Tintin, the beginning

Helena at the start of the summer spent some time at her grandmother's house. When we picked her up, she was more than proud to show off the pile of Tintin books she'd read. She had to tell me all about them.

And at that moment we resolved to work our way through the lot of them (in French). We borrowed a few volumes from my mother-in-law and set off.

Helena was reading them in a somewhat haphazard order, but I decided to start at the beginning: Tintin au Congo.

(It turns out that this is in fact the second Tintin volume, after Tintin au pays de soviets, which story was originally serialized and has the distinction of never having been colourized. Anyway, Congo is in the #1 position on the back cover, where all the volumes (minus the Soviets) are pictured in order.)

Every time I settled down to read Tintin, Helena would join me. This meant she would want to tell me what happened, tell me all her favourite parts; even better, she would want to read it aloud to me, and so we'd have to start again from the beginning. We made several such starts on several rainy evenings. Progress was slow. On the up side, Helena's French vocabulary and pronunciation is much better than mine, so it was quite a boon to have her by my side. I managed to finish the book before summer's end by "sneaking" a page or two at a time after Helena's bedtime.

(Helena made it through just one additional Tintin story this summer. They're more involving, I guess, when you're sitting in the nook by the treasure trove of them at grandma's house.)

Tintin's never held any particular appeal for me, but there's no denying he's well loved by a great number of people the world over. The plot of Tintin au Congo wanders all over, but there's a great sense of adventure and it's much funnier than I expected it to be, in a gentle kind of way. I fully intend to read them all, eventually, if only to know what it is my daughter's talking about.

But thank you, Tintin, for turning my daughter into something of a reader.

Through the wardrobe

Yesterday Helena and I went to see The Chronicles of Narnia: The Exhibition.

You can't really consider this post a plug, because, well, the exhibit ended yesterday. And on the whole, the exhibit was pretty lame (even the catapult was out of order), and admission prices were outrageously high. Also, this was not about Narnia as an imaginary land, or about the Narnia books (although a small stack of books in various language was on display); make no mistake about it: this exhibition is about the movie.

One space was devoted to The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, and a smaller room focused on Prince Caspian. Throughout, a great number of monitors played clips from these films.

If the show ever comes to your town, I can't say I recommend seeing it, unless you're a big fan of the movie, or deeply interested in costume and set design, or are deeply bored and don't know what to do with your money.

On the other hand, as far as Helena's concerned (and, yes, me too), it was worth every penny to be able to step through the carved wardrobe doors and brush past a pile of fur coats to step out into a pine forest where snow blew down around us. The moment was magical (even though it came via Disney).

Other highlights included sitting on a replica of the White Witch's throne (just because); touching the ice wall, which was painfully cold (the accompanying plaque was trying to impart something about climate change); and lifting a (safely encased) sword, just as a taste of what hard work it is, going to battle.

I'm not absolutely certain of my facts...

I'm not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare — or, if not, it's some equally brainy lad — who says that it's always just when a chappie is feeling particularly top-hole, and more than usually braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping. There's no doubt the man's right.

— from "Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest," in My Man Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse.

It seems also to be true, as many people have decried before me, that P.G. Wodehouse is the perfect antidote to the blahs, a reading funk, or just a plain old bad day.

I'm straight away downloading more Wodehouse to have on standby.

The next item of distraction

I wanted to say a little about The Dud Avocado, by Elaine Dundy, but time is tight these last couple weeks, so I keep waiting and waiting for time enough to say what I have to say, and it turns out I really don't know what to say, and if I wait any longer there won't be anything left for me to say, all that something I'm trying to put my finger on will have vanished into thin air, so here I am settling to say just a very little.

It's charming!, delightful!, even outrageous! in its way. Groucho Marx, in a letter to Dundy, wrote, "I had to tell someone (and it might as well be you since you're the author) how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado. It made me laugh, scream, and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm)." Written in 1958, The Dud Avocado wreaks of other-era-ness, but in the best possible way. About a 21-year-old American girl living in Paris for a time (funded by her uncle), sowing her wild oats and trying to find herself. Somehow, magically, it's fresh.

The thing that stands out for me, beyond the colourful characters and funny incidents, is the voice. And I don't just mean the tone, its easy, breezy way, the way the language simply carries you off, or the mood. I'm kind of assuming these are quasi-technical terms — voice, tone, mood — and I can't pretend to know how to use them correctly. But I mean: voice! It's so strong, I can hear it in my head, I don't mean like just some random crazy voice in my head, but really hear it, and if I were any good at that sort of thing (like in the way you need a certain vocabulary to be able to describe a really nice glass of wine — see, how lame is that, "really nice"?), I could describe it, its timbre and pitch and fullness and legs, the way it cracks with occasional uncertainty and how it flirts. I mean: you can hear it! this beautiful narration, it's the most natural thing in the world.

It's a voice with a touch of Irma la Douce about it; the stories share little (although, hmm... it's been ages since I saw that movie; I mean, the plots are different, but come to think of it, you could probably spot lots of similarities, situation by situation), but anyway the spirit of Paris is similarly resonant. Also it reminds me of Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, minus the psychoanalysis, and Breakfast at Tiffany's (more the film than the novella), but without quite that level of tragedy. She's a phony, but a real phony.

And she's young! and in Paris! and in love! and oh, how terribly wrong it sometimes goes! And even though you want to slap her from time to time, really, deep down, you hope everything turns out for Sally Jay.

I returned to the table black and blue, two buttons ripped off my blouse and mad as a wet hen. I confronted Larry. "Good-by," I said. "Go to hell and take this whole bunch with you. Do you know what I think? I think they should be driven into the sea with pitchforks, like a horde of great crab things." I gesticulated wildly, and my handbag swung out and hit something or somebody, and landed on the floor, butter-side down of course, and everything spilled out — lipstick, compact, passport, mirror. It was the Ritz all over again, except the gesture had popped the last button of my blouse as well. I stamped on the mirror in sheer temper. Then I sat down. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Everyone, I noticed, was very polite about my outburst, which for them was merely the next item of distraction which they expected to have provided; Larry picked up my bag, put all my things back in it, handed it to me and told me to go to the Ladies Room and have the attendant sew the buttons back on my blouse, and that we'd go on as soon as I got out.

And then — oh gosh — I know all this next part by heart — I should, I've been over it so many times. And then I came out of the john and told Larry I'd lost my passport and he said, "No you haven't, here it is, I found it after you left" and he took it out of his jacket and slapped it against the palm of his hand a couple of times and asked me why on earth I carried it around with me. I said because I didn't know where to put it down. Oh Lord, just saying these words even now makes me groan with boredom, when I think how many times they've bounced off dead walls and deaf ears. Anyway, I said I didn't know where to put it down because I was always losing things, even in my hotel room, or they were losing me, rather. It's a gradual thing — I kind of slowly miss them — it's as if they're weaning themselves away from me. I've never known a fountain pen longer than a month and I'm lucky if a lipstick stays with me for three weeks. So, as I said, that was why I carried this passport around with me. Larry said, "O.K., O.K., it's none of my business," took my bag, dropped the passport in, clicked it shut, and handed it back to me. And that, as I was later to say about a hundred thousand million times, was the very last I ever saw of that passport.

I bet you want to know what happened to that passport!

Here's another little excerpt, which gives insight into the title.

This book is a bit hard to find in Canada (I believe it's a matter of rights and permissions — there's not even a Canadian price printed on the cover), but it's worth going out of your way to get your hands on a copy.

Wow, I had more to say than I thought.

Fallait laisser tomber

Beside the Sea, by Véronique Olmi, is an amazing little novella, simple and powerful. Recently available in English, several reviewers are raving about it (eg, 1, 2, 3).

It's about a mother taking her two boys to the seaside, and from the start, something doesn't feel right. Why, for example, are they travelling by night? And Kevin is worried about missing school. Mother's planning for this ideal vacation is pretty half-baked — she doesn't seem to know where they're going, they're poorly packed (did they leave in a hurry?), she just doesn't have much of a grip. Everything is going wrong and it's thoroughly disheartening.

As the mother tells the story, we learn a little bit about her, but very little: she's afraid of talking to people, she's missing teeth, she goes to the free clinic. There's a social worker, there are meds. Money's tight. At first I thought she must be young, and quite simply overwhelmed by motherhood, but later I didn't think so, though maybe that's simply her weariness aging her beyond her years.

Since I couldn't track down a copy of this book easily, I picked it up in the original French (Bord de mer).

J'ai regardé par la fenêtre, on voyait rien. Moi j'ai l'habitude de donner sur les immeubles d'en face et j'aime ça, voir les gens bouger derrière les rideaux et toutes les petites lumières allumées quand le soir arrive, c'est beau et on est tous ensemble, bien rangés dans nos boîtes, c'est l'ordre des choses, ça me plaît. Là, on voyait rien, même pas des phares de voitures, un réverbère, rien. Qu'est-ce que ça donnerait en plein jour ? Qu'est-ce qu'il y avait derrière ma fenêtre ? La mer ? Non, j'entendais rien et puis un hôtel au bord de la mer ça aurait été trop cher, je me serais méfiée tout de suite. Alors ? Qu'est-ce qu'il y avait en face de moi que je voyais pas ? Le terminus des cars ? Un chantier avec des grues des camions et tout le tintouin, quelque chose qu'on construit ou qu'on démolit ? Je déteste ça, les maisons à moitiées arrachées, je supporte pas de voir la couleur des tapisseries de maisons à moitiées arrachées, y a rien de plus triste à mon goût. Fallait pas que je commence à imaginer, tout était possible derrière cette fenêtre, on pouvait s'attendre à tout, fallait laisser tomber, laisser tomber tout de suite avant de se faire des cauchemars.

It turned out to be slow going for my far-from-fluent self, about 10 pages a day (and I think now this kind of slowdown was just what I needed), but the experience — as much as the book itself — has given me a lot to think about.

I've been thinking about tone, and how it is that we glean what we do from what we read. Choice of words, their social register. Uneducated? Melodramatic? From grammar, how casual the tone, whether a character (or her thoughts) is care-free, sloppy, rigid, organized; from punctuation, how breathless and panicked, or slow and thoughtful. This is hard enough to do when reading in one's mother tongue — we process so much of this information subconsciously, it's hard to point to direct evidence for the conclusions we draw. In a second language, well, it's harder.

I'm pretty proud of myself for getting what I did from this exercise, but my knowledge of French grammar is piss-poor, and it turns out my vocabulary's pretty limited too. And then there's the fact that I filter it all through my knowledge of English-language writing conventions, which don't necessarily apply. On top of this, my entire reading is coloured by my preconceptions of the material.

For all that, I did come away with some very strong impressions — of the characters and story, and favorable of the book as a whole as an intense and provocative read — but I can't say how true they are. (I'm curious to try this book in English someday.) I do look forward to tackling the second Olmi novella in my French volume.

Cheer up, my little avocado!

We looked at the menu. "Hah! Avocados," he said, brightening. "How I love them. Cheer up, my little avocado," he said to me pinching my hand. "You know, these American girls are just like avocados. What do you think, am I right, Max? Who ever even heard of an avocado sixty years ago? Yes, that's what we're growing nowadays." His avocado arrived and he looked at it lovingly. "The Typical American Girl," he said, addressing it. "A hard center with the tender meat all wrapped up in a shiny casing." He began eating it. "How I love them," he murmured greedily. "So green — so eternally green." He winked at me.

"Stefan, please..."

"No, it's true. And I will tell you something really extraordinary, mes enfants. Do you know that you can take the stones of these luscious fruits, put them in water — just plain water, mind you — anywhere, any place in the world, and in three months up comes a sturdy little plant full of green leaves? That is their sturdy little souls bursting into bloom," he finished off, well satisfied with his analogy.

"Well, this one isn't going to burst into bloom, " I said morosely, putting my nose in my drink. "What you've got here is a dead one."

"A what? A dud one?"

I took my face out of the glass. "No, dead. Dead. Oh, forget it."

Max raised his glass and smiled at me. "The dud avocado," he said, proposing the toast.

— from The Dud Avocado, by Elaine Dundy.

I raise my glass.

Être ailleurs

Il m'a pas répondu. Il était barré quelque part, il sait bien faire ça, Stan, larguer les amarres — c'est pas mon môme pour rien. La maîtresse lui prête des livres et quand il lit c'est pareil : il nous quitte. Des fois je crois qu'il continue à lire ses livres, quand il les a rendus il y pense encore, il lit même sans les mots, il est vraiment très fort pour être ailleurs.

— Bord de mer, Véronique Olmi.

This harmony was not complete

The Unit, by Ninni Holmqvist, is a sharp little dystopian novel with loads to say about some really important matters.

Dorrit Weger has just turned 50 and moves into the Unit. She's given up her house (or it's been taken away), so she can live here in relative luxury, on the taxpayer's dime. She has no children, but she misses her dog. She is here to perform her civic duty.

It's revealed in the early pages (and in most descriptions of the book), that the institution which is her new home is the Second Reserve Bank Unit for biological material. I'll leave you to figure out what that means.

As compliant and accepting of her fate as Dorrit is, the program is not exactly voluntary; it's a government program that was initiated after years of public debates and democratic votes.

Some of the big topics on which it seems The Unit is making a comment:

Usefulness. The society in The Unit could be taken as a kind of socialism taken to an extreme. Everyone must contribute to the greater good, but the worth of individual contributions must be weighed against each other, and that's where it gets dicey. What would ever make a person dispensable? I don't think my job is important enough for me to make the cut.

Authenticity. Maybe because this is on my mind, reading it fresh on the heels of Remainder. There are cameras everywhere, the awareness of which give every action a meta-action. It's not clear how much of what seems to be is real. It's not clear whether it matters. "I wasn't completely sure that this was actually true, for real, but the main thing was that if felt that way." But then there's the garden, Monet's garden, which is exactly the same as Monet's garden, but it's not.

Motherhood. There's a passage regarding the subject of motherhood that made me cry. (Me! Cry!) About that veil that falls between a pregnant woman and the rest of the world, each side feeling pushed out by the other. And not till you're on the pregnant side do you totally understand it, and understand how little control you have over it. As if there's a genetic necessity for your world to be centred elsewhere.

Love. The big irony is that for many inhabitants, many of them social misfits (what else would you call these artists, these free spirits?) all their lives till now, the Unit provides a sense of belonging, and strange and beautiful friendships are forged. Dorrit had never found love on the outside — not the kind that this society values anyway. Her love for her dog, or for her sister, are deemed less worthy.

Art. It's no accident that the Unit is home to a high proportion of artists, writers. Clearly, they are not useful to society in any meaningful way. Also, they can, and are encouraged to, continue to practice their art on the inside; in this way it is regarded as something of a hobby, to do in your spare time, but it's hinted that the state is also able to profit from it. There are also librarians, gardeners, and intellectuals. "People who read books tend to be dispensable. Extremely."

I was watching her as she talked, her green eyes exuding a sense of calm and harmony. But at the outer corner of one eye a tiny nerve was vibrating, almost imperceptibly; it twitched and quivered beneath the skin. This quivering, together with just the tiniest hint of tension around her mouth, was the only thing that gave away the fact that this harmony was not complete, that there was something inside that was not calm, and I was seized by an almost irresistible urge to put my arms around her, to console and protect. To try to save her. But just as during our nighttime stroll in Monet's garden a week ago, I was afraid I would ruin the atmosphere if I gave in to my emotions and impulses.

Some readers found the prose dull, but I found it easy. The dry, matter-of-fact tone is in keeping with Dorrit's attitude; the whole story is imbued with her ennui, and I found it highly effective.

Other blog reviews
Petrona
Reading Matters
Shelf Love

Its own satisfaction

Around four, I offered to tour Cornelia through my record collection. Part of me didn't want to play her any music, instead I wanted her to see how merely possessing all those albums was its own satisfaction, to know that they were there. The collector's joy. There'd been a time when I knew every recording of every piece, the sign of a specialist who understands very little. But now to gaze upon the sleeves, to not play them. To be in awe. I wanted her to use silence to appreciate that, in comparison, the experience of listening was a lot more personal and complicated: how it depended on the day's mood, the temperature of the air, what clothes you were wearing and how they felt, what you'd eaten for lunch, and then of course the equipment and the tones it produced and at what volume, and every associated emotion and memory brought by the listener. Never mind the music. The experience of music was so different for each individual, it wasn't even worth discussing. As soon as I pressed PLAY, we may as well have existed in separate dimensions.

You Lost Me There is the debut novel by Rosecrans Baldwin, cofounder of The Morning News.

It starts off light — with a light touch, light-hearted. And while it maintains a casual tone, you end up exploring some relatively meaningful emotional and philosophical questions.

The narrator is an Alzheimer's researcher, so he has a scientific idea of how memory works, but this gets put through the wringer as he works through his own memories on an emotional level, particularly as many of those memories are in stark contrast to those of his late wife, killed in a car crash, who left behind some index cards documenting a very different take on events they had shared.

I think about that kind of thing a lot, like how some very vivid memories of mine must figure as insignificant blips in the minds of some of the characters who've passed through my life. Or like how my mother has composite memories, of that one time, that as I understand as a patchwork of what I remember as a number of discrete events.

Not that my opinion much matters on these points, but the title and the cover do nothing for me. What made me take notice was the author's name (I love the Tournament of Books!), and then it was the plot summary that hooked me. But I would not have picked up this book on the basis of its packaging. Nothing about it holds any appeal for me — the colour, the font, the antlers. Halfway through the book I was still wondering what's with the antlers (actually, for the first half, I didn't even identify them as antlers, I was seeing more along the lines of tree-branch hands), and even while antlers do ultimately figure in the story, and even as part of a climactic scene, I don't think they play a vital enough role to be the visual motif to carry the book. But, hey, what do I know, I'm no book jacket designer. The title I simply don't connect with, even after having read the book; it's actually kind of clever, if I think about it, in an appropriately casual way, but I'm not sure I should have to think about it.

But, really, thank you very much, Penguin Canada, for sending me a review copy, because it turned out to be a very charming and thoughtful book, an enjoyable reading experience, and I doubt I would've got around to this book otherwise, and all in all I'm rather glad that I did.

There's something easy about this book — easygoing? Like when you dread going to a dinner party, but then you go and there's someone you never met before who just puts you totally at ease, you really hit it off, someone who is charming and interesting, and spirals a little bit out of control as the party goes deep into the night, but you've kind of bonded by this point and you're totally sympathetic, so you see each other through till morning, and you probably won't ever see each other again and that's OK, and you're really glad you went.

That's what this book felt like. Forgive my rambling, but it's a couple weeks now since I finished reading it, and my memory of it shaky as far as the objective facts of it go. But the feeling of it is still there.

I heartily recommend this book. (Certainly I liked it much better than that other book, by a big-name author, about a scientist, his identity issues and relationship foibles; and it's funnier by far.) You Lost Me There is perfect for a late summer's day while you sit in your garden chair and drink too much wine. Just enjoy it.

From there to here

I'm having a hard time carving out some time to write in any reflective kind of way. I've been back from away for days, but tired, stressed, and busy.

In particular there are two books I finished reading before leaving and want to write about. You Lost Me There, by Rosecrans Baldwin, which was wonderful in ways I didn't expect it to be, and Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, which is mindfuckingly amazing. (Stay tuned for more!)

And I finished reading The Passage (all 800+ pages!). The pacing is good, and the characters are (mostly) believable, and ohmygod postapocalyptic biofreak vampires! so it's a good summer read, or long train ride read, or stormy night read, or snowbound winter cabin read (I'm guessing). I'll definitely be reading whatever books follow this one in the series, and I'll probably even see the movie.

I saw some clip of an interview with author Justin Cronin in which he discusses the book's genesis and the tradition he sees it following, being somewhat epic adventure, like, for example, Jules Verne (or am I confusing this with the China Miéville interview I saw? or was that element common to both?), but it's got me wondering, what kind of book is this really?, it's not exactly literary, but it's a far cry "better" than many a blockbuster à la Dan Brown (but how? by what objective criteria?), and I'd like to think this book will be read and enjoyed 100 years from now, maybe not as the cream of the literary crop, and not as some obscure gem, but as something people, real people, read and enjoyed, and it's pretty good dammit, and I wonder is this, say, Dumas-calibre? I mean: an adventure story! with heroes and villains and moral ambivalence and romance!

The vampires, I'll point out, are wholly original vampires, and I shouldn't even call them that — they're referred to as "virals." They are the result of biogenetic manipulation gone wrong, and have no relation to Vlad the Impaler and myths of that ilk, barring a few superficial similarities (but virals love garlic — you can set traps with it). I think Cronin owes a lot to Anne Rice (will people read Anne Rice 100 years from now?), actually, in terms of the vampire/viral sense of "family" and their manner of connection/communication.

(Note to self, apropos of nothing: Read Stephen King's The Stand someday before I die. No, I haven't read any Stephen King.)

There was only one expedition to a bookstore while we were away (I shouldn't call it that. Really, it was an expedition to get mommy an espresso-based beverage, the site of which caffeine-proffering establishment is on the premises of a bookstore, so I had to take a gander...), and I picked up only something for the kid, In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories, by Alvin Schwartz, which was a big hit, in particular the story of "The Green Ribbon." Helena's reading skills are better in French than in English, so it's a coup for me, a huge relief, to find something that both involves and challenges her in a language I can more easily relate to her in.

My sister was lovely enough to bring me The Dud Avocado, by Elaine Dundy, which I've been wanting for ages, but then my daughter was careless enough (but no, it's not her fault, it's an accident of circumstance) to set a sopping wet paper towel beside it on the table on which it was resting, so the back third of it now is pretty severely warped, and this made me sad and angry, but I'm past it, it's still the same book I want to read, with all the same words, all still legible, a beautiful book, it's what's on the inside that counts.

The week (that is, the week since I've been home already) being what it was, I thought I deserved to treat myself to a book, and I specifically had in mind Beside the Sea, by Véronique Olmi, the reviews of which are overwhelmingly good (see for example, 1, 2, 3), but a little internet legwork showed I wouldn't find a copy within a reasonable radius of here, and not wanting to wait for one to be delivered, I decided, I'm smart enough to handle this in its original language (hah!), so today I got off the metro a station early to check out the French bookstore, and now I have for my very own a slim volume containing 2 novellas: Bord de mer / Numéro six. I've read a couple pages, I get the gist, but I know I'm missing out on nuances. We'll see how it goes...

Some kind of regard

When Catherine flew into London on the day the Settlement came through, I arrived at the airport just after her flight was due in. I saw from the Arrivals screens that it had landed and I hurried over to the area where the sliding screen doors separate the customs and immigration area from the public terminal. I leant against a rail and watched passengers emerge from these doors. It was interesting. Some of the arriving passengers scanned the waiting faces for relatives, but most weren't being met. These ones came out carrying some kind of regard to show to the assembled crowd, some facial disposition they'd struck up just before the doors slid open for them. They might be trying to look hurried, as though they were urgently needed because they were very important and their businesses couldn't run without them. Or they might look carefree, innocent and happy, as though unaware that fifty or sixty pairs of eyes were focused on them, just on them, if only for two seconds. Which of course they weren't — unaware, I mean. How could you be? The strip between the railings and the doors was like a fashion catwalk, with models acting out different roles, different identities. I leant against the rail, watching this parade: one character after another, all so self-conscious, stylized, false. Other people really were like me; they just didn't know they were. And they didn't have eight and a half million pounds.

— from Remainder, by Tom McCarthy.

I'm about halfway through and loving it. To this point, I don't know what the "remainder" actually refers to (what's left of the eight and a half million pounds?), but I find myself relating to the narrator quite intensely (apart from him having eight and a half million pounds), this constant, all-pervading sense of inauthenticity, like when you see yourself going to work on the metro, all dressed up and determined and serious, pretending to be a grown-up professional, or when you're out for drinks and you say witty things and toss your head and laugh like it's all been scripted, but you can't step outside of that role, cuz there's nothing outside the script, the play's the thing, this is what it is to be a grown-up: pretending to be a grown-up.

Or maybe it's just me. (And the narrator.) Maybe the book's supposed to be about something else entirely.

What should I read next?

I'm taking a train trip (soon), and I want to stock up on some fresh reading material (that is, something other than the classics I've got on standby). It has to be available as an ebook. I'd like it to be relatively recent (written this century). It must be engrossing, and easy enough to follow that when Helena announces that she's bored I can break away from the book to set her on some new tack and come back to it and know exactly who's who and what's what.

Should I choose:

• The Passage, by Justin Cronin
• The Unit, by Ninni Holmqvist
• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell
• Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami
• The Imperfectionists, by Tom Rachman

Or something else entirely?

In the year 2071

In the year 2071, the library has a different feel from the library of today. Apart from a lively, and book-filled, children's section:

...the rest of the main floor was given to rows and rows of partitioned carrels, each with its own computer and headphones.

"We went to the information desk," Anna said. "I asked the librarian where the books were. 'Is there a particular book you want to see?' he said. I said, 'No. We just want to browse.' He said, 'I'm sorry, but the stacks are not open to the public. The catalog is on-line. If there's a book you want, just click on it, and a staff person will bring it to your carrel. It doesn't take long.' 'Is there no way to see the books?' I asked him. 'I'm here with my son. I want him to see what a library is like.' The old man smiled at us. 'This is a library,' he said. 'I mean a library with books,' I said.

That is, this is how the library of 2071 is imagined by Steven Polansky in The Bradbury Report.

The premise: United States, 2071. The government has had a wide-scale cloning program in effect for some 20-odd years, so that clones can supply organ material to originals. (The rest of the world does not condone these practices, but this is not explored beyond Canada eventually being a kind of safeplace with respect to our main characters.) One clone has escaped form the Clearances and a series of circumstances brings him face to face with his original. Together with Anna, an activist, an old friend of the original's, they spend a year on the run from their government.

And it's all a bit complicated by the fact that the original is not in the best of health.

So there are some pretty interesting moral, philosophical concepts flowing through this novel. I see it as a kind of flipside to what I imagine Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go is like (I haven't read it).

[A lesson in spoilers wrt employer relations: A year or two back, my then boss, knowing how bookish I was, was excited to share the fact that she was getting into reading. Boss: I just started Never Let Me Go; do you know it? Me: I haven't read it, but I've heard a lot about it. That's the one about clones, right? Boss: Oh.]

One complaint I have against this book is that it simply didn't feel future-y enough. Of course, you don't want the details of the setting in time to overshadow the point of the story. But this goes too far the other way. The only point of being set in the future is to allow for the plausibility of cloning. Everything else about this novel feels like an old man writing about and bemoaning 2010.

I had trouble buying into a number of innocuous details: In the year 2071, will anyone casually and inconspicuously wear a Montreal Expos cap? The narrator of the report was born the year the team moved. In the year 2071, hotel-room bedding is drenched in cigarette-smoke. In the year 2071, a high school math teacher rarely uses a computer. In the year 2071, street maps are common and inconspicuous. In the year 2071, TVs are commonly set on low tables. In the year 2071, another teacher has trouble coming to terms with a library, as described above, as if she hasn't been in one for 60 years. I can imagine good possible reasons for all these things, but they don't feel natural.

On the other hand, I quite like the depiction of the weekend Ray and Anna spend in Montreal. It read like a love letter to the city I call home.

On several occasions, the characters describe the clone as being like a child, only he's not a child. In fact, I smiled in recognition more than once at situations I've encountered as a parent, in particular the problem of expressing oneself clearly and with finality but without condescension. No one hates being condescended to more than children do, but adults tend to allow it in their case. The clone, oddly enough, wasn't, I believe, sufficiently socialized to recognize the tone. In that it's a book about what it means to be human, in some ways, I think, it would've served this purpose just as well to feature a child rather than a clone.

What it means to be human? It goes beyond science, of course. Ritual, manners, identity, ownership. A kind of meta-ness. Some cultural memory, cultural consciousness.

Not quite science-y enough to be science fiction, the pacing's off for it to be a thriller (though some other plot elements of the genre are present), and not quite satisfying enough (clever enough? passionate enough? pretty enough in its individual sentences?) for me to consider it "literary fiction." But interesting enough to those who like dystopic fiction and appreciate considering the moral quandaries that science — that progress — poses.

The nightmare that is life

Just wow! Nightmare Alley (1946, reissued in 2010 by NYRB Classics), by William L Gresham, is hands down the best book I've read in ages, a stay-up-way-past-your-bedtime page-turner kind of book. It had me crying out loud, "Oh, my gawd!" and "No!" and "What are you thinking?!"

Stanton Carlisle is a carny, with ambitions for a better, easier life. He learns a mind-reading system, and eventually sets up a séance scam. He goes from mentalist to spiritualist minister. He has the sometimes unwitting help of Molly, who doesn't approve of Stan's methods but can neither sway him nor break free of him. She wants out, but Stan revels in this life; it's the only way he can see through to the top. Stan's poising himself for the big one, the dream mark.

There are carnival freaks and gorgeous ladies and some real regular folk, unstable childhoods, unstable minds, crossings and double-crossings, sex and alcohol, mild misgivings and in-too-far-to-turn-back.

It's gritty noir, Jim-Thompson-style (how do I explain the feel?), inside the head of, the more it goes, an increasingly unsympathetic (mostly), really pretty deplorable person. He has it coming.

Nightmare Alley also happens to be a very finely crafted novel. Every chapter is named for a tarot card; taken in sum they map out a reading for Stan. It's clever, but not too clever. And the pacing is brilliant.

Gresham writes some marvellous sentences. When they head to the South: "This was dark and bloody land where hidden war traveled like a million earthworms under the sod." Or about the industrialist with the electricity plant: "The old man's power covered the country like a pair of bat-wings, flapping cold and black."

The mood is relentlessly bleak, and I just ate it all up. The novel seemed particularly fitting for the hot, humid nights we've experienced of late.

Reviews:
Paperclip People (mild spoilers).
Washington Post.

Nightmare Alley was produced as a film (Tyrone Power, 1947) (I'll be looking out for this), and was recently adapted as a musical.

I'm severely disappointed to learn this was Gresham's only novel. But really, a novel like this says everything it has to say. [Edited to add: See comments. He wrote one other novel after all.]

I haven't felt this way since I discovered Patrick Hamilton, and there are some similarities between the two writers: they're of the same generation (indeed, they died within about a week of each other); both had a tortuous relationship with alcohol, and with Marxism (which relationship I know not how tortuous); Hamilton had an affinity for the theatre, Gresham was fascinated by the stage that is the carnival.

And then there are the conmen. Stan Carlisle doesn't start out quite so low, so evil, as I remember Ernest Ralph Gorse to be. But they're both highly ambitious, hardworking in their way, and resourceful. They live by their wits. Everything depends on how well they read people.

So, both writers provide deeply psychological character studies, a close look at the underbelly of the mind. And this kind of character fascinates me. The practical matter of plotting out this kind of an existence and the moral matter of coming to terms with it; living it and living with it; the rationality and the rationalizing.

I'm the sort of person who tries, and I don't think I have to try very hard, to see the best in people. I take things at face value, unless given good reason to suspect it otherwise. I do not think the world is out to get me (though maybe it is, maybe I should). I share my life with someone who suspects the worst of everyone (and to be fair, in his line of work that's a reasonable and effective stance to take). He sees malevolent intent everywhere, and takes it personally. Maybe I'm not very good at reading people but I'm awed by how others do it (whether or not they do it well).

I was conned a few weeks ago, and I knew it even before I handed over my $10, but I handed it over anyway. Why would I be perceived as a mark? (And why did I give her the money?)

[Woman, about 50, reasonably well-dressed, outside the mall entrance to the metro approaches me (and Helena) frantically with, "Do you speak English?" and a story. Her luggage (with purse) was stolen at the train station, she's missed her train now (going back home to Toronto), she's short $8.43 to be able to change her ticket, she came to the mall hoping to catch her friend who works there. She'll send me a cheque, she owns a restaurant. Maybe it's true. If I were conning somebody, I'd try harder for it to make more sense. I gave her $10, which only minutes before I didn't know I had (I found it in a forgotten pocket). Helena and I had an interesting chat about whether we believed her and, regardless whether it was the truth, was it the right thing to give her money. I'm still grappling with why I found it easier to surrender cash to her than I do to most panhandlers.]

According to Stan, fear is the key, the great motivator. So what is the fear that marked me? Fear that I might be seen by my daughter to be cold and unfeeling toward someone's plight? Fear that that plight might actually be true?

Umm, where was I going with this story?

The conman, the con, the con mind — riveting stuff. Nightmare Alley — a bang-up, crackerjack, first rate piece of book.

At loose ends

I was certain, some mornings, that I heard her watching TV, feeding the cat, but I caught myself. The girl stayed with her grandmother for a couple weeks, and I missed her like crazy. Somehow, a week away from her in midwinter in Cuba was easy; but a summer weekend in a cabin on a lake without her was empty.

She knows we went to Jazz Festival without her. "But we always go to Jazz Festival! Together!" By "always," I guess she means, like, twice. Last year I dragged her out with me in the drizzle, and we stayed for less than an hour, but evidently she had a memorably spectacular time.

I've been luxuriating in sleeping and drinking and smoking and reading, and being generally unproductive. There are closets to clean. Bookshelves to organize. I wanted to take inventory of all that remains unread around here. Perhaps that's a job better done slowly, after all. Maybe by the time Helena goes back to school I'll have my own reading plan sorted out.

While she was away, Helena turned into a reader. All it took, it seems, was a stash of Tintin books. I'm determined to find out for myself once and for all what the appeal is. And maybe it'll help me bring my French vocabulary up to Helena's speed.

She's also taken to journalling, on her teacher's suggestion. Someday it's just a sentence, but most days it's more than I bargained for.

The kid's been back a couple days. Life is almost normal again.

I've been trying, without success, to write about Nightmare Alley (William L Gresham). I don't know what more I can say than that it's absolutely the best book I've read in ages.

Sexy reading

I picked up Granta's sex issue a while ago as it seemed to feature even more than the usual lot of great and interesting-to-me writers. And, yeah, I guess I was feeling kinda sexy that day.

The Roberto Bolaño story, "The Redhead," is taken from Antwerp, so if you have a copy of that book, you don't need to search out this anthology for completeness. Barely 2 pages.

On the basis of the excerpt presented here, I've determined that, much as I loved The Keep, I have absolutely no interest in reading Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad. Zilch.

Similarly, there are a number of other authors I will not be seeking out.

After reading Tom McCarthy's story I've pushed his Remainder a little higher in the list of books I mean to get to real soon. I'm definitely interested in reading more of Natsuo Kirino, and possibly Victor LaValle.

Sex is, I think, hard to write about, and probably best tackled obliquely.

(William H Gass tackle the subject in On Being Blue, which was reviewed thus: "It's about sex and about language and about the language of sex, and how we're failed by language in writing about sex, and how we fail sex with language.")

It's a huge subject matter, of course — the coming of age stories, the sexual identity stories, the longing for it, the absurdity of it, or the futility of it, or the disappointment of it, or the necessity of it. So very rarely the sexiness of it. And most stories about sex, in any of its complicated manifestations, I don't really care for, I've finally decided. (Except Houellebecq — Houellebecq fascinates me.) Most reading is about getting inside other people's lives, other people's heads, but when it comes to sex...? Maybe because it's so intensely personal, maybe it's the one thing where you have to get inside your (my?) own head first. (And maybe I see Houellebecq trying to do this? Grapple with it inside his own head, I mean.)

Only one entry to my mind qualifies as erotic, and it was a pleasure to read, and that's Emmanuel Carrère's "This Is for You." It was first published in a literary supplement to Le Monde in 2002 (available online, in French), as an open letter to his girlfriend. Ah, the French! You'd never find a North American newspaper printing any such smutthing.

You can read more about this piece in terms of its tackling a taboo as well the performative function of language (about Carrère's comparing the power of a statement like, "You are getting wet," to the effect of, "I declare war." (I almost wish I was doing a Linguistics PhD thesis on sex talk)).

The ugliness of sleep

Why do I have to frig around with all this chickenshit stuff? I didn't want their dimes. I wanted to see if I could take them. Jesus, the only thing you can depend on is your brains!

In the coach, under the dimmed lights, the crowd of carnival performers and concessioners sprawled, huddled, heads on each others' shoulders; some had stretched themselves on newspapers in the aisles. In the corner of a seat Molly slept, her lips slightly parted, her head against the glass of the black window.

How helpless they all looked in the ugliness of sleep. A third of life spent unconscious and corpselike. And some, the great majority, stumbled through their waking hours scarcely more awake, helpless in the face of destiny. They stumbled down a dark alley toward their deaths. They sent exploring feelers into the light and met fire and writhed back again into the darkness of their blind groping.

— from Nightmare Alley, by William L Gresham.

I didn't mean to be reading this book now, yet, but in sorting through my stack I happened to open this one, and I saw "the stubble on the deputy marshal's chin was white — like a white fungus on a dead man," at which point I had to start at the beginning, and I couldn't put it down.

Inky and tentacled

Take a Frankenstein-type story against a backdrop combining Margaret Atwood's Year of the Flood and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials and do it up Doctor Who style, but more menacing, and you'll get something like China Miéville's new novel, Kraken.

While not my favourite of China Miéville's novels (though I'm not sure which of a couple others I'd name for this distinction), Kraken is certainly the most rollicking fun!

The plot starts simply enough: Who stole the giant squid from the British Museum? We follow Billy, the curator who preserved this particular specimen, into the mystery. Before you know it you're immersed in a London teeming with end-of-times religious cults, among whom some revere this squid as representative of their Kraken god, and criminal gangs. The city is regarded as a living entity unto itself, and magic is commonplace (though it was never clear to me whether average citizens understood these workings and ignored or dismissed them or maybe were magicked into being oblivious about the situation; as a "secret" knowledge it belongs to a vast underground society that operated just slightly out of step alongside a seemingly perfectly ordinary city). The allegedly neutral Londonmancers are taking sides, the familiars are on strike, and the memory angels are taking action. There's a lot to keep track of and I occasionally faltered, but at its heart this book is a whodunnit and you keep reading to find out.

We meet some deliciously creepy baddies — part Dickens, part noir — along the way:

They were in a beat-up car. The man Goss drove. In the back, the boy, Subby, held Billy's arm.

Subby had no weapon and did not grip hard, but Billy did not move. He was frozen by the man and boy having unfolded in his room — the intrusion, the drugged dragging of the world. Billy's thoughts stuttered in loops. He felt dragged across time. A smear of pigeons was behind the car, pigeons that seemed to have been following him for days. What the hell what the hell, he thought, and Leon.

The car smelt of food and dust and sometimes of smoke, Goss had a face wrong for the time. He looked stolen from some fifties. There was a postwar cruelty to him.

I envy the person a hundred years from now who ventures to annotate this novel. Miéville's descriptions are grounded in now, some cultural references more popular than others: Harry Potter, Star Trek, Life on Mars. One cop has Winehousey hair.

We're steeped in a world where nerds drive science and engineering (and this is seriously relevant to a few plot points). Miéville imagines that, for example, in his London, Doctor Who fans fashion untraditional magic wands and call them sonic screwdrivers.

Apparently, Billy thought, he lived now in a trite landscape. Deep enough below the everyday, Billy realised with something between awe and distaste, a thing has power, moronically enough, because it's a bit like something else. (p 260)

These revelations into a paradigm of recusant science, so the goddamn universe itself was up for grabs, were part of the most awesome shift in vision Billy had ever had. But the awe had been greatest when he had not understood at all. The more they were clarified, the more the kitsch of the norms disappointed him. (p 263)

So Miéville managed to extricate himself from my accusation of kitsch just before I named it. It was all starting to seem disappointingly silly and over-the-top, but he acknowledged it, explained it, and argued successfully for the relevance of his approach. I let myself enjoy the rest of the rollercoaster ride.

More than once I was reminded of Doctor Who (wouldn't you love for Miéville to contribute to that show!). This book shares with the most recent series story arc, to some degree, the concepts of erasing time and rebooting the universe. But some episodes from series past are also called to mind, in particular The Shakespeare Code. The power of the written word, the old magic of naming things. You will find some profound ideas beneath the surface, if you care to look.

Above all, I love how Miéville uses language. He excavates old words and reinvents them as required. He verbs nouns and adjectivizes verbs. He just writes so bloody evocatively well.

There is no knowing beyond that membrane, the meniscus of death. What can be seen from here is distorted, refracted. All we can know are those unstrustworthy glimpses — that and rumour. The prattle. The dead gossip: it is the reverberation of that gossip against the surface tension of death that the better mediums hear. It is like listening to whispered secrets through a toilet door. It is a crude and muffled susurrus.

Brave new jazz

Last night, we took in a show at the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal: John Zorn with Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed. Arguably, Lou Reed is the most recognized name in this trio, but it's actually the other two whose music I'm more familiar with.

Laurie Anderson holds a special place in my musical development. It was a thrill for my teenage-self to realize playing violin (which I did) didn't restrict you to Vivaldi. I saw her in concert back around 1989, and that was a "performance."

As for John Zorn, saxophone god, I stumbled upon the first of his Masada albums in 1994 (it was playing in the record store; I asked what it was, bought it on the spot), and I continue to regard it as my desert-island pick. We saw his Acoustic Masada at the festival a few years ago, and it was one of the most spectacular concerts, of any musical genre, I've ever seen, in terms of intensity and vitality.

Lou Reed? I don't know much about Lou Reed. Walk on the Wild Side. Sweet Jane. That thing in the Wim Wenders movie.

What to expect from this show? I didn't expect Zorn to be playing Velvet Underground tunes, Anderson to interpret Masada, or Reed to be singing Home of the Brave. (I admit I was a bit nervous, actually, having heard about Anderson and Reed's recent gig in Australia that was audible only to dogs.) I jokingly tweeted that this combination was something akin to, in lit terms, interleaving the pages of Julio Cortázar, William S Burroughs, and Nelson Algren. I think I'm not far off. It's a brave new animal I heard, growling its way into existence. (I learned after the fact that it was all improv.)

Preshow press conference with Anderson and Reed: This is really interesting, actually — I just listened to it — wrt Anderson's relationship to technology and approach to art in general. She talks about what you hear, as a violinist, happening right next to your ear, the grinding, the overtones and harmonics, how the synths are a way to bring that to the whole audience, to lay bare the machinery of the music. (But, no, Lou, there was no rock and roll.)

Reed contributed, I think, very little to the show, and compared with the others on stage, he seemed not invested in the music, not fully present. (He's also old, and not very mobile.)

Musically, Reed laid down a floor of sound, a kind of throbbing static, a loud white noise, over which Anderson and Zorn stomped and frolicked. Four guitars were onstage — he switched between a couple of them and put a few notes on sustain, but there was very little discernible guitar playing. For one piece his attention was entirely on the reddish panel in front of him — some kind of equalizer? synthesizer? sound board? but I couldn't see any knobs, keys, levers. It looked like he was operating it like a touch pad.

Two pieces in came the booing, "Play some music!"; Zorn suggested to those audience members who don't like to "get the fuck outta here." Allegedly, many people did.

[I couldn't help thinking that this was the perfect soundtrack to my current read (China Miéville's Kraken) — the squelch and roar of the end of the world through which strains this near-angelic tinkling, like delicate glass.]

It felt like being at the centre of a wet sponge — there's a heaviness, but with all these porous spaces teasing you through a labyrinth toward light and air.

Anderson and Zorn traded off between (some semblance of) rhythm and melody. Cacaphony at times, but ordered — Anderson kept time with her feet, Zorn slapped is sax.

I couldn't tell you what kind of violin Anderson was playing, how it differs from the traditional instrument (apart from being electric). What struck me, though, is that despite her musical evolution and reputation for avant-gardism, her playing was decidedly more traditional than ever; that is, although there were instances of her sliding her hand over the fingerboard from the left, and that sound when you play on the wrong side of the bridge, the execution of this improv was fully grounded in basic, traditional bowing and fingering techniques. And this to me was a nice surprise — to hear the strains of something almost Vivaldi-like issuing up through something completely modern. This music isn't just new, it comes out of what came before.

Zorn is delightful. He plays (and I credit this description to J-F) like a kid who just got a new toy, determined to squeeze every ounce of life out of it, run it through its paces, try to break it. The man's a genius.

The main criticism levelled in the review in the local newspaper (in which they get the photo caption wrong) is that the show was short, barely over an hour.

I choose to believe this was not in response to the hostile reception. What Zorn does is extremely physically demanding. (Can anyone play saxophone for more than an hour? Can anyone play saxophone the way John Zorn does for more than an hour?) The Masada show of a few years ago was of similar length. Simply, the show had reached its (physical, but no doubt also emotional) limit.

I don't feel equipped to describe music, let alone jazz. I don't know jazz beyond knowing what I like. This was undeniably experimental. Was it music? I think so. Was it art? Definitely. Not for everyone, but I'd do it again.

Peace without quiet

Four-day weekend. Destination: fishing lodge, about 26 km north of the epicentre of the earthquake that rocked our world the day before.

"I'm bringing a novel about a giant squid, one about human clones, and one about a circus geek. Do you think that says something about the kind of person I am?"

"I dunno, but it says something about the kind of fisherman you are."

I caught countless bass (fiesty little fuckers), 2 pike, 3 whitefish, a couple clams (freshwater mussels, I guess — boy, they clamp down hard), and a sunburn.

Peaceful, but not quiet. Blue herons, ducks, loons, turtles (OK, the turtles were quiet). A rock in the lake they call Gull Island, for the hundreds of gulls that perch there, squawking incessantly.

Not seen, but heard: woodpeckers, and ouaouaron frogs (so I'm told), which sound like they're shooting elastic bands or sometimes just twanging them.

A couple deer with a young one lapping at the shore.

A family of beavers, Junior clinging to mommy's back. For some mysterious reason the parents deposited him at water's edge in front of our cottage and swam away. Curiosity got the better of us, and we crept up to sneak a peak at Junior. He splash-swam out of there, but mommy brought him back a short while later, and we left it alone.

I read about half a book this weekend, and I had a wonderful time.