As ever, my posts are scrambled, but I am slowly making my way through a few recently read books. I've also tentatively outlined the 13 books that will complete the challenge, though I think I will probably outpace 13 a bit this year.
Yann Martel is definitely going to be in the news this year because the movie version of Life of Pi is coming out. I read Life of Pi a few years back and enjoyed it, but didn't find it life-changing like some folks. (Actually, The Hungry Tide (2005) by Amitav Ghosh covers similar territory and might be even a bit more profound and/or moving at least to me, and I would highly recommend it. Maybe a few years down the road, I will reread the two back to back.)
Based on the success of Pi, his first book of short stories was republished: The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios and other stories. The first story (HR for short) is a novella and the second story "... the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto ..." comes pretty close to being a novella as well. The final two stories are not quite as long. It is kind of strange to read a book of stories with only four stories in it; it is closer to the Short Works of Joseph Conrad than an Alice Munro or Mavis Gallant collection, that's for sure.
You can certainly tell that these are early works from a promising but somewhat raw writer. "Manners of Dying" is a fairly forgettable piece in the Twilight Zone/Groundhog Day tradition.
The last story is a bit more experimental and also has seeds in the fantastic. There is a grandson visiting his grandmother and after a few sentences reporting her speech, the text literally goes to "blah-blah-blah-blah ...." and you then see the grandson's thoughts as he tunes out. A somewhat unnecessary plot contrivance is that she makes mirrors that are formed by speaking words, words, words and that may be why she is such a motor-mouth (that and the fact she is old and lonely). I don't even know if it qualifies as a twist, but years later, the grandson is kicking himself for not listening closer to what she said.
I didn't care too much for these two stories.
The Donald Rankin piece seemed like it was also going to be rooted in the fantastic -- a tourist wandering around DC finds an unknown theatre and goes and listens to a piece of music by an unknown composer. But Martel is going for something different here, more grounded in reality: the theatre is indeed a shell of its former self (they sit on folding chairs) and the performers and composer are all army vets, putting on these performances as a kind of therapeutic outlet. What is a little hard to buy is that the Canadian narrator would actually have the nerve to chase after Rankin and that Rankin would let him into the bank where he works as a janitor. I guess there wouldn't be much of a story otherwise...
This story was better but still not that memorable.
No question the strongest piece is HR, which does justify reprinting this collection. In some ways the set up is even more hard to credit, but the reader just has to move beyond that. Two college boys meet and become close friends. The narrator is a senior and Paul is a freshman. The bond is so close that when Paul gets very sick, the narrator more or less loses his mind, stops caring about classes and fails his final year. What is a bit unusual is that it is just a friendship and not a sexual relationship between the two. Honestly, it might have been a bit more believable had the positions been reversed -- a freshman idolizing a senior. In any case, Paul contracts AIDS in the most blameless way possible -- his father gets in a car accident in Jamaica and Paul needs a blood transfusion and there you go. (You could call it the Immaculate Transmission, given how far Martel goes to make Paul a paragon of virtue and later suffering.) When the father finds out his role, he beats his car to death and sets it on fire. This is transference of course, since they had been driving another car (for a minute I thought I had caught Martel in a lazy error ;) ).
Anyway, the narrator more or less gives up his studies for 9 months and begins visiting Paul whether he is home or at the hospital (mostly at the hospital). They decide to tell each other stories of a huge clan based in an alternative universe. Each story represents a year from 1901 to 2001. The stories are supposed to be inspired by some event in the real world from that year. The concept is a little like Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, though the story that they tell each other sounds a bit more inspired by Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. I suppose it isn't a surprise that Paul's stories get darker and darker, regardless of the real world events (i.e. the early 40s stories should be darker than those based on the 50s). It's also not that much of a surprise that the stories get cut short (stopping at 1962) when Paul finally succumbs.
I kind of wish Martel had stuck with the core of his idea and ditched the AIDS victim frame, since I don't think he had earned the right to use such a device so early in his career.* Maybe he had indeed been touched by AIDS-related suffering at around 19 or 20, but it strikes me as a cheap or even lazy way of making the story more profound and sentimental. I'd also say the same about trying to piggyback on the trauma faced by Vietnam War veterans in the second story, which as a Canadian writer, he'd have no real connection to. I don't mean that any topics are literally off-bounds for a writer, but a writer who goes to these themes (without having more or less earned their stripes) is a cheap hack, heading straight towards Hallmark greeting card or Sunday movie-of-the-week territory. I think even Life of Pi has some of this easy sentimentality, but is a stronger piece of writing. I suspect Martel is never going to be a writer I respect,** but I will probably reread Life of Pi once again (and perhaps catch the movie -- once it shows up on TV ;) ).
* My own claim is stronger than Yann's -- my mother spent the last part of her career working for an AIDS hotline and social service agency -- bringing that stress home and so on, but I would really shy away from using/exploiting that in my own published writing.
** Having taken a minute to check what else he has written, I see that Beatrice and Virgil, his latest novel, is described as an allegory of the Holocaust. I guess he has surrendered to his worst tendencies and is already in hack territory, trying to piggyback off of others' suffering to make his work profound. Maybe I won't bother with Pi after all.
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Monday, September 10, 2012
6th Canadian challenge - 3rd post
I have been reading quite a bit of poetry lately, including Canadian poets of course. What is kind of odd is how I keep hearing about the canon of Canadian poets and honestly had heard of 1 of them before. The others are completely new to me. I had vaguely heard of Irving Layton, though probably more for his literary criticism than for his poetry. The other ones that keep cropping up were complete blanks to me: Milton Acorn, Raymond Souster, Louis Dudek and Al Purdy. After trying to rectify the situation by reading through their selected poems, I find Al Purdy the most up my alley, followed by Louis Dudek. The others aren't doing too much for me.
In any case, I am not going to review these books now (though I may eventually review Dudek's Poems from Atlantis). It's just what I have been up to that has been making it so hard to get to any new reviews. However, I was able to finish reading a book recently (on the ferry from Victoria actually): Derek Winkler’s Pitouie. This book is one of the ones I won from last year's contest. Pitouie is a novel about multiple con games, and it is probably impossible to describe them in any great detail without spoiling the book completely. It's best to think in terms of some of David Mamet's screenplays as a starting point for Pitouie, though one of the last cons reminded me strongly of one of the cons perpetuated by the Stainless Steel Rat (a character invented by the recently-departed Harry Harrison). The book is quite entertaining and a quick read. It is about a reporter from Waste Management Magazine, who is brought out to hear about an opportunity for Western businessmen to dump toxic wastes in a volcano in the center of the island of Pitouie (somewhere off the coast of South America). However, much like Mamet, when you start thinking too much about the details of any particular con, a lot of things stop making sense, particularly the half-truths told when outsiders must be recruited into the game. I actually have a somewhat serious objection to the plot but I can't raise it since even mentioning the objection would be a spoiler. So it's not exactly a review-proof book, but fairly close. I guess I may as well leave it at that. Actually, I will add that the reporter finally gets quotes from the businessmen he accompanied on his junket, and some of them seem pretty revealing (if somewhat cartoonish). Still, Derek Winkler's own bio suggests that he did some PR flak-ery, and this may be his way of getting back at the corporate world.
In any case, I am not going to review these books now (though I may eventually review Dudek's Poems from Atlantis). It's just what I have been up to that has been making it so hard to get to any new reviews. However, I was able to finish reading a book recently (on the ferry from Victoria actually): Derek Winkler’s Pitouie. This book is one of the ones I won from last year's contest. Pitouie is a novel about multiple con games, and it is probably impossible to describe them in any great detail without spoiling the book completely. It's best to think in terms of some of David Mamet's screenplays as a starting point for Pitouie, though one of the last cons reminded me strongly of one of the cons perpetuated by the Stainless Steel Rat (a character invented by the recently-departed Harry Harrison). The book is quite entertaining and a quick read. It is about a reporter from Waste Management Magazine, who is brought out to hear about an opportunity for Western businessmen to dump toxic wastes in a volcano in the center of the island of Pitouie (somewhere off the coast of South America). However, much like Mamet, when you start thinking too much about the details of any particular con, a lot of things stop making sense, particularly the half-truths told when outsiders must be recruited into the game. I actually have a somewhat serious objection to the plot but I can't raise it since even mentioning the objection would be a spoiler. So it's not exactly a review-proof book, but fairly close. I guess I may as well leave it at that. Actually, I will add that the reporter finally gets quotes from the businessmen he accompanied on his junket, and some of them seem pretty revealing (if somewhat cartoonish). Still, Derek Winkler's own bio suggests that he did some PR flak-ery, and this may be his way of getting back at the corporate world.
Sunday, September 2, 2012
6th Canadian book challenge - 2nd post
Well, my planned sequence is totally shot, but I guess that is ok. Given it is a long weekend, I may finally get caught up. In any case, I am going to review a second poetry collection by Kimmy Beach (the poet featured in my first post for this challenge -- In Cars). It is Alarum Within: Theatre Poems (Turnstone Press, 2003). I had fairly high hopes, since I worked with a theatre company for 2.5 years in a non-acting capacity (like Kimmy I knew my strengths were not in acting). I should say up front that the approach is largely the same as In Cars, i.e. confessional and dealing in marginally aberrant behaviour, but the voice isn't quite as strong or as developed. Also, the collection as a whole doesn't cohere as well. Kimmy seems to be detailing odd things that happened to her on a play-by-play basis, and naturally some are not as interesting to outsiders. In contrast, there is a definite shape to the poems of In Cars -- (semi)-innocent state, risky behaviour leading to tragedy, and then almost a fugue state where Kimmy is processing the accident and it keeps imprinting itself onto the rest of her life, making it (understandably) hard to move on. Despite my partial disappointment in this collection, I will certainly read her forthcoming books, since she grew considerably between Alarum Within (2003) and In Cars (2007). It looks like Last Temptation of Bond is coming out next year, though this looks a little more pop culture-oriented than these other two. In addition to the confessional poems, she has written Fake Paul (2005) about hunting down traces of the Beatles in Liverpool. I may track that one down and see what I think.
One thing I did learn is that In Cars is set in Saskatchewan*, based on internal evidence. We learn that Kimmy has runs in with a number of the actors in her small regional theatre and perhaps not surprisingly she pops pills to get through some rough nights. There is a section that seems painfully revealing about her childhood adoration of a man (Mr. Dress-up) who performed for children and who disappointed her by not adopting her and/or showering her with love. (It isn't entirely clear to me, but either her mother was a single mom or Kimmy desperately wanted to escape her life.) When the actor comes through town again on a farewell tour, Kimmy works up the courage to tell him that her 5-year-old self wanted more than a postcard filled in using a rubber ink stamp:
"(I told my mom
my name's not Friend)"
from "Dear Friend"
Apparently she asks (as an adult) to look inside his magic trunk:
"Of course you can look inside, Kim
he says, but I'm afraid
you might be disappointed
Impossible!"
Of course Mr. Dressup ("Call me Ernie") is correct:
"inside a green felt Robin Hood hat
two plastic flutes one black magic marker
some sawdust the most
devastating sawdust in the world"
from "Raiders of the Lost Tickle Trunk"
The next section is about Kimmy being struck down by encephalitis early during rehearsals for Brecht's Mother Courage. Most of the poems are about her partner (husband-to-be) and mother visiting her at the hospital but the director also comes around to see if she is going to pull through in time to stage manage to show (she doesn't). She does, however, manage to see a performance of the show and finds it terrible and the audience stays away in droves. While this might just possibly be due to the fact that the bleak topic isn't a good fit for regional theatre, Kimmy decides that:
"it's not true what they say
it will fall apart if you're not there
I'm living proof
I am indispensable"
from "The Worst Show I've Ever Seen"
I wasn't as interested in the sections describing her adventures during Jesus Christ, Superstar or Oliver!, at least in part because musicals are not of great interest to me. I honestly couldn't really follow the thread of "seek the deepness," although Scene 21 appears to be the seeds of In Cars.
I generally thought the last section (about Hamlet) was the strongest. Each of the 4 poems in the sequence Proverbs starts with a snarky comment about actors, like "Give not unto the actors their props before their time, for as surely as the sun doth rise in the east they shall lose or break them."
The last poems following Proverbs are definitely a bit darker and they seem to be combining the action on stage with Kimmy's own history of either a miscarriage or an abortion. Like "seek the deepness," I wasn't entirely sure what she was getting at. I suspect the topic is (or was then) still so raw for her that she needs to be somewhat indirect about it.
On the whole this is an interesting collection, but I would probably have enjoyed it a bit more had I read it prior to In Cars.
* Oops, Alberta after all (see comments).
One thing I did learn is that In Cars is set in Saskatchewan*, based on internal evidence. We learn that Kimmy has runs in with a number of the actors in her small regional theatre and perhaps not surprisingly she pops pills to get through some rough nights. There is a section that seems painfully revealing about her childhood adoration of a man (Mr. Dress-up) who performed for children and who disappointed her by not adopting her and/or showering her with love. (It isn't entirely clear to me, but either her mother was a single mom or Kimmy desperately wanted to escape her life.) When the actor comes through town again on a farewell tour, Kimmy works up the courage to tell him that her 5-year-old self wanted more than a postcard filled in using a rubber ink stamp:
"(I told my mom
my name's not Friend)"
from "Dear Friend"
Apparently she asks (as an adult) to look inside his magic trunk:
"Of course you can look inside, Kim
he says, but I'm afraid
you might be disappointed
Impossible!"
Of course Mr. Dressup ("Call me Ernie") is correct:
"inside a green felt Robin Hood hat
two plastic flutes one black magic marker
some sawdust the most
devastating sawdust in the world"
from "Raiders of the Lost Tickle Trunk"
The next section is about Kimmy being struck down by encephalitis early during rehearsals for Brecht's Mother Courage. Most of the poems are about her partner (husband-to-be) and mother visiting her at the hospital but the director also comes around to see if she is going to pull through in time to stage manage to show (she doesn't). She does, however, manage to see a performance of the show and finds it terrible and the audience stays away in droves. While this might just possibly be due to the fact that the bleak topic isn't a good fit for regional theatre, Kimmy decides that:
"it's not true what they say
it will fall apart if you're not there
I'm living proof
I am indispensable"
from "The Worst Show I've Ever Seen"
I wasn't as interested in the sections describing her adventures during Jesus Christ, Superstar or Oliver!, at least in part because musicals are not of great interest to me. I honestly couldn't really follow the thread of "seek the deepness," although Scene 21 appears to be the seeds of In Cars.
I generally thought the last section (about Hamlet) was the strongest. Each of the 4 poems in the sequence Proverbs starts with a snarky comment about actors, like "Give not unto the actors their props before their time, for as surely as the sun doth rise in the east they shall lose or break them."
The last poems following Proverbs are definitely a bit darker and they seem to be combining the action on stage with Kimmy's own history of either a miscarriage or an abortion. Like "seek the deepness," I wasn't entirely sure what she was getting at. I suspect the topic is (or was then) still so raw for her that she needs to be somewhat indirect about it.
On the whole this is an interesting collection, but I would probably have enjoyed it a bit more had I read it prior to In Cars.
* Oops, Alberta after all (see comments).
Sunday, August 12, 2012
6th Canadian book challenge - 1st post
I really thought that Headhunter would be the first book I reviewed for the 6th Canadian book
challenge (I read it over a month ago), but I wanted the review to be more polished and have sort of run out of time (I will finish it soon though). Details here if you are interested in signing up for the Challenge: 6th-annual-canadian-book-challenge.
Generally, for lesser known authors and/or books I try to follow the adage that if I don't have much nice to say about the work, I should keep it to myself. This doesn't apply to mega-best-seller authors, but it certainly applies to poets. So I will only review poetry collections where I like the work.
I am making an exception to this general rule for Thomas Chandler Haliburton, who was an early essayist/humourist. He is best remembered for The Clockmaker and The Old Judge. He is far more political/polemical than Stephen Leacock, though you might be able to trace some line from Haliburton to Leacock. Actually, some of Mark Twain's lesser writings do have some of the same features and weaknesses of The Clockmaker. I think these were probably pretty dated in the 1950s when the New Canadian Library tried to resurrect Haliburton's career, and I find them basically entirely unreadable now, and in both cases I stopped after about 3 chapters. Possibly I would have liked them a tiny bit more if I agreed with Haliburton's politics, but I still think the writing style is dire. Thank goodness I simply borrowed them and didn't put down any hard cash for these. Really just wanted to get this off my chest, and this post isn't actually going to review these books.
Instead, this review is about a poetry collection that really reads like a novel, and I mean that in a good way. The book is In Cars by Kimmy Beach (Turnstone Press, 2007). I can't tell if the poems are literally autobiographical or an imagined autobiography, but they certainly ring true. I will proceed as if they are autobiographical.
Kimmy writes about growing up in the 1980s. A time when pop radio mostly played 70s hits (Eagles, Led Zeppelin, T-Rex) along with the early 80s music (Blondie, The Cars, Flock of Seagulls and of course Gary Numan's "Cars") along with groups that spanned these decades (Kinks, AC/DC). This is important because nearly all the poems talk about driving around with the radio blasting, and Kimmy name-checks all kinds of songs, all of which were part of my late childhood. If you weren't driving around or trying to score beer, then you were at the roller rink. Here there is a small divergence, and I suspect I am about two years younger than Ms. Beach, since for us, the roller rink was definitely fading and the video arcades were the cool place to go (at least for geeky guys like myself). It is fair to say, however, that I grew up in a small to mid-sized city in Michigan and Ms. Beach is somewhere in rural western Canada, probably not far from the Alberta/ Saskatchewan border. But we drove everywhere, just like those kids did. In Michigan at least, you could drive at 16, so lots of high schoolers had cars, just as the kids in this collection do.
She definitely sounds like she hung out more with the "wrong crowd" than I did, since I never did try to sneak smokes or beer. Nor did I try to get any of the "action" that she gets in her car. But still, this really brings me back. (I'm working on a set of linked posts on nostalgia and this book definitely contributed to a near fatal case I had about a month back -- joking.)
The poems almost are chapters in a novel. Kimmy has a bad encounter with a boy she thinks of as a friend. She almost loses a female friend after the boy spreads rumors about her. She starts seeing another boy. She goes to the rink to meet up with friends. They head to the 7-11 to hang-out (I used to love 7-11 -- it had all the kinds of junky, comfort foods that teenagers craved and no healthy, boring foods).
Kimmy is a bit of an outlier in that she has her own car and drives quite a bit (a bit unusual) and she seems to know a bit about fixing up cars (her brother is a kind of master mechanic apparently). There are car accidents throughout the book, including some fatal ones. The last few poems kind of showing her rerunning events in her head, haunted by what has happened, wondering if she could have changed the course of events. Actually the cumulative effect of the last 9 poems is quite powerful.
Rather than explicating a few poems line by line, I will simply post two of the stronger poems in their entirety. If you like them, I would definitely encourage seeking out In Cars to read the entire set. To me, this collection is really quite an impressive achievement.
mom in the driver’s seat
of our white ‘63 Chrysler New Yorker
she takes the wheel from me
I go back to my book
shoulder line a blur to my right
cold air and swirls of snow
at our faces as I spin out at intersections
on dark back roads and deserted parking lots
I’m driving the way you like it dangerous
I drive harder hard as I can
our breath sharp puffs at the dash
light from the fuel gauge and tach
reflect orange in your eyes
the car giving us all it has
thrilled to be under us letting us ride it harder
Generally, for lesser known authors and/or books I try to follow the adage that if I don't have much nice to say about the work, I should keep it to myself. This doesn't apply to mega-best-seller authors, but it certainly applies to poets. So I will only review poetry collections where I like the work.
I am making an exception to this general rule for Thomas Chandler Haliburton, who was an early essayist/humourist. He is best remembered for The Clockmaker and The Old Judge. He is far more political/polemical than Stephen Leacock, though you might be able to trace some line from Haliburton to Leacock. Actually, some of Mark Twain's lesser writings do have some of the same features and weaknesses of The Clockmaker. I think these were probably pretty dated in the 1950s when the New Canadian Library tried to resurrect Haliburton's career, and I find them basically entirely unreadable now, and in both cases I stopped after about 3 chapters. Possibly I would have liked them a tiny bit more if I agreed with Haliburton's politics, but I still think the writing style is dire. Thank goodness I simply borrowed them and didn't put down any hard cash for these. Really just wanted to get this off my chest, and this post isn't actually going to review these books.
Instead, this review is about a poetry collection that really reads like a novel, and I mean that in a good way. The book is In Cars by Kimmy Beach (Turnstone Press, 2007). I can't tell if the poems are literally autobiographical or an imagined autobiography, but they certainly ring true. I will proceed as if they are autobiographical.
Kimmy writes about growing up in the 1980s. A time when pop radio mostly played 70s hits (Eagles, Led Zeppelin, T-Rex) along with the early 80s music (Blondie, The Cars, Flock of Seagulls and of course Gary Numan's "Cars") along with groups that spanned these decades (Kinks, AC/DC). This is important because nearly all the poems talk about driving around with the radio blasting, and Kimmy name-checks all kinds of songs, all of which were part of my late childhood. If you weren't driving around or trying to score beer, then you were at the roller rink. Here there is a small divergence, and I suspect I am about two years younger than Ms. Beach, since for us, the roller rink was definitely fading and the video arcades were the cool place to go (at least for geeky guys like myself). It is fair to say, however, that I grew up in a small to mid-sized city in Michigan and Ms. Beach is somewhere in rural western Canada, probably not far from the Alberta/ Saskatchewan border. But we drove everywhere, just like those kids did. In Michigan at least, you could drive at 16, so lots of high schoolers had cars, just as the kids in this collection do.
She definitely sounds like she hung out more with the "wrong crowd" than I did, since I never did try to sneak smokes or beer. Nor did I try to get any of the "action" that she gets in her car. But still, this really brings me back. (I'm working on a set of linked posts on nostalgia and this book definitely contributed to a near fatal case I had about a month back -- joking.)
The poems almost are chapters in a novel. Kimmy has a bad encounter with a boy she thinks of as a friend. She almost loses a female friend after the boy spreads rumors about her. She starts seeing another boy. She goes to the rink to meet up with friends. They head to the 7-11 to hang-out (I used to love 7-11 -- it had all the kinds of junky, comfort foods that teenagers craved and no healthy, boring foods).
Kimmy is a bit of an outlier in that she has her own car and drives quite a bit (a bit unusual) and she seems to know a bit about fixing up cars (her brother is a kind of master mechanic apparently). There are car accidents throughout the book, including some fatal ones. The last few poems kind of showing her rerunning events in her head, haunted by what has happened, wondering if she could have changed the course of events. Actually the cumulative effect of the last 9 poems is quite powerful.
Rather than explicating a few poems line by line, I will simply post two of the stronger poems in their entirety. If you like them, I would definitely encourage seeking out In Cars to read the entire set. To me, this collection is really quite an impressive achievement.
Kimmy Beach
How I Learned to Drive
mom in the driver’s seat
of our white ‘63 Chrysler New Yorker
my brother and sister reading
Archies and love comics in the back
Archies and love comics in the back
she fishes a lighter and her Cameos
from the huge black purse between us
her other hand leaves the wheel
Drive for a sec
one hand flicks the lighter
the other cups the flame
and I reach across without a thought
one hand flicks the lighter
the other cups the flame
and I reach across without a thought
an eleven-year-old lost inside
Casino Royale scarcely lift
my eyes from the page take the square steering wheel
Casino Royale scarcely lift
my eyes from the page take the square steering wheel
keep the car straight on the road with one hand
for as many flicks as it takes her lighter to catch
the first whiff of tobacco
she takes the wheel from me
I go back to my book
shoulder line a blur to my right
through an open summer window
on a long prairie highway
Kimmy Beach
We Ride
you’re next to me and we’re riding
in my Mustang
all the windows down and winter
pouring in
in my Mustang
all the windows down and winter
pouring in
cold air and swirls of snow
at our faces as I spin out at intersections
on dark back roads and deserted parking lots
speakers pushed to the edge of distortion
I’m driving the way you like it dangerous
revving to five thousand before I shift
you say you wish every girl
drove like me
you reach over to stroke my thigh
and I settle my leg into your hand
slam the stick into fourth then touch
you with my right hand your thighs sigh open
you say you wish every girl
drove like me
you reach over to stroke my thigh
and I settle my leg into your hand
slam the stick into fourth then touch
you with my right hand your thighs sigh open
shrieking muffler
snow and exhaust a wall behind us
snow and exhaust a wall behind us
I drive harder hard as I can
our breath sharp puffs at the dash
light from the fuel gauge and tach
reflect orange in your eyes
the car giving us all it has
thrilled to be under us letting us ride it harder
we scream past tilted stop signs
an inch thick with snow
my hands leave the wheel
my car takes us and we ride
we ride
an inch thick with snow
my hands leave the wheel
my car takes us and we ride
we ride
Saturday, June 30, 2012
Canadian book challenge - 23rd post
So I thought I would close out this year's challenge with an update on the Brick Books poetry books I won back in April (thanks again!).
I have read all of them now. Alien, Correspondent by Antony Di Nardo is largely set in Beirut, Lebanon. It had some interesting moments, but wasn't quite to my taste. I passed it on to a co-worker who is originally from Lebanon.
I reviewed Noble Gas, Penny Black by David O'Meara just a few posts ago (book challenge post #19). I really liked one poem "Night Train" and thought a few others were interesting, but ultimately decided I could pass this book on to another co-worker.
This is also the fate of Spirit Engine by John Donlan, which I will review just a bit later in this post.
The real sleeper for me was Mortal Arguments by Sue Sinclair. I was kind of skimming through the poems, and thinking that I was picking up some echoes of Mary Oliver (though not as overtly religious). The best way I can describe it is that the poet is imagining some kind of unspeakable force (which I conceive as a kind of luminosity) that they try to describe in order to get a picture to emerge behind and between the words. But words are fairly limited and this is itself part of the frustration. I should point out that this set up is more reflective of Oliver than Sinclair, but as I said, I was picking up some echoes, but with the substitution of time (and esp. the passage of time), clocks and dreams as things that are hard to capture and put into words. About halfway through, I realized that I was starting to really get into the book at a deeper level (certainly more than Oliver's work normally resonates with me, though I think she can be a very good poet). Then Sinclair threw in a pretty good poem about the Toronto streetcar and a quite funny poem about taxis, and I was hooked (my real world job is transportation planning). So I'll hold onto Mortal Arguments and add it to the groaning shelves. I think I should go ahead and let the poems sink in and then reread the book and review it later for the next challenge (along with Headhunter and The Engineer of Human Souls).
On to the real review of Spirit Engine, which is John Donlan's most recent poetry collection. I found this a prime example of how totally extraneous things can influence readers. The back cover blurbs don't do Donlan any favours. One of the reviewers comes uncomfortably close to saying he is the best poet (or best metaphysical poet) since John Donne. Donlan's poems are nothing like Donne's, and I don't even understand the comparison, and it took me a while to get past that. There is also this bit in Donlan's bio where it says he works half the year as a reference librarian at the Vancouver Public Library (and who knows I might even have encountered him) and takes half the year off for his writing. Now I am generally in favour of flexible scheduling, and indeed have gone to 80% a few times in my career. But it is very hard for me to understand how he could have found someone who wanted to do a 50% time share (6 months on and 6 months off). Of course there might be other arrangements... As I said, this doesn't have anything to do with the book, but I found it awfully distracting and probably publishing this info was a disservice to the poems themselves (given how judgmental, not to say jealous, readers are today, particularly if those readers are also poets and particularly if they are failed poets...).
I guess I'd say there were two or three poems I thought were quite good all the way through and several more where I liked a stanza or some of the thoughts/imagery/wordplay.
My favourites were towards the end of the book -- "Galactic Dynamics" and "Garter Lake Gazette."
"Garter Lake Gazette" jumps from the subatomic level to the more prosaic:
"Now we've found how fast electrons
hop from atom to atom -- something, quintillionths ...
In our '86 Olds
we amble the rocky lane, frog juggernaut,
soaring any road like bird or angel."
Donlan then goes into a tangent about how the "car life" can't last (or "survive") as the price of gas goes into the stratosphere, which then segues into a description of a sudden rainstorm and then he cycles back to thinking of the far future and what the weather might be like after global warming. (At least I thought that was where he was going with this poem.)
"Galactic Dynamics" has some of the same underlying dynamics (at least I think so), but the poet calls on our future selves to be slightly more accepting or sanguine about the weather than in "Garter Lake Gazette":
"So long as inertia's great flywheel holds all in place
why complain about the weather? Let it teach us
to vary, repeat ourselves, defy prediction.
At least we're here. 'Cheer,' calls the red-winged blackbird."
The wordplay in both poems in the middle stanzas is enjoyable, though I'd have to reprint whole poems for it to really come across.
"Nostalgia" is probably my next favourite poem (and might have some metaphysical aspects, but it is hardly Donne-like):
"All the old signs are gone, their flaking paint --
TIME IS SHORT, ETERNITY WHERE? on a barn --
everything's new now."
The poet returns to his youth:
"We used to spend the whole day doing nothing
useful.
We'd poke around under the bridge
before anyone was up."
He recalls with some regret how he didn't try to talk to an older man walking with two Huskies (couldn't talk to strangers even then, of course). As the poem closes, he starts bringing himself back to the present:
"That must have been fifty years ago.
The old man is dead,
and the dogs are dead."
Other bits and pieces that struck me:
I liked the first stanza of "Solstice Song":
"You can sing about the rain
but it won't do a damn bit of good.
You might as well talk to the wall.
You might as well talk to the cat"
I liked the shout-out to the SkyTrain Millenium Line in "Scavenger." Quite possibly the only time that the SkyTrain has made its way into a poem, even if it isn't the most positive depiction.
I liked the opening of "Fountain," which was clearly inspired by Rilke:
"How can you change your life? Like a wavering fountain's
column, it is continuously refreshed
from a reservoir deeper than sleep..."
I also liked that he did acknowledge the debt to Rilke at the comments on the poems at the end, and of course that I had spotted this without being told...
There is definitely some good stuff going on in these poems, which overcame my initial resistance to them. It does appear that I can check out all 3 of his previous poetry books from the Vancouver Public Library, so I'll give them a try a bit later.
This is review 25 and my final review for the 5th Canadian book challenge!
I have read all of them now. Alien, Correspondent by Antony Di Nardo is largely set in Beirut, Lebanon. It had some interesting moments, but wasn't quite to my taste. I passed it on to a co-worker who is originally from Lebanon.
I reviewed Noble Gas, Penny Black by David O'Meara just a few posts ago (book challenge post #19). I really liked one poem "Night Train" and thought a few others were interesting, but ultimately decided I could pass this book on to another co-worker.
This is also the fate of Spirit Engine by John Donlan, which I will review just a bit later in this post.
The real sleeper for me was Mortal Arguments by Sue Sinclair. I was kind of skimming through the poems, and thinking that I was picking up some echoes of Mary Oliver (though not as overtly religious). The best way I can describe it is that the poet is imagining some kind of unspeakable force (which I conceive as a kind of luminosity) that they try to describe in order to get a picture to emerge behind and between the words. But words are fairly limited and this is itself part of the frustration. I should point out that this set up is more reflective of Oliver than Sinclair, but as I said, I was picking up some echoes, but with the substitution of time (and esp. the passage of time), clocks and dreams as things that are hard to capture and put into words. About halfway through, I realized that I was starting to really get into the book at a deeper level (certainly more than Oliver's work normally resonates with me, though I think she can be a very good poet). Then Sinclair threw in a pretty good poem about the Toronto streetcar and a quite funny poem about taxis, and I was hooked (my real world job is transportation planning). So I'll hold onto Mortal Arguments and add it to the groaning shelves. I think I should go ahead and let the poems sink in and then reread the book and review it later for the next challenge (along with Headhunter and The Engineer of Human Souls).
On to the real review of Spirit Engine, which is John Donlan's most recent poetry collection. I found this a prime example of how totally extraneous things can influence readers. The back cover blurbs don't do Donlan any favours. One of the reviewers comes uncomfortably close to saying he is the best poet (or best metaphysical poet) since John Donne. Donlan's poems are nothing like Donne's, and I don't even understand the comparison, and it took me a while to get past that. There is also this bit in Donlan's bio where it says he works half the year as a reference librarian at the Vancouver Public Library (and who knows I might even have encountered him) and takes half the year off for his writing. Now I am generally in favour of flexible scheduling, and indeed have gone to 80% a few times in my career. But it is very hard for me to understand how he could have found someone who wanted to do a 50% time share (6 months on and 6 months off). Of course there might be other arrangements... As I said, this doesn't have anything to do with the book, but I found it awfully distracting and probably publishing this info was a disservice to the poems themselves (given how judgmental, not to say jealous, readers are today, particularly if those readers are also poets and particularly if they are failed poets...).
I guess I'd say there were two or three poems I thought were quite good all the way through and several more where I liked a stanza or some of the thoughts/imagery/wordplay.
My favourites were towards the end of the book -- "Galactic Dynamics" and "Garter Lake Gazette."
"Garter Lake Gazette" jumps from the subatomic level to the more prosaic:
"Now we've found how fast electrons
hop from atom to atom -- something, quintillionths ...
In our '86 Olds
we amble the rocky lane, frog juggernaut,
soaring any road like bird or angel."
Donlan then goes into a tangent about how the "car life" can't last (or "survive") as the price of gas goes into the stratosphere, which then segues into a description of a sudden rainstorm and then he cycles back to thinking of the far future and what the weather might be like after global warming. (At least I thought that was where he was going with this poem.)
"Galactic Dynamics" has some of the same underlying dynamics (at least I think so), but the poet calls on our future selves to be slightly more accepting or sanguine about the weather than in "Garter Lake Gazette":
"So long as inertia's great flywheel holds all in place
why complain about the weather? Let it teach us
to vary, repeat ourselves, defy prediction.
At least we're here. 'Cheer,' calls the red-winged blackbird."
The wordplay in both poems in the middle stanzas is enjoyable, though I'd have to reprint whole poems for it to really come across.
"Nostalgia" is probably my next favourite poem (and might have some metaphysical aspects, but it is hardly Donne-like):
"All the old signs are gone, their flaking paint --
TIME IS SHORT, ETERNITY WHERE? on a barn --
everything's new now."
The poet returns to his youth:
"We used to spend the whole day doing nothing
useful.
We'd poke around under the bridge
before anyone was up."
He recalls with some regret how he didn't try to talk to an older man walking with two Huskies (couldn't talk to strangers even then, of course). As the poem closes, he starts bringing himself back to the present:
"That must have been fifty years ago.
The old man is dead,
and the dogs are dead."
Other bits and pieces that struck me:
I liked the first stanza of "Solstice Song":
"You can sing about the rain
but it won't do a damn bit of good.
You might as well talk to the wall.
You might as well talk to the cat"
I liked the shout-out to the SkyTrain Millenium Line in "Scavenger." Quite possibly the only time that the SkyTrain has made its way into a poem, even if it isn't the most positive depiction.
I liked the opening of "Fountain," which was clearly inspired by Rilke:
"How can you change your life? Like a wavering fountain's
column, it is continuously refreshed
from a reservoir deeper than sleep..."
I also liked that he did acknowledge the debt to Rilke at the comments on the poems at the end, and of course that I had spotted this without being told...
There is definitely some good stuff going on in these poems, which overcame my initial resistance to them. It does appear that I can check out all 3 of his previous poetry books from the Vancouver Public Library, so I'll give them a try a bit later.
This is review 25 and my final review for the 5th Canadian book challenge!
Canadian book challenge - 22nd post
The Free World by David Bezmozgis will close out the backlog of reviews for this Challenge. This is an interesting novel. It looks at an extended family of Russian Jews from the Soviet era when they gained the right to leave the U.S.S.R. (I believe this places the novel squarely in the mid to late 1970s). In many cases, the emigres first traveled to Europe to wait for processing and to see which country would "adopt" them. For many, the choice was easy: Israel was by far the most welcoming and had the lowest entry requirements. Indeed, Israel went out of its way to attract these Soviet Jews. The U.S. and Australia were fairly attractive options but also could be tricky to get into, even with distant relatives willing to sponsor the quasi-refuges. Canada was sort of considered a second-best alternative, but it had slightly lower entrance barriers. As it happens, Bezmozgis' family did settle in Canada. While this novel is probably not drawn directly from his actual family and their experiences, their journey clearly inspired this book. As an another aside, I know a family of Soviet Jews that first settled in Israel but eventually made their way to the U.S. I suspect because they were willing to settle in Israel, their passage was expedited, and they may not have had to wait in Europe at all.
In any case, the novel is set entirely in Rome where this family (two brothers, their wives, some children and then their elderly parents) are waiting for passage to the US. The mother has a cousin of sorts in Chicago and they are hoping that will be sufficient. This was a time when the "Free World" was deliberately tweaking the nose of the U.S.S.R. and would accept almost all refugees from there. However, there were still some hurdles, particularly for cases like the father, who had significant health issues and, furthermore, did not want to mouth the expected platitudes about how terrible life was under the Soviet regime, particularly as a Jew. As it turns out, the father was a decorated Soviet war hero. While he wasn't exactly ecstatic about living in the U.S.S.R., he would not have left, except that he realized how terrible his life would have been after his family left and he was suddenly tagged as a Jew (and his hero status would more or less be revoked).
As one might imagine, there is quite a bit of tension between the father and the two sons, as well as between the two sons (one is a bit of a dreamer and the other is much more driven). Further complicating the picture is that the dreamer son's wife actually isn't Jewish at all but divorced her Russian husband and then married her current husband. So she's kind of a double outsider. Still, she seems marginally happier about her lot than most of the other characters. The dreamer, who speaks a tiny bit of English, is given a job as a translator for other Soviet Jews arriving after him. The more driven brother starts getting into somewhat shady deals that generally involve Jews that used to belong to the equivalent of the Russian Mob. (These other characters have been identified as a problem and neither the U.S. nor Canada wants anything to do with them.) There is an interesting subplot of another Soviet Jew who did go to Israel, but found in its own way (military conscription) Israel felt too much like the U.S.S.R., and he was visiting Rome on a visa about to expire, trying to convince the Americans to take him, but not having much luck.
One of the crisis points arises when the family's cousin calls up and says that she had to sponsor another family, and presumably they would have to wait another year in Rome. At this point (after the recriminations), they turn their attention to Canada. But additional snags come up, as one might imagine. I think I'll leave the plot there for those that do want to read the novel.
Overall, I thought Bezmozgis did a good job in showing these people out of their element in Rome and their very different takes on the situation, as well as their recollections on their past in the U.S.S.R. While I didn't care for the crusty father (Samuel?) as a person, in the sense that I wouldn't want to interact with him, he was a very memorable character. I thought I detected a few flashes of Lear here and there (the deposed king dealing with his difficult offspring), but perhaps it is just because I have had Lear on my mind a lot this past year. He does get one scene towards the end of the book where he watches his grandchildren playing on the beach where he more or less is reconciled to this new path. While it wasn't their first choice, it is interesting how Canada becomes a big part of their dreams of reaching the "Free World." Anyway, Happy Canada Day!
Edit (3/25/2017): I don't know if the Jew in Rome who doesn't want to return to Israel is based on a real person that Bezmozgis or someone in his family met while in Rome, but there are some interesting parallels to Shimon Susskind, a character in Bernard Malamud's "The Last Mohican." Incidentally, this story ends up both in The Magic Barrel and Pictures of Fidelman. It's nice to imagine it is a bit of a homage to Malamud, though perhaps an accidental one.
In any case, the novel is set entirely in Rome where this family (two brothers, their wives, some children and then their elderly parents) are waiting for passage to the US. The mother has a cousin of sorts in Chicago and they are hoping that will be sufficient. This was a time when the "Free World" was deliberately tweaking the nose of the U.S.S.R. and would accept almost all refugees from there. However, there were still some hurdles, particularly for cases like the father, who had significant health issues and, furthermore, did not want to mouth the expected platitudes about how terrible life was under the Soviet regime, particularly as a Jew. As it turns out, the father was a decorated Soviet war hero. While he wasn't exactly ecstatic about living in the U.S.S.R., he would not have left, except that he realized how terrible his life would have been after his family left and he was suddenly tagged as a Jew (and his hero status would more or less be revoked).
As one might imagine, there is quite a bit of tension between the father and the two sons, as well as between the two sons (one is a bit of a dreamer and the other is much more driven). Further complicating the picture is that the dreamer son's wife actually isn't Jewish at all but divorced her Russian husband and then married her current husband. So she's kind of a double outsider. Still, she seems marginally happier about her lot than most of the other characters. The dreamer, who speaks a tiny bit of English, is given a job as a translator for other Soviet Jews arriving after him. The more driven brother starts getting into somewhat shady deals that generally involve Jews that used to belong to the equivalent of the Russian Mob. (These other characters have been identified as a problem and neither the U.S. nor Canada wants anything to do with them.) There is an interesting subplot of another Soviet Jew who did go to Israel, but found in its own way (military conscription) Israel felt too much like the U.S.S.R., and he was visiting Rome on a visa about to expire, trying to convince the Americans to take him, but not having much luck.
One of the crisis points arises when the family's cousin calls up and says that she had to sponsor another family, and presumably they would have to wait another year in Rome. At this point (after the recriminations), they turn their attention to Canada. But additional snags come up, as one might imagine. I think I'll leave the plot there for those that do want to read the novel.
Overall, I thought Bezmozgis did a good job in showing these people out of their element in Rome and their very different takes on the situation, as well as their recollections on their past in the U.S.S.R. While I didn't care for the crusty father (Samuel?) as a person, in the sense that I wouldn't want to interact with him, he was a very memorable character. I thought I detected a few flashes of Lear here and there (the deposed king dealing with his difficult offspring), but perhaps it is just because I have had Lear on my mind a lot this past year. He does get one scene towards the end of the book where he watches his grandchildren playing on the beach where he more or less is reconciled to this new path. While it wasn't their first choice, it is interesting how Canada becomes a big part of their dreams of reaching the "Free World." Anyway, Happy Canada Day!
Edit (3/25/2017): I don't know if the Jew in Rome who doesn't want to return to Israel is based on a real person that Bezmozgis or someone in his family met while in Rome, but there are some interesting parallels to Shimon Susskind, a character in Bernard Malamud's "The Last Mohican." Incidentally, this story ends up both in The Magic Barrel and Pictures of Fidelman. It's nice to imagine it is a bit of a homage to Malamud, though perhaps an accidental one.
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Canadian book challenge - 21st post
For something completely different, I reviewed a children's book: Robert Munsch's The Paper Bag Princess. I'm not going to worry too much about spoiling the ending here...
My daughter (5 -- and a half, she adds) liked it the first time around, but not the second time. I guess because she was somewhat scared of the dragon, even though she knew the dragon would get its comeuppance. I thought it was a relatively clever inversion of the traditional princess/dragon story. It was pretty clear that Prince Ronald was indeed a jerk (even from the first illustration) and indeed he is not at all thankful that he was rescued. Some parents have problems with the princess calling him a bum at the end. I didn't get too hung up on that. I did explain to my daughter that it was really too bad that the prince wasn't grateful, etc. On the whole, I didn't mind the message that fairy tale romances only work if both partners work at it and some princes simply aren't worth marrying. (In contrast, I loathe Babette Cole's Princess Smartypants where the anti-marriage princess is a thoroughly unpleasant piece of work from the first page.) I was, however, taken a bit aback by the picture of the naked princess with her clothes burned off before she found the paper bag to wear. That probably could have been handled a bit differently...
My daughter (5 -- and a half, she adds) liked it the first time around, but not the second time. I guess because she was somewhat scared of the dragon, even though she knew the dragon would get its comeuppance. I thought it was a relatively clever inversion of the traditional princess/dragon story. It was pretty clear that Prince Ronald was indeed a jerk (even from the first illustration) and indeed he is not at all thankful that he was rescued. Some parents have problems with the princess calling him a bum at the end. I didn't get too hung up on that. I did explain to my daughter that it was really too bad that the prince wasn't grateful, etc. On the whole, I didn't mind the message that fairy tale romances only work if both partners work at it and some princes simply aren't worth marrying. (In contrast, I loathe Babette Cole's Princess Smartypants where the anti-marriage princess is a thoroughly unpleasant piece of work from the first page.) I was, however, taken a bit aback by the picture of the naked princess with her clothes burned off before she found the paper bag to wear. That probably could have been handled a bit differently...
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