Book Buzz

MARGARET ATWOOD

Literary to the n’th degree. It is Margret Atwood after all. And her dry sense of humour shines through out. Witty in the extreme. Interestingly her musings on debt were published just before the financial crisis. The work was prepared for the Massy Lectures heard on CBC. The final section is a rewriting of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol. Her version has the spirits of Earth Days past, present and future. It is from far from the only funny part of the book but certainly the funniest. Some parts need skimming. Especially those of us less literary than Atwood.

Jack W. Brinks

For 6000 years First Nations hunters on the prairies used their knowledge of the land and of buffalo behaviour to drive their quarry over cliffs. Archaeologist Jack Brink has written a major study of the mass buffalo hunts and the culture they supported before and after European contact. Brinks draws on his 25 years excavating at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in southwestern Alberta – a UNESCO World Heritage Site. “I love the story behind the jump – the events and planning that went into making the whole event work. I continue to learn more about the complex interaction between people, bison, and the environment, and I continue to be impressed with how the ancient hunters pulled off these astonishing kills.”

When the first Europeans hunted bison they would shoot the biggest oldest male. The First Nations hunters would laugh. The meat would not be good for eating nor would the hide be good for tanning. A hunt for meat would take place in the fall when the cows would be fat. For hides they would hunt in the spring when hides would be thinner and easier to work with.

The workers at Smashed in Head were unsuccessful at creating a tipi made of buffalo hides. They found a group of people who made tipis for Wanuskewin Heritage Park, a buffalo jump near Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. But when they contacted these people they were no longer process buffalo hides the tradition way. It was too much work!

Filled with facts and stories and beautifully illustrated. An excellent read.

A JOURNEY THROUGH THE REALM OF VANISHING CULTURES

WADE DAVIS

Ethnobotanist and anthropologist Davis has traveled the world for 25 years to study the myriad ways indigenous people live in physical and spiritual intimacy with the natural world. Though listed as a book of photographs, LIGHT is much more. The pictures are amazing but the writing is a synthesis of many of the cultures he has explored. A beautiful, stunning book that is ultimately somber and sorrowful for it is describing “vanishing cultures.” Davis wrote that genocide, the deliberate and systematic extermination of a racial,  or cultural group is abhorred in modern times but ethoncide the systematic destruction of an ethnic culture in many ways is accepted. While discussing Andean culture of South America he wrote how nutritionally important the coco leaf contributing large quantities calcium and other minerals that were not traditionally found in their diet. Gems like this are found throught the book. Much of what he writes is the spirituality of the culture. Davis reflects on the effects of colonialism in these areas and laments the uncertain fate of groups like the Penan of Borneo, the nomads of Kenya and the Inuit in Canada is Russia.

An excellent read and an excellent collection of photographs.

KAREN CONNELLY

This memoir highlights the year Connelly spent living in a small town in northern Thailand. She was seventeen when she left for Thailand and the writing reflects this. It is not a mature work. But I enjoyed it for the insights into daily life of the Thai people, their language and their culture. When I was in Thailand I asked someone to teach me to count to ten. “Nung.” I repeated, “Nung” and the people howled with laughter. I couldn’t hear the tones of the language. The same word can have five or six meanings depending on the tone used in speech. I really never learned any Thai. But Karen lived with families and went to school with the young people. Immersion is the best way to learn a language. But of course it wasn’t easy learning the language and accepting the restraints of the culture. Being the only “farang” (foreigner) in the area she had little privacy. Being a woman she didn’t have the freedom and choices she was used to in Canada. The writing improves through out the book. She calls Thailand “the green country” and the inhabitants “the gentle people.”

What drew me to this book is some of Connelly’s other writing. The Lizard Cage is an excellent novel of modern Burma.

A good read if you are interested in Thailand and Asia.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I ‘m sorry another dud. What is happening to Can Lit? I usually laugh out aloud reading Coupland.

A is speculative fiction in the near future where bees have gone extinct. Today a frightening possibility. But after several years of extinction five people are stung around the world. As soon as they are stung they are seized by officials and studied by computers. After they are released they are drawn together. At this point all is well. But this is what looses me. The five characters are taken to Canada’s most remote archipelago, Haida Gwaii. There they are told to tell each other stories. So a third of the book is pithy, little allegorical tales.

Maybe you will get more from it than I. Doug write us a book for heaven’s sake!

MARGARET ATWOOD

one word: DISAPPOINTING. Much to my surprise and dismay. I love Atwood’s writing. What got me with this book is that it did not live up to it’s hype. The hype being that FLOOD starts off where Oryx and Crake left off. I kept waiting for that to happen. It does around page 350. Before that she is exploring the life of a couple of characters before the apocalypse. All very interesting. All superbly written. I am likely the only one in all of Canada who was left embittered by this novel. Be for warned. I wish I had been. I could have enjoyed it more.

MARGARET ATWOOD

Since Atwood’s newest novel starts where ORYX ends, I thought I would refreshen my mind by reading this excellent saga. Wow what a book. No punches held. Not post- apocalypse, this novel tackles the devastation from before and during as well as post. Snowman is the last human left alive after an engineered virus designed by Crake is dispatched to the populous.  Crake spared Snowman to take care of his new species: a humanoid creation made by splicing different DNA.

It is a dark look at our future. It reminds me of the song (first line ) I Can Ride My Bike with No Handlebars. Starts off as simple braging but graduates into a megalomaniac ready to destroy the world.

I can hardly wait to read The YEAR of the FLOOD.

ANNE MICHAELS

A beautifully written, poetic phrases pour from the pages, but plot wise unsatisfying novel. It me against the critics on this one. VAULT has been longlisted for the Giller Prize. The background to this poetry are the dam building projects in Quebec in the 50’s and Egypt in the 60’s. Perenial problem is what do we do with the people whose land is flooded. Avery is an engineer in both projects. He met his wife Jean on the former and lost her during the later. All is well at this point but three-quarters into the story Michaels interjects a new character into the mix and fogets about Avery until the last few pages. She has an affair with an old man, an artist. And a new background Warsaw pre, during and post WWII. What Avery thinks or how he feels is not there which creates a large gap in the tapestry of Vault.

Quote: “–Please go.     His words turned her cold. But he did not let go.   She gradually felt her longing was not separate from his. The slow, impossible, surrender to what was true. He did not let go, and in this union, his confession of aloneness was as close to love as all that had yet passed between them; as close as love is to the fear of love.”

Read it for the language. Forgive the breach in the tapestry.

MAGGIE SIGGINS

BITTER is a powerful account of what has happened to the people in and around Pigeon Lake over the past 200 years. For over two hundred years, Pelican Narrows has endured an equally torturous relationship with the encroaching European culture, from the Hudson’s Bay Company factors and missionaries of earlier times to the bureaucrats and police of today. Siggins used oral history and documented the personal stories of contemporary Pelican Narrows Rock Cree. She gives us the human faces behind the newspaper stories of native issues. Bitter Embrace is an extraordinary contribution to our history and our understanding of ourselves and what our First Nations Communities have under gone and have to deal with now.

It is a difficult read but should be read by all Canadians and read and discussed by all high school students in Canada.

MICHEL TREMBLAY

I’ve been wanting to revisit this old friend ever since it was part of Canada Reads on CBC. I had forgotten what a challenging read it is. I had to map the author’s family tree – the characters in the book – to keep them straight. Tremblay said he wrote this novel and the next three in the series to tell his family how much he loved them. Beautiful. The novel takes place in one day. The Fat Woman is Tremblay’s mother pregnant with him. Welcome to the family.

I tried to included the family tree but the format is lost so I created a web page. Please take a look. Other character besides family are listed as well.

ARAVIND ADIGA

I discovered this book by reading this review in the New Internationalist:

Top of the swaying piles of books that pedestrian street-hawkers navigate through Mumbai’s traffic jams is Adiga’s controversial first novel. Apart from winning the prestigious Man Booker prize in Britain, The White Tiger has also taken India by storm. But in his native land, Adiga’s efforts have elicited admiration and anger in equal measure. For some, The White Tiger is a bold, honest work that unflinchingly ‘tells the truth’ about contemporary India; others have dismissed it as ‘inauthentic’ and peopled with ‘grotesque caricatures’.

The first-person narrative is dominated by the book’s hero, Balram Halwai, who is writing a letter to the Chinese Premier. The latter is about to visit India to find out about ‘entrepreneurship’ – something ‘India Rising’ has in abundance and China lacks. But what do Indian politicians and élites know about it, asks Balram? Listen to me, he says, and he starts to tell his own dark, intriguing journey to success, from low-caste village boy in ‘The Darkness’ (the northern state of Bihar) to wealthy business owner in the IT hub of Bangalore. It’s a tale of servitude, abuse, betrayal, murder, corruption, theft and ruthless cunning. The message is stark: if you start life at the bottom, this is how you escape poverty and humiliation in India’s ‘democracy’.

The wit is mordant; the politics trenchant; the vision as unforgiving as neon light. Compassion is entirely lacking in Balram’s dog-eat-dog world. There is just one perspective – the protagonist’s – and his distinctive voice, as he tells his story brilliantly, incisively and – of course – controversially.

http://www.newint.org/columns/media/books/2009/01/01/white-tiger/

Great read. Interesting picture of Indian society.

LOUISE PENNY

A dysfunctional but rich family has a reunion at a lodge in Quebec. One of the siblings, the black sheep, meets an untimely demise. Which one of the other family members executed her is such a symbolic way?  It just happens that Chief Inspector Gamache is vacationing at the lodge with his wife so the investigation starts immediately.

Lousise Penny is a good writer. The insult “slid off his back landed on the floor and disintegrated.” However it took Penny 89 pages to get to the murder. I found this title from CBC’s Canada Reads Blog. August was the month to discuss mysteries and their authors. Worth the read but not great.

MARIATU KAMARA with SUSAN McCLELLAND

The Bite of the Mango is the true story of Mariatu Kamara, a girl born in Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone, an impoverished country on the west coast of Africa, was in a horrific civil war while Mariatu was a child. Despite the poverty in her tiny rural village, Mariatu’s first few years are happy ones, filled with friends, games and chores.  Mariatu’s father has two wives, neither of whom seems very pleasant. Mariatu is given to an auntie to raise, which likely would have been a great idea had the village not been attacked by rebels. At the age of 12, Mariatu had her hands amputated by boy-rebel soldiers. She had been previously raped and impregnated by an older man in the village who wanted to marry her.

Despite the extreme pain and suffering Mariatu’s story is one of hope and redemption. She now lives in Toronto where she attends college. She also tours North America as a UNICEF Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict.

A must read.

NANCY HUSTON

Elegant pianist-instructor’s child is born only slightly over two pounds, one kilo. So often there are major problems when children that young are kept alive outside of the womb. This live birth is after several pregnancies that ended midterm. The ICU pediatrician tells Lara that the only way her daughter, Maya, will survive is if she is the child’s life line. She dedicates herself and her life to her daughter. The marriage disintegrates but the child lives. She grows into a little angel, petite and full of joy and lightness of being.

But what will happen when their roles are reversed? It is a slim volume, well worth the read.

TIMOTHY TAYLOR

Chef Jeremy is owner operated of a increasingly popular bistro on the edge of cuisine in Vancouver. With a great staff the menu changes daily focusing of local ingredients. Unfortunately Chef is not a good manager, when one credit card is maxed he simply applies for a different credit card to keep the restaurant alive. He needs to sell the controlling interest (95%) to coffee mogul and former next door neighbour, Dante, owner of Inferno Coffee. The new restaurant is the extreme opposite of local trying to be as international as possible, as the controlling interest wants. Meanwhile he is developing a closer relationship to the Professor, his father, who lives in Stanley Park studying the homeless who live in the park.

Several subplots and all of the epicureanism as well as good writing make for a great read.

TRAVELS IN SEARCH OF CANADA

WILL FERGUSON

Never would have thought I would read a travel book about Canada. But I enjoyed Ferguson’s ramblings. It’s part memoir, part comedy, part history as well as being a travel book. It turned out to be a great mix. I savored the stories from the places that I knew such as Thunder Bay and Moose Jaw as well as from the places that I had never visited such as “The Kingdom of Saguenay” and the “Republic of Madawaska.” Those are both parts of Canada.

Well worth the read.

MALCOLM GLADWELL

Gladwell is an incredible thinker. In this volume he tackles the factors that make one successful. We often thinks that success comes from hard work and, being smarter than the other guy. But what Gladwell points out is that is not the end of the story. Sometimes, you can be those things and not be successful. Gladwell looks at how to know whether a child will be a star hockey or soccer player based on what month they are born in. What the Beatles and Bill Gates have in common. Why Asians are so good at math.

“Outliers are those who have been given opportunities – and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.” A child born in a low social economic situation with genius IQ most frequently goes no where. Children need the support of family and community to succeed. It is not the brightest who succeed.

Read!

ANITA RAU BADAMI

When his daughter, studying in Canada, rejects her Indian betrothed to marry a foreigner, Sripathi disowns her telling her she is for bidden to return home. A clash between the old, ancient and new, modern values of Indian culture. This family is from the Brahmin cast. They look down on their neighbours from lower casts, especially the matriarch, Sripathi’s mother. But they are living in debt, in a house that is falling apart.

When the daughter is killed in a car accident along with her husband, Sripathi flies to Vancouver to pick up his granddaughter who he has never met because of his edict sentenced before she was born. There are many changes with the arrival of the child – a lot of blaming and healing. The book is slow but worth the time. It won the 2000 Commonwealth Prize for fiction.

ANTHONY BIDULKA

On his way home from his engagement and trip to Hawaii, Saskatoon PI Russell Quant stumbles upon a treasure map and a murder. Intrigued by both he can’t let them go until he solves them. Beach book for the summer by gay Saskatoon author.

ROB HARASYMCHUK

Dingo parents his sister and his special needs brother since the death of their parents. But in many ways this loss had happened years ago: the father had withdrawen into alcohol, the mother, depression and mental illness. His need to support his family leads him into temptation and activities outside of what is legal. What starts as a drama turns into a thriller when Dingo last heist is a farm chemicals plant. Set in Saskatchewan and Saskatoon Dingo is a good read.