Author Archives: Coastal Spectator

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

By John Vaillant (Knopf Canada, 2010, 329 pages, $34.95
Reviewed by Frances Backhouse

A tiger, wounded by a hunter, returns to stalk and kill the man and terrorize his village before it finally meets its own death in a dramatic showdown. It sounds like myth or legend, but as the subtitle of John Vaillant’s latest award-winning book states, this is a true story, all the more powerful because of its veracity.

Vaillant’s first book, The Golden Spruce, examined the ecological, political and economic reverberations of one exceptional tree’s destruction and won the 2005 Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction. Now The Tiger has picked up the 2011 B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, this country’s most lucrative non-fiction prize. Both books reflect Vaillant’s acute concerns about environmental issues. “The Golden Spruce and The Tiger are really the same story,” he told the audience at the B.C. award ceremony. “I just told it a different way.”

Despite the similarity in theme, the research requirements of the two projects were literally worlds apart. Not only did Vaillant travel to the remote Primorye Territory in Russia’s Far East, he also conducted most of his interviews through an interpreter. The depth of the information he gathered is a tribute to his journalistic skills and to the talents of Josh Stenberg, whom he acknowledges for his role as “fixer, minder, cultural advisor, counsellor, and historian,” as well as translator.

Vaillant begins the book with an exquisitely rendered scene of high suspense, as the protagonist and his dog move unwittingly through the dark toward their fatal encounter with the Amur tiger that lies in wait for them:

“Then, as the familiar angles take shape across the clearing, the dog collides with a scent as with a wall and stops short, growling. They are hunting partners and the man understands someone is there by the cabin. The hackles on the dog’s back and on his own neck rise together.

“Together, they hear a rumble in the dark that seems to come from everywhere at once.”

Primed by this brief prologue, I was surprised to turn the page and plunge into dense, fact-filled exposition. If you’ve heard about Brad Pitt’s production company optioning The Tiger and are looking for a fast-paced, Hollywood-style adventure, you’d better wait for the movie. If, however, you don’t mind a narrative thread that is spun out gradually, while simultaneously being woven into a meticulously researched and intelligently considered rumination on the relationship between people and tigers, read the book. Vaillant is a master of this writing style, though I would have preferred far fewer footnotes.

Given the current domination of memoir within the literary nonfiction genre, Vaillant’s decision to stand outside this story is surprising and admirable. In a Q&A interview posted on his web site (at www.thetigerbook.com/faq/), he explains that his initial impulse was to write a first-person travelogue. He stifled it out of respect for the story’s “mythic” dimensions and the people involved. “[The] events are so intense and poignant that I felt as if I hadn’t really earned the right to insert myself into them.”

Instead, he takes us into the events through the participants, focusing on Vladimir Markov and Andrei Pochepnya, the tiger’s victims, and Yuri Trush, the game warden charged with tracking and killing the tiger. Although he never met two of these men, Vaillant creates detailed portraits of all of them. He probes far back into their personal histories and maps their lives in an attempt to understand their motivations and fears during the winter of the tiger attacks.

There is little doubt that Markov, a known poacher, tried to kill the tiger so he could sell its body parts on the black market. But rather than make a villain of him, Vaillant takes the same kind of big-picture approach he took with The Golden Spruce. In this case, he traces a line from perestroika and the dismantling of the Communist system to the widespread unemployment in Primorye that pushed men like Markov into poaching as a survival strategy.

Vaillant is donating part of the book’s proceeds to organizations working to protect Primorye’s Amur tigers, which now number fewer than 400. More important, he has raised awareness of the precarious status of all tigers – not by proselytizing, but by speaking to both our primal fear of these beautiful, deadly cats and our fascination.

As Vaillant notes, “Tigers … get our full attention. They strike a deep and resonant chord within us, and one reason is because, as disturbing as it may be, man-eating occurs within the acceptable parameters of the tiger’s nature, which has informed our nature.”

Subconsciously, we all still remember what it’s like to be prey. The Tiger makes us face that ancient terror.

 

Winds of Heaven: Emily Carr, Carvers & The Spirits of the Forest

Directed by Michael Ostroff
Reviewed by Frances Backhouse

 

Like many contemporary British Columbians, I can’t hike on the West Coast without Emily Carr ghosting along beside me. I don’t even realize she’s there until suddenly a shaft of light strikes a cedar in just the right way and the scene before me transforms into an oil painting on canvas. Ottawa-based director Michael Ostroff seems to be subject to the same kind of double vision and has turned it to magnificent advantage in his latest cinematic offering, Winds of Heaven, which premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) in October 2010.

After struggling for recognition as an artist for most of her life, Carr is now widely acknowledged as one of Canada’s pre-eminent 20th-century painters. Ostroff could have simply chronicled her rise to fame, providing a comfortable diversion for her many admirers. Instead, he chose to explore Carr’s relationship to the First Nations culture that so strongly influenced her creative journey. The resulting 90-minute documentary is a nuanced and original take on her work and life, which ViFF executive director Alan Franey calls “[o]ne of the most important films ever made about our province.”

British Columbia joined Canada in 1871, the year Carr was born; by the time she died in 1945, the province had assumed its modern identity. As Carr was growing up, B.C.’s original inhabitants were being increasingly marginalized. Yet, unlike most of her contemporaries, Carr was fascinated by indigenous culture, particularly the work of First Nations carvers. Her paintings of totem poles are among her most famous.  Klee Wyck, a memoir about her visits to First Nations villages, won the 1941 Governor General’s award for nonfiction and continues to sell well. According to First Nations art critic Marcia Crosby, however, Carr’s ongoing popularity does no favours to the people who furnished her inspiration.

“The way [Carr’s] history has been collapsed with aboriginal history has the power to teach very old ideas,” observes Crosby, who, along with ’Ksan museum curator Laurel Smith Wilson and art historians Gerta Moray and Susan Crean, provides commentary through the film. One of Ostroff’s main goals, an admirable one, appears to be refuting those out-dated ideas about the obsolescence and inferiority of First Nations culture. At times this narrative thread threatens to eclipse Carr’s story, but ultimately the integration is successful. My only objection to the film  is that Ostroff comes close to holding Carr responsible for an entire generation’s racist attitudes and hurtful behaviour, not just her own.

Fittingly for a film about art, Winds of Heaven is a treat to watch. John Walker’s fluid camerawork gives us sumptuous footage of wild coastal landscapes and luminous rainforest close-ups that perfectly complement shots of Carr’s paintings, while archival footage and photographs and period recreations fill in historical background.

The dramatizations never show Carr in full—usually only her hands are visible: sketching, painting, typing—but we hear her through the voice of veteran Stratford actress Diane D’Aquila, who reads selections from Carr’s letters, diaries and published writings. What we do see are vivid, believable reconstructions of Carr’s world, including her childhood home, the pension where she lived while studying art in Paris and the Victoria boarding house that she ran for years and memorialized in The House of All Sorts. Scenes of her 1930s painting expeditions into the semi-wilderness around Victoria, with a caravan she dubbed “The Elephant,” are especially striking.

For anyone who is unacquainted with Carr, Winds of Heaven offers an excellent introduction. More important, it challenges those of us who think we already know her to take another look at the artist and her art — and to fully appreciate where both came from.

For more insights into Emily Carr, check out The Other Emily: Redefining Emily Carr, March 2 to October 10, 2011, at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria.

A Celebration of Myrna Kostash’s Prodigal Daughter: A Journey To Byzantium

Open Space Gallery,
510 Fort Street, Victoria
January 20, 2011
Reviewed by Judy Leblanc

Since I am not usually a follower of non-fiction, I wasn’t sure how I’d respond to an evening with Myrna Kostash at Open Space. The Edmonton author is known for the intellectual rigour she has applied to a body of award-winning non-fiction books, numerous articles, radio documentaries and playscripts. The evening unfolded in the way she describes her book, Prodigal Daughter (published by The University of Alberta Press) as, “part this, part that.” Her readings, interspersed with commentary, swept me along on a journey that was as much intellectual and spiritual as it was personal. I found myself wondering what icons I might pursue were I so inclined.

To write the book, Kostash pursued the legend of a third-century saint named Demetrius. She made two trips through the Balkan countries of the former Byzantium Empire. Her research culminated in Thessalonica, where Demetrius, killed during a period of Christian persecution, was martyred 200 years later.

A hushed audience of just 11 people, the airy gallery and the topic for the evening made for a vaguely hallowed atmosphere. Kostash applied a light touch to what could have been some heavy slogging. The audience laughed when she said that in the seventies she had the  “big fat attitude” that preceded the New Journalism. At one point, she stepped aside from the podium, pointed to the image of Demetrius on the cover of her book, and asked if we knew who it was. Apparently, none of us did.

“Have you heard of Thessalonia?” she asked eagerly, pleased to get some nods.

The ease and accessibility of her verbal delivery was evident in her selected readings. Kostash, the co-founder and past-president of the Creative Nonfiction Collective, has long been a champion of creative non-fiction. She described Prodigal Daughter as “part memoir and part reportage.” The narrative is rife with personal anecdotes. Her attention to detail, common in fiction, drew me into the story. She read from the first page of her book: “I was nine years old, sitting at a worn wooden desk, in a handsome brick school…”  Kostash has thoroughly assimilated her research; that’s a blessing because the book’s bibliography is 15 pages long.

Demetrius employed miracles to defend his beloved Thessalonica from barbarians, essentially the Slavic peoples: Kostash’s people. Kostash, from Edmonton, is of Ukrainian descent. In spite of the Slavs status as barbarians, centuries ago they adopted the Orthodox Church, complete with Demetrius. This curious fact was the impetus for her book. However, the story’s vision shifted into something unexpected.  Kostash reminded us that creative non-fiction often has two levels: “apparent subject,” and the story below, that which is “driving all this.”  She went on to relate a conversation she had with Saskatchewan writer, Trevor Herriot. She had asked him how she might persuade people to care about her book. He challenged her with the question, “Why do you care?”  He suggested that the writing of the book expressed a “yearning for the divine.”

Ever a researcher, Kostash’s recent return to the Greek Orthodox Church of her childhood came from wanting to understand who Saint Demetrius is to people who have faith. She confessed to having some “issues” with the church. Later, an acquaintance of hers told me that Myrna is “shaking things up” in her church. I don’t doubt it and more power to her. Institutions of all kind, not only churches, need thinkers like Kostash in their midst.

Prodigal Daughter, with its esoteric concerns and scholarly background, may not have a large commercial appeal. However, its intelligence and its author’s passion for her subject set this book clearly above the current glut of facile spiritual-journey accounts.

The Sentimentalists

Gasperau Press, 2009, 216 pages hardcover, $27.95 /
Douglas and McIntyre, 2010, 216 pages paperback, $19.95
Reviewed by Arleen Paré

In 2010, Johanna Skidsrud won the Scotia Bank Giller Prize for her novel, The Sentimentalists. This alone guaranteed increased sales for the book, originally published by Gasperau, a small Nova Scotia press, but the resulting controversy about the inability of Gasperau’s small print run to meet post-award book sale demands resulted in greater publicity.   This is Skidsrud’s first novel, again unusual for a Giller Prize winner.   The Sentimentalists is a fine novel; it deserves the attention it received.

The Sentimentalists tells the story of an unnamed female narrator who lives with her alcoholic father, Napoleon Haskell, through the summer he dies of cancer.  During this time, he describes his experiences in the Vietnam War.  The two live with Henry, an old man whose town was flooded by the St. Lawrence Seaway in the 1950s.  Henry’s son, Owen, Napoleon’s war buddy, was killed mysteriously in Vietnam.  The novel, though ostensibly Napoleon’s daughter’s story, told largely from her point of view, focuses primarily on Napoleon.   It begins with Napoleon’s house: “The house my father left behind in Fargo, North Dakota, was never really a house at all.  Always instead, it was the idea of a house.”   As the novel begins, so it proceeds, dealing more with ideas, the hidden and incomplete, more with the invisible than the visible.  The boat her father tries to build never becomes a boat.  Henry’s flooded town was not ever a town.   Her father’s story is pocked with holes.  Owen’s death remains unsolved.

Skidsrud is also a poet.  Her first poetry collection, Late Nights With Wild Cowboys appeared in 2008.   Skidsrud and Gasperau have a Nova Scotia-based history, but now Skidsrud lives in Montreal and The Sentimentalist is published by Vancouver’s Douglas and McIntyre.  Douglas and McIntyre bought publishing rights from Gasperau when the artisan press and printer couldn’t keep pace with post-Giller printing demands.   I have both editions.  They are similar-sized, but the original is slightly thicker, denoting the better quality of paper used.  It’s a handsome book.  The second version, the version most will purchase, is standard:  less subtle, less handsome.   I must be a sentimentalist.  I read the second version, unwilling to blemish the first.

The Sentimentalists might never have been published at all if Gasperau, mainly a poetry press, hadn’t originally given it a contract.  The novel is sufficiently unorthodox that it might not have been accepted by more mainstream publishers.  But its unconventionality and poetic qualities are what make it interesting, prize-winningly so.  As a poet, I appreciate that Skidsrud employs poetic diction and complex syntax, but I think most readers will.  Typical fiction publishers would have considered her long, multi-claused sentences to be excessive, ungrammatical, perhaps, eschewing their rhythmic qualities and philosophical weight.  They might have worried about the novel’s ephemeral narrative, its unlikely plot turns, its phantom-like characters, its shifting points of view, its fictionally unsatisfactory ending.   Traditional fiction-heavy publishers might have balked at the following paragraph:

But as I floated over Henry’s house, and did and did not listen to myself, it occurred to me that the reverse of the thing was also true.  That instead of disappearing – or equally, as we disappeared – we also existed more heavily, in layers.  And that by remaining, as in floodwater, always at the surface of everything, though our points of reference begin to slowly change, it is always so slight a transition, moment to moment, that it is almost always imperceptible.

I savoured every sentence, all six or seven lines of every sentence, in thrall to Skidsrud’s language, her skill to lead the reader through each thoughtful convolution.  The book is beautiful and provocative.  And the mystery remains: how The Sentimentalists slipped through the strict fiction standards to win Canadian fiction’s finest award.

That Gaspereau did not balk highlights the importance of Canada’s small presses.  Some will take literary chances.  Some are loyal to their authors.  But then the almost punitive reversal: when a small press author wins big, a big press must step in, because the small press cannot afford to support the prize.  This dynamic, where risk-taking and discovery on the part of small presses is followed by acquisition and profit by larger presses demonstrates the importance of public support for both large and small Canadian publishers, so that Canadians can go on enjoying such prize-winning novels.

Charm, Beauty and Poise: Timeless Tips for Girls Who Have Let Themselves Go

Performance / Fund Raiser
University of Victoria Student Union – Michelle Pujol Lounge
January 27, 2011
Reviewed by Arleen Paré

Sheila Norgate’s performance of Charm, Beauty and Poise made me laugh out loud.  On a foggy end-of-January night, that’s a good thing.   I’m her perfect audience demographic, an over-fifty feminist.  The rest of the mainly over-fifty feminist audience was laughing too.   Her conservative set-up, deadpan delivery and behind-the-lectern “lecture,” allowed her selected ad material to skewer itself in solid satire.

Norgate, self-described recovering nice-girl, is a successful Gabriola Island visual artist, well-known in Victoria.  Her paintings have sold in art galleries across the continent.  She’s also a performance artist, and has presented Charm, Beauty and Poise in other venues before bringing it to UVic to help student social justice group, Armed with Understanding, to raise money for women’s groups in Victoria and Vancouver.

Norgate calls herself a feminist (NOT, she warns, a post-feminist), and the largely female audience (I counted three men in the room), seemed onside.  The room was packed, which surprised me in an event organized by student volunteers, with promotion primarily through social media, and held in a SUB meeting room at UVic.   Nor is Charm, Beauty and Poise slick.  Norgate deploys no digital technology, no power point, no lighting effects, nor musical background.  This was old-fashioned feminist activism, live-performance satire, a one-woman send-up of patriarchal values.  Some might find it dated, but not this audience.  With Sheila wearing red taffeta, pill-box hat and boa (although her stodgy shoes were all wrong!), the show’s tongue-in-cheek premise is that women these days eschew much-needed beauty help.  In her role as a Miss Manners sort, Norgate provides “corrective” advice, covering a range of beauty remedies, including chin-straps and exercises to reduce cheek fat.  We guffawed, but several younger women in the audience seemed more outraged than amused, and one later wondered why Norgate hadn’t addressed the issue of next steps.   I wondered too at the difficult issues of the “all-whiteness” of the images she used, the lack of biting feminism, and of how feminist and/or lesbian fashionistas might react to the show.

With the use of a slide-projector, Norgate displayed image after womanly image of archival ads.  She paired the images with historical text of pre-feminist beauty etiquette in those not-so-distant times.  While slides bore dates, helping establish context and authenticity, Norgate failed to provide their magazine origins.  As she showed one slide depicting directional arrows on a woman’s body, Norgate read the official formula for the ideal female figure, which, should you need to know, dictates that the width of a woman’s shoulders must be the width of her hips, and her crotch must be half-way between her feet and her head.   A 1961 ad warned that “no face needs sloppy jowls or swinging dewlaps.”

Norgate later explained that she became interested in exposing patriarchal beauty standards after finding an old etiquette book at Toronto’s Hadassah Bazaar in 1994. In 1997, Raincoast published Norgate’s own book, Storm Clouds Over Party Shoes: Etiquette Problems of the Ill Bred Woman, a satirical exposé of former standards.  Norgate’s current aim is to “connect the dots” between early twentieth-century ad material and the current anorexia crisis;

her upcoming book, Dangerous Curves, deals with this issue.  When asked where to buy chin-straps, she answered that she’d seen them for sale in a recent Enroute magazine.  Hmmm – maybe the show isn’t dated after all.

For bookings, contact Norgate by email.  If it’s laughter you need, consider it.