Mind Picking : Happy Halloween II

Last Halloween I recounted all of my true ghost stories and had half an idea that I would keep an ear open for more to record here this year, but alas, I heard none. What I did collect was this strange story from my father-in-law:

Back in the old country, in Sicily*, people weren't too concerned about ghosts, but they did believe in and fear changelings. When a full moon came around, my aunts and uncles used to tell me, there were those who could feel that a change was coming – and no one is really sure if we're talking about werewolves here, but the fear was that these people would turn into beasts of some sort. Sometimes these people would volunteer to be locked up and sometimes they were taken by force, but it was always the whole village involved, because everyone was scared. The changelings would be gathered in a barn, locked in, and some of the villagers would watch over them from the outside. My aunts and uncles from the old country told me – and they would have seen this themselves in the early 1900's – that there would be screaming and growling coming from inside, and if anyone would start banging against the inner walls, the villagers would poke these longs knives in through the slats. They told me that they saw with their own eyes the knife blades coming out bloody, but in the morning, when the moon was gone and the sun was up, none of the changelings would have cuts on their bodies, and that's what scared them most of all. All those years later, when they would tell me these stories, you could tell they were still scared.

Doing a quick google search of Sicily + changeling netted no results, but Sicily + werewolf shows that there's plenty of historical backing for this story:

• In Sicily, it was said that if someone was seen by a werewolf they would lose his/her power of speech.

• In Sicily, a child conceived during a new moon was thought sure to grow up to be a werewolf. 

• In Sicily, werewolf stories remind us that these creatures apparently cannot climb more than three steps at once so finding a flight of stairs to run up would be extremely helpful if one ever happened to chase you!

• According to this source, Sicilians believed that you could become a werewolf if  you slept outside on a Friday with a full moon, and that to kill a werewolf, you can hit it on his head with a knife, cut away the backs of his paws or touch him with a specially crafted key.

• A Sicilian belief of Arabic origin holds that a werewolf can be cured of its ailment by striking it on the forehead or scalp with a knife. Another belief from the same culture involves the piercing of the werewolf's hands with nails.

• In the book  Sicily: A Literary Guide for Travellers, it is recounted:

One of their more surreal exchanges took place on an August night 'when the moons were so preposterous'. Their purveyor of ice started to question the couple on their knowledge of werewolves; the boy even suggested that (Truman) Capote may be afraid of venturing out after dark. It appears that Taormina was in the grip of a werewolf scare owing to the tale of a youth who had claimed he was attacked by a half-human howling beast on all fours. The author, with his American scepticism of peasant superstition, laughed at the boy's naivety, only to be brought up short for his impertinence when the youth told him that the town used to be infested with lycanthropy, finally reassuring him that just a couple remained.

And in fiction:

• In the 12th century book Guillaume de Palerne, a young prince of Sicily is kidnapped by a werewolf at the age of four. Woven into the story of the eponymous hero is the parallel story of Alphonse, the Spanish prince who was transformed into a werewolf by his stepmother when he was still a toddler.

That's just the top results of a quick google search, and although this proves the superstition and isn't meant to reflect my own beliefs, it is interesting to me that the Sicilian belief in changelings (or werewolves if we must) survived into at least the early 20th century; survived in the family stories of the people I married into.

Happy Halloween!

*For my own interest, this is as good a place as any to record that my father-in-law's Italian  grandfather (Giuseppe Tomasino) was from Calabria and his grandmother from Salerno.


Strange stories from previous years:

Halloween I

The Bone Clocks

The young hold out for a time, but eventually even the hardiest patient gets reduced to a desiccated embryo, a Strudlebug…a veined, scrawny, dribbling…bone clock, whose face betrays how very, very little time they have left.

I was gobsmacked when I finished reading David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas: so thoroughly unlike anything I had ever read before, I closed the book slowly, unable to immediately decide whether I had just read a work of complete genius or if I had been hoodwinked by some clever literary legerdemain. The stories, nested like a matryoshka doll, were a perfectly constructed universe; from familiar past to distant future. Had I been goodreads-rating at the time, my first and final impressions would have warranted five stars -- even if Cloud Atlas was a fraud, I was a willing dupe. Based on that enthusiasm, I then read, greedily, everything else Mitchell had written, and would have given them all four or five stars; I love David Mitchell. Now comes The Bone Clocks, his first book that I've read as it's released, and after seeing that it was long-listed for the Booker Prize, I knew I would love this book, greedily prolonged my anticipation by ploughing through the rest of the list first, and then…I was so disappointed. I did not love The Bone Clocks.

I was hooked at the beginning: the story of 15-year-old Holly Sykes, a normal if slightly rebellious girl from rural England, set in 1984 (when I was also in high school), was interesting and relatable to me. When the slightly fantastical elements were added -- the Radio People and Miss Constantin -- I was reminded of Haruki Murakami (another of my all time favourite authors), and I was still totally on board; so far, so good. The storyline then jumps ahead to 1991 and focuses on Hugo Lamb, a seemingly affable university student and, in a move that I loved, the cousin of the main character from Mitchell's Black Swan Green. In this section, we also meet Richard Cheeseman, a fellow student who is slaving away at his first novel, and I found this plot outline to be a hilarious sendup of Mitchell himself:

"My hero is a Cambridge student called Richard Cheeseman, working on a novel about a Cambridge student called Richard Cheeseman, working on a novel about a Cambridge student called Richard Cheeseman. No one's ever tried anything like it before."

"Cool," says Jonny Penhalgion. "That sounds like --"

"A frothy pint of piss," I announce, and Cheeseman looks at me with death in his eyes until I add, "is what's in my bladder right now. The book sounds incredible, Richard. Excuse me."

We soon learn that Holly Sykes appears in Lamb's story, too, and eventually, it's clear that she will appear in each section to anchor the overall storyline. We also learn that maybe the fantastical elements weren't all in Holly's head after all. I'm still onboard at this point. Then, we skip ahead again, to 2004, and get the point of view of Ed Brubeck -- a war reporter based in Iraq and Holly's partner. As this section alternates between a family wedding in London and Ed venturing outside the Green Zone to get "the real story" on the war, the book began to take on a more political tone, with Ed patiently trying to explain the apparent ingratitude of the Iraqi people to the wedding guests and being confronted by half-crazy and belligerent American soldiers back in Iraq. So who's to blame for the quagmire?

The de facto king of Iraq is a Kissinger acolyte named L. Paul Bremmer III. On taking office, he passed two edicts that have shaped the occupation. Edict number one ruled that any member of the Ba'ath Party above a certain rank was to be sacked. With one stroke of the pen Bremmer consigned to the scrapheap the very civil servants, scientists, teachers, police officers, engineers, and doctors that the coalition needed to rebuild the country. Fifty thousand white-collar Iraqis lost their salaries, pensions, and futures and wanted the occupation to fail from that day on. Edict number two disbanded the Iraqi Army. No back pay, no pension, no nothing. Bremmer created 375,000 potential insurgents -- unemployed, armed, and trained to kill. Hindsight is easy, sure, but if you're the viceroy of an occupied country, it's your job to possess foresight -- or at least to listen to advisers who do.

Hindsight is easy, sure, and Mitchell isn't against using it to point fingers, but okay, skip ahead four years and meet Crispin Hershey -- a middle-aged novelist who has seen better days; written his best books a long time ago (apparently based on Martin Amis?). The previously met Richard Cheeseman is now a book reviewer, and his critique both skewers Hershey and preemptively answers Mitchell's critics:

Why is Echo Must Die such a decomposing hog? One: Hershey is so bent on avoiding cliché that each sentence is as tortured as an American whistle-blower. Two: The fantasy sub-plot clashes so violently with the book's State of the World pretensions, I cannot bear to look. Three: What surer sign is there that the creative aquifers are dry than a writer creating a writer-character?

And later, Herhsey's agent remarks, in another seemingly preemptive note from Mitchell, "A book can't be half fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant." And then more fantasy elements are added (but as Soleil Moore -- apparently important to the Script -- and her actions don't really affect the overall plot, is her presence here only to set up a situation in some other, yet-to-be-written Mitchell book?). I really did like Hershey's story, so this section was encouraging. But then, skip ahead to 2025, and the fantasy elements are brought to the forefront, while never forgetting "the book's State of the World pretensions". One character, who has been more or less hibernating since 1984, asks what she has missed in the intervening 40+ years and is answered:

Oil's running out. Earth's population is eight billion, mass extinctions of flora and fauna are commonplace, climate change is foreclosing the Holocene Era. Apartheid's dead, as are the Castros in Cuba, as is privacy. The USSR went bankrupt; the Eastern Bloc collapsed; Germany reunified; the EU has gone federal; China's a powerhouse -- though their air is industrial effluence in a gaseous state -- and North Korea is still a gulag run by a coiffured cannibal. The Kurds have a de facto state; it's Sunni versus Shi'a throughout the Middle East; the Sri Lankan Tamils got butchered; the Palestinians still have to eke out a living off Israel's garbage dumps. People outsourced their memories to data centers and basic skills to tabs. On the eleventh of September 2001, Saudi Arabian hijackers flew two airliners into the Twin Towers. As a result Afghanistan and Iraq got invaded and occupied for years by lots of American and a few British troops. Inequality is truly Pharonic. The world's twenty-seven richest people own more wealth than the poorest five billion, and people accept that as normal. On the bright side, there's more computing power in Arkady's slate than existed in the world when you last walked it; an African American president occupied the White House for two terms; and you can now buy strawberries at Christmas.

My own description of those years might have included a few more items on the bright side, but okay, sigh, here is where we need to move on with the climax of the fantasy subplot, where the body-snatching Horologists must continue their war with the Anchorites of the Dusk Chapel of the Blind Cathar of the Thomasite Monastery of Sidelhorn Pass (with Holly Sykes along for the ride, natch). I must confess: I see no reason for this subplot at all. I have always appreciated Mitchell's writing about the spirit and the migration of souls, but for some reason, this felt like a lame YA fantasy confrontation -- Murakami wouldn't have written this -- and, worst of all, it doesn't even matter: humanity, the Earth, the cosmos, everything proceeds along no matter which side wins. (However, redemptively, I did like that Marinus mentioned his life in Dejima and meeting the title character of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.)

Jumping ahead to 2043, Holly Sykes is now an old woman, living in a not unimaginable future world, and she shudders with grief:

It's grief for the regions we've deadlanded, the ice caps we melted, the Gulf Stream we redirected, the rivers we drained, the coasts we flooded, the lakes we choked with crap, the seas we killed, the species we drove to extinction, the pollinators we wiped out, the oil we squandered, the drugs we rendered impotent, the comforting liars we voted into office -- all so we didn't have to change our cozy lifestyles. People talk about the Endarkenment like our ancestors talked about the Black Death, as if it's an act of God. But we summoned it, with every tank of oil we burned our way through. My generation were diners stuffing ourselves senseless at the Restaurant of the Earth's Riches knowing -- while denying -- that we'd be doing a runner and leaving our grandchildren a tab that can never be paid.

That's pretty much it -- without the plot, of course -- and I'm including all of this to say: in a lot of ways, The Bones Clocks is the same kind of story as Cloud Atlas; a warning of what the future might be like if we continue on our current path. But while I was able to close the covers of Cloud Atlas and have been moved by its vision and its novelty, to have trembled at the ultimate fate of humanity, The Bone Clocks was scolding and linear, with this useless fantasy subplot. It's like the television show Glee: remember when it first came on the air and it was entertaining and showed all of these misfits finding a safe place to gather and bond over 80s pop tunes? And then remember how it eventually became a series of very special episodes and started spelling out all the ways that we should be more tolerant of each other? I understood that message from the first episode -- I'm pretty sure we all did -- but I don't watch TV (or read books) to be scolded. (And the preemptive messages to Mitchell's would-be critics don't fix the flaws. Nice try, though.)

I'm disappointed by the overall vision here but David Mitchell is still an incredible writer, so I'll end with a curious and intriguing image:

Miguel tries to look jokey-penitent, but misses and looks like a man in white jeans who underestimates a spot of flatulence.

And for fun, here's a link to a short story that Mitchell released this summer on Twitter. 

The Cuckoo's Calling

I wish there was a way to unknow that Robert Galbraith is a pseudonym for J. K. Rowling: despite her apparent efforts to break into mystery writing anonymously, this is the secret that everyone knows and I, at least, couldn't help but make mental comparisons to the Harry Potter oeuvre. I suspect that was the exact situation Rowling was trying to avoid, but I'm not going to feel too badly for the richest author in the world. And fair or not, I kept wondering throughout this book: If Rowling hadn't written The Cuckoo's Calling, would anyone be reading it? 

I enjoyed the introduction: Tall and pretty with long, strawberry-blonde hair, Ginny Weasley Robin Ellacott, new to London and accepting temp jobs while looking for something more permanent, makes her way to her next assignment: the office of Cormoran Strike, P.I. As she is about to open the door, Strike comes flying out, knocking her backwards, and in order to stop her tumbling down the stairs, Strike grabs wildly for purchase:

The girl was doubled up in pain against the office door, whimpering. Judging by the lopsided way she was hunched, with one hand buried deep under the lapel of her coat, Strike deduced that he had saved her by grabbing a substantial part of her left breast.

Awkward. Soon interrupted by a client, the temp gets to work, showing much initiative and intuition, and it is hours before the two are alone and able to introduce themselves properly:

"Sorry I kept calling you Sandra; she was the last girl. What's your real name?"

"Robin."

"Robin," he repeated. "That'll be easy to remember."

He had some notion of making a jocular allusion to Batman and his dependable sidekick, but the feeble jest died on his lips as her face turned brilliantly pink. Too late, he realized that the most unfortunate construction could be put on his innocent words. Robin swung the swivel chair back towards the computer monitor, so that all Strike could see was an edge of a flaming cheek. In one frozen moment of mutual mortification, the room seemed to have shrunk to the size of a telephone kiosk.

I've quoted at length because that payoff made me laugh out loud and I thought, "Okay, this is a grownup book, and since the joke wasn't actually spelled out (even though these two scenes are three chapters apart), I feel like Rowling is respecting my intelligence as a reader". I expected there would be more funny and clever bits, but sadly, there weren't; this is just a rather bloated mystery with an unsatisfactory solution.

The best part of The Cuckoo's Calling are the characters of Strike and Robin: they are both bright and interesting and good at what they do, and even though she is meant to be a temp, it's obvious early on that their meeting is the beginning of a dynamic partnership. But while I can appreciate that the first in a planned series of books needs to give some backstory, there was way too much about Strike's history. Did he need to have a rock star father and a groupie mother? Did he need to have been recently rendered homeless by his posh and gorgeous fiancée? Did he need to have been a wounded war hero? And if his character needed to be all of these things, did they all need to be hauled out in the first book? 450 pages seems long for a mystery and every time someone asked Strike what it was like to be Jonny Rokeby's son, it felt like a distraction from the mystery: and I do understand that this book is meant to be a comment on the nature of fame and the relationship between celebrities and their fans and paparazzi (something I'm sure Rowling knows all too well), but too much of that also detracted from the mystery. Deeby Macc saying that Lula was essentially killed by the press brought to mind Princess Diana, but then characters go for a walk and note the Princess Diana memorial fountain, and then later Strike makes the conscious connection between the two, and yes, I get it, and by this point I no longer felt like Rowling respected my intelligence.

As for the mystery : I'm not a huge reader of the genre, but as I would call myself a Raymond Chandler fan, I can confidently say that The Cuckoo's Calling ain't no Chandler. Basically, Strike interviews everyone the police already talked to (and these were investigating detectives who felt the pressure of having their every move scrutinised by the media and superfan bloggers), getting everyone to reveal just a little bit more this time around. Eventually, Strike can prove that Lula didn't commit suicide (and I'll call that not a spoiler because how else could it be a murder mystery?), and he meets the suspect in one of those never-ending "you did this and this and thought you got away with it" speeches, saying the suspect had "the luck of the devil" which is how the reader can now dismiss all of the red herrings (a dyslexic witness misunderstood what was read, a Polish maid's English wasn't good enough to understand what she had heard, a cheating spouse was reluctant to come forward with the truth) and case closed. **spoilers here** Okay, I NEED to comment on the roses: how did Strike make the leap from a water puddle in the hall to John taking some from Deeby's flat? How many roses would it take to leave a big enough puddle for someone to slip in? Would Lula really open her door if her peephole was blocked by the roses? Wouldn't petals and leaves have been strewn about her place in the struggle? And if Jonah saw Lula fall, why didn't he come forward? Even if he didn't see the push, why didn't he come forward? **end spoilers** I wasn't impressed with the mystery, at all.

I understand the point of the pseudonym, and as I said, I can't unknow that this was written by J. K. Rowling, but it didn't feel like it was written by a man -- and if Rowling (the richest/best-sellingest author in the history of books) didn't think that she could sell a mystery without a man's name on the cover, that's a little sad. There was plenty of swearing, and while it read natural as dialogue, it didn't seem of a piece with the slightly formal and old-fashioned expository passages. And one last complaint -- the Latin epigraphs also felt out of place and pompous (as did ending with Strike remembering a long passage from Tennyson). However, I really did like Strike and Robin and would like to see how they work together without her eventual departure hanging over their heads (and without, hopefully, the need for too much more of Strike's backstory). I wouldn't have picked The Cuckoo's Calling up if Rowling's cover hadn't been blown, and I can't say that I loved it, but as I'm on a rather long waiting list for The Silkworm, I'll likely be in the mood for it when it becomes available.

Juliet Was a Surprise

Bill Gaston's short story collection Juliet Was a Surprise is just my taste -- small bursts of insight into the sticky muddle that is interpersonal relationships, with characters who don't know as much about each other as they think they do; who don't even know themselves. These stories reminded me somewhat of Lynn Coady's Hellgoing, but where her characters were mostly angry and trapped, Gaston's are confused and surprised; like the naïve babies some accuse each other of being.

What to make of a situation where, on returning to a vacation house that's been rented for a solitary respite, an aging man finds a young couple who insists that they've also paid to be there for the week. When they make it plain that they won't be leaving, the young woman says:

"We can be your house clowns." Eden put her hands to her head like antlers and swayed back and forth, big-eyed and unsmiling. Her eyes were playful but ironic and -- he didn't know why he thought of this word -- literate. But still possibly dangerous.

Well, why did I find that image in House Clowns so menacing? I was caught up in the paranoia of the unnamed protagonist -- who wouldn't want to identify more with the staid professor than the scruffy hitchhikers? -- right up until he started acting oddly himself. When the ending comes, it's totally satisfying because the seeds were planted all along; I was just distracted by those swaying antlers.

Or what about the self-identified twerp in Any Forest Seen from Orbit -- a middle-aged virgin arborist who thinks of trees as sexy, to whom a deodora cedar is "not unlike a geisha in traditional pose: hips tilted one way, head tilted another; face down, demure; arms at dramatic angles, holding fans" -- what is he to make of Juliet, a married client who:

...spun around at the door and mouthed, ferociously, "Ten after seven."

And then, good God, she pointed. Not at me. Not at the ground beneath her feet. No, she pointed at herself. Below the belt. She pointed at the prize, while announcing the time it would be claimed. I'd never seen a human do that. I understand now that it is something an animal might do, if it had fingers, and could tell time.

That was so bizarre that I thought the twerp (another unnamed protagonist) was imagining it until he returned at the appointed time and was asked to begin by combing out all of Juliet's body hair, She'd lift an arm and I'd draw the brush, once, twice, through her pit, the tines softly tugging through. Well, how did Juliet think that her game would end?

And again I'll note that this collection speaks to my own taste -- I am always open to a touch of the supernatural and was intrigued by Cake's Chicken and its tale of "two things science can't explain". Like Dale in To Mexico, I too read all of Carlos Castaneda in my youth (and unlike him, I did eventually muddle through Under the Volcano as well) and I enjoyed being in on the allusions. I loved the slow revelation of Chantal's dilemma in Tumpadabump (and also love that that perfect title doesn't actually occur in the story). Several stories are told well from a woman's perspective (although Geriatric Arena Grope wasn't my favourite), but it's the oblivious and unself-aware men who stand out: in Petterick, At Work in the Fields of Bulwer-Lytton, To Mexico, and Four Corners, male leads act aloof, as though that's their preference or a commentary on the women they find themselves with, but it's repeatedly revealed that it's the flaws in themselves that cement their isolation. And, overall, these stories are simply well-written.

Cake and Danny stood there taking in the sunset. It was a good one, no question -- a glorious wall of orange and purple, with little ruptures that looked like balconies, from which shot rays of sacred light, behind which God made vast, heart-breaking decisions. Because they were so still, I glanced at the two friends' faces. Cake's expression was complex, for once. He seemed chastised by the sunset, humbled. But in his look there was also hope that what it was telling him might be wrong. Anyway, that's what I imagined I saw. As for Danny, his take on the beauty was simpler -- he sneered. He was basically daring it.

And that's all you'd need to know about Cake and Danny, and how you feel when you look at a sunset might be all you need to know about yourself. A quick and consistently interesting read, Juliet Was a Surprise is easy to recommend.

The 2014 Governor General's Literary Awards Shortlist, with my ranking:

English Fiction:

• Sweetland by Michael Crummey 
• Juliet Was a Surprise by Bill Gaston  
• My October by Claire Holden Rothman 
• The Back of the Turtle by Thomas King 
• The Opening Sky by Joan Thomas

The 2014 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction winner is The Back of the Turtle. Meh.

Waiting for the Man

I started having these dreams. I don't know what else to call them. Visions maybe. Nightmares. This thin black man in a floppy straw hat, dressed right out of the seventies, looking for all the world like a TV pimp. Like Huggy Bear from Starsky & Hutch. I never watched that show, it was before my time, but I remembered the character and now he was haunting my dreams. And this man, sometimes, later, would ride in on a white horse, a gigantic white horse with a mane that looked combed and neat and clean. A good-smelling horse. Bathed. It smelled supernaturally clean. And the Man had a smile you couldn't outrun. It was the size of the world. I fell into it.

Joe Fields is a 35-year-old copywriter for a NYC ad agency, making good money, living alone in a slowly gentrifying neighbourhood, and despite having an outward appearance of success, likely suffering what his father diagnoses as a mid-life crisis. When the Man steps from Joe's dreams and begins to appear and talk to him in real life, telling him simply "to wait", Joe interprets that as a command to sit on his front steps and await further instructions. As days and nights pass, the curiosity of neighbours leads to increasing media interest until Joe is the center of a maelstrom of attention, complete with websites, blogs, groupies, TV satellite trucks, sponsors, and pilgrims. Eventually, the Man tells Joe to head west, and with a donated Honda (wait for it…) Odyssey, he begins to drive, media entourage in tow. We know that Joe eventually does make it out west because the chapters detailing his waiting and travelling alternate with chapters wherein Joe is a fruit and vegetable peeler in the kitchen of a luxury ranch and spa in Montana. So basically, due to the intervention of a Magical Negro trope, it's like Bagger Vance has told Forrest Gump to start that jogging trip he goes on, but instead of other regular folks joining in his quest, because it's 2014, Joe Fields is trailed by a live satellite feed; regular folk can stay home on their fat butts and watch from their TVs, monitors, and smartphone screens.

Author Arjun Basu has a twitter following where he is known for award winning short stories that he calls Twisters. He must think in short bursts because even long paragraphs in Waiting for the Man are made up of short and punchy sentences. At times, this is interesting and propulsive, but often, it comes off as self-conscious and aphoristic. Basu obviously has done a lot of thinking about our modern media-driven celebrity culture, but I felt assaulted by page after page of moralistic conclusions:

• People become famous for wanting to become famous. Wanting to become famous used to be an aspiration and now it's a career.

• The web tells everyone that everything you say, every opinion you have, every action you take, has value. It's the logical conclusion to the entitlement that everyone feels. It's brought fifteen minutes down to one.

• Too many of us are so removed from the natural world that it has lost its reality. Its meaning. The natural world risks becoming a figment of the imagination, a good idea, maybe, but scary, too, a repository of old stories. Nightmares.

I also didn't understand why Basu -- so far as I can tell, born in and living in Montreal -- felt the need to set his story in NYC. There must be ad executives having mid-life crises in Montreal or even Toronto -- and this wouldn't necessarily have bothered me if Joe didn't repeatedly talk about being a New Yorker and how only other New Yorkers would understand. Was that the only way to make the book a commentary on American media/celebrity culture? It felt inauthentic and off-putting to me. And, here's my biggest complaint: *spoiler* Why did Joe need to go on his big quest just to end up doing the same job in Montana? If his character grew from beginning to end, I couldn't see it, and if there's no point to the quest, there's no point to the book.

I wanted to love Waiting for the Man, and while it wasn't terrible, I'm left wanting.

The longlist for the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize (with my personal ranking):

·  Sean Michaels for his novel  Us Conductors  *

·  Miriam Toews for her novel All My Puny Sorrows *

·  Claire Holden Rothman for her book My October 

·  David Bezmozgis for his novel The Betrayers  *

·  Heather O’Neill for her novel The Girl Who Was Saturday Night *

·  Frances Itani for her book Tell  *

·  Kathy Page for her short story collection Paradise and Elsewhere 

·  Rivka Galchen for her short story collection American Innovations 

·  Padma Viswanathan for her book The Ever After of Ashwin Rao *

·  Shani Mootoo for her novel Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab 

·  Jennifer LoveGrove for her novel Watch How We Walk 

·  Arjun Basu for his novel Waiting for the Man

* also on the shortlist

The 2014 Giller Prize winner is Us Conductors

Super Sad True Love Story

The Boat Is Full
Avoid Deportation
Latinos Save
Chinese Spend
ALWAYS Keep Your Credit Ranking Within Limits

American Restoration Authority
"Together We'll Surprise The World!"

In author Gary Shteyngardt's near-future world, this message is hung from Credit Poles throughout Manhattan; shafts whose primary function is to display, on small LED screens, the credit rating of everyone who walks by. If that isn't enough information, everyone possesses an äppärät: the latest generation of smartphone -- now shrunk to pendant size -- that not only connects to the world but, for those who have RateMePlus, broadcasts (and ranks against th0se nearby) the owner's hotness, personality, sustainabilit¥ (that ¥ symbol acknowledging that the US, at this point, is basically owned by its Chinese creditors), and personal info. And if that still isn't enough information, the latest fashion is for women to wear nipple-less bras and see-through Onionskin Jeans -- with no panties, of course, but creative grooming and bejewelling of lady parts. In this TMI world -- where even the news is a self-filmed reality show, likely combined with porn or true-confessions for the ratings -- is it a wonder that actual human beings have trouble connecting with each other?

Leonard Abramov -- the 39-year-old son of Jewish Russian immigrants -- sells immortality treatments to the super-rich. Balding, out of shape, and one of the last readers of actual books, Lenny is beginning to feel his age and wishes that he could afford the treatments that he sells. When he meets Eunice Park -- the 24-year-old daughter of Christian Korean immigrants -- Lenny is attracted to and feels rejuvenated by her youth. Even though Eunice is pretty much repulsed by him, she agrees to move in with Lenny so she can be closer to her own family (and keep a wary eye on her abusive father). Looking at Eunice and her friends together, Lenny thinks:

I felt both jealous of their youth and scared for their future. In short, I felt paternal and aroused, which is not a good combination.

Which, of course, made me think of:

But, this is a Super Sad True Love Story after all. Shteyngardt is a talented satirist and the beginning of this book was funny and observant: it really isn't a big stretch to see us retreating further into our online lives; becoming more acquisitive; leaving behind the world of books and real academic learning to land jobs in Credit, Media, and Retail. Eunice spends all of her time on her äppärät -- either shopping for clothes on AssLuxury or using the all-in-one facebook/tumblr/email site GlobalTeens -- and Lenny uses his äppärät to monitor his credit score, to attempt to understand global economics, and to track Eunice's movements. Layered on top of this shallow lifestyle is a tyrannical government: the ultra-conservative Bipartisan Party. From a scene at the airport:

A tank rolled over to us, and the nine first-class Americans instinctively raised our hands. The tank stopped short; a single soldier in T-shirt and shorts popped out of the hatch and planted a highway sign next to it, black letters against an orange background:

IT IS FORBIDDEN TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE EXISTENCE OF THIS VEHICLE ("THE OBJECT") UNTIL YOU ARE .5 MILES FROM THE SECURITY PERIMETER OF JOHN F. KENNEDY INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT. BY READING THIS SIGN YOU HAVE DENIED EXISTENCE OF THE OBJECT AND IMPLIED CONSENT.

American Restoration Authority
"Together We'll Surprise The World!"

This "deny and imply" is cleverly used throughout, but as the book becomes more political, it begins to lose its heart: I certainly appreciate the point that a self-absorbed, consumerist society can allow its government to slowly strip away rights until we're no longer shocked by the sight of tanks in the streets and gunships overhead, but by the time of The Rupture (with the government massacring squatters in Central Park in anticipation of a visit from China's chief economist), this is no longer a love story, just super sad. The same jokes persist -- Onionskin Jeans and speaking in crude acronyms -- but they're no longer funny, which I would accept if the book became profound…but it doesn't; it just collapses under the weight of itself. For dystopic fiction, Super Sad True Love Story doesn't really go far enough: we are only a short leap towards the äppärät (Google Glass?), the Chinese will eventually call in their loans, and the distance between socioeconomic classes grows larger every day; but this book doesn't feel like a warning about the future or a red flag about how we're living today. After reading Shteyngardt's memoir Little Failure, I understand why he needed to include versions of his own parents in this book -- and maybe that explains why the character of Lenny would be attracted to a fellow child of a conservative immigrant culture (even if Lenny himself is most attracted to Eunice's boyish figure) -- but I'm left scratching my head, wondering why there's this constant threat that Eunice's father is going to get violent with her mother and sister, and yet that never happens and is neither confronted or resolved. And the ending, while clever, I guess, seems clever for its own sake. I suppose I'm most disappointed because Shteyngardt is a talented writer line-by-line and I wanted it to add up to something more than it did. 

The love I felt for her on that train ride had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many sullen moons -- it was systemic and it was complete.

This is the first Shteyngardt novel I've read, and as it doesn't seem to be his most popular, I am certainly willing to try him on again.

The booms, big and small, faraway and close, the pounding in my head, tracer rounds against the overcast moon, tracer rounds lighting up the secret, hidden parts of the city, an entire building of crying babies, and, even scarier, the temporary absence of those wails. Relentless. Relentless. Relentless. You can see the magenta flashes even against the fully closed curtains, you can hear them on your skin. At night, the sound of metallic scraping coming off the river, like two barges slowly crashing against each other. When I open a window, the strange bloom of flowers and burnt leaves hits my nose -- a sweet, dense rot, like the countryside after a storm. Oddly enough, no car alarms. I listen for the comfort-food sounds of ambulances presumably rushing to keep people alive -- every few minutes the first day after the Rupture, then every few hours, then nothing.

Unwanted synchronicity: I was reading the above passage from the second half of this book yesterday, trying to distract myself while a home-grown terrorist went on a shooting rampage in Ottawa, murdering a soldier doing ceremonial duty at the Canadian War Memorial before entering Parliament and being shot and killed himself. As there was uncertainty about the existence of a second shooter, and I was feeling tense and vulnerable, I didn't want to watch the action live, opting to finish my book, occasionally pausing for updates. 

I love Canada; love that we don't have tanks on the streets and security checkpoints at every building; but the world is surely changing. Reading this passage, imagining that two rampaging ISIS-wannabes in three days could be the beginning of a trend, of course I worry about all-out war being brought to my sleepy hometown. Nearly as bad as all-out war would be an overreaction from the government -- the kind of Big Brother/Bipartisan Party "deny and imply" world that Shteyngardt has created here -- but I don't really worry about that; that's not the Canadian way, and even with a Conservative government in power, they're hardly fascists. On the other hand, if both of these losers (and less than a hundred others) were already on CSIS' radar as potential radicals, we may need to start talking about surrendering some presumption of innocence to get them off the streets before they do harm. One can only hope we've got grownups in charge.

The Awakening

The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings.

Just yesterday, there was an article in the paper with the unfortunate headline: Why the first mission to Mars should only have female astronauts. I say "unfortunate" because that clickbaiting headline didn't really represent the body of the article, which lists many reasons for why women make good astronauts, with a particular emphasis on the fact that their smaller body size and caloric intake would necessitate bringing less payload (thereby saving money) on a long mission to the Red Planet. The journalist concludes that a diverse group -- one with women and men, preferably of different backgrounds -- would be ideal for the mission. But that headline, with the "only females" bait, brought out the worst in the online community, with the top comment being:

Interesting, although somewhat different than my experience. I have found over the years that if you have too many women working together you get drama and conflict. Why? I have no idea. Seems that many women just don't play well with others.
Perhaps retired jockeys may the solution.
Just sayin'.

And the top response to him was: The definition of a misogynist is a man who hates women as much as women hate each other. Yeah, I'm sure that rapists and patriarchal oppressors (and online commentators) are simply mimicking female cattiness. And, of course, where NASA is concerned, retired jockeys are obviously more suitable for space exploration than women engineers, geologists, and exobiologists. Just sayin'.

All this to say that, although we have, of course, come a long way, baby, women are still not universally seen as the absolute equal of men; not even here in progressive North America, and much of our advances can be laid at the feet of the early feminists (and as for that dreaded f-word, another popular comment on the Mars article is: I think no one but the most prominent, powerful feminists in North America should be on this flight. In fact, in order to ensure all prominent feminists get a fair shot at the glory, I think as many of them as physically will fit in the capsule should be sent on their way. They would be heroes, especially if they never came back to Earth, for all sorts of reasons.) Har, har. Fortunately, we can only imagine how much more marginalised life was for North American women over a hundred years ago, and books like The Awakening serve as reminders and demonstrate the courage that their feminist authors possessed.

Edna Pontellier seems to have it all: a rich and kind husband; two healthy little boys; and a favoured position in society with many interesting friends, parties, and holidays. With a nanny and other servants, her time is mostly her own, and Edna explores her artistic side, painting and listening to music that moves her. And yet…when she spends one summer vacation in the company of an exciting young man, Edna realises that she has never once made a decision that was true to her own self, and she slowly awakens:

•Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recongize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her. This may seem like a ponderous weight of wisdom to descend upon the soul of a young woman of twenty-eight -- perhaps more wisdom than the Holy Ghost is usually pleased to vouchsafe to any woman.

• I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself. I can't make it more clear; it's only something which I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me.

• She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.

(This paragraph has the spoilers.) Refusing to be caged any longer, over the next several months, Edna sheds, one-by-one, her social duties, her home, her husband, the very notion of marriage, and eventually, in a move that many reviewers see as an unforgiveable abandonment of her children, Edna swims out to sea and allows it to swallow her whole. So far as oppression goes, Edna's life doesn't look half bad -- she did choose her own husband (even if it wasn't a love match on her end), all of her physiological and social needs are being met (without the need for hard labour or drudgery on her part), she has avenues for self-expression, and many freedoms. Even so, her husband does think of Edna as his property; her social life as an extension of his business concerns. The pressure to be the ideal mother-woman becomes too much and Edna realises that a gilt cage is still a cage and begins to live for herself alone. In the tradition of Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, that kind of a selfish decision can only end poorly.

The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude… The foamy wavelets curled up to her white feet, and coiled like serpents about her ankles. She walked out. The water was chill, but she walked on. The water was deep, but she lifted her white body and reached out with a long, sweeping stroke. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.

In a way, Edna Pontellier's life anticipates our modern malaise; where vague feelings of dissatisfaction are enough to torpedo a marriage; where frantic whispers of "Oh, think of the children!" aren't enough to stop families from breaking apart. We may take that in stride today, but it must have been a revolutionary idea when The Awakening was published in 1899; certainly the author, Kate Chopin, felt a backlash with poor sales and harsh reviews. I'm always of two minds when I hear of someone walking out on a family to pursue self-fulfillment -- it's certainly selfish and the breaking of a vow, but with only this one life to live, who am I to say someone must remain in a cage? Does selfish need to be a bad word? Is it a commendable accomplishment of feminism that today men and women alike can refuse to be yoked by societal expectations? I don't know if I can 100% understand Edna's motivations and actions in this book, but I do applaud Kate Chopin's courage in laying it all out; it is on shoulders such as hers from which women may yet reach for Mars.

This review may make me seem like a strident feminist, or least someone who can be riled by internet trolls, but neither is really the case (and as for trolls -- I don't think these men I quoted were insincere, and maddeningly, no one contradicted them). In a story that was posted to facebook the day before, the headline said: RCMP sets an ‘ambitious’ new goal: Recruit as many women as men. Because that was on facebook -- where the trolls do tremble under their bridges, waiting for opportunities to pounce -- the first comment was "I think only women should be admitted to the RCMP and the Canadian Forces. Our sacrifice is over. Women can take all the bullets from now on". Am I wrong to think that that has a whiff of misogyny in it? At any rate, here's what I think:

Merit and suitability need to be the main considerations, whether hiring for the RCMP or Mars-bound missions. Maybe there's some social good in attracting more women (or for that matter, more minorities) to some occupations, but their hiring must be merit-based. When I read that some politicians want to legislate equal numbers of men and women in Parliament, I have to wonder how that would be accomplished. I have no interest in being a politician, and when I see that there are more men than women in politics, I honestly think that's an unequal degree of interest, not lack of opportunities. When I see quotas for hiring women firefighters I cringe and think: the strongest women aren't even as strong as the weakest men, and I don't want fire departments preferring the weakest in order to satisfy some notion of social justice. And that gender-bias seems to work in favour of women when it comes to the Mars mission -- the benefits weren't just about size, but where every other qualification is equal, size should be taken into account. 

Now, that's not to say that I don't believe this isn't still a man's world, and my beliefs about that have been developed into what I call my Jeopardy! Theory: It's obvious, when watching Jeopardy!, that men win much more often than women, and when they win, they enjoy much bigger paydays. This can be explained in either of two ways:

#1 Men are objectively better than women and will therefore win more often. 

#2 Something about Jeopardy! favours men over women.

Since I don't for a second believe #1, #2 must be true. Do men recall trivia a fraction of a second faster? Do they ring in a fraction of a second faster? Are their caveman-hunter brains wired to strike from the subconscious while cavewoman-gatherer brains pause to evaluate?  No matter the explanation, in any situation where physical strength isn't a factor and men dominate, I believe the games are rigged in men's favour. Men enjoy more positions of power (economic and political) because men have invented the systems that lead to and entrench power. Men are the primary philosophers, the literary award winners, the bankable movie directors, the newspaper opinion writers, the so-called funny comedians, etc., and not because they are simply and objectively better than women, but because these systems by which we see and interpret our world have been developed by men and other men more easily slip into these roles. Plenty of women have a natural ability to play these men's games and succeed, but where interest doesn't exist, jamming women into men-shaped holes just doesn't work.

And, for the most part, western society works fine according to these systems developed by and dominated by men; women can feel vaguely oppressed without really being able to put a finger on the why -- leading to fictional characters like Edna Pontellier breaking free or real-life feminists like Doris Lessing doing the same -- and I would understand why men might be mystified by the revolt: You picked a fine time to leave me Lucille... At any rate, I have no idea what feminine power would look like and am not naive enough to say, "At least there would be an end of wars if women were in charge". 

We're still evolving as a society and I recognise how lucky I am to have been born in this time and place, yet everyone -- man and woman -- deserves a shot at self-fulfillment; deserves a shot at reaching for the stars.