My Tragic Right Hip

Beautiful Friends, The End

2011-07-26T15:07:00.003-04:00

What a day, a birth day, indeed, to say good-bye to this particular spot and happily announce that we have moved to a new house, a permanent house, kindly built for us by Stuart Lawlor @ Create Me This.

Please join us and update your links: www.tragicrighthip.com

#54 - Suddenly

2011-07-09T19:21:00.004-04:00

First, I am going to preface this review with a statement: I adored Bonnie Burnard's The Good House. It's a novel I picked up on a whim from Book City when it was first published and sang its praises to everyone who would listen for years. It's a classic, right up there with The Stone Diaries, Clara Callan, and Away (book I read all around the same time), and so I was excited to read Bonnie Burnard's latest novel Suddenly, if only because it's the first one she's published in 10 years. That's a long time to wait.

Sadly, I probably never should have read this book. It's neither the right time of my life (it's a novel about truly middle-aged women) nor am I in the right frame of mind (having spent the last nine months battling my own life-threatening disease, I couldn't quite cope with the breast cancer victim at the centre of the novel) to appreciate the gift of Suddenly. There's no doubt in my mind that Bonnie Burnard's a wonderful writer. She has an ability to bring the everyday to the page that's unparalleled by many of her contemporaries. It's a unique gift, and her voice reminds me deeply of Carol Shields, which is why I was so very disappointed in this book.

Sandra, our heroine, finds an evil lump in her breast at the end of the summer -- her grandchildren have just gone back to the city with her husband, and she sits alone after a swim contemplating the hard reality of her future. Of course, her friend Jude has battled breast cancer and survived, and Sandra hopes she will too. Alas, it is not to be, and the majority of the novel takes place on her deathbed, that awesome Canadian-woman-writer-trope, where the family rallies around and all of the action takes place in reverse as the dying go through their lives, their relationships, their happiness and their regrets with a fine-toothed comb.

But one remains easily lost within this book because the point of view isn't that simple, it switches from Sandra, to her best friend Colleen (who is beautiful, but childless, natch, and married to Sandra's brother, the surgeon Richard), to her other best friend Jude (the ex-hippie, jilted by a Texan lover who left her on a farm to go fight the Vietnam war after casually fathering her son), to her husband Jack, and back again. It's all over the place and the pronoun "she" doesn't help matters when all three main characters are women...

It's a tedious book, with tedious, unbelievable characters: Sandra's a saint; so's Colleen only she's beautiful too, Jude's "wild" but reformed, and they all feel so old they're covered in a layer of dust. These are the women of my mother's generation, one of them could have been my mother, and yet they have no sense of humour, no sense of adventure and really no life in them at all -- even when it's "flashing" before them as their best friend fades away in a cloud of morphine and horrible pain from an awful disease that takes far too many women. The title confused me for nothing happens quickly in this book -- Burnard takes pages and pages to describe the most mundane aspects of everyday life, episodes that would have been best excised, and the whole novel would have been better for me if it read chronologically, if I got to see these women through their lives and not just as flashbacks in Sandra's journals, which, of course, she kept religiously her entire life.

But I feel bad being so critical, which is why I think that my original statement, that it's neither the right time of my life nor am I in the right mindset to contemplate a novel about someone so willingly giving in to a disease -- not fearing death is one thing but Sandra's utterly unrealistic in terms of her approach to illness; no one is as saintly as she's portrayed on the page, no one. There's no anger, and even when there is, it's slightly ridiculous -- two women having slight "words" during a winter storm and then poof, it's back to celebrating Sandra and her ability to hold the other two women together. Yawn.

I much prefer Lionel Shriver's approach to illness: frank, honest, angry, and also accepting -- there's something raw and real to how she writes about sickness, and I appreciated it. There's tedium to being sick, to having tests, to being stuck in a bed, and anger, relentless, unceasing anger about the fact that your body just isn't doing what it's supposed to. And I'd hope that Sandra would have a glimpse of this throughout the book, that someone, anyone, might rage against the dying of the light just a little before rubbing more lotion on her cold feet or recalling some other wonderful thing she did during her abnormally normal life and marriage.

So don't blame Burnard -- it's a great book club book for women of my mother's age, it's a terrific book to give your mother-in-law for Christmas, and it would have done wonders if Oprah's Book Club still existed and ever considered that Canada has a literature from which to choose reading material. But Suddenly, with its long, drawn-out conclusion (Sandra dies! People mourn!) just didn't cut it for me, a girl of a certain age who has battled a mean-ass frustrating disease for months.

#53 - The Retreat

2011-07-05T19:10:00.005-04:00

This may be hyperbole, but I think David Bergen is a national treasure. It's quite a statement to say that over the course of reading four of his novels, his Giller winner (The Time in Between) remains my least favourite. People, it won a major prize! Overall, I devoured A Year of Lesser and See the Child, and thought they were both excellent. But The Retreat might just be my favourite Bergen novel so far -- but I haven't read The Matter with Morris (just the first 50-odd pages for work), so I am reserving judgment until then.

The majority of the action in The Retreat takes place at a camp, the retreat of the novel's title, near The Lake of the Woods, just outside of Kenora. The landscape, having spent about a week there at a cottage of an old ex-boyfriend way back in the way back, is beautiful. The Lake of the Woods itself is huge, with crisp blue waters, but the pond close to the property isn't. It's murky, filled with reeds, and just as dangerous -- it's an important distinction, because major accidents and/or incidents happen throughout the book on or close to the water, and Bergen's ability to weave such an archetypal theme (man vs. nature) within his more specific, personal story, remains one of the book's true accomplishments.

But let me digress. Raymond Seymour, an 18-year-old Ojibway boy, finds himself embroiled in an love affair with niece of the local police. Their relationship -- hot and heavy -- burns out quickly, and not just as a result of the intervention of her father and uncle but, because, it's just not meant to last. Alice's uncle takes Raymond out onto the Lake and dumps him on an island -- expecting him not to return. This dynamic, bad cop/good kid, feels familiar, and it should, the relationship goes exactly where you expect and the penultimate action remains utterly heartbreaking. It's 1974, and Bergen chooses as a secondary background of sorts, to wrap The Kenora Crisis around his story, even though Raymond and his brother, who has just returned from being "raised" (read: forcibly removed) by a Mennonite family in the south, are tangentially involved in the uprising.

When Lizzie Byrd (17) and her family arrive at The Retreat, a quasi-commune run by "the Doctor," a self-important, psycho-babbling fool who cons people into believing he can heal their souls by "talk" and the simple life of camp, she's reluctant to participate. The births of her younger siblings have been hard on her mother, and her father desperately tries to save his family and her sanity by granting her every wish -- in this case, it's to spend the summer at The Retreat. Lizzie meets Raymond and a cautious friendship evolves into something more substantial. As the summer progresses, their feelings grow deeper, regardless of whether they truly understand one another's complex situations (her crazy family; his unfortunate situation with the cop that never seems to end). But as the season comes to an end, the novel finds its conclusion -- the characters, distraught, damaged and utterly changed by the events of the summer. It's an amazingly quiet novel for the amount of emotional damage that is wrought on the people within, which remains Bergen's exceptional ability as a writer -- to place people in crisis and not let them entirely recover.

This is my favourite kind of book, a great setting, a complex, real issue that meant something in history, family dynamics that remain complex and difficult, and action that's both believable and well-paced. In short, it's an excellent read, probably one of the best books off my shelf. The Bs have been utterly kind to me (Barnes, Bergen, brilliant!).

#52 - The Uncommon Reader

2011-07-01T15:13:00.005-04:00

Sleep refused to settle upon me last night, and I finished The Leopard, and went to my shelves to carry on trying to find something alphabetical that I could read at 2 AM. Luckily, Alan Bennett's deliciously short The Uncommon Reader was almost next on my British shelf and its 119 pages meant that I finished it just before I finally drifted off to sleep. It was a cute book to read upon as we (Canada) are in the midst of a royal visit (in fact, I heard on the CBC yesterday that over 120 foreign bureaus/journalists will follow the couple on their visit as compared to the 24 that applied when the Queen visited was it last year? We're all a little entranced by the Duke and Duchess. As Lainey says; it's good for gossip...).

So, The Uncommon Reader of the book's title is The Queen, who has never truly read before -- for reading isn't necessarily "doing" anything and she's been a "doer" her entire life. An ode to reading with a cheeky sense of humour, Bennett's novella remains thoroughly entertaining from start to finish. Goodness, it's even got a fascinating vein of literary criticism -- of course The Queen wouldn't understand the nuances of Austen at first, having never lived among the lower classes. Of course, if she started her ready odyssey with Henry James, well, she might as well have given up all together.

One day, a travelling library shows up at Westminster and The Queen, on a whim, picks p a book by Ivy-Compton Burnett. Soon she's having Nathan, a former dishwasher and avid reader thus promoted to page, finding books for her from libraries all across London. They read books in aid of royal visits, they read popular fiction, they read the classics and all the while The Queen philosophically comes to understand the power of the written word in a way that was never presented to her before. The more she reads, the more she begins to write, and the more she begins to write, the more she decides she has something to say -- a voice, shall we call it.

I won't spoil the cheeky, cute ending but I will say that I smiled a lot while I was reading this book, even at 2AM when I really should have been sleeping. And, I've knocked another one off my shelves!

#51 - The Leopard

2011-07-01T14:51:00.005-04:00

I've been reading a tonne of Scandinavian mysteries over this mat leave -- it's not that they are mindless, that's not what I am trying to say, but they do wonders for my tired brain, especially now that the RRBB is moving around like a maniac and I am spending a lot of my time just chasing him down. Anyway, I finally finished Jo Nesbo's The Leopard -- for me, these books are easy reads, one-nighters, that kind of thing, but this book is over 600 pages long; it's an investment.

When the novel opens, Kaja Solness hunts Harry Hole down in Hong Kong where he's gone to disappear after the toll catching The Snowman took upon him (a novel I haven't read yet). He's thin, addicted to opium, and refuses to come home even after she tempts him with a case only he can solve. But it isn't the crime that brings him back to Oslo -- his father is dying, and Harry can't bear to stay away. There's a new "sheriff" in town: a crass, crooked and unfailingly asshat-like boss of Kripos (which I am assuming is their national police force) named Mikael Bellman who threatens, not only Harry's success in solving the case, but his career in general. Yet, none of that matters to Harry -- brash, intelligent, strong -- he's James Bond with a drink problem, otherwise known as your prototypical hero in these kinds of books, and yet, like Jimmy McNulty in The Wire, you root for him regardless.

The gruesome nature of the central crime -- the killer takes his victims lives with something called a Leopold's Apple, an instrument of torture that punctures (24 times) your face and throat so you drown in your own blood -- stumps the officers, and as soon as Harry joins Bellman and Kripos, they start to get somewhere. Like any good mystery, there's red herrings and twists and false leads and impeccably dangerous situations galore. There would have to be to keep us entertained for yes, like I said, 600+ bloody pages. You could cut a third of this book and it would still be a great read -- there's a lot of extraneous stuff here that could have been pared down, that would have helped the book race along instead of plodding in some places.

Regardless, there's wonderful desolate scenery that takes place in the far-reaching snow-bound Norway that I found truly fascinating. Ski lodges that are sitting ducks for avalanches, that sort of thing, that add a certain nuance to the plot and characters. Of course, the crime gets solved and, of course, the criminal punished and I'm glad I read the whole book because there was a moment half-way through where I considered just skipping to the end because 600 pages!

I have Norway covered already via Karin Fossum, so Nesbo doesn't count for Around the World in 52 Books. I need to find some Finnish mysteries!

Yet Another Review Catch-Up #s48, 49, 50

2011-06-24T18:38:00.006-04:00

Well, we were up north for about two weeks and got home the other day. A massive storm hit the greater Peterborough area, and so many trees were knocked down on our property that we were lucky that no one was hurt and/or no buildings were damaged. But goodness, as my RRHB exclaimed when he drove up just after the storm, "It's like the apocalypse hit." There are empty spaces where trees have stood my entire life. My uncle took this picture -- this pine tree just caught the edge of our sun deck and it took my husband and brother the better part of a day to chainsaw it out of there. For a while, my aunt and uncle were trapped as about six huge trees fell right by our gate making sure there was no way to drive out. I kept exclaiming, "Oh my god!" when the baby and I drove up on the Sunday after the storm. It was crazy. The biggest storm anyone has seen in 40 years. What up weather?

I did very little reading. The RRBB is a moving maniac, inches away from crawling, he's a going concern. You can't leave him alone on the floor any more. Within moments, he's miles away from where you first put him down, and he's going through a funny stage where he fusses a little if I'm not sitting right behind him as he plays. That, my friends, can't continue. But I indulged him a little only because we were at the cottage for the first time and he needs to be comfortable there.

Anyway, I am, of course, behind in my reading, my reviewing, my list-making, my life, my correspondence, just about everything. So here are some mini-reviews:

#48 - The Shape I Gave You - Martha Baillie
I have almost completely forgotten about this book, which doesn't bode well for an extremely positive review. Half-way through reading it, I decided, absurdly conceitedly, that I had solved all of the issues with Canadian publishing, it's that we read far too many Canadian books, publish far too many semi-high-brow literary novels, so that just about everyone, myself included, thinks that's what they should write. First of all, any of you who know me as a reader, know how frustrated I get on occasion with modern novels in epistolary format. It's a rare format one can make successful. This novel, the bulk of which is a long letter from Beatrice Mann (who lives in Toronto), a middle-aged woman who has just lost her teenage daughter, to Ulrike Huguenot (who lives in Berlin) explaining everything about her marriage, her motherhood, and the affair she had with Ulrike's father. It's an odd book -- a little too Ondaatje-esque for me, heavy on "literary" and light on plot, which, in my early years, I adored, I emulated, in fact. But as I get older, I like simpler prose, novels that are well paced and jolt like lightning. This isn't a fault with Ballie's writing -- it's more a personal preference. Anyway, it's not that I disliked the book, I just found it a little rough around the edges, and really wanted it to get to the point.

#49 - Voyage in the Dark - Jean Rhys
This is one from the shelves too, thank goodness, at least I am clearing off some books, even if I skipped my alphabetical order. Funny, just sentences above I lamented about authors who are heavy on the literary and light on plot, and now I am about to confess that modernist writer Rhys (whose lilting, patient sentences might define "literary") is one of my favourites. I might have read this book years and years ago; I picked up my copy to find all kinds of sentences tucked away inside the back cover -- not related to the book, just odd thoughts I must have climbed over a pillow or two in the middle of the night to scribble down on the nearest paper. They don't make any sense now. Anyway, the novel, the story of a young West Indian girl who loses herself in London and becomes a "fallen" woman, caused quite a controversy when it was first published. Now, with the state of the world almost completely fallen, and the stereotypical "hooker with a heart of gold" making an appearance in many George Clooney movies (well, maybe just in the terrifically boring The American), the fate of poor Anna Morgan isn't necessarily shocking, it's more tragic. Truly, honestly, utterly tragic -- if only because of the naivety, the utter essence of the girl's misery (a lack of fortune and a misunderstanding of her place in the world) comes across in every single page. She's displaced, disorganized and utterly incapable of unassisted survival -- yet, you can't help but ache when she makes poor decision after poor decision. Your heart pulls when she describes the relationship with Francine, a black servant in her father's house, with whom she was very close. And when the inevitable happens, and Anna finds herself in a world of trouble, it's not surprising the lengths she goes to fix the situation, and even less surprising, is the outcome. Rhys, whose stream of consciousness style isn't for everyone, inhabits Anna like a tic in a mattress, and its amazing how deep the character runs through language alone, not necessarily action (if that makes any sense). It took me ages to finish this book, both because I was up north alone with the baby and also because I kept starting and restarting paragraphs just because I liked them so much. She's such a wonderful writer.

#50 - Sisterhood Everlasting, Ann Brashares
There's not much to say about this book, it tugged away at my heart because I am sentimental about these novels. I think they are great YA fiction and wished I had them to read as a young girl (vs. the trashy Harlequin-esque crap I filled my brain with). I love their magical quality, and the ethereal nature of all of the characters -- but it isn't necessarily down to earth. Yes, it'll make you weepy, especially because Brashares does something shocking (even if her readers are now mature enough to handle it -- what happens still smarts) and forces her characters, through tragedy (and not just the loss of the pants) to truly grow up. It's a sweet book, a sweet read, just perfect for lying immobile after a kidney biopsy, and that's all I really have to say. Wait, just one other thing to note, having met Brashares in person, I will say that she is as lovely in person as her books, which is always a blessing and means I am ever-inclined to continue to read said author's work...

Review Catch-Up #s 44 - 47

2011-05-30T20:36:00.013-04:00

I have spent three days this week at various doctors appointments and sitting waiting for blood work, and managed to read three books in five days. It's almost like I'm breastfeeding at all hours again, only I'm not. Actually, it's nothing like that at all. In fact, it's exactly the opposite. Regardless, here are some short reviews of books I've read lately.

#44 - Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Allan Sillitoe
Sometimes, when you see the filmed version of a book first, it's almost impossible not to replay the movie in your head as you read. In the case of Allan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, this was entirely the case. Luckily, both the book and the film are excellent, so I wasn't disappointed by anything happening in my own head as I read. Sillitoe's portrait of a young man, a working class, philandering, hard-drinking, impulse-driven, anti-hero remains captivating over 50 years since its publication. I found myself violently engrossed in the film, at times disgusted by Arthur Seaton's behaviour, his attitude towards women, his own selfishness, and yet utterly thrilled by his voice, his hard-driving anger, and his youth.

Set in a working class section of Nottingham (and forgive me if it's all working class; I am not familiar with the geography), Seaton works at a bicycle factory, where he gets paid by the piece. Work too fast, and you make too much money, the big bosses will come down on you; work too slow and it isn't worth your while to get up in the morning. There's a tender balance Seaton strikes between boredom, completely shutting off to the redundancy of his tasks and letting his mind wander (usually to the state of his love life, which is complex, and full of many married ladies). He served in the army but has no faith in it; he drinks not just because it's the only thing to do but because it IS the thing to do; and all of his relationships with women are based on lying, cheating and his own awkward concepts of love. Yet, as a character, I couldn't help but adore him -- a prototypical bad boy when it still meant something to buck the system, and the dichotomy of the two parts of Seaton's life: the Saturday nights spent drinking and with his hand up the shirt of his many married lovers; and the Sunday morning when he goes fishing and perhaps decides upon one girl, nicely contrast the tenor of life in England after the war. Everyone needing to find their footing, their voice, after the collective "pulling together" (Keep Calm and Carry On) as a universal decree. All in all, it's an excellent novel. (Also exciting is that it's on the 1001 Books list, whee!).

#45 - State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
Ann Patchett is one of my favourite American novelists. I adored Run, enjoyed Bel Canto, and had my heart broken over Truth & Beauty. But State of Wonder is in an entirely different class -- if I had to find a comp, like someone (I can't remember who) mentioned on Twitter, I'd too suggest Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. But, truly, the unbridled success of this novel lies in Patchett's almost post-colonial "talking back" to Joseph Conrad's classic Heart of Darkness. Now, I read Conrad's book in first year university and haven't revisited it since, so it's hazy, to say the least in my memory. I recall more of Apocalypse Now than I do the novel itself but that doesn't mean that I can't theorize that Patchett set out to write back to Heart of Darkness, tackling not necessarily themes of colonialism and "going native" (shuddering to write that sentence) but more so the toll and cost of medical research takes from on our "modern" world.

When Dr. Marina Singh's workmate and lab partner, Dr. Eckman, is pronounced dead in a far flung letter from Dr. Annick Swenson, a research doctor who has been in the field for almost decades developing and studying a very particular tribe in order to create a fertility drug that could revolutionize women's reproductive health, she (Dr. Singh) is sent out to retrieve the true story and maybe, just maybe, bring both the body and a report of where the work actually is back to the company for whom they all work. Things go wrong for Marina right from the start -- her suitcase is lost, her clothes taken by the Lakashi tribe when she arrives in camp, and soon every vestige of Western life has disappeared from around her. She wears her hair plaited by the Lakashi women, the only dress she has comes from them as well, and without sun protection, the half-Indian Marina's skin bronzes so deeply that even she notices how different she looks than when at home suffering through a long, terrible Minnesota winter.

Classically trained as a OBGYN, Marina gave up her medical practice due to a terrible accident, and has been a pharmacologist ever since. Yet, once she finds Dr. Swenson (and the path that got her there was no less than difficult), her skills as a doctor are called upon -- an in unclean, unhygienic and utterly disorganized (in terms of performing surgeries), and Marina's life takes a turn in a direction she never imagined. The novel's ending, both spectacular and breathtaking, has perfect pacing -- I couldn't put it down, and it brought me to my knees. I found myself reading and reading, any chance I could get, morning, deep into the night, just to find out what happens. And the last sentences, just like the amazing ones that end The Poisonwood Bible, stayed with me for days. Highly recommended; it's perfect summer reading in my humble opinion.

#46 - Faith by Jennifer Haigh
I'm going to be honest -- the subject matter of this novel remains difficult for many reasons -- the church and its history/current struggle with pedophilia doesn't necessarily equate "light," "breezy" read. Yet, the tone and undercurrent of Jennifer Haigh's novel, while neither light nor breezy, is both generous and kind, a difficult balance to achieve when discussing Catholic priests and the matter of faith in general. The narrator of the story, a self-proclaimed (at the beginning of the novel) modern-day "spinster," Sheila McGann retells a story her half-brother Art, a priest who has found himself embroiled in a scandal that threatens not only his livelihood but also his life, and his core beliefs.

Sheila returns to Boston to help her family in the time of crisis. Art, accused of an unspeakable act with a young boy, the grandson of the rectory's housekeeper, with whom he has a parental-like relationship, shakes everyone to their cores. I know it's a cliche -- family comes upon tragedy, novel unravels whether or not the accusations are true -- but Haigh has a gift for character, and while this novel remains very traditional in its narrative format, I was impressed at how she tackled the subject matter. Haigh never shies away from the difficult nature of it, and I like how faith as a concept remains interwoven throughout the narrative. Arthur has never questioned his calling. But, like anyone, it's impossible to know when something might happen to rock your beliefs, earthquake-like, and send you reeling in another direction. Innocent, even naive, to the ways of the world, Art finds himself questioning everything he has ever known: the church, his ministry, the idea of love, when he comes to face to face with Kath, the mother of the young boy he is accused of abusing. It takes the entire novel to truly find out what happened. And no one is left unscathed, not even the reader. Faith is a novel that forces one to evaluate one's own relationship to God, to the church, even if you're a non-believer. It's impossible to stand in judgment, of anyone's life, and I think that is the eloquent point that Haigh makes throughout this book. It's one that definitely got me thinking. And I'm a girl who got the majority of her religious schooling from Are You There God, It's Me Margaret? when she was a child. Of course, I read more widely about religion in university. (I still remember sitting with a particularly obnoxious Religion major at Queen's who honestly said to me, "You know, it's not as if I'm totally obsessed with God or anything, I just think Jesus was a really cool guy." Seriously. That was her take on her entire degree. Good grief.) Regardless, the kind of storytelling that Haigh purports in this novel usually drives me crazy (the retelling of a story when one could choose just to tell the damn story) but it's subtly balances nicely with the seriousness of the subject matter and I don't think she could have written it another way. By the end, I was a little heartbroken, which, for me, is always the sign of a very good novel indeed.

#47 - Every Time We Say Goodbye by Jamie Zeppa
This is a Vicious Circle book club book, and I'm so pleased that I'll get to discuss it with a great group of women. It's a women's novel (as you can see from the awful cover [I'm sorry but it really, really isn't reflective of the book]) rather than dreamy chicklit as the cover suggests. I know what it's going for -- there's a pair of siblings that the novel centres around, but the cover adds a layer of Hallmark Movie of the Week that dumbs down Zeppa's sharp, instinctive and eager writing.

Told from multiple perspectives, the book follows three generations of Turner women, some blood, some married to blood, who each struggle with the idea of family, what it means to be a mother, and the difficult restrictions society, at different times over the last 50 years, for people of my gender. I fell particularly in love with Grace, a woman forced to leave her son behind to make a better life for herself in the city. Her strength, ability and the way she came into her own was particularly breathtaking. There's a lot in the novel that isn't necessarily fresh (troubled fathers, difficult women that seem cut from Lawrence, "women's" troubles) but Zeppa finds a way in that is both refreshing and real -- and I enjoyed this book immensely. I just have one tiny criticism -- there's a main character, Vera, a matriarchal figure, that we never hear from, she's only portrayed through other people's stories. I would have enjoyed knowing more about her point of view, her perspective, but I understand how too many voices could also ruin this novel. Regardless, it too is a perfect summer read. Funny how that works out, isn't it?

Notes From A House Frau XXII

2011-05-30T16:29:00.001-04:00

What A Difference A Few Weeks Make

This picture cracks me up. The RRBB definitely enjoys his food -- on this day he had green beans, some chicken and vegetables, and some barley cereal. There might have been dessert. I can't remember. All I know is that by the end of it he had food from one end of his face to the other, which to me is an important part of discovering what he likes and doesn't like, of discovering the joy of eating. The RRHB does it a little differently, he cleans up the baby as he goes along, consistently wiping his face so that he doesn't spread food from one end of himself to the other.

It's interesting, as the RRBB turned 7 months last weekend, I can completely see him start to develop more and more independence. I know, ironic, to talk about independence in terms of a wee baby who can't walk, talk or even feed himself. But, more and more, the RRBB likes to do things independent of me -- he's almost completely weaned, and while I still feed him, technically, the food isn't coming from inside of me any longer, and that takes some getting used to. He still yearns for it, and so we've kept one or two feedings until the doctors absolutely tell me I need to stop, yet he's trying and loving so much "real" food that I'm encouraged by all of his likes (and very few, read: none, dislikes). Also, he's sitting up on his own for the most part, falling over occasionally, bumping his head, bawling, and then breaking my heart. Yet, we are so very, very lucky, as I keep saying to all of my relatives, for he's truly a happy, healthy, gregarious, charming little boy. I adore him.

Independence is an interesting concept -- I am certain the RRBB doesn't understand it psychologically, or maybe he does and I am way off the marker but, instinctively, he's trying harder and harder to separate himself from us, his parents. He complains now if he lies down in the bath, before he would sit placidly, splashing a little, now the water ends up halfway out of the tub before we're even finished. He loves Not a Box, but not so much Goodnight, Moon. If he isn't eating fast enough, he complains; but then, if it's too fast, he gets equally upset. He makes a little strange when he wakes up from a nap. Yet, if you get him at the right time, he'll charm the pants off of you. This is the real gift of parenthood, not just the unmitigated, unceasing love that renders your heart incapable of understanding how this person was not a part of your life just months ago, but seeing first-hand the evolution of a personality. Objectively, it's not something one remembers, it's not as if you can reach back into your own mind and think, "wow, what was I like at 7 months?" Yet, every day that I spend with the baby, I am seeing how fascinating it is to watch him grow -- and my heart breaks just a little each time he grows more independent, but it also means I've got a bit more freedom. Evenings, nap time (few and far between these days; teething), stroller time, visits with grandparents and granties and gruncles, and it's all a wonder to me. I can't stop marveling at him. I can't but wonder what other surprises are around the corner.

He's the only baby I will ever have. Even typing that sentence makes me sad. I never imagined I would love the baby stage as much as I have. I mean, I have always loved babies, but in the sense that I'd hold them for a while and hand them back. Cute, snuggly little things that smelled delicious and whose exhausted parents I'd barely notice. Parenting wasn't a reality to me -- the utter loss of self wasn't a devastating reality, the sheer tenacity of his will to break us completely in those first few months has almost been utterly forgotten. Now, I can sit and read while he plays beside me, holding one hand to steady him, the other in a book. That, I can do. He goes to sleep so early that my mind can drift (when I'm not so exhausted I can barely see) to a place where I can spend some time working on non-blog writing. In short, I feel lighter than I have in months.

That's not to say that the disease has let me go just yet. I see the SFDD this week and we go from there. They are almost convinced they need to switch the drugs. All I know is that I need to get off the prednisone. There's a pain in my left hip. It's familiar. And tragic. And I can take a lot, a lot of punishment from the gods or the universe or whatever karmic relativity has decided that what my world means is Wegener's and all the ensuing tragedy, but if I lose my other hip, well, I am not sure I'll recover. I need to move. Without movement, without walking, biking, swimming, I will surely curl up into a ball and disappear.

#43 - Last Night In Montreal

2011-05-15T16:25:00.002-04:00

Before sitting down to write about Emily St. John Mandel's first novel, Last Night in Montreal, I wanted to do a pros and cons list of my own pre-conceived notions about fiction in general. My innate likes and dislikes, if you will. There are cliches in writing that I just can't stand -- easy things that authors fall back on because they are such a part of our collective unconscious, if you will, that even if one doesn't realize you're writing a trope, you're still writing a trope.

Circus performers. The idea of running away to the circus. And as prevalent and innovative, even successful as the modern day Cirque du Soleil might be in Canada and around the world, sentences like, 'they were part of a circus family when that was still something that could be done,' or the like, make me cringe, just a little (read: a lot). It's not that good books can't be written and/or good stories can't be told about circuses (case in point: Water for Elephants, which I have not read, but has been on bestseller lists for almost four years) or great drama created out of the idea of someone walking a tightrope (case in point: the excellent Colum McCann novel, Let the Great World Spin). Yet, in this novel, when the circus performer characters are dropped in, it feels forced and full of anguish -- like an imagination that's had too much caffeine and is trying to finish an all nighter -- something just isn't right and someone probably should have started cramming earlier.

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. Lilia, a distinct but also wispy and beautiful young woman, has trouble staying in one place. She was raised by her father who kidnapped her away from her mother one cold winter's evening and she hasn't stopped running since. Lilia's an interesting character -- she's bright, can speak several languages (taught to her by her father on the road) and has to work through her past by constantly moving on to the next location. She doesn't normally give her lovers any warning. She simply packs up her stuff, stashes it away, and then leaves when she feels she can't stay any longer. Her safety -- mentally, physically -- is at risk, and so she must go. Eli, her current Brooklyn-living boyfriend, can't accept that she's gone, so he goes on the road to try and find her. He doesn't necessarily want her to come back. No, he just wants an explanation, and to know that she's okay. So off Eli goes to Montreal. Why Montreal? Well, Eli receives a missive from someone named Michaela, who claims to know where Lilia is...

In tandem with the current-day storyline that follows Lilia, Elia and Michaela, the novel drifts back in time via different characters to fill out the novel. The most engaging parts of the book take place on the road with Lilia and her father -- there's a wonderful dynamic between the two, and even if I do find Lilia kind of twee for my liking, I can see how kidnapping her both saved and damaged her at the same time. But here's also where the book goes off the rails a little bit, there's a private detective, Christopher (paid by whom, who knows? It's never explained.) who becomes obsessed by the case (he's Michaela's father; this is the circus stock family). These two families are now intertwined, and their complex relationship forms the crux of the novel.

There's no doubt that St. John Mandel is a terrific writer. She has a gift for description and the book hums along -- it's just not, from my point of view, entirely believable. There's a 'movie of the week' element to it that I just couldn't shake and I will hold any "damaged" girls up to Baby in Lullabies for Little Criminals and always find them wanting. And the circus performers. Of the entire novel, I appreciated the ending, but the penultimate scenes and resulting action, well, that also falls into the "tired" category -- to spell it out would be to completely spoil the novel, so I'm not going to do that here, as per usual. On the whole, it's a terrifically uneven first novel, but it's also just that -- a first novel, and I do actually look forward to reading more from St. John Mandel in the future.

WHAT'S UP NEXT: The last of my library books for a while -- Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Then it's back to the shelves for sure -- I am very behind in my challenge, and by alphabetized books are just mocking me, mocking me!

#42 - Bullfighting

2011-05-12T14:30:00.003-04:00

There's just something about Roddy Doyle's writing that reminds me of The Pogues song "Bottle of Smoke." It's just so quintessentially fast-paced, direct, and full of great storytelling. These short stories speed along like a day at the races, and reading them feels like you've come ahead a winner -- 'like a drunken f*ck on a Saturday night, up came that Bottle of Smoke.' All thirteen stories are from a man's point of view, that's not to say that there aren't female characters, but these men, some older, some younger, have all reached middle age. They've watched their kids grow up, they've watched their parents grow old, they've had jobs, they've lost them, they've lived and loved, but most of all, they've survived.

Doyle's writing, so succinct, so of the moment, and his dialogue and the entire demeanor of the stories remains so refreshing, that you feel like you're sitting next to the author in a pub as he tells the story. Despite their similarities, the characters are all still so distinct -- and it reminds me of a great writing lesson that I was once told by a teacher who really, really disliked me and what I had to say -- they each have something that defines them, that stops them from becoming a stereotype, whether it's a reaction to a situation or a particular thing they love about the woman that became their wife.

I enjoyed each and every one of these stories, so it's hard to pull one or two out as my favourites. They all blended together so nicely, like an evening of conversation at a pub with a group of old, familiar friends, and the writing is so controlled that there isn't a sense of unevenness that I generally find with short story collections. I enjoyed "Teacher" and "Bullfighting" -- as both dealt with interesting situations -- the former, a man's struggle with alcoholism; the latter, a group of friends who take a trip to Spain. Male friendship isn't always explored in the books that I read on a regular basis. It's either there as a crutch, a necessary side-kick and/or reason to move the plot along in a mystery, but in "Bullfighting," it's the central theme of the story. These four men have know each other forever, and they don't have to talk about their feelings or share their inner secrets, they can just sit around and shoot the shit. And Doyle knows just how to write it to ensure that there's a poignancy to the everyday that can't be avoided, that needs to be celebrated.

It's a wonderful collection. And for all my ranting about reading far too many short story collections these days, I have to say that I'd take one by Doyle over a novel just about any day. It's just excellent.

Monday Disease Blues: A Top 10 List

2011-05-09T14:32:00.003-04:00

The RRBB had his six month shots today, and he's a little crabby, doesn't feel like eating and his nap schedule's all mixed up. So, I'm letting him play on his activity mat for a while as I sit here on a pilates ball and try to string some words together. Ups and downs, that's what the last few days are all about, ups and downs. Far more downs in terms of the disease than ups but what can you do -- every day is different. People think I'm joking when the answer to "how are you" these days is always, "well, I'm not dead!" We were at the doctor's this morning and it's semi-official -- they are probably going to put me on Cyclophosphamide for the Wegener's, and I have to wean the baby entirely sooner rather than later.

1. Who knew that weaning lead to depression? Like I need something other than the prednisone and postpartum messing with my brain. It's an unholy trinity -- but maybe bits of one will cancel the other one out. My family doctor's kids are 16 months old (she had twins) and today in the office she told me she still doesn't feel back to normal, and she's not even coping with a massive, stinking disease.

2. It's a beautiful day today and the last thing I want to do is go outside. Thankfully, the PVR is full of Oprah, Friday Night Lights and other sundries for when the RRBB is sleeping. I could read but I am even too exhausted and weepy for that today. I watched the Shania Twain episode while the baby slept a few hours ago -- I don't think I'd ever read her book -- but I'm fascinated by the fact that she wanted to lay it all out there, as pathetic and ridiculous as her actions were around the breakdown of her marriage, she simply wrote it all out and published it. Even the terrifically awful letter she wrote begging her ex-husband's mistress to leave them alone -- she published it. Oversharing? Perhaps.

3. As if I needed a reason to feel worse about always wearing pajamas. I read this beautiful post about motherhood on Kerry's blog, and then clicked over to the article she references about these terrifically hip and hot moms who never wear sweatpants, like, ever. Seriously? It's a good day if I actually change the sweatpants from the ones that I sleep in to a relatively cleaner pair to walk to the grocery store (and by "sweatpants" I am including their ugly stepchild, the legging, which I swore I would never, ever wear as pants. One should never swear anything about fashion). I would look better if I attempted to wear makeup, dyed my hair and put away the sweatpants but, hell, where would that energy come from?

4. The blues won today. Damn them.

5. CBC Radio played some really beautiful music from the National Parks Project on Sunday. Man, it made me want to take a road trip to every single one. Anything to get out of the city. Anything to get out of my house really. I'd love to take a giant trip this summer with the baby, somewhere foreign and by foreign, I mean Paris, but it's not practical given our financial situation (read: we are flat-ass broke). I miss travelling. And we'll have to learn how to do it a whole other way -- with RRBB. First up this summer: new passports. It's the last piece of ID with my maiden name on it. I will be a whole other person once that's done.

6. Teething + Needles = One Crabby Baby. Sigh.

7. The novel I'm reading for book club reminds me of Before Sunset. Still, I can't get passed page 15 and started reading Roddy Doyle's new collection of short stories instead. I'm already halfway through; it's terrific. God, I love his short sentences.

8. I can't believe I am this upset about having to wean the baby.

9. The disease is winning. And not in the #winning sense that crazy-ass Charlie Sheen's barking all around Twitter about. Today, the family doctor actually said, "We need to save your kidneys now." And I got totally freaked out and almost started bawling in her office, and it wasn't even an appointment for me -- it was supposed to be all about baby. For the very first time in my life, I don't know if the Wegener's will win. I'm scared. I am honestly terrified.

10. Feel like the worst friend in the world. I haven't talked to or seen so many people that I adore, and one of my New Year's Revolutions was to be a better friend. I'm just not hitting that goal at all and it's making me feel awful.

Okay, enough self-indulgent, feeling-sorry-for-myself claptrap. I am now going to go and eat some dinner. Perhaps I'm just hangry (hungry + angry = one irrational girl [as coined by Charidy]).

Notes From A House Frau XXI

2011-05-08T19:22:00.004-04:00

Nostalgia: Pictures For My Kid

Last night, my RRHB and I went to see The Lowest of the Low play Massey Hall. For a long time, he and that band's lead singer have been good friends. It's a pretty amazing thing to see someone you've known for twenty years (they were celebrating the 20th anniversary of Shakespeare My Butt) up on stage at one of Toronto's most prestigious venues. It's also really cool to see Massey Hall packed with people who have adored that record as a life anthem for as long as its been pressed jumping up and down in their seats, singing along, knowing all the words, and clamoring after the band post-show for autographs etc. It was a delightful evening.

But, as with everything these days, the whole evening just got me thinking about where the heck twenty years disappeared to. The disease had just been diagnosed, and I was out for one of the first times since getting out of the hospital. The same side effects (puffy face, hair loss, pimples, weight gain) on a much younger, non-postpartum body seem almost glorious in retrospect. I was wearing a cute, flowered dress, this I remember. We were upstairs at Sneaky Dees and my RRHB's first band, Dig Circus, opened up for The Lowest of the Low. The RRHB sang me the dirty bits of "Rosy and Grey." I danced a lot. We weren't together but it seems almost prophetic to think back now as to how we were probably always destined to be together anyway. He's still the very best person I know. He was back then. Brought me a hilarious Pepsi hat when I was in the hospital and hugged me like I was no different. He still holds me like that today. I treasure that, it's something to cling to during all of this, and how hard it's been for so long.

Annnywaay, I got stinking drunk. And managed to get stinking drunk for many, many Low shows in the coming years. There was one point when we (my dearest Hannah) saw them play in Kingston, and then drove all the way to Banff where we were working for the summer, only to see them there as well. Knowing the band, because so many of my friends from high school were in Dig Circus, was a highlight of my young life -- it felt so cool to go to the club and talk to the band. I had grown up with obsessive love for so many bands, a lot of it I outgrew (goodness, I listened to so much U2 in high school and then never again), but it also set the tone for so much of my life. I love live music, prefer it in dingy clubs before the bands are big enough to hit Massey Hall where you can get right up close to the front of the stage and go deaf listening to the up and down and back and forth of it all. And I've seen so many life-changing rock shows with my RRHB and they always make me nostalgic. Not like the nostalgia of last night, of a misspent youth, of the hundreds of hours I've spent drinking beer and jumping up and down, of thinking about all of the things that have passed since the very first time I'd seen the Low until now, but of how rich my life is because music, good music, has always been in it.

Before the show, the RRBB and I danced around the kitchen to "Come on Eileen", a favourite song that just happened to be on the radio. A few weeks ago we went to see The Pixies (also at Massey Hall; they played another anthem album, Doolittle), and a couple weeks before that we went to see the Elephant 6 Collective (although another throw-back to the 90s, I had only started listening to these bands in the last couple years). I'm lucky to know some of the musicians whose words and sounds have made such an impact on my life. I feel words deeply. They are more than letters strung together. They are always pregnant with meaning and precious with pause -- they keep me whole and make me who I am. Without them, without being constantly amazed by how other people use them, I would be lost. Without my own words, I would have drifted off into the abyss of the disease, of the general overwhelming tragedy of my life, years and years ago. And then to know the incredible human beings behind the words, the melody, the tunes that are as familiar to me as the smell of the city after a delicious rainfall, well, I'm lucky.

In a way, I want our RRBB to know his parents outside of this role we have fallen into simply because of his creation. When we first announced his impending arrival, thus dubbed "fig" for the duration of his incubation, our families and friends were really excited for us. The baby became the centre of our universe. It's all anyone talked about, and now that he's here, he's the star of the show, and rightfully so. He's a gregarious, delicious little creature who brings the joy like nothing I've ever had in my life. But we were people before him. In fact, I think we were pretty interesting people. And for him to appreciate how rich he has made our lives, he needs to know how rich our lives were before he was a fig in my belly. Our lives aren't captured on film, so he'll rely on photos and stories and seeing the people we've known for more than 20 years at birthdays and occasions and dinners and we'll become the "parents" -- it's generational, and it's not something that can be changed. I don't want to be his friend. I am his mother. This is a role I take very seriously, but I do want him to know us as friends in relation to the people we know, to the goodness we've put out into the world, to the weight we attach to words in both of our lives. We can play him the songs. Perhaps he'll fall in love with them too. Perhaps he won't. Maybe he'll hate music and want only to play hockey. Maybe he'll really not like books (argh!) and love video games. Who knows. For now, I'm satisfied to let him in a little bit at time -- to dance around the kitchen yelling "Torra loora rye aye" and hoping he feels the joy I feel when I hear that song.

It's Mother's Day. We are not celebratory people, in a sense, no, that doesn't describe it. Celebrating life on specific, somewhat made up holidays (Valentine's Day, etc) has never really been my/our thing. I mean, I know I've told this story before, but neither of us can ever remember our wedding day -- RRHB because he wasn't convinced about getting married in the first place and me because I was always convinced I just wanted to be married and couldn't give a whip about a wedding. People look at me strange when I say I honestly have no idea when my anniversary is, but I'm more interested in being with my RRHB on a daily basis, on celebrating my marriage in my own way, than I am about making a big deal about anniversaries, holidays, etc. We love our families. We love our family. We love each other. We love him. I've survived another day with the disease and, in ways, I think nostalgia truly takes up enough space in my life in so many good ways that I don't need to save it all up for one day. When my RRHB kept asking me what I wanted to do for Mother's Day, I didn't have an answer. And then, I'm glad I didn't. Because today was perfect and perfectly us. We got up, had pancakes, took the baby for a wonderful walk by the lake, and spent an afternoon talking nostalgia about the last twenty years. And, for the first time in a long, long time, my eyes are wet and dripping with tears that feel like little blessings and not the unbearable weight of the disease.

#41 - Must You Go?

2011-05-08T16:15:00.004-04:00

Antonia Fraser's memoir of her life with Harold Pinter could not have been more delightful had it actually been delivered to my door as ice cream, toffee and chocolate sauce. Sweet, but not saccarine, sharp but not severe, it's simply an account of two people who met, fell in love, and then spent the rest of their lives together. Fraser, well known for her biographies of Mary, Queen of Scots, all of Henry's wives, among other writings, met Pinter, the infamous playwright, while both were ensconced in other long-term marriage (each had been with their spouses for eighteen years). Neither expected to leave their marraige. Neither expected to fall so deliciously in love with one another -- but that's exactly what happened.

Fraser's elegy to her late husband opens with the explanation of the book's title -- Fraser, having met Pinter in passing, was about to leave a party, when she stepped over to say goodbye, he said, "Must you go?" She didn't, and they spent the rest of the night and a good part of the next morning talking. Thus setting the tone for not only their relationship but for how the two would build an exceptionally happy marriage. Taken almost exclusively from her Diary writings, the book's construction remains remarkably linear, a story told from beginning, to the middle, and to the end, which might feel tedious in the hands of a lesser writer. Even Fraser's everyday notations are fascinatingly witty, endearing and utterly full of heart. The entire book has a sweetness to it but, at the same time, it's also an incredible glimpse into the private lives of two very famous writers. How they work seems almost secondary to the everyday goings on -- the lunches, the friendships, the travelling, their children -- and the creative process is never discussed in any depth, simply mentioned in passing as a part of the rest of their lives.

Diary entries seem so private. And I'm sure a solid amount of sculpting and editing has gone into shaping them so that they make sense in a more public way. This isn't a traditional memoir, and even though it's so very different stylistically, it's just as moving as Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Yet where Didion almost collapses under the weight of her loss, Fraser seems to be more intent upon writing a celebration of their lives. I'm certain that Fraser deeply mourned the loss of the love of her life but she's got a wonderful attitude towards life -- always enjoying the experience, always looking for the next bit of history to capture her attention, always celebrating her immensely happy marriage -- that's infectious. It's a great book to be reading when your own life isn't necessarily going in the up and up, especially health-wise, especially to see that Pinter was still acting, still writing (but not necessarily new plays; more poems and short pieces), and still incredibly active politically even when he was suffering from cancer, yet another disease, and then the painful side effects of all the medication.

I'm consistently amazed at the amount of true work that they both managed to accomplish, especially in the middle years of their lives, what with seven kids (Fraser had six; Pinter, one) to raise and plenty of drama (Pinter's ex-wife had a hard time accepting that he had left and refused on numerous occasions to grant him a divorce). In the truest sense of the word, for me, this was a book that proves that love triumphs, that a good attitude can battle any adversity, that it's worth standing up for your politics, for your love, for your life, and that visiting dead writers's graves always makes for an excellent photo opp. I had a library copy, which I had to return, or else I would have quoted from the book directly -- but what I would have loved, as well, is a bibliography of everything that Fraser and/or Pinter read over the years, an addendum to their writing lives -- what a fascinating study that would have made as well. Regardless, it's an excellent read, and one that I'm so happy I found.

Also, Must You Go? REALLY makes you want to keep a daily diary, but knowing my life isn't remotely as exciting as the Pinter/Fraser household, perhaps I'll refrain and just steady on here as I've been doing the last few years.

#40 - The Troubled Man

2011-05-06T15:55:00.003-04:00

This novel was incredibly bittersweet -- not 100% mystery, not 100% your typical Swedish thriller, and there's an element of incredibly honesty about aging throughout these pages. So often, male authors of a certain age (ahem, John Irving, Rushdie, ahem) tread and re-tread their same themes: men sleeping with younger/older women, ridiculous novels that they've written thrice before, and the banner of "literary fiction" seems to save them from ridicule. They rest on their laurels. They rest on the fact that they've written great works before. But I call these novels "mid-life crisis on the page." They generally frustrate me critically and as a reader -- they aren't pushing any boundaries and there's not a lot of honesty going on. I respect honesty on the page, from a writer, from their characters.

Mankell's The Troubled Man, which is not without its problems (the dialogue, in particular, between Wallander and his daughter Linda is rather painful), but at its heart, the theme that touched me most was seeing how such a vibrant, aggressively distinctive man reacts to getting older. And not just middle age, but old age, as Wallander starts forgetting things, losing time and generally suffering from the first symptoms of dementia. It's actually quite heartbreaking -- yet, it doesn't stop Wallander from solving the novel's key mystery -- the disappearance of Linda's quasi-father-in-law.

The mystery in the novel seems straightforward at first, Håkan von Enke, a highly decorated, extremely respected naval officer (he was the captain of various Swedish submarines) simply disappears on day while on his daily walk. There's nothing missing from his bank accounts, he has taken no clothes, and it's as if he vanished into thin air. And when, a few weeks later, his wife also vanishes without a trace, the entire story becomes more complex. Are the von Enke's what they seem? Are they alive? Are they dead? Wallander does his best to solve the mystery -- looking at things from a different perspective, turning them over in his mind, until the book comes to its penultimate action, and the case is solved.

Mankell writes in tangents, suddenly Wallander's making steak or doing something that simply appears in the story, and there are a lot of characters that seem to show up to tie up loose ends -- both in terms of the detective's life and of the central mystery. It's interesting that much of this novel takes place outside of Wallander's actual police duties. He's on sick leave and/or vacation for most of the book, but like many hero's of crime fiction, he just can't stop working. The case sits before him, eating away at his subconscious, until he finally figures out the answers. Taking the focus away from traditional police work allows the novel to pay attention to Wallander's personal life -- his old relationships, the loss of good friends, the general sense of melancholy he feels about aging, about what's happening to his brain.

Again, the tangents that Mankell intersperses throughout the text are sometimes daunting, they pull away from the story and allow the narrative to wander. In a way, it feels as if Mankell, by consistently pulling Wallander in all these different directions, is narratively representing the state of his mind -- disjointed, sometimes confused, sometimes razor sharp, agile, angry, yet always on the cusp of discovery (and eventually he does solve the crime). All in all, like I said at the beginning of the post, it's a bittersweet read -- but one that challenges the idea of "genre" fiction, more 'end of life' (is there a word for this, like the opposite of buldingsroman?) novel than anything, and there's nothing that makes you think more than the mortality of one of your favourite characters on the page.

The Prednisone Crazies: A Top 10 List

2011-05-02T12:39:00.004-04:00

Throughout the history of my having Wegener's, I've been taking prednisone off and on for about 20 years. Not consistently, but always as the disease flares, gently in some cases, and more aggressively (like now) in others. My system seems to be sensitive to the drug, to all drugs actually, which means that I tend to experience the side effects deeply. It's how I ended up with my tragic hip -- Avascular Necrosis brought on by massive doses of prednisone when the disease was first diagnosed and the doctors were aggressively treating the disease to save my kidneys, and to stop my lungs from bleeding (which is what happened at Week 32 of my pregnancy as well). The most intense side effect I feel from the drug would have to be the psychosis. More often than not, it sends me reeling into a pit of depression and this always seems to last so much longer than the active symptoms of the disease. It's a hard way to live. All of the underlying issues with having a long-term disease, of battling for your health on a daily basis, of coping with the absolute fact that you can't control what's happening, of never knowing and/or feeling 100% yourself for months, even years at a time, are exhausting. So, after much thought, I'm trying to be more positive and reconnect with all of the things in my life that make me, well, me, so I don't go completely off the rails this time with the meds. Usually, it's thinks like routine and work that keep me grounded, but as I'm on mat leave, it's harder to cling to the old ways of coping.

1. Get Outside
The weather truly sucks my ass. I mean, it's raining ALL the time, and it's oppressive. But, I find even if I take a short walk, mainly with the RRBB, I feel better. I also managed to get an hour's worth of gardening done this week (that's my wild arugula coming up) while my RRHB took the baby for a walk.

2. Read
Yes, I know I do this anyway, but the more I read, the more I feel like I'm moving forward in my life. perhaps that doesn't make much sense but it helps ground my brain in more than the frenetic panic that the prednisone causes -- it stops me from collapsing entirely into the cloud-like depression that hangs overhead. It's a cliched, but apt, metaphor for how the drugs envelop your brain. Reading gives my imagination a chance to battle it back.

3. Write
This is self-explanatory. Last night the RRBB went to bed at 645. If we keep this up, I can actually take an hour or two right after he goes down and after scarfing down some dinner to string some of my own non-blog words together. It's energy I don't have but that I can't afford to waste either watching the last 16 or so episodes of Oprah, which is what I have been doing.

4. Ask for Help
I'm terrible at this -- but the best and only way of coping with the psychosis, for me anyway, is talk therapy. I've tried drugs and I don't like to take them. And the fact that I've been sleepless for so long isn't helping the weeping, and if I can at least try and express some of the hopelessness I feel in a safe environment, it means that the "crazies" (and how they manifest in my brain) won't necessarily overwhelm me to the point where I'm scrubbing bathrooms with a toothbrush and bleach at 3AM.

5. Restorative Yoga
Goodness, I wish we weren't so bloody broke. But I know now is not the time to be taking private restorative yoga classes. However, I can't say enough how awesome and healing my practice is in terms of both the disease and what it does to my brain. Right now, we're doing a bit of Mom and Baby yoga on Thursdays at Liberty Movement Studio, and that'll have to do.

6. Letting The OCD In One List At A Time
One of the ways that the prednisone manifests itself is through OCD tendencies. I make endless lists, spend hours running through figures, worry about dirt, and organize and re-organize things like shelves, books, closets. In a way, I think it's a way for my mind to cope with the overwhelming sense that I have utterly no control over what's happening in my body. The more I feel like I have control, the calmer I am, even if there's little to nothing that I can do about rising creatinine levels or coughing up crap -- I have to leave that up to the doctors and the medication -- I can try and staunch the rapidly increasing panic that sits in the middle of my chest with an active To Do List and more organization.

7. Trying Not To Be So Hard On Myself
I look terrible. I feel terrible. I don't feel like myself. I don't look like myself. I could spend hours creating negative downward spirals of self-defeatist thinking, abandoning all rational thought, starting silly fights with my spouse about feeling all of the above, and then, I have to stop. Because you know what a great cure for the above is -- the RRBB. His silly grin and absolute joy in my company, regardless of how hard it is to find the energy to take care of him, means I'm smiling for most of the day. Everyone looks better when they are smiling, even if their cheeks are ridiculously puffy and outlandish from the disease. Hey, here's a silver lining -- usually the "moon face" is accompanied by acne, but I'm guessing post-natal hormones have kept that in check because my skin is actually quite clear. This also means not feeling bad about watching too much television or all of the other goals on my usual New Year's Revolutions list.

8. Don't Listen to the Voices in My Head
The worst of the prednisone crazies, the voices that suddenly come upon the scene and tell me to do horrible things like drive my car into oncoming traffic and/or jump off a high rise, haven't started yet. This is something I'm incredibly thankful for. The pressure of what goes on in my brain is so intense that years ago I started doing something odd -- climbing in my closet and closing the door. And when I feel most overwhelmed, when there's nothing but mud and anger between my ears, all I want to do is climb back into the closet. A long time ago, I filled them up with stuff so that it wasn't a possibility. I thought it was the most rational thing to do at the time, but now I can calm myself down by thinking that I'd like to get in, but not actually crawling into the cupboard and closing the door. Even small steps are victories. Right?

9. Weep
Better out than in.

10. Know That I Will Get Better
This one is the hardest. Living with a long-term disease is like an endurance run -- it's a permanent change to your life, it forces you in directions you would never go, and forces you to contend with your mortality more often than not. Positive thinking, that's what so many people tell me -- my yoga teacher, in the form of a mantra; my family, in the form of how much love and good energy they have towards me; my friends, in the form of their never-ending support. Now I need to translate all of that into my own mind and know that I will get better, even if it takes months, years, this time around, I have so much more life ahead of me, I just wish I could live it. You know?

#39 - The Elegance of the Hedgehog

2011-05-02T09:54:00.007-04:00

Two very good friends recommended this book to me, and they were both so very correct to do so considering how much I enjoyed it. The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a compelling, intelligent and utterly charming book. From the setting, an elegant apartment building in the centre of Paris where exceptionally well off people live, Barbery sculpts the story from two distinct points of view. Renee, the building's concierge, spends her days hiding her intelligence from those who live above her -- both literally and metaphorically. Paloma, an incredibly precocious and bright 12-year-old, lives on the fifth floor and also hides -- from her parents, from her schoolmates, from just about anyone simply because she likes to be quiet and think.

Both are convinced that there are deep metaphysical and philosophical reasons to hide. Renee hides because she's convinced the boundaries of society -- she being a lowly concierge -- defines her in a particular time, place, essence. Paloma hides because she's convinced that life isn't necessarily worth continuing -- she's decided to commit suicide the moment of her 13th birthday, it's the only logical thing someone of her intelligence can do, you see. Both create personas they show to the world and keep their true selves hidden away. Until one day when a new tenant renovates an apartment in the building, a mysterious Mr. Ozu, discovers the truth about both of them, connecting them in a way that only kindred spirits (those of the Anne of Green Gables kind) can be connected.

The novel skips back and forth between the worlds of Paloma (from upstairs) and Renee (from downstairs) and at once you get the view of the classicism Barbary seems to be exploring. There's deep philosophical undercurrents running through the novel. Renee attempts to teach herself phenomenology (which, if I remember anything from my second year class in existentialism is simply incomprehensible), she explores Japanese films, reads the Russians and generally soaks up impressive amounts of knowledge. Yet, even though she's just a lowly concierge, her intelligence can't be hidden forever -- and it takes an outsider, someone who truly "sees" her, to break open her own psychological barriers about her background and the expectations she has from her life. Renee believes she's a peasant -- and that shall forever set her aside from those she serves.

Paloma, born into wealth and privilege, easily sees through the trappings of her societal sect. She's vicious when it comes to cutting through the nonsense, mocks her mother's seemingly useless therapy, feels her sister's academic pursuits are more for show than anything, and is constantly questioning the world around her to find meaning. In a way, she's represents an epistomological side to within the novel -- always wondering about knowledge, driving her own theories about what meaning truly is, and defining herself consistently by what she knows or how she knows it.

Renee, if we are speaking in dichotomies, despite her Cartesian inferences, is the flipside -- more ontological, she's consistently questioning her very existence, talking in terms of not being "seen" and/or "noticed" by the people she interacts with every day. Metaphorically, it goes back to the age-old "if a tree falls in the forest..." kind of thinking. The more Renee hides, the more she proves her theory that her true self isn't worthy of existence, and when she is "found out" to be the brilliant, interesting, fascinating, self-taught lovely woman she is -- the revelation isn't lost on those around her. And love, which she believed to be forever banished from her life, becomes a very real and distinct possibility.

The novel is just full of delicious, quotable prose, but because I had a library book, I didn't want to ear mark the pages and was never around a pen and pencil to jot things down. Just know that there were moments of absolute bliss when I was reading this book -- a clarity of character and perception that I found so refreshing -- and the ending, oh, the ending, it's very sad, but oh so fitting, and I am ever so glad that I read this book.

WHAT'S NEXT: I'm reading the latest Wallander novel by Mankell. Hoping to get it finished and then on to my other library books before I take everything back this week. And get back to my shelves for the next little while.

Notes From A House Frau XX

2011-04-28T16:52:00.003-04:00

I Am Drowning in Empathy

At this very moment, my RRHB is serenading the RRBB with very sweet guitar sounds, singing softly to him, and I am finding it a struggle not to bawl. I am not going to lie. Things are hard right now. It's been a long six months of fighting the disease with very little good news. As a result of my blood work being so wonky, I'm back on a higher dose of prednisone and it's actually taking its toll this time around. I am defeated and down. I am hoping every moment of every day that it isn't reflected in my parenting. That the baby can't take one look at his puffy, grey-haired mother and think: "Why did I end up with her?"

He's six months old now, and we officially have to start weaning him. I need to start taking not one but probably two different medications for the disease, and neither are compatible with nursing. I am so hesitant to let it go, not because I think it's so good for him, or because we've created an accidental parenting nightmare with him only nursing to sleep for the most part but, rather, because it's truly the one thing that's gone so very right amongst all of the wrong the last few months. He's a champion nurser -- has gained a great deal of weight, and is rarely waking up more than once a night now that we've got a semi-decent bedtime routine going. I'm clinging to breastfeeding in the sense that it's a symbol of normalcy in terms of my life at the moment. I feel like a regular everyday mom, and not one whose exhaustion comes from a battle going on within her own body rather than the comforting tiredness of raising an infant.

I can't seem to hold back the blues any longer. I've tried. I'm doing it all right: I'm getting out, getting exercise, seeing friends, have a great support system, but when my creatinine hit 180 and I knew the disease was back to its nasty, aggressive self, I felt palpable fear. A panic in the middle of my chest. An ache in my belly. A tell-tale sign that if you don't fight psychologically as well as physically, the disease can beat you on all accounts. But thinking positively has never been a strong suit of mine. It's funny -- I like to think of myself as relatively upbeat person. Glass half-full. Glass half-fun. Lots of jokes. Laughing a lot. Enjoying life however it comes to me, but then, pour the prednisone into my system and I become entrenched in the cocoon of depressive thinking, everything's going wrong, I suck at it all, I look terrible, I feel even worse, and it's a vicious cycle that seems as hard to get off as a British roundabout.

And I cry. And cry. And cry. Not in front of the baby. And not about anything in general. I just feel so bad about so many different things -- silly TV movies, an episode of Law and Order, a book, a newspaper article, the state of the environment, the election -- the list goes on. I'm drowning in empathy. Goodness, my mother, who lived for over twenty years in a chronic care hospital, had a horrible existence. And I can't stop thinking about her lately, feeling such epic pain on her behalf, and I know it's not rational, she has thankfully passed away now, that it kept me up for hours the other night. Like Leonard Cohen sings, "I ache in places now where I used to play." I know he means it slightly differently than I would interpret, more bodily, but my mind is aching in ways I haven't had to deal with in decades. And I can keep it together. I am keeping it together. But I'm missing out on my own life in a way too. That's what disease does to you -- robs you of your potential. I've always thought that I've put up a really good fight of taking that potential back, of climbing out in ways that I can feel proud of: advanced degrees, writing, a career that I enjoy, a family, but for right now I'd settle for progress in a medical sense. For better test results, for my body to respond to the treatment, for someone to find a magical solution that rips the Wegener's from my body once and for all.

Funnily, the baby and I are struggling together. He's trying so desperately to move. He rolls and rolls and rolls and rolls but can't get any further, and then he fusses because it's frustrating not to be able to go where you want to go. I roll him back and pat his belly, tickle him a little, sing a little song, and he grins -- it's so delicious it could be a vegan cupcake -- and then we start the whole ritual over again. But I know while he can be the "measure of my dreams" (so say the Pogues), he can't be the solution to what's going on in my brain. He doesn't need that kind of pressure -- I have to pull myself up from the malaise myself. Burdening your children with your happiness -- what could be worse, I think, in terms of screwing them up for life.

Yet, there's so much joy in the everyday. We took the picture above yesterday when all three of us sat outside on our back porch and just watched the rainstorm. Pounding down all around us, we three happy and dry, the rain was another new experience for him, and for us too, in a way, looking at it from his point of view, wanting him to know weather, life, the outdoors, our backyard, all the potential of his life. Maybe that's the point, to remind myself that I still have potential, that the disease can't take it all, I don't have to let it win. But today, it's winning. Today, I'm crying a little bit too much. I don't want to leave the house. I want to eat Doritos, nachos and all kinds of other bad food. Thankfully, the Nephews are coming over for an hour and that should distract all of us from the maudlin feeling-sorry-for-myself kind of day I'm having.

#38 - Anthills of the Savannah

2011-04-28T14:16:00.004-04:00

Because we had been reading a lot of Can Lit in our book club, and a lot of short stories to boot, I put forth Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah as our April selection. Over the years, my post-colonial reading has declined dramatically, and it was one of the goals of having an Around the World in 52 Books challenge -- to end up reading more non-Canadian fiction. Alas, it was probably a good thing that I decided to actually make dinner for The Vicious Circle Book Club, if only so they'd forgive me for choosing such a dense, complex novel.

It took me six tries just to get passed the first few chapters, and we decided as a club that once you got to page 40, the book became readable, and you were somewhat home free. With respect to construction, it's the most post-modern novel I've read in a long time: perspective switches from first, to third, from character to character, and the narrative often circles around events, moving back and forth in time, just assuming the reader will keep up. Here's where we bring out that old po-co staple -- that a lot of African fiction follows more oral than narrative traditions, but I'm not sure I'd make the sweeping generalization that Achebe was setting out to prove that -- maybe it more like he was trying to reflect the impossibility of telling a story, a straight forward, this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened, kind of story, when your world is in utter chaos.

Set in the fictional West African nation, Kangon, three old school friends, Sam, Chris and Ikem, Western-educated men living among the upper echelons of society, must redefine their relationships now that Sam has become His Excellency -- the country's dictator. As Chris, one of the main characters says, "I have thought of all of this as a game that began innocently enough and then went suddenly strange and poisonous." As the rest of the novel unravels, the story is strong: Sam wants to stay in power, and even though there's an uprising "in the north" against him (which is a product of deep misunderstanding and miscommunication), lifelong friends Chris and Ikem, now the Minister for Information and the editor of the national newspaper respectively, bear the brunt of Sam's fall from grace and are fired, forced into hiding and fighting for their lives.

Because characters are "witnesses," the novel changes form on the drop of a hat -- you can be in the first person with Chris in a meeting, then be reading some whimsical treatise by Ikem, listening to Beatrice, Chris's girlfriend, speak pidgin English with Elewa, Ikem's girlfriend, and then be in the middle of some strange scene involving non-doctors and other visiting dignitaries from all of their time in London. Structurally, narratively, the novel makes little sense, but the story is so powerful and the writing so excellent that instead of writing the book off as "bad" per se, I spent a long time trying to unravel why Achebe chose to tell it this way.

There are moments of pure grief in this novel. Acts of senseless violence, struggles that seem utterly relevant now, especially in light of what's happening in the Middle East and in Northern Africa. There's also an element of futility to the story, and the strength, the power in the continuation of life comes from the female characters. This was not something that went unnoticed by our book club -- we all really loved the character of Beatrice, and I even went so far as to suggest that I probably would have found the novel easier if the entire book was written from her point of view. But easy isn't the point, life itself isn't easy, and living in a nation that's having violent growing pains isn't a story that can be told in traditional ways. In a sense, Achebe's novel proves that our "canon," the Western tradition, isn't necessarily up to scratch when it comes to the complex and difficult "isms" surrounding the characters in this novel. I could think about it for weeks and not unpack it completely. And, if I were still in school, I think I'd be very happy to write a long, complex paper about it.

Kerry does an awesome job of recounting our discussion from the other night.

What's Up Next: I'm devouring The Elegance of the Hedgehog. It's delicious and delightful and utterly engaging. I'm almost through and I only started last night! And then I've got a long list of library books AND a beautiful friend who knows me so well sent me Roddy Doyle's latest book of short stories -- I couldn't resist, I've already read the first 5 pages and can't wait to read the rest. I adore him. So, I've abandoned Off the Shelf for now, but only because I needed a break. I was reading far, far too many mediocre books (with the exception of Julian Barnes, natch) and needed a breather. But I will go back. I am determined to read every single damn book that's perched there, just to say that I did. Stubborn, yes. I know.

TRH Books - Catching Up

2011-04-22T17:53:00.005-04:00

I don't have time these days for individual posts but I do want to catch up so that I can take the time in the next couple weeks to really talk about a few books on my TBR pile. I've abandoned my stacks lately and have been reading library books for the most part, or books that the publishers have sent over. But here goes:

#33 - The Brightest Star in the Sky by Marian Keye s

At first, I didn't quite understand the premise of this novel. The narrative -- an omniscient "being" trying to figure out where to "land" -- tells the story of the inhabitants of a building in modern-day Dublin. Each person and/or couple who lives in the flat has his/her/their issues in terms of life, work, relationships. You know, vintage Marian Keyes. It's a swift, sweet and predictable read, but I enjoyed the book.

#34 - The Girl in the Green Raincoat by Laura Lippman

Rear Window meets She's Having a Baby (without the histrionics) -- Laura Lippman's Tess Monaghan is laid up with pre-eclampsia prior to the birth of her daughter. When she sees a dog race by without its green raincoat wearing owner, she finds herself embroiled in a missing persons case she needs to solve from her bedside. I missed the novel when it was serialized in the New York Times Magazine, but I loved the story anyway: it's short, yes, but it's also vintage Lippman, smart, sassy, and truly addictive. In the post-script, Lippman explains the particular challenge of writing an ongoing character and/or story in serial format, and how she made each chapter complete while progressing the larger narrative as a whole. Fascinating.

#35 - Foursome by Jane Fallon

Jane Fallon's latest novel, Foursome, tells the story of two married couples who have spent the last fifteen or twenty years being a, well, foursome. The two fellows are best friends; their wives the same. They make perfect pairs -- happily married, great kids, fun, full lives in London -- until everything starts to crumble the minute that one half decides to get divorced. Or, rather, one husband decides he simply isn't happy and doesn't want to be married any longer. When her safe, secure group breaks down, Rebecca isn't quite sure how to put her life back together. Sure, her marriage is stable, and she's got a job that she loves, but the minute Alex, the husband of her best friend Isabel, professes his undying love for her (oh boy; he's her husband's best friend!), which she has absolutely no interest or willingness to reciprocate, well, all hell breaks loose. And it only gets worse before it gets better when Alex starts to date the loathsome Lorna, her "work enemy." In the end, it's a book that knows that life can never stay the same once major shifts have happened, and whether it's for better or for worse, change really must be accepted. Fallon's such a refreshing chicklit writer -- it's hard to describe these novels as "chicklit," though, they're well-written, with great characters, more family drama than shoe shopping, and I just adore her sense of humour.

#36 - A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes

My reading affair with Barnes continues, and I adored this book of short stories. In fact, I'd say that the opening story, "The Stowaway," might just be one of my all-time favourites, moving right up there beside "Hills Like White Elephants." I love the tradition of writing back to our creation stories -- Timothy Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage, Tom King's Green Grass, Running Water -- and Barnes does it exceptionally well. He winks at the reader throughout with the woodworm popping up in the most peculiar of places, and "Parenthesis," might just be the most heartbreakingly beautiful discussion of love I've read in ages. Overall, these stories are brilliant, vintage Barnes and I can't wait to read Flaubert's Parrot, which is next on my Barnes Read-a-thon.

#37 - The Stonecutter by Camilla Lackberg

I wasn't too terribly impressed with Lackberg's first novel, The Ice Princess. But The Stonecutter is a definite improvement, despite its utterly confusing title -- perhaps it should have been called The Stonecutter's Wife, but whatever. After reading an article from NPR about other Swedish crime mysteries to equal THE Swedish Crime Series of the Century (The Girl With The...), I thought I'd give her another try. There's still a lot of sloppiness to her novels: far too many characters and subplots meant to throw you off the "scent" of the main mystery and its conclusion. But I enjoyed the back and forth, past to the present, of this truly horrible character named Agnes -- she's was deliciously wicked in an awful way. And how Lackberg ties everything together in the end is quite satisfying. And I'm ever enjoyed the progression of the relationship between Erica and Patrick, who's charged with solving the murder of a seven-year-old girl.

So, short mini-reviews of my reading this month. Now I am desperately trying to finish Anthills of the Savannah for book club tomorrow evening. No napping for me today! I think RRBB's still got a contact high from all the Easter chocolate his mother may or may not have ingested yesterday anyway.

Notes From A House Frau IXX

2011-04-19T13:06:00.008-04:00

All The Boys In The House

We baby sat my two nephews the other weekend -- two six-month-old babies (see left) and one five-year-old. And it was chaos. My RRHB had The Nephew outside to do some yard work while I took care of the two wee babes. For a while, it was Keystone Cops: put one baby down, the other would cry; pick him up, then the first baby would cry. Wash. Rinse. Repeat for about 25 minutes. Then I got wise to their mojo and just walked around the house with a baby in each arm. Every now and again the cousins would reach over and hold one another's hands. Babble a little bit. There was a point they were both in the crib and I heard SBC (Sweet Baby Cousin) screaming -- RRBB had turned himself right around and was hoofing him in the head. Hilarious. Then it came time to put them all down: RRBB down first, nurse him while reading The Nephew some stories. RRHB rocking SBC as I put The Nephew to bed. I take SBC and continue to rock him to sleep. The whole production took hours. Seriously, how do people do it? It's an art form, that's for sure. But it was also completely fun.

The lessons I learned? Even though it was hard to have more than one baby at one time, and that my body can not remotely sustain another pregnancy, but if I was 10 years younger and 100 times healthier, I'd think I'd have bucketloads more kids. It's just so fun. And that's not to say that my RRHB and didn't have a rich and fulfilling life before RRBB. We did. We travelled and made music and wrote unpublished novels and have wonderful friends and lovely families and loads of nieces and nephews and were considering moving to the UK (just because neither of us have lived anywhere else). But I'd always wanted to have children, and I am so glad that we did -- I'm exhausted, still dealing with a disease that doesn't seem to be quieting down, bored most days with being at home, but feeling enriched emotionally in ways that I find hard to describe. There's an element of patience and kindness in my life that was absent before. I had a terrible temper growing up, and well into adulthood. Apartments with holes in the walls where I kicked them once I realized I'd lost my Metropass or was late because I couldn't find my keys -- all kinds of trivial things that didn't remotely deserve the emotional response I gave them.

It's so interesting. Humans have emotions to burn. Piles of pent up anger, rage, discomfort, and some of it's absolutely debilitating. When you add tragedy to the mix, things intensify. There's no where for the energy to go -- and if you don't find active, positive ways to disperse it, I think that's when your brain just goes into overdrive. At least, that's the way it is for me. When I was younger, I held it all in, the pain of losing my mother, the frustration of constantly dealing with a life-threatening disease, a string of ridiculously bad, terrifically awful relationships -- constantly putting pressure on my brittle heart to take more and more. Gaining perspective isn't easy. For me it took one major prednisone-induced breakdown in my 20s. I'm not sure how much I've talked about it -- I couldn't leave the house, was cleaning with bleach at 3 AM, never ate, and was listening to voices in my head telling me to jump off of buildings. Oh, and did I mention I was trying to finish my MA? It was the most difficult emotional time of my life -- I didn't have any coping mechanisms. And once the psychosis hit its peak (the voices), that's when my kidney doctor at the time sent me to a shrink. I credit him with saving my mind and the "prednisone crazies" as I like to call them have never been so bad since. I have tools now of dealing with them -- of knowing what it is and the right way to approach the overwhelming emotions.

I needed coping skills this week. My creatinine spiked to 180 (keep in mind normal is 70, and my "normal" is in the 120s) -- the higher that number the less your kidney is functioning. And I was having all kinds of other advanced disease symptoms, terrible joint pain, awful ringing in my ears and ridiculously painful sinuses. I KNEW that because we had dropped the prednisone that it wasn't simply strong enough to contain the Wegener's. I cried, a lot. With the exception of when they diagnosed the disease, I've never had test results that high, and I'm living with the palpable fear that they're not going to be able to control the disease. That my kidneys will go and that'll be that -- positive thinking aside, patience aside, I needed an outlet for all the excess emotions raging through my system. The calmer I am, the better it is -- and thankfully, we got tickets to see The Pixies at Massey Hall (awesome seats, row L!). That one show, they played B sides and Doolittle only, reminded me not only of who I am but where I came from -- we've listened to that record relentlessly. It's one where I know all the words and all the songs and can place myself in different parts of my life through the music.

These days, because it's such a fun stage -- the six-month marker, I've been craving the baby. Not like I crave Cadbury's Easter Eggs but more like something pulling at my heart. I don't want to trivialize the relationship or state the obvious, write in cliches (every mother loves their child to abandon blah de freaking blah), but when he's sleeping I wish he was awake. When he's awake, I know he should be sleeping more. On days like today, he's perfectly angelic. Not fussy, eats just about everything in front of him (with the exception of some fruits that he's not crazy about just yet), smiles, sleeps, and cuddles with an intensity that I find hard to replicate. Days like yesterday, well, he's teething, so grumpy and couldn't stand not being held, which makes the hours slow and the time creep. I wouldn't trade it for the world -- either RRBB. I know I'm struggling. I know I'm not getting enough rest. I know I need to stop nursing. I know that the disease is winning these days but I find the joy in the everyday so much more than I ever used to.

We went for a beautiful long walk today along the railpath. There were tonnes of birds: mockingbirds, juncos, red-winged blackbirds, and a giant Canada goose. My friend Kath came with us, and she was walking her gorgeous dog, Mannix. The air's cool but fresh. The city is quiet because it's a holiday. And even though I want so much, for it to be warm, for me to lose the baby weight, to not feel the pressure of the disease, I also want to be patient with myself. We aren't having any more kids. I need to not race through this like everything else I do in life, just to get to the end, and then move on to the next thing. Yet, I'm loving every part of his growing up -- I mean, right now the RRHB's playing the piano and the baby seems to be singing along. It's so cute it makes you want to eat his toes. He's kind of screaming like Frank Black at the moment: whaaaaa! Aaaaaa! eeeigh!!!

So my life is made up of moments lately. Some good. Some bad. But all connected by this gift of time that I have before me. Six more months and then it's back to work. Then the baby is no longer a baby but a toddler and if one more person tells me how fast it's going to go, I might just start weeping in front of them. I don't want it to go fast. I want it to be the slow food movement of maternity leave. I want it to be all savoury and with rich spices and lots of new and exciting dishes. And when we need it, a frozen pizza or two.

#32 - Committed

2011-04-12T12:56:00.005-04:00

Dear Elizabeth Gilbert,

Should you have ever come to one of my book club meetings, you will have discovered that I am not a fan of the epistolary format. It makes me a bit crazy unless it's Mary Shelley, actually. Yet, I feel the need to speak to you directly. Perhaps it's the personal nature of your book or perhaps it's my own selfish need to write a bit differently today -- regardless, here we go, an open letter to you.

An apology to start: I really and truly hated Eat, Pray, Love. I didn't give it a proper chance, however, and threw the book across the room halfway through India. The voice, the whining, the lack of appreciation for your life's gifts, it all annoyed me to no end. And then I watched the movie (why oh why does Hollywood insist upon making movies about writers where they never, ever write? Aside from an email or two -- to break up with a boyfriend none the less -- the Liz Gilbert in the film never picks up a book or a pencil. Annoying. Didn't that bother you?) and it affirmed my every action in terms of not finishing that book.

Cultural zeitgeist aside, I was weary to read Committed. In fact, I'm not sure why I did -- and it took some effort, an extra trip to the library, a hold, actual dedication to read your book while caring for an ever-increasingly needy infant. But am I ever glad that I did. I'm going to say it loud and clear: I'm so very sorry. I was Judgy McJudgerson when it came to EPL, I couldn't abide by the stories I was hearing of groups of women having themed parties and giving up their own lives for a year of self-journeyment. Maybe I was jealous. Maybe I wanted to be out there too -- travelling for year and then writing about it. I mean, it sounds delicious. Yet, something in Committed, maybe it was the word "skeptic" in the book's subtitle that caught me, or maybe it was the subject matter (being a happily married lady myself but ever-curious about the social and political implications of the institution itself), but I was hooked by the first chapter.

In fact, despite the odd pairing of the more anthropological aspects of the memoir with your own personal experiences, I was somewhat taken in by your obsessive/compulsive need to research just about everything you could possibly about marriage before wearily entering into your own second union. I know Curtis Sittenfeld pointed out that some of the connections between your own research and experiences in limbo while waiting for Felipe's immigration situation to be sorted stretched thin across your narrative, but I didn't mind. I enjoyed learning about the people that you met, the marriages you came across, the kind of social history that seems to only be discussed between women but not necessarily written down. Women need to talk more about their differences. Or, rather, women need to be better aware of the social and political implications of marriage around the world -- if only to appreciate and understand our own particular wants, needs, and biases.

But what I adored about your book, and what made me feel like a heel for being so judgmental about your first book, was the story about your grandmother. I, too, grew up with a strong natured, extremely intelligent, ridiculously amazing grandmother -- a war bride who bravely left her family behind in England to start a new life in Canada with a difficult man, who held her family together tragedy after tragedy, and whom I loved so much that I still think about her every single day. Your grandmother, with her sassy fur coat and her determination, her happiness in that tiny farmhouse with her small kids and everything that she gave up -- there's a richness to her story that I felt was missing from the bits of EPL that I read. Maybe I should have been more patient. Maybe more Maud-like stories would have shown up in the "Love" section of your book. Alas, I didn't wait around to find out.

I did, however, rip through to the end of this book and was pleased to see that the legalities of your situation worked itself out. That your skepticism still allowed you to take a brave step down the aisle and I could absolutely relate to the idea of wanting to be married but not necessarily needing a "wedding" (we called ours a "non-wedding" for a long time and got married at city hall; it took less than 15 minutes. In fact, the actual "wedding" means so little to either of us that we a) forget our anniversary just about every year and b) neither can remember exactly how long we've been married. Some people might think this strange -- but for me, and for us, it's about the relationship, not the piece of paper, about building a life together, not about the institution. In a way, why did we get married at all, one might wonder. But it was important to me to be married and I'm sure it's exactly as you explore throughout your book -- the way I was raised, the example of my parents' marriage, my grandparents and aunts and uncles.

Also, you have such a grand sense of humour throughout this book that perhaps I missed completely while being so annoyed with EPL? The tone of this book was whip-smart yet still with a questioning when it came to having to do something you were both so against from the beginning of your relationship. Lastly, I can absolutely relate to the obsessive/compulsive way you went about coming to terms with having to get hitched -- the research, the restlessness, the ideas of how to still be the "you" that you had discovered after your first failed marriage. And as one who obsesses and has their own compulsive tendencies when it comes to many aspects of my life -- it made me feel better to see someone else put it down in writing so eloquently.

So, in short, here's my apology for being so flippant and, well, cruel. I'm sorry.

Notes From A House Frau XVIII

2011-04-05T14:18:00.005-04:00

At this very moment, my RRBB, after an exhausting few minutes of rolling over, fussing because he can't get himself back again (like a turtle on its back only in reverse; it's quite funny), has spent the last fifteen or so minutes looking at himself in the mirror on his activity mat. His concentration skills are hilarious. I'm not sure at all what he sees in the mirror but he's absolutely enamoured with whatever it is...

Here is our wee boy at five months (five months!) [And this picture is already three weeks old because he's 26 weeks tomorrow]. He's starting to have quite the little personality. My temper, my RRHB's response to anything traumatic (to go to sleep), and a lovely happy smile that belongs to him alone. Everyone keeps telling us that this is the best of the baby stage -- when they get to this age, five or six months, but I'm enjoying every baby stage these days, if only because it's all so new to me, and just so damn fun. That's not to say that I'm not exhausted, because I am, beyond words, and that I'm not frustrated by how the disease still refuses to calm down, because I am, but I'm trying to be calm and collected, find a quiet routine we can settle into, and make the most of the time that I have before heading up to the cottage for the summer (without plumbing!).

We gave the RRBB some sweet potatoes this afternoon. His very first non-cereal food. He decided about four bites in that enough was enough and he'd really just prefer to breast feed. It's a slow, patient process, this real-food business. Like anything, I am excited for him and want to record every little thing that happens -- but I can't be sure that when he's older, he'll actually want to know.

Over the last few days, I've seen many doctors: SFDD, kidney doctor, gastro doc, and had some blood work done today. I'm not going to lie -- I've been panicking inside a whole lot about the state of my poor kidneys. I have tried to be positive, tried to look at the bright side of it all (that my condition is essentially unchanged since two weeks before having the baby), and yet regardless of all the drugs, of all the "resting," of all the not working, my creatinine is still sky high as is my blood pressure. In all the years I've had the disease, I've never had high blood pressure -- and I hate taking medicine for things that my body should just do right -- and it scares me when I put the cuff on and get a reading like 146/98. We can't afford any more restorative yoga at the moment, and the money I thought would last us a year barely made it through six months. Such is life, right?

Last time, I promised I would stop complaining about being sick. Or tired. Sick and tired. A lot of residual shock and awe about how everything turned out led me to try and read other birth stories. Helen left a comment letting me know about a collection called Great Expectations: Twenty-Four True Stories About Childbirth edited by Lisa Moore and Dede Crane (#31). And it's excellent (thank you Toronto Public Library for loaning me a copy). I whipped through it in just a couple of hours (over a few days) and came to the conclusion that not a single birth plan goes according to, well, plan. For something that women have been doing since women were, well, invented, childbirth is as complex and ever-changing as people are themselves. I needed to read this -- I needed to know that despite all the best laid plans (birthing tubs, doulas, midwifes, home births, drugs, no drugs) that a women might set out before her due date, chances are something dramatic will change in the minutes when she shouts "it's time" at her husband and/or significant other. It's a bright, fascinating collection -- not a single one of the writers fall back into cliche to describe their experiences, which I felt was a revelation considering most pop culture birth stories coming to us via television and the movies aren't remotely realistic. Like firefighters heading into a blaze without their masks, they're all panting and fake screaming, with babies popping out looking six months old already. But this collection is painstakingly honest, achingly real and just what I needed to read.

Anyway, I don't have much else to say. I've been trying to write this blog post for over a week now and the RRBB hasn't let me get much done. I've got two book reviews to get to and a to-do list that is as long as my arm. So, I will stop rambling, for now.

#30 - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

2011-04-04T17:28:00.006-04:00

In the hands of a lesser writer, the meticulously researched, exceptionally complex story of this novel would have probably spiraled out of control. Such is not the case in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet where David Mitchell masterfully crafts an intricate look at life in a remote Japanese "exit" island (Dejima) at the turn of the 19th century. As a part of the Dutch East Indian Trading Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, VOC), de Zoet arrives on Dejima with an honest heart and an even more moral eye. He has one job set out for him: to meticulously revise the company's records to ensure they are correct and therefore stop the corruption. This job, however, proves difficult when it's discovered that just about every rank and file of the men serving the VOC on Dejima, and even those tasked to clean up the corruption, are themselves corrupt.

If de Zoet is the moral heart of the book, then the soul of this novel is absolutely Orito Aibagawa, a midwife, who despite terrible odds, furthers her career despite both gender and class discrimination. De Zoet falls easily in love with Orito but his feelings are secondary to what she must endure when she's taken captive by an evil Abbot and forced into servitude alongside numerous other women. The abuse of the women (each month a few women are chosen to receive the "gifts" of the monks [pregnancy] and then told absolute lies about what happens to their newborn children when they are immediately taken away post-birth) coupled with the maniacal, strange beliefs of the Abbot remain a fascinating thread within the novel.

There are so many characters in this novel that to recount what happens to all of them, or to truly give justice to Mitchell's mammoth undertaking (the attention to historical detail; the fascinating intersection of the two different cultures; the actual events that propel the narrative forward), would be impossible in a blog review. What I would like to say, though, is that the historical detail never gets in the way of the story -- it doesn't insert itself like an awkward metaphor. Instead, it provides a rich, robust backdrop to a time and place that isn't exploitative. It felt very timely, given the recent, tragic, and devastating events unfolding in Japan, to be reading a book that I felt was extremely respectful of both its culture and heritage. Perhaps I'm wrong, but with nothing to compare it to, I'm going to go with my gut instinct and commend Mitchell for allowing this reader into a world she had never had any idea even existed.

I kept imagining writing rich and robust essays about this book while reading -- applying all kinds of post-colonial analysis to both Mitchell's narrative structure (fairly straightforward but by placing "Jacob de Zoet" in the title one would assume he's the "main" character so it's interesting to note how little of the book actually revolves around him) and to the failed attack by the British that propels the novel to its conclusion. All in all, it's a deep, meaty novel that deserves all of the accolades (Commonweath Writer's Prize regional win, Booker nom, tonnes of "best of" lists from last year). It was completely worth the $1.80 that I had to pay in late fees upon returning it to the library this afternoon.

READING CHALLENGES: Because Mitchell is British, I can't count this towards Around the World in 52 Books. Sometimes, I think I should revise the challenge to include the actual settings of the novels instead of just the nationality of the authors but I've done it this way for so long that I don't want to change it up now just to include more books. And I've absolutely abandoned my shelves for the moment. I have way too many library books and publishers titles to get through over the next few weeks. It's actually a relief because I was getting bored, bored, bored of my shelves -- despite how very dedicated I am to getting through as many of the books as possible this year. Right now I'm halfway through Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed and I have a lot to say about it...plus a little to rant about EPL & its movie adaptation.

Notes From A House Frau XVII

2011-03-25T17:01:00.005-04:00

It's been a hard week. I had a very disappointing visit with the SFDD last Wednesday morning. My creatinine levels have spiked again for no discernible reason. So, I can't taper the prednisone any further, and I'm back to bi-weekly blood tests, which is tiresome and exhausting, to say the least. And I know I shouldn't complain, that there are far sicker people in the world, people in far worse conditions than I am, but I had trouble seeing beyond my own frustration with fighting an unchanging disease for the last six months. You start to feel as though you are losing the battle that might cost you the war or, in my case, an organ. We are not remotely there yet but I've never been so scared that the disease won't get better, wholly better, than I am these days.

I've cried a lot. I've felt guilty for thinking terrible thoughts -- was this the right decision to move forward, why didn't I speak up when I was feeling so poorly, could I have prevented the episode from becoming so dramatic. Probably not. There was no way to tell and we ended up coming out of it alive and with a beautiful baby that we adore so much it hurts. But that doesn't stop me from being so utterly and completely sick of being sick these days. When the SFDD told me my creatinine had gone way back up, it was everything I could do not to burst into tears in his office. He's calm. I'm a wreck. My stomach is in knots and there's nothing I can do to fight the despair.

My RRHB keeps telling me that things are no different than they were when they let me out of the hospital all those months ago. And he's right. I'm not getting worse. The disease is stable or else they wouldn't let me go home and "stay the course" (SFDD's words; not mine). And taking 15 mgs of prednisone is way better than taking 60 mgs of prednisone. And so, we continue. And continue. Six more weeks until I see him again, six more weeks of being able to breast feed, six more weeks before they talk again about another drug regiment, and six more weeks of trying to think positively, of smiling, of playing, of giggling, of trying to relax and not worry so much about it all.

Way back in the way back, when I was first diagnosed with the disease, I was still a teenager. I had that invincible feeling about it all, there's no way I'd let the disease kill me -- it simply wasn't an option. You just don't realize the severity of it all at that point. I went to university, to grad school, started working, got married, and have had a baby -- all things that weren't necessarily possible the very moment I was diagnosed. That's the trouble with the flares, with the unstable test results, they refuse to be a part of the big picture. They trap you in the downward spiral of letting the disease win -- as if mind over matter actually makes a difference. All these years later, I'm far more temperate in terms of how I think about it all. I know stress and worry makes it worse. I know that being healthy is ever-so important. I know that I am lucky to live in a country where I have access to medical care that has consistently and, almost effortlessly, saved my life on more than one occasion. Still, I'm angry.

So, I'm trying not to let it show. I'm going to bury it for a little while. I'm going to sob, if I have to, and then laugh uncontrollably at some stupid thing that my RRHB says. I'm going to feel sorry for myself and then berate myself for doing so. Then, I might take a walk. I'll string some words together and then take a deep breath. It's funny, we all use war metaphors when "fighting" diseases -- and I can't help but hear echoes of Shakespeare's Henry V, the Kenneth Branagh film, which I haven't seen in years, but that great St. Crispin's Day speech, a sword thrust in the air. Maybe that's what I need: a great big sword to thrust in the air.

#29 - Cleaving

2011-03-24T11:04:00.009-04:00

Yes, I am skipping #28, Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, because I'm not particularly inclined to write and entire post about it. It was interesting, as everything he writes is, but not really book-length fascinating. And I certainly didn't find it as impactful as The Tipping Point. In a way, the book seemed a bit contradictory -- the thesis was all about trusting your first instincts, but the arguments and/or examples were all people who had massive amounts of experience in a particular area that gave them the freedom to trust their first impressions (if that makes any sense). I mean, I realize it's also about unpacking prejudice and other social innuendos (I found the section on marriage and reading faces particularly interesting), but overall, I don't know if this book changed my perspective on, well, life and business etc. the way his first book did. Regardless, I am now going to put Outliers on my library holds list because I do like his writing so very much.

So, Blink is my trailer -- now for the feature, Julie Powell's Cleaving. I read and adored Julie & Julia, and came to this book with the same wide-eyed wonder of yet another deserving blogger becoming a published writer -- expanding and solidifying their skills on the written vs. the virtual page. But, not all books can contain the wonder of first books when they are particularly successful, and Cleaving suffers a little from the sophomore slump.

The first half of the book deals specifically with Powell's apprenticeship with a butcher shop in rural New York. She writes passionate and obviously well-learned passages about her experiences, and I found these sections of the book the most intriguing. They were riveting -- bones cracking, wrists aching -- and you can immediately tell the passion she feels toward the art of butchery, a profession that few women enter. But where the book falls down are the "life is messy" bits in between. Her marriage, oft-described as 'like breathing' or something equally life-sustaining, has, well, lost its oxygen -- both she and her husband are having affairs; Julie first, then Eric in retribution, perhaps. And yet, despite hurting each other to the core, they stay together, they love each other, even if, at that moment, it means a lot of anger and trial separations. Powell's lover, referred to for most of the book as "D," is passionate, dirty, and a little rough, which is what she needs. In a way, it fulfills some sense of anger (or I'm totally reading into it) and self-destructive behavior that Powell feels deep down.

Yet, the narrative itself, the Julie Powell contained within the book's story, doesn't actively analyze her behaviour -- sure, she over-"metaphorizes" it (there are only so many meat metaphors one book should contains). She flails around drinking too much, and somewhat laughing off claims of alcoholism, sex addiction (not really but she does participate in SOME dangerous activities in certain parts of the novel), and actively tries to stalk "D" once he tells her he can no longer see or speak to her. In a way, it's the same obsessive behavior that made her dedication to the Julie & Julia project work, and you can't fault Powell for her extremely open, balls on the table, writing style. In a way, though, I did wish she came closer to finding out some answers -- or at least looking deeper at the roots of the problems.

The constant comparison between her husband, the meat, and her lover grew tiresome, and then she lost me completely in the second half of the book when she leaves Eric (the husband) to take numerous trips to explore meat culture around the world. Not saying that self-discovery is wrong, or that her experiences don't sound magnificent, but the whole book felt smacked together in a way that didn't necessarily work from a narrative point of view. The sinews, forgive my own meat metaphor, grew far too thin between the first part and the second.

In a way, it's impressive that Powell writes so openly and honestly about her experiences. And I'm not even claiming it's "TMI" as some of the other criticisms I read around the internet claimed -- it's more that there's a lack of style to the project, the style was there in her first book, this one feels rushed, repetitive and kind of "shock for shock value." There's no denying she's a talented writer of memoirs (memoirist?) but, on the whole, I wanted there to be a central focus, sometimes, that wasn't Powell, her actions, her feelings, or her explosive.

Not to make a comparison, but I've started Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed (another library book!) and, while I hated Eat, Pray, Love (threw it across the room half-way through "Pray"), I'm rather taken with it so far. Gilbert sets out, upon learning that she'll have to marry her lover (so he can live in America, with her), whom she promised never to marry (they both had spectacularly awful divorces), to learn everything she can about the institution to see if she can uncover her preconceived notions and move forward. That's what Cleaving is missing -- context -- something beyond the vivid descriptions of butchery (which, I'll repeat, are excellent) that grounds the memoir in something other than Powell's own heaving emotions.

That said, the package is fantastic -- I adore the cover; think the title is brilliant, it brings up all kinds of great word associations; and ripped through the first part in an afternoon. So, I'm on the fence when it comes to the book as a whole, but felt spectacularly sorry for her husband, her lover and Powell herself, the emotional train wreckage they all went through was so messy -- it can't have been easy to relive it on the page. And sometimes, the rawness of it all comes through so clearly that I'm surprised Powell had the gumption not to edit herself, even if the book suffers for it.

I read this great opinion piece on NPR's MonkeySee blog about the book. And agree, too, with the Globe's review. In case anyone was thinking of reading this book, too.

Notes From A House Frau XVI

2011-03-21T11:51:00.006-04:00

RRBB has been hitting some very fun milestones lately. He had his first taste of solid food (if you can call it that) as the picture here depicts. He slept through the night: twice (even though in the few hours preceding the long sleep he was over-tired and ridiculously manic, but not upset). He visited a sugar bush and an antique mall (or, rather, his bored parents dragged him to said sugar bush and said antique mall). And he was babysat for the second time while my RRHB and I went to see the Elephant 6 collective at Lee's Palace on Friday night. Shockingly, he's still the happy, well adjusted, easy baby we've brought into this world.

Of course, I'm still not sleeping from the drugs. But the odd night isn't so bad here and there, I can handle it. It's funny, I get poetic about it in a way: the sun rises and it sets, the moon comes out, but without that deep hours-long pause -- time passing in an instant because you are, well, unconscious, everything blurs into one, breakfast feels like a late night snack, lunch disappears, and dinner is always rushed, trying to cram the day in before the bedtime routine starts. As always, I am at a loss for spoken words. Friends came over for dinner yesterday and I just couldn't finish my sentences, kept forgetting words, used the wrong words, filled up the space with malapropisms -- when does the 'baby brain' end? Perhaps when I get more consistent, consecutive rest, or perhaps when the RRBB turns 18 and heads off to university. Who knows. For now, I'm struggling with simple sentences while complex thoughts careen around my brain like snowflakes -- always melting before they necessarily land.

We went to the Bloor/Gladstone library last week, and it was glorious. It really is a beautiful building and I'd forgotten how much I enjoy libraries. I haven't truly visited one on a regular basis since being in grad school, and now that we're pinching every penny, I simply can't afford to buy books. I've been wondering a lot about other birth stories, wanting to compare experiences, wanting to maybe experience a little catharsis too in terms of my own trials and tribulations. So, one of the books I picked up was Rebecca Eckler's Knocked Up (#27). I didn't read anything other then What to Expect When You're Expecting while I was pregnant, and now that I'm no longer pregnant (although still with-pooch), I am curious to know about other mothers-to-be. I mean, not everyone ends up on the special pregnancy ward of Mt. Sinai hospital with their lungs bleeding before giving birth, right?

In short, I wanted to know what normal was like, in a way. Granted, there was a little too much: "is my ass fat????" throughout Knocked Up, and I don't know that I would have chosen a c-section had one not been chosen for me (I was oddly looking forward to the experience of giving birth). But I did laugh in various places, and while I know Eckler takes a lot of flack for her self-involved, me-first, examination of both pregnancy and parenthood, I actually enjoyed the lighthearted nature of the book. More chicklit than the nauseating "motherhood makes me a saint" stance of so much that I find online relating to this situation we're in (yes, motherhood), Knocked Up gave me a bit of a mental break in terms of contemplating all that happened to me, and that's all I'd ask of it. It was an easy-breezy read and I'm jealous of her ability to stay so completely focussed on not changing in the midst of such a huge change.

That's not something I've been able to do -- none of my clothes fit, in fact, I can't even seem to find three-quarters of my wardrobe, having packed things away to who knows where in the house. My body is so very different and I barely recognize myself in the mirror. The shock of the naked self in the shower is enough to give up food forever, and were it not for the prednisone encouraging my stomach to crave every baked good on the face of this earth, I just might. I need to get more exercise, and I was actually jealous when the Rebecca in Knocked Up went out on a girl date barely two weeks into her daughter's existence. There's a level of guilt that I feel the moment I am away from the baby -- that I am being a bad mother in a way by not constantly being in his company. I know that's crazy, and ridiculous, and that doesn't mean that I don't hand him off to his father for hours at a time, but it doesn't seem to be getting any easier leaving him. But to get back to my point, the physical changes -- shorter hair, chubbier me, bloating from the meds -- feel so much more permanent these days than the mental ones.

The mental part of being a mother seems easy these days. There's love. You give it out, a lot of it. There's patience, which sometimes gets tested. There's joy. There's boredom, and there's bliss -- but it all comes together in a pretty awesome package. So, I don't blame someone for obsessing about the size of their ass -- it's overwhelming to contemplate all of the physical and mental changes at the same time, something's got to give. I was remembering way back in the way back this week. An old boss I had at an evil corporation that I used to work for (which no longer exists) took us out for lunch within the first few months of her assuming a position she later proved she was utterly unqualified for. She had just finished mat leave for her second child and we were talking about babies. At some point, and I can't remember what preceded the moment, she crinkled up her face and said that she really didn't like babies, not even her own. Perhaps she likes her kids when they get out of the difficult infant stage, who knows, but all I've been thinking this week is how awesome babies are. I know I shouldn't be so judgmental but as if I didn't need another reason to post-actively hate the woman, now I even think she's kind of inhumane. I've already forgotten the witching hour, the exhaustion, the frustration of the first little while, and moved on to complete and utter adoration.

I know it won't always be like this -- and we're so lucky that we have an extremely easy going baby -- but, for right now, I'm wallowing in the fun of it all. Charging ahead with crazy vampire kisses and holding that baby high up in the air to hear him squeal. Suffering through the whining when he's in the car seat to enjoy a beautiful spring day where it neither rains nor snows -- where the sun actually feels warm. Staying up far past my bedtime to enjoy a moment of non-couch (baby STILL only sleeps on me for long periods of time) freedom to watch reruns of Law and Order. Listening to him giggle uncontrollably downstairs as my RRHB plays with him. Even sobbing uncontrollably because of the hormones and whatever else is coarsing through my system because of the meds. It's all awesome in a traditional sense of the word -- it inspires awe in me that this is my life now, that my life contains another's so completely at the moment, all things that I didn't know when I was just pregnant and hoping to live. I am thankful that I did. I wouldn't want to miss any of this.

Other library finds for this week: Blink, A History of the World in 10 and 1/2 Chapters, West Toronto Junction, Christina Rossetti: Selected Poems, as well as Knocked Up. I've been reading a poem a night before I go to bed, just dipping into them, and found this delicious line that somewhat sums up my last couple weeks: "O clamorous heart, lie still."

As if it could. As if.

#26 - Light Lifting

2011-03-19T17:25:00.004-04:00

Light Lifting, Alexander MacLeod's remarkable book of short stories, was our book club selection this month. I have to admit I did complain a little about reading yet another short story collection. In my mind, I'd grown a bit weary of the format and wanted something a little juicier, a little longer, to dig my teeth into. The women in my club are the smartest book people around and we have amazing discussions about books but this was our third story collection in a row and I had very mixed feelings about the other two.

But I've come to a very different conclusion after reading Light Lifting. I'm not tired of the short story. I'm tired of reading uneven collections where the stories are too dependent on quirks for them to be plausible and/or plot-worthy. With Light Lifting, and like The Lemon Table, I was ridiculously impressed, not only by the quality of the writing, but also by the cohesiveness of the stories themselves within the book. MacLeod hasn't written a linked book of short stories but each of the pieces includes are complete in a way that many lesser writers, some of whom we've read over the last few months in our book club, fail to achieve with any consistency.

There are real people between the pages of Light Lifting and while they all undergo some sort of life changing event, the writing around it remains subtle, metaphors don't stick out like sore thumbs, nothing supernatural happens, there's nothing 'put-upon' in terms of their suffering -- things just happen. Neighbourhoods change. Plants shut down. Fights break out in bars. But it's the intersection of these events and the places where his characters in his stories are in their lives that combine to create a remarkable moment. Someone at book club described it as pivotal -- something you don't realize at the time, or you do but it takes some time to reflect -- and one is forever changed.

I would hate to single out one story as my favourite among such rich bedfellows. But, as I always read so personally, the last story, "The Number Three," about a man who killed his wife and son in a tragic car accident, ripped open my heart and splayed it out -- I bawled. I mean, of course I did, even from the very first sentence, I knew I didn't have an emotional chance against this story: "The single fried egg might be life's loneliest meal." The psychological ramifications of the accident, regardless of whether or not it was his fault, are deep. And ironic, as he was a career man working for GM, and story's title plays on ideas of the big three, and the decline of the industry in general. So much is taken away from this protagonist, and even when there's a moment where he might take a step forward, the palpable pain that prevents the step is achingly apparent. It's just damn fine writing.

And in another bit of fine "life equals art" moments: there's a part in "Wonder About Parents" where the dad takes the baby, five months old or so, into the change room and discovers she's pooped so much that it's easier just to throw her outfit into the trash and carry on. They're on a road trip, heading home for the holidays, and the baby isn't well. His wife makes him go back and retrieve the clothes, they were a gift, they can be washed -- clothes are expensive. He does. Well, we were discussing that particular moment when the RRBB had his own, ahem, explosion at book club and I contemplated throwing all of his clothes out, but didn't, because he was wearing a pair of pants that I adore, that were also a gift. But, goodness, the child had poo IN HIS HAIR.

Overall, it was a wonderful book club brunch, and every single one of us loved the book. It's up there in terms of one of the best I've read so far this year (but The Illumination still holds the crown thus far, I think). But I'd highly, highly recommend this book -- in fact, I'd be happy to pass my copy along to anyone who might want to read it, I loved it that much. Light Lifting needs to be shared, discussed, and celebrated -- it's that good.

#25 - The Incident Report

2011-03-13T19:03:00.005-04:00

Sometimes, there's a clear reason how and why books end up on my shelves. Mainly they're inherited from friends in publishing, rarely they are gifts, and often they are books that I've purchased for some reason or other. But when the time comes to actually reading and reviewing them, I can't remember the impetus -- the review, the award nod, the discussion -- that precipitated the book collecting dust over the months and months it lingers on my shelves. Such is the case for Martha Baillie's The Incident Report. I know it was long-listed for the Giller in 2009, and the Globe review must have intrigued me, but having never read The Shape I Gave You (it's on the shelf; don't worry, and I know exactly where it came from), I'm surprised I'd have two books by one author unread...usually I'll at least try to read something by an author before buying another work.

Annnywaaay.

At first, I didn't know what to make of the book: is it a novel, a collection of linked short stories, the dreaded micro-fiction? Instead, I'm choosing not to put a label on it or to define it in such a way because I think it takes away from what Baillie was trying to do. I enjoyed the book very much overall, especially the vignette-esque parts to the story -- those little episodes that took place outside of the main character's life itself (they reminded me of the interviews in Up in the Air with the employees who had been let go; that was my favourite part of that film, I think, also, the most original). Each morning, Miriam Gordon rides her bike to the Allan Gardens branch of the Toronto Public Library, where she works as a newly rebranded "Public Service Assistant." When anything untoward or out of the ordinary happens at the library, said "PSAs" are required to fill out an Incident Report, which is how the collection is organized. Short, snippets of incidents that make up a life -- both in terms of work (the strangers that come in and request and/or do strange things) and her personal life (a burgeoning relationship with a younger cab driver named Janko, with whom she falls in love).

Because this is a Canadian novel, there's a lot of tragedy, which to expand upon would ruin the book, so I won't say anything beyond the fact that, as a reader, I have grown a little weary of reading about "damaged" people. I know pain makes for exceptional sentences. Yet, I am craving a little everyday in my books these days...maybe because I'm living so much in the day-to-day myself, and have had enough tragedy in my own to fill fourteen lifetimes that I am sometimes exhausted with it in novels. However, the nature of the narrative in Baillie's book isn't exploitative -- it's simply stated, matter of fact, even -- and that helps to dampen the emotional overbearing nature of the events themselves within the incident reports.

Some of the novel remains unresolved. Miriam's finding notes in various places around the library -- hidden in books, left behind on the photocopier -- that have echoes of a Rigoletto opera that her father once loved, and she's reimagined as the heroine. This was the weakest part of the book from my point of view. The mystery isn't necessarily solved nor is it suitably explained but, in a sense, that's okay, because it's more about how Miriam perceives what's going on than what actually happens that seems important. It's a way for her to explore her relationship with her father and for the reader to know more about the background of her tragic life -- how she ended where she is emotionally.

The love story is sweet, and Janko and overwhelmingly lovely character. Some of the passages had echoes of Ondaatje for me, "The Cinnamon Peeler"-type stuff, and I didn't mind it at all (only rolled my eyes once, and for those of you counting, it was, yes a "ride-me-like-a-stallion-Morag-moment within the book"). In a way, Janko was such an innocent character, consistently reading children's books, living in a small, small apartment, someone displaced by the ideals of a better life -- there was a story behind his life that we never got to know, only because this is Miriam's life, and so we know him only in relation to her. Had the novel been more traditional, I'm sure we would have known far more of his back story but then I think we would have lost the beautiful sense of wonderment that comes across throughout the sections of the reports dedicated to their relationship.

So, I wouldn't say I was swept away by The Incident Report like I was with the next book I read, Light Lifting by Alexander MacLeod, but I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it, and how much I appreciated its brevity. Also, it's another book off the shelves and into the box of books to be donated, shared, shipped off, and/or sent away to anyone who might be interested.

#24 - The Illumination

2011-03-13T18:42:00.003-04:00

Oh, Kevin Brockmeier, thank you so very much for breaking my heart.

The Illumination swept me away and held me tight and didn't let go -- I inhaled this book over a 24-hour period, and actually didn't mind the fact that I was the only one awake in my house far into the night simply because I had this book for company. Told in successive vignettes from the perspective of six different people, a single notebook, filled with one sentence love notes from a husband to a wife, the novel tracks the impact of "The Illumnation" on their various lives. One day, peoples injuries, be it cancer or a canker sore, begin to glow with white light. All of a sudden, the world's population is lit up when they are in any kind of pain. And it affects each person differently, and utterly changes the world.

The novel begins with Carol Anne Page, who manages to slice off the tip of her thumb trying to get into a package that her terrifically mean-spirited ex-husband has mailed to her. While in hospital, with her glowing wound, she meets a kind doctor, and then has a roommate who dies in a car crash. As her light is just about to expire, the young woman tells Carol Anne to keep her journal -- inside are hundreds of love notes from her husband, whom she thinks perished in the crash -- and the book starts along a journey that essentially forms the basis of the plot of the book. What's going to happen to the book, how does it end up from one person to the next, and what does it mean to their lives.

It then goes back to the husband, to a young boy, a missionary, a writer and then finally a street person who sells books in NYC. Each story alights on the fact that their lives are somehow touched (or ruined in Jason, the husband's case) by these words and the pain they carry. All in all, it's an excellent novel, truly the best I've read so far this year (I know it's only March). The writing is spectacular and, like Blindness by Saramago, the supernatural event isn't cloying or overdone; it's simply another way to explore the human condition and how it changes when pressed in a direction it never imagined it would go. There isn't the "end of the world"-ness that you'd find in something like Children of Men or the aforementioned Blindness, but there is a sense that without The Illumination, these six individuals would never come together, even with the notebook, which is a fine thread to connect them together.

They are vastly different stories but they all have one thing in common, and that their internal pain in some ways now matches their external pain, and there's little that can be done about it, even in a day of modern medicine. Strange and exciting things happen to each of the characters as we follow them while they have the notebook -- it changes them sometimes, sometimes nothing changes except perhaps a level of acceptance of the true disappointment in life. Regardless, the stories broke my heart in a million different ways and I love that about a novel. In particular, the one told from the perspective of young Chuck Carter, whose rich and vivid imagination more than counterbalances the fact that his home life is terrifically mixed up and abusive, and that he has decided to stop talking. I wanted to reach into the book and tear the boy up with hugs, I wanted to shake his parents, and then I remembered it wasn't real.

I can't imagine liking a book more, I truly can't.

#23 - You Or Someone Like You

2011-03-13T18:25:00.002-04:00

I'd never heard of Chandler Burr or Your or Someone Like You before our sales conference, maybe a year ago, maybe longer. A friend in the office read and adored the book, so I ordered a copy in to read and there it sat on my shelf at work, and then at home, for months and months. So, coming to the "Bs" meant finally reading it, and what a surprise, it's actually a terrific novel, and completely not what I expected.

In a way, Burr's narrator, Anne, reminded me of a character Lionel Shriver would create: intelligent, uncompromising and, at times, aggressive in terms of what she wants out of life. At it's heart, this is a book about words, what they mean, how we use them, and how books enrich a life. Anne's got a PhD in English Literature. She's been married to Howard Rosebaum for years. He's a huge Hollywood producer and they've been living in LA for years. They are the elite of the elite of LA, they know everyone, and everyone knows them.

Anne's background, British by accent, raised around the world by her parents as her father served in the Foreign Legion, has taught her that home is always where you choose to be; Howard, her husband, feels like home is where you go back to, where people always have to accept you. This fundamental different might not seem like much, but when religion becomes involved (Anne never converted; Howard is Jewish but not Orthodox or necessarily practicing), it becomes a fissure that threatens to tear the couple apart. And when their son Sam announces that he's going to visit Israel, to explore his roots, something happens to shake Howard and Anne's marriage to the core.

Surrounding the family drama, Anne begins a book club -- more like an intense canonical reading group -- and she takes directors, screenwriters, producers, line producers, and the like through the books as a means of self-improvement and understanding. From there, it gets out of control, an article in Vanity Fair, and then all of sudden she's about to produce her own movie. Not always likable and not always saying things that prove popular, when Howard has a crisis of conscious, Anne breaks all boundaries to get him back. In a way, she has chosen love and family above all else, and without Howard, she's not home, she's not where she wants to be. But how she gets there, and her opinions, and what she has to say to impact him, to pull him back from where he ended up, well, it's neither politically correct nor all together sane.

The book is delicious in its irony, and carries the weight of its words very well. It's hard to write a book about high literature, about some of the greatest books ever written, include many of their words, and not expect the book to hold up to the same kind of scrutiny. I didn't agree with a lot of what Anne said sometimes, especially towards the end, but that's the point -- she was trying to be argumentative, fighting with all of her words to get her husband back, and regardless of the outcome (SPOILER: she gives a disastrous speech in front of a lot of truly "important" people), you can't fault her reason or her passion. But I think the most successful aspect of the novel is the fact that it truly doesn't go where you expect a simple story about a marriage either falling apart or coming back together goes. In fact, there's nothing simple about this book, and that's to be celebrated.

CHALLENGES: Off the shelf...

Notes From A House Frau XV

2011-03-10T14:59:00.005-05:00

We just got back from Restorative Yoga and the RRBB is conked out and successfully transferred to his bassinet. The photo for this post was the how the baby looked before we headed out to an Oscar party. Yes, he was yawning this much even before the show started. We left the house at 5 PM. He lasted approximately 3 hours with a nap in between, and then we came home. I really enjoyed being social for those few hours. I miss being social. Yet another discovery about myself that I've made since spending so much time at home -- I always imagined myself a homebody (I think I've talked about this before) and now that I've got a whole year off, the last place I seem to want to be is tucked away in our beautiful house.

The weather isn't helping. You can walk in the snow -- walking in the rain with a baby just isn't fun, you can't carry an umbrella and push the stroller, the baby is stuck under cover, and it's sort of completely miserable. So, this week was spent feeling a little sad, lonely and isolated. The prednisone getting to my brain in bits, and I actually sobbed one day. Sobbed. It's all to be expected, and it passes. Today (it's Saturday now) we went for a nice long walk, and I feel better. The baby has started teething and in a week or so he gets to start solid food. They grow up so fast, don't they?

Some days, I feel bad that I'm sitting here on the computer while the baby plays, either in his chair or on his activity mat. I know it's good for him, but I feel guilty, feel like I am depriving him of some parental stimulation, already letting him down and he's not even 5 months old yet. And then I feel like I'm a crazy multi-tasker, doing one hit of Where is the Green Sheep or Mr. Clumsy or Lost and Found, then writing a sentence when he's in the chair. Popping my head over the mat and making a funny face while he talks to his baby-friend the octopus or turtle. Then, I write another sentence or two. I read like a maniac while he's breastfeeding, sometimes, I'm concentrating so hard on the book I don't even notice he's fallen back asleep and there goes the sleep training -- I should have popped him back into his bassinet 15 minutes ago.

And then I start thinking that I'm too hard on myself, having too many expectations, and spending far too much time worrying about all the things that went wrong with my own childhood (which is few; we had a very happy childhood). The one thing that I am so concerned about, his sleeping, is primarily because I've been such an awful sleeper my entire life. I remembering being young, under five at least, and my mother sending me off for a nap in the afternoon. We were living with my grandparents then, in High Park, and the house was full of dark wood -- rich, expansive -- and all I did when I closed my eyes was imagine things. My brain wouldn't stop wondering how my body worked, what was the point of being here, where did things go -- strange things for a small child to work out, so philosophical. Ha! But I never slept. And as I got older, it only got worse. When I was in grade school, I started daydreaming in bed when I should have been sleeping, keeping myself awake by imagining I was Wonder Woman or some other crazy fantasy. Again, I never slept. And even older still, in university, taking the meds for the disease for the first time, I think I spent all of my second year of university awake -- a combination of a small bed, a tall boyfriend, and so much stress. Lots going on at home, very little money, lots of schoolwork, and that ruined me for years.

Finally, after much, much work and my own sleep training, years later I started getting some rest. But it took years of reprogramming myself, and still, every few days I'll have a night where sleep just eludes me. I think that's why I imagined the sleepless nights with the RRBB would be no problem, but now, including the many last weeks of pregnancy, I count not sleeping through the night a single time in over eight months. I feel like I'm back in second year university. Going through days in a fog, unable to create full sentences, and feeling so lonely. It's true that sometimes, you find a great sentence at 3AM but by the time you've got a moment to put it in context of a story, or whatever else you're working on, your mind is too fraught and frustrated that the work suffers anyway.

Thankfully, the RRBB has had two nights in the last week where he has slept for a solid six hours in a row. The first time it happened, I was awake the entire time. The second time, last night, I managed to sleep too, not the whole time, but at least a good portion of it. He still hasn't slept through the night but I'm imagining, as his mother's son, it'll be a while before that happens. And my main lesson for this week is to try and stop worrying about it. Fresh air, a little exercise, an adventure or two, and we'll all feel a bit better this week, not so sad, lonely and isolated.

Come on spring.

#22 - Quiver

2011-03-09T14:56:00.004-05:00

With Quiver, Holly Luhning has written a passable first novel that I, for the most part, enjoyed. There were issues, again, with the fact that I'm not sure if the novel itself knew what it wanted to be -- which is something I've encountered a lot these days in the books I've been reading, especially with first novels -- it's part thriller, part historical fiction, part conspiracy and suspense, with some chicklit cliches thrown in there (I've never met a heroine who fixes her makeup so much in any other book before).

Annnywaaay. Danica aka "Dani" has landed a plum fellowship at Stowmoor Psychiatric Hospital in London. A relic from the Victorian era, the hospital holds some of the country's most violent offenders, including Martin Foster, a man who brutally murdered a young girl in the name of Elizabeth Báthory, the 16th century countess infamous for bathing in the blood of her victims so it would preserver her youth. The cult of Báthory unwinds throughout the novel in a distinct Da Vinci-like way -- with found "diaries" and a secret group of people dedicated to keeping her memory and, for lack of a better word, "ways" alive. Dani has always had a fascination for Báthory, and this leads her into some dangerous territory. She meets a mysterious and beautiful "archivist," Maria, while at a conference. She's glamourous and a bit dangerous, and thus Dani's slippery slope begins -- soon she finds herself making professional errors and her personal life (she moved to England with artist boyfriend Henry) begins to fall apart.

Because something just isn't right.

Oh there's intrigue and italics, lots of secret meetings, and plenty of gruesome details, but the whole book lacks a certain focus to make it truly creepy. It just didn't quite get there for me, maybe because I found it a little too melodramatic in places, especially in the sections of the recreated diaries, and Luhning has a penchant for tangents when she's trying to make a point in places where fast-paced plotting would have been more beneficial.

There's a lot of Silence of the Lambs meets Interview with a Vampire within these pages -- a lot of rich description and I do find the whole Báthory backstory utterly fascinating. I just wish it was better entwined with the general plot and action of the book. A lot of the times, I found myself wondering how Dani got to be a psychologist at all -- she's quite terrible at reading people, and falls into obvious traps that would have more advanced crime fiction enthusiasts rolling their eyes a little bit.

That said, it's a really easy book to fall into, and that always takes talent -- to grab the reader and haul them along for a nice 1.5 day diversion. And I was truly creeped out by some of Báthory's behaviour -- and would have liked to have seen a lot more of it throughout the novel.

#21 - The Lemon Table

2011-03-07T14:30:00.005-05:00

My bookish love affair with Julian Barnes continues, and I thoroughly enjoyed his short story collection, The Lemon Table. It's funny, a lot of the criticisms that I leveled against Sarah Selecky's work -- mainly its use of the second person, a story in epistolary format, and general the "twee-ness" of much of the stories -- can be set against this collection as well. Barnes uses the second person, which normally makes me crazy; he has a story that's all letters from a kooky old lady to himself, wherein the self-referential nature of it all would usually enrage me; and the last piece could be described as microfiction with no "real" plot per se but a selection of descriptions that come together to tell the tale of an egotistical composer. All of the above normally have me throwing the book against the wall and giving up in exasperation. But gracious, these stories are excellent.

The last story, "The Silence" tells me that lemons are a symbol of death in Chinese culture -- I'm not sure how reliable the narrator is in this last piece, so I am not going to take that verbatim. But it does give the reader and understanding of the general theme that pervades the entire collection. Musings on the ends of lives, on divorce, on death, on widows and the children left behind, on relationships that could have been but never were -- and I imagined 'table' more of tableau -- of that terrible acting exercise where your teacher yells "hold" and everyone freezes in whatever position they landed upon.

It's a terrific collection, cohesive even though none of the stories are linked; rich in language and metaphor; paced brilliantly and truly honest in its interpretation of the human condition. In a way, these stories reminded me of Alice Munro, only there's a little bit more sex and bad language, especially in "Appetite," which like her story, "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," deals with the tragic and debilitating affects of Alzheimer's. Both Barnes and Munro have a distinct talent when it comes to creating characters and situations that highlight the slightly awkward and sometimes terrible aspects of human nature. In this, the stories feel real, they feel relevant, and they feel complete, but not overwritten.

On the whole, I can't get over the immense breadth of Barnes's talent for creating characters that cross decades, even centuries, are so wholly different in voice, and are so utterly believable (even when he writes from a woman's perspective). In the epistolary story, entitled, "Knowing French," a spunky pensioner sends the author Julian Barnes a number of letters, each progressively more familiar, with little gems of humour and slices of life: "What I was trying to say about Daphne [a fellow "inmate" at her home] is that she was always someone who looked forward, almost never back. This probably seems not much of a feat to you, but I promise it gets harder."

Indeed!

And then, in an amazing story about misguided and unrequited love, "The Story of Mats Israelson," he writes, "Barbro Lindwall was not convinced of her feelings for Anders Boden until she recognized that she would now spend the rest of her life with her husband."

Exactly!

And then my last favourite line from the book, it's from the last story, the microfiction-like one about the egocentric, aging, and silent-for-years composer: "Geese would be beautiful if cranes didn't exist."

You see!

I can't stop. I earmarked a half-dozen, maybe more, pages, and kept putting the book down on my chest just to savour particular passages. In "The Things You Know," two elderly widows sit down for a terribly polite breakfast once a month and what comes out of their mouths is completely different from the thoughts in their heads: the resentment towards one another only palpable as a fork stabs an egg or a waiter brings hot water instead of a purely fresh pot of tea -- it was actually one of my favourites among an already rich collection.

Overall, now I think I want to read every single book Julian Barnes has ever written. It'll be a challenge to find books this good on my shelves as I continue through them. Thankfully, I've got a few books from publishers to get through before I get back to my challenge. I need a bit of a break from the pressure of the 300-odd titles staring at me day after day from my desk chair.

Notes From A House Frau XIX

2011-03-06T13:45:00.005-05:00

Thoughts When The Last Time You Slept Well Was Two Tuesdays Ago

The RRBB cracks me up these days. Here's a picture of him on his activity mat, where he plays everyday for about a half-hour or more before getting cranky and not enjoying the company of his baby-friend the octopus any longer. We've started dressing him in real clothes when he leaves the house as well -- although that's hard to do when sleepers are the best things ever, especially if they have a zipper. And a picture of an elephant. Or feet that are fashioned into "shoes." The whole idea of cuteness just goes into overload on a daily basis in our house. Multiple strangers stop me when I'm out and about and comment upon the beauty of the baby -- and some, without permission, natch, reach in the stroller and touch him. I try not to get annoyed. But it's hard when everything is annoying me these days because I'm so freaking tired.

The being tired isn't the RRBB's fault entirely. Sure he's still waking up once or twice in the night, but it's mainly the fault of the prednisone that when I am up, I can't seem to get back to sleep. Or, I can't get to sleep at all and then there's no point in lying there being miserable -- I might as well get up and read and make more to-do lists than listen to both of the men in my life snore away happily. Oddly, it doesn't make me angry at all to not be sleeping these days, a little grumpy, a little out of sorts, but nothing like the rage that I usually feel after months and months of being on drugs that keep you awake and turn your brain inside out.

Last week I felt a little of the prednisone crazies for the first time. I was a bit down in the dumps thinking that it's been almost six months of really intense treatment for the disease this time around, and I'm over a quarter of the way through my maternity leave. Winter seems never-ending. The snow is still beautiful and we are still getting out and about but my son (my son!) hates hats. He screams when I put them on, screams until he's resigned that I'm not going to take it off, and then screams when his head gets too hot. So I will be very glad when it comes time to abandon his head to the elements and walk around unencumbered by animal-inspired toques.

As I sat up doing a restorative yoga posture called "legs up the wall" in the RRBB's bedroom (because he's still sleeping in ours) reading the other night, yet again after trying to go to bed early, after finally getting the baby down, after my RRHB put down his book and we turned off the light, and I discovered that sleep was like the mystical South for early explorers -- something on the horizon to be expected but never experienced -- I just felt sad. Overwhelmingly sad. And for no reason. Sometimes, I think the trauma and the stress of the disease comes out of my body in sadness -- the ache of my poor beleagured organs can't express themselves and so I just get sad, sad, sad.

It's hard not to feel the pressure of the physical changes of the disease. Hard not to feel frustrated when you see people who gave birth the day after you looking like a million bucks on Oprah (don't make me say who; it's embarrassing enough to be watching Oprah), and you've still got a paunch and your hair is terrible despite a cute new hair cut and you've got a pooch and your stretch marks are still purple and tiger-like and you haven't had a shower in two days because your RRHB is working and you've got the baby and haven't talked to anyone in days and are kind of lonely and it's 2AM and there is no sleep in sight. See, sad.

And I tried, for about 24 hours, to "Change [My] Life in 30 Days" as per a challenge in Chatelaine magazine. They dared me; I tried -- I ate well (followed their 80% rule and then gave up and went right back to eating three muffins and some organic jujubes for lunch), I "scheduled fun," which sounded stupid even when I was reading it, and could just not bring myself to go on a "laughter date." I'm impressed with the writer's ability to come up with 30 ways to change your life, small things to make your everyday just that little bit better, but they were not the long lasting, calming changes that I was craving. They were a bit too Gretchen Rubin (not bad; just not for me) for my taste. So, I've been thinking of my own 30-day challenge, because, of course, what I need is more to-do lists and ways to improve myself during an already stressful time, something to try next month and to keep track of here. Where I'd start -- create a healthy budget and stick to it. The trouble with these "dares" is that they aren't long-lasting. You do it one day and then drop it the next. My life isn't going to be made better or different or less sad by only having the "pick six" things on my to-do list. Seriously, shut up Chatelaine. When did you get so vapid?

Self-improvement seems like such an easy goal when you've got an entire year of not working. When you're committed to examining every aspect of your life -- not only because you're thinking every day of how your life impacts a wee one in your care, but because you never want to take that life for granted. I'm tired of almost dying every couple of years. I'm exhausted from fighting the Wegener's. I'm feeling like I've had my fill of epic tragedy. I don't want to talk about my life in terms of the things that have been denied to me -- because it's so much better to actually think about it in terms of what my life experience has opened up for me. There's a richness in the strength and understanding that comes from struggle. But sometimes, just for a couple of hours, I wish it wasn't all so blood hard all the time.

A year ago, even well before I was pregnant, I never would have imagined I could walk so far and for so long. But, like anything else in life, the more you do it, the better you get, and it seems that the more I walk, the more I can walk. I'd make all kinds of excuses: my hip, too tired from work, too far, let's just take the car -- and now I get angry if I can't get out and get going. A "block" means at least an hour, maybe two, and while I'm doing things along the way, grocery shopping, to-do list attacking, I'm also pounding out the sadness, leaving it a bit behind as I go -- it's the days upon days that I get stuck in a rut, where I am too down to leave the house, those are the moments when the prednisone wins. When the disease wins. When I am struggling to know myself outside of the diagnosis and the bloodwork and the peeing in jugs and the blood pressure issues and the preeclampsia and the rest of it all. If only it wasn't there in my face every time I look in the mirror -- the "moon" cheeks and the thin hair. If only I could leave those reminders behind as well.

Annywaay, I am rambling. The baby's sleeping still and I'm taking advantage and rolling out words like thunder, and not really thinking through what I'm writing about. Perhaps this is the moment to stop.

#20 - Turtle Valley

2011-03-04T15:33:00.004-05:00

I really must confess that the last couple books have really been not up to snuff in terms of the quality of reading that I've been finding on my shelves -- I mean, I've discovered some truly excellent authors I had never read before (Julian Barnes) and inhaled the backlist of others that I had come to love (Elizabeth Strout). I really wanted Turtle Valley by Gail Anderson-Dargatz to turn things around for me. Alas, it did not.

Sigh.

Turtle Valley has to be one of the most frustratingly erratic novels I have read in a long time. The narrative suffers from a distinct lack of focus and can't really decide what it is -- a ghost story, the tale of a woman's marriage falling apart, a story of seemingly never-ending family tragedy? Instead, all of these plots and themes are muddled up together in a rushed, convoluted, awkward book that had so much promise.

But let me digress. I really loved The Cure for Death by Lightning. And, if I can remember, I enjoyed A Recipe for Bees too. Anderson-Dargatz is a talented writer, no one is denying that fact, but this is not a cohesive novel that shows off her storytelling ability. Kat, short for Katrine, arrives home to Turtle Valley with her preschool-aged (I'm imagining; his age is never given) son Jeremy and disabled husband Ezra in tow (he suffered a stroke; tragedy #1) to help her aging parents pack up their house as a forest fire rages in the area. The natural disaster provides an excellent backdrop to the story, and allows a sense of natural urgency and drama to inhabit the narrative -- this is the good stuff. But where the novel falls completely apart is how Kat unravels the mysteries of her family's past, hidden letters, hidden stories, unforgiven truths, and a ghost that haunts them all.

There's no straight shooting in this novel. Anderson-Dargatz wants to tell things slowly but then there are places where the book just doesn't make sense, where it would have benefited from a serious sense of grounding just so the reader can believe what's going on. In one scene, Kat's lifting dinner out of the oven (wha?) and then discovering her grandmother's letters and racing off to the neighbour she once had an affair with (tragedy #2, lost love) and then suddenly the fire's on top of them and her father's dying (tragedy #3). Then she's telling her older sister about a moment of tenderness between she and her husband (marital discord and eventual divorce; tragedy #4), which is a scene we READ, that had nothing to do with the retelling or any of the moments she described, and this goes on throughout the entire novel.

Far too many scenic moments and heavy-handed imagery plague the narrative (how many times can we be told about the ladybugs, how many!!!) and, in places, the dialogue is terrifically awful, and I found myself doing the patented eyerolling, yelling in my head, "people don't talk that way!" as I was reading. The whole book would have benefited from a far more dedicated sense of time and place, and there needed to be far more attention to detail. Maybe if there wasn't so much going on -- ex-lovers and dying fathers and dead grandfathers haunting the place and half-bonkers mothers and angry husbands and ever-looming fires getting closer -- the book wouldn't feel so all over the place. In a sense, I felt overwhelmed by the trouble in the novel, by Kat's inability to actually cope with one aspect of her life at any one time -- she's racing around like a firebug, jumping from thing to thing, and we barrel along with her, much to the novel's disadvantage.

The real fire in the Shuswap happened in 1998 and, like I said, Anderson-Dargatz uses the event well, but I often wonder if so much tragedy feels or reads realistically -- it all felt so forced: her husband's stroke (how old was he, how did they explain the stroke, what was his prognosis, how long has he been sick, none of this is explained); their marital problems (which, of course, led to her wanting to rekindle a relationship with the hot potter next door whose own wife suffers, OF COURSE, from MS); the drama surrounding her grandfather's death (that's the big family mystery); her father's cancer and her mother's increasing dementia, that there are just too many awful things happening in this novel.

I know life is like that sometimes, terrible tragedy upon terrible tragedy, but I just didn't get Kat. She pleads with her husband to let her in, to let her love him, and then she cheats on him; her family keeps secrets upon secrets from her, and then they spring the truth on her at the very moment the fire's about to take all the proof away. And when they finally discover the love letters between her grandmother and her great-uncle (her mother's mother; her father's uncle), she races off with them even though, as I said above, she just took a pot roast out of the oven. And no one says ANYTHING. All in all, the erratic, convoluted nature of this book disappointed me throughout. I wanted to love it. I wanted to be swept away in the scenery and the shock of the fire -- I wanted to believe in the ghost story, the haunting, and I wanted Kat to redeem herself by the end, but there's too much in this novel for it to be wrapped up quickly, and yet, that's what Anderson-Dargatz attempts to do. The end of Kat's marriage is glossed over in one sentence, and then wrapped up awkwardly, as if it was simply a tool to insert even more drama into an already conflict-heavy, relationship-based family story.

All in all, I'm not sure how I feel about the book. I sped through it, so it definitely grabbed my attention, but I definitely expected more from this book, and this author.

READING CHALLENGES: Off the Shelf, and if I was doing a Canadian challenge, it'd be one for the books there too. I skipped the 1001 Books section of the shelves this time around, I really want to save those chunky books for the summer at the cottage, so I am trying to power through the Canadian, American, International and British sections over the winter/spring. Also, I only have one Austen left, Mansfield Park, and I don't want to read it just yet. So I might skip the "As" and come back around to it when I'm not so disappointed in my reading. Thank goodness for Julian Barnes. I'm reading his short story collection, The Lemon Table, now and it is excellent.

#19 - In The Time Of The Butterflies

2011-03-04T13:53:00.005-05:00

When tackling this whole "off the shelf" challenge I have consigned myself to this year, I've been judging books by their page length, which, in my reading world, translates to how long it'll take me to get through it. In the Time of the Butterflies, from start to finish, clocks in at 324 pages. That's about three hours for me -- so maybe a day and a half in baby time. But GOOD GRIEF this book took me forever to read because I just couldn't get into it.

While I have no doubt it's an important novel -- the weight of the language, the heavy-handed metaphors and sentences dripping with meaning, tells me as much -- and the history that forms its central plot, the murder of the Mirabel sisters in the Dominican by the ruthless dictator Trujillo, is actually really fascinating. But the book does not, in my mind, "[make] a haunting statement about the human cost of political oppression."

In a way, this is women's history. The novel centres around the 4 sisters and their daily lives -- their marriages, the birth of their children, and it's a domestic novel for the most part. And all the while, the four sisters are charging forward with a revolution. I just wish there was more revolution in the book and less meandering. I wanted to know more about the revolution and less about ribbons. I know that's probably quite sexist of me, that the fact that these were women revolutionaries challenging the male-established dictatorship means the novel should necessarily include discussions of the domestic, but it slowed down the action to a crawl. And by telling the story from all four of the sisters' points of view, Alvarez manages to disjoint the narrative so completely that you only get a fraction of each of their lives. Personally, I would have preferred the novel centre around Mirabel, the most dynamic and active of the four sisters. But, I didn't write this book.

First published in 1994, I think this book suffers a little from the trappings of the time -- long-winded and overly descriptive, I'm reminded of the Seinfeld episode where Elaine goes to see The English Patient (let me just state, for the record, that I loved both the book and the film), rolling her eyes the entire time in boredom. At least I think that's what happened -- I think that might be the only episode of Seinfeld that I've actually seen from start to finish. Annnywaay, she just doesn't get what the big deal is, and I feel that way about this novel. It's a national bestseller, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and blah de blah, accolades and great blurbs. Yet the book failed to keep my interest and over and over again I found myself not wanting to finish. It was written at a time when long, flowery sentences and the cult of Gabriel Garcia Marquez was going strong. And the importance of the novel, the politics, the very real struggle, the incredibly tragic murder of these four women, gets lost within the precious nature of the prose, the inevitable storytelling that never seems to actually tell a story but circle around it, planting pretty flowery sentences along the way.

Overall, I was disappointed, and found myself just wanted to get to the end, to see how they die -- and then, of course, it all happens off stage, which made me furious. They died violently, brutally, unnecessarily, and Alvarez should have had the bravery to write it. Instead, the book simply stops and then switches perspective again, heads back into its dreary narrative and tries to cover it up by describing their dead bodies as the remaining sister, Dede, identifies them. There's no power to this narrative; the power is in the truth of the events themselves, and Alvarez coasts along because of it. I know it's harsh but, again, books should stand the test of time, prose shouldn't feel dated, and a story of such importance should actually read that way, and not hold itself up on some bronzed pedestal.

READING CHALLENGES: Off the Shelf, and Around the World in 52 Books. Alvarez was born in the Dominican, and I usually really love Caribbean literature, but not so much in this case.

Notes From A House Frau XIIX

2011-02-28T18:04:00.006-05:00

Between Love And A Hard Place

First of all, I can't believe that our RRBB was ever that small. I'm being brave putting this picture online. It was taken during the heart of all the tragedy and trouble that surrounded his fairly easy birth. And now, 4 months later, he's giant -- 14 pounds and almost 2 feet long; he survived and flourished as my body recuperated from all the drama surrounding the disease, my pregnancy, and then our delivery.

I am so torn these days. As much as I want the time to pass -- so he's a little bit older, so he sleeps a bit better, so I get more sleep, just realizing that he's already doubled in size in 4 months makes me realize that people telling you time flies isn't just a platitude.

I have a rolling to-do list that never seems to get the most important items crossed off, and I can never seem to find the time in a day just to get caught up with blogging. And we're not even doing anything. It's the non-productivity that I find most daunting about being at home. The busy work. The mindless hours spent reading while baby sleeps on me because we still can't train him to sleep anywhere else during the day. I feel like Sisyphus and the rock -- only I'm way more tired than I ever imagined a god might be. There's a lot of existential thinking that goes on in the wee hours of the night. A lot of first sentences are being composed. A lot of sleeping happens by the men I am surrounded by, not so much by me. I know it's the meds and, in the past, these sleepless nights used to be filled with despair. An aching, longing kind of sadness that was punctuated by extreme self-hatred. I know, now, that was the meds too, a lovely thing called prednisone-induced psychosis, but rationalizing that it's the drugs never stopped my self-loathing, never stopped the 4AM struggles with whether or not I even wanted to be alive.

There's none of that this time around when battling the disease. The sleepless nights are passed in relative calm. Like I said, I make a lot of to-do lists. I eat breakfast at 3AM and take my meds so they get through my system before the baby wakes up again. We sleep in together some mornings, him nestled in the crook of my arm, as he has done since the moment he was born. These moments are fleeting, just as the sadness was momentary as compared to how much time I've spent actually healthy vs. in the throws of the disease; but, when you're there, the time stretches out, long, sinewy, and I have to force myself to just enjoy it. Instead, like this morning, when I couldn't sleep but RRBB was snoring happily, I had all the blog posts rolling through my head, enough to risk trying to put him down -- pop open go his eyes, wide smile on his face, and then we're downstairs, and then he's playing on his activity mat, and I'm playing with him, and then he's tired again and, here we go, he's sleeping on me for another hour and I'm starving and have to pee and would really like to make a sandwich or a smoothie.

And then, the day is just gone. My RRHB is back from errands or work or recording and gives me a chance to have a shower (oh, the humanity!). We make dinner and then it's the endless session of trying to get the baby down for the night. And this, this is how the time flies, all of a sudden another week has gone by and I've done stuff: gone to the mall, bought soap, made dinner (once!), got groceries, half-cleaned something, written more to-do lists, and am utterly exhausted having accomplished nothing. I am not a girl used to accomplishing nothing. My time is fractured all over the place -- sure, I've got lots of it, but it's filled up with the care of something so precious that my heart aches with the importance of it all -- and sometimes I wish, hating myself for it, that I could have just a little bit of it back. Yet, there's no resentment, no anger, just wishful thinking. I'm torn between the two lives that I've created: the old me, the non-mom and the new me, mother to the RRBB.

There was a writing contest I wanted to enter but probably won't because I never win writing contests. The theme, "How Motherhood has Changed You," seemed trite in a way, no, that's not the right word; too obvious, that's a better phrase, because the change is so shocking, so complete and so utterly different that for a slow learner like myself, it's hard to come to terms with -- 4 months in and I'm still searching for the right words to describe it.

I'm starting to impose some structure on our days. While not a routine per se, we do have story time in the morning. Lately we are reading Where is the Green Sheep, a new Mister Men book each day (because I ADORE them), some Dr. Seuss, and Oliver Jeffers. I'm not sure baby is paying any attention at all, mainly he gets excited by the kiss bombs in the middle of story time vs. story time itself, but I love reading aloud. Then he sleeps, maybe I sleep too, then we go out for a walk, run errands, and by the time we get back it's afternoon nap time -- which means I'm stuck for sometimes three hours in one place, if he's particularly fussy, playing iPad Scrabble and reading. I'm being relentless about dropping him in his bed when he nods off, but the wailing, good gravy, that ensues isn't worth it -- why would I WANT to make my child unhappy?

But it can't continue, oh, this accidental parenting (damn you Baby Whisperer, damn you). But I need some time. Just a little bit, just a teeny, tiny bit, to myself, and it can't be at 2 AM because I'm neither awake nor asleep enough in those moments to get anything accomplished. But I sure think about everything I'd like to accomplish. How has motherhood changed me? I don't think that it has -- my perspective, my day-to-day routines, and my life is certainly different, but I am still the same person, deep down, I still want all the same things. I still believe in all the same causes. I still want to do all the same things -- I just don't have any time to do them.

Winter was wonderful. But its time has come and gone. We managed brilliantly through snow storms and disease clouds. We still got out. We didn't go stir crazy. We almost destroyed our poor stroller for all the bumps and boulders on the sidewalks. Yet, I'm craving better weather, sunshine that actually carries warmth, ridding the car seat of bunting, and days where I can cart a pen and a notebook to a park with the RRBB and just sit outside. Just a few more weeks and I'll welcome the smell of melting dog shit and all the cigarette butts and other debris that litters the streets around my neighbourhood. There will be parks and swings and swimming and gardening and time will pass too quickly and I will try and savour every moment.

#18 - Pretty Little Dirty

2011-02-27T16:13:00.003-05:00

If I remember correctly, I wasn't terrifically enthralled with Amanda Boyden's second novel, and so I let Pretty Little Dirty languish on the shelves for, well, years. And while there were a few problems with the novel, I found myself reading it well into places in my life where I should have been sleeping, and that's got to be a sign that it moved me in some inexplicable way.

Lisa Smith (oh what a placid, everyday name) has been best friends with Celeste Rose Diamond (yes, you read that right; the names are terrible, I know) since they were both in grade six and moved to Kansas City from other, larger cities (Chicago and New York respectively) before the start of the school year. Their friendship is epic: they are destined to love one another in ways that only schoolgirls can -- utterly and completely, beyond a familial relationship and creating a bond that best friends know is there, even if they can't explain it -- they love one another above and beyond anyone else.

Celeste, of course, is utterly beautiful, and both she and Lisa are gifted academically -- so they excel at school, when it's in their interests. They are suburban girls looking for adventure, and they find it the summer before they graduate from high school in the form of an teacher and his students from the local art college. Experimenting with sex and drugs, Boyden's narrative matches the feverish way young girls have of barreling into adult life -- it rolls around and around, often repeating similar thoughts over and over again -- much like a conversation between girlfriends. She has a strange tick to her writing -- keeps telling us, the reader, that Celeste's story is far more interesting than her own, but then we never get the full story when it comes right down to it, because the book is told from Lisa's perspective. Celeste remains at arm's length from us, and maybe that's the way Lisa likes it -- she's as much in love with being Celeste's best friend as she is with the idea of friendship itself. The ultimate unreliable narrator, in a way, putting her subject on a pedestal and then never really letting the reader see how the sculpture came into existence.

I also like how, while there's very typical things in this novel that even reminded me a little of Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides (minus the very important Trip Fontaine character, naturally) -- mother's with psychological problems, broken families, fathers that hold on too tight to their daughters, sex with older men -- Boyden intersperses this with the punk scene in the 80s, something that's kind of close to my heart. Not because I was remotely a punk, but there was a time when I used to sneak downtown to hang out with skin heads at a bar called Michael's on Queen Street across from the Big Bop, and grew up just at a time when the wrong Doc Marten's could get your head kicked in -- so much of this book, while set earlier than my own teenage years, reminded me of my youth. I didn't do nearly the same amount of drugs, and never dropped out of university, but the struggle to find myself, to define myself outside of the tragedy that defined my own family, as Lisa attempts to do by attaching herself to the Diamonds, well, that rang incredibly true.

It's hard to write teenage angst without it coming across as melodramatic, and Boyden does it so very well in this book -- there were problems with the book in places, mainly the sex scenes (they were a bit too much and a little "ride me like a stallion Morag" for my liking) -- but overall, once I started this book, I couldn't put it down. I actually avoided sleep training the RRBB so I could read more, which meant we spent a lovely few hours with him sleeping on me as I powered through the pages. Lastly, I really, really wish people would stop using the second person. I don't know why it bugs me so much, but it does. However, I would have given my left shoe to be at some of the shows Boyden describes throughout the narrative. Black Flag in 1982? Probably way too violent for me but what an experience.

The Summary: Another Off the Shelf book down, and while the alphabetical reading is now weighing me down a little (I'm really not liking my current book, In the Time of the Butterflies), I am getting through the books much quicker than I thought. I might start reading 2 or 3 in a row from any particular shelf just so that I'm not bouncing around so much and can get through a letter before moving on to the next. In fact, maybe that's what I'll start now and pause my current book because it's seriously boring.

#17 - Arthur & George

2011-02-27T11:16:00.004-05:00

Oh, Julian Barnes, how I adored Arthur & George. From its opening pages right up until the end, it's a complex mix of the fictional and the historical, a comment on colonialism/literature, and a rollicking good adventure. The novel even encouraged me to download The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes to my iPad (it's on the 1001 Books list anyway). I'm not quite sure how to alphabetize my ebooks into my reading yet so it might remain unread for some time, but I digress.

Told from either man's changing perspectives, with a few odd other characters thrown in, the novel brings to life to exceptionally interesting characters: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, among others and George Edalji, a half-Scottish, half Parsee solicitor wrongly accused of a number of heinous crimes.

Doyle's a larger than life character -- both in the book and in his own mind, to a degree. He's the prototype for the colonial British man: athletic, sharp, intelligent, opinionated, moral, and just (to his own sense of duty and accomplishment, if that makes any sense -- we might question his upstanding "Britishness" under a post-colonial analysis and discover his beliefs lacking a broader, more realized context) and his confidence spills over every page. He marries a lovely woman because he should; and then promptly falls in love with someone else (but never acts upon his feelings in anyway that could be considered ungentlemanly). He strives to clear George Edalji's name because it's the right thing to do but doesn't believe in the suffrage of women. And it's these contradictions that make him such a fascinating character caught within Barnes's rollicking story.

George Edalji, a firm believer in truth with a capital "T" finds himself in quite a pickle when the local constabulary arrests him for mutilating animals and sending horrible, harmful prank letters to his own family. George, a solicitor by trade, firmly believes in the good, just righteousness of the legal system. It will save him. What he doesn't count on is the racism that feeds the decision to imprison him. Even when further animals end up mutilated, there's a "viable" explanation as per why George is still guilty of the crimes.When Sir Arthur reads about his case in an obscure newspaper, he sets his mind upon clearing George's name and helping him seek restitution for both his wrongful conviction and his imprisonment.

Even though their lives and personalities couldn't be more different, when they finally meet, their actions -- Doyle's "investigation" and subsequent attacks in the press and George Edalji's further insistence of his innocence -- challenged and then changed the existing legal system. But it is the personal lives of both men that keep the narrative from feeling dry and/or crisp. Barnes remains rich in his description of their lives, their wants, their needs, their loves (or lack thereof in the case of Edalji). He's also careful to keep a narrative distance. While we feel and know the racism behind George's conviction -- the staunch way that George himself refuses to believe it had any part in his troubles, how George firmly believes (and was brought up to be) himself to be an Englishman first, remains a fascinating part of his character. Goodness, I enjoyed this novel -- its pacing, the characters, the setting, the "investigation," -- all of it. It was a bright and welcome change -- to race through a book that you felt was somewhat flawless in terms of its prose and presentation.

I've never read any other Julian Barnes. I'm glad there is at least one other on my shelf that will be tackled the next time I reach the British section. It shouldn't take me too long. I can't believe that after finishing In the Time of Butterflies, I'll be back reading Austen again -- the last on my shelves.

The Shelves: Their Glory

2011-02-20T12:33:00.003-05:00

Here they are in all their glory: my beautiful, alphabetized books. My challenge: read every single one before I go back to work in October. Will I get there, doubtful, but I'm going to give it my all, or my eyeballs, so to speak. I probably will not read that Kleenex box, though. I didn't count the books but I estimate there's over 300 titles here, which is daunting, to say the least considering I've never even made it to 100 in a calendar year. Oh boy. What have I done?

#16 - Showbiz

2011-02-20T10:55:00.008-05:00

I'm not going to lie -- I cursed my "I am totally determined to read everything on my shelves" challenge a little bit with Jason Anderson's Showbiz. Part-fan fiction, part faux-history, and part "journalist that gets caught in a thriller," the book, well, simply felt implausible to me. I'm not saying that Anderson isn't a good writer, and that he doesn't have one wickedly fun imagination -- both of these things are true, but this book wasn't for me.

Nathan Grant's a Canadian ex-pat journalist attempting to make it in NYC. He's broke, needs to find a job, a girl, a life. And when he stumbles across an old comedy record by a fellow named Jimmy Wynn -- he finally thinks he's getting somewhere. See, Wynn used to do an impersonation, a really good act, based around his contemporary president -- Cannon (who bears a thinly veiled resemblance to Kennedy). After Cannon's assassination, Wynn's act is ruined and he's on the run, disappeared into pop culture oblivion, because of a "secret" the president apparently imparted to him.

What Nathan knows he's got is a story he can sell to the magazine where his friend Colin works: The Betsey. It's dedicated entirely to the life and times of President Cannon. Bingo, he's pitched it, it's accepted and all of a sudden he's in Vegas trying to track down an aging comedian among bucket loads of aging stars all kicking out their last legs on the strip.

But where there's Cannon, there's conspiracy, and where the book turned into a strange film-like mess for me. I just didn't believe it, and that's my fault. I couldn't get passed the whole "faux" world in which it was written -- and Anderson heads off on a lot of tangents. The reader doesn't necessarily need to know the plots of every single B film that Wynn, in one of his many disguises after being disgraced, and nor do we need to read every single article or have each clue spelled out so exactly. The pop culture stuff within the novel was interesting but I've never been one for conspiracy theories and prefer to read my history straight -- not that I don't believe that fan fiction, which I kind of somewhat consider this to be, isn't a worthy enterprise, it completely is, but you have to accept and believe the action for it to work, and I just didn't with this book.

In the end, I finished it, but I did a lot of complaining while reading. I knew when my RRHB said, "What a great cover," that the book probably wasn't going to be for me -- and even though I enjoyed Nathan's almost hapless way of finding himself in the middle of the action and, like I said, am in awe of Anderson's amazing pop culture inventive imagination, on the whole I wanted just a tad bit more resolution and reality within this book. He could have gone even further with the satire and I would have enjoyed it more. I guess, that's what I'm trying to get at -- this book just didn't know exactly what it wanted to be (from my perspective). So, I have mixed emotions about this book. I want to support the writer, I think he's got an interesting talent, but the novel, overall, didn't really work for me.

But I think I'm a better person for reading it. It's important to read out of your comfort zone (literary fiction) and see what other kinds of novels are being published. See what other writers are coming up with in the wee hours of the night when their imaginary characters are being chased down by men with not-so innocent motives. If I were to give a good comp for this book, it might be the film St John of Las Vegas, which I actually enjoyed a great deal. It's got the same quirky, "mis-happenstance" feel to it that the novel strives for.

WHAT'S NEXT: I've started the utterly delightful Arthur & George by Julian Barnes, and am already enjoying it immensely. Then, we're into the Americans: Amanda Boyden's first novel, Pretty Little Dirty I think it's called.

Notes From A House Frau XIII

2011-02-17T15:12:00.007-05:00

"And I Start to Complain When There's No Rain"

Today we feel fantastic. We walked a giant loop today -- all the way to the butcher's in another neighbourhood and back again. Just about two hours, the RRBB and I, and he only cried once along the way. On top of that, he's still sleeping in his bassinet of all places, and not on me, so I am taking advantage and killing items one by one on my to do list like they are a shooting game at the Ex in August. Bam! Checkmark. Bam! Checkmark. Bam!

I saw the kidney doctor this week and my blood work keeps improving. My creatinine is the lowest it has been in months, and there's something called albumin that was well out of whack, which has also returned to normal. That's the good news. Of course, because it's me, there's also bad news. Once I stop breastfeeding, and both the SFDD and the kidney doctor recommend (or are encouraging me to stop) weaning him at six months, there's other medication that I'm going to need to start taking. I'd really like to do the entire year but we have to balance the continued health of my kidneys, which are still being damaged, along with still having some high blood pressure, from the preeclampsia.

Apparently, I could have high blood pressure for the rest of my life.

I am not happy about this. In the entire history of my disease, and that's twenty years of fighting it now, I have never had high blood pressure. So, it seems I have to do all kinds of things to try and regulate it outside of medication: eating better (yeah, right, while on prednisone; give me strength), getting exercise (walking, walking, walking and starting back at the gym in March), and taking supplements (garlic, etc). Once some of the baby/prednisone weight comes off, hopefully it'll improve too, but the end result is that I'll have to take something called an "ace inhibitor" for the rest of my life. It's protects your kidneys from the damage done by too much protein passing or something. They are blood pressure meds. I am disappointed that the preeclampsia has done so much damage and is taking so long to clear up -- that it might never clear up is even more upsetting, but what would be worse is losing my kidney function entirely, and ending up either on dialysis or needing a transplant. We don't need that kind of tragedy, we just don't.

It's been a long, long road back. Now that I have some perspective, and am that far away from everything that happened (next Thursday it's 20 weeks since I was admitted to the hospital), and the baby is a little bit older, the whole world seems, well, less oppressive. Also, I was thinking about how hard winter feels generally -- when you have to get up everyday and go out in it, when you don't have the freedom to curl up on the couch and snuggle with a baby if it's just too daunting -- and usually by this time, I am grumpy, aggressive, angry and really, really tired. Also, I generally go through my days with a giant ball of panic that sits right in the middle of my chest. Panic about work, about getting stuff done, about work politics, about my career (or lack thereof), and when I got my new job, all of that sort of disappeared -- sure, it was stressful, but I loved every minute of it.

So, I'm feeling conflicted these days. Now that I am feeling so much healthier, what kind of pressure can I put on myself to be better, to do better, to make better use of my days. A friend came over the other night and I was explaining to her how I feel, some days, like a very typical newish mom. I fill my days with "busy work" because I'm not the sort to sit still, but is this "busy work" worth it -- should I still be trying to rest instead of speed balling through to recovery. It's hard. I'm hard on myself. I set high, lofty goals. I demand a lot, and it's this pressure that probably caused the disease (among other reasons) in the first place. It seems that I don't know how to be unless I've got the giant, Pilate's ball-sized stress in my chest.

It's an unhealthy way to live. I know this. And I don't put this kind of pressure on anyone else in my life; in fact, just the opposite. I want my friends and family to happy, calm and content. I don't know why I can't put the same kind of goals into perspective when it comes to my own life. There's a part of me that takes everything so personally -- that holds on to meaning that's an impression and not truly a reality. Again, it's not a healthy way to live. It's not something I want to impart to my RRBB either, and certainly something that my RRHB finds hard to live with.

But back to the "typical mom" scenario. My RRHB has been doing a play all week with his new musical endeavor, Detroit Time Machine, and so I've been with the baby by myself a lot. For the first time in months, this is actually something I can handle. I'm not too sick to do it by myself. In fact, it's been actually kind of fun. So, we were looking for something to fill our days and I decided we'd head to the mall ("mecca" with a small "m"). I adore the mall. You can take the girl out of the suburbs but sometimes, you can not take the suburbs out of the girl: case in point, Sherway Gardens. It's just so, lovely.

So, the baby slept and slept and slept, and I refuse to wake him so it was late when we left the house, after 2 PM. I got myself all worked up that there would be traffic and he'd be miserable and maybe we shouldn't go at all, etc. But he was perfect and only fussed a bit on the way home, slept while I walked around, and all I saw everywhere I looked was other moms -- babes unbundled with semi-bored expressions on their faces. Some were even quite haggard (and if you've seen my hair, it defines "haggard"). And as I sat down, eating an ice cream cone and just people watching, the giant ball of stress dissipated. I don't know what happened. I just took some deep breaths and enjoyed the moment.

I know this seems silly -- but it's all a part of how I think I'm changing because of the baby. Yes, I did talk my girlfriend's ear off when she came over the other night because singing and talking all day to the baby isn't necessarily conversation. But, I am also enjoying the silence a lot more than I ever have before. I'm enjoying everyday life when it's not crammed into an already overstuffed weekend. I'm enjoying the new sounds the baby's making. I'm enjoying the winter. I'm enjoying not working. Don't get me wrong. I love my job and can't wait to go back, but I've never not worked, and even when I haven't slept, when the baby's cranky, when I'm all alone and feeling the pressure of taking care of another life, I'm still more calm than I ever was a year ago. And maybe that's what's contributing to making me better too. That and a little retail therapy. It seems I just can't stop buying soap.

#15 - I Curse The River of Time

2011-02-14T12:18:00.002-05:00

Per Petterson's I Curse the River of Time remains a novel about endings throughout its elegant telling of Arvid's final days with his mother, who is dying of stomach cancer. Yet, it's also a novel of disillusion, of abandon and of deep discontent. At 37, Arvid's on the cusp of being divorced, and has never truly quite found his place in the world -- if my mother were still alive, she would tell me this is a typical novel of someone suffering from "middle child syndrome." Something she referenced quite often, in jest, when referring to her place in her own family.

Unable to face the fact that his wife, partner, of the last 15 years no longer wants or needs him, Arvid reverts into childish behaviour, following his mother to their summer cabin in Jutland after discovering she's dying. Interspersed with the awkward and complex time he spends with his mother away from their father and the life they had both known for almost 40 years in Oslo, Arvid's erratic actions are explored in context of his earlier life -- when he was an ardent communist, a factory worker, a member of the peuple -- and how his convictions, as well as his strong beliefs, are also changing in lieu of both his age and where he is in his life. There's a lovely passage near the end of the novel that explains, perhaps, in part, his reluctance to let go of his marriage, of his beliefs, of his relationship with his mother despite the fact that each of these things are willfully being taken away from him:

...but when it came to dying, I was scared. Not of being dead, that I could not comprehend, to be nothing was impossible to grasp and therefore nothing to be scared of, but the dying itself I could comprehend, the very instant that you know that now comes what you have always feared, and you suddenly realize that every chance of being the person you really wanted to be, is gone for ever, and the one you were, is the one those around you will remember.

In a way, Petterson's novel explores the death of communism itself through this character -- in his own disillusionment with the fact that it didn't succeed in Russia, that the wall came down in them middle of the action, and that Arvid has worked for many years, not as a proletariat, but in a lovely bookstore -- something that has made him extremely happy. Yet, he can't let his party platform go, he feels guilt over his own disillusionment with the politics, with his own failure to move forward beyond his university beliefs.

His complex relationship with his mother also underlines all of his actions. When he tells her he won't be going back to the university because he wants to become a full-time communist, she slaps him -- a gesture of frustration over his childish ways, of his inability to fully command his life in an adult way, of never being quite "old enough" but always being "too old" in her eyes.

This rich, complex relationship, as are many situations between mothers and sons, underlines everything that Arvid does in life. He can't seem to get her attention in the same way as his other three brothers, one of whom died tragically. She tells her best friend, Hansen, that he's not entirely a grown up, and this is tragically reflected in his actions towards the end of the novel when it becomes glaringly apparent that she won't live much longer. And still, Arvid's almost selfish ways impinge upon the way his mother chooses to live out the end of her life -- it's his divorce, his troubles, his lack of understanding why his world falls apart around him, that is the most tragic aspect of the novel.

Yet, Arvid's unhappiness, his inability to truly move beyond the earlier parts of his life that have consistently defined him, even loosely, remain grounded in a very real, very cognizant sense of place within the novel. Petterson dutifully explains Arvid's routes, where he walks, how he drives, the churning of the sea as he crosses the passage to his mother's summer home. All of the very real places one goes in one's life -- the train to work, the roads the flat sits above, the myriad of things that happens on the way somewhere (a man having a fit, a neighbour on a bicycle). To force the reader to realize, I think, in a way, that even if Arvid can't come to terms with his life, like the passage above illustrates, his life simply goes on anyway, even if your wife doesn't love you anymore, even if your mother is dying, even if the wall comes down.

Overall, it's a brilliant novel, it sort of reminded me of Mothers and Sons, even though those were short stories, in the exploration of the relationship -- but it's more a book about a mid-life crisis, not your typical "bucket list" bullsh*t, but a very real crisis of consciousness when everything that you once stood for, that you felt worth saving, that you felt worth protecting, has changed and you haven't. And you simply can't understand why the you that was the same last week isn't quite right for this one.

It certainly makes you think.

READING CHALLENGES: I already have a Norwegian entry for 52 Books, and I didn't even take this off the shelf, so that's zip for the reading challenges. But yay! to #15, I guess?

Notes From A House Frau XII

2011-02-11T12:59:00.002-05:00

I Have Always Slept With The Door Open

This is how I spend much of my days. Dressed in scrubby pajama-like clothes, hair -- a complete disaster, some sort of food or other mess stuck to my forehead, and a baby on my lap. Usually he's sprawled out on My Breast Friend, the awesome-est breast feeding pillow of all time, or on my elephant pillow that Sam gave me for upstairs, as I am either playing Scrabble on the iPad or reading. If you can believe it, we had company over this day. Yes, this is me "dressed" for company. I have owned that stolen sweatshirt for many, many years... it's actually embarrassing how old it is, which made me think a lot about what I wanted to write today: musings on the subject of permanence.

I know the above state is not permanent. That the baby won't always want or need to fall asleep on me or will even be an infant for much longer. The time goes by so fast. He's already 16 weeks, and will reach his 4-month birthday in about ten days. So, he's ever-changing. Whether it's a new sound he makes or a funny thing he does, it's delightful to see his personality emerge. He's an extremely happy baby. He maybe cries/fusses for about 15 minutes a day and usually only when he's overtired, so if we can catch him on the wave into exhaustion, he doesn't cry at all but does demand A LOT of soothing before crashing into sleep either on me or my RRHB, as noted above.

But when I was lying on the massage table after restorative yoga yesterday, and the RMT was pulverizing my back to try and get at the massive knots, she said that the best way to combat the muscle issues was to drink more water, get exercise and stretch it out. In my head, I thought, "And when does one have time to do ALL of that?" Plus, blogging, plus walking, plus taking a shower. Her actual words were: "I know having a baby can sometimes be time consuming...but..." And then I asked the dreaded question, "Do you have kids?" "No," she replied, "I have friends that do."

And therein lies the ultimate dichotomy: the complete disconnect between how much time -- and I am surely at fault here for my own misconceptions before having RRBB (I am not just being critical) -- a baby takes up in your life at this stage. The 2.5 hours I spent at yoga and getting a massage were the ONLY moments I have been away from the baby (with the help of the RRHB) in a week, since the last time I went to restorative. And next week, because my RRHB is doing a play, I will be taking the baby with me to yoga, and as well the week after that because he's back doing some work. I'm even taking the baby to see the kidney doctor on Monday. I have no choice. And this is the permanence I have been thinking about for the last couple days.

Way back in the way back, when I used to be friends with a woman who once dated my RRHB, they were discussing kids. Keep in mind, we've been together for almost 13 years so this is a long, long time ago, and I've known my husband since I was 15. Annnywaaay, this woman said that it's no big deal to have a baby in your life, you just mold them into what already exists, the change isn't that drastic. This was the argument she was using to try and convince him, at 25 or so, to have a child with her. He didn't buy it. And I am completely admitting my own ignorance. I thought the same thing. That they were like cute little bits of baggage, dress them up, pack them neatly, and cart them off. Yet, despite how utterly portable RRBB is at this age, that doesn't mean that the change to our lives is anything less that completely and utterly drastic, and, yes, permanent.

Yet, the idea of swift, permanent change isn't unfamiliar in my life. My mother's accident when I was fourteen; disease at nineteen, multiple job losses over the years; etc. I know how to respond to tragedy. It's almost always in the vein of Keep Calm and Carry On, push it all down, deal with it later, one day in front of the other, victory garden kind of stuff. I am strong, apparently, a "defeater of death" as one friend commented via email the other day, and it shows in especially hard situations. I can handle just about everything. Funny how all it takes is a wee, little 13-odd pound cutie-patootie to break me. And break me often. The disease didn't kill me. Losing my mother didn't kill me. All the other tragedy in my life only served to make me introspective and feed the desire to write novels where everyone dies in extremely horrific ways -- novels that will probably never get published. But the baby, wow, that's change on a whole other level that I was not remotely prepared for.

If he's tired, cranky, can't sleep, can't be soothed, has an injury, anything out of the ordinary (he had a rash the other day), and I go bonkers. I worry non-stop about it, can't stop talking about it, wonder how much I'm doing wrong on a daily basis, and honestly turn myself inside out until I am a little blurry around the edges -- you know, like that camera lens they use to make older actresses all soft and wispy. Even my mother-in-law has laughed and told me that I need to temper the worry a little. And she raised my RRHB who climbed the antenna of their house at 2 years of age, walked at 9 months, and rolled over at a week (a week!).

I suppose what's missing from this scenario, as compared to everything else I've dealt with in my life, would have to be the idea of tragedy. There's nothing tragic about our son with the exception of how he came into the world, in the sense that giving birth to him almost killed me, and we pretty much celebrate everything about him. It's a sense of happy contentment I have never known -- staring at him as he sleeps on me for the seventh hour in a day is very different from lying in bed crying because you miss your mother so much even your teeth ache from the loss. They are both permanent. I will never get my life back exactly as it was pre-baby. My kidneys will never work as well. My body is forever changed (have you heard me complain about the awful stretch marks, seriously, I look like a tiger). My mind never strays far from him. I think of so much in relation to him that one would think I was the only person in the world to ever have a child (how ridiculous is that?). It's all new for me, a new kind of coping, one where there are still plenty of tears, because, hormones. But I can laugh at myself a lot more now. I am trying to take things less seriously, less personally, because those are skills I want to impart to the baby.

Mainly, I don't want him to know the "me" before him, in a sense. I want him to know the me that celebrates his existence in my life, the person I'm evolving to because we had him -- there are things that I have come to know, about the idea of happiness, about what I need in my life, about the choices I've made, that are all a direct result of being pregnant, going through the whole WG attack, and coming out the other side. Yes, I am even stronger now, I suppose, which is actually kind of irrelevant. What's more relevant is how permanently and fundamentally different I am now. How permanently different our lives are now. We make decisions because of him, for him, around him, and that's okay. It's not just about us, even though the "us" that existed before (and that we had a glimpse of the other night when we went to see a band at Lee's Palace; twenty years I've been going there, sneaking in before I was of age, sneaking out well after) needs also to evolve, it's definitely a richer, broader existence.

We were looking for ways to expand our lives before the RRBB was even an accident waiting to happen. We were thinking of moving to the UK for a year, just to live somewhere else, swapping houses with another couple thinking of doing the same. My RRHB has been constantly evaluating what kind of work he'd like to do beyond the music, and needed time to explore his interests, and decide whether or not that involved going back to school. Funny how life sometimes decides things for you: the disease made me focus more on writing, on books, things that I had always loved but never imagined would turn into a career; losing my mother made me self-sufficient in ways that I wish I didn't have to learn but did; the baby has opened up my life and my concept of happiness in ways I never imagined or expected. All of these things are permanent. All of these things are drastic. All of these things are worth considering. All of these things make me who I am -- and even if I feel a little lost these days, there are anchors there that I never knew existed, and I am sure, even in a fit of hormone-induced tears, half-naked on the couch, exhausted, I am quite convinced that I won't float away.

I wasn't so sure a month ago.

#14 - Emma

2011-02-09T14:57:00.004-05:00

When I was younger, much younger, the first time I went to university, I sort of decided that "old" books weren't worth studying. I did my whole English degree trying to avoid anything remotely written before the 21st century. It wasn't easy. I think I had to do a Romantics and a Victorian class, along with Shakespeare, but I filled every elective with Post-Colonial, American, Modern British, anything to avoid what I perceived to be "boring" books.

No one ever said I was particularly smart in my youth.

But what it means is that I haven't read all of Jane Austen. I've barely scratched the surface of some of the best work in the English language, actually. And it's a good time of my life, two degrees later, working in publishing, to be reading these books for the 1001 Books list. So, in my quest for alphabetical order in my off the shelf reading, Emma came up first.

We all know the story: Emma Woodhouse makes all kinds of matchmaking mistakes, often puts her foot in her mouth, gets jealous, and sometimes becomes a person she doesn't like very much. Emma takes the young, impressionable, yet pretty, Harriet under her wing (a girl with lesser prospects and an unknown lineage) and finding her a suitable husband (first Mr. Elton, then Mr. Churchill, then, disaster when Harriet falls for Mr. Knightley and Emma is not particularly pleased with this turn of events) becomes her goal. Throw in a little petty jealousy when the talented and accomplished Miss Jane Fairfax arrives on the scene and there's plenty of picnics and parties to entertain the romantic in everyone. Of course, there's a happy ending, and much emotional development upon Emma's part. In a way, it's a little bit of a coming of age novel -- as we watch Emma develop from girl to woman.

Any critical analysis of the novel on my part would be ridiculous, I'm sure there's nothing I can add to the conversation. We live in a society that's already Austen-obsessed: There are mugs (of which I own four), multiple movies, numerous (far inferior) books, and a whole host of ivory tower work surrounding her life and her novels. But I will say this, from a format perspective, in terms of pacing, humour, theme, and depth of character, Austen certainly defined the novel for, well, just about every novelist to come after her writing in this genre. The more I read, the more I am astounded at the depth of her structure, how it perfectly suits the characters, and reaches a conclusion, while completely predictable only because I've seen Clueless about a half-dozen times, that made me smile.

I read in the introduction that Jane Austen, while writing Emma, that she was creating a character that people wouldn't like very much -- and I heartily disagree. I loved Emma, couldn't stand Mrs. Elton (as I am sure I was supposed to), and thought that Jane Fairfax should just come clean already -- she'd feel so much better. See, how you just get caught up in them like they're real people? Sigh. So, I've got two more Austens on my shelf, so by the time I get back to the 1001 Books section, I'll have two more delightful reads before I get into the real down and dirty stuff that I've been avoiding reading for years (like Murakami -- I honestly have zero desire to read Murakami, but it's on my shelves and I will at least attempt it. But, luckily, it's in the "M's" so it'll take me months to get there. I've barely scratched the surface of the first letter of the alphabet on any shelf).

WHAT'S UP NEXT: I'm reading the new Per Petterson, I know, it's out of order, but I've got to read the books sent to me from the publishers -- they do get priority. Then I'll be back on my Canadian "A's", which I think is a novel by Jason Anderson from ECW.

#13 - This Cake Is For The Party

2011-02-08T08:56:00.003-05:00

One very good lesson for life: One should not read any other books whilst one is reading Emma by Jane Austen. They will all pale by comparison. So, it's unfair to This Cake is for the Party that I had to stop at page 258 in Emma for a couple of hours to read Sarah Selecky's short story collection for my book club.

This is not your average book club, just let me state that for a fact. I swore up and down, left and right, to hell and back, that I would never, ever join another book club. It's not that I didn't like my first book club experience. Let me just say it wasn't for me. The ladies were lovely people. But they weren't book people. It's important for book people to be in clubs with other like-minded book people. They don't have to all like the same books, they just need to read the books, want to talk about the books, want to talk about what works within the books and what doesn't. My first book club didn't do this -- we had a blow job class once, that's how far we fell. And I judged. And then I ruined that book club with one drunken night a club and some misheard gossip. Oh yes, but that's not a story for the internet. Like I said, lovely people, but now, my new club, The Vicious Circle, is full of delicious, delightful, delectable, defined book people. We talk books non-stop. I feel like I am swimming with my own school for once; it's an important feeling. Books are important. They start with words on a page; it's only fitting that people use words to critique, enjoy, discuss, etc.

Annnywaay, so, long story short, we read This Cake is for the Party this month. Now, I don't read a lot of short story collections. I tend to only go back to them if I've read a novel by an author I fall in love with and then double back to read earlier material. Case in point: Tim Winton. Or if the collection is written by Alice Munro, because, well, it's Alice Munro. But we've been reading a lot of short story collections for book club -- last month it was Jessica Grant, this month it's Selecky, and next month we are reading Alexander MacLeod's Light Lifting. I will freely admit that half-way through the meeting last night, I did say, "Can we then read a novel please?" It's not that I don't appreciate the art form -- it's that I expect a lot from it. The stories must have guts, be whole, feel intensely, and travel a long way from start to finish. These are high standards. But if you don't have high standards, what's the point?

Did Selecky's collection pull its weight? Not entirely. I'm being perfectly, perfectly honest now -- I would have never read this book were it not short listed for the Giller prize nor a selection for my book club. And even after dedicated two solid hours to it, and saying out loud to my RRHB as I read feverishly while the RRBB took an abnormally long nap in his bed, I did like it overall. A couple of the stories truly broke my heart -- especially "Where Are You Coming From Sweetheart," which is about a teenage, motherless girl having trouble with her father's completely inadequate parenting skills. She desperately wants to escape Sudbury and live with her aunt Juicy (LOVE aunt Juicy) and her cousin in Mississauga, where she wouldn't have to stalk local parks for empty beer bottles and water her father's growing collection of half-dead plants. There's an ache to this story that so accurately reflects what it's like to be in a house post-tragedy and it resonated with me personally for reasons I don't have to repeat here.

The other story that blew my mind, that had the guts I so search out in a short story collection, was "Paul Farenbacher's Yard Sale." Meredith, neighbour of Paul Farenbacher, starts the story calm, cool and collected as the widow of the story's namesake clears out her house after the death of her spouse. There's anger, resentment, and a wonderful, wonderful scene at the end that I won't spoil because it is delicious.

Lastly, there's a delicious ending to the second story in the collection, "Watching Atlas," that I wished more of the less strong pieces emulated. Often, I felt like the stories just ended for the sake of ending and, in the format, I truly believe that endings are even more important than beginnings.

But then, a lot of the stories feel too poised, they feel like they've been written and re-written, and there's one in epistolary format that didn't work for me at all. The other story that I really had trouble with was "One Thousand Wax Buddhas." There was the use of the second person. And this isn't something I can hold against Selecky. It's important to play with form to get to the heart of your characters, to push your writing to another level, but I really hate the second person. Again, this is a personal opinion. I also am not entirely fond of "quirky" for the sake of "plot" -- when characters have "quirks" that stand in for actual action -- which is a point that came up last night.

She's a polished writer, and there were some lines in this collection that were undeniably amazing. I earmarked about a half-dozen pages throughout, and even read a couple passages over because I liked them so much. There's also a coherence to this collection that was missing from Jessica Grant's book, these stories fit together even though they aren't linked, but Selecky needs to rely less on her own devices (lots of extra-marital sex [what is it with affairs and books for me these days]; plenty of hippies making work in their basements and other places in their houses; and male voices that weren't 100% believable). In a way, I felt these characters all needed to get out and live more -- but that's just me.

So, overall, my review of the book is mixed. Yes, I liked it. Yes, there were some truly great bits of prose. Yes, there were two or three stories that made me stand up and shout. And then there were some that weren't on the same level as the others, for me. I think it's important to read writers and read first books, to support the new generation of Canadian writers, and Selecky does that herself by teaching creative writing. But I got the sense that she has spent a lot of time with these stories. I am curious, now, to see what she'll write next, or to see what she'll publish less, if it'll be more stories or a longer piece of fiction. But, regardless, I am hooked. I will happily read whatever she does next.

It's Jane Austen's World: We Just Live In It

2011-02-03T10:14:00.002-05:00

From Emma:

"Emma has been meaning to read more ever since she was twelve years old. I have seen a great many lists of the drawing-up, at various times, of books that she meant to read regularly through -- and very good lists they were, very well chosen, and very neatly arranged -- sometimes alphabetically, and sometimes by some other rule. The list she drew up when only fourteen -- I remember thinking it did her judgment so much credit, that I preserved it some time, and I dare say she may have made out a very good list now. But I have done with any steady course of reading from Emma. She will never submit to anything requiring industry and patience, and a subjection of the fancy to the understanding..."

As Mr. Knightley explains why Emma should not necessarily become good friends with Harriet, about page 26.

Notes From A House Frau XI

2011-02-02T13:35:00.002-05:00

What A Difference A Day Makes

I saw the SFDD today, and what a difference a couple of weeks makes. The meds have been in my system for longer, and the disease is finally, FINALLY starting to respond. My kidney function is still elevated, but that could be damage from the pregnancy and the preeclampsia -- I just have to accept the fact that things will not go back to my "normal." As as my wise, wise RRHB said last night when I was a little teary crying, "I just want to feel like myself again," "But you aren't your old self, you're a mother now, too."

So often, I am concentrating on the things that I've lost -- my health, my brain, my freedom, and not resenting the losses, per se, but learning how to adapt to this new life is taking a bit longer than I'd imagined it would. I've been reading a lot of interesting "mom" articles lately, and for the most part, they infuriate me. Case in point: "And Baby Makes Three..." and here's where it all starts to fall down for me:

It’s nothing short of impressive, the way these new mothers embrace their changing bodies as a home for baby to grow in and feed from. The way that they innately know what their baby needs and can recognize the meaning behind every sound or gesture and can usually provide what’s needed to soothe them.

While this isn't an incorrect observation, what the author fails to realize is the hours spent listening to your child wail, the many different ways of bouncing, rocking, walking, talking, feeding, feeding some more, and feeding some more before a mere piece of the puzzle -- how to separate a "tired" cry from a "hungry" cry -- reveals itself only to change radically the next day as your RRBB's brain changes from, literally one day to the next.

For me, this is just filler content. Why even write this article if you don't have anything remotely remarkable to say? Why capitalize on a cutsie, overdone, cliched head to go on to say how remarkable new moms are? I know I'm being harsh -- but I think this piece would have been a lot more effective had the blogger job shadowed a new mom for an entire 24-hour period versus dropping in via Auntie mode, which, I too, mistakenly thought having a full-time baby would simply be an extension of.

And then I read Katrina Onstad's piece in the Style section about how Spanx now has maternity options and threw up a little in my mouth. Pregnancy ravishes your body enough -- I've gained weight that I can't lose because of the prednisone, have stretch marks that are truly, truly awful, a c-section scar, and a pooch. I can't imagine the damage you're doing by forcing your body to not look pregnant -- how does the baby move around? Hell, you aren't even supposed to wear tight clothing when you're pregnant; it's ridiculously uncomfortable anyway. Shouldn't we be allowed to let it all hang out when we're growing a person inside of us? I mean, it's hard enough to let go of the vanity (I truly did love my trim waist and my smooth, pretty stomach; all that has disappeared for now) after you give birth but to be "fashionable" by squishing down your baby bump? What is the world coming to?

And then we come to the all consuming topic of happiness. My goal in life has never been to "be" happy -- but to understand happiness in relation to the truly tragic aspects of my life. Happiness isn't a goal, it's not something to be achieved for me, it's something to be understood -- it can't be an item on a to do list, it takes hard work to understand yourself, to know what gives you pleasure, to avoid what gives you pain, and to realize that if you put "be happy" as a goal, you are automatically setting yourself up for failure. I was bombarded with "happiness" last week -- Oprah had Goldie Hawn (wha?), a so-called expert, on her show, and it made me think a lot about the years I spent in therapy saying, "but I just want to be happy" without truly understanding that it's as much a philosophical construct as it is a smile on your face. My goal in getting through these first few weeks of parenthood has never been happiness -- my goal, as a good friend says, has been to keep my child alive, maybe, just maybe, have them thrive a little bit. The cult of Oprah's a bit much these days -- from the vegan challenge (been there, done that, um, last year) to the pale attempt to trivialize a very real, and very complex human condition (to Gretchen Rubin it, I'd say), and yet, I just can't stop watching it.

Anyway, what is my point. I must have one. Yes. In my life I have always wanted to have children, whether they were mine or adopted, whether they were my nephews or nieces, I love having them in my life. And just when I had accepted the fact that we weren't going to have any of our own for various reasons -- the main one being the very real toll it could take on my health -- I had actually, for the first time in my life, moved on. And then, surprise! We're pregnant and 36 weeks later, we're parents. And in between I spent three weeks in the hospital fighting for my life cursing the doctors that told me everything would be okay when, seriously, everything was simply not okay. Not okay.

But now, things seem to be coming back in line, and I can take a step back from "coping" with everything that happened to "enjoying" what's going on now. I'm not going to say that articles like "When Baby Makes Three..." don't completely trivialize how drastically and never-endingly parenthood changes your life; instead, I'm just going to giggle a little at their naivety. At my own naivety -- I too once truly believed that being married and having a baby would equal "happiness." That I cried and cried because those things, because of the disease (not the marriage part, natch), were denied to me like so much else in my life (was I ever REALLY going to be a modern dancer, probably not, so it's okay that the disease destroyed my hip). When really, what it's all about is finding a way to a different, newer, you -- like my RRHB said, I'm never going to be the same "me" that I was 17 weeks ago when I went into the hospital, so why feel bad about it? Why worry about it? Why struggle with it? Why not let myself evolve along with the RRBB and see who comes out at the end -- maybe she's happy, maybe not, but one thing I do understand is that it's not as easy as taking a quiz or writing some bland pap about how majestic your "mom" friends are (mine are awesome; don't get me wrong). I am not a "yummy" mommy. I've got grey hair and loads of stretch marks. I have a "moon face" from the meds. But I can still make my RRBB smile like there's no tomorrow -- and there is bliss there, I don't need Oprah to tell me that.

And seriously, we need real dialogue about what happens to us, to our bodies, to our marriages, to our lives, to our health. We don't need a Hollywood fantasy or "perfect" moms or the pressure to do it all "right" or the heavy, heavy weight of "happiness" making it all harder to get through the day-to-day. Sometimes, all we need is an organic lollipop and a cup of tea, maybe a cookie -- a couple of deep breaths, a good book and the time and space to write a few words. See, I'm starting to know this new me, she does look a little like the old me, just turned a couple of degrees to the south.

#12 - Purple Hibiscus

2011-02-02T11:56:00.005-05:00

Purple Hibiscus is an assured and impressive debut from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: what a difference between it and the other first novel that I just finished reading, The Very Thought of You. There are none of the first novel jitters in Adichie's work: the plot and pacing are excellent; the story crescendos at exactly the right moment, her prose is bright, lively and interesting; and, layers upon layers of fascinating observations exist between the essence of "family" and the breakdown of the "state" as Nigeria becomes subjected to a military coup.

Kambili and her brother Jaja, along with their mother, Beatrice, live in constant fear of their father, Eugene, a complex, difficult and deeply religious man. His Catholic faith sustains him, but it also represses his family, creates a power vacuum, and ultimately results in some of the most gut-wrenching violence (not related to a crime novel) I've read in a long, long time. Eugene rules his household with an iron fist, one clasped entirely to a rosary, and when his wife or children stray -- whether it's to talk to or see their "heathen" grandfather or to not become first in their class -- the consequences are dire. The children, aged 15 and 17, live in constant fear of their father's fists, his belt, his whip, and there's no telling exactly what will set him off. Set against his rigid rules and regulations, Kambili and her brother find a few weeks of freedom when they go to visit their aunt, Eugene's sister, Ifeoma. The time they spend with her changes them forever.

The backdrop of the family drama is set against a military coup happening in Nigeria. It's fascinating that Eugene, so brave (he runs a newspaper as well as owns a number of factories that make food) in his intentions to resist the powers of the regime. He refuses to bribe the police officers, sends his newspaper editor into hiding, and remains incredible generous to the people who work for him. Yet, when it comes to his family, he simply can not see that subjecting them to the extreme Catholic values that he believes, in his heart, will save his and their souls, through the violence and an extreme restriction of their basic human rights echoes the very nature of dictatorship. I think this dichotomy, for me, strikes a cord that resonates throughout the entire novel.

Kambili can't speak without stuttering, doesn't smile, lives in constant fear of her father's punishment, but she also loves him, as a daughter would. Her father's violence whether it's towards her, her brother or her mother, is simply another facet of everyday life. In a sense, I think this is why her voice feels so much younger than 15 -- she's suspended in a strange, awkward childhood, and only begins to blossom when she stays with her aunt and sees how normal teenage girls act. Kambili's a lovely character -- bright, intense, open, honest -- and when you feel her father's blows upon her back, you want to cry out for her to run away, to fight back, and when she finally does, it's a revelation.

There's so much to love about this novel, the setting, the way Adichie uses traditional language, the explanations of food, of their daily lives, and the rich landscape soiled, in a way, by the corruption that's all around. Violence, at home or by the state, is an everyday part of life, yet Kambili can still see the beauty in a simple, special purple hibiscus. It's an impressive thing to not have your spirit broken -- something I admire intensely about this book, and something that I strive for in my own everyday life. And even when things are truly, truly horrible, there's still a goodness in Kambili that can't be broken, scarred maybe, but even those find a way to heal eventually.

READING CHALLENGES: Around the World (Nigeria) and Off the Shelf.

WHAT'S NEXT: I'm on "A" from my 1001 Books shelf, so I started reading Emma this morning. I love that I have spread out the Austen to read in my lifetime. I would be sad if I had already read them all. I'm exited I still have three to go.

Notes From A House Frau X

2011-01-31T14:35:00.005-05:00

The World Is Constantly In Motion

The most surprising part of the last week or so is how magical the transformation is from "newborn" to "baby." RRBB's so much more active, especially when he's sleeping -- slurping and sucking on his hands, snorting, kicking off his covers, and somewhat trying to teach himself how to soothe himself, if not to sleep, then back to sleep, which I'll take at the moment.

And like he's constantly in motion, I, too, am in flux: up and down and up and down go the test results, which simply signals the need for more blood work, and more peeing into jugs. It's so undignified. No one likes peeing in jugs, I swear, and the things that doctors need are never the things that the patients need. In fact, we're more like babies than anything -- we need comfort, hugs, calm words, patient hands. The other day in the doctor's office, my SFDD took off my boots for me while I was on the examining table, just like a father would do to a five-year-old, and it was oddly comforting. And then, we saw my SFDD in the market the other day when we were grocery shopping. He's such a very kind and gentle man -- he stopped to talk to us quickly and cooed at the baby, commenting, like so many people do who know me better than they know my RRHB, that he looks the perfect picture of me.

So funny, people who know us both can't stop talking about how he's the spitting image of my RRHB, which is what I think; people who know me better all say the baby looks so much like me. In a sense, you see what you're familiar with, making the baby different in the eyes of each that see him. I like that -- different people seeing different things in my son (my son!) in terms of how they know me and his father, it's nice.

The prednisone seems to be charging ahead with some obsessive/compulsive side effects these days. While I'm definitely sleeping more, thanks to an older baby and a very supportive RRHB, strange things are occupying my mind: a never-ending to do list that has items like "back closet books" and "file 2010 paperwork." Longstanding, rolling items that are not remotely practical when you have a 15-week old baby. But the boxes and boxes of books in my house are no longer the sentimental mementos they once were -- they are out of order, out of space, and lost in a time when words didn't necessarily mean more to me, they just had more permanence.

I don't need to keep every single book I read any longer. I am more mature as a reader -- I know certain things about myself: I don't reread; I like to get through a book every couple of days; I work in publishing and see A LOT of books; I can remember a lot even though I read quickly but passionately (slow reading, pffft); and I'd much rather pass along the book to someone else who might enjoy it than have to dust it for the next twenty years. That's not to say I don't keep certain books, I do, like On the Road and other books that I'd consider my favourites; lovely coffee table books, cookbooks, but we only have so much space, and it seems that all the words are weighing heavily on my mind these days. Maybe it's because I have such limited time to string my own words together and maybe it's because I have lost so many words too.

I find myself unable to finish so many thoughts. I'll start to say something and drift right off. It's impossible to do two things at once. I've been playing loads of Scrabble just to make sure my brain still works at a basic level. You take words for granted when you use them in a social situation every day. Sometimes, I even forget to talk to the baby, I just think he knows what I'm thinking by some magical baby-mother osmosis. And then I'll snap out of it and start rhyming, making up silly songs, thinking that I've got a children's book in me (doesn't every mother think that? aren't we all just so very wrong?): "I love you like the air loves the trees; I love you like the flowers love the bees; I love you..." you get the idea, right? More often than not, my RRHB has to say, "Use your words," when I trail off yet again inexplicably in the middle of a thought, "can you pass me the, um, thing..."

We are going out this Friday night for the first time as couple since the baby was born WITHOUT the baby. My cousins are babysitting. I love the fact that our RRBB has a cousin who is about three weeks older than he is, my mind is full of all the fun the pair of them will have at the cottage, maybe not this summer because they'll still be a bit too young to explore the forest or find salamanders in the swamps, but in the upcoming years, they'll grow up as we did, and despite all of the truly tragic things that happened to me in my youth: my mother's accident, my disease, all the family troubles, we, my two cousins, brother and I, had an idyllic childhood at the cottage. For now, they'll have to be satisfied with knowing each other as baby friends, sleeping in the same crib and going to Stars and Strollers together.

Seeing, actively seeing and raising, the next generation forces you to come to terms with a lot of things that you maybe forgot. When I was out at my dad's the other day going through all my old childrens books, I found Rupert. The first thing I did was open it up and smell it -- the scent of the book as strong in its memories for me as the story. The idea that portions of my childhood have lasted so very long with me resonates in how I want to raise our boy. But it also resonates with me how little of his memories I'll be able to control -- what he remembers, how he remembers, what he holds with him into adulthood. I guess all we can hope is that we don't screw him up too badly. And on that note, he's fussing, and needs a cuddle.

Don't we all?

#11 - The Very Thought Of You

2011-01-31T10:41:00.002-05:00

When I got the British/Irish/Scottish section of my shelves, the book that came up first was Rosie Alison's The Very Thought of You. At the time, I couldn't remember a) why I had this book in the first place or b) where it came from. Most of the books on my shelves are from various jobs I've had, things I've traded with friends at other publishers, blogger review copies, you get the idea. But this novel was a rarity, something I actually bought. I think I was trying to read all of the Orange Prize novels for some challenge I had invented for myself, or something.

Annnywaay, I was ultimately disappointed in this book, and found myself, more often than not, rolling my eyes at her prose and complaining, loudly, to my husband about how melodramatic and often nonsensical the book was as I was reading it yesterday while we were playing Scrabble on the iPad as the RRBB slept (you get a pattern here... a LOT of reading goes on while the RRBB sleeps these last few days). The story of a young girl evacuated from London at the start of the Second World War, The Very Thought of You simply tries too hard to capture the essence of the time and place. The novel opens promisingly -- echoes of The Remains of the Day float through the book as it describes the fall of the house of Ashton, whose last remaining heir, Thomas, had just died leaving the house to the National Trust and its inevitable treasures up for auction.

Thomas, and his wife Elizabeth, opened their home to 80-odd boys and girls during the war. With his body destroyed by polio, and the remaining members of his family dead, Thomas and his wife, Elizabeth, who is, natch, beautiful but damaged, find solace in children roaming the halls and playing outside while the war rages around them. Anna Sands, a quiet, contemplative child, misses her mother desperately but finds her way at Ashton Park. The girl gets drawn into the complex adult relationships between the Ashtons and the various other people embroiled in their unhappiness.

There are way, way too many characters in this book, and much of the narrative consists of awkward, cliched prose that melodramatically describes not only the failing relationship between the main characters, but also the multiple extra-marital affairs that seem to happen all over the place. No one is happily married in Alison's novel, and it gets a bit tiresome after a while. The story could have been simpler, the prose more direct, and then I could actually understand its inclusion on the Orange Prize longlist last year.

The author does an exceptional job of getting into the mind of Anna as a child, but then falls down by dragging the reader through the rest of her life in a Titanic-like moment that feels very put upon as an ending. There's no doubt that Alison has talent, but the novel suffers from a lack of true perspective, it tries too hard, which ends up meaning a lot of it just isn't believable. There's a point where too much tragedy between the pages simply becomes too much tragedy. I felt something similar when watching The Company Men last week at Stars and Strollers. Sometimes, the reader just needs a break from all awful things humans can do to one another, they need to actually love their partners, and someone, somewhere needs to find a bit of happiness, even if it's only for a moment. I'm not saying that Alison's characters don't -- I'm just saying that it's all a bit overdone.

London during the war is a fascinating subject for me. One of my favourites to read about, and the idea of the novel works, as does its basic plot -- but there were two secondary characters, Norton, a diplomat with whom Thomas Ashton worked, and his wife Peter, whose lives would have made for a far more interesting novel than the sappy "love gone wrong" and then "love lost forever" storyline occupied by the Ashtons, the two main adult characters. It's a shame when one gets to the end of a book and all one has to say for it is, "well, I'm glad that's done." And considering the other Orange Prize nominees, including Barbara Kingsolver's exceptional The Lacuna, I'm surprised that the panel included this book at all. However, despite Alison's first novel jitters (overwritten sentences, the tendency to say something, then repeat it just in case the reader didn't get it the first time, introducing bucketloads of characters that never appear again, the need to tell the WHOLE story), I'm curious to see how she matures as a writer. I'm sure her next novel will straighten out some of the above and what great exposure for an up-and-coming writer regardless of how I ended up feeling about the book.

#10 - The Reserve

2011-01-31T09:52:00.004-05:00

Well, let me be honest, Russell Banks' The Reserve totally surprised me. The only other novel by Banks that I've read was The Sweet Hereafter and, while I enjoyed it at the time, the only reason I had for reading it was to compare it to the film, which was excellent. I tried and abandoned Cloudsplitter, and never went back to Banks. But, I've got my new reading approach, and B is for Banks in my American fiction section, and hence, The Reserve.

Not unlike Robert Goolrick's A Reliable Wife, The Reserve has a totally unreliable and somewhat wicked female protagonist. Beautiful, charming, and terrifically disturbed, Vanessa Cole has returned to her parents' summer home after her second divorce. It's 1936, and her behaviour remains scandalous throughout the novel. And when artist Jordan Groves flies in to see her father's art collection, he's lured into a dangerous relationship with the woman that has far reaching consequences for both of them, and for their families.

There's a Gatsby meets Hemingway feeling to this novel. The Coles are of the upper classes, and it's not just money that separates them from the locals. But the fact that they own a section of an exclusive property in the Adirondacks called The Reserve. The locals work there; the summer people only vacation, and this dichotomy is explored throughout the novel, especially when Vanessa turns to the guide Hubert St. Germain to help her with the tragic situation that becomes the pinnacle moment in the book. When her father dies suddenly of a heart attack, Vanessa's demons, whether real or imagined (the novel only hints at the truth), are unleashed. And her actions are shocking.

Banks excels at plotting and the novel simply draws you in from start to finish. His descriptions of the setting are incredible and do much to add to the atmosphere that surrounds Vanessa's questionable actions. The fog that lies low over the lake echoes her state of mind kind of thing, and while it might sound sound cheesy when I write it here, I'm not doing Banks' exceptional prose justice. There's not a hint of melodrama, and there could be, and even though you feel you know these characters -- the flighty socialite, the rugged outdoorsman, the unhappy wife, the "artist" as "man" (aka Jackson Pollack), Banks has a way of twisting them just slightly to the left or the right, whether it's by their dialogue, or the actions that ultimately unhinge them, that casts them away from type.

I roared through this book. Once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down. I left the RRBB sleeping on me for hours so as not to disturb either his napping (I should have put him in his bed as we're trying to do more of these days) or my reading time. At one point, he was curled up on the bed beside me as I dove through the final thirty pages or so, with me rubbing his tummy so he would sleep just that little bit longer and I could finish. I was that engrossed. Sure, there are loose ends. Sure, there were things that could have been tidier, but on the whole The Reserve is damn fine novel, and it makes me actually want to read more Russell Banks. Thankfully, I've still got a copy of Cloudsplitter, as it's a 1001 Books book, which means it's now in alphabetical order -- and once I've finished my International "A" selection (Purple Hibiscus), I'm on to 1001 Books titles. But it'll be a while before I get to the "Bs". I've got three Austen novels to get through first.

Sigh. My life is rough, isn't it?

#9 - Weight

2011-01-27T10:44:00.004-05:00

So, before I hit upon my latest reading strategy, I was at a loss for what to read next. I was in the bedroom with the baby and said to my RRHB, "just get me a book, any book." He picked Jeanette Winterson's Weight. As part of The Myths series, I'm not sure how to categorize this book -- part fiction, part philosophy and part mythology, Weight re-tells the story of Heracles, a scoundrel of a god, and Atlas, the man charged with holding up the world.

Again, this was a short book, so it took me merely an evening to read (including breastfeeding bouts throughout the night). Overall, I enjoyed Winterson's re-telling, and while I have read very little mythology in my lifetime and have only the cursory understanding of these stories in the first place, I liked the moral underpinning she employs here -- that we all have our own burdens, and like Atlas, we can choose or not choose to hold them up or simply let them go. Winterson relates everything back to her own life throughout the telling, and there are chapters where she explains her history, and how and why she came to write as she does. The personal element adds a little something to the tale and there are whimsical elements (like Atlas finally getting some company in the form of a pet; I won't spoil it, it is very cute) that I also enjoyed.

After reading The City Man, it's interesting that I got through another book so quickly -- and pleased to have read something slightly different than pure fiction. I have one more book from the series on my shelves, Karen Armstrong's, and will probably get to that shortly as well. For now, I'm moving on to American fiction and have started Russel Banks' The Reserve. Lots to get through!

#8 - The City Man

2011-01-26T17:24:00.002-05:00

When trying to figure out what to read next from my shelves, I have come upon a master plan. I am going to alphabetize my books in somewhat of a Deanna-inspired Dewey system. Canadian books are gathered together, as are Nonfiction, American, British, International, 1001 Books titles, and Lifestyle. I know "nonfiction" covers a wide, wide, wide selection of titles, it's just easier than subdividing them even further. I'm also going to start a new section called "Writing" (books about writing, dictionaries, etc but I've already read all of those -- and unless people give me more of them, that section won't increase). This might take me a while but I bought the baby an activity mat yesterday (Baby Einstein's 'Baby Neptune') and he played on it for 45 minutes last night when he was exhausted, which means I might get even more time when he's awake and active! Hello more writing time! Then I think I'll start reading one from each section in their alphabetical order and go from there. I've been having a hard time choosing books, standing in front of my shelves for hours, baby on my shoulder, and I need to be quick and decisive these days. My brain is mushy enough.

Annnywaaay. Long, rambling digression aside, this is why when In the Company of Cheerful Ladies fell behind the couch and I seriously DID NOT have the energy to get it before bed, I picked up Howard Akler's completely riveting The City Man before bed the other day. It was one of those nights where I didn't sleep either so it meant I read the whole book in pretty much one sitting -- it's a swift, stylized 150-odd pages, so conducive to a night where your meds are keeping you up and you have to feed the baby anyway.

The novel is told in vignettes, or what I'd call micro fiction, short paragraphs that create the sense of a novel because they are all ultimately related but that could be read almost separately because of their coherence and beauty. Akler's created a world within these pages of Depression-era Toronto where pickpockets embroil themselves in the "whiz", grift at Union Station, smoke like fiends, and where one post-treatment (for "exhaustion" as we'd say in this day and age) reporter named Eli chases and then breaks the story. Of course, there's a love story, and pool halls, and a great Dame of a housemother -- in all the book feels like a great period film, complete with humour and heightened vocabulary.

Akler must have done a tonne of research, but that's not what I liked the most about the book. I mean, sure, the atmosphere is effective, the story sharp, but he writes clean, clean, clean prose -- and I admire that among all else. In a way, this book felt a little like that terrifically underrated George Clooney movie, Leatherheads . In full disclosure mode, Akler is a friend of one my closest girlfriends, and I've met him socially over the last few years, I'm just sorry that it took me this long to read his novel. I know he's working on another, and the moment it's out -- I'll be on it.

Another for the 2011 Off the Shelf Challenge.

O Stands For Opulence

2011-01-24T12:01:00.003-05:00

I've been embracing my stay-at-home mom status by watching (via PVR, natch) episodes of Oprah, The Farewell Season. I've been skipping a lot of the more morbid episodes, preferring instead to wile away the hours on the more energetic episodes, you know, the "favourite" things, stars promoting their latest films, J-Franz's book club appearance (how uncomfortable was THAT?). Most of the time I can ignore the overt marketing crap because I do think it's honourable to encourage people to read, to write, to live their "best" life, whatever that means. But never before has the sheer marketing value, the desperateness of various different high-profile brands been more apparent than when I was watching the Australian episodes.

Cue sappy, inspirational music as we come upon a very thin man with a beautiful wife and two gorgeous children. He's suffering from Australian cancer, which isn't much different from cancer in any other part of the world. But somehow, these people are special, they are undergoing tragedy. And I'm not belittling their suffering. My grandmother and uncle died of bowel cancer; it's an awful way to spend your last days. My point, though, is that the saints of Oprah-land deemed this particular couple worthy, and found a corporate sponsor, XBox Australia, to underwrite their suffering or, rather, to give them $250k so they can spend a year "enjoying" their lives instead of having to work so hard keeping everything together in the face of tragedy.

This got me thinking. Maybe that's what I need. A corporate suffering sponsor. I could blog about my trials and tribulations having an awful disease like Wegener's Granulomatosis (because, seriously, haven't we all heard enough about cancer, why not let some of the other diseases have the spotlight and the cash influx from companies looking to reformat their image in the age of social responsibility?). I could stand to cash a cheque for hundreds of thousands of dollars and spend the year recovering in the south of France or somewhere equally indulgent to my inner most and wildest dreams. I mean, who wouldn't?

But the whole idea is so repugnant, in a way. That some suffering is worthy of corporate sponsorship, simply because Oprah came to town and wanted to do some good (I'm not criticizing the intentions). What I'm more curious about is how the idea came about in the first place -- did XBox Australia sit down with Oprah's people and say, "we need to revamp our image and we'll do anything to get in bed with you, because you are the queen of all media and our time is running out, with this being the "farewell" season and all." Because it doesn't seem like a likely fit -- video games and cancer. Well, maybe I'm wrong. I guess I could have used some XBox while I spent three weeks in the hospital almost dying, then giving birth, and then almost dying again.

Maybe it's just sour grapes. Maybe deep down I'd love it if Stella McCartney or Jo Malone or Mac or Apple or some other giant brand that I actually respect and admire came calling to highlight my suffering for their own corporate greed. Wait, greed isn't the right word -- and marketing doesn't quite fit either, it's a strange combination of altruism for the sake of selling shit, and I know it's as old as dirt, the idea of companies giving back so that their brands are vital and necessary, and, well, front of mind, but I can't help but feel that it's tawdry to capitalize on someone's suffering regardless of how it must have felt to that family -- like winning the lottery. They are deserved of such a gift, that much is true, but I would love to see a lot more transparency -- it's not Oprah giving these gifts, she's simply allowing big, fat companies to ride on her coattails and allowing them to pat themselves on the back by doing "good" in her name.

And why is corporate generosity such a boon these days? You can't watch a single one of these daytime shows without the audience members receiving diamonds and computers and a whole host of other crap. And I'm not saying we don't do it either, gosh, we give away a lot of books, it's a good marketing ploy, but my company has never underwritten suffering the way XBox has -- they've never sponsored a tragedy in the name of "fun."

So, any company out there looking for a family undergoing some serious tragedy, we're here. We could use a little fun. We could use a little corporate social responsibility. And I promise I won't even mention the fact that my disease was ultimately discovered by a nasty Nazi doctor. Ooops. Maybe that's what's holding everyone back.

#7 - The Empty Family

2011-01-23T10:45:00.005-05:00

Colm Tóibín's excellent book of short stories, The Empty Family, cements his presence as one of the writers working today whose prose I covet, envy, and ultimately am awed by. The title, as his interview in the National Post points out, reflects the idea that there's a dichotomy to family, in all its inclusiveness, there's also a separateness for those who move beyond the traditional, who haven't got family to depend upon, or who choose to abandon and/or create families from non-blood ties. All of the protagonists in these stories leave home, leave their families, leave the relative safety of their immediate lives for change whether it's necessary (in one story, a young Spanish girl who is involved with the communists goes abroad after being arrested) or simply for an adventure (another character lives and loves with abandon in Spain in 1975). And the results, are terrifically life altering.

Of the stories, my favourite would have to be "Two Women," where Frances Rossiter, an aging, successful art director who returns to Ireland to dress a film and has a chance encounter with the widow of her most enduring lover. The scene, set so simply, has so many underlying emotions that evoked, for me, Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" where the real action remains in what's not being said instead of the actual conversation between the two characters. In fact, this is a particular stylistic affectation of Tóibín's writing, that there is so much left unsaid, awkward pauses melting between beautiful prose that illuminates the characters in ways that lesser writers would leave hanging. He can infer, and that's a talent that doesn't go unnoticed by me.

The stories are all vastly different; however, the ones where he uses "I", I couldn't help but imagine them linked in some way, the narrative giving voice to a protagonist that seems always to be at odds with the story itself in a way, like a literal interpretation of the book's title. As in the opposite of what "I" usually means: strong, individual, like Bob Marley's Rastafarian reinterpretation, his refusal to use anything but "I" -- these characters are not lacking but they are separate, outside in a way, alone, but not necessarily lonely, yet still feeling an ache. Funny, I can relate, in a way, it's kind of how I'm feeling these days, a distinct loss of "I" with the creation of my family. I am not, yet, in anyway empty, though.

My other favourite story from the collection would have to be "Silence." Lady Gregory fills up her life, a relatively happy life as a widow, with stories she tells, in secret, in code, to Henry James hoping that he'll turn them into prose. It's fascinating how she absorbs her guilt over an act of betrayal by slowly leaking the truth out in pieces that are overt lies to the writer. As if his written words will absolve her of her sins, should she actually think of them that way. But more so, to bring her feelings to the surface, to have them talked about in real society would be impossible, and so she makes up interesting ways for them to bubble to the surface that only she knows. The power of society, the impregnable rules for women, and the idea that marriage is simply a contract, regardless of how rich and/or happy it makes you, are all fascinating themes within.

In the National Post article that I linked to above, Tóibín mentions that there's a sentence from "The New Spain" that he's been holding on to for 23 years, that it took him that long to find the right place for those words. In a way, I find this so freeing -- as a writer who holds on to sentences for ages and consistently goes back to old notebooks for new inspiration, I can understand how it might feel to wait for just the right place for just the right words. And I am glad that Tóibín takes his time with these sentences, because the end result is nothing short of remarkable.

#6 - Blue Shoes and Happiness

2011-01-23T10:28:00.003-05:00

My Zombie Survival Guide daily calendar tells me that a motorcycle is the best way to flee an infested area, which could be problematic for me as I have never driven a motorcycle in my life. Oh well. That has absolutely nothing to do with Alexander McCall Smith's Blue Shoes and Happiness, which is the seventh book in the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series with Mma Ramotswe and her cast of likable characters. The calendar makes me laugh, that's all.

It's a breezy, delightful series, and I'm actually reading In the Company of Cheerful Ladies (#8) at the moment and expect to be finished it today, they're such quick books to get through. I had three of the series on my shelves, one I had already read, and so I decided just to power through the other two. I love how Mma Ramotswe isn't a traditional detective, while she may be traditionally built, and how the cases do not involve bloody murder of the Mo Hayder kind (although I do adore Ms. Hayder) but are instead more like moral lessons. Sure, there are mysteries to be solved but they are generally addressed through common sense and communication, traditional Botswana (I think?) values, and the essence of good for the sake of being good, no ulterior motives:

Most problems could be diminished by the drinking of tea and the thinking through of things that could be done while tea was being drunk. And even if that did not solve problems, at least it could put them off for a little while, which we sometimes needed to do, we really did.

My thoughts exactly. A good cup of tea, a warm muffin, and a comfy chair and most problems can at least be mulled over, if not completely solved. In Mma Ramotswe's case, she drinks her beloved bush tea, in my case, it's decaf earl grey with the milk poured in first (and I couldn't give a toss what Christopher Hitchens would say about that -- it was the way my British grandmother taught me to drink tea and it tastes the best when the hot water scalds the milk, it just does). The point being that it is in the drinking of the tea that humanity comes together, not the making of the tea, although I would agree with Hitchens that finding a decent cup of tea in America isn't easy.

Annnywaaay, I'm off topic, entirely with this post, rambling on about zombies and Christopher Hitchens. There's not a lot to say about these novels, just that I adore them, adore the characters and can't wait for the TV show to come back on, because it's delightful too. What's also nice is that McCall Smith was born in Zimbabwe, which puts him on the map in terms of my Around the World in 52 Books, and the African settings of these books always make me want to travel to that continent, just to experience life in a different way. So I've knocked off a couple of challenges with two short novels, and haven't quite decided what my shelves will bring forth next in terms of what I'm in the mood to read.

Notes From A House Frau IX

2011-01-21T14:37:00.004-05:00

The Magic Marker?

Our RRBB turned three months on Saturday, the magic marker, everyone told me, to when things would start to improve. There's just one caveat, he was born a month early so I'm thinking he'll start sleeping more, and the fussiness will calm down somewhere closer to 16 weeks or four months. I didn't think we'd make it this far, let alone still be sane, but he's been so terrific lately, and crying for only about a half-hour every day at different times in the day, that we all feel a bit calmer in the house. He's also doing an awesome job with tummy time as represented in this hilarious photo.

And calm is what I need. My creatinine went back up, and so the SFDD is still back and forth about whether or not to change our treatment. I am so freaked out right now by the disease and by the fact that, while nothing has really changed (the levels are high but not AS high as they were), the disease still seems to be stubbornly trying to kill me. Yet, I feel so much better. That could be accounted by the fact that I'm getting much more sleep these days, though. It's a silent killer, this Wegener's Granulomatosis, and I wish that it would just go away.

It's funny how being home turns your life upside down in a way. I have never figured myself to be a particularly active person -- I like to sit around, watch TV, read, watch movies. But all of that comes from working full time and needing, I suppose, the down time. I never figured that a 50-odd hour work week, plus commute, was really all that much, it was just what you did. And now, I'm not saying that staying home with an infant is easy, far from it, it's the hardest job I've ever had, but it's also boring. The baby isn't boring. He's a fascinating little thing and watching him evolve is one hell of an interesting perspective, a blessing, I know. But your brain, your own brain, kind of goes on hold, and instead of filling up your day with work, with actual things that make a contribution to the world (in my case, it's books, and I love my job), you fill up your day with errands. With all of the things that you had to cram into the weekend because by Monday morning at 730AM, it was up and go back into the routine again.

The RRBB sat in his bouncy chair for over an hour yesterday while I went through his clothes. Consistently amused by a toy giraffe, we read two books, and listened to music. Then, we danced, a little three-month celebration, I suppose. But that's a lot of stimulation for one wee one and that was only one hour. What do you do with the other 23? He sleeps, I read. He eats, I read. He cries, I cuddle. My RRHB cleans the entire house, I manage to vacuum the upstairs and clean the bathroom sink. Because baby fusses, baby sleeps, baby eats, and I read.

Don't get me wrong, I love reading, but I also need a day that's not filled up specifically with errands. And most of them are made up because if we just don't get out of the house, we start to lose our minds. It's funny, compartmentalizing your life into little hour-long blocks (will he sleep longer than an hour this time?) is not conducive to a lot of activities. And the weather isn't helping. We try to take him for a walk every day, despite the bitter cold, despite the fact that people don't shovel, despite the fact that it's mid-January in Toronto, Canada, simply because we are not the homebodies we claim to be. I will do anything to get out of the house these days, healthy or not, and I'm hoping that it's good for the RRBB, because his parents are errand-crazy.

I'm bleary-eyed this morning, cramming blogging into today. I'm trying a new tactic and putting the RRBB right back into his crib the minute he falls asleep if we are home. The sleep book says that he'll sleep better that way but I'm just trying to wean him from the human-couch aspect of our relationship. It doesn't always work. We had a semi-rough night last night, the first in weeks, so one can't really complain, and I've never seen a baby smile so much in my entire life. He's truly a happy little guy, which means, I hope, we're doing something right. Now if only that happiness could calm me down so I'm not always freaking out about my test results and what the doctors are going to say and whether or not I'll have to change medications and whether or not my kidneys will survive and whether or not the preeclampsia will ever go away and whether or not the prednisone crazies will kick in and whether or not my blood pressure will stablize and whether or not I'll be able to fill up another week with errands. And I feel like I'm wasting this time, which makes me resent the disease even more, it's holding me back from all kinds of things. I can't see the positives today, perhaps that's what boredom does to you, in a way, it pulls you down in ways that you don't want to go, makes you imagine the worst, refuses to give into the calm that you need to badly to get better.

So, errands, made up stuff that isn't remotely necessary to your life, but gets you through the days, pushes you forward without actually accomplishing anything major. I suppose, if you had enough errands, and the ability to focus for longer than a half-hour because of sheer exhaustion, you could manage a to-do list or two. Maybe that's the solution. Putting the errands on a master list just so I feel like I'm spending days living instead of dying (sic, The Shawshank Redemption).

Yesterday, I just had to dance with the RRBB to The Pogues' song A Rainy Night in Soho. I'm not going to lie, I had his little hand in mind and we were waltzing around his room, singing these words in particular: "You're the measure of my dreams, the measure of my dreams." I cried, which is something I do a lot, and then remembered what my RRHB said when I told him about the test results bumping back up -- that it's not getting worse so why freak out just yet, everything is exactly the same, even if it's not terrific, at least it's not as bad as it could be, and the RRBB is certainly the measure of my dreams these errand-filled days.

#5 - Abide with Me

2011-01-18T10:20:00.006-05:00

Elizabeth Strout is the kind of writer whose novels have such a solid moral core that you don't even realize their depth until you're at the end, teary-eyed, and wondering how she managed to be so subtle in her prose, yet so overwhelmingly apparent in her themes both at the same time. But wait, let me back up a little. There's a subset of American fiction, primarily written by literary writers, people like Strout and Marilynne Robinson, that I would equate to the "old woman on her deathbed" narrative that sometimes defines our Canadian canon, and that's the "pastor going through crisis" trope (would we call it a trope? Do I even remember what that word means?) that you find in novels like Home or Gilead. So, when I first started Abide with Me, I thought, 'oh, here we go, Strout's just putting in her two cents worth in terms of that American tradition.'

But what a rich tradition it is, and what a rich novel Abide with Me turned out to be. The story of a widower who is the minister of a small town in New England where the rustic setting not only traps its inhabitants during the long, cold winter, it turns them, often, against one another through fits of gossip, jealousy and petty indiscriminations. Tyler Caskey arrives young, bright-eyed and newly married. His wife, Lauren, is almost too big for the town with her bushels of red hair and big city ways. She spends too much money and isn't all that interested in being a minister's wife. Not to mention the fact that the town isn't all that crazy about her, either. But then, she dies a horrible, tragic death (and I'm not spoiling anything here), and Tyler's lost his way, and the novel turns -- it becomes about grieving, about loss, about life after tragedy, and the subtle ways Strout moves through Tyler's experience don't even become readily apparent until the end of the novel, when you fully understand how hard it must have been for him to lose the woman he loved, but also the life he expected to lead.

Not only is Tyler suffering from the loss of his wife, but it seems everyone else in town has undergone some sort of trouble. From adultery to actual crimes, Strout's novel pits the concept of grief up against some very real problems that exist within the human condition, perhaps to explore how grief affects people in many different ways, that it comes in many different forms. By the end, the book moves into a separate stage, and it is through the idea of healing, whether it's by telling the truth finally, by allowing yourself to be forgiven, or by respecting the fact that sometimes you simply can't continue, the entire town can't help but move through Tyler's grief with him, and it has a very poignant impact on everyone.

I adored this novel. I was so taken by the character of Katherine, Tyler's five-year-old daughter, who so vicerally experiences her mother's death that my heart broke on every page, and the sheer inability for the people around her to see how and why she's suffering (with the exception of her father who, while baffled by his daughter's behaviour, clearly loves her more than life itself) or to give her the hand she needs felt so real to me, primarily because I too lost my mother, but not at such a young age. All in all, the novel, set in the 1950s, explores gender roles, explores the banality of small-town life, the suffication of spending so much time indoors when the snow is piled high and all the women can do is make beds and polish floors to keep themselves sane, and it also explores the idea of faith, how it can stretch and bend, but also break, just at the very moment when you need it the most -- and this is a theme for which I am quite familiar with in my own life these days.

I'm amazed that I had these novels just sitting collecting dust for so long. But I am a true believer in fate when it comes to reading. You pick up a book at the right time for you to be reading that book -- if you don't finish, it's not always the book's fault, it's just perhaps not the right moment to be reading. I needed both Amy and Isabelle and Abide with Me this month. They have enriched my life in ways that I find hard to express -- and given me something to aspire to, Strout's writing is simple exquisite.

READING CHALLENGES: Off the Shelf.

Notes From A House Frau VIII

2011-01-17T12:59:00.002-05:00

I realize this photo is sideways, but that's kind of how I'm feeling these days. Not upside down any longer, which is a good thing, but not wholly myself either. We've had an exciting couple of weeks -- we've been getting out a whole lot, we've started to see the world from the squished up view of the Baby Bjorn, which is far, far easier in this weather than the stroller, we've gone skating two Sundays in a row, and out for dinner a whole bunch. We've still got a wee bit of the Witching Hour (last night he cried for a record ten minutes) but we've collapsed entirely into "Accidental Parenting" as The Baby Whisperer (suck it) would say.

Instead of doing our sleep training, which equals us going upstairs and having a bath at seven and then spending two-to-three hours trying to get the RRBB to sleep, we're watching movies with him sleeping on us until he's almost blacked out, and then depositing him in bed. The result? He sleeps for almost four hours at first, then three, then three, and I feel like a human being in the morning. Also, he doesn't wail for the entire time we're trying to get him down. My thoughts? He's just not ready yet. And I'm okay with that. So far we've watched: The Fighter, True Grit, Black Swan and tonight's The Social Network. Please don't ask how we're seeing these films. It's not pretty.

It's funny how much I hate taking pictures of myself when I'm in the throws of the disease. I don't feel like myself and I don't look like myself. The prednisone makes you puffy, it makes your skin all mottled, and bucket loads of your hair falls out. I don't know if I've written this before but way back when I was first diagnosed with the disease, my family doctor said, "What a shame it had to happen to such a pretty girl." As if forever setting up the dichotomy between a healthy, attractive me and an ugly, diseased me. The distinction exists so clearly in my mind that it's hard sometimes to forget about it -- you can avoid mirrors, you can put on some makeup, you can cut your hair (or, in my case, keep saying you're going to cut your hair and never make an appointment because, well, that's a long three hours to spend away from the RRBB), but you can't avoid the side effects.

In a way, side effects are like so much in life, something you need to get through before life gets better, like the Witching Hour. But the manifestation of looking so terrible, the very real implications of the disease, well, those are harder to reconcile when you've been undergoing treatment for so long. And, truly, I haven't even been recovering for that long -- just 14 weeks, like I keep saying, I was the sickest I've ever been in my life, and it's going to take longer than 3 months to get better. Getting better isn't the point, either, staying better is, making sure that I am calm and collected, and truly healed, to get to healthy like I was before I got pregnant. One of the things that's helping is getting out of the house. You start to go completely stir crazy even though it's wonderful to have the RRBB, sometimes you just need to strap him into something and put one foot in front of the other. There's an amazing rail path by our house that we've been walking lately. Lots of wild grasses, snow, and birds, plenty of people walking their dogs as well, and we can walk and talk, and walk and talk, it's very therapeutic.

In addition to walking, I've signed up for Restorative Yoga once a week. It's so expensive but so necessary. I feel so much better after I am done, and it's just an hour, but I also experience how completely broken my body is too. My breathing especially -- the disease has tuckered me out this time, and even though I can barely do anything, and feel like I'm starting from scratch with my practice, bawling each time I'm there, I know it's doing me a world of good. I am consistently amazed at how much pure trauma the body holds separate from the mind, again with the dichotomies, and pulling them both together, like balancing what I'd like to look like with the necessity of the side effects, is an ongoing process. Sometimes you just need to give in to the moment, perhaps that's my lesson for the week, you need to abandon what the books say and just do what instinctively feels right, what works, accidental or not.

Sometimes accidents, biology, sperm meeting egg on a snowy day in February in New York City, are just about the best things to happen in your life. We should remember that lesson always and not define yourself by the tragedy that sometimes accompanies the figurative car crash but what the end result might be -- a brand new life that comes with its own way of expanding your heart in ways that you never thought possible. It's not like I can't teach myself to breath again, it's not like I'm going to forget how, I just need a bit more practice. Luckily, I've got a year to figure it all out, moment by moment, and minute by minute, and as long as I can keep my fingers moving, everything will be okay. For the first time in a long time, I feel positive that I'm actually going to get better, that there's a light at the end of the tunnel, but I don't want to jinx it -- for now, I'm just going to say that even if I don't look like myself, there's a tiny glimmer of feeling like myself, which, in my mind, might actually be better.

#4 - The Keep

2011-01-17T12:07:00.007-05:00

For the most part, I enjoyed Jennifer Egan's The Keep. While I found her writing to be a little commonplace for lack of a better word, I did enjoy the story. In a lot of ways, this novel reminded me of The Ruins, only with stranger characters. The book opens up with a fairly typical urbanite, Danny (an overgrown connected club kid, right down to the earrings and pointy boots), making the pilgrimage to his cousin's castle. Howard, said cousin, has bought the entire German estate, including an ancient keep with its resident, an equally ancient member of the originating family who refuses to leave, and intends to renovate it as a resort -- one free of all modern communication, a place to reflect and unwind, only it's in ruins at the moment. Howard has asked Danny to come and help, and as a 36-year-old with no prospects, he comes as called.

Only there's a history between them. An incident. One that has rocked their relationship, and one that they need to work out as the story progresses. I am not going to spoil that here. What I will say is that alternating between the chapters where Danny finds himself in increasingly dangerous and injurious situations, you discover the novel's actual narrator, Ray. He's a prison inmate taking a creative writing class, and the story of the castle, of the keep, and of Howard and Danny, is actually his project. Teaching the class is Ann, and a strange, Shawshank-like relationship rears up between the two.

For a while, you wonder how it all relates: where does Ray's story come from, how does it all tie in together, and then Egan pulls out the twist, and the book changes perspectives. We're now looking at things from Ann's point of view, and this was the part of the book that I actually found the most intriguing. A former crystal meth addict, whose husband is still addicted, Ann is trying desperately to be a good mother to her two daughters, both of whom were subjected to their parents' awful behaviour.

Many of the characters feel cookie-cutter, like you could have pulled them from a bag of stereotypical characters from pop culture -- even Ann, "drug addicted mother" and Ray "far-too smart criminal," are a little too cookie cutter for my taste. But as far as a good commercial read goes, you don't get better than The Keep. It's creepy in all the right places but, like The Ruins, the true terror factor doesn't leap off the page as one would hope. There's one absolutely terrifying situation but I was constantly questioning the believability of the whole story throughout. Yet, I did find myself drawn to Ann, and to her vulnerability, and that's probably why I wished there were more from her perspective than just the last section of the novel. But I'm a sucker for hard-luck addict stories, hell, that's why I loved Lullabies for Little Criminals so much.

On the whole, I was terrifically creeped out by The Keep and found it a solid read, especially following The Guardians. Maybe January is the perfect month to read terrifically spooky books -- it's all dark, cold and snowy, and the nights seem to last forever, especially when you're up at odd hours like 2 AM, 4 AM, etc. But does this novel put me on a crash course to read every else Egan has ever written, not really. Certainly not like Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout, which is why I'm halfway through Abide With Me at the moment. I'm hoping to finish it today because I have so much to say about it already -- the blog post is active in my mind. Now finding time to read and then write it all up, well that's an entirely different story.

READING CHALLENGES: Off the Shelf, of course. I'm getting tired of writing that sentence. I am not, however, getting tired of cleaning off my shelves. Now we just need more visitors who like to read so they can pick over my outgoing box of books so the novels can actually leave the house and be enjoyed by someone else!

#2 - The Guardians & #3 - Making Light of Tragedy

2011-01-11T21:32:00.007-05:00

A friend at Doubleday sent me a galley for Andrew Pyper's The Guardians way back in the way back, and then asked that I not post until closer to the book's pub date, which was the beginning of the month, I think. Regardless, I put the book on my shelf and forgot about it until one day last week when I was searching around for something BETTER to read than the Joyce Maynard I had just finished. I described the book on Twitter as such: "The Guardians = Stand By Me + River's Edge / Mystic River without the Boston setting."

And I stand by these comps. The book, about a group of hockey-playing young men, friends since grade school, who end up embroiled in a tragic situation involving their hockey coach, a young woman and a haunted house, was seriously not what I expected. As you know, I have little faith in "haunted" stories. Blame my reticence on Sarah Waters, I think The Little Stranger ruined it for me forever, and maybe it's because I don't think any book can do "haunting" better than that Alejandro Amenábar film, The Others, I've given up finding satisfaction in being scared in print. Also, I really hate being scared so why would I put myself through days of it versus 1.5 hours of a film.

Yet, I found myself inexplicably drawn into to Pyper's narrative. He has a cool way with character, they're masculine, very Lehane-esque, but that's not off putting to me as a female reader. The main character, Trevor, suffers from Parkinson's, which, while the disease isn't remotely the same as mine, I can kind of relate to -- simply the idea of your body not cooperating with itself. When his childhood friend commits suicide after years of protecting both the secret the group of four boys harbours and the house across the street (the haunted house), Trevor and Randy (the second of the foursome) head home for the funeral. The truth unravels from there, and I didn't even mind the "memory diary" device that Pyper uses (Trevor's therapist insists he keep it as a way of dealing with the disease; should my shrink ever do such a thing I would terminate treatment immediately; who wants to be constantly reminded of what the farking disease has taken away from you, seriously?). The narrative switches back and forth between Trevor's diary and the action in the present tense.

There are all kinds of interesting things that happen when someone goes home, especially someone who made the conscious choice, after the tragedy, that Trevor did to never go back. The small-town Ontario setting adds to the nuance of the novel -- things like this couldn't happen in a big city, someone would tear the house down, raze the trouble before it even started or simply not notice, walk on by. But in this town, a hockey town, the house stands for over forty (I think) years creating havoc for not only the four boys who are deliciously intertwined in its grasp, but a few other tragic souls as well. It's a terrific book, a perfect read for a snow day if there ever was one, and I'm glad that I read it in the deep, deep hours of the night, just for those extra chills.

The other title I read last week was Jessica Grant's Making Light of Tragedy for my book club. The cover sucks so I am refusing to put it up here on the blog, and Kerry's done a wonderful job of wrapping up our meeting. Everything she says about the book, well, that's what I think about the book too. I fell on the Grant's writing was a little bit too twee for my liking, and kept thinking of that old-school writing class line that if you're in love with your prose that's the stuff that should be cut right away, and there were many, many, many loved lines in these stories that could have been sliced to the benefit of the writing. However, there were also some amazing metaphors -- and this coming from a girl who actively removes every single metaphor from her own writing she finds them so distracting -- where I found my breath catching just a bit at her turn of phrase it was so beautiful. So, uneven, but enjoyable. The company, however, and our meeting, was a serious breath of fresh air. I even managed to feel like I was using a part of my brain that a) doesn't sing everything I'm doing, b) actually considers thoughts before they come out of my mouth, and c) had nothing to do with talking to or about the RRBB.

WHAT'S UP NEXT: I'm reading The Keep right now, as recommended by a few friends, but am actually spending far too much time playing iPad Scrabble during the late-night feedings. It's scrambling my brain a little so I am going to stick to just the book tonight, we'll see how that goes at 2 AM.

Notes From A House Frau VII

2011-01-03T20:17:00.006-05:00

RRBB's First Toque: O, Sweet Child Of Mine.

I am a woman who loves a toque. I wear them all the time, who cares if I look like Jay of Jay and Silent Bob, I love them. And, I am instilling this very real, very Canadian love on my child. This toque is a present from his Grantie Judy. And it's awesome. Although I am afraid he'll out grow it before too long and then I might have to frame it. Along with his umbilical cord stump and my pregnancy test. Is that weird to want to frame all that stuff and put it on my walls? I don't think so, but someone might.

We aren't sure if we are through the rough patch yet. Starting on Christmas, as I said, RRBB went through a period of intense fussiness at bedtime. It was almost too much to stand. A friend said, "Oh, yes, you think it's done and then they break you." And she was right. On New Year's Eve, instead of starting at 830 or so, RRBB decided to start his fussing at 11 PM and go right until 4 AM. And we are now in week three or so of this phase. Everyone says that it'll calm down around three months, but counting from his due date, that's another five weeks or so. We can do it right? If people can climb Mount Everest, my RRHB and I can cope with a crying baby. The whole concept of The Witching Hour is fascinating -- that his little brain/body is working so hard to grow at such a furious pace that it simply can't contain itself -- that it almost makes up for how rough the few evening hours are.

Luckily, he's an utter delight during the day for the most part, and is a great napper. We take amazing walks along the rail path by our house, and he doesn't mind at all being in the stroller (once he's in and outside). We've even managed to go out for dinner twice, and tomorrow I think, if I am not so diseased, we might go to a Mommy and Me movie. Maybe. That might be pushing it. All in all, there's little bits of life coming back into my life these days -- I am clinging to them. He's smiling a tonne, is awake and alert more, and is starting to really recognize us. But what I've been thinking all along is how different the idea of parenthood has always been for me, for someone who always imagined it was out of reach because of the disease and other factors, from the reality. The emotions are so much more intense in both directions. I never imagined I'd miss myself so much. Hell, I spent x-number of years hating myself intensely, why would I miss myself? But I do, and just those little bits of me coming back, along with some better test results from my blood work lately, I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

So, we might be a bit behind in terms of birth date/due date, and it might take a few more weeks of losing our evenings entirely to a wailing child, but by the summer, hell, by the spring, I think we'll be in a much better place. I'm even feeling confident they won't switch the drugs over... but we'll see about that because I'm still having disease symptoms three months into treatment. I wish I wasn't puffy. I wish my hair wasn't falling out. I wish I wasn't eating terrible predisone-induced food. I wish the baby wasn't fussy. I wish we weren't so broke. But I don't at all wish for anything to be different because I am content in a way that I never knew possible. Things are miserable with my health, worse than ever, but I made it through, and sometimes being tough is just the point. Maybe there's nothing else to it -- and that's what almost three weeks of fussy baby is pointing us too as well. You can battle it all with a good sense of humour, an awesome RRHB, and some really, really good drugs. But being tough, being strong, being someone who survives, these are not poor qualities to have, are they?

#1 - The Good Daughters

2011-01-02T12:50:00.005-05:00

Sometimes it's hard for me, professionally, even though I know this is a blog for which I am not getting paid, to separate my true feelings about a book from a more balanced approach in terms of reviewing. Joyce Maynard's The Good Daughters puts me once again within this dilemma. Other aspects conflicting my ability to write a non-biased review: I have met and interviewed the author, and was incredibly inspired by her; and I loved her previous novel, Labour Day.

But that doesn't take away from the fact that there is something definitively lacking within this book. If I had to put a finger on it -- and this may seem harsh -- it's story. Told from the alternating perspectives of two "birthday sisters" born on the same day in a small rural community in New Hampshire, the book feels more like a character study than a novel, and it lacks a certain polish. The writing is often redundant and repetitive, parts that could be interesting are told in shorthand in the rush, I suppose, to get through the entirety of each woman's life. The book skims the surface and uses cliche to describe key elements (no woman should ever be described as a rare fruit, like, ever) and the constant back and forth feels gimmicky.

It's obvious that there's more to the story than the fact that the two girls, Ruth Plank, a farmer's daughter, so inherently different from the rest of her family, not just physiologically but also emotionally, and Dana Dickerson, stuck with parents who never should have been so, awkward and incredibly different than her flighty family, were both born on the same day in the same hospital nine months after a terrible hurricane (yes, a hurricane, boy it does stir up some awful human emotions and some truly interesting mischief, yawn). And, not to brag, but I had figured out the "twist" by about page two and then had to read on until the big reveal -- Maynard parsing out little clues here and there throughout. What's most astonishing is that both Ruth and Dana, intelligent, well-adjusted women both, didn't give more thought to how different they are, to the real story, before just about everyone around them who knew the truth ended up dead.

There's a sweetness to the novels that you can't deny, and I think it would make a very good book for, forgive me, suburban mom book clubs. But it really wasn't a book for me -- a quick read, which I always appreciate, with a really great setting (I love the Plank farm; its history and its roots [been in the family for 10 generations]) and I can see what Maynard was trying to do but I always find that books that try to encompass so much, like entire lives instead of those pivotal moments, sometimes lack the depth that I crave in a more literary sense. Yet, the stereotypes and the coincidences are a little too much to take in places -- I appreciate Maynard's inclusive writing, international adoption, a truly beautiful lesbian partnership, are just two examples, but when it all comes together it feels forced, a little too Jodi Picoult movie-of-the-week for my tastes.

Overall, I was disappointed in this book, and I hate to start off a reading year on such a note, but there's always tonight for another try. I'm not sure where I'll go next. There are so many books to choose from. What I'd really like to know is what everyone else is reading and have some recommendations. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to find one or two titles on my shelves.

New Year's Revolutions 2011

2011-01-01T13:38:00.004-05:00

We had a bit of rocky start to the New Year. RRBB fussed until about 4 AM so there was a lot of up and down last night. I haven't given the same kind of thought to my New Year's Revolutions as I normally do -- I honestly take the week between Christmas and New Year to reflect on my year and to read as much as possible. At least I'm still accomplishing the latter.

To review: New Year's Revolutions 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010

I did really well compared to last year: I kept the weight off, exercised regularly, even during pregnancy (swimming at lunches at work), spent a lot of time at the cottage, and even managed to get my book out into the world (it was rejected; but that's okay). Instead of the more philosophical goals I generally set out to accomplish, I am taking a slightly different stance this year.

1. Be Well
This means doing everything I can to fight the disease whether it's taking my meds, adjusting to the new course of treatment, taking restorative yoga, going for walks with the RRBB, or simply accepting the fact that I am very sick right now and the most important thing is to get better. I have too much to lose otherwise. But it also means being well in my mind. I have a lot of work to do still in terms of accepting everything that happened over the last few months: I still haven't forgiven myself for letting the disease get so out of control. I know technically it's not my fault but I could have been more aggressive in letting the doctors know exactly how I was feeling or being more persistent in terms of my own care. I was just so happy to be having the baby -- I got cocky.

2. Write
Any words, in any place, in sentences or just in thoughts. I just need to keep going. Between the disease and the RRBB, I have lost myself entirely. This wasn't something I was expecting with motherhood. The sea shift in terms of where my attention needs to be. There's nothing wrong with an old fashioned pencil and paper in a cafe. That's something I can do during the week with the RRBB. He does love his walks. Winter be damned.

3. Be a Better Friend
People were so very, very good to us during our tragedy. Old friends, new friends, it was amazing the outpouring of goodness. I need to find small ways to give that back -- to let everyone know how much I appreciated it, how special it made us feel.

4. Enjoy Our New Life
This one's easy. It's the simplest thing to do right now. Even when the RRBB is screaming and bawling at 330AM we still love him to bits. He'll work it out. Just seeing my RRHB laugh at him when he's turning purple lightens the stress of the situation. Now, if I could only get some more sleep.

5. Stop Worrying About Money
We aren't going to make very much of it. We are probably going to go into debt. I have to let it go and get through the year. I need my RRHB's support during this time. We need to be together here for the RRBB. Everything else will work itself out.

So, only five -- of course, the usual revolutions are in there -- watch less TV (which I have done in spades, I have barely seen the TV since the RRBB was born), read more (which I've been doing exceptionally well with), make better choices when it comes to the internet (the iPad makes this easy; no more internet coma), and use what we've got, consume less (this might be hard as we are, of course, wanting to do so much with the house this year).

What are your New Year's Revolutions?

#67 - Amy And Isabelle

2010-12-31T14:04:00.002-05:00

After suffering through Pearl, was I ever grateful for Elizabeth Strout's excellent Amy and Isabelle. When I was combing the shelves for something to read, I had forgotten that Strout wrote the excellent Olive Kitteridge, and you can see similar themes in her earlier novel: small town life, history repeating itself, the problems of parenthood, mother-daughter relationships (even though Olive had a son, correct?), so I should say parent/child relationships.

Regardless, Amy and Isabelle remains a thoughtful, engrossing novel that takes place, I think as the 60s are turning into the 70s. Isabelle, the mother, and Amy, the daughter, each live with their own internal restrictions that affect their relationship. Isabelle is strict, complex, sad -- she tells everyone she's a widow, but you know that's not the whole story -- and is in love with her boss at the shoe mill where she works as a secretary. So proper she always wears pantyhose in the heat of summer (the hottest on record), her thin brown hair consistently pulled into a French twist, she's unprepared for the issues that arise over her daughter: typical teenage stuff, lying, inappropriate love affairs, and then a shock that changes everything.

Amy's naive in an intelligent way. She was raised by an honest, forthright person (for the most part) and believes that when someone says something, they mean it. And her good heart, her good nature, gets her into a situation that ultimately disappoints her, it's heartbreaking for both mother and daughter.

Strout has a gift for small town life, like in Olive Kitteridge, she intersperses the story of the main character with other colourful people -- people like Amy's best friend Stacy, her parents, the church women and a truly delightful character called Fat Bev (who comes from French Canadian stock; naturally).

Shirley Falls, Maine might be experiencing a heat wave but the weather isn't the only thing stagnating. As the summer progresses, and as the lies pile up both for Amy and for Isabelle, it's a relief when the truth rains down, both metaphorically and literally -- the storm breaks not just the weather, and it's glorious. The novel itself reads like that moment just after a storm when everything feels fresh and renewed. I honestly enjoyed this novel so much that I spent the few spare minutes finishing it yesterday morning when I should have still been sleeping. I did regret this for a moment when the RRBB had such a rough night last night, but good lord, it was a good read. I honestly think that Alice Munro is an excellent comp for Strout, so if you're a fan, I'd be curious to see what someone else thinks.

READING CHALLENGES: What else? Off the Shelf!

WHAT'S UP NEXT: I started Joyce Maynard's The Good Daughters and am already finding it a bit lacking. The prose feels a little sloppy and repetitious at the moment, but I'm hoping the further I get into the actual story, the more this will abate.