Coming up in the New Year: A Whole Lot of Reviews

Cold and dark days are great for reading, and I've been doing quite a bit of it.  Most of it is project-related, but I've come across some excellent books in recent weeks.

But so many other things are pressing around me that I don't have a chance to comment here.  So until I can catch my breath in the New Year here's the link to our End-of-Year blog for your reading pleasure.

Too Many Books, Too Little Time

Not only is this book discusson week, I've been working very hard on my non-fiction book Road through Time.  With any luck there will be a draft done early in January.

There also some good news on the fiction front: it looks like Cormorant will be bringing out my novel River Music in mid-March.

And I have a number of books I'd like to comment on, but there just hasn't been enough hours in the day.  That explains the lack of recent posts...and now back to work.  

Remembering War: Laura Fermi and Finding the Enemy

Today is Remembrance Day in Canada, Veterans' Day in the US, the end of the Great War.  Not a bad day to read Laura Fermi's Atoms in the Family--or for that matter my  Finding the Enemy.

It's been 100 years since a start of that conflict which set the stage for so much of the history o the 20th century.  The wearing of red poppies to honour--or glorify--those who fought is something I stay away from.  War is Hell, and while those who died should be remembered, nothing is gained from jingoism or patriotic chest beating.

But having said that, it's worth mentioning a series of photos in The New York Times today as well as the two books named above.  The pix are recently declassified ones of young men preparing the two A bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The Second World War ended then, and the debate will go on for decades more about whether that was necessary.  What is clear is that things changed dramatically afterwards.

What is also clear is that the people involved were all very young.   The birth rate at the secret research and bomb test site in New Mexico was very high, and life a little complicated for the young families who were moved there so the men (and they were almost all men) could build the bomb.  Laura Fermi, the wife of Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi and a mathematician herself, was one of them, and, clearly not completely challenged by being a housewife, wrote a book about their experience.  If only for a glimpse at how much intelligent women were up against 70 years ago, the Atoms in the Family is worth reading.  But it also is a look at war on the home front, amusing, touching and ultimately serious.

My own book of short stories is the fruit of a lot of reflection about war.  The title comes from the cartoon strip Pogo, who says "We have met the enemy and he is us."  What are our responsiblities when faced with situations of conflict?  How do we separate a "just war" from an unjust one?  The main characters are a nuclear physicist who has to ask himself these questions after participating in the construction of the A bomb, and his family. The time frame ranges from the first A bomb test to the First War in the Persian Gulf in 1991.  The stories are intimate, personal and, I hope, thought-provoking.  The book is still around in many libraries and can be picked up from several on-line sellers.

And the photo?  Well, it's not the usual red poppy shot.  I took it in Portugal last summer, not far from the ruins of Conímbriga, a Roman town abandoned to attacks of the Visigoths about 300 AD.  War seems to be about as ever present as death and taxes. 

Time Out for Writing...

I find that keeping up with the blog and trying to make progress on my next book Road through Time is becoming very difficult.  At the moment I'm deep in the chapter about the mysterious roads Native Americans took to settle the Western Hemisphere. Please excuse my lack of posts....

The photo, taken in Pacific Rim National Park Reserve on Vancouver Island, gives a hint of how those early adventurers got from near the Arctic Circle to the tip of South America in a few thousand years.

Jonas Salk and Philip Roth: the Nemesis

Google opened this morning with a tribute to Jonas Salk, the developer of the first inactivated polio virus vaccine on what would have been his 100th birthday.  I'm old enough to remember polio scares--no swimming, no crowds, no fun during the summer--and the relief apparent on our parents' faces when a vaccine was found.

But it is very easy to forget just what a mysterious threat the disease was, which is one reason it's worth reading Philip Roth's Nemesis now.  The book is told from the point of view of a man who'd been a kid during a polio epidemic in New Jersey during World War II.  His idol and mentor was a teacher who apparently carries the disease to a summer camp before succumbing himself.  Both the narrator, who also get it, and the teacher carry with them years of suffering and struggle post-polio--and its consequences.

The tone is naive at first, as befits the observations of a boy, but becomes increasingly nuanced and philosophical as the story progresses.  Roth says that he doesn't write books of philosophy but the question of responsiblity--and the teacher is haunted all his life by the suspicion that he was an agent of death--and the unfairness of life is paramount.  An example: "He was struck by how lives diverge and by how powerless each of us is up against the force of circumstance. And where does God figure in this?”

One of the things notable about the story is the implicit comparison between mainstream religion (in this case moderate Judaism) and a kind of primitive magic (a made-up Native American ritual that is part of the camp's schtick). Roth seems to be saying that there isn't much difference, in the end. 

Also striking is the way the narrator is able to build a reasonably good life for himself even though he is badly damaged by polio but the teacher remains mired in a sort of noble self-pity.  Roth introduces the possiblity of individual choice and will into the equation.

Polio is a thing of the past throughout much of the world now (only in Pakistan does it seem to be markedly on the increase.) But Roth's novel is a good and deceptively simple read that raises a host of concerns that we all must consider.

That's Salk in the photo on the right, and Roth on the left, in case you hadn't guessed. 

Alice Munro on Fanaticism: the Juliet Stories in Runaway

In this week when two young  Canadian men killed two other ones because, it seems, of misguided ideas about Islam, my thoughts have turned to Alice Munro's compelling stories in Runaway. As it happens, I've re-read it twice this fall and will probably read it at least two times more as my book discussion groups talk about it. 

Three of the stories in the collection tell of Juliet's progress from being the smartest girl in a rural Ontario town to teaching classics in British Columbia, meeting and falling in love with a man on the train, building a life with him that is free of the constraints she felt in her own childhood, and then being sorely disappointed when, after raising their daughter alone after his death, the girl is seduced by a cult.

My bookies have been particularly troubled by these stories.  How can Juliet bear having her daugher run away like that?  they ask.  What a tragedy that the girl doesn't appreciate what her mother has done!  Why would she choose to follow the strict tenets of the group she joins?

That there are no simple answers to these questions is a hallmark of Munro's writing.  She makes us think, after she's led us deeper and deeper into her story, but never tells us what to think.

And what I think is that Juliet was mistaken in depriving her daughter of any contact with traditional spiritual or religious throught.  Her daughter wants to escape this kind of thought control just as Juliet wanted to escape the closed world she was born into.  Better to have allowed a certain amount of that other paradigm into her daughter's life.  Doing that might have made the inevitable separation of parent and child less irrevocable.

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Amazon Kills the Buzz: Krugman on the Effects of the Big On-Line Retailer

I had never heard of monopsony until this morning when I read Paul Krugman's column in The New York Times.  It's the undue power of a monster buyer, as opposed to monopoly which is that of a monster seller.  In both cases, the organization wielding this power can influence price and supply--and in the case of Amazon's monoposony, what we read and even think.

Krugman gives a short summary of Amazon's fight with the French-based publisher Hachette over pricing, and then talks about what this means to readers and writers.  Then he writes: "Book sales depend crucially on buzz and word of mouth (which is why authors are often sent on grueling book tours); you buy a book because you’ve heard about it, because other people are reading it, because it’s a topic of conversation, because it’s made the best-seller list. And what Amazon possesses is the power to kill the buzz. It’s definitely possible, with some extra effort, to buy a book you’ve heard about even if Amazon doesn’t carry it — but if Amazon doesn’t carry that book, you’re much less likely to hear about it in the first place."

He gives as an example two books by recently mentioned prominently in the NYT:  "One is Daniel Schulman’s “Sons of Wichita,” a profile of the Koch brothers; the other is “The Way Forward,” by Paul Ryan, who was Mitt Romney’s running mate and is chairman of the House Budget Committee. Both are listed as eligible for Amazon Prime, and for Mr. Ryan’s book Amazon offers the usual free two-day delivery. What about “Sons of Wichita”? As of Sunday, it “usually ships in 2 to 3 weeks.” Uh-huh."

I'm not sure just what Amazon might be promoting here--are they promoting one kind of right-wing thought over anyother?--but any writer who's had a book effectively unavailable through Amazon knows just how hard it is to fight that kind of non-promotion.  And that's saying nothing about the fact that Amazon sets prices lower than other retailers which mean less revenue for writers whose royalties are based on retail prices.

What Literary Juries Think: Go Figure!

This is the season of prizes.  The Nobel goes to French writer Patrick Mondiano (whom I've never read, and must now), the biggest Canadian prize for non-fiction, the $60,000 CDN Hillary Weston Writers' Trust Prize,  goes to Naomi Klein for This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. the Climate, the Booker goes to an Australian guy who was stone cold broke when he finished the book, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, and our local fiction prize named after novelist Hugh MacLennan will go to one of three names who are not big ones, yet.

The Quebec Writers' Federation short list includes: Jon Paul Fiorentino for I’m Not Scared of You or Anything from Anvil Press, Sean Michaels  for Us Conductors from Random House Canada and Guillaume Morissette for  New Tab from Véhicule Press/Esplanade Books.

Interestingly, neither Heather O'Neill's The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, finalist for the Scotia Bank Giller Prize nor Claire Holden Rothman's My October, finalist for the Governor General's Prize for Fiction,  made the cut.

This appears to be the result of completely different juries having different ideas about what is good, and in the case of the QWF jury,  perhaps a penchant for young writers.  The three finalists are well under 40. 

That's probably all to the good, but I guess I'm going to have to read all the books to decide which jury has the line on quality.

Ebola and Other Plagues: A Book to Put Them in Context

Laurie Garrett's book The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance is nearly 20 years old but it offers very interesting background information about the first round of Ebola in Africa, plus important discussion of how diseases develop and spread.   Garrett is now  senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations and a Pulitzer Prize winning science writer, as well as being an engaging writer.

I had read this book several years ago when doing research on some medical matter at a time when AIDS was still little understood by the public.  The chapters on Ebola and Marburg diseases were fascinating.  While much has changed  since, the account gives some idea of how diseases emerged out of nowhere and then receded after less than a year.

What is puzzling is that the diseases seemed to burn themselves out.  This does not seem to be happening here, possibly because the outbreaks began in more densely populated, better connected parts of Africa than during the 25 previous episodes of the disease.  (For an interesting comment see: Ebola: The Tolling Bell.)  When people incubating the virus can travel, the risk of them contaminating others is great.  In earlier epidemics, Ebola appears to have been confined to relatively isolated villages and once everyone in contracted the disease and either died or survived and became immune, the outbreak was over.

The video attached is from Outbreak, a blockbuster disaster flick, that ends without the world ending, despite forecasts of universal doom.  Better to read Garrett's book or her trenchant piece Foreign Policy published Oct. 6, 2014.  She writes:  "First, a rapid point-of-care diagnostic that can find Ebola virus in a single droplet of blood must be developed. A point-of-care test avoids the need to ship samples to a laboratory and then wait for days to learn the results....I suggest the use of self-administered implements commonly used by diabetics to make a finger prick and squeeze out a droplet of blood. That droplet would go into a tiny plastic well -- an object about an inch in size that is internally coated with either DNA or antibodies that recognize specific genes or proteins found exclusively in the Ebola virus. If those viral markers are present, the device would glow with bioluminescence or change color -- the result would be observable with the naked eye...

"Finger-prick tests for Ebola are in development now at Senova, a company in Weimar, Germany; at a small Colorado company called Corgenix; and at California-based Theranos...One of these screening tests should soon meet the criteria of speed, accuracy, and ease of use necessary to prevent travelers' spread of Ebola; facilitate contact tracing; and, in the midst of the epidemic, tell who has the virus and who does not."

I Have a Great Conversation with Two Urban Experts

One of the high points of this summer was a conversation moderated by Dimitri Nasrallah with Taras Grescoe, Avi Friedman and yours truly called Imagining the Cities of Tomorrow.


Such fun!  And I think quite informative.  Would love to have another chance to talk to them about the future of cities!

Cooks, Biographies, and Eating Well

This week I made Devil's Food Cake Cockaigne, a lush chocolate cake that I hadn't thought about for several years.  The occasion was Elin's birthday, and while we'll be celebrating with  joint party in a few weeks time, it seemed that Friday was a good night for a mini-fête.  Jeanne particularly liked sprinkling little candy stars on top after the cake was iced, but apart from that I was a little disappointed.

Not sure if that is due to changing ability to taste things or to a more developed appetite for exotic food.  Whatever the cause, it made me start thinking of The Joy of Cooking, the first good cook book I ever got, and the delightful biography of the book's authors, Stand Facing the Stove: The Story of the Women Who Gave America the Joy of Cooking  by Anne Mendelson.

Left a widow with a small legacy, Irma Rombauer decided to collect recipes and publish a cook book for women like herself  who found themselves at the beginning of the Great Depression with the necessity to cook for their families for the first time in their lives.  Some of them literally did  not know how to boil water, hence the step by step directions which included "stand facing the stove." Aided by  her daughter, Marion Rombauer Becker, Mrs. Rombauer created a cook book that  became one of the most successful ever.  It did not bring her the fortune that it should have, though, which is one of the most fascinating portions of this biography.

Stand Facing the Stove  appeared shortly before the book was completely revised by Mrs. Rombauer's grandson with the aid of a host of professional cooks.  It removed much of the lively commentary that made earlier editions such fun to read. I remember thinking bah humbug when I saw it, and when I went looking for cook books for my kids when they started out on their own, I sought out earlier versions. The 1964 version, which is the one I have, gave me many evenings of entertaining reading when I putting a lot of energy into learning how to cook well because I had discovered that eating well is, next to love,  the greatest pleasure in life.

But I guess my taste for chocolate just isn't what it was.  For the next birthday, I'll seek out some other dessert, I think.

The Weather in Bujumbura

 Thirteen years ago--as the world was growing crazy in the aftermath of 9/11-- I was getting ready to go to East Africa and the Great Lakes region to research my novel The Violets of Usambara.  

When the Twin Towers went down, there were those around me who thought I should call of the trip: my sister would send me e-mails daily telling me I was nuts to do so--but I'd bought my tickets and I decided it was now are never.  Actually things went very well--here's the link to my blog about the book and the trip--and tt was the first of several real travel adventures that I've been lucky enough to undertake as the old lady writes books.

That's why I was delighted today when I stumbled upon a report from Patrick de Bellefeuille, weather man for Méteo Media who is in Bujumbura this week, helping train local weather people in a place where weather bulletins have never been broadcast. Some good background in his reporting about a complex and fascinating country. 

 

The photos are two I took on my trip.  The top is  of cattle near Lake Tanganyika, brought down for safe-keeping during a time of some tension.  The botton one is the view out my hotel window. It thought I could recognize some of the buildings in de Bellefeuille's report: things obviously have changed there, but some haven't. 

One Small Victory: ERDC Starts Pay-Out Process

Just a head's up for readers who might also have been writers for The Gazette between 1985 and 2010: the Electronic Rights Defence Committee has started the process of distributing the settlement it received in a class action against The Gazette and its various owners.  For more information and details of how to file, click here.

Unexploded: Enough to Put You off WWII Novels

One should never say that there have been too many books about anything, but after reading Unexploded by Alison MacLoed I've been seriously considering calling for a moratorium on WWII novels.

I approached this book about life in Brighton in the months after Dunkirk with good expectations, thinking that MacLoed was part some how of Alistair MacLoed's clan.  And while she certainly is his kin in the grand scheme of Scottish affairs, her novel is orders of magnitude less interesting than other books by clan members.

The pedestrian story--kids who admire Hitler, a middle class woman who falls in love with a Jewish enemy alien, her Mosley-loving husband, their char with a heart of gold--has little new in it.  More importantly, the story is not told in a way that adds anything to our understanding of the period or of the human condition.

MacLoed and her editors are also extremely sloppy. How can you trust a book that  has a major character thinking about getting penicillin to cure a dental abcess and taking some parcetemol to counter the pain even thoug neither drug was available commercially until after the War? 

How it made the 2013 Man Booker long list is beyond me!

1491: Before the Columbian Exchange

What was it like in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans?  Comments have been frequent over the years, but 1491: New Revelatons of the Americas before Columbus
by Charles C. Mann   is perhaps the most interesting.

Mann is a journalist, but he is far more erudite than most and he writes orders of magnitude better than any academic.  This means that he is able to handle mountains of scientific studies and hours of interviews to present a fascinating and surprising picture of what the New World was like before the 15th century wave of European exploration. 

First of all, he says, it wasn't a New World at all.  People had been in North and South America for up to 30,000 years or more, and in a few places had invented cities at the same time or even before people in the Near East had settled down in permanent villages.  Nor were there only a few of them: estimates now are that 40 million people lived on the two continents.  Certainly the very first Europeans commented again and again on how populated the country was, even the  Amazon basin. 

What happened shortly afterwards was nearly complete decimation of the population through disease.  Mann says that calculations of a 90 per cent die-off of the many and varied native groups are not far-fetched. 

This was great tragedy for the people involved, but also for the entire world, he writes. 

"Having grown speately for millennia the Ameicas were a boundless sea of novel ideas, dreams stories, philosophies, relgions, moralities, discoveries and all the other produc5w of the mind.  Few thing aremore sublime or characrerically human that the cross fertlizatoon of cultures.  The simple discovery by Europe of the existence of the Americas caused an intellectural ferment.  How much grander would have been the tumult if Indian societies has survived in full splendor? 

"Here and there we see clues to what might have been.  Pacific Northwest Indian artists carved beautiful masks, boxes, bas reliefs and totem powles within the dictates of an elaborat aesthetic system based on an ovoid shape that has no name in European langauges.  Britsh ships in the nineteenth century radically transformed native art by giving he Indians brightly coloured paints that unlike native pgiments didn't wash off in the rain.  Indians incorporated the new peigments into their traditionns, expanding them and in the process creating an aestic nouvelle vague.  European surrealists came acoss the new art in the first years of the twentieth century.  As artist swill, they stole everthing could, transfiguring the images further.  Their interest helped a new generation of indigenous artist to explore new themes.

"Now envision this kind of a  fertile back and forth happening in a hundred ways with a hundred cultures--the gifts from four centuries of intellectual exchange.  One can hardly imagine anything more valuable  Think of the fruitful impact on Europe and its descendants from contacting Asia.  Imagine the effect on these places and people from a second Asia.  Along with the unparalleled loss of life, that is what vanished...."

Mann has written a second, somewhat less successful book,  1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created .  He also is a little constrained in both books by his seeming lack of knowledge of French and Portuguese--most of his examples are drawn from English and Spanish sources or experts.  But this is a book that should be read by anyone trying to tease apart where we are now.  His sections on agriculture in Amazonia and the Peruvian deserts are particularly relevant since they show glimpses of how human intervention can lead to a long term, sustainable relation to nature.

The photo, by the way, is of the Madre de Dios river in Peru, a tributary of the Amazon.  Much has changed along it, as I found when I was in South America last year.  This book, which I had read before but have just returned to, has been an eye-opener for me as I try to make sense of what I saw.  

The Odor of Coffee: Dany Laferrière and Science

The coffee's dripping and I'm thinking about how good it smells.  Since last night one of my library discussion groups talked about Dany Laferrière's The Return, the work of this Haitian-Québécois member of the Académie française is on my mind.

The verdict about Laferrière's novel about a man's return to Haiti to scatter his father's ashes was not clear.  Some loved it, others found it too scattered.  Much more successful, I think, is his account of a period spent with his grandmother as a 10 year old, The Aroma of Coffee.

Reading this is pure pleasure, both for the descriptions of life in a Haitian village and for the strong portrait of a grandmother who cares for her sick grandson with love and firmness.  She also makes a terrific cup of coffee.  As is the case for many writers, Laferrière spent a time of enforced isolation as a pre-adolescent, and then was faced with integrating into a wider world rather suddenly.  In his case, it was a fever that kept him inactive and allowed him to read a lot.  When he was better, he went back to Haiti's main city Port-au-Prince where he found a swirling world that he had to make sense of.

The book is not an auto-fiction.  That is Laferrière uses elements from his own life, but transforms them to make something that is art, not life.  (In fact, he spent a much longer time  with his grandmother, and he returned to the capital at an older age.) The result is very much worth reading.

So is The Return, for that matter, particularly if you haven't read much Laferrière because he returns to many themes he's written about earlier, but refined them here.  If  you have followed his career, you might find it verging on the same old, same old. 

Both books were translated by David Homel, who does a terrific job. 

And as for the great attraction of coffee, The New York Times has an interesting story today that explains how the ability to make caffeine evolved in coffee trees as a double-whammy tool for the plant's survival.  In large amounts, as when coffee leaves fall to the ground and degrade, caffeine prevents other plants from germinating and competing with the tres.  But in small amounts, as in the nectar of coffee flowers, the chemical gives pollinating insects a little buzz that encourages them to return to the flowers.

Same thing for us, I guess.  The smell of coffee is divine and the small energy hit of one cup is great, but too much can give you palpitations or worse.

Okay, I've finished my cup.  Quite procrastinating on the Net and get to work....

The Net in Favour of the Book and Real Paper

Maybe the book--and paper--will survive!  Sure would like to think so.

Here are three videos that give me hope.

The first is boosting a product, certainly, but it gives many good arguments for the usefulness of books.

The second has been around the Net for some time, but still is good for a laugh.

And the third, well, it may be in somewhat doubtful taste, but it hits you at your most vulnerable
.

The Marriage Plot: Not Eugenides at His Best

It's a coincidence but I finished reading Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot two days before our 50th anniversary.  The heroine Madeleine Hanna is an English major, much taken by Victorian novels, who eventually heads for an academic career where the marriage plot beloved of 19th century writers will be a pillar of her scholarship.

She has two suitors, Leonard Bankhead, certifiably crazy and possibly a brillliant biologist, and Mitchell Grammaticus, far more sane,  but mad for Madeleine and searching for truth and--possibly--God. She's not exactly an heiress, but money is not problem for her, yet she's at an age when she should get married to somebody suitable.

Put that way, the situation sounds like an updating of something by George Eliot.  The amount of pre-marital sex might upset Victorian readers, although it's clear that a lot of hanky panky went on 150 years ago, as Eliot's 20 year adulterous relationship with George Henry Lewe attests.  Mitchell's spiritual quest, Madeleine's match-making mother, and Madeleine's disatisfaction  with the life she seems headed for would all be familiar to 19th century readers, however.

Eugenides pulls a couple of surprises at the end of the book, which show off his erudition and kick his story into the end of the 20th century.  It also is a fast and fascinating read: I sat up late one night to finish it.  But the book is not as good as his earlier work, particularly Middlesex.  There  he also played with literary form--he said he tried to follow the history of literature in the style he wrote each section--and the novelty of his hermaphrodite main character created a dynanism not found in his new book.

Fifty years ago just before our wedding I read Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure
and Bette Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, both of which give a very negative view of marriage and the possiblity of a good relation between men and women. That I went ahead, and married Lee anyway says something about my hopes for what we could build together. The fact that we're still at it all these years later says even more about what we've been able to do.

Two State, One State:The Dilemma of Israel and Palestine in Two Books

The New York Times carried a very interesting essay earlier this week by Anthony Lerman, "The End of Liberal Zionism."  This summer's war in Gaza underscores the difficulties Jews who embrace liberal values have with the coalition of right wing and theologically pure interests which now hold sway in Israel.  I've invited my liberal Jewish friends to comment on Facebook, but so far I have no input from them.

So I've returned to thinking about two books read in recent months which gie fascinatin background to the ongoing troubles between Irsaellis and Palestinians.  The first is David Grossman's To the End of the Land and the other is Guy Delisle's  Jerusalem Chronicles: Tales from the Holy City.

The former novel is by one of Israel's best known novelists and tells the story of a woman who through magical thinking tries to stop learning that her son has been killed during the last Israeli conflict with Lebanon.  Rooted in a walking trip the Grossman himself took through his country, it examines how it got to its current sorry state.  Too long by about 50 pages (the book would have profited from an editor cutting out a sentence here and another one there), the novel nevertheless is engrossing on a human level: I understood completely why the heroine covered up the windows on her door so she wouldn't see the messenger of death arrive.  After reading it I also could appreciate much better why Israeli is the way it is today.  My admiration for Grossman only grew when I learned that one of his sons was killed in the final days of the Lebanon incursion.   He
did not succumb to rage at what had happened, but continued to work on his rather measured account.

The second book is a graphic novel that Delisle wrote after  he and his family spent in a year in Jerusalem while his wife worked for Doctors without Borders. It's a view you won't find anywhere else, and a great complement to Grossman's novel.

Grossman, by the way, wrote an eloquent plea in the July 28, 2014 New York Times, that could be an answer to the Lerman's much less hopeful piece.  He concludes as if to point out to Lerman where liberal Jews are now:

"There are many who still “remember the future” (an odd phrase, but an accurate one in this context) — the future they want for Israel, and for Palestine. There are still — but who knows for how much longer — people in Israel who understand that if we sink into apathy again we will be leaving the arena to those who would drag us fervently into the next war, igniting every possible locus of conflict in Israeli society as they go.

"If we do not do this, we will all — Israelis and Palestinians, blindfolded, our heads bowed in stupor, collaborating with hopelessness — continue to turn the grindstone of this conflict, which crushes and erodes our lives, our hopes and our humanity."

The Goldfinch: Such a Little Bird, Such a Big Success

Friday I started reading Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, and I finished the 771 pages on Wednesday evening. That's the fastest I've read a book in some time, which is an indicator of just how engrossing the book is.

There are a lot of nods toward the world s we know it in the story: the precipitating event is a terrorist attack (by whom we never learn) on a great art museum in New York City.  Theodore Decker's mother is killed in the blast, and he is set adrift in the world.  His father has disappeared, his grandparents don't want him, and he is taken in gracefully if reluctantly by the family of a school friend.  A painting The Goldfinch by the 17th century Dutch artist Fabritius is his only ballast: a dying old man incites him to take it, apparently to rescue it from the post-blast fire which seems likely to engulf it.

Sounds rather Dickensian, and, indeed,  the book is full of detail, plot and coincidences in the rousing 19th century tradition.  But there is also much that is purely 21st century anomie described in prose that sings. Just as Fabritius made a masterpiece in the form of a small painting of a tiny bird, Tartt raises a drug-filled mystery (I was reminded of Steig Larsson's trilogy), to something quite beyond genre fiction. 

Loving Paris--and Madeline--for 65 Years

Our recent trip to Paris and this show in New York have me thinking about Ludwig Bemelmens and his wonderful book Madeline.

Madeline is the first book I ever borrowed from a library. It was brand new, the year must have been 1947 or 1948, and I saw it in a display of new books. You had to have a library card to borrow and to get a card you had to be able to sign your name, so, dyslexic me, I made my mother help me practice until I got the "Mary" down pat. The librarian let my mother sign my last name, as I remember.

 And I suppose in a way my love of Paris and my desire to travel began there.  The French city is a long way from Walla Walla, WA where we were living, and the vision of a city with little girls living in an old building covered with vines was wonderfully exotic. 

It turns out that Bemelmans wrote the book just before World War II, and his drawings of the pre-war city may have een part of its appeal to adults.  But the story about a brave little girl (was she an orphan? why was she living with all these other children?) captured the fancy of lots of kids then, and now.

Still love the book, and read the French version recently to Jeanne.  I'm happy to report that she liked it, even though France is far from exotic for her.

Where Do Vinyl Records Go When They Don't End up with Michael Chabon's People?

The logical, perhaps inevitable follow-up to Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue: the ultimate vinyl record collector is a Brazilian dude.

Love Story from a Muslim Country Unlike the Others

Ali and Nino, Kurban Said's charming love story set in Azerbaijan, took place a hunded years ago.  Ali, a Muslim prince, tells it--how he is in love with Nino, the Georgian princess as World War I begins, how their home town Baku is rich from newly found oil, how a Muslim and a Christian may, perhaps, if they're very lucky, beat the odds and find happiness.  Along with the ups and downs of their romance, we learn a great deal about the politics of the region, Islam, the countries around the Caspian Sea and how close some of them came to being folded into the Western sphere of influence in the earlly part of the 20th century. 

That would be enough to recommend the book, but the mystery surrounding the identity of the author is an added reason to read it. I first heard about the novel when Tom Reiss did a profile for The New Yorker about its author, who may not have been Said, a distinguished Muslim journalist, but an Azerbaijani Jew, Lev Nussibaum who died during the Second World War in Italy.   Or maybe, Reiss suggests,  the book was written by a German noblewoman who spent the end of her life holed up in a castle.  Intrigued, I went looking for the book, but after reading it  I found myself no nearer to knowing the truth.  Azerbaijan, however, appeared on my radar, and I've been following its trajectory ever since.

Oil  continues to float the Azerbaijani economy, and the country--about 90 per cent Muslim--is one of the rare places where fundamentalism seems not to be rising. Ali and Nino is considered a national treasure. A stainless steel sculpture of the pair (above) by  artist Tamara Kvesitadze shows them as two separate figures who slowly approach each other until they literally become one.  The book has been made into an opera in Paris, and will shortly, it appears, appear in an English language film.

Before then, though, read the novel.  The romance is just what you need on a late summer weekend, and the back story will help you undertand what's going on in the world right now.

Paris in the 1870s: Fertile Ground for Fiction

 Take a big book with you on vacation, and you won't have to worry about running out of reading material: that was what prompted me to cart along Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina
when we went to Paris and Portugal a few weeks ago.  The fact that one of my library reading groups will discuss it in the spring was an added reason, as was the idea that really good books should be read at several points in one's life.  Since reading is a dynamic thing, what you as a reader bring to each reading can transform a book.  I fully expected to find completely different things in the novel than what I found the last time I read it maybe 20 years ago.

That was very true, in part at least.  The first half where we learn about the complicit seduction of Anna Karenina by Count Vronsky and the sorrows and joys of Levin and his Kitty as they try to live a good life came back to me in vivid detail.  But as the book advanced I realized 1) that I hadn't seen the political and theological argumentation that Tolstoy folded into his story and 2) that I hadn't finished the book...

Picking up the book after a long day of sight seeing in the City of Lights at first was a little disconcerting.  The Russian universe seemed at first so different from the vibrant city I was visiting.  But then I saw just how much Paris--transformed by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann in the mid-19th century--resonated with Tolstoy's world.  The idle rich, the importance of railroads, the extravagant political ideas: they also were found in Haussmann's Paris, and, consequently, have echoes today.  (The photo is of construction of the Opéra Garnier which gives some idea of what went on as the city was completely reorganized.)

Then I began reflecting on other novels written in the same period. Afer Googling a bit I found that 1877 also saw the publication of two other very good ones that take place in Paris too: Emile Zola's L'Assommoir and Henry James's The American.  The pair are poles apart--Zola writes about those dispossessed by Haussmann's clearing of the center city and James's hero is a brash American industrialist who wants to marry the American widow of French aristocrat.  But they each give an engrossing picture of what the world was like then, and their observations complement Tolstoy's picture of Russian society.

Verdict: All three novels are worth reading again.  Think about taking one or all the next time you've got hours and hours of travel ahead of you. 

Books That Live on: The Saga of Robert Nelson

Had the very pleasant experience last night of arriving at an event marking the opening of an exhibition about Wolfred Nelson (that's him in the image,) doctor, mayor of Montreal and Patriot, at the Maison des Patriotes in St-Denis-sur-Richelieu and finding a stack of my biographical novel of his brother Robert Nelson prominently displayed in the museum's store.

My book was published 15 years ago in English and in French, and I've been told that it still is read with interest by those interested in the history of the Rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada.  This episode in 1837-38 was the closest Canada ever came to revolution, and set the stage for responsible government, and the establishment of Canada as a separate country 30 years later.

The Nelsons were among the many Anglophones who took up the cause of independence.  Unfortunately their contribution is frequently forgotten in Quebec: the rebellions are more often glossed as a fight between the British and French Canadians.  In Upper Canada, the Patriot leader was William Lyon MacKenzie, who also made his mark later in the new nation of Canada, and who, famously, was grandfather of William Lyon MacKenzie King, prime minister for 22 years.

Last night the Nelson family was there in force: Wolfred's great grandson Richard Nelson, M.D. was the driving force behind the exposition.  It seemed that everyone of them had read my book and enjoyed it!  What a nice thing to have happen so many years after the publication of the book!

It remains one of my favourite projects, as it involved much research which I ended up folding into a novel.  My initial idea had been to write biography of Robert Nelson, but there wasn't enough information about his later life, so I opted for a truly "creative non-fiction" approach.  There are 198 footnotes, but the story itself is told as just that: a story.   Perhaps this new exhibit will lead to new readers. 

New Web TV Literary Program from Montreal

For those of you who like to read, check this out.  It's a new web TV literary program called Between the Pages from Montreal, hosted by Dimitri Nazrullah.  There are four programs in the can already, with four more to be filmed next week.

Tuesday I'm going to be talking with Taras Grescoe, author of Straphanger, among other things, and Avi Friedman, McGill architecture  prof and one of the men behind The Grow House, about The Future of the City.

Will post when the discussion is ready for broadcast. 

Conínbriga, Portugal: Not the Inspiration for Margaret Atwood But Who Cares?

It's been nearly a month since I posted here--too much interesting travel and not enough internet access to blog.

But I thought about books a lot.  One of the most striking was the echo of Margaret Atwood's short story collection Moral Disorder I heard in Conínbriga, Portugal. 

Atwood's stories are about the best she's done in a couple of decades, in my opinion.  She opens herself up as she has rarely, writing about people who are very much like herself and her family.  At first the reader may think the stories are unrelated, but each one throws light on some rather important concerns: what will become of the world we live in?  How to love?  Is there a connection between the concrete everyday world and something that transcends time and space?

This last lies at the center of the first story "The Bad News." An aging couple, Nell and Tig, struggle to deal with the bad news that awaits them every day in early Twenty-first Century newspaper headlines.  But Nell finds herself slipping into another time and place when the news was equally bad, Southern France in the Third Century C.E.   The barbarians are outside the gates, Romans like this other Nell have reason to be afraid.  The question Atwood poses is: should we prepare for the end of the world as we know it, too?

Conínbriga in central Portugal is very much like Glanum, the French ruined town that starts Nell's musings.  A thriving place for a couple of hundred years at the crossroads  of Roman thoroughfares on the Iberian peninsula, its people retrenched in the Third Century apparently out of fear for the advancing Barbarians.  They effectively abandoned part of the town, tearing houses down and  building a defensive wall five meters high inside of which they hung on for a couple of more centuries. 

The extent of the town was forgotten until the late 1920s when a Portuguese archeologist began excavation of the site.  Since then off a good portion of the town  has been uncovered.  The mosaics are extraordinary, and the House of Fountains, one of the houses left outside the wall, a dream of a Roman villa (see photo.)

Visiting ruins like this (or the medieval part of nearby Coimbra) invites speculation who lived there and what their lives were like.  Just as Atwood's collection suggests connections between incidents and people, so wandering through the vestiges of the past summons up reflections about human nature, strife and survival.

New Novel in the Works...

Okay, as I prepare for our trip to France and Portugal, I'm going to let you in on a secret: it looks like I'll have a new novel out in the fall.  Can't tell you with whom or what it's about, but here's a hint:  The title will be River Music, and there's music, and cultural politics and a certain amount of passion in it.

More when I come back.  That's when I'll have to get down to working on the final revisions.

The Digital World: Next Step for the Electronic Rights Defence Committee

Writers and readers of books should be aware of the swirling discussion about electronic publication and proper compensation for the people who write what we read. The latest is a suit by The Authors Guild, aiming to overthrow a court decision that upholds Google's e-book publishing program that digitizes "orphan" and other books. 

The same kind of problem exists in periodical publishing, and the Electronic Rights Defence Committee has been fighting since 1996 to get recompense for free lance writers whose work was stolen and published electronically by The Gazette, Montreal's English language daily.

The ERDC won the class action some time ago, but working toward distribution of the settlement has been slow going.  Now a hearing has been set on the distribtion plan, with a notice to members of the class being widely circulated.  Here's the link.  You'll also find the DRAFT claim form and other related documents.  Perhaps we'll finally get around to calling for claim submissions in the fall. 

What to Read This Summer: Travels with Herodotus

One of the things I love about travelling is taken with me a solid book that will resonate with what I'm doing, even though on the surface there is no relation between the lived and the read experience.

Untl now, I thought the book par excellence for this was Charles Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle, which I had the good fortune to take with on a trans-continental camping trip 40 years ago.  The short journal entries were perfect reading for the end of the day or in rest time on sweltering afternoons.  Darwin was in his mid-20s when he set out on his five year, around-the-world trip as a dining companion for the ship's captain and amateur naturalist.  His observations are frank and fresh, and slowly one can see his questions about the age and history of the world and its creations deepen and taken him places he had no expectation of going.

But Ryszard Kapusincinski's Travels with Herodotus comes close.  In it the Polish writer and journalist who died in 2007 at 74, gives an account of his travels with perhaps the first history of the world, written by a peripatetic Greek who wanted to see things first hand.  Kapusincinki left Poland for the first time in the 1950s as  reporter for the Polish news agency, carrying with him Herodotus's book, which has much that is relevant now. 

For Short Story Lovers: 31 Stories That Steven Beattie Thinks Are Terrific

Every year Quill and Quire's review editor Steven W. Beattie devotes the month of May to talking about 31 short stories that should be read by every lover of the genre.  Here's the link to this year's harvest, which looks terrific.

I must admit that I've not read most of the writers Beattie's picked this time around, but I'm making a list and intending to look for their works.  But he also includes several of my favorites, including Shirley Jackson, the American Richard Wright and Cynthia Flood. Definitely worth checking out. 

One quibble: it would be nice if Beattie included a printable list of the writers and the stories he's picked at the end of the exercise so you can take it with you to the bookstore/library.

Living with Sudden Riches: The List of My Desires and What Happens When We Get What We Want

One of the best selling books in recent years in France has been translated into English as The List of My Desires. In it a 47 year old very ordinary woman living in a small town wins about $30 million the first time she buys a ticket.  She keeps it a secret from everyone, even her husband, with some interesting but sad consequences.

One of the most amusing but scary scenes in the book is when Jocelyne picks up the cheque and is told what to beware of, now that she's rich.  The message is: sudden riches are usually not a good thing.

It's a book that my French book discussion groups found both a good read and an excellent starting point for discussions about what we really want.  In one of the English groups, a member had read it in translation and suggested it for next year's list (can't use it because at the moment there are not enough copies in the local library system.)

As for the truth about the nasty things that can follow winning big, today's New York Times contains a re-evalution of what happens.   "How to Win the Lottery (Happily)"  by John Tierney quotes some new studies which show that happiness may drop after a win when everyone you ever knew comes out of the woodwork, but can increase afterwards. People may "have to talk themselves into believing they deserved it," according to  Anna Hedenus, a sociologist at the University of Gothenburg, who did a study of 400 Swedish lottery winners.


Michael I. Norton, a social psychologist at Harvard Business School, adds keeping your win a secret  could help avoid bad consequences.  He says to tell  no one but your spouse; make no extravagant purchases or gifts at first, but slowly increase your spending and your giving so no one will suspect your newfound wealth.

Of course, in the novel, Joclyne's secrecy helps her not at all, and the NYT's story ends with a plea to secret winners to take part in a study of their experience. Tierney writes:
"We know you secret winners are out there. You have the power to disprove the curse of the lottery once and for all by writing me (or having your lawyer do it). We promise to protect your anonymity.  And we swear we won’t ask you to share the money.


The photo is a still from the French film which has its premiere this week, and for you who know French, here's the trailer. "

Mademoiselle Nancy: Building Vocabulary One Fancy Word at a Time

When I went looking on the web to find out the English name of Jane O'Connor's series of books about a little girl who wants to be chic, I was a little taken aback to discover she's Fancy Nancy.  We've been reading Mademoiselle Nancy to Jeanne (age three and a half) for about a month in French. 

Nancy says she plays better soccer when she wears  frou-frou socks, she thinks her family should take lessons in how to be chic, she loves fuschia (the chic or fancy way to say pink) and she is brought down to earth every time in a charming way, after having learned a number of new, gorgeous words. 

I haven't counted, but there must be at least eight books in the series, some of which were developed to expand the horizons of early readers. The stories in French would seem to be particularly useful for kids in French immersion.  Mademoiselle Nancy et le garçon de Paris, for example, takes place in some Canadian town where a newcomer plays "soccer" even though he comes from Paris: French kids would say foot.  But who's to quibble when Nancy is there to dance around.

Nancy's love for fancy words can come in handy when you're trying to get a child out of a potty mouth rut.  Jeanne thinks it's hilarious that there are other words for pipi and caca and actually will use them occasionally.

The View from Here: Lists of Books for 2014-2015

I haven't posted in several days, not because I haven't been reading, but because I've been reading so much.  Not only were the book discussion groups in full swing last week and the week before, I've been preparing the lists of suggested books for the 2014-2015 season of library sessions.  Not sure exactly how the line up will run, but here are the contendors.  The final choice will depend in large part on the number of copies available in area libraries.  

Good reading!

The Return by Dany Leferrière

From the Prix Medicis winner comes a haunting meditation on the nature of identity.

Dany Laferriere's most celebrated book since How to Make Love to a Negro, The Return is a bestseller in France and Quebec and the winner of many awards, including the prestigious Prix Medicis and the Grand Prix du livre de Montreal.

The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud

Nora Eldridge, a 37-year-old elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is on the verge of disappearing. Having abandoned her desire to be an artist, she has become the "woman upstairs," a reliable friend and tidy neighbour always on the fringe of others' achievements. Then into her classroom walks a new pupil, Reza Shahid, a child who enchants as if from a fairy tale...

The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill

Abducted as an 11-year-old child from her village in West Africa and forced to walk for months to the sea in a coffle—a string of slaves— Aminata Diallo is sent to live as a slave in South Carolina. But years later, she forges her way to freedom, serving the British in the Revolutionary War and registering her name in the historic “Book of Negroes.” This book, an actual document, provides a short but immensely revealing record of freed Loyalist slaves who requested permission to leave the US for resettlement in Nova Scotia, only to find that the haven they sought was steeped in an oppression all of its own.

Runaway by Alice Munro

The incomparable Alice Munro's bestselling and rapturously acclaimed Runaway is a book of extraordinary stories about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises. In Munro's hands, the people she writes about—women of all ages and circumstances, and their friends, lovers, parents, and children—become as vivid as our own neighbours. It is her miraculous gift to make these stories as real and unforgettable as our own.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Described by William Faulkner as the best novel ever written and by Fyodor Dostoevsky as “flawless,” Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and must endure the hypocrisies of society.

Room by Emma Donaghue

To five-year-old Jack, Room is the world. . . . It’s where he was born. It’s where he and Ma eat and sleep and play andlearn. There are endless wonders that let loose Jack’s imagination -- the snake under Bed that he constructs out of eggshells;the imaginary world projected through the TV; the coziness ofWardrobe beneath Ma’s clothes, where she tucks him in safelyat night, in case Old Nick comes.

And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

Khaled Hosseini's novels have sold more than 38 million copies worldwide. Now, six years after A Thousand Splendid Suns debuted at #1, spending fourteen consecutive weeks at #1 and nearly a full year on the hardcover list, Hosseini returns with a book that is broader in scope and setting than anything he’s ever written before.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace be comes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.

The Magic of Saida by M.J. Vassanji

The Magic of Saida tells the haunting story of Kamal, a successful Canadian doctor who, in middle age and after decades in North America, decides to return to his homeland of East Africa to find his childhood sweetheart, Saida. Kamal's journey is motivated by a combination of guilt, hope, and the desire to unravel the mysteries of his childhood--mysteries compounded by the fact that Kamal is the son of an absent Indian father from a well-to-do family and a Swahili African mother of slave ancestry.

Running the Rift  by Naomi Benaron

Running the Rift follows the progress of Jean Patrick Nkuba from the day he knows that running will be his life to the moment he must run to save his life. A naturally gifted athlete, he sprints over the thousand hills of Rwanda and dreams of becoming his country’s first Olympic medal winner in track. But Jean Patrick is a Tutsi in a world that has become increasingly restrictive and violent for his people. As tensions mount between the Hutu and Tutsi, he holds fast to his dream that running might deliver him, and his people, from the brutality around them.

The Keeper of Lost Causes by Jessi Adler-Oslen

Carl Mørck used to be one of Copenhagen’s best homicide detectives. Then a hail of bullets destroyed the lives of two fellow cops, and Carl—who didn’t draw his weapon—blames himself. So a promotion is the last thing he expects. But Department Q is a department of one, and Carl’s got only a stack of Copenhagen’s coldest cases for company. His colleagues snicker, but Carl may have the last laugh...

Shotgun Lovesongs by Nikolas Butler

When the four men at the core of Shotgun Lovesongs came of age together in Little Wing, Wisconsin, the highest point of the tiny farm town was the abandoned mill. Now in their thirties, Ronny’s trying to start a life after rodeo and booze, Kip has come back to pour stock-market millions into reviving the mill, Hank’s followed his father into farming, and Lee’s indie-rock career--built on his legendary DIY recording in a Little Wing chicken coop--has shot him into another social stratosphere. Nickolas Butler’s debut novel was inspired in part by the life of his high school friend Justin Vernon, who took the 2012 Grammy for Best New Artist as Bon Iver, and despite its occasional flirtation with stereotypes, his characters and their friendships have authentic souls. Through fights, reconciliations, and celebrations, Butler’s polyphonic story swells to a full-throated anthem about the expansive possibility born of belonging to a deep-rooted community, a kind of America we want to believe might welcome us all home. -

Distantly Related to Freud by Ann Charney

It’s Montreal, 1953, and eight-year-old Ellen, an only child prone to daydreaming, and her mother, a woman who believes in the promise of fresh starts, have moved into a large house on the flanks of Mt. Royal. To make ends meet, Ellen’s mother takes in a group of refugees from Central Europe, whose erratic behaviour and dark view of human nature captivate the young girl’s imagination. Ellen sees the refugees as a potential source of valuable information about her own background, of which she has heard little, except for a few stories about a lost golden civilization and the family’s distant connection to Sigmund Freud.

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simpson
The feel-good hit of 2013, The Rosie Project is a classic screwball romance about a handsome but awkward genetics professor and the woman who is totally wrong for him
A first-date dud, socially awkward and overly fond of quick-dry clothes, genetics professor Don Tillman has given up on love, until a chance encounter gives him an idea.
He will design a questionnaire—a sixteen-page, scientifically researched questionnaire—to uncover the perfect partner. She will most definitely not be a barmaid, a smoker, a drinker or a late-arriver. Rosie is all these things. She is also fiery and intelligent, strangely beguiling, and looking for her biological father a search that a DNA expert might just be able to help her with.

The Wedding Night by Sophie Kinsella
   When her old boyfriend Ben reappears and reminds her of their pact to get married if they were both still single at thirty, Lottie jumps at the chance. But not everyone is thrilled with Lottie and Ben's rushed marriage, and family and friends are determined to intervene. Will Lottie and Ben have a wedding night to remember ... or one to forget?

Canada by Richard Ford
    After his parents are arrested and imprisoned for robbing a bank, fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons is taken in by Arthur Remlinger who, unbeknownst to Dell, is hiding a dark and violent nature

that interfereswith Dell's quest to find grace and peace on the prairie of Saskatchewan.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. As she prepares to graduate and tries to understand why her college love life has not lived up to expectations, she finds herself unexpectedly in a love triangle with two very different guys. Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the Novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.