Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
It’s 1985 and the Roman Catholic church still has a hold over daily life in small towns like New Ross in the southeast of Ireland. Bill Furlong, who has a modest business providing coal and other combustibles for heat, finds himself in demand as Christmas approaches and the weather turns cold. Against all expectation, Bill…
Something To Do With Paying Attention is the title editors gave to this novella after they pulled it from the wreckage of David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published (but unfinished) novel, The Pale King. It stands alone and apparently even David Foster Wallace considered that it might do well on its own. The narrator is a self-described nihilist…
It’s almost a given in any discussion of Middlemarch that it begins by citing Virginia Woolf’s opinion that it’s one of the few books written for grown-up people. Here I am, fully grown-up, the same age as Virginia Woolf when she stuffed her pockets with rocks and stepped into the River Ouse, only now getting around to…
I’m not sure how to react to this novel. Part of me balks at the saccharine sentimentality that drips from some of the passages. At the same time, part of me stands in utter awe of Mary Shelley. She was, perhaps, the first person to offer up a full articulation of the idea that human…
Etiology This book entered my life when I was at the gym riding a stationary bicycle (technically a unicycle), pretending I was being pursued by a horde of hungry zombies, and listening to a CBC Ideas podcast in which Nahlah Ayed interviews Andrew Potter for an update on his book, On Decline. In the interview, Potter…
I bought Premee Mohamed’s second novel at the ECW Press booth at Word On The Street. A girl was holding a copy of Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow and I told her that I’d enjoyed it. The ECW girl standing on the other side of the table said: well, if you like that,…
Caught is a bit of a departure for Lisa Moore insofar as it is more plot driven, less concerned with the investigation of interior experience. One might go so far as to say it is more commercial, and this is confirmed by the fact that the cover of my edition declares that Caught is now…
The Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a storm in February of 1982 and all 84 members of the crew went down with it. Under the subheading “Aftermath” in the Wikipedia entry for the Ocean Ranger, Lisa Moore’s novel, February, gets a mention. I misread the note about Lisa Moore’s novel and took…
I noted that last month House of Anansi published Lisa Moore’s fourth novel (fifth if you include her young adult novel, Flannery). It’s titled This Is How We Love and I have every intention of reading it. However, I am embarrassed to report that I said the same thing in 2005 when I bought her…
I showed up late to the Zadie Smith party. I don’t know why that is. Given my reading habit and the way I indulge my bookish pursuits, you’d think I’d notice when an amazing new voice appears on the horizon (I authorize you to sort out that mixed metaphor any way you please). Maybe it…
I’m not one to jump on bandwagons but, in the case of Ali Smith, I’m willing to make an exception and declare myself a fan. In the past few years she has produced some extraordinary work and Companion Piece offers us one more in a growing succession of extraordinary works. Ali Smith distinguishes herself in…
Historically, Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella has been read either as a quasi confessional reflection on male (homo)sexuality, or as a reflection on beauty and the author’s responsibilities. Gustav von Aschenbach, an established writer of some renown, widowed with an adult daughter, decides that he would benefit from an extended holiday. After a false start, he…
Dream Sequence is ostensibly a straight-forward story of a lonely woman, recently divorced, who stalks a B-list movie star whose career is on the ascendancy. When she contrives to meet this man of her dreams, her fantasy world undergoes an abrupt collision with reality. The collision produces no insight, not at least for the characters….
I offer the following remarks about Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day in close proximity to my earlier remarks about Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier because the two novels feel like companion pieces. They deserve to be read together. The butler of a once-great English house takes the idea of English reserve almost…
I’ve intended to read The Good Soldier for some time because it ends up on all those top 100 lists. I’ve always been skeptical of those lists as they tend to come from anglo portals like The Guardian and their mere existence raises questions about process. I imagine a coterie of silver-haired pipe-smoking waning white…