Tuesday 23 July 2013

The 100 Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared



Malmköping, Strängnäs, Braås, Växjö , Vidkärr … while reading the place names in this Swedish novel, I had the feeling that I was browsing the aisles at Ikea, and though that might be reductive, Ikea is about all I know about Sweden. But when characters sat down to a meal of meatballs with lingonberries, I decided that the furniture store might actually fairly represent that country from which it comes.

In the beginning, I found The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, and especially the main character Allan Karlsson, to be charming and fun. Some quotes that struck me right:

The 100 year-old man set off in his pee slippers (so called because men of an advanced age rarely pee farther than their shoes)…

He was told that he shouldn't ask so many questions unless he wanted his ears boxed. Since Allan, like all children at all times, did not want his ears boxed, he dropped the subject.

Allan thought it sounded unnecessary for the people in the seventeenth century to kill each other. If they had only been a little patient they would all have died in the end anyway.


But I stopped marking these clever quotes eventually (the last is from page 52 of a 384 page book) because they soon started to wear on me and lost their charm. I also began to really dislike the main character and pretty much everyone around him. It's one thing for Allan to say that he has no interest in politics, but another for him to take no side in the major wars and skirmishes he's inserted into. In this age, and at my age, I have no patience for moral equivalence: I do believe there was a "right" side in the World Wars and I have no time for anyone who might argue that the 9/11 terrorists had some legitimate grievances. I could also forgive the accidental murder of the thug Bolt, but when Allan intentionally caused Bucket's death, he was no longer sympathetic.

I also grew bored of the constant insertion of Allan into major historical events, particularly because he didn't have an effect on those events. Like Chekhov's gun, I think if you put a character into recognisable historical situations, he should cause or change or somehow affect those situations. Passive observation, particularly without judgement, seemed pointless. The one exception was when Allan met with Kim Jong Il, the young second-in-command of his father, Kim Il Sung. Kim Jong Il was such a homicidal maniac in real life that I enjoyed this image: While the young Mr. Kim sat on Allan's knee, Allan talked with feeling about the bright memory of his last meeting with comrade Stalin. The mocking of the man behind the atmosphere of Escape from Camp 14 is fitting, and I just wish that Jonas Jonasson had given the same treatment to Mao and Stalin and Franco. 

By the end, I felt that The 100-Year-Old Man just fizzled out. The Detective/Prosecutor subplot pretty much collapsed under the weight of the nonsensical "suitcase full of bibles" alibi and then they all live happily ever after. Yawn.

And so while I was put in mind of Ikea when I started reading this book, and then wondered if I was stooping to cliches, I think in the end it's the perfect comparison : Reading The 100-Year-Old Man is like buying book shelves at Ikea. At first they look nice, fitting together cleverly, but the more you look at them, the more you notice the nicks and scratches that appear, and if you hang onto them too long, they will likely collapse due to poor structure and cheap materials.

I would probably give this book 2.5 stars if I could, to rank it slightly below the other books I only just liked, but since I did appreciate some of the writing and the obvious historical research that went into it, I need to round it up.



Tuesday 16 July 2013

Nikolski


I haven't actually attended a performance of Cirque du Soleil -- those tickets are crazy expensive -- but I have watched a few of their shows when they've been on TV. Totally redefining what a circus can be, the awe-inspiring athletic performances are paired with surreal costumes and makeup, strange staging and awkward-beautiful movements and singing. When I see a scene from a Cirque du Soleil show, I am usually left thinking, "That is weird. Is it art because it's weird, or is it weird because it's art?"






I was often in mind of the Cirque du Soleil while reading Nikolski, written by Nicolas Dickner, as Quebecois as the creator of the Cirque. Is it a cultural quirk of those from La Belle Province to up the artistic value of their efforts by building rigid but invisible frameworks for their creations -- whether highly trained contortionists or precisely crafted phrases -- to leap and tumble from? What seems to work for the Cirque du Soleil fell slightly flat for me in this book.


There is a wealth of clever wordplay (and I can only trust that the translator of this book was faithful to the feel of the original). 

She piles the books on the table, puts on her glasses as though she were putting on a diving suit, and plunges into her reading.
When Noah shows up, fifteen minutes later, all that can be seen of the girl are the air bubbles frothing at the surface.

And there were some obscure word choices. I loved that the cop's eyes were described as selachian (shark-like), but question the usefulness of words I don't know and don't think I'll need going forward like: metonymy ( a figure of speech used in rhetoric in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name but by the name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept) or fascicles (a bundle or a cluster). I do like to be challenged with vocabulary, but I am left wondering with some of the language in Nikolski if the translator was too literal, or if this the exact flavour the author intended.

The plot was potentially intriguing: Three young people, unknowingly related to each other, are drawn to Montreal where they cross paths and fortunes over a period of ten years. But, as it turns out, their paths and fates remain separate, and the idea of there being significance in their meetings is brushed off:

And that is exactly the trouble with inexplicable events. You inevitably end up interpreting them in terms of predestination, or magical realism, or government plots.

And so, just as I accepted the warning to not interpret greater meaning, it dawned on me that the structure of Nikolski mirrors that of the mysterious "Three-Headed Book", a unicum, that keeps poking its head above the surface:

"A unicum. A book of which there is only a single known copy in the entire world…It's made up of fragments of three books. The first third is a study on treasure hunting. The second comes from a historical treatise on the pirates of the Caribbean. The final third is taken from a biography of Alexander Selkirk, who was shipwrecked on a Pacific island…The bookbinder salvaged the wreckage of three books and sewed them together. It's a piece of craftsmanship, not a mass-printed object."

Aha, I thought. So Noah is the treasure hunter, Joyce is the pirate, and the unnamed narrator is the one shipwrecked, having never set foot off the island of Montreal. The author is signalling that there is more craftsmanship on display here than I may be aware of. I have arrived at the thrilling climax of the novel, of the circus, what death defying coup de grace will leave me dazzled and amazed? The missing map? How intriguing!

I stand there open-mouthed, contemplating the implications of this strange puzzle. Here is a discovery that clouds the issue rather than clarifying it.

Nothing is perfect.

I smile, shrug my shoulders and, after taping the map of the Caribbean into place, return the Three-Headed Book to the clearance box.

Oh, right. I'm not to suppose there's more meaning beyond the page. So is it art, or just a little weird? Nikloski is certainly well-crafted and precise, there's an air of the experimental about it, but it seemed to lack heart, and in the end, I may smile but, like the narrator, I also shrug my shoulders and contemplate the clearance box.






Saturday 13 July 2013

Little Bird of Heaven




I think that I should say bluntly This was the time in my life, I fell in love with Aaron Kruller. 
There would be a way of composing this that would allow the reader to understand She is in love with that boy. She will be so humiliated, she will make such a fool of herself, can't anyone stop her! -- a way of indirection and ellipses, not blunt statement; but I want to speak frankly, I want to say something that can't be retracted Yes I was in love with Zoe Kruller's son, the first time in my life I was in love. And there is no time like the first.
I don't know if this passage was purposefully meta-fictive, some kind of post-modern irony, but this entire novel was written in indirection and ellipses and with frustratingly few blunt statements. At its core, Little Bird of Heaven is a crime story, a murder mystery, it tells you so right at the beginning. It sets up two likely suspects, the murdered woman's estranged husband and her lover, throws in a whole cast of secondary characters -- could she have been killed by her floozy room mate? Another lover? A drug dealer? But in the end:  The floozy room mate, Jacky, makes a deathbed confession that she knew all along that Zoe had been killed by the owner of the club where she and Zoe worked. Isn't it the first rule of a murder mystery that the killer must make an appearance before the reveal? So maybe this story wasn't a classic murder mystery, perhaps it intended to be more literary than that, but if it was meant to be an exploration of the character of people affected by tragedy, by a shocking murder, then it simply fell flat for me.

I listened to an audiobook of Little Bird of Heaven and I found it so boooring and so looong (the rain that kept me from my walks might be partially to blame but this took a month to listen to). The two times that Jacky is talking to Krista are needlessly wordy -- the first meeting took over an hour to listen to, and it's 99% Jacky talking. I just wanted something to happen. And rarely does anything happen in this book; it just keeps repeating and circling back, with indirection and ellipses, and I feel robbed of the time. This is probably mostly due to the unsatisfactory resolution of the mystery; I just feel so cheated.


I remember being very affected by We Were the Mulvaneys, but this is the third JCO lemon for me in a row, and I don't think I'll be giving her another try any time soon.  





That's where my Goodreads review ends, but I had something more personal to add, so here I am. I found it interesting that the main character's name is Krista because I don't think I've seen (or heard) my own name in fiction before, but no matter how much I suffer from Magical Thinking, I really didn't think that much of it. Then I read the name Krista again this week in the last book I reviewed, Light Lifting. (In the story Adult Beginner I, Stace is goaded into diving from a hotel roof into the Detroit River. Her friend says: "Look. Even Krista's done it twice." Stace looks at her and thinks: Even Krista. Twice. And that was enough to make her take the plunge.) If I've learned anything about synchronicity from Jung and Sylvia Browne, it's when the universe keeps sending you the same bit of information, you need to sit up and pay attention. I do understand how hopelessly naïve and new-agey that sounds, but there are too many coincidences in my daily life for me to not try and find meaning in them.

And so what was I meant to pay attention to in Little Bird of Heaven? This passage made my spine tingle:
Snake-quick came Delray's backhand slap, striking his sulky faced son on the side of his head and nearly knocking him over. 
You don't talk of your mother like that, you little pisspot. You show respect or I will break your ass.
When I was maybe five, I had the brilliant idea that it would be funny to poison my little brother by putting nasal spray in his PB&J (har har). As he raised the sandwich to his mouth, however, I lost my nerve and said, "Kyler! No! It's poisoned!" He started crying and my Dad stormed into the kitchen, and when I confessed to what I had done, my Dad grabbed me by the upper arm and half-dragged, half-carried me to my room, flung me inside and said, "You can just stay in there you little pisspot." What an odd expression: I don't think I've heard anyone else say that, in real life or in fiction, so something must be linking my Dad with Delray Kruller. But what?

As I think about it, it's fascinating, actually, that my father has as much "Indian" blood as Delray (Mi'kmaq in my Dad vs Seneca in Delray), and while it's enough to identify the fictional character as a "halfbreed", regarded with suspicion in the town of Sparta, I don't ever think anyone would identify my Dad as such. I have first cousins with Status Cards, but even though Kyler once expressed interest in finding out more about our Native heritage, my Dad got mad, thinking he was just looking for a way to exploit any advantages the card might give him. A few angry words were enough to make Kyler drop it. Indeed, even if I was handled roughly a few times as a kid, it was my brothers who were more likely to get the "backhand slap".  But is my Dad really like Delray?

In Little Bird of Heaven, Delray Kruller is an auto mechanic who owns his own shop. He got the young and gorgeous Zoe pregnant, married her, and although he loved her, he couldn't stop being a drug addict and a drunk and all around abusive guy-- she leaves him and ends up murdered which leads to his own breakdown. My Dad was a mechanically inclined young guy but wanted a white collar life. He started a good job in a bank, met my young and gorgeous mother, got her pregnant, married her, and although he was certainly possessive of her, he couldn't stop being a pretty angry man. While I don't believe either of them spent their years in great happiness, my parents are still together. After 30 years rising through the ranks at a large corporation, my Dad was able to retire at 55, moving with my Mom down to Nova Scotia, into what was for the longest time the largest private home in the county. Having two alcoholic brothers (are they actually Delray?), my Dad has never been a drinker. Now that he's retired, Dad spends most of his time out in "Pop's Shop", the auto garage he built on his property (he even installed a hydraulic lift in there last year). My Mom thinks he's so happy now that maybe he should have just been a mechanic all along. 

We didn't have a lot of money when I was growing up -- my parents got married so young and had three babies in three and a half years -- and although we lived like poor people, I was always aware that my father had a white collar job and that somehow meant that we were more middle class than lower. Two strange occurrences that belie my idea that we always looked middle class:
  • We lived in a small Ontario town for seven years. During that time, my older brother became a real hard case juvenile delinquent: cutting school, smoking dope in his bedroom, eventually stealing a car at 14 and trying to drive it out to Alberta. When he was caught and sent back to us, that was the last straw for my Dad, who marched Ken to a barber to buzz cut off his long blonde hair, tossing him around pretty good when they got back home. When a Social Worker was scheduled to visit our house, Ken begged me and Kyler to exaggerate the abuse so that he could be sent to a foster home (we were not actually part of the interview and Ken wasn't removed from our home). Within about 18 months, my Dad had the chance to be transferred to Alberta, and to give Ken a fresh start more than anything else, we made the move. My Dad was sent out west first, and I was on a trip to Ireland with my best friend when my Mom locked up the house for the last time, so it was just her and my brothers when the firefighter from across the street came to say goodbye. With a big smile my Mom rolled down the window of her car and said, "Well, I guess that's it. We'll be leaving now." And this big burly man said, "The whole neighourhood is happy that trash like you is moving away." He must have felt so good as her smile twitched and faded.
  • Not long after my parents moved to Nova Scotia, my Dad, who had been working on something around the property and was dressed in blue coveralls, probably needing a shave, found himself in town and remembered that he needed to set up a new chequing account to move money around for some reason.  He went into his bank, walked up to the teller and told her he needed a new account. She frowned at him and called her manager over. After a brief chat between the two of them, the manager told my Dad that he could only open an account if he had some form of proper id. My Dad lost it -- Do you know who I am? Do you know how much of my goddamn money you're holding in this bank right now? As a matter of fact, I'm done with this bank, yada, yada. Since my Dad wore a suit and tie to work five days a week, it always looked fine to me, when I was growing up, if he dressed down to hang out in his garage on the weekends. I wonder how often he was mistaken for a homeless man?
All of this to say that I probably have some wacky misconceptions, self-delusions, about where I've come from. Ken, who is a Stationary Engineer and manages the mechanical trades at a  hospital in Toronto, commutes in a pickup truck. I've asked him why he doesn't drive a car, for the gas savings if nothing else, and he says he drives the truck because he's just a hillbilly at heart. A hillbilly? I'm not a hillbilly and we had the exact same childhood. But where do we come from? Two reasons why I will never know:
  • I remember sitting on Dad's lap when I was little and asking him, "Is it true that I'm mostly Irish?" "Yes," he replied, and then with an incredulous chuckle and a shake of his head, he added, "Not that that's anything to be proud of".
  • More than once when I was little, if I asked my Dad a question, he'd reply, "If it was any of your goddamn business, someone would have told you by now". I stopped asking questions. Dave finds it very curious that I can talk to people and never ask them any personal questions -- if there's one thing I know, it's that nothing is any of my goddamn business. Ken moved out of our house when he was 17 and I had no idea where he went. As a matter of fact, I wouldn't have known he had moved all the way to PEI if I hadn't overheard it. My brother was on the opposite end of the country and that wasn't any of my goddamn business? Apparently.
And so another spine tingling passage from Little Bird of Heaven:
Something to do with being who I am, the family I am from, don't ask anything more it's none of your God-damn business.
Every time Aaron has questions for his mother, Zoe tells her son "Why don't you ask Delray?" He didn't ever ask for the same reason I wouldn't have. But I still don't know exactly what the message is that the universe is sending me through this book.

My Dad is like Delray, but there's a lot about Eddie Diehl that's in my Dad, too. My Mom is like Zoe, but there's a lot of Lucille in her, too. As a juvenile delinquent who turns into a "citizen", Ken is like Aaron. As the person who tries to just ignore the very idea of family history, Ben the Chemical Engineer is very similar to Kyler the Civil Engineer. But as for the Kristas...the only similarity I see between the character and me is a desire to pretend that everything is all right. It was family mythology that I was my Dad's favourite, something that my Mom liked to note. Another quote:

Where there must be a choice, a girl will choose Daddy. Even if you are Mommy, you concede that this must be so: you remember when you were a girl, too.
But even I was afraid of my Dad; I was the only one who was ever a "little pisspot". But I had a role to play, and if it kept me safe, I played it. And now Ken is the only one of us he'll talk to on the phone.

There's probably more to this book that is trying to talk to me, but that's enough for now. I still don't think that Joyce Carol Oates wrote a good book here -- this is not insightful character development -- but she somehow captured scenes from my own childhood that made a very personal experience out of it for me. Am I supposed to be grateful that my Dad didn't become a drunk and drink himself to death (like his brothers both did)? Am I supposed to be glad that my Mom never left the family (like Zoe) or kicked out my father (like Lucille)? There's something here that I need to keep chewing on. (Thanks universe.)

Thursday 11 July 2013

Light Lifting



According to CTV, Light Lifting is a work of "ferocious physicality" and I think that pretty much sums it up. From the beautiful athletic forms of mid-distance runners (Miracle Mile) and lifeguards (Adult Beginner I) to the grotesque -- the baby diarrhea that soaks through a diaper from foot to neck in Wonder About Parents and the grapefruit sized hernia on the belly of the mostly naked Barney in The Loop -- people are described in unsparing terms, without judgement, their outsides often mirroring exactly who they are on the inside (no matter how JC tries to change himself in the title story, Light Lifting, there is no escaping what he appears to be). There are fights -- brawls -- and road hockey and bicycling and running and hard labour and swimming and physiotherapy and love-making; sickness and peak performance; ordinary life and the breath-taking cheating of death. However, Alexander MacLeod is also described as a writer of "ferocious intelligence", and this collection displays that as well: within every physical form simmers hope and regret and love and fear, all presented in a spare and masculine style.

The writing in Light Lifting, while at times masterful, can be a little uneven. In Adult Beginner I, for instance, Stace flashes back to a family trip to Nova Scotia where her mother insisted on teaching her to swim in the Atlantic. This passage seemed overwritten to me and took me out of the story:

The wall of water came into her vision, looming over her mother's shoulder like an old-style gangster thug sifting out of the crowd in a grey trench coat with a brim of his fedora pulled low down. He was so thick and so wide, he blocked out the sky. He shoved her mother forward headfirst into the sand before grabbing the girl and carrying her off in the opposite direction.

But then this bit redeemed the scene for me:

Timing blurred. It was impossible to keep track of the minutes and seconds. The first flash of panic gave way to a cloudy, sleepy feeling. Nothing came in or went out -- no air and no water. She felt completely full, as if all the gaps and extra spaces in her body had been made solid. She went limp and for a moment she felt like a floating thing, like a person who might really be able to move easily, and for a long time, in tune with the up and down beat of the ocean. This, she thought, this was it. Swimming. Almost right.

But then a series of sharp stinging pains came through her skull and she felt first the individual hairs, then whole clumps of her scalp being yanked out of her head. In a dizzy haze she thought she saw her father, but his glasses were gone and his sweatshirt seemed bloated and pulled strangely across his shoulders. His nose was scrunched up like something smelled very bad and he seemed angry, furious with somebody. She thought she heard her name.

"Stay with me Stacey," he said.

"Stay here. I've got you. It's going to be okay. We have you now. Stay with me."


That had my heart in my throat, and even though it's a flashback, so you know Stace had survived the near-drowning, it was the most danger-filled scene in the story for me, likely because it seemed urgent and immediate. I didn't feel the same urgency when Stace tripped on the edge of the hotel roof or when she was looking for Brad's body or even when the ship was bearing down on her. And by the way, that ending felt manipulative to me: like a line from Alanis Morissette's "Isn't It Ironic". 

Mr. Play It Safe was afraid to fly
He packed his suitcase and kissed his kids good-bye
He waited his whole damn life to take that flight
And as the plane crashed down he thought
"Well, isn't this nice."
And isn't it ironic, don't you think


I think by now the consensus is that Ms. Morissette wrote about a list of coincidental, and not very coincidental, events that most wouldn't call ironic really, so the cheats of fate that come back to haunt the characters in this book don't feel entirely truthful; can be nearly as mockable as the song. You learn to swim? Well, then here comes a ship that "advances over the water and swallows everything in its path". You run the race of your life? Well, then you can be a hero for about a half an hour. You think it's a good thing that union organizers have preserved your job at the auto plant in the face of ever increasing automation? Well, then here's a car accident that kills your wife and child, one that would have been survivable had there not been a manufacturing flaw -- human error in the installation? --  in the air bags. 

Aside from the unavoidable fate bombs, there were many declarations that I can't decide if I like. Are they profound or a little trite? Suitable for book clubs or pillow embroidery?

We have to scrounge for meaning wherever we can find it and there's no way to separate our faith from our desperation.

We are made most specifically by the things we cannot bear to do.

There are things we must allow each other that have nothing to do with kindness.


And if I can be so bold as to make one more complaint about what is actually a book I enjoyed quite a bit, I was lost during the long passage in Wonder About Parents where the dad and his brothers discuss the Pistons and their nicknames. I can usually follow along when a book is talking about a subject I'm not knowledgeable about, but this basketball talk was beyond me and I found it annoying. Okay, one more complaint: I didn't really like the telegrammic style of this story; I needed more verbs! Having said all that, though, this was my favourite story in the book. It perfectly captures the mystery at the center of traditional nuclear families: the parents were once strangers and then a couple with a full life together, and then the kids got added in later. MacLeod says it best:

We get to choose each other, but kids have no say about the nature of their lives…What are we to these people? Genetics. A story they make up about themselves.

This story was exactly what I was trying to say with this post: Dear Daughters

One thing that I really appreciated about Light Lifting was the apparent research that went into its writing. So many topics, from lice to bricklaying to the auto industry, seem written by an insider, and in a way that was relatable and interesting. The way MacLeod told the story of racing the trains through a two and a half mile tunnel under the Detroit River between the USA and Canada made me wonder if this is something he actually did as a high school kid. And that was another thing that really worked for me in this book -- I am familiar with its settings and think I'm about the same age as the author. He was born in Nova Scotia, like my own father, and I will be going there next week to visit my parents. Although I've only driven through Windsor on the way to Detroit -- and only went to Detroit for cheap flights out of its airport -- I do live in Southern Ontario, the approximate setting of most of these stories. Many details that MacLeod mentions in this book conjure specific memories for me and I started making a list: Ben Johnson, the Fisher Price circus train with the giraffe sticking its head out the roof, Wildberry Coolers, Playdough's Fuzzy Pumper Barber Shop, Riviere-du-Loup, Alexander Keith's, Marineland, film strips, the Muskokas, and Lik-M-Aid Fun Dip. I am always impressed by a Canadian author who isn't afraid to mix in details that are only relatable to other Canadians (which about half the things in that list are).

Overall, I thought the writing in Light Lifting was very good. Short stories are a tough format and MacLeod succeeded in making me care about new characters every thirty pages or so; as physical as each story read, the author never forgot to infuse the people with hearts and minds and souls.






Wednesday 10 July 2013

Assassination Vacation




Until that moment, I hadn’t realized that I embarked on the project of touring historic sites and monuments having to do with the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley right around the time my country iffily went off to war, which is to say right around the time my resentment of the current president cranked up into contempt. Not that I want the current president killed. Like that director (of the Sondheim musical Assassins), I will, for the record (and for the FBI agent assigned to read this and make sure I mean no harm – hello there), clearly state that while I am obsessed with death, I am against it.

This quote pretty much sums up the plot of Assassination Vacation (touring sites related to these three assassinations) and its tone (contempt). As a Canadian, I have no "skin in the game" when it comes to the current hyperpartisanship in the United States, but as a fairly conservative person (and by Canadian standards that's nowhere near Tea Party Republicans) the partisan attacks in this book read as churlish and unbalanced. More examples:

That's what I like to call him, "the current president." I find it difficult to say or type his name, George W. Bush. I like to call him "the current president" because it's a hopeful phrase, implying that his administration is only temporary.
Near here, on the far side of Cuba, more than six hundred prisoners of the War on Terror, a few of them child soldiers under the age of seventeen, are, by executive order, incarcerated at the U.S. base on Guantanamo Bay for who knows how long for who knows what reasons in what Human Rights Watch has called a "legal black hole".
By pulling the troops out of Dixie, the Republicans were selling out the freed slaves. Which makes the Compromise of 1877 one of the tourist attractions on the road to watching the party of Lincoln morph into the Republican Party we all know and love today.
As a Democrat who voted for Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election, an election suspiciously tipped to tragic Republican victory because of a handful of contested ballots in the state of Florida, I, for one, would never dream of complaining about the votes siphoned in that state by my fellow liberal Ralph Nader, who convinced citizens whose hopes for the country differ little from my own to vote for him, even though had those votes gone to Gore, perhaps those citizens might have spent their free time in the years to come more pleasurably pursuing leisure activities, such as researching the sacrifice of Family Garfield, instead of attending rallies and protests against wars they find objectionable, not to mention the money saved on aspirin alone considering they’ll have to pop a couple every time they read the newspaper, wondering if the tap water with which they wash down the pills is safe enough to drink considering the corporate polluter lobbyists now employed at the EPA.

That last quote is fairly representative of Sarah Vowell's humour and I think that a reader will find her funny to the extent that one agrees with her politics. I do understand the political climate at the time of this book's writing (2006) and the hopelessness Vowell felt at having her country hijacked by what she found to be a distasteful agenda, but I'm sure it's the exact same way that Republicans feel right now under President Obama (who, by the way, hasn't quite found a way to close down Guantanamo Bay yet. And don't get me started on what an environmental hypocrite the Nobel Prize and Oscar winning Al Gore has turned out to be.)

When Vowell isn't venting her spleen and sticks to her stated purpose of visiting sites and monuments related to the three selected assassinations, travelling from Alaska to the Florida Keys, she provides interesting information and paints vivid pictures of the places she visits, with an especial fondness for the period-costumed tour guides in significant homes. The overall structure, however, is pretty random and scattershot, with a fairly comprehensive section on Lincoln and much less information on Garfield and McKinley. Personally, I found it very odd that Vowell didn't include the only other assassinated president; why write about three out of four? As the New York Times book review says: Having made the commercially courageous decision to avoid the catnip that is the Kennedy name, Vowell restricts her gaze to America's first three presidential murders: those of Abraham Lincoln, Garfield and William McKinley. Was this a courageous decision, would all things Kennedy overwhelm the stories of the other presidents, or did Vowell leave out the Democrat for partisan reasons? The fact that she doesn't explain the omission is passing strange to me, but as we are following Vowell as she determines what sites would interest her next, we must allow her to set the agenda. Not all the whistlestops were equally interesting to me, and like Vowell's sister, I often mentally "stayed in the car" as she explored. I was, however, interested in the information about Robert Todd Lincoln:
Abraham Lincoln's oldest son, Robert Todd Lincoln, was in close proximity to all three murders like some kind of jinxed Zelig of doom. The young man who wept at his father's deathbed in 1865 was only a few feet away when James A. Garfield was shot in a train station in 1881. In 1901, Robert arrived in Buffalo mere moments after William McKinley fell. Robert Todd Lincoln's status as a presidential death magnet weighed on him. Late in life, when he was asked to attend some White House function, he grumbled, "If only they knew, they wouldn't want me there."
Also included was information about scandals and mismanagement Robert Todd Lincoln was involved in while he served out his own political career (unhidden spoiler/tease: cannibalism!), and Vowell even singles him out as a better target for the anarchist Leon Czolgosz, who shot McKinley. In the same vein, Edwin Booth (brother of John Wilkes) keeps making appearances: He once rescued Robert Todd Lincoln from the train tracks where he had fallen and at the moment pallbearers carried Booth's coffin from a church in New York City, the interior of the Ford Theater in Washington collapsed, killing 22 federal employees who were working in the converted office space. I liked these odd and fateful events even better than the well known coincidences that link the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations (an early exposure to these links, in LP form, started Vowell on her lifelong fascination with the subject of presidential assassination).

I liked this book less than Unfamiliar Fishes, but I didn't hate it, so I wouldn't say it warrants only two stars. It has, however, turned me off Sarah Vowell and I don't think I'll be reading her further. As a liberal-elite-atheist-memoirist, her humour and worldview isn't reaching me, and although I made the same complaint of hyperpartisanship about David Sedaris' latest book (Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls), his vignettes are redeemed by their overall atmosphere of gentleness and thoughtfulness. Assassination Vacation, to a reader like me who doesn't have a bone-deep hatred of George W. Bush and the Republican party, comes off as bitter and a little mean. I'll end with the same quote I shared from The Dinner that I linked with David Sedaris, David Rakoff, and Jon Stewart, intellectual compatriots of Sarah Vowell's who are losing their ability to amuse me, as it sums up the times for me:
The principal was probably against global warming and injustice in general. Perhaps he didn't eat the flesh of mammals and was anti-American or, in any case, anti-Bush: the latter stance gave people carte blanche not to think about anything anymore. Anyone who was against Bush had his heart in the right place and could behave like a boorish asshole toward anyone around him.
It's this assumption that a person is on the right, the smart, side of history when opposing an unloved administration that led to at least two of these three murders (Garfield's assassin was likely insane), and it's a position that I found Vowell to be too cosy with, weighing the whole book down for me.



Monday 8 July 2013

Cool Water



You can tell me that your dog ran away
Then tell me that it took three days
I've heard every joke
I've heard every one you'd say
You think there's not a lot goin' on
Look closer baby, you're so wrong
And that's why you can stay so long
Where there's not a lot goin' on



All I really know about Saskatchewan: This theme song and the show it's from, Corner Gas; one brief trip I took as a teenager to see the orchids at Cypress Hills; stories about the ranch in Eastend that's in my husband's family; and the fact that the province, with its crops and valuable natural resources, has recently become an economic powerhouse, propping up the failing manufacturing economies of Ontario and Quebec. 

Reading Cool Water is kind of like the Corner Gas theme song: You think there's not a lot going on, but you need to look closer because you'd be wrong. Recounting one day in the lives of six or so families in rural Saskatchewan, this book has no jaw-droppingly extraordinary events, no clever moral to illustrate, not even any passages of beautiful prose that I wanted to mark and save. It just putters along, visiting one and then another of the families, and then, stealthily, it worked its magic and I found myself caring about the characters -- so much so that more than one final scene with a family or couple left me in tears (not that they necessarily had sad endings, but they were emotional nonetheless).

Dianne Warren obviously loves the landscape and people of Saskatchewan and writes with truth and humour (I was charmed by everything about Antoinette the camel). As I said, I wasn't particularly impressed with any individual passage, but this book as a whole was an enjoyable experience. I feel as though Warren, in the words of Lee's adoptive parents, has given me a good map and used me well.





I should really learn more details of Dave's relatives' ranch in Eastend, the town of 400 or so people shown above, and preserve them here sometime. What I do know: Uncle Ivan returned from WWI with a dead arm. With some money he had saved and an army pension, he moved to the area of Eastend to claim a homesteading ranch. When the Great Depression hit the area, Ivan was one of the few ranchers with an outside income and he bought up sections from bankrupt farmers and ranchers, eventually amassing the 30 or 40 000 acres it is today. Still owned and ranched by the same branch of the family, in 1991 the remains of "Scotty the T Rex" was unearthed on the property, leading to the T Rex Discovery Centre being built in Eastend.


1911 Census

Ln35678910
31Topham WellingtonMHeadMAug186644
32Topham Eliza AnnFWifeMJul186545
33Topham IvanMSonSDec189416
34Topham OliveFDaughterSApr189813
35Topham KathleenFDaughterSJul19055
36Topham RoyMSonSJul191010 mon
37Mooney RussellMNephewSApr1902



In this census chart I found, Roy Topham is my mother-in-law's father. Although Roy died before my husband was born, Dave and his family visited the Eastend ranch when they went on a vacation out west in the 70s. One of Dave's most vivid memories is sitting with old Uncle Ivan, his long-dead arm placed awkwardly on his lap, as he related stories of the great war.

Western Land Grants (1870-1930)

Item Display


Legal Land Description

PartSectionTownshipRangeMeridian
NE5722W3

Reference:

Volume:
992
Folio:
461
Microfilm reel number:
C-6738
Names:
Ivan S Topham
Letters Patent: