Month: November 2021

Fight Night – Miriam Toews

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I have mixed feelings about Canadian writer Miriam Toews’ eighth novel Fight Night, which was a 2021 Giller prize finalist. On the one hand, it irked me and on the other hand, I could appreciate its charms.

Nine-year-old Swiv (although she certainly doesn’t seem like any nine-year-old that I’ve ever encountered), lives with her pregnant mother (the fetus has already been named Gord) and her grandmother, Elvira. Precocious doesn’t begin to describe Swiv. She’s been expelled from school and demonstrates no interest in going back. Instead her grandmother homeschools her; her lessons include things like suduko, Boggle, “How to dig a winter grave”, and letter writing. (The novel is actually Swiv’s letter to her absent father.)

Swiv’s mother is an actress who seems to always be in trouble with a stage manager or director. Elvira is the stabilizing influence and even she seems half crazy.

Grandma says fragments are the only truth. Fragments of what? I asked her. Exactly! she said. She asked me what my dream was last night. I told her I dreamt that I had to write a goodbye letter using the words one and blue. Na oba! Grandma said. That’ll be your assignment for today, Swivchen. She has a secret language.

Swiv recounts her families’ idiosyncrasies with a matter-of-factness that seems beyond her years. She is responsible for bathing her grandmother, and putting on her compression socks, for picking up the pills and conchigliette her grandmother drops on the floor yelling “Bombs away!” and, when the two of them travel to Fresno to see Elvira’s nephews, being her travel companion.

Elvira’s open-heartedness is contagious. She sees the dual nature of life, that it is both hilarious and devastating. “Do you know the story of Romeo and Juliet?” she asks Swiv. “Well, I mean in a nutshell. It was a tragedy. Do you know Shakespeare’s tragedies? People like to separate his plays into tragedies and comedies. Well, jeepers creepers! Aren’t they all one and the same.”

Toews mines her personal history here – as she has on past occasions – and it makes for fascinating reading, for sure, but maybe this is just a case of the right book/wrong time or maybe I was distracted while reading it. Fight Night worked for me in some ways. Swiv’s voice is singular. The way she relays the things she hears, her mimicry, charming. But the novel is written without quotation marks, and the paragraphs are often long with multiple speakers and I found it hard-slogging sometimes. Some things that happened at the end just seemed sort of over-the-top ridiculous and undermined that novel’s potential emotional impact. Or maybe tragicomedy is what Toews was after all along.

Life certainly can be ridiculous.

Nothing – Janne Teller

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Translated from the Danish, Janne Teller’s award-winning YA novel Nothing is pretty dang bleak. When fourteen-year-old Pierre Anthon announces on the first day of school that “Nothing matters”, he sets off a chain reaction of events that runs the gamut from the childish to the horrific to the ridiculous.

Pierre Anthon and his hippie father live in a commune, so his classmates figure it makes sense for him to take the position that “It’s all a waste of time. […] Everything begins only to end. The moment you were born you begin to die. That’s how it is with everything.”

Pierre Anthon takes his belongings, leaves school and proceeds to climb the plum tree in front of his house. As his classmates pass by he slings hard plums and his dismal world view at them. His friends decide that they have no choice but to coax him out of the tree and the only way to do that is to prove that life is worth something.

The kids come up with a plan. They’ll create a sort of installation at the old saw mill. The will collect things that matter. At first, they ask their neighbours to make a contribution and the items start to accumulate: old crockery, a rose from a bridal bouquet, photographs. Then, feeling that they didn’t have enough skin in the game and that Pierre Anthon would see straight through them, they decided they needed to pony up and make a personal contribution to the cause. That’s when things start getting tricky.

Pierre Anthon’s view is decidedly nihilistic: religious and moral principles don’t matter, and life is meaningless. As the teens push each other to contribute things that are deeply personal, they cross more than one line. They soon lose sight of what they set out to do and their whole experiment becomes less about trying to help their friend see the value in life and more an exercise in horror.

Translation aside (and you know how I generally feel about them), Nothing is a surprisingly complex book. At first I thought it was going to be juvenile; the characters are barely teens and they sound young; the ideas and the themes in this novel, however, are anything but. The novel starts out quite innocently, but it goes down a very dark path, invites the reader to consider some equally dark ideas and you won’t come out the other end feeling even remotely hopeful about life.

Lies You Never Told Me – Jennifer Donaldson

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Ohhh. This one got me.

Jennifer Donaldson’s YA mystery Lies You Never Told Me is a dual perspective narrative that should keep readers guessing until the end. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how Gabe’s story intertwined with Elyse’s.

Gabe and Sasha are their school’s power couple. Sasha is one of the Austin elite and Gabe is a Chicano skateboarder he knows Sasha’s parents don’t approve of even though he “grew up in the same bougie neighborhood [and] my mom’s family has been in the U.S. for generations. They’re old money. They could find any of a hundred reasons not to like me.”

But Gabe is actually a good guy. He’s a great big brother to his six-year-old sister, Vivi, who was born with Down syndrome. He does well enough in school, has a couple great friends and puts up with a lot from Sasha, who seems stuck up and high maintenance from the get go.

One night, leaving Sasha’s house on his skateboard, Gabe is hit by a car. The girl who finds him and calls 911 is a new girl at their school, Catherine, and Gabe is drawn to her in a way he can’t explain. When he can no longer deny his growing attraction to Catherine, he breaks up with Sasha, but she’s not having it. Sasha mounts a full on campaign to get Gabe back.

The other narrator is Elyse, a girl with her own troubles. Her mother is an addict and Elyse is just barely holding it together. She does her best to pay the bills and look after her mother, but she’s just fifteen and it’s hard.

When her best friend Brynn convinces her to try out for the school’s production of Romeo & Juliet, Elyse barely hesitates.

I can feel the change come over me as I recite the words. It always happens – or it happens when I’m focused, when I’ve found something in the role to love. My shoulders round forward, my mouth quirks upward into a wistful grin, and I slide into character with ease.

Elyse is convinced that Brynn is going to snag the lead, but when the new drama teacher, Mr. Hunter, awards the role of Juliet to Elyse, her life explodes with possibilities.

Donaldson skillfully weaves these two stories together, and even though none of the four main characters (Gabe, Sasha, Elyse and Catherine) necessarily interact with each other, your brain will work overtime trying to figure out what links them together. Lies You Never Told Me is a well-written YA mystery with lots of twists and characters you will like and loathe in equal measure.

If I Knew Then – Jann Arden

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Jann Arden is a Canadian singer-songwriter, actress, writer, animal rights activist, vegan and all around kick-ass human being. I have been a fan of hers for at least thirty years, which is why when she made a cameo in the 60th birthday video my daughter, Mallory, made for me I was speechless. She sang a little of “Good Mother”, offered a book recommendation (The Overstory by Richard Powers) and was charming as all get out.

Her non-fiction book If I Knew Then is a memoir about aging and is written with Jann’s trademark honesty and humour. She calls a spade a spade and I appreciate that about her.

One morning a few months after I turned fifty, I remember stopping dead in the middle of my usual routine

[…]

Suddenly it was as though I was staring at the most beautiful map of the world. I saw all the places I had been, all the things I had done, all the strength and service my arms and legs and shoulders and feet had given me for so many years, even though I had put this body through such bullshit and abuse and neglect and shame and loathing. All of that crap.

Jann tells stories about her complicated relationship with her father (who died in 2015), her devotion to her mother (who died of Alzheimer’s disease, which Jann recounts in her book Feeding My Mother) and the personal mistakes she made on her way to becoming, as she puts it, a “crone.”

The Crone is remarkably wise and unapologetic. She is fierce and forward-thinking – someone who is at the pinnacle of her own belonging. Okay, I’m not entering the time of the Crone. I am a Crone. I am at the beginning of a new chapter in my life – a whole new book, really. And it’s one that’s going to read and unfold exactly the way I want it to.

If I Knew Then has lots to offer a woman of any age. Although Jann is talking about herself in her 50s, maybe a younger woman could use some of her hard-won wisdom. For instance, if only I had appreciated my body a little more when I was 30. I didn’t think I was skinny enough or fit enough back then, pre-kids, but now when I see pictures of myself from that era, I am whoa! I also had a complicated relationship with my alcoholic father and I adored my mother. I don’t think I ever appreciated how difficult it was to be a parent though until I was a parent myself. My parents were never young to me; they were always just my parents. Both are gone now, too, and there are so many things I wish I could ask them. And apologies I’d like to make.

Jann’s book gives you permission to acknowledge your mistakes, and to move beyond them. She stresses the point that it is our failures that make us better human beings, that failing is, in fact, “a necessity.” Sometimes we need to be reminded that true learning comes from not getting it right the first or fourteenth time around and that “Good things come out of bad things.”

Fans of Jann Arden will certainly enjoy If I Knew Then, but even if you’re not familiar with her, this book is an enjoyable, personal (but universal) examination of a life lived, wrinkles and all.

The Winter Sister – Megan Collins

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When Sylvie was 14, her older sister, Persephone, was murdered. No one was ever charged with the crime. Now, 16 years later, Sylvie has returned home to Spring Hill to help care for her mother, Annie, who is taking chemotherapy. Sylvie and her mother haven’t been close in years, not since Persephone’s death, and being home is stirring up all sorts of detritus.

Megan Collins’s debut novel The Winter Sister is a murder mystery framed by a family drama, or maybe it’s the other way around. It’s definitely a novel about complicated family relationships, love, and the way our memories morph over time.

When they found my sister’s body, the flyer’s we’d hung around town were still crisp against the telephone poles. The search party still had land to scour; the batteries in their flashlight still held a charge. Persephone had been missing for less than seventy-two hours when a jogger caught a glimpse of her red coat through the snow, but by then, my mother had already become a stranger to me.

Sylvie’s life hasn’t been successful. She went to art school, then got a job as a tattoo artist, a job she seemed destined for. As a kid, she’d drawn pictures over the bruises Persephone’s boyfriend Ben had left on her sister’s wrists and arms and ribs. These bruises had always seemed like proof to Sylvie that Ben was responsible for Persephone’s murder. When she bumps into him at the hospital, it dredges up all her suspicions. Why is he allowed to be walking around, living his life, when her sister is dead.

But it’s not just Ben that makes being home so difficult; Sylvie has to interact with her mother, something she hasn’t really done since she went off to college. She has a hard time reconciling her pre-murder mother with the shrunken, bitter woman she sees now. It isn’t just the cancer that’s eating away at Annie.

Collins does an excellent job of stringing the reader along, dropping clues about the murder so that it feels like you are reading a thriller of sorts. But this is also a book about the secrets families keep. Can we ever really know each other? How do small decisions impact the trajectory of our lives? It has never occurred to Sylvie that her memories of what happened that night might be tangled in something bigger. Instead, she’s carried a tremendous amount of guilt around like an anvil.

The Winter Sister is a well-written family drama. I will definitely be reading more from this author.

A peek at my bookshelves

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Back when we were first looked down for Covid, I came across Shelf Absorption, a site that was looking for people to share their bookshelves and bookish thoughts. There was a questionnaire and an opportunity to send some pictures and it was the perfect distraction from all the craziness of those first few weeks of Covid anxiety. My contribution went live back on October 5th, and I’ve been meaning to post the link here since then.

If you are like me and you gravitate to other people’s bookshelves when you are in their homes, this site is like candy. Sadly, I think the owners are taking a little break, but there’s lots to keep you busy for a little while.

Here’s a little preview of what you’ll find from my featured spot.

The Ludic Reader on Shelf Absorption

How Reading Changed My Life – Anna Quindlen

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Anna Quindlen’s (Every Last One) essay How Reading Changed My Life is an essay every book lover will enjoy. I call it an essay because it’s just 70 pages long, but maybe reading memoir is more appropriate. Quindlen recounts her early days as a reader, the value books have had in her life, and (given that this was published in 1998) a look at the future of books in the digital age.

Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. “Book love,” Trollope called it. “It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.” Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort – God, sex, food, family, friends – reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung, at least publicly, although it was really all I thought of, or felt, when I was eating up book after book, running away from home while sitting in that chair, traveling around the world and yet never leaving the room.

Quindlen’s essay sings the praises of being a book drunkard and is critical of the notion that we should be reading solely as “a tool for advancement.” Of course I read to learn things, but I am mostly a pleasure reader, a ludic reader. I have piles of books everywhere and hundreds of unread books on my bookshelves because I will get to them some day. I swear.

Quindlen, too, reads for pleasure. She shares her memories of the first book that “seized [her] completely by the throat”, so much so that she read it and reread it, believing that it was “the best book ever written.” Of course, now she admits it’s probably – critically speaking, at least – not very good, but still finds it “a good read, but no longer a masterwork.” All readers have a book like this in their personal canon. Mine is probably Velocity. I mean, that book probably isn’t high art, but I’ve read it more than any other book and it still guts me. Quindlen allows for reading that is personal; there is no room for snobbery, and I appreciate that.

…if readers use words and stories as much, or more, to lesson human isolation as to expand human knowledge, is that somehow unworthy, invalid, and unimportant?

Preach!

How Reading Changed My Life tackles censorship (“It is difficult not to think of that clarion call, of the notion of forbidden fruit, looking at the list of America’s banned books.”), assigned reading (“In fact, one of the most pernicious phenomena in assigned reading is the force-feeding of serious work at an age when the reader will feel pushed away, not from the particular book being assigned, but from an entire class of books, or even books in general.”) and books in the digital age (“It is not possible that the book is over. Too many people love it so.”)

This book is a delight. Highly recommended.

The Cult on Fog Island – Mariette Lindstein

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Cults are fascinating, aren’t they? I was a kid in the 1970s and there wasn’t anyone scarier than Charles Manson. I watched the whole documentary about Keith Raniere and NXIVM. I mean those were some intelligent people and they just got sucked into this crazy, perverted world. Jonestown. Children of God. Heaven’s Gate.

Mariette Lindstein was a member of Scientology for 25 years. She left in 2004. Her debut novel, The Cult on Fog Island, is the story of a 24-year-old Sofia who attends a conference on a Fog Island.

Life has been difficult for Sofia. She’s sort of at a crossroad and she isn’t really sure what to do with herself. She’s earned a degree in English literature, her toxic relationship with Ellis is over and now she doesn’t know what to do with herself. When she gets an unsolicited email inviting her to attend “A lecture on ViaTerra by Franz Oswald. For those who wish to walk the way of the earth”, she’s intrigued.

She and her best friend, Wilma, attend the lecture. Sofia’s spidey senses go off almost immediately but Oswald’s charm, charisma and imposing physical presence are soon impossible to ignore and Sofia “began to catch on to what he believed in. A sort of back-to-Mother-Earth philosophy where anything artificial was the root of all evil.” When Oswald offers Sofia the opportunity to build a library – no expense spared – for ViaTerra, it seems like a gift from the heavens.

Of course, things aren’t quite right on Fog Island; the prologue is about an attempted escape. But for a book about a cult, it’s pretty boring. I mean, it’s over 500 pages long and nothing really happens until about page 450. Until then, the book meanders through the day-to-day business of ViaTerra which includes Sofia’s “unwinding” (three days of eating, sleeping and walking around the mansion’s grounds), studying the group’s theses, four vague tenets (which at first make Sofia feel “disappointed and duped”) and basically being groomed by Oswald. When Sofia finally admits that something sinister is going on (even though the ferry captain told her on day one that the place was haunted), it still takes a hundred pages for her to make a move.

My main issue with The Cult on Fog Island is pacing. So much is crammed into the last 100 pages it felt sort of uneven. If the whole thing had been about 250 pages shorter, I might have been more inclined to care about Sofia. Lots of conveniences and moments where tension could have been ramped up and just weren’t. And again with the clunky dialogue, which I find is often a problem with translations.

Then, when I finished, I discovered that this is book one of a trilogy. Yeah, not going to be reading the rest.