Bone & Bread

Bone & Bread / Saleema Nawaz
Toronto: Anansi, c2013.
448 p.

I enjoyed this novel for so many reasons. It's set largely in Montreal, so of course the joy of revisiting and trying to identify some of my old environs was wonderful -- though you don't have to be a Montrealer to feel engaged in this vividly drawn setting.

The most notable thing for me was the writing itself. It is beautiful, capturing images,  characters, feelings, in its many descriptions, metaphors, and simply lovely sentences. It reads as completely natural and yet is also a clear reflection of such talent. I am envious!

The story details the relationship of two sisters, Beena and Sadhana, who are orphaned early, in quite a disturbing manner. These sisters have a Sikh father and a Western mother, and grow up in Montreal largely distant from their Indian family, other than an uncle. This uncle works in their father's bagel shop, and takes over both the shop and the girls' guardianship once they are left orphans. This is a realistic, difficult, yet ultimately powerful relationship for them all.

The book covers issues of sibling love and rivalry, family bonds, grief, the difficulty of maintaining and identifying one's cultural background, sexual desires and roles, teen pregnancy, anorexia, how much one can help really another person, and more. It is rife with issues, replete with drama.

And yet it is also extremely readable, engaging, and illuminating. The issues do not overwhelm the story itself; they are a natural part of the narrative, unlike novels in which story seems to exist simply to prop up a favoured perspective on The Issue that the author is dealing with. This seems to me to be a tough balance, but Nawaz manages it effortlessly.

I found the younger years of the sisters the most powerful, as they depend on one another utterly, and coexist in a small space, helping one another face the world. As they hit their mid-teens, Beena becomes pregnant, while Sadhana finds her focus in anorexia. They both move into their own private worlds until they finally split apart physically as well, with Beena moving to Ottawa with her young son to find a place of her own. The rest of the book details their efforts to stay connected despite the magnetic pull between them which both draws them together and repels.

There was one element right at the conclusion that I felt was jarring; Beena has been searching for Sadhana's diary after her death. She finally lays her hands on it -- but doesn't even open it, doesn't read it. In her circumstances, I can't imagine not reading it. It did feel a bit anticlimactic.

Nonetheless, this was a wonderful book, with much to admire. The setting was so well done, and the sisters' relationship was loving and difficult, very true to life. There were moments when Nawaz' choice of phrasing made me stop, look at everything differently, and reread the sentence more than once. I enjoyed it, and was interested in each character's take on the world, whether it was Beena, Sadhana, or one of the people who surrounded them. Intriguing reading, with lots to discuss.

Atkinson's Life After Life

Life After Life / Kate Atkinson
Toronto: Random House Canada, c2013.
477 p.

(**Spoilers ahead**)

There's been much talk about this book recently, and as my hold finally came up at the library, I read it over a couple of days last week. Wow! There is a reason for the buzz.

This is one of my 'best books' so far this year. I was absolutely taken with the conceit of the tale; Ursula is born, and then dies. And then is born, and then dies. And so on, and so on. At one point, her brother wonders, "Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could live over and over again until we got it right?"

And that is essentially what Ursula is doing. The cleverness lies in the way Atkinson details it; at each death, she returns to the point where things could have gone differently, and starts anew. As Ursula gets older, this can entail going back a number of years -- the connections get more complicated as more is happening. Some of the situations are ghastly, violent and so sad. And some are simply unfortunate. During a spate of Ursula's childhood accidents and restarts, my husband commented, "It feels like I'm reading the Gashlycrumb Tinies." So true!

But the detail in each part, the small things that shaped the direction of life -- Ursula's small wooden knitting doll, heavy snow delaying the midwife, a moment's distraction during the Blitz, being unable to celebrate VE Day -- these details create a layered, enthralling world that I was utterly absorbed into.

I loved how Ursula became more aware at each restart that something was going on. She has a strange sense of familiarity, put down to déjà vu, when she is repeating something, trying to fix it, to change the possible future. It was brilliantly conceived, and brilliantly executed too. I read it in a mad rush, so impressed by the skill and imaginative power involved.

Upon reflection, there were some elements that were perhaps not as compelling. In one of Ursula's futures, she ends up marrying a German during her pitiful continental tour post-school, and has a child. By some stroke of luck, she befriends Eva, a young woman who brings her along to a posh retreat in the mountains for the sake of her daughter's health. It's Eva Braun, of course. But things end badly. This German episode felt a bit divorced from the tale that had come previously, but its reasons for being become apparent in the following pages.

Ursula begins again and again, and finally recalls enough to set herself a course of action. She plans, prepares and puts into motion her essential reason for living -- returning to Germany and finishing off Hitler. This is a bit unsatisfying; is Ursula really just an instrument of fate? If things can be altered by such a little detail, is Hitler's demise utterly in her hands alone? To me, this exposed the germination of this tale, as we have probably all considered that question -- if you could go back in time and kill Hitler, would you?

Still, this was an amazing read, and now that I've finished I would like to go back and begin again, and pay attention to all those details I'm sure I missed in my first quick reading. If this book didn't have to go back to the library, I would! It was clever, but also very compassionate and human. Ursula was a deeply felt character, distinct from her siblings, unsatisfying to her charming mother, uncertain about what she wanted from life. I was drawn into her world and into her inexplicable condition. I found the repetitions in the narration as she begins anew each time both strong and affecting, as the reader could see the minute alterations and try to figure out what had changed and what the results might be this time around.

This was an excellent read with internal echoes adding colour and weight to the story. I felt that there were certain similarities of atmosphere or theme in a couple of other books I've read recently, which would make great companion reading. My suggestions:

The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt -- for the pre and interwar setting, the sense of large families in the country, the intense interiority of the main characters, the looming presence of the War.

Making It Up by Penelope Lively -- for her focus on chance and the moments in a life when everything could have gone completely differently

Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis -- for the episodes in the Blitz, the fluidity of time, and the emotional punch of unexpected losses

Poisoned Pawn

The Poisoned Pawn / Peggy Blair
Toronto: Penguin Group, c2013.
318 p.

This was a light mystery I picked up recently, book two in a series of which I haven't yet read book one! It features Cuban detective Ricardo Ramirez, who has to travel to Ottawa to follow up leads on a very complicated case which includes Canadian tourists, mysterious poisonings and much corruption of many bureaucratic organizations.

It paints quite a picture of life in Cuba -- the shortages, the differences between what tourists are allowed to see and what daily life is like (there are even two currencies: Cuban pesos and tourist pesos). There is a lot of description of the daily routines of Ramirez and his department, as well as his family life, always turbulent. Despite official agnosticism, there are still many practicing Catholics and those who practice Santeria in Ramirez' life, including his grandmother, who left him with the gift/curse of seeing ghosts. He is by now resigned to seeing murder victims in his living room until he solves a case.

There are predictable moments when Ramirez gets to Canada, like his shock at the cold. There are also comparisons pointed out between Cuba's third-world conditions and those of Native reserves all over Canada, when Ramirez is met at the airport by an Ojibway officer, Charlie Pike. In this instance, I found that the author didn't allow much subtlety of interpretation, rather she spells it out, coming across as somewhat didactic. Still, the conditions on reserves and in residential schools do play a part in the story, so for non-Canadians this approach may be necessary to aid understanding.

The mystery itself is complicated, a multilayered twist of various strands that end up not being completely connected, but in searching for the answers to one case, the other is invariably implicated. These strands connect Ottawa and Cuba, and Ramirez must walk a fine line between the expectations of both sides in order to sustain his precarious lifestyle in Cuba. He wrangles the corruption in each place with enough panache to preserve himself, while meting out justice, as much as he is able.

It begins with a poisoning of a Canadian woman who is fleeing Cuba, carries on with a dead woman in an alley in Havana, and has a suggestion of widespread child abuse as an element in the case. Ramirez, with the help of both the local coroner, a dwarf named Hector Apiro, and the contacts he makes on his Canadian visit, must find the connections.

The setting is an integral element of the story, and Ramirez' world is fascinating. Even without reading the first book I was able to follow along and get to know the characters sufficiently to become involved in the story. If you've ever travelled to Cuba you might find this one particularly interesting for its inclusion of everyday detail. Quite unusual, and intriguing in its variety of characters.

The Butler Speaks

The Butler Speaks: a Guide to Stylish Entertaining, Etiquette and the Art of Good Housekeeping / Charles MacPherson
Toronto: Random House Canada, c2013.
247 p.

I received this book from Random House and have really enjoyed looking through it over the last week. It's actually quite fascinating -- although I do freely admit I skimmed over the section on how to properly clean every single thing in your house.

This is not a stuffy volume of arcane protocol, rather, it is a modern take on the service industry. I really liked what MacPherson said in the opening pages:

Etiquette is not a set of classist rules for the rich, famous or snobby -- rather, it's a way of understanding other people and having consideration for their needs.

It covers all sorts of things, from how to set a table and differentiate between cutlery, to how to clean, iron or polish your household. If you ever wanted to know how to set a tea tray correctly, that's here too. What wine to serve with which meal? Is this chair Queen Anne or Louis Quinze? Fold a napkin? Make a bed? Create a champagne tower? Address people correctly by order of protocol? Yes, you'll find out how. There is also a wonderful discussion of the temperament and behaviours of an efficient and effective butler (or any other kind of service position).

While I am not considering a career as a house manager this was still great reading. Recommended reading which he includes at the end, a list of 10 essential household management books (actually 11, but one is only in French), contains Cheryl Mendelson's Home Comforts, a book I bought some years ago but have as yet never even opened. Oops. However, if this field does in fact interest you as a career choice, try reading this book to get a feel for what's involved, and check out his recommended titles. And then check out his website, too -- Charles MacPherson Associates offers an accredited training course in the field, and it appears to be quite elaborate with assistance in placement afterward as well. It is based in Toronto, and MacPherson also makes regular appearances on the Marilyn Denis show.

Definitely a useful book for the non-professional (like myself) who needs a reference for some of these things now and again! A great gift, too, for those people you know you won't offend by giving it to them ;)

Where'd You Go, Bernadette?

Where'd You Go, Bernadette? / Maria Semple
New York: Little, Brown, c2012.
330 p.

Another epistolary read, this one has been repeatedly recommended to me. I'm sure that most readers will have heard of this one by now -- it's the story of Bee Fox, a rather precocious girl living in Seattle with her currently agoraphobic (and formerly famous) mother and her Microsoft exec father.

It is told in a collection of letters, notes and emails back and forth from the various players in the story -- Bernadette, her virtual assistant in India, crazy neighbours, passive-aggressive fellow mothers from Bee's fancy school, and more, with the addition of a few narrative sections to add information to the story.

Bernadette, formerly a star in the architecture field, has closed herself off from most interactions with the outside world, preferring to stay inside of her rambling, crumbling home. Bee, a brilliant student, has been promised a reward if she gets straight A's (which of course she does) and starts off this tale by asking for a family trip to Antarctica.

With her mother anxious about the entire idea, and her father a busy executive falling into a relationship of sorts with his hyperefficient secretary, Bee's trip doesn't look good. But planning goes ahead, until Bernadette disappears while an intervention is being staged in her kitchen.

The second half of the book follows Bee and her father as they travel to Antarctica and follow Bernadette's trail to try to discover what has happened to her. Father-daughter bonding (and non-bonding) goes on, they discuss Bernadette's place in their lives, we get to see Antarctica even as the sullen teenager Bee ignores it, and get to some emotional depth in Bee's longing for her mother. Finally, a resolution: by chance and daring, Bee and her father take action and find out what has happened.

I liked this book. It was fun, with snappy dialogue, some entertaining characters, great settings -- both Seattle and Antarctica are real places here. The epistolary format perhaps didn't work so well for the entire story, but exposition is really hard to capture authentically solely via the written word, especially in our non-letter writing culture. It was much more normal for 18th century letter writers to go on and on about every detail, since there was no other way that people were finding out information, for example. Still, it was pretty well done, and really creative and entertaining.

What I didn't like so much was the confusion I felt between the characters of Bee and Bernadette. Not only are their names similar, but their voices are as well. They think and speak in the same patterns, and with the same insouciant sarcasm. I couldn't immediately recognize who was speaking in some scenes, despite the fact that one character is a precocious teenager and the other a disappointed adult. Sometimes I felt like the structure and dialogue was just a little too snappy.

So while I didn't adore this one as much as many other readers have, I still enjoyed it and appreciated what it was trying to do. I liked many of the elements and will most definitely be keeping my eyes open for this writer's next book.

Henrietta Sees It Through

Henrietta Sees It Through: More News from the Home Front, 1942-1945 / Joyce Dennys
New York: Bloomsbury, 2011, c1986.
181 p.

I read Henrietta's War some time back, not realizing there was a part two to the story, until I was unexpectedly given a copy of this one! This book continues the story with Henrietta's letters to her cousin Robert, overseas somewhere. Henrietta lives in the West Country, and is tired of London visitors commenting that "these people don't know there's a war on", especially on the day that a local couple hears that their youngest son has been killed.

The book was published as columns in Sketch during the war, and only published in the 80's collected into book format. Thus there are many concerns that people who didn't know the outcome of the war might be experiencing -- food shortages, short tempers from the anxiety, a fear of lack of elastic and what that might mean for undergarment availability, having to take in evacuees, loneliness (especially of young wives left unsure of what was happening to their husbands), and more.

Despite this, Henrietta has a sense of humour and can always see both the ridiculous and the small delights still to be found in daily life. The book is simultaneously charming and serious, a little heavier than the first volume but still as light-hearted as possible, including the same kind of cartoon sketches that were so entertaining in the first.

There are marriages, engagements, lots of babies (Henrietta's husband Charles is a local doctor so she always knows about these), parties, music, dancing, and even kissing games at one point. The delight the village takes simply in dressing up for a party is palpable, a relief from the self-denial and stoic carrying on that makes up their daily round during these years.

I love reading letters, real or fictional, as I believe the format can create a kind of intimacy and self-revelation that is unique. Here we get to know both Henrietta's fears and her methods for keeping on, told in a delightful way to a friend and relative who is also familiar with the people and surroundings she's talking about. The book ends with a letter announcing the celebration of VE Day, still relatively low-key, but with the whole village out in the streets dancing and singing and lighting a huge bonfire. Soldiers stationed nearby join in, and there is even mention of a Canadian solider in the last couple of pages. It's quite moving though told so efficiently. Following Henrietta and her various friends and neighbours through the war was a lovely experience, both for her humour and her good heart. I'm glad both books were published for us to explore now; the fact of living through this war on the home front shouldn't be forgotten.



(FYI: For an example of life on the Canadian Home Front during WWI, I always recommend Rilla of Ingleside)

Women's Lives: Poetic Retellings

I'm participating in the Poetry Month Blog Tour, hosted by Serena of Savvy Verse & Wit, again this year. I always enjoy this project, as everybody has such an individual choice to share for each day of the tour. If you haven't been following along so far, you can still go back over the tour schedule and catch up on some pretty great stuff!

Today I'm sharing two collections I've just read, The World's Wife by Carol Ann Duffy, suggested by blogger Buried in Print, and one that I recently won via the Literary Press Group's poetry month cross-Canada poetry tour, Glossolalia by Marita Dachsel.

The connection these two books have lies in the way they both focus in on women's lives, ones we often hear about only from a male perspective, and give us a first-person view of their experience.

I've read some Carol Ann Duffy before (loved her poem Tea) and so was eager to read this collection when I saw it mentioned by a blogger whose taste I trust.

The World's Wife reimagines the lifestories of women from myth and fairytale. It was fabulous.

Starting with Little Red Cap and going all the way to Medusa, The Beast's Wife, a bevy of "Mrs." and beyond, this was a marvellous, kaleidoscopic reshifting of what we think we know from all the stories we've heard -- none of which are traditionally told from a female viewpoint. These women explain themselves, express how the truth of their lives doesn't quite match up with the stories told about them, or simply comment on their own views of the world. Each poem works beautifully, and I was particularly taken with two, the sonnet "Anne Hathaway", and the final poem, "Demeter".


This last one, in particular, reminded me of a collection I read fairly recently, Demeter Goes Skydiving, and the ways in which that poet, Susan McCaslin, inhabited mythological women like Demeter, speaking from the perspective of this mythical mother experiencing the modern world. I think that this approach to poetry appeals to me quite a bit, and was happy to find Duffy's collection so I could sate myself with extensive examples of such!

Glossolalia, on the other hand, gives voice to the many historical wives of Joseph Smith. Dachsel is particularly interested in polygamy and the peculiar secretive way it was practiced at the time of these wives' experience. The lives of these numerous women lend themselves to exploration, and Dachsel digs in with imagination and verve.

There were so many wives. There's a list at the back, with ages and dates of marriage, and it's quite overwhelming to look at them all, ranging in age from 14 (ick) to 50's. Dachsel gives them each a specific voice, and yet a combination of 2 voices (one set of siblings) in the same poem was particularly notable. There was one poem by an unnamed wife who refuses to talk, who states that she has "nothing to say to you" -- this anonymous wife seemed to have a certain authority in her silence. Each of these women seems to be justifying her life and decisions from the grave, reminding me faintly of the famous Spoon River Anthology, though these poems are generally longer and sharper than the Spoon River examples.

Their stories reveal various reasons for their decisions to marry Smith. In this early method of polygamy, the marriages were secret, women could already be married with no requirement to leave their current husband to live with Smith, and these spiritual marriages could be as easily dissolved. There were practical reasons, like the oldest wife, who was a sister left alone when her only brother died, married as a kind of favour. There were more specious reasons, as with the youngest girls, with Smith pretending it was all for heavenly glory, ugh.

One of the most fascinating elements was the voice of Joseph Smith's first, original wife, Emma Hale Smith, throughout the book. Her perspective on his religiously permitted philandering was unexpected, and powerful. Notes in the back reveal that she approved of a small number of his marriages, mainly to younger girls who were already servants in their home. The others she either wasn't directly aware of or powerless to stop in fact, though that didn't stop her opinions on them. Here she is, around the middle of the book:

I believe I believed. Joseph,
you were everything
I believed....

I believed you
until I couldn't. ...

A person does not lose faith --
It is not a hairpin or a tooth.
Faith evolves, salvaged.
A grove becomes a house.
A fire becomes ashes.

I loved the creative impulse behind this collection, and the idea was brought to reality with great effectiveness. I enjoyed every minute I spent reading this, and will be going back to reread many parts of it again. I like clever concepts melded with a facility for language and imagery, and this collection delivered. Recommended to anyone interested in modern poetry and/or women's lives reimagined.