Book Buzz

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ALEKSANDAR HEMON

Lazarus is a rich and complex novel. It is a chronicle of loss and hopelessness and cruelty yet it is entertaining and well written. Having survived the 1908 pogrom in his native Bosnia Lazarus immigrated to Chicago with his sister Olga. In Chicago he is killed by the chief of police in the chief’s home. He was shot several times. They quickly pulled down his pants to see if he was a jew. In the modern era, Vladimir Brik is a struggling writer with a highly successful wife. She is a successful American neurosurgeon who saves lives from “her high position of surgically American decency.” Brik gets a grant to research Lazarus and takes a photographer friend, Rora, back with him to Bosnia and Sarajevo to find out more about Lazarus, his family and the pogrom.

An excellent read.

Edited by  DAN SAVAGE, TERRY MILLER

Savage and Miller are the married couple (they got married in Canada) who started the IT GETS BETTER video campaign on You Tube as a result of a slate of lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered teens who committed suicide due to bullying. They were hoping for one hundred, maybe two hundred at best, after they publish their video on You Tube. With in a week there were over one thousand videos. These vignettes are taken from the videos. They are all sad tales when they describe the bullying but all uplifting as writer after writer talks about finding his or her acceptance with friends and family. The first message in the book is from President Obama.

Now the videos will have their own web site so that young people who need to hear these messages in five, ten or twenty years will be able to. Power to the people. Good on Dan and Terry.

www.itgetsbetter.org

BRADY FOTHERINGHAM

What an undertaking to ride 3000 km through mountain passes, deserts, different countries and many, many ethnic groups all on bicycle. What a wide range of gear was necessary: cold weather gear for high in the mountains, desert gear for weather so hot that tires wouldn’t patch properly if they punctured. Brady started the trip with a couple of Brits, one turned 58 on the trip, but only stayed with them for three weeks. He  preferred go solo. The trip was not so much a cycling excursion but a “cultural odyssey.” I love his description of the food he ate and how he would order from menus he couldn’t read. “I was counting on a strong immune system to get me through the dubious food and water I ate and drank.” There was always the possibility of experiencing bouts of diarrhea in places with less than modern toilet facilities. One amusing description was of the author using a squat toilet on a moon lit night but the way it was constructed once you were inside it was pitch black. The silk road was also the road that the world’s religions traveled. “Buddhist monks travelled through the Indus Valley over the border into China. The eventual clash between the Buddhist faith and Islam, introduced by the Mongols, led to the desecration of Buddhist artwork.”

Trail is well researched and a fantastic travel story. Well worth the read.

MIRIAM TOEWES

What a culture shock. A Canadian Mennonite girl living in Mexico becomes involved in a feature film production that is happening next door. She is 18 and married to a mexican man who only comes around once and awhile. Her husband seems to be flitting on the edges of narcotic production and uses Irma’s shed to store boxes. Her father has shunned her for marrying a Mexican but keeps her next door so she can continue to work for him. Irma is a bright but naive young woman. She has never seen a photo of her self. Her Mennonite up bring has been extremely strict.

Since she speaks Plattdeutsch (low German), Spanish and English, Irma is hired to help translate the director’s instructions to his actors (one of these is a German woman who seems a bit lost) and to cook and clean for the crew. The filming proceeds intermittently; Irma’s father and some of the other Mennonites resist, incompetence reigns and the weather is unco-operative. Irma conceives an affection for a member of the film crew, and she enjoys her exposure to these artistic outsiders. Irma’s sister Aggie also gets involved with the strangers so Irma tries to shelter her. She knows the kind of trouble she could get into at home.

I travelled to Mexico and Belize last winter and saw Mennonites. This book brought back a lot of memories.

Well worth reading.

IAN LESLIE

Liars is a far reaching well researched book. Not coming entirely clean with other people and practising various degrees of self-deception are part of what it means to be a social animal, Leslie claims. To successfully live with others is to learn to lie. Chimpanzees practice deceptive behaviour too.  The best liar in a group is not sweating and fidgeting, according to Leslie; it’s more likely to be the most charming, charismatic, “credible” person in the room. Leslie explores the recovered-memory movement, when social workers and therapists managed to elicit “repressed” accounts of childhood abuse that turned out to be false memories, implanted by the suggestive line of questioning. What we believe about ourselves, it seems, is alarmingly open to revision.

Born Liars also goes into the powerful role that belief and self-deception play in our health, and how we experience suffering. During the Second World War, Henry Beecher was a doctor tending soldiers on the battlefield. When he ran low on morphine, he began injecting some of the badly wounded with a “painkiller” that was nothing more than a saline injection. The placebo proved almost as effective as morphine. He also discovered that the soldiers seemed to suffer less than patients undergoing surgery in a hospital – because, he concluded, the meaning of their pain was different. A wounded soldier is on his way out of the chaos of battle, and headed for home. The pain arrives as good news. But a postoperative patient is facing uncertainty and disruption of his normal life. The pain is more ominous.

Liars is a great read.

GIL ADAMSON

Hazel is a peculiar girl, burdened with an eccentric family. Her father regularly rewires the house to release tension. When Hazel steps on a wire he doesn’t move it so no one can step on it again but just says, ” Oh that must of hurt.” She gets shocked two more times. When her brother Andrew gets shocked, Dad simply says, “That happened to your sister too.” Her brother rarely speaks and reads the TV guide as if it were a novel. Mother is “physically fantastic”, but a mystery to her daughter and husband, and “stuck here with all of us, all our stories and fibs and downright lies”. Hazel watches and worries, and describes the “travesty” of family get togethers, the agony of attending weddings as a teenager, the unique but familiar humiliations of childhood and teenage years, the hatred of school, the bitter anger that is special to families, and her constant underlying sense of unease: “You get the feeling your parents are the only thing between you and disaster.” Autobiographical coming-of-age tales as first novels are common. But there is something shining and bright about this one. A must read.

DANIEL JUDSON

Remer was a Private Investigator in New York until an angry recipient of his surveillance had him kidnapped, tortured and branded with the word VOYEUR. Five years later was living in Southampton operation a small liquor store and staying in the shadows. Until one of his former staff went missing with $80,000 of his money. This mystery has enough twists and turns to keep it interesting. A good read.

JACQUES d’AMBOISE

At over 400 pages this book is for danceophiles, if there is such a word. d’Amboise started dancing in the ’40′s and never looked back. He learned with the School of American Ballet and then joined the prestigious New York City Ballet. He became George Balanchine’s “the supreme Ballet Master’s” protege. “You must practice, practice, practice. Onstage, forget everything! Just listen to the music and dance.” I love that thought of dancers.

I enjoyed it even though there were many areas that I skimmed. Again, not for every one.

REBECCA STEAD

When You Reach Me is a story about friendship and time. The mystery at the core of the book flicks around the edges for a long time before revealing itself.

By sixth grade, Miranda and her best friend, Sal, know how to navigate their New York City neighborhood. They know where it’s safe to go, and they know who to avoid. Like the crazy guy on the corner.

But things start to unravel. Sal gets punched by a kid on the street for what seems like no reason, and he shuts Miranda out of his life. The apartment key that Miranda’s mom keeps hidden for emergencies is stolen. And then a mysterious note arrives, scrawled on a tiny slip of paper. The notes keep coming, and Miranda slowly realizes that whoever is leaving them knows things no one should know. Each message brings her closer to believing that only she can prevent a tragic death. Until the final note makes her think she’s too late.

It’s a good read.

ANN PATCHETT

Patchett is one of my favourite authors however State is far from her usual standards. It is still worth reading but the middle section drags. Marina Singh becomes a research scientist for a pharmaceutical company after she damaged a baby doing a caesarian section in her year of residency. The CEO of the drug company sends her to Brazil to find a wayward researcher who is no longer in touch with the company. This researcher is the doctor who Marina was working under in her residency. A different employee was sent to find and bring home the noncommunicative researcher but he died of a fever in the jungle. What Marina finds in the jungle is the most interesting part of the story. The rest can be skimmed.

Definitely check out her older works such as Bel Canto and Run. They are must reads

TIM FLANNERY

Earth is the best non-fiction book that I have read in a long time. It is well written and mostly explained in simple language for the lay man. That is how I felt for the first half of the book which deals with the natural history of the universe and specifically the earth. It takes two generations of stars to produce carbon which is the building block of life as we know it on earth. That means that the matter from the big bang needed to be formed into a star which would burn for billions of years and eventually supernova, then repeat that process again before the matter was formed into the earth. Joni Mitchell was right; we are star dust.  The second half of the book deals with the mess humanity has made of the earth. But for me at least that was not new information. But I loved the first part of the book.

SARAH ADDISON ALLEN

When her mother died, Emily went to her grandfather’s house in Mullaby. She had never been in Mullaby before; she had never met her grandfather. She soon found out that Mullaby is a town where strange things happen. The wallpaper in her room changes depending on her mood and on what is happening in her life. At night strange lights haunt the town. Some people are quiet friendly but other are quiet hostile. Hostile people tell horrible stories about her wonderful mother. What is going on?

If you like magic realism this is a good book for you.

ELIZABETH HAY

Alone is is a complicated narrative skillfully woven by one of Canada’s great writers. Annie tells the tale of her adventuress and bohemian  aunt, Connie Flood, who began her career as a school teacher in Saskatchewan. After a young girl is assaulted by the sadistic principle Connie leaves teaching and becomes a reporter in Ontario. But Annie’s tale is also her own searching for her self, her truth and her story is also told. A story of love, hate, desire and redemption. A must read.

Basharat Peer

Peer’s Curfewed Night is an incredible memoir that brings the Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan and into the lives of Kashmiris and into our awareness. Peer was only 13 in 1990 when Indian troops fired on pro-independence Kashmiris and, as he puts it, “the war of my adolescence started”…One of the great achievements of Curfewed Night is its seamless mingling of memoir and reportage. It is the book of Basharat’s Peer experiences, yes, but those experiences include returning to Kashmir and seeking out the stories of others affected by the conflict. It is not an easy book to read. Man’s cruelty to man is overwhelming. Why didn’t we know about this when it was happening?

SUSIE MOLONIE

Witches can have anything they want. Anything. But witches need thirteen to work their will. How better to achieve this than to lure back a banished daughter and her child. By making the mother sick they get the young mother to return and bring her daughter as a sacrifice. Black humour at its best.

CHESTER BROWN

Strange book. I’m uncertain why it was written in graphic novel form other than the author is a noted graphic author, he wrote and drew a well reviewed biography of Louie Riel. However the graphics add little to the story line. But the story line: a man tires of romantic love so choose to believe that romantic relationships are inherently destructive. Brown chooses to pay for sex rather than deal with the difficulties of an intimate relationship. He presents his case for the decriminalization of the profession to his friends and family, which makes for interesting discussion but not interesting graphics.

As I said strange book. Definitely worth  a look.

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IAIN REID

Reid has constructed quite a funny memoir in part thanks to his warm and engaging parents. Reid himself seems self centred, both pessimistic and indolent. His parents truly love their life together and their life on their farm. Reid makes his parents come alive in all their eccentricities. One of the scenes that I laughed out loud at was the family choosing what to eat while they eat the previous meal. Which is something my spouse Bev loves to do. There are several places in the book that are laugh out loud funny. Worth the read though somewhat uneven.

PHILIP ROTH

Bucky Cantor would be fighting in WWII but for poor eyesight. Instead he is at home in New Jersey a gym teacher during the year and for the summer a playground supervisor. He loves working with kids helping them to grow strong and healthy but an invisible scourge is stalking their city: polio. Polio is a summer disease that likes the heat. At the time no one new how polio spread, so they were worried about everything. Especially Cantor.  Could it be eating at the local diner? Could it be swimming at the pool? Could it be running and playing in the hot weather?   Cantor takes the weight of the world on his shoulders. It is interesting to see how Cantor changes over the course of the novel.

For me an interesting and unwritten subtext is that while a few children are dyeing painful deaths in the US in Europe the Holocaust  is killing millions of Jews.

LINDA GRANT

Stephen Newman, the protagonist of Orange Prize-winner Linda Grant’s new novel We Had It So Good, is a prototypical baby boomer, and the novel makes an ambitious attempt to document the lives of that generation (or at least the college-educated and privileged part of it).

Born to immigrant parents in mid-century Los Angeles, Newman appears in the book’s opening passage as a nine-year-old child visiting his father’s workplace, a cold-storage locker filled with the furs of Hollywood celebrities. On impulse, Newman tries on Marilyn Monroe’s champagne mink stole, redolent, in Grant’s wonderfully evocative phrase, with the “fragrance of hot pearls.”

This wins him a smack on the back of the head and a heated torrent of abuse in his father’s native language, “with few vowels and many syllables, which seemed to get stuck in the speaker’s throat, choking him.” For Grant, language is always a bit problematic, both conveying and concealing truth.

The incident with the stole was not Stephen Newman’s only brush with celebrity. Later, crossing the Atlantic on the way to a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, Newman has an encounter with “a big blond Southern boy with a veneer of East Coast sophistication.” The big blond is Bill Clinton, although Stephen’s grown son later rejects this and his father’s other prized stories, seeing them as attempts to pretend that baby boomers were more interesting than they really were.

This moment of inter-generational doubt is a signpost to one of Grant’s ongoing concerns, the elusiveness of truth. By the end of the story, for example, Stephen is an aging and disillusioned boomer learning that his own father’s stories about how he came to America were false.

Stephen never sees Clinton again, but his story continues to track the most significant events in his generation’s history, from the Vietnam-era draft, which prompts his decision to remain in England after he is expelled from Oxford for cooking LSD in the school laboratories, to heady experiments in communal living and radical politics that faded, for so many, into the soporific longueurs of middle-class respectability, and to late-life confrontations with mortality, from 9/11 to cancer wards.

Much of this is richly observed and imagined, and the characters are complex, well rounded and believable. Grant has much to tell us about class and character, history and human frailty, and she has created a story that captures much of the truth about a certain time, place and class setting as the Age of Aquarius morphed into the Age of Hedge Funds.

Although the characters belong to a group that once would have sung along to the Who’s anthem My Generation and its arrogant line, “hope I die before I get old,” most of them didn’t manage that escape. This splendid novel is about how those survivors aged.

There is one caveat. This reviewer can fully understand the temptation Grant felt to have the most radical of the seventies commune crowd become a plump, complacent advertising executive in the new century, but it is a temptation, however delicious, that should have been resisted. This book is too good to require cheap irony.

That said, Grant’s use of free indirect discourse, the narrative device that infuses a first-person sensibility into an apparently third-person account, is brilliant. Using this demanding approach, Grant succeeds in creating a vivid sense of the inner lives of Stephen, his friends and family. This book, by an acclaimed British writer who did her graduate studies in Canada, is one baby boomers will read with rueful recognition. As for younger readers, they may find it an interesting historical romance.

Tom Sandborn is an aging baby boomer and war resister who settled in Vancouver rather than London. Borrowed from the GLOBE AND MAIL

Published Tuesday, May. 31, 2011