Cormac: The Tale of a Dog Gone Missing

When I say Fairhope is a small town in Alabama, think of art galleries and coffee shops and cafés and sailboats bobbing at anchor on Mobile Bay, beneath the high bluff upon which the town is perched. Think of flowers on the corners of brick-paved sidewalks, gnarly live oaks draped with Spanish moss, magnolias and tall pines swaying in waterfront breezes that smell faintly of fish and salt. Think of a bustling independent bookstore on the corner; and think of my sleepy bookstore with old and rare volumes just down the street. Think of twelve thousand residents and more published authors per capita than any other place in the country. Think of a new library that is the centerpiece of the town's architecture.

Now think about the world's handsomest and sweetest Golden Retriever, as smart as any four-year-old child, who answers to the name Cormac, and who lives on the outskirts of Fairhope in an aging farmhouse on an easy hill, with two acres to roam, complete with a barn and swimming pool. Think of what a great place this is from which to launch a red-haired dog's bizarre adventure.

I am not against having my heartstrings pulled by a shaggy dog story – I cried over both Marley and Me and Lily and the Octopus – and as I have had a ridiculous amount of fun sharing my home with a now five month old Minidoodle named Cormac, a book entitled “Cormac: The Tale of a Dog Gone Missing” seemed an easy fit; I wasn't asking much of this book – just entertain me for a while. This “based on a true story” novel of a doggy who gets separated from his family had heartsting-pulling potential – I have no doubt that author Sonny Brewer loved Cormac and his disappearance was devastating for their family – and the details that Brewer's search revealed were of the “truth is stranger than fiction” variety, but the execution of this book was just passingly satisfactory. Brewer himself doesn't come off as very likeable, and for someone who tells us repeatedly that people tell him he's a good writer, this isn't amazingly written. Still no regrets: I got plenty of laughs from people who have met my dog and then saw me posing with this book.

Several of my customers at Over the Transom have heard me say that Cormac McCarthy's literary craftsmanship is unexcelled, have heard me preach that McCarthy's penchant for infusing violence with a love of language is exquisite. I believe, and have hand-sold the opinion, that Cormac McCarthy's unblinking eye catches man's blood-smeared meanness in the glaring light of his particular art and renders it required viewing. It occurred to me that Mr. McCarthy might not be flattered to share his name with such a sweet, doe-eyed fellow as the Golden Retriever in the back seat of my Jeep. But, if Cormac McCarthy knew that I was a bookseller specializing in used and rare volumes, that I'd invested $750 for a first edition of Blood Meridian, then perhaps he might not judge his name taken in vain.

(Yes, I named my own dog after Cormac McCarthy, but when people ask, I prefer to explain my secondary reason: that “Cormac” was a legendary Irish king and that seemed a fitting name for my red-haired Doodle.) So: Sonny Brewer was a bookstore owner in the hipster town of Fairhope, Alabama, barely making ends meet, when he decided to send an unfinished manuscript out to an agent. He was immediately taken on, the agent found a publisher, and in a whirlwind of success, the next thing Brewer knew, he was out on a book tour, needing to leave his four-year-old doggy at home in the care of a friend. During a brief thunder storm (which Cormac had recently developed a fear of), the dog ran through his yard's invisible fencing system (which had apparently happened a few times before), and by the time the friend called Brewer out in San Francisco to tell him the bad news, a neighbourhood search had begun. The story of the search wouldn't fill a whole book (although the details were quite interesting), so Brewer writes about his personal and professional life, and that's where he reveals himself to be someone I don't think I'd like. I didn't like the way he was always keeping important things from his wife (and when he described someone on a restaurant patio as “a small-breasted woman with straight blond hair”, I had to wonder if he really likes women at all; that description rubs me totally the wrong way.) I didn't like Brewer's history as a dog owner (he describes a series of dogs that he picked up and gave away when they weren't a good fit for his lifestyle; Cormac didn't have a microchip, despite the vet having recommended one; the invisible fence that didn't keep the dog in was never improved upon; not neutering an animal that gets away sometimes is incredibly irresponsible). I can't imagine why he would admit to setting the cruise control on his Jeep on a relaxing highway drive so he could keep one eye on the road while reading a book with the other. And as for the details of his search: I really couldn't understand why, when he called the pound and learned that a red Golden had been processed through the previous week, Brewer asked to speak to a manager, and when she said that he would need to come down in person – their policy is not to discuss details over the phone – Brewer blew up and said she's be hearing from his lawyer. And then, instead of driving to the pound, he drove to his lawyer's office – who got the same message from the manager: this is the policy. The two of them try to get others to call this manager, same result, so he goes back to his bookstore, where a friend insists on driving him to the pound – fifteen minutes away. Why wouldn't he have just gone to the pound in the first place?? More than one person tells Brewer that he's being rude on the phone – he was understandably upset over his lost dog, but as he's the one telling the story, I have to wonder just how rude he really got; I don't like him.

Ah, so much good writing, so little time. The great writers I love to read were an influence on my writing, but they also kept me from trying my own hand at fiction. Gabriel García Márquez, William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy. I stood in stunned awe of their work. What was the point? If I couldn't write that well, why spend the ink?

Like I said at the beginning, I wasn't expecting high literature from this read, so it's unfortunate that Brewer himself invokes comparisons to these celebrated writers; unsurprisingly, he falls short. I would rate this a 2.something but am rounding up because my own good red dog is curled up on my feet and that makes me feel a little bit more kindly toward humanity.

Bunny

We call them Bunnies because that's what they call each other. Seriously. Bunny.

Example:

Hi, Bunny!

Hi, Bunny!

What did you do last night, Bunny?

I hung out with you, Bunny. Remember, Bunny?

That's right, Bunny, you hung out with me and it was the best time I ever had.

Bunny, I love you.

I love you, Bunny.

And then they hug each other so hard I think their chests are going to implode. I would even secretly hope for it from where I sat, stood, leaned, in the opposite corner of the lecture hall, department lounge, auditorium, bearing witness to four grown women – my academic peers – cooingly strangle each other hello. Or good-bye. Or just because you're so amazing Bunny.

I really liked Mona Awad's Bunny – it's sardonically funny, but with very sad underpinnings (like Eileen or Martin John; two other books I loved for the same reason) – and it goes to some unreal extremes to explore loneliness, outsiderness, and the ways in which women can choose to support or destroy one another. It does have a Mean Girls in the Ivy League vibe, but layered on top of that are dark and twisted fairy tales come to life – which works so well. When I read Awad's Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, I wished it had more literary oomph; this is the novel I was looking for. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

As Bunny begins, Samantha Mackey is starting the second year of her MFA program at the prestigious Warren University; the only full scholarship student among her all-female cohort. These other women are from very rich families, they clique together and dress like juveniles, and they all write aggressively feminist fiction with mythical twists. (The leader of the pack, whom Samantha has nicknamed Duchess, writes inscrutable “proems” on glass sheets with the dagger-shaped diamond she wears around her neck; the other Bunnies and their workshop advisor – whom Samantha has nicknamed Fosco – lap it up while Samantha rolls her eyes.) After suffering a year of her cohort giving unhelpful criticism during Workshop – accusing Samantha of writing gritty outsider fiction for its own sake – she finds herself suffering writer's block just as she is supposed to be using these last two semesters to polish up her thesis. I don't always love books about writers (especially books about struggling to finish an MFA), but Bunny delightfully skewers the premise:

They all watch me walk toward the stage at the center of the room, where they're all seated as though they're in a play. In what Fosco likes to call the “Hermeneutic Circle”, aka a “Safe Space” in which to bravely bare our souls to one another in the form of cryptic word art. Evoke our alchemical experiences and experiments. “In which our work will perform the Body and the Body will perform our work.”Whatever that means. Even after a year at Warren, I'm still not totally sure.

Meanwhile, Samantha has spent the summer hanging out with her new friend, Ava – a snarky freewheeling artist who backs up Samantha's unflattering estimations of her program and the Bunnies – but when the Bunnies make gestures to include Samantha in their circle, Samantha is inextricably drawn to them; even if it imperils her relationship with Ava. After attending their “Smut Salon” and participating in their off-campus “Workshop”, Samantha will be shown what “performing the Body” really means.

Bunny is ironically self-aware: Samantha internally critcises the Bunnies for writing about mythological lovers, and the Bunnies vocally criticise Samantha for writing outsider fiction, and yet Bunny is an outsider story that darkly references myths and fairy tales. I don't know what “the work performing the body” means either, but I especially loved Awad's metaphors about the body: When he looks at me, I feel my rib cage open like a pair of French doors. Everything that keeps me alive suddenly bared and there for the taking. Or: I want to scream. But I just sit there. My smile is fixed on my face, nailed there, though it jerks under the pins. And this is definitely feminist writing – so many of the metaphors are about the female body: Fosco looks at her class “in her probing, intensely gynecological way”. There is a pause “so pregnant it delivers, consumes its own spawn, then grows big with child again”. Ava explains about the Bunnies: “These cultish girls...tried to eat her soul like a placenta”. From the intriguing line-by-line writing, to the surprising and insightful narrative, and the art that Awad employs to bring it all together, I loved everything about Bunny.

Mistakes to Run with: A Memoir

At the age of seventeen I was convinced of the righteousness of my behaviour, which showed what a person could do when not intimidated. I ate lobster, I drove a Camaro. I wasn't a victim. We smiled from the curb at the men who drove around the block, waved, beckoned with our index fingers, manufacturing a sweetness for even the circle jerks who ogled our flesh through their car windows but never stopped to take us out. This was part of the job, smiling while covering up our fear.

Mistakes to Run With is not just a gritty tell-all memoir about a former teenage sex worker's travels through the eighteen levels of Buddhist Hell (for which the chapters are named), but since Yasuko Thanh is a celebrated author of fiction, she brings a novelist's sensibility to shaping her story with insight and wisdom. I think back now to when I read her prize-winning Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains and I feel rather small for having come on here to report whether or not I “liked” it; it's so very easy to forget that these authors we casually evaluate are real people who sweat and labour over their efforts. Nonetheless, I'll follow through with the expected form and report that this was an incredible read – for its art as much as for its narrative.

Many children grow up unloved, but they don't go to the extremes I did. Maybe this is a story about how borderline personality disorder – a diagnosis I received two years ago – develops in a child. Or maybe it's about a good girl who makes bad choices. Or maybe it's about the power we have to rationalize our worst behaviours. I'm still trying to understand whether it was something as inborn as the colour of my eyes that made me trade a life at home for the streets. Or an obsessive need for approval generated by an inability to impress my parents. Whatever it was, I ran away from home at the age of fifteen armed with misguided convictions that allowed me to justify my recklessness, impulsivity, and promiscuity to myself. I was motivated to stay on the streets as long as I did by the firm belief that love involved self-sacrifice, that it constituted a form of noble suffering. But no one story can paint the whole picture. Love had to be earned, and you had to pay dearly to get it. That's what my life so far had taught me.

Born to a Vietnamese father and a German mother, Thanh was raised in a low income neighbourhood of Victoria, B.C. When her brother came along five years later, Thanh lost not only her room to him (she was now relegated to a fold out chair in the living room), but also lost whatever attention and affection she might have had before. Despite being a top student and winner of academic competitions, Thanh received no praise from parents who took her accomplishments as merely expected, and when she eventually ran away at fifteen, her parents informed Social Services that they didn't want her back in the home in case she negatively impacted her brother. On her own, Thanh eventually made her way to Vancouver and was delighted to join a stable of prostitutes under the care of a suave pimp named Avery, and she spend the next several years trying to prove her worth to him by degrading and debasing herself, all while believing that she was in control of everything and no kind of victim. She turned her nose up at the “crack hos” around her (while thinking of herself as merely a sex worker who enjoyed smoking crack), when she eventually had children, Thanh wanted men to think that she was something more than just another one of the sad stay-at-home Moms she hung out with, and when she was later diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, Thanh resisted being put on antidepressants because she had always thought of herself as a step above those “on meds”. It was this kind of awareness of Thanh's self-protection measures – the low self-esteem urging her to feel even slightly superior to those around her – that crafts her disturbing story into one it doesn't feel voyeuristic to witness.

On my office wall was what I called my memory box. Wooden with a glass front, it held things from my childhood. Among them was a bookmark I once drew of Alice in Wonderland where she cried so hard that everyone floated away on her tears. Carried off by her sadness, washed away by her pain. My writing would do this. Wash away my pain. Vindication. I write to be free. The words will free me. Then it would all have been worth it. All? What all? The streets, Avery? Yes, I'd show them. A child's threat: “Then they'll be sorry.” For years in my secret heart I'd been waiting for discovery. It felt like reaching in the dark – for an outstretched hand that would touch me, know me.

And through it all, Thanh wrote as though it would save her life. In the later part of the book – as Thanh describes what she was going through domestically and psychologically as she studied creative writing and began to experience professional success – it was astonishing to learn how her ghosts and demons both urged her on and held her back. Not everyone needs to write a memoir, and not everyone who does can do it well, but Thanh succeeds here on every level and I wish her much success going forward.

Children of the Moon

“What is it you want from me?” I ask out loud, and like a match striking its strip, I think I have an answer. The recordings and the transcripts I have made of Pó are an intimate invitation to experience this world through her recollections. Unencumbered. Raw. The question What for? comes back at me. I flick my cigarette over the balcony, orange ember spinning. I don't know how this story will end. But I know how it began. I press my pencil to paper, write They are called children of the moon.

Author Anthony De Sa was raised in Toronto's Portuguese community and is known for his books set within that heritage. With Children of the Moon, De Sa takes this a little further afield, focusing mainly on African characters – with a Portuguese twist. Pó is a Masai woman with albinism, living out the end of her days, ravaged by cancer, squatting in the officially abandoned Grande Hotel Beira in Mozambique. Serafim is a Brazilian journalist who has travelled to Beira in order to get Pó's story, and Ezequiel is an old man living with dementia and Parkinson's in a Toronto basement apartment, suffering PTSD and hallucinations about his time as a child soldier in Africa – first in the charge of guerrilla soldiers and then as an aide to the Commander of the Portuguese forces sent to quell the rebel forces. Point of view rotates between these three characters, and eventually, it is revealed how Pó and Ezequiel were linked in the past. As often happens, I'm a little uneasy about the suitability of a white Westerner writing African voices, but with this slim book, De Sa gives the reader plenty to think about – and the Portuguese aspects make it feel more authentic. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

My mother pushed me out into a warm evening, where I took my first breath. I was told this story countless times by Simu. I never tired of it. The moment I slipped out from my mother I was greeted by the moonlight that crept into the mouth of our mud hut. My pale body dragged across my mother's belly and to her breast. My skin, white as bone. A curse. A moon child, the men muttered, before running away. Simu remained to soothe the concern in her sister's eyes.

As an African villager with albinism, Pó's life was in danger from those who believed that her skin and body parts could be used for charms and medicine. After being moved several times for her protection, she ended up at the Grande Hotel in Beira as an adult, where she now lives with thousands of other refugees; acting as an unofficial advocate for those around her and getting just enough notoriety to attract the attention of international journalists. She has always been careful with how she reveals her life story, and as she knows this will be her last chance to get it right, Pó is more forthcoming with Serafim than she ever has been before.

Shortly after I checked into the Hotel Tivoli, I dragged a chair and table out onto the fourth-floor balcony of my corner room, arranging them so that I could see bits of the ocean to my left and the fragile buildings of this poor city to my right. The shouts from shop vendors and street brawls that spilled from bars onto dirt roads, the smell of smoke from outdoor kitchen fires, all reminded me of the favela where I was raised. Like Serrinha and surrounding Florianópolis, there's nothing beautiful about this city; nothing about its architecture inspires me, except at dusk when lights twinkle from apartments or the glow from open storefronts floods the streets, and I think of quieter times.

The journalist, Serafim, is a blackout drunk on the run from the fallout over his last big story (in which he revealed the existence and location of a previously uncontacted Amazonian tribe). He is sincere in his desire to honestly capture Pó's story, but he seems equally committed to protecting his own reputation.

I don't deserve to participate in life, not after what I saw and what I did. I used to catch myself smiling – children playing, piri piri shrimp, All in the Family – and I would feel guilty for letting joy creep inside me. They give me risperidone, which dulls the noises in my head and lets me drift off to a time and place where everything seems real. I keep telling myself that it's better not to look back. Nothing good comes from going back. Now, I spend part of my day or what is left of the night in my bed or in my chair staring into the dark until my eyes can pierce the thickness to see clearly through it. I see people, animals, and objects all around me, though they try to hide in the carpet pattern or in the paintings on the wall. I never switch lights on in the basement. I like it this way. “I used to have a dream as a boy – not a nightmare,” I say. Then I realize I am alone. Still, I'm careful not to speak too loudly or to give too much away. You never know who is listening.

The chapters from Ezequiel's POV were my favourites – abandoned at a Mission as a baby, this child of a white father and black mother was raised by a European pastor and his wife until Mozambique's war of independence came roaring through. Going on to do whatever it took to survive, Ezequiel's story was even more affecting than Pó's – and as there was nothing very graphic shared about the fates of those with albinism, what Ezequiel's narrative revealed about Mozambique's civil war, guerrilla tactics, and the ugly racism of the Portuguese military was the more engaging story.

Children of the Moon isn't a very long book and there's something very careful and quiet about De Sa's writing. Before Pó speaks, she considers what she'll share; before Serafim begins his writing, he carefully assembles notes (striking through “albino” to replace with “persons with albinism”; striking through “witch doctors” to replace with “healers”), and this carefulness creates distance between the reader and the narrative. However, this is balanced by Ezequiel's uncensored dementia-related memories and hallucinations and these sections provide the book with the necessary heart. In the Acknowledgments at the back of the book, De Sa thanks the people from Under the Same Sun who educated him about people with albinism, people who brought him to Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park, people who got him access to the hallways of the Grande Hotel Beira, and his uncles and those veterans who shared their stories with him: this is obviously a book with extensive factual basis, but it's not a very narrative driven read. Yet, this makes the book feel more respectful of the material and I'm not left with that uneasy feeling of cultural misappropriation; I learned some interesting things and was engaged enough with the three characters to want to know how their stories would develop. I'd give this three and a half stars and am rounding up for Ezequiel.

The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted

Do you see how things can turn out? Do you see that the world is big enough to make certain things possible? That thirty-six years ago the German Student Union could hold a rally in Opernplatz, Berlin, and burn twenty-five thousand books, many written by Jews, the students rejoicing in their festival of loathing, and now this, in Hometown. Hannah’s bookshop of the broken hearted, a thing of beauty.

In a letter from the author at the beginning of my ARC of The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted, Robert Hillman explains that the two main characters in the novel are based, vaguely, on people he knew in the small Australian town where he grew up (that town, vaguely, represented here as the fictional “Hometown”). The local bumpkin Tom Hope is based on a young farmer Hillman knew as a kid, and the exotic foreigner, Hannah Babel, is based on a music teacher who arrived at his high school in 1961 (the era in which this book is set). Hillman fleshes out this Hannah's Holocaust survival narrative with details from two such survivors' stories that he helped to write; two women “who walked out of the gates of hell and found the courage to embrace life again”. I liked everything about Tom Hope and his struggles with work and love, I liked the idea of the slightly mad but charming Madame Babel coming to rural Australia and shaking things up with a doomed-to-fail bookshop, but as with The Tattooist of Auschwitz or even Sophie's Choice, I'm not really comfortable with modern-day novelists imagining a person's experiences in the Nazi concentration camps; I especially don't like it when a man describes what that must have been like for a woman. Bearing witness is vital – I appreciate that Hillman used his skills to help actual Holocaust survivors to capture their stories – but this felt like misguided appropriation and the flashback scenes in Auschwitz spoiled the whole thing for me. (As noted, I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

An hour before he appeared in the shop, he had been covered in muck, rounding up the sheep, shouting at cows, putting his fingers to his teeth to whistle up Beau, and now he stood with a big smile telling farmers' wives where to find the Georgette Heyers. In a shirt and tie. Polished shoes. Black slacks with a pleat down each leg. If you loved a woman, this is how you might well end up. Dear God. At midday, he kissed Hannah good-bye and skittered back to the farm with a hundred things to attend to.

The book begins with the story of Tom Hope: a young man who only became a farmer when his uncle left him his spread, and as with his working life, everything just sort of happens to Tom – an unloving woman agrees to marry him, she leaves for a while, she comes back pregnant with another man's baby, Tom accepts it, she runs away again and Tom raises the toddler as his own (for a couple of years), and when she returns yet again to take the boy away, Tom can only throw up his hands and try to heal his broken heart by throwing himself harder into caring for his sheep and cows and the fields and orchards (all of this happens in the first few chapters, and it promised an intriguing and affecting story). When Hannah Babel (an older, exotically beautiful and eccentric foreigner) arrives in town and hires Tom to craft some bookshelves for her new shop, it doesn't take long for her to seduce him, and despite the large parts of herself that she keeps walled off, and despite some superior airs and an obvious intellectual mismatching, Tom accepts the relationship and they are soon married. Through alternating flashback scenes, we learn how Hannah lost her husband and son in Auschwitz, and it's understandable that she doesn't want any more children; that she never again wants to be responsible for a young life that she might not be able to protect. But when the boy that Tom still thinks of as his son escapes the commune/cult where his mother has brought him, finding his way back to Tom despite all odds, the couple is pushed to the brink – whose needs and pains will win out in this competition of the broken hearted? (At one point, Hannah gives Tom A Christmas Carol to read – she gives him several books to “improve” him, and that's about as meaningful as the presence of the bookshop gets – and Tom likes the book and especially its happy ending, “In life itself, you didn't get the chance to choose an ending; but if a writer could give Bob Cratchit a Merry Christmas, then that's what a writer should do.” I liked that Hillman acknowledged this early and it made it more intriguing to learn how he would tie up his own characters' tales.)

She came to Australia with the bookshop still in her imagination and thought: How much farther can I go? This is where I stop. A very long way west of Budapest, of Auschwitz. She had read enough to know that we cannot speak of things that are “meant to be.” If her long journey from Europe to Hometown, to Tom Hope, to the bookshop of the broken hearted was meant to be, then Mein Kampf was meant to be, and the cleansing, the säuberung of the students in Opernplatz were meant to be. She said: “Too bad about that.” Hannah's happiness was great enough to embrace contradictions. It was without doubt meant to be, this bookshop that would bankrupt her, this love for a man who would one day notice her gray hair and her wrinkles more keenly than he did now. Too bad about that. For now, a little taste of paradise.

Tom and Hannah are both intriguing characters and there's plenty of potential in throwing these two mismatched and broken souls together. But while we accept that Tom is focussed, hardworking, and uncomplaining without more than a few references to his developing years, Hillman gives us Hannah's entire life story (through thoughts and flashbacks), and that feels like the author doesn't trust the reader to have an understanding of the baggage that a cosmopolitan Holocaust-survivor might be carrying with her as she flees to the furthest reaches of the Earth. It was interesting for me to read of the young men in Hometown who were itching to get conscripted to fight in the Vietnam War (I didn't realise that Australia was a major combatant, and as a Canadian, I've never read stories before of anyone who wanted to join that fight), but I don't know how realistic it was for Tom to have been portrayed as someone who had never heard of the Holocaust (because Australia had fought in the Pacific during WWII, did they really never get news from the European front? Or is this just further proof of what a bumpkin Tom himself was? Would he really not know that Jewish people don't celebrate Christmas?) I didn't like that the waiting-for-better-days character's name was Hope, that the multilingual foreigner was named Babel, or that their hometown was named Hometown, and as I started with, I really didn't like the scenes set in Auschwitz. On the other hand, there was much lovely writing here, and especially with Hannah's character, some really intriguing personality choices – she's messed up and every word and thought suggests that brokenness; it's compelling that Tom would be drawn to that. An uneven read with pluses and minuses; solid three stars.

Lost Children Archive

Whenever the boy and girl talk about child refugees, I realize now, they call them “the lost children.” I suppose the word “refugee” is more difficult to remember. And even if the term “lost” is not precise, in our intimate family lexicon, the refugees become known to us as “the lost children.” And in a way, I guess, they are lost children. They are children who have lost the right to a childhood.

Lost Children Archive started with a bang for me – I was immediately entranced by its inventive, creative narrative and structure – but the more I got into it, the more frustrated I became with its lack of emotional pull; it ultimately felt heavy handed and without heart. And I don't know if it makes it better or worse to learn that the basic plotline – a blended family starts to break apart on a cross-country road trip on which the father/husband is researching “Apacheria” and Geronimo's last stand, and the mother/wife is researching the plight of refugee children held at America's southern border – is based on an actual trip taken by author Valeria Luiselli, her former husband Álvaro Enrigue (who used the material from that trip in his own novel Ahora me rindo y eso es todo), and their children: it makes the concept feel less inventive, and the anonymous/archetypal nature of the unnamed family members off-puttingly ironic. The plight of modern day refugee children in detention camps is too important to conflate them with the Clearing of the Plains – which as an overarching novelistic concept, ends up not doing justice to either issue (and really only makes sense once you realise that, like with Luiselli and Enrigue, the two issues are only linked by the time and opportunity afforded by the road trip, which isn't novelistically satisfying). In many ways, I really admired the writing in this book, but I don't think it was really a success.

Conversations, in a family, become linguistic archaeology. They build the world we share, layer it in a palimpsest, give meaning to our present and future. The question is, when, in the future, we dig into our intimate archive, replay our family tape, will it amount to a story? A soundscape? Or will it all be sound rubble, noise, and debris?

So, the man and woman – he, a documentarist (like “a chemist” of sound), and she, a documentarian (like “a librarian” of sounds, but more like a radio journalist) – met when they were paired for a four-year-long project to document every sound in New York City (from its eight hundred spoken languages, to the subway system, Broadway, Wall Street, etc.). They fell in love along the way, married, and made a family with his (now) ten-year-old son and her (now) five-year-old daughter. Now that the project has ended, they realise that they have different visions for their future careers and they decide to take a road trip to the land of the Apache – where he can record the echoes of the past (with the idea that capturing the ambient environmental sounds of the lands of the Apache will preserve something inherent to Geronimo and Chief Cochise, “the last people on the entire continent to surrender to the white-eyes”) and where she can record the stories of children smuggled over the southern border by coyotes, and in particular, search for the two daughters of a Mexican woman she had met in NYC – and most of the story takes place in their car with the two kids in the back seat. In the very back of the Volvo are seven bankers boxes – the man has four, filled with research material and notebooks; the woman has one, filled with research material; and the kids each have one, empty for now – and the novel itself feels archival as the contents of the boxes are listed, songs and audiobooks played in the car are dissected, and as the son learns to use his new Polaroid and attempts to make his own record of the trip. These are people who read broadly and play Lord of the Flies for their children's edutainment, and initially, I was totally enchanted by how smart the whole thing felt; just like the woman character in the book:

When I read Sontag for the first time, just like the first time I read Hannah Arendt, Emily Dickinson, and Pascal, I kept having those sudden, subtle, and possibly microchemical raptures – little lights flickering deep inside the brain tissue – that some people experience when they finally find words for a very simple and yet till then utterly unspeakable feeling. When someone else’s words enter your consciousness like that, they become small conceptual light-marks. They’re not necessarily illuminating. A match struck alight in a dark hallway, the lit tip of a cigarette smoked in bed at midnight, embers in a dying chimney: none of these things has enough light of its own to reveal anything. Neither do anyone’s words. But sometimes a little light can make you aware of the dark, unknown space that surrounds it, of the enormous ignorance that envelops everything we think we know. And that recognition and coming to terms with darkness is more valuable than all the factual knowledge we may ever accumulate.

But, as the story went along and the family encountered town after town of ugly Americans, the political became more overt and instructive:

The daily federal quota for undocumented people, he said, was 34,000, and was steadily growing. That meant that at least 34,000 people had to be occupying a bed each day in any one of the detention centers, a center just like this one, across the country. People were taken away, he continued, locked up in detention buildings for an indefinite amount of time. Some were later deported back to their home countries. Many were pipelined to federal prisons, which profited from them, subjecting them to sixteen-hour workdays for which they earned less than three dollars. And many of them were simply – disappeared.

I'm happy to be informed by anything I read, but there's a later scene in which the family witnesses some children being put on a small plane at a remote airport (and as there is an included Polaroid of such a plane taken through a chainlink fence, perhaps that experience was a part of Luiselli's own family's roadtrip), and that scene was much more affecting than someone spouting numbers. 

For the next twenty minutes or so, we're all silent inside the car, listening to the songs that shuffle and play, looking out our windows at a landscape scarred by decades or maybe centuries of systemic agricultural aggression: fields sectioned into quadrangular grids, gang-raped by heavy machinery, bloated with modified seeds and injected with pesticides, where meager fruit trees bear robust, insipid fruit for export; fields corseted into a circumscription of grassy crop layers, in patterns resembling Dantesque hells, watered by central-pivot irrigation systems; and fields turned into non-fields, bearing the weight of cement, solar panels, tanks, and enormous windmills.

One of the books that was brought along in a bankers box is Elegies for Lost Children, and as the novel goes on, the woman reads this book (of a group of refugee children's dangerous crossing into America) into the record – sometimes to herself, sometimes to her son, and sometimes into her voice recorder. As Luiselli explains of this fictional work in an afterword, “The Elegies are composed by means of a series of allusions to literary works that are about voyages, journeying, migrating, etc. The allusions need not be evident. I’m not interested in intertextuality as an outward, performative gesture but as a method or procedure of composition.” And so, as she explains, she borrows words and concepts from famous voyage stories (The Waste Land or Heart of Darkness) to put into her own narrative, and it's this kind of high concept, elevated overthinking that felt apparent on the page – the story gets lost in the writing. In later passages, some sections are told from the son's point-of-view (and I never believed this POV: he both spoke too old for his age and acted too young), and in one of the last passages, the son's story gets intertwined with the lost children from The Elegies, and in a single chapter-length sentence, everything swirls and merges (swirling in unrelated characters who are doing their own things, too; including an office worker listening to an audiobook of Lynne Cheney's “rotundly moralistic lesbian romance novel”), and I got so bored and annoyed that I nearly stopped reading this book with only twenty or so pages of text left to go. 

And yet: this is smart and erudite and attempts to expose a really important social issue (meaning the refugee children; the plight of Geronimo and the Apache comes off more as an adolescent obsession on the husband's part). I liked the archival aspects, the idea of capturing of soundscapes – including family conversations – as the preservation of history, and the connections made to art and literature. But the plot didn't work, the characters didn't work, and the potential for pathos was dulled by overwriting. As a novel, this simply didn't work for me.

Man Booker Longlist 2019:

• Margaret Atwood, The Testaments 
• Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier 
• Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, The Serial Killer 
• Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport 
• Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other 
• John Lanchester , The Wall 
• Deborah Levy, The Man Who Saw Everything 
• Valeria Luisell, Lost Children Archive 
• Chigozie Obioma, An Orchestra of Minorities
• Max Porter, Lanny 
• Salman Rushdie, Quichotte 
• Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World 
• Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein 

Eventually won by The Testaments and Girl, Woman, Other in a tie, my favourites on the list were Lanny, Night Boat to Tangier, and An Orchestra of Minorities. I fear the Man Booker has become too political for me - favouring identity politics over excellent storytelling - and I don't know how much longer I'll think it a badge of honour to keep reading the longlists.

Tunesday : Ave Maria

Ave Maria

Ave Maria, gratia plena.
Maria, gratia plena
Maria, gratia plena
Ave, ave dominus,
Dominus tecum.
Benedicta tu in mulieribus,
Et benedictus
Et benedictus fructus ventris,
Ventris tui, Jesus.
Ave Maria.









I don't claim any special connection to Paris or Notre Dame Cathedral, but when I was told yesterday that it was burning, I was completely horrified; my hands flew to my mouth and my eyes stung with tears. And when I saw the cellphone videos of the devastated crowd singing Ave Maria together, I was gutted by the sense of shared loss - Notre Dame is more than an old church in a foreign country to check off one's bucket list, it's a piece of shared human history that feels like it belongs to the world. Surviving the French Revolution, two World Wars, and eight hundred and fifty years of passing time, it defies understanding that she was brought down by an electrical fire.




I have been to Paris twice, and posed for the following picture (with an Australian we met along the way) from atop the roof of Notre Dame when I was eighteen:






And Dave took the picture at the top when we climbed to the roof of Notre Dame on my fiftieth birthday. On that second visit, I was disappointed that the roof was now surmounted by a chainlink fence (that forced Dave to take his picture through the chinks instead of getting a nice subject-filled panorama like back in the day), but I suppose we can just call ourselves lucky to have been there at all - a thought which seems incomprehensible to me today. The only picture I took on my birthday was Dave posing as Quasimodo (which, queasily, shows how much old timber there was up in the belltower):






Here's hoping for a speedy and appropriate rebuild.

The Pisces

I thought of my moon in Gemini, the twins, with their dual nature. I contained both man and woman. But Theo and I, we were two of the same. I thought of Pisces, the two fish, bound together by one string – one star – Alpha Piscium. In an attempt to escape the monster Typhon, Aphrodite and her son Eros turned into fish and swam away. But who was Aphrodite and who was the monster here? I had threatened to swim away so I wouldn't be the abandoned one. Now he was trying to punish me by leaving first.

Looking into author Melissa Broder's previous work, The Pisces appears to be the perfectly natural first novel for her to have written. She has released several volumes of poetry – and the language in this novel is definitely poetical, if not pretty – her last book of essays (So Sad Today) apparently deals with staring down the void and attempting to find meaning in life – as does this novel – and she even writes the horoscopes for Lenny Letter – which makes that opening quote an even more natural thought process for her main character to have gone through. With all of the visceral, discomfortable grittiness of Ottessa Moshfegh's Eileen and the implausible erotic metaphor of Marian Engel's Bear, Broder has created something both ugly and beautiful; real, like life, even if it involves the incredible. When I explained the overall gist to my husband he said, “That sounds not only clever, but smart,” and that about sums it up. This won't be for everyone, but I'm glad I picked it up and will seek out Broder's other work. 

I'd heard it said that when you're feeling good is sometimes when you're most suicidal. Maybe it's after you decide that you're going to do it that you suddenly seem happier. I don't think that's why I walked across the beach to the ocean that night. I don't think I was planning to jump into the ocean drunk or that I wanted to get killed by a stranger. I knew it was dangerous to be out there at midnight. I rarely even walked the boardwalk after ten or eleven. I think I just felt invincible, connected to myself, like I could do anything and be totally fine. Maybe I was looking for a new high.

Lucy is a thirty-eight-year-old Phoenix-based PhD student – she has been (mostly avoiding) working on her thesis on Sappho for the past nine years – and when she unexpectedly breaks up with her longtime (but somehow casual) boyfriend, she experiences a breakdown that sees her moving to California to dogsit for her sister for the summer and attending court-mandated group therapy sessions for women with “depression, and sex and love issues”. Lucy judges the other women in the group very harshly (which other, better informed, reviewers point out is a common initial reaction for anyone forced into therapy), and despite being encouraged to not date and concentrate on herself for a while, Lucy immediately joins Tinder and has a series of disappointing (and graphic) hookups; this definitely does not help her mental state. But while sitting on the oceanside rocks outside her sister's Venice Beach mansion, Lucy strikes up a conversation with a hot, young late-night swimmer and begins to believe that she is lovable after all.

When I awoke it was after one a.m. and the tide was rising higher. My body was coated in salt and ocean foam. I felt like I was part of the rock and part of the ocean, and I wondered if this is how Sappho felt, even in her deepest desperation, part of the earth, like that desperation or longing or eternal cosmic want was something to be celebrated – something natural – holy even, or at least, not just something to be endured. What if everything was natural? What if there was no wrong or right action in terms of who you loved, who you wanted, or who you were drawn to? If the will of the universe was the will of the universe, and if everything was happening as it was, then wasn't everything you could possibly do all right?

I loved that Lucy was working on Sappho, and in particular, that she was reconsidering the authenticity of previous scholars filling in the blank (lost) passages in the poet's work with guesses based on biographical or historical information. The blanks in Sappho's work mirror the voids in Lucy's own life, and Lucy's academic theories change and evolve as she begins to reevaluate the roles that her own blank spaces serve. That's big picture, but more up close, knowing that Lucy has studied the Greeks and their mythology makes sense of what Lucy encounters in the now, and that adds a layer of menace and irony as the reader suspects what Lucy must know deep down. (Does anyone not know that Lucy's great summer love is a merman, and that like Odysseus' Sirens, he can only be luring humans to their doom? Is he a manifestation of Lucy's suicidal mental state and an invitation to run away with him is but a call to pull a Virginia Woolf?) Clever and smart, I was both mesmerised and horrified by this read.

Walking on the Ceiling

Some days, it's difficult to believe that this friendship really existed – with its particular logic, its detachment from the world. What I remember has the texture of a dream, an invention, a strange and weightless suspension, like walking on the ceiling.

Walking on the Ceiling is a strange little novel to pigeonhole – it's so wispy and spare, yet sketches a life in a way that we all would recognise as faithful to the processes of memory, storytelling, and self-mythologising. With a main character who thinks about her time in Paris after she returns to her hometown of Istanbul, and who had spent her time in Paris talking about Istanbul, the reader is not only treated to an intimate portrait of both cities but is witness to a damaged young woman's coming-of-age; a reckoning with her past and a squaring off to the future. Everything feels small about this book – from the weight of it in the hands to chapters as brief as two sentences – but its impact is big; call me impressed with this debut by Turkish writer Ayşegül Savaş. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

I think more and more these days that I should set down some of the facts of my friendship with M., to keep something of this time intact. But stories are reckless things, blind to everything but their own shape. When you tell a story, you set out to leave so much behind. And I have to admit that there is no shape in those long walks and conversations, even if I think of them often.

As Nurunisa (Nunu) tells her story, we learn that she was raised in Instanbul – her father was a poet who died young and her mother never quite got over her widowhood – and in order to escape the sadness of her homelife, Nunu went abroad to study; eventually enrolling in a Masters program in literature in Paris. While in Paris, she meets the famous British author she refers to only as “M.” – a man whose popular English language books about Istanbul had been a favourite of Nunu's, but which her mother mocked as obviously the limited views of a foreigner – and as the pair strike up a friendship and begin to go on long walks around the city and have frequent email conversations, Nunu finds herself carefully choosing and shaping the sorts of stories that she'll tell the author about the reality of having grown up in Istanbul – stories that are often not faithful to that reality, or stories of her mother's that she has co-opted as her own. As the book goes on and Nunu remembers conversations that she had had with her undergrad college roommate and a later live-in boyfriend, she reveals that this cribbing and fibbing is something she has always done – to her roommate, making her mother sound lovely; to her boyfriend, making her sound horrid. The shortest chapter in its entirety:

I'm trying to say that I've tried to tell a story about her many times. But none have resembled my mother.

Because Walking on the Ceiling is a book about writers (Nunu herself becomes a journalist at a travel magazine after she returns to a now volatile Istanbul), there are frequent meditations on the nature of writing and storytelling (which is something I like when it's done well, as it is here). On the one hand, one assumes that M. will appropriate Nunu's stories for his latest “Thracian” novel, but on the other, she's aware of that fact and carefully curates what she shares; it's hard to say who's using whom, and especially when these conversations help Nunu to sort things out in her own mind.

Stories have their own logic. For one thing, a story can only be told once it has an ending. For another, it builds, and then unravels. Each element of a story is essential; its time will come and it will ultimately mean something. In this way, stories are accountable, because they can look you in the eye.

Eventually, each element in this novel reveals its importance along the way, and Nunu's story feels both particular and universal. The fact that this happens in so short a space feels powerful and precise. A lovely read.

Tunesday : Piano Battle!

About a week ago, Centre in the Square had a contest on their Facebook page - name a movie that featured Debussy's Au Claire de la Lune on its soundtrack for a chance to win tickets to see their upcoming Piano Battle show - and I entered, and found out at 2:30 yesterday afternoon that I had won tickets to see the show at 7:30 last night. Short notice, but I sure like free, so I texted Dave and he was able to get home early from work for a surprise night out.

After a quick bite (we were disappointed to see how many of the "nice" restaurants downtown Kitchener are closed on Mondays, but I don't know why we're always surprised to so enjoy the dinner salads at Bobby O'Brien's), we headed to the theatre - and thoroughly enjoyed the show. The concept: two classical pianists, one dressed in black, one in white, each play a song (something powerful, something lyrical), and after each round, the audience holds up cards to vote for whoever they believe "won" that battle. 

The music itself was undeniably impressive - these are very talented performers - but the "battle" aspect seemed a bit strained. I notice this YouTube video is from 2011, and the in-between patter and smack talk that they engage in has probably been the same for all those years; it felt tired and unspontaneous, rattled off quickly in sometimes incomprehensible German accents, and didn't add much to my enjoyment. And as for the voting - they seemed to just takes turns "winning" and advancing their grand pianos across the stage towards a finish line so that they could end in a tie and have an audience member come up and give an impartial count of a final audience vote; I have no doubt it ends this way at every performance. I get that classical musicians probably need a hook to get people out to their shows today - the theatre wouldn't have been giving away tickets if this had been sold out - but I wish that everything hadn't felt so over-rehearsed. On the other hand, watching them play while blindfolded or while playing ping-pong with one hand was impressive and entertaining.

As we were leaving the theatre, Dave (who sounded slightly reluctant to go see this show in the first place) was saying how much he loves classical piano and that we should look into going to a concert without the whole battle concept. Well, where did that come from all of a sudden? Free or not, if he's in, I'm in!