REVIEW: The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick deWitt

Patrick deWitt’s noir Western The Sisters Brothers has been the talk of the literary town for the past year. I first heard about it myself just over a year ago, in an interview with Allison Saltzman, the art director at Ecco (an imprint of HarperCollins), over at the Caustic Cover Critic. As these things often go, the first thing that caught my attention was therefore the cover, because the book wasn’t even out yet. In fact, in the interview, Saltzman mentions that the book’s stunning cover, designed by Dan Stiles, did just that: it gave the novel attention that the publishers hadn’t expected. If the cover did help set The Sisters Brothers on its way to glory—shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and The Morning News Tournament of Books—then we should be thankful that it did, because this one’s a real treat.

The novel follows the ups and downs—both in their relationship and their encounters with the wild world—of the Sisters Brothers, a duo of hired guns, who are on a job to find and kill an elusive man called Hermann Kermit Warm. The stage is the American Western frontier: Oregon and California. The time is 1951: right in the middle of the Gold Rush, while the novel basks in the kind of explosive madness which it resulted in. The city of San Francisco, for example, grew in a few short years from a small settlement into a bustling city. In The Sisters Brothers, it’s a shady place, where men can get whatever they want—except the influx of money from the gold rush has made prices soar to four times what they are anywhere else. deWitt writes that, in the port, men abandoned the ships in order to go work the rivers: “The harbor, at first sight, I did not understand it. There were so many ships at anchor that their masts looked to be tangled impossibly; hundreds of them packed together so densely as to give the appearance of a vast, limbless forest rolling on the tides.”

What makes The Sisters Brothers a fantastic read is, first and foremost, deWitt’s careful crafting of narrative voice. The narrator in question is Eli, one of the two brothers, who speaks to the reader lucidly, clearly, and with a touch of deliciously dark humor. I was reminded of Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, where I found another picaresque story told in a remarkably distinctive tone. deWitt overcomes the particular difficulty of achieving a mid-19th century american feel to his narrator by reducing his use of contractions to a minimum, which gives the text just the right pitch of antiquatedness. And the other thing you’ll find in The Sisters Brothers is a good old story, which will make you want to keep reading just for the sake of knowing what happens next. I mean actual story here, not plot, because in fact the deWitt’s plot stretches a little too much, at times, to get a proper hold of every single element. Yet the use of a weaker plot devices—such as a diary left-behind in a hotel room for the protagonists to read, and even a supernatural gold-prospecting twist that most reviewers seem to overlook—is pardonable because this is no whodunit; it’s a western, a quest from point A to point B. It’s about who shoots who. Escapism and action at its purest form, then, which is nice to have once in a while in a book that’s also well-written (I once read someone call David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet “well-written pulp”— the same thing operates here, and I’m still note sure it’s a bad thing).

But don’t get me wrong, it isn’t all guns and plot holes with a few flourishes of language. The Sisters Brothers is also fascinating, thematically, for its exploration of doubles, beginning with the two brothers of the title. Eli (the narrator) is podgy, hesitant, prone to bursts of anger, and takes pity on whomever they encounter. His brother Charlie is slim, calculating, ruthless, and likes to drink himself into a stupor. But they are brothers, and there is therefore a similar core within them that they cannot ignore; Eli says: “Our blood is the same, we just use it differently.” The entire novel plays out a struggle of power between them: Charlie is the dominant brother, the boss, but he needs Eli, because together they form an impressive team. Even Eli’s persona is split into two: the inevitable result of being a natural-born killer who also feels remorse. Thus, as the novel progresses, Eli doubt his life as a criminal increasingly, and learns to deal with this second self, the one that expands out of his center when there is violence, turns him into an animal. In the end, the brothers are able to establish a new order between them as the novel draws to its conclusion. They shed the hard life of the gunman (and lose a limb, newfound allies, and a boss in the process) and make themselves anew. It’s a question of life and death. 

A Type of Book

The Periodic Table of Typefaces, designed by Cam Wilde.

Have you ever paused, while working on your word processor, before the choice of fonts available to compose your text in? It happens to me all the time. Each typeface, I feel, communicates a different vibe. It must be selected carefully, because it has to concord with the content of the text, in order to underline its meaning. You’re writing something anonymous, efficient, short, modern, and probably meant to read on screen: pick Helvetica. Something classic, ornate, and refined, which will be printed on faux-yellowed paper:  Monotype Corsiva. Something long, literary, thrilling, and probably fictitious: Baskerville. Something innocent, fun, short, and a little childish: Comic Sans. Something plain, factual, long, and serious: Times New Roman. It’s important to choose the right typeface in order to convey the right message. You don’t want to print out your wedding invitations in Papyrus (which, by the way, is one of the fonts I hate the most, and still crops up in various places, despite its ugliness—it was even used for the title and subtitles of the film Avatar).

There are other questions that come to mind. Who designed these fonts? How do you design a font? How old are they? Which is the most common? Which fonts read better? Which font did Gutenberg use? In search of answers to questions like these, I recently developed an interest in typefaces: their design, their history, their uses. Luckily, there are lots of places to find answers. The first is a fine little book, published in 2010: Just my Type: A Book About Fonts, by Simon Garfield. This book is the perfect introduction to the world of typography. Its chapters go through the history and basics of type design, and are separated by smaller chapters on specific types, such as Albertus (used on the classic Faber and Faber covers) and Bodoni, an elegant font which was used on the cover of Vanity Fair for their special feature on Tiger Woods. The book evades the more serious technicalities of typography, but offers a fun overview of the subject. It is especially entertaining when dealing with the dark side of type design, such as the ongoing war between Helvetica, usually judged to be one of the most perfect typefaces ever created, and its clone, Arial (the rivalry is hilariously illustrated in this YouTube video). Another quirky bit of typographical trivia: a pangram is a phrase containing all the letters of the alphabet, and is therefore ideal to show all the letters of a given font; the most popular pangram currently in use by type designers is the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog (although, of course, it isn’t a perfect pangram because it repeats letters). 

Where Just My Type looses a few points (pun intended) is in its failure to properly celebrate the typefaces; instead, it dwells on everything that has to do with them. It’s a little too loud. Luckily, there are other books that offer a softer take on the subject. G. gave me one of them for my birthday: Letter Fountain. It’s a hefty volume, published by Taschen—a great publishing house for everything artistic—that is entirely devoted to the design of typefaces. It begins with an overview of the history of writing, printing, and the development of typography, then it organizes typefaces into their different families, and finally gives a large number of individual typefaces their own pages, complete with a brief history and description, an example of each letter and symbol, as well as an overview of its different variants (bold, italics, etc.) and sizes. Letter Fountain is a celebration of design and aesthetic pleasure: it’s a beautiful book that showcases the beauty of typefaces by letting them speak for themselves (which makes sense, considering that’s what they’re designed to do). It also includes cool features, like three ribbon bookmarks, a ruler and conversion chart for font-sizes, and an appendix that includes a glossary, four different indexes, and a timeline of a timeline of type founders. It’s impressive, and a little excessive. 

Naturally, typography, is inseparable from books. Without efficient, beautiful, and readable letters, there would be no books. I’ve always loved when there’s a little note on the type at the back of a book, detailing what font it’s set in, why, and what the history of the typeface is. For example, the volumes in the Everyman’s Library are set in Caslon, which, the triangular note on the last page tells us, “put a stop to the importation of Dutch types” when it was created in England in the 18th century, “and so changed the history of English typecutting.” Type design is serious stuff. More specifically, typefaces are also inseparable from cover design. A lot of book covers are made several times better or worse because of the font they use to spell out the title of the book and the author’s name. Sometimes, letters are the only thing used on a book cover. I’m thinking of the works of JD Salinger, who demanded that the covers of his books be entirely bare except for his name and the title of the book. That means Penguin had to get creative in their use of fonts when they republished Salinger’s work a few years ago for the UK market. They commissioned a type designer, Seb Lester, to do the job. The result is stunning:

So what’s the next step for the new typography fanatic in me? There are other books to get, even more hefty and complete than Letter Fountain, if you can believe it. For example, the ultimate reference in typeface remains the FontBook, aka “the big yellow book,” which calls itself “the most complete digital type reference in the world.” There’s also Giambattista Bodoni’s beautiful Manual of Typography, an 1818 Italian masterwork on typography, reprinted by Taschen in a luxurious two-volume set (pictures bellow). But before I spend that much money to look at pretty letters, I’ll begin by watching Helvetica, a 2007 film about the proliferation of one of the world’s most common typefaces. It’s probably going to change the way I see the world; that’s how important type is. 

PROFILE: Ian McEwan

Photo credits: Randolph Quan.

If you’d asked me, a few years ago, who my favourite living writer was, I would’ve answered without hesitation: Ian McEwan. Circa 2007, McEwan was at the summit of his art and eminence as a novelist: Atonement, probably his best book, had just been turned into a brilliant movie (directed by Joe Wright, starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy), Saturday, his novel about post-9/11 Britain, had been published in 2003 and  confirmed his skill in dealing with contemporary state-of-the-nation feelings, and he had just published a beautiful novella, On Chesil Beach, which was shortlisted for the Booker. Moreover, McEwan had managed to bridge the tricky gap between literary and commercial fiction; his books were on university reading lists and bestseller lists alike.

I read McEwan for the first time that year after seeing the film version of Atonement around Christmas. The truth is, I was probably seeking for a film adaptation of book to fall in love with; the previous Spring I had read and thoroughly enjoyed Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, only to be severely disappointed by the film version, which I’d had so many hopes for. Then came Atonement: beautifully directed, it had important things to say about art, contained big themes like love and war, and its ending was heart wrenching without being melodramatic. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, recommended it to everyone around me, and read the book over Christmas. The novel provided me with a literary mirror for the film. I found it just as great; it had everything I looked for in a book: compelling story, complex characters, beautiful writing. Most importantly, it felt literary (I’d been careful to buy the original paperback with the indignantly bored little girl on the cover, not the movie tie-in edition), which was essential to me at a time when I as trying to define myself as a reader of real literature, but still liked my books to be compelling. I was hooked on McEwan.

When school finished that Spring I read through Saturday, a strange novel that follows its neuro-surgeon protagonist, Dr. Perone, through an ordinary weekend day that turns out to be extremely unordinary. Saturday is a tour-de-force in its ability to manipulate the reader: at the beginning, I thought the story advanced very slowly, with lots of flashbacks and filler material and very little going on, but halfway through the novel I realized how attached I’d become to Perone and his family. By the end, when this family is threatened, the novel turns into a page turner because the McEwan has successfully built an emotional attachment between the reader and his characters. Then, in the fall, I read On Chesil Beach in a couple of days, and the same trick operated: very little actually happens for pages, except you get so close to the characters that by the time the story reaches its climax—a conversation on the beach between two newly-weds who misunderstand each other on the deepest level—I was sitting on the edge of my chair, breathless, whispering words of encouragement and disappointment, depending on what was being said. Again, I was thrilled with the beauty and efficiency of the language, and at how much complexity and characterization McEwan could concentrate in so few pages.

McEwan is a realist. He said so himself at a recent lecture he gave at Harvard (unfortunately, I couldn’t attend—my invitation got lost in the mail), entitled “The Lever: Where Novelists Stand to Move the World.” He’s very careful in his descriptions of places and things and events in order to recreate the right setting for his novels, be it modern-day London or Dunkirk in 1940. Of course, the precepts of realism requires that you describe the real world as faithfully as you can, down to the right constellation, the right brand of cigarette. It’s true that McEwan does this; some passages in his work are almost frustrating in their attention to detail, their desire to describe everything in detail. But where he is truly remarkable is in his ability to stretch reality to its limits, by placing his characters at the edge of normality, in situations that throw them completely off-balance. Sometimes, as in Atonement, where a little girl’s lie threatens to destroy the lives of two lovers, the results are stunning. Other times, as with the two loony lawbreakers in Saturday, coincidences seem a little bit exaggerated and the plot, like dough stretched too tightly between two hands, becomes torn. Yet as Alice Munro once said of another author, the writer always wins in the end. This is especially true of McEwan: even when he carefully walks you through a plot that seems implausible, he usually catches you with the elegance, restraint, and creativity of his writing. Usually. 

There are still those who argue in favor of early McEwan (see the hilarious book trailer for Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story), but I have a feeling that, in some time, when McEwan will have passed away (although I wish him long life!) and critics look back on his work, the three novels of his I first discovered—Atonement, Saturday, On Chesil Beach—will be considered his best. Here’s a writer at the top of his form, perfectly in control of his art, but still discovering things about writing, experimenting with voice and form and plot. Previously, McEwan had written a lot of books—just under a dozen, by my count—including two collections of short stories. Among these were Enduring Love, which still ranks among some of his best work (I haven’t read it yet so I can’t say), The Innocent (a kind of emotional spy-novel, set in Berlin during the Cold War), and his booker-winning Amsterdam, which frankly is not great by any standard (the conclusion seems to be that 1998 was a very bad year for fiction in English). McEwan’s early work earned him the nickname “macabre,” because of his unrestrained descriptions of gore. In The Innocent, for example, the main character needs to get rid of the body of someone he’s accidentally killed; a very long description of how to cut up a corpse into pieces and carry these pieces out of an ensues (a scene, as it turns out, that he now regrets). McEwan became relatively well-known in the 90s, but this was nothing like the stellar reputation he would gain in the early 2000s with the three books I mentioned above.

Then he published a new novel, Solar, in 2010, which I looked forward to and took a break from school readings to enjoy. Except I was disappointed. McEwan knew what he was doing in this novel—which is a kind of satire about climate change, featuring a ruthless, obese, nobel-prize winning physicist—but he knew it too well. The writing is too polished and self-conscious, the plot seems stretched, and the humor falls flat. The novel is so neat it feels dead. McEwan will be publishing a new novel this summer, Sweeth Tooth, a return to the spy genre he’d flirted with in The Innocent. An excerpt, entitled “Hand on the Shoulder,” about a young woman’s recruitment into MI5 by professor and lover in Cambridge in the 1970s, was published this week in The New Yorker. It provides usual McEwan fare: light irony, play with memory, importance of authenticity, interesting descriptions of food and sex… But again, I felt a little short-changed when I read. In an effort to make everything seem logical, plausible, McEwan describes emotions in too much detail; plot points are sold paragraphs in advance, so all you’re left to wallow in as a reader are feelings. And feelings only go so far. Am I evolving as a reader? or is McEwan really regressing as a writer? If the answer to the latter question is yes, then McEwan’s writer’s career fits into what Rick Gekoski has recently described as a usual curve of ascent into maturity and descent until death. Most author’s, Gekoski argues, rarely publish their best work last. But there are exceptions—Philip Roth, Henry James—and perhaps McEwan will count among them. Only time will tell. 

Double the Beauty: Experimental Canadian Modernism

Experimental writer or music star? Leonard Cohen in the 1960s.

It’s hard to say what kind of reputation Canadian literature has abroad, although I’m fairly certain the word “beige” must come up quite a bit. While it’s true that Canadian literature in English is very young (it’s hard to speak of great literary production in Canada, except for a few isolated cases, before 1940), I don’t think it’s any more boring than any other national literature. In fact, Canada has produced its fair share of first rate experimental writers, and a good deal of (post)modern stuff—and I’m not talking about Generation X. Literature that is experimental and modernist exists in Canada. You just have to look for it. After all, modernism demands a little bit of obscurity, a little bit of difficulty, in order to enhance whatever it has to offer. As Leonard Cohen would say: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

In Christian Bök’s remarkable poetry collection Eunoia, for example, every chapter uses only one vowel to tell a story, with minimal word repetition. The effect is hypnotic, magical: “Enfettered, these few sentences repress free speech. The text deletes selected letters…” (You can read chapter e (for René Crevel) in interactive format online.) If this isn’t experimental stuff, I don’t know what is. And it’s only a recent example. Even around 1960, when literature was edged toward the cusp between modernism and what critics now (ambiguously) call post-modernism, some budding Canadian writers burst onto the literature scene with exciting and original works, the likes of which had never been before—here or elsewhere. And they were writing about something they knew: Canada.

I want to talk about two of these books. The first is Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook, originally published in 1959. The back-cover of the hideous New Canadian Library edition tells us that this short novel is about “a small, tightly knit community in the B.C. Interior.” Well yes, and no. Watson’s book, which is sometimes called a prose poem, was created through a process of distillation. Watson intended to write about the violence and insensibility in British Columbia’s Cariboo country, where she had worked as a teacher. In writing her book, however, she gradually stripped away any definite sense of place, as much physical and emotional description as she could, and most of the characters’ histories. What you’re left with is a story in concentrated form, told in a sparse, elliptical language that makes you dizzy with potential meanings. By getting rid of the specifics, Watson makes her tale universal.

Despite its condensed style, the novel is heavy with significance. As soon as I finished it, feeling that I had missed a great deal, I flipped the book back to the first page and began reading it again. Someone once told me that you haven’t really read anything unless you’ve read it twice. This is particularly true of The Double Hook—never before had I felt that it was necessary to read a book a second time in order to understand it (I mean understand in the most basic sense). It’s only that time around that, having gotten past the search for “what happens next,” I started noticing things.

While there is certainly an aspect of difficulty to The Double Hook, as part of its modernist agenda, it also has a great deal to give, provided the reader is ready to work a little. For instance, Watson creates a subtle pattern of recurring imagery, borrowed from Ancient Greek and aboriginal mythologies, which gives her novel a rich, deeply meaningful texture. While the characters in the novel are thrown into situations that shake the community to its foundations, an old woman, supposedly dead, continues to stalk the creek for fish. Meanwhile, a trickster spirit, Coyote, stares and howls at them from the hills. This is the stuff of dreams. But The Double Hook’s highly focused language—so focused it nearly always misses the larger picture—renders its characters infinitely complex and fascinating. They feel real because the writing tells you very little but shows a great deal.

In the universe of The Double Hook, the sky is “tight as a rawhide” and the hills have “flat ribs.” Characters can hear “the sound of the cow’s breath in the dry grass,” and when they throw water into the dust they watch it “roll in balls on the ground.” You can feel the sweat, the craft in every sentence. Watson toiled for years on her novel and struggled to find a publisher for it. She eventually revised the book and managed to get it published with the help of Frederick M. Salter, a professor at the University of Alberta. (If you’re interested, you can see various documents relating to the novel’s original publication on the Historical Perspectives on Canadian Publishing website.) We should be grateful that Jack McClelland eventually recognized The Double Hook’s incredible power and was ready to give it a chance. The novel’s publication is now recognized as a watershed in Canadian literature.

My second example is another (often overlooked) masterpiece written by Leonard Cohen in the 1960s. Cohen, of course, is now a world-famous singer-songwriter, who has recently demonstrated that he’s still got it (and that he’s got less voice than ever) in his most recent album, Old Ideas. Cohen, who is also (and, perhaps, first and foremost) a poet, underwent a brief stint as a novelist in the sixties, during which he wrote The Favourite Game (1963), his Künstlerroman, or novel of artistic coming-of-age, and Beautiful Losers (1966), a sex-infused acid trip of incredible literary force.

While Beautiful Losers is very much a product of its time, it was also groundbreaking in many ways. Both in form (a linguistic tidal wave of broken chronologies, gripping prose rhythm, repetitions, and lists) and content (an accumulative exploration sexual behavior and religious defamation), almost fifty years on it’s still not the kind of book you come across very often. As much as Watson’s novel is condensed, controlled, and refined, Cohen’s book is encyclopedic, loud, and dirty.

The novel explores the twisted love triangle between an unnamed narrator (critics often refer to him as “I”), his childhood friend and sometime lover F., and his deceased wife Edith (who is also F.’s lover). Cohen also draws parallels with the story of Catherine Tekakwitha, the first Native American martyr (who will be canonized in 2012). Beautiful Losers is about construal, about imposing your own visions and desires onto someone or something other than yourself. It’s a powerful work—imaginative, poignant, and visually shocking—that grabs you by the gut and doesn’t let go until you’ve turned the last page. It’s also the kind of book you feel awkward about reading in public transportation (as I did on many occasions) because it’s riddled with explicit, graphic (and often unusual) sex scenes.

Like The Double Hook, it demands rereading—not so much to shed light on the subtext, but in order to properly sift through all the things that Cohen throws at you: sex, the history of religious colonialism, destroyed systems, sex, transformed bodies, pages without punctuation, manifestation of French-Canadian nationalism, a Danish Vibrator (D.V.) that comes alive and escapes into the ocean… You can’t help but search for meaning in all of this.

Hello, meaning? Are you there? Sometimes you think you’ve got it, and then there’s a page copied from a Greek-English travel dictionary and you’ve lost it again. But, like all great works of literature, you don’t read Beautiful Losers to catch its meaning (that would be putting it into a box, reducing it, ignoring the bits you just don’t get). You read it for the experience. Maybe that’s what the D.V. was trying to tell us.

It’s a great novel. These are both truly great novels. Disturbing and great. And Canadian.

My Year in Reading

I wasn't entirely sure what image to use at the top of his blog post to represent a year of reading and blogging. Then I found this beautiful flip book calendar, featuring a tree transformed by the seasons.

Most other book bloggers or book-related websites do some kind of feature on their best reads of the year in December or January, which is the traditional period to neatly tuck away what’s been achieved in order to move on to the year ahead. I love reading this type of list myself, but I find their number is growing exponentially and it’s easy to lose yourself in a deluge of interesting titles. I toyed with the idea of doing it myself over the holidays, but instead I decided to release a list of my years reading now, in the Spring, because it’s during the Spring, last year, that I began Book’s End with a post about book titles. That’s right, Book’s End is one year old.

And what a year it’s been! To be fair, I spent most of it reading for school—although there were pleasant discoveries in that domain as well. For example, I’ve been spending a lot of my time pouring over the short stories of three Irish writers for my undergraduate thesis: Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O’Connor, and Sean O’Faolain. I’m lucky to have chosen writers of such undeniable talent because I can honestly say that not once did I NOT feel like picking up one of their collections to read or reread a certain story. These writers are three masters of the short story form, and their works reveal many truths about human nature. I also very much enjoyed Bowen’s The House in Paris, which I studied in a class on the Uncanny last year. It’s a wonderful between-the-wars novel about displacement and inheritance. 

Thanks cdrummbks on Flickr for the image.

Other school-related discoveries include Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian (a stunning, extremely well-wrought reinterpretation of a historical figure), Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley (a Canadian masterpiece I had never heard of before), Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook, Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers (you’ll hear more about these last two modernist novels very soon), Jean-Paul Sartre Les Mots (I thought this book would be dreadful but it turned out to be a bibliomemoir, a genre I’m very fond of), and Toni Morrison’s pitch-perfect Jazz, about Harlem in the 1920s. 

My reading this year was also enriched by my membership to Mr. B’s Year of Reading Delights, which means I got a new handpicked book in the mail every month until February. Because of my otherwise busy reading schedule, I didn’t get a chance to read all of them yet, but among those I did take the time to open, I thoroughly enjoyed Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, a hilarious, rambunctious Australian novel about a 19th century Tanzanian prisoner on a mission to paint and catalogue specimens of fish from the surrounding waters. This strange novel, which develops level after level of forgery, is also an exhilarating exploration of language.  I look forward to checking out the rest of the novels my bibliotherapist at Mr. B’s sent me, such as Robin Jenkins’ The Cone Gatherers and Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers.

In the last twelve months also went from living in Bristol, England (where I’d gone to study abroad for two semesters) to moving back home to Montreal, Canada. I made the dreaded voyage at the end of June, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch provided the transition between my life there and my life here. As I’ve said elsewhere, I planned to finish the novel in Bristol but ended up using it over there as a kind of manual to explore the British countryside, and finished it in Quebec as a way of easing myself into my old, normal life… It was my first time reading Eliot, and as these things go I read it mostly for the interweaving of plot and the descriptions of quaint English country life. It demands rereading in the future. 

As for other books I picked up myself (or that were recommended by G.) during the year, the ones I enjoyed the most tended to be a little bit ludicrous (escapism, anybody?). There was Jocelyne Saucier’s award winning Il pleuvait des oiseaux (It rained birds, as yet untranslated), which I got as a gift at Christmas, about old people falling in love in the woods of Northern Ontario. There was Bulgakov’s thrilling The Master and Margarita, which I read in the train over a trip in Italy that contained way too many hours of transportation. There was Umberto Eco’s brilliant The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, about an amnesiac who remembers only everything he’s ever read. These are very different novels, but they are united by their originality and distinctive voices. Here are books that come blazing into your life with their own aesthetics, their own logic. You must accept them on their own terms: that’s what makes for a remarkable reading experience. 

One regret I have about my reading year is that I didn’t get a chance to check out any new publications. Reading books that have been out for a while is a safer choice, but it’s also fun to be able to take part in what everyone’s talking about, like Julian Barnes’ Booker-winning The Sense of and Ending, or Murakami’s 1Q84 or (more recently), Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision. There are some books I’m really excited about that will be coming out in the next months, such as Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies (the sequel to Wolf Hall) and a new novel by Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth; hopefully I’ll be more inclined to pick up some reading material from the “hot off the press” pile at my local bookstore. 

School’s almost out, now, and there’s a daunting, exciting (and growing) pile of books on my bedside shelf (I realize I just said I was also looking forward to buying new books that will come out this year—it’s the paradox of my existence). Hopefully I’ll be able to spend the upcoming months with my nose between their pages. 

Guinness Lit

 

I’ve written about bathroom lit and comfort lit, but now, in honor of Saint Patrick’s Day, it’s only natural that I discuss one of my favourite topics: Guinness Lit (actually, a subgenre of the latter category), aka the kind of book that goes well with a pint of “the black stuff” and will get you in the mood to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day in high literary style. For example, I began declaiming Yeats’ poem “Easter 1916″ this morning, while G. read me some of her favourite play, Translations, by Brian Friel. It was awesome. Oh, and she wants me to make my Irish culinary specialty, soda bread. 

Ireland has one of the most impressive literary traditions in the world: it has produced no less than four Nobel Prize laureates (can you name them all?*) and many of the most important writers of the last 300 years, such as Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, J.M. Synge, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Sean O’Faolain William Trevor, John Banville, Anne Enright, and Colm Tóibín… Not bad for a small island with a population of under 7 million (the Republic has 4.5).

Four years ago, when I had just turned eighteen, I went backpacking around the Emerald Isle for a month and fell deeply in love with it. What struck me about Dublin, especially, was how steeped it was in its rich literary history. I spent nearly all my time there visiting places related to famous Irish books and writers: the Dublin Writer’s Museum, the National Library (with its stunning exhibit on Yeats), the Abbey Theatre, the Chester Beatty Library, the Marsh Library, the Book of Kells and Long Room in Trinity College. I also went on a literary pub crawl and visited countless bookshops—Catach Books and the Winding Stair probably being my top two. Even the Gravity Bar, at the very top of the pint-shaped Guinness Storehouse, features glass walls with quotes from Irish texts describing different parts of Dublin. I love one on Trinity College, from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “The grey block of Trinity on his left, set heavily in the city’s ignorance like a dull stone set in a cumbrous ring…” New to the world of Irish letters, charmed by what I discovered, I soaked all of this in and bought myself a copy of Ulysses in the James Joyce Cultural Center (they’re behind the Bloomsday celebrations that occur every June). For the rest of my trip, I plodded through the book’s labyrinthian beauty (I got about halfway through, and understood maybe half of that).

The Statue of James Joyce, just off O'Connell Stree, in Dublin

Inside The Winding Stair bookshop.

Really, there is no better way to celebrate Irish culture on Saint Patrick’s than by reading something Irish. I personally suggest a short story (although I must admit I’m biased because that’s what I’m writing my undergraduate thesis on, so my head is filled with them); the form is often recognized as a particular speciality of Irish writers (critics believe this is because short stories tap into the rich tradition of gaelic oral tales). Irish short stories are still very much appreciated—as attested, for instance, by the publication of the Granta Book of the Irish Short Story last year. Suggestions? Frank O’Connor remains the master for me; he writes moving and simple portraits of Irishmen and women. Try “The Cornet Player Who Betrayed Ireland” and “Guests of the Nation” (you’ll find them both in the Penguin mini modern classics series), which explore the human implications of politics. My favourite of O’Connor’s remains “My First Protestant,” about a man’s disillusionment concerning religion and Catholic-Protestant strife.  There are lots of other great Irish short story writers. Joyce’s “The Dead” is a classic, as is Elizabeth Bowen’s “Summer Night” and Sean O’Faolain’s “Midsummer Night Madness,” although my favourite of his is “The Lovers of the Lake,” about two headstrong middle-aged lovers who discover the depth of their relationship by doing a pilgrimage to Lough Derry. For something more modern, check out Colm Tóibín’s “A Priest in the Family” (from his collection Mothers and Sons), a pitch-perfect story about a case of Catholic sex abuse, from the point of view of the mother.

What Guinness lit are you going to pick up today?

*W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney.

International Women’s Day (in Books)

Alice Munro

It’s International Women’s Day, and some ripples can be felt in the literary world as, for instance, the longlist for the Orange Prize for Fiction (the only literary prize judged by women that considers novels written exclusively by women) has been unveiled today. This year’s list presents the usual wide array of nationalities and genres, with a preponderance of historical fiction (although that seems to be something of a trend in prize nominations these days).

I think this day is a great opportunity to give female writers some love, so I wanted to share my thoughts on three women writers I adore. The first is Alice Munro, a Canadian short story writer whom I constantly mention on Twitter and who’s been a very important inspiration for me. Munro is a very wise and very humble writer, who continues to produce excellent stories with a remarkable consistency. If you don’t know much about her, I would recommend that you buy her Best Stories volume, but also that you check out this article her friend and fellow Canadian Margaret Atwood wrote about her in The Guardian.

Diana Athill

I’ve also written before about my second subject, the British editor and writer Diana Athill, whose memoirs remain among the most funny and moving books I have ever read. In her volumes of memoir Athill offers a true master class in writing, and also an honest portrayal of her life as a woman. I haven’t read her latest book, Instead of a Book (the title is a nod to her first book of memoirs, Instead of a Letter), which is a selection of letters she sent to the American poet Edward Fields over the span of 30 years, but I mean to pick it up very soon.

As for my third pick, I consider her one of the great underread writers of the 20th century: Elizabeth Bowen. Bowen wrote a large number of exquisite novels from the 1920s to the 1960s, and many of them are masterpieces of authorial voice and human psychology. I’d never heard of her before university but she now ranks among my favorite writers. In fact, I like to think that if I were to complete a PhD thesis (which I won’t), I would write it on Bowen because I believe her prose can undergo rigorous examination and study and still remain beautiful.

Elizabeth Bowen

These three women have written about many things and many kinds of people, but where they excel is in their portrayal of women in all stages of life. They write about bright-eyed, perspicacious girls who peer into the world of adults and feel it’s sharp sting—like Athill, humiliated in front of the stable-boy whom she is in love with as a girl in Yesterday Morning. They write about disillusioned young women who take their fates into their own hands, like the female protagonists in Bowen’s To the North. They write about middle-aged women who recognize their faults and rebel against those who would constrain them—Munro’s women are nieces (“Connections”), daughters (“The Moons of Jupiter”), wives (“The Bear Came Over the Mountain”), lovers (“Corrie”), and  mothers (“Deep Holes”) in this situation, for better or for worse. The write about quirky, charming, resolved old women, which they have themselves become (or, in Bowen’s case, became before she died in 1973). Here are three truly first-rate writers. 

So, which are female writer are you going to pick up and celebrate today? 

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

Did you watch the Academy Awards last Sunday? It wasn’t the best show, as these things go—but maybe I couldn’t appreciate it as much because I hadn’t seen the movies that were nominated everywhere like Hugo and The Artist. One of the night’s prizes did catch my attention, however. The Oscar for the Best Animated Short Film was awarded to a movie about books: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. My ears twitched at the word “book.” The film is only a couple of bucks on iTunes so I bought it the next day—I wasn’t disappointed.

In the case of this film, a kind of cross between The Wizard of Oz, Buster Keaton, and those kids stories about magical books, less truly is more: it only lasts 15 minutes, but it packs quite a punch. Visually, the creators have cleverly melded different animation styles to create attractive textures: warm, dusty interiors and crisp, lush exteriors. They also use both black & white and colors, often in the same shot, as a way of portraying the magical effect that books can have on the dreariness of everyday life, turning boring gray into vivid colors (The Giver, anyone?). Because that’s what this film—as the title certainly suggests—is all about: a book’s magical ability to bring joy. The story is a little naive, maybe, and the theme, though pleasant, gets repetitive, but overall it’s a charming, luminous work. 

The highlight of Mr. Morris (it feels weird to write this, since Mr. Morris was also the name of my college English professor) is seeing the books of the title come to life. Because yes, the books that Morris Lessmore meets in the film, and eventually comes to take care of (for example, feeding them alphabet cereal in the morning or putting on their dust covers when they go outside) really do fly. They also dance and play the piano and have emotions. Oh, and the best way to make them come to life is to read them—just like real books. In fact, the books are shown with such tenderness and humanity that I felt like going to hug my own books after watching the movie, and adopt all those that are left at the bottom wardrobes or on the highest shelves, sad and unread. 

Watch Mr. Morris — it’s a beautiful film — and go give your books some love afterward. They’ll fly, and so will you. 

Novel Suspects

The face of Kevin, from Lionel Shriver's 'We Need to Talk About Kevin,' as reconstructed by a law enforcement composite sketch software.

You must excuse my absence on these pages in the last several weeks; I’m afraid I’ve been very busy with grad school applications and the hours of document tinkering and running around for various letters and documents they imply. I’m all done, now, so all I can do is look away and let other people decide my future for me—and, in the meantime, blog a little.

The other day I came across a mention in The Guardian of a very interesting project: writer Brian Joseph Davis has started a tumblr page on which he posts mug shots of literary characters he created with a police composite sketch software. The project is called The Composites.  The idea is great—so great, it’s almost a surprise no one has done this before—and the result is often fascinating. There’s a innocent-eyed, slightly pouting Tess from Tess of the d’Urbervilles; a cocky Humbert who stares right at you; an angry, worn-out Madame Bovary; and a grim-looking Mr. Rochester with a great set of whiskers. While the results aren’t always splendid, the faces are infinitely more fascinating than movie representations of these characters because they’re based purely on authorial descriptions; you can’t guess a well-known actor’s face underneath the features. 

The creator of the site invites viewers to send in the descriptions of characters they’d like to see. Some, sadly, are impossible to do, such as Holden Caulfied, whose only description in The Catcher in the Rye mentions “a new crew cut.” Are there any characters you’d like to see an image of?

Reviewing Reviews

In this age of proliferation for both literary prizes and book reviews, it was only a matter of time before a prize would be awarded to the best book reviews of the year. This prize now exists: created by the website Omnivore.com, which recycles culture reviews from newspaper and magazine websites, The Hatchet Job of the Year Award is meant to celebrate “the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review of the past twelve months”. The idea is that, with the decline of newspaper readership in favor of tweets, blogs, and reader reviews on sites like Amazon, the very important job of the true book critic must be honored in some way. The need to praise real, thought-out book reviewing is especially important since newspapers have begun to imitate the web-model themselves in recent years by publishing short, hip book reviews that are more like blurbs or ads than actual content. The truth is, newspapers and magazine should continue offering with pride what anyone with access to the internet can’t do: professional, objective reviews that evaluate books thoroughly, put them into context, and draw comparisons with others works. Because they have the resources, newspapers can provide this kind of in-depth analysis for every review they publish. Then, it’s the reviewers job to keep the standards high and offer something more than a plot summary and a bit of recycled pros and cons. Maybe this prize will help book critics achieve the recognition they deserve

I am becoming increasingly aware of the difference between run of the mill reviews and in-depth, meaty analyses. Often, really good reviews won’t even tell you if the book is bad or good. True reviews are not only there to tell if you should buy the book or not; they’re supposed to draw in material from the outside to help understand how specific books are to be appraised, and then pick at the smallest details to assess their intrinsic qualities. A good example are the amazing pieces over at the New York Review of Books. These are lengthy, in-depth reviews of books that are really essays about the books and the authors who wrote them. Recent excellent examples are the review of Joan Didion’s latest memoir Blue Nights and the phenomenal essay Julian Barnes wrote on Joyce Carol Oates’ own memoir A Widow’s Story.

It’s unfair, however, to say that you can’t get good content on social media. Sometimes, they do provide close contact with really brilliant literary thinkers. I’m thinking of people like Charles May, who, for quite some time now (by internet standards), has been producing consistently  insightful work on his blog, Reading the Short Story. May is an academic who has specialized on the form of the short story; his blog is a collection of his thoughts about books, reviews of contemporary and older short stories, and responses to comments and questions about the form. It’s a very interesting project, and a trustworthy source about authors and books who are worth reading; nowhere else on the internet will you find a lengthy review of a single short story by Alice Munro. 

Among the nominees for the Hatchet Job of the Year (see the shortlist here) are the wonderful classicist Mary Beard, for a Guardian review of Rome, by Robert Hughes, in which she spotted dozens of unacceptable and frustrating mistakes in the chapters about the city’s ancient history (high school level stuff, like confusing CE and BCE, apparently). Mary Beard has declared on her blog that she is not expecting to win the prize. For her, the review she wrote on Hughe’s book was simply part of her job. Reviewers, she writes, should act as “gate-keepers”, lest a book’s success depend entirely on “the size of its publicity budget and the enthusiasm of its publishers’ tweets”. In fact, Mary Beard is a little bit alarmed, because she fears that her review of the book may have been lauded above all others because these other reviewers may have either omitted to mention the erroneous material, or else failed to see it entirely—two “ghastly” prospects. Words of wisdom from a truly admirable woman (as a side note, I saw Mary Beard host the “ancient booker” event at the Cheltenham literary festival last year—she was great). If she wins, she will have gotten herself a year’s supply of potted shrimp.