A non-fiction book all about the 'slow' movement: engaging, enlightening and crucial to maintaining a modicum of sanity in today's rush-rush world.
This is an important book. Subtitled ‘How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed’, the author of this engaging work explores the Slow revolution as it applies to food, city life, cars, medicine, sex, work and children. Probably best known for the Slow Food movement, which began in Italy in response to fast food, ‘Slow’ has branched out in many directions. There are now thirty cities in Italy that have designated themselves as Slow Cities, meaning they do everything they can to consider the quality of life in their urban centers rather than merely the economic impact of regulations. This results in fewer cars, less smog, more biking and walking, more small shops.
Honoré points out that the cult of speed has been with us since the Industrial Revolution – and it’s getting worse, with businesses routinely expecting 60-80 hours from workers each week, young children with the schedules of high-powered executives, rampant road rage and doctors who don’t have time to listen to their patients. The author states: “Boredom…is a modern invention. Remove all stimulation, and we fidget, panic and look for something, anything, to do to make use of the time.” But Honoré is no true-believer – he questions every aspect of the Slow movement and keeps coming up with the conclusion that it just makes sense – life in the slow lane is more enjoyable, more pleasurable, more humane. This is a remarkable book that should be read by every resident of today’s frenzied urban world.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Friday, February 10, 2012
Book Review #23: The Memory Artists by Jeffrey Moore
This delightfully quirky novel didn't get much attention when it first came out but I loved it. Moore's work should be better known.
Set in Montreal, this novel is the highly inventive story of four friends, a mother and a doctor. Noel, who has synaesthesia (like Liszt and Rimbaud), sees sounds as colors. He also has a prodigious and acute memory. Noel’s mother has Alzheimer’s and he is seeking a cure in his basement laboratory with the help of his friends: handsome, debauched Norval; childlike, Internet addict JJ; and Samira, an Arabic-Canadian former actress who is the love interest of the three males. Studying Noel’s disease is Dr. Vorta who stands in the background of this story like a puppet-master. As the cynical Norval works his way through an alphabet of lovers (as a performance art piece), Samira becomes the ‘S’ in his project, causing a subtle conflict with Noel who is secretly madly in love with her.
Bursting with vitality, ingenious and darkly spangled with a sometimes-grim humor, the novel’s fragmentary style, which includes selections from several characters’ diaries, reflects the skipping stone mind of a synaesthete. The writing is relentlessly witty and a constant delight. Norval extracts himself from a sleeping woman’s limbs with “diamond-cutter caution”. JJ has the “teapot cheeks” of youth and “a preliminary scenario for a goatee”. The story is filled with detailed lore on chemistry, pharmacology and herbology as Noel finds hints in the ancient Arabic book, A Thousand and One Nights, in his hunt for a cure to memory loss. In a lovely, touching denouement, Noel discovers the secret buried in his “pent heart”. For those who like their fiction quirky and energetic, this novel is highly recommended.
Set in Montreal, this novel is the highly inventive story of four friends, a mother and a doctor. Noel, who has synaesthesia (like Liszt and Rimbaud), sees sounds as colors. He also has a prodigious and acute memory. Noel’s mother has Alzheimer’s and he is seeking a cure in his basement laboratory with the help of his friends: handsome, debauched Norval; childlike, Internet addict JJ; and Samira, an Arabic-Canadian former actress who is the love interest of the three males. Studying Noel’s disease is Dr. Vorta who stands in the background of this story like a puppet-master. As the cynical Norval works his way through an alphabet of lovers (as a performance art piece), Samira becomes the ‘S’ in his project, causing a subtle conflict with Noel who is secretly madly in love with her.
Bursting with vitality, ingenious and darkly spangled with a sometimes-grim humor, the novel’s fragmentary style, which includes selections from several characters’ diaries, reflects the skipping stone mind of a synaesthete. The writing is relentlessly witty and a constant delight. Norval extracts himself from a sleeping woman’s limbs with “diamond-cutter caution”. JJ has the “teapot cheeks” of youth and “a preliminary scenario for a goatee”. The story is filled with detailed lore on chemistry, pharmacology and herbology as Noel finds hints in the ancient Arabic book, A Thousand and One Nights, in his hunt for a cure to memory loss. In a lovely, touching denouement, Noel discovers the secret buried in his “pent heart”. For those who like their fiction quirky and energetic, this novel is highly recommended.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Book Review #22: The Way the Crow Flies by Ann-Marie MacDonald
Proof that Ann-Marie MacDonald's Fall on Your Knees was not a one-hit wonder.
By the author of the best-seller, Fall On Your Knees, this long novel opens in 1962 when the MacCarthy family moves from Germany to their new home on a Canadian air force base near London, Ontario. Madeleine, eight and already a blossoming comic, is particularly close with her father, Jack, an air-force officer. The loving Acadian mother, Mimi, and brother, Mike, 11, round out this family whose simple goodness reflects the glow of an era that seemed like paradise. But all that is about to change. The Cuban Missile Crisis is looming, and Jack, loyal and gullible, suddenly has an important task to carry out that involves a scientist, a former Nazi, in Canada.
While Jack scrambles to keep his activities hidden from his wife, Madeleine too is learning to keep secrets (about a teacher at school). This novel is all about the fertility of lies, how one breeds another and another. Although the writing flows like a river with a strong current, the profusion of pop references, especially ad slogans, grows tiresome. The author can, however, capture a lovely image in few words: “The afternoon intensifies. August is the true light of summer.” and “…yes, the earth is a woman, and her favourite food is corn.” At times the story is marvelously compelling, as the mystery of a horrific murder in the fields near the base is unraveled. When the story evolves into a trial and its outcome, the story peaks, a conclusion with no easy answers. The last third of the book takes place, for the most part, 20 years later. Here the novel meanders somewhat, losing its ability to captivate with the same intensity. The reader longs to return to the earlier world, which MacDonald has captured in vital detail.
By the author of the best-seller, Fall On Your Knees, this long novel opens in 1962 when the MacCarthy family moves from Germany to their new home on a Canadian air force base near London, Ontario. Madeleine, eight and already a blossoming comic, is particularly close with her father, Jack, an air-force officer. The loving Acadian mother, Mimi, and brother, Mike, 11, round out this family whose simple goodness reflects the glow of an era that seemed like paradise. But all that is about to change. The Cuban Missile Crisis is looming, and Jack, loyal and gullible, suddenly has an important task to carry out that involves a scientist, a former Nazi, in Canada.
While Jack scrambles to keep his activities hidden from his wife, Madeleine too is learning to keep secrets (about a teacher at school). This novel is all about the fertility of lies, how one breeds another and another. Although the writing flows like a river with a strong current, the profusion of pop references, especially ad slogans, grows tiresome. The author can, however, capture a lovely image in few words: “The afternoon intensifies. August is the true light of summer.” and “…yes, the earth is a woman, and her favourite food is corn.” At times the story is marvelously compelling, as the mystery of a horrific murder in the fields near the base is unraveled. When the story evolves into a trial and its outcome, the story peaks, a conclusion with no easy answers. The last third of the book takes place, for the most part, 20 years later. Here the novel meanders somewhat, losing its ability to captivate with the same intensity. The reader longs to return to the earlier world, which MacDonald has captured in vital detail.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Book Review #21: Ascension by Steven Galloway
An excellent earlier novel from the author of the best-selling The Cellist of Sarajevo.
An imaginative mix of fact and fiction, this novel relates the life of Salvo Ursari, a gypsy from Transylvania whose parents were burned to death in their home by non-gypsies when he was nine. Salvo moves in with an aunt in Budapest where he eventually learns the art of walking the high wire from a tough master. He is later reunited with his brother and sister, who also become high-wire artists and, after a run-in with the Gestapo, the family flees to America where they become a famous act in the Fisher-Fielding circus.
The strength of this novel is the author’s ability to sustain tension. In a number of scenes on the high wire, (besides the circus, Salvo walks across the Grand Canyon and between the twin towers of the World Trade Center) the author has a remarkable ability to involve the reader in the action, although some of the descriptions of circus tricks are difficult to picture. The author offers an excellent description of the horrendous 1945 big-top fire in Boise, Idaho in which 112 people died, bringing the age of large tent circuses to an end. The book is also riddled with gypsy tales that have the feel of genuine folk stories straight from the forests of eastern Europe. Even though we meet the many people who have inhabited Salvo’s world, including the extended Fisher-Fielding family in constant struggle over control of the circus, it is his loneliness on the high wire that we feel most keenly.
An imaginative mix of fact and fiction, this novel relates the life of Salvo Ursari, a gypsy from Transylvania whose parents were burned to death in their home by non-gypsies when he was nine. Salvo moves in with an aunt in Budapest where he eventually learns the art of walking the high wire from a tough master. He is later reunited with his brother and sister, who also become high-wire artists and, after a run-in with the Gestapo, the family flees to America where they become a famous act in the Fisher-Fielding circus.
The strength of this novel is the author’s ability to sustain tension. In a number of scenes on the high wire, (besides the circus, Salvo walks across the Grand Canyon and between the twin towers of the World Trade Center) the author has a remarkable ability to involve the reader in the action, although some of the descriptions of circus tricks are difficult to picture. The author offers an excellent description of the horrendous 1945 big-top fire in Boise, Idaho in which 112 people died, bringing the age of large tent circuses to an end. The book is also riddled with gypsy tales that have the feel of genuine folk stories straight from the forests of eastern Europe. Even though we meet the many people who have inhabited Salvo’s world, including the extended Fisher-Fielding family in constant struggle over control of the circus, it is his loneliness on the high wire that we feel most keenly.
Monday, December 19, 2011
Book Review #20: Deactivated West 100 by Don McKay
As well as being one of Canada's finest poets, Don McKay carves insightful and beautiful essays out of the natural world around him.
Two-time Governor General’s Award winner for poetry, McKay, in this collection of essays, explores “the relation between place and wilderness”. Intriguingly, McKay investigates the meaning of place by getting lost in the deep backwoods of Vancouver Island. The author is intimately attuned to plant life, animals and birds, the geologic signatures under the landscape, as well as the few fading remnants of human passage through this thick overgrown bush country. McKay’s wandering, however, is always rooted in language, where he dazzles like sudden sunlight on mica, as he pictures himself “a man stepping blindly into line one of The Inferno…” Any long walk is also an opportunity to muse, as McKay does here, on a variety of fascinating subjects: the use of the cleft-triangle in painted caves and Joyce’s Ulysses, the impossibility of finding hermits as a theme in ancient Chinese poetry, and the way waterfalls can “break into speech”. McKay keeps his feet on solid earth and his ear well tuned – he is as comfortable quoting Yogi Berra and The Globe and Mail as Jorge Luis Borges and Xenophanes. With exhilarating imagination and insight, McKay reminds us that “place is where stories happen…where infinity becomes history.”
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Book Review #19: A Reading Diary by Alberto Manguel
Not only is Alberto Manguel a fine writer, he is one of the great 'readers' of our time, as this volume attests.
Subtitled ‘A Year of Favourite Books’, this small volume combines ruminations by Manguel on twelve novels, memories of childhood (when he first read many of these books), shards of poetry, events in the daily news that link to the books, visits of friends and neighbours, the turn of the seasons in his garden, as well as numerous apt quotes from a variety of sources. Manguel is a voracious, generous and astute reader and he includes works from across the globe: Don Quixote, Kim, The Pillow Book,Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, novels by H.G. Wells and Goethe. His astonishing literary range is evidenced by the inclusion of works from lesser-known South American writers (Bioy Casares and Machado de Assis), children’s literature (The Wind in the Willows) and detective fiction (The Sign of Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). His comments on the works are always intelligent, insightful, original and engaging.
Manguel maintains a contemplative tone throughout, as befits a book written, for the most part, in a medieval presbytery, now his home in southern France. In this reflective tone, he states: “I, of course, will disappear …the books will be scattered. … As in the eye of a sculptor chiselling away at a stone, the whole will be all the more beautiful for our absence.” Manguel’s enthusiasms encourage the reader to visit or re-visit many of these literary worlds, but he is especially convincing in his discussions of Cervantes, Kipling and Sherlock Holmes. There is no doubt Manguel loves libraries and books: “I explore my library like someone returning to his native land after an absence of decades.” His gift is the ability to foster that same love in his readers.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Book Review #18: The Vicinity by David O’Meara
Excellent poems from a fine Canadian poet.
The urban world of concrete, structural steel and glass is the primary subject of this fine collection of poems on the city acutely observed. In the wrong hands this could have led to a blurred gray vision of the world but O’Meara’s use of language and images is so striking and original that dusk’s “uneven ledges” turn into “long, sun-burned collarbones”. ‘A Civic Gesture’, the first of two sections, ends with a long poem titled ‘Letter to Auden’, in which O’Meara gives the old poet a report on the state of the world since his death. This structured piece of moral outrage also exhibits a wry, infective humor: “And correct me here if there’s some doubt, / But wasn’t the Great Wall constructed / to keep the tourists out?”
Throughout the collection, there are numerous examples of the poet’s exhilarating, fresh imagery: A brick wall is “stoic toil”; a dark window on a train becomes “a specimen slide of dark fields”; and wind is a civil servant “pushing papers along curb lengths”. In arguably his finest poem, ‘The Basilica at Assisi’, the poet imagines himself as a rough laborer in 1233 who wishes he could “swear and still be pious”. As for St. Francis, he could “talk a storm into a rain barrel”, and the deadline for finishing the basilica is “This time next century”. Although the second section of the book, ‘Walking Around’, exhibits an appropriate meandering quality, the poems are less razor-sharp. Altogether, this is an excellent, finely honed collection, filled with precise, wholly original language.
The urban world of concrete, structural steel and glass is the primary subject of this fine collection of poems on the city acutely observed. In the wrong hands this could have led to a blurred gray vision of the world but O’Meara’s use of language and images is so striking and original that dusk’s “uneven ledges” turn into “long, sun-burned collarbones”. ‘A Civic Gesture’, the first of two sections, ends with a long poem titled ‘Letter to Auden’, in which O’Meara gives the old poet a report on the state of the world since his death. This structured piece of moral outrage also exhibits a wry, infective humor: “And correct me here if there’s some doubt, / But wasn’t the Great Wall constructed / to keep the tourists out?”
Throughout the collection, there are numerous examples of the poet’s exhilarating, fresh imagery: A brick wall is “stoic toil”; a dark window on a train becomes “a specimen slide of dark fields”; and wind is a civil servant “pushing papers along curb lengths”. In arguably his finest poem, ‘The Basilica at Assisi’, the poet imagines himself as a rough laborer in 1233 who wishes he could “swear and still be pious”. As for St. Francis, he could “talk a storm into a rain barrel”, and the deadline for finishing the basilica is “This time next century”. Although the second section of the book, ‘Walking Around’, exhibits an appropriate meandering quality, the poems are less razor-sharp. Altogether, this is an excellent, finely honed collection, filled with precise, wholly original language.
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