Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
Joey Comeau’s first novel was Overqualified, which I looked at here. He’s come out with two novels since then, & I picked up both from the ECW Press booth at Word On The Street last September. The first is One Bloody Thing After Another. It’s suburban horror (what other kind of horror is there?).
The 8th installment of my January Book Project is Tel-Talk, edited by Paola Poletto, Liis Toliao & Yvonne Koscielak – published by Tightrope Books. It both documents and responds to interventions/installations staged last year around telephone booths mostly in downtown Toronto, mostly near where I live, which makes it personally a fun book to read.
The 7th installment of my January Book Project is Geoff Dyer’s 2009 novel, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. See my earlier review of his 2011 non-fiction collection, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. Maybe I should have read these in the order of their publication. And yet it seems fortuitous to have done things in reverse because Otherwise etc. alerted me to many of Dyer’s concerns/interests/passions and I came to his novel ready to watch how they played out in a fictional space.
It is tempting to read Searching for Gilead as a fictionalized elaboration and expansion of August Farewell. Like Hallman, the narrator, Tom Fischer, is an environmental advocate, and the fact that the story is told in the first person creates the illusion that the author and narrator are the same person.
I can’t remember how I got here, but it feels like I’m in a TV series. Maybe you know the one. A plane crashes near an uncharted island in the middle of an unspecified ocean. The survivors confront various challenges, including their own sordid pasts.
The 6th installment of my January Book Project is something I picked up from the author himself at last September’s Word On The Street. It’s Buying Cigarettes for the Dog, by Stuart Ross and published by Freehand Books. Hmmmm – how to describe this collection of short stories… It’s like an ADHD version of Etgar Keret, only he forgot to take his Ritalin and swallowed a bunch of amphetamines instead.
Pages 40 and 41 gaze at one another with a canny prescience. On page 40, we have the image of the Twin Towers. On page 41, we have a discussion of terrorism and danger on planes. Mao II was published in 1991, a full decade before 9/11. And yet there it is.
As I was stocking canned goods, Lenora brushed past me and whispered under her breath: Wonder where they got the new girl from. She nodded to the end of the aisle where I saw half a checkout counter and a pair of forearms drawing packages of pasta under the scanner.
The main character of Point Omega is Richard Elster, a defense intellectual, an academic recruited by the DOD to “freshen the dialogue, broaden the viewpoint.” Like my great uncle Perly, Elster approaches problems conceptually. He abstracts himself from the gritty reality his work supports.
My third installment in the January Book Project is the first novel in Hugh Hood’s New Age cycle of twelve novels set in Toronto. Published in 1975, The Swing in the Garden has the feel of a memoir, evoking Toronto in the years of the great Depression, with a clear sense of local geography and civic politics.
On July 31st, 1703, Daniel Foe (who came to call himself Daniel DeFoe) was arrested for seditious libel and sentenced to stand in the pillory for three days. Queen Anne had just ascended to the throne as Queen of England and was intent upon rooting out Nonconformists e.g. Roman Catholics (among the most despised in England), and people like DeFoe, the son of Presbyterian Dissenters, who, although Protestant, nevertheless refused to acknowledge the primacy of the Church of England.
The first book of my January Book Project is Pathologies by Susan Olding. Pathologies looks something like a memoir, something like a collection of literary essays. As essays, they are connected and follow a roughly chronological sequence. Although each could stand on its own, taken together, they produce something like an autobiography.
The following story is absolutely true. I heard it from the friend of a friend who copied it from a napkin in a coffee shop. I have reproduced it here verbatim except where I copied it word-for-word:
There were two sisters who lived in Yarmouth. One was missing a finger and the other had a squeaky whisper of a voice. The story goes that when they were young girls, they had a conversation that went like this:
It took Adams by surprise to discover at the bottom of the stack a late application from a certain Maria Grüber who claimed to have done a five-year stint working for Mother Teresa at her orphanage in Calcutta.