Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
I’ve committed an act of theft and, if I’m lucky, I’ll get away with it. I’ve stolen some lives and a piece of property and I’ve hawked them for a novel. My novel is called The Land and I plan to release it on May 7th or thereabouts. Here’s what I did: I took four people (my sister-in-law, her husband, and their two boys), I ran off with their organic farm, and tossed them all into a bag along with a few unruly ideas to spice things up.
I’ve finished part III of Joshua Cohen’s Witz, no small feat given that I’m now more than 300 pages into an 800 page novel in which 1 page of Witz represents 2 pages of any other self-respecting novel. In other words, it’s a long book.
Here I am, doing my well-intentioned liberal-white-guy best to discover other voices, and (adhering to my resolution to read at least one African author each month) I start with Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.
Barney’s Version, this afternoon. Yesterday, I finished rereading Mordecai Richler’s novel. Now, I’m sitting here with a glass of 14 year old Oban single malt scotch whisky and am toying with the idea of lighting a Montecristo while I reflect on the differences between the film and the novel.
I was first attracted to Ten Storey Love Song because it began on the cover and continued to the end as a single 286 page paragraph – a quiet challenge to our assumption of what a book should look and read like.
There was a time when fiction writers from Toronto were self-conscious about setting their stories in Toronto. Our city was too provincial to be real. It was urban enough, but had no credibility. It was still too close to its parochial roots.
I locate my roots in the left — with my nice middle-class suburban liberal upbringing — but lately, I’ve felt disillusioned by the left’s effete response to power’s abuses which I find indistinguishable from complicity.
Flaubert’s Parrot is a literary romp by Julian Barnes that tracks the obsessive research of a widowed doctor named Geoffrey Braithwaite. Along the way, Dr. Braithwaite considers all kinds of arcane details about the famed French novelist: his sexual proclivities, plots for unwritten novels, and the use of animals in his writing.
The first time I read Sons and Lovers, I was the same age as Paul Morel, the main character of D. H. Lawrence’s classic novel. The chief difference between me and my fictional nemesis is that Paul Morel was carrying on with the married Clara Dawes and I was carrying on with … well … a reading list for an undergrad degree in English literature. He seemed to be having more fun than me.
The protagonist, Raskolnikov, is an impoverished ex-student living in St. Petersburg. His chief supporter is fellow student, Razumihin, who earns a few roubles here and there translating European works. It is Razumihin who dreams of setting up his own publishing business.
In yesterday’s post on Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, I asked a question which I never answered: “And can we make anything more of it [the Tropic of Cancer] 75 years after its publication?” That’s a question about Miller’s legacy.
The expat Yank living in Paris in the late 20’s and early 30’s. The oblique references to an American wife named Mona who has sent him off to Paris without a care for his sexual proclivities. The plotless meandering. The indiscriminate drinking and fucking. The largely useless attempts to write a novel.
Graham Swift’s The Light of Day opens with all the promise of a standard detective potboiler. We meet an ex-cop private investigator named George Webb and Rita, his trusted assistant.
Something unusual happened as I was reading Michael Helm’s new novel, Cities of Refuge. I stumbled upon a couple paragraphs which I realized alluded to real events. At least I thought they alluded to real events.
I’ve always assumed that Scots are just naturally hospitable. Then I read Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and stumbled on a passage (you won’t find this scene in the film) that causes me to wonder if maybe I haven’t met the right Scots yet.