Mind Picker : Elevator Pitch

This is my favourite story I've heard in a long time:

Dave was in Toronto the other day to go to a conference with the Alibaba people. He arrived at a downtown hotel – One King West, where he had never been before – and he was immediately annoyed to discover that they only had valet parking and he was out $35 before he even got out of the car.

When Dave entered the hotel lobby, he was confused by the two banks of elevators, and when he asked an employee where he was supposed to go, the man waved in the general direction of the elevators and said, “The conference rooms are on the second floor.”

Dave entered an elevator, and as he began looking at the floor buttons, an old lady got on as well, so Dave moved to the rear. As he did so, he noticed that there was no button for the second floor on this elevator. The old lady, who was parked right in front of the buttons asked, “What floor?”

Dave replied, “The second, but it doesn't appear...”

“Yeah. You're on the wrong elevator. This one just goes to the residences.” And then she punched the button for the 36^th floor.

As Dave swivelled his disbelieving eyes between the back of the old lady's head and the floor indicator as it counted off the climb up those thirty-six stories, he realised that this hunched and frail-looking cadaver with the frizzy grey hair was freaking Margaret Atwood.

How hard would it have been for Atwood to select the Door Open button and let Dave off immediately to find the proper elevator? Instead, because he was a gentleman and had moved to the rear for her, Dave could only glare at the back of freaking Margaret Atwood's thinning grey afro and chant to himself no-talent-overrated-hack (his words) over and over up thirty-six floors, watch her toddle off when the doors opened, and then stew alone for the thirty-six story ride back to the lobby.

Freaking Margaret Atwood.

When Dave was telling us this story, Ken suggested that he should have stepped forward and said, “Oh no, but you'll make me late for my rendezvous with my Handmaiden.”

And Dave said, “No, what I should have done was leaned forward and pressed all the buttons like Will Ferrell in Elf. 'Look! A Christmas tree!' And then get off at the next floor and walk back down to the second.”

I got some good reactions to this story when I shared it on Facebook, but my favourite was Kyler's photoshopping:

Freaking Margaret Atwood. 

Kennedy told this story to a few friends at University, and they all had one of two reactions: they were either shocked to hear that Atwood was still alive or they had a similar story of their own to share. When I asked my mother on the phone why she hadn't commented on the story on facebook, she said that she didn't want to upstage me with her own tale:

Back in the '90s, my Mum and a friend of hers went into Toronto to see Pierre Trudeau read from his memoir. As they were sitting in a cafe afterwards, Mum whispered to her friend, "I think that's Margaret Atwood at that table over there." The friend glanced over, turned back to my mother, and said, "Yeah. That's her. I know her."

Mum, a longtime fan, said, "Oh, do you think you could introduce me?" The friend's eyes went icy and she said, "No."

She then explained that some years earlier, she and her husband -- a well-known Canadian publisher -- had been living in London and one night they threw a dinner party for a bunch of Canadian authors who happened to be in the city. It was a very successful evening, with good food and excellent conversation -- please dear, call me Peggy, all my friends do --  and when they were parting at the door, Atwood embraced her hostess and said, "Thank you so much for the wonderful evening, we absolutely must get together again"; that sort of thing.

Just a couple of days later, as this woman was walking down the street, she saw Atwood walking towards her. She waved, beaming, and as they were just about to meet up, she said, "Oh Peggy, imagine meeting you..." But Atwood scowled down her nose at her hostess from just a few nights earlier, and kept walking. An absolute snub that left the woman feeling pained and ridiculous. So, no, she wasn't going to walk over to Atwood in the cafe to introduce my mother.

I don't know if that trumps Dave's elevator story, but it does illustrate that Atwood hasn't simply allowed herself to become eccentric with age; she was a young curmudgeon, too.

Freaking. Margaret. Atwood.

Empire Of Deception: From Chicago To Nova Scotia - The Incredible Story Of A Master Swindler Who Seduced A City And Captivated The Nation

Conmen need a battery of traits to win their victims’ trust and lighten their wallets. Chicago’s Leo Koretz had them all. They must be good actors and Leo, acting the part of a savvy financier who hobnobbed with a mysterious syndicate of millionaires, delivered a magnificent performance. They must be likeable, and everyone liked and trusted the generous, wisecracking, charming Leo. He could have been a top-flight lawyer, a business leader, or perhaps a powerful politician. He chose, instead, to become a master of promoting phony stocks.

Leo Koretz's story is not just stranger than fiction, but if an author made up this life story, a reader would never believe it; it's too outlandish, unbelievable; too filled with irony. As Empire of Deception opens in 1920s Chicago, Koretz is being feted by his millionaire backers – people for whom the conman has made a fortune on paper – and as a jest, they call Koretz their “very own Ponzi”; never suspecting that the recently convicted Charles Ponzi (of the famous pyramid scheme) had nothing on their hometown swindler. Could a filmmaker get away with a scene like that or would the audience be hurling tomahtoes at the screen?

But the thing is that Koretz was committing an enormous pyramid scheme, and unlike Ponzi and his one year run, Koretz kept his going for nearly two decades. In the beginning, he was a legitimate land broker, but when his income wasn't sufficient to start a family, Koretz realised how easy it was to sell phony mortgages – even repeatedly on the same property – and the more he sold, the greater return he was able to pay to his early investors, and then more new investors came begging him for a piece of the action. After losing money himself to a conman who was offering timberland in Panama, Koretz developed the exact same idea that everyone knew he lost money on into an irresistible investment opportunity that had Chicago's well-heeled knocking on his door and begging him for shares in Panama timber. When he wanted the scam to grow even faster, Koretz casually dropped to a few acquaintances that oil had been found on his Panama property and the money really started pouring in – with most investors choosing to roll their dividends back into stock so that Koretz never had to pay anything out. When, after nearly twenty years, Koretz knew that the scheme was about to collapse, he made his escape to the woods of Nova Scotia (buying a hunting lodge on a remote lake right next to the lake my own parents currently live on). Had he been able to live a quiet life, Koretz would likely have escaped the law forever, but his free-spending high life eventually brought him down and he was extradited back to the States. Even his end has the air of the incredible: after pleading guilty and accepting the justice of a prison term, the diabetic Koretz had a lady friend smuggle him in a large box of chocolates that sent him into a coma and then death. Koretz committed suicide by sugar. You couldn't make this stuff up.

I'm including Koretz's whole story because that's what Empire of Deception is essentially about – and that wouldn't make a very long book. In order to stretch it out (and, admittedly, to provide some needed context), author Dean Jobb interplays Koretz's story with that of Robert Crowe; the State's Attorney who prosecuted Koretz; who had coincidentally been a young law clerk in the same firm where Koretz made the start of his own career after law school. Although it had nothing to do with Koretz, the sections dealing with Crowe allowed the author to write at length about Chicago's corrupt and violent municipal government, Prohibition, the rise of a young Al Capone, and even the famous Leopold and Loeb murder trial. Charles Darrow makes a couple of appearances, Zane Grey travels to Nova Scotia to go tuna fishing, and we get quotes from Carl Sandburg, Mark Twain, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In an afterword, Jobb explains that he has been researching the Koretz story for thirty years, and although he found source material to be frustratingly scarce, the amount of peripheral information he assembled is really very impressive – there are hundreds of factoids and direct quotes throughout the book – but to some degree, it felt like padding (and the book is still only around 250 small pages before the epilogue). 

Empire of Deception is a very easy and interesting read, but sometimes the writing made me smirk:

A writer of detective stories – reading them was Leo's guilty pleasure – would have pulled out all the stops to describe the way those eyes turned a spotlight on the world. Penetrating, piercing, razor sharp. It was as if he could peer straight into a person's soul.

You can't get away with cliches by blaming them on an imaginary “writer of detective stories”, but the tone of this book is overall likeable. Koretz also bilked his own family with his scheme, leaving behind not only his aged mother and siblings but a wife and two children – all reduced from millionaires to destitute – and as a result, the family let his memory die with him (even Leo's stone at the family gravesite just says “son”). In the afterword, Jobb says that two of Koretz's grand-nephews were eventually able to piece together much of their infamous relative's story and that they love to regale friends with the true crime tale, using Koretz's death as “the punchline”. As much as I appreciate the research and passion that Jobb devoted to this book, I wonder, ultimately, if Koretz's story is much more than an amusing bar story.

Dean Jobb is a Halifax-based writer and it's amusing-but-ultimately-kinda sad that this book seems to need to have different titles depending on its market. I like the Canadian title ("Empire Of Deception: From Chicago To Nova Scotia - The Incredible Story Of A Master Swindler Who Seduced A City And Captivated The Nation") and my girls, like I myself was, were most intrigued by the Nova Scotia connection. But to sell Stateside, I see it needs to be called “Empire of Deception: The Incredible Story of a Master Swindler Who Seduced a City and Captivated the Nation” (best to just leave out all mention of Nova Scotia). And coming early next year, the paperback will be called “ Empire of Deception: Greed, Gullibility, and a Brazen Swindler in Jazz Age Chicago”. Now we're talking.

Tunesday : Don't Pass Me By

Don't Pass Me By

(Starkey, Richard) Performed by The Beatles

I listen for your footsteps coming up the drive

Listen for your footsteps but they don't arrive

Waiting for your knock, dear, on my old front door

I don't hear it, does it mean you don't love me anymore?

I hear the clock a ticking on the mantel shelf

See the hands a moving but I'm by myself

I wonder where you are tonight and why I'm by myself

I don't see you, does it mean you don't love me anymore?

Don't pass me by, don't make me cry, don't make me blue

'Cause you know darling I love only you

You never know it hurt me so, how I hate to see you go

Don't pass my by, don't make me cry

I'm sorry that I doubted you, I was so unfair

You were in a car crash and you lost your hair

You said that you would be late about an hour or two

I said that's all right, I'm waiting here, just waiting to hear from you

Don't pass me by, don't make me cry, don't make me blue

'Cause you know darling I love only you

You'll never know it hurt me so, how I hate to see you go

Don't pass my by, don't make me cry

One two three four five six seven eight

Don't pass me by, don't make me cry, don't make me blue

'Cause you know darling I love only you

You never know it hurt me so, how I hate to see you go

Don't pass my by, don't make me cry

This wasn't the song I was going to write about this week, but while reading the book of short stories How You Were Born, I was reminded of a story from my own youth for which this song seemed somewhat appropriate. Here's the context:

In the book there's a story called Acrobat, about an 11-year-old girl named Zoe, shy and new to town, who is intrigued by a flyer inviting children to an acrobatic demonstration in the park. When Zoe arrives, she is hyper-aware of her shabby clothing, and thinking of her mother's romance books, she muses --

Girls in these books were described as hovering or trembling on the brink of something. Zoe was skeptical. She felt she was slopping over, that an unending humiliation was beginning. Nothing could be more humiliating than a body.

And then she sees the acrobat for the first time --

She saw him standing by the steps of the bandshell and she saw the dragon inked blackish green along his shoulders, half-hidden by his dirty undershirt, which she knew was called a wife-beater, an exciting name, offering a glimpse into an adult world of beer bottles, broken windows, shouting.

When the dragon man lifts Zoe into the air with his feet (in what I called an airplane ride with my kids), she experiences a feeling of "dizzying liberation" where one is "just yourself, changed". There's so much want and need in the following scenes, the most innocent and confusing  of sexual awakenings, and you can't help but feel for Zoe as she wills the acrobat to acknowledge that she was a special participant; as she tries to doll herself up with a limp and bunchy dress, with splashes of water and barrettes for her bushy hair; as her mother begins to intuit why Zoe feels the need to dress up for the evening acrobatic performance --

Linda ran ahead, Zoe following carefully in her tight shoes, her mother beside her, mouth twitching in what Zoe felt was mockery. It made her walk more slowly, conscious of her own sweaty smell staining under her arms. For her mother it may have been something else. Fear, the wish to give a warning. Whatever it was, her mouth twitched.

After a scene that shows Zoe how her mother is seen by others, she spots the dragon man off to one side of the bandshell, and before the show begins, Zoe is compelled to make her way over to him --

She made herself move, walking toward him faster than she could think and with no idea what she wanted to say. Some words that would let him know that this was something she would remember and be grateful for, that would make him glad she was there. He would see that to her this was more than the disappointing trickle of people, the parched parkland and open sky, and that she, too, was more than those things. She would make him happy. 

When she reached him, he shook his head. 

"We begin in a minute, you should sit down."

He didn't recognize her. She waited, not able to believe it, but when he waved her away with even less patience she walked off, crouching down on the other side of the bushes, watching the men through the branches.

In a surprise ending, Zoe watches as the dragon man gives an affectionate kiss to a younger male acrobat and --

Surprise jolted her, that unplanned weightlessness overtaking her and making her body and the air around her strange. A depth and a lightness. Flying.

Okay, that's a lot of quoting from one story,  but author Kate Cayley captured so much of how I felt around that age -- the embarrassment of a changing body, the dawning realisation that others might be judging my mother unkindly -- a mother who regarded me with that same twitching, smirking mouth -- the same uncertainty when meeting older men: are you actually flirting with me or just being friendly?

To get down to specifics -- when Cora and I were twelve, we had matching t-shirts made at the local flea market. They were plain black shirts with a barely scooped neckline (nowhere near plunging, just obviously a girl's shirt) and we had decals of a Beatles lunchbox put on the fronts, and on the backs, Cora's said "Paul" and mine said "Ringo". The 70s were a big time for customised t-shirts and you could order decals from comic books (Keep on Truckin'!) and I remember that my little brother talked our Mum into buying him a shirt with his school nickname -- Bonewrapper -- printed in huge bone-letters across the front. I have no idea where that name came from, but I didn't think it was a compliment, and all the way home our big brother was squirming with discomfort until he finally blurted out something like, "I don't think Kyler should wear that shirt. It might be kind of...um...sexual." Of course, Mum was livid that she wasted the money on that shirt, wished that Ken had stopped her from buying it in the first place, and naturally, Kyler never wore it. Ken still calls our little brother Bonewrapper sometimes.

Unlike Kyler, I remember buying my own shirt for myself (I did have a job that summer) and I remember the particular freedom of finally making some of my own clothing choices that having money enabled. All through elementary school, we got new clothes once a year -- Back to School shopping in August -- and it was always a priority for my mother to devote part of her limited budget to getting me a little girl dress to wear on the first day of school and then again on picture day; that was her idea of respectability. I remember on grade 7 picture day I rebelled and wore some of my mother's clothes -- a beige peasant blouse, a pretty long floral skirt that she had made, and strappy high heeled sandals that had me limping by the end of the day (this was the only benefit of Mum staying in bed as we left for school in the mornings; she had no idea what I was wearing until I came lurching into the house that afternoon on blistery feet). 

I also remember that at the beginning of the summer I was twelve, my Dad came home with a garbage bag full of hand-me-downs from who-knows-where, and they were intriguing to me because the clothes had obviously belonged to a grown-up lady; and I was yearning to grow up. There were some crazy 70s-print dresses that I wished I had a reason to wear, and there were some cute shorts and tops sets, and very intriguing to me, was a blue tube top. The first day that it was hot enough for me to go bare shouldered, I wore that tube top out of the house, and that was the first time I saw my Mum doing that twitchy, near-smirky thing with her mouth. I barely had bumps under the elasticised top (that only served to flatten me out more) but it felt dirty to walk down the sidewalk like that, and in the end, I regretted it. Nothing could be more humiliating than a body. I never wore that tube top again, but in a strange aside, my mother did -- and this is what I mean about people judging her unkindly: she also never got new clothes and I can't fault her for wanting to be stylish herself, and if I was 12, she was 33 -- surely not an inappropriate age for a tube top in the 70s? The only problem was that my Mum was very busty and the elastic squished her breasts into tubes against her chest (can you picture that?) and that wasn't a very flattering look; I can only imagine what the neighbours thought. (I wrote here about how crazy my family eventually became and the nasty sendoff a neighbour gave to my Mum as she drove away from the house for the last time.)

So after all of that context, here's a short story --

That summer that I was twelve, I was walking up our street, wearing my Beatles lunchbox t-shirt and a pair of shorts. I was going to get the mail -- which even in the 70s was in a superbox a couple of blocks away, so think on that all you Canadians who are currently fighting against the end of door-to-door delivery -- and at the end of our block, I passed by a van with a couple of older men in contractor overalls standing beside it; likely plumbers or electricians who were doing work at the house there. Once I was past, one of the men called out in a wheedling voice, "Hey, Ringo -- why are you just walking by without saying hi? Come on back and talk to us." With "Ringo" written on my back, I knew he was talking to me, and I shot a bewildered look back over my shoulder at them, and the two men were chuckling and leering at me. I turned my eyes back forward and all I could think was, "Do you not know I'm twelve?" 

I know I got the mail and that I then needed to decide whether to walk back past these men to get home or whether I should take some crazy long way to avoid them. For perspective:

And here's the crazy thing: I want to say that I don't remember whether I walked back past them or not, but that's not exactly true; I can actually remember doing both perfectly well. I can remember wanting to see if that creepy old guy would talk to me again (hoping he would; hoping he wouldn't) if I walked by and working up the nerve and doing it; I even remember him sounding less jokey and more threatening this time. I can also clearly remember that I decided to walk up to Elm Rd and go totally out of my way to not risk looking like I was wanting more interaction (side note: I know Main Street looks like the shorter route but it was actually a highway without sidewalks; not nice for walking along). I honestly don't know which version is true.

I can't imagine a more innocent looking outfit on a young girl going about her innocent business; what was the deal with this guy? I've written here before about the time that two of my male teachers remarked in front of me that I have "bedroom eyes" (an event that came half a year after the present story), I wrote before about my Dad's friend Garth creeping me out by telling me that I look good when I have my hands in my pockets (can't find the story, but that was pretty much it and it also happened around this time), and I also once wrote about how later this same summer my Dad trimmed off my carefully groomed fingernails against my will (also can't begin to imagine where I wrote that down), and the common thread seems to be that adult men were beginning to recognise that I was growing up and that was an ambivalent experience for me -- I wanted attention but was totally embarrassed by it, and when quasi-sexual attention was coming from inappropriate sources, I was totally confused; I wanted/didn't want it and felt that same depth and lightness that Zoe described in the story; like having your body fall backwards down an elevator shaft while your mind stretches back to ground level.

Don't pass me by, don't make me cry, don't make me blue

'Cause you know darling I love only you

You never know it hurt me so, how I hate to see you go

Don't pass my by, don't make me cry

In the same way that Beatles fans don't really take Ringo's only writing credit very seriously, I don't know how seriously I was supposed to take a grown man catcalling -- Oh, don't pass me by, Ringo! -- when I was still more child than woman. I was twelve. Nothing could be more humiliating than a body. Although the memory of this day is still vaguely shameful for me, even if I was the teasing Lolita that Humbert Humbert accused his nymphet of being (which she obviously wasn't; which I wasn't; one afternoon in a tube top was the sexiest I ever dressed in my life), what was this guy thinking? What were my teachers or my Dad's friend thinking? Were the 70s a different (worse) time, or are there grown men today making twelve-year-old girls squirm under the focus of their attentions? As a mother on the other side now, I can only fear and try to give out warnings and watch helplessly, my mouth twitching with contradictory emotions.

Wind/Pinball: Two Novels

On any given day, something can come along and steal our hearts. It may be any old thing: a rosebud, a lost cap, a favorite sweater from childhood, an old Gene Pitney record. A miscellany of trivia with no home to call their own. Lingering for two or three days, that something soon disappears, returning to the darkness. There are wells, deep wells, dug in our hearts. Birds fly over them.

In the introduction to Wind/Pinball, Haruki Murakami describes the epiphany that struck him while watching a baseball game in his 20s – that he could write a novel; something he had never considered before – and he then goes on to tell the story of how he knocked out Hear the Wind Sing at his kitchen table, late each night, after returning from his day job at the jazz club he owned with his wife. Finished in just four months, Murakami sent his only copy of the manuscript off to a publisher and claims to have pretty much forgotten about it until he was informed that not only was the book going to be published, but it was shortlisted for (and eventually won) a literary prize. Emboldened, Murakami then wrote the semi-sequel Pinball, 1973, and eventually, had the confidence to sell the business and start writing full time. Along the way, he faced a lot of criticism from the Japanese literary establishment for his subversion of the proper use of the language, and as that hints at how revolutionary Murakami's work really was, it leaves me wishing I had a better understanding of what the establishment was like. The other thing we learn is that Murakami later saw these two early novellas as embarrassingly amateurish and had blocked all efforts over the years to re-release them, and although the completionist in me is satisfied that they were finally made available this year, I would have to admit that they aren't representative of Murakami's real genius and wouldn't make a good entry-level introduction to his oeuvre.

So, we learn how Murakami developed an informal method of writing Japanese (by attempting to write in his limited English and then translating back into Japanese), but I'm left wondering about the context of his subjects – writing just twenty years after the Americans bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Murakami stuffed these books with American pop culture references; like having everyone listen to The Beach Boys and Bobby Darrin, characters remember and lament the assassination of JFK, and a writer states that his biggest influence was the (fictional) American sci-fi writer Derek Hartfield. Did these references also annoy the establishment? 

As for the actual books, they certainly prefigure the themes that Murakami would become known for – the precision of describing music and meals, the inscrutable females, the whisky, the trains, the cats, and the omnipresent wells – but despite some slightly odd events, Wind/Pinball doesn't quite embrace the surreality that later books so impressed me with. I love that we meet the Rat for the first time, but without a Sheep Man, Murakami is only teasing at the edges of what he would eventually embrace. I'm happy to have been able to read these short novels , but only in an archaeological sense: I can recognise them as crude and early works of art that might not be appreciated by those who don't know what comes later.

Where there is an entrance, there is usually an exit. That's the way things are made. Mailboxes, vacuum cleaners, zoos, salt shakers. Of course there are exceptions. Mousetraps, for instance.

How You Were Born

The night you were born I dreamed of a train that surged out of the dark, headlights blazing, furious with light. It bore down on the world, shrieking, a great and terrible movement. You stared, unblinking, and your eyes were fixed on the fading afterimage of wherever you were before we are. You were more awake than anyone I had ever seen, your hands waving lightly in the new air. And I thought: this is how you were born.

Back when How You Were Born first won the 2015 Trillium Book Award in June, I heard the most charming story (taken here from The Globe & Mail ):

When the finalists for the (award) were announced last month, Kate Cayley and her partner explained to their 7-year-old daughter that Cayley was nominated alongside some of the best writers in Canada, including Dionne Brand, Thomas King and Margaret Atwood – all past recipients of the prize.

“My daughter, without a beat, said, ‘Well, you’re not going to win.’”

I love that story because, as a reader, I just see the finished book and hear about awards as abstract ideas and I can like this or not because it's just a consumer product in the end, but to Cayley's daughter, this book represents everyday life, maybe the nights when supper was late because Mom was on a roll, and the finished book isn't a product so much as an artefact, and how, therefore, could one's own Mom possibly compare with Margaret Flipping Atwood? I'm thinking the win (and subsequent additional nomination for the Governor General's Award for Fiction) also came as a surprise to Cayley's small Newfoundland publisher because it took me this long to get a copy of the book to read, being totally unavailable to order from the library or online bookstores until now. Consisting of eleven short stories over 150 or so pages, this collection felt, overall, a little light to me compared to the other heavyweights Cayley was competing against, but there's something – some uncanniness – that lingers after this book is closed that feels like it may have affected me more than I consciously realised.

Filled with unusual characters – acrobats and freak show performers, Appalachian folk legends, a Buchenwald survivor afraid of his nursing home and another old guy fighting back against his doppelgänger – it was often difficult for me to make a real mental connection with the stories. But when Cayley wrote from a familiar perspective – as in the eager little sister, ready to play spies with her ASD brother in The Summer the Neighbours Were Nazis or when the 11-year-old shy girl fell for the man with the dragon tattoo in Acrobat – I was totally connected emotionally. Ultimately, there were enough of these connected moments to raise my estimation of this collection, especially in afterthought.

Classics scholar – I've been educated to believe in fate, not the happy resolution kind, but the older kind in which something happens to you and you bow your head and live in it, there's no other choice.

These stories all feel like the slices of fate that you bow your head and live in; not huge dramas but the small events that make up a life nonetheless. The two stories that bookend this collection – Resemblance and How You Were Born – are both about the same lesbian couple and the child they have together, and it seems fitting to me that it's hearing about Cayley's own daughter that made me seek this book. Four stars is a rounding up.

So, yeah, written by a lesbian author, I was often startled when a character in one of the stories would demonstrate same sex affections, but "startled" doesn't mean "put off"; there's something refreshing and appropriate about having my assumptions gently challenged. One story -- Boys -- did make me uncomfortable and that was made doubly worse by this review:

The most startling and devastating tale is Boys, about a man who enables his brother’s pedophilic tendencies, not carelessly but out of love. It’s a deft portrayal of two kinds of human frailty told with uncommon compassion.

In this story, a mentally slow man -- James -- has a fixation on young boys and he tries to befriend them and get them to go for a ride in his car with him. It's never made clear whether James is interested in the boys sexually or whether he's mentally stalled at the age of a young boy himself (and therefore looking for an appropriate playmate?), but the facts aren't clear to Jim either (the man's cousin who is being paid to keep an eye on James), and to the degree that Jim is enabling "his (cousin's) pedophilic tendencies", I didn't find that a loving act of uncommon compassion. 

*****

Finalists – 2015 Trillium Book Award

Margaret Atwood : Stone Mattress
Dionne Brand : Love Enough 
Kate Cayley : How You Were Born
James King : Old Masters
Thomas King : The Back of the Turtle
Edmund Metatawabin : Up Ghost River 

Of these, my favourite read was Up Ghost River, but congrats to Kate Cayley for the win.

Governor General's Literary Awards English Fiction Finalists: 

Kate Cayley - How You Were Born

Rachel Cusk - Outline

Helen Humphreys - The Evening Chorus

Clifford Jackman - The Winter Family

Guy Vanderhaghe - Daddy Lenin and Other Stories

Happy to see Daddy Lenin take the GG!

His Whole Life

His Whole Life is an odd bit of Canadiana. As the story opens, Jim is ten-years-old and sitting in the back seat of his parents' old Chevette as they make their annual trek from NYC – where they live because of his American father George – to eastern Ontario – where his Canadian mother's family owns a secluded lakeside cabin. Attempting to slip in his most pressing question as just one more long drive conversation starter, Jim asks his parents, “What's the worst thing you've ever done?”, and this book then spends all of its remaining pages revealing the answer to that question for these three central characters. Along the way there are repeated themes of estranged siblings, broken friendships, prodigal sons, women who serve as end-of-life caretakers who then find themselves cut out of wills, men who are violent or resentful or sneaky-mean, dying dogs, and through it all, young Jim is the observer, the conciliator, the glue. In the end it would seem that author Elizabeth Hay's point is that for a people who stereotypically spend all of our time apologising, it would seem we Canadians have little capacity for actual forgiveness. Sorry, but I didn't love this book.

When Nan inherits her brother's property in the summer of 1995 – at the same time that she's feeling unhappy in her marriage – she decides to take Jim up to Canada for his entire summer vacation. Nan reconnects with her childhood friend Lulu, and with the second Quebec referendum on separation looming, the two women find themselves on opposite sides of the debate: Nan (the Canadian now living in America) is a passionate federalist who continuously trots out the retired-from-public-life Pierre Trudeau as the ultimate symbol of national unity and Lulu (born in the States, raised in Canada with a Québécois Grand-Mère, and recently living in Mexico ) is all for separation, holding up the now crippled Lucien Bouchard as the saint and martyr of Quebec's cause. Jim himself is a big fan of René Lévesque (dead by this time, but who Jim knows from his repeated readings of The Story of Canada), and it was so strange to me that these characters rarely brought up the two men who were actually on the opposing sides of the debate that summer: Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and Quebec Premier Jacques Parizeau. No matter, though, because the Quebec referendum seems to only be present in order to serve as a repeating knock-over-the-head metaphor about estranged families and failing marriages:

She wanted to feel more alive, that’s what she wanted. To live an independent and courageous life. And with that bracing thought something clicked in her brain and she understood Quebec. She understood a place torn between staying and leaving, and therefore always dissatisfied.

Canada beckoned to her, such a stable and reasonable country. Yet always on the verge of coming apart, because Quebec was so unhappy. As unhappy as I am in my marriage, she thought.

George hung on the edges, ill-defined, less important. He was “the rest of the family” the way English Canada was “the rest of Canada.” R.O.C. for short. That summer Quebec seemed serene in its power, secure, as if all packed up and ready to leave.

Even years after Quebec narrowly voted down the question of separation, Nan regarded George's post-surgical face and mused:

His mutilated face reminded her of a reconfigured map, a country carved up, her country without la belle province.

Um, your side won, so get over it? In the same way that Hay made all of these obvious political connections, she also would repeatedly come right out and name key character traits, as though not trusting herself to “show, not tell”:

Jim enjoyed watching people take sides. It increased the drama and he loved the drama. Yet it worried him too, since he wanted people to like each other and he wanted to be on the right side, the brave and exciting side.

That was a very obvious statement about Jim that I found annoying after watching him repeatedly demonstrate exactly those aspects of himself, as was the following when Jim returns to NYC and breathes deeply of its unique air:

It was like smelling an American dollar bill, thought Jim, and he loved it. These returns to New York at the end of August were a powerful part of his life.

Well, duh. These returns are shown many times, and besides, couldn't that be inferred? And sometimes, I didn't really know what Hay was getting at:

The son works forgiveness for the father. It felt like two rivers meeting inside her, one blue, one brown. The brown of “George, you hurt me,” and the blue of “I'm still breathing. I must have hurt you too.” If forgiveness could be considered a kind of movement in one's chest that made it easier to breathe.

His Whole Life ends the summer that Jim turns seventeen – set right after Pierre Trudeau's death and state funeral – and although there were many interesting vignettes along the way (I liked everything about the bizarre Isaac) and while, yes, Hay has a piercing eye for scene-setting, in the end, I don't know what this book was really about. I thought that Jim – with his group hugs and his knack for saying just the right thing – was too good to be true, and I grew weary of all the references to Homer and Shakespeare and Treasure Island (and if you're going to mention more than once that Jim was named after Robert Louis Stevenson's scamp of a narrator, why not explain the why of that?), and although I love me a book set in Canada, I didn't understand why Trudeau's life and death was the framing backdrop for what is otherwise a domestic drama. And don't even get me started on how annoying it was for Nan to rub the scar on her forehead every time she felt cornered, or the way she stroked the area over her heart whenever she was hurt. 

I didn't get this book and I didn't really like it, but being more okay than downright bad, I won't dip below three stars on it.

The 2015 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize nominees:

André Alexis - Fifteen Dogs

Elizabeth Hay - His Whole Life

Pamela Mordecai - Red Jacket 

Russell Smith - Confidence
John Vaillant - The Jaguar's Children

*Won by André Alexis, a good result in my opinion

In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom

I am most grateful for two things: that I was born in North Korea and that I escaped from North Korea. Both of these events shaped me, and I would not trade them for an ordinary and peaceful life. But there is more to the story of how I became who I am today.

Yeonmi Park was born in the North Korean city of Hyesan, close to the Chinese border. With only the narrow Yalu River separating the little girl from the periodic fireworks and intriguing cooking smells and the taunts of well-fed children that drifted over to her own side of the border, Yeonmi had nonetheless been sufficiently brainwashed by the pervasively insidious Kim regime to have honestly believed that she was living in a Worker's Paradise; the envy of the entire world. Although her family had suffered along with the rest of the country during the famines of the 1990s, Yeonmi's father was able to make enough extra money smuggling precious metals into China in order for their family to have a relatively worry-free life. When the father was eventually caught and sent away to prison camp, the family's existence became very precarious; and when he was allowed to return home on sick leave, the family made a desperate decision to escape across the frozen Yalu and into an unknown future. 

In Order to Live is different from other books I've read about North Korea. The Orphan Master's Son is a fictional account that dips into the lives of people at every level of North Korean society, Escape from Camp 14 is the biography of a man born and raised within a North Korean prison camp, and Yeonmi's story is something entirely different; and mostly because Yeonmi's story is the only one that describes a close and loving family. Yeonmi calls herself a member of the Jangmadang or “Black Market Generation”: the first modern North Koreans to have an underground capitalist economy, and because her parents were successful traders, Yeonmi grew up watching smuggled Hollywood movies and even had a Nintendo game system. Her family was hungry – but not starving – and cold – but not freezing – and despite a low social ranking (because of a grandfather's landowning status at the end of WWII), the Parks didn't live in constant fear of the authorities (and the ability to offer bribes provided much of their security). Because the North Korean government needs to turn a blind eye to some of the black market activity in order to keep their population alive, the idea that there's an increasing exposure to Western culture gives hope that repressed citizens of the Hermit Kingdom might eventually recognise the official lie they've been raised in. On the other hand, when Yeonmi's father was taken away and her mother followed to try and secure his release, base survival became the family's only concern.

Living in a border town leads to fantasies of escape, and when Yeonmi's older sister disappeared, Yeonmi and her mother soon followed across the frozen river. Although their guide had assured them that there would be a community of refugees inside China who would help them, they soon realised the truth: while North Korea was hungry for black market clothes and dvds, China had a thriving market for slave-brides; a direct consequence of the official one child rule which today sees many unmarried Chinese men, especially in rural areas. Right now, there are apparently many thousands of North Korean refugee women who have found themselves sold into such marriages, and as they are undocumented and illegal, they are forced to submit entirely to their new husbands or risk deportation back to North Korea and unimaginable punishment. Although Yeonmi was only 13 at the time of their escape, she and her mother were unwitting victims of such human trafficking. While her mother was bought as a farmer's wife, Yeonmi caught the eye of the rich young broker himself and quickly realised that living out scenes she recognised from Pretty Woman wasn't the escape she had imagined:

I was beginning to realize that all the food in the world, and all the running shoes, could not make me happy. The material things were worthless, I had lost my family. I wasn't loved, I wasn't free, and I wasn't safe. I was alive, but everything that made life worth living was gone.

Eventually, Yeonmi was able to make a deal with the broker that saw her reunited with her parents, and after her still sick father died, Yeonmi and her mother started on a path that would see them escaping into Mongolia, and eventually, repatriated to South Korea. It was interesting to learn about the acclimatising that South Korea offers to those from the North – and even though they had spent years in China, the Parks were still in need of deprogramming – and the supports and services that they have in place. It is apparently very rare for a student in Yeonmi's situation to catch up with her peers, but once given access to books and the internet, Yeonmi became a voracious reader who wanted to learn everything that had been denied her. After entering university and appearing as a semi-regular on a popular TV show (that attempts to teach South Koreans about those in the North, and that Yeonmi hoped would somehow lead to a reunion with her still missing older sister), Yeonmi caught the eye of the international community and now finds herself the voice of North Korea; and very much in Kim Jong-un's sights. 

Although written with the help of a journalist, the writing in In Order to Live didn't blow me away – there were big jumps in time when I would have liked more detail and many small jarring moments that I attribute to amateur writing – but Yeonmi's story was fascinating, and by the end, I was in tears. Any book I've read about North Korea has intrigued and repulsed me and it's a wonder that we aren't thinking about these people every day – if we can't have any influence on the maniacal Kim dynasty, why aren't we pressuring China to stop propping them up? Or at least pressuring them to stop sending North Korean refugees back for “reeducation”? An interesting perspective on why Yeonmi wrote this book is this interview in The Guardian where she says:

I really hope this book will shine a light on the darkest place in the world. We don’t feel like human beings: people don’t feel that they can connect with North Koreans, that we’re so different. People are making jokes about Kim Jong-un’s haircut, about how fat he is – this country is a joke, really. It is a joke, but it is a tragic joke, that this kind of thing can happen to 25 million people. These things shouldn’t be allowed to happen to anyone, because another Holocaust is happening and the west is saying: “It isn’t happening, it’s a joke, it’s funny – things can’t be that serious.” But we are repeating history – there are thousands of testimonies, you can see the concentration camps from satellite photos, so many people are dying. Just listen to my testimony, to the testimonies in front of the United Nations. I just hope people will read the book and will listen.

I, too, hope people will read this book and will listen. To cut to the chase, here's the video of Yeonmin's speech to the One Young World Summit (which also made me cry):