Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
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…
While reading poetry this afternoon, something about its associative nature caused me to wonder: whatever happened to Jeffrey Lidgate. Jeffrey was a childhood friend from elementary school. Lawren Harris P.S. We used to go after school to play at one another’s homes. The Lidgates lived in a small, box-like bungalow on the southwest corner of Elm…
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…
Yesterday, I learned that Dr. Sultan Al Jabar has been appointed president for COP28, the 2023 iteration of the misnamed conference on climate change. Al Jabar is the UAE minister for industry and advanced technology but, more pointedly, also serves as chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), the world’s 12th largest…
While I was yet a teenager, the Nazis conscripted me to cook for their officers. As sous chef, I had to serve them breakfast. However, I had always been a subversive lad and so I hatched a plot. I would serve the officers omelettes made from rotten eggs and slowly this is how I would…
Although the passage from one year to the next is an arbitrary line in the sand (or snow, since this is winter in Canada), it does provide us with a pivotal moment when we can reflect on what has gone before and look forward to what is yet to come. The obvious topics—pandemic, Ukraine—have already…
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…
Late last evening (Nov 7th), judges announced this year’s winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize for Fiction. Before sharing the announcement, a couple housekeeping matters: First, I would recommend all the books on the short list. They are very different, one from another, and each has something unique to commend it. From Noor Naga’s playful,…
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…
In 1959, Tibetans staged an uprising against the occupying forces of the Communist Chinese Party. In the words of just about any Star Wars movie, the imperial forces crushed the rebellion. With help from the CIA, the Dalai Lama fled the country and has lived in exile ever since. Among other things, the Chinese army…
Among other things, I am an avid amateur photographer and follow a number of photography educators on social media. Periodically, they solicit their followers for suggestions to expand their course reading lists. They want to move beyond the usual suspects. By “usual suspects” I mean writers like Susan Sontag (On Photography), Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida), and…
The year is 1929 and Baxter is a young Black man working as a porter on Canada’s rail lines. Although, for many men in Baxter’s position, work as a porter is the best they can expect from life, Baxter aspires to more. For him, work as a porter is a means to an end; he…
Noor Naga, best known for her poetry, has written a novel that is a 2022 finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. I think it is relevant that she is a poet, as her poetics leak into her prose, giving it a compression and density that is sometimes dizzying. By that, I mean that her relatively…
My chief complaint about much of the (Canadian) poetry published in the last couple of years is that it assumes I’m a qualified psychotherapist. I’ve grown wistful for the days when the cliché du jour had poets smoking joints in garrets, starving but fashionably appointed in their berets. Today, poets sit in clinical offices, leafing…