Literature

I must admit that despite being a big, big fan of Fleming’s Bond series, I was a little disappointed by The Man with the Golden Gun. The opening was very promising: a brainwashed James Bond walks into Secret Service headquarters and attempts to assasinate M (whose name we finally learn, the biggest shock in the whole Bond series). Fleming is always at his best when Bond is on the ropes, a condition more frequent in the novels than the films. Once he meets up with Scaramanga in a Jamaican whorehouse and gets back into himself, the novel falls apart a bit. Mostly it’s due to how poorly Fleming handles American dialogue. Though Scaramanga is Catalan (Catalonian?) originally, he spent significant time in the United States and speaks in an American accent, and with Fleming’s notion of mid-60’s American slang. And Fleming really, really sucks at American vernacular. Scaramanga is a… Continue Reading →

I don’t norally say things like this, but I think it’s an entirely apt assessment, and I couldn’t get it out of my head the whole time I was reading this. Entitlement is Dirty Sexy Money meets A Separate Peace. For those not in the know (and judging by that fact that it’s being canceled—yet another little pleasure I’ll have to let go of—not many of you are), Dirty Sexy Money is about how lawyer Nick George’s adult life is turned upside down as he takes responsibility for cleaning up the various messes made by the Darling family, the inconceivably wealthy family he was close to when growing up. A Separate Peace is of course the vaguely homo-erotic novel about coming of age at a private school that everyone who went to public school in Ontario was made to read in high school in the 1990s. Entitlement is more or… Continue Reading →

I had expected this book to take me only a day or so to read; after all it’s not only quite short, it’s written by one of my favourite authors. It took me more than two weeks to read. Usually taking so long with a book means either that it is extremely long, or it has trouble holding my interest. Neither was the case with At A Loss For Words. Instead I found that I was so emotionally invested in the material that I found it virtually impossible to stay with the book for any length of time. If you shortened the time frame and switched the pronouns around, the plot—a writer, suffering from writer’s block, is reunited with a lost love for an intense long-distance romance, only to be callously abandoned by him a second time, with traumatic consequences—would be a pretty accurate description of the last twelve months… Continue Reading →

There’s a lot of energy in this book. The opening story, “A Sound Like Dolphins,” is possibly the weakest in the book, but it also sets up nearly every story in the book with its blend of frank violence and sexuality and the every day mess that is domestic life. When we think of tales of domestic life, particularly in this country, we tend to think of rural—or at least not explicitly urban—families living lives of no real import but nonetheless dealing with nuanced emotional and moral consequences. We also tend to think of these works as focusing primarily on the lives of women. Being, as we are, nearly a decade into the 21st Century, one would hope that we could put aside in both our national literature and our national subconscious such simple, ridiculous notions such as women having more or more interesting/important things to say about domesticity through… Continue Reading →

Those who know me, if I am known at all, know me as a bit of a nitpicker (okay, more than a bit). Little details can often get under my skin. I was therefore disappointed to find problems on the very first page of Be Good, indeed with the epigraph itself. There are three quotations that open the book, the third being lyrics from “God’s Gonna Cut You Down,” attributed to Johnny Cash. Johnny Cash did indeed record the song in 2003, and it was released in 2006, nearly three years after his death. Cash’s five “American Recordings” albums were all excellent, but he only wrote fifteen of the sixty-eight songs on those albums. All the rest were covers. “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” is a traditional roots song of the kind that used to be known as a “negro spiritual” and then later just a “spiritual”, and is better… Continue Reading →