Category Archives: Reviews of the written word

Orlean Revitalize Doggy Legend

Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend

By Susan Orlean

Published by Simon & Schuster

324 pages, $29.99

BY JESSICA LAMPARD

Susan Orlean published her first book Saturday Night in 1990, and has written for the New Yorker since 1992. She is the author of nine non-fiction books, including her 1998 bestseller The Orchid Thief.

With her latest book, Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, Orlean uses a potent mix of historical facts, description, and personal details to illuminate the reasons why movie-star dog Rin Tin Tin has “managed to linger in the minds of so many people for so long, when so much else shines for a moment only and then finally fades away.”

After all, the original Rin Tin Tin died back in the 1920s after a regular-length romp on earth. Yet his legacy still endures, even after many of his movies have been lost and his television show cancelled.

The book is full of factual details, which range from sad to funny to just plain fascinating. Orlean reveals that certain folks worked to further Rinty’s legacy at great personal cost (one producer spent millions of dollars and ended up living out of his car largely because he believed in Rin Tin Tin’s star power). She also presents numerous dog-related snapshots of history. For instance, Orlean tells us briefly about the self-professed “two crazy women” and their trick poodles who drove together in their caravan with a gun for protection, providing dog-training services all across the country.

And the result ends up being more about people—specifically, the mysteries of life such as fate, luck, individuality, love, and passion—than about Rin Tin Tin himself.

Throughout the book’s various mini-stories, Orlean tethers her narrative to Rin Tin Tin’s owner, Lee Duncan. Lee is profiled so acutely, we end up developing for him an empathy that’s usually reserved for family. Orlean allows this understanding to form by sharing intimate details of his life; we learn, for instance, that Lee grew up in an orphanage and could connect most easily with dogs.

Also, Orlean further adds to the sense of intimacy by commenting on her characters with kind-hearted wit. In reference to one of Lee’s journal entries in which he describes Rinty as “bubbling over” with excitement, for example, she suggests that “(s)ometimes he bubbled too much, and in one case attacking a porcupine, which filled his movie-star face with quills.”

Orlean also gives her subject wide appeal in part by drawing connections with Rin Tin Tin to the most basic of archetypes: the hero. As Orlean explains, “Dogs, in fact, were the perfect heroes: unknowable but accessible, driven but egoless, strong but tragic, limited by their muteness and animal vulnerability.”

She regularly applies this trademark flair for condensing her research into bubbles of perfectly formed insight, which are scattered evenly throughout the book. For instance, she informs us that while many other dogs could perform athletically on cue, Rin Tin Tin was perhaps most gifted at expressing complicated emotions. And therein lies part of the reason for his enduring stardom, according to Orlean. In her own words, “many of Rinty’s plots revolved around him making choices between pack mentality and individual judgment, an almost impossible feat for a dog.”

Orlean has devoted ten years of her life to transcribing the story of Rin Tin Tin, and the devotion shows. Much like the mysterious Lee Duncan who first brought Rin Tin Tin to fame, Orlean lets the characters emerge as fully formed individuals acting independent of her narrative, never allowing her own colourful commentary to steal the show. As a result, the Rin Tin Tin legend has been given new legs yet again—this time by Susan Orlean.

 

 

 

 

Books – Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe

Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe

A Book Review by Kimberly Vaness

Charlotte Gill was nineteen when she planted her first tree. The seedling took: Gill spent nearly two decades as a silviculture laborer in some of the deepest wilderness in Canada. Between planting seasons, she lived in Vancouver to try making a go at the writing life. In 2005, she published her novel, Ladykiller, to critical success. Gill now writes full time, after trading in the shovel for the pen, and teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia.

Eating Dirt showcases Gill’s down-to-earth voice, even while she contemplates the motives of humanity. Her descriptions of raw wilderness in British Columbia helped me imagine how exhilarating the solitude of tree planting would be. In each chapter, she reveals the biology behind her workplace, and the secluded thoughts of the tree planter. Gill is passionate about her job, and like a clear-cut, it shows. “There are so many living creatures to touch and smell and look at in the field it’s often a little intoxicating. A setting so full of all-enveloping sensations that it just sweeps you up and spirits you away, like Vegas does to gamblers or Mount Everest to climbers.”

Gill does not shy away from noting the irony between planting trees and logging trees, and questions humankind’s hunger for growth. She comes to conclusions, and I found myself nodding in agreement. “If an object exists in this world, it can’t stay intact, unexamined, unused. We’re biological capitalists. If it lives we’ve got to make the best of it. We’ve got to hunt, cook, and taste it. Whatever it is, we’ve got to harness and ride it, pluck it and transform it, shave it down and build it up.” Gill’s honesty takes hold of readers and packs them into her silviculture world. At times, it feels as though the reader and Gill are embarking on a physical and psychological journey together.

A humorous undertone is also present in the book. “If we could return ourselves like appliances from the Shopping Channel, surely we’d request different components.” From Gill’s descriptions of muggy mornings, to sweltering hot afternoons—and all the bites, blisters, and bears in between—I earned a new respect for folk who plant trees. Gill captures silviculture between the pages, and through her own personal experiences truly makes this a unique piece of creative non-fiction.

You do not need to be a silviculture laborer to enjoy reading Eating Dirt. The book is appealing in its fresh visual descriptions, and its sneak peek at a largely undocumented subculture. Gill’s employment around the pristine Great Bear Rainforest is also relevant to today’s controversial Northern Gateway Enbridge Pipeline, which plans to cut straight through the British Columbian old growth forest.

Kimberley Veness is a third-year Writing and Environmental Science major at the University of Victoria.

Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe By Charlotte Gill

Review by Kimberley Veness

Charlotte Gill was nineteen when she planted her first tree. The seedling took: Gill spent nearly two decades as a silviculture laborer in some of the deepest wilderness in Canada. Between planting seasons, she lived in Vancouver to try making a go at the writing life. In 2005, she published her novel, Ladykiller, to critical success. Gill now writes full time, after trading in the shovel for the pen, and teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia.

Eating Dirt showcases Gill’s down-to-earth voice, even while she contemplates the motives of humanity. Her descriptions of raw wilderness in British Columbia helped me imagine how exhilarating the solitude of tree planting would be. In each chapter, she reveals the biology behind her workplace, and the secluded thoughts of the tree planter. Gill is passionate about her job, and like a clear-cut, it shows. “There are so many living creatures to touch and smell and look at in the field it’s often a little intoxicating. A setting so full of all-enveloping sensations that it just sweeps you up and spirits you away, like Vegas does to gamblers or Mount Everest to climbers.”

Gill does not shy away from noting the irony between planting trees and logging trees, and questions humankind’s hunger for growth. She comes to conclusions, and I found myself nodding in agreement. “If an object exists in this world, it can’t stay intact, unexamined, unused. We’re biological capitalists. If it lives we’ve got to make the best of it. We’ve got to hunt, cook, and taste it. Whatever it is, we’ve got to harness and ride it, pluck it and transform it, shave it down and build it up.” Gill’s honesty takes hold of readers and packs them into her silviculture world. At times, it feels as though the reader and Gill are embarking on a physical and psychological journey together.

A humorous undertone is also present in the book. “If we could return ourselves like appliances from the Shopping Channel, surely we’d request different components.” From Gill’s descriptions of muggy mornings, to sweltering hot afternoons—and all the bites, blisters, and bears in between—I earned a new respect for folk who plant trees. Gill captures silviculture between the pages, and through her own personal experiences truly makes this a unique piece of creative non-fiction.

You do not need to be a silviculture laborer to enjoy reading Eating Dirt. The book is appealing in its fresh visual descriptions, and its sneak peek at a largely undocumented subculture. Gill’s employment around the pristine Great Bear Rainforest is also relevant to today’s controversial Northern Gateway Enbridge Pipeline, which plans to cut straight through the British Columbian old growth forest.

Kimberley Veness is a third-year Writing and Environmental Science major at the University of Victoria.

Life By Keith Richards

Reviewed by Tyler Laing

Born in 1943 in war-stricken England, Keith Richards’s time and place very much shaped his musical destiny. As did his mother’s influence. Radio was ever-present during Richards’s pre-TV childhood. And his mother, “being a master twiddler of the knobs” played the good stuff. “She would point out who was good or bad, even to me. She was musical, musical.” But while mum had a role, so too did the dissolution of mandatory national service as Richards left high school. The two years he normally would have spent in the military he instead spent jamming with Mick Jagger and Brian Jones. By 1962 they had formed The Rolling Stones—arguably the biggest rock band of all time.

Before leaping into this gargantuan autobiography, I didn’t expect much more than a heroin-induced, cocaine-fuelled, booze-juiced joyride—an exhaustive look into one man’s excessive sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. And while I got that, to be sure—“There’s not much you can say about acid except God, what a trip!” “I’m on pure cocaine, none of that shit crap, I’m running on high octane.” —this book included more than that as well.

In light of his reckless and irresponsible lifestyle, Richards addresses mortality—his colleagues and friends who die—with an objective eye. “I hate all that crying shit, and moping . . . The fucker’s dead.” Even when it’s his young son Tara, who died while Richards was on tour, he maintains this distance. “Never knew the son of a bitch, or barely . . . it was just a crib death.” He neither writes for sympathy nor caters to sentimentality. For this, Richards should be commended.

But as touching and enlightening and exhilarating as this story is, a smelly fog clings to the pages. The rules of Creative Non-fiction have been debated for decades, but one universal truth exists—don’t lie! Fabrications and recreations are going to happen, but blatant conscious deception is unacceptable. And this is a crime Richards comes dangerously close to committing.
Before I bit into even the first paragraph, I read these words on the jacket: “This is the life. Believe it or not I haven’t forgotten any of it.” C’mon, Richards. Really? I’ve been on some benders before, though my most insane party experiences would be like a morning at the petting zoo for this guy. Even still, I’ve lost plenty of nights—weekends, even—to the blackout. And he openly admits, “sometimes I was absolutely fucking comatose.” So for him to come out of the gates and claim complete mental retention of his experiences is to pull his cock out and slap me with it.

This autobiography is at times a laugh, at others a cry, and it’s definitely a white-knuckled ride through a rock god’s life. But as entertaining and illuminating as the content is, respect must be shown for both the genre and the reader’s willingness to suspend reality. Was A Million Little Pieces a good read? Sure it was. But that didn’t stop the world from demonizing James Frey. Should Richards’s fate be any less cruel?

— Tyler Laing is a third-year in the Department of Writing. He will be
working as a summer intern with Harbour Publishing, starting May 7, 2012.

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.

 

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.