Who's Reading What: Issue 104
Compiled and edited by Julianna Varga
Antony Di Nardo Author of "Want Ads for the Keeper of the Keys" (Issue 104: Poetry)
On the bedside table is Umberto Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, about an antiquarian’s search for memory and identity through the many books and printed pages that sustained him during childhood and adolescence. It’s an oddly illustrated novel: a cornucopia of coloured images found on book and magazine covers, posters, comics, biscuit tins, record albums, and so much more, dating back to Europe's early 1930s and into the war years. My copy is dog-eared because of passages such as this one: “They were poems. Poems so bad they could have been no one’s but mine. Teenage acne....I do not remember where I read that there are two kinds of poets: the good poets, who at a certain point destroy their bad poems and go off to run guns in Africa, and the bad poets, who publish theirs and keep writing more until they die. Perhaps that is not really how things go, but my poems were bad.”
Elizabeth Hay Author of "Real Estate" (Issue 104: Reflections)
I'm reading Beneath My Feet: The Memoirs of George Mercer Dawson with Phil Jenkins. Ottawa writer Phil Jenkins has compiled, arranged and edited the writings of geologist George Dawson into an excellent, seamless memoir.
Kristen den Hartog Author of "Lawrence" (Issue 104: Fiction)
I just finished The Outsider by Albert Camus--bleak and brilliant. And now and again I return to a startlingly beautiful book of poems, The Refrigerator Memory by Shannon Bramer, and open it anywhere. She has an original, sophisticated way with language, and the vast imagination of a child.
Andrew Tibbetts Author of "Clueless, but Smiling in Toronto" (Issue 104: Reflections)
I'm reading this year's Best American Short Stories. It's edited by Stephen King, but he seems to have selected most of the usual suspects--Alice Munro, The New Yorker, etc....so there will probably not be cars that eat people. I have mixed feelings about that. Why am I reading it? To steal every single good idea for a short story that will bring me fame and fortune, of course! For example, I have one idea about a couple from rural Ontario whose marriage is falling apart while the wife does the dishes and then a car eats them. See you in the next BASS, suckers!
Lesley Buxton Author of "Motherland" (Issue 104: Fiction)
At the moment, I'm rereading "People Like Us," a story by Ottawa writer Mary Borsky, from her book, Cobalt Blue. She's a very observant writer with a knack for dialogue. This dark story which follows a mother and son desperate to communicate is heart wrenching. At my local St. Vinny's recently, I was thrilled to discover a stack of The Best American Short Stories. I enjoy collections such as The Journey Prize Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories, because they introduce me to new writers. And last but not least, I just started The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman. I bought it for my ten-year-old daughter, but I'm hooked. It's very intriguing.
Richard Cumyn Author of "Ottawa Made Me" (Issue 104: Reflections)
I'm finishing Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety, a simple, graceful story about the long, close friendship of the Morgans and the Langs. It would make a refreshing companion piece to Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier and John Irving's The 158-Pound Marriage, which, like Stegner's book, examine the intimate relationship of two married couples. Stegner keeps his "four-square coterie" free of the extramarital sexual tension that makes the Ford and Irving novels so fascinating, and his narrator can be annoyingly plucky in response to adversity. Nevertheless, it's a big-hearted book with much to remind us about the need for preservation in our personal lives and in the natural world.
I admit to hurrying Mr. Stegner along so that I can get to Michelle Butler Hallett's second book and first novel, Double-Blind. Michelle's short story collection, The Shadow Side of Grace, was a bold debut, a gutsy exhibition of literary ventriloquism proving once again that there's something potent in the drinking water of Newfoundland and Labrador. In Double-Blind, Josh Bozeman, an American psychiatrist in St. John's, is studying paranormal behaviour for SHIP, the "Society for Human Improvement and Potential." With an acronym like that, you know there's a deadhead lurking somewhere under the surface.
I've got one of those exposed-to-the-wrong-era-of-Sesame-Street short attention spans and don't seem able to read any one thing for very long at one stretch, so I've usually got a bunch of things on the go at once. I've got five going at the moment. The Granta Book of the American Long Story, edited by Richard Ford, which is fabulous. Paul Theroux, The Happy Isles of Oceania; pretty good, probably not his best. Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters, which had me thinking of Jane Austen at first, the subtleties of pre-war sensitivities in Japan. The New Quarterly 103: Natural Histories--I especially liked the Kathleen Winter interview. And I picked up this collection of Nabokov's stories when I was in the States this summer for $3. I love it. It was printed in the fifties and has this cheesy cover with sultry looking women on it. Inside the cover you can see where someone once tried to sell it for 25 cents but marked it down to 19. It smells like an old bookstore and the stories so far are...kind of...out there. I bought it because it has "That In Aleppo Once..." in it, which I've read before and loved. The jury's still out on the rest. A little arrogantly snippy maybe. I also just bought Dee Dee Ramone's Chelsea Horror Hotel. I'm not expecting much but love the Ramones anyway. It'll look nice on the shelf where I can pull it out and wave it in front of unsuspecting guests.
Leslie Vryenhoek Author of "Unsettled" (Issue 104: Poetry)
What I'm reading depends on what room I'm in. Up here in the study, I'm sneaking lozenges from Billy Collins' The Trouble With Poetry, but beside the bed I've got boYs (no, just Kathleen Winter's new short stories). Meanwhile, Bernice Morgan's Cloud of Bone is waiting for me to pull up a seat in the living room.
Alexander MacLeod Author of "Good Kids" (Issue 104: Fiction)
I'm reading Out Stealing Horses by the Norwegian writer, Per Petterson. I’m in the middle of it, but this book has one of the best openings I’ve ever read. The novel starts with a quick series of important, unforgettable scenes, all delivered to the reader in taut, vivid prose. The landscape and the sensibility are cold and clear and, so far, the book seems terrifyingly good.
Alison Pick Author of "House Hunting" (Issue 104: Poetry)
I'm reading Ambivalence by Jonathan Garfinkel, about the author's relationship (you guessed it, ambivalent) with Israel. For such a weighty topic, the book is light, funny, and very readable. I've recently been exploring what it means to be (half) Jewish, and it's a big relief to read someone whose hesitations about Zionism echo my own. I'm also reading Brian Henderson's new collection, Nerve Language, just nominated for this year's Governor General's Award. Brian and I were on a jury together last year and so I know him in that particular context, and acquainting myself with his poetry has been a real pleasure. It's a wonderful book: sharp, streamlined, and surprising.
Kerry Clare Author of "The New Peppermint" (Issue 104: Fiction)
I recently read Elizabeth Hay's Late Nights on Air-- the most audible book I've ever come across. I was struck by Hay's perfect evocation of snow crunching under bootsteps, of a paddle's sweep through water, of a lone voice talking on the radio being the only noise forever in a cold dark night. This story of various characters working together at a small Yellowknife radio station captures the fluid nature of human relationships, yet against such ordinary play is also a powerful sense of foreboding. Hay makes "The North" a place on earth, but allows for an understated mysticism. Also, this book has a beautiful dust jacket, which, I think, really matters.
Elisabeth Harvor Author of "First Real Estate" (Issue 104: Reflections)
Vivid, neurotic, reckless and memorable characters dwell inside two terrifically alive Canadian story collections: The Virgin Spy by Krista Bridge and Cobalt Blue by Mary Borsky. Krista Bridge, a gifted student of mine in the Humber School for Writers' Correspondence program a few years ago, writes introspectively and wonderfully acutely about young women suffering surfeits of sex and surfeits of doubt. While Mary Borsky, a writer whose work I only recently and joyfully discovered (in The New Quarterly) writes about the comic pathos of the lives of young married women, the lives of children, and the stunning collisions between children and their no longer married parents.
Several weeks ago I wrote a review of On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan for another website, but now that I have the chance to write even more for TNQ, I'd like to add to it a bit. But first a confession: I hated Ian McEwan's Atonement. I thought it was such a disingenuous jumble and there were also such huge holes in the plot. Hated it even though it was actually more subtle in some ways than his earlier books. On Chesil Beach, on the other hand, turned me into a total convert, in spite of an ending that left too many questions about one of its two characters unanswered. But enough quibbling, since it's so rare to find comedy this tender in contemporary fiction. It would also have been so easy for McEwan to lampoon Florence as she wanders like a frightened anthropologist into unknown terrain. But instead of doing this he uses sexual explicitness as a way of taking the high road with a character who's so terrified of "going all the way" that he himself goes all the way as a writer, allowing her to frantically mock herself as he lets us into the heart of her terror via a kiss. It's like being so intensely inside the fear of a person with a phobia that all you can see is how astounding it is, the horrified but wild lunge toward the next step.
Terry Griggs Author of "Confirmed" (Issue 104: Reflections)
Style and language being the main considerations, I've just started The Pesthouse by Jim Crace, very promising, and have been nibbling away at Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan, which is deeply and delightfully strange. Loved Mother's Milk by Edward St. Aubyn and Old Filth by Jane Gardam. Upcoming in non-fic is Jenny Diski's On Trying to Keep Still. And, to temper my literary Anglophilia, I'm also reading The Angry Island: Hunting The English by A. A. Gill, in which he eviscerates his fellow countrymen: "The lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beady-eyed, beefy-bummed herd of England." Very funny.
Grace Johnstone TNQ Volunteer
As someone with toes in both arts and letters I am always enamoured of people who can draw and write equally well. On a long train ride back from Montreal recently I brought Elisabeth Belliveau’s tender graphic novel the great hopeful someday from Conundrum Press. I fell quickly into the simple prose and delicate line drawings that evoked the city fleeting in the distance with its depanneurs and ghosts and drafty apartments. Her pages feel like scribbled notes on torn paper passed to you in class by your best friend, full of lists and longings and sketches and sighs over broken hearts. It is a book for anyone who has ever stared longingly out the window of a late-night train between cities. Below a drawing of the same night sky she writes “you are made of disaster and beer” and who hasn’t felt the same?
My other recent discovery is Miranda July’s website for her new book No One Belongs Here More Than You (noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com). July is the writer and director of the fantastic film Me and You and Everyone We Know and while I don’t even own the book yet I am drawn to reading her website at least once a day. She has written the entire text on the top of her refrigerator with a dry-erase marker and photographed it in segments for the website and if you’ve every thought about colour-coordinating your outfit to the galleys of your book she has some excellent suggestions. Everything July touches is infused with the type of spontaneous creativity that most of us can only aspire to.
Kim Jernigan Editor, The New Quarterly
I had a daisy petal relationship with Michael Winter’s latest novel, The Architects Are Here. I loved it, I loved it not. I loved his characters. They seemed to me real and modern and complexly drawn, and it was a pleasure to hear them talk. I resisted some of his stylistic idiosyncracies, not so much his wry refusal of non-essential apostrophes as his fondness for enjambed sentences and his occasional repetition of minor plot details. I loved the opening scene—it’s vivid and harrowing and visceral, and it sets in motion all that follows. I resisted the ending. Winter has said he wanted to write a novel about repercussions, but the repercussions here devolve into a cycle of revenge, a series of rapid fire jolts that, to this reader at least, felt contrived, or maybe just unnecessary, not the thing that held me. What did hold me was the tension he sets up between love and desire, between what we know—personally and professionally—and what we are, between a monied urban world and an impoverished rural one that none-the-less holds to its history. But last petal standing, I loved this book. There be truth in it.
