Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
The category, Head, is for posts that make us think.
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…
Like most people during the pandemic, I avoided doctors like the plague. In the first year, when I was already overdue my annual physical, my family doctor sent me a preemptive email saying she was only seeing patients by Zoom and, even then, only for important issues. Respiratory distress was an important issue; an annual…
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…
What would it take for AI to write a credible poem? I pose this question because, when I first heard about ChatGPT nearly a year ago, the first thing I asked it to do was compose a Shakespearean love sonnet to Donald Trump. The result was utter shite: O Donald, Donald, my love for thee,Is…
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…
Two weeks ago, the world learned that Puffin Books, publisher of the late Roald Dahl oeuvre (am I allowed to say oeuvre?), unleashed a pack of ravenous sensitivity dogs on the dead author’s sixteen volumes and the upshot of their efforts is a squeaky clean oeuvre with all the naughty words scrubbed so that even…
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…