Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
Birth and revelation, death and ultimate destruction. These have been bred into the DNA of Matt Bell’s slender collection, Cataclysm Baby, twenty-six delicious tales (one for each letter of the alphabet) about fathers and the more-often-than-not grotesque children they bring into a dying world.
I want to talk to you about horses. Or at least the idea of horses. I want to talk to you about Plato’s idea of horses – the horseness of horses. The idea that all real horses – the ones that drop steaming platts in fields and swish flies with their tails – are instances of an abstraction. We recognize a particular horse in the real world because it corresponds to a form we carry around in our heads.
Futurist is not the first word that comes to mind when describing Julian Barnes. However, after reading Staring at the Sun, published in 1987, one wonders if he might not have enjoyed a fertile alternate career as a science fiction writer.
I bookended 2011 with two large novels. In January, I read Witz, by Joshua Cohen, a sprawling brilliant novel which I would set on my shelf beside the likes of Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest. In December, I read 1Q84, by Haruki Murakami, also a sprawling novel which at least one critic has likened to War and Peace and Infinite Jest.
Death Wishing is the debut novel from Laura Ellen Scott whose chapbook, Curio, I featured here earlier this year. It’s hard to know how to classify Death Wishing. Magic realism, perhaps, although it behaves much like science fiction, with a single wild premise producing conflict that drives the action, and characters who reveal themselves as they confront the conflict.
I’ll soon be setting out on a road trip that takes me through the Prairies. I prepare for trips like this, not by planning where to stay or by careful packing that anticipates every possible weather situation, but by reading books from the places I expect to visit.
I don’t know what to make of the novel, Sub Rosa, by Amber Dawn. I suspect my difficulty with this novel has as much to do with my personal expectations as with the novel itself.
I first heard of E. M. Forster’s novel, Maurice, as an undergrad English student, not through one of my courses, but on a visit to my grandparents. At that time, my grandfather was a retired clergy and a staunch member of the Community of Concern, a group hellbent on keeping the dreaded homosexual out of United Church of Canada pulpits.
Zoe Whittall’s Holding Still For As Long As Possible is a novel about queer youth in Toronto. I’m not a queer youth in Toronto. I’m a straight middle-aged guy in Toronto. (I leave for another time the debate about whether straight people can identify as queer.) So I don’t feel acutely qualified to pronounce upon…
Periodically, I like to feature local books which, in the case of nouspique, means books with a connection to Toronto and environs. I do this, not to tout the virtues of my hometown, but to help cultivate the local in a global medium. I feel bound by an unwritten contract: I blog Toronto books in exchange for the pleasure of reading about other people in their locales.
Imagine all this and what you have is the late Paul Quarrington’s wild Flying W of a novel, Civilization and Its Part in My Downfall, whose most notable feature (apart from its good-natured fun-poking tall-tale yarn-spinning, is its sheer delight in language.
According to the Walkerton Herald-Times, the parent of a grade 12 student has filed a complaint with the Bluewater District School Board calling for removal of Timothy Findley’s novel, The Wars, from the curriculum. According to the article, Carolyn Waddell, a professional counselor, alleges that there are parts of Findley’s novel which are “depraved”. She…
Did Doris Lessing influence David Foster Wallace? The question occurred to me as I read Lessing’s Shikasta, the first in her five-volume Canopus in Argos series of “space fiction” novels.
According to the BBC news online, we now live in the Anthropocene period, which is a fancy way of saying humans have so altered the planet’s surface that we’ve left traces of ourselves in its permanent geological record.
If David Bezmozgis’s novel, The Free World, were a drink, it would be a scotch, not peaty or smoky, but smooth and well-aged. It would have none of the surprising roughness of Laphroaig, tending more to the clean finish of Highland Park. As a drink, it would be safe, conventional, respectable.