I wanted to write about something else today (maybe finish that Bad Behavior review, eh?), but I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore. Or whatever. The truth of the matter is that I saw something that pissed me off, maybe not a huge thing, but big enough, and I'm the kind of dude who likes to stomp around and make a fuss when I'm pissed off. So here's my fuss.

I learned today (and would have learned yesterday, if I hadn't been ill and skipped some reading), that Penguin has struck a deal with W H Smith to be their sole supplier of travel books. This is a Big Deal. (Canadians might recognize the company from their old Canadian operation, called SmithBooks, which was bought by local owners and merged with Coles to become Chapters. So not small potatoes.) First, W H Smith has a significant, often exclusive, presence in UK airports and train stations, 450 Travel stores in all, which means they have a bit of influence on the travel book market in the UK. This isn't quite vertical integration, but it has the same kind of anti-competitive stink to it, and the book industry has a special sensitivity to that particular smell. Second: Travel writers, publishers, and booksellers are rightly up in arms over the whole thing, and there are protests, boycotts, and one of Penguin's own travel writers has ended his relationship with the publisher and contacted the Minister for Culture. Finally, Penguin is the world's second largest publisher, with market-specific branches all over the place, including here in Canada. This whole debacle could be highly relevant to Canadians, as it could set a precedent; if they can pull this off in one market, what's to stop them from trying it in others? W H Smith issued a transparently ridiculous press statement about the deal being "easier for the customer", and Penguin hasn't said a thing. That in itself is telling; Penguin usually gives great press. If they genuinely believed this was a Good Thing, they'd be driving through the streets with a megaphone like Jake and Elwood. There's a follow-up post over at MobyLives if you're like me and are interested in more details.

So that's upsetting. But it's not what pissed me off. What initially did it is that I had to hear it from MobyLives in the first place. This is honest-to-fucking-God book news with possible implications for the entire book publishing industry. Do I hear about it from the Globe & Mail and their spiffy new more-and-better-coverage website? They devote a single link to it, in the form of a mangled, incomplete sentence. A headline with no story. What about the National Post and their new blog? I've teased them in the past for less than adequate coverage, but they've been improving more or less exponentially in the last few months. They devote a whole paragraph to it, essentially rehashing, and even linking to, the MobyLives post. Their analysis amounts to, and I quote: "Seems like a bit of a bone-headed move on the booksellers' part to me." So what about the Books department over at the Ceeb. If there's one thing the Ceeb does well, and God knows it's damned near the only thing sometimes, it's news. Nobody does news like the Ceeb. Ceeb in the hiz-ouse, yo. Survey says: not a goddamn word. Not one. So the professional journalists covering book publishing at three of Canada's best and most important news gathering agencies came back with a combined total of fifty-eight words on the subject. Right.

I'm not a journalist. I don't pretend to be one, and have no particular desire to be one. But presumably when the Post and the Globe launched all this new online hotness, the idea, as advertised anyway, was to give us more and better coverage. More reviews, more interviews, more commentary and so on. In defense of the Post, they're doing a better job than they were, and I had actually planned on linking to something of theirs today, but I'm too upset to be writing nice things, so it will have to wait a day or two. The Globe, I'm sad to say, was long on promise and short on delivery. Now, the guys who run the Books section over at the Globe are great, hard-working folks. No question. But why am I getting a marginally funny humour piece from Brian Joseph Davis when there's real industry news to be discussed? I know Martin Levin is off on assignment somewhere, but give me a break. They just did a feature on romance novel cover art for crying out loud. There was that lovely opportunity to practice some journalism when Richard Flanagan's great speech was published, but no juice there either. Where was the discussion of the underlying issues that led to the speech? Where was the analysis comparing the Australian and Canadian markets (lots to compare, I hear) and the inquiry on what it might mean to Canadians if such a precedent was set in a market like Australia? It wasn't in the Globe, that's for sure. I looked. Hell, I had to go to Google just to find the Flanagan speech once it was off the front page of the Books section, since the Globe's built-in search engine returned the same completely irrelevant results for every single set of search terms. MobyLives is run by a publisher, not a journalist. Somebody who is paid to make lovely books for us to read, not somebody, like our friends at the Post, the Globe, and the Ceeb, who are paid to tell us things about books and the publishing industry that we probably ought to fucking know. I should not have heard it there first.

The other thing, and no doubt you can't wait to hear about it, is something that even MobyLives got wrong. The story here is not the protest. Let's look at the headlines, shall we? First Moby: "Penguin boycott announced as furor erupts over strongarm deal with W. H. Smith" and "Support for Penguin, W.H. Smith boycott grows". Now the Post: "Bookmarks: Scholastic controversy, W.H. Smith boycott, designing an author's work". The Globe: "Brit travel writers angry over Penguin monopoly in airport, railroad bookstores". Now the Ceeb: oh, wait, right. Way to go Ceeb. Notice the similarities? To the book world, the deal itself should have been big, controversial news, and the inevitable protest a follow up. People getting angry over this nonsense is not the part that's newsworthy. Hell, people not getting angry would have almost been more newsworthy, because then at least they could have been asked "what's wrong with you? Don't you know what this means?" This happens time and time again where protests are concerned, but given how much chatter there is about how independent book reviewers have to be, how they can't merely act like publicity departments for publishers, it's disheartening to see the real story being shoved aside because some folks got, justifiably, a little shouty. If they want to be journalists rather than glorified PR men, maybe it's time to go gather some news. Isn't this exactly the sort of thing where grizzled old newspaper men, proper reporters, are supposed to, if not scoop the blogs, then at least give us the experienced, insider perspective that only a real news gathering agency can? Christ on a bike.

I'd never been to a book launch before. I wasn't sure how, or even if, it would be any different from your standard reading. I'd half expected something like the old bawdy houses we used to have in Waterloo, with raucous readings, cheap wine, nibbly little cheese things, and pleasant, half-drunk conversation. I suppose McNally Robinson is not exactly the place for that sort of thing (more because of its location in the city than the fact of it being a bookstore), though there were readings and pleasant conversations. I didn't realize until I got there that tonight's launch was actually for two books: Terry Griggs' Thought You Were Dead, which was why I went, and Vicki Delany's Gold Digger. Generally speaking, one wants to go to a book launch or reading intending to buy the author's book, if one hasn't done so already, but my budget only allowed for one, so it was Thought You Were Dead that I was reading on the subway home. At the request of Ms. Rebecca Rosenblum, and despite a bad experience playing journalist in the past (and with no digital camera available), I took notes. Behold the result:

The McNally Robinson is much like the flagship store in Winnipeg was when my sister took me there a few years back: large, bright, clean, with the appearance of a big box store, but with more knowledgeable staff and a selection focused more on readers than on some marketing guy's idea of what should be in a bookstore. There was a space set up on the second floor with spotlights, a very cool input/output node for a sound system, complete with mixing board and switches to control the store's PA for the immediate area (it was extra cool to hear the volume go down on Madeleine Peyroux's cover of Leonard Cohen's "Dance Me to the End of Love" in only our little corner), and entire shelving units mounted on casters to make room for the little stage with its academic looking podium and elegant display table. We sat on surprisingly comfortable, vaguely Eames-like faux Modernist chairs. It all felt rather intimate.

There were about a dozen of us, including the authors themselves, a turnout I think is indicative more of McNally Robinson's remoteness than the drawing power of the event (I spent nearly two hours on the TTC to get there). We were a microcosm of the standard literary crowd; we were the disheveled, the semi-formal, the prim, the greying, the youthful and the almost perversely bookish. There was even a lady in a spectacular hat of the 19^th Century New Orleans variety. The only group not visible was the lit punk brigade, whom I represented in spirit, if not appearance. One likes a diverse crowd.

As it turns out, the woman in the spectacular hat was Vicki Delany. She was up first, preferring mostly to "chat" rather than read directly from Gold Digger (though she did that too). The genesis of the novel is apparently a canoe trip Delany took with some European friends (well, one assumes they were friends), when she struck upon the idea of how ridiculous it would seem to the voyageurs and the prospectors during the Klondike gold rush that we would spend our money and leisure time exploring what, for them, was a lifestyle often fraught with hardship. The idea sat in the back of her mind, eventually finding expression in a historical murder mystery. She went on to explain how she was fascinated by the idea of the Klondike gold rush as the last great exodus spurred by optimism, and with certain parallels she sees in our optimism about how technology is shaping our future. I'd never thought of it quite that way before, and she's right: it is fascinating. I kind of wish I had the time to get into all the other interesting bits of her talk, but I just don't (I wrote a bunch of them down, though; ah, the joy of taking notes). Delany closed her talk by reading from Gold Digger, and though not the best reader in the world, she was confident enough to be better than most. Gold Digger may see itself reviewed here yet.

Terry Griggs took the stage next, sans spectacular hat, but armed with a lovely green pendant and an anecdote about (possibly) seeing Elizabeth May on the train reading P.D. James (we're all mystery fans, I think, even if we don't always go for detectives or police procedurals). Vicki Delany quipped that she should be reading Canadian (true!), and chuckles could be heard maneuvering through the crowd. She wasn't as big on impromptu speechifying as Delany was, so she got right down to the reading.

Griggs' reading was very dynamic, but not at all what I was expecting. She reads well, but when I see her fiction on the page, it has, not just an energy (it was still quite energetic when read aloud) but a rapidity about it. One doesn't skim Griggs' work (if one does, one misses quite a bit), but the voice in my head is considerably quicker than Griggs' own when she reads. I enjoyed listening to her read a great deal, but I think I prefer her words on the page.

I was able to meet Griggs after the reading, and of the dozens of authors I've been lucky enough to meet over the last few years, she is one of the most open and personable. We had a nice chat, during which I displayed my complete inability to engage anyone in reasonable small talk, and instead talked far too much about myself. She was obligingly patient with my shortcomings, and I left with a signed copy of Thought You Were Dead to start reading on the subway home. I'm only a touch over thirty pages into it, but I'm enjoying it so far (I finished Mary Gaitskill's Bad Behavior on the way to the launch, and I'll be writing a review of it tomorrow night). I'll have a full review up when I'm done reading it, but in the meantime I think that if you have the opportunity to attend a reading or similar, you should go.

Since this report was lighter on Terry Griggs stuff than I intended, allow me to point you in the direction of some more Terry Griggs stuff elsewhere on the internet, like this recent interview with Pickle Me This, the Revenge Lit flash fiction contest, and her recent takeover of the National Post's book blog. While you're at it, why not check out Vicki Delany's site. I hope you enjoyed this eleven-hundred word reminder of why I'm not a journalist.

There's some smart and relevant book coverage going on at the National Post right now. I for one, am shocked. Why the sudden shift, National Post? Has Shinan Govani been on vacation?

There's an interview with Andrew Steeves, publisher at Gaspereau Press, one of Canada's finest small presses. They've recently had to reduce staff, and Steeves was anxious to make it clear that the layoffs were not the result of the current economic crisis, but rather a move to find a healthy, stable scale for their operations.

I think it's important to stress that I don't think this is directly related to the more general economic downturn. Honestly, when you start a business from scratch you gradually try and figure out what size works for what you're doing. I mean, you go through so many years where there isn't a normal; the year previous can tell you nothing about what to expect. And only in the last couple of years have we started really to see several years in a row that looked similar, where we weren't seeing massive growth or massive change. So the last few years we've had a better look at what the reality is. We could see what problems were the growing problems and what problems were like 'Wow, we're really just in over our head' problems. That would be my sense of it.

I'm sorry that they had to let staff go. It can't be easy for a house that small, but I am glad that they'll be able to continue operating.

Secondly, Craig Davidson's debut collection of short stories, Rust and Bone, is being made into a film by French director Jacques Audiard. (No jokes about the French's lack of machismo, please.) Davidson was recently interviewed about the deal, and about some difficulties he's had as a writer.

My worry was: if you throw the entirely [sic] of yourself into any given endeavor and still wind up on what you perceive as the short side of the ledger ... it does have an oddly unhealthy manner of worming itself into your psyche. The idea sort of was: if I give myself fully to this at the expense of most other aspects of human existence and still fail, well, what am I really fit to accomplish?

It might seem a bit nasty of me, but I like to hear about writers struggling with issues of confidence; not because of some kind of schadenfreude, but rather because, as still a largely unpublished writer, it's good to know that I'm not the only one with those kinds of worries. Because God knows I've experienced some of those feelings myself.

Of course it wouldn't be the Post without something like this Q & A with Nathan Sellyn, whom readers may remember as the author of Indigenous Beasts, the book of short stories that gave me a panic attack on the streetcar. The questions are so inane the interviewer may as well have asked "where do you get your ideas from?" Maybe they just didn't want me to feel like I was missing out on coverage of Govani's calibre.

I was interviewed by Finn Harvor at his blog, Conversations in the Book Trade. Christ, I'm a long-winded bastard. I do hope I made at least a little sense. As always, errors, omissions, and so on are on me.

I wanted to like this novel, I really did. I even tried to like it. Sabatini's first book, a collection of linked short stories called The One With the News, was this amazingly nuanced examination of emotional complexity in a time of family trauma, and might be one of the best things ever published by The Porcupine's Quill (ugly cover and all—though really, it wouldn't be a PQ book be without a cover so ugly it could scare small children). Her second collection, The Dolphins at Sainte-Marie, was equally well-crafted, solidifying Sabatini as a disciple of Alice Munro. I learned several years ago, when Sabatini came to do a reading in Sudbury (not the first time we'd met), that she was planning to write a novel based very loosely on her grandfather's experiences during the Second World War. Though I have no clue how much of her grandfather's life remains in it, Dante's War is clearly that novel. And with Dante's War, Sabatini has achieved something that only a Canadian writer could do: she's written a World War Two novel with no conflict.

Okay, that was an exaggeration. There is conflict in the novel, but it seems mostly incidental and has little to do with driving the narrative. Query: when a novel is driven by something other than conflict (be it internal, external, whatever), where does it go? Answer: nowhere. Dante and Angelina are two Italian youngsters growing up between the wars in separate, smallish communities. Dante has an abusive father, and Angelina is harassed by a bitter old crone who probably killed her husband. Dante has an extremely loyal best friend to lean on, and a hermit for spiritual guidance. Angelina has an extremely intelligent and loyal dog for a best friend, and a wise priest for spiritual guidance. They meet in Rome just before Dante is shipped off to join the war effort, fall quietly in love, and spend the next few years writing to each other until Dante comes home and they get married. The end. So here's where you'd probably think things along the lines of "I bet they had a lot of difficulty with the separation, right? There was heartbreak and temptation and whatever, right?" Nope. They're both super-faithful, and though clearly lonely, they always seem to put those thoughts quickly from their minds so they can get on with the gardening or the fixing of airplanes or whatever. No real despair, no sexual frustration, nothing. (I've been in three long-distance relationships, some lasting for years—or two, I guess, since the third one was just the second one replayed a few years later—and there's very little that's genuine about how they cope with that aspect, if my experiences are any kind of indicator.) Now you're probably wondering "okay, but it was the war. I bet Dante was in constant danger and always fighting and such, right?" It makes sense that you might think that, but you'd be wrong. Dante spends most of the war fixing dive bombers far from the front lines, and though rationing is tight and the weather sucks, he's in no real danger for the bulk of the novel. When Dante does eventually see combat in North Africa, the facts of the battles and his near starvation are rendered so matter-of-factly, so free from suspense or drama, that it's impossible to believe that he won't come through it in one piece. His best friend Sabino ate a bullet near the end, but if you were paying attention in the opening pages, you already knew that was going to happen. "Okay, okay. But what about back in San Placido, where Angelina was. I bet there was tight rationing, and I know there were Nazi soldiers all over Italy during the war. Those weren't fun guys to have around. I bet Angelina was in constant danger!" Yeah, not really. It wasn't until near the very end of the war that San Placido started to feel the pinch, since they were too poor and remote a community to really bother with, and the Nazi soldiers were more of a nuisance than anything else for the better part of the war. There was this one soldier who was harassing Angelina, but we'd been told through the whole novel how she can toss her hefty brothers around and plow the fields and so on, so we're never really afraid for her, and she deals with him with the same matter-of-factness that Dante deals with the front lines. The closest thing the novel has to a moment of honest to God tension is when the Nazi soldiers find the body of the one who was harassing Angelina, and they ransack the village looking for partisans. One of the soldiers smacks Angelina across the head with a rifle, and her dog takes out his throat for his trouble. Sabatini somehow manages to elicit more sympathy and fear for the dog than for any of the people in the village (but he's a good and loyal little puppy, so of course he escapes the nasty soldiers). And... that's it really.

The title, if you're still inclined to be curious about that kind of thing, could actually be read as a metaphor for Dante's life. He's reputed to have a horrible temper, something he inherited from his abusive father, and it's always getting him in trouble. Or at least we're told it always is; it's one of those things that we're told, but never really materializes in an interesting or dramatic way in the text. Dante never does anything really upsetting or extreme. I don't even remember him raising his voice. He actually comes off as rather meek and diligent, particularly after joining the army. The war Dante is fighting is with himself, his temper, etc. It'd be a neat little metaphorical package if it was actually played out in the text. I wanted to see what other people thought about the book, and I came across Kathleen Govier's review. I would have probably liked the novel Govier described in her review, but Dante's War wasn't it. She must have been reading some other Dante's War, by some other Sandra Sabatini.

I'm so disappointed. The One With the News and The Dolphins at Sainte-Marie were these lovely, remarkable little books, and I was hoping for the same sort of richness from Dante's War. It just didn't materialize. Dante's War feels so much like a "proper" Canadian war drama that it almost borders on parody in some places (Dante's best friend always being assigned with Dante out of some kind of managerial kindness, the mother who lays upstairs dying of Cancer, the scene where the heroine's dog attacks a group of Nazi soldiers, takes one's throat, and then escapes unharmed, I mean seriously).

I'm now caught up on my reviews. Next is Bad Behavior, by Mary Gaitskill.

This book had been giving me the eye in my local store for a couple months before I broke down and bought it. The premise of the novel as reported by the back cover struck me as fifty percent intriguing and fifty percent off-putting. The intriguing: Auden, Hoolboom's narrator/protagonist hears a voice in his head, a voice other than his own. When he moves from Sudbury to Toronto after discovering he's HIV-positive, he meets video artist Steve Reinke, only to discover that it is Steve's voice he hears inside his head. (Reinke, according to the notes, is a video artist out here in the real world too, though unlike his fictional counterpart, he is not HIV-positive. Some of his work is available to watch online.) Steve and Auden become... well, friends is the wrong word, I think, but they become close, anyway, and Steve helps Auden begin writing a book about Steve's life. The book isn't just a book; it's also a machine, designed to heal Auden, to change the voice inside his head, and to alter the reader in such a way that a new personality will emerge from the experience. Sounds pretty amazing, right? Steve's video art also plays a pretty big role, though personally I think that video art is one of those things that sounds much more interesting when you read about it than it actually turns out to be when you see it. The off-putting bits on the back are the descriptions of The Steve Machine as an AIDS fable and plague journal. Though not actually true of this book (thank God), I always feel like the author (or the publisher on their behalf) has confused themselves with a social worker, and that they've just been assigned my case. Note to authors: I don't give a shit about your social agenda, unless you're telling me an interesting story in an interesting way, with interesting characters. Even then I still won't give a shit about your agenda, but I'll probably like your book. Whenever I see a phrase like "AIDS fable," it makes me worried that I'm about to read a book about Gay People. I don't mean a book about characters who happen to be gay, because I'll take an interesting book about gay characters over a dull one about straight characters any day of the week. A book about Gay People is one in which the characters' homosexuality becomes their sole important characteristic, and the world of the novel has been built around that sexuality, rather than it being merely one fact among many in that world. (I won't even get into the fact that I know it's ridiculous of me to assume that a book with an HIV-positive male narrator means that narrator is gay, except to say that we're talking about literature as social work, not literature as art or even literature as a reflection of reality, because we know that in either of those last cases such an assumption would be foolish.) There's also the strong possibility that the book will become about The Disease, and that the world of the novel will be constructed solely so that we can cry over people dying of AIDS, and we can rage against an uncaring society and a corrupt system and I don't even care enough to finish the sentence that shit bores me so much. It turns out I didn't have to worry; neither Hoolboom nor Coach House Books thought he was a social worker. Instead, they all seemed to think he was a writer who wanted to tell an interesting story in an interesting way with interesting characters. As it happense, they were right.

Holboom's prose is casual and energetic, bordering on the Canadian Indie Style, but with enough discipline and control to avoid actually flying off into The Style. Though Auden seems to want to sublimate himself to Steve as the driving force of the story, it's Auden's strong, wonderfully developed personality that really shines through in sentences and paragraphs of The Steve Machine. I quite like this bit:

In my new dreams I savoured dinners with conversation so witty my guests ached with laughter, and all of them begged me to share their bed afterwards, startled by my perfect fashion sense and sexual athleticism. Shallow dreams, I knew, but sometimes even the unconscious gets tired of outputting Greek myths and new corporate logos. Meanwhile, in my waking hours, a small, angry man with a mouth in place of understanding hunted for blame. Like the hummingbird, he'd learned just one tune, and never tired of playing it. It was my fault. That's what he let me know. Even if the day hadn't started up yet, something somewhere was going wrong and I was to blame. When I spoke too frequently, this feeling would start creeping into conversation. Some were born with subliminal seduction, others with subliminal failure: it was a little trick some of us had learned to keep happiness from spoiling a view that had grown only too familiar.

There were two things I knew for sure when I tested positive. That I was going to die. And that I was going to hunt down the voice that was forever busy inventing new kinds of failure, and squeeze its little windpipe until it snapped between my fingers. I would not die guilty. I just didn't have the time. (p. 98)

So much of The Steve Machine is about the roiling course of Auden's attitudes and emotions as he becomes himself, the owner of his own true voice, in the face of his disease and blessing/curse of his relationship with Steve and the book they're writing together. For every moment of despair there's a moment of strength or apathy or affection. Interestingly, speaking of affection, I never really figured out if either Auden or Steve are gay; they clearly both like men, but there are passages that could indicate they might also like women. It just doesn't seem crucial to the book or to their identities to pin a definite sexual identity on either of them. And that's frankly refreshing. In literature, as in life, they are too many people whose sexuality eclipses all their other qualities to the point that it becomes the primary way you think of them as people (and don't those people irritate you?), but there are just as many people for whom phrases like "I don't like applying labels" actually means deep internal confusion, rather than the transcendence of labels that one imagines is the desired impression such phrases are intended give. Hoolboom ought to be commended for managing to create characters who actually achieve that transcendence.

Like Steve Reinke, Mike Hoolboom works primarily as a film and video artist. Though he's written other books, The Steve Machine is his only novel to date. I do hope there will be others.

Next is Dante's War, by Sandra Sabatini.

Wandering Time was a gift from a friend of mine, and it couldn't have arrived at a more necessary time. I'm not generally known as a nature loving sort of guy. Quite the opposite, actually. I'm known as a nature hating kind of guy. That's not strictly true, it's just the reputation I've acquired over the years by doing things like not wanting to go camping, preferring to do indoor things like read books and watch films, and leaving my rural logging town for the big scary city of Toronto. The truth is, I love nature in small doses. When I lived in Waterloo I'd go to the park to watch the ducks when I wanted to relax, and here in Toronto I go out and watch the squirrels as they frolic. They're very calming. During the winter months, I was going through a personal crisis that was particularly bitter and troubling. I needed a way to de-stress, and the usual methods weren't working. I couldn't even go out to look at the squirrels, because it was winter. It was then that this book, an upbeat collection of journal entries and meditations on nature, arrived in my mailbox. If I couldn't go out and explore what passes for nature in downtown Toronto (there's some lovely little nooks full of trees and bushes and squirrels and birds, actually), I could at least read about somebody else exploring a more rugged landscape.

I don't know anything about Urrea, except that he's a Latin American writer who grew up in the inner city and moved eventually to a more rural lifestyle. Wandering Time is essentially a much-edited journal of his encounters with man and (mostly) nature over the course of a full year, divided by seasons rather than more precise chronological measurements. It was a soothing book. Some of Urrea's observations were a little trite, but that's part of the charm. Wandering Time is gentle, meandering, and fun in the same way that many of the most simple pleasures left over from childhood can be fun. Urrea may be a great poet, an author of strong literature, but it doesn't really show through in this book. There was very little sophisticated or challenging about it; it's more like a cool bath on a hot day. I wouldn't recommend this book to everyone, but it made me feel good at a time when I needed cheering up.

Next up, The Steve Machine, by Mike Hoolboom.

Bragi Ólafsson's Pets, published by Open Letter Books and translated by Janice Balfour is really fucking good. It's the best book I've read in at least eight months, possibly longer. Bragi Ólafsson is probably best known to Canadians as the bass player for the Sugarcubes, the band Björk was in before going solo and becoming the coolest weird chick on Earth. If you're anything like me, the first thing you thought upon learning this fact was: "a novel written by a celebrity? When was the last time you read one of those that didn't suck?" It turns out that Ólafsson is a pretty big deal in Iceland's literary scene. He's a respected author who's won a bunch of prizes and runs his own publishing house. And no wonder, really. The Pets is goddamn brilliant.

Here's the rundown: Emil Halldorsson is a bit of an asshole, but he's a likable asshole, and he's just come home from a trip to England. He has a son (who lives with his mother) and a girlfriend, but on the way home he makes a date with a lovely young lady who doesn't know about his girlfriend. While he's waiting for her and some other friends to come over, Havard Knutsson, a rather horrible man from his past, shows up unannounced. Emil doesn't want to see him, but knows that Knutsson won't go away until he's good and ready, so he hides. Under the bed. It's not the most brilliant of plans, but Emil doesn't have a lot of options and Knutsson has him pretty rattled. Emil's right to be rattled; though it takes most of the book to get all the specifics about how destructive he really is, watching Knutsson slowly and deliberately descend on Emil's home in the opening sections of the book is incredibly intense. Knutsson invites himself in, and eventually winds up holding a kind of impromptu party for the parade of Emil's friends and acquaintances that show up at his door. All while Emil listens and watches from beneath the bed.

The Pets is alternately funny, creepy, and wonderfully strange. It never stops moving. Janice Balfour's translation is crisp and energetic; there's a wonderful sense of alien-ness, of a different culture, without the prose suffering from any awkwardness or "translationese". It feels almost like Ólafsson could have written the book in English himself, and I love that about it.

What else? The ending is phenomenal. It was dramatic, and frustrating, and a little bit shocking and awful, and the only possible way the book could have ended without being completely unsatisfying. Goddamn brilliant, I swear. I want to say more, but The Pets was surprising at every turn, and I think a lot of what works about the novel depends on not knowing what's going to happen next.

Bragi Ólafsson's The Pets was published by Open Letter Books, and translated by Janice Balfour. Next up is Wandering Time, by Luis Alberto Urrea.

The Taker and Other Stories, published by Open Letter Books and translated by Clifford E. Landers is the first of Rubem Fonseca's works to appear in English, though I understand he's been quite influential in Brazil for most of his career. He was a cop—commissioner of police, in fact—before picking up a pen. I didn't know that before reading the book, but it fascinates me now that it's come to my attention. These stories are dark, violent, and terrifying in some ways; many of the characters are so unapologetically apathetic about their behaviour and circumstances they border on the sociopathological. That's the sort of thing that really gives me the heebie-jeebies (that's the medical term, right?).

"Night Drive" is the perfect opener for the book, and if The Taker is representative of Fonseca's other work, then it's a perfect introduction to his writing. The story is simple, semi-anonymous, and shockingly brutal. In roughly two pages, Fonseca builds a normal-seeming, domestic world, and then brings it crashing down when we learn that the narrator and family breadwinner relaxes in the evenings by running down young girls with his car. I'd heard these stories were the subject of some controversy when first published in Brazil, and given that I've also heard Brazil has the same kind of rural-centred soft-focus literary tradition we have here in Canada, that makes perfect sense. These stories would be controversial here as well, if they managed to get published at all. (I'm not certain they would have been.) Urban brutality doesn't feel good, after all, and making us feel good is generally what we want our cultural myths to do for us.

For all its kick, "Night Drive" isn't the story that really stayed with me. There's actually two, and I'm a little bothered that they're still with me. I quite frankly don't understand what's going on in them. I don't mind saying that's a little unusual, though not entirely unprecedented. I've been baffled by short stories in the past (the first time I read Dubliners comes to mind). The first story is "The Book of Panegyrics," which appears to be about a man scamming some cash and a place to hide out by posing as a professional caregiver for a misanthropic old man who has a strange story about a book that was written in his honour, and various acts of vengance and cruelty. It could have been a straightforward piece about class conflict (The Taker has some fine examples of those), but from there it becomes exceptionally weird. The man posing as a caregiver winds up bedding the real female caregiver quickly and easily, on top of which he seems to be suffering from some kind of paranoid delusions (I write "seems" because he may not be delusional; it's hard to tell). The man posing as a caregiver is also the narrator, and that leads to other problems figuring out what this story is about. He spends most of his time telling the story of leeching off the old man and his family, and on the old man's story, but those things are clearly less important to him than whatever undisclosed conspiracy has him hiding out in the first place. Spending virtually no time on the issue that is clearly the most important to the narrator baffles the hell out of me.

The other piece that sticks with me is "The Eleventh of May", which appears to be about a retirement home where the residents are slowly being murdered to ease the burden on the state. There's a lot of the same tropes that you find in most retiree/inmate fiction (the boredom, the abuse and neglect, the paranoia), but there are clearly other things going on. I just don't know what they are. I have a feeling I can't explain that there are some pretty specific criticisms being leveled against the Brazilian government, about which I know essentially nothing except that there is one. That I was missing a big chunk of necessary cultural context was clear for most of these stories, but I feel like "The Eleventh of May" could be a darker, creepier One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest if I had a better grasp of Brazilian culture.

I'm reluctant to mention this next thing, because I really did enjoy the book, but I was bothered by Landers' translation. I don't mean its accuracy; I don't read Portuguese, so I can't speak to that. The one thing—perhaps the only thing—that I want out of a translation is that it function as an English document. By that I mean that the language of the translation flows easily. I've seen a variety techniques for shoe-horning the quirks of one language in the quirks of English, and they can all work just fine. A great example is Richard Pevar and Larissa Volokhonsky excellent work on The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol. However the awkwardness that you can't quite put your finger on, that sense that a sentence is correct without being quite right that we call "translationese" doesn't work for me. Unfortunately, The Taker has it in spades. (It's not terrible, not at all like Andrew Hurley's colossal failure with Borges' Complete Fictions.) I have a hard time putting my finger on specific instances, but whole sections of the book just didn't feel quite right. They felt like translations. These stories are worth dealing with the translationese, though. More than worth it.

The Taker and Other Stories was published by Open Letter Books. Next up is The Pets, by Bragi Ólafsson, also published by Open Letter Books.

The Biblioasis folks, who have published many fine books, including Rebecca Rosenblum's fine short story collection, Once, are running a Revenge Lit contest to celebrate the launch of Terry Grigg's new novel, Thought You Were Dead (looks quite interesting, actually). Many of the entries are being posted on the contest blog. "Speak Softly", my own entry, went up today. Check it out! And remember, there's still time to enter.