"A girl was never ruined by books," my mother used to say. I've spent most of my life trying to prove that wrong.

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Desire Lines Giveaway Ends: Congrats to the Winners!

In a little under a week 212 people entered the Goodreads Giveaway of Desire Lines: Stories of Love and Geography.  Congratulations to Erin  of Mississauga On and Kristin  of Bismark, ND who were chosen by the Goodreads elves to receive the two copies available.

The books were put in the mail  Monday morning, in hopes that they'll get them in time for Christmas. (Good chance for Erin, but I don't know about Kristin, given the weather conditions.)


Christmas Reading: The Dead from James Joyce's The Dubliners

When it comes to holiday reading your thoughts might not go immediately to a story with a title like "The Dead." But this last story in James Joyce's The Dubliners is a perfect antidote to too much artificial good cheer.

The events take place one evening during the end of year holidays at a party given by two maiden aunts.  There is a certain amount of holiday greeting exchanged, quite a bit of drinking on the part of the gentlemen, political discussion that nearly veers out of control, and the realization  by Gabriel Conroy that his wife Greta, although she has been a good wife to him, had a love before him.

Anyone who has found family gatherings far from simple events will sympathize with the ambiguous relations among the characters.  We do not always like those closest to us, even though we may love them deeply.  Learning how to live with that web of emotions and expectations is very hard.  Yet we do it, as Joyce understood.

The story was made into an excellent film by John Huston about 30 years ago.  Worth seeing on some holiday night when you're sick of Miracle on 34th Street and The Grinch.




Friday, December 13, 2013

While We Wait for Home Delivery to End: A Novel about the Postman's Raound.

Here's a delightful book that should be read while we wait for Canada post to cut out home delivery.  (In case you missed, the Crown Corporation has just announcd that it will be doing away with home mail delivery over the next five years.) 

While opposition organizes to this really stupid idea: take a look at  Quebec writer Denis Thériault's short novel  The Postman's Rounds.  It takes place a few years ago when the postman actually delivered the mail and was a part of everyone's life. 

And another Canada Post-book connection.  withdrawn its permanent stamps, of course, because they want to boost the price of letter mail.
I went looking for stamps featuring Marie-Louise Gay's children's books for our Christmas mailings to discover that there were none. 

Win a Book You Might Want to Cover with Brown Paper!

Three days left to enter the Goodreads Giveaway for Desire Lines: Stories of Love and Geography.

Enter to win a copy of a book that two people this have told me they've covered with brown paper because they felt funny reading it on public transportation!  Quite a feat for an old lady writer like me.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Elites, Inheritance of Power and Leadership

The recent interest in Nelson Mandela's life make me think of two  books about colonalist methods.  In both : Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe the newcomers look for promising young men with the idea of winning them over and making them local leaders who are friendly to the colonizers. 

Mandela, I learned this week, was sent to boarding school in late adolesence, when he "was being groomed to become a chief."  His subsequent career was not what was expected of him, to say the least.  But the fact that he was tapped for great things, being the son of a family of the elite, is not surprising.  Co-opting a ruling group is something that colonializers and conquerers have done for epochs.

Geraldine Brooks's novel tells the story of the first Wamponoag native to graduate from Harvard College in the mid-17th century.  The son of the most powerful man in his group of Native Americans, he agreed to be educated in the school set up expressly to claim young natives for the Christian God.  His purpose was, as Brooks tells it, the better to counter the influence of the newcomers by understanding what they stood for.  In  the end he dies before he can do anything, and his people are first decimated by disease, and then pushed to the edge of history and power: it was 346 years before anothet Wamponoag graduated from Harvard.

The Achebe book is a classic of modern African literature.  The main character does not embrace European ways, but all around him, there are those who are seduced by Christianity, led by men from families that had been on the edges of power.

In neither of these cases are the heroes  "rice Christians," who joined the newcomers in order to be fed in times of famine,  Rather, they are men who in "ordinary," pre-colonial times would have led their people.  Mandela was extraordinary in breaking out of the mold, and the world is a better place for that.

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Amazon Basin and The Old Man Who Read Love Stories

This was taken in Puerto Maldonado, on the Rio Madre de Deus in the Amazon basin.  The  bustling little city (population about 140,000) is where you used to have to take a ferry across the river to continue west into the Amazon.

But now a new bridge links the two sides, making it possible to go ride on reasonably good road from the Pacific coast of Peru, across Brazil and on to the Atlantic.

Travelling the highway was one of the reasons I went to South America a few weeks ago.  A trip like that makes you think about many things, including  new understanding of books you read a long time ago. 

One of these is Luis Supelveda's delightful The Old Man Who Read Love Stories.  The thumbnail plot outline is: "In a remote river town deep in the Ecuadoran jungle, Antonio Jos Bolvar seeks refuge in amorous novels. But tourists and opportunists are making inroads into the area, and the balance of nature is making a dangerous shift."

Well, yes, that's what I remember.  But there's much more to it, including a character who is a teeth-pullling dentist and who removes all the teeth of a gold-hunter on a bet.  The description is chillingly funny, but it turns out that there's an allegorical twist, since the Brazilian national hero who pioneered settlement of the hinterland is called Tiradentes, the tooth-puller. 

Sepulveda is a Chilean left wing activist in addition to being a playwright and novelist, and was a good friend of Chico Mendes, a Brazilian from a few miles east of Puerto Maldonado.  Mendes was assasinated 25 years ago for leading a revolt of rubber tappers and protesting the rape of the Amazon.  When you realize that, this charming little story--which can be read as tribute to the power of fiction to transport--becomes much more serious.  It even can be read as the reverse of what it appears on the surface--that is, as a call to action, instead of an elegy for escape.

Friday, December 6, 2013

A Day of Some Sadness: Nelson Mandela Leaves Us, and the Anniversary of the Polytéchnique Massacre

 I had intended to share this even before the news of Nelson Mandela's demise came out.  Today is, after all, the 24th anniversary of the killing of 14 young women at the Université de Montréal's École polytéchnique.  Most of them at the time were not yet 24, all of them were never able to show what they could do to help the world.

Their deaths, and what the tragedy said about the place of women in this world, has haunted me.  It took me a long time to write this story, and maybe it comes close to what I want to say.

Underground
(Taken from Desire Lines: Stories of Love and Geography)


The monument to the young women is not far from the site of
the massacre, just off the university campus. Every December
Lise goes there even though it often is snowing and always is
cold. There are benches around the edge of the park, and a
path down the middle with several granite blocks on either
side. Arcing away from each granite block is a low curve of
stone with what might be letters engraved on it. A bronze
plaque with a date is set in the earth at each place. The last
date is always 1989, but what is on the granite varies.

It took Lise two visits before she deciphered the meaning.
Each block is sliced in such a way that the shadow of a letter
can be seen: A, or M or B.... Then as you stare, the pattern of
dark and light, high and low, can be seen as letters, spelling
out the name of one of the girls. There and not there. In the
earth, but not.

Lise had the quote ready the first time she went underground:
“In France in the old days, women worked the mines, and the
men liked it. Check it out: Germinal by Zola, pages 56 and
after.” That might shut the guys up if they complained about
women underground being bad luck. But even if it didn’t, she
couldn’t let them stop her. As one of Lise’s friends from
engineering school said, men can be real pains in the butt,
God love ’em.

Getting ready to go underground on the tour for new hires
at LG-2, she put on jeans, a hard hat and steel-toed work
boots like everybody else. What she hadn’t expected was the
brass token the clerk handed her as she signed the registry at
the entrance to the access tunnel.

“Make sure the number is recorded right, then put it in
your pocket,” he said. “It’d be too bad if the chaplain ended
up calling the wrong family.”
“You mean when the whole thing collapses and our bodies
are mangled beyond recognition?” she asked, grinning, being
a good sport.

“Yeah, or when there’s an accidental explosion when
they’re transporting the dynamite, or the ventilation system
catches fire or....” He allowed himself a small chuckle.

“Wouldn’t want to upset our little sweetheart’s Maman and
Papa.”

“Sweetheart,” she repeated, hoping her face did not register
the sudden anger that engulfed her. Daniel was always telling
her to cool it, she was the only female in this group of new
engineering hires at the James Bay project, she should just be
glad about that. But still....

“Don’t let him bother you,” their guide said to her quietly
when she had moved up to the front of the group. “He’s a
fossil. He doesn’t realize how times are changing.”

She heard a snort of laughter from the driver of the electric
train that would take them 140 metres below to where the
turbines would go in LG-2’s power house.

“Ten years ago you wouldn’t have been allowed inside the
building,” he said.

“And aren’t you glad that times have changed,” she shot
back, flashing him her brightest smile. Then before she could
see how he took that, she climbed in a seat well back in the
first open car. No-one came to sit next to her, though. Oh
come on, she thought, are all these guys afraid of me? So much
for a scientific education.

But then their guide climbed in beside her. “It will be
formidable,” he said, as if to reassure her.

She nodded. “Without a doubt.”

The three little mini-trains started up, rolling nearly
soundlessly down the access tunnel. It sloped downward at an
eight per cent pitch—enough to drop sufficiently over the
kilometre-long trajectory to reach the working level, but not
too steep for larger vehicles hauling rubble out from the
blasting. But there’d be no explosions that day. “When we’ve
got company, we’re on our best behaviour,” the guide said.

“We’d have safety problems if we had outsiders running
around when the dynamiters were at work.”

The rock walls slipped past, changing a little in colour as
they descended. But the rock was solid granite, the hardest,
most stable stuff on the planet, part of the Canadian shield,
older than the hills, literally. Aside from the voices of the men
 
and the hum of the electric motors, it was quiet for most of the
way. Only when they looped back did the sound of the work
crews reach them.

The noise grew louder and louder until they came to open
space where the great machine-room of the power plant would
go. There it was deafening, as the equipment backed up and
moved forward, scraping up the debris from the last blast,
drilling at the edges, smoothing them, getting ready for the
blasts that would come later and the workers attacked the
belly of the earth.

When the dam was finished, the great hall would be big
enough to hold two Chartres cathedrals, their guide said when
they’d stopped and got out to look around. He had to yell over
the ambient noise, which echoed against the rock face. So far
about three quarters of the rock had been excavated, they had
another three months more, but by the end of the year
everything should be ready for the first switch to be pulled
and the turbines to roll.

“And will we have a party then,” the guide shouted to
them. “We’ll all be proud, so proud.”

Probably, Lise allowed herself to think. Certainly there were
a lot of people buying into the James Bay. She was skeptical,
but here she was anyway, signed on to help master the waters
of a corner of the globe bigger than some respectable
countries.

It was then that she saw the writing on the wall. Right in
front of her, off to the side: a door painted on the rock so
cleverly it looked almost real. Sortie d’urgence, it said: emergency
exit. Hundreds of metres under the surface of the earth: there
was no way out, of course. A joke, of course. If something
happened they’d have to leave the way they came. There’d be
an elevator later, steps too, but for now this was a construction
site where fear was supposed to be checked at the time you
picked up your brass.

So she made a point of not being afraid. She was in for the long
haul. She did good on that first assignment, and on the next,
and the next. She married Daniel, they formed a team. Most of
the time she was like one of the guys, she pulled her weight,
and all the other clichés. She didn’t even explode when it was
expected that she do the cooking when she and Daniel were
invited to spend a long weekend at a hunting lodge owned by
a construction company. Later she wondered what she would
have done if they’d wanted her to cook a deer, had one been
unlucky enough to be shot by them.

Years passed. The world changed a bit. She was no longer
the only female in her department. Women got elected to
government, girls began to take more and more places in
university classes. Lise didn’t call herself a feminist. The
important thing was to concentrate on doing what she had to
accomplish very, very well.

Then she was in Chicago, on a routine consulting trip for a
consortium putting together a bid on a hydro project in India.
Daniel was holding down the fort at home: they had a
housekeeper, the kids had their activities, he could referee as
well as she could, that was a matter of principle with them.

The hydro project planners wanted to take her out to
dinner, but she’d had enough for one day because they’d want
to continue their discussions, and already they’d asked more
than she expected. She had her professional pride, they
weren’t going to get advice at bargain rates just because she
was a Canadian woman, as if a woman’s ideas were worth less
than a man’s.

So she ate in a coffee shop across the street from the hotel,
an unpretentious place, the sort of restaurant that doesn’t stay
open late in Chicago’s downtown. Nobody was on the street at
6 pm, a cold wind blew, it was wicked winter weather already
even if it was only early December.

Coming back she was delayed five minutes by an encounter
with one of the Indian engineers who also was staying in the
hotel, and was obviously at loose ends. Had she eaten? Did she
want to have a meal with him? Oh, well, in that case, what
about a drink? Didn’t she think there is a major problem in
the plan for the powerhouse?

No, she said. No, if he wanted to talk, they could meet in
the morning before the next session. But now she had work to
do, thank you very much.

There was a message when she got back to her hotel room,
however. She looked at the clock: 7.30 pm, 8.30 pm at home.
Her first thought was: a problem with either one of the kids or
the next project Daniel was working on. But the voice wasn’t
the one she expected: it was her boss, back in Montreal.

“Maybe you’ve already heard,” he said. “I told your
husband that I’d make sure you knew. You really have to look
at the news. Something terrible has happened to those
engineers.”

She fumbled with the buttons, trying to listen to the
message again. But when she couldn’t get more than another
round of press this and thats, she put down the telephone and
reached for the tv remote control, her hands shaking.

The regular news was over so she started flicking through
the channels. CNN might have something about a breaking
story with engineers. Or maybe not. Maybe it would be easiest
just to call home....

No, there it was. Pictures of police ambulances and yellow
danger tape surrounding what looked like…no, it was…the
entrance to the engineering school, the place she’d studied,
the building where she taught the occasional course now. She
stood there for a moment, her finger still ready to push onward
through the channels, as if by switching to another one she
would leave this, whatever it was, behind. The voices were
hard to understand. An announcer was saying something in
English, but behind him she heard the French of home.

The phone rang, and she picked it up, just as the camera
lingered on dark splashes on the cement entrance way. Then
it swung around to show police officers and Urgence Santé
workers pushing the doors shut on an ambulance. The lights
on its top started pulsing.

She didn’t say anything, just watched. “Lise,” her boss said,
“have you looked at the tv yet? They’ve killed a half dozen,
they’re saying now. All girls. Nice young women, student
engineers....”

He continued but she stopped listening. “No,” she said.
“No.” She hung up the telephone very carefully, so quietly
that he probably didn’t even know she was no longer there.

Then she sat on the edge of the bed and watched the part of
the drama she was allowed to see unfold.

She was ashamed at being fascinated. The only death she’d
been close to was that of a crane operator that first season at
James Bay. He’d been crushed by rock when one of the loads
shifted, and she held his hand while they waited for transport
to arrive. He stared up at her, his eyes drifting in and out of
focus. Once he made little kissing sounds at her and she
supposed he thought she was his wife or girlfriend. But when
no woman claimed his body, and a search of the records
turned up no family, she knew that for a brief moment she
must have represented something entirely different. All the
women in the world, maybe. As, it appeared, those girls did to
the crazy young man who killed them.

Daniel met her at the airport. He saw her first, then he was
heading toward her, he was enveloping her in his arms the
way he had not done in a very long time.

“You’re safe,” he whispered in her ear. “You’re here.”

“Of course,” she said. Of course she’d been safe, she’d
always been safe. If he’d asked, she would have told him that
believing that was a matter of principle, it formed the bedrock
of her soul.

But now every December she goes to the monument, and sits
on one of the benches even though it often is snowing and
always is cold. Sometimes she thinks about the massacres that
occur on other campuses. This one prompted a tightening of
gun control laws locally but had no wider impact in a world
filled with violence.

Five years ago she finally read Germinal all the way
through—not just to page 58 but all 577 pages—and she
knows that the women in the French mines, like the men,
lived terrible, brutish lives, and working there was no feminist
triumph. So sometimes she thinks about that.

Always she remembers that she has been much luckier than
these young women, now underground. There was no
emergency exit for them. Their brass, their confidence, could
not protect them. But they are still with us.



Note: Fourteen young women were killed on 6 December 1989 at
31
l’École polytéchnique of the Université de Montréal by a lone gunman,
Marc Lépine.
They were:
• Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968), civil engineering student
• Hélène Colgan (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
• Nathalie Croteau (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
• Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
• Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968), chemical engineering student
• Maud Haviernick (born 1960), materials engineering student
• Maryse Laganière (born 1964), budget clerk in the École
Polytechnique’s finance department
• Maryse Leclair (born 1966), materials engineering student
• Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
• Sonia Pelletier (born 1961), mechanical engineering student
• Michèle Richard (born 1968), materials engineering student
• Annie St-Arneault (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
• Annie Turcotte (born 1969), materials engineering student
• Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (born 1958), nursing student

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

More Geography and Where You Can Get Desire Lines Today...

Still getting my act together after my return from South America--this is the view from the Estrada do Pacifico, not far from a 4,725 meter pass in the Andes.  Great scenery!  Fascinating geography!

Which brings up Desire Lines: Stories  of Love and Geography.    I just checked and Drawn and Quarterly (211 Bernard West, Mile End) and Librairie Paragraphe (2220 McGill College Ave, Downtown Montreal)  both have copies.  Neither Amazon nor Chapters/Indigo have it available on line, though, but if you really want a copy before Christmas, I'll see that you get one.  Send me an email at msoder@aei.ca.

Note on 5/12/2013: Judith Warne at Librairie Clio in Pointe Claire--Plaza Pointe Claire, 245N boul. St Jean, Pointe-Claire, QC-- also says she has copies. 



Monday, December 2, 2013

The Bridge at San Luis Rey

I'm back from my trip to South America, and getting my notes and photographs in order.  The book I keep thinking about is Thornton Wilder's The Bridge at San Luis Rey, the story of an investigation of the collapse of a suspension bridge in the Andes in the 17th century. 

I'll return with more thoughts about it, but in the meantime, here's my picture of a water course that the Inkas channeled in Cuzco maybe 500 years ago

Thursday, November 14, 2013

Credit Where Credit Is Due: Clark Blaise to Receive an Honorary Doctorate

Many, many years ago when I was just starting out writing and the CBC did such things on a regular basis, I heard Clark Blaise read a short story on the radio.  It was set in Montreal, but aside from that I remember nothing except that it was absolutely terrific, exactly what I'd been trying to do for some time and hadn't succeeded in doing.

He was teaching at Concordia University then, with already several books of short stories to his credit, and, gathering up all my courage in both hands, I sent him a fan letter.  He answered quickly, and, encouraged, I wrote again, asking for some advice about how what do with the novel I was working on then.

He called me this time, and asked if I'd published any stories, which I had (two), and how I was (30.)  I could hear him thinking on the other end of the line, and then he said, well, send me your stories and I'll see about the novel.  To make a long story short, by the end of the year he'd made a couple of interesting suggestions about my work and given me a path to follow.

And I'll be forever grateful for his encouragement at a point in my life when I didn't know where I was going.  The result was the publication of my first novel The Descent of Andrew McPherson in 1976.  It's now available only Abebooks, but maybe we'll get a digital version out one of these days.

This week I learned that Clark will receive an honorary doctorate from Concordia University next week, and rarely was such an honour more deserved.

Here's a list of his work: definitely worth looking for.

Short stories

    A North American Education – 1973
    Tribal Justice – 1974
    Resident Alien – 1986
    Man and His World – 1992
    Southern Stories – 2000
    Pittsburgh Stories – 2001
    Montreal Stories – 2003
    The Meagre Tarmac – 2011 (longlisted for the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize)

Novels

    Lunar Attractions – 1979 (winner of the 1980 Books in Canada First Novel Award)
    Lusts – 1984
    If I Were Me – 1997

Memoirs

    Days and Nights in Calcutta – 1977 (with Bharati Mukherjee)
    I had a Father – 1992

Non-fiction

    The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy – 1987 (with Bharati Mukherjee)
    Time Lord – 2000

Sunday, November 10, 2013

Friday, November 8, 2013

The Slide Show That Wasn't

It was a great evening on Wednesday at Drawn and Quarterly, but because of technical glitches, I didn't get to show the images behind the stories.  Here are a few of them, just for fun:


Thursday, November 7, 2013

Desire Lines Is Sold Out, at First Launch:But More on the Way

Sold out!  Every single copy of Desire Lines went out the door last night  at the Montreal launch in Librairie Drawn and Quaterly.  Thanks to all the friends who came to hear me talk about the book, and who (I hope) had a good time.

More good news: the bookstore received another shipment of books this morning (a box had gone to Edmonton) so come on by 211 Bernard West to pick a copy up at the same 10 per cent discount they were offering last night.

Thanks to Jack Ruttan who took the picutre of me with Dina Sakali, and to Edwin Holgate who painted the nude 90 years ago or so.

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Tonight's the Night: Desire Line Montreal Launch

Be there or be square!

7 p.m., Librairie Drawn and Quarterly, 211 Bernard West. Mile End. 

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Serious Comic Books: The French Have a Word for It


This morning Le Devoir has turned over the  entire paper to cartoonists.  The occasion is the opening of a new show of graphic illustration at the Musée des Beaux arts de Montréal, but it also is a sly way of commenting on the recent municipal election.

Instead of the usual photos accompanying news stories, the newspaper has asked the cream of Quebec's bédéistes (from bandes dessinées, the French term for cartoonists) to illustrate the news.  Some of them are right on, indeed.  And some of them are suitably méchant like the one above which shows mayor-elect Denis Coderre as the somewhat buffonish Asterix from the famous series of "comic books."

In the French-speaking world, illustrated books have long been considered seriously.  I remember being aghast when an artist friend suggested a book group I belong to read BDs for one of our monthly meetings.  But she presented a  number of beautifully drawn and produced books with story lines no more silly than many literary novels, and explained how the art work was of very high quality.

Since then I've taken "graphic novels," as they're called in the English-speaking world, far more seriously.  It's clear that the books frequently treat themes of substance, and are far from being the refuge of the semi-literate.  (Drawn and Quarterly, in whose bookstore I'll have my book launch Wednesday night, is a very successuly publisher of this kind of book.)  But the genre also always for much very  interesting comment on the state of the world. 

Among the ones I'd recommend are Guy Delisle's series on far away places, particularly his Jerusalem Chronicles: Tales from the Holy City, which is rooted in a year he and his family spent in Jerusalem while his wife worked for Doctors without Borders. A view you won't find anywhere else!


Friday, November 1, 2013

Desire Lines: The First Copies Arrive!

And there was singing and dancing chez les Soderstrom!

Lee, who hadn't seen the cover, says somewhat hopefully, that maybe the "pornographic" cover will make it sell well.

But since the image is from a painting by Group of Seven artist Edwin Holgate it's high culture, now sleaze!

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Nothing But Good Times: A Little Story for Halloween


 Drawn and Quarterly Bookstore invited me to take part in their Haunted Bookstore night on Wednesday.  We were supposed to read a spooky story, and at first I thought I'd do something by Henry James, but he is just too wordy.  So I turned to a story in my last collection, The Truth Is which had a satisfyingly weird ending.  The  more I worked to cut it down--we only had eight minutes--the weirder it got.  So here it is in all its Halloween flavour:


Nothing But Good Times:


            Sylvie was thinking about what she should wear that night when the old woman started waving the $20 bill in her face. "Give me another bill.  It's one of them devil ones," she said. "The man gave me this one, and it's bad. It's got the sixes." 
            The sixes? Sylvie had  heard somebody raving about the banknotes with all the sixes on them, the three little boxes like dominos, making three sixes, the sign of the Satan.  This old crone with her shapeless body under her red and black dress and her white hair frizzing out from under her beret was the first to say anything about them here, though.   
            As far as Sylvie was concerned, a bill  was a bill, and the old woman was just a nuisance, somebody who came in to buy cat food and Cheerios, to trade change for banknotes or to turn in soda cans.  Sylvie had other things to worry about.  She'd left a few clothes at Anthony's but it was Saturday afternoon and his mother would be there. To change at his place would open up all sorts of things that Sylvie didn't want to have to deal with.            
            "I want another bill," the woman said again.  "One without the sixes."
            Last weekend, Easter weekend  they spent at the Hilton out by the airport.  Nice place.  Great time.  Couldn't expect to do something like that  this weekend but Anthony usually had good ideas...
             
            He was such fun.  He had a car, a red car.  He dressed sharp.  He liked to have a good time.  A good time, that's what he'd promised her for tonight too....
            The old woman leaned her belly against the counter and waved the bill so Sylvie couldn't miss it.  "You trying to bedevil me too, girl."
            The man next in line laughed   "Oh, give her a new bill," he said.  "She'll stand there all afternoon if you don't."
             
           
            The woman spun around so she could stare at the man.  She looked him up and down.   "What makes you think so?  They're all  alike," she said.  She smoothed the bill again in her hand.  "All alike, wanting to do dirty to the rest of us.."
             Sylvie decided she  didn't need this five minutes before her break, five minutes before Anthony was supposed to meet her .  She punched in the code that opened the cash drawer and  very carefully chose two fresh $10 bills.  She held them up to the light as if to check their honesty and then held them out to the old woman who grabbed them and then wadded the $20  up in a ball  before throwing it at Sylvie.
            "Oh, shit," Sylvie said to herself. But the old woman heard her.
            "Watch your tongue, girl," the woman shouted  "God gave us language. Language is a gift from God, and you shouldn't go messing with God."
            Sylvie didn't say anything.  She started to put the man's groceries in shopping bags.
            The old woman looked at her but didn't move. ""You shouldn't go messing with God. There are things stronger than you." She turned so she could look at all the people standing in line.  "Read your scripture," she shouted.  "All of you:  fear God and beware the sign of the Beast." 
            Anthony came through the door just then and waved to Sylvie.  She shot him a big smile and the old woman whirled around again.  "Beware," she shouted at Sylvie.                        
            Spring was late that year.  At the middle of April piles of snow still lay rutted in the lanes and packed under stairways, but they went for rides in Anthony's car with all the windows rolled down anyway. The air smelled sometimes damp and ,faintly of green, a whole lot better than the dog droppings slowly appearing from under the snow.           
            By then he  thought they ought to move in together. They were made for each other, he'd say. Then he would put his arms around her, reaching inside her coat if they were outside, running his hands over her back and sides, wherever they were.  She found that difficult to argue with. She decided that when she wasn't around him she was only half alive.  Even the way he'd started borrowing money from her didn't bother her.  After all, he'd paid for all their good times up until then; it was only fair, she told herself, that she start paying some too.
            But he was late meeting her at the souvlaki place on the first Friday afternoon in May. The setting sun colored the sky above the buildings across the street.  The days were getting longer.  If they were going to find a place, they should start looking, because leases were coming due all over the town.  
            Then the crazy old woman came past, dragging a shopping cart behind her. She lingered at the corner, checking out the recycling bins.
            One thing for sure, Sylvie didn't want to live in this neighborhood even with Anthony.  It was spooky  and full of crazies.
            And where was Anthony? 
            There, coming across the street.  He saw her through the window, and blew her a kiss as he passed.  In three seconds he was standing beside her, But he didn't sit down. 
            "Listen, Angel," he said, kneeling beside the table so their faces were on the same level..  He looked in her eyes.  His breath was warm on her face.  She wanted to be alone with him as soon as possible.  .
            "Yes," she said expectantly.  
            "Listen, I got to run.."
            She clutched at his hand.  "Hey, no, you can't do that.  ."
            "It's all right, Angel, not to worry.  All I've got to do is go around the corner and see this guy."
            "Why?"
            "Why?" His gaze went out the window as if he were seeking the answer there.  Then obviously he decided he had to tell her something.  "I got to see a guy about the car repairs. It's nothing to worry about," he said.  "Look, I'll be back in l5 minutes. " And he was gone.
            Fifteen minutes.  She shook her head,            He had secrets, that she knew.  But then so did she.  Secrets were normal.  You couldn't let them get in the way.  Life was too short, there wasn't enough fun in it to ruin what there was by worry.  That's what he'd showed her.  That's what he always said: good times, we're going to have nothing but good times.
            Across the street the old woman was moving again.  She grabbed hold of the handles of the shopping cart and started down the street, scanning the sidewalk for more recycling.
            The street lights came on. The waitress  came over with the beers Sylvie had ordered..  She took a few tentative sips as she watched the old woman open the little metal gate that enclosed a patch of front yard and then wrestle the cart around the outside stairs  toward the placed where the recycling must be. 
             An outside light flooded the little yard casting long shadows toward the street and suddenly the woman was on the sidewalk again.  She threw back her head and arms in a scream that Sylvie could almost hear. 
            A woman passing on a bicycle pulled to a stop and  looked around.  The old woman pointed toward the courtyard, so she went  to look inside.  But she came hurrying back  too.  She ran up the outside stairs and began pounding on the door to the apartment on the first floor.
            Sylvie, of course, could not hear what was being said, but she could tell from the way the man at the door reacted that something grave had happened.   Just around the corner, Anthony had said.  Only 15 minutes.
            Then she heard the sirens.
            After the police and the ambulance arrived, the old woman headed toward the restaurant where Sylvie still sat. She rapped on the window with both
"Your man," she shouted loud enough to be heard through the glass.  "The wages of sin are death.  Your man has been paid in full."
            Anthony. Sylvie stood up quickly, almost knocking over her chair and the beer.  She grabbed for her coat and her purse.  The waitress saw her and started toward her.  "You haven't paid," she said.
            Sylvie stopped and rummaged in the purse for a $20 bill.  As she hurried out the door, she thrust it at the waitress.  The sixes: she had no time to think about the sixes.
.            It was Anthony all right, lying curled on his left side, his right arm up over his head as if protecting it.  There was a line of blood running out of his mouth.  His eyes were shut, his skin was pale under the stubble of his beard.  His red scarf was still around his neck, pulled tight, but Sylvie also saw that  the smooth curve of his  forehead was broken.  The skin appeared uncut but the bone underneath it was pushed in.  He was breathing, she could see his chest moving beneath the blanket which  covered him from his shoulders to his feet. 
            "Anthony," she said, softly.
            One of the medics heard and turned around. "You know him?" he asked. 
            She nodded. 
            The medic stood up.  "We'll do our best.'
             She took a step closer. She was shivering so hard her teeth were chattering..  Car repairs he'd said.  Being beaten up had nothing to do with car repairs.  "He was mugged," she said.  Anybody could be mugged.  It happened all the time.
            "Maybe, maybe not," the medic said.  "You should talk to the police about that."           
            "The Force will have its way," came the old woman's voice from  behind her. "He dared to mess with ungodly, and the ungodly smote him.  Let that be a lesson to you, girl.  Avoid evil.  Cast the devils from you..."
            Sylvie shut her eyes.
            "Did he have any enemies?" one of the policemen asked , coming over with a clipboard.  "Do you know if he was in any trouble?"
            "Does he had any money on him?"  she asked back. "He'd just gone to the bank, I think.  He should have had quite a bit ..."  The sixes, the sixes.
            The policeman looked interested, but before he could ask her more, the door to the basement apartment opened. Sylvie held her breath as soon as she heard the hinges begin to move.  The eyes that peeked through the narrow crack were dark and suspicious, and when the policeman ordered the door opened further, they blinked twice, as if considering.  
            A tiny groan came from Anthony, so tiny that Sylvie could barely hear it.  She wanted to lean over, to listen more closely, but the sight of the eyes  at the door made her blood freeze.  This could not be happening. All she wanted was a good time,  she hadn't asked for anything more than that.
            The groan thickened into a sort of croak in the back of Anthony's throat.  The medic who'd been monitoring his blood pressure  looked up and called something to his colleague that Sylvie didn't catch.  The policeman stepped forward and put his hand on the her arm.  "Miss," he began.
            But she knew she couldn't stay any longer even before the medics began to push her out of the way.  She wanted out.  She would leave and never come back.  She didn't belong here, nobody belonged here. 
            "You can't leave," the old woman said.  "The Lord will judge you, you have to wait..."           
            The red car, Anthony's red car, was parked half-way down the block.  Sylvie brushed past the old woman's hand.  If she got to the car, everything would be all right.  Anthony would get well, the world would go on, there would be pleasure again. 
            But before she got there, she heard the old woman screaming:  "She's going, she's going.  We cannot let her get away."
          And then she knew she was trapped, and that it would be a long time before the next good time.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

The Ghosts of Henry James: Tales for the Halloween Count-down--If You Don't Mind Verbiage

Looking for something spooky to read at Drawn and Quarterly's Haunted Bookstore evening October 30, I began reading Henry James's various weird tales. 

James is such an aristocratic writer with such a convoluted style that ghost stories are not what immediately spring to mind when his name is mentioned.  But the darker side of life comes through in several of his tales

Specifically there's The Turn of the Screw, set in a properly Gothic English estate whereThe Jolly Corner is a novella I read when doing my James seminar as a senior at university, and which profoundlly troubled me.  So did The Beast in the Jungle in which it's quite clear that the well-bred world that James lived in and wrote about is much stranger than one would think.
a new governess discovers some strange goings-on that affect the children in her charge. 

But as I dipped into the tales I was frankly annoyed by James's stylist contorsions.  The man never used one word when a paragraph with three dependent clauses would do.  None of the stories have the directness that would connect with Halloween-crazed young'uns today, so I (not too unhappily) decided to look elsewhere.

At the moment I'm considering reading from an adapted version of a story from my last collection, The Truth Is.  Called "Nothing but Good Times," it has a weird old lady who talks about the Force and God, and an ending that is sort of spooky now.  Perhaps if I tweak it some, it will do....

Sunday, October 20, 2013

Countdown to Desire Lines Launches!

Desire Lines is my first short story collection in more than a decade, and it's something to celebrate.  That's why we're having not one, but two launches.  You're all invited to attend one or both:

Wednesday November 6 at 7 p.m.
Librairie Drawn and Quarterly
211, Bernard ouest
Mile End, Montreal
(80, 435 and 160 buses)
https://www.facebook.com/events/212952195545596/

And/or

Tuesday November 12 at 7 p.m.

Librairie Clio
245-N. Boulevard St Jean
Pointe Claire, PQ,
Plaza Point Claire
https://www.facebook.com/events/236775476478589/

Dobryd, the Novel of a Captive Child, Or Happiness Is Where You Find It

When I recently read Emma Donoghue's best-selling novel Room, I couldn't help thinking of   Ann Charney's novel Dobryd. Like Donoghue's narrator Jack, as well as the under-nourished living ghosts of refugee camps, Charney spent the first part of her life in peril. Dobryd in fact begins: "By the time I was five years old I had spent half my life hidden away in a barn loft."

Those words took my breath away when I first read them many years ago. The novel's unsentimental, clear-eyed vision offers hope that, with luck, the human spirit can blossom under the most dreadful circumstances.

Dobryd was published in Canada  in the mid-1970s to a few, very good reviews. "One of the truly significant insights into the effects of war," said Books in Canada, but despite such praise, it wasn't a commercial success. Republished  in the 1990s,  it still is available from  Permanent Press, and has been translated into French (editions in both Canada and France), Italian and German. Given  continued violence against civilian populations all over the world, it should be read everywhere.

Dobryd is a simple story simply told. After two and a half years hiding outside a small town in Poland, a five-year-old girl, her mother, her aunt, and her cousin along with four other adults, all Jews, are rescued by Russian soldiers as World War II draws to a close.

The child is at first terrified by the reaction of the people in her little world: "Weeping and laughing at the same time, they hugged me and embraced one another. I felt smothered in their arms. These embraces were not the ones I was used to; too tight, too close. I was frightened." And, looking outside the barn for the first time, she says: "A large orange circle covered the sky and coloured the world below. The fields, the animals, the farmhouse, all were illuminated in this strange, intense, blood-like colour.I heard myself scream, again and again."

The scream is the one that she has been prevented from letting out during their long period of hiding. Finally Yuri, the Russian soldier who has been carrying her, calms her. "My new friend.carried me outside. All the while his soft voice reassured me, and the sound of those words made me feel safe.. The fresh air of the summer evening felt soothing against my skin. I looked around me. I was no longer afraid."

The girl's mother finds work as a translator for the Russians, while her aunt, older and less dynamic, takes the girl to the market which has sprung up as part of the barter economy. The two of them become extremely close, and the aunt recounts how the family arrived at the barn where they hid, and what it had lost. Her stories have a fairy-tale quality: the family was rich, educated, and refined, with cupboards full of linens and rooms full of books.

The little girl's world seems a universe away. She is delighted to help clear the rubble from their first lodgings in Dobryd. She gets her first taste of ice cream when her mother and Yuri decide after much discussion to trade a can of meat for it. Her treasures are a piece of white tulle and an empty perfume bottle that she and her friends use for their games of make-believe.

But these privations do not make an occasion for sorrow and regret. Charney says her book is an attempt to distance herself from the work of other survivors of Nazi oppression like Elie Wiesel and André Schwarz-Bart. "I didn't find my experience in their books, and I didn't want to spend my life following the narrow lane of lamentations," she says.

"I wanted to show that one can live through all that and still go on to be a whole human being. I wanted to have the world as my oyster the way it is for other people, and I wanted to feel free to go on to explore other things." She adds with emphasis: "One should really exalt life." That's why the book begins as it does with the liberation, and why there is so much about pleasure: the ice cream, the feel of air on skin, the joy of being able to see further than four walls.

She says she began to write the book in an attempt to capture the emotions she remembered from that time. At first she remembered very few details, which is the reason she chose to call this work fiction. The conversations are invented, and the background is fairly standard for educated, well-off Jews in Poland.

But as she wrote, she found more and more coming back to her. "Indeed some of the things I thought I was inventing are things people have written to me to say that they remember from their own lives," she says. "Which means, I guess, that the inventions are in some larger way true. Because the book is fiction, it grabs people and appears to speak to their experiences also. In a way it is a generic book, rather than a specific book, about childhood and war."

Dobryd is also remarkable for the clarity and simplicity of its language. Charney says she wanted to avoid sentimentality. "I tried to write as sparingly as possible. I went over the manuscript several times to review adjectives and other words that would tell the reader what to think." She adds that she is perhaps more conscious of language than writers who have spoken English from their earliest years. It wasn't until she, her mother, aunt, and stepfather arrived in Montreal, when she was eleven, that she learned English and then French: she'd read Anne of Green Gables, but in Polish.

There is a question why Dobryd, despite its excellent reviews, made such little impact when it was first published. One reason may be that it was issued just as the Canadian literature industry was revving up. Books in Canada only began in 1971, remember, and its first novel prize was established a few years later, too late for Dobryd to qualify. In addition, there is the warm portrayal of Yuri, the Russian soldier who rescues the heroine's family and becomes its protector. Young, cheerful, and enthusiastic, he urges them to be hopeful even though their home village has been destroyed. "You'll see-we know how to build in Russia. We'll build a new town for a new kind of life. Yes, today is a sad day for you. But in six months, I promise you, we'll all be working so hard rebuilding this town that no one will have time to grieve."

No matter that Yuri's faith does not overcome the suspicions of the heroine's much more sophisticated and better-educated mother. No matter that the family ultimately chooses life in Canada. When Dobryd was first published the Soviet Union was the Evil Empire, and this kind of portrayal was definitely out of fashion. Given the vagaries of the publishing world, that might have been enough to keep it from being more widely reviewed.

Times have changed since then, of course, but there are  still children in peril from stife both political and personal.  Will a few of them  bear as eloquent witness to the strength of the human spirit as Charney has? One hopes that some of them will have the same sort of luck that she had.

Luck? Yes, Charney benefitted de la chance dans la malchance, as they say around here. She was lucky enough to be born to a mother who was strong and clever and had enough resources to pay for help. Then once they were in hiding, the adults around her doted on her, teaching her to read and write, to knit, to sing. Afterwards Yuri became her special friend, and the champion of the family. It is from these repeated experiences of love and attention that Charney has built a sensibility that allows her to say that she had a "happy childhood".

Like Jack in Room she is a survivor because of the love that surrounded her.  And she continues to write compelling stories.  Her latest novel Live Class will be published in November by Cormorant
Books.

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Room: A Book from the Headlines and Perhaps Also from the Heart

I finished reading Emma Donoghue's Room a few days ago and I've been puzzling about it ever since. 

The novel, which according to Donoghue's website has now sold more than a million copies, was nominated  for and/or has won a raft of prizes including the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (for best Canadian novel), the Commonwealth Prize (Canada & Carribbean Region), the Canadian Booksellers’ Asand the Orange Prize.  In addition the American Library Association gave it an Alex Award (for an adult book with special appeal to readers 12-18) and the Indie Choice Award for Adult Fiction.

That means, I guess, that a lot of people found it compelling reading.  As did I. But what's the point, I found myself asking.

Donoghue's narrator is  Jack, a five year old who has been imprisoned since his birth with his mother in Room, a reinforced, sound-proofed garden shed.  She makes him sound like a kid, giving him the same grammatical quirks most children that age struggle with, such as how to form the past tense of words like "got"--is it just "got" or "gotted?"

Ma is everything to Jack, as mothers frequently are to pre-school children.  But we quickly learn that their connection is orders of magnitude stronger than most because she is the only person he has ever seen. Even though  Old Nick, Jack's father and their jailor  visits Room most evenings, Ma protects Jack from him: the only people he knows anything about are those he sees on television.

How they escape from Room occupies the first two-thirds of the novel.  Donoghue makes it every bit as exciting as the best action movie, and she also lets us know that having watched Dora the Explorer can be very useful too.  The rest of the book deals with how Jack and Ma learn to live Outside.

This is where a few question have to be asked.  It might be easy to dismiss the first part of the book as a light weight adventure lifted almost bodily from the headlines: there are after all  terrible stories of the man in Cleveland who held three young women hostage for a decade, and before that men in California and Austria.    But Donoghue isn't interested in why such things happens, she concentrates on Jack, whose existence isn't terrible, thanks in large part to Ma's efforts to keep him from  Old Nick. 

This part of the book reminded me of Montreal writer Ann Charney's account of her own escape from imprisonment at the end of World War II.  In her novel Dobryd (a very good book BTW) she tells how she  had been hidden in a barn along with a dozen adults for two and a half years when the sector of Poland where they were was liberated by Soviet forces.  Her memories of the time are not unpleasant, though, because she was cosseted and played with, in part to keep her quiet, but also because she symbolized life to those in hiding.

Similarly Jack regrets leaving Room a little because Outside has a terrifying number of choices to make.  Nothing is certain, everything changes, Ma isn't always there. 

This is, perhaps, the point of the book, what rescues it from being just light suspense reading.   There are many varieties of danger and captivity, Donoghue seems to be saying. Those of us on Outside may not recognize what traps we are in, or what threatens us.



Thursday, October 10, 2013

Alice Munro Wins Nobel Prize--and Good Writing Wins Too

My reaction this morning was sheer delight when I heard that short story writer Alice Munro has become the first Canadian and 13th woman to win the Nobel for literature.  There have been some dismal choices in the past, but this time I think the Swedish Academy was right on.

Ever since I read The Lives of Girls and Women, I've been a Munro fan.  About the same time I read Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman and though it was very good too.  But in the intervening years I've come to the conclusion that, while both writers are very good, Munro goes  straight to the heart of the human condition while Atwood veers into narrative bling when she comes face to face with emotion.

Below you'll find an appreciation of the two that I wrote a while back.  Atwood, unforunately, has not worked so close to the grain since, while Munro returned to it in her most recent stories.

From 2007:

"The publicity blurb for Margaret Atwood’s Moral Disorder on the US Random House website is a little coy: the short story collection is “fiction, not autobiography; it prefers emotional truths to chronological facts. Nevertheless, not since Cat’s Eye has Margaret Atwood come so close to giving us a glimpse into her own life.”

Well, there are those who say that it’s Life Before Man that one should read if one wants to see between the lines into Atwood’s life, particularly as it concerns her relationship to her partner Graeme Gibson and to Shirley Gibson, his late ex-wife. But, no matter: the stories of Moral Disorder are not only good reading, they are fuel for reflection on the ways that writers use their own lives in their fiction. There is a triangle at the heart of Moral Disorder--a man, his talented but erratic wife, and the younger woman who comes to share his bed and help raise his children—that resembles the Atwood-Gibson ménage. The resemblance is not important to judging the book though: almost all the stories are strong, satisfyingly well-imagined and would stand on their own even if you knew nothing about Atwood's own life.

As it happens, I came to them only a month or so after I read Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock. Munro’s short stories at their best have absolutely no equal, but in Castle Rock it seems to me she found herself too fettered by the facts of her life and family to allow herself to soar as she does so often elsewhere.

Much of Moral Disorder takes place in Munro territory—WASPish, intellectually worthy, properly modest Ontario society. Atwood, whose imagination has wandered through time and space increasingly in recent years, allows herself to focus on childhood, early womanhood and maturity as they have been lived in recent years in central Canada. This return to experiences closer to her own allows her, it seems, to write more affectingly than she has in a long time. The reader can see through cracks in Atwood’s wise-cracking, science-fiction-loving, dazzlingly brilliant persona to a real person--loving, and maybe even loveable--underneath."

And about Castle Rock itself:

"
This last week I've taken a break from 19th century Paris, and read The View from Castle Rock (McClelland and Stewart, 2006) by Alice Munro. What a pleasure, and an interesting experiment in walking the boundary between fiction and non-fiction!

Munro has always drawn deeply on her own experience in creating her remarkable series of fictions, which in many respects are truer than non-fiction. When I first read The Lives of Girls and Women in the early 1970s I was blown over at their resonances with the lives led by women in my family. With some trepidation I bought a copy and sent it to a cousin whose struggle to break free of small time life was still going on at that time. She never commented on it, which I took then to mean just how uncomfortably close to her reality Munro’s stories were.

But at the age of 75, Munro suggests that Castle Rock is something closer to the facts about her life, that it approaches memoir in some respects. Part of the book consists of stories which she wrote over the years beginning with documents from her Laidlaw ancestors. At the same time, she says in the foreword to the book, she found herself writing about the figures in her own life, using their real names, but discovering that they began to take on new “their own life and color and did things they had not done in reality....You could say that such stories pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does.”

In The View from Castle Rock, Munro writes with her usual elegance and elliptical economy. But, oddly, the stories are not as compelling as other fictions she has created out of the same life experience. It is as if writing “fiction” from the beginning allowed her really to soar, like her ancestor who said he could see America from Castle Rock in Edinburgh.

For the facts about her life, read Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing up with Alice Munro ( McClelland and Stewart, 2002) by her daughter Sheila Munro or the literary biography, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, by Robert Thacker (McClelland and Stewart, 2005.) For marvelous literary experience, read any of her books of short fiction."