If you’ve tried one of Keith Oatley’s earlier novels (The Case of Emily V. published in 1993, A Natural History, published in 1998), you might think that a novel from him on WWII might be a bit much; his earlier novels are somewhat demanding — great if [...]]]> Keith Oatley’s Therefore Choose
Gooselane Editions, 2010

If you’ve tried one of Keith Oatley’s earlier novels (The Case of Emily V. published in 1993, A Natural History, published in 1998), you might think that a novel from him on WWII might be a bit much; his earlier novels are somewhat demanding — great if you like your drama heavy-on-the-interior, your dialogue on the scanty-side, your prose on the wordy-side — but not for everybody.

His characters are often scholarly (and often female, so given their historical settings, this makes them of interest from a feminist perspective all the same) and Keith Oatley himself is scholarly (a well-published academic with a long list of publications in psych journals and his text books outnumber his novels by far; his earlier works are worthwhile and rewarding with a close read, but they are the kind of books you recommend selectively.

Not so with his third novel, Therefore Choose. It’s tremendously accessible and relevant.

I think there are enough consistencies with his earlier fiction to maintain his readership, but I’m sure his new novel will garner Keith Oatley a new readership as well. You can sign me up in the New Reader column, and you can mark me down to read his fourth as well.

Should you be one of these new Keith-Oatley readers is the question. I say, yes, if:

* You’ve enjoyed, or wanted to read, some of the following: Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces, Timothy Findley’s Headhunter or The Wars, Sandra Sabatini’s Dante’s War, Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française.

(Or, you don’t read a lot of contemporary fiction, but you’re hooked on either Persephone’s Wartime fiction/non-fiction, or wartime Virago Modern Classics.)

* You enjoy a historical setting that isn’t overly descriptive, one with a clear sense of time and place, but one in which the emphasis is on universal themes, the human condition, all the Big Stuff without all the Little Details about chair-covers and pillow-tassels.

* You like novels in which the bulk of the narrative is interior.
(You’d rather know how a character felt about having joined the army than read a scene set in the registration office stuffed with sensory details.)

* You like a novel with a romance that pulls you through, with heavier themes presented in that context.
(And an old-fashioned romance to boot. Meaning that you like your romances heavy on the monogamy and light on the adultery, though you’re not troubled whether the romance is same-sex or inter-sex.)

* You prefer grey to a preponderance of either black or white.
(You’d rather feel the sting of a character’s unresolvable dilemma than have a string tied into a bow around the literary package.)

Therefore Choose is a memorable read indeed; it reads quickly, but the story lingers.

Have you read this work? Are you keen to try it now?

The kid? He’s five years old and lost in an airport. And he’s weeping. Incessently. Gesturing and wandering, barely forming words through his tears and, later, refusing to speak at all.

Nurses and clerks and various airport personnel try communicating in [...]]]> Salvatore Scibona “The Kid”
Summer Fiction: 20 Under 40
June14/21 The New Yorker

The kid? He’s five years old and lost in an airport. And he’s weeping. Incessently. Gesturing and wandering, barely forming words through his tears and, later, refusing to speak at all.

Nurses and clerks and various airport personnel try communicating in an assortment of languages but eventually the boy even refuses to hold the hand of an interested woman who wants to reunite the boy with his…his what?

In just a little more than two columns, the reader is desperate to know his story. Nearly as desperate as the individuals who are attempting to unravel the mystery of The Kid.

The reader doesn’t know where the boy’s parents are either. And even when the story slips back into the past, the narrative goes so far back that The Kid simply hovers, still lost in the airport, whilst the reader meets Mom and Dad and begins to make sense of The Kid’s predicament.

Here is an excerpt which not only makes your mouth water for potato pancakes, but which also reveals the unsettling combination of the everyday with the bizarre that characterizes this story.

“She cooked potato pancakes for Elroy and the kid, who abhorred sour cream, applesauce, anything presented to him as a condiment. These are the accidental kinks of habit that become our permanent selves. Elroy, as a child, had always preferred to sleep under sheets tight enough to cramp his toes. This preference had led him to take comfort in the austerities of basic training — they break you down, they build you up again, faster, tighter — and he discovered that he had a talent for the breaking down, a talent for forgetting. And then a talent for acting on the impulse to kill.”

It’s likely a common occurrence, children getting lost in international airports. Just as it’s normal for kids to be fussy about what’s on their plates. My youngest step-daughter won’t eat anything that looks like a condiment either. And sure, we all played games with our sheets, right? I used to short-sheet my own bed because I’d read too many summer camp books.

It’s all very banal, but then things take a turn and the reader is adrift. The Kid’s Dad? He has a talent for acting on the impulse to kill. What does that mean? Where is this place he comes from where acting on the impulse to kill is viewed as a talent? And we know that he was once in the airport with The Kid, so where is he now?

Check out the author’s Q&A to find out the inspiration for this disturbing short story.

Have you read it, or perhaps his 2008 novel, The End?

This is the last of Banana Yoshimoto’s works that have been translated into English that I had to read; if it had been the first of her works that I’d read, I don’t think I’d have read any further, [...]]]> Banana Yoshimoto’s Hardboiled and Hard Luck (1999)
Trans. from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich (2005)

This is the last of Banana Yoshimoto’s works that have been translated into English that I had to read; if it had been the first of her works that I’d read, I don’t think I’d have read any further, let alone read the gamut.

So let me continue by mentioning how much I loved Kitchen (published in 1988 in Japanese, published in 1993 in English).

I vividly remember the room in which I read it, the way in which the light came in the south window, smoky and weak.

I couldn’t put it down. I didn’t put it down. I read straight through both novellas (the other in the same volume is “Moonlight Shadow”).

Her prose in those two novellas is both piercing and tender; the stories she told felt both fresh and achingly familiar. If you’ve read them, I think you’ll know what I mean. Kitchen-lovers are hard-smitten.

And, although I didn’t adore her other works with the same intensity, I read Amrita twice, and I loved Asleep, enjoyed Lizard and NP, and thought Goodbye Tsugumi provocative.

Sure, there were elements that felt familiar from book to book, but they didn’t feel same-y. (Or, else, I left enough time between them, which is quite possible, because I became hooked early and there was at least a year between each of the translations that followed).

The novellas in Hardboiled and Hard Luck repeat a lot of the qualities that made me fall in love with Kitchen: strong but sad and slightly damaged and faintly poetic heroines who either were once or are now in love,
a thin veil between this world of the known with people in it and the world of the unknown with spirits in it, misunderstood apparitions, and haunting landscapes.

And, anyway, I don’t mind a bit of overlap. Her stories deal with love and loss: archetypal themes that can’t help but echo across the tellings.

And I never tire of her musings on the power of words and the importance of storytelling. Below are some bookish quotes from her earlier works

From NP: “All of us are so strange – me included. I was a character in a book, and now I’ve come out of the book and am talking and walking …. At the same time, it seems like the real me has become part of the book.”

From Lizard: “They’re just words that only you and I can understand. You know, like words you only use with certain people, like with your wife, or an old girlfriend, or your dad, or a friend. You know what I mean, a special type of language that only you and they can comprehend.”

And, from Amrita: “Novels are alive. They live on the other side of our lives, influencing us like good friends. I learned this from my own body. It might be for only a couple of hours, maybe an entire night, but we still have a chance to go across to their side of reality. I’m telling the truth.”

So, yes, tell it to me again and I won’t mind. And I don’t mind, really.

The young woman in Hardboiled is struggling with a half-remembered death-anniversary. The young woman in Hard Luck is struggling with the final loss of her long-brain-damaged-and-comatose sister. Their struggles feel like very familiar territory.

“Listen, I understand what you’re saying. This is a strange day. The sort of day when people in the old days talked about seeing sneaky creatures like mujina. Somehow the air feels heavy, and the night is darker than usual. But you know what? It will pass. Even nights like this come to an end.”

Maybe it’s not that this duo is all that bad; maybe Kitchen was just that amazing.

Have you read this author? This work?

A few years ago I saw Sherman Alexie at a ridiculously underattended reading in a small Toronto bookstore on a fine Friday night in summer. I remember wondering if there wasn’t something else I wanted to [...]]]> Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian (2007)
Art by Ellen Forney
Little Brown, 2009

A few years ago I saw Sherman Alexie at a ridiculously underattended reading in a small Toronto bookstore on a fine Friday night in summer. I remember wondering if there wasn’t something else I wanted to do that night. And presumably many other people wondered the same thing. Which was all the better for those of us who did opt to attend because it made for a remarkably intimate setting: that night, Sherman Alexie cozied onto my MRE list.

Even though I had only read a few short stories at that time (and seen Smoke Signals), I was wholly and completely hooked on his approach to storytelling and his outlook on the writer’s life. And then, near the end of August, when I was settling back into the Monday-to-Friday-ness of life, after a long summer holiday, I was hungry for a glimmer of that long-ago Friday night chat. And, then, one day later, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian cozied onto my list of Favourite Books for 2010.

Oh, I know I’m not the first person to feel this way after meeting Junior. The novel won The National Book Award and caused quite the buzz in lit-land. Chances are that you’ve already read it yourself. So you probably don’t need me to tell you that it’s the story of Junior’s coming-of-age on (and off) the Spokane Reservation. You don’t need me to tell you that Alexie fuses comedy and tragedy in an unforgettable character. You don’t need me to tell you what a great novel this is.

But you might want to be reminded of Junior’s simple style. Here’s how he describes the location of the reserve:

“If the government wants to hide somebody, there’s probably no place more isolated than my reservation, which is located approximately one million miles north of Important and two billion miles west of Happy. But jeez, I think people pay way too much attention to The Sopranos.”

And here’s what he has to say about Dawn, the girl he fell in love with when he was 12:

“She was out of my league, and even though I was only twelve, I knew that I’d be one of those guys who always fell in love with the unreachable, ungettable, and uninterested.”

See? He’s a misfit. It’s a common tale. “Don’t get me wrong. I think weird is great. I mean, if you look at all the great people in history – Einstein, Michelangelo, Emily Dickenson – then you’re looking at a bunch of weird people.”

Yes, in many ways Junior is struggling just the same way as so many boys (and girls) his age struggle. He is inadequate and painfully aware of his inadequateness: “He imagines asking Rowdy for his advice in terms of getting Penelope to notice him: ‘Well, buddy,’ he would have said. ‘The first thing you have to do is change the way you look, the way you talk, and the way you walk. And then she’ll think you’re her fricking Prince Charming.’”

But Junior’s life is fundamentally shaped by not only the storms of adolescence. “It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor. You start believing that you’re poor because you’re stupid and ugly. And then you start believing that you’re stupid and ugly because you’re Indian. And because you’re Indian you start believing you’re destined to be poor. It’s an ugly circle and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

So he’s a poor misfit, caught in a systemically warped society. But not to worry (if you were): this is not some book-length, Oh-poor-Indian narrative. Junior’s is not a Black-and-White world. Er, Red-and-White world. “Indians can be just as judgmental and hateful as any white person.” The complexities of identity permeate this story, but never overtake the heart of its telling. Which is Junior. All the way, Junior.

What really made me love this book was not just Junior’s voice and the terrific artwork that helps life his story off the page. It was the experience of reading a scene (three-quarters of the way through the novel) that left me completely unmoored.

I won’t say what happens, but it’s the much-anticipated conflict that has been brewing throughout the novel. It’s that oh-so-recognizable scene-right-before-the-final-scene in the movie, and you can practically see the arc of the age-old story as the ball is tossed. Yes, it’s a wee bit predictable. And that’s right where I got caught. In that predictability. In that narrative arc. Junior’s narrative.

What Alexie did in that scene cut me loose from the expected. I was so completely wrapped up in Junior’s experience that I didn’t even notice the shift. The shift that was catching Junior up. The shift that caught me right up with him. I can’t remember the last time that an author got a hook into my jaded-reader’s-skin that way. And I don’t think I’ve ever felt such intense elation, twinned with such overwhelming shame. It wasn’t my conflict, it was Junior’s, but it caught me in a moment of vulnerability that has cemented Alexie’s position on my MRE list.

I’ll have more to say about his first novel, Reservation Blues, next month. I know there are lots of Sherman Alexie readers out there: what’s your favourite novel of his?