Date: 2006-08-10 13:07 Subject: A Splinter in the Heart by Purdy Security: Public Tags: al_purdy, canada

A Splinter in the Heart (1990)
by Al Purdy
259 pages - McClelland & Stewart

Patrick Cameron is a sixteen-year-old living in Trenton, Ontario in 1918. The war in Europe is quite distant from daily life in Trenton, its reality articulated by the absence of young men on the streets of the town, the names of the local dead that get listed in the newspaper, and the large British Chemical Company munitions plant built on the outskirts of town in 1915 that has brought prosperity to all of Trenton. As Patrick goes through coming-of-age milestones over the summer, loves and deaths, looming over the story is the coming Trenton Disaster, the explosion of the munitions plant on Thanksgiving Day.

Al Purdy was one of Canada's greatest poets, but I hadn't realized he'd written a novel until I came across this book. Purdy himself was born in 1918, so he goes back in time a bit with this story. For a book written by a poet the prose is surprisingly simple and straightforward, with a light touch that makes me think perhaps this was intended for the Young Adult market? The experiences of Patrick, such as getting to know a girl new to town, the death of his old grandfather, the courting of his widowed mother by a blustery minister, the death of his dog, training himself to run so he can compete with the overachieving neighbour boy, befriending the town idiot who lives in the garbage dump - this is all nice, but it just seems so paint-by-numbers, as if Purdy isn't so much creating a specific character as he is drawing on the popular cultural themes of a coming-of-age novel. In the author's note at the start he talks about locking himself in the bathroom or disappearing somewhere the moment someone started talking about another revision, and the book does feel like he never really accomplished saying what he wanted to. I'm glad he stuck to poetry for most of his life.

However, I did enjoy the details of life in an Ontario town during the Great War, and there are enough of those kinds of elements that make it an enjoyable read - in the sort of way that you enjoy a conversations with a friend, even though that particular conversation might not have really gone anywhere much. It also made me think about how odd it was that the war that defined Canada as the country it is today was fought overseas on another continent. This quote is probably the best summation of the Canadian experience as anything else I've come across: ( quote )

Date: 2006-08-10 21:30 Subject: The Wisdom of the Desert ed. by Merton Security: Public Tags: philosophy, religion, thomas_merton

The Wisdom of the Desert: Sayings from the Desert Fathers of the Fourth Century (1960)
edited and translated by Thomas Merton
81 pages - New Directions

This is a little collection of sayings of the desert hermits of the 4th century who separated themselves from society and went into the desert regions of Egypt, Palestine, Arabia and Persia. Merton has selected these himself, not to any scholarly or doctrinal purpose, but just picking what he thought might be good and pleasing. Merton includes a twenty-some page introduction, which was the part I enjoyed most. The selections themselves are from the Verba Seniorum, and they range from enlightening to mundane to puzzling. It's very similar to anthologies of Taoist or Zen sayings.

It's interesting to read through, but doesn't give a lot of information about the Desert Fathers themselves, or the wider world they existed in, which was something I was curious about. I guess I'll need to find another work that deals with that.