Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
Recently, the CBC rebroadcast Eleanor Wachtel’s Writers & Company interview with Zadie Smith originally broadcast in 2010 to coincide with the release of her book of essays, Changing My Mind. In the interview, she discussed views she had aired in some of her pieces, views which, in my estimation, have come to roost in her…
Learned By Heart is a historical novel that imagines the early years of the inimitable Anne Lister when she was a student at the Manor School in York and embarked upon her first love affair. The object of her love was Eliza Raine, a biracial orphan born in Madras (now Chennai) to an Indian mother…
It’s 2006 and David Dvornik is an American investment banker who lost his shirt in the Enron scandal. Of eastern European descent and something of a Russophile, he travels to St. Petersburg to clear his head. With vague plans to write some articles, he hails a cab to Kresty prison where he hopes to do…
A cousin recently posted a rant on Facebook. He went on at length about being tired of other people feeling entitled to live off the backs of hard working people like him. While he avoided certain key words, it was clear where he positions himself on the political spectrum. He doesn’t like having to pay…
I have ambivalent feelings about this novel. On the one hand, when critics treat Emily St. John Mandel as a literary novelist, I think she’s out of her depth. When her novel, The Glass Hotel, was nominated for the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize, I observed that it was conspicuous amongst the nominees as the one…
Teaching A Stone To Talk (New York: HarperCollins, 1982) Why have I not read anything by Annie Dillard before? I wish I had encountered her writing earlier. It would have been a consolation when I needed it perhaps more than I do now. She reminds me of the New England transcendentalists, Thoreau and Emerson, and…
Left Is Not Woke, by the philosopher, Susan Neiman, and published in March of this year, is unusual in that it offers a critique of wokeness from the left. We are more accustomed to hear critiques from the right, although most of what we hear from the right doesn’t qualify as formal critique, more like…
I bought Grimmish at Word On The Street, recommended by one of the people manning the Coach House booth. Glad I followed the recommendation as the novel, by Michael Winkler, is well written, funny, with a self-deprecating humour that I found personally affecting. The premise is straight-forward. Set in the early years of the 20th…
I remember when Vincent Lam’s first novel, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, was published a few years back. At the time, Lam was practising emergency medicine and the book reflected experiences at medical school. It received a lot of press and won the Scotiabank Giller prize in 2006. I was otherwise occupied with foolish pursuits and…
Zadie Smith’s latest offering is a bit of a departure for a woman best known as a novelist. The Wife of Willesden is a dramatic adaptation/translation (from Chaucerian to North Weezian) of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Unlike Chaucer’s version, Smith’s includes an introduction where she provides an…
The blurbs tell me Falling Hour is a novel. That depends on what you mean by a novel. If by novel you mean an extended stretch of writing through which the consciousness communicating with the reader (for convenience, let’s call this consciousness the narrator) is a person who doesn’t share the author’s name, then I…
Victory City is a novel about writing or, perhaps more generally, about creativity. No doubt, my opening statement is sweeping or over-broad or simplistic, but that’s how we do things nowadays, isn’t it? In fact, given its richness, Victory City is probably a novel about a lot of other things, too, but for the time being let’s pretend…
In an accompanying note to Haven, Emma Donoghue acknowledges that while she conceived of the novel before the pandemic, she executed it in the thick of things. While not explicitly a Covid novel, it nevertheless takes on features of the experience in tangential ways. We learn, for example, that one of the characters, a monk named…
In this, Ian McEwan’s umpteenth novel, we trace the life of Roland Baines, exact contemporary of Ian McEwan himself. While not of a particularly scientific cast of mind, Baines has over the years read the occasional book by popularizers of quantum physics and cosmology and finds in the paradox of Schrödinger’s Cat a useful way…
Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is one of two story collections to be shortlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize for fiction. Hers is the sort of collection you’d expect to appear if you were to set a book of Etgar Keret stories on a shelf next to a book of…