Canadian Book Challenge

I received this book as a gift several years ago, but the subject matter (a country and western singer from Toronto) put me off it, as well as the fact that it’s a pretty ugly book with uncomfortably tight binding. Those may be stupid reasons to put off reading a book, I guess, but those are the kinds of things that can go through your mind when you’re looking for your next reading experience. It’s right up there with “am I in the mood or action, or contemplation?” I also think that I may have insulted the person who gave it to me by not reading it right away, which was not my intention at all. But I guess there’s no going back to those moments, right? So a few days ago I finally felt it was time, and here we are. Robertson’s protagonist, James, is in fact a country… Continue Reading →

I only just recently tracked this novel down, an old professor of mine having recommended to me two or three years ago. I had been sitting on a comfortable but somewhat worn green recliner in his office, discussing my disappointment with how parochial and predictable and just plain bloodless the CanLit scene had become, when he pulled this book from his shelf and had me read a section near the beginning in which Russ Littlebury, the protagonist, assaults a funeral director. He challenged me: how often do you come across something like this in a Canadian novel? The answer was almost never. Canadian novels, with a few notable exceptions (Robertson Davies and Russell Smith both come to mind) are seldom boisterous and even more seldom dangerous. We seem to excel at expressing quiet dignity, quiet pain, quiet lives. If we tackle large themes at all, or the messiness and violence… Continue Reading →

At last the trilogy is over. The more I read of this third book in The Fionavar Tapestry, the more I was reminded of The Lord of the Rings, and certainly not in a good way (I am not a fan). Obviously Kay is a fan; he helped Christopher Tolkien edit The Silmarillion, after all. But I think what he wound up doing with this trilogy, his first attempt at long-form high fantasy, was take his fan status too far. So much of The Fionavar Tapesty can be paralleled directly with events in The Lord of the Rings. There is the same sense of a world obsessed with the past, there is an ancient and beautiful/powerful race journeying to a land of their own in the West (the lios alfar in Fionavar, but plain old elves in Tolkien’s world). Each includes dwarves under the mountains and riders on the plain,… Continue Reading →

I was talking last night with someone about the fact that I was reading The Wandering Fire, and not enjoying it very much, and that I was disappointed, particularly since I enjoyed Tigana so much, and Kay came so highly recommended. In him I found a kindred spirit, and he proudly proclaimed that The Fionavar Tapestry, of which this book is the second part, is a pile of wank. Good call, that. I think, if anything, The Wandering Fire was worse than The Summer Tree. The one character that I had held out hope for, a Toronto law student named Kevin Laine, suddenly became another high fantasy puppet. Up until this book he was the only one of the five transplanted Torontonians not to have unlocked secret knowledge, discovered godlike powers, or become a Conan-like action hero in the space of a few days. Up until this book. Midway through,… Continue Reading →

You’ll notice that the cover on the left doesn’t match the title of the book. That’s because The Summer Tree is in fact the first book in a trilogy called The Fionavar Tapestry, and my copy has all three parts of the trilogy bound together in a single volume. I list them as separate books, however, because even within this single volume they are broken up with separate title pages, acknowledgments, tables of contents, etc. It’s three books bound together as one; that’s my policy on this stuff and I’m sticking to it. With that out of the way, I can talk about the book itself. It’s the second thing I’ve read from Canadian fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay, the first being a quite good novel inspired by Italian history called Tigana. I didn’t realize until I was more than half-way through that The Summer Tree was Kay’s first novel.… Continue Reading →

I don’t have the dust jacket for this book at present, but I read a summary of it online, and the conclusions that others have drawn about these stories, the certainties about things left unsaid, made me feel like I did when I was a child, when in the movies an actor and actress would embrace and the screen would go dark. I know now, as an adult, that it meant they were having sex in whatever magical land existed off-camera, but as a child I had no idea, and so missed several rather important plot points. Reading those other peoples’ impressions I felt like I had misunderstood when things faded to black. Reflection makes me think that perhaps I didn’t misunderstand. Quite a bit occurs in the unstated moments of Munro’s short fiction. What she leaves out is as important as what she describes, but I don’t get the… Continue Reading →

I’ve never been particularly touched by Holocaust narratives, and though strictly speaking this isn’t a Holocaust narrative, I was finally able to emotionally connect with the event. Nathan Gelder is a half-Jewish Dutchman (his mother is Dutch, and I thought that Jewish ancestry was matrilineal, but I could be wrong) who loses his family in the Nazi invasion of Holland, while he is sent to live with his rich uncle in Canada. My mother’s family comes from Holland as well, and we lost a great deal of family as a result of the Nazi regime, although we’re gypsies and not Jews. I’m too young—far too young—to have felt the impact on a personal level, but still I think there’s a movement, not in an organized sense or anything, but more like a general feeling, among people of my generation to want to feel involved and connected somehow to events of… Continue Reading →

If you’ve been reading this site for the last month, you’ll know that I’ve joined The Canadian Book Challenge, a contest wherein participants are asked to read thirteen books by Canadian authors between October 4th 2007 and the first of July 2008. Author Steve Zipp was kind enough to send me a copy of his recent novel Yellowknife to use as one of my thirteen selections. I tell you this only in the interest of full disclosure, although regular readers will know that I would never let such a thing colour my opinion of a book one way or another. The book itself, the physical artifact, is quite handsome and feels good in the hands. The paper is of exceptional quality, and the matte cover rather refreshing. It’s published by Res Telluris, a house with which I was previously unfamiliar, but as Yellowknife is such a fine specimen, it seems… Continue Reading →

I read The Temptations of Big Bear several years ago as part of a course on contemporary Canadian literature. I was struck by Wiebe’s formal experimentation and his deft, original approach at dealing with aspects of Canada’s history that can be uncomfortable for many contemporary Canadians to acknowledge. It was a delicate, graceful book, and I’d squeeze the word “accomplished” in there somewhere if I could figure out how. So I was definitely looking forward to his 1974 follow-up book of short stories, Where is the Voice Coming From?. Turns out it was pretty terrible. Wiebe does not excel at the short story form at all. There are a few piece like “Scrapbook” and “Tudor King” that read like they were intended to be poignant coming of age tales about children dealing with the harsh realities of mortality in the prairies, but instead they are empty, amateurish scraps of narrative… Continue Reading →

I met Leon Rooke briefly in 2001 at the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival, the same day I met Sheila Heti and George Elliott Clarke. I heard him read some stories, at least one of which hadn’t been published yet. He didn’t need a microphone; his voice wasn’t just loud, it was big. You could hear it through the entire festival grounds. You could feel it. I told him that I had never read any of his books, but that after that performance I would go and buy the next one I found. And I did, in fact I bought two (Shakespeare’s Dog, and Painting the Dog). Fat Woman is my third, and I didn’t realize until I was nearly finished it that it was his first novel. My edition isn’t the one you see pictured here. Mine is a tacky blue mass-market paperback from a company called General Publishing, part… Continue Reading →