Actually starting to think ahead to July 2 and what will be left on my plate. I have one unfinished review to write (The Free World). Probably will not be able to get through Headhunter in the next week. That may be the first review of the next challenge. And definitely not The Engineer of Human Souls, since I haven't even started it. That might be one to plan to take along on a plane trip to Toronto (scheduled for Sept.). I've read part of Yann Martel's early story collection, but will probably wrap that up next challenge as well.
I have only a few stories left in Carol Shields' The Orange Fish, and I did finish her earlier collection Various Miracles. So I will begin a double review and then return to close out this entry when I have conquered The Orange Fish. For some reason I thought The Orange Fish was published first, which was giving me minor fits since two of the stories share a character (the comic writer Meershank) and it seemed so unusual to write stories of this type out of chronological order. In particular, why this character would need a prequel. It certainly makes more sense now that the order has been restored with "Flitting Behaviour" first and "Block Out" second. Somewhat unhappily, I thought "Flitting Behaviour" was one of the better stories from Various Miracles, but I am not particularly taken by "Block Out." It's hard to put the finger on where the second story isn't as interesting, but most likely it is because of the disconnect between a comic writer having to deal with heavy, heavy stuff (death of a wife) in the first one (which is sort of interesting) and then dealing with writer's block in the second story, which doesn't have quite the same frisson, esp. when he overcomes it offstage as it were and then writes a new novel in record time.
I have to say that Shields' short stories just are not doing that much for me. They seem to fall into two modes -- stories that focus on overlooked people, particularly older women ("Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass" and "Hazel") and stories with a magic realism slant ("Words," "Various Miracles," "Invitations," and "The Orange Fish"). The problem is that in these short stories she can't be (or doesn't feel she can be) as subtle as in a novel, like The Stone Diaries, and so is a bit more direct about how we should think/feel about these overlooked, older women and she comes across as a poor (wo)man's Margaret Atwood. And I don't think the magic realist stories work well at all. I was particularly annoyed by "Words," which has a sort of clever conceit -- let's take something we all have to do everyday (talk) and make that responsible for global warming in place of the other things we do everyday to keep our society functioning (and that is also killing us). But I just found it annoying.
Fortunately, there are occasional stories in a third mode, where she looks at the workings of a couple (usually a couple that have been together a long time) and observes them at a crisis point relatively late in their lives. These seem to work the best -- "Fragility," "Others," and to a lesser extent "Milk Bread Beer Ice"* fit in this category. Still, for me, Shields' short stories have a hit rate of around 15% of stories that I find interesting and/or worthy out of all the stories she's written (that I've read). Pretty low, all things concerned. Munro is probably closer to 75%, though it has been a while since I've read her (next year perhaps). Simply haven't read enough Mavis Gallant to judge. Of course, in that last poetry collection I reviewed (Noble Gas, Penny Black), I only was completely captivated by a single poem out of the entire bunch and it still was worth reading just for that one.
These are reviews 21 and 22 of the current challenge. It also closes out my read/review a book by Carol Shields in June challenge. I thought I was going to read Unless, but couldn't find my copy. Something to keep in mind for next June...
* While the story is on a different topic, I thought that Milk Bread Beer Ice with a few tweaks might make a good list of things that unify Canadians. Perhaps add Coffee and Cigs and then substitute Donuts (or more specifically Tim Horton's Timbits) for Bread and you'd have it. I haven't done much at all with my broken sestinas over the past year, but this would make a good list, esp when I reach the year that I lived in Toronto.
Sunday, June 24, 2012
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Canadian book challenge - 19th post
So I have finally gotten around to reviewing one of the four poetry books published by Brick Books I won in the challenge. I think David O'Meara's Noble Gas, Penny Black had the most gripping cover (a florescent light ring on a greenish background), which is probably why I started with it. There may also be the greatest disconnect between title and contents of any of the volumes. I think if people gave the title much thought, they would probably be expecting poems that are focused on the past. There is indeed a poem about going to a postal museum in Prague (to see the Penny Black stamp) but even here, the poem is far more concerned with the present, as are the vast majority of poems in this collection. Off the top of my head, I can't recall which poem had anything to do with gas, but I may go and look again before I pass the book along to another poetry lover.
In many cases, people struggle to find a way into poetry collections, so they may look for meaning anywhere. It caught my attention that O'Meara was a bartender in Ottawa, and I immediately put together a mental image of an overly literate bar tender (with a useless English lit. degree?) writing away in the afternoon after waking up late from another night shift at the bar. Fair or not, I did pick up a few times where O'Meara was using five and ten dollar words: diurnal, decolletage, mouldering, shuffled conjointly, antiphlogistine, effulgent and unguinous. For me, this indicates he really is aiming for a very specific, narrow meaning in these poems and isn't all that concerned about leaving readers behind. That is obviously his right, but it does indicate a certain type of poet. Only the first poem "The Next Day" seems to draw directly on bar life, but several others do seem informed by a life in the service industry ("Station" and "Cafe in Bodrum"). The last section of poems are drawn from his vacations, mostly to Japan. While it certainly varies, I tend to be about as excited by vacation poems as by vacation snapshots (though I prefer either of these to poems about dreams, which is not the same as dream-like poems, which can be very good indeed).
Just to prove there are always exceptions, my favorite poem in the collection is "Night Train," which is a poem about his experiences traveling in Asia. In this case, however, the focus is not so much on "I did this, I saw that," but about the possibilities of communication across cultures as well the remaining limitations.
Quoting extensively here:
With the parents and their child, we were five
in the sleeping car, the scoured steel rails
shunting us further into Asia.
...
"How old?" I could only try in English
and mimed the years with spreading fingers.
He flashed a loving victory sign.
And then it was night. We rattled
towards November. In blue uniform and cap,
a dusty porter haunted the passageway ...
"Papa, are we home?" "We're almost there,"
I heard him say, or maybe
"Not yet, not yet, but soon."
To be honest, I just wasn't that grabbed by this collection, though the 5 poems in "The Old Story" tracing a failed relationship have their charm (being so self-aware of how little new there is to say about relationships). However, "Night Train" strikes me as a truly great poem where O'Meara really elevated his game. Probably not coincidentally, he keeps it simple and doesn't go looking for opportunities to use fancy words to show off how much he knows. The poem takes you on that train through Asia and shares this special moment between O'Meara and the father (and son).
In many cases, people struggle to find a way into poetry collections, so they may look for meaning anywhere. It caught my attention that O'Meara was a bartender in Ottawa, and I immediately put together a mental image of an overly literate bar tender (with a useless English lit. degree?) writing away in the afternoon after waking up late from another night shift at the bar. Fair or not, I did pick up a few times where O'Meara was using five and ten dollar words: diurnal, decolletage, mouldering, shuffled conjointly, antiphlogistine, effulgent and unguinous. For me, this indicates he really is aiming for a very specific, narrow meaning in these poems and isn't all that concerned about leaving readers behind. That is obviously his right, but it does indicate a certain type of poet. Only the first poem "The Next Day" seems to draw directly on bar life, but several others do seem informed by a life in the service industry ("Station" and "Cafe in Bodrum"). The last section of poems are drawn from his vacations, mostly to Japan. While it certainly varies, I tend to be about as excited by vacation poems as by vacation snapshots (though I prefer either of these to poems about dreams, which is not the same as dream-like poems, which can be very good indeed).
Just to prove there are always exceptions, my favorite poem in the collection is "Night Train," which is a poem about his experiences traveling in Asia. In this case, however, the focus is not so much on "I did this, I saw that," but about the possibilities of communication across cultures as well the remaining limitations.
Quoting extensively here:
With the parents and their child, we were five
in the sleeping car, the scoured steel rails
shunting us further into Asia.
...
"How old?" I could only try in English
and mimed the years with spreading fingers.
He flashed a loving victory sign.
And then it was night. We rattled
towards November. In blue uniform and cap,
a dusty porter haunted the passageway ...
"Papa, are we home?" "We're almost there,"
I heard him say, or maybe
"Not yet, not yet, but soon."
To be honest, I just wasn't that grabbed by this collection, though the 5 poems in "The Old Story" tracing a failed relationship have their charm (being so self-aware of how little new there is to say about relationships). However, "Night Train" strikes me as a truly great poem where O'Meara really elevated his game. Probably not coincidentally, he keeps it simple and doesn't go looking for opportunities to use fancy words to show off how much he knows. The poem takes you on that train through Asia and shares this special moment between O'Meara and the father (and son).
Friday, June 15, 2012
Canadian book challenge - 17th post
I made a long trip from Vancouver to Austin, TX this past weekend (June 1-3), so I had a lot of time on the plane. I had just started rereading Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye, and I wrapped that up on the way back (with a little time to start Carol Shields' story collection Various Miracles). I still enjoyed Cat's Eye, though it didn't grip me quite as much the last time around. Is that because I am a bit less interested in feminist takes on literature? Is it because I am marginally less interested in the lives of artists? I definitely did focus on different aspects of the novel this time around.
Cat's Eye is basically about an artist (now located in Vancouver) thinking over her past growing up in Toronto and the traumas of childhood that helped shape her art. You almost get an exposition of all her major pieces. Many, though not all of the editions of this book, have a representation of what one of the pieces ("Unified Field Theory") probably looked like. (You almost wonder if Atwood should have gone that extra step and gotten someone to create all the art works she described, or if that would have robbed people from imagining them in their own minds.) Somewhat curiously, her relations with her parents and brother were very solid, but she was tormented by a small group of "friends." It goes into other aspects of her life as well, and might fairly be called a feminist take on the bildungsroman tradition. Perhaps my favorite part of the novel is how she describes the outskirts of Toronto getting more developed.
Even I experienced this in my little hometown where the open field we crossed to get to school turned into a whole bunch of houses the last time I was back. There was a "huge" woods behind the school where we would explore for hours. I assume much of that is also developed. I also can't imagine my wife letting the kids wander around for hours on their own, even in relatively safe Vancouver.
In general, I would still agree with most of the assessments in the paper, though I am sorry that I wasn't more specific up front about Stephen's relation to the main character, Elaine. He is her older brother. I noted one thing that I liked about the novel, that while it is written from first-person perspective, the interpretation of events shifts and the past gets cloudy (so this isn't an omniscient narrator by any means). The time period shifts regularly, so we are back in the outskirts of Toronto in the 1940s, for instance, and not merely in the present with Elaine casting her mind back to 1940. I thought this was particularly useful in watching her relationship with Cordelia unfold. I was struck, then and particularly now, that while much of Elaine's life actually took place in Vancouver, all her mental energy (and 97% of the book's pages) are concentrated on Toronto.
I think this time around I was a bit more attuned to Elaine and her relationships, whereas the first go-around I was concentrating a bit more heavily on Toronto as a setting (and a setting that changed over time as the city continued to develop and it became much less rural on the outskirts). I'm not really sure how much more I can add at the moment, particularly since I don't want to repeat what I wrote in the term paper. Anyway, I was glad to reread the book, and I have moved on to Findley's Headhunter (for a totally different take on Toronto).
Actually, I have returned to add a few more comments. Enough time has passed since the last time I read this book (dangerously close to 20 years ago) that I had forgotten a few key plot points. Much of it came back to me relatively quickly, and I sometimes found myself anticipating events. However, I had kind of repressed a bit about Stephen (perhaps because I identified with him more at that time), and it suddenly dawned on me where Atwood was going, and I was kind of unhappy all over again. I wonder if I do reread the book a third time if I would succeed in forgetting again. Anyway, it is interesting that the painting that generally graces the cover of the book itself links everything together -- the event depicted in the painting is one of the turning points of Elaine's young life (when she came close to dying in the frozen creek near her house) and the title "Unified Field Theory" is a bit of a nod in the direction of her brother's profession (physics).
In general, I would still agree with most of the assessments in the paper, though I am sorry that I wasn't more specific up front about Stephen's relation to the main character, Elaine. He is her older brother. I noted one thing that I liked about the novel, that while it is written from first-person perspective, the interpretation of events shifts and the past gets cloudy (so this isn't an omniscient narrator by any means). The time period shifts regularly, so we are back in the outskirts of Toronto in the 1940s, for instance, and not merely in the present with Elaine casting her mind back to 1940. I thought this was particularly useful in watching her relationship with Cordelia unfold. I was struck, then and particularly now, that while much of Elaine's life actually took place in Vancouver, all her mental energy (and 97% of the book's pages) are concentrated on Toronto.
I think this time around I was a bit more attuned to Elaine and her relationships, whereas the first go-around I was concentrating a bit more heavily on Toronto as a setting (and a setting that changed over time as the city continued to develop and it became much less rural on the outskirts). I'm not really sure how much more I can add at the moment, particularly since I don't want to repeat what I wrote in the term paper. Anyway, I was glad to reread the book, and I have moved on to Findley's Headhunter (for a totally different take on Toronto).
Actually, I have returned to add a few more comments. Enough time has passed since the last time I read this book (dangerously close to 20 years ago) that I had forgotten a few key plot points. Much of it came back to me relatively quickly, and I sometimes found myself anticipating events. However, I had kind of repressed a bit about Stephen (perhaps because I identified with him more at that time), and it suddenly dawned on me where Atwood was going, and I was kind of unhappy all over again. I wonder if I do reread the book a third time if I would succeed in forgetting again. Anyway, it is interesting that the painting that generally graces the cover of the book itself links everything together -- the event depicted in the painting is one of the turning points of Elaine's young life (when she came close to dying in the frozen creek near her house) and the title "Unified Field Theory" is a bit of a nod in the direction of her brother's profession (physics).
While the parallel isn't exact, much of the book is prismatic and sort of reflects the vantage point of someone who could step outside time and see a person's entire life. This is supposedly the vantage point of Dr. Manhattan (the naked blue guy in the Watchmen comic). I think the one area Atwood is being just a bit too pat is how you see the early life experiences and how they are directly feeding into Elaine's later paintings (even if, in some cases, she no longer can recall the linkage). Maybe if we did see the paintings it would be more apparent how these experience were translated and transmuted the way a creative person would go about it. It's not a major criticism, but I would have thought she could have been a bit more subtle here.
Canadian book challenge - 18th post
I thought I would do something different - review a Canadian play. As it happens, Timothy Findley's Elizabeth Rex has been published as a stand-alone play, and it is staged occasionally (though certainly not frequently). I believe in North America, it premiered at Stratford, ONT and its first US production was Ann Arbor at Performance Network (I actually saw a number of shows there during my undergrad days -- glad to see they are keeping up the good fight). Then it played the Twin Cities, NYC, DC and just recently Chicago. As far as I can tell, it didn't actually play Toronto, but I might be mistaken. It did have a 3 week run in Montreal. As a side note, I am glad that Findley managed to live to see the play open at Stratford as well as win the 2000 Governor General's Award for English language drama (thank you, Wikipedia)
Edit: Elizabeth Rex is going to be featured at Bard on the Beach in Vancouver this summer (2013). I probably will not go (since nothing could top the production I saw in Chicago), but will encourage others to do so.
I did go quite a bit out of my way to catch the Chicago production while visiting Chicago over the Xmas holidays (third row seats no less). Diane D’Aquila,who originated the role of Queen Elizabeth at Stratford, reprised her role. She was terrific, as was the entire cast. It is quite interesting that there are some significant changes to the stage version from the published version. A second lady-in-waiting role was eliminated and the Queen interacts a bit less directly with the bear in the staged version. The revisions aren't earth-shattering, but seem to make sense. However, it isn't clear to me when Findley would have made them (I certainly assume that these were authorized changes...). This review will draw on both the stage and published version where appropriate.
The basic conceit is that Shakespeare and his troupe have put on Much Ado About Nothing in a command performance for Queen Elizabeth, but most of them have gotten caught up in a curfew (to prevent any popular uprisings against the queen on the eve of the execution of the Earl of Essex). They end up spending the night in the Queen's stables. It quickly emerges that one of the lead actors (Ned) is dying of the pox (syphilis), which he caught from a soldier who went off and died fighting the Irish. (The pox=AIDS meme is established but not driven into the ground. Still some of the subtexts remind me of queer theatre of the late 1980s or early 1990s; not necessarily a bad thing, just I wasn't expecting it.)
The Queen -- still troubled by the need to execute Essex -- visits the actors. (In this play the working assumption is that Essex was once her lover -- and that everyone knows this.) After their initial deference wears off, there is a long night of truth-telling. To be sure, it is hard to believe the actors would ever let themselves go to the extent portrayed here, but then there wouldn't be much of a play, so some suspension of belief is required for sure. The basic bargain struck is that Ned, who plays all the female lead roles, will help Elizabeth mourn Essex as a true woman should, while Elizabeth will help Ned man up and face his death with some dignity.
An interesting side plot is that Shakespeare is unwilling to complete Anthony and Cleopatra while Elizabeth is still ruler, as it seems too transparently about her. Findley also adds in the true historical fact that Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton, was also due to be executed also with Essex. Shakespeare had clear ties with Southampton, and many scholars contend that Shakespeare wrote many of his sonnets with Southampton in mind (though whether they were truly lovers is in much dispute). Findley has Shakespeare plead with Elizabeth to spare him, though he will not grovel to save Southampton. For the most part, Shakespeare is a relatively minor character with a few good lines, while the real focus is on the interactions of Elizabeth and Ned.
Elizabeth Rex is certainly not a perfect play, but it is clever and a committed piece of theatre. It never comes across as a third-rate attempt to imitate Shakespeare, though the attempt to wrap things up neatly wasn't completely convincing (to be fair, this is frequently a problem in Shakespeare's plays as well). Overall, it did help that Diane D’Aquila really sold the role, particularly in the waning hours before Essex's execution when she begins to have second thoughts. It probably does play a bit better on stage than on page, though I saw the play and read it so closely together that they are now mutually reinforcing in my mind.
Edit: Elizabeth Rex is going to be featured at Bard on the Beach in Vancouver this summer (2013). I probably will not go (since nothing could top the production I saw in Chicago), but will encourage others to do so.
I did go quite a bit out of my way to catch the Chicago production while visiting Chicago over the Xmas holidays (third row seats no less). Diane D’Aquila,who originated the role of Queen Elizabeth at Stratford, reprised her role. She was terrific, as was the entire cast. It is quite interesting that there are some significant changes to the stage version from the published version. A second lady-in-waiting role was eliminated and the Queen interacts a bit less directly with the bear in the staged version. The revisions aren't earth-shattering, but seem to make sense. However, it isn't clear to me when Findley would have made them (I certainly assume that these were authorized changes...). This review will draw on both the stage and published version where appropriate.
The basic conceit is that Shakespeare and his troupe have put on Much Ado About Nothing in a command performance for Queen Elizabeth, but most of them have gotten caught up in a curfew (to prevent any popular uprisings against the queen on the eve of the execution of the Earl of Essex). They end up spending the night in the Queen's stables. It quickly emerges that one of the lead actors (Ned) is dying of the pox (syphilis), which he caught from a soldier who went off and died fighting the Irish. (The pox=AIDS meme is established but not driven into the ground. Still some of the subtexts remind me of queer theatre of the late 1980s or early 1990s; not necessarily a bad thing, just I wasn't expecting it.)
The Queen -- still troubled by the need to execute Essex -- visits the actors. (In this play the working assumption is that Essex was once her lover -- and that everyone knows this.) After their initial deference wears off, there is a long night of truth-telling. To be sure, it is hard to believe the actors would ever let themselves go to the extent portrayed here, but then there wouldn't be much of a play, so some suspension of belief is required for sure. The basic bargain struck is that Ned, who plays all the female lead roles, will help Elizabeth mourn Essex as a true woman should, while Elizabeth will help Ned man up and face his death with some dignity.
An interesting side plot is that Shakespeare is unwilling to complete Anthony and Cleopatra while Elizabeth is still ruler, as it seems too transparently about her. Findley also adds in the true historical fact that Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton, was also due to be executed also with Essex. Shakespeare had clear ties with Southampton, and many scholars contend that Shakespeare wrote many of his sonnets with Southampton in mind (though whether they were truly lovers is in much dispute). Findley has Shakespeare plead with Elizabeth to spare him, though he will not grovel to save Southampton. For the most part, Shakespeare is a relatively minor character with a few good lines, while the real focus is on the interactions of Elizabeth and Ned.
Elizabeth Rex is certainly not a perfect play, but it is clever and a committed piece of theatre. It never comes across as a third-rate attempt to imitate Shakespeare, though the attempt to wrap things up neatly wasn't completely convincing (to be fair, this is frequently a problem in Shakespeare's plays as well). Overall, it did help that Diane D’Aquila really sold the role, particularly in the waning hours before Essex's execution when she begins to have second thoughts. It probably does play a bit better on stage than on page, though I saw the play and read it so closely together that they are now mutually reinforcing in my mind.
Monday, May 28, 2012
Canadian book challenge - 16th post
I decided I ought to go ahead and wrap up my Kroetsch reviews. His final novel was called The Man From the Creeks. It becomes immediately apparent that the novel is designed to lead up to the shoot-out in the Malamute Saloon portrayed in Robert Service's poem The Shooting of Dan McGrew (text of poem here). In fact, the narrator is well aware of the poem, but he was present at the shoot-out and notes that the poet (or scribbler as I think he calls Service at one point) came along several years after. Not surprisingly, he says a few of the details were wrong. Kroetsch occasionally has to tie himself almost in knots to get some of the details portrayed in the poem to come to pass. For all that, there is still a fair bit of playfulness present in a book with such a preordained and fatal outcome. I occasionally found myself thinking of Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold, as well as Chaplin's The Gold Rush.
In a nutshell, the narrator is the son of "the lady that's known as Lou." Lou and the boy decide to escape their lives running a pawn shop in Seattle and to try their hands at prospecting at the height of the Gold Rush. They sneak aboard a boat heading up north but are discovered. A man buys their release with two barrels of whiskey he's bringing north. This man, Benjamin, hasn't brought any proper prospecting equipment at all, only whiskey, though this is nearly worth its weight in gold. In any case, they set out as an unlikely trio, none of them with any real sense of what they are getting themselves into. While Lou tends to be the most level-headed, she makes many critical mistakes along the way. It does strain belief that they actually make it north in one piece. Benjamin saved Dan McGrew's life (hiding him in a huge barrel) and has been told that if he makes it up north, he'll be cut in on the action.
They are also supposed to bring another woman (Sal or perhaps Lil?) who used to be a dancer but now runs a hardware store. The boy starts working for her and falls under her spell. As spring comes and the ice melts (to allow the Gold Rush to continue), she rather wisely decides to go back to the States with her earnings and to not go on to meet up with Mr. McGrew. It falls to the boy to break the news to McGrew. McGrew puts Benjamin to work, working a terrible claim, and the stress more or less sends him around the bend, though indeed he does strike goal near the very end of the book. Lou and the boy come work for McGrew in his saloon (and indeed the boy is "the rag-time kid" of the poem). The denouement does play itself out largely as laid out in the poem, with one critical difference, which I will not reveal. The boy ends up taking over McGrew's saloon (perhaps a bit unlikely), living to 100 (which is mentioned throughout the book) and never fully getting over his puppy love for McGrew's lady-love (Sal or Lil). Am I being too harsh in having trouble believing that someone in such a challenging climate would remain in this state of arrested development for over 80 years? After surviving some truly terrible conditions, he would just sit and regress for this length of time? I suppose there are people that do fall into that category, but I just thought it was unnecessarily cruel on Kroetsch's part to leave the kid in such a state when it didn't really add anything to the overall story arc. It's almost as if he was thinking about a kid killed off in another one of his novels and says, see, given the kind of person he was, he didn't really miss all that much... Maybe I am just reading too much into this, but I wish he had chosen a different approach for handling Lou's son and the aftermath of the shooting.
In a nutshell, the narrator is the son of "the lady that's known as Lou." Lou and the boy decide to escape their lives running a pawn shop in Seattle and to try their hands at prospecting at the height of the Gold Rush. They sneak aboard a boat heading up north but are discovered. A man buys their release with two barrels of whiskey he's bringing north. This man, Benjamin, hasn't brought any proper prospecting equipment at all, only whiskey, though this is nearly worth its weight in gold. In any case, they set out as an unlikely trio, none of them with any real sense of what they are getting themselves into. While Lou tends to be the most level-headed, she makes many critical mistakes along the way. It does strain belief that they actually make it north in one piece. Benjamin saved Dan McGrew's life (hiding him in a huge barrel) and has been told that if he makes it up north, he'll be cut in on the action.
They are also supposed to bring another woman (Sal or perhaps Lil?) who used to be a dancer but now runs a hardware store. The boy starts working for her and falls under her spell. As spring comes and the ice melts (to allow the Gold Rush to continue), she rather wisely decides to go back to the States with her earnings and to not go on to meet up with Mr. McGrew. It falls to the boy to break the news to McGrew. McGrew puts Benjamin to work, working a terrible claim, and the stress more or less sends him around the bend, though indeed he does strike goal near the very end of the book. Lou and the boy come work for McGrew in his saloon (and indeed the boy is "the rag-time kid" of the poem). The denouement does play itself out largely as laid out in the poem, with one critical difference, which I will not reveal. The boy ends up taking over McGrew's saloon (perhaps a bit unlikely), living to 100 (which is mentioned throughout the book) and never fully getting over his puppy love for McGrew's lady-love (Sal or Lil). Am I being too harsh in having trouble believing that someone in such a challenging climate would remain in this state of arrested development for over 80 years? After surviving some truly terrible conditions, he would just sit and regress for this length of time? I suppose there are people that do fall into that category, but I just thought it was unnecessarily cruel on Kroetsch's part to leave the kid in such a state when it didn't really add anything to the overall story arc. It's almost as if he was thinking about a kid killed off in another one of his novels and says, see, given the kind of person he was, he didn't really miss all that much... Maybe I am just reading too much into this, but I wish he had chosen a different approach for handling Lou's son and the aftermath of the shooting.
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Canadian book challenge - 15th post
Alibi is one of Kroetsch's most openly postmodern novels, perhaps only topped by his follow-up novel The Puppeteer. There is a fair bit of doubling (indeed the narrator's name is William William Dorfen, though he is almost universally addressed as Dorf). He acts as a buying agent for a reclusive Alberta millionaire, Jack Deemer, primarily in helping him amass unusual collections. Dorf claims to have never even set eyes on Deemer, though he runs into Deemer's runaway wife, Julie Magnuson. Deemer sends him on a quest to find and buy the ultimate spa, and he of course checks out Baden Baden, though this isn't the chosen spa. The chapters are short and do sort of cover the same ground from a variety of perspectives, not completely dissimilar to Last Year at Marienbad, which may have been an inspiration for Alibi. Or not.
Dorf keeps running into people with connections to Deemer's past, particularly Fish (a man maintaining a spa near Banff). Fish and Deemer both were vying for the hand of Julie back in the day (and before Deemer was so rich). Dorf also tangles with Karen Strike, a documentary film maker who ends up in Deemer's employ, making a movie about spas (naturally). Dorf keeps learning more about Deemer, little of which sits well with him. Dorf actually has liaisons with both Julie and Karen (not at the same time), but finds himself unable or unwilling to purchase a spa for Deemer. Despite a few interesting set pieces, particularly when Dorf and Fish are in Banff together, the novel kind of drags in spots. Maybe Hamlet-like characters are only interesting when there really is a lot going on around them. If the plot moved a bit quicker and the book was more linear, it might have been something like North by Northwest, but it really isn't in that tradition at all. In a bit of a left-turn, Dorf ends up fleeing Canada and turns up at a European spa, where he and Julie end up in an extended menage a trois with a doctor, who happens to be a dwarf. Pretty kinky. I'd rather not spoil the ending. I think in general, the book has its merits, but is a bit disappointing. I don't think it really caught on with the general public.
MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD
After a roughly 10 year gap, Kroetsch published The Puppeteer, which is actually a direct sequel to Alibi. Apparently, Kroetsch was considering writing a third novel to round out a trilogy, but wrote The Man From the Creeks instead. Whether he completely abandoned the idea or he would have returned to it had he not died in a car accident is unclear to me. It's so hard to say what he might have done, but I thoroughly disliked The Puppeteer and am actually a bit sorry I read it, so it is hard to imagine a third novel having reversed my feelings. Again, my impression is that the public did not care for this book, though I don't know what its critical reception was. Basically, Kroetsch throws all the postmodern contrivances together. Relatively quickly we learn that Dorf is hiding out in Vancouver, working as a pizza delivery man who is masquerading as a kind of monk. He goes by the name of Papa Vasilis. A bit later in the book, he breaks up with his girlfriend (the pizza queen of Vancouver) and hides out in the attic of Maggie, a female novelist, who is separated from her husband, Henry, an archeologist working in Greece. Dorf has become a fairly pathetic character who for some unknown reason starts putting on elaborate puppet shows up in the attic. This felt like a total contrivance to me, and is one of the flaws of post-modern fiction where the artifice is so foregrounded that characters don't have or require any internal coherence. Dorf was a relatively resourceful guy in Alibi -- why would he have fallen quite so low? But even beyond this, there are two devices I didn't care for at all.
1) Periodically a different narrator breaks in, and it turns out this is Jack Deemer himself, still rich but almost blind (and presumably the true puppeteer). He seems to know all kinds of things about the female novelist but nothing about Papa V. (or the goings on in the attic). Maggie leaves Papa up in the attic and heads out to Banff with a couple of older women (they might actually be Papa's V's aunts, but I can't exactly recall). Of course, they run into both Fish and Karen Strike. I suppose this is inevitable in a sequel.
2) However, it isn't that much longer into the novel that we find that Dorf did not kill the dwarf after all, and beyond that, Julie Magnuson faked her own death. So basically absolutely everything in Alibi has been upended and reversed. I just couldn't get with that. Some readers like these kind of games, but it was too much for me. There was a subplot about this wedding dress (worn by both Julie and Maggie). It basically completely stretched credibility that the whole cast would end up in Greece and Jack Deemer would put on the wedding dress and pass as a woman for a while. I really disliked the ending, which seemed fake and unearned. Maybe Kroetsch just wrote himself into a corner and couldn't see how he could reverse or invert the new ending (or that the marginal payoff was so low) for a third book. About the only thing of interest (aside from some decent street scenes set in Vancouver) was the subplot about Henry trying to smuggle out Greek icons, including one with a (female) face of God.
There is no question this is my absolutely least favorite novel by Kroetsch. I would only recommend it to a lit. major who had a real hankering for postmodern fiction.
These are reviews 15/13 and 16/13.
Dorf keeps running into people with connections to Deemer's past, particularly Fish (a man maintaining a spa near Banff). Fish and Deemer both were vying for the hand of Julie back in the day (and before Deemer was so rich). Dorf also tangles with Karen Strike, a documentary film maker who ends up in Deemer's employ, making a movie about spas (naturally). Dorf keeps learning more about Deemer, little of which sits well with him. Dorf actually has liaisons with both Julie and Karen (not at the same time), but finds himself unable or unwilling to purchase a spa for Deemer. Despite a few interesting set pieces, particularly when Dorf and Fish are in Banff together, the novel kind of drags in spots. Maybe Hamlet-like characters are only interesting when there really is a lot going on around them. If the plot moved a bit quicker and the book was more linear, it might have been something like North by Northwest, but it really isn't in that tradition at all. In a bit of a left-turn, Dorf ends up fleeing Canada and turns up at a European spa, where he and Julie end up in an extended menage a trois with a doctor, who happens to be a dwarf. Pretty kinky. I'd rather not spoil the ending. I think in general, the book has its merits, but is a bit disappointing. I don't think it really caught on with the general public.
MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD
After a roughly 10 year gap, Kroetsch published The Puppeteer, which is actually a direct sequel to Alibi. Apparently, Kroetsch was considering writing a third novel to round out a trilogy, but wrote The Man From the Creeks instead. Whether he completely abandoned the idea or he would have returned to it had he not died in a car accident is unclear to me. It's so hard to say what he might have done, but I thoroughly disliked The Puppeteer and am actually a bit sorry I read it, so it is hard to imagine a third novel having reversed my feelings. Again, my impression is that the public did not care for this book, though I don't know what its critical reception was. Basically, Kroetsch throws all the postmodern contrivances together. Relatively quickly we learn that Dorf is hiding out in Vancouver, working as a pizza delivery man who is masquerading as a kind of monk. He goes by the name of Papa Vasilis. A bit later in the book, he breaks up with his girlfriend (the pizza queen of Vancouver) and hides out in the attic of Maggie, a female novelist, who is separated from her husband, Henry, an archeologist working in Greece. Dorf has become a fairly pathetic character who for some unknown reason starts putting on elaborate puppet shows up in the attic. This felt like a total contrivance to me, and is one of the flaws of post-modern fiction where the artifice is so foregrounded that characters don't have or require any internal coherence. Dorf was a relatively resourceful guy in Alibi -- why would he have fallen quite so low? But even beyond this, there are two devices I didn't care for at all.
1) Periodically a different narrator breaks in, and it turns out this is Jack Deemer himself, still rich but almost blind (and presumably the true puppeteer). He seems to know all kinds of things about the female novelist but nothing about Papa V. (or the goings on in the attic). Maggie leaves Papa up in the attic and heads out to Banff with a couple of older women (they might actually be Papa's V's aunts, but I can't exactly recall). Of course, they run into both Fish and Karen Strike. I suppose this is inevitable in a sequel.
2) However, it isn't that much longer into the novel that we find that Dorf did not kill the dwarf after all, and beyond that, Julie Magnuson faked her own death. So basically absolutely everything in Alibi has been upended and reversed. I just couldn't get with that. Some readers like these kind of games, but it was too much for me. There was a subplot about this wedding dress (worn by both Julie and Maggie). It basically completely stretched credibility that the whole cast would end up in Greece and Jack Deemer would put on the wedding dress and pass as a woman for a while. I really disliked the ending, which seemed fake and unearned. Maybe Kroetsch just wrote himself into a corner and couldn't see how he could reverse or invert the new ending (or that the marginal payoff was so low) for a third book. About the only thing of interest (aside from some decent street scenes set in Vancouver) was the subplot about Henry trying to smuggle out Greek icons, including one with a (female) face of God.
There is no question this is my absolutely least favorite novel by Kroetsch. I would only recommend it to a lit. major who had a real hankering for postmodern fiction.
These are reviews 15/13 and 16/13.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Canadian book challenge - 14th post
So on beyond 13. I actually read Morley Callaghan's A Fine and Private Place basically at the same time as Barometer Rising (switching on the bus and so forth). I found this novel a
bit more engaging from the get-go, though it is somewhat meandering. It is set in Toronto. The basic plot is that a graduate student, Al, finds himself in a relationship with Lisa, a former classmate, who now works in the news media. She supports him as he struggles to complete a dissertation. While he initially expects to write on Norman Mailer (an obvious topic that Lisa feels is a bit beneath Al), with some prodding, he finds himself fascinated by the writings of Eugene Shore, a local writer who is generally unappreciated in his hometown but has a bit of a claim to fame elsewhere. Shore is a fairly transparent stand-in for Callaghan himself, given that he writes books about outcasts and tends to sympathize with criminals over cops. While this is a bit of an over-simplification, a number of Callaghan's books like Such is My Beloved and More Joy in Heaven were upsetting to the members of the literary establishment that wanted "moral" and uplifting fiction. (While I haven't read enough of Callaghan to know for certain, it strikes me that he is intrigued by the same themes as Graham Greene.) Callaghan definitely has a negative take on reviewers and academic critics of all stripes, or at least he voices these sentiments through Shore. Nonetheless, with Lisa's intervention, Shore agrees to meet Al and they fall into a bit of a mentor-mentee relationship.
Lisa begins to get concerned as Al seems to be getting lost in his new topic, pretty much starting over after having written dozens of pages, because he just can't seem to get the angle on Shore. She begins to despair he will ever finish and regrets pushing him towards Shore in the first place. (She might have some things to say to the wife in Kroetsch's Gone Indian where the narrator has finally exhausted everyone's patience by switching dissertation topics repeatedly.) This section does seem to go on a bit too long for my taste, so I was glad when one of the subplots took over in the third act. I don't want to reveal too much about this aspect of the book and certainly not the ending. I will note however, that, just as in Bissoondath's The Innocence of Age, a cop gets involved in a shooting.
I wonder how many cops show up in novels and don't shoot someone? Pretty few, I'd wager. It's probably a corollary that if a gun shows up in the first scene (of a play or movie), it has to go off in the last scene. (Sometimes attributed to Hitchcock or Godard, it is more likely that it stems from Chekhov.) The ending is just a bit ambiguous, at least in terms of whether we really think Al and Lisa have emerged from a rough patch and are now are on firm ground as a couple. Al is clearly going to have to stop relying on Shore as a kind of crutch or an excuse to keep from writing (in fear that Shore will write something new to overturn all of Al's previous judgements). As an aside, while this isn't the only lesson to be learned from this novel, it generally is a bad idea for English lit. students to write dissertations on living writers.
I wouldn't say that Toronto emerged as a strong backdrop in this novel. There were certainly shades of "Toronto the Good" when the newspaper reviewers had a particularly moral take on Shore, but there weren't too many times when I didn't think the novel could have been set in Winnepeg or Edmonton. The Innocence of Age, despite some shortcomings, was more thoroughly a Toronto novel than this one. I expect that the next three novels I tackle will be Toronto-based novels. The plan is to reread Atwood's Cat's Eye and Findley's Headhunter. If there is still time remaining before the challenge ends, I will tackle (for the first time) Skvorecky's The Engineer of Human Souls. And if I don't get through them, they will be the first reviews for the next challenge.
Lisa begins to get concerned as Al seems to be getting lost in his new topic, pretty much starting over after having written dozens of pages, because he just can't seem to get the angle on Shore. She begins to despair he will ever finish and regrets pushing him towards Shore in the first place. (She might have some things to say to the wife in Kroetsch's Gone Indian where the narrator has finally exhausted everyone's patience by switching dissertation topics repeatedly.) This section does seem to go on a bit too long for my taste, so I was glad when one of the subplots took over in the third act. I don't want to reveal too much about this aspect of the book and certainly not the ending. I will note however, that, just as in Bissoondath's The Innocence of Age, a cop gets involved in a shooting.
I wonder how many cops show up in novels and don't shoot someone? Pretty few, I'd wager. It's probably a corollary that if a gun shows up in the first scene (of a play or movie), it has to go off in the last scene. (Sometimes attributed to Hitchcock or Godard, it is more likely that it stems from Chekhov.) The ending is just a bit ambiguous, at least in terms of whether we really think Al and Lisa have emerged from a rough patch and are now are on firm ground as a couple. Al is clearly going to have to stop relying on Shore as a kind of crutch or an excuse to keep from writing (in fear that Shore will write something new to overturn all of Al's previous judgements). As an aside, while this isn't the only lesson to be learned from this novel, it generally is a bad idea for English lit. students to write dissertations on living writers.
I wouldn't say that Toronto emerged as a strong backdrop in this novel. There were certainly shades of "Toronto the Good" when the newspaper reviewers had a particularly moral take on Shore, but there weren't too many times when I didn't think the novel could have been set in Winnepeg or Edmonton. The Innocence of Age, despite some shortcomings, was more thoroughly a Toronto novel than this one. I expect that the next three novels I tackle will be Toronto-based novels. The plan is to reread Atwood's Cat's Eye and Findley's Headhunter. If there is still time remaining before the challenge ends, I will tackle (for the first time) Skvorecky's The Engineer of Human Souls. And if I don't get through them, they will be the first reviews for the next challenge.
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