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Book Review

Who Will Win the Giller Prize?

Who Will Win the Giller Prize?

Book Review

Having just purchased my ticket to the annual Giller Light Bash, my thoughts are turning to who will win the prestigious honour this year. I’ve only read two books from the six-book shortlist; I’m really excited about both these choices. They are both really strong books that highlight current issues dealt with by women: body image and rape.

13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl is a series of stories about the same woman over her lifetime as she struggles with her weight, but more importantly her self-confidence and ambition that becomes inexorably tied up in how much she weighs.

The Best Kind of People comes from a favourite Toronto author of mine, Zoe Whittall, who creates the story of a family dealing with the aftermath of a beloved father, husband and teacher who’s been charged with rape of three students. The novel presents a rounded view of the issue of rape, and how we as a society distort the issue, treat (or mis-treat) the victims and the accused in such cases. How much do we ever know another person vs project our own desires and motivations on that person?

I’m actually rooting really hard for either of these books to win, if only because they were hugely entertaining, thought-provoking books on my reading list for 2016.

[Read my review of The Best Kind of People | Read my review of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl]

 

Review: Watch How We Walk

Review: Watch How We Walk

Book Review

Watch How We WalkA simple and compelling story about a claustrophobic family relationship, told from the perspective of the youngest daughter, Emily. Her family are devout Jehovah’s Witnesses and the strictness of the church and her father makes tensions simmer deep and long.

I’m assuming that Jennifer LoveGrove depicts devout Jehovah’s Witnesses with some accuracy — for me it was fascinating to read about how Emily struggled to reconcile her deep belief that worldly people and things are evil with her real desires to make friends, to fit in at school, and to question her upbringing.

I won’t share the ending — one I didn’t predict! — but just to say the ending was a surprise to me and I liked the choice!

 
Review: Us Conductors by Sean Michaels

Review: Us Conductors by Sean Michaels

Book Review

Us Conductors garnered its author $100,000 when the debut novel won the 2014 Giller Prize. One of my personal goals is to read as many Giller-nominated books each year as I can manage. I’m not usually that successful in completing the goal, but I do manage to get through my share of some great Can-Lit selections. Sean Michaels’ novel definitely bumped closer on my radar when it won Canada’s richest literary prize but it was already in range when I heard the theremin’s inventor was the subject.

Us Conductors is a fictional re-telling of the life and work of Lev Termen, the inventor of the theremin musical instrument and many other modern technologies. The narrative focuses on his time in America promoting and securing patents for his theremin, as well as his time spent in Soviet prisons during WWII. The other main thread running through the novel, one that informs the narrative style, is Termen’s love for violinist and theremin player Clara Rockmore.

The fictional Termen narrates through letters and interior monologues addressed to his absent “love-of-his-life” Clara. This means that many passages fall into the second-person POV. Which is a very difficult way to write without drawing the reader’s attention away from the narrative. While I was reading I was torn in my assessment of the success of the writing style. Both the aforementioned second-person POV and the heavy, annoying use of comma splices drew me out of the narrative flow. However, at close of the final page, I will give to Sean Michaels that he created a successful and daring novel. One that uses a tricky writing style appropriately and effectively. Nothing is more annoying that a senselessly difficult writing style for no apparent reason.

You may get a sense of my reserve in heaping praise on the novel. While I’m willing to applaud Sean Michaels achievement and understand his prize win, I cannot wholeheartedly say I enjoyed the novel. For me, it comes down to the focus on the relationship between Clara and Lev–or should I say lack of relationship? OK, they met and had a fun time in the Roaring Twenties New York. OK, she was a teenager to his thirties. But I don’t buy the rest of Termen’s supposed mooning around for decades. The actions of the real Termen’s biography belie all this mooning about. It seems that Michaels is straining to fit this ill-fated love story into a mould that just doesn’t quite fit. I just was more excited about everything else in the story–the spying, the secret assignations, the inventions, the other theremin players, the Russian prisons–than I was about boring Clara.

OK, end rant.

Read this book for its intrigue and for the theremin. I’ll give this 3.5/5 stars.

 

Review: The Perfect Order of Things by David Gilmour

Review: The Perfect Order of Things by David Gilmour

Book Review

The Perfect Order of ThingsIn The Perfect Order of Things, David Gilmour writes a quasi-autobiographical novel, with a narrator we are encouraged to view as being the voice of David Gilmour. However, he very carefully fashions a novel that jumps and skips lightly over moments in a life. Moments that are personally painful. Links to the present day appear through an examination of place, and revisiting a place years later triggers memories of that past event which shaped the narrator’s life profoundly.

I enjoyed the conversational and anecdotal writing in this novel. Because of the personal first person narrative, we are limited to one perspective, and the other characters are presented very enigmatically. Underlying the novel’s main arc, I felt this was a central theme, that we cannot ever know other people in our lives, we can only interpret their actions and words. This can end in tragedy when the people in our lives are troubled, as we see with the narrator’s father and his best friend.

Gilmour is to be commended on writing another deeply personal novel, in the vein of his bestseller The Film Club, yet with more substantial examination of life and how it’s lived.

The cover: I’d like to point out the beautiful jacket design. The imagery is stunning — the library cataloguing drawers, with the water subtly spilling out. A-plus!

Book Review of The Blondes by Emily Schultz

Book Review of The Blondes by Emily Schultz

Book Review

Emily Schultz has done it again. She’s delivered a quirky novel that examines our society and values through whacked-out, supernatural situations. The Blondes takes you on a ride with Hazel Hayes, displaced Canadian living the hazy, wandering student life in New York. After a breakout of a new strain of rabies-like disease, affecting only blonde-headed (dyed or natural) upper-middle-class women, Hazel goes on a cross-nation journey with many bumps along the way.

The character of Hazel is both endearing and frustrating, as she makes cavalier decisions, often quite ill-thought, that can turn out well or not. She seems to go with the flow, never popping up as a unique person with strong convictions. Instead, she seems very adrift in life. The outbreak gives her stronger resolve, and it’s quite surreal reading a story in which the protagonist gains strength of character living through a “blonde fury” epidemic.

The story moves along smartly, and I was riveted to this book. I hope it gets nominated for an award this season!

— The Blondes by Emily Schultz (author website) is published by Doubleday Canada (book page) in 2012.

Review: The Beggar’s Garden (Stories) by Michael Christie

Review: The Beggar’s Garden (Stories) by Michael Christie

Book Review

The Beggar's GardenMichael Christie’s collection of stories is set in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a rough area of the city. Read together, the stories are linked thematically by the loneliness of the characters that offers a portrait of a community in which people are struggling against separate demons. Christie is hugely successful in creating compelling characters, whose voices speak from the margins, yet offer great insight into their world and human experience as a whole.

In “Discard”, a grandfather trying to reconnect with his street-living grandson gravitates towards homelessness. He finds truer happiness living on the streets following his grandson than his home ever gave him.

“The Extra” is told from the voice of a disabled man who relies solely on the guidance of his friend Rick. The narrator places utter confidence in Rick, despite obvious signs he’s being treated less than fairly by certain standards. However, we get the sense that the narrator’s life is happier with Rick, who does take care of him, as opposed to being cared for by the social assistance system.

There is a certain level of discomfort to these stories; they are about people with addictions, in mourning, in mental institutions, or with social integration problems. However, Christie creates beauty out of the ugly loneliness of the character’s lives, and that’s why these stories are worth reading.

The Beggar’s Garden was longlisted for the 2011 Giller Prize, along with another collection of stories from Vancouver-based author Zsuzsi Gartner. Her collection, Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, was often in my mind while reading The Beggar’s Garden. The former is more suburban, more satirical, while the latter has more heart, more dismal hope.

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