#52 - Tinkers

Paul Harding's novel, Tinkers, won the Pulitzer Prize last year, and it's a novel more than worth its success. First published by the Bellevue Literary Press in NYC, the novel will hopefully find a wider audience now that it's being published by HarperCollins. Anyway, the publishing history isn't really the purpose of writing a review on the blog, is it?

In a way, Tinkers will feel familiar to Canadians, it's premise, an old man lays dying and reflects on his life, is one that we're quite familiar with. If it were only called Stone Tinkers, it'd probably be a bestseller. The novel intertwines the stories of son and father, George and Howard Aaron Crosby, as George lays dying, system shutting down, in his living room. Surrounded by family, sometimes George knows what's happening, sometimes his body betrays him, but Harding has a particular talent for writing his death honestly and without pretense.

Both George and his father are good, honest people, but that doesn't mean they always make the right decision. Without necessarily wanting to spoil anything (and it's written in the marketing blurb), they've been estranged for years when Howard, who is epileptic, abandons his family on the pretense that his hard, hard wife has finally reached the end of her rope with the burden of his disease, and is about to commit him to an institution.

Howard, a tinker, who walked the cold backroads of Maine with his cart selling anything and everything, simply turns in the other direction and doesn't go home. He begins an entirely new and fulfilling life that seems at peace with his utterly good nature -- but, then again, it's not an honourable thing to leave your family behind with no way to support itself. But the way its written, you actually feel sympathy for Howard, you feel like it's the right thing to do, and are convinced that everything will be fine.

George, a clock repairman, has led a happy, quiet life. Precision guides him, even in death, and as his body shuts down, its elements of machinery, the very same things that guided George through life, are failing. His mind wanders, he can't recognize the family members by his bed, but he notices that his favourite clock isn't wound. In this simple example, it's apparent that one of the most moving aspects of Tinkers remains Harding's ability to describe a body deteriorating into death. Tears came to my eyes more than once throughout my reading of this novel -- I was reminded of my mother, of how her body failed in the few days it took her to die. Sometimes his descriptions were so apt that I felt the pain of the loss in my chest. To me, that's the sign of an exceptional writer. Someone who can move you to remember or feel something so personal yet so unrelated to the story by the simple power of a sentence.

Harding attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and worked with Marilynne Robinson, and you can feel her influence all over this novel. It's quiet but intense, the characters are wholly good people with complex flaws, and the novel's simple story betrays the power of the prose. Overall, I'd highly recommend this book -- it's a quick, emotionally satisfying read -- it's perfect for a rainy day when you have some time to spend just laying about on the couch. But have a tissue or two on hand...

#41 - We Need To Talk About Kevin

Lionel Shriver's Orange prize-winning novel has been on my "to be read" pile ever since I started working at HarperCollins Canada, two point five years ago. Somehow, it always got shuffled around, whether or not I was trying to start or finish a challenge, or something flashy had caught my eye, the book remained on the pile. I guess I found the subject matter a little daunting: a mother talks through letters to her ex-husband about their troubled child, Kevin, who was responsible for a serious school shooting incident.

But once you start We Need to Talk About Kevin, it's almost impossible to put down. Shriver has a way with character that forces the reader to confront human nature head on -- both the good and the bad. There's no stereotype in Eva. She's an individual who has made her way in the world, created a successful company and lives a happy life with her husband. She's hesitant to start a family for a number of reasons: will she be a good mother, how will a baby change their lives, what will it do to her relationship, all of which seem rational when making a decision as big as whether or not to start a family. And it's apparent that it's a decision, and not an accident, when she gets pregnant with Kevin. Everything else that happens later seems to fall from Eva as a result of her inability to feel happy about the birth of her son. It's not as if she blames herself but more that she's working through the blame, the denial, the regret, as she sends letter after letter to her estranged husband, Franklin.

The letters are personal and they are obviously missing a bit of perspective. But that's why they are just so effective, you are in Eva's life irrevocably, and you feel her pain, are motivated by her hurt, and want to understand what went wrong almost as much as she does. I don't think you can write a book like this without laying bare the limitations of humanity in a way -- of society's ability to forgive and forget to a point that benefits those directly involved in tragedy. For Eva, she's haunted by her losses, surely, but she's also haunted by the simple fact that life doesn't end even if you might want it to, even if you believe it should. You take a step and move into a more, miserable life, but you're alive nonetheless.

Her relationship to her son, the mass murderer, is complex, difficult, aching, and utterly real. But what I loved most about my Perennial edition, was the story behind the book at the end. Apparently, Shriver (and I'm paraphrasing so hopefully I don't get this too wrong) wrote this novel really quickly and sent it to her agent at the time who rejected it entirely. The string of novels she'd written up to that point hadn't been enormously successful and when the agent refused to sell it, Shriver took it upon herself to send it to an editor friend, who ultimately (I think) published the book. Then, as we all know, it won a well-deserved Orange Prize. Sometimes a writer simply has to trust her own voice. Right?

IMPAC Win

Quinn posted up a note this morning that Rawi Hage has won the IMPAC award. I only made it through three of the shortlisted books (too many challenges; too much travelling; very little reading) but DeNiro's Game was one that I read and loved. It's nice to see novels that were shortlisted for Canadian prizes, like the book I'm currently about 20 pages away from finishing, The Book of Negroes (which just won The Commonwealth Prize), go on to win international prizes. It's not as if I'm writing a "here's the trouble with the Giller" note or anything, but I'm glad that both DeNiro's Game and The Book of Negroes will go on to find larger audiences as a result of the attention.

Posting has been sparse, life seems to be overwhelmingly busy these days. And we're on the road again tomorrow, taking a family trip to NYC. Right now I feel like I've been travelling for months. And for those moments where I'm sitting behind my desk staring out the window thinking how nice it would be to have a job where I travelled even more, I'll need to remember this feeling. The one where I just want to be home with a good book, my two working hands, and some time to get caught up on my writing.

#2 - July's People

Nadine Gordimer's July's People is a bloody good book. A book I wasn't necessarily expecting to be as riveting as I certainly found it, and by far one of the best titles I've read from the 1001 Books list. In fact, I was so obsessed with finishing that I stood on Lansdowne Ave and read the last two pages before walking home. Some guy walked by, chuckled, and said, "Must be a really good book."

Uh, duh.

The story takes place in South Africa in 1980 during an uprising, which is fictional, where the country is invaded by Mozambique. With mayhem all around, Maureen, her husband Bam, and their three children are forced to flee the city. Their servant, whom they call July, offers to take them to his village, where they settle in his mother-in-law's hut for the time being.

Stripped of their city life, their status, and with nothing but the colour of their skin and a few prized possessions (a "bakkie" [truck] and a rifle) to remind them of what life was once like and despite their fiercely liberal beliefs, Bam and Maureen struggle to get along in this foreign world. Fighting fleas, sickness in their children, language difficulties, and a whole host of other problems, it's a challenge just to get through a day.

After weeks pass, the family starts to adjust, and the little motions that happen in families start again. The children make friends, and even Maureen finds herself more comfortable around the other women, gathering greens for dinner with them, speaking in broken Afrikaans to them, and managing the hut with a strong hand. But as a whole the family cannot flourish in the environment, and as a result, the relationship between July and the Smales breaks down.

Once affable, even amiable, small things pick away at the core differences between them: how July refuses to give back the car keys after taking a trip to town; how Maureen lords the information of his city mistress over him; and how he adjusts to life back in the village full time, how his own presence effects his family unused to seeing him home. Themes of racial inequality are impossible to ignore, as they're turned on their heads, then ripped apart, and forced into situations that exploit how the idea of the liberalism so cherished by Maureen and her husband in a philosophical way is almost farcical.

In one of my undergraduate classes in post-colonial literature, I read Gordimer's Burger's Daughter, which I remember to be just as poignant and readable as July's People. It was the same year that I read my first novel by J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, but for some reason, I carried on reading him and abandoned Gordimer altogether. Maybe now is the time for me to read more Gordimer? Especially considering how much I enjoyed this novel.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: Because I didn't have my camera with me on Lansdowne as I read the last two pages, I've piled the book up on a stack of ARCs that I have to take back to work. Oh, and there are some stocking feet poking their way in as well as the library book I need to return. Ah, the life of a literary gal.

READING CHALLENGES: July's People is on two of my lists: the 1001 Books I'd like to read this year, and the South African entry in my current Around the World in 52 Books. I'd highly recommend it for either. Oh, and I think Nadine Gordimer won the Nobel Prize for Literature (which I just confirmed on Wikipedia; she won in 1991), so we can add that to the major award winners that I've read in my lifetime too. Whew. Kind of like a bird life list for bookish peeps.

#76 - Late Nights On Air

Elizabeth Hay's lovely, Giller-winning novel took me quite some time to read. Set in Yellowknife in 1975, the novel follows a group of CBC radio people as they make their way through an informative part of their lives. Touched by the presence of two relative strangers, Dido from The Netherlands and Gwen from small-town Ontario (if I'm remembering correctly), the station's manager, Harry, finds his life categorically changed from the moment he meets both women. Their presence in his life and at his station act as a kind of impetuous for change for many of the other people these two come into contact with, and in his own way, Harry falls for both, with differing results.

As the novel drifts in and out of the lives of the various characters, you can tell that Hay feels out each and every one with an intensity that can do nothing except inform the story. As the life in the station exists both on and off the air, it becomes apparent that each person in her narrative has come north and stayed for different reasons. There's something so subtle about Hay's writing, and about this story in general, that builds up over the time spent engrossed in the book.

And when the four main characters, Gwen, Harry, Ralph and Eleanor, set off into The Barrens for a trip of a lifetime, you know that they'll come back changed. It's a novel about that moment in life that you only realize later has come to define your entire life. While all the characters are too close for this to become clear, the narrator gives little hints throughout the text (meant to serve maybe as suspense; in my opinion not entirely necessary), and on the whole it works well structurally.

While I haven't read many of the other shortlisted titles (just two Effigy and Divisdero), I do think that Hay's novel has the scope, the emotion, and the heartbreak to be a novel deserving of the prize. I adored Garbo Laughs, and I felt this novel taught me many things, not only about life north of sixty, but also about the idea of radio, the importance of it in the lives of these characters, how sometimes a career isn't necessarily built but its found, and that love can move in many forms within a person's heart.

It's interesting that two of the more intriguing books in Canadian fiction this year have been set in the North, Kevin Patterson's brilliant Consumption, and now Late Nights on Air. Maybe it'll get more people thinking about how different the landscape will be in the next fifty years if we don't make an effort to preserve it. Every inch of Hay's novel is full of the scenery, not just to set the story, but to inhabit it, like we do our desk chairs every day, from the flora, the fauna, the wildlife, it's a world that demands attention, and not just on a fictional level.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: I finished the book in bed this week, and so a picture of it on my bedside table taken from the perspective of my head laying on the pillow.

#70 - The Gathering

After hearing Anne Enright read last weekend at the festival, I raced home afterwards and started The Gathering right away (well, after I'd finished with Hemingway, of course). In part because I loved her reading of the work, powerfully spoken with a voice fraught with emotion and a hint of exhaustion, but also because the novel just won the Booker. (I get caught up in awards, I'm not ashamed to say. It's a good way to discover new writers, right?). Not surprisingly, the book reads in much the same way: it too is powerful, full of emotion, and teeters on the emotional edge that Veronica, the novel's 39-year-old protagonist, finds herself.

Charged with telling her aging mother, worn out after raising twelve children and enduring another seven miscarriages, that her brother's body has been found in Brighton, Veronica struggles to cope with his death. As if the absence now of him from her life entirely puts her entire existence into a sharper focus, and until she gets it all down, until she tells the story of what happened when she was eight or nine in the living room of her grandmother's house, Veronica simply can't move on. As if the past has finally come up and choked her future, and without blowing it all out around her, she'll never breath the same way again.

The narrative that spills out over the next few hundreds pages fights with itself at every turn, angry, raw, overwhelmed, Veronica takes hold of what's left of her life and shakes it, pulls all the pieces down around her and then can't really tell how to put them back together again. In the end, I'm not clear if she has or not, but it doesn't really matter because this book is so painfully honest about life, about family, about tragedy, that becoming 'normal' again isn't much the point.

Just before she started her reading, Enright mentioned that now The Gathering had taken the prize, she felt far more tender toward it, considering so many more people were going to read it now with the shiny gold sticker on its cover. And I can see why she might need to make the distinction. Veronica isn't a character that you feel an affinity for, she's a character that pulls you into loving her with sharp fingernails and a bitter edge to her voice. She's at once complex and plain, difficult and bright, and smart and ridiculous all at the same time. But she's also got to get to the end of this, not her life, but just these feelings hauling her out to the metaphorical sea of her family's existence.

It's a book about memory, about the lies we tell ourselves every day, about what family means and what it doesn't, and about how people don't change, 'they are merely revealed.'

Highly recommended.

And The Booker Goes To...

The Gathering by Anne Enright, only the second Irish woman in the history of the prize to win. I was intrigued by the chair's description of the novel as "a powerful, uncomfortable and, at times, angry book..."

Who wouldn't be interested after that?

EDITED TO ADD: I'm actually going to see Anne Enright and Vendela Vida tomorrow night for IFOA. I will report back on the "angry" discomfort found in the book...

Short List, Long List, Any Old List

We're back from another weekend at the cottage, which starts off an incredibly busy span of time for me: I leave on Wednesday for NYC for work and I'm not back until Sunday night where I'll be visiting friends, doing other fun stuff like shopping, and hopefully seeing a Broadway show...oh, and attending some meetings too. Then it's Word on the Street the following weekend, then Thanksgiving, then I think we're home before going up north again to close up the cottage. It doesn't leave time for a lot of reading, does it?

Regardless, there's an incredibly solid Giller longlist that's just been announced this morning here. This year, compared to most, I've actually read 4 of the books on the list so far: October, Effigy, Helpless, and Divisadero. And it's always exciting to see who actually makes the shortlist.

Anyone pick their front runner just yet?

And while we're on the subject of prizes, there's a really interesting article in The Guardian about the 'tussle' behind the scenes over the Booker shortlist here. I'm certainly not as prepared to offer an opinion on that literary giant of a prize as I've only read one of the books listed, and that's On Chesil Beach, by McEwan.

It's such an exciting time of year for books, lots of events, plenty of big tomes hitting the stores, and loads of prize announcements to keep people talking.

#60 - Out Stealing Horses

Norwegian writer Per Petterson's outstanding work of fiction, Out Stealing Horses, had me enthralled from beginning to end. Having won this year's most monied international award, the IMPAC Dublin, the novel tells the story of a man called Trond who approaches his old age with one goal in mind: to learn to be alone. And it is in this journey of self-discovery, this coming to terms with spending time completely cut off, in a way, from the society of one's life, that the story unfolds.

Returning to the county where his happiest memories as a boy happened, Trond slowly lets the reader in on the real reason he decides to retire there (without a phone, without a television, without an inside, working bathroom): he needs to truly understand and come to terms with his relationship with his father. The book meanders as slowly as a seasonal change from Trond's current situation as a 67-year-old man to the summer he spent at a similar cabin with his father as an adolescent. That summer, marked both by tragedy (an awful accident at the neighbour's that involved his only friend Jon) and utter happiness, ends up, in retrospect, the moment in time that defined him. To give away more of the plot would not necessarily ruin the novel, but I enjoyed the story as it unraveled so much that I am hesitant to say anything further should I spoil the reading experience for someone else.

The prose, long lavish sentences that flow seemingly endlessly from start to finish, sometimes over half a page, reflects the main character's voice so utterly that I also had to wonder how different it would have been to read the novel it its native Norwegian. Not that the translator, Anne Born, did a terrible job, just that Petterson's writing is so lyrical that it must simply read like poetry in his native tongue. For the most part, this is an interior story, with much of the action taking place in Trond's mind, his memory. But there's an active core too: the acrid, rich smell of the horses they "steal," the feeling of the hot sun during his glorious summer, the crunch of the snow fall, it all adds up to an author that has an almost unbearable talent for writing landscape and situation.

For the first time in a long while, I felt like I truly experienced life in the "host" country of my reading travels. The Norway he describes, both in the late 1940s, during the war, and in his modern time, remains vivid all throughout the book, even if the setting (the county where each cabin sits) itself remains unchanged throughout. And for a person who herself grew up at a cottage, understanding the connection to a place that feels like home, means that there's an added level of emotional involvement for me. Bloody brilliant, there are precious little other words to describe it, well-deserved win, in my opinion.

I know that I've only read two of the other nominees (Slow Man and No Country for Old Men [humm, quite a pattern there actually, as each have protagonists coming to terms in different respects with the lives they've chosen to lead]), but in terms of my Around the World in 52 Books challenge, I'm so glad this book won so I had the chance to read it. I doubt I would have picked it up otherwise if it weren't for the short blurb in a Publisher's Weekly newsletter. Funny, now I can't imagine a life where I haven't read this novel.

Time is important to me now, I tell myself. Not that it should pass quickly or slowly, but be only time, be something I live inside and fill iwth physical things and activities that I can divide it up by, so that it grows distinct to me and does not vanish when I am not looking.

People like it when you tell them things, in suitable portions, in a modest, intimate tone, and they think they know you, but they do not, they know about you, for what they are let in on are the facts, not feelings, not what your opinion is about anything at all, not how what has happened to you and how all the decisions you have made have turned you into who you are. What they do is they fill in with their own feelings and opinions and assumptions, and they compose a new life which has precious little to do with yours, and that lets you off the hook.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: Setting the book down on a messy pile of papers while I cleared off enough desk space to finish up my freelance assignment. The cover's beautiful, isn't it?