Canadian Literature is a quarterly of criticism and review published out of the University of British Columbia. Since 1959, we have been publishing critical articles and book reviews on or about Canadian authors. http://www.canlit.ca en-us Copyright 1995-2010 Canadian Literature. All rights reserved. Reproduction without permission prohibited. Views and opinions expressed by the author(s) are not necessarily shared by Canadian Literature Drawspace http://www.canlit.ca/resources-publinks.php#219 http://www.canlit.ca/resources-publinks.php#219 Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:40:37 PDT Every so often a text comes along that changes how things are done. Ian McKay’s second volume of an expected three-volume history of the left in Canada is one such text. The weighty tome (over 600 pages) takes on what McKay calls the Canadian left’s first formation, which took place in the period prior to the more familiar and oft-debated interwar period. His thesis rests, in large part, on the confluence of the overwhelming surge of capitalist modernity—a period of rapid industrialisation in Canada (with all its transnational implications)—with the rising discourse of “social transformation founded upon the insights of evolutionary theory.” Like many books that are able to come up with some really key, wide-ranging insights, Reasoning Otherwise is both interdisciplinary and accompanied by an innovative and original methodology. McKay employs what he calls “reconnaissance,” a methodology he began theorizing in the pages of The Canadian Historical Review and Labour/Le Travail. He uses reconnaissance to get at the “general rules and assumptions, the grammar and syntax, underlying those statements” which are “left behind by the people of a given political formation.” McKay puts this reconnaissance to work in order to explore “questions” of class, religion, gender and sexuality, race, war, and the aftermath of the general strikes of 1919. Particularly relevant for the study of the literature of this period is McKay’s discussion, in his chapter on “The Religion Question,” of the left’s negotiations of modernity and spiritualism and how those negotiations were connected to evolutionary discourse. In Reasoning Otherwise, McKay continues the rethinking of the history of the left in Canada he began in Rebels, Reds, Radicals. He maintains the notion that anybody who shares four key insights can be called a leftist—these are insights into “capitalism’s injustice, the possibility of equitable democratic alternatives, the need for social revolution, and the development of the preconditions of this social transformation in the actual world around us.” These insights are good markers for getting away from sectarianism in the production of historiography of the left in Canada and they seem useful for the study of leftist literature in Canada—they are certainly a good alternative to simply calling something “political”—but I wonder if I shouldn’t have reservations about the viability of the fourth “insight” when it comes to artistic production. While one of the blurbs on the back cover suggests that McKay’s book “will become the definitive text for the foreseeable future,” what is so promising about his method is that it does not aim to shut down continuing discussion. Rather, McKay’s “mission of reconnaissance” acts as incitement for other scholars and students to delve deeper into the complicated construction of the left within this period. If Ian McKay has approached the history of the left through reconnaissance, scholars of literary modernism in Canada can perform a reconnaissance of a slightly different kind with the material Gregory Betts has given us in his important collection, The Wrong World: Selected Stories & Essays of Bertram Brooker. Betts’s edition is the third instalment in the Canadian Literature Collection, which publishes scholarly editions of out-of-print or unpublished Canadian texts from the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. This collection of Brooker’s writing brings together a selection of short stories, one novella, as well as essays and polemics, many of which have never been published. Perhaps better known as a modernist painter, Betts’s introduction convincingly makes the case for the importance of Brooker’s prose to the emergence of literary and interdisciplinary modernism in Canada. The critical introduction is informative, to be sure, but not so much as to turn a reader away from actually reading the stories and essays. The short stories range from earnest realism to avant-garde experiment, while the essays take on subjects ranging from the censorship of art in Toronto to “cosmic patriotism.” It is perhaps a bit odd that within a single-author collection of texts spanning a significant amount of time, the dates of first publication or approximate dates of composition are not made immediately accessible for each selection when the editorial procedure follows chronological arrangement. This may seem overly picky but when literary scholars look to reconstruct the emergence of modernist expression in Canada and include Brooker as one of the first to articulate literary modernism, as this collection does, knowing the specific time frame of composition and publication becomes germane because the emergence of literary modernism in Canada was deeply interactive, reactive, and responsive. Despite a few slippages in the construction of the textual emendations and revisions, Betts has done a great service to the study of modernism in Canada by recovering and arranging these texts. This collection has great pedagogical potential and can contribute much to a rethinking of how modernism is taught in Canada. Part of the text’s usefulness for teaching is its accompanying website (www.press.uottawa.ca) which contains supplementary material such as biographical information, essays and short stories that are not included in the collection, and study questions for the texts that are included. The strength of this collection lies in the fact that it is geared to help both literary scholars do the work of reconnaissance that Ian McKay advocates and that is so important for the study of modernism in Canada while it also facilitates the ability of a new generation of students to do that same work.   http://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=15247 http://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=15247 Thu, 22 Jul 2010 11:45:16 PDT Shani Mootoo’s Valmiki’s Daughter is set in modern Trinidad, in the crime-rife city of San Fernando. The class system is alive and well: the right measure of Indian blood and skin tone holds great importance here. Too Caribbean is negative, as is skin too dark and houses too far down the hillside. Women’s education is most respected (by men) when it is undertaken outside the university: too much education is unfeminine. Fit female bodies are poorly viewed among the upper classes. And homosexuality is best hidden. As such, the stage is set in Valmiki’s Daughter. Valmiki, a wealthy, well-respected doctor in San Fernando, lives with his wife Devika and two daughters Viveka and Vashti in the upscale hilltop suburb of Luminada Heights. Very quickly, we learn that Valmiki not only has repeated affairs with foreign woman—in other words, not the dark-skinned women of Indian descent from his own class, but the ill-respected mostly white foreigners who consult him in his medical practice. His secretary Zoraida knows of all of his liaisons and protects him in his quest for discretion—even helps foster this odd element of his practice. We also learn that Devika rarely addresses this aspect of Valmiki’s character, is aware of his behaviour, and while she does not condone it—even somehow worships his indisputable virility—she will not unsettle her own charmed life, which wants for nothing materially. We also discover quickly that though he presents an image of virility in his seemingly insatiable desire for female flesh, Valmiki’s real carnal desire is for men. Marrying Devika was a way to save him from the shame of pursuing his true nature, which would have been shunned in traditional Trinidadian society. Nevertheless, interspersed with his pursuit of women is a regular connection with Saul, a man of a much lower social class than Valmiki, who is married to a woman who knows of and accepts his homosexual nature—and who, like Devika, knows on which side her proverbial bread is buttered. Of course this stage, set as it is, leads to the obvious question: so what is it about Valmiki’s daughter? Early on, we also discover that Viveka causes great tension in the family because of her interest in sports, her unfeminine tomboy-like nature, her pursuit of a university degree—and ultimately, her awakening interest in women. Valmiki has a special connection with Viveka, allows her to manipulate him; he inherently understands that their natures are one and the same. And Devika, who believes that a mother knows everything about her child by mere “feel” or intuition, instinctively knows that Viveka is like her father. Mootoo’s novel is one of powerful tensions that push and pull with an almost sexual rhythm. There is a constant play of contradictions: Devika’s disgust with Valmiki’s never-ending ways, yet her desire to be taken by him; Valmiki’s incessant need for female validation pitted against his primordial hunger for male companionship and sexual play; and Viveka’s realization that seeking a romantic connection with a male would be socially correct but contradicts her awakening need for female completion. Mootoo is skilled at chafing these imbalances, one against the other, and finding resolution, though that resolution continually hangs on the precipice of disaster. My only complaint about this novel is Mootoo’s insistence on beginning each section of the novel (there are four parts and an epilogue) with a geographical journey that addresses the reader as “you” and takes her on a guided tour of San Fernando and all other places significant to the story. This is a tedious change in tempo that risks losing the reader at each section’s outset. Diana Fitzgerald Bryden’s No Place Strange explores the politics of place more probingly than the politics of bodies, though it does touch on this theme as well. And while Valmiki’s Daughter held us captive in a continuous wave of foreboding, No Place Strange dangles us in the arenas of terrorism and murder. Bryden’s complex novel plays out the connections of four people to legendary Palestinian terrorist Rafa Ahmed—legendary because of her beauty, her coldness—and because of her sex. Lydia, a young Jewish Canadian woman, knows of her journalist father’s love affair with Rafa from an early age. His untimely death is surely the result of his relationship with her—which Lydia must somehow reconcile. She escapes from her reality by travelling to Europe, and meets a young Lebanese man, Farid, with whom she falls crazily in love— though circumstances separate them before she can tell him she is pregnant with his child. What she doesn’t know is that Farid is the son of Mariam, a well-respected scholar under whom Rafa once studied. Lydia and Farid’s unexpected separation in part arises from the sudden visit of Mouna, Farid’s cousin, who was also raised by Mariam. The intensity of their kinship destabilizes the budding romance between Lydia and Farid, and ultimately leads to Lydia to take a brief trip from their meeting ground in Greece. But that trip severs their bond for years to come. In short order, Mouna, a political activist in her own right who is obsessed with Rafa, discovers that Lydia is the daughter of the white journalist whose death might have been at Rafa’s hand—a possible sacrifice for Rafa’s cause. Her leanings—both sexual (though unrealized) and political—for Rafa Ahmed, prevent Mouna from understanding Lydia’s pain at having lost her father. And they complicate her sympathy for the relationship between Farid and Lydia. Bryden’s novel follows the journeys both Lydia and Mouna make: Lydia’s quest for the truth of her father’s relationship with Rafa; Mouna’s for the role the man really played in Arab-Israeli relations. Their tense relationship, explored briefly in the framework of Lydia’s short-lived love affair with Farid, finds resolution when she travels to Montreal to attend a conference where Rafa is scheduled to speak. Mouna anticipates this trip, fully understanding that Lydia will want to confront Rafa in her quest for answers. She wants answers too. When they do connect in Montreal, craftily orchestrated by Mouna, they are surprised, though they dance around one another skittishly, to find that they like each other. And the ultimate reunion for Lydia and her young boy, Felix with Farid, is both moving and satisfying for the reader. Bryden’s skill, in this, her first novel, is of a seasoned writer. The author of two books of poetry and of numerous published short fiction and non-fiction selections, she seems an amateur beside the heavy-weight Mootoo, whose Cereus Blooms at Night was a finalist for the Giller Prize among others. Yet that couldn’t be farther from the truth. She is good company for the acclaimed Mootoo, and No Place Strange is strong evidence.   http://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=15271 http://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=15271 Thu, 22 Jul 2010 10:15:49 PDT Carmine Starnino’s This Way Out reads like an Atlas for city streets carved from grit. Its honesty reeks with the details of life stripped down past its bare beauty, not necessarily finding its core, but positing, knowing where to start looking. What is refreshing about the book is that the reader is never freed from a reminder of what makes up a day in urbanity: the gore and detail of the prophetic, down trodden, artistic act is made real by keeping “great conclusions at bay” and sticking “with small answers”. He constructs his poems with sensitivity to a conversational cadence and the problems these poems highlight: the boldness of getting by. He carries his “spondee of rev and roar” as a way of retaliating against the fears of survivability, and his audience is a friend or anyone in a paper-thin apartment. As you can guess, this is not a quiet book. Starnino’s poetry pushes for a greater awareness of economic strata, but most interestingly he does so by taking stock of extremely local details to explore the generalities of the larger world. Personal details and histories in his poems trump the economic systems that cause them. This Way Out is more of a series of shout-outs for hope mingled with apprehensions about the future, rather than an obsessive retelling of where these problems came from. Similarly, Starnino acknowledges literary history without letting it take center stage. Where the pastoral of Wordsworth left us behind (or we it) Starnino instead limns a wilderness of personally known street corners, tight apartment walls, and families. Tender (or maybe sore) paternal relationships are yoked and discussed against the backdrop of lives worn weary by consumer culture.  The frenetic energy of the “founding Flarfists, late into the night, hitting send”, alongside the frozen moments before startling a duck in the park, brings us to a poetic urban that is unapologetic, nude, and aware that you cannot stop staring. Taking a different approach to imagining the everyday is Anne Compton’s third book of poetry asking questions indoors and out. Compton employs a very meditative approach to understanding the interpersonal spaces between families, gardens, and the words within those spaces. Compton provides a refreshing refinement of both diction and timing by mining the speech of ancestors on grand literary and small rural scale to contextualize her exploration of the private and public spheres. Compton uses “the Fisherman’s habit of non sequiturs” and other quotations from personal and communal pasts to trace memory as analeptical yet never removed from present moments and conversations. A fine example is her use of epigram to invoke Tennyson while deploying the language of personal memories born from the histories and gardens of Atlantic Canada. No one reading her book can help but consider her use of sections to frame the poems that arise from her specific situation as woman, daughter, and writer. Sections begin with a quotation that hints at open-ended questions about religion and desire figured through memory. The quotes are truly questions rather than statements for Compton.  This book lurks with allusions to trauma, these questions, but what makes it stand out is her calm and understated voice that describes said trauma. Compton paradoxically figures peace and fear in the same breath. For Compton the public and domestic come to terms in a language not wholly her father’s, not wholly her own, but completely strident, compelling, and intimate. It is a joy to trip with Compton over girlhoods, wakes and their accompanying waking, and the language of confluence and convergence, memory and community. As she reminds us: “we will gather, gather at the river”.   http://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=15301 http://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=15301 Fri, 16 Jul 2010 13:27:40 PDT Carmine Starnino’s This Way Out reads like an Atlas for city streets carved from grit. Its honesty reeks with the details of life stripped down past its bare beauty, not necessarily finding its core, but positing, knowing where to start looking. What is refreshing about the book is that the reader is never freed from a reminder of what makes up a day in urbanity: the gore and detail of the prophetic, down trodden, artistic act is made real by keeping “great conclusions at bay” and sticking “with small answers”. He constructs his poems with sensitivity to a conversational cadence and the problems these poems highlight: the boldness of getting by. He carries his “spondee of rev and roar” as a way of retaliating against the fears of survivability, and his audience is a friend or anyone in a paper-thin apartment. As you can guess, this is not a quiet book. Starnino’s poetry pushes for a greater awareness of economic strata, but most interestingly he does so by taking stock of extremely local details to explore the generalities of the larger world. Personal details and histories in his poems trump the economic systems that cause them. This Way Out is more of a series of shout-outs for hope mingled with apprehensions about the future, rather than an obsessive retelling of where these problems came from. Similarly, Starnino acknowledges literary history without letting it take center stage. Where the pastoral of Wordsworth left us behind (or we it) Starnino instead limns a wilderness of personally known street corners, tight apartment walls, and families. Tender (or maybe sore) paternal relationships are yoked and discussed against the backdrop of lives worn weary by consumer culture.  The frenetic energy of the “founding Flarfists, late into the night, hitting send”, alongside the frozen moments before startling a duck in the park, brings us to a poetic urban that is unapologetic, nude, and aware that you cannot stop staring. Taking a different approach to imagining the everyday is Anne Compton’s third book of poetry asking questions indoors and out. Compton employs a very meditative approach to understanding the interpersonal spaces between families, gardens, and the words within those spaces. Compton provides a refreshing refinement of both diction and timing by mining the speech of ancestors on grand literary and small rural scale to contextualize her exploration of the private and public spheres. Compton uses “the Fisherman’s habit of non sequiturs” and other quotations from personal and communal pasts to trace memory as analeptical yet never removed from present moments and conversations. A fine example is her use of epigram to invoke Tennyson while deploying the language of personal memories born from the histories and gardens of Atlantic Canada. No one reading her book can help but consider her use of sections to frame the poems that arise from her specific situation as woman, daughter, and writer. Sections begin with a quotation that hints at open-ended questions about religion and desire figured through memory. The quotes are truly questions rather than statements for Compton.  This book lurks with allusions to trauma, these questions, but what makes it stand out is her calm and understated voice that describes said trauma. Compton paradoxically figures peace and fear in the same breath. For Compton the public and domestic come to terms in a language not wholly her father’s, not wholly her own, but completely strident, compelling, and intimate. It is a joy to trip with Compton over girlhoods, wakes and their accompanying waking, and the language of confluence and convergence, memory and community. As she reminds us: “we will gather, gather at the river”.   http://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=15300 http://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=15300 Fri, 16 Jul 2010 13:26:43 PDT Trevor Herriot has established his reputation as a naturalist whose environmental concerns filter through his attention to the Canadian prairies. Where his first book was an award-winning biography and his second a personal (and spiritual) meditation on wildness, Grass, Sky, Song comprises elements of each earlier book. An environmental history of prairie grassland that looks anxiously into a dire future, Grass, Sky, Song is also an account of the naturalists (and scientists) who have observed and recorded western grassland ecology. If, as Herriot points out, “questions in natural history are often answered by digging into human history,” the stories of amateur and professional ornithologists might enable a suitable response to the ongoing disappearance of native grassland and the birds that have evolved over millennia to survive there. “Looming over every fragment of wild grass,” laments Herriot, is “a future no one talks about, a prairie where no birds sing.” Evoking the final line of Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” Herriot simultaneously invokes the toxic discourse of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the 1962 book that triggered modern environmentalism. That such an alarming work as Herriot’s needs to be written in 2010 is a sad reminder of how much more damage has been wrought in the half century since Silent Spring. Or is it perhaps an indication of what could have been so much sooner if not for Carson and her followers? Grass, Sky, Song suggests a bit of both—the promise and peril of his subtitle—by extolling certain virtues and demonizing others. Interspersing the main narrative—which sees Herriot moving across sections of grassland and documenting massive agricultural changes and declining bird populations—are brief “biographies” of individual bird species, which are more status update (population, migratory patterns) than standard field guide. The book’s tone, which is for the most part informative and thoughtful without sounding alarmist, shifts drastically once Herriot addresses pesticide use and its myriad effects on the health of soil, native grass, grassland birds, and humans. The reasons for his indignation are clearly warranted, particularly as it emerges alongside revelations of his wife Karen’s recent cancer diagnosis, but the main object of his scorn—science—seems misplaced. Characterized by the claim that “Doing science . . . is so often about controlling nature, which is of course the very fountain of all that resists control,” Herriot’s attack just barely avoids leaving politicians, scholars, and consumers—in short, people—off the hook. The shift in tone reflects the profound frustration and helplessness that Herriot seems to feel; he blames science, and at the same time he refers to science for the statistics that populate his book; he believes humans are capable of change, but he recognizes that we are reluctant to make the changes necessary to make a difference. The frustration I at times feel when reading this book, of course, pales in comparison to the frustration articulated in this elegiac tribute to a bioregion and its avian inhabitants. In Adrift on the Ark, Margaret Thompson uses stories of animal behaviour to frame personal reminiscences and indignation of a kind vastly different from Herriot’s. The pronoun in her subtitle suggests inclusivity and complicity (despite the implication that humans are not already part of the natural world). The essays themselves, however, suggest otherwise. A woman whose brother kills a bat that was trapped inside her house receives a lecture about her “ridiculous beliefs” from Thompson; a neighbour’s clandestine capturing (and subsequent “disposal”) of peacocks in Thompson’s Victoria, BC, neighbourhood is considered evidence of “sociopathic tendencies.” Thompson admires bats for their parental devotion; and she values those feral peacocks (whose introduction to Victoria remains unexamined) as visual spectacle at which passersby can marvel. And yet she tells of a time when, faced with the prospect of devalued property, she wages a “campaign” against beavers to whom, she writes, she “was not going to capitulate.” Land ownership is apparently not a “ridiculous belief.” And no one involved in the beavers’ deaths demonstrated sociopathic tendencies. Why? Thompson doesn’t tell. As a collection, Thompson’s book is heavy on personal reflection and light on introspection. The result is an uneven look at one person’s connection to animals rather than, as the title promises, at humans’ varied connections to the more-than-human world.   http://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=15299 http://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=15299 Fri, 16 Jul 2010 13:22:21 PDT Trevor Herriot has established his reputation as a naturalist whose environmental concerns filter through his attention to the Canadian prairies. Where his first book was an award-winning biography and his second a personal (and spiritual) meditation on wildness, Grass, Sky, Song comprises elements of each earlier book. An environmental history of prairie grassland that looks anxiously into a dire future, Grass, Sky, Song is also an account of the naturalists (and scientists) who have observed and recorded western grassland ecology. If, as Herriot points out, “questions in natural history are often answered by digging into human history,” the stories of amateur and professional ornithologists might enable a suitable response to the ongoing disappearance of native grassland and the birds that have evolved over millennia to survive there. “Looming over every fragment of wild grass,” laments Herriot, is “a future no one talks about, a prairie where no birds sing.” Evoking the final line of Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” Herriot simultaneously invokes the toxic discourse of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the 1962 book that triggered modern environmentalism. That such an alarming work as Herriot’s needs to be written in 2010 is a sad reminder of how much more damage has been wrought in the half century since Silent Spring. Or is it perhaps an indication of what could have been so much sooner if not for Carson and her followers? Grass, Sky, Song suggests a bit of both—the promise and peril of his subtitle—by extolling certain virtues and demonizing others. Interspersing the main narrative—which sees Herriot moving across sections of grassland and documenting massive agricultural changes and declining bird populations—are brief “biographies” of individual bird species, which are more status update (population, migratory patterns) than standard field guide. The book’s tone, which is for the most part informative and thoughtful without sounding alarmist, shifts drastically once Herriot addresses pesticide use and its myriad effects on the health of soil, native grass, grassland birds, and humans. The reasons for his indignation are clearly warranted, particularly as it emerges alongside revelations of his wife Karen’s recent cancer diagnosis, but the main object of his scorn—science—seems misplaced. Characterized by the claim that “Doing science . . . is so often about controlling nature, which is of course the very fountain of all that resists control,” Herriot’s attack just barely avoids leaving politicians, scholars, and consumers—in short, people—off the hook. The shift in tone reflects the profound frustration and helplessness that Herriot seems to feel; he blames science, and at the same time he refers to science for the statistics that populate his book; he believes humans are capable of change, but he recognizes that we are reluctant to make the changes necessary to make a difference. The frustration I at times feel when reading this book, of course, pales in comparison to the frustration articulated in this elegiac tribute to a bioregion and its avian inhabitants. In Adrift on the Ark, Margaret Thompson uses stories of animal behaviour to frame personal reminiscences and indignation of a kind vastly different from Herriot’s. The pronoun in her subtitle suggests inclusivity and complicity (despite the implication that humans are not already part of the natural world). The essays themselves, however, suggest otherwise. A woman whose brother kills a bat that was trapped inside her house receives a lecture about her “ridiculous beliefs” from Thompson; a neighbour’s clandestine capturing (and subsequent “disposal”) of peacocks in Thompson’s Victoria, BC, neighbourhood is considered evidence of “sociopathic tendencies.” Thompson admires bats for their parental devotion; and she values those feral peacocks (whose introduction to Victoria remains unexamined) as visual spectacle at which passersby can marvel. And yet she tells of a time when, faced with the prospect of devalued property, she wages a “campaign” against beavers to whom, she writes, she “was not going to capitulate.” Land ownership is apparently not a “ridiculous belief.” And no one involved in the beavers’ deaths demonstrated sociopathic tendencies. Why? Thompson doesn’t tell. As a collection, Thompson’s book is heavy on personal reflection and light on introspection. The result is an uneven look at one person’s connection to animals rather than, as the title promises, at humans’ varied connections to the more-than-human world.   http://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=15298 http://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=15298 Fri, 16 Jul 2010 13:21:01 PDT In her highly-decorated first novel, Annabel Lyon takes on the risky subject (as more than one reviewer before me has noted) of Aristotle, focusing specifically on his years spent tutoring Prince Alexander (who would become Alexander the Great).  Karen Connelly’s newest work, an autobiographical exploration of her time spent in Burma during the late 1990s, is no less risky (though arguably more “risqué”).  But for readers of The Golden Mean and Burmese Lessons:  A Love Story, there is no risk involved:  these books, while obviously very different in terms of form and content, are equally rich and rewarding. Anyone unfamiliar with Lyon’s previous work—her collections of stories (Oxygen, 2000) and novellas (The Best Thing for You, 2004)—could not have missed her novelistic debut.  Winner of the Rogers Trust Fiction Prize, The Golden Mean was also shortlisted for the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award, a regional (Caribbean and Canada) Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the Amazon.ca/Quill and Quire Best First Novel Award.  Evidently, the gamble of attempting to say something “new” about Aristotle—to construct not only a fresh narrative perspective on the philosopher himself but also to offer a believable, book-length glimpse into his world, so far removed from our own—paid off.  With seamlessly incorporated research and a deftly “humanizing” approach to character, Lyon focuses, to her credit, less on the specifics of Aristotle’s work than on the nuances of his personal life, including his battle with (it would seem) depression and his uneasy sexual relationship with his wife. Beginning in 342 BCE, and narrated by Aristotle himself, The Golden Mean traces the philosopher’s seven-year stint in Pella, teaching Prince Alexander, the son of King Philip of Macedon.  By choosing to move to Macedonia, along with his reluctant young wife (Pythias) and nephew (Callisthenes), Aristotle delays the advancement of his career at the Academy in Athens and becomes unwittingly embroiled in the political dramas of both Philip’s court and family.  While he goes to Pella at the behest of and as a favour to the King (his childhood friend), Aristotle receives little loyalty from Philip in return.  He struggles, too, with the business of tutoring both young Alexander (as acutely observant and innately intelligent as he is politically savvy and increasingly hungry for power) and Alexander’s mentally challenged brother, Arrhidaeus.  As the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that Aristotle’s primary challenge is to teach Alexander lessons never learned by Philip:  lessons about moderation and balance.  In one pivotal scene in the novel, as Aristotle juxtaposes “the extremes” and “the middle,” obviously privileging the latter, Alexander is incredulous.  “You can’t mean,” says the Prince, “to prize mediocrity.”  Aristotle, noting that “[m]oderation and mediocrity are not the same,” asks his pupil to “[t]hink of extremes as caricatures.” When Alexander tellingly suggests that Aristotle/Philip and Alexander/Arrhidaeus are examples of such “caricatures,” he lays bare the dilemma with which Aristotle himself must contend.  Has the teacher found a “golden mean” between thought and action, philosophy and life?  Or has he, in polar opposition to Philip, lost himself in “abstraction[s]” and “empty concept[s]”? Not unlike Lyon’s Aristotle, Connelly—author of nine books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction—confronts existential crises in Burmese Lessons:  A Love Story, some intimately related to her status as an author.  Initially, Connelly’s travels in Burma are motivated by her desire to interview dissidents, most exiled in Thailand, and to publicize, via her writing, both the horrors of Burma’s military dictatorship and the struggles of the regime’s resisters.  But as she falls deeply in love with Maung, leader of a guerilla army, and befriends numerous other Burmese dissidents, she finds herself questioning her “calling” and its efficacy vis-à-vis the cause.  As she “guiltily” confides to one activist, “writing a book [isn’t] enough”; “[m]aybe,” she ponders, “I should join an NGO and do real humanitarian work in the field.” Guilty, moreover, about indulging her “personal longings” among individuals who have made extraordinary sacrifices in order to do “political work”—“[d]aily,” she writes, “I meet people who have lost everything because they acted and spoke out against injustice” —she recognizes, again and again, her privilege as an “outsider” and wonders if she can ever overcome her position as such.  Yet because Connelly neither couches her self-reflexivity in theoretical jargon nor lapses into sentimentality, the narrative never loses its “honesty” or its periodic humour.  Loathe as I am to use such descriptors as “honest,” “raw” and “human” in any review, Burmese Lessons is all three.  Little is withheld in this book and nothing, it seems, is taboo.  This is the story of a woman who loves easily (“I love, I love, I love”), revels in extraordinarily good sex, feels suspicion and jealousy (“[a]re you sure [Maung’s] single?” asks an acquaintance, planting the seeds of doubt), experiences severe constipation, and succumbs to malaria.  The painfully impossible decision she ultimately faces—to marry and have children with Maung, but in so doing abandon her writing life—becomes the heartbreaking climax of an intensely-fraught, multi-layered story.  That Connelly chose, and chose well, the writing life is evidenced by The Lizard Cage(2005), her exquisite novel substantially informed by her time in Burma.  Indeed, throughout Burmese Lessons, Connelly alludes to the ways in which the novel began to “become” over the course of her travels (“a man’s voice whispers in my head … He talks about his own life . . . I’ve also heard his laughter.  I’ve heard him sing”). Ultimately, then, while Burmese Lessons leaves us with aching questions about the fate of Connelly’s lover, we might speculate that he is immortalized as a ghostly, bittersweet presence in her previous book.   http://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=15297 http://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=15297 Fri, 16 Jul 2010 13:19:19 PDT In her highly-decorated first novel, Annabel Lyon takes on the risky subject (as more than one reviewer before me has noted) of Aristotle, focusing specifically on his years spent tutoring Prince Alexander (who would become Alexander the Great).  Karen Connelly’s newest work, an autobiographical exploration of her time spent in Burma during the late 1990s, is no less risky (though arguably more “risqué”).  But for readers of The Golden Mean and Burmese Lessons:  A Love Story, there is no risk involved:  these books, while obviously very different in terms of form and content, are equally rich and rewarding. Anyone unfamiliar with Lyon’s previous work—her collections of stories (Oxygen, 2000) and novellas (The Best Thing for You, 2004)—could not have missed her novelistic debut.  Winner of the Rogers Trust Fiction Prize, The Golden Mean was also shortlisted for the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award, a regional (Caribbean and Canada) Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the Amazon.ca/Quill and Quire Best First Novel Award.  Evidently, the gamble of attempting to say something “new” about Aristotle—to construct not only a fresh narrative perspective on the philosopher himself but also to offer a believable, book-length glimpse into his world, so far removed from our own—paid off.  With seamlessly incorporated research and a deftly “humanizing” approach to character, Lyon focuses, to her credit, less on the specifics of Aristotle’s work than on the nuances of his personal life, including his battle with (it would seem) depression and his uneasy sexual relationship with his wife. Beginning in 342 BCE, and narrated by Aristotle himself, The Golden Mean traces the philosopher’s seven-year stint in Pella, teaching Prince Alexander, the son of King Philip of Macedon.  By choosing to move to Macedonia, along with his reluctant young wife (Pythias) and nephew (Callisthenes), Aristotle delays the advancement of his career at the Academy in Athens and becomes unwittingly embroiled in the political dramas of both Philip’s court and family.  While he goes to Pella at the behest of and as a favour to the King (his childhood friend), Aristotle receives little loyalty from Philip in return.  He struggles, too, with the business of tutoring both young Alexander (as acutely observant and innately intelligent as he is politically savvy and increasingly hungry for power) and Alexander’s mentally challenged brother, Arrhidaeus.  As the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that Aristotle’s primary challenge is to teach Alexander lessons never learned by Philip:  lessons about moderation and balance.  In one pivotal scene in the novel, as Aristotle juxtaposes “the extremes” and “the middle,” obviously privileging the latter, Alexander is incredulous.  “You can’t mean,” says the Prince, “to prize mediocrity.”  Aristotle, noting that “[m]oderation and mediocrity are not the same,” asks his pupil to “[t]hink of extremes as caricatures.” When Alexander tellingly suggests that Aristotle/Philip and Alexander/Arrhidaeus are examples of such “caricatures,” he lays bare the dilemma with which Aristotle himself must contend.  Has the teacher found a “golden mean” between thought and action, philosophy and life?  Or has he, in polar opposition to Philip, lost himself in “abstraction[s]” and “empty concept[s]”? Not unlike Lyon’s Aristotle, Connelly—author of nine books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction—confronts existential crises in Burmese Lessons:  A Love Story, some intimately related to her status as an author.  Initially, Connelly’s travels in Burma are motivated by her desire to interview dissidents, most exiled in Thailand, and to publicize, via her writing, both the horrors of Burma’s military dictatorship and the struggles of the regime’s resisters.  But as she falls deeply in love with Maung, leader of a guerilla army, and befriends numerous other Burmese dissidents, she finds herself questioning her “calling” and its efficacy vis-à-vis the cause.  As she “guiltily” confides to one activist, “writing a book [isn’t] enough”; “[m]aybe,” she ponders, “I should join an NGO and do real humanitarian work in the field.” Guilty, moreover, about indulging her “personal longings” among individuals who have made extraordinary sacrifices in order to do “political work”—“[d]aily,” she writes, “I meet people who have lost everything because they acted and spoke out against injustice” —she recognizes, again and again, her privilege as an “outsider” and wonders if she can ever overcome her position as such.  Yet because Connelly neither couches her self-reflexivity in theoretical jargon nor lapses into sentimentality, the narrative never loses its “honesty” or its periodic humour.  Loathe as I am to use such descriptors as “honest,” “raw” and “human” in any review, Burmese Lessons is all three.  Little is withheld in this book and nothing, it seems, is taboo.  This is the story of a woman who loves easily (“I love, I love, I love”), revels in extraordinarily good sex, feels suspicion and jealousy (“[a]re you sure [Maung’s] single?” asks an acquaintance, planting the seeds of doubt), experiences severe constipation, and succumbs to malaria.  The painfully impossible decision she ultimately faces—to marry and have children with Maung, but in so doing abandon her writing life—becomes the heartbreaking climax of an intensely-fraught, multi-layered story.  That Connelly chose, and chose well, the writing life is evidenced by The Lizard Cage (2005), her exquisite novel substantially informed by her time in Burma.  Indeed, throughout Burmese Lessons, Connelly alludes to the ways in which the novel began to “become” over the course of her travels (“a man’s voice whispers in my head … He talks about his own life . . . I’ve also heard his laughter.  I’ve heard him sing”). Ultimately, then, while Burmese Lessons leaves us with aching questions about the fate of Connelly’s lover, we might speculate that he is immortalized as a ghostly, bittersweet presence in her previous book.   http://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=15296 http://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=15296 Fri, 16 Jul 2010 13:17:53 PDT Let me begin simply: if you have time to only read one of these three fine books of short stories, pick Deborah Willis’ Vanishing and Other Stories. The praise and award nominations for this, her first collection of short stories, are warranted. The comment from Alice Munro adorning the Penguin edition where she praises the emotional range and depth of the stories is apt. Willis is absolutely a voice to listen to. Her writing is simple, effortless; the aphoristic insights given to characters are gems. Academic Penny in “The Fiancée” receives this pithy advice from her mother as she contemplates marriage: “Of course he’ll disappoint you. But that’s not the worst part. Disappointing him. That’s what’ll kill you.” The range of imagined lives is similarly impressive. The recently widowed Tom in “Escape,” the teenage girl in “Sky Theatre,” the young urbanites in “This Other Us” each inhabit a fully realized and complete world that the reader comes to understand through flashbacks and understated, elegant narrative. However, the collection is not without its minor faults. While the use of the second voice works to excellent effect in a story like “Remember, Relive,” where it intimates the distance between a woman and girlhood sexual secrets, grudgingly yielded, it does not work as well in “Romance Languages,” perhaps because the character herself cannot bridge the distance between her mother’s somewhat reckless, tabloid-esque worldview and her own reticence. Here the second-person point of view does not let the reader adequately glimpse under the surface of the character’s motivations. Having said that, Willis trusts her reader to put together the puzzle pieces of motivation, and this is one of her chief strengths. Willis’ implicit trust in the complicated beauty of unresolved emotional connections underpins all of the stories with a clear-eyed benevolence. If Willis’ stories plunge us into a sharply delimited world of domestic lives, Hélène Rioux takes readers on a romp across a wider geographical space and over a more varied, integrated, imaginative terrain. She uses slender, evocative threads of coincidence to tie together these loosely connected stories, and catching the clues is a delight. For example, Morello cherry jam appears in more than one story, as does a surrealist photo by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, the song from a movie score, an accident on a Quebec highway, a menu featuring a dancing shrimp, among other flotsam of contemporary life. These work to remind readers that the ephemera of our world ricochet from one life into the next, one location to the next. As Carmen says in “Early and Late Evening in Coayacan,” “I think everything is connected. The present is linked to the past.” Each of the stories is connected as are points on a map. Indeed, each chapter/story is located in time and space by the title (“Three o’clock in the afternoon, on a beach in Cabarette”), which offers a simple and effective way to ground each narrative even before it begins. There is a great deal of imaginative play at work here and a craftsman’s eye for detail which only becomes fully evident once you have finished reading the entire collection. My only quibble with these expansive, inclusive stories is that Jonathan Kaplansky’s translation is wooden at times; he received a similar criticism when he translated Intimate Dialogues, and I see more evidence here of a kind of tone deafness. I suspect these stories are even more impressive in the original French. The stories in the third collection, Truth and Other Fictions by Eva Tihanyi, feel at times more like experiments in fiction-making. This is Tihanyi’s first collection of short fiction; her previous publications have been poetry. Poetic condensation is certainly one of the strengths she brings to her writing, but she tends too much to the easy aphorism. “Body and Soul” interweaves the stories of Mary Leakey and Billie Holiday to good effect but promises more than is finally delivered in the tenuous connection at the end of the story. A New York Times Cookbook is a better departure point for the next story, which sketches with economy and vigour a woman’s adult love life. This is one of the most accomplished stories of the collection. While the other stories work to involve the reader, the endings sometimes feel pat or predictable. “Tigers Either Way” telegraphs its moral in the title even before it clobbers the reader with a Zen parable in the first paragraph. Many of the stories blend with a sameness of voice, but this should disappear in future work when the author lets herself sink more into her material.   http://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=15294 http://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=15294 Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:54:47 PDT Let me begin simply: if you have time to only read one of these three fine books of short stories, pick Deborah Willis’ Vanishing and Other Stories. The praise and award nominations for this, her first collection of short stories, are warranted. The comment from Alice Munro adorning the Penguin edition where she praises the emotional range and depth of the stories is apt. Willis is absolutely a voice to listen to. Her writing is simple, effortless; the aphoristic insights given to characters are gems. Academic Penny in “The Fiancée” receives this pithy advice from her mother as she contemplates marriage: “Of course he’ll disappoint you. But that’s not the worst part. Disappointing him. That’s what’ll kill you.” The range of imagined lives is similarly impressive. The recently widowed Tom in “Escape,” the teenage girl in “Sky Theatre,” the young urbanites in “This Other Us” each inhabit a fully realized and complete world that the reader comes to understand through flashbacks and understated, elegant narrative. However, the collection is not without its minor faults. While the use of the second voice works to excellent effect in a story like “Remember, Relive,” where it intimates the distance between a woman and girlhood sexual secrets, grudgingly yielded, it does not work as well in “Romance Languages,” perhaps because the character herself cannot bridge the distance between her mother’s somewhat reckless, tabloid-esque worldview and her own reticence. Here the second-person point of view does not let the reader adequately glimpse under the surface of the character’s motivations. Having said that, Willis trusts her reader to put together the puzzle pieces of motivation, and this is one of her chief strengths. Willis’ implicit trust in the complicated beauty of unresolved emotional connections underpins all of the stories with a clear-eyed benevolence. If Willis’ stories plunge us into a sharply delimited world of domestic lives, Hélène Rioux takes readers on a romp across a wider geographical space and over a more varied, integrated, imaginative terrain. She uses slender, evocative threads of coincidence to tie together these loosely connected stories, and catching the clues is a delight. For example, Morello cherry jam appears in more than one story, as does a surrealist photo by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, the song from a movie score, an accident on a Quebec highway, a menu featuring a dancing shrimp, among other flotsam of contemporary life. These work to remind readers that the ephemera of our world ricochet from one life into the next, one location to the next. As Carmen says in “Early and Late Evening in Coayacan,” “I think everything is connected. The present is linked to the past.” Each of the stories is connected as are points on a map. Indeed, each chapter/story is located in time and space by the title (“Three o’clock in the afternoon, on a beach in Cabarette”), which offers a simple and effective way to ground each narrative even before it begins. There is a great deal of imaginative play at work here and a craftsman’s eye for detail which only becomes fully evident once you have finished reading the entire collection. My only quibble with these expansive, inclusive stories is that Jonathan Kaplansky’s translation is wooden at times; he received a similar criticism when he translated Intimate Dialogues, and I see more evidence here of a kind of tone deafness. I suspect these stories are even more impressive in the original French. The stories in the third collection, Truth and Other Fictions by Eva Tihanyi, feel at times more like experiments in fiction-making. This is Tihanyi’s first collection of short fiction; her previous publications have been poetry. Poetic condensation is certainly one of the strengths she brings to her writing, but she tends too much to the easy aphorism. “Body and Soul” interweaves the stories of Mary Leakey and Billie Holiday to good effect but promises more than is finally delivered in the tenuous connection at the end of the story. A New York Times Cookbook is a better departure point for the next story, which sketches with economy and vigour a woman’s adult love life. This is one of the most accomplished stories of the collection. While the other stories work to involve the reader, the endings sometimes feel pat or predictable. “Tigers Either Way” telegraphs its moral in the title even before it clobbers the reader with a Zen parable in the first paragraph. Many of the stories blend with a sameness of voice, but this should disappear in future work when the author lets herself sink more into her material.   http://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=15293 http://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=15293 Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:53:37 PDT Let me begin simply: if you have time to only read one of these three fine books of short stories, pick Deborah Willis’ Vanishing and Other Stories. The praise and award nominations for this, her first collection of short stories, are warranted. The comment from Alice Munro adorning the Penguin edition where she praises the emotional range and depth of the stories is apt. Willis is absolutely a voice to listen to. Her writing is simple, effortless; the aphoristic insights given to characters are gems. Academic Penny in “The Fiancée” receives this pithy advice from her mother as she contemplates marriage: “Of course he’ll disappoint you. But that’s not the worst part. Disappointing him. That’s what’ll kill you.” The range of imagined lives is similarly impressive. The recently widowed Tom in “Escape,” the teenage girl in “Sky Theatre,” the young urbanites in “This Other Us” each inhabit a fully realized and complete world that the reader comes to understand through flashbacks and understated, elegant narrative. However, the collection is not without its minor faults. While the use of the second voice works to excellent effect in a story like “Remember, Relive,” where it intimates the distance between a woman and girlhood sexual secrets, grudgingly yielded, it does not work as well in “Romance Languages,” perhaps because the character herself cannot bridge the distance between her mother’s somewhat reckless, tabloid-esque worldview and her own reticence. Here the second-person point of view does not let the reader adequately glimpse under the surface of the character’s motivations. Having said that, Willis trusts her reader to put together the puzzle pieces of motivation, and this is one of her chief strengths. Willis’ implicit trust in the complicated beauty of unresolved emotional connections underpins all of the stories with a clear-eyed benevolence. If Willis’ stories plunge us into a sharply delimited world of domestic lives, Hélène Rioux takes readers on a romp across a wider geographical space and over a more varied, integrated, imaginative terrain. She uses slender, evocative threads of coincidence to tie together these loosely connected stories, and catching the clues is a delight. For example, Morello cherry jam appears in more than one story, as does a surrealist photo by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, the song from a movie score, an accident on a Quebec highway, a menu featuring a dancing shrimp, among other flotsam of contemporary life. These work to remind readers that the ephemera of our world ricochet from one life into the next, one location to the next. As Carmen says in “Early and Late Evening in Coayacan,” “I think everything is connected. The present is linked to the past.” Each of the stories is connected as are points on a map. Indeed, each chapter/story is located in time and space by the title (“Three o’clock in the afternoon, on a beach in Cabarette”), which offers a simple and effective way to ground each narrative even before it begins. There is a great deal of imaginative play at work here and a craftsman’s eye for detail which only becomes fully evident once you have finished reading the entire collection. My only quibble with these expansive, inclusive stories is that Jonathan Kaplansky’s translation is wooden at times; he received a similar criticism when he translated Intimate Dialogues, and I see more evidence here of a kind of tone deafness. I suspect these stories are even more impressive in the original French. The stories in the third collection, Truth and Other Fictions by Eva Tihanyi, feel at times more like experiments in fiction-making. This is Tihanyi’s first collection of short fiction; her previous publications have been poetry. Poetic condensation is certainly one of the strengths she brings to her writing, but she tends too much to the easy aphorism. “Body and Soul” interweaves the stories of Mary Leakey and Billie Holiday to good effect but promises more than is finally delivered in the tenuous connection at the end of the story. A New York Times Cookbook is a better departure point for the next story, which sketches with economy and vigour a woman’s adult love life. This is one of the most accomplished stories of the collection. While the other stories work to involve the reader, the endings sometimes feel pat or predictable. “Tigers Either Way” telegraphs its moral in the title even before it clobbers the reader with a Zen parable in the first paragraph. Many of the stories blend with a sameness of voice, but this should disappear in future work when the author lets herself sink more into her material.   http://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=15292 http://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=15292 Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:52:16 PDT Afghanistan is much in the minds of Canadians since Canada started sending troops to the Central Asian country in 2002, but few of us know much about the culture and history of Afghanistan. In Ghafour’s The Sleeping Buddha, both an autobiography of her family and a field report of the state of Afghanistan in 2003, when the author returned to the country of her birth, the reader learns something about the country not often reported, if at all, in the media. Hamida Ghafour “fled Kabul with her parents . . . in 1981” and was working as a reporter in England when she was offered the opportunity to return to Afghanistan by the Daily Telegraph, an opportunity to “witness firsthand this ‘war on terror’ and cover the post-Taliban reconstruction era.” Acculturated as a Canadian, Ghafour tries to provide a humorous side to the patriarchal constraints imposed on all women—living with two other foreign women and a male South Asian aid worker, Ghafour writes, “the guards downstairs thought the women in the building were Waseem’s harem.” But patriarchal values and suspicions of professional women were the least of Ghafour’s worries. Those she overcame by wearing clothes that were acceptable to the conservative Afghan society and when pushed, claiming to be a Westerner rather than an ethnic Afghan woman. What Ghafour had to negotiate with more difficulty were emotions evoked by seeing the destruction of her familial heritage and the destruction of her birth country, as well as by confronting a culture that meant much more to her through the memories of her parents. In The Sleeping Buddha, Ghafour is not merely reporting on the uneasy tolerance of the foreigners, the rubble left by the Russian invasion and the Taliban, and the politics of Hamid Karzai, but also on the loss of her grandmother’s poetry, the ruins of the ancestral home, and the erasure of a family’s concrete past. Although “poetry forms a deep and emotional core of Afghan identity,” Ghafour laments that “books that survived the communist purges were looted by the mujahideen and what was left was burned by the Taliban.” On an equally personal note that provides the kind of insight that news reports cannot, Ghafour writes of visiting her grandmother’s house in the eastern part of the country: “There is one ancient bush of purple blossoms in front of the house. The bombs missed it, and it has stood for nearly a century, as old as King Amanullah. My grandmother would have seen it from the window of the sitting room when she was a little girl.” While analyses of American politics and Karzai’s dilemmas and interventions of warlords are readily available if one looks for them, this kind of elegiac portrait of an Afghan family and the loss it suffers is both moving and rare. Equally moving but for a completely different reason is Wayson Choy’s Not Yet. Choy has established his writerly reputation with The Jade Peony and Paper Shadows, his earlier memoir. Readers might expect this latest book to be a sequel. It is and it isn’t. Not Yet is a meticulous observation of Choy’s collapse from asthma-heart attack in 2001, his hospitalization, his very gradual recovery and rehabilitation process to health. This return to active life is followed by a trip to China, a rare behind-the-scene description of the writing process as he worked on All That Matters, and ends with a second heart attack. This reviewer only has the uncorrected proof and therefore cannot provide quotations. But Choy’s writing is a mixture of humour, searing self-analysis, and eloquent recognition of the warmth and support provided by his friends—virtually an extended family—during his ordeals. In case one should think that Not Yet is all about Choy, it is also about writing and the writer’s obsession with his craft against all obstacles, including failing health and medical interdictions. Choy, as shown in his previous books, has a wonderful knack for providing eccentric characters with endearing qualities. In this book, people such as Victoria and Danielle, though making only cameo appearances, are given the same attention as close friends and near relatives. But the real revelation, ultimately, is Choy the writer. If Ghafour’s The Sleeping Buddha is panoramic and Choy’s Not Yet is a miniature, The Evergreen Country by Thuong Vuong-Riddick is somewhere in between. Told in the more conventional structure of an autobiography, the book begins with the arrival of the author’s Fujianese ancestors in Vietnam and their gradual social establishment in Hanoi at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The first few chapters cover the marriages of grandparents and parents as well as the births of siblings. The pace slows down after the birth of the author in 1940, no doubt because Vuong-Riddick no longer relies solely on the memories of others. Growing up, Vuong-Riddick experienced first the Japanese, then the Chinese military invasion during WWII. It was also a Vietnam colonized by France. When peace returned, the author’s father bought shares in a company called Les Magasins Chaffanson and the author attended a convent called Les Oiseaux. At the same time, Vuong-Riddick experienced the cultural confusions ethnic Chinese growing up under colonial rule inevitably must, whether it is between Chinese and Portuguese, Chinese and British, or in this case, Chinese and French. Into this cultural mix can be added the American presence in the 1960s, the author’s sojourn in Paris, and her eventual settling in Canada. It is an eventful life. But that is not the only reason The Evergreen Country is interesting. The book also outlines the complex and tumultuous history of a country that, like Afghanistan, the world knows not enough about.   http://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=15291 http://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=15291 Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:42:12 PDT Afghanistan is much in the minds of Canadians since Canada started sending troops to the Central Asian country in 2002, but few of us know much about the culture and history of Afghanistan. In Ghafour’s The Sleeping Buddha, both an autobiography of her family and a field report of the state of Afghanistan in 2003, when the author returned to the country of her birth, the reader learns something about the country not often reported, if at all, in the media. Hamida Ghafour “fled Kabul with her parents . . . in 1981” and was working as a reporter in England when she was offered the opportunity to return to Afghanistan by the Daily Telegraph, an opportunity to “witness firsthand this ‘war on terror’ and cover the post-Taliban reconstruction era.” Acculturated as a Canadian, Ghafour tries to provide a humorous side to the patriarchal constraints imposed on all women—living with two other foreign women and a male South Asian aid worker, Ghafour writes, “the guards downstairs thought the women in the building were Waseem’s harem.” But patriarchal values and suspicions of professional women were the least of Ghafour’s worries. Those she overcame by wearing clothes that were acceptable to the conservative Afghan society and when pushed, claiming to be a Westerner rather than an ethnic Afghan woman. What Ghafour had to negotiate with more difficulty were emotions evoked by seeing the destruction of her familial heritage and the destruction of her birth country, as well as by confronting a culture that meant much more to her through the memories of her parents. In The Sleeping Buddha, Ghafour is not merely reporting on the uneasy tolerance of the foreigners, the rubble left by the Russian invasion and the Taliban, and the politics of Hamid Karzai, but also on the loss of her grandmother’s poetry, the ruins of the ancestral home, and the erasure of a family’s concrete past. Although “poetry forms a deep and emotional core of Afghan identity,” Ghafour laments that “books that survived the communist purges were looted by the mujahideen and what was left was burned by the Taliban.” On an equally personal note that provides the kind of insight that news reports cannot, Ghafour writes of visiting her grandmother’s house in the eastern part of the country: “There is one ancient bush of purple blossoms in front of the house. The bombs missed it, and it has stood for nearly a century, as old as King Amanullah. My grandmother would have seen it from the window of the sitting room when she was a little girl.” While analyses of American politics and Karzai’s dilemmas and interventions of warlords are readily available if one looks for them, this kind of elegiac portrait of an Afghan family and the loss it suffers is both moving and rare. Equally moving but for a completely different reason is Wayson Choy’s Not Yet. Choy has established his writerly reputation with The Jade Peony and Paper Shadows, his earlier memoir. Readers might expect this latest book to be a sequel. It is and it isn’t. Not Yet is a meticulous observation of Choy’s collapse from asthma-heart attack in 2001, his hospitalization, his very gradual recovery and rehabilitation process to health. This return to active life is followed by a trip to China, a rare behind-the-scene description of the writing process as he worked on All That Matters, and ends with a second heart attack. This reviewer only has the uncorrected proof and therefore cannot provide quotations. But Choy’s writing is a mixture of humour, searing self-analysis, and eloquent recognition of the warmth and support provided by his friends—virtually an extended family—during his ordeals. In case one should think that Not Yet is all about Choy, it is also about writing and the writer’s obsession with his craft against all obstacles, including failing health and medical interdictions. Choy, as shown in his previous books, has a wonderful knack for providing eccentric characters with endearing qualities. In this book, people such as Victoria and Danielle, though making only cameo appearances, are given the same attention as close friends and near relatives. But the real revelation, ultimately, is Choy the writer. If Ghafour’s The Sleeping Buddha is panoramic and Choy’s Not Yet is a miniature, The Evergreen Country by Thuong Vuong-Riddick is somewhere in between. Told in the more conventional structure of an autobiography, the book begins with the arrival of the author’s Fujianese ancestors in Vietnam and their gradual social establishment in Hanoi at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The first few chapters cover the marriages of grandparents and parents as well as the births of siblings. The pace slows down after the birth of the author in 1940, no doubt because Vuong-Riddick no longer relies solely on the memories of others. Growing up, Vuong-Riddick experienced first the Japanese, then the Chinese military invasion during WWII. It was also a Vietnam colonized by France. When peace returned, the author’s father bought shares in a company called Les Magasins Chaffanson and the author attended a convent called Les Oiseaux. At the same time, Vuong-Riddick experienced the cultural confusions ethnic Chinese growing up under colonial rule inevitably must, whether it is between Chinese and Portuguese, Chinese and British, or in this case, Chinese and French. Into this cultural mix can be added the American presence in the 1960s, the author’s sojourn in Paris, and her eventual settling in Canada. It is an eventful life. But that is not the only reason The Evergreen Country is interesting. The book also outlines the complex and tumultuous history of a country that, like Afghanistan, the world knows not enough about.   http://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=15290 http://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=15290 Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:41:20 PDT Afghanistan is much in the minds of Canadians since Canada started sending troops to the Central Asian country in 2002, but few of us know much about the culture and history of Afghanistan. In Ghafour’s The Sleeping Buddha, both an autobiography of her family and a field report of the state of Afghanistan in 2003, when the author returned to the country of her birth, the reader learns something about the country not often reported, if at all, in the media. Hamida Ghafour “fled Kabul with her parents . . . in 1981” and was working as a reporter in England when she was offered the opportunity to return to Afghanistan by the Daily Telegraph, an opportunity to “witness firsthand this ‘war on terror’ and cover the post-Taliban reconstruction era.” Acculturated as a Canadian, Ghafour tries to provide a humorous side to the patriarchal constraints imposed on all women—living with two other foreign women and a male South Asian aid worker, Ghafour writes, “the guards downstairs thought the women in the building were Waseem’s harem.” But patriarchal values and suspicions of professional women were the least of Ghafour’s worries. Those she overcame by wearing clothes that were acceptable to the conservative Afghan society and when pushed, claiming to be a Westerner rather than an ethnic Afghan woman. What Ghafour had to negotiate with more difficulty were emotions evoked by seeing the destruction of her familial heritage and the destruction of her birth country, as well as by confronting a culture that meant much more to her through the memories of her parents. In The Sleeping Buddha, Ghafour is not merely reporting on the uneasy tolerance of the foreigners, the rubble left by the Russian invasion and the Taliban, and the politics of Hamid Karzai, but also on the loss of her grandmother’s poetry, the ruins of the ancestral home, and the erasure of a family’s concrete past. Although “poetry forms a deep and emotional core of Afghan identity,” Ghafour laments that “books that survived the communist purges were looted by the mujahideen and what was left was burned by the Taliban.” On an equally personal note that provides the kind of insight that news reports cannot, Ghafour writes of visiting her grandmother’s house in the eastern part of the country: “There is one ancient bush of purple blossoms in front of the house. The bombs missed it, and it has stood for nearly a century, as old as King Amanullah. My grandmother would have seen it from the window of the sitting room when she was a little girl.” While analyses of American politics and Karzai’s dilemmas and interventions of warlords are readily available if one looks for them, this kind of elegiac portrait of an Afghan family and the loss it suffers is both moving and rare. Equally moving but for a completely different reason is Wayson Choy’s Not Yet. Choy has established his writerly reputation with The Jade Peony and Paper Shadows, his earlier memoir. Readers might expect this latest book to be a sequel. It is and it isn’t. Not Yet is a meticulous observation of Choy’s collapse from asthma-heart attack in 2001, his hospitalization, his very gradual recovery and rehabilitation process to health. This return to active life is followed by a trip to China, a rare behind-the-scene description of the writing process as he worked on All That Matters, and ends with a second heart attack. This reviewer only has the uncorrected proof and therefore cannot provide quotations. But Choy’s writing is a mixture of humour, searing self-analysis, and eloquent recognition of the warmth and support provided by his friends—virtually an extended family—during his ordeals. In case one should think that Not Yet is all about Choy, it is also about writing and the writer’s obsession with his craft against all obstacles, including failing health and medical interdictions. Choy, as shown in his previous books, has a wonderful knack for providing eccentric characters with endearing qualities. In this book, people such as Victoria and Danielle, though making only cameo appearances, are given the same attention as close friends and near relatives. But the real revelation, ultimately, is Choy the writer. If Ghafour’s The Sleeping Buddha is panoramic and Choy’s Not Yet is a miniature, The Evergreen Country by Thuong Vuong-Riddick is somewhere in between. Told in the more conventional structure of an autobiography, the book begins with the arrival of the author’s Fujianese ancestors in Vietnam and their gradual social establishment in Hanoi at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The first few chapters cover the marriages of grandparents and parents as well as the births of siblings. The pace slows down after the birth of the author in 1940, no doubt because Vuong-Riddick no longer relies solely on the memories of others. Growing up, Vuong-Riddick experienced first the Japanese, then the Chinese military invasion during WWII. It was also a Vietnam colonized by France. When peace returned, the author’s father bought shares in a company called Les Magasins Chaffanson and the author attended a convent called Les Oiseaux. At the same time, Vuong-Riddick experienced the cultural confusions ethnic Chinese growing up under colonial rule inevitably must, whether it is between Chinese and Portuguese, Chinese and British, or in this case, Chinese and French. Into this cultural mix can be added the American presence in the 1960s, the author’s sojourn in Paris, and her eventual settling in Canada. It is an eventful life. But that is not the only reason The Evergreen Country is interesting. The book also outlines the complex and tumultuous history of a country that, like Afghanistan, the world knows not enough about.   http://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=15289 http://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=15289 Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:40:02 PDT