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 Consolation (2006)
by Michael Redhill
469 pages - Anchor Canada
'I doubt a four-foot piece of the True Cross would be enough to stop work on a site in this city. You find a three-week-old potato chip in Montreal, they raise a velvet rope around it and have a minute of silence. But here, no.' (pg.281) This novel proceeds along two separate time-lines. One narrative takes place around 1997, when the Air Canada Centre was undergoing construction. A local historian is convinced that the original plates of a complete photographic survey of Toronto from 1856 were sunk in the harbour during a storm on their return from England, a site which over the years was filled in as the shoreline moved outward, and would now be buried on the site where they are excavating for the arena. But the historian is suffering from a fatal illness and commits suicide, leaving his family to try to discover if he was right or just making things up, as his colleagues believed.  The second narrative takes place in 1856, and concerns a pharmacist who arrives from England, leaving his wife and children to arrive later, and starts operating a pharmacy his family purchased. However, business does not go well, as the city's economy is stagnant and he can't compete with already-established pharmacies. A change occurs when he begins to supply chemicals to a photographer, and he finds himself entering a life in conflict with his English upper-class preconceptions. This novel won the City of Toronto Book Award for 2007, and was long-listed for the Booker prize. And I think the best way it can be described is that it feels very much like the sort of thing begging for a Booker. Not a lot happens story-wise, and the writing often becomes overly precious. I did like the narrative in the past a bit more, while the present-day story was mostly filled with unlikeable people (and the corporate-historic interest face-off felt like it was manipulated for dramatic effect, and I doubt things would occur that way in reality. Not that bad things wouldn't happen, but not in that way.) I think I wanted to like this more than I actually did. There's some great pictures of old Toronto in this thread. 'I had a thought: he and I were as real as those other people had been, who lived there once. And our being alive and their not being alive somehow wasn't that much of a difference between us. (pg.445)
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 By the Time You Read This (2006)
by Giles Blunt
308 pages - Random House Canada
John Cardinal is a police detective in fictional Algonquin Bay, Ontario, an obvious stand-in for the city of North Bay. At the start of the novel his wife, who has a history of severe depression, is found to have fallen from the roof of a tall building, and everyone except Cardinal considers it suicide. Then Cardinal starts receiving taunting anonymous mail, which leads him to suspect that his wife has been murdered. But everyone else thinks he is just going through stress related to her suicide. At the same time, one of the other detectives in the department is tracking down a lead consisting of some internet images of child abuse that may have taken place in Algonquin Bay. This is the fourth novel featuring detective John Cardinal, but it's the first I've read. Some UK editions of this book use the title The Fields of Grief (why? did they think *that's* the title to turn it into a bestseller?).
 The author was apparently a writer for Law & Order, among other TV shows, and the novel gets off to quite a strong beginning, and the characters of people in the police department are drawn very well. I'd say it's an above-average mystery novel up until the last third, when it really takes a nosedive as the methods of the various villains are brought to the forefront. One of the main problems in both investigations is that it seems that very obvious pieces of evidence are ignored or not followed up on until the plot calls for them. Also, the villain behind the rash of 'suicides' is just not believable the way he's portrayed (even though the narrative goes out of its way to mention a real-life figure who was the obvious inspiration). Also, I think the child abuse/pornography subplot is a cliche right up there with having a subplot with a wiser older character who was a holocaust survivor (which seems to be on the back of half the books on the remainder shelves). I don't have anything against exploring these topics in an in-depth or original way, but when inserted into a thriller they're usually just a lazy way to try to stimulate people's emotional responses. And the way the author goes into details of the child abuse, it seemed to be there either to titillate or otherwise existed on almost a parody level, since it went on for unnecessary pages.
But I don't think that's what the author was trying to do. He probably wasn't trying to do much of anything other than tell a story to take up some time, since if you think of some of the issues that are brought up, such as suicide or therapy or depression, the novel has really muddled views that wouldn't bear much scrutiny. It does start with some promise, but all you need to know about the level of cliche it descends to is that in the end the detective leaves the police station all alone to arrest his wife's murderer, not even calling for backup when he finds a dead body, and personally carries the one convincing piece of evidence along (presumably before any copy of it has been made), so he can dramatically brandish it in the one-on-one show-down finale.
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 Town House (2007)
by Tish Cohen
276 pages - HarperCollins
Jack is in his middle-thirties, and living off the royalties of his father's recordings, a rocker in the Ozzy Osbourne or Alice Cooper mould. He's divorced and still living in his childhood home, a townhouse in Boston which he shares with his teenage son and a cat deformed by an accident. And he has severe agoraphobia, to the point where he is afraid to venture out to the sidewalk in front of his house. He's pushed out of his comfort zone when he can no longer make his mortgage payments and the bank decides to sell his house from underneath him.
I decided to read this book without knowing too much about it. It was featured in one of those occasional lists of recommendations the library puts out, and I thought to myself, 'Hmm, a book about the son of a rock star who never goes out of his house, written by someone living in Toronto, sounds interesting.' Unfortunately it's really pretty bad. I guess this is what they call 'commercial fiction', and it turns out that the movie rights were sold for the novel even before it got a publishing deal. I also looked at the cover art and thought 'Hmm, it looks a tiny bit like a chick lit novel, but it can't be, right, with the story about a guy and his son, and rock music, old houses, etc... But I think this actually comes pretty close, as it turns out that Jack's passion is creating paint shades for interior decorating(!) and the son is so obsessed with trashy 70s fashions and accessories that from the way he dresses and acts, even an anti-bullying workshop might take time out to beat him up.
I think this book could have been successful if it was just more something. Maybe more funny. Or more caustic. More brief. More in-depth. Everything's really shallow and lacking in weight (especially for a novel about a hardcore agoraphobic, who you would think would be tortured with self-loathing, or loathing the world, or something), and I have to agree with the amazon reviewer (one of the few reviewers out there who I assume isn't a friend of the author) who says it's basically 'television in book form'.
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Terrors of the Night: Canadian Accounts of Eerie Events and Weird Experiences (2005)
by John Robert Columbo
229 pages - The Dundurn Group
A collection of various accounts of unusual and uncanny events, mostly gathered from old newspaper pieces, and usually a page or two in length. Categories are: Witchery and Magic, Earthly Powers, Wild Things, Hardly Human, Omens and Prophecies, Powers Beyound Ours, Miracles and Other Cures, and Inquiry into the Bizarre.
Because of the nature of the book, being mostly old newspaper clippings with a short introduction, reading this is a bit of a fragmented and inconsistent experience. A lot of these pieces are simply the result of being from publications that obviously had a very broad and creative idea of what constitutes 'news'. Probably the most interesting part is the last chapter, 'Inquiry into the Bizarre', which consists of some responses that were received from a 1978 survey that asked people to send in their own weird experiences.
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Fifth Business (1970)
by Robertson Davies
273 pages - Penguin Books
'Fifth Business' is a term (according to Davies) in opera or theatre which refers to a character that is neither hero or heroine, confidante or villain, but is still integral to the plot. In this case that role is played by Dunstan Ramsay, who is relating his experiences, but finds himself a supporting character in his own life story.
Dunstan Ramsay is born in the early twentieth century in a small Ontario town, and as a child he has an experience that will affect him the rest of his life: his lifelong friend and enemy Boy Staunton throws a snowball at him, but Dunstan ducks and the snowball hits the pregnant Mrs. Dempster instead, which leads to the premature birth of Paul Dempster. It's an event that haunts Dunstan with guilt all his life, but also opens up possibilities for all three of Dunstan, Boy, and Paul that wouldn't be there otherwise.
Dunstan goes on to fight in the Great War, and then becomes a teacher at a private school. One of his main interests in life becomes saints and the stories around them, and in fact he believes Mrs. Dempster to be a saint of a kind, and attributes three miracles to her. Dunstan (like the author Davies) is a Protestant, and hence there is some tension in his fascination with saints, as he belongs to a branch of Christianity that still honours the old saints, but doesn't recognize any in the modern age, as if sainthood was something that had gone out of style, or as if God had once been present in the world but has now departed.
The book follows Dunstan's life until he's about sixty years old. I find it hard to relate the quality of this book, but it is very good, and is not only Davies' best, but could quite easily be considered the greatest Canadian novel ever. It stands alone, but it can also be read as the first part in The Deptford Trilogy, which also includes The Manticore and World of Wonders.
'He told us, quietly and in the simplest language, that he had to run his Mission by begging, and that sometimes begging yielded nothing; when this happened he prayed for help, and had never been refused what he needed; the blankets, or more often the food, would appear somehow, often late in the day, and more often than not, left on the steps of the Mission by anonymous donors. Now, pompous young ass that I was, I was quite prepared to believe that St John Bosco could pull off this trick when he appealed to Heaven on behalf of his boys; I was even persuaded that it might have happened a few times to Dr Barnardo, of whom the story was also told. But I was far too much a Canadian, deeply if unconsciously convinced of the inferiority of my own country and its people, to think it could happen in Toronto, to a man I could see.' (pg.128) correction:Fixed which war he fought in; WWII would obviously make no chronological sense.
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White Rapids (2006)
by Pascal Blanchet, translated by Helge Dascher
156 pages - Drawn and Quarterly
White Rapids, or Rapide Blanc, was a company town built by the Shawinigan Water and Power Company, when in the 1920s they decided to build a dam and power plant in a part of northern Quebec that was only accessible by rail. The town was built out in the wilderness complete with single family homes, a school, Catholic and Anglican churches, and a curling club. Eventually it was reachable by road, and it survived until about 1970, when all the electric power companies in Quebec were nationalized, and it was decided to fully automate the dam and plant.
This book tells the story in drawings and sparse words, with a drawing style that recalls advertisements from the 1920s, and a white-orange-brown colour scheme. There's not as much text as you usually get in comics, in either conversation or description, and it feels something more like a series of postcards. Certainly it's pretty, and a lot of work was put in to produce it, but I wonder what the point of it all is. The 'story', such as it is, is really only an outline, and it jumps right from when people got settled in, to when the town was closed down. And the drawing style is so stylized--from a never-never dreamland--that it certainly can't play much of a role in historical documentation. Interesting, but kind of slight.
Additionally, the book I read seemed to be fresh from the presses, but rather than having a pleasing scent, whatever chemicals they used to print this made me feel a bit ill while I was handling it :\
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Life of Pi (2001)
by Yann Martel
326 pages - Harvest
This novel is written in three distinct parts of unequal length. The first part introduces us to Pi Patel, who is a teenager in India who considers himself a Hindu, a Muslim, and a Christian. His father runs a zoo, but then the family decides to sell their animals to zoos in North America, and emigrate to Canada. In the second part, the ship the family and animals are on sinks in the Pacific and Pi is stuck on a small lifeboat with a few animals, including a large tiger. In the last short part, Pi talks to some investigators once he washes ashore in Mexico, and gives them an alternate version of events that he considers more 'realistic'. This book won the Booker Prize in 2002.
I can partly see why this book is so popular. It's an easy read and it has a lot of animals, and for the most part, people like animals. Also, every edition I've seen has really appealing cover art.
However, maybe it's a sign that I'm not completely cynical that in the end I was flabbergasted how a book that's been both so popular and critically successful could be so poor. It really lost me at the point where Pi realized there was a live tiger roaming free on the lifeboat and he didn't really plot how to kill it, or trap it, or do something apart from trying to train it for the circus. It just doesn't work as a 'realistic' story, but Martel is totally incompetent at evoking any kind of suspension of disbelief that would make this some kind of fantasy story or fable. The story is full of cutesy jokes that remind me a bit of Italo Calvino, though without much magic.
There's a lot of talk of the depth of this book, but the story doesn't really have much thoughtful content - Pi never debates whether he should just give up and die, or if it's worthwhile to struggle on; he never really reflects on what he's lost, or thinks about what would be a worthwhile to do with his life if he survives. The religious themes are also really shallow; the three religions thing is pretty much the sort of thing that would only make sense to an adolescent. Also, if I understand Martel's point, I think he's saying that religion is something like an interesting fable that's more colourful than reality? I think that's borderline insulting to anyone that considers the religious quest a search for capital-T 'Truth'. I'm not sure there'd be any value in believing if it was all just 'a better story'.
P.S.: To the people that have read it, I actually thought the second version of events was far better.
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Acquainted with the Night: Excursions Through the World After Dark (2004)
by Christopher Dewdney
314 pages - Bloomsbury
Along with an opening and closing chapter, this book contains 12 chapters which each correspond to the hours of an ideal night, from 6PM to 5AM. In each chapter a different area is addressed, such as astronomical science, nocturnal animals (watch out for vampire parrots!), night rituals, sleep and dreams, and other subjects. It is all interspersed with snippets of poetry and some general observations on the phenomenon of night and its influence on the human experience.
I love the format of this book, as it's an unclassifiable smorgasbord which touches upon all variety of subjects, much like a conversation that goes long into the night. It reminds me of another, similar (and better) book, The Importance of Living by Lin Yutang, in the casual, wide-ranging, friendly attitude.
However, as much as I enjoyed some aspects of this book, there was something that occasionally grated on my nerves, and I think that can be summed up as the 'tone' of the work. Which I suppose is the literary equivalent of a clash of personalities. It's just little comments, often summing-up a subject or making a throw-away remark, that sounded a bit too trite and thoughtless and shallow. It's too bad, because a slightly more earnest effort would have made this book excellent.
An example of this is the author stating that people that live the longest sleep between something like 6.5 and 7.5 hours, so it's best not to sleep too long for your health. Which is absurd reasoning, because there's quite likely numerous other factors in a person's life which will affect both their longevity and how much sleep they require. It's like saying that people that live the longest don't spend a lot of their lives in the hospital, so it's best for your health to stay away from the hospital, no matter what. Other dumb-sounding comments are saying that scientists have determined that some birds sleep in flight, but 'who knows how they found that out' (what, is that fact somehow beyond the reach of research?), saying that war or other nighttime organized violence is 'fortunately rare' (Huh? For who? War and related events are hardly 'rare' in human experience), and calling painter Edward Hopper's work 'photo-realistic'. Dewedney also states that our depression and despair get much stronger in the night, something I have found to be very often quite the contrary, and that's the sort of dischord that would pop up occasionally but repeatedly that made it difficult to fully enjoy this book.
As an aside, I hadn't heard of Christopher Dewdney before, but apparently he is the significant other of writer Barbara Gowdy.
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Shenzen: A Travelogue from China (2000)
by Guy Delisle, translated by Helge Dascher
148 pages - Drawn & Quarterly
Though this has been published after Pyongyang in english, it is actually an earlier work by Delisle. He spends several months overseeing the production of television animation in the city of Shenzen, China, which is just north of Hong Kong. Along with the dealing with the difficulties of supervising the work of people with an entirely different language and culture, Delisle spends his time trying to navigate restaurants and shops, and takes side-trips to the cities of Canton and Hong Kong.
The world that is explored here isn't as extreme as North Korea, but I don't think the work suffers much because of that. Delisle has a great ability to take note of the little habits and gestures of people, and you learn to sense how it's very much the small details more than the big obvious points that contribute to a sense of homesickness and dislocation. The black-and-white art is also very good. Excellent.
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Searching for Bobby Orr (2006)
by Stephen Brunt
295 pages - Alfred A. Knopf
Bobby Orr is considered, along with Wayne Gretzky and Gordie Howe, to be one of the three greatest hockey players of the modern era. Emerging from Parry Sound in Ontario's near-north, he revolutionized the defenceman's position and brought 2 Stanley Cups to the Boston Bruins, though he was plagued with bad knees almost from the beginning, which eventually forced him to retire at age 30. He also became a professional athlete at the dawn of the age of the sports agent and the player union, exemplified by Orr's brash agent, Alan Eagleson, who would later serve time in jail for defrauding players.
I usually stay away from books about sports, because they're usually written for the sort of person that might read a couple of books a year, written in the tone of a tabloid newspaper or talk-radio. But Stephen Brunt is a thoughtful sports columnist, and this book has gotten a lot of good press, so I thought it would be a worthwhile read. Bobby Orr declined any involvement, and none of his close friends or family members were involved either, so most of it is constructed from records of the time, and whatever interviews the people involved have given over the years.
It starts out as an engaging read, but at the end I found it didn't really have much substance; no revelations that are hinted at throughout the book, and I even wonder what the exact purpose of writing it was. As mentioned, it is well-written, by a person whose perspective extends beyond the sports page, and so much of the book becomes not just about Bobby Orr or hockey, but about the changes of the 60s in society and in professional sports. Also, game summaries and statistics are kept to a minimum, which is fortunate, because I can't see how anyone can find that to be gripping reading.
But the book is very odd in some other ways. It focuses a lot on the build-up to Orr's professional career, his youth and time in the junior leagues, but then zooms through his time in the NHL and then pretty much breaks off the narrative while he is still a pro, just giving little snapshots of the end of his career, and where he is at the present day. It's as if Brunt was following an outline, and then somewhere along the way realized this was going to be a 500 or even 800 page book if he kept writing in this style, and then he just jammed in 'the rest of the story'.
Another very strange thing is almost the entire tone of the book, criticizing how Orr always projects a squeaky-clean, boy-next-door image, both during his days as a player and even now when he appears in advertisements or in public. The problem is, that Brunt keeps talking about how Orr has become a pro at putting up this 'false front', constantly saying that 'the reality isn't so publicly palatable', and then providing close to zero detail about what this dark private self might actually be up to. The closest he comes is talking about some one-night-stands and a string of girlfriends in the first few years of Orr being a pro, and that he has a temper, especially if he's been drinking. But no actual details of anything especially seedy, or at all violent, or even hurting another person in any way. The more I think about it the cheaper it seems to keep harping on someone's public face as disguising something dark and unacceptable, but then not actually providing the slightest proof -- it's really the sort of attack that could be levelled at anyone, because we all have public faces that aren't the whole story.
'The Canada of our imagination, the Canada that Canadians imagine when trying to pin down their elusive national identity, is somewhere just like Floral or Parry Sound or Brantford. When we look in the mirror, we want to see tough, decent people, honest workers, deferential, polite, grateful for what they have, willing to stand obediently in line, team players but unafraid to go into the corners, elbows high when it serves the collective good. We are hockey players the way Americans are, in their own very different mythology, Wild West gunslingers (independent and God-fearing and wary of authority, their individual rights held sacred above all).' (pg.12)
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The Letter Opener (2007)
by Kyo Maclear
313 pages - HarperCollins
The narrator, like the author, is a woman with a Japanese mother and Scottish father. Naiko left university without completing her final year after she got a job with the post office, and ever since she has been content to work in the Dead Letter Office, officially known as the Undeliverable Mail Office, trying to find the right recipient for all the odd things that can't find their destination while they are in the care of Canada Post. It is 1989 and Andrei, a co-worker who is a refugee from Ceausescu's Romania, suddenly disappears without warning. The novel weaves in her memories of him with her speculations about what has occurred, while Naiko also just goes through her days and deals with other things, both uniquely historic and mundanely everyday.
This was a really good book, and excellent for a first novel. There is an attention to detail that isn't just a neurotic cataloguing, but considers the emotional nuances. I think a dead letter office is just one of those perfect settings for a story that automatically lends it a rich atmosphere. The prose style is very engaging without being at all showy. The one big complaint that I would have, that kept occasionally needling at me while I read, is that the author seems to really be trying to work in as many 'Important Social Issues' as possible, sometimes just for a few pages: care of the elderly, Alzheimer's, the holocaust, the internment of Japanese during WWII, persecution of homosexuals, communist regimes and their fall, etc.
It's understandable for a first novel to try to lean on 'big issues', but I really found the strongest parts to be the ones just about quiet, personal moments, like how the narrator prefers taking public transit, and how, as a teen dining with her family after their parents divorce, in an upscale restaurant where it seems none of them belong except for her father, she reaches under the tablecloth and starts scuffing up the wooden table with her fork in resentment. I actually used to live 'down the street' from the huge Gateway postal facility where the Undeliverable Mail Office is located.
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The City Man (2005)
by Howard Akler
154 pages - Coach House Books
It is 1934, the Great Depression, and Toronto is celebrating its centenary. Eli Morenz is released from a few months stay in a psychiatric hospital, and gets his old job back as a newspaper writer with The Daily Star, though he starts out tracking down any scraps the editors throw his way. Mona is part of a pickpocket gang that work Union Station. When her gang works the crowd at the centenary festivities, Eli gets assigned to find out more about the underground world of pickpockets.
That sounds like it has the potential for being quite the exciting book, maybe a Dickensian adventure or a grimy thriller in the style of Graham Greene. Unfortunately the book pretty much entirely fails to deliver. The one good thing that I can say is that the author certainly did his research, and you learn something not just about the techniques of pickpocket teams, but the slang used in the trade. The novel is written in very short bits, most of which barely last a page, and so there is a lot of white space in this slim book. It's written in a sort of style that I guess is trying to be 'lyrical'; but you just end up with absolutely no quotation marks in the dialogue, and awkward word choice like "stentorian fucking" and "Eli looks into the typewriter, the paper whiter than an orgasm." I can't believe this book was a finalist for a couple of awards; though the author can research and turn the odd phrase, there isn't any storytelling going on, the characters don't even have the substance of cardboard cut-outs.
Bah, I feel like I've hit a bad rut of books lately, where most stuff has just been just 'okay', but I haven't really been captivated in a while. Additionally, I had the bright idea to make myself a schedule of reading Dostoevsky's novels and the Bible, but that has really fallen by the wayside, and I think demonstrates how amazing I am at making plans and sticking to them. I'm not sure what might pick me up out of my doldrums.
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Design City: Toronto (2007)
by Sean Stanwick & Jennifer Flores, photography by Tom Arban
272 pages - John Wiley & Sons
This book highlights some of the new pieces of architecture in the city of Toronto; from buildings that have been around several years, such as the Bata Shoe Museum, to others on which the shovel had not quite broken ground at the time of publication. The emphasis is on public buildings, such as museums, restaurants, schools, and even a convent. Probably the two most notable projects in the city are not new buildings but additions and renovations of existing structures: The Art Gallery of Ontario by Frank Gehry, and the Royal Ontario Museum by Daniel Liebskind.
I guess this was an okay read. The pictures are nice, and four to eight large, full-colour pages are devoted to each project. I'm not sure if I gained very much from reading the text, since not a single critical word is spoken from cover to cover. There is the occasional ridiculous statement like, "What makes a Design City?" Um, how about whatever you feel like, since it's just the name of a line of books, and not a term with any meaning? Also, because there are no details on each illustration, it's sometimes hard to tell what's a 'real' photograph, and what is just a created model by the designers.
And, even though it's actually not as garish in real life as it seems in photographs and plans, I really don't think that the monstrosity that is the addition to the Ontario College of Art and Design deserves to be featured on the cover. If I had to pick a favourite project in here, it would probably be the Evergreen Commons at the Brick Works.
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The Malaise of Modernity (1991)
by Charles Taylor
135 pages - House of Anansi
This is the book-form of the Massey Lectures delivered in 1991, and was published in the U.S. under the title The Ethics of Authenticity. In this book, Taylor looks at three 'malaises' that are affecting modern society: individualism (which threatens a loss of meaning), the primacy of instrumental reason (which threatens an eclipse of ends), and the political consequences of individualism and instrumental reason (which threaten a loss of freedom). Taylor focuses mostly on the first malaise, individualism or a struggle for authenticity, and then in briefer sections applies a similar sort of exploration to the other two areas.
Taylor says that for the last several hundred years, a prime factor in western society has been the quest for authenticity, the notion of "to thine own self be true". This notion has its attackers, which characterize the present as a 'culture of narcissism' and self-indulgence, and it also has its proponents who are often temped to say that the only value is freedom of choice, and that all choices are equally valid. Taylor looks at the ethic of authenticity and finds it something noble and worthwhile, and believes that the solution lies in exploring and making clearer the ethic, because relativist attitudes, on closer inspection, are inauthentic themselves. We all define ourselves against horizons of meaning, and in communication and interchange with the outside world, and if we deny that and say 'every choice is equal', it not only 'flattens out' the outside world and robs it of value, but it eventually robs us of our own identity, since it was built up and forged by a specific history, in a specific world. At the same time, it's not only probably impossible, but also undesirable to try and somehow turn back the clock to a time before people felt such a strong inner call to authenticity, as it is something that helps us navigate through the modern world.
On the primacy of instrumental reason (aka the dominance of rationalism), Taylor also sees something useful, but something that needs to be framed within a more human vision, so things like statistics or efficient modes of production can still be used, but for human ends. And as for the political consequences, there's a necessity to build broad coalitions of consensus, to prevent society from splintering into small special-interest groups who fight all-or-nothing battles on government policy.
This was a pretty good, short introduction to the thought of Taylor, a Canadian philosopher who was in the news lately for winning the $1.5 million Templeton Prize. It does date itself amusingly towards the end, where Taylor (a Quebecer), says that the break-up of Canada is imminent with the defeat of the Meech Lake Accord. I wonder if Charles Taylor wears 'Chuck Taylor' Converse sneakers - that would be pretty cool.
Taylor's 2004 lecture on Religion and Violence is available online as an audio file.
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The Town That Forgot How to Breathe (2003)
by Kenneth J. Harvey
471 pages - Raincoast Books
Bareneed, Newfoundland, is a small fishing village devastated by the collapse of fish stocks. As the novel progresses, a strange illness begins to spread, in which people start to become violent before losing their ability to breathe unconsciously - if they don't actively try to breathe, they suffocate. Along with this, other strange things begin occurring, such as bodies of drowning victims washing up on shore en masse, looking like they'd just drowned even if they're hundreds of years old.
For the first 100 pages or so, this was a very gripping and engaging book. However, at some point after that it loses its power and inventiveness, and just kind of plods along, switching between a big cast of characters every few pages. As more of the mystery begins to be revealed it becomes painfully awkward and patronizing. The parts where previously good characters begin to have bad thoughts and impulses are written in a way that comes off as just completely unconvincing and goofy. I know that the author was trying to make a point about the value of historical ties, storytelling, etc., but it comes across as so much syrupy sentimentality. I do think that we ignore the past too readily, and the modern world isn't universally wonderful, but the solution isn't blinkered nostalgia. However, if you think that electricity is an evil that must be wiped from the face of the earth, this could be the book for you.
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The Playboy: A Comic Book (1992)
by Chester Brown
170 pages - Drawn & Quarterly
This details Brown's relationship with Playboy magazine, starting with surreptitiously buying issues at a variety store as a teen, and varying waves of collecting and then destroying issues. All of it is narrated by, and I would say ruined by, a miniature present-day Brown who flies around over the scenes and gives clever and smart-alecky commentary on events. This really robs things of any potential drama or significance.
Oddly, this story is as much about collecting as it is about pornography. At a few points Brown states that he's just as interested in the articles (?!?). The story probably means something to Brown, but it misses being widely appealing.
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I Never Liked You: A Comic-Strip Narrative (1993)
by Chester Brown
185 pages - Drawn and Quarterly
A sparsely illustrated work that relates some episodes from Chester Brown's youth. A lot of it deals with the uncertainties and insecurities of growing up. At school, kids pick on him, and try to get him to swear. Some girls at school seem to like him, but he's not sure what to do, and sometimes finds it easier to not take a chance and just close himself off. His distant relationship with his parents worsens when his mom goes into the hospital with mental problems.
The drawings are fairly basic, and there's actually more blank paper than illustrated space, but it's effective in sketching out small episodes over time, and even the quiet moments like watching nonsense on TV, or thinking about throwing yourself into passing traffic. I read Brown's Louis Riel some time ago, and I think I didn't really like it (though I don't remember why), but this was quite effective, and a quick read too.
edited to add: I woke up really early this morning and read this quickly. I find I've been thinking about it all day, and it's had a really strong effect on me, so I'm elevating my evaluation of it. It's great.
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Inside (2006)
by Kenneth J. Harvey
282 pages - Random House
After fourteen years in prison for murder, the protagonist Myrden is freed because of new DNA testing done on a crucial piece of evidence, and he returns to his old neighbourhood in St. John's, Newfoundland. It's a neighbourhood stuck in poverty, alcoholism, and violence, and his wife has been living with another man, and his entire life has been wrapped in trouble: his father murdered his mother, and most of Myrden's children have been in trouble with the law, some already dead. But also, because of being incarcerated so long, he is guaranteed a big payout by the government, a benefit that Myrden as a hard time appreciating.
This book. It's written in a style. That's very abrupt. With lots of short sentences. Very. Short. You get used to it. It actually works. Still feels weird, though.
There's a lot to like about this book: emotional intensity, honesty, a realism that doesn't become outrageously gritty. I think the author makes a brilliant decision in that Myrden's situation is simply that the evidence that convicted him has been invalidated; he's not actually innocent, even the truth that he tells himself is that he probably didn't kill the girl, though he was too drunk to remember anything that happened that night, and it was either him or about three other people that were with him that night that did it. I also like how, though the characters are mostly stuck in squalid lives, they're not stereotypically ignorant: they have artistic talents that they've developed to some degree (even though their environment usually encourages them to keep these under wraps), they're aware of the better parts of town and how people live there.
I suppose there's things you can nitpick about the book, perhaps occasionally sliding into dramatic cliches (the bar-brawl where the 'good' person beats the 'bad' people to a pulp, the kind-hearted mentally handicapped character who is misunderstood by the world around him), but when is that not the case? It's a really intense read that had me absorbed, and really affected me as the story developed, and I think that's the main thing.
( quote )
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Ticknor (2005)
by Sheila Heti
109 pages - House of Anansi
George Ticknor is the narrator of this brief novel, and most of it is his thoughts, feelings, memories, as he is walking through the streets of Boston, carrying a pie and running late to a social gathering at the house of his lifelong friend, William Prescott. Ticknor and Prescott were both historical figures, and Ticknor actually wrote a biography of Prescott, though I doubt there is much historical accuracy in this novel. A contrast is created between Prescott, who is a prolific writer, successful, popular, and happy, despite suffering a severe eye injury in childhood that affects him his entire life, and Ticknor, who is anxiety-ridden, isolated, and unable to escape from his life as a bachelor, scraping by on published articles.
The style of this book tripped me up at the start, and though I got used to it, overall I'd say it was more of a hindrance to understanding the story, as opposed to actually plunging you into a person's mind. One of the most irritating things is that "I", "You", and "He" are often used in the same paragraph, and it's only after many pages that I became sure that "I" and "You" are actually both referring to the narrator. The sentences are also mostly quite short and have a clipped feeling, and many of the paragraphs feel awkward, with the sentences not following each other at all, and giving the feeling not of a flow of thought, but just a list of things that doesn't go anywhere. I suppose it could be argued that this is trying to mirror the mindset of the narrator, but if so it's unsuccessful, it just feels like awkward writing.
There are some effective moments where feelings of inadequacy are touchingly evoked, and at times a vibrant contrast is created between a happy and successful life, and a cheap and emotionally malnourished one. However, overall a lot of the story is lost in unnecessarily affected style.
* The CBC website has an article about the book, including an amusing picture of Heti in a police line-up with Margaret Atwood and others.
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The Cunning Man (1994)
by Robertson Davies
514 pages - Penguin
Jonathan Hullah is the narrator of this novel which chronicles his life. He spends his childhood in a small town in Northern Ontario, and then moves to Toronto for schooling, eventually becoming a doctor and setting up an unorthodox practice that takes a holistic approach, considering people's medical troubles within the scope of their entire lives. Many of the characters in previous books by Davies make a shorter or longer appearance; for example the murder that begins the novel Murther & Walking Spirits occurs here near the end of the book.
I'd heard that this was Davies's weakest book, but I didn't realize how bad it would be. There is no urgency or guiding purpose to these episodes from Hullah's life, many of which seem like watered-down and rejected versions of things that had occurred in Davies's previous books. This was his last novel, published about a year before he died, and it sadly does have a tone that creeps in fairly often of the 'senile old coot'. For example, Hullah moves into a renovated barn that's now in the middle of the city, where he both lives and has his office, and he sets up the old bell in the small tower to ring every hour, even during services in the church next door, even during all hours of the night. Neighbours complain to him and the city puts him through various red tape, and the narrator is just utterly pleased with the pointless trouble he's causing everybody.
There's also a lot of things thrown in that I think are just supposed to be 'controversial' and 'shocking', but again just sadly come off as an otherwise uninteresting person trying to annoy you. I have no trouble with bringing up any of these things, but the problem is they don't go anywhere. The issues aren't delt with in any way, they're just raised and then forgotten. For example, what is the point of just mentioning in passing that child prostitutes can sometimes get violently abused by their clients? The book is full of that sort of stuff. I can't believe I read the whole thing, but the prose style makes it pretty easy to keep flipping the pages.
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