Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
I don’t know why I’ve never bothered with Richards. I’ve heard of him. I’ve seen his books on the shelves of my local bookstores. Maybe I’ve overlooked him because the critics and reviewers have overlooked him, and so I’ve never felt any of the urgent hype to take up his books. I have no idea…
Caught is a bit of a departure for Lisa Moore insofar as it is more plot driven, less concerned with the investigation of interior experience. One might go so far as to say it is more commercial, and this is confirmed by the fact that the cover of my edition declares that Caught is now…
The Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a storm in February of 1982 and all 84 members of the crew went down with it. Under the subheading “Aftermath” in the Wikipedia entry for the Ocean Ranger, Lisa Moore’s novel, February, gets a mention. I misread the note about Lisa Moore’s novel and took…
I noted that last month House of Anansi published Lisa Moore’s fourth novel (fifth if you include her young adult novel, Flannery). It’s titled This Is How We Love and I have every intention of reading it. However, I am embarrassed to report that I said the same thing in 2005 when I bought her…
I have a special pile of books, purchased with the best of intentions, which nevertheless go unread. What lurks in the background is, perhaps, a species of gluttony. I want to read everything. I want to swallow it whole, digest it, ruminate until I pass it into my second stomach, break it down and draw…
When I cracked open the book and started in on George Melnyk’s forward, I was a bit startled to read his confession that “[t]his book contains poems of great sophistication and it also contains doggerel.”