(An entertaining novel of magic realism from the Canadian prairies.)
This novel is an entirely original history of the Canadian prairies. From the early years of buffalo hunting and rebellion through to 1970, Blondie, the wry narrator, recounts the story of four feisty women: her mother, Alice; her stunningly beautiful daughter, Helen; her artist granddaughter, Dianna; and herself. In her 109 years, Blondie has seen it all, from the hanging of Louis Riel to the loss of Helen in the Spanish Civil War.
Assorted husbands, a banker, a monk, a communist and several ghosts also make an appearance, lending this marvelous literary confection set in the Red River valley of southern Manitoba a magical eccentric atmosphere. Recurring floods and lightning bolts at the moment of conception add to the rollicking mix.
Sweatman writes with rare skill and humor: “Eli looked at the corn as a Zen Buddhist would examine a screwdriver.” She delights in the way words flood their banks and find new channels through the flatlands: “My mother’s laughter, those nine months, came from the place where happiness and a nearly intolerable ache live together” and “the air was like the underside of a mushroom, milky pale lavender and musk”.
The beauty of the language never wavers. It is consistently inventive and, with the strong story, lifts this novel to another level. Highly recommended.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Book Review #5: Village of the Small Houses by Ian Ferguson
(If you missed this one when it first came out, it's worth going back for. A wildly entertaining memoir of the far North.)
At times touching, at times humorous, this engaging memoir is set primarily in Fort Vermilion, a town of scattered native and white settlements in extreme northern Alberta. The author moved there with his family in 1959 after a rental scam his father was pulling in Edmonton was discovered. The North was a country of rough roads, endless winters (snow in July), ramshackle shacks and marvelously eccentric characters. These included the author’s likable scheming father (who became a teacher in the local school); his father’s best friend, Bud Peyen, a huge ferryman native; the author’s best friend, Lloyd Loonskin; and the unforgettable Sixtoes Mitchell, a trapper and the scariest-looking man in the world: “He looked as if his face had caught on fire and they’d put it out with an axe.”
Ferguson delivers a clear picture of what life was like for a young man growing up far from TV and flush toilets, surrounded by thousands of square miles of inhospitable bush country. Against this background, the people tend to stand out and the author’s recollections bring them fully to life. Highlights include the family’s escape from Edmonton in a 1953 green-and-white Mercury Zephyr; the time Lloyd Loonskin got himself lost in the woods and was found by Sixtoes; and a bear attack in which the author was saved by the family dog. This memoir comes with the smell of wood smoke, yet is able to avoid the sentimental and romantic notions of a life of poverty in the north.
At times touching, at times humorous, this engaging memoir is set primarily in Fort Vermilion, a town of scattered native and white settlements in extreme northern Alberta. The author moved there with his family in 1959 after a rental scam his father was pulling in Edmonton was discovered. The North was a country of rough roads, endless winters (snow in July), ramshackle shacks and marvelously eccentric characters. These included the author’s likable scheming father (who became a teacher in the local school); his father’s best friend, Bud Peyen, a huge ferryman native; the author’s best friend, Lloyd Loonskin; and the unforgettable Sixtoes Mitchell, a trapper and the scariest-looking man in the world: “He looked as if his face had caught on fire and they’d put it out with an axe.”
Ferguson delivers a clear picture of what life was like for a young man growing up far from TV and flush toilets, surrounded by thousands of square miles of inhospitable bush country. Against this background, the people tend to stand out and the author’s recollections bring them fully to life. Highlights include the family’s escape from Edmonton in a 1953 green-and-white Mercury Zephyr; the time Lloyd Loonskin got himself lost in the woods and was found by Sixtoes; and a bear attack in which the author was saved by the family dog. This memoir comes with the smell of wood smoke, yet is able to avoid the sentimental and romantic notions of a life of poverty in the north.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Book Review #4: This Side Jordan by Margaret Laurence
(A somewhat forgotten classic by one of Canada's greatest writers.)
First published in 1960, This Side Jordan is the first novel by Margaret Laurence, best known for her modern classics, The Stone Angel and The Diviners. Set in 1950s West Africa, the novel throbs with a palpable sense of urgency. You can almost hear the highlife music playing in the background.
Employing a cast of vividly drawn characters, Laurence explores the difficult psychological and social borderline between blacks and whites at the end of the colonial era in the city of Accra and its environs.
The main protagonist, the spectacled Nathaniel Amegbe, is torn between two worlds: his deeply felt Ashanti past and his present occupation as a schoolteacher. As readers, we are privy to Amegbe’s attempts to think his way to a kind of salvation. Amegbe, in all his contradictions, embodies Africa as it tries to enter the modern world.
Laurence paints characters that are living presences. Johnie Kestoe, for example, a racist company man, “was thin in a sharp, almost metallic way, like a man made of netted wire upon which flesh has been inadequately spread.” The stories of Amegbe, Kestoe, their wives, families, business colleagues and friends, are the struggles of two distinct worlds trying to mesh.
The novel works brilliantly at numerous levels: the personal, the historic, the social. As an exploration of Ghana in that period, it is strikingly believable. It also sparkles with Laurence’s fine writing: “Oppressive and stifling, the air seemed to be hung with hot unshed rain, and the leaves of the palm trees crackled like breeze-fanned flames.”
This Side Jordan is an examination of greed, racism, pride, struggle and self-betrayal. In the end, however, it is a tale of the human condition and the saving grace of redemption.
First published in 1960, This Side Jordan is the first novel by Margaret Laurence, best known for her modern classics, The Stone Angel and The Diviners. Set in 1950s West Africa, the novel throbs with a palpable sense of urgency. You can almost hear the highlife music playing in the background.
Employing a cast of vividly drawn characters, Laurence explores the difficult psychological and social borderline between blacks and whites at the end of the colonial era in the city of Accra and its environs.
The main protagonist, the spectacled Nathaniel Amegbe, is torn between two worlds: his deeply felt Ashanti past and his present occupation as a schoolteacher. As readers, we are privy to Amegbe’s attempts to think his way to a kind of salvation. Amegbe, in all his contradictions, embodies Africa as it tries to enter the modern world.
Laurence paints characters that are living presences. Johnie Kestoe, for example, a racist company man, “was thin in a sharp, almost metallic way, like a man made of netted wire upon which flesh has been inadequately spread.” The stories of Amegbe, Kestoe, their wives, families, business colleagues and friends, are the struggles of two distinct worlds trying to mesh.
The novel works brilliantly at numerous levels: the personal, the historic, the social. As an exploration of Ghana in that period, it is strikingly believable. It also sparkles with Laurence’s fine writing: “Oppressive and stifling, the air seemed to be hung with hot unshed rain, and the leaves of the palm trees crackled like breeze-fanned flames.”
This Side Jordan is an examination of greed, racism, pride, struggle and self-betrayal. In the end, however, it is a tale of the human condition and the saving grace of redemption.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Book Review #3: Charlie Johnson in the Flames by Michael Ignatieff
(Yes, Michael Ignatieff had a previous life as a novelist, an excellent one actually.)
This short, intense novel tells the story of Charlie Johnson, a war correspondent working in the Balkans during the recent war there. Charlie, hardened to the realities of war but not yet insensitive to the human beings experiencing daily trauma, is accompanied by his cameraman and best friend, Jacek, a melancholy, reliable Pole. The story focuses on a single event and its aftermath. While hiding in a contested village, Charlie sees a peasant woman set alight and tries to put her out with his bare hands. After his recovery, he grows obsessed with his memory of the woman, who was rescued by helicopter but eventually died. He returns to the Balkan danger zones to hunt down the high-ranked soldier who murdered her, not to kill him but to simply ask “Why?”
This is an extremely accomplished novel in which the author places the reader in burned out villages and tense, ugly towns with uncanny clarity. An old rundown hotel has “Third Reich corridors, curving, carpeted, high-ceilinged and dim”. The Balkans at war are a haunting and dangerous place so Charlie’s return is difficult to understand, even for him, but entirely believable. As Jacek says, “We suffer from too much experience”, and Charlie, whose life feels empty and undirected, hungers for answers. All the characters, including the locals, Charlie’s burdened wife, and Etta, his lover from the home office in London, leap off the page into reality. This is a highly filmic work, disturbing, engaged, utterly convincing.
This short, intense novel tells the story of Charlie Johnson, a war correspondent working in the Balkans during the recent war there. Charlie, hardened to the realities of war but not yet insensitive to the human beings experiencing daily trauma, is accompanied by his cameraman and best friend, Jacek, a melancholy, reliable Pole. The story focuses on a single event and its aftermath. While hiding in a contested village, Charlie sees a peasant woman set alight and tries to put her out with his bare hands. After his recovery, he grows obsessed with his memory of the woman, who was rescued by helicopter but eventually died. He returns to the Balkan danger zones to hunt down the high-ranked soldier who murdered her, not to kill him but to simply ask “Why?”
This is an extremely accomplished novel in which the author places the reader in burned out villages and tense, ugly towns with uncanny clarity. An old rundown hotel has “Third Reich corridors, curving, carpeted, high-ceilinged and dim”. The Balkans at war are a haunting and dangerous place so Charlie’s return is difficult to understand, even for him, but entirely believable. As Jacek says, “We suffer from too much experience”, and Charlie, whose life feels empty and undirected, hungers for answers. All the characters, including the locals, Charlie’s burdened wife, and Etta, his lover from the home office in London, leap off the page into reality. This is a highly filmic work, disturbing, engaged, utterly convincing.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Book Review #2: A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel
Alberto Manguel is a consummate lover of books. I suspect that reading, for him, is somewhat akin to breathing, that intimate, that essential.
An award-winning editor and writer, Manguel has published numerous works including
The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, The Gates of Paradise, and News From a Foreign Country Came.
A History of Reading, published in 1996, is a tour de force, an elegant book, handsomely illustrated, thoroughly researched. As an anecdotal and highly personal history, the work celebrates the joys, delights and endless quirky details of reading, writing and books.
Manguel points out that a book, unlike life, can be reread and relived. Reading can also be a private or a public act. In a chapter titled “Being Read To”, he explores the role of the lector in nineteenth century Cuba, when tobacco workers paid one of their number to read aloud political tracts, histories, novels and poetry while they rolled cigars.
From the mysteries of cuneiform to the visual language of an Absolut vodka ad, Manguel ranges from our earliest written languages up to the present age of information.
He sneaks behind private walls to give us a view of medieval Japanese women reading in their chambers and takes us back to the bookstores, stationery shops and literary cafes of his youth in Buenos Aires. He introduces us to the greatest book thieves of all time and reminds us that Don Quixote went mad from reading too many novels of chivalry.
A History of Reading is, quite simply, a bible for bibliophiles. As Miss Prothero said to the firemen standing among the cinders of her burnt house in Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales: “Would you like anything to read?”
An award-winning editor and writer, Manguel has published numerous works including
The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, The Gates of Paradise, and News From a Foreign Country Came.
A History of Reading, published in 1996, is a tour de force, an elegant book, handsomely illustrated, thoroughly researched. As an anecdotal and highly personal history, the work celebrates the joys, delights and endless quirky details of reading, writing and books.
Manguel points out that a book, unlike life, can be reread and relived. Reading can also be a private or a public act. In a chapter titled “Being Read To”, he explores the role of the lector in nineteenth century Cuba, when tobacco workers paid one of their number to read aloud political tracts, histories, novels and poetry while they rolled cigars.
From the mysteries of cuneiform to the visual language of an Absolut vodka ad, Manguel ranges from our earliest written languages up to the present age of information.
He sneaks behind private walls to give us a view of medieval Japanese women reading in their chambers and takes us back to the bookstores, stationery shops and literary cafes of his youth in Buenos Aires. He introduces us to the greatest book thieves of all time and reminds us that Don Quixote went mad from reading too many novels of chivalry.
A History of Reading is, quite simply, a bible for bibliophiles. As Miss Prothero said to the firemen standing among the cinders of her burnt house in Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales: “Would you like anything to read?”
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Short Book Reviews
Copyright Notice
(The contents of this Web site are the exclusive property of the author. Any unauthorized use or reproduction is an offence, punishable by domestic and international law. For permission to reproduce any material from this site, please contact the author at mfrutkin@rogers.com)
I have decided to remove all but nine of the short essays from this blog, for the simple reason that the entire collection of these essays will be published in Spring 2012 by Fourfront Press (Toronto). So, look for Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously at that time and get the entire package!
At this point, I am going to begin posting short reviews of various novels, non-fiction and poetry collections that amazon.ca asked me to write. They were all published on the amazon site between 2001 and 2006. Over that period, I wrote over 150 very short reviews. My editor at amazon gave me complete editorial freedom (almost), never changing a single line except the removal of the last line in this review of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake.
Review #1: Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
In this science fiction novel that is more Swift than Heinlein, more cautionary tale than ‘fictional science’ (no flying cars here), Atwood depicts a world that turns from the merely horrible to the horrific, from a Fool’s Paradise to a bio-wasteland. Snowman, who sleeps in a tree and just might be the only human left on our devastated planet, recalls how the world fell apart. He is not entirely alone, however, as he considers himself the shepherd of a group of human-like experiments called the Children of Crake.
While the first 70 pages or so are a rather ponderous set-up of what has become a cliché of the human endgame, the novel takes life when Snowman (known as Jimmy then) recalls meeting Crake, his best friend. A dark genius, Crake is the book’s most intriguing character. Crake and Jimmy live with all the other smart, rich people in the Compounds, protected facilities owned by bio-tech companies. Ordinary folks live in the chaotic pleeblands. This is the near future, our time still within living memory.
Meanwhile, beautiful Oryx, raised as a child prostitute in Southeast Asia, finds her way to the West and meets Crake and Jimmy, setting up the obligatory love triangle. Eventually Crake’s experiments in biotechnology run amok and cause the world’s shockingly quick demise (uncanny echoes of SARS, ebola and mad cow disease). Snowman is left to try to pick up the pieces.
Once the bleak narrative gets moving, it clips along at a good pace, with a healthy dose of wry humor. Nevertheless, there are enough speed bumps (some clunky dialogue; heavy-handed symbols such as the broken watch Snowman wears; and the silliness of naming the Children of Crake after famous characters such as Abraham Lincoln) that this cannot be considered among Atwood’s best.
If the sky really is falling and you’re heading for that desert island, this isn’t the one book to take.
(The contents of this Web site are the exclusive property of the author. Any unauthorized use or reproduction is an offence, punishable by domestic and international law. For permission to reproduce any material from this site, please contact the author at mfrutkin@rogers.com)
I have decided to remove all but nine of the short essays from this blog, for the simple reason that the entire collection of these essays will be published in Spring 2012 by Fourfront Press (Toronto). So, look for Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously at that time and get the entire package!
At this point, I am going to begin posting short reviews of various novels, non-fiction and poetry collections that amazon.ca asked me to write. They were all published on the amazon site between 2001 and 2006. Over that period, I wrote over 150 very short reviews. My editor at amazon gave me complete editorial freedom (almost), never changing a single line except the removal of the last line in this review of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake.
Review #1: Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
In this science fiction novel that is more Swift than Heinlein, more cautionary tale than ‘fictional science’ (no flying cars here), Atwood depicts a world that turns from the merely horrible to the horrific, from a Fool’s Paradise to a bio-wasteland. Snowman, who sleeps in a tree and just might be the only human left on our devastated planet, recalls how the world fell apart. He is not entirely alone, however, as he considers himself the shepherd of a group of human-like experiments called the Children of Crake.
While the first 70 pages or so are a rather ponderous set-up of what has become a cliché of the human endgame, the novel takes life when Snowman (known as Jimmy then) recalls meeting Crake, his best friend. A dark genius, Crake is the book’s most intriguing character. Crake and Jimmy live with all the other smart, rich people in the Compounds, protected facilities owned by bio-tech companies. Ordinary folks live in the chaotic pleeblands. This is the near future, our time still within living memory.
Meanwhile, beautiful Oryx, raised as a child prostitute in Southeast Asia, finds her way to the West and meets Crake and Jimmy, setting up the obligatory love triangle. Eventually Crake’s experiments in biotechnology run amok and cause the world’s shockingly quick demise (uncanny echoes of SARS, ebola and mad cow disease). Snowman is left to try to pick up the pieces.
Once the bleak narrative gets moving, it clips along at a good pace, with a healthy dose of wry humor. Nevertheless, there are enough speed bumps (some clunky dialogue; heavy-handed symbols such as the broken watch Snowman wears; and the silliness of naming the Children of Crake after famous characters such as Abraham Lincoln) that this cannot be considered among Atwood’s best.
If the sky really is falling and you’re heading for that desert island, this isn’t the one book to take.
Friday, November 12, 2010
23/ Dignity
Ultimately there is but one audience. The writer must write for himself. He must try to free himself from the winds of opinion that blow him this way one day and that way another. The writer must constantly return to the spontaneity of the act itself, the dignity and joy must be found there. To return to the creative impulse, to work without hope or fear of praise or calumny is indeed dignified. It is a life's work, a struggle more important than any particular book or essay, more important than any passing criticism or hyperbole.
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