So I’m not recounting things because they happened to me; I’m trying to make a work of art the way a novelist would or a poet would. I’m trying to assemble a machine that the reader puts the penny of his or her attention into and pulls the handle and gets out a feeling.
I'm glad that I listened to the audiobook of Lit because it was read by Mary Karr herself and her slight Texas twang gave a sardonic edge to the more self-effacing bits; and as anyone would think, someone who survives this harrowing childhood and overcomes this alcoholism and resolves an adult relationship with this mother would likely need some complicated coping mechanisms, including wit and irony. Hers is a eventful and rich story (especially impressive since this is her third memoir) and listening to her tell the tale felt intimate and maybe (hopefully) not too voyeurish.
On the other hand, if, as that quote I found indicates, her intent was to make me feel, I don't know if this book is 100% successful-- it left me a little empty, despite the interesting story told by a successful poet and professor of English. I respect that she fought for sobriety, and I understand that that is hard work that she had to do by herself for herself, but I don't understand how she became so especially favoured by the God she refused to believe in: every time she was broke or unhappy or unfulfilled, someone would advise Mary to get on her knees and pray, and repeatedly, a royalty cheque would come in the mail, or a fellowship would be offered out of the blue, or an acquaintance would randomly offer what she was looking for. I don't resent her experiences with what she refers to as grace, but the world is full of people more desperate who can't seem to pray their way out of their problems.
After finishing Lit, I was surprised by some of the things I discovered about Mary Karr-- she's considered to be a very successful and respected poet, lecturer and teacher, and yet in the book she seems to be always just on the edge of respectability and solvency, that one royalty cheque away from losing the home she's trying to provide for her son as a single mother. Also, it seems to be a poorly kept secret that the "David" she dates in the book is David Foster Wallace, and although I understand why a person wouldn't necessarily want to be name-dropping the famous person she dated, I would have had a slightly different understanding of the narrative had I known that at the time. In Lit, she describes a marriage in which her teetotalling husband is oblivious to her alcoholism, and yet it's easy enough to find some of his essays in which he writes about his own lifelong alcoholism. Was this change made to protect Mary's ex-husband's privacy? Shouldn't it make me wonder what other parts are sanitized or otherwise "improved" upon?
Here's an excerpt from an interview about Lit and the nature of memoir:
SFP: You write in the prologue to Lit, a letter to your son, that you’re telling your own story in the hopes that one day he’ll be able to tell his own. Do think that’s one of the projects of memoir, for the narrator to claim his or her story?
MK: No, I think it’s one of the projects of becoming a grown-up. And, in fact, I think you have to be a grown-up before you can write a memoir—otherwise, put a cork in it, and don’t waste my time. You have to be a grown-up to be able to ruthlessly examine what happened. I wrote this book three times—and that’s multiple drafts each time. I wrote it the first time to remember what happened. I wrote it the second time to get some psychological perspective. Each one of those times took years. And then the third time, I was doing some work on the religious stuff and what I call lapidary work, just trying to make the sentences good. You look at the sentences in it, and if it says, “I went to the store,” you think, That’s a pretty tedious sentence. How can that be better? “My mother drove me to college.” No, My mother’s car moved like a Monopoly icon through fields of Iowa corn. That’s just a better sentence. I got that from reading Isaac Babel. He has some amazing sentences. I have a voice that I know how to do, that has certain qualities of syntax and diction that I’ve cultivated over years. This book is not in the same voice as The Liars Club and Cherry, but it’s akin to it, you can tell it’s the same person. If it seemed like a totally different person it would be weird.
So, was this memoir overwritten? Does three versions, over many years, lead to a more artful experience? Could it have stifled feeling with form? I'm not certain: as much as I recognise how well written Lit is, I'm not sharing in the presence of grace.
Since I cried and snuffled my way through February, I was really looking forward to reading Alligator, and perhaps I was expecting too much, especially since this book was Lisa Moore's first novel. I didn't find the multiple first person narratives and time jumping particularly confusing (which seems to be the chief complaint from other readers), in fact the time shifting in February and Open was a definite stylistic point in their favour, but here the complicated structure came off as masking more sizzle than steak.
Even in this early work, Moore writes some lovely bits I enjoyed rereading, such as:
The anticipation of the hurling mass of the next wave, which is cold and mounting triumphantly and about crotch high, is huge, and if this wave hits her she's getting all the way in. Like the world exhaling. A hammering home of the truth. A refusal to be a wave any longer. The wave accepts the absurdity of being a wave, but also recognises the beach for what it is: a reckoning. Who said it would go on forever.
Nobody said.
They said quite the opposite.
There is no cold on earth as unequivocal as this wave that is higher than her head and about to smash itself against her skull. It is as cold as cold can be. Because how can matter be so blasted with sunlight, so sparkle-riven, and curve with such blood lust and be so soul numbing? A wave is the bone around the marrow of light.
"A wave is the bone around the marrow of light." That took some figuring out, but I enjoyed rolling it on my tongue. I think what's nagging at me is the bleakness of everyone's situation in this book, that everyone will eventually be hit by the bone around the marrow of light, be attacked by the alligator that is lurking for each of us. And in the imagery, this notion felt a little heavy-handed. Did anyone not lose at least one parent at some point?
Illustrative of this:
She had come to think of life not as a progression of days full of minor dramas, some tragedies, small joys, and carefully won accomplishments, as she figures most people think of life -- but rather a stillness that would occasionally be interrupted by blasts of chaos.
And more so:
The water was deep and I screamed and I could feel weeds clinging to my jeans and he hauled the boat in and I tried to get onto the little island of mud he was on but the land kept giving way under me and he jumped onto the boat and I saw an alligator slide off the shore.
I had not seen it before and then I saw it. I thought I saw it. A shape that sank almost below the surface, just the ridge of its back visible, gliding quickly toward me. It moved with the same slow-fastness that things in dreams move with, it dipped under the surface but the wake, a soft V in the water, plaiting itself behind some invisible thing coming my way.
And then he had me in the boat. He reached over the side and hauled me up, which, how he lifted me I don't know. I lost a shoe and he was screaming how stupid I was how crazy and stupid and he stopped and he got me a blanket and he was crying with his face all screwed up with rage, tears rolling down his cheeks, and then he just stood over me patting the blanket and he stared for thirty seconds or so and I said his name and he didn't hear me and then he started shouting at me again. How stupid I was.
I said but there weren't any alligators around. There weren't any around, I screamed back at him and I was crying too, and when I said that there weren't any alligators around, there was a whack against the side of the boat.
Ah, so the teenage girl has been behaving recklessly because, due to her youth and protective upbringing, she didn't yet realise that the alligators are always lurking? It's a small complaint, no doubt compounded by my big expectations, and I will gladly read anything Lisa Moore comes up with next.
This is really more like 3.5 stars for me, but I suppose it does belong a notch above my other 3 star ratings, so it will have to be a 4. After reading and loving The Stone Angel, I decided to try and read all of the Manawaka Series of books and, although The Diviners is the last in the series, it was the next I was able to get, so it was the next I read. I think that it is mainly in comparison to The Stone Angel that this book left me a little cold.
I've been trying to figure out why I wasn't as impressed by this book, especially since it has a feeling of the epic, of a long and complicated journey, and I think in the end my complaint is that I didn't connect to the narrative on a personal or deeper level. This is especially odd since the character of Morag Gunn is a novelist and spends time explaining the complicated craft of writing literature, of trying to write a story on more than one level, so there must be something here I'm just not getting, because I'm certain the author took pains to put it in. I don't know much of Margaret Laurence's personal history, but even the author blurb shows that she has inserted much of her personal history into the character of Morag: born in a prairie town; orphaned young; wrote for the local newspaper; escaped to the University of Winnipeg; got married; moved away (Morag to Toronto, Laurence to Africa); got divorced; moved to the west coast; finally settled on a small farm in rural Ontario; enjoying success as an author along the way. Every time Morag mirrored what I knew about Margaret Laurence's history, I felt a bit taken out of the story, as though I had seen a little flag that said: these parts are true.
As writing a novel is a bit of alchemy I don't really understand, I liked these self-reflective bits on the process:
I used to think that words could do anything. Magic. Sorcery. Even miracle. But no, only occasionally.
And:
Probably no one could catch the river's colour, even with paints, much less words. A daft profession. Wordsmith. Liar, more likely. Weaving fabrications. Yet, with typical ambiguity, convinced that fiction was truer than fact. Or that fact was in fact fiction.
I also liked the introspective bits about who we are and what little we show of our true selves. It's true that we can no more imagine, or really want to know, the inner-workings of anyone else's mind, any more than we can help being shocked by seeing a teacher at the grocery store when we're little kids:
Whatever is happening to Pique is not what I think is happening, whatever that may be. What happened to me wasn't what anyone else thought was happening, and maybe not even what I thought was happening at the time. A popular misconception is that we can't change the past - everyone is constantly changing their own past, recalling it, revising it. What really happened? A meaningless question. But one I keep trying to answer, knowing there is no answer.
And:
The hurts unwittingly inflicted upon Pique by her mother, by circumstances - Morag had agonised over these often enough, almost as though, if she imagined them sufficiently, they would prove to have been unreal after all. But they were not unreal. Yet Pique was not assigning any blame - that was not what it was all about. And Pique's journey, although at this point it may feel to her unique, was not unique. Morag reached out and took Pique's hand, holding it lightly.
And I like this bit because not only did I also for some reason switch from calling my mother "Mum" to "Ma" when I was teen, but so has one of my own girls. Like my own Ma, I find it more amusing than distancing:
This Ma bit is new. It is as though Pique, at fifteen, has now decided that Mum sounds too childish and Mother possibly, too formal. The word in some way is a proclamation of independence, a statement of the fact that the distance between them, in terms of equality, is diminishing, and the relationship must soon become that of two adults. On balance, Morag is glad. But it will take some inner adjustment.
I liked the bits where Margaret Laurence references Susannah Moodie and Roughing It In The Bush because it's good to get the references. I still don't know if it makes me want to read the books of Moodie's sister, Catherine Parr Traill, though.
I appreciated how The Diviners took ideas from The Stone Angel full circle-- especially how it was discovered that the plaid pin from John Shipley was traded to Lazarus Tonnerre for a knife, then traded to Christie Logan for a pack of cigarettes, the knife given to Morag. Knowing that Pique would eventually be in possession of both the pin and the knife closes the circle on all of the families, uniting the Scots with the Métis and mocking the last of the small town's prejudices. I can also imagine how brave it was for Laurence to write about a strong woman who decided to have a baby without a husband, at a time when even the maternity nurses in the hospital told her she was lucky to be allowed to have her baby there. I understand Margaret Laurence received death threats over this fact and I salute her grit and honesty for writing it. Perhaps it was the experience of watching someone fighting a battle long won that prevented me from becoming fully invested. Perhaps, like old Royland, I had simply lost the powers to divine on this one.
Mr. Troy has chosen a bad day to call. The rib pain is not so intrusive this afternoon, but my belly growls and snarls like a separate beast. My bowels are locked today. I am Job in reverse, and neither cascara nor syrup of figs nor milk of magnesia will prevail against my unspeakable affliction. I sit uncomfortably. I am bloated, full, weighted down, and I fear I may pass wind.
I remember my mother telling me, with great delight, that my younger brother was reading The Stone Angel in high school and that he was disgusted by all of the references to the old woman's bowels. I suppose I joined in on the laugh at the time, since it was always good fun in our home to laugh at the things that made my humourless little brother uncomfortable. I know I didn't study this book in school, and although I thought I had read it before now, the only thing that stuck out in my memory as I devoured it this time is poor old Hagar's bowels. And this time, I am left feeling protective of the old woman, insisting that she not be an object of disgust or pity or ridicule.
This book is remarkable, not least of all because the main character is just so unlikeable. Ruled by pride passed down from her Scotsman father, Hagar (Currie) Shipley withholds the little kindnesses throughout her life that could have smoothed the way both for herself and for the family that she keeps at arm's length, leading to disasters of varying degrees. At the end of her life, she realises too late what this pride had wrought: Pride was my wilderness and the demon that lead me there was fear. After a visiting pastor sings the old hymn that Hagar has impulsively (perhaps mischievously) asked of him, she has a further insight. As he sings of rejoicing, Hagar is overwhelmed with tears and thinks: I would have wished it. This knowing comes upon me so forcefully, so shatteringly, and with such a bitterness as I have never felt before. I must always, always, have wanted that -- simply to rejoice. How is it I never could? I know, I know. How long have I known? Or have I always known, in some far crevice of my heart, some cave too deeply buried, too concealed? Every good joy I might have held, in my man or any child of mine or even in the plain light of morning, of walking the earth, all were forced to a standstill by some break of proper appearances -- oh, proper to whom? When did I ever speak my heart’s truth? Even so, this is not a redemptive deathbed epiphany; Hagar is not remorseful about the kind words that she has withheld, but full of regrets that she had not allowed herself to feel joy.
This book is also remarkable for the gorgeous prose, and though it was written in 1964, it feels fresh and modern. A favourite passage, while Hagar is on the lam:
If I cry out, who will hear me? Unless there is another in this house, no one. Some gill-netter passing the point might catch an echo, perhaps, and wonder if he'd imagined it or if it could be the plaintive voices of the drowned, calling through brown kelp that's stopped their mouths, in the deep and barnacled places where their green hair ripples out and snags on the green deep rocks. Now I could fancy myself there among them, tiaraed with starfish thorny and purple, braceleted with shells linked on limp chains of weed, waiting until my encumbrance of flesh floated clean away and I was free and skeletal and could journey with tides and fishes.
It beckons a second only. Then I'm scared out of my wits, nearly. Stupid old woman, Hagar, baggage, bulk, chambered nautilus are you? Shut up.
In Survival A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, Margaret Atwood quotes the following as the moment that Hagar transcends the CanLit tradition of characters as victims:
I lie here and try to recall something truly free that I've done in ninety years. I can think of only two acts that might be so, both recent. One was a joke - yet a joke only as all victories are, the paraphernalia being unequal to the event's reach. The other was a lie - yet not a lie, for it was spoken at least and at last with what may perhaps be a kind of love.
I found it interesting that what appear to be acts of freewill in the novel, marrying Bram and then leaving him or running away to Shadow Point, must in Hagar's evaluation have been forced upon her by her pride. At the end of her life, Hagar finally overcomes the victimhood that pride has forced onto her, and through the joke and the lie, finally acts in the best interest of others.
Speaking of Hagar for the last time, is her son Marvin:
"She's a holy terror," he says.
Listening, I feel like it is more than I could now reasonably have expected out of life, for he has spoken with such anger and such tenderness.
When I think of Hagar, and her blocked bowels and her lack of joy and her failing memory and her nightly incontinence and her miserable treatment of the long-suffering daughter-in-law, Doris, it is entirely possible to think of her with a blend of anger and tenderness. Having read some negative reviews of this masterpiece, I need to wonder at the inclusion the The Stone Angel on high school reading lists; perhaps readers need to be a little more connected with the failings of the body and the mind before they can appreciate the honesty of this book; perhaps it takes some degree of life experience to appreciate that you can like a book without liking the people in it.
How it irks me to have to take her hand, allow her to pull my dress over my head, undo my corsets and strip them off me, and have her see my blue veined swollen flesh and the hairy triangle that still proclaims with lunatic insistence a non-existent womanhood.
Of course my little brother was embarrassed to have read that in high school, and somehow, I am embarrassed on Hagar's behalf that those lines can be read unsympathetically by anyone.
I don't remember the sinking of the Ocean Ranger off Newfoundland in 1982, but I was only 14 at the time (such a self-involved age) and living through the most grief-producing event of my own life-- my parents had decided to tear us from our friends and familiar setting (seven years since we had been schlepped from New Brunswick to Ontario) and displace the family to Alberta, and although my father didn't work in oil, he was chasing the good times of the oil boom that brought so many Maritimers out to the West back then. I had, just the year before, gone on a band exchange with a girl from St. John's, and she and her family were warm and funny and generous people. They didn't seem to have that much, but as they drove me around, proudly showing off the city that they loved, it was apparent that they had everything that mattered. With this frame of reference, I should really have been more aware of this real life disaster, and it may have been within this frame of reference that I found myself sobbing, barely able to read the words through the tears, at several points as I read this book.
Although you know pretty much right away that Helen loses her husband Cal in the disaster, when this scene happens, I could barely get through it:
Somehow Helen had picked up on the idea that there was such a thing as love, and she had invested fully in it. She had summoned everything she was, every little tiny scrap of herself, and she'd handed it over to Cal and said: This is yours.
She said, Here's a gift for you, buddy.
Helen didn't say, Be careful with it, because she knew Cal would be careful. She was twenty and you could say she didn't know any better. That's what she says herself: I didn't know any better.
But that was the way it had to be. She could not hold back. She wasn't that kind of person; there was no holding back
Somewhere Helen had picked up the idea that love was this: You gave everything. It wasn't just dumb luck that Cal knew what the gift was worth; that's why she gave it to him in the first place. She could tell he was the kind of guy who would.
Her father-in-law, Dave O'Mara, had identified Cal's body. He told her this over the phone.
I wanted to catch you, he said. Helen had known there wasn't any hope. But she felt faint when she heard Dave O'Mara's voice. She had to hold on to the kitchen counter. She didn't faint because she had the children in the house and the bath was running.
It gave me a turn, her father-in-law said. I'll tell you that much.
There were long stretches in the phone call where neither of them said anything. Dave O'Mara wasn't speaking because he didn't know he wasn't speaking. He could see before him whatever he'd seen when he looked at his dead son, and he thought he was telling her all of that. But he was in his own kitchen staring silently at the floor.
…
Helen lost her peripheral vision. She could see a spot about the size of a dime in a field of black. She tried to focus on the surface of the kitchen table. It was a varnished pine table they’d bought at a yard sale, and in that little circle she could see the grain of wood and a glare of overhead light. She had willed the spot to open wider so she could take in the bowl with the apples and the side of the fridge and the linoleum, and then the window and the garden. Her scalp was tingling and a drip of sweat ran from her hairline down her temple. Her face was damp with sweat as if she’d been running.
…
Helen was in a panic as if something very bad was going to happen, but it had already happened. It was hard to take in that it had already happened. Why was she in a panic? It was as if she had split in half. Something bad was going to happen to her; and then there was the other her, the one who knew it had already happened. It was a mounting and useless panic and she did not want to faint. But she was being flooded with the truth. It wasn't going to happen; it had already happened.
You don't want to see him, Dave said.
…
Dave kept talking and didn't know he was talking, but it was also an effort to talk; Helen could tell. Dave sucked in air through his teeth the way someone does when he is lifting something heavy. He kept saying the same things. He kept saying about holding Cal's hand. Not to worry about the ring. She would get the ring, he'd make sure. That Cal's glasses were in his pocket. That Cal had on a plaid flannel shirt. The receiver felt sweaty and it was dark early in the afternoon because it was February, and it would be dark for a long time. It was silent out in the dark except for the wind knocking the tree branches together.
I wish I had the time to copy out every scene referring to Helen's loss, because they were touching and brutal and beautiful and relentless-- I think relentless is the most appropriate adjective because, although I have never suffered this kind of a loss, I can imagine that it is the unrelenting nature of grief that most debilitates a person; the moments when you have forgotten to remember that central loss, some rare moment of peace, when suddenly, wham, it all comes flooding back, fresh and horrifying, and conveying that experience is what Lisa Moore achieves in February.
In addition to the story, the themes, that overwhelmed me while reading this book, I was also astounded by the craftsmanship of the writing. The beautiful turns of phrase, the nimble interspersing of present and past, even the use of colons and semi-colons made me stop and marvel at their inclusion-- making me wonder if they were used in specific places simply to make me go back to parse why they had been placed in exactly the place they sat, rereading key phrases, as though the author knew she would be forcing me to pay closer attention. I was also stunned by several small scenes that so perfectly described a mundane type experience that I had to reread them, just to see how Moore had achieved such simple perfection. An example of what I mean:
The one woman at the table full of men, her mouth full, raises her escargot prong, a wet grey slug hanging from the end. She has slug in her mouth and her lips are glossy with slug juice. John is surprised to find this erotic. Butter. It is garlic butter that makes the woman's chin greasy, and she is trying to get the men to shut up…
Butter and the sweat of a boiled organism, all muscle. John tries to think of a muscle in the human body that is the same size as a slug. Natalie is bobbing in her seat and waving the little fork. The men wait. One by one, they fall into an agitated silence…
Natalie Bateman puts her fingers over her mouth and chews and chews and rolls her eyes comically because this is a table of men held up by a miniature fork. Her eyes water and she takes a gulp of champagne and John sees she is beautiful…He watches her wrinkle her nose when she drinks from the champagne glass.
More personally, as the mother of girls, I could identify with the following passage, and am encouraged that I will survive the natural loss of them from my everyday life:
The girls left hair on the sink and in the drain, and they shaved their legs and left a ring of grey scum around the bathtub, and they talked on the phone, and the parties they threw, the cold smell of cigarette smoke in the morning and beer and all the windows open, the freezing air coming in.
And they fought with each other, her girls; they bickered. A hairbrush hit the wall, someone borrowed someone's something or other without asking. Where's my new sweater? She took my sweater.
But just let someone outside the family make a disparaging remark. Just let some outsider say something about one or the other of the girls and see how they flew together, to defend. They took care of one another. there was the worry of them driving with drunk boys, the worry of illness or no date for the prom, or they wanted expensive things for Christmas or their birthdays, or there was some injustice with a teacher, some threat of expulsion, or they wanted a job or someone wanted to marry them. And then, without warning, they were gone. They had all grown into their own lives, and it was very quiet. Helen had thought she would have to claw her way out of that quiet, and then, very soon after, she was grateful for it.
Having just read Survival A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, and attempting to evaluate February through its lens, I would have to admit that it seems to fall into Atwood's critique of CanLit's Victim motifs. As Atwood says in her book: What happens in Canadian literature when boy meets girl? And what sort of boy, and what sort of girl? If you've got this far, you may predict that when boy meets girl she gets cancer and he gets hit by a meteorite. Indeed, on Cal and Helen's wedding night, the mirror in their hotel room shatters, seemingly from a simple glance from Cal. It buckled, or it bucked, or it curled like a wave and splashed onto the carpet and froze there into hard, jagged pieces. It happened so fast that Cal walked over the glass in his bare feet before he knew what he was doing, and he was not cut. It was not that the breaking mirror had brought them bad luck. Helen didn't believe that. But all the bad luck to come was in Cal's glance, and when he looked at the mirror the bad luck busted out. I will assume Lisa Moore is more familiar with Margaret Atwood's work than I am-- is it significant/coincidence that Helen and Cal meet in 1972, the same year Survival is released?
This is my first 5 star book of 2013, and it earns every stellated point of it. A work of perfection, not least of all, because it made me feel.
As a final note, how strange that Cal and Helen have a Nova Scotia Duck Toller, the uncommon dog breed that my family had when I was little; the dog that was so hyper he was given away to a farm; the dog that ran away from the farm and found his way back to us in St. John; the dog that later became sick, and my Dad and his friend Clifford took that dog into the woods to shoot him, which, in the end, my Dad had to oblige his friend to do. Why was I told all of this (at 6 or 7) as though it was a touching story about my Dad? There's something more to this, and after some simmering, and some degree of Magical Thinking, I found more parallels: Like Cal and Helen, my parents had a shotgun wedding, and coincidentally, my parents were married on Bell Island, the obscure lump in the hazy distance that Helen spies through her binoculars from the kitchen window of their "summer home around the bay". Like with Cal and Helen's kids, I have been told that my brothers and I were all failures of birth control, haha. And then the differences: while Cal assumed the personal risk of working on the oil rig for the stability of his family, my parents decided to destabilise our family, repeatedly moving us ever westward before they decided to start retracing eastward(eventually by themselves) back to their roots. And then, most peculiarly, while Cal risked his own safety to search for his missing dog in a storm, my own Dad had to repeatedly try to get rid of our own Nova Scotia Duck Toller. Like I said, I suffer from enough Magical Thinking to feel that these coincidences are meant to mean something to me, and I'll be simmering on them for some time to come.
I picked up the book Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature because as much as I do love Canadian Literature, I'm not a terribly critical reader and I thought I could benefit from an esteemed author such as Margaret Atwood pointing me in the direction of what I should be reading. She states in the preface to this book that she undertook its writing with the hope that it could be used as a teaching guide in high school/college and I'm afraid that it came off a little textbookish to me. It certainly took me long enough to read through such a small volume.
For my own benefit, I'm going to keep track of her main argument here (as lifted from Wikipedia):
The central image of the victim is not static; according to Atwood four "Victim Positions" are possible (and visible in Canadian literature). These positions are outlined below.
• Position One: To deny the fact that you are a victim
This is a position in which members of the "victim-group" will deny their identity as victims, accusing those members of the group who are less fortunate of being responsible for their own victimhood.
• Position Two: To acknowledge the fact that you are a victim (but attribute it to a powerful force beyond human control, i.e. fate, history, God, biology, etc.)
In this position, victims are likely to resign themselves to their fate.
• Position Three: To acknowledge the fact that you are a victim but to refuse to accept the assumption that the role is inevitable
This is a dynamic position in which the victim differentiates between the role of victim and the experience of victim.
• Position Four: To be a creative non-victim
A position for "ex-victims" when creativity of all kinds is fully possible.
.
Further affecting my enjoyment of this study, I must admit, are the facts that I'm not a particular fan of Atwood's writing or politics. I read all of her major works 20+ years ago, and like this book, found them rooted in a different time and not terribly relevant to me. I've read her more modern books as they've been released ( Oryx and Crake, The Penelopiad Canongate Myths, etc.) without enjoyment, more because I think I should than any other reason. After reading such an early book as Survival, I wonder to what degree the author herself would think CanLit has changed in the past 40 years? I remember the official hand-wringing of wondering what a "Canadian Identity" is-- chiefly defined by what we are not; neither British nor American. But wouldn't anyone agree that in today's world Canada has our own seat at the adult table of world affairs? And that our literature stands up against that of any country?
What I liked most about Survival were the snippets of poetry. I'm not inclined to pick up a volume of poetry and these carefully selected lines spoke to me in a way that confirms the form as timeless and universal.
What's packed about her ivory bones
Is cruel to the wondering touch;
Her hard skull rounds the roots of stones
And cannot give or comfort much;
Her lap is sealed to summer showers,
Ice-bound, and ringed in iron hold;
Her breast puts forth its love like flowers
Astonished into hills of cold.
Not here the Sun that frees and warms,
Cherishes between fire and flood:
But far within are Seraph forms,
Are flowers, fountains, milk, blood.
-Jay Macpherson, "The Caverned Woman"
I live in a land where cold has conquered
green things, reigns grey and heavy over phantom
trees.
I am a silent partner of a race that shivers in its
sleep under frost-bound words, whose frail quick
speech is fading.
I am part of a cry all around me
stone with no language
steep cliff
bare blade in my winter heart
-Yves Prefontaine, "Country to Let"
My brother handed me the book Unbroken and told me that it's his new obsession; that in a world where everyone knows the names Tiger Woods and Lindsay Lohan, it's unbelievable to him that we don't all know the name Louis Zamperini, and to the extent that he should be at least as famous as Seabiscuit, the author's more famous biographical subject, I would have to agree-- and am happy to hear that this story is being made into a movie, if only to make the tale even more accessible.
I started this book, therefore, with great hopes and really enjoyed the story of his juvenile delinquency and redemption through track; his Olympic journey; his Air Force training days, deployment, and exciting crash; and, especially, the stranding on the raft. As the story went on, however, it just became too much-- it felt like Forrest Gump's unbelievable place in history. How many people have shaken hands with Adolf Hitler and Pappy Boyington and Billy Graham? The American POW in Japan experience is one I've never heard before and is truly horrifying, but I was already mentally checking out at that point-- it had just become too much. The Bird seemed like the final over the top detail in a cheap thriller-- and I know he existed and I know he was sadistic and I know that Louis suffered, but I couldn't take in any more. And then the rescue and the PTSD and the beautiful socialite wife and the drinking and the broken dreams of, finally, Olympic glory...too much happened to Louis Zimperini to keep reminding me that it was nonfiction. When he went to the Billy Graham revival meeting and remembered his promise to God while on the raft, then turned his life around, poured out his booze and dedicated the rest of his life to good-- the story was just too good to be true.
Since the story itself is remarkable and inspirational and potentially riveting, I think I need to blame the author for my disengagement; it was just. too. much. The pages and pages of footnotes attest to the incredible amount of research that went into this biography, but maybe not every detail needed to make it in. I see reviews here that laud Laura Hillenbrand for the novel-like narrative she wrung from this research, but it just didn't work for me the way it did for my brother.
I didn't read Sh t My Dad Says, mostly because I object to the coarsening of public spaces that results from seeing the title at the book store, and then in the TV listings. I'm not some total prude; I'm not offended by adults sprinkling their language with expletives in private conversation, but I don't want to hear (or see) that language at McDonalds with a bunch of kids running around. As a result, I had an idea that Justin Halpern's Dad was some kind of narrow-minded, foul-mouthed Archie Bunker that I didn't need to learn anything about-- and I admit I was guilty of the worst kind of prejudgement.
I chose to listen to I Suck at Girls, just hoping for something light and funny. To my delight I discovered it to be a thoughtful, and very funny, look back on the author's experiences with girls, from his first grade crush to the woman he wants to marry. When his Dad appears in the book, yes, his language is foul, but his advice is sound and thoughtful and warm-- he obviously loves his son and wants the best for him.
In one of my favourite scenes, a young Justin and a friend have braved their fears to explore the forbidden canyon beside the Little League field, and discover a "Hobo Cave" filled with dirty blankets, empty beer bottles and stacks of porn. The boys gather up all of the pictures they can carry and start running, but soon : There, hightailing it out of the canyon, came two bearded homeless men, each of whom looked like Nick Nolte rendered in beef jerky. As soon as I heard that description, I laughed, but then immediately felt kind of bad for laughing at homeless men-- which is, I think, the reaction I was supposed to have because when Justin's Dad discovers what he has done, he insists the first thing the boy needed to do was to return the pictures to the entrance to the canyon the next morning. “Why can’t I just throw them out? I don’t want to go back to the canyon,” I said. “Bullshit. Someone spent time collecting this shit. What if I threw out your baseball card collection? That wouldn’t be right.” I nodded. His analogy made sense to me, and suddenly I felt a twinge of remorse, having deprived those men of one of their few—and probably most prized—worldly possessions. I bent down and lifted the big wad of dirt-covered porno out of the hole. “Are you mad?” I asked, as I picked up the shovel. “Nah. I don’t think this even cracks your greatest hits of stupid. But there’s one important thing I need you to know.” I stopped shoveling and looked at him. He pointed at the pile of loose, grimy magazine pages on the ground. The Dad then explains that Justin needs to understand that real woman don't look like the women in those pictures and that real women won't do the crazy things depicted either. That these two important life lessons, respect for women and compassion for the less fortunate, could have been gleaned from such a bizarre situation gives me much respect for Sam Halpern as a father.
And did I mention that the whole thing is really funny? Totally worthwhile experience.
When I was a young adult, I was committed to reading nonfiction. Probably because I never finished university, I was on a quest for self-education and could haughtily sneer to myself, "I don't have time to read novels when there's so much in the world to learn." I should also add that before university, I read mostly pulp: Stephen King, Anne Rice, Piers Anthony (on the badgering advice of a close friend/superfan). Then, a most astonishing thing happened: not long after becoming a mother, and picking up any book at hand while breastfeeding, I read Margaret Laurence's The Fire-Dwellers. This was 17+ years ago and I can still remember how gobsmacked I was by the main character: a frumpy, dissatisfied housewife who couldn't remember getting old. There's a scene (and I NEED to reread this book now that I'm thinking about it) where Stacey is in her wood-panelled recroom, alone in the middle of the day, drinking Tom Collinses, and she kicks off her shoes and plays some old records and moves around, dancing like a young girl once more-- only more free than she had ever been in her life. I was reading this scene, still young myself, but I can remember the tears springing to my eyes as I recognized myself in Stacey: we had absolutely no circumstances in common, but I could see the truth of the scene and it felt real and beautiful and universal and I had an epiphany of yes! This is the point of good literature and of course the most important things in life can be learned from it.
From then until now, I have sought out these epiphanies, these pearls of truth, and naturally they're hard to come by, but Open is full of such moments. I recently read an article by Dave Bidini in which he said that the author of this book, Lisa Moore, once called him a lazy reader. Not being a particular fan of his, I had a moment of schadenfreude at the reproach, but after finishing and loving this book of short stories, I wonder if Ms. Moore would also call me a lazy reader. Absolutely without a sense of literary criticism, I approach books viscerally, and they either resonate with me or they don’t. And this one did. Full of basically unhappy and dissatisfied women, which I am not, I could recognize the truth of their lives. From a young girl of twelve hunching forward in her bathing suit so her budding breasts weren't obvious, to a forty-something in an open marriage realizing that she didn't want to lose her husband to another woman, I don't need to have lived through these exact situations in order to know that the way they are described here is exactly how they would feel to me. The stories are mostly written with memories springing up in the middle of present consciousness and I loved the experience of this style of writing-- so true to the way that we all experience real life. The language is poetic and descriptive and each story is a perfect pearl.
Getting back to Stephen King, I remember reading Gerald's Game, written from the point of view of a woman, and thinking, "I just don't buy any of this". King is a master storyteller, but I don't think anyone would argue that he is a master of literature, and though that sounds in my head like my new version of a haughty sneer, I simply mean that he's not trying to reveal the universalities of human experience through the particulars of his characters, and I did not for a minute believe that this man had gotten into the head of his woman protagonist. By contrast, in Open, Lisa Moore hit me again and again with beautiful, honest, and gobsmacking moments that reflect what being a woman is. Lazy reader I may be, but my reading life has been enriched by the experience.
