Canadian Book Challenge

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 →

It’s always interesting to read novels written by critics, and I must say that I was looking forward to A Week of This with greater than average anticipation, because not only is Nathan Whitlock the reviews editor for Quill & Quire, he’s also quite well-known as a blogger in the somewhat limited circles I travel in. (I have linked to his blog above, but not his author-promo site, because it resizes your browser window, and quite frankly, fuck that.) The question one always has to ask with critics-cum-writers, is what will they do about all those pronouncements they’ve made over the years? Will they swing for the fences and attempt to be the next Gaddis or Pynchon, or will they play it safe, get their man on base and settle for being the next Mike Barnes or Elizabeth Hay? Nathan Whitlock, it seems to me, chose to bunt. What I… Continue Reading →

When I bought this book, it was, as Steven admits to sometimes doing, mostly because of the cover. Really, who can resist a barely-clad woman in black? Not I. It wasn’t solely because of that, though. Part of it was the quotation from Timothy Findley on the back, and part of it was because there aren’t many Canadian novels (well, far fewer than those of our British and American cousins, anyway) that take the urban experience seriously, and I’m becoming more and more an urban creature since moving to the south. This novel, if nothing else, promised to be intensely urban. I was therefore quite saddened to find that the novel was pretty terrible. Indigo Blackwell, our protagonist, is a vapid character living a more or less meaningless existence, working a not-very-satisfying job and married to a husband (Sam) who is selfish and mildly manipulative. He’s doing research for his… Continue Reading →

I bought this book because it was the only volume of science fiction in the entire Canadian section of my favourite neighbourhood book store, and I had never before read a Canadian novel that was deliberately labeled as SF. The reviews plastered all over it (from publications as diverse as Analog and Quill & Quire, though strangely no indication of what the book was actually about) were from sources I respected and more than piqued my interest. It turns out Phyllis Gotlieb is fairly well-known in SF circles, but I am an interested outsider at best. Everything I’ve read about Gotlieb’s work, and about this novel in particular, suggests that it is violent and highly sexual, though not necessarily erotic, and I found those statements to be true. It took me a good thirty or forty pages to get the hang of the book, but after that it took me… Continue Reading →