Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
The category, Head, is for posts that make us think.
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…
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…
Earlier this month, CNN White House correspondent, John Harwood, called Donald Trump a “dishonest demagogue” while on the air. In short order, his employer showed him the door, citing a need for the press to maintain political neutrality in its reportage. A day later, the CBC reported that Adrian Monck, an official from the World Economic…
Delphi is a Covid novel. We’ve read earlier novels that use Covid as part of the contextualizing furniture. Ali Smith’s Summer and Companion Piece both allude to the pandemic, but neither is what I would describe as a Covid novel because neither treats Covid as central to the story. But with novels like Sarah Moss’s…
It’s 1985 and the Roman Catholic church still has a hold over daily life in small towns like New Ross in the southeast of Ireland. Bill Furlong, who has a modest business providing coal and other combustibles for heat, finds himself in demand as Christmas approaches and the weather turns cold. Against all expectation, Bill…
In 2015, Ali Smith compiled a collection of short stories as a response to the UK’s cost cutting measures that targeted its public library system. Interpolated between the stories, we find statements by ordinary members of the public reflecting on what libraries have done for them and how those libraries have enhanced their communities. Although,…
Where The Light Fell is a “Covid-aware” memoir, which is to say that even though the book narrates and reflects upon earlier times, it keeps one of its bookish eyes on the present moment and, while barely saying so, draws a line of continuity from past events to the present lunacy that grips America today….
Apropos of nothing Apropos of nothing, I note the following quote from p. 12 of DFW’s Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity: “One thing is certain, though. It is a total myth that man is by nature curious and truth-hungry and wants, above all things, to know.” (Italics in original.) In the accompanying…