Book Buzz

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.

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.

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.

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.

DAVID LESTER

Quite an amazing graphic novel, The Listener intertwines the story of a Canadian artist, Louise, haunted by the death of a man called to action and protest by her sculpture and the story of Hitler’s rise to power which led to the second world war. Louise does a tour of Europe trying to comprehend what has happened in her life and to her art. Among the most important people that Louise meets is an elderly couple named Marie and Rudolph. They tell her a little-known tale of an election in the small German state of Lippe (only about 100,000 inhabitants) in January of 1933. At the time, while the Nazis were the largest political party in Germany, being the largest party in a plurality does not necessarily mean much if you can’t do anything with your power. While they remained the largest party, the Nazis had begun to lose seats and their momentum was beginning to wane (and as you all know, a large part of Hitler’s power was harnessing forward momentum). So when Lippe held a parliamentary election in 1933, the Nazis through everything they had into winning the election to keep up their momentum. Marie and Rudolph tell the story of the underhanded spin-doctoring that was used to secure that election for Hitler and therefore solidifying their power in Germany.

Great and quick read.

CAROLINE ADDERSON

In some ways 1983 seems late for peace and anti-nuclear activism; we tend to think of protests being in the late 60′s and early 70′s, Vietnam War era. Falling is about a group of young people in 1984 who were peace activists protesting nuclear proliferation. Its several years before the end of the cold war. The narrator Jane meets this group of activists when she takes a room in their shared accommodation house in Kitsilano, Vancouver. Despite the fact that they are aiming for peace they fight amongst themselves and treat each other quite callously. This story rang true for me for at this time my sister was living with an anti-nuke peace activist. He was an artist and would paint pictures of famous places such as Disneyland and the Egyptian pyramids with nuclear bombs exploding. He was an asshole just like one of the characters in the novel.

A good read.

WES FUNK

Baggage is a novel of a mennonite teen, Sam, moving into the city, Saskatoon, from his parents rather strict farm: no TV, but radio and lots of chores and church. After a few weeks of cooking school he gets a job at Vi’s, good home cooked food, nothing fancy. He works under Slash the middle age, gruff, pot bellied cook who slips out for a smoke when ever he has a chance. A couple of sisters do the majority of the waiting. Soon Slash is picking up Sam on his way to work as they become good friends and eventually more.

Baggage is a light read; highly unrealistic. But it is a feel good book of people taking care of each other, trying to build relationships and community. Good for when you want a trashy read.

DAVID ADAMS RICHARDS

The choices, actions and decision people make reverberate far further than we could imagine then return to haunt us. Michael Skid skid comes from a well to do family in a New Brunswick town. His father is a judge. A misunderstanding separates him from his childhood friend Tommie Donnerel, so Skid chooses to spend the summer slumming being a hippy, doing drugs, drinking shine and seducing a naive young girl. He and his friends fall prey to the charismatic criminal Everette Hutch. They have some fun but of course things go wrong and people have to pay and not alway the right people. The entire community is effected. Richards writes well; it is a great read.

TERRY FALLIS

A burnt-out political aide quits just before an election — but is forced to run a hopeless campaign on the way out. The seat is that of the very popular fiance minister who is a shoe in. The point is to field a candidate even if he is sure to loose.  He makes a deal with a crusty old Scot, Angus McLintock — an engineering professor who will do anything, anything, to avoid teaching English to engineers — to let his name stand in the election. No need to campaign, certain to lose.

A great political satire of Canadian politics.

EMMA DONOGHUE

A must read! It isn’t a perfect novel. In many ways the narrator seemed older than five. I’m not adding any plot details. I wish that I had come to this book not knowing what was happening. Go get the book now.

MICHAEL TURNER

The Canadian Michael Turner has a knack for titles. Just as children’s books with the word “chocolate” in the title sell unusually well, Turner’s three novels seduce you with their promise of grown-up delights: alcohol, debauchery, sex. Hard Core Logo , his experimental novel about a punk band of the same name, is now a movie, a radio play and a comic book; American Whiskey Bar was picked up for television; and now The Pornographer’s Poem has won him huge critical acclaim and an award in British Columbia.

Happily, the book justifies its hype: it’s more generous with the porn than with the poems. Turner himself has called it “The Catcher in the Rye with a strap-on”, and the Salinger bit is important, for the novel is at heart a coming-of-age story. It is 1978 and the nameless narrator is 16 when an unorthodox teacher introduces him to the techniques of Super-8 film. Disillusioned and frustrated by what he sees as almost universal hypocrisy, our boy keeps only one of his projects: a blurry home movie of his swinging neighbours having sex with their dog. The short is a hit on the Vancouver underground scene and he drifts into semiprofessional porn.

We’re given the pornographer’s story as he tells it, complete with exaggerations, half-truths and justifications. Turner’s hero will not tolerate hypocrisy, in himself or in others, yet he does things our society considers morally unjustifiable: underage porn, hard drugs, abandoning friends. How would such a man justify himself? This is the fascinating riddle that weaves in and out of the narrative. Turner sets up a vague authority figure to interrogate the narrator about his misspent life; there’s no process of judgment, just questions and statements. It is up to us, and our prejudices, to work out whether this is a life worth living.

The novel is pornographic in more ways than one. The erotic scenes are offered up to us without passion: we watch from a distance, as though through a camera lens. When The Pornographer’s Poem is made into a film – as it almost certainly will be – it will be closer to that other unrelenting portrait of 1970s suburban sleaze, The Ice Storm, than to Boogie Nights. Like both films, though, it has its moments of humour. Turner has an especially good time with the narrator’s early adolescence, when sex is still an escape, an exploration – something to be marvelled at.

A masturbatory photo found in a neighbour’s drawer provides a brilliant passage on the feelings of a child forced to acknowledge and accommodate the fact of sexuality. “I remember the moment so well,” recalls the narrator, “if only because of the way the photo seemed to animate that garbage, how each item – the Vaseline, the beer sausage, the tissues, the magazines – came to life, leapt from the page, how they danced about my neighbour like something from Fantasia.” Disturbing, but, like the rest of this excellent novel, somehow disturbingly true.

This review borrowed from The Guardian, Saturday 2 December 2000.

NICOLAS DICKNER

Apocalypse is a novel of obsession. Hope believed that the world would come to an end of 07 17 2001. Her entire family believes that the world is coming to an end soon but they all have individual dates for their personal apocalypse. When the date finally comes and the world doesn’t end, the Randall family member slowly loses control and goes mad. We see Hope’s mother’s madness a the beginning of the novel. Hope writes her date everywhere, on pieces of paper, on binders, everywhere. It is an obsession. Hopes best friend Mickey supports her through her mother’s bizarre behavior. Eventually Hope’s obsession with her date takes her to Japan in search of a mysterious author who she believe can help her.

A fine read but not as good as his first novel Nikolski.

CAMILLA GIBB

Maggie Ly was born in Vietnam but raised in the United States. Maggie and her mother were able to get out of the country at the end of the American war. Her father planned to follow but that never happened. Maggie came to Vietnam to find someone who knew her father, an artist. He went through re-education because of his political beliefs, including the fictional Beauty of Humanity Movement. Maggie. Her search takes her to a pho seller may have known her father, and so she ends up visiting Hung’s pho cart, hoping to discover something about her father. Hung prepares his pho with loving conscientiousness. He sells the soup to customers but feeds the poor people who live around him.

The oppression of the Communist rule comes through clearly which is shown by the difference between how Hung has lived and how his adoptive family, especially 22-year-old Tu, lives after capitalism takes over the country. Tu is a math whiz who “has made the depressing discovery that loving math was a very different thing from loving teaching it.” So he quits his job and becomes a guide in the new world of Vietnam, hoping to profit from the tourism industry along with his friend Phuong, a former music teacher who has dreams of winning Vietnam Idol. The Vietnamese may have fought the Americans, but the young Vietnamese appear to revere all things American, in particular popular culture.

This book shows us what humanity should be with love, acceptance, respect, no matter if you are related by blood or by your heart. An excellent read.

BILLIE LIVINGSTON

Going Down Swinging is a novel of despair. It is seen through the eyes of Eilleen Hoffman, her seven-year-old daughter Grace, and indirectly, Grace’s teenage sister, Charlie. Eilleen was an elementary school teacher but is on the road to rock bottom. There are times when she can pull herself out of the morass of alcoholism through AA meetings. But when she falls of the wagon she lands hard. She even prostitutes herself for extra money. She puts her young daughter Grace at risk by bringing home unknown men. And of course Child Protection and Welfare are involved.

The writing is uneven but it is still worth the read.

AMY McKAY

Dora Rare is an exceptional young woman, descendant of a Scottish woman shipwrecked on the Bay of Fundy and a Mi’kMaq man named Silent Rare. At 17 Dora is chosen to be an apprentice and successor to the local midwife, Miss Babineau, an old Acadian woman widely viewed as a witch. It is a time when the doctors are trying to take control of the birthing process. The Birth House is set during the historical backdrop of WWI when most of the young men were going off to fight a war in trenches,  the Spanish Influenza of 1918, the Halifax Explosion during the war , and the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919. My mom was born in 1917 in rural Saskatchewan. Durning the flu she was sent home to die; the doctor said there was nothing more that he could do for her. Her older brother kept her alive, all the rest of the family was deathly sick. I’m not sure if any children died but eight survived. My father born two years later, 1919, in a different part of rural Saskatchewan was born in a hospital.

This isn’t the best book on midwifery that I’ve ever read but it is well worth the read. I like the old fashion way it is written with correspondence part of the story. Well worth a read.

The Birth House is a Canada Reads Book for 2010.

SARA GRUEN

Isabel Duncan is a researcher at the Great Ape Language Lab. Isabel is the teacher, caregiver and friend to a troop of talking bonobos, who live with her in the “lab,” expanding their vocabularies while ordering in lattes through the lab assistant, the tattooed and punky Celia. Bonobos are often mistaken for chimpanzees. Isabel’s fiance Peter is head of the department. There are always a few animal rights protesters outside the lab waving signs and protesting. All very peaceful until the day the lab was blown up and the bonobos were released into the wild of the university campus. Unfortunately Isabel was still in the building. She was covered by a door or her injuries would have been compounded by sever burns.

I don’t want to tell too much more than this other than this is a must read. As was Gruen’s last book Water for Elephants.

KAREN CONNELLY

Connelly writes with an honesty that is refreshing. She writes about meeting with dissidents and protesters in Rangoon while researching for her novel, The Lizard Cage. The Lizard Cage is a powerful book written about the military  juanta and how the people are being abused by their own government. Lessons lacks the power of her fiction because it is swamped with too much detail and repetition. The book (460 pages) would have been better if a third of the book had been edited out. Writing needs to be concise. She does a particularly good job of describing life in refuge camps.

It is worth reading but needs skimming.

EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL

Ultimately Montreal is a book about abandonment and obsession. Lilia is “kidnapped” or “abducted” by her father from her home in Montreal with her mother and her older half-brother by her father. They race across the boarder and spend the next several years continually on the move crisscrossing the US. Christopher, a PI, is hired to find them and becomes so obsessed he abandons his own daughter, Michaela. But as a young adult Lilia does not know how to settle down in one place; unable to commit to anyone or anything she is always leaving. Her lover, Eli, refuses to let her go and follows her from New York to Montreal.

Montreal is beautifully written, slowly weaving the tapestry of Lilia’s story. Worth the read.

ROBERT WARD

Both travelogue and spiritual study, Virgin Trails tells of Ward’s visits to several sites of Mother Mary devotion in Europe. Ward writes well accounting the history of various sites, the history of pilgrimages and stories of other pilgrims. There are many miracles afforded the Virgin Mary at many of the shrines.  Wards focus is that they relate to a persistent faith in the idea of mercy and the very real and ancient human need to believe in the possibility that there is a greater kindness out there somewhere. But not all apparitions were the same. Bernadette at Lourdes came away with the message of mercy and love. But the children at Fatima in Spain received a message of intense pray so that their sins could be forgiven. At one point they tied rope around their arms that caused excruciating pain. Mary did tell them to remove the rope at night.

I found the first part of the book most interesting but the second half describing his pilgrimage to drag. But I was most happy to have read the book. But the editor did a poor job. There were picture but on thumbnail size so it was difficult to see what was in the photo. The book would have been much better with appropriately sized illustrations.