Fun in Pointe Claire too ..

A great way to spend the morning: talking about Frenemy Nations.

Many thanks to Librairie Clio for setting it up.

A Very Successful Book Launch...

It was standing-room-only at la Petite Drawn and Quarterly on Tuesday when we launched Frenemy Nations: Love and Hate between Neighbo(u)ring States.  Lots of old friends and even some people I didn't know, which is always a good sign.

More good times coming: a little presentation at Librairie Clio on Nov. 16, and possibly a sortie into Vermont later in November.

Great times!

The Book Arrives...

The first copies of Frenemy Nations arrived this week!  So nice to see it in the flesh, as it were. 

Official publication date is October 26, and we'll be celebrating on October 19 with a launch at the Petite Drawn and Quarterly, 176 Bernard West, Mile End, Montreal.  Love to see you there!

A Little Shameless Self-Promotion: Walrus Talk on Boundaries Sept. 23

The photo is of the Connecticut River which separates New Hampshire and Vermont.  It's just one example of how boundaries--arbitrary and otherwise--divide and influence people.

In this case, the state line is not the middle of the river, but the high water mark on the western side.  This has meant that the good sites for power dams are mostly in New Hampshire, which in turn meant that it was much easier for that state to turn to manufacturing, while Vermont continued as an agricultural state.

I'll be talking about this boundary and others when I take part in one of the CIFAR-The Walrus Talks on Monday Sept. 23 from 7-9 p.m. at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau. The topic is Boundaries and my presentation is titled (at the moment at least) Across the River, the Height of the Land: Physical and Political Boundaries.  Tickets at https://thewalrus.ca/events/

And of course boundaries lie at the heart of my new book Frenemy Nations: Love and Hate between Neighbo(u)ring States which the University of Regina Press will be bringing out next month.

NEXT MONTH!  Hard to believe since this project has been in the works for so long. There will be more about the launch later.

The Overstory and Changing Minds

Finished Richard Powers' The Overstory last night and then went on to read Caleb Crain's  review of Ted Chiang's new fiction in The New York Review of Books.

Hmmm, I thought,  The Overstory is certainly a big, sprawling novel with a lot of story, but at its heart are ideas.  Is this good or bad? 

Powers has said that he read more than 120 books to research the novel.  He told The Guardian: "I wanted to tell a story about ordinary people who, for whatever reason, have that realisation about the irreversible destruction that’s happening right now and who get radicalised as a result. The book explores that question of how far is too far when it comes to defending this place, the only place we have to make a home. The act of writing this book has made me more radicalised, for sure."

And he says several times in the book that the only way to change someone's mind is tell a story.

Does he succeed?  Will anyone who is not already convinced that the world is in dire straits read it, let alone be changed by the book? 

I doubt it, although I give him A for Effort.  The many intertwined histories that he portrays can be absorbing, and I found myself nodding, yes, I've read about this.  But I can't see a climate change denier picking it up, out of the blue, and letting himself/herself be carried along to the conclusions that all the characters come to.

That said, I have three other criticisms.  The first is that a selected bibliography would be great: I found myself thinking of references he must have read, but I would like to know more about the formal foundation for his characters. 

Secondly, he only mentions in passing the fact that forests have been under siege for thousands of years.  People have cut them down for all sorts of reasons, but one underlying ones is that savannas are what anatomically modern human evolved in, and where we feel most at home--a few trees are great, but grass is what we like. (I write a lot about that in two of my books: Road Through Time: The Story of Humanity on the Move and Green City: People, Nature,  Urban Life)  While forests are wonderful, interconnected things, any battle to protect them must take that into account.

Thirdly, there is little mention of children or mothers in the book.  Powers says he has chosen not to have kids, which is in many respects a principled choice.  But for ordinary folks, making sure there is a world worth living in for future generations is a primary motivation for environmental action.  The female characters in the book either have no desire to have children or can't, and the mothers of all characters are largely absent (three of them a either silly, literally demented, or mentally unstable.) Perhaps the novel would be twice as long if Powers included their stories, but judicious trimming might have made room for them, thus adding another level to the novel's punch.

A Rare Case of a French Translation Being Better than the English Origianl

Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls is one of the rare books that I think is better in French translation than in the English original. One of my library groups--a francophone one--chose it for the schedule this year, and we'll be discussing it in early September. I'd read it before in English (or so I thought) but that was long so I decided to start the translation--Pour qui sonne le glas--well in advance, since I read more slowly in French than in English.

The story, if you've forgotten, tells of Robert Jordan, an American member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fighting fascist Loyalist forces in the 1930s. He's a Spanish professor from Montana, so he's fluent in the language and somewhere he's picked up knowledge about how to make bombs. His task is to blow up a bridge during an attack by Republican forces, so the Loyalist ones will be trapped and wiped out.

Easier said than done: he works with a group of guerilla fighters, who have various talents and experiences. A beautiful 19 year old girl who'd been raped repeatedly by the Loyalist is among them. She's been traumatized but nevertheless they fall in love and have three days together before almost everything ends badly.

Hemingway writes powerfully and very clearly about what this sort of war is like: I was reminded of Tim O'Brien's masterful fictions from the Vietnam War. Much ugliness is there, with few heroes and a great deal of lies. Anyone who knows Hemingway's own story can also read many hints of exactly how his own drama will end.

But Hemingway has chosen to directly "translate" the Spanish spoken by Jordan and his partisans into English, particularly at the beginning. When the friends or lovers address each other they frequently use the "Thou," the second person singular form which hasn't been used in English for a couple of hundred years. The result is either comic, awkward, or read from this distance, a shocking case of condescending appropriation of voice. A reader of the original in 2019 might well be tempted to throw the book aside after a few chapters.

However in French, the second person singular is used all the time among friends, family and lovers, so that infelicity falls away because addressing someone as "tu" is commonplace. The story shines through, and it is worth reading.

My advice to readers of the original: grit your (proper second person plural, you'll notice) and carry on. Although I must note that apparently when I'd read the novel at about age 19 I only read the steamy love scenes: there was much that was new to me.

When Fiction Nails It Better Than Non-Fiction

Just finished Anna Burn's devastating Milkman. The Mann Booker prize winning novel takes place in an un-named city (obviously Belfast) in the 1970s when violence and inter-community hate was pathologically universal.

After reading it, how could anyone want a Brexit without a "soft border" with Northern Ireland? (Or any sort of Brexit, in fact.) But maybe there is hope because the Bojo's Conservatives' majority is now reduced to one.

The Man Booker Longlist with Comments from The Guardian

The long list with reviews from one of my favourite newspapers, The Guardian

 

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (Vintage, Chatto & Windus)

The plot: Under lock and key until publication day on 10 September, The Testaments is set 15 years after the end of The Handmaid’s Tale and follows the lives of three women in Gilead.
What we said: Nothing yet! But it is set to be one of the biggest books of the year.

Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry (Canongate)

The plot: Late at night in the Spanish port of Algeciras, two ageing Irish gangsters, Charlie and Maurice, are waiting on the boat from Tangier so they can continue their search for Charlie’s daughter. Banter ensues.
What we said: “What distinguishes this book beyond its humour, terror and beauty of description is its moral perception. For this is no liberal forgiveness tract for naughty boys: it is a plunging spiritual immersion into the parlous souls of wrongful men.” Read the full review.

My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Atlantic Books)

The plot: A Nigerian woman is forced to clean up after her younger sister when she develops a taste for killing her boyfriends.
What we said: “It all adds up to a distinctive but uneasy mix of morbid humour, love story, slashfest, family saga and grave meditation on how abusive behaviour is passed down through the generations.” Read the full review.

Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann (Galley Beggar Press)

The plot: The 1,000-page monologue of an angst-ridden homemaker in Ohio, in which she frets about love, loss and the state of the nation – which unfolds almost entirely in a single sentence.
What we said: “Readers who have been exposed to the work of, say, Sarah Manguso and Rachel Cusk, or even Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, will recognise Ellmann’s dauntless cataloguing of desires and hopes and fears, and her refusal to be anything other than endlessly curious and utterly self-directed.” Read the full review.

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (Hamish Hamilton)

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The plot: The novel follows 12 characters, most of them black British women, some living in different decades while others overlap. There’s Amma, a lesbian socialist playwright; non-binary Morgan, who uses the internet to navigate gender identity; and Winsome, an unhappily married migrant from Barbados. There is no overarching story, but the book is more widely about the connections that can be made between disparate humans.
What we said: “Girl, Woman, Other is about struggle, but it is also about love, joy and imagination … For many readers, it’s not a familiar world – this is a Britain less often depicted in fiction. But that certainly doesn’t mean it’s not a world that is possible, and worth celebrating.” Read the full review.

The Wall by John Lanchester (Faber & Faber)

The plot: Set in Britain in the not-too-distant future after a climatic event known as “the Change”, movement between countries is outlawed. A young conscript patrols the Wall, a barrier built along the British coastline, looking for “Others” who might appear at any moment from the sea.
What we said: “It’s a clever, clairvoyant concept. Lanchester reveals with slow, steady control the cruelties of his strange new world and then socks you with their philosophical implications.” Read the full review.

The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy (Hamish Hamilton)

The plot: Two versions of the same story are interwoven – in 1989, Saul is hit by a car on the Abbey Road crossing, but gets up and goes to see his girlfriend, travels to East Germany and buries his father. And in 2016, Saul is hit by a car on the Abbey Road crossing and is rushed to the hospital, spending the following days in and out of consciousness as his father sits by his bedside.
What we said: Nothing yet - it’s published on 29 August.

Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli (4th Estate)

The plot: As a young family leaves New York to go on a road trip to the southern border, several Mexican children start their journey to attempt to cross into the US.
What we said: “In a virtuoso piece of writing, as the children, delirious with heat and fear, trudge through the desert, Luiselli unleashes a sentence that unfurls over 20 pages, swooping easily from one stream of consciousness to another, and somehow carrying the reader with it. But for all its cleverness, this is also a warm and funny novel, equally droll in its treatment of the precocious, anxious children and its mockery of the solipsistic adults who are so careless of them.” Read the full review.

An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma (Little, Brown)

The plot: Narrated by a chi, a guardian spirit in Igbo myth, this novel follows Nonso, an ambitious Nigerian graduate who becomes trapped in Cyprus after falling for an education scam.
What we said: “Where his Booker-shortlisted debut, The Fishermen, felt like the work of a born storyteller, his new book – a mystical star-crossed romance – is more polished … Obioma’s absorbing tragicomedy painfully probes the perils of victimhood.” Read the full review.

Lanny by Max Porter (Faber & Faber)

The plot: Set around the disappearance of a small boy after he summons a strange presence to his commuter village, Lanny experiments with voices and typography and taps into the strangeness of English folklore.
What we said: “Lanny is simultaneously a fable, a collage, a dramatic chorus, a joyously stirred cauldron of words, and remarkable for its simultaneous spareness and extravagance.” Read the full review.

Quichotte by Salman Rushdie (Jonathan Cape)

The plot: A modern-day reimagining of Don Quixote that follows a travelling salesman across the United States.
What we said: No reviews yet – it’s out on 29 August.
• Rushdie is speaking at a Guardian Live event in Oxford on 27 August – book your tickets now.

10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World by Elif Shafak (Viking)

The plot: On the outskirts of Istanbul, a sex worker is murdered and her body dumped in a rubbish bin. As her brain shuts down – over 10 minutes, 38 seconds – key moments and memories from her life play out over the page.
What we said: “Shafak takes a piercing, unflinching look at the trauma women’s minds and bodies are subjected to in a social system defined by patriarchal codes. It’s a brutal book, bleak and relentless in its portrayal of violence, heartbreak and grief, but ultimately life-affirming.” Read the full review.

Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson (Jonathan Cape)

The plot: Ry Shelley, a transgender doctor who self-describes as a “hybrid”, meets Victor Stein, a celebrated professor who sees transhuman possibilities in Ry’s body. “You aligned your physical reality with your mental impression of yourself,” he tells Ry. “Wouldn’t it be a good thing if we could all do that?”
What we said: “Frankissstein is a fragmented, at times dazzlingly intelligent meditation on the responsibilities of creation, the possibilities of artificial intelligence and the implications of both transsexuality and transhumanism.” Read the full review.

Not As Good As Dogs...

André Alexis's wonderful Fifteen Dogs was a tour de force: original, thought-provoking, and clearly a magical fiction from the beginning. This new novel, the fifth of his five related novels, is not nearly as successful.

It starts out with a young narrator telling how he's driving a scholarly friend around rural Ontario so the older man can do research on the life of a mysterious poet. Unlike Fifteen Dogs, the clues that all is not what it seems don't reveal themselves immediately, and so the reader is led down a number of paths that he or she only tardily realizes are the stuff of fairy tales. This is annoying because the book is so full of botanical detail that one is tempted to think it's a fiction wrapped up in nature writing. Then comes the description of the fire lion flower that Jacques Cartier and his men used in orgies, or the hand-shaped ground cover that tastes good in salads but which is clearly a plant from the netherworld. What? was my reaction. This can't be! Spoiler alert: it isn't.

Similarly a number of thinly disguised figures from the CanLit world make their appearance. A cross-dressing museum guide named Michael bears a striking resemblance to an expert on copyright, while a poetess who made up stories about being abused as a child suggest another rather woman whose work was acclaimed but whose personal life was a disaster.

I read the book to its end, but that's about it. The other three books in Alexis's series will remain unread, I think.

Seven Day Book Challenge

My cousin Cathy Retterer challenged me to the 7 day, 7 book business. The idea is that you post a book you really like, along with the book cover if possible. No comments, no reviews. Since Cathy and her sister Peggy Johnsen, are famous readers, I had to take up the challenge. So here goes:


Day One:  Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.

Day Two Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon

Day Three The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin

Day Four The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

Day Five The Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro

Day Six by Vikram Seth
A Suitable Boy

Day Seven The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

Norse Myths: The Ultimate End of the World. Or Not.

It takes two people to make a book, the writer and the reader. That's a statement I make frequently when I lead my book discussion groups, and this week I came upon a brilliant example when I went looking for another telling of the Norse myths.

One of my groups had  read Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology this spring, and so I went looking for another retelling of the stories.  That experience loomed behind my reading of  A.S. Byatt's Ragnarok: The End of the Gods and I think Byatt's book suffers in my mind because of that.  I liked Gaiman's colloquial style and was put off a bit by Byatt's more studied devices.

Gaiman's book is much less poetic, and far more action-filled, easier to read, something that would appeal to young as well as adult readers. Byatt's book has as its point of view character is a "thin child in wartime" which might make you think initially that it would appeal to a similar audience. It juxtaposes the child's magical wandering in the English countryside during a very frightening time when the family has been evacuated out of London during World War II with the world of the Norse myths. She is just as much at the mercy of geopolitical events as the people who made up these stories were, faced with wind, storm, sea, human passion and greed, and the turmoil of the earth itself. Byatt's book is far more literary than Gaiman's, and the stories seem more distant, more obviously tales of things that are far removed from the present. They are--dare I say it?--much thinner in substance.

The thin child's own story ends happily in a sense: her father comes back safely from North Africa, the war ends, the family is together again. But there are shadows. Her mother who had enjoyed teaching, now does not have a calling since the men have come back. Rebuilding after the war means destroying the countryside. After time, it looks like the end of the world, Ragnarok, lies only a little ways in the future. Indeed, Byatt ends the book with a comment that also applies to the present: "the world ends because neither the all too human gods, with their armies and quarrels, nor the fiery thinker know how to save it. "

Gaiman has said that he thinks 80 years from now someone will come along and retell the stories in a voice that carries the accents of the end of the 21st century. That is what we do with stories as powerful and complex as myths, he suggests. True, probably. But what is telling about the two writers' attitudes to myths is his assumption that the world will be around in 80 years time, and that he ends his book with a vision of a rebirth, a new start for humanity. Byatt is much less certain about what the future holds.
A difference in expectations from two British writers, one of whom remembers War first hand, and the other who is too young for that?

Norse Mythology or The End of the World As We Know It

When I was about 10 my family acquired a book of the retelling of myths for children. It had some nifty illustrations, as I remember, but I liked the stories even more. The ones that made the biggest impression were the Norse myths, with Loki, Odin, Thor and Freya, although the only plot I remember was how Balder was killed by a mistletoe dart.

Neil Gaiman's version was published a couple of years ago, and for reasons I've more or less forgotten, I put it on the reading list for one of my book groups. The book is quite unlike what we usually read, so I wasn't surprised when something less than the usual crowd showed up. But the discussion was animated, and most of the participants said they ended up enjoying the book, in spite of their initial hesitation.

Much of what was said turned on the difference between the morals of the stories: unlike the great monotheistic religions, there is no hope of salvation in the Norse world. What gets you ahead is strength, wiliness, and perhaps a perverse sense of humour. All of these characteristics might have been good for survival in the difficult times of battling tribes, horrendous cold, pounding storms and never-distant hunger. But in the end there is little hope: the twilight of the gods is not far away, the world will be wiped clean, there is no individual salvation.

Pretty bleak stuff, made all the more pertinent because our comfortable world seems to be running headlong toward an end which no one will survive. Gaiman says he hopes that 80 years from now someone will dust off his re-telling of the stories, find them dated, and recast them in the idiom of that time. To that I say: lets hope there will be people like us 80 years from now....

Books for 2019-2010

This is the time of year I make book lists for the groups I lead in Montreal-area libraries.  Here are the ones which made the cut for 2019-2020, in no particular order.  

This is not to say there aren't a wonder of other books out there--the library groups are constrained by what's available in number--but I think there's some excellent reading here.

 

Milkman  by Anna Burns

The story hour  by Thrity Umrigar

The underground railroad by  Colson Whitehead

The only story by Julian Barnes

Nine perfect strangers  by Liane Moriarty

Watching you by Lisa Jewel

Where the crawdad sings by Delia Owens

The golden house  by  Salmon Rushdie

Before we were yours /by Lisa Wingate 

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely fine  by Gail Honeyman

Women Talking by Miriam Toews

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

The Human Stain by Philip Roth

The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer  

Vinegar girl : The Taming of the Shrew retold  by Anne Tyler

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani

The Burning Girl by Claire Messud

Brother by David Chariandy 

Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

Small Country by Gaêl Faye

Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate

Songs for the Cold of Heart by Éric Dupont (Peter McCambridge, translator)

The Break by Katerena Vermette

American War by Omar El Akkad

Returning to the Past: Patrick Modiano and Pedigree

Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014 for the body of his work which includes a couple of dozen novels and "autofictions:" the Nobel citation says the prize was given "for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation. " Obviously there is a lot of imaginative work here, because Modiano was born in July 1945, just as the War was ending, and knew the Occupation only through the memories of others.

Pedigree purports to be the truth behind his fictions, the story of his life up until the time he published his first, widely acclaimed novel, La Place de l’Étoile at the age of 23. The title of this work is a pun, referring both to the Paris landmark and to the wartime joke about the Jew who was asked where la Place de l'étoile was, and who pointed to the left side of his chest where Jews were supposed to display the yellow star that marked them for Nazi persecution.

What happened to one's family in the past is a question that many writers return to again and again. In Modiano's case finding out has required much sleuthing, and more than once he's prepared a partial answer. A case in point is La rue des boutiques obscures , which is almost surrealistic in its presentation of tantalizing hints about what the truth is. In Pedigree: A Memoir the portrait he paints of his dysfunctional family is damning. He suggests at one point that his mother cared more about her little, pedigreed lap dog than she did about her two sons. He reports near the end his father's heavy-handed machinations designed to get him to follow a conventional path. He chronicles the way he defied his father, and adds with only a little regret, that he wishes his father had lived to see his success.

But one person's obsessions, however strangely fascinating when encountered for the first time, can grow boring. Dany Laferrière, the Haitian-Québécois now a member of the Académie française, says his literary work is like a house that he has returned to many times, remodelling it and adding new rooms. In his case, I would advise reading The Enigma of the Return where his story is presented in its most poetic and searing version to date.

Similarly, Modiano seems trapped by his past and France's past. He writes well, but my advice would be to read this book and not to bother with his others.

Picking Books to Read Next: The List for the Awater Library 2019-2020 Is Finalized!

Gearing up for another season of good reading at the Atwater Library! Here are the books and the dates for the 2019-2020 season: all the books are in the library, so start reading! (Of course, we have one more session set for Wednesday, June 12 when we'll talk about Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology. The discussions are open to anyone.)

2019

Sept 11

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

It is 1945, and 14-year-old Nathaniel and his sister, Rachel, are apparently abandoned by their parents, left in the care of an enigmatic figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and grow both more convinced and less concerned as they get to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women with a shared history, all of whom seem determined now to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be?

Oct. 9

Small Country by Gaêl Faye

Burundi, 1992. For ten-year-old Gabriel, life in his comfortable expatriate neighborhood of Bujumbura with his French father, Rwandan mother and little sister Ana, is something close to paradise. But dark clouds are gathering over this small country, and soon their peaceful existence will shatter when Burundi, and neighboring Rwanda, are brutally hit by civil war and genocide.

Nov. 13

Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate

Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family’s Mississippi River shantyboat. But when their father must rush their mother to the hospital one stormy night, Rill is left in charge—until strangers arrive in force. Wrenched from all that is familiar and thrown into a Tennessee Children’s Home Society orphanage, the Foss children are assured that they will soon be returned to their parents—but they quickly realize the dark truth

Dec. 11

MILKMAN Anna Burns

In Northern Ireland during the Troubles of the 1970s, an unnamed narrator finds herself targeted by a high-ranking dissident known as Milkman. The 2018 Man Booker Prize winner.

2020

Feb. 12

Songs for the Cold of Heart by Éric Dupont (Peter McCambridge, translator)

A yarn to rival the best of them, a big fat whopper of a tall tale that bounces around from provincial Rivière-du-Loup in 1919 to Nagasaki, 1990s Berlin, Rome and beyond. This is the story of a century — long and glorious, stuffed full of parallels, repeating motifs and unforgettable characters — with the passion and plotting of a modern-day Tosca. (Originally published as La fiancée américaine.)

March 18

Women Talking by Miriam Toews

One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting. For the past two years, each of these women, and more than a hundred other girls in their colony, has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm.

April 8

The Break by Katerena Vermette

When Stella, a young Métis mother, looks out her window one evening and spots someone in trouble on the Break — a barren field on an isolated strip of land outside her house — she calls the police to alert them to a possible crime.

May 13

Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

The story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse. Set against the looming horrors of the battlefield - the weary, demoralized men marching in the rain during the German attack on Caporetto; the profound struggle between loyalty and desertion

June 10

American War by Omar El Akkad

In the not too distant future, the United States is again at war with itself. Fossil fuels, which have decimated the environment, are banned, but the states rich in them refuse to comply and thus break away from the union, resulting in biological warfare, drones as killing machines, and state fighting against state. 

 

P.S. The painting is by Gotthard Kuehl and done in 1894. 

The Rich Are Still Different from You and Me...

Kevin Kwan's books about the rich and famous in China, Singapore and environs are compulsive reading, I find. The first one Crazy Rich Asians I picked up because I liked Singapore a lot the couple of times I visited. I continued reading because it really is a remake of a Jane Austen novel, like Pride and Prejudice where the major intrigue is about marrying off rich young men and somewhat poorer women. The background is how the wealthy lived in early 19th century Britain: here it is the recent wealth of the Asian Tigers.

The richest people in  China Rich Girlfriend , the second of the trilogy, are mainland Chinese who are worth billions and billions. We don't learn anything about how they got their money: that's lost in the mist of what happened in the last 30 years of the 20th century as China changed its way of doing business. What we see is extravagance and nary a thought for ordinary folk. Rachel Chu, who functions as the Austenian heroine, provides some semblance of a moral compass, but otherwise the novel is enough to make one wonder what happened to the Revolution, any revolution...

I thought of that this morning as I found this story in the New York Times: "Admissions Scandal: When ‘Hard Work’ (Plus $6.5 Million) Helps Get You Into Stanford" https://www.nytimes.com/…/yusi-molly-zhao-china-stanford.ht… truth is right up here with fiction.
The photo, BTW, is of construction in Shanghai 12 years ago, as the city was being rebuilt.

Unsheltered Isn't Up to Kingsolver's Best

Barbara Kingsolver is a wonderful writer, and her Poisonwood Bible is one of the best novels of the 20th century, in my opinion. I think I've read all the ones she's written since, and found them engaging although not up to the standard she set with PB.

Unsheltered--two stories, one set in 2015 when Trump is on the rise and another about 1870, that are interwoven-- is not either. Some of her zingers were marvelous, and certainly the novel was compulsive reading. There was too much didactic stuff in places, although I thought she did a great job in explaining natural selection when her 19th century character Thatcher Greenwood must defend Darwin in a debate on which his future as a teacher depends. But I doubt that few Creationists are going to read the book, so Kingsolver is preaching to the choir here.

The novel has a few loose ends that are annoying, like why didn't the other set of grandparents contribute something to a child's welfare, and how did social services approve the transfer of custody of the child from the father to the "unsheltered" grandparents when their living conditions were so terrible. (The photo, BTW, is of our house during a period when we felt it was falling down around us: I really sympathized with the characters' concern about the place they were living.)

On the other hand, the conflicts and travails of the characters were perhaps too neatly wrapped up at the novel's end: all but the villains have things to look forward to. I'd like to think the world was like that, but it isn't, and I'm pretty sure Kingsolver is as pessimistic as I am.

Libraries Where You Can Sleep (Sort of)

The first thing I look for in a room where I am to spend the night (yes, seriously) is whether there is good light for reading in bed. This means a lamp on a bedside table that isn't so high that it shines in my eyes, and of course not an over head light that 1) will do just that and 2) require that I get out of bed to turn it off.

So I like this story in Bustle about  AirBnB accommodations  with lovely collections of books. But I also like places where guests are invited to leave a book they've finished and don't want to carry home. As Dylan Thomas had it in A Child's Christmas in Wales :

“(Miss Prothero) said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, "Would you like anything to read?” 

 

The all-purpose question!

Pat Barker on How Writers Work.

 Very interesting interview in Winter 2018 Paris Review with prolific British writer Pat Barker.

I particularly liked her comment about how she began to think about writing about war.  Her grandfather had a bayonet wound in his side.  "...I would ask him what it was, but it must have been difficult for him to answer that question, since he never spoke about the war.  I can't remember what he said--there was the wound and there was silence, so there was a mystery, and that is what usually sets a novelist going.'

And the zinger, the core of creating fiction:


"People are always saying, Oh, I know a wonderful story, but you don't want a wonderful story, you want a little something that you can turn into a story.  You need a gap. You need mystery? "

French Exit: Maybe a Turn-off to Miss....

Patrick deWitt's French Exit a strange book! Thankfully, it's not as gruesome as his The Sisters Brothers, but at least there he addresses some interesting things, among them the mythology of the West and the damage done by mining. Here we've got a mother and son couple who've gone through billions and now find themselves reduced to retreating to a borrowed apartment in Paris.

Poor them!

DeWitt's novel reminded me a little of Boris Vian's cult favourite L'Écume des jours (called, improbably, Froth on the Daydream in its English translation) in that the characters move through a number of adventures in a dreamlike Paris, heading toward an irrevocable ending. If deWitt were inspired by Vian, he is not alone: En attendant Bojangles (Waiting for Bojangles in English) by Olivier Bourdeau also shares an uncanny resemblance with Vian's book.

But playing the game of literary sleuthing is not enough to give deWitt's book more than a passable rating. Maybe better to read Vian and be done with it. Or better yet, go to Paris and live your own quirky adventure.

(This French Exit, is not to be confused with Brexit, by the way, and I'm looking forward to some sharp-tongued Brit writing a satire about what's happening in the UK at the moment.)

Raging Storms, Raging Hormones in a Very Dark Tale

Once again the library discussion group where I'm filling in for the leader this spring turned up a very interesting book.  I would never have picked this up, since I don't read mysteries very much, but I've very glad I was introduced to Peter May and his characters on the Isle of Lewis, one of the Outer Hebrides off the coast of Scotland.

We are plunged into the mystery with a gory scene of two teenage lovers seeking a quiet place who discover a disemboweled corpse swinging from the rafters of an abandoned boat house.  Within one short chapter, May gives us a taste of the main themes of the book: hormones and fundamentalist religion, wild weather and wild men, fathers and sons. Then the story itself opens as Fin Macleod, a detective based in Edinburgh, is called to investigate the murder on the island where he was born and from which he could not wait to escape when he turned 18. 

Alternating between Fin's first person memories of his childhood and adolesence and a third person recounting of the investigation, May does a masterful job of maintaining suspense, giving us an intimate look into life on the Isle of Lewis which is like many other places on the edges of 21st century society (I was reminded of Appalachia), and conveying the anguish of a man who has lost a son.

The weather and the sea play an enormous role in the story, and here May's writing is compelling.   Ultimately, though, it becomes almost tedious, since May, like many other mystery writers, succumbs to the temptation to fill pages with detail that are only somewhat related to the yarn they're telling.  (And here I'm thinking of Louise Penny, whose delightful Armand Gamache stories contain too much about the good food eaten in Three Pines!)

The Widow by Fiona Barton: Journalism as Sensationalism or Sociology?

I probably wouldn't have read Fiona Barton's The Widow, had not one of the women in a book discussion group I lead found herself faced with it shortly after the death of her husband four years ago. She was visiting her daughter in the aftermath, and the young woman suggested she check out the reading group in the library nearest her home. My friend did, only to discover that The Widow was the reading for that month. She apparently was a little shaken but went to the discussion anyway, and came away pleased: the widow in the story was completely different from herself, and, it seems, her terms of reference were shaken a bit, in a good way

Not that the story is an easy one. Jean's husband has recently died, and Kate, an aggressive reporter for a London newspaper, wants to get her to tell the inside story on the man's involvement in the disappearance of a toddler a few years before. Glen, who clearly is a child-pornography addict, has been cleared of the crime because the case was thrown out of court on a technicality. He even wins a settlement for wrongful arrest. But both Kate and the detective investigating the case are still suspicious, and so they close in on Jean after Glen's death, ready to get the real story.

Barton, a former reporter who probably has a lot in common with Kate, tells the tale skillfully, keeping us off balance until the end. She also shows a face of sensational journalism that is both very interesting and repugnant. Paying people for exclusive interviews is common in the UK, although not in North America. (Here paying for a story is more likely a way to kill it, as witness the way the National Inquirer bought Stormy Daniels' tale of her tryst with Donald Trump and then sat on it.) Kate may want to bring to light the truth about the crime in hopes that it will protect other children, but she also wants to make a media splash for her newspaper.

That kind of dogged reporting can be valuable for a society: The Globe and Mail's incessant harping on the SNC-Lavalin case is a Canadian case in point. So is the continued surveillance of the Trump administration by The New York Times and the Washington Post. The question is: would resources expended in pursuing sensational interviews be better spent going after corruption and systemic wrong-doing?

Probably, although I'm reminded of a story one of my profs in J School told about a celebrated murder case in the 1950s. The New York Daily News covered it for weeks with front page stories and many photos that were dubbed too sensational. The New York Times also carried news about it, but didn't receive the same criticism. When the actual number of column inches of coverage in the two papers were compared, however, he found that the NYTimes actually carried more. The difference, he told us, was that what the Daily News carried was considered over-the-top, but the NYTimes was "sociology."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/the-widow-review-can-she-find-love-in-a-killer-marriage/2016/02/07/feb21dba-b7d2-11e5-99f3-184bc379b12d_story.html?utm_term=.42fbe1208cb8

Lying Low: A Lesson from Dinosaurs...Or What Happens When You Have a Cold

The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World by Steve Brusatte was one of my Christmas books that I dipped into in early January, but had to put aside for work-related reading. Three days of a cold, however, allowed me to plunge back in, and I found myself transported from my living room hideout to the world of the deep past. Brusatte is both a paleontologist of some accomplishment (it seems) and an engaging writer. He effectively communicates his life-long passion for dinosaurs and the joys of the fossil hunt, as well as explaining in very accessible terms the kind of statistically-based research that he and his cronies have done to unravel the mystery of how dinosaurs arose and what doomed them.

That would be enough to make this a book worth reading. But Brusatte also writes extremely evocatively, and his description of what it must have been like to live the final moments of the dinosaurs' world before the earth was hit by an asteroid 66 million years ago is better than any special effects sequence dreamed up by film- or video-makers.

Also thought-provoking is his description of what happened afterwards, with small, timid, generalist mammalian creatures rising to prominence when the dust had settled and the wild fires had burned themselves out. There may be take-home here: specialization into many niches in a diverse landscape comes with its perils. Maybe there's something to be said for maintaining a low profile and the ability to exploit many kinds of opportunities. Must think about this some more, particularly since my time on the couch in the living room has been so fruitful in terms of reflection. 

The photo, by the way, is from the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, AL where we spent a wonderful couple of days many years ago.  Our son was eight,  fascinated by dinosaurs, and we'd planned on spending an afternoon there before pushing homeward after a long trans-continental camping trip.  But the place was so interesting that we ended up spending nearly three days investigating the displays and talking to the staff.  By the end of our visit, our guy had started giving little tours to people, explaining what he'd learned and offering opinions on the best fossils. People actually listened to him!  It helped he was very cute and had become quite knowledgeable.  Would love to take his own sons there to look around.

2019: A Year That Begins in a Reading Binge

This season I have six book discussion groups in Montreal-area libraries and I've been paddling fast to keep my head above water.

Usually in the groups I can count on a couple of repetitions, but for the February series I have six new books that I read in January.  In addition my two "just for fun" reading groups--one of neighbors and the other of women who are vaguely somehow connected to McGill University--met in January and I read books for them too.  The month also was the one when I was working on the final revisions to my own book (now called Frenemy Nations: Love and Hate between Neighbo(u)ring States) and I found I had two more books that I had to read to finish the job.

That brings the total to nine books since January 1, which is not too shabby a way to start a year, I think.  I found all except The Hypnotist (a title that I inherited from the usual group leader for whom I'm filling in until June) worth reading, and some of the books were truly good. 

Here's the list, in case you'd like to do your own binge read:

War Plan Red by Kevin Lippert
Le Plongeur de Stéphane Larue
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
The Mummies of Ürümichi by Elizabeth Wayland Barber
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
The Hypnotist by Lars Kepler
The Story of Arthur Truluv by Elizabeth Berg
Transcription by Kate Atkinson
The Marble Collector by Cecelia Ahern