Literature

I’d passed Before I Wake in the bookstore umpteen million times, and it itched at me, as books do, but I passed it by. If you read the copy on the back of the book, it will tell you that young Sherry Berrett gets struck by a car and falls into a coma (yes, Robert, a coma, not a catatonic state—fool me once, etc). Her parents eventually make the heart-breaking decision to take her off life support, and then—when she doesn’t die—there’s all sorts of talk about miracles and whatnot. At the time I was walking past Before I Wake in the bookstore I had a “no Jesus” policy. A friend and I had been talking, and we noticed that in the popular media—television in particular—religion seemed to be tacked on to everything, whether it needed it or not, and particularly a sort of lukewarm, non-committal Christianity. Regardless of whether… Continue Reading →

I read The Waterproof Bible so long ago now that it feels like forever, but it’s so good, and since I’m already behind schedule anyway, I thought, fuck it, let’s write about it. I sprung for the hardcover, which I almost never do, but in this case it was worth it. Rather than your typical big-publisher hardback with an undistinguished cloth cover and a dust jacket with a pretty picture that will get ignored or damaged or lost, Random House made something that looks like the kind of thing McSweeney’s would have put together, with some really lovely gold leaf and a clever belly band that’s actually thematically relevant. The stock isn’t quite as good as what McSweeney’s would have used, but then McSweeney’s would have charged an additional ten bills for it, too. Anyway, the thing is gorgeous. This is the bit where I’m supposed to tell you what… Continue Reading →

Over the last year and a half or so I’ve read at least two dozen crime novels, and what sets this first Chief Inspector Alan Banks novel apart from all of them is how low the stakes are for most of the book. Almost every crime novel I’ve ever read involves a murder at some point (I’m hard pressed to think of one right now, but there may be a Chandler novel without a murder that I’m just not remembering; I read most of those ages ago), and Gallows View features only a single accidental death, and for most of the novel it feels like a peripheral concern. Alan Banks’ biggest concerns (despite the accidental death of an elderly woman, which one would think takes priority, but then one would be wrong) turn out to be a Peeping Tom and a ring of thefts. Well, to be fair the thefts… Continue Reading →

I’ve spent the last year or so—and especially the last six months—introducing myself to the world of crime/mystery fiction. (I don’t really know what to call it; there seem to be a number of genre subtypes, and I’m not familiar enough to be able to sort them out.) I’ve been having a great time with the genre, a far better time than even I expected. I think I went through ten novels in March alone. I picked up this book, the first of several Canadian noir reissues, based on a post on The Dusty Bookcase, a blog run by Brian Busby, who just also happens to be the series editor. The Crime on Cote des Neiges was first published in 1951, and is one of three detective novels set mostly in Montréal that Charles Ross Graham wrote under the nom de guerre “David Montrose.” (The others are Murder Over Dorval… Continue Reading →

The initial reviews of Light Lifting were excellent, but largely lacked the critical language that entices me to pick up a book. I don’t know if it’s a shortcoming on my part, or the way the literary conversation goes here in Canada, but I got the distinct impression that MacLeod’s stories were just very well executed variations of standard Munrovian realism. Because the book is published by Biblioasis I felt sure I’d agree that it was an excellent book (I have yet to be disappointed by anything of theirs), so I dutifully bought it, thinking I’d get around to it in the fall when that sort of thing seems to appeal to me a little more than usual. When Bronwyn and others started raving about it on Twitter in way that felt different, exciting, I knew it couldn’t wait and I wanted to be involved in the conversation, so I… Continue Reading →

Can I tell you what surprised me most about this book? Because months and months after I read it (I know, I’m sorry, I’m late with everything these days) the shock is still with me. What Boys Like isn’t funny. Well, okay, it isn’t primarily funny. There are bits in these stories that are meant to be funny, especially little bits of dialogue, which Jones has a wicked gift for, and those bits are funny, but these stories show a considerable range in terms of tone and emotional direction, just as you’d expect from a Metcalf-Rooke award winning collection. The reason this surprised me is because my primary experience of Amy’s writing is her blog, which is basically the funniest thing ever. I—honest to God—got the sense that she was first and foremost a humourist (and the one reading I went to, where I totally chickened out and went slack-jawed… Continue Reading →

I’d never read anything by Zsuzsi Gartner until now, except a few smatterings of the Darwin’s Bastards anthology she edited, but I had heard her name, and heard good things about her first book, All the Anxious Girls on Earth. Better Living Through Plastic Explosives is a title to inspire, and as reviews and comments came flooding in from friends and associates who’d acquired advance reading copies (as indeed my copy is), it seemed exactly the sort of thing I’d want to read. Gartner did not disappoint. The collection opens with a story called “Summer of the Flesh Eater” satirizing class conflict in an upper middle-class suburb. It’s clever, and biting, and a tad ridiculous, and remains the piece I remember most vividly. A motorcycle driving, steak-grilling, lawn-ornament-owning, working-class man moves into a cul-de-sac populated by unimaginably twee upper middle-class men and their amorphously defined wives. Told from the point… Continue Reading →

Sent to me by the fine folks at Invisible Publishing, L is the surreal story of Henry, a man with a troubled home life, the woman called L who moves into the cramped room above his café, and how the café and the city seem to shift and respond to their relationship and their emotions. At first I didn’t like the book at all. It felt awkward and lacking direction, and it didn’t help that Orti’s prose is incredibly strange. More than once I caught myself checking to see if L was in fact a translated work, because it had all the signs of having a serious case of translationese. And then, about halfway through, it hit me: L is a piece of French New Wave cinema. It is a Goddard film that has been transliterated from celluloid to paper. Once I realized that, everything made sense, and I found… Continue Reading →

I’ve been a fan of Heti’s writing since The Middle Stories in 2001. With those strange and sometimes whimsical stories she seemed to be edging up to conventional structures only to more fully write against them. Her first novel, Ticknor (2005), was a remarkably tight, intense book that once again blurred the lines between genres and conventions (in particular the literary novel and the biography). It’s one of my favourite books of the last decade. And then in 2007 I read her interview with Dave Hickey in The Believer, in which she said, “Increasingly I’m less interested in writing about fictional people, because it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story. I just—I can’t do it.” It seemed to me a repudiation of what made her fiction striking, challenging, and fresh. On the surface it would seem that… Continue Reading →