The Mill on the Floss

George Eliot's novel The Mill on the Floss is a museum piece from another time. The writing is richly descriptive and the characters are drawn with fine and perceptive sensibility, and considerable irony when Eliot's wants to point out their human foibles. She establishes her novel with a strong sense of historical and cultural context, with a keen awareness of the subtleties conveyed by pronunciation and the use of language.

The main character in the book is Maggie, an overly smart, bold and impulsive, "ugly duckling" of a girl who grows into a sensual and perceptive woman, whose dark appeal, challenges the stenotype of conventional blond attractiveness, and whose inquiring mind is all too aware of the limitations that she faces in life as a woman whose economic situation is far from secure. As far a novel-writing goes, this is a promising start. Too bad Eliot doesn't quite figure out what to do with her character, whose main love interest is her devotion to her brother Tom, who frankly does not do anything to deserve her affection, making her utter adoration somewhat inexplicable. Tom is dedicated to restoring the family's economic stability and control of the mill, and upholding his father's grudge against Lawyer Wakem.

A lot of potentially interesting issues are raised: the impact of economics on society, conventional morality and the consequences of challenging that morality, family relations, fidelity to friends, family, oneself. But the author never fully develops her ideas, and after many many pages of introducing her story and the characters, Eliot literally sweeps it all away and ends the book. Just like that.

It is really a disappointment that the conflicts and the relations do not get resolved in a more satisfactory manner. Let me clarify that not every story needs to have a happy ending, but I would have preferred an ending with some sort of relevance deriving from the actions or the nature of the main characters. Eliot's ending is random and facile.

My second objection to the book is that the exploration of class, social standing, and newfangled economics is no longer relevant to the modern reader, at least not in the same way. Nor is the provincial morality. As a museum piece this book is interesting, but it is no longer relevant today and it has not withstood the test of time.

In a Sunburned Country

In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Off to a really slow start (but it gets better)



The first 40% of the book is made up of lame non-adventures (he hikes through endless suburbia, is chased by dogs in a park, goes on and an meandering search for drinking establishments), in places that he himself describes as dull, with vain attempts to spice up the non-action with descriptions of all the terribly dangerous things that could kill you in Australia (none of which he encounters). His writing is amusing for the first 20 pages or so but then the oh-so-clever and precious style begins to get tedious. It is all a bit too forced. It would be a better book if he took it down a notch. The parts about Australia were interesting but there was too much Bill Bryon on the subject of Bill Bryson.

Could he possibly have been bored in Australia? Let's hear Bryson's own words:

On Sydney: "The frappuccino heaven that is modern Sydney…" "We set off on foot to the Museum of Sydney, a sleek and stylish new institution, which manages to look interesting and instructive without actually being either."

On Canberra: "Even the lake, which winds a serpentine way between the commercial and parliamentary halves of the city, has a curiously dull, artificial feel." "many people believe the Parliamentary Zone has an empty and unfinished character,… I’ll say. It was like walking around the site of a very large world’s fair that had never quite gotten off the ground."

On Tanuda: I liked Tanunda [wine country] and had a very pleasant evening there, but there was absolutely nothing exceptional or eventful in the experience,

Adelaide: "The real problem with Adelaide these days, I suspect, is that it has just stopped being interesting."

In his defense, Bryson is a superb researcher and editor. He is excellent at culling information from a variety of sources and presenting it in a compelling manner. He did this superbly in the other books of his that I have read, A Short History of Nearly Everything, and The Mother Tongue. This book is no exception; the bibliography attached to In a Sunburned Country is impressive. You can see that he has done his homework.

But even the Australian people are described as being pretty grim: "They don’t have that happiness in their faces anymore. I don’t think anybody does." "They are an extraordinarily self-critical people. You encounter it constantly in newspapers and on television and radio—a nagging conviction that no matter how good things are in Australia, they are bound to be better elsewhere."

Then he hits Melbourne and heads out to explore some of Australia's most impressive natural sites. The book changes, it comes to life. Bryson finds the joy and élan he was missing, and suddenly Australia goes from being a place that you might have been relieved not to have visited, to being somewhere that you are dying to go and see.

He still make judicious and effective use of all kinds of interesting factoids, but they are placed in context and made relevant to his experience, as he appreciates the beauty and wonder of the land, and ponders its complex and challenging history.

Despite the cultural wasteland of the Ned Kelly tribute in Glenrowan, friends Alan and Carmel take him to Powers Lookout, and there we are given our first glimpse of the magnificence of Australia's natural features. From there it just keeps getting better and better.

"What he had for us the next day was a place called Alpine National Park, and in fact it was even better. Covering 2,500 square miles of eastern Victoria, it was lofty, grand, cool, and green. If ever there was a portion of Australia remote from all the clichéd images of red soil and baking sun, this was it."

The Great Barrier Reef: "Well, it was wonderful. No matter how much you read about the special nature of the Barrier Reef nothing really prepares you for the sight of it… I was captivated beyond description."

"Daintree National Park. The road wound up and through a mountainous and intensely beautiful rain forest. We had at last made it into the wet tropics, and I couldn’t have been more pleased."

The Gibson Desert: "Even on a smoothly paved highway, in the comfort of air-conditioning, you are not entirely robbed of the sense of what the explorers must have gone through. The discomforts can’t be fully imagined, but the scale can, and it was awesome."

The uncanny sight of the Devil's Marbles and the mystique of Uluru (Ayer's Rock): "In every other way more arresting than you could ever have supposed. I have discussed this since with many other people, nearly all of whom agreed that they approached Uluru with a kind of fatigue, and were left agog in a way they could not adequately explain."

This is travel writing at its best: Just the right balance between historical, scientific, and contextual information, and the beauty and the wonder of just being open to the experience and letting it unfold. That is what tells the reader that something special is out there and that there is an urgent need to see it before time has taken its toll.

Bryson puts his finger on the crux of the matter and wryly notes, "Perhaps it’s my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can." And there is a lot in Australia that is worth seeing.



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Liberating the Truth from History

How do you tell the story of a country? Tell it as the story of a person. The main character and narrator of Midnight's Children, Saleem Sinia, is born (or at least someone is born, because there is a bit of a muddle) at the stroke of midnight, on August 15, 1947, the day that India gained its independence from British colonial rule. Narrating his own story, Saleem tells his country's story, and that of the other 1,001 children who were born that day, and blessed with special powers because of their special place in history --not that it helped with their survival in many cases, but then nation-building is fraught with risks.

Salman Rushdie, also fortuitously born in 1947, took to heart the classic advice to budding authors: write what you know. The result is beyond history, beyond testimony; it is art. He identifies the truth in the storytelling, or as he puts it: he liberates the truth from history.

The book is tightly interwoven although at times it seems loose and meandering. Saleem's faithful companion Padma speaks for the reader and urges Saleem to get back on track. My favorite aspect of the writing was the sensual quality: it is tremendously atmospheric, and permeated with considerable wry humor. The imagery is rich and resonating. Nothing is gratuitous. Every detail, every description, has either symbolic or historical relevance. This is what sets Salman Rushdie apart from writers who can spin a good yarn and keep the reader engaged, but who have no sense of literary construction, not to mention history.

History is the main theme of the book; personal history, the nation's history, and the need to create one's own history. History has cracks, it comes together and disintegrates, memory is faulty. But overall, history is always invented and it depends on who is doing the telling.

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans"
One aspect that several people at book club mentioned as being difficult was the fact that this is the kind of book that must be read while paying close attention; you can't skim through it or else you will miss key information. Often Rushdie will offhandedly toss out a fact, or mention an event, and then 20 pages later (not just one or two pages) it will be revealed that the aforementioned detail was a key turning point in the life of a character or the country.

Rushdie plays freely with the supernatural (ghosts, but are they?), oral storytelling, voices, prophecies, Christian, Muslim, and Hindu religious conventions, melding them into a unified, if surreal, whole. The priests are instructed to tell their Indian Christian converts who might be concerned about whether they will be accepted into Heaven if their skin is darks: Tell them that Jesus is blue as the "Hindu love-god, Krishna, is always depicted with blue skin. Tell them blue; it will be a sort of bridge between the faiths." This is a Solomonic solution rife with absurdity. Upon being told that Jesus is blue, Saleem's nurse Mary Pereira is indignant, "You should write to Holy Father Pope in Rome, he will surely put you straight; but one does not have to be Pope to know that the mens are not ever blue!"

The multiplicity of voices was another aspect that was problematic for some readers. Events unfold simultaneously. We get to hear different voices speaking at the same time, just as Saleem hears the voices of the midnight's children in his head. This is the literary convention that Rushdie uses to express what the main character is experiencing, as well as representing the conflicting forces in the country.

Midnight's Children is a book that is epic heroic, historic, and yet completely human and accessible, because for all its scope and grandeur, it is a story about life, as it unfolds and is told from the perspective of a fictitious narrator who reveals his world as he sees it, with his inconsistencies, frustrations, and memory lapses, but with the honesty of an inhabitant of the world he describes. He is no stranger to this land. And even though the readers of this book may come from widely divergent cultural backgrounds, the underlying humanity of the story is universal.

This is one of the great novels of the 20th century, and the Man Booker Prize committee agrees: in 1993 Salman Rushdie was awarded the Man Booker Prize as the best book selected in the past 25 years. It is also one of my favorite books.

I was fortunate to be able to hear Salman Rushdie speaking in Bogota in February 2009, following his appearance at the Hay Literary Festival in Cartagena. This is an excerpt of my review of Rushdie's conference.

Forthcoming, affable, with a sharp sense of humor, Rushdie spoke about his books, elements from his life that have influenced his writing, and the novel as an expression of popular culture.

Interviewer and Hay Festival Director Peter Florence began the interview by noting that Salman Rushdie has often been compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez for his use of magical and supernatural elements in his writing. Rushdie acknowledged the similarity in the sense that both he and Garcia Marquez write about characters whose world view is colored by a sense of a world of wonder and magic that surrounds them and that this magic has become part of their everyday existence. "I'll take the comparison," Rushdie said, playing to the crowd. But there the similarity ends, for whereas Garcia is an eminently rural author, Rushdie's works are rooted in the in the hustle and bustle of the cities of India, color by his experience of growing up in Bombay (Mumbai), and nuanced with his experience of living in the cities of London and New York.

His first successful novel, Midnight's Children (1981), tells the story of a boy and other children, who were born on August 15, 1947, the day that India became independent of British colonial rule. The personal stories are interwoven into the fabric of history and, as Rushdie notes, his purpose is to liberate the truth from history. He also wanted to write a book to give voice to the vernacular to the Indian people. Until this point, the only authors who had written about India were British, such as E.M. Forrester's Passage to India, written in an English that was cool, classical, distant, and reserved. Rushdie wanted to capture the feeling of life in India, in all of its hot, vulgar, smelly, noisy, spiritual, surrealist glory. He joked with the audience that Latin America has nothing on India when it comes to squalor and passion.

Rushdie commented that for him the novel must always be something new, something different. Just as the character explores a new concept identity, Rushdie allows himself to explore in the novel form. He stressed that the novel is inherently an irreverent form in which nothing is sacred, and that as an author he has the right to question as he sees fit. It is his voice, his unique voice, he stated, and nobody owns him. He referred to the novel as a vulgar form, meaning of the common people. He commented on the validity of the different expressions of music, film, and popular culture as reflecting the sensibilities of the times. Rushdie noted that people tend to like or dislike his books for exactly the same reason, often citing their cinematographic quality.

I came away from the interview with a newfound respect for Salman Rushdie, an author of creativity, artistic integrity, humor, and gritty sensuality.

People of the Book

People of the Book
By Geraldine Brooks

People of the Book uses the storytelling device of tracing pieces of forensic evidence (an insect's wing, the book's missing clasps, a wine stain, salt crystals, and a white hair) as the pretence to go back in time and recreate the story of the Sarajevo haggadah, a seder text that is remarkable for its lavish illustrations, which are extremely rare, given the Jewish prohibition against idolatry.

Author Geraldine Brooks's fortes are her ability to weave an engaging story that invents the path that the haggadah might have followed as it changed hands over time, and her handling of the historical context in which each of the characters lived. Brooks creates vivid and engaging history with a fine eye for the details that bring a story to life without weighing it down with over-description.

In contrast, the parallel contemporary story is weak. It explores Hanna's melodramatic relationship with her unsympathetic mother. Her jet-setting lifestyle in which she flits around the globe to drop in on her friends and professional colleagues who are renowned as the best in their respective fields, as she is, natch. And by the way, for an academic who claims to eschew slang, she sure uses a lot of it. A romance based on a brief fling with a Muslim librarian whose actions will destroy Hanna's professional credibility (How's that for the foundation for a relationship?). At least Brooks knows that she is stooping to sheer silliness when she makes reference to Mission Impossible II as she introduces the final section of the book, which deals with the plan to return the haggadah to its rightful place.

This is a really good book, mixed together with a mediocre one.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I hate book reviews that start with something like, "I found this such an interesting book. It taught me so much about…." But that is the way I feel about this book. Anyway, just what was I supposed to have known about Chinese foot binding, marriage practices, and filial relations in the period from 1823 to the start of the 1900s?

The book is narrated from the point of view of Lily, the "worthless daughter" of a rural Chinese family, who has her feet bound to improve her marriage prospects. Her prospects do improve, mainly because a wily matchmaker has been looking to link the fate of Snowflower, the daughter of a once noble family that has fallen on hard times, to that of a likely rising prospect. Lily fits the bill. Marriage intrigues and matchmakers aside, this is a book about a deep friendship between two women, the conflicting needs of personal honesty and social expectations, and the process of social acculturation.

The reader is taken on a journey into an exotic world that explores the role and worth of women in Chinese society, foot binding, laotong friendship, sworn sisterhoods, personal ambition, sincere affection, betrayal, and atonement.

The themes remain contemporary and universal. The delight of the writing is the focus on the details of everyday life. See leads us on a journey in which we observe, smell, feel, and empathize along with the heroines. She truly leads us to See with new eyes.

I could have done without some of the melodrama: Spring Moon throwing herself down the well was a bit much. But then it is part of a different cultural logic. It is like Chinese opera. I can't say that I have a taste for that kind of stylized performance and screechy atonal music.

On a more familiar note, having recently read Anne of Green Gables again, it is impossible not to note the similarity in the concept of intense and unbending female friendship. Lily and Snowflower are bosom buddies and this friendship sustains each of them, for different reasons through most of their lives. Anne would have been a stubborn Horse too. The book is both foreign and familiar.


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Critiquing the critics / Crítica a los críticos

Para la versión en español, véase la parte inferior de la página.

Hay Festival, 28 to 31 January 2010, Cartagena, Colombia

This was the first time that I had attended the Hay Festival, having wanted to go I previous years but not being able for financial, familial, or work reasons.

I owe a good dose of gratitude to Sally for encouraging me to go, and many thanks to Sally's friend Monica who very generously offered us lodging at her house in the San Diego sector of Cartagena's Old City, mere blocks away from the festival events.

***

Critiquing the critics: First conference review from the Hay Literary Festival

The first conference we attended was "The Pleasure and the Job of Critiquing Books," with Guillermo Altares, editor-in-chief of Babelia, the cultural supplement of the Spanish daily El País; Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Spanish critic Manuel Calderón, and Christopher Domínguez, literary critic for the Mexican publication Letras Libres, hosted by Colombian poet Mario Jurisch.

In this session the four critics lamented the decline and disappearance of newspaper literary supplements as the only medium that they feel is suitable for publishing literary critiques. Their overall conclusion is that the job of the literary critic is in danger, mainly as the result of the languid state of the reading public whose tastes heavily favor authors such as Paulo Coelho and Dan Brown.

It was interesting to hear these critics interacting with each other and bemoaning how difficult it is to be them. They apparently had forgotten that they were speaking at a literary festival attended by people who do read books of a higher category than the kind generally found at airport bookstands. Their apparent disdain for the reading public was really quite striking.

They did make some interesting observations: The role of the critic as legal counsel rather than judge, advocating for the writers; and a caveat against jaded criticism, in which the critic uses some poor author's less than successful piece of writing as a vehicle to show off his own cleverness. They discussed the difficulty of communicating their enthusiasm for a book in the limited format of the book review (one reviewer suggested that the ideal length for a book review should be 10-12 pages). They also addressed the delicate situation of reviewing books written by friends, and the quandary of being instructed to review certain books at the behest of their publishing house.

My overall feeling at the end of this conference is that the critics are correct in their appraisal that the job of the literary critic and the literary supplement are endangered. They talked about literary criticism as if it were their exclusive domain, disregarding that the public at the Hay Festival are intelligent readers who practice in literary criticism. They made no mention of the Internet or peer review, which are now hugely influential media. The website GoodReads and the Virtual Bookshelf application on Facebook (among many others, blogs for example) allow readers to organize their readings and publish reviews. When considering books to buy online, many people look at the reviews by other customers. These are media to which everyone can contribute on equal footing and, not surprisingly, some reviews are well written while others are not.

Thoughtful and insightful reviewers will always be appreciated. Their job has not become irrelevant, but increasingly the literary critics face competition from a sector that they had not considered as peers but who are now in a position to hold them accountable for their work, challenge them, or even enter into competition with them. These peers are the educated and informed reading public that was seated before this group of critics, who seemed to have forgotten completely about us.

***

Thursday night we went to the Manu Dibango concert in the Plaza de la Aduana. Dibango's music is jazz, funk, "with traditional African afrobeat sax-star elements." It was a lovely balmy night. The music was upbeat and groovy (wow, is it still possible to use that word?). It reminded me of the Montreal jazz festival. Too bad that more people weren't dancing. From our seats, Sally and I played Spot the Author.

When quoting this source, please cite: Leslie Carmichael, 6 February 2010 http://noessinomivida.blogspot.com/

***

Finalmente, por primera vez, asistí al Hay Festival, donde quería ir en años anteriores, pero no pude por razones económicas, familiares o de trabajo.

Debo agradecimiento a Sally por animarme a ir, demás de muchas gracias a la amiga de Sally, Monica, quien muy generosamente nos ofreció alojamiento en su casa en el sector de San Diego en la vieja ciudad de Cartagena, a unas pocas cuadras de los recintos del festival.

***
Crítica a los críticos: Primera reseña de conferencia del Festival Hay.

La primera conferencia que asistimos fue "El placer y el oficio de criticar libros", con Guillermo Altares, editor de Babelia, el suplemento cultural del periódico español El País; autor y crítico colombiano Juan Gabriel Vásquez, crítico español Manuel Calderón, y Christopher Domínguez, crítico literario por la revista mexicana Letras Libres, bajo la conducción del poeta colombiano Mario Jurisch.

En esta sesión los cuatro críticos lamentaron el menguante y la desaparición de los suplementos literarios de los periódicos como el único medio que se sienten como adecuado para publicar críticas literarias. Su conclusión general es que el trabajo del crítico literario está en peligro, principalmente como resultado del estado lánguido de los lectores cuyos gustos favorecen a autores como Paulo Coelho y Dan Brown.

Fue interesante escuchar a estos críticos que interactuando entre sí y lamentándose de lo difícil que es ser ellos. Al parecer, se olvidaron que estaban hablando en un festival literario donde los asistentes eran personas quienes leen libros de una categoría superior a la clase que generalmente se encuentran en los puestos de ventas en los aeropuertos. Su desdén aparente para el público lector era verdaderamente impresionante.

Hicieron algunas observaciones interesantes: el papel del crítico como abogado más que juez, en defensa de los escritores; y una advertencia en contra las críticas cínicas, en las cuales el crítico utiliza algún escrito regular de un autor desafortunado como vehículo para alardar su propia inteligencia. Se discutieron la dificultad de comunicar su entusiasmo por un libro en el formato reducido de la reseña del libro (uno de los críticos sugirió que el tamaño ideal para una reseña de libro debería ser 10-12 páginas). También abordaron la delicada situación de reseñar libros escritos por amigos, y el dilema de recibir instrucciones de reseñar ciertos libros por orden su casa editorial.

Mi impresión al finalizar esta conferencia es que tienen razón en su apreciación que el oficio del crítico literario y el suplemento literario están en vía de extinción. Hablaron de la crítica literaria como si se tratara de su dominio exclusivo, sin tener en cuenta que los miembros del público en el Hay Festival son lectores inteligentes quienes practican la crítica literaria. No mencionaron el Internet y la crítica entre pares, que ahora son medios enormemente influyentes. El sitio de Internet GoodReads y la aplicación Biblioteca Virtual en Facebook (entre muchas más, blogs por ejemplo) permiten a los lectores organizar sus lecturas y publicar críticas. Cuando están contemplando libros para comprar por Internet, muchas personas echan un vistazo a los comentarios de otros clientes. Estos son medios abiertos a cuales todos pueden contribuir en igualdad de condiciones y, no es de sorprenderse, que algunos comentarios son bien escritos, mientras que otros no lo son.

Críticos reflexivos y perspicaces siempre tendrán apreciación. Su oficio no es irrelevante, sino que cada vez más los críticos literarios encuentran competencia de un sector que no consideraron como pares pero quienes hoy en día está posicionado para exigir una rendición de cuentas sobre su labor, desafiarles, o entrar en competencia con ellos. Estos pares son los miembros del público lector, educado e informado, que estaba sentado frente a este grupo de críticos quienes aparentemente se olvidaron por completo de nosotros.

***

El jueves por la noche fuimos al concierto de Manu Dibango en la Plaza de la Aduana. La música de Dibango es jazz, funk, y elementos tradicionales africanos con el "afrobeat sax-star". La noche era suave. La música era movida. Me acordé del festival de jazz de Montreal. Lástima que más personas no estaban bailando. Desde nuestros puestos, Sally y yo jugamos a Encuentre el Autor.

Para citar este fuente: Leslie Carmichael, 6 febrero 2010 http://noessinomivida.blogspot.com/

Facilitating Notes for Lullabies for Little Criminals

1. Synopsis
2. About the author
3. Interview with the author
4. Bibliography, awards and review
5. Discussion Questions
6. Quotable Quotes


1. Synopsis
Lullabies for little criminals, by Heather O'Neill
A vivid and poignant child's-eye view of the dark side of urban Canada
By Julie Wheelwright
Tuesday, 19 February 2008

It's intriguing to ponder why Heather O'Neill, the author of this prize-winning debut novel, did not write a misery memoir. In an essay, she suggests that much of the material for her narrator, Baby (who is being raised by Jules, her heroin-addicted father, in Montreal's red-light district), came from her own experiences. O'Neill writes that, despite drawing on painful memories, her novel "exists in the childish realm of make-believe".

It was a wise choice, since much of what Baby endures might have made for unbearably voyeuristic reading. Her mother, pregnant at 16 in a small Quebec town, dies in a car crash before Jules heads for the city with his daughter. They move from hotel to hotel as he tries out get-rich-quick schemes and petty crime, and falls deeper into addiction.

What O'Neill has captured vividly and poignantly is Baby's desperate attempt to retain her love and respect for her father. "I liked him right next to me, stoned and not going anywhere," she writes. "I felt protected and perfect." But as Baby grows up, her father becomes increasingly destitute. At one point, Jules is forced into rehab and Baby goes into a foster home, where she experiences a fleeting form of love and security.

All too soon, Jules arrives and takes Baby back. Eventually, he spirals back into addiction and leaves town, and Baby moves in with Xavier, a pimp. Soon she's experimenting with heroin and is forced into working for her lover's clients. She still attends school and does her homework at night, in between tricks.

When Jules reappears, he tries to cut off anyone who tries to help her. Xavier is equally possessive and assaults her when he finds her dating a boy. O'Neill also does a masterful job of retaining Baby's perspective as a child, sizing up these monstrous adults and still managing to find wonder amid the rubble of her life.

There is eventually a suggestion of redemption for Baby. O'Neill's novel builds to a riveting climax, where her narrator's life and sanity seem to hang in the balance. Only when Jules finally releases his grip on his daughter can she move to a real place of safety. This is a deeply moving and troubling novel exploring the dark side of urban Canada, where, all too easily, children are still left to struggle against impossible odds.


2. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Heather O'Neill was born in Montreal (1974), then after her parents split up went to live with her mother in Virginia. When O’Neill was nine or so, her mother “decided to become a punk rocker” and sent O’Neill and her two sisters to live with their father in Montreal. O’Neill has written about having been abandoned by a mother who continues to live an itinerant life, and about being raised by an emotionally unpredictable father who these days would be described as “working poor.” While there are clearly some similarities to Lullabies (which is set in the early 1980s), O’Neill asserts that the novel isn’t autobiographical – it simply takes place in “sort of the same world that I grew up in.”

The world O’Neill grew up in is NDG, or Notre Dame de Grace, a pleasant, mostly gracious middle-class West End neighbourhood. Back in the 1980s, however, NDG was an inner-city zone more often called by its unofficial name, No Damn Good.

O'Neill earned a B.A. from McGill University in 1994 and currently lives in Montreal with her husband Jonathan Goldstein, an author and CBC Radio personality, and with her daughter, Arizona O’Neill (1994).

She published her debut novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, in 2006. The novel was subsequently selected for the 2007 edition of Canada Reads, where it was championed by singer-songwriter John K. Samson (from Winnipeg, The Weakerthans). Lullabies won the competition.

Her credits also include a screenplay (John L’Ecuyer’s feature film Saint Jude, released in Canada in 2000. Jude, played with luminous directness by Liane Balaban (last seen in New Waterford Girl), is a bright young thing living in the seedy world of Montreal’s street hustlers. In short order, she’s kicked out of her father’s house and on the run from a drug dealer. On the street, she undergoes what is conventionally called a “descent into hell”, though thanks to L’Ecuyer’s direction, and Heather O’Neill’s script, it's a fall lacking in either fear or regret. ), a book of poetry, and contributions to The New York Times Magazine, Public Radio International's This American Life, and the CBC's Wiretap.

An excerpt from Lullabies appeared in Toronto Life’s 2003 summer fiction issue, a New York friend of O’Neill’s passed the magazine to Sam Stoloff, an agent with the Frances Goldin Literary Agency. Stoloff called O’Neill’s home in Montreal and learned that she was visiting New York at the time. “He proceeded to call everybody I knew in New York, looking for me,” says O’Neill


Quill & Quire
Nov. 2006
Bringing up Baby
Heather O’Neill’s debut novel brings magic to a grim inner-city childhood
by Juliet Waters
St. Urbain is best known as the Montreal street where Mordecai Richler came of age. Today, Heather O’Neill lives there with her longtime boyfriend, Jonathan Goldstein, an author and CBC Radio personality, and with her daughter, Arizona O’Neill, who has just started Grade 7 at École Superieure de Ballet Contemporain. Their ground-floor apartment is guarded by a lawn statue of Peter Rabbit, and I’m reminded that my six-year-old son won’t have anything to do with the Beatrix Potter classic, which he calls “that book where the father gets eaten in a pie.”

O’Neill, 32, leads me into her bright, clean, uncluttered kitchen, and while she’s making us coffee, I ask her whether Arizona has read O’Neill’s first novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals. It’s a reasonable question, since the book’s narrator, Baby, is 12 going on 13. “No, she’s not allowed,” says O’Neill – a reasonable answer. After all, by the end of the novel, Baby has become a prostitute and a street junkie, like Jules, the young single father who has raised her. A dilemma looms for O’Neill, though – some of Arizona’s classmates have found out about the book, and are intrigued that Arizona isn’t allowed to read it. So they’re of course eagerly awaiting its release.

They’re not alone. In the U.S., where HarperCollins is publishing the novel (HarperCollins Canada is distributing it here), Barnes & Noble has selected O’Neill for its Discover Great New Writers campaign. When I meet with her, she’s recently been contacted by People magazine about a publicity photo to go with a review of the book. “People magazine,” O’Neill repeats incredulously, in a soft voice that is impressively smooth, given how many Camels she will smoke in the hour I’m there. “That’s so odd.”

Not so odd to those who’ve read the book. Baby’s voice, intelligent and infectious, brings to mind the hypnotic charm of recent bestsellers told from the point of view of gifted children neglected by their parents – books like Augusten Burroughs’ Running with Scissors and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. It’s no surprise that a New York publisher leapt on the manuscript. “I was struck by the absolute honesty and freshness of Heather’s voice,” says editor Courtney Hodell, who acquired Lullabies for HarperCollins (and has since moved to Farrar, Straus and Giroux). “The book has a shocking, visceral impact, as if its sometimes-wrenching events are happening directly to you. I have no idea how she managed to retain such a precise memory of how children see the world.”

O’Neill found her way to Hodell through a mixture of serendipity and connections. After an excerpt from Lullabies appeared in Toronto Life’s 2003 summer fiction issue, a New York friend of O’Neill’s passed the magazine to Sam Stoloff, an agent with the Frances Goldin Literary Agency. Stoloff called O’Neill’s home in Montreal and learned that she was visiting New York at the time. “He proceeded to call everybody I knew in New York, looking for me,” says O’Neill. “Everywhere I went, people were [saying], ‘This agent is looking for you.’” The two finally met in Washington Square Park, after O’Neill had reached Stoloff on a payphone: “I’m really close by,” he told her. “Stay there. What are you wearing?”

The friend who passed the manuscript on was Paul Tough, an editor at The New York Times Magazine who has been publishing both O’Neill and Goldstein since he was editor of Saturday Night in Canada in the late 1990s, and also on his own website of confessional essays, Open Letters. O’Neill has also appeared regularly on the popular National Public Radio show This American Life, where Goldstein was a producer from 2000 to 2002. And Montrealers have been predicting big things for her ever since one of her short stories was adapted into John L’Ecuyer’s feature film Saint Jude, released in Canada in 2000.

At Q&Q’s press time, Lullabies was scheduled for release in mid-October, with plans for a Montreal launch at Paragraphe Books followed by a mini-tour of four U.S. cities (New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Ann Arbor). Asked whether it feels strange to be published first in New York rather than Canada, O’Neill replies, “I have dual citizenship, so I feel more North American anyway.”

This leads to questions about parents and origins, and suddenly, if subtly, O’Neill’s voice tightens. “I was born here, and then after my parents split up I went to live with my mother in Virginia,” she says. When O’Neill was nine or so, her mother “decided to become a punk rocker” and sent O’Neill and her two sisters to live with their father in Montreal. On the Open Letters site, O’Neill has written about having been abandoned by a mother who continues to live an itinerant life, and about being raised by an emotionally unpredictable father who these days would be described as “working poor.” While there are clearly some similarities to Lullabies (which is set in the early 1980s), O’Neill asserts that the novel isn’t autobiographical – it simply takes place in “sort of the same world that I grew up in.”

The world O’Neill grew up in is NDG, or Notre Dame de Grace, a pleasant, mostly gracious middle-class West End neighbourhood. Back in the 1980s, however, NDG was an inner-city zone more often called by its unofficial name, No Damn Good. In the era between the two separatist referendums, the anglo community was in the midst of a steady exodus, and Quebec language laws further discouraged English public school enrollment.

O’Neill uses the word “post-apocalyptic” to describe her public high school experiences there. “The year I was in Grade 11, they had only signed up five kids for Grade 7 – the reputation of the school was so bad they couldn’t get any more kids to go there,” she says. “It was so rough – just a lot of foster home kids and kids who had been kicked out of other schools. There was this general kind of lawlessness, and it was just full of kids who had lost their will to live...” she trails off in a mock-dramatic tone that has enough gallows humour in it to crack up two Irish-blooded girls from NDG, if no one else. O’Neill doesn’t glamorize her adolescence, but she’s also not ready to simply write it off as grim tragedy.

The magic and the horror of Baby’s life are typical for any smart kid growing up in those circumstances, especially without a mother. It’s a precarious tightrope of experience that can turn either way. Lives like that of Baby, who finds herself juggling two boyfriends – a geeky, endearing son of an accountant and a tortured, sexy, manipulative pimp – were not uncommon then, and they may not be now. “That’s something I tried to capture in the book,” says O’Neill. “The way that lowlifes are so attractive to children. Because in a way children are the only ones who take them seriously and believe their crap…. And yet there can be something magical about that sometimes.”

For those who survive the consequences. Not so magical for those who don’t. A point made clear in the book.

The French have a word for which there is unfortunately no equivalent in English: jouissance, the joy of transgression. It describes that illicit thrill that keeps kids hungry for experience no matter how dangerous. That keeps rabbits seeking out Mr. McGregor, no matter how protective their mother. That will keep readers who pick up Lullabies for Little Criminals reading until they are crying.


3. INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR
Harper Collins Author Interview

Heather O'Neill on Lullabies for Little Criminals

Q: How did the narrative voice of Baby first come to you?
A: A lot of children grow up in poverty with flawed parents but their inner world is still as inherently filled with wonder and innocence as children who are kept away from the city's underbelly. In fact, they might have more of a need for this type of imagination as a defense mechanism. I wanted Baby's voice to reflect this. I wanted a voice that could at once be as simple as a child's retelling of A Cricket in Times Square yet also be able to encompass the realities of heroin addiction. I wanted a voice that kind of captured the metaphors of a childhood spent on the streets, and described the heroes and villains of that world. Baby is a poet in this way.

Q: What were some of the fictional challenges you faced in inhabiting the mind and voice of an adolescent girl?
A: Adolescents are still children in that they can't yet tell the difference between make believe and fiction. They don't believe in love making or that they will be adults. They don't believe any of this until it is right before their eyes. They don't know the consequences of being an adult. It is all still like dress up. They were just having conversation with stuffed monkeys a couple years before. They're so vulnerable; it's nerve-wracking to write about them. I found it difficult emotionally because you want to save children from hardship and protect them, but I wrote them into some dark situations. Even seeing a child missing the city bus is heartbreaking to me, so it was mentally draining to write some of the stuff that happens in the book. It made me feel like a bad person. When you write about little children, you can avoid tragedy, but adolescents look for trouble, so I thought it was necessary for sad things to happen. Adolescents are attracted to tragic heroes. That's why rock stars dress like homeless people. Adolescence is a fall. It's when every child becomes an orphan. If we could, we would keep children as far away from the adult world as possible, but they are going to be adults no matter what.

Q: The vivid first-person narration of your novel makes it read more like autobiography than fiction. To what extent did you borrow from your own experiences as a teenager in crafting the world Baby inhabits?
A: The novel isn't autobiographical. The down and out world of Montreal was the one that I grew up in, though. It's a world that is composed of what attracted and fascinated me at Baby's age. Also, like Baby, I didn't have a mother. I was raised by my father since I was seven years old. So the longing and absence for a mother is something that is in my bones, especially the difficulties of being an adolescent girl without a mother and looking for maternal love in relationships with boys. A lot of the children in the book were inspired by children that I was infatuated with. My dad is very different from Jules. But he's similar in being eccentric and outrageous, but more in a tough guy kind of way. Like Jules, he tried his best, although his idea of parenting was absurd.

Q: Your book has been compared to works by Kaye Gibbons, J.D. Salinger, and Donna Tartt, among others. Were any of these authors' direct or indirect influences on your novel?
A: I've never read Kaye Gibbons. J.D Salinger is a rite of passage. Every child sees themselves a little differently after reading Salinger. In his novels, children's angst and depression and beauty are taken seriously. We are constantly interpreting the world for children, but in Salinger's world, the child is always the authority on society and its weaknesses. Baby has the keenest sense of observation of all the characters in the book.

Also, Salinger captures the nobility and tragedy of being an adolescent. His adolescents are displaced aristocrats who have lost their kingdom and wealth, which was childhood. This is especially devastating to Salinger's Glass children, who were so precocious and starred on a radio show called "It's a Wise Child." I like to think of Baby as being one of these precocious children, on par with the Glass kids. She happened not to have a privileged childhood in the traditional sense. But to her Jules is as entertaining and exotic as a Vaudevillian performer or a philosopher. At the beginning of the novel, she sees herself and Jules as being the most interesting family on the block.

Donna Tartt's brilliant youths are at once precocious and lost in the world of childhood. They act and posture like adults, but their idea of being an adult comes from fairy tales. They still believe that being an adult means being a crusader or a daring detective. Tartt describes the dangerous path of clever children who should have straight A's but choose instead to be romantic delinquents. I think this idea of young adolescents acting out adult situations is an important one in my novel. The line between pretending to be a criminal and actually being one is a fine one for children. They never quite know when they have crossed it. I love Tartt's writing, but I wasn't thinking of it directly while writing my book. Narrative voices are years in the making. Mine was influenced by everything I read and everyone I met in some way, from Shakespeare to my father cursing a leaking pipe.

Q: Lullabies for Little Criminals is your first novel. What was the most rewarding aspect of writing this book?
A: I really enjoyed the lower class world that I grew up in. I was always smitten with lowlifes and daredevils and junkies. Being able to capture the joy and breathlessness of this world, of living les quatre cents coups, was rewarding. I had a ludicrous childhood, but I feel that I was able to profit from a lot of the idiotic and unfortunate things that happened to me by turning them into fiction. I feel in that way that I cheated fate by writing this book, by declaring that ordinary stones were gold.

During the writing of the book, I was inspired by children around me. Watching children playing their recorders for change on the street corner, seeing them try on pink Converse sneakers, sunbathing at the pool with their fake tattoos of tigers, looking both way before crossing a street all gave me imagery and ideas for the book. I was also inspired by rock and roll and photographs and leather boots and pin striped suits and roses in hats and cars with missing doors. The nature of the things that inspired this book along the way was delightful.


4. AWARDS AND REVIEWS

Two Eyes Are You Sleeping (1998) poetry

Lullabies for Little Criminals (2006)
-Winner of Canada Reads 2007 (During Canada Reads, five personalities champion five different books, each champion extolling the merits of one of the titles. The debate is broadcast over a series of five programs. At the end of each episode, the panelists vote one title out of the competition until only one book remains. This book is then billed as the book that all of Canada should read. Following the announcement of the winning title, the CBC opens an online forum where readers can discuss the book.)
-Winner of the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction 2007
-Shortlisted for the Governor General's Award 2007
-Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2008
-Shortlisted for the Amazon.ca/ Books in Canada First Novel Award 2007
-Shortlisted for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award 2007
-Shortlisted for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montreal 2007
-Shortlisted for the Exclusive Books Boeke Prize South Africa 2008
-Longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2008


Review
Positive reviews praised the authenticity of her story, finding the narrative voice honest and unsentimental, and the descriptions vivid.

A negative review. Often negative reviews provide more thoughtful comments than positive ones.

"Lullabies" is one of those novels which is basically little more than adequate, but gets a lot of buzz and therefore picks up some momentum (and sales and praise).

The summary is "a 12 year old girl from a broken home has various street adventures in Montreal".

I honestly don't think you can give much more to it than this. None of the "adventures" really lead up to anything. They're all sad little vignettes with a long stream of characters who appear and disappear and the only saving grace is that Baby herself is given a half-decent narrative voice.

So, Baby and her father Jules are fairly interesting characters. The eventual "love-interest", Xavier, is likeable, but basically everyone else just disappears.

Despite how dangerous a life Baby seems to be living, and the lowly nature of the characters she knows, there is almost no tension in the book because you never really believe that anything will happen to Baby.

As well (and maybe this is a necessary trade-off to make Baby's narrative voice fun and lively), there is little drama in the situations because the drug abuse, the lost friends, the group homes, the abusive pimp, the negligent father, are all depicted lightly. There is never that feeling that Cormac McCarthy can give his young characters in "All The Pretty Horses" and "The Crossing" that this event, or this decision, will either save me or destroy me. And this character is definitely being destroyed, but the gravity of this doesn't really come across.

As I say however, this is probably a necessary trade-off to make the narrative voice so lively.

So, basically, this book won't kill you and won't be a total waste of money, but you'd be far better off spending your money on "A Complicated Kindness" by Miriam Toews (which is another recent Canadian novel told by a young female narrator).



5. QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

Narrative voice: first person retrospective
p. 280 (jumping on tippy toes) "That was a kind of a prayer I used to do back then." Simply describes, without judging.

How would you describe Baby's relationship with Jules? p. 90 With Alphonse?

Falling through the cracks. What opportunities did society and its institutions have to intervene? Social workers, Jules, Jules in hospital, Jules in rehab, foster care, being hit by car, school, community center, crisis hotline (Felix), arm dislocated, Xavier's parents.

Contrast between the way Baby feels about her new apartment with Jules and the way we feel as it is described. P. 52

How do you feel about the humor in the book? p. 53, 56

What are the different forces that motivate Baby at different points in the book? To be good at school? To get back to Jules? To join the community center. To seek Alphone's attention. To let herself be prostituted? To use heroin? (p. 72) To hug other people's mothers?

The way children can move on the streets. When is a child old enough to be held accountable for their actions?

What allows Baby to turn her life around? And how does she do it?

Is the book hopeful, overall?

How would this book have sounded if Paloma from The Elegance of the Hedgehog had written it?

HarperCollins Reading Guide
* 1. How would you characterize Jules's feelings about his daughter, Baby, and his behavior as a father?

2. How does the itinerant, impoverished life that Baby and Jules lead affect Baby's self-esteem and her sense of her place in the world?

3. How does the confessional quality of the first-person narrative of Lullabies for Little Criminals impact your appreciation and understanding of the hardships Baby experiences?

4. To what extent do you think Jules bears responsibility for Baby's increasingly risky behavior?

5. How do Baby's friendships with Linus Lucas, Theo, and Felix enable her to endure some of the difficulties of her childhood?

*6. "Every good pimp is a mother." What does Alphonse represent to Baby, and why does she eventually agree to turn tricks for him?
How does Alphonse feel about Baby?

7. Why does Baby ultimately decide to try heroin, the drug that has nearly destroyed her life because of her father's ongoing addiction to it?

8. To what extent is Baby's story in Lullabies for Little Criminals a tragedy?

9. After keeping silent for so long, why does Jules finally share information with Baby about her deceased mother, Manon Tremblay, and how do these details affect Baby?

10. What does the final scene of the novel in rural Val des Loups suggest about Baby's future?


6. Quotable Quotes

"Jules had implicitly taught me to turn my back on anyone but him, the way he had done to his family. At that point in my life it probably saved me from an awful lot of heartbreak."

When the doctor takes her off painkillers. "He said it was necessary for me to feel pain so that I would know if I was being hurt."

"I felt them staring as I walked away in that haughty way that stoned twelve-year-old girls sometimes have."

"It never occurs to you when you are very young to need something other than what your parents have to offer you."

"Every good pimp is a mother."

On having sex with Alphonse: "I felt like something terrible had happened to me and he was comforting me."

"All teenagers start leading double lives anyhow; mine was just a little more extreme."

"There was a part of me that was smart and original and nerdy too."

"When I thought of my old friends, Linus Lucas and Theo, I realized that they were nor really criminals either. They were like me. We were just acting out the strangest, tragic little roles, pretending to be criminals in order to get by. We gave very convincing performances."

I was tired of their superiority complexes. Maintaining a superiority complex, especially when you were a loser, took a lot of mental effort and denial."

Rescuing Matt

Rescuing Matt (twice in one day)

On Friday night Matt had a party to attend. He wanted to practice dancing in the afternoon, so we reviewed salsa and merengue. I taught him a couple of new steps. Matt and another friend were going to the party together. That boy's father was going to drop them off, and José Miguel said he would pick them up at 1:30 in the morning.

I had a quiet evening at home. I bathed with lavender bubble bath and went to bed early, having had a busy day. At midnight the phone rang. Matt was calling from the party. The party wasn't very good, he said. There weren't many girls. He had only danced once. He and his friend wanted to come back, but José Miguel wasn't answering his cell phone and calls didn't seem to going through to the house phone. Should they take a taxi?

I told them to a wait, and that I'd call José Miguel. I got the answering machine on the house phone. I got voicemail on the cell phone. I tried calling several times. Finally I got up, got dressed, and went out to José Miguel's apartment. At least he is only a five-minute walk away. I rang the doorbell insistently. He finally answered, and I told him that Matt was calling and he needed to deal with it. He did. He went and got Matt and the friend.

On Saturday morning Matt apologized for having woken me up in the middle of the night. It wasn't Matt who owed me an apology.

On Saturday morning I went to the grocery store at the Gran Estación shopping center. I had to go today because I had credit coupons from previous purchases made during the Exito anniversary sale, and these were good until 15 November. I got a very good deal on fish: I bought tilapia, catfish, and surimi. On my way home my cell phone rang. Matt was at José Miguel's. He was back from his tennis class. While he was putting his bike away, the door swung shut behind him, with his keys outside, locking him into the apartment. Where was I, Matt wanted to know, and could I come and unlock him? I diverted my course to head for José Miguel's, and 15 minutes later I was unlocking the door for Matt. That lock has always bothered me. It is a real fire hazard/death trap.

Bogota Life

Bogota lost out to Toronto to host the 2015 Pan-American Games. Political cartoonist Vladdo wrote: "It beats all that Toronto would be chosen for the 2015 Pan-American games when there's no Democratic Security there."


In 1999, while going to Montreal with the boys, we ended up with the last three seats on the plane from Bogota to Miami, traveling with the Colombian team en route to the Pan-Am games in Winnipeg. It is fun to travel with a national team!

Bicycle beats private car and public transit in Bogota transport competition.
http://www.semana.com/noticias-nacion/bicicleta-rapida-transmilenio-carro-particular/131337.aspx


The Elegance of the Hedgehog

I gave up on reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery for book club. I am so disillusioned with the book that I am even considering blowing off my book club meeting this Tuesday. Even when I haven't liked the book, normally I'll go because I enjoy the company, the conversation, the food and the wine, but I just feel so completely negative about this book that I am having trouble picturing myself at the meeting. The phrase, if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all, keeps popping into my head, and I don't want to simply trash the book without acknowledging some redeeming feature. I found it pretentious, pedantic, and utterly unbelievable. Reneé, the smug and superior autodidact concierge, bent on feeding her insatiable mind and spewing her wisdom while hiding beneath a déclassé veneer meant to meet social expectations, is a paragon of inconology (as opposed to iconography). Paloma, the malaise-ridden, worldly, weary 12-year-old (tired of exactly what, we do not know) is her junior counterpart. Their common refrain is: "Let me explain…" because apparently that is their job in this novel: to explain ad nauseam.

There is an adage in theater: You can either show it or say it. Meaning that you can use the characters' traits to guide the development of the story through action and interaction, or you can have talking heads expounding on their beliefs. This book was about a couple of talking heads, and I wished that they would shut up. I guess I'm just more of a practical kind of gal and I feel that fiction should have a plot. Silly me. I can think of two similar books that had similar characters but that used the characters to further the action: Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky and Headlong by Michael Frayn. Both handle their problematic characters with much more aplomb, managing to be intelligent without being overbearing, and giving the reader enough credit that they can allow the story to unfold without over explaining.

Sometimes book club readings resonate at unexpected moments. In last week's episode of Dr. House (many weeks ago if you saw it in North America; we have to wait until it has been subtitled before it is broadcast in Latin America), Gregory House used V.S. Ramachandran's mirror box therapy to cure a man who was suffering from phantom limb pain --just like we had read about in The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge.

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Putting on Eyres

I was unlucky enough to have read The Thirteenth Tale in my book club. Reading this book made me wonder, what are the elements that inform the reader that a book is meant to be realistic and plausible, or that the reader is meant to suspend disbelief to allow for supernatural elements, and why is Setterfield’s attempt to balance these two approaches not wholly successful?

The style is nouveau gothic, replete with madness, incest, rape, illegitimate births, “ghosts,” arson, murder and, above all, Keeping Secrets, set against the backdrop of the Yorkshire moors, with plenty of nods to the literary inspirations of the genre, such as Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Woman in White. You can practically hear the creaking doors, whistling wind, and crashing notes on the organ as you read.

I found the story’s resolution to be completely contrived, sentimental, and implausible. At least Vida Winter, did have an interesting story, even if her telling of it was exceedingly coy. Unlike the whiny Margaret who has spent most of her life trying to work herself into a romantic hysteria over the loss of her own twin at birth, which she accidentally discovered when she found the birth and death certificates at age 10. I also have serious doubts about Margaret’s competence as a writer, mainly because of her persistent habit of using prepositions to end sentences with: “Contemporary literature is a world I knew little of” (p. 29). One of the first major mysteries that the book presents is why the famous author Vida Winter would hire the unknown (and grammatically challenged) bookstore clerk Margaret Lea to write her autobiography. It is revealed at the end of the book that Winter had read Lea’s little known biography of the Landier brothers, and figured that she had insider knowledge about siblings. That seems to be an awfully flimsy pretext that we are given to resolve one of the book’s Burning Questions.

The book actually acknowledges its own silliness when Dr. Clifton prescribes Margaret a dose of Sherlock Holmes as a cure for her ailments wrought from romanticism. This Sherlock Holmes reference also serves as the turning point for the book’s resolution, in which Margaret puts her analytical skills to work and resolves Vida Winter’s mystery. And, just to ties things neatly together, we are informed in the final chapter, that Dr. Clifton has romantic intentions toward Margaret. His attraction to her would have to be the great Unresolved Mystery. Frankly Margaret has more in common with the reclusive Aurelius who has spent his life pining for his unknown family, as Margaret has been pining for her long-dead twin sister, whose ghost appears to her in the book’s postscriptum to say goodbye, and to wrap up the story.

Along the way, Margaret, an avid reader, makes an observation about the process of reading a book and being aware of how many pages remain in which the author will present her dénouement. All I can say is, I’m glad it is finished.

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The Madonnas of Leningrad

The Madonnas of Leningrad: A Novel by Debra Dean


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Memory allows us to survive under duress. Memory also plays tricks on us, incorporating magical elements into our lives. Memories exist of things that could not possibly have happened, and yet that is how we remember them. Marina's hallucinations, brought on by hunger, enable her to see visions in the paintings, and allow her to process her rape on the rooftop as a visitation by a god. These become survival mechanisms that allow her to accept and incorporate the events, without being certain what, if anything, actually took place. Her mind finds beauty, and this quality also enables her to survive. Anya, the babushka, teaches Marina to build a "memory palace" in order to recall the paintings that once hung on the walls of the Hermitage Museum. Recreating the memory of those paintings, stored away to protect them from the ravages of the Second World War, allows Marina to keep her mind sharp and focus on beauty when the rest of her life is hardship.

The book moves back and forth between the contemporary Marina who is suffering from Alzheimer's, and the young woman who was a tour guide at the Hermitage Museum and who lived in the museum's cellar that was used as a bomb shelter during the war.

Author Debra Dean juxtaposes descriptions of the paintings as an indirect commentary on the characters' lives in a way that is evocative without being heavy-handed. What might have been trite, sensationalist or cruel, transcends to become hyperrealist and universal.

The book is slightly uneven, in that the story told in the past is more interesting and compelling than that of the contemporary characters. It could be argued that this is also true of people with Alzheimer's, that their memories of the past are more vivid than their present, but that does not mean that this makes a good literary device if the contemporary story is noticeably weaker. With Alzheimer's, the rooms of Marina's memory palace are emptying. Still, this book had moments of high beauty, and overall I recommend it.

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The 13th Element

The 13th Element: The Sordid Tale of Murder, Fire, and Phosphorus by John Emsley


My rating: 1 of 5 stars
Cheap Sensationalism

The first hundred pages address the history of the alchemists and their attempts to make phosphorus, in a breathless recounting of professional jealousy and completing claims to have discovered…. Oh, sorry I dozed off for a moment there-- a method for its manufacture, mainly using vast quantities of human urine. Early medicinal claims have all been debunked. Well, that covers the first hundred pages.

It has some interesting anecdotes like the history of the Swedish match king, but these have no lasting bearing on the "story," and as I finished reading each anecdote, I couldn't help but thinking, so what?

The most interesting aspects of phosphorus were the ones that relate to daily life. For example the debate about the environmental damage allegedly caused by phosphorus in laundry detergent, and how subsequently it was discovered was that the culprits were the heavy metals, oils and insecticides that had killed the zooplankton that eat the algae blooms. I remember the hue and cry over phosphates, and then how the debate quietly faded away.

The book attempts to compelling but the closest it achieves is sensationalism, with graphic descriptions of the gruesome ailment phossy jaw, the horrors of the incendiary bombs that were dropped on Germany, tales of murder by phosphorus, and a look at how phosphorus might be implicated in what is known as spontaneous human combustion. All in all, The 13th Element left a bad taste ion my mouth… wait a minute, what is that taste? I've been poisoned! Arrrrgh…..

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Headlong

Headlong by Michael Frayn



My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In many ways Headlong follows the model of the tragedy, in that the outcome is the inevitable result of a fatal mistake by the main character, philosopher Martin Clay. For those who prefer the definition of tragedy as hinging on a fatal character flaw, Clay is a gloriously flawed character. He is self-absorbed, dismissive, delusional, presumptuous, pedantic, duplicitous, deceitful, withholds information, jealous, and insecure. I won’t give away which of these flaws is his downfall.

The outcome may be tragic, but the journey itself is entirely wrought with tragicomic elements. Consistent with Frayn's best known work, the play Noises Off, there is considerable bouncing and banging about, with doors slamming, people running in and out, misunderstandings, blurting out the wrong thing, sex farce, pictures flying out of windows, dogs sticking their snouts into indiscrete places, ridiculous hiding in the woods, and a smattering of references to The Importance of Being Ernest.

I kept thinking as I was reading this book that it would have been a very different story if it had been written by Dan Brown. In their story telling Frayn and Brown share some similarities: a huge amount of historical documentation backs up their work, and both exhibit a willingness to create a scenario in which a plausible historical event that cannot be substantiated is allowed to take flight. In this case of Headlong, the main character Martin Clay believes he has found a missing painting by Bruegel that would complete a set of paintings of the seasons. As Clay searches for historical backing for his claim, we are introduced to the intrigues of the social and political context in which Bruegel painted. This, however, is where the similarity ends, because if this were a Dan Brown book it would hinge upon some sort of conspiracy theory involving lesser-known Church sects and it would have been a whole lot less funny.

What we do find out about is the Spanish Inquisition, portrayed in Bruegel's paintings through subtle references to all its bloody splendor. I came away from this book with considerable respect for Bruegel as an artist, considering the challenges that he had to surmount. Frayn has produced a ripping good yarn. It gets a little slow as we have to plod through Netherlandish history, but these details are necessary to the resolution of the mystery… as necessary as pink baler twine!

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