Category Archives: Reviews of the written word

Monk’s personal commentary not the journey promised

A Year at River Mountain
by Michael Kenyon
Thistledown Press, 271 pages, $19.95.

Reviewed by Judy LeBlanc

The diary form in fiction invites us into the deepest chambers of the human psyche, a terrain to which I am drawn. However, it is not a form preferred by writers for good reason; it takes a compelling narrator to hold you that up close and personal for the length of a book. Cloister that narrator in a spiritual context in a faraway country and before I turn the first page, I am excited about the premise and what most certainly will be a serious grapple with metaphysical questions, insight into the human condition, a sprinkling of ah-ha moments.

In A Year at River Mountain seasoned author, Michael Kenyon (five novels, three books of poetry) takes the reader into the world of an aging actor turned monk from Vancouver who has spent the past twelve years sequestered in a monastery in China. A visit from an actress the year before and her anticipated return forms the skeletal backdrop of the narrative. The beguiling actress named Imogen–of Shakespearean allusion–serves as a ghostly representation of the life from which he has fled and drives the narrator into musings on desire, his childhood and failed marriage, an estranged son. Kenyon strikes a tone of melancholy and timelessness as he describes the changing seasons and the monastic routines: sweeping leaves from the path to the temple, laying out nests, meditation. Nature is imbued with the narrator’s emotions: “Like the weather with its succession of storms, each ripping then drenching the forest, stirring the river into a brown, hissing snake wider every day, I am unsettled.” A sense of disturbance to the old order is heightened by the eruption of images, stark and vividly drawn: a vulture perched on the body of a drowned child as he drifts down the river, a bear nosing the old master’s corpse, a rape scene. A threat of violence lurks just beyond the monastery where unrest in the village culminates in war.

Though the seasons provide a gauge for the passage of time, the plot is more kaleidoscopic than linear. Brief and often disparate episodes drive the story forward and contribute to the character’s increasing feeling of dislocation. It is unfortunate that Kenyon didn’t allow his talent for evocative imagery to carry the weight of the story. An excess of sentence fragments evince poetic pretension. Rhetorical questions are left to hang like so many hollow pieces of laundry. Too many cryptic assertions trip me out of what might otherwise be an absorbing panorama of this man’s psychic struggle. The narrator describes his own commentary: “The massive abstractions and universalities and anonymous figures arrive anyway . . .” It is as if the author, himself, is aware of his inclination to strain toward profundity, and in the end, to fail to deliver.

This book promised a journey through a challenging terrain with the reward of a wider view. Instead, I am left with the feeling that I have scrambled through underbrush and arrived not far enough from my point of departure.

 

Judy LeBlanc is a fiction writer and a recent grad of UVIC’s MFA program.

Cheryl Strayed finds her way in Wild

Wild: from Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
by Cheryl Strayed
Knopf, 336 pages, $29

By Lorne Daniel

“The experience of being a writer is a lot like a long walk in the wild,” Cheryl Strayed said early in her keynote address to an audience of 600 at the San Miguel Writers Conference in Mexico on February 13. The Oregon-based writer spoke of parallels between her search for new direction in her life and her literary pursuits.

Strayed’s memoir Wild: from Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, was an Oprah book club selection, spent weeks on top of the New York Times bestsellers list and is soon to be made into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon.

The book came about only after she hit  “that bottom place in my life.” After her mother died, Strayed lost herself in promiscuous sex and heroin, destroying her marriage. Strayed, who grew up in rural Minnesota, says it was natural to go “looking for home in the wild” on the Pacific Crest Trail.

“I was just flinging myself in the direction of what is good.” In the process, “I got to feel part of the world again,” she says. “On the trail, I experienced all the consequences of my own actions.”

Even so, “experience doesn’t make a book,” she emphasizes. “Consciousness does. I didn’t have a story to tell until I started to write it.” The book was written years after the hike was completed.

“The next journey, after the hike, was becoming a writer,” she says. “I had to really, truly apprentice myself to the masters of the craft. And I did that.” She learned, in part, by “just typing out the work” of writers like Alice Munro, or writing paragraphs that tried to emulate the style of works she admired.

Strayed started writing Wild as an essay “but by page 75 of the draft we had come nowhere close to the [Pacific Crest] trail.” She realized she had to expand it into a book with a broader focus. “Structure is the toughest nut to crack,” she says of decisions about how to build the narrative and integrate events that occurred well before her trail trek.

Working from journals and her memory, Strayed also checked back in with some of the people she had met on the trail to verify her recollections. In many cases, though, Strayed was on her own in both the literal and literary sense.

In her keynote, Strayed read a scene from the book in which she is at the start of the trail but can’t budge, let alone lift and carry, her monstrous backpack. She plays the scene for considerable laughs but acknowledges a writer’s dual purposes of entertainment and engagement. “The deeper meaning of that scene is: how is it that we bear the unbearable?” As a writer, “you start to see yourself in terms of those larger questions.”

“I was wildly ambitious” in pouring herself into the book, Strayed says, but she also “embraced the fact that my book is probably going to fall short” of her literary ambitions. “I had absolutely no idea that one day my cell phone would ring and it would be Oprah Winfrey.” And for writers who might wonder, no, she says, she had no previous network of VIP connections. The book simply found–and continues to find–readers who identify with a lost person searching for her self.

 

Lorne Daniel is a Victoria-based writer of poetry and non-fiction. You can find him at www.lornedaniel.com, on Facebook and Twitter.

Poet riffs on intersections of humans, animals and machines

The Flicker Tree: Okanagan Poems
By Nancy Holmes
Ronsdale Press, $15.95, 108 pages

Reviewed by Yvonne Blomer

The Flicker Tree’s poems praise the Okanagan’s living creatures, whether they be plants, birds, animals or humans. These poems note the see-er in the ecology of the poem and of the bird, the prickly pear, and the butterfly.

In the book’s opening poem, “Earth Star,” readers are placed in the wilderness where the human hand is ever-present, “Logged two or three times, the woods are grazed and thin,/ wrecked with beautiful litter: lichen-crusted/ branches, broken trees.” As I read, I couldn’t help but think of the poetic form the idyll and its overarching sense of paradise, its desire to praise the rural life. Nancy Holmes’s poems offer one caveat as part of that praise: they cannot ignore the human element, the spoiler in that idyll/ideal. This idyll-like stance holds in other poems, such as “Morning Dove,” “Swans in January” and in “Saskatoons,” where the natural world is imbued with the comparisons to the human–where “fat-ass fruit” is “piling up in the bank account” or in “Finch Feeder,” where the narrator is the dealer and the birds the drug users, “The junkies sit all day/ at the dangling syringe, shooting up black seed.”

Holmes’s use of simile from the human world, a kind of reversal from how poems usually find the wild in the human, continues in other poems.  In “Sagebrush Buttercup” for example, the buttercups are likened to buttons on a machine: “Let’s push these yellow buttons/ and start the spring.”

In the title poem “The Flicker Tree,” Holmes writes, “wracked by their own autumnal cries/ so piercing and sorrowful/ that when I hear them/ I too am candled/ by freshened embers of grief.” Holmes carries an awareness of the natural world as a place of worship in these lines where “candled” and “embers” recall the prayers and incense of other sanctuaries.

These poems reflect Wordsworth’s notions of “emotion recollected in tranquility,” but also convey  grief in what is offered by the window pane, the human observer, the machine. Hers not a poetry of the romantic because reflection reveals emotion centered on the loss inherent in environmental change. Holmes cannot observe the natural world and capture it in poems without also observing other impacts on that world, something Wordsworth did not face.

The first section of the book culminates in a long poem titled “Behr’s Hairstreak: Capture and Release.” This long poem focuses on the notions of “capture” and “release” so that these two things become riffs through the poem. Here, Holmes allows the poem to take leaps and trusts that the reader follows, such as, “bulrushes  brown and velvety/ like newborn foals.” A few lines later, “stiff upholstery/ like your grandmother’s chair/ let’s just stay here, stop moving,” followed by a calendar of things “I line up each day in neat rows (it starts like graph paper)/ inside me the moon waxes and/ withers like a growth (quadratic equation).” Science and poetry, scientist and poet also riff or merge in lines and images.

The other two sections in the book, on Okanagan’s places and people and on Woodhaven, “A Crisis of Place” include strong poems that did not capture me as powerfully. Some teeter too close to the political, leaning toward “message” which tends to bury magic or playfulness. That said, there are gorgeous lines: for instance, “the magpies write notes all over the mountain,” from “Giant’s Head Mountain Ghazal.”

Nancy Holmes is a spirited and wise guide to the Okanangan, its creatures and people, as well as the intersections thereof.

 

Yvonne Blomer is the Artistic Director of Planet Earth Poetry in Victoria, BC.  Her most recent book of poems is The Book of Places (Black Moss Press, 2012). Forcefield: 77 BC Women Poets (Mother Tongue Press, 2013) is forthcoming.

 

BC author captures reality in fiction

People Who Disappear
By Alex Leslie
Freehand Books, 256 pages, $21.95.

Reviewed by Miles Steyn

The title of Vancouver author Alex Leslie’s debut collection of stories, People Who Disappear, sounds like a Dateline: Investigation Marathon. Yes, people do disappear, but don’t expect thrilling, high-stake plots; it’s the everyday, unassuming way of life which causes the Canadian characters who star in this book—some already gone, some living—to change and leave, be it figuratively, literally, mentally, or historically.

Although the plot of some of the stories tends to run away at times, Leslie has an ability to abduct readers with her dark, poetic language, which stands upright, screaming for attention.

Like a camera out of focus, it could take some time to adjust to the metaphors stacked high on each page. Some jar the reader: “The snowy road balanced against the side of a dark mountain, the ultrasound image of a bone inside an arm,” but others strike an image with perfection: “air thrown up by the ocean rushes down the deck and makes my stomach its windsock.” Once you find a rhythm to Leslie’s prose—paying closer attention to the human drama of the stories rather than plot—her tonally and textually rich writing will clasp your attention like a vice grip.

In the opening story, “The Coast Is a Road,” two female lovers—the narrator and a journalist—roam the Pacific coast together, the journalist searching for environmental news stories, the narrator for intimacy. The story zigzags between land and sea, developing the relationship of the characters until a twist in the plot sinks the ferry upon which our two lovers are passengers. It’s hard to miss the connection between this ferry and the BC Ferry, MV Queen of the North, which sank in 2006. In fact, most of the short stories in this collection seem grounded in fact. “People Who are Michael” follows a series of YouTube videos of a small-town Canadian boy who becomes an international recording artist and millionaire before the age of seventeen. Sound familiar? Justin Bieber was evidently the inspiration for the character Michael, who, in an unexpected twist, is kidnapped by a crazed fan. From the colour of his wardrobe, his hairstyle, to the comment his mom makes below a video upload: “Michael before he was famous . . . sorry about the video quality . . .  you can hear his voice pretty great though . . . ” it’s glaringly obvious that this is a carbon copy of Bieber’s life, but with a strong, dark turn.

This collection of a dozen stories features every subject from gay women to the environment, each wrapped in social and political themes such as homophobia, mental illness, or environmental issues, and always backlit by Canadian culture.

People Who Disappear manages to paint portraits of people, not characters; humans who are unified in their flaws, emotions, and desires, all footed in the Western Canadian landscape Alex Leslie so organically depicts. Promising work from a young, talented British Columbia author.

 

Miles Steyn grew up in South Africa and has studied creative writing at UVic and UBC.

A box of memories reveals a life of curiosity

Sweet Assorted: 121 Takes from a Tin Box
By Jim Christy
Anvil Press, 194 pages, $20

Reviewed by Jennifer Kingsley

Jim Christy has been tossing souvenirs into a cookie tin–Peek, Frean & Co. Limited Sweet Assorted Famous English Biscuit tin, to be precise–for almost forty years. The items are various: receipts, photos, hand-written notes, plastic figurines, sketches, coins and even some human teeth. Christy unpacks the tin and catalogues each item with a photo, a title and a description. Put those elements together, and voilà: Sweet Assorted.

Some descriptions are only a few words long, like the sentence that accompanies a small, yellow-green plastic soldier, “In a hurry to be a hero, or a statistic.” Other entries spin out over a few pages and introduce us to some of the zillions of characters Christy, a former American who’s a BC resident when not traveling, has met in his life of frequent adventure.

I was drawn to this book by its form. I wanted to see what Christy’s accidental cookie-tin curation would produce. He scraps plot development, sustained characters (except himself) and recurring images in favour of, well, a bunch of junk. Some items and descriptions take us on flights of fancy to revisit Oaxaca in 1991, Maple Leaf Gardens in 1971 or New Zealand in 1989. Others lead us down memory lane where we learn about Christy’s tireless travel and boundless curiosity. The premise of the book is like a dare (to mention another cookie company) to find meaning amongst the scraps.

Three-quarters of the way in, Christy asks his readers two questions. The first does a fine job of describing the book; the second points out one of its main issues. “What is this entire book, if not an aside?” he asks, “But, then again, an aside to what?” That was the central challenge of this book for me; I struggled to find a vision that could propel it beyond the sphere of Christy’s personal life. Some of the entries occur as a device to drop names or revisit past achievements. Others are simply descriptions of the photo alongside or of an item with forgotten origin. That being said, perhaps our memories are nothing more than a unique, sweet assorted collection, and maybe it is unfair to ask for anything else.

There was a shine to this eccentric work that I appreciated. Christy is being himself. His tin alternately brings back memories and reveals what he has forgotten. He lays out his successes and his failures and leaves us to form our opinions. I closed the book hoping to meet Jim Christy one day. His curiosity, convictions and thirst for adventure have lasted decades, and they don’t seem to be fading with time. I admire that.

Jennifer Kingsley is a writer and broadcaster based in the small town of Almonte, Ontario.

Gordimer fails to personalize the political

No Time Like the Present
By Nadine Gordimer
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
432 pages, $32

Reviewed by Robert Morris

Nadine Gordimer’s new novel No Time Like the Present will challenge most readers. The gnarled, twisted syntax never relents and often frustrates. No page turns without work; this is not a Dickens or Franzen novel: “Over the seasonal get-together drinks at house or church pool in the Suburb it’s not the comrades’ academic who turns within the holiday mood to interrupt . . .” But Gordimer has her reasons, explaining that “South African English [has] inflections which come from the way the language is used by the Babel of citizens, isiZulu, Setswana, Sepedi, isiXhosa, Afrikaans” as well as Hindi, Greek and Yiddish . Yet the difficult prose and hard work needed to wade through it does not reward the reader. Instead, it just creates a layer of indefatigable resistance to engaging with the plot that follows a married couple, Jabulile Gumede and Steven Reed as they pursue their careers.

The novel begins in post-apartheid South Africa, a time rife with conflict that many authors have exploited for content – for example, J. M. Coetzee in his novel Disgrace, which follows a disgraced university professor as he navigates his newly fallen existence through sexual, political, and racial tension as he moves back and forth across the urban/rural divide. Coetzee’s novel succeeds; Gordimer’s does not. While the same motifs and tensions arise, her novel loses the personal in the political. Characters function as vessels for political ideologies and identities (divorced from a person – as in a gay or black person). For example, Steve, like Coetzee’s character, is a white, a university professor, son of a secular Christian and Jewish mother. His wife, Jabulile, is Zulu, black, a lawyer, and the daughter of a Methodist preacher. Both fought for the Umkhonto, the armed wing of the African National Congress, to end apartheid. They consider themselves comrades in the (communist) Struggle, always capitalized. Gordimer introduces these details as summary rather than as scene; she simply informs the reader in an avalanche of identity data that occurs in the first thirty pages. Worse, the reader, whom Gordimer has already buried, than has to contend with even more identity data as Gordimer introduces peripheral characters: a brother who has reclaimed his Jewish heritage and another who is homosexual; yet, for these two peripheral characters, their Jewishness and homosexuality are what is important, and they offer nothing to the plot. Of course, every character in a novel, and in life, will have politics, ethnicity, identity but in Gordimer’s novel the characters do not feel real, or at best they feel secondary to their skin color, sexuality, religion.

With characters buried beneath language, identity markers and politics, the novel’s interpersonal conflict has no dramatic force and doesn’t propel the plot; instead, conflict between ideologies provides narrative energy, however listless (for it seems unattached to any ‘real’ person). What is personal remains unresolved, with plot lines seemingly abandoned. This causes the novel to read like a political tract: it promulgates rather narrates. And while No Time Like the Present certainly reveals some of the contemporary conflicts of South Africa, it remains blind to the idiosyncratic individuals who actually fight them.

Robert Morris is a Victoria resident and UVic student

Devious heroine inhabits Tuscan idyll

The Whirling Girl
By Barbara Lambert
Cormorant Books, 395 pages, $22

Reviewed by Vivian Smith

Do you like the board game Clue, in which many suspects are introduced at once and a plateful of red herrings is meant to throw players off the track of whodunit?

Have you been captured by the crafting of Tuscany as an enchanted land of incomparable light, food and ancient villages, as portrayed in pastel movies like Under the Tuscan Sun and books like The Tuscan Year?

Do you enjoy fiction in which a beautiful “Botticelli” heroine from grey, rainy western Washington State (so like Victoria in winter) goes to warm, sunny Italy under mysterious circumstances and the men she encounters are either “alarmingly handsome” or shaggily “leonine” with hints of “petulance” about them?

Would you like the idea of a cream-coloured Mercedes in the rear-view mirror and then later, a turreted castle in which said heroine and the wildly rich owner of said Mercedes (and castle) make love in a great silk bed, because, as we learn early on, such a liaison is foretold?

And do you stand with novels in which every few pages, a series of long questions such as these precedes minuscule plot advancements? Do you appreciate reading some sentences in Italics so you know to pay closer attention?

If you’ve answered yes six times, then this novel will have you as sweetly giddy as if you’d drunk deeply of grappa in a sun-dappled piazza. Me? I felt like a whirling girl myself, at first busily marking plot points and character introductions with yellow sticky-notes so as not to get as lost as one might while hunting through underbrush for Etruscan treasure. That is what protagonist Clare Livingston sets off to do in the olive-groved hills near Cortona. I set down my sticky notes about a quarter of the way in, realizing, through foreshadow as translucent as extra virgin olive oil, that most of it wouldn’t matter in the end anyway.

Clare’s beloved uncle has died, you see, and left her a property in Tuscany, which may – just may – hold ancient artifacts of great worth. He leaves this potential treasure-trove to her “with forgiveness,” which we come to learn has to do with their early relationship as professor/mentor and lonely child. Decades later, Clare’s devotion to her work as a botanical artist, described in rich, meticulous detail for which I was grateful, seems to be the best part of her. Otherwise, I found Clare to be a hard-to-love heroine who determinedly lies to the world about how she researched her own book. She also wreaks vengeance on her ex-husband for his infidelity, after having been the other woman during his own earlier marriage; and she has a role in the ruin of her uncle. And her lover Mr. Mercedes? Gianni, sure enough, is married, too. I did glean one possibly useful insight into the mind of a plagiarist, though, as Clare excuses her huge professional fib as an act of self-indulgence. Never heard that one before.

Clare is, of course, the whirling girl of the title, a woman still spinning inside old lies as she makes up new ones on her Italian adventure, until even she cannot lie any more. The image comes from the kind of Etruscan artifact that her uncle taught her to love: a “dancing woman wearing pointed shoes, whirling, the movement evident in her whipping sleeves, a seven-tiered incense-burner balanced on her head.” I would like to have seen that girl on the cover, rather than a dark painting of a woman at a party, as handsome as the Charles Pachter artwork is.

If, as the book’s front flap suggests, you find in these pages a vivid exploration of what conditions “foster art, or love and the unearthing of civilization’s buried stories,” then you are perhaps a more romantic and forgiving narrative excavator than I.

Vivian Smith is a Victoria-based journalist, writing coach and magazine editor. She is also an occasional sessional instructor in the Department of Writing.

 

 

 

Obituaries provide lively reading

Working the Dead Beat: 50 Lives that Changed Canada
By Sandra Martin
House of Anansi Press, 429 pages, $29.95

Reviewed by Joy Fisher

The first thing I noticed about this impressive book was its cover. I can’t remember the last time I saw a hardback embossed in an intricate gold-leaf design. The second thing I noticed was the publisher: House of Anansi Press. This, I thought, promises to be a memorable read.

I wasn’t disappointed.

In Working the Dead Beat, Sandra Martin, the Globe and Mail journalist sometimes referred to as the “Obit Queen of Canada,” resurrects the dead, sets them in the context of their times, and delivers—not eulogies—but, rather, complex and nuanced assessments of their lives and characters, “warts and all,” as she has been known to say.

These short biographies of Canadians who died between 2000 and 2010 demonstrate the art of obituary writing and go beyond it. They are not the published obituaries of the persons who are included, but, rather, expanded portraits based on those “first drafts.” Not all of the original obituaries were written by Martin—though most of them were—but all of the artfully-drawn accounts included in the book are the product of the writing skills she has developed over the past half-century or so she has been observing life in Canada.

The stories are neatly divided into five categories of 10 lives each, many of whom the reader will recognize. “Icons” includes such notables as Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, writer Jane Jacobs and economist John Kenneth Galbraith. “Builders” encompasses stories of the lives of such notable figures as historian J.M.S. Careless, Celia Franca, the founder of the National Ballet of Canada, and former Supreme Court Judge Bertha Wilson.

Some of the lives memorialized are notable because they are deliciously spicy. Included in the category “Rogues, Rascals, and Romantics,” for instance, are the spy Gordon Lunan, the bank robber Paddy Mitchell and exotic dancer, filmmaker and writer Lindalee Tracey.

Another category, “Private Lives, Public Impact” shines a spotlight on lesser-known Canadians, such as Ralph Lung Kee Lee, a Chinese Head-Tax survivor, who, at age 106, was one of six Chinese men who sat in the visitors’ gallery of the House of Commons as Prime Minister Stephen Harper rose to offer a formal apology on behalf of Canada for its treatment of Chinese men during the early part of the 20th century.

In the final category, Martin writes of 10 people who devoted their lives to “Service.” Found in this chapter are accounts of the lives of, among others, journalist Helen Allen, who helped children find adoptive families, and Ernest Alvia (“Smokey”) Smith, who was, at the time of his death in 2005, the last living winner of the Victoria Cross.

Adding to the value of this well-researched book is Martin’s introduction debunking five myths about the “dead beat;” introductions to each of the five categories that reveal facets of the history of obituary writing itself; and a final concluding chapter that assesses the changes taking place as technology advances.

If you enjoy vividly-drawn, incisive portraits of individuals, you will enjoy this book. If you appreciate social history that speaks to the way Canada has matured as a nation, you will enjoy this book. If you are fascinated by the developments that led to the rise of newspapers in general or of the tradition of obituary writing in particular, you will enjoy this book.

Joy Fisher is a fourth year creative writing student at UVic.

 

Intimate memoir captures 1950s

Pinboy: a memoir
By George Bowering
Published by Cormorant Books, 276 pages, $29.95

Reviewed by Jenny Boychuk

To say George Bowering had fun with this portrayal of his 15-year-old self is an understatement.

What first seems to be a typical coming-of-age story about a boy growing up in B.C.’s rural Okanagan in the fifties soon turns into something much more entertaining, refreshing and unexpected.

Like many his age, young Bowering loves comic books, westerns and baseball. He writes sports journalism for local newspapers and works part-time as a “pinboy” at the local bowling alley. He helps women carry their groceries and takes it upon himself to help those less fortunate. He eats jam sandwiches and Campbell’s vegetable soup for lunch and has supper at 5 p.m. He’s also got some serious testosterone screaming through his body.

But amid these teenage normalities is something both honest and mysterious. Bowering is in love with three different women: his classmate and steady girlfriend named Wendy, a poor girl from across the tracks named Jeanette—and one of his high school teachers, Miss Verge. Bowering takes us through orchards, lakes, fields and an apartment above the local grocery store with these women. He even risks his life for one of them.

Bowering shows the reader these women through the mind of a teenage boy and, regardless of your gender, the female body suddenly begins to feel foreign. One of the great strengths of this memoir is Bowering’s patience in allowing the reader to experience these women for the first time as he did: He enables the reader to question who they are and who they will be, to question their anatomies.

He plays with language as he recalls, for instance, the word hurt: “Funny verb, that, now that I come to remember the first time I heard it. It was from Wendy herself, sometime over the preceding year. I don’t want you to be hurt, she said, I think. And I wondered about that: does it mean hurt feelings? But it sounded more serious than that, more intimate. But then I got to thinking about the word intimate, which always made me think of inside the brassiere.”

Another major strength of this book lies in the authenticity and playfulness of Bowering’s voice. As a reader, I felt as though I was sitting on the front porch in some small town with him. His stories felt intimate and private, although I never questioned that he was happy to tell them. This book felt like one of those wonderful, unexpected conversations that comes from a single question, and maybe you didn’t ask to know about the rest of it, but you leave feeling damn happy he went there.

Though much of the memoir is light-hearted, Bowering doesn’t hesitate to reveal some of the darker secrets of his youth.

“I still believed in God. I did not go over in my mind a list of reasons why that horse died tied up off the path up in the hills. I only figured that something crazed must to have happened. And I did not tell anyone about what I had found. If it had been a human being I would have told people.”

This most human account of a boy coming into adolescence proves to be both hilarious and heartbreaking. For every awkwardly funny and unwanted erection, there is also true yearning for the women around him. It is a privilege to have a glimpse of this part of Bowering’s life, of this boy who spends half of his time living in books and the other half playing detective in the tall grass as he watches a girl walk home from school.

Jenny Boychuk is a recent graduate of UVIC’s Department of Writing. She lives and writes in Victoria.

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.