Another Year in Reading

I started this blog back in the Spring of 2011, and I’ve decided to continue the tradition I began last year of posting about my year of reading (something that is quite popular on literary blogs and magazines) in the Spring instead of the usual December.

This has been quite the reading year, and as usual I’m a little disappointed by the numbers when I look at the final list. My lack of reading last summer is explained by the fact that I was juggling multiple jobs, which meant I spent the better part of May AND June reading Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies. The other remarkable aspect of my year in reading is that this last school year was the first in a long time during which I had no mandatory books to read for class. So all the books I read were for “pleasure,” whatever that means!

I’ve written about many of my favourite books on the blog and in other places during the year, of course, so there’s no point in repeating everything here. Instead, here’s a list of some of the books that marked my year and which I also kept mostly quiet about online.

So here it goes for a handful of books from my last year in reading, which encompasses most of 2012 and the first chunk of 2013:

• Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

Bowen is one of my favourite writers, and it was such a pleasure to read through one of her most well-loved books. While the novel is intensely introspective and Bowen’s narrator is a little heavy-handed in placing the right elements for the reader to understand certain things at certain moments, Portia, the 16 year old protagonist, carries this story on her shoulders like Jesus carried his cross. It’s a heartbreaking tale of loneliness and and lost innocence, told with the deftest of sensibilities.

• David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

Again, I’d read through Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet with great pleasure, and I was looking forward to reading this novel, whose publication is bookended by these two more famous works. Black Swan Green follows the teenage years of Jason, a poet stammerer growing up in a small village in England in the 70s. The story is in turn brilliantly hilarious and excruciatingly sad. Mitchell nails the spirit of pre- and early-adolesence of boys with frightening precision, especially that deep sense that you must always check how you’re acting to make sure you’ll be judged positively. The narrative can get a little too jolty, but it only adds to the heady joyfulness of the ride.

• Tim Parks, Italian Neighbours

I blogged tentatively about this book when I wasn’t even finished reading it, but now that I have I can officially rave about how wonderful it is (plus, the cover is really nice). In Italian Neighbours, Tim Parks remembers his year of living in a rented flat in Montecchio, a small village in Northern Italy. Don’t ask me how he does it, but by somehow exploring one topic per chapter, he also manages to provide a chronological account of that year, while introducing us to a host of unforgettable characters. Parks’ prose is pitch-perfect and his eye for cultural singularities is sharp. In fact, I enjoyed myself so obviously with this book that I ended up reading a bunch of chapters to G. before going to bed over the Christmas break; I couldn’t resist letting her in on the fun. Italian Neighbours is relaxed (in the best way), honest, touching—all the things non fiction is supposed to be.

• Joel Dicker, L’Affaire Harry Quebert

This odd, fat French book landed in my stocking with hearty praise from french-reading critics on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s weird: a deeply American literary thriller (set in Maine and New York, with American characters and a narrator who’s a Jewish writer from Newark) written in French by a Swiss. Unfortunately, the book failed on almost every account for me. The narrator is an idiot and a prick, the murder of which his old mentor is wrongly accused is uninteresting, the earth-shattering love story between said mentor and the victim sounds awfully hollow. The book ends up sounding hollow too: the characters are so exaggerated it becomes a kind of satire of the great american novel, except it’s not a joke (at least I don’t think it is). Still, I would be curious to see this novel translated into English (if only because it’s ballsy and its setting demands it) and see what the New Yorker would think of it.

• Seamus Heaney, Seeing Things

One of my resolutions this year was to read more poetry. Done. Heaney is a living god of words. His way of circling around an image, of sending out his lines into a beautiful tangent and then gently tugging them back to the starting point is literally breathtaking. His verbose adjectives somehow manage to convey exact meaning by piling up verbs and nouns. His voice second-guesses, questions, quotes, contemplates. It builds. This is what poetry does, man. It makes things.

• Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

Also part of my poetry reading resolution. I have an exaggerated affection for Carson’s translations of Euripides but I never got around to reading her poetry. In some ways, I was not disappointed; in others, I was definitely blown away. Carson reinterprets the little known ancient Greek myth of Geryon, a red monster who was killed by Herakles. She inserts her characters in a fluid world, halfway between our reality and the myth of the source material: Geryon and Herakles become lovers in a complicated, painful relationship, but Geryon remains the red, winged monster of the legend. In spite of the odd form—a prose poem in alternating short and long lines bookended by an essay and a fake interview with the ancient Greek poet who first wrote empathetically about Geryon—the book is compelling, almost compulsively readable. It’s also very moving: Geryon’s loneliness and displacement is expressed with great subtlety and harrowing honesty.

• Art Spiegelman, Maus

After seeing a wonderful exhibit about Art Spiegelman at the Vancouver Art Gallery, I knew the time had come to finally read Maus. Wow. This is the kind of book you devour once and then return to again and again. I loved the book’s metafictional elements, its thick scratchy drawings, its fluid panel transitions, its ability to stare anything—funny or sad—right in the face and openly struggle to represent it through art. Maus is simply a masterpiece.

***

And now, onwards into a brand new year of reading! Please take a moment to reflect on your year’s favourites and share them below. 

An Afternoon in Bloomsbury

 

I’m visiting G. in Oxford for a few weeks, and Oxford being what it is of course she’s being kept very busy by weekly essays and exam prep. So on Wednesday I decided to escape the student city and take the Oxford Tube down to London to spend part of the day. By the way, Wednesday was also May Day, which means a big morning of celebrations in Oxford, including listening to a choir sing from the top of Magdalen tower at 6 am, followed by a delicious breakfast in a local café (or pub) open early for the occasion. No one jumped off Magdalen bridge this year, as far as I know. 

Bloomsbury is one of my favourite neighbourhoods in London, so when I don’t have a lot of time in the city I usually end up spending it there instead of discovering new corners. My day in the capital started rather late in the morning at the British Library, where I wanted to check out an exhibit on crime fiction, Murder in the Library: The A to Z of Crime Fiction. I thought it was a full fledged exhibit like the Science Fiction one I’d seen a couple of years ago, but it ended up only being a series of small cases and panels in a corner of the lobby (there will be a larger exhibit on propaganda opening this month). The exhibit was still interesting, however—I just wouldn’t recommend making a detour specifically to go see it. 

After a delicious lunch at a favourite haunt, I enjoyed the beautiful weather and made my way down to Lincoln’s Inn Fields to visit the Soane Museum, a strange little collection I’d heard about but never gotten around to visiting. The building was designed by Neo-Classical architect Sir John Soane as a museum for his extensive private collection of artifacts, paintings, and memorabilia. After a polite welcome from butler-like museum staff who regulate the entry and ensure your possessions are carried in plastic bags, I was ushered into the house without further direction or information. The visit begins in Soane’s elegant library, and then moves into other rooms in the house, which are cluttered from floor to ceiling with classical urns, vases, busts, plaster, marble ornaments, bronze replicas, etc. I found very few explanation panels; I guess the point is to walk around and gaze in admiration at the impressively haphazard collection. There’s a room lined with large canvases, Hogarths and Canolettos among them, with walls that open thanks to a clever contraption and reveal plans for buildings designed by Soane. In the dank, dark basement of the house lies the massive alabaster coffin of Seti I, father of Ramses II. The whole experience was a little overwhelming and definitely a little confusing. I did very much enjoy the exhibit at the end of the visit, Piranesi’s Paestum, which gave a lot of context to neo-classical architecture and 18th century interest in classical buildings. 

It was already nearly time to go back to Oxford by then, but before I left London I had one more stop: the London Review Bookshop, near the British Museum. Every time I go there, I’m amazed and impressed by the bright surroundings and their incredible selection. Somehow, this bookshop manages to stock every literary writer, past and present; I firmly believe they have everything I could ever look for. Still, I searched around for something special to purchase, not any book I could’ve ordered online in a flash. I wanted something exiting, something I didn’t know existed. I wanted to surprise myself. Despite the thousands of volumes, however, I didn’t find anything that fit the bill. But then, just as I was leaving the store, something caught my eye in the front window: a small, elegant hardcover with a name I recognized, Al Alvarez. I’ve written a little about Alvarez before; he’s a poet, novelist, and essayist, a true “man of letters,” who wrote books on subjects as varied (although not altogether unrelated) as night, gambling, and suicide. His book on writing and reading, The Writer’s Voice, is one of the most helpful and engaging books of literary criticism I have ever read. I’m a big fan of his; I had no idea he’d written a new book.

So I entered the store again and grabbed the book from the window display to purchase it. It’s called Pondlife: A Swimmer’s Journal. It could’ve been about the life cycle of bullfrogs and I would’ve already been sold, basically. It turned out the book is made up of short journal excerpts Alvarez kept between 2002 and 2009 (the year he turned 80), focusing around his daily swims in the pond at Hampstead Heath. Exactly the kind of British non-fiction I love to devour. Needless to say I returned to the city of spires and honey-coloured stone with a London Review Bookshop bag in my hand. 

World Book Night 2013

World Book Night is celebrated on April 23, a date which UNESCO coined international day of the book in honour of Shakespeare and Cervantes, who both died on this day in 1616 (Shakespeare was also born on April 23, at least according to the World Book Night websites—Wikipedia says otherwise). For the third year in a row, in the UK, the World Book Night organization prints hundreds of thousands of copies of free books, from 20 titles selected by the public. 20,000 book donors are given copies of the book of their choice to hand out to their communities, while others are distributed in schools, nursing homes, prisons, and other social institutions.

G. and I have a personal attachment to this event. We were lucky to be able to attend the very first World Book Night celebration in 2011, at Trafalgar Square. We were both studying in Bristol at the time so we took the train down to London and spent three hours freezing our feet off, surrounded by the London traffic, in front of a stage on which authors and celebrities read to us. We saw the likes of John LeCarré, Philip Pullman, Margaret Atwood, Alan Bennett and many, many others reading from their works. It was a beautiful experience. After the event, we found ourselves in a turmoil of book donors suddenly exchanging and giving away copies of their chosen World Book Night titles. We received two or three books and found another one hidden in a corner of the Bristol Cathedral that same week. 

This year, G. is studying in England again and applied to become a World Book Night donor herself. She chose to give Bernhard Schlink’s aptly titled The Reader to students in need of a study break. I happened to be visiting her this month, so we decided to go down to London on April 23 for this year’s World Book Night Celebration at the Southbank Centre. The evening was hosted by writer and comedian Hardeep Singh Kohli and featured a large number of talented writers, as well as the deep-voiced actor Charles Dance (of Game of Thrones fame) reading from Josephine Hart’s Damage, and Ian Fleming’s niece Lucy who read from her uncle’s essay “How to Write a Thriller.”

Highlights of the evening for me include Alice Oswald’s mesmerizing rendition of the Hector section of Memorial, her retelling of the Iliad; Sir Andrew Motion’s quiet excerpt from his novel Silver, a sequel to Stevenson’s Treasure Island; Mark Haddon reading from the hilarious opening pages of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time; and Sebastian Barry’s explosive and delightful rendition of a scene from The Secret Scripture. 

It was a wonderful evening, and with summer warmth, sunshine, and a pleasant crowd to welcome us in London, we couldn’t have asked for a better night to celebrate reading.

ComfortLit: Saplings by Noel Streatfeild

I know of few books in this world that are more comforting than the old-school British fiction published in the UK by Persephone Books. I’ve raved about them here before and will no doubt continue to do so every time I read another one of their books because their project really is a resounding success. It’s not about cool new post-post-modern books and experimental fiction or the reprinting of vintage books because they’re hip. It’s about recuperating works of literature that were successful in their day and are little known now and giving them a simple grey covers and elegant endpapers. It’s about good books, no matter when they were originally published and what fashion they originally did or did not follow.

And all of this is especially true of a novel published by Persephone Books that I got for Christmas, Saplings by Noel Streatfeild. Although I didn’t know anything about Streatfeild before, I discovered that she is actually well-known in the US and the UK for her series of children’s books, especially Ballet Shoes. However, unbeknownst to most readers, Streatfeild also wrote a large number of novels for adults, and Saplings is the first to be reissued. It was published in 1945, and deals directly with the social situation before and during World War II. In fact, the book’s purpose is to chart the tragic and inevitable fragmentation of a happy British family during the war years.

Saplings is by no means a perfect book. By modern standards—and even, arguably, by the standards of the period—the narration jumps around from character to character with an undeniable lack of smoothness, the book’s structure is loose, swaths of time are skipped with little purpose, and we lose sight of many important characters by the end. Yet somehow the slightly antiquated style excuses all of these flaws, and the novel remains a true pleasure to read. The characters feel true, the prose is quite gripping, the themes of family and affection resonate with the right amount of vividness, the story is properly heartbreaking.

Despite the incredible sadness of seeing the Wiltshire children grow apart from each other and the dissipation of the strong, healthy values with which they initially set out in life, the novel’s world remains a pleasurable one to wallow in. The characters are attaching and the references have just the right tint of nostalgia today. Plus, the book holds a kind of historical/social value: as the afterword suggests, Streatfield was one of the first writers to depict the effects of WWII in the domestic sphere. The British may not have been invaded, but it didn’t mean that households and families weren’t shattered. How Saplings can be at once so comforting and alarmingly sad remains for me its greatest strength.

Understanding Quebec and Hubert Aquin: HA!

In the afternoon of March 15 1977, the Québecois writer Hubert Aquin left his home in the Notre Dame de Grâce neighbourhood in Montreal  and drove to the nearby Villa Maria College, a bilingual high school. He parked on the side of one of the roads on the school grounds, stepped out of his car, aimed a shotgun at his face, and pulled the trigger.

Aquin was survived by his partner Andrée Yanacopoulo and their son Emmanuel, as well as two sons from a first marriage (with whom he hadn’t had any contact in some years). Among the family, friends, and fellow writers and nationalists who had known Aquin from close or afar, his suicide came as a surprise to some and a confirmation to others that Aquin had spent his life blazing a trail that had always led in the direction of a wall. In a documentary film on his life released in 1979, Deux épisodes dans la vie d’Hubert Aquin, his widow reveals in a rather cold, straightforward way that shocked many people how she had in fact known when and how Aquin would commit suicide. She had given him her blessing and she had even asked him to do it on the 15, a Tuesday, and not on the Monday as he had planned because she was teaching that day and it wouldn’t fit her schedule. To those know knew Aquin closely during this period, it had become increasingly clear in the previous six months that suicide was the only solution.

But then, of course, the obvious question is: why did Hubert Aquin kill himself? That is what Gordon Sheppard tries to answer in his brick-like book HA!: A Self-Murder Mystery. Sheppard is a Canadian film-maker and writer who worked on and eventually abandoned a film project with Aquin in the 1970s after his own success with a film called Eliza’s Horroscope, starring Tommy Lee Jones. After Aquin’s death, Sheppard set out to document Aquin’s life, time, works, and death in an all-encompassing volume that would finally be published fully in 2003 (I believe the publication was delayed mainly for legal reasons). Sheppard’s goal, other than trying to understand Aquin’s suicide, was to celebrate Aquin as a great writer, a great artist—draw him out into the pantheon of internationally recognized geniuses. The book was written in English for a reason (almost all of the material in it was translated from the French).

HA! is an oddity. It’s a strange investigation that functions basically by accumulation, layering fact and versions in order to present a complete, labyrinthine portrait of the subject. It gives the reader statistics about Québecois society in 70s, quotes from Aquin’s books, newspaper articles from the period, interviews with many subjects, biographical information on art, as well as many pictures and paintings, so that the reader has the impression of reading a detective novel in the form of a scrapbook. Moreover, Sheppard wrought the book like a film script—the publisher “presents” it while he is both writer and director—with each chapter having its own, smartly described “soundscape” and most of the text consisting of dialogue in interview (that is, in script) format.

And does it work? Yes, mostly it does. I never knew that a book whose greatest part is mostly in the form of interviews could be this gripping. Sheppard had access to a number of interesting people who present different versions of Aquin’s story. Even those people who refused to speak become somehow significant. Sheppard also brings his own far-reaching culture in order to draw interesting conjectures on the broader theme of suicide and art.  The book gives a hazy but complete portrait of Aquin’s life and works, as well as an illuminating picture of Québec’s social, cultural, and political reality in the 1960s and 70s, during Hubert’s life. It’s a truly fascinating exploration, and an incredibly accomplishment. 

It’s important to mention at this point that Aquin’s widow, Andrée Yanacopoulo, is a key figure in the investigation. In fact, after the first few chapters, she also becomes a detective figure in the book and assists Sheppard in collecting evidence and testimonials. Ha! also includes facsimiles of postcards and letters, including a full detachable colour copy of the goodbye letter Aquin gave to Andrée before he died. These documents are moving because they are incredibly personal, and one almost wonders why Yanacopoulo allowed them to be released. By the end of the book, when discoveries are made about Aquin’s life that even she wasn’t definitely aware of, the reader experiences the gravity of these discoveries mainly through her intimate reaction. It’s a little uncomfortable, but very powerful because the reader is finally given a definite filter or baseline from which to understand Aquin. Yet after having been obviously implicated in the project of Sheppard’s book, Andrée Yanacopoulo then decided to dissociate herself from it, as the edition notice states very clearly in both French and English. This fact only helps to muddle the mystery of Aquin’s heritage.

Many of Sheppard’s ideas and hypotheses are conjectures, of course, and there is the sense at times that the writer/director is pulling material in from too many directions at once in an effort to make his story more universal. There is nothing wrong with this intention, only sometimes he looses himself in the delight of his own playful agenda. For example, he creates an imaginary wake for Aquin that lasts 50 pages with different dead writers like Joyce, Isak Dinesen, and Dante coming to give speeches and read from their books. I call that kind of thing masturbating with your own intellect. In passages like this, Sheppard risks loosing the reader, and he is definitely testing the reader who was brave enough to crack open this almost 900 page-long volume.

As for HA!‘s main enquiry—why did Hubert Aquin kill himself?—the answer is of course very complicated. Sheppard manages a couple of significant revelations near the end of the book (so, if you get tired in the middle, read on!) that may or may not give us some clues. But in the end, of course, it doesn’t really matter. Whether it be because he had failed to connect with his first children, because he thought himself unable to write another book, or because he couldn’t find a job to sustain his family, what’s important is Aquin’s shocking act, its repercussions—both public and personal—and the important body of literary work that he left behind. Sheppard would have us see that the last of Aquin’s works was his suicide.

Understanding Quebec and Hubert Aquin: Prochain Épisode

So-called “national literature” is a complicated thing, which is perhaps why I have a complicated relationship with the literature of my own nation, Québec. 

The complications have in part been caused by the fact that I know very little about French Canadian literature. Almost all of my literary studies have been in English and, since I have always read more in English than in French (for reasons I can’t explain), I am ashamed to say that my knowledge of Québec’s literature is very limited. I am happy to know the works of some authors relatively well: Jean Barbe, Dany Laferrière, and Jacques Poulin, to name a few. But of others, I have unfortunately read not a word: Marie-Claire Blais, Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, Anne Hébert, Gabrielle Roy… These authors are not well-known outside Québec (although a little bit in France, perhaps), but they are canonical in my home-province. I feel I need to know their works if I want to gain a better understanding of the culture which I have inherited. 

In an effort to remedy this situation, last summer I picked up Hubert Aquin’s Prochain épisode (available in English in a translation by Sheila Fischman titled Next Episode). Aquin was a writer, novelist, critic, and a fierce nationalist during Québec’s most troubled time. He wrote four novels in the 1960s and 1970s, all dealing with themes of independence, violence, identity, and suicide in a remarkably maximalist and lyrical style which was unlike anything that had been produced in French Canada at the time. He committed suicide in 1977 and was widely recognized as the pre-eminent writer of French Canada at the time of his death, although his books never sold very well and were never much read outside of universities.

In Prochain épisode I was surprised and pleased to discover everything that I find bold and interesting about literature. This is a novel that takes risks. I had found in the past that, while Québec has produced its masterpieces, there is a form of insularity to the province’s literature. Writers seem to work in a kind of vacuum. Yet in Aquin’s thickly layered narrative, built like a hall of mirrors that repeats the various images over and over, I found the modernist self-awareness and cultural accumulativeness that I thought was only possible in the kind of books that were widely recognized as brilliant, like Ulysses. Here (at times helpfully pointed out by my edition’s annotations) were references to dozens of writers like, indeed, Joyce, and Nabokov (and Pale Fire at that, not just Lolita), as well as painters and musicians and think from all over the world. 

I was thrilled and soon enthralled, for Aquin is a careful stylist. From the first, meandering sentence to the last paragraph, in which Aquin the revolutionary merges with Aquin the writer and draws the novel to its fully-admitted end, the novel dazzles with perfectly-formed lines. The cadence and energy of the prose is such that it often alone manages to drive the novel along, since this is a story about stasis and repetition in which not many things really happen. It is a novel in which the speaker appears to be looking out with great attention on the world, but is rather looking into himself with an all-consumming fever.

Prochain épisode is in some ways Aquin’s manifesto, his fictionalized confession. How the novel came to be is almost legendary. In 1964 Aquin announced publicly that he was going underground to fight as a revolutionary terrorist for Québec’s independence. A few month’s late he was arrested in a stolen car and in possession of an illegal firearm. Aquin was imprisoned for a short time and then treated in a psychiatric hospital. There, he began to write the Prochain épisode, which is narrated by an imprisoned revolutionary; the novel is about himself and yet not about himself. 

As you can see, it’s impossible to read Aquin’s work without becoming fascinated by the larger-than-life character who stands like a shadow behind the book. That’s why my next blog post will be about an English-Canadian artist who tried to make Aquin’s oeuvre known outside of Québec and reveal his suicide for what it was: a work of art. To be continued…

REVIEW: Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer

I received ZZ Packer’s story collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere as a gift in January, and therefore felt pretty much obliged to read it. Which is fine, because I was looking forward to find out what the hype about Ms. Packer was all about. I remembered her as one of the famed New Yorker’s 20 under 40 (among other up and coming literary superstars like Gary Shteyngart, Karen Russell, and Jonathan Safran Foer). What I hadn’t realized was how much of Packer’s reputation preceded her: she received such awards as the Best American Short Stories and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has been the writer in residence in a number of prestigious creative programs in the US. And all of this, I discovered, for this single, slim book of stories.

Well, perhaps not surprisingly, I was a little underwhelmed. Certainly Packer knows how to write: her voice is strong (although perhaps, at times, not as sonorous as would befit her stories), her characters deep, her situations interesting. Her main theme, the reality of African American girls and women in the US, is vastly rich. There is nothing, therefore, profoundly wrong with anything she is doing. And yet there is something missing.

Mostly, I think what I was disappointed by is how she lets her stories unravel for too long. The wonderful thing about short fiction is how compact it is, how, even in longer stories, the prose never loses focus of the emotional core that is being explored, always looping back on themes or images that help it move along productively. Except in a few cases, this is not so in Packer’s book, where the stories tend to ramble on, unfurling in a repetitive fashion as they are driven forward not  by theme or image of feeling but by stagnant plots.

As a case in point, the story “Speaking in Tongues” goes on for fifty pages; it’s practically a novella. The story follows the adventures of Tia, teenage girl who runs away from her aunt to find her long-lost mother in Atlanta. It’s a picaresque journey that puts her in contact with different shady characters: a man who buys her food at McDonald’s, a pimp who takes her to his house, and a prostitute called Marie. Where the story could be lively, interesting, and hook the reader into rooting for Tia and fearing for her life and innocence at every turn, instead I found myself a little bored as the story seemed to stall and repeat itself. The interjection at the end of the story, meant to loop the story back to its beginning, feels more like a device from the author to assure her that all of this material had its purpose. 

The best story in this collection is definitely the one that gives the book its title, which is about a young black girl who ends up studying at Yale. Here, we have Packer finally letting loose the strength of a truly compelling voice, and utilizing her skills for both humour and tragedy. The narrator’s bitterness and anger is as compelling as it is sad, and her complex relationship with Heidi, her Canadian friend and sometimes lover, allows the story to reach true depth. Packer’s exploration of class, education, race, and solitude reaches an illuminated pinnace. Among the eight stories in the book, this is the only one I can honestly see myself revisiting multiple times in the future. 

Reading Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, I was reminded at times of Junot Diàz—not so much in Packer’s style but in her thematic exploration. And its perhaps here that I made a mistake, because of course Diàz’s voice is so enthralling, and his mastery of the short story as a form is so bold, that it’s very easy to compare anyone to him and see their shortcomings. Packer, like all writers, must be approached on her own terms; but even then, I find that she didn’t quite live up to all the hype. Many of her stories tend to start with a powerful bang, and then unroll in a tattered way—one that does not like energy, but somehow uses that energy to move in circles that never really seem to get the subject into any clearer focus.

So, all in all, I found that, while Packer demonstrates a lot of potential in her one book, it didn’t quite add up to this image of a fresh, brilliant new writer bursting onto the literary scene. I think she still has something to prove (and maybe she will with her upcoming novel about Buffalo soldiers, several years in the making).

Finally, I wanted to end on a completely different note concerning this book. The image I put at the top is the cover of the original hardcover edition of Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, and it is one of the most unfortunate covers I have ever seen on a book published by a mainstream publishing house. I mean, seriously? It looks like it was made on “Paint” by a 12-year-old.

P.S. I know I’ve been blogging about a lot of short story collections recently, but this is the last one for a while, I promise.

Curated Books

I recently visited an exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts with someone who taught me something interesting about museums. Whenever that person reaches the end of an exhibit (aka the gift shop), she goes back and walks through the rooms quickly to take a last look at the works she enjoyed the most, in an attempt to memorize the names of the artists and paintings she preferred. The lesson is this: any collection of works of art, although unified thematically or otherwise, is made up of individual works which have been selected and organized by someone, and are presented to you in a certain way. Sometimes it’s a good idea, once a given order of things has been experienced and digested, to revisit the individual works of art that spoke to us most powerfully, and try to look at them on their own—to find out what their intrinsic qualities are. 

And so it is with a number of books I have recently read, which were different kinds of collections. I will write about some of these in later posts, but for now I want to talk about an odd book published last fall by The Paris Review called Object Lessons, which is a collection of twenty stories from the magazine’s history. This collection is not a “best of”; instead, it is a specially curated group of twenty stories, selected by twenty writers. So these are not the most well-known stories published by the magazine—in fact,some of them were obscure even to the book’s editors—but rather a set of pieces that were handpicked by different artists, who chose them for very different reasons, and who offer a short introduction with their chosen story. Sometimes, that introduction breaks the story apart and explains how it works. Sometimes, it just tells you that the story deserves to be read. 

If I were to revisit this collection, as the lady I mentioned above revisits art exhibits, I would stop again before Craig Nova’s “Another Drunk Gambler” for the beautiful texture of the prose, James Salter’s “Bangkok” for its great lesson in dialogue, and Mary-Beth Hughes’ “Pelican Song” for the off-kilter humour in the voice, which I can never quite pull off myself. I would take another glance at “Likely Lake,” by Mary Robison, but perhaps find it not quite as satisfying upon closer inspection. Raymond Carver’s “Why Don’t You Dance” and Denis Johnson’s “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” would only remind me to explore the works of these authors in more depth, although now may not be the time. I would wallow again with pleasure in Ethan Canin’s long, very moving “The Palace Thief,” which inspired a movie (The Emperor’s Club) which I saw and loved long ago, having never realized that it was based on a short story of such impeccable quality, and in which the style is melded so perfectly to the content. I would salute Borges’ “Funes, the Memorious” as an old friend, with a complacent smile of recognition entirely for show, and whisper “until next time.” And then, finally, I would pause again and reflect upon Dallas Wiebe’s strange “Night Flight to Stockholm,” experiencing with renewed surprise and sadistic delight at this (literal) dismemberment of writerly ambition.

So, then, not a bad count, when you think about it. 9 out of 10 stories delighted me. (By the way, this is not an easy exercise as I left the book back in Montreal and must work from memory and what little material there is on the book’s Amazon preview in order to properly remember the stories.)

And it’s a good thing that I went back to revisit those that did delight me because, when I initially emerged from the book, those weren’t necessarily the ones I was thinking about. Instead, the collection, by its curated nature, had provided me with an historical sense, an idea of the bigger picture. As I read through the book, I took notice of the date when each story was originally published in the magazine (they are provided at the end of each storty) and I noticed that most of the weirder stories, the ones I couldn’t quite pin down, couldn’t quite figure out what they were going on about—or what, even, they were trying to do—were published in the late 60s and through the 70s.  

I’m talking about “Dimmer” by Joy Williams, “Emmy Moor’s Journal” by Jane Bowles, “Except for the Sickness I’m Quite Healthy Now. You Can Believe That.” by Thomas Glynn, and “Several Garlic Tales” by Donald Barthelme. These stories are so bizarre that they seem to come out of a twilight era in American letters. What it is, of course, is postmodernism, which arose in the 60s and carried over more strongly in the 70s, when authors like Thomas Pynchon and Leonard Cohen and Joan Didion came bursting onto the literary scene, bending language and breaking apart tradition, while authors like John Steinbeck, T.S. Eliot and William Faulkner were literally dying off. The end of an era and the dawn of something faster, wilder, never before seen. 

The stories from this period found in Object Lessons offer good examples of the kind of fragmented, relentlessly self-aware, delusionally experimental stuff that could be published in literary magazines during that time. But this sense of historicity can be overwhelming, and it can dangerously overshadow the distinct qualities of the individual pieces of writing. Carver’s “Why Don’t You Dance” was originally published in the 70s. So was Wiebe’s “Night Flight to Stockholm.” And these two stories delighted me more than they confused me, although I’m sure they belong to some kind of artistic movement (although maybe Carver is his own movement). So I’m happy I encountered them here, and all the other stories in this collection, and I’m happy that I was able to put them in some kind of context. But I’m also pleased that I followed the example of the lady I know, and that I was able to look at all of these stories on their own terms—weird or not. 

A lesson well-learned.  

Helvetica, the Documentary

I wouldn’t go as far as calling myself a typography aficionado because I know far too little about the subject, but a general interest in type design (expressed in my constant search for the perfect typeface for different writing styles, even if I always end up using Baskerville, Garamond, and Times New Roman) and even more general interest in design (see pretty much everything I’ve posted related to book covers) have driven my desire to watch a documentary film by Gary Hustwit about the world’s most widely used typeface for a long time. 

That was a pretty long sentence just to tell you that I watched Helvetica. 

Here’s a short one to tell you that I liked it.

The film is a very effective and well-wrought object in itself, just like the typeface whose history and wide use it illustrates. The images are crisp, wide, and suggestive. There is a certain element of contemplation that perhaps gets a little overused—the viewer is invited to look at a lot of type and play the “spot Helvetica” game—the overall effect is actually rather uplifting and fun. And it does urge us to look at the world more carefully to notice what we usually wouldn’t. 

In a way, I was afraid that the film would be too much about typefaces. As much as I love the idea of typefaces and as much as I like looking at them (if you’ve never taken a look at Taschen’s beautiful book Letter Fountain, I strongly urge you to do so), watching a designer play around with ascenders, descenders, and serifs for a whole 90 minutes is beyond my intellectual capacities. But, actually, Helvetica uses its star typeface as a kind of thematic link in order to explore the history of design in the 20th century. Where the film truly shines is in letting designers from different generations, and therefore different movements, speak up about their aesthetic beliefs. The history of any art form, of course, can be summarized in a series of calls and responses; the film does a really great job of illustrating that chain of influence in design with several beautiful, intriguing, exciting examples to showcase the different periods.

If you watch Helvetica and liked it, I also recommend that you take a look at Hustwit’s other two films about design (ostensibly, these three films make up a kind of trilogy), Objectified and Urbanized.

By all means, if there are any other books or films about design or typography that I should know about, please post them below! 

Thoughts on Alice Munro’s Latest

I spent most of December (and even a few days in January) taking my sweet time through Alice Munro’s latest collection of short stories, Dear Life. It’s a very rich book and, as always with short story collections of this quality, I look forward to revising its stories in the future. Short fiction, like poetry, demands rereading. In the meantime, I can still offer a few thoughts about what may very well turn out to be Munro’s last collection. 

In fact, I was already familiar with two of the stories in Dear Life before I read the book. I try to get a copy of the New Yorker to read when I’m traveling, and I was lucky enough to fall upon Munro’s “Corrie” when I took the train in England in the fall of 2010 and then “Amundsen” when I first flew over to Vancouver last August. While both these stories are very different in tone, they are representative of Dear Life because of their focus on relationships and solitude. Charles May has offered a very thorough analysis of “Amundsen” on his blog, in which he suggests that the story illustrates the cultural and societal divides between the world of men and the world of women. “Corrie,” on the other hand, is the sparsely told story of a woman who’s life is made hollow by the man she loves. 

Old age is a crushing presence in many of these stories. “Pride” explores companionship in old age and the things a person must leave as the surrounding world changes. “In Sight of the Lake” is a dizzying, closely narrated story about memory and confusion. While these two stories should resonate very strongly with the author’s own reality, they are in fact the least successful in the book because of their structure; their endings seem a little forced and artificial, which is unusual for Munro. But then, “Dolly,” about an ageing couple who get into an odd argument when they come in contact with the poet husband’s old lover, is a perfectly balanced piece of fiction, at once tragic and funny.

As usual, Munro excels at characters. A few light details or lines of dialogue are all we require from her as readers to recognize exactly what kind of people she is writing about. For instance, in “Train,” the collection’s longest story, Munro manages to stitch together several periods in a man’s life with a considerable number of coincidences by the sheer force of the fascinating, quirky, very real character she is exploring, while withholding the basic information that any other writer would give away immediately. Honestly, I wish I knew how she does it. 

All in all, Dear Life didn’t quite move me as much as Munro’s 2009 collection Too Much Happiness. The stories here seem more varied in voice and content, which could be a good thing, except it makes the whole seem disparate—like a bunch of material was pulled together to make a final book. Like music albums, Munro’s other books tend to form coherent clusters of stories, even if these stories aren’t necessarily linked. Charles May has suggested that the first story in Dear Life, “To Reach Japan,” (which by the way is a brilliant piece of fiction as a stand-alone), might be an earlier story that Munro had never published. Another of the best stories in this collection, “Gravel,” with its revisiting of a childhood death through the lens of memory, seems to have been pulled right out of Too Much Happiness, in which death and violence feature prominently.

One of the most interesting features of Dear Life is that the four last stories are grouped together under the header “Finale.” Munro tells us that these stories, only one of which had been published before, in the New Yorker, are autobiographical in feeling more than in fact. Independently, these pieces are snapshots, moments in Munro’s childhood, half understood at the time and mostly focused around her mother. Read together, however, the pieces create an intriguing yet quiet effect; they circle the same facts and feelings, the same reality, in order to produce what is essentially the inception of everything Alice Munro has ever written. If Dear Life is indeed Munro’s last book, then we as readers couldn’t have asked for a more fitting ending.