Author Archives: chaman

Rushdie memoir casts a spell

Joseph Anton
By Salman Rushdie
Random House
636 pages, $30

Reviewed by Arnold Kopecky

“Where they burn books they will in the end burn people too.” If you could boil Salman Rushdie’s quarter-million-word memoir down to a single phrase, that would probably be it – though it wasn’t him who said so, nor was it Joseph [Conrad] Anton [Chekhov], the name Rushdie assumed for the last decade of the 20th century. No, it was the German writer Heinrich Heine, writing a century earlier, his words borne out first by the Nazis and later recalled by Rushdie in light of his own experience.
In 1989, soon after the Ayatollah issued the fatwa and the government of Iran started sending assassin squads to England, Rushdie/Anton watches a mob burning The Satanic Verses on television and shouting for the author’s death. This is happening not in Iran, but in Bradford, England; twelve years later, the same mob’s mentality is now incinerating 3,000 thousand people in the twin towers. Rushdie’s private hell has become the world’s war on terror.
Perhaps it helped that I had two weeks in the Mexican sun with nothing better to do than absorb over 600 pages of prose, but Joseph Anton cast a spell on me. I suffered just the slightest bit of detail-burnout near the end. Rushdie kept an immaculate record of every conversation, thought, emotion and social transgression (both his own and those of his friends and acquaintances) throughout the fatwa years, knowing that one day, if he lived, it would be him who wrote them down. The writing is less drunken, more crisp – more accessible, as he would probably hate to hear – than in his fiction; in both substance and style, I’m reminded of G.G. Marquez’s News of a Kidnapping, the riveting account of ten prominent Colombians held hostage for a year by Pablo Escobar.
For a while, Rushdie says, he thought he would turn his fugitive years into a novel, as he’s done with every other aspect of his life. Saleem Sinai’s Methwold Estates in Midnight’s Children, we learn, is a precise replica of Rushdie’s childhood home; the opening scene of The Satanic Verses was inspired by the Air India flight that Qaddafi blew up, with one of Rushdie’s relatives aboard. But when it came to writing about the fatwa years, he eventually concluded that “the only reason his story was interesting was that it had actually happened.”
Interesting, too, that a writer whose best fiction was written in the first person should choose to cast his memoir in the third. Perhaps it has something to do with the surreality of those fatwa years. These were years consumed equally by trying to gain entry into “the halls of power” in order to convince the world’s governments to help him, and by trying to remain a writer of fiction. Throughout it all, Rushdie endured astonishing displays of antipathy from the British public, compounded by the petty squalor of shuffling from one house to another at the behest of an oft-grumbling Scotland Yard. One moment he’s having tea with the Prime Minister of England, the next he’s hiding behind a kitchen sink so that the plumber won’t recognize him.
The memoir reads like a bookish Jason Bourne movie, with a cameo from every writer you ever heard of – good guys and gals include Eco, Fuentes, Sontag, Mailer, Grass, Marquez; John le Carre and Roald Dahl come off as surprisingly bad. The cast expands beyond the world of letters to embrace the likes of Bono, Gorbachev, and Bill Clinton, who – predictably but hilariously – is ever the slut.
Some readers may feel Rushdie’s record of these remarkable years veers into A-list gossip, occasionally even revenge (think twice, reader, before divorcing a famous writer); but a hundred years from now, when everyone in the narrative is dead, what will remain is an intimate portrait of the absurd ends to which religious fanaticism can take not just a life, but humanity.

Arno Kopecky is a travel writer and journalist whose stories have appeared in The Walrus, Foreign Policy, Reader’s Digest and the Globe and Mail. His first book, The Devil’s Curve, is a literary travelogue about his journeys through South America.

 

P.K. Page biographer reveals her method

By Lynne Van Luven

“People generally don’t really think about mortality until they get into their 80s,” P.K. Page biographer Sandra Djwa was quoted as saying in a recent interview.

I find this statement intriguing because I think about death almost every day – decay in life, the future ever-impinging on the present, skull beneath the skin, that sort of thing. (Too much black-romantic poetry at an impressionable age, I suspect, augmented by too many news reports from trouble spots on the globe.)

It’s been almost three years since Page’s death on January 14, 2010, so I decided to attend Djwa’s public talk January 10, 2013, at a University of Victoria visit sponsored by The Malahat Review. Djwa, a gracious woman of 73, had visited poet Tim Lilburn’s class the day before, and now she was standing before us, her auburn hair glinting under the classroom lights, as she explained why her “private and sometimes reticent” subject, P.K. Page finally agreed to an interview.

Describing herself as “friends of a sort,” with Page, Djwa said that biography is a big commitment for anyone because it’s like “letting an interloper into your life . . . an intrusive, unwanted guest.” Djwa first met Page through her poetry in 1962; the two did not connect in person until 1970, when Page visited Djwa’s poetry class at Simon Fraser University, where Djwa is now professor emerita.

In February 1997, in a letter to Djwa, Page “wondered, can we do it?” Djwa quoted her own letter to the poet, in which she too questioned if she was up to the task. Obviously, she was, since Journey With No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page is one of five books short-listed for the $25,00 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction.

Djwa cited the extensive arsenal she used to forage for facts about her subject: interviews with the author and with people who knew her; letters and diaries; news reports and archival documents; the subject’s journals, and, of course, her poetry itself. “Memory,” noted Djwa, “is a very tricky reconstructive mechanism.”

Throughout her talk, Djwa charmed the audience with her wry, self-effacing wit. She suggested a biography was a reflection of one life obsessed by another, and she noted that she sometimes tested Page’s memories of a situation with others’ stories about the same event. She sub-titled her book “a life” not “the life,” she said, because every biography is the “life of a subject as seen by a specific biographer at a particular point” in that person’s life. Nobody ever knows everything about another human being.

She cited one scene in her biography in which she had substantiated Page’s memories of her early days by an interview with Mavis Gallant. From that, she forged a description. “Is it true?” she asked the audience after she read a passage. “Well, mostly.”

Welcome to The Coastal Spectator

 “I think everybody’s a rock critic,” said Rolling Stone’s Lester Bangs in a 1980 interview.  In defence of his claim, Bangs said,  “when you go into a record store and you decide to buy this one over that one, you’re being a rock critic.  I don’t have any more credentials than anyone else.”

Well, times have changed mightily since 1980: iTunes sings it all,  music stores are closing and records are retro.  Still, Bangs had the right idea; everyone has an opinion, based on personal taste.  We’d like to hope the taste is augmented by research and cogitation.

The Coastal Spectator is a bit of an experiment:  we want to see if “culture vultures” want to talk about what they are experiencing on Vancouver Island and its immediate environs.   The original site springs from a University of Victoria Department of Writing 2011 MFA course in criticism and reviewing, but it’s now open to anyone who wishes to share assessments of all forms of Canadian culture, including books, films, plays, music and art gallery shows . . . if  a cultural event occurs on Vancouver Island, it deserves appreciation and observation.  And The Coastal Spectator wants to hear your thoughts about it.

You might feel a whisker of context scratching at the back of your mind.  You might think, “Hmm, The Spectator. . .  Wasn’t that a periodical published back in 18th century London by essayists Richard Steele and Joseph Addison?”  Yes, you are right:  the periodical  first appeared March 1, 1711; it aimed to “enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality. ”  And it posited its articles in a fictional way through a Spectator Club whose imaginary members extolled their ideas about society. 

We’re hoping to be less stuffy and more real.  We want to hear from actual people, who partake of and care about arts and culture, in its many contemporary forms.

So, take a look around our site, and join us if you wish.