Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
The Roman Catholic Church appears to be in crisis with the continued outing of homosexual pedophile priests and revelations of abuse. The sad thing about this is that the abuse is not the crisis. Given that abuse has been happening since the days of St. Peter, one can hardly call the status quo a crisis.
The Other Sister is a story of twins and, perhaps necessarily, a story of personal identity. It concerns Julia, a freshly admitted resident of Evenholme, a home for the aged. At 97, Julia is sound in her mind, but growing frail in her body. Her daughter, Rachel, has given her a laptop computer and so Julia reluctantly agrees to spend a little time each day typing her recollections on this new machine.
Do you remember Michael Apted’s documentary Seven Up! He follows fourteen kids from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds and poses (to the viewers) a simple question: is there truth in the Jesuit dictum “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.”
A place becomes real as it becomes storied. When I was in high school, my home town, Toronto, was about as real to me as Pluto. My English teachers nurtured a quiet bias for writing that came from any place but Toronto. Nothing good ever came from Toronto.
I am a literary snob. There! I’ve put it out where everyone can see it. I”m not just a little snobbish; I’m steeped in the culture of snobbery. I am a complete and utter snob. When Plato talks about “forms” in the Republic, he uses me as an example of Platonic Snobbery. There I am, holding my nose up in the air, looking down at pulp fiction with the same disdain I hold for dog turds.
I finally got around to reading Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer winning second novel, Gilead. I think she will forgive me for taking so long, since she herself has no particular regard for the passage of time. It has been more than twenty odd years since the publication of her first novel, Housekeeping. And the prose itself proceeds in a way that is more aligned with things timeless than with things urgent.
Two middle–aged sisters with families of their own are suddenly faced with the challenge of an aging father who is determined to marry a thirty–something woman from his native Ukraine.
This is the first novel of Laila Lalami and it created something of a splash when it was published two years ago. It is a little book, well–crafted and worth reading. Clearly Lalami has literary aspirations and clearly too she has the potential to write bigger pieces of fiction in the future. I hope the world can give her the space to do that.
F.X. Toole is best known as author of the short story which inspired the Oscar winning movie, Million Dollar Baby. He did not live to see the publication of his first novel, Pound For Pound, nor even to complete a polished draft. But given the subject matter – small-time boxers trying to make it to the pros – there would be something wrong with the novel if it didn’t read a little rough around the edges.
With her third novel, Mean Boy, Lynn Coady takes several risks which leave the reader wondering: is this just another solidly crafted book? or might it qualify as something more substantial?
Jerzy Kosinski’s novel, The Painted Bird, filled with vignettes of violence perpetrated against innocence, is more compelling than ever in an age when media presents us with confirmation that such things occur on a daily basis in our world. Whereas CNN’s truth is of one sort, Kosinki’s is of quite another.
Summer reading, nothing freshly published, just books that have sat unread on my shelves, books I’ve been meaning to read but have brushed aside in favour of more immediate demands.
A Le Carré spy novel is more than just another cheap paperback thriller. That is what we learn from the dust jacket of The Little Drummer Girl. According to the L.A. Times: “Le Carré’s ability to create character, dialogue and event approaches the amazing … THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL confirms without qualification his status as a writer of elegance and importance.”