air force base in the early 1960's the McCarthy family is leading a post-war dream" - eww, the 60's? I started watching Mad Men last week when it debuted over here and barely lasted the episode. That was not a good era for women. This book though captivated and I could not put it down all weekend despite the migraine inducing small type (what is wrong with me, I missed half a day of work recovering)Part childhood memoir, part cold war thriller (mild), part crime/mystery novel and rather patriotic...got me thinking with one character's supposition that the worst kind of Canadian patriotism is anti-Americanism. Makes sense, doesn't say much to define your country by what your country is not. And yet it is so easy (and tempting) to do. Part Four seemed to loose momentum and the dreamy story telling quality that drew me in...but satisfying just the same. And to be honest, I'm rarely satisfied with the ending of a good book, it seems the characters should keep living their lives on the pages...

"When you look closely, however, you can see that they all have the thing in their eye. The result of an accident or a gift. Perhaps God dropped each of them on the head before they were born. Light seems to reflect at an odd angle from their irises - the visible effect, possibly, of information that, having entered the brain obliquely, exits the eye at a corresponding tilt. Something, at some point, smote or stroked them. Each lives in genial terror of being found out and exposed as a fraud. Each is fuelled by a combustible blend of exuberance and self-loathing, informed by a mix of savvy and gullibility. None was cool in high school. Denizens of the great in-between of belonging and not belonging; dwellers in the cracks of sidewalks; stateless citizens of the world; strangers among us, familiar to all. Comedians. These are Madeleine's people."

"The man who whined reappeared from time to time, but she kept him separate from her dad. It never occurred to her that the woman who criticized was anyone other than her mother."

PS- Jaralyn, I think you would like this one...

Two solid reads...

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

It moved so slowly, it nearly stopped. For a mystery that is. But I kept on reading because the author created such an interesting world, and imaginary Jewish Alaska. The description of a neighbourhood, "Shvartsn-Yam" in the Sitka Sound:

"The swingers and the vacationers gave way to a population of upper-lowlifes, Russian immigrants, a smattering of ultra-orthodox Jews, and a bunch of bohemian professionals who like the atmosphere of ruined festivity that lingers in the neighbourhood like a strand of tinsel on the branch of a bare tree."

Another taste...

"The Dnyeper stairwell reeks of sea air, cabbage, cold cement. When he gets to the top, he lights a papiros to reward himself for industry and stands on the Taytsh-Shemets doormat, keeping the mezuzah company. He has one lung coughed up and the other on its way when Ester-Malke Taytsh-Shemets opens the door. She holds a home pregnancy test stick with a bead, on its business end, of what must be urine. When she notices Landsman noticing it, she coolly makes it disappear into a pocket of her bathrobe."

This tale centres on a disallusioned detective (a drunk as well) living in a flop hotel estranged from his wife, who has recently become his boss. His sidekick is Berko a towering aboriginal turned Jew. The District of Sitka was created sixty years ago following the horrors of the Holocaust and the 1948 collapse of Israel - in this version of history this Jewish territory is about to revert to Alaskan control, this period of transition will leave a lot of people without residence permits. There is a dark, end times feel to the mystery, a fight against giving up in both the protagonist and the society in general. Nicely described in the book jacket, "at once a gripping whodunit, a love story, a homage to 1940's noir, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption"...Richly atmospheric, the sounds and the smells of damp and dark permeate the pages.




Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

A few moments of doubt during the first few pages, oh no, another "The Mysterious Incident of the Dog in the Night" another precocious uber smart child protagonist, but by the end of chapter one, a few tears had trickled down my cheek. I guess I was suprised, and that is what happens when you borrow a book from a friend and fail to bother reading the jacket. I kept reading, not because I wanted to find out what would happen (that part of the "quest" seemed a bit cliche) but because the narrative stirred me. It reminded me of how September 11th effected individuals, and what really happened afterwards. How did people pick up the pieces and carry on? And in this story, how does a child carry on?

Nine year old Oscar Schell wonders if his dad was a jumper. He has a book of "things that happened to me" under his bed with strange and wonderful images cut from magazines (and this is incorporated in the novel) and one is of a man falling from one of the twin towers. When looking around in his parents closet he finds a vase and inside the vase there is a key inside an envelope which says "Black" written in his father's handwriting. At one point in the story he wanders into an art supply store to find out if they have that pen...the pen was red. The shopkeeper notes that usually people write a colour in the exact colour when testing pens on the pads they keep there. He looks and sure enough, all sorts of scribbles and doodles are ont the pads but a great many people write the colour of the pen they are testing. Or their name. This is when he see's his fathers name scribbled on a test pad, soon he finds it all over the store. His father died over a year before. Little moments where someone remembers or realizes that the past is still present, that reminders are everywhere are one aspect of how the novel grapples with the concept of time. Time of death, times before, times after, and how they intersect. I highly recommend this book.

I have a visual memory

Well no time to write, just time to read. I have my first paper presentation ever this week and I'm madly busy but the one thing that makes it all fade away is a good book. Whether it's a light mystery or something a little darker. I enjoyed all of these books, found in English at my local library. At the end of term all the foreign student's finally return their books and it's a buffet of new fiction (well relatively new...as good as it gets here) and I can't turn it down no matter how busy I am.

44 Scotland Street

Reading this book was like drinking a cup of hot cocoa in a cozy warm kitchen while the rain pitter patters outside. Sigh. I drank up the sequal (which wasn't quite as lovely) and I check daily for the 3rd in the series - the triquel?? Daily? Yes, daily. I have a neat little research room in the university library due to an office shortage in the department in which I'm studying, so each day on my way to the stairwell I swing by the 2 rows of English fiction. I could easily put a hold on it, but I rather find it just when I need it.

McCall Smith wrote this novel in installments for the newspaper (so I think this is why it moves along a little faster with a bit more oooomph than the Ladies Detective Series) - and believe it or not, some of the characters are real people as themselves, or under different names, in the city of Edinburgh. In his own words -

"What I have tried to do in 44 Scotland Street is to say something about life in Edinburgh which will strike readers as being recognizable about this extraordinary city and yet at the same time be a bit of light-hearted fiction. I think that one can write about amusing subjects and still remain within the realm of serious fiction. It is observing the minor ways of people that one can still see very clearly the moral dilemmas of our time. One task of fiction is to remind us of the virtues- of love and forgiveness, for example - and these can be portrayed just as well in an ongoing story of everyday life as they can on a more ambitious and more leisurely canvas."
Well put. These days I'm surrounded by quite a bit of posturing under the guise of knowledge sharing, although, I can't say I wasn't forewarned about this, so it's lovely to consider the worth of the simple things we enjoy, that they are not insignificant in the greater scheme of things.

Divisadaro by Michael Ondaatje

I loved Anil's Ghost, so I knew I would love Divisadaro. The tale begins in Northern California during the 1970's - a man loses his wife during the birth of their first child and ends up raising three children. How? A woman dies during labour the same day as his wife and he offers to takes this baby as well. He has also taken in Coop, sole survival of the brutal slaying of his family on a neighbouring plot. Claire, Anna and Coop are intimate with loss, and on the cusp of passion and adulthood when a tragic accident and a forbidden love splinter the family. The story finds Claire in San Francisco, Coop gambling in Nevada and Anna writing in France, and yet there is an unbreakable bond between them. Poetic, atmospheric and full of the dark and the light this is a beautiful book. Peopled with characters who know hardship, ruin, self-destruction, beauty, and how to find one's own unique way in the world.

"I came to France, in the 34th year of my life, to research the life and works of Lucien Segura. I had flown to Orly, my friend Branka had met my plane, and we drove through the darkening outskirts, passing the smaller peripheral towns that were like blinks of light as we travelled south. We had not seen each other in over a year, and now we were catching up, talking all the way. Branka had packed a hamper of fruit, bread, and cheese, and we ate most of it, and drank from a constantly refilled glass of red wine that we shared."

- sounds nice, but what, they were drinking and driving? ah, fiction.

"There was now not a single lite streetlamp in the villages we passed, just our headlights veering and sweeping along the two-lane roads. We were alone in the world, in nameless and unseen country. I love such journeying at night. You have most of your life strapped to your back. Music on the radio comes faint and intermittent. You are wordless at last. Your friend's hand on your knee to make sure you are not drifting away. The black hedges coax you on."

"

Timbuktu

Timbuktu by Paul Aster

I have to admidt that I skimmed a great deal of the first half. The rantings of a the dog's companion and lifelong love, a homeless man, were just too monotonous and familiar for those of us who have worked in public libraries. This book truly took flight for me in the last few chapters. This is sometimes the case when one enjoys the prose but not the topic.

"Paula loved the house but she didn't love Dick. This had become manifestly clear to Mr. Bones, and although Polly herself didn't know it yet, it wouldn't be long before the truth finally came crashing down on top of her. That was why she needed Mr. Bones, and because he loved her more than nay other living person in the world, he was glad to serve as her confidant and sounding board. There was no one else to fill this role for her, and even though he was a mere dog who could neither counsel her nor answer her questions, his simple presence as an ally was enough to giver her the courage to take certain steps she might not have taken otherwise."

Lives of Girls and Women

Lives of Girls and Women: A Novel by Alice Munro

I am ashamed that this if the first time I have read Alice Munro - one of the great Canadian authors of our time - what kind of librarian am I? To my defence, I'm not usually interested in short story collections, just when it gets interesting, the story ends! Lives of Girls and Women is her only novel and one which draws on her childhood in Ontario during the 1940's. For those of you who do not like historical fiction, don't let this deter you if you enjoy coming of age novels. There is something tantalating and delicious about turning each page awaiting the inevitable first experiences with "sex, birth and death" and even more so when it is so realitically portrayed, as in this semi-autobiographical novel. When I began this novel, I truly thought my grandmother might enjoy it having been raised on a farm in Manitoba, but after a few pages I realized that there was a darkness that wouldn't agree with her. Munro is shockingly candid in portraying people for all their faults, deceptions, and desires.

Del Jordan is the daughter of a silver martin farmer a mother who takes boarders and goes door to door selling encyclopedias to make ends meet. Stories weave in and out...a neighbour who gains a wife to an advertisement in the paper for a woman with one child seeking a housekeeping position "matrimony if suited" and finds himself married at the train station on arrival with tragic consequences. Del's first love almost drowns her for the sake of baptizing her into a marriageable state...Del's own pursuit of religion, sneaking into the Anglican church and unsuccessfully seeking God despite her agnostic mother's disapproval. These are good tales that share a place and a time where a girl felt compelled to follow a certain path. Del choses her own way, not without experiencing the way it might have been and then suddenly awaking as though from a dream.

"There was a house in Jubilee with three prostitutes in it....On sunny days the two younger women would sometimes come out and sit in canvas chairs. They wore print dresses and slippers; their white legs were bare. One of them was reading Star Weekly...Naomi said that this one's name was Peggy....I wished I had seen more of this Peggy thant the soft, mouse-brown nest of curls above the paper; I wish I had seen her face. I did expect something- a foul shimmer of corruption, some emanation like marsh gas. I was suprised, in a way, that she would read a paper, that the words would mean the same things to her, presumably, that they meant to the rest of us, that she ate and drank like a human still. I though of her as having gone right beyond human fuctioning into a condition of perfect depravity, at the opposite pole from sainthood but similarly isolated, unknowable. What appeared to be ordinariness here- Star Weekly, dotted curtains looped back, geraniums growing hopefully out of tin cans in the whorehouse window, seemed to me deliberate and tantalizing deception - the skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust."

And a quote I quite like as it relates to multi-modality, a concept I'm looking at with my research right now...

"Believe me," he said, " I wish you luck in your life."

"Then he did the only special thing he ever did for me. With those things in his hands, he rose on his toes like a dancer, like a plump ballerina. This action, accompanied by his delicate smile, appeared to be a joke not shared with me so much as displayed for me, and it seemed also to have a concise meaning, a stylized meaning- to be a letter, or a whole word, in an alphabet I did not know."

"People's wishes, and their other offerings, were what I took then naturally, a little distractedly, as if they were never anything more than my due."

"Yes," I said, instead of thank you.