Mind Picking : Farewell 2017

I chose this picture as a kind of summary for the past year ironically: 2017 was another year of ease and happiness, with more than my share of good experiences; a year free of troubles and personal turmoil. It's all too much happiness, embarrassingly so, and I can only reply, "Ugh, as if." You know it's been a relatively stress-free year when I make it through a bunch of good books, and as my Goodreads infographic shows, I had plenty of time for reading:

And so, as I post every year, here are my favourite reads, beginning with 

The Top Five Books Released in 2017

  Days Without End

I just love Sebastian Barry, and this unusual tale of the Irish experience in the days of America's Wild West was the absolutely perfect blend of interesting history and savoury wordscraft. Loved every single page.

   Autumn

Ali Smith's experimental style tends to go over my head, but I connected with every bit of this story - all about the words with this one.

   Lincoln in the Bardo

Again, this was mind-blowing, genre-expanding wordscrafting and I was pleased that George Saunders won the Booker for it (any of these top three could have won to my satisfaction). 

   Exit West

This was probably the most of-the-moment book I read this year - a speculative, magicky look at the West being forced to accept the refugees we have created by our own actions in foreign interventionism - and Mohsin Hamid got it all just right.

   Lost in September

It was hard to choose my favourite Canadian book of the year, but this one lingers the best in my memory; it was a pleasure to read; should have won a literary award. I'd have given it the Governor General's Prize.

                         And Another Fifteen Favourites Released in Earlier Years

   The Power

I found this book to be so soul-satisfying (until the maybe imperfect ending) and I think it will stay with me a long time.

   Spill Simmer Falter Wither

Another Irish storyteller and a damaged protagonist - this is everything I love.

   Human Acts

This is the second book I've read and loved by Han Kang - I can't believe how little I knew about life in South Korea.

   The Accusation

And if I didn't know much about South Korea, this collection of short stories out of North Korea was a true education.

   House of Names

In addition to being a finely written book itself, I think what I liked the best was the intertexuality; the impetus to go to the bookshelf and try to find the original Greek plays this was based upon; an extended experience.

   Minds of Winter

I was fascinated by this book, and at the time, it was one of many signposts pointing towards the Yukon; it had a whiff of fate about it.

  The Lesser Bohemians

Irish storyteller; check. Engaging storyline; check. Less confusing than McBride's first effort; check. Loved it.

   I Am a Truck

My other favourite Canadian book. This is so perfectly Canadian - the French and the Anglo - I'd have given it the Giller Prize.

I'll arbitrarily group together my four favourite classic novels read in 2017:

   Stoner

Simply a perfectly crafted story of a life; this is why I read.

   We Have Always Lived in the Castle

More guilty pleasure than true literary classic, I enjoyed this book immensely.

   Jane Eyre

There's a reason it's called a classic. (And I'm glad to have finally read it so that I could form my own opinion about the legendary Rochester. That cad.)

   Wuthering Heights

Another overdue classic that was totally worthwhile.

And my three favourite, unintentionally related, nonfiction:

   Being Mortal

I guess I was much in mind of mortality and end-of-life care this year, and this book was mind-expanding.

   This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death

Fascinating and meditative; an education in dying.

   The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

And this one is a much cheerier (but still ultimately touching and tragic) memoir of an impending death that tied all of this together for me this year.

A look back at 2017 (in mostly fuzzy cellphone pictures):

With both of our girls in University, it was fun to see Mallory perform onstage at Laurier in Footloose and Kennedy perform at her school in The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade - hard to believe that that will be Kennedy's last ever amateur performance as she graduated this year:

                                            

Not one to sit around doing nothing, and pumped to craft a professional career, Kennedy immediately started applying for every theatre-related job she could find. She spent the summer as a camp counsellor for a Summer Theatre Camp, she travelled into Toronto several times to appear in student films, she had a short-term contract with a local theatre as a dramaturge, etc., etc. One of the opportunities that she discovered in her online searches was a six month contract with a theatre company in Whitehorse and the idea of that - living in the extreme North and watching as the days go from 24 hours of night to 24 of day - was fascinating to both her and me. She applied for it in September, had a Skype interview for it in October, and waited and waited to hear back from them. Meanwhile, Kennedy had started working at a children's musical theatre about half an hour drive away, and after making herself indispensable to them, that theatre crafted a five year plan around her becoming their fulltime salesperson. Happily, Kennedy wasn't interested in committing long term to a position like that (she still wants to act, after all), and when she proposed just doing the role for a year to cover a maternity leave, they shook on the new deal. And then the Whitehorse theatre called - and wanted Kennedy to move up in January. As fascinating as that adventure would have been (and as I mentioned around Minds of Winter above, I had never encountered so many references to the Yukon all of a sudden; something felt fateful about this opportunity), the position they offered her was permanent (there was no more mention of a six month contract), Kennedy had already accepted the other offer, and the more we considered the practicalities of it, the more impossible a relocation to the North sounded for her (and her tiny car). So, while Kennedy will not be moving to the Yukon, she is currently considering a move closer to the children's theatre - and that would be an adventure, too.

We saw plenty of live shows this year. In addition to seeing my own kids' plays, we went to a Classic Albums Live performance of David Bowie's songs at the Centre in the Square, I won tickets for an exclusive and up close live taping of a Barenaked Ladies TV special featuring The Persuasions (that's how close we were in the picture above), the GIFT Gala had a performance with both Blue Rodeo and Hedley, and in September we went to the Centre in the Square again to see Brian Wilson (and some other Beach Boys) performing their album Pet Sounds (and other hits). We went to Stratford in the summer to see two plays back-to-back: Timon of Athens (which was wonderful) and The Bakkhai (which was kind of not wonderful). Because she's a big musical fan, we took Ella to see Singing in the Rain at the St. Jacob's Theatre (it was a fine production) for her birthday, and just the other day, we took her to see Beauty and the Beast at the Dunfield Theatre as her Christmas present (it was wonderful - and especially getting to hear all the little kids in the theatre belly-laughing at Lefou's pratfalls). In November, we went back to St. Jacob's (Dave, his Dad, Kennedy and me) to see George Wendt perform as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman - Dave loved it, even if I found the casting of an old sitcom star to be a little gimmicky (the rest of the cast was great; especially the Linda). And because Dave is a Meatloaf fan and I am decidedly not, the girls took him to see Bat out of Hell on his birthday recently, while I got to stay at home. I'd say that's some support for the arts.

                                         

This was also the year that I had my eye surgery (described in grotesque and unnecessary detail here and here) and needed to take a month off of work, so went back to rent a cottage at Sauble Beach yet again. Neither of the girls could come for the full week, and it's really not the same without them, but Dave and I enjoyed ourselves all the same. Mallory worked the summer at African Lion Safari and was delighted to eventually also get a second job at Value Village - she seemed to be working all the time, and I didn't really piece it together that she was saving up as much money as she could in order to move in with friends when her University started up again. I'm so dumb that it wasn't until I was helping to move her into her apartment that I asked if she'd ever be moving back home again - and she said no. That's my Baby gone - and while I'm pleased and proud that she's independent and adventurous enough to make that leap, that's my Baby gone. (Mallory got the news that she had won a scholarship essay contest through my work while we were at Sauble, and I'm sure that cash helps, too. Good job, Mal.)

This was also the year of big and amazing trips - Kennedy and I went to Italy in September as her graduation present (related here), and just a couple of weeks ago, Dave took me to Paris for my 50th birthday (as gushed about here). Dave had business trips to Japan and Germany again this year (and he added on a side trip to Amsterdam in order to see the Anne Frank House and the Van Gogh Museum; it was a nice related experience for him to come home and see the Van Gogh film Love, Vincent [that brings his paintings to life] just a couple of days later) and for the first time he went to China and was brought to the Forbidden City, viewed Chairman Mao's preserved remains, and climbed a portion of the Great Wall (I'm envious of that last experience, for sure; love me some old rocks). 

And this was the year of moving Dave's parents closer to us, which I pretty much wrote about all year - the many weekends spent decluttering their home to prepare it for showings, its quick closure, and the physical move to their new home with Ruthann and Dan. I tried to capture some of his mother's current condition here, and there isn't much more to say about that at this point except to note that this move was a big part of the year that passed for all of us (and is probably why I was so attracted to books on mortality as related above).  

The holiday season was crazy busy at work, naturally, and I was delighted to have both Kennedy and Mallory home for Christmas; relieved that Dave took time off work and did pretty much all the cleaning and decorating around the house. We had our usual Christmas Eve party, a brunch the next morning with Dan and Rudy joining us and Dave's parents, followed by dinner across the street at Ken and Lolo's. There was much fine food, good cheer, and thoughtful and loving gifts - an embarrassment of riches to cap a year of particular good fortune. I am grateful for everything, and even if this is the year that finds us with an empty nest, I am looking forward to 2018 and all that it may bring.

The Water Beetles

I'm watching the beetle. Not the beetle I wish I was, but the bigger one who wants to kill it. Mine is golden-green, small and easy to spot. Just behind it is the larger one with a shiny, deep-black carapace, so black it seems to drink the light right from my eyes. The big one hasn't struck mine yet, it's only watching, and it tastes the air ahead to see when it should act. I can see it will strike and win, and the beetle I wish I was will die. Like everyone else, it is at war, which means its every move is inevitable and prescribed.

The Water Beetles reminded me of The Narrow Road to the Deep North: like Richard Flanagan before him, author Michael Kaan took his father's real-life account of harrowing experiences during WWII, and by crafting a narrative that dips in and out of the timeline of an entire life, Kaan is able to show how such early experiences shape, and wound, a person forever. As a meditation on memory and personhood, I found The Water Beetles to be serious and deep. As a WWII story that I hadn't heard before, I found it to be informative and gripping. What more could I have asked for?

Looking back into the past is a lonely game of self-delusion, watching people and events move with an inevitability that never was. The history books tell everything with such certainty. But at the time, nothing seemed inevitable to me. Some things were impossible or unlikely, some things expected, but most of all, beyond the routine of daily life, the world was a mystery. We knew little until it happened.

In the opening scene, the narrator, twelve-year-old Chung-Man, is on a forced march with some of his family members; weary, starving, and in constant fear of the Japanese soldiers with their guns and bamboo switches. After this brief opener, the story rewinds to introduce Chung-Man as a child of privilege; a rich man's son living in Hong Kong, with maids and a driver, a tailor dressing the boy for British-styled private school. We meet the entire family over the next several chapters, always having in mind which of them were POWs in the opening scene, and there's a satisfying narrative tension as the reader wonders what happened to everyone else. As the narrative also jumps ahead to Chung-Man's present and stories from his adult life, there are hints about who will survive (including, obviously, Chung-Man himself), and this doesn't lessen the tension: I needed to know how everyone mentioned got from there to here. As the Japanese invade Hong Kong, I was fascinated by the British army's fast capitulation of its colony (but, to be fair, I hear they were otherwise engaged by the war), and as Chung-Man is led into hiding in the Chinese countryside, I was riveted by how easy it seemed to be for Japan to bomb and march their way to a seemingly unopposed victory over the much larger country. I didn't know much of anything about this history, and this story was an education. (As per Flanagan's book, the Japanese soldiers are particularly cruel to their POWs – I cringed at scenes of stragglers being shot in the head; starving children forcing down spoiled food; women hiding in the stinking latrine from the midnight visits of their drunken captors.)

Knowing I'll die soon doesn't bother me. There's too much to be unburdened of, the indignity and pain. The fact is that the long contest against death is relatively easy; you win every day, no matter how, until you lose. You know who holds the prize each night when you hit that pillow.

What troubles me is the struggle to stay continuous, to be a single person over time. How can I be certain it was really me who emerged from the boy in the horse farm, or from the one who carried the buckle? He doesn't feel like the same person sometimes. Part of me is still back there, looking into the future as a mystery instead of the crumbling pile it is to me now.

And The Water Beetles would have been a worthy read if it were only a history lesson, but the older Chung-Man's philosophising about the perceived inconstancy of personhood over a lifetime really affected me; Kaan captures something unique and important with these bits. I wouldn't have picked this up if it hadn't been a finalist for the Governor General's Award for Fiction, and having now read it, I'm surprised it didn't win; at a minimum, it deserves to be more widely read.

The 2017 Governor General's Literary Awards Finalists:

• All the Beloved Ghosts by Alison MacLeod
• Lost in September by Kathleen Winter
• The Water Beetles by Michael Kaan
• Uncertain Weights and Measures by Jocelyn Parr
• We'll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night by Joel Thomas Hynes

Won by We'll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night - which seems an odd choice to me. I liked it, but would have personally given the award to The Water Beetles.

The Marrow Thieves

From where we were now, running, looking at reality from this one point in time, it seemed as though the world had suddenly gone mad. Poisoning your own drinking water, changing the air so much the earth shook and melted and crumbled, harvesting a race for medicine. How? How could this happen? Were they that much different from us? Would we be like them if we'd had a choice? Were they like us enough to let us live?

The Marrow Thieves is about a near-future dystopia: a not unimaginable one in which the worst predictions about Global Warming and the all-around poisoning of our planet have come to pass; shifting the landscape and killing off millions. In a unique twist, Métis writer Cherie Dimaline imagines that in this future world, the white folks are suffering from a debilitating malady that may be, somehow, cured by the bone marrow of Native peoples, and in a deliberate, appropriate, and thoughtful callback to the deplorable Residential School System, “Recruiters” are sent out to round up the Natives and bring them in for “harvesting”. As a result, Natives take to the forests, banding together for safety, and much of this book is about their daily struggle to survive; staying one step ahead of the Recruiters and working hard to keep their culture(s) alive. Despite there being little explanation provided around the specifics of the race-based illness and its race-based cure, I appreciate Dimaline using this framework to explore the history and present-day relationship between Native peoples and the rest of Canada; this kind of sociological exploration is found in all the best of dystopic fiction. On the other hand, I didn't think that this story was terribly well executed: the characters were shallow, the writing was clumsy (far too many clunky foreshadowing bits and narrative inconsistencies), and there was very little world-building for a changed Earth scenario (Dimaline writes early that the fauna has been affected by the ravaged environment – raccoons the size of huskies! – but we only see the hunters bring back very ordinary deer, squirrels, and wild turkeys; other than a lot of rain, this could be set in the Northern Ontario of today). Still, this feels like a really valuable narrative – the fact that a Native writer could imagine this future should alert the non-Native reader to the present-day fears of this community.

In the beginning we meet our narrator Francis (also known as French or Frenchie) as an eleven-year-old on the run. When he gets separated from his brother, Mitch, all he knows to do is to head for the woods and start walking north; rumour has it that there is a safe and viable Native community up there. Early on I was a bit taken aback by the overwritten thoughts of an eleven-year-old:

Out here stars were perforations revealing the bleached skeleton of the universe through a collection of tiny holes. And surrounded by these silent trees, beside a calming fire, I watched the bones dance. This was our medicine, these bones, and I opened up and took it all in. And dreamed of north.

French soon meets up with a group of Natives who take him in, and through an Elder's campfire stories and the other group members' “coming-to” tales (the stories of how each of them came to run for the woods), the history of how this world came to be is related. I found this device to be a bit formulaic, but it gets the info out there. The story jumps ahead five years and they eventually find another lone Native – the outspoken and beautiful Rose – and she provides a love interest for French; allowing for all the elements of a classic coming-of-age story. Obstacles and crises propel the narrative forward, and while I found the ending to be incredibly touching, enough is left open-ended that Dimaline could certainly write a sequel, or even a series. Having won both the Governor General Literary Award for Young People's Literature and the Kirkus Prize for Young Readers' Literature for The Marrow Thieves, I do hope that Dimaline is encouraged to explore this world further.

And as for the ideas: I have said before that I believe the Residential Schools here in Canada weren't necessarily conceived in evil; that the coloniser mindset could believe it was doing Native peoples a favour by stealing their children, erasing their culture, and attempting to educate them for a place in the steamrolling white culture coming over the horizon. (And, of course, this was a terrible and dehumanising mindset that has led to horrific intergenerational trauma for our Native communities; I just don't believe that the people who initially put it into effect were all genocidal maniacs.) On the other hand, in this future world, the white people are genocidal maniacs: none of the people that French runs into has much information about how the white disease works or how the Native marrow would cure it, they don't even know how the marrow is harvested, so the reader doesn't know either – all we do know is that the woods are crawling with white Recruiters (and Native traitors) who are prepared to apprehend and presumably kill fellow human beings in order to help their own community; and in my own mind I was wondering if we haven't evolved past that kind of official us-vs-them thinking; would I support the “harvesting” of Native children to cure my own children of a disease? I don't think I'd be any more capable of that than I'd be of hunting down another race of people for food if other sources ran out (but no one ever said that the killing of children to preserve order made that much sense in The Hunger Games, either; you just need to buy into the idea that there will always be power imbalances and people at the top who try to keep it that way.) But to nuance the moral quandary, Dimalane has the Elder, Miig, urge the others to consider what they themselves would do to protect their group: Anything; Everything, they reply.

As long as the intent is good, nothing else matters. Not in these days, son.

So, if your intent is to protect your own group, whether white or Native, anything goes? What a remarkably subtle idea for Dimaline to have woven throughout this story, and it's one that I'll need to keep thinking on. In this interview, Dimaline explains her impetus for writing The Marrow Thieves – what she hoped both Native and non-Native young readers would take away from it – and, again, I find her inspiration to have been vital and necessary. I can't help but wish, however, that the whole had been better written.

Tunesday : River

River

Written and Performed by Joni Mitchell

It's coming on Christmas 
They're cutting down trees 
They're putting up reindeer 
And singing songs of joy and peace 
Oh I wish I had a river I could skate away on 

But it don't snow here 
It stays pretty green 
I'm going to make a lot of money 
Then I'm going to quit this crazy scene 
Oh I wish I had a river I could skate away on 

I wish I had a river so long 
I would teach my feet to fly 
I wish I had a river I could skate away on 
I made my baby cry

He tried hard to help me 
You know, he put me at ease 
And he loved me so naughty 
Made me weak in the knees 
Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on

I'm so hard to handle 
I'm selfish and I'm sad 
Now I've gone and lost the best baby 
That I ever had 
I wish I had a river I could skate away on 

Oh, I wish I had a river so long 
I would teach my feet to fly 
I wish I had a river 
I could skate away on 
I made my baby say goodbye 

It's coming on Christmas 
They're cutting down trees 
They're putting up reindeer 
And singing songs of joy and peace 
I wish I had a river I could skate away on

What a bittersweet Christmas song, so full of the regretful melancholy that can affect people at this time of year. I have so much to be thankful for - my health and family, my comfort and safety, my abundance of everything - and even so, I can feel a melancholic pull; even in the midst of such abundance and surrounded by people who want me to be happy. River is the perfect song to listen to and explore strange and ambivalent feelings; a classic, whether sung by Joni Mitchell or Robert Downey Jr (and just why hasn't he done more singing?)

This Christmas was much the same routine as every Christmas, so I'm just going to highlight a few things. To begin with, this is the first year that my inlaws are living in the same city as us, having been moved closer to share a house with their daughter and son-in-law. With my mother-in-law succumbing slowly to the dementia of Alzheimer's, and my eighty-year-old father-in-law no longer able to care for both his wife and their house, this move was necessary, and to be honest, overdue. But Bev is just far enough gone not to understand why they made the change; she apparently is often in tears, threatening to move back to London herself if Jim won't move with her. When we went out to New Hamburg to attend a Christmas dinner with her side of the family, every time someone would ask her how she was liking Cambridge, Bev would answer, "It's okay, but I don't remember anyone asking me if I wanted to move there". And there's truth to that - five years ago Bev would have agreed to the move, but neither she or Jim thought it was time yet; with friends, family, and excellent neighbours living nearby, they had support and reason to stay put. Over the years, as people passed away - not to mention Bev's increasing care-related needs - they became more isolated, and finally, Jim agreed to start thinking about the move. They found an appropriate house so quickly that, really, Bev wasn't asked her opinion, and I suppose with her memory increasingly failing from day-to-day, we didn't think it much mattered. And I don't mean to be cruel when I say that: for the previous year or so, Bev had spent many days looking out the front window of the house she had lived in for over thirty years saying, "It's nice here, but I think we should go home soon." If Bev could no longer recognise that as her house, what difference would it make if she lived somewhere else; somewhere better, with no stairs to negotiate and with her daughter right upstairs to help with everything?

But, I guess it did matter, and Bev does indeed know (and resent) that she wasn't consulted about this. And that's a melancholy Christmas tale. (By the by, Jim dug out and brought along their Christmas sweaters from that picture up there, and Dave and I still had - and wore on Christmas morning - our own sweaters; impossibly hard to believe that that was twenty-five years ago; that twenty-five years later we'd all be living in the same city under these circumstances.) Here's what I'm most surprised about the progression of Bev's Alzheimer's: I expected memory problems - and there certainly are those - but I had no idea that the disease would be so centered in her body; that it would be about wetting the bed at night (because she often wakes up in the middle of the night and takes off her "uncomfortable" Depends), and about constantly trying (and sometimes failing) to rush to the washroom on legs that have stiffened up from sitting too long - she walks, unsteadily, with a hunch now; struggles to step over a door's low threshold. A UT infection recently left her sitting slumped in her chair, unable to life up her fork to eat scrambled eggs: it's the body that's failing the quickest, but the disease has given Bev no shame about it. Peeing in her bed, pooping down her leg onto the floor, having her grown daughter wash her in the shower - Bev is taking it all in stride, not recognising the increased care that her needs are tasking her family with. She has no idea why this move needed to happen, so of course she's resentful about it. Dave has stressed to her a couple of times that the move was primarily for his Dad's benefit - that he needed help caring for her - but there is some disagreement over whether or not she should be defined as a burden (despite her memory doctor having used this tactic). And it's funny to me that after watching first her grandfather and then her own mother - both of whom lived with her near their ends - succumbing to the indignities of Alzheimer's, Bev has zero recognition of what's happening to her. And, of course, that's a blessing.

And here's another melancholy tale - My mother called to ask me about my Paris trip, and after saying that she gave up flying because the idea of breathing in the air that others had breathed out made her gag, she remembered this story: Apparently, the first Christmas after my Mum, Dad, and brother Kyler moved back to Ontario, her sister Carole (who was living a three hour drive away in Kingston at the time) called and said my mother should visit her for Christmas. Mum said that she needed to be home for Christmas for Dad and Kyler, but Carole was feeling lonely so far away from the rest of their family in PEI, and she again insisted that Mum come for Christmas. My mother pointed out that Carole was there with her husband and two children - she would hardly be alone for Christmas - but again, Carole said that she needed to be surrounded by family at the holidays, and finally, Mum agreed to drive down for Boxing Day. There was a big ice storm that year, however, and when Mum called Carole on Christmas Day and said that she couldn't possibly drive to Kingston the next day, Carole lost it and said that Mum could take the train then. Mum, apparently, then began talking this crazy talk about being sickened by the thought of breathing in the air that other people had just breathed out, she couldn't possibly endure being stuck on a train with strangers, but again, Carole played the family card and shamed Mum into taking that train. The punchline: After leaving a resentful Dad and Kyler, after putting herself through the mental torture of being cooped up in that traincar of strangers' expelled breaths, when Carole and my cousin Kaitlin met Mum at the train station, they mocked her meanly and mercilessly for having worn her fur coat. Mum said it was awful, and they didn't stop talking about it the whole time she was there, and then she just kind of trailed off in her thoughts. (By the by: after divorcing that husband and alienating herself from her two children, Carole is now suffering from Alzheimer's herself and has been put, against her will, into assisted living.)

So, after this story of what you'd do for family and the coming-together pressures of the holidays, my girls called their Nan and Pop twice on Christmas morning, not getting an answer either time (but leaving a long message the second time). Mum called me later in the afternoon, talked about the weather for a while (the high winds had knocked out their power), and without either mentioning the word "Christmas" or commenting on the presents I bought for her, she suddenly asked to speak to someone else and that was alls I got by way of Christmas greetings from my own parents (if you don't count the card and cheque Dad sent; I count that as the minimum requirement of acknowledging your children and grandchildren). And that makes me melancholy, even when I was surrounded by my brothers and their families, along with Dave's extended family, for many days around Christmas, enjoying several parties here and there, having the inlaws sleep at our house for a couple of days as they've been doing for twenty+ years, even though they live in town now. There's family and then there's family, and when my own parents inevitably need to call on us, we have no idea how we can be of help from way up here. Move one or the other of them up to live with one of us? Force one or the other, against their will, into assisted living? No clue.

I wish I had a river.

The Doll's Alphabet

The Doll's Alphabet has eleven letters:
ABCDILMNOPU

The Doll's Alphabet is a strange, surrealist collection of stories that consistently had me wondering, “What did I just read? What does it mean?” That quote above is the entirety of the titular story: And. What. Does. That. Mean? Does it mean anything? I don't know if that particular “story”, and author Camilla Grudova's decision to name the collection after it, is meant to warn the reader off of trying to parse a deeper meaning in these tales, but like time-tested fables, these stories feel deep; they clicked for me beyond my conscious mind, leaving me puzzled but somehow satisfied. Channelling Grimm by way of Gogol, Grudova layers on some Atwoodesque social commentary and it all works.

This collection has thirteen stories, ranging in length from the two sentences above to one story that is twenty-six pages, and they are all set in a world of scarcity (think a cross between Communist bread lines and some post-apocalyptic future) with grime, shabbiness, and folks living on tea, tubers, and tinned fishes; this is our world but not, familiar but strange. (If I had a complaint it would be that for a collection of fantastical tales, despite different social structures and apparently different settings in each story, they all seem to inhabit the same world; there's also a sameness of voice and style that could have been shaken up.) And these are decidedly feminist stories, with surrealist situations underscoring gender roles – pregnancy and childbirth are often dodgy propositions; even mermaids risk molestation. Themes and ideas recur throughout, but no image moreso than that of an old-fashioned sewing machine; and what does that mean? In the first story, Unstitching, women discover how to reveal their inner selves (to the disgust and envy of their male partners):

One afternoon, after finishing a cup of coffee in her living room, Greta discovered how to unstitch herself. Her clothes, skin, and hair fell from her like the peeled rind of a fruit, and her true body stepped out...She did not so much resemble a sewing machine as she was the ideal form on which a sewing machine was based. The closest thing in nature she resembled was an ant.

In Agata's Machine, a reclusive young genius transforms a sewing machine into a magic lantern that projects a moving image of her dream man, and in Edward, Do Not Pamper the Dead, a man undermines his wife's efforts to save up for a sewing machine of her own:

He had dreamt of the sewing machine many times; he was convinced Bernadette and the machine would somehow become one being, a silver needle coming out of Bernadette's mouth where her teeth should have been. In his dreams, he lay flat on her lap, and she sewed his hands to his feet and so forth. Her neck bent, her face almost touching her thighs, but for Edward in-between.

In Waxy, in a society where Men study Philosophy Books in order to take Exams while supported by their women who work in Factories, a young woman works at a sewing machine factory (painting “NIGHTINGALE” on each machine by hand), and in the final, perhaps strangest story, Notes from a Spider, a celebrated man with a handsome, human face and the body of an arachnid finally finds his equal in an unexpected place:

The machine in the window had four legs, like iron plants, a wooden body, a swan-like curved metal neck and a circular platform to run the fabric across, not unlike the plate on a gramophone where the record was placed, and a small mouth with one silver tooth. She was an unusual, modern creature. What beautiful music she must make! Florence was her name, it was stencilled on the shop window. FLORENCE. I sat there in my carriage until it was morning and the shop opened. I hastily purchased her, the one in the window. They asked if I wanted her taken apart, for carrying, but I had her put, as is, in my carriage. I drove through the city, my legs entwined with hers, two of my feet placed on her sole-shaped pedals.

I don't know what any of it means, but I liked it. A lot.

Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

I knew birds were not trivial. They were constantly chirping, and what they were saying, or what I heard them say, was Stand up. Look around. Be in the world.

Birds Art Life is a hipstery memoir – Toronto-based writer Kyo Maclear drops the names of arthouse movies and indie musicians that I've never heard of (in the acknowledgements, Maclear even thanks a Jason Logan for the “street-harvested pigments” she used in the pen and ink sketches for this book; and if that ain't hipster, I don't know what is) – and the overall effect didn't do a whole lot for me: I didn't find her story to be either mind-openingly unique or relatably universal. On the other hand, I did find Maclear to be likeable, interesting, and unpretentious. This is a fine read, but didn't open my eyes to anything new; I wouldn't widely recommend it, but am also not warning against it.

If I am guilty of hiding among tinier people in a tinier parallel world, it is because I am searching for other models of artistic success. The small is a figure of alternative possibility, proof that no matter how much the market tries to force consensus, there will always be those making art where the market isn't looking.

In the beginning, Maclear explains that as the only child of divorced immigrant parents, she has had to become the caregiver for her aging father – and with the added demands of a husband, two children, and a writing career, she felt herself becoming “wordless” with “anticipatory grief”. After experiencing a feeling of wanderlust – a desire to roam and free up her “creative and contemplative” mind once again – Maclear found herself drawn to the story of a local musician who takes pictures of birds around Toronto; thought perhaps her own happiness could be bird-shaped. After making contact with him (curiously, Maclear only and always refers to the man as “the musician” in the book, but thanks him by name in the acknowledgements), he agrees to let her follow him on his bird walks for a year. This book is the story of these birds walks and what species they find together, along with Maclear's family history, some sketches and photos of birds, some current events, research that includes lists of famous people and how they relate to her points, and some meditations on the nature of art and creativity. Mostly, it's about the birds.

Most of us don't have time for the malady of stillness. Life is too short for longueurs. The idea of sitting for hours on end, on rocks or bits of log, in the cold, for a bird, is the definition of lunacy and silliness.

And yet –

Maclear writes that when she was working on this project, she often described it to friends as a “sketchbook”, and that feels like an apt description for the finished product: it's a multimedia assemblage; a collage. And ultimately, by looking for birds, she refound her voice.

The birds tell me not to worry, that the worries that sometimes overwhelm me are little in the grand scheme of things. They tell me it's all right to be belittled by the bigness of the world. There are some belittlements and diminishments that make you stronger, kinder.

I thought that the writing was polished and the thoughts interesting, but it still didn't add up to all that much. Birds Art Life reminded me of Unearthed – another slow-simmer Toronto-set memoir – when I wanted something deeper like H is for Hawk or Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Still, not a waste of my time.

2017 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction Finalists:


Tomboy Survival Guide by Ivan Coyote

Birds Art Life by Kyo Maclear

Life on the Ground Floor:Letters from the Edge of Emergency Medicine by James Maskalyk 

All We Leave Behind: A Reporter’s Journey into the Lives of Others by Carol Off

Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City by Tanya Talaga

*Won by Life on the Ground Floor. All of these books are worthy finalists, and I learned a lot, but my favourite would be Tomboy Survival Guide as the best written/most eye-opening.