Author: August

I picked this book up because of Mr. Beattie‘s appreciative essay in the Salon des Refusés issue of Canadian Notes and Queries. I hope that he won’t mind my quoting from it. He wrote: The only thing that can be said definitively about Jarman’s stories is that they do not resemble the kind of blandly naturalistic pieces of psychological realism that are normally associated with Canadian short stories. […] Some writers write from the head, others write from the heart. Jarman writes from the gut. Jarman’s stories are not places to turn for comfort or succour. He is a ridgidly unsentimental writer, who eschews pat resolutions and reassuring platitudes. […] Instead, he writes subversively about outcasts and roughnecks, men who are desperately trying to eke out an existence on the margins of a society that seems ferociously inimical. The stories are told with a heightened awareness of language and its… Continue Reading →

Diane Schoemperlen is one of my favourite authors. Her short story collection, Forms of Devotion, is among my favourite volumes of short fiction, Canadian or otherwise. I’ve had Red Plaid Shirt sitting on my shelf waiting to be read for quite some time now, alongside Our Lady of the Lost and Found. I was saving it for a time when I felt really excited about short fiction, and thanks to the recent Penguin/Salon controversy, that time is now. Imagine my disappointment, then, to learn that many of these stories are from previous collections. It was only outweighed by my joy at learning that Schoemperlen had written more than four books. For some reason, when Forms of Devotion was released, none of her works before In the Language of Love were ever mentioned. I can only imagine that’s because they are out of print, but I now at least know there… Continue Reading →

I read The Girls Who Saw Everything based almost solely on Mr. Beattie’s recommendation, and was well rewarded. Dixon’s novel was playful and witty, absurd and serious, emotionally complex and fully engaged with literary culture (though not disconnected from how that culture is viewed from the outside). I was quite shocked then, to learn that Dixon is not primarily a writer of prose fiction, but rather a playwright and actor. Dixon seems quite at home in prose, and the book was a joy to read. Were it not for my inability to look away from the CBC’s coverage of the Olympics I would have finished this days ago, perhaps even on the day I began it. The brilliantly named Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club is a collection of fascinating eccentrics, though their taste in literature is at times questionable (In the Skin of a Lion their favourite novel?… Continue Reading →

I read Open several years ago, because I’d been hearing Lisa Moore’s name all over the place and wanted to see what the fuss was all about. I don’t recall if I was living in Waterloo or Sudbury at the time, but I do remember somebody accusing me of buying the book solely because the cover featured an attractive woman in a bikini. I also remember enjoying the book quite a bit, but not why, nor are the details of any of the stories clear. Degrees of Nakedness will probably elicit a similar reaction from me several years from now. I enjoyed the book, but there’s nothing about it that I would really call remarkable or particularly unique. Each of the stories seems told in the same detached, slightly sombre tone, and Moore’s prose is so relentlessly clean and straightforward that it’s difficult to feel much of anything for most… Continue Reading →

I admit to buying this book for the sole reason that it was made into a film starring Ellen Page. After seeing her performances in Hard Candy and Juno, as well as interviews with her, I simply could not resist. She’s far more intelligent and dedicated to her craft than most people her age in any field, and light years beyond your average actor or actress. While I was reading I noticed a full page ad in the back of the book for “reading guides” that Anansi makes available for download. I think they’re intended to help book groups with discussion, and I find the idea fascinating. The guide won’t really tell you anything about the level of discussion found in your average book group (and The Tracey Fragments doesn’t seem like the kind of choice your average book group would make), but rather what Anansi thinks the level of… Continue Reading →

I did not realize it when I purchased this book, but it is a sort-of sequel to his 1996 novel Troutstream, which also happens to the be the name of the fictional Ottawa suburb in which both books take place. Perhaps it would have been useful to have read that book first, I don’t know. I bought Exotic Dancers mostly, I’ll admit, because of the interesting cover and the fact that it’s told in several different voices, including passages in which the narrator breaks the fourth wall and directly addresses the reader and discusses events in his life unrelated to the story. Besides, the title suggested that there might be a little bit of sex and adventure in this story, and I am still on a deliberate search for something less parochial in Canadian letters. The first fifty pages could not have done more to turn me off. The introductory… Continue Reading →

I enjoyed this novel, but I’m having some difficulty trying to explain why. It reads, for one thing, like the lyrics to a Dresden Dolls song. It is so crammed with contradictory metaphors that, while the prose is quite lovely, it often betrays its own internal logic, tenuous as it is. Imagine that Jeannette Winterson has read about two-thirds fewer books than she actually has, and has also lost her interest politics and you’ll have a good idea of how Claudia Dey’s prose functions. Not my sort of thing at all, really. And yet I could not put it down. The plot and characters were very fairy-tale-like, with names like “Eugenia”, “Immaculata”, and “I.I. Finbar Me the Three”. Eugenia, the narrator, is on a quest to find her father, a man who seems, based on his behaviour, to be either a mad artist or a mad hobo, or potentially even… Continue Reading →