Category Archives: Reviews of the written word

Tofino artist, writer create fine chapbook

In the fall, a lovely package arrived in the Coastal Spectator mailbox. It was a chapbook, This Dark, haiku by Tofino poet Joanna Streetly, illustrated by Tofino artist Marion Syme. Syme and writer Adrienne Mason are the owners of Postelsia Press, which published This Dark. Mason, who trained as a marine biologist, explains that the Postelsia is the Latin name for the sea palm, a tiny, tenacious seaweed that lives in West Coast habitat. Both Streetly and Mason talked to Lynne Van Luven recently about their creative (ad)ventures.

Adrienne and Joanna, when I hold This Dark, there is no doubt in my mind that this chapbook of illustrated haiku grew directly out of the West Coast environment.  Can you each talk a bit about how you came together in this project?  

Joanna:  Adrienne contacted me one day after I’d put out a haiku about gardening and the rain. It was a rainy April day, and we were all in the thick of the weather change. It was a shared experience, and the poem extended the scope of that shared experience. It linked us to each other and to our environment. A two-point connection became a three-point connection…

I can’t remember the haiku that pushed Adrienne over the edge, but one day she instantly responded to one, saying that the poems just had to be published. Several wine and dinner gatherings later, a first draft was in the makings. In publishing these poems, complete with the gorgeous linocuts, Postelsia Press has helped make them feel tangibly representative of the coast – a hold-in-your-hand collection, but also an expression of collaboration itself.

Adrienne:  I enjoyed reading Jo’s haiku on Twitter – her choice of words always seemed so perfect – and I could tell she was having fun with it… Her daily haiku were a reminder about the importance of daily practice.

Haiku also spoke to the physicality of books that I love. There is something that appeals to me about a small book with some heft that can fit in your hand. And [my partner] Marion and I wanted to design beautiful books, so Jo’s words and our vision of the physical manifestation of the book — small, thick, beautifully illustrated, with a quality wrap cover — came together.

Adrienne, you and artist Marion Syme founded Postelsia in 2009 — hardly a good time to launch a small press. You are an author yourself, published by more established presses such as Greystone and Kids Can Press.  What was your impetus?

I don’t even consider Postelsia a small press, more of a micro press. In some ways it was a backlash to “traditional” publishing. I’ve published over 30 books in that way, and, frankly, I just wanted to do what I wanted to do. More importantly, we have one thing that a lot of publishers don’t have — direct access to a steady stream of visitors from around the world who come to this international destination. We also have two independent bookstores — one in Tofino and one in Ucluelet — as well as two other outlets that sell a nice selection of quality books. We were very clear from the beginning that our marketing and distribution “strategy” (such as it was) would stop where Highway 4 meets the Pacific Rim Highway. I knew how difficult it was to get books into stores outside of the region, because essentially we’re looked at like a self-publisher, so we’ve always been very clear that our market is the Tofino-Ucluelet region.  (Having said all that though, we do have one of our books distributed through Sandhill.)

It is really more a labour of love . . . than anything. Everything gets invested back into the press. I know this business has the smallest of margins, so I went into this with my eyes wide open. I want to produce local books (we use printers in Port Alberni or Victoria), with local writers and artists, on local topics.  You can find the four books we’ve published (and that are still in print) at Postelsia Press.

Joanna, your bio says you “have lived afloat in Clayoquot Sound for over 20 years.” I imagine that somehow the compressed quarters of a boat might have made you a woman of few words when it comes to your writing. Do you think there is any connection between the sparse beauty of haiku and your floating home?

I don’t consider myself a person who is naturally given to sparseness. But my lifestyle has saved me from being a compulsive packrat. I live on a floathouse that I mostly built myself. The interior is 16 feet by 24, with a nice airy loft . . . floathouses have to be able to float. And that means you can’t fill them with possessions, or they’ll list to one side – or even sink… Twice a year as my penance, I reluctantly box and bag the detritus of useless stuff that seems to creep around me like ivy. I sort it into piles – to give away, to sell, to recycle. It’s never enough.

With haiku, the process is similar. I chose to work with the syllables as a way of honing my writing skills. Skilled editing is a challenge and benefit to any writer. And so, for me, haiku became a way to distil essential moments into a single drop of imagery. I always begin with too many syllables, too many words I’m attached to. I always have to sort out my thoughts and choose which ones are worth holding onto. Rarely, a haiku will be born whole, no refining needed. More commonly, I chew them over while I walk through the forest, or they rearrange themselves in my brain as I paddle a kayak.

Artist Marion Syme’s linocuts are a response to Joanna’s haiku, and to her own walks in the forest and along the beaches. Adrienne, you say you had a great launch of the chapbook in August that drew together the Tofino community. I am wondering how you think “community” contributes to artists’ and writers’ process and products.

In Tofino, and in our region in general, “community” is huge. If you are a local writer or artist, you will almost be guaranteed a great launch of your work. The community as a whole is very creative so people understand that when artists put themselves out there – to release their writing, art, theatrical production, music, whatever — it’s part of the “deal” for the rest of us to support them. I know people who will buy every book put out by a local person and purchase new works of art, even though they have no room on their bookshelves or walls…

I think the creative events are also one of the few times in a very busy tourist town where “locals” gather. We did Jo’s launch for This Dark in mid-August, possibly the busiest time of the year in Tofino, but community members filled the venue. It was a little pause in the summer where we could come together, celebrate Joanna and Marion’s creativity, before going back out into the busy world. I am always rejuvenated after these events, and they are wonderful reminders of why Tofino is such a great place to live.

What new books can we expect from Postelsia Press?  

This Dark is our most recent title. Then there is a chapbook, The Golden Fish, which is an original fable by our local (just retired) librarian. And a small anthology (which we envision as one of a series), The Chesterman Beach Anthology — poetry, history, memoir, interviews by locals (some writers, most not) all about Chesterman Beach, our community’s place to celebrate, mourn, exercise, work out our troubles, get married, scatter ashes, learn to ride bikes, party…

Collection maps career of seminal poet

Angular Unconformity: The Collected Works of Don McKay

By Don McKay

Goose Lane Editions

584 pages; $45.00

Reviewed by Cole Mash

The importance of being gifted with the publication of Don McKay’s collected works can be found nested in the title McKay chose for the volume. In the dust jacket, McKay provides us with a definition: “An angular unconformity is a border between two rock sequences, one lying at a distinct angle to the other.” The name is perfect because that is exactly what we have: two Don McKays lying at an angle to each other; one a timestamp of a McKay’s earlier work, and the other the seminal poetry that has made McKay one of Canada’s most celebrated bards.

Raised in Cornwall, Ontario, Don McKay is the author of 12 books of poetry, twice winning the Governor General’s award. He was made a member of the Order of Canada in 2008. McKay is considered a pioneer of Canadian eco-poetry, once describing his own work as “nature poetry in a time of environmental crisis.”  His love of birds and birdwatching is a trademark fulcrum of his poetry.

Angular Unconformity: The Collected Poems 1970-2014 brings together a number of McKay’s books of poetry in their entirety, including, among others, his widely celebrated Birding, or Desire (1983), his Governor General’s Award winning books Night Field (1991) and Another Gravity (2000), as well as some new poems and an insightful afterward by the author.

At the beginning McKay gives us a section called “A Note on the Title” in which he tells us that an angular unconformity has gaps in between the geologic structures; gaps of millions of years. He tells us to “imagine a biography with gaps of decades in it” and that is what we get with this offering: a poetic biography filled with blank space. Some books such as Air Occupies Space (1973) and Lightning Ball Bait (1980) are left out altogether, but in this erasure we get representative relic, a facsimile of an old flight plan.

The volume begins with poems from Long Sault, McKay’s second book of poetry. These poems foreshadow a later eco-centred McKay. “See” starts out by comparing roadways to islands followed by a poem employing the eco-imagery of a river sleeping “behind the dam.” The rest of the poems from Long Sault continue with this eco-imagery, and we even get an early bird sighting with mention of a great blue heron, a bird which McKay would later devote a whole poem to.

Next we have the poems of Lependu. The poems in Lependu centre on historical Ontario and the story of the hanged man (le pendu being French for “the hanged”).  In the poem “When Lependu Loves You”, McKay writes, “Nevertheless//when Dundas Street expects Lependu//to be in the air on Friday night she grins//like an extra long unplayed piano”. In this passage there is an absence of the eco-centrism characteristic of McKay’s work before and after this book. Instead, the poems of Lependu establish a sense of place and country, which McKay also carries forward in his poetry, and drives us onward with the ferocity of language that perpetuates McKay’s work.

Then we arrive at McKay’s seminal book, Birding, or Desire. This book brings together the Canadiana and eco-poetics that McKay cultivates in his first two selected offerings. He does this almost metapoetically in the poem “A Morning Song” in which his copy of “Birds of Canada roosts on the shelf,” a Canadian book on a shelf in a Canadian book to be bought and placed on your shelves. It is here in the book that a thematic and linguistic continuity is found in the wooded space McKay has chosen to inhabit with his words. This harmony is sustained right up to the last poem in the collection, which asserts, “we are here, we love it, we// belong”.

In the beautiful and haunting parable-esque afterword, McKay envisions running into a much younger version of himself. When looking back on his life he tells himself that “half a century, does not pass in vain,” and this book is proof of that; evidence of water collecting in the ground for years–a frost heave crack in the spring pavement.

McKay’s poems are filled with exciting, kinetically charged language in a geography I can inhabit and relate to. The text invites the reader to come and learn about one of our country’s great poets while also sheparding them through the experience; it is a field guide to McKay, and one that would be an asset to the shelf of any lover of Canadian poetry.

Cole Mash is an English and creative writing student at UBC Okanagan. His poetry has been published in The Eunoia Review and The UBC Okanagan Papershell Anthology.


Governor General winner melds intensity and restraint

Lake of Two Mountains

By Arleen Pare

Brick Books

83 pages, $20

Reviewed by Julian Gunn

Arleen Paré opens her Governor General’s Award-winning collection, Lake of Two Mountains, with “Distance Closing In,” a spare, moody poem with echoes of the Imagist poet H.D.: “sky collapsing from its bowl / shoreline waiting    taut / stones dark as plums.”

Paré, now known to all of Canada as a Victoria-area poet and novelist, is masterful in this mode of simultaneous intensity and restraint. Lake of Two Mountains is an elegy of sorts—in the tradition of the love-elegy as well as the elegy of loss. The beloved here is the lake, known passionately in childhood and now re-imagined from multiple perspectives. The collection is like an Elizabethan poet’s blazon, with the beloved’s parts mapped out as a geography—but here the metaphor and the beloved are one thing, a landscape at once infinitely interpretable and yet also always exceeding human attempts to grasp, to own, to define.

Poet Patrick Lane compares the poems in this collection to “monastic prayers for forgiveness,” and there is indeed something both contemplative and austere about them. There is no narcissism here, no confessional “I.” Instead, Paré, offers grammatical and figurative intercessors. Where we might expect that “I,” there is often a “you,” as in “How Fast a Life.” “You stood at the end / of the wharf, you and you sister. / Cautious. In handfuls, your mother’s ashes / catching the wind,” Pare writes, and this “you” thrusts the memory into the arms, so to speak, of the reader. Or a simple word like “let” creates poems that are both pleas and directives: “let him sit on the beach… // let him unreel / the past on the waves,” “How Mend a Life” incants.

The poetic voice comes closest to asserting ownership in the poems about family members. In “Dad Before Lake” there is the possessive “my mother”; in “How Mend the Years” there is “my uncle.” Most raw and intimate, perhaps, is “Dad in the Lake”: “His face as it clears each popping wave – / his eyes – / how unsure where he is.” “Figments” recounts the death of a mother, the eeriness of the body in death, its alien otherness as a kind of fossil evidence of the living person. It speaks of a retreat from language: “If you could, you’d live below theory.”

Indeed, language, in its precision, its power and its failure, is the collection’s ambiguous consolation. The poems often take formal shapes that elegantly echo their subjects. “Alnoitic Rock” (the name of a rare volcanic rock found in the region) presents “topographies herded flat, wide as the weft of caribou hooves,” and is written in long, widely-spaced lines. “More” is a poem about reflection that itself reflects, in shimmering, gently distorted echoes.

Lake of Two Mountains stands as a remarkably coherent, yet never over-formalized, whole. It is keen-eyed, full of detail and careful construction; there are many pleasures in its language. If I were to look for some further development on these strengths—say, in Pare’s next collection—it would be only this: that some of her carefully governed intensity be allowed to break through, both formally and emotionally, like the bolt of lightning that threatens but never strikes in “Distance Closing In.”

Julian Gunn is a Victoria poet, essayist and reviewer.

Bold debut novel challenges views of sexual abuse

Pedal

By Chelsea Rooney

Published by Caitlin Press

240 pages, $21.95

Reviewed by Jen Neale

Chelsea Rooney’s Pedal, her debut novel, is a bold and challenging look at issues that most veteran writers fear addressing. The novel examines sexual abuse, and also pedophiles, one of the last groups that, according to Rooney, “we’re allowed to openly hate”. Rooney, a Vancouver-based writer, completed the novel while attending UBC’s MFA program. On her website, she says, “I just wanted to write a book that was funny and also had pedophiles in it, like life does.” The humour and style with which Rooney writes renders this a necessary read for anyone seeking a fresh take on a mired subject.

Pedal tells the story of Julia, a counselling psychology master’s student researching sexual abuse, specifically, non-traumatic sexual abuse in childhood. Julia seeks to find people like herself, who experienced sexual abuse as a child, but refuse to buy in to the victim/survivor models available. She nicknames her participants her “Molestas.” In a meeting with Julia, one of the Molestas describes a therapist who tried to convince her that her depression was caused by her years of childhood molestation rather than her sister’s recent death. The Molesta responds to the therapist by telling her to go fuck herself. Julia questions whether trauma and shame come from society—and particularly doctors—rather than from the experience itself.

The idea that childhood sexual abuse could be harmless, or even desired, will no doubt cause many readers to squirm; however, Rooney discusses this idea so unflinchingly and with such reason that I gave it full credence. The underlying message is inarguable—the right of women to define their own experiences of abuse.

Julia’s field of interest naturally extends to the perpetrators of sexual abuse, including her father, whom she calls Dirtbag. However, Julia’s obsessive fascination with pedophiles eventually leads to both her graduate advisor and boyfriend leaving her life on a single day. After being spurned by these two stabilizing forces, Julia sets off on a cross-Canada bike trip with a man named Smirks, whose sexual proclivities she takes advantage of for research and self-analysis. The result is a tense narrative, with questions of sexual disposition woven seamlessly into the text. Pedal begs to be read in a single sitting.

It’s worth pointing out that Rooney distinguishes in her novel between pedophiles, those who are attracted to children, and molesters, those who act on their desire. The reader is pulled into the secretive world of non-offending pedophiles at an MAA (“minor-attracted adult”) meeting. The attendees are those that cannot publicly reveal their attraction, or seek support, if they wish to maintain their social and professional lives.

Though it has the forward momentum and arc of a novel, Pedal seems to follow the format of a personal essay in its systematic exploration of ideas. Sexual abuse and pedophilia are examined from every possible angle, but no conclusions are ever forced upon the reader, who is instead left to follow Rooney’s ideas to their natural, often paradoxical, conclusions.

Mid-way through the novel, for example, Smirks asks Julia how she would solve the pedophile problem. Julia conjures up an alternate reality where pedophiles could act on their desires—an island filled with children who felt no shame or trauma in sexuality. Smirks asks what happens to a sixteen-year-old girl who is no longer attractive to inhabitants. Knowing that her line of reasoning falls apart here, Julia says, “You’d kill her.” Julia knows that in reality there is no easy answer to the pedophile question, and also the question of what happens to the minors involved. Pedal is filled with such moments, where the arguments highlight an aspect of Julia’s past or inward search.

Julia is a finely balanced character. At times she seems hopelessly lost, and in these moments I couldn’t help but feel parental worry. At other moments, though, her clarity and wisdom forced me to reconsider my longstanding beliefs on childhood and sexuality. In perhaps the most distressing moment of the book, Julia encourages Smirks to spend some alone time on a canoe with a young girl. When the canoe and passengers are no longer in sight, Julia is forced to confront her conviction: will she intervene or remain inactive? These are scenes to be read through barely-parted fingers.

Pedal carries the reader through moments that, if they were not buoyed on either end by humour and lively prose, would sink to the depths of discomfort. Rooney handles her topic with sympathy and openness, two qualities pedophiles are not afforded in society. With public dialogue on sexual abuse expanding, this novel comes at a key moment.

Jen Neale is a Vancouver writer.

Wilderness memoir takes honest look at paddle journey

Paddlenorth: Adventure, Resilience
and Renewal in the Arctic Wild

By Jennifer Kingsley

Greystone Books / David Suzuki Foundation

Pages 240; $29.95

Reviewed by Terry Jones   

In her debut book, Paddlenorth: Adventure, Resilience and Renewal in the Arctic Wild, Jennifer Kingsley carries us with her on a daring trip that begins in the Northwest Territories and follows the Back River through Nunavut to the Arctic Ocean. Deposited by float plane on the permafrost, Kingsley and five companions test their physical and emotional resources in an intense drive to reach their goal 1,000 kilometres to the north.

With an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria, a Bachelor of Science in biology, and extensive experience as a naturalist and wilderness guide, Kingsley has found her writing niche with her first book. She provides accurate, vivid descriptions of the flora and fauna of the Arctic Tundra. Through her eyes, we share sightings of migratory birds, white wolves, muskox, and the magnificence of massing herds of caribou.

The struggle for survival serves as a leitmotiv for Paddlenorth. Kingsley provides compelling examples of everyday life-and-death situations in the Arctic wilderness. We learn of the endurance of the caribou as they ford icy water and we witness nature’s raw power as prey and predator face off at the water’s edge.  “The bear . . . snapped that goose left and right until it hung like a skein of wool,” Kingsley writes.

The paddlers’ survival mirrors that of the resident wildlife. Despite the team’s thorough preparation that includes rationed food, carefully chosen equipment and emergency gear, the reader is always aware of the possibility of imminent disaster. This awareness and the author’s first-person narrative serve to heighten and maintain the story’s tension and suspense. An overturned canoe can mean hypothermia, emergency evacuation or worse. An inoperable emergency phone might make rescue impossible. An inattentive moment could mean a face-to-face encounter with a grizzly. In addition to the these dangers, the team faces rapids, waterfalls and huge blocks of ice, and struggles with the discomfort of unrelenting mosquitoes, black flies, wind, sand, blisters and frigid temperatures.

Kingsley never shies away from talking about the mental toughness the trip required or her emotional struggles to fit in with the team. “I was tired of reading about the wilderness as a backdrop for so-and-so’s personal struggle; yet there I was, dragging my anxieties across the North,” she writes. Kingsley observes the “tundra’s oppressive moods” can make one feel claustrophobic despite the region’s immensity. The Arctic tundra, known also as the Barrenlands, is the place to go if you want to “measure yourself against the Earth” and “test your perspective on life and distance.” Kingsley’s honesty is admirable as she examines the challenges of group dynamics, where personalities and preferences can cause disagreements and insecurity. She’s candid about times when she doesn’t feel good about her behavior and when she’s taken to task by a fellow paddler. “I had been impossibly stubborn at times,” she admits.

We begin to feel we know her paddling group, not only through a series of black and white photographs but also by sharing in their grief, frustration and misgivings. Kingsley is frank and thorough in her description of the tightrope the group must walk between the enjoyment of stopping to view the natural world and the necessity of completing paddling distances over the 54-day trip.

Kingsley artfully weaves the history of the Arctic into her narrative. We learn that the Back River is named for Lieutenant George Back who served as midshipman on Franklin’s first and second overland expeditions through the Canadian North between 1819 and 1822. Snippets of the Arctic’s history underscore the necessity for Kingsley’s group to be prepared for any circumstance. The land has a long history of people dying while waiting to be rescued.

With Paddlenorth, Kingsley has succeeded in writing a travel memoir that is both exciting and educational and also serves as an excellent resource for anyone planning a similar adventure.

Terry Jones is a Victoria writer. 

Imagination sets Arctic adventure book apart

Boundless: Tracing Land and Dream
in a New Northwest Passage

By Kathleen Winter

House of Anansi

280 pages; $29.95

Reviewed by Jennifer Kingsley

I was suspicious of this book at first. I thought it was audacious to write an entire volume about the Northwest Passage after being there (and it’s a big place) for only two weeks.

Then I met Kathleen Winter, this fall, at Calgary’s Wordfest. She got up on stage and said, “How could I be so audacious as to write a whole book about the Northwest Passage after spending just two weeks there?” Her awareness of this simple fact won me over. She laughed, and we laughed with her. Also, I had already read the book, and it reinforced that a story is more than the substance of an experience; it’s what you make of it. The duration of a voyage can be secondary to its impact.

Boundless is a personal account of Winter’s time as a writer-in-residence aboard the Clipper Adventurer, a steel-hulled ship chartered by Adventure Canada to take 100 tourists at a time to the Arctic. On her voyage, in 2010, the objective was to travel one of several routes through the Northwest Passage–from Kangerlussuaq, on the west coast of Greenland, to Kugluktuk, in the western Canadian Arctic. She was a last minute addition. It was her first time so far north.

Winter sets the scene by emphasizing the spontaneity of the voyage and introducing us, right away, to some of the characters she will share the ship with, including Inuit guides to whom she feels drawn. After two brief chapters, Winter takes a sharp turn to recall the home-made “Viking funeral” she held after her first husband’s death. She and a friend towed all of his belongings into the middle of a lake, while others looked on, and torched the whole barge worth. The scene surprised and enthralled me. It revealed so much of Winter’s character and past that I was ready to go anywhere with her. This chapter demonstrates one of the books greatest strengths: Winter moves easily between ideas, experiences and eras of her life. She’s nimble. She can cover the foxtrot and aging in a single page. She leaps between disposable knickers, colonial history, mustard and poverty. She introduces us to Emily Carr’s milkman while icebergs float by.

Life on a ship is familiar to me. I am one of the T-shirted naturalists that Winter chides in this book, though I work with a different company. I mention this because I know how different life can be on ships; they have their own transformative landscape, and Winter recognizes it immediately. She details her own tendency toward independence that borders on isolation (she stands alone on deck, hides in her bunk, works on her crocheting) and then introduces musician Nathan Rogers, son of the beloved Stan Rogers. Nathan is an ambassador of ship life; he won’t stand for this Leave Me Alone stuff. She describes him, and his singing, this way:

“Somehow everything I’d learned about life pointed to an idea that to receive something you had to earn it. I’d never thought of myself as a tree, a graceful being visited by songbird, starlight, and rain, and which people love for itself, not for what it does or how smart it is, or how indispensable. I was used to making myself indispensable in one arena or another, but Nathan’s song turned me into that tree.”

At moments, Boundless, borders on the existential and Winter peppers the narrative with so many questions I longed for a few more answers. I questioned, at times, the connection the author describes between herself and the land. I wondered how that could really happen on a two-week cruise with more than a hundred shipmates. But then every adventure story is personal and unique. Transformative moments are not universal; it is not my place to doubt them, and many of us–myself included–have experienced similar realizations as a visitor to a new place.

What sets Boundless apart is Winter’s craft and imagination. I would love to sail with someone like her–either on a ship or through the pages of a book.

Jennifer Kingsley’s book Paddlenorth: Adventure, Resilience and Renewal in the Arctic Wild was published by Greystone Books and David Suzuki Foundation in 2014.

Debut novel explores Japanese-Canadian prairie life

Prairie Ostrich

By Tamai Kobayashi

Goose Lane Editions

200 pages; $19.95

Reviewed by Chris Ho

The trials of finding one’s place in the world is something that everyone must go through (“yes, don’t remind me of high school,” you say), but Tamai Kobayashi’s distinct and cautious prose is woven with heart-wrenching elements of racial otherness, family fracture and religion. At times, Prairie Ostrich feels a bit like a diary of a young girl growing up, but what makes it unique is the way that Kobayashi intertwines and develops these themes while writing with powerful poetic voice.

Kobayashi’s debut novel is a heartbreaking story about the “only Japanese-Canadian family on the prairie” of Bittercreek, Alberta, in 1974. Kobayashi’s fictitious locale is a small town set in its ways and wholly non-accepting of diversity – whether it be religious or racial. Readers follow eight-year-old Egg Murakami through a grueling year in which she is bullied at school and feels isolated and neglected by her mother and father.

For Egg, stepping outside of her home often feels “like stumbling into a room where she does not belong, where Japanese turns into Jap.” Desperately and inquisitively, she searches for a sense of belonging, hiding away in the crevices of the school’s library to avoid the cruelest of bullies, Martin Fisken. While other kids might read fictional tales of talking animals and heroic kids, Egg finds comfort in the precision of the dictionary because “everything else [in life] is so muddled.”

After the mysterious death of her oldest brother Albert, her father exiles himself to the ostrich barn while her mother attempts to numb her pain through excessive drinking. Confused and alone, Egg somehow feels responsible for her family’s fractured spirit. Her sister, Kathy, tells her that stories help us make sense of life because they always having a purpose and a moral. But as Egg is surrounded by all the bad in the world, she can’t help but wonder: “What if there isn’t a Moral, or a Meaning? … What if God can’t do anything?”

Kobayashi seems to find a balance between the voice of an eight-year-old searching for meaning with the strong poetic language of the narrator – though at times I found it improbable that an eight-year-old would have the kind of intellectual depth that Egg expresses. This feeling took me out of the story from time to time: Egg is definitely not your average eight-year-old.

That being said, my only real criticism is that the dénouement seems rushed, and overly tidy. Throughout the novel, the narrator presents a few ways to look at adversity as Egg begins to realize that maybe there is no “moral to the story” in real life. But instead of transcending these viewpoints and concluding the novel with an enlightened and more complex moral message, Kobayashi opts for the predictable. I felt as though the “message” was that Egg turned out to be right in thinking that suffering is sometimes a blessing in disguise since it leads to personal growth. As for her other thoughts about life throughout the novel, well, she was just being naïve. Kobayashi rebels against that traditional feel-good ending; however she doesn’t take it far enough to avoid the clichés associated with those feel-good endings.

Chris Ho is a Victoria musician and freelance writer.

Courageous memoir examines rape trauma

One Hour in Paris:  A True Story of Rape and Recovery

By Karyn Freedman

Freehand Books, 195 pages, $21.95

Reviewed by Marjorie Simmins

Everyone has single hours – even single minutes or moments – after which their lives are forever changed. But not all of us will need every scrap of bravery, determination and creativity we possess to make our subsequent days caring and meaningful. Karyn Freedman’s memoir, One Hour in Paris, which was recently nominated for the 2014 B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, details one such person’s journey.

The title tells almost all: over the course of one hour in Paris, Freedman was brutally raped, and is still recovering. While her rapist was convicted to eight years in prison, Freedman is no freed woman 20 years after the event. Instead, she continues to struggle with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and its cyclical, pernicious symptoms, for which she continues to receive counselling and treatment.

Undeniably, Freedman’s spirit and psyche are in some ways permanently injured; she herself refers to psychological trauma as a “chronic condition.” But do not believe for an instant that Freedman’s rapist even came near to vanquishing her warrior heart. First, it took keen, instinctive smarts and speed to eventually escape from her rapist – who used a knife to threaten and control her and frequently said he would kill her. Second, and years later, she looked on the horror of rape worldwide, and did not blanch. Third, and latterly, Freedman decided to pull rape out of the shadows of shame and indifference, by telling her own story, and bearing witness to the stories of others.

A lifelong feminist and an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph, Freedman studied sexual violence around the globe, including Africa’s eastern Congo, which United Nations’ officials have called The Rape Capital of the World. In 2008, Freedman travelled to AIDS-devastated Maun, Botswana, to work in a human rights organization called Women Against Rape (WAR). There, she shared her story with other victims of rape, both adults and children.

When she did this, she learned from one young woman that she had “no idea people in countries like Canada were subject to rape.” Another had never heard anyone talk about rape as candidly as Freedman did – easing the pain and marginalization all of them felt. Yet another teenager told Freedman that hearing her story “would change her future because it showed her that recovery is possible.” It was, writes Freedman, “an indelible moment.”

Freeman continues to give back to the world that once hurt her so badly. She does this most profoundly by having written her memoir, an act that takes spine for writers describing even the gentlest of lives. In the end she views rape as “intensely personal and deeply isolating,” but also a “social problem … that is the result of the way societies are structured and resources and power distributed.”

One Hour in Paris is a gripping and courageous read; the writing is also graceful and accessible. Equally fascinating is Freedman’s focus on the field of trauma studies and discussion of “the nature and reliability of traumatic memories.”

Of her own memoir, she concludes: “And while it is a true story, from start to finish, it is in the end the story as I remember it.”

What a memory – and what a triumph beyond it.

Marjorie Simmins is a West-Coast-raised writer living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her memoir about life on the two coasts, Coastal Lives, was published by Pottersfield Press in 2014.

 

Mysteries abound in The World Before Us

The World Before Us

By Aislinn Hunter

Published by Doubleday Canada

400 pages, $29.95

Reviewed by Erin Anderson

The World Before Us, the second novel from Vancouver writer Aislinn Hunter, comes 12 years after her last fiction release, Stay. In between the two works, Hunter published The Possible Past, a collection of poetry which – in title at least – ties in best with the vision explored in The World Before Us.

Protagonist Jane seems to live in the past, cataloguing the antiques in the obscure museum where she works and wondering about the fate of the young girl, Lily, whom she lost while babysitting 20 years ago. She is also literally immersed in the past, unknowingly followed by a miasma of lost souls who believe her research will help them recover their own identities.

Jane’s personal and professional interests collide when Lily’s father is a scheduled guest speaker at the museum, which is being shut down. His visit acts as a catalyst and drives her to look deeper into the lives of several people who lived a century ago: a young woman who disappeared from an asylum, a man who founded his own eclectic museum and two competitive brothers from an upper-class family.

In clear, descriptive prose, Hunter lays out several possibilities for the lives under Jane’s microscope. Fictionalized versions of historical events emerge, extrapolated and inferred from Jane’s own discoveries and, later, from the memories pieced together by her cohort of ghosts.

The suspense in this ambitious novel sneaks up on its readers; what begins as a series of small unknowns coalesces into the larger mysteries at play. What happened to Lily? Who are the cloud of souls that surround Jane? Where did the young woman known as N. disappear to 100 years ago?

Hunter unravels these mysteries slowly and deliberately, examining the intricacies of the characters Jane knows only through letters, books and personal items, until even the smaller pieces of the past loom large. The World Before Us unfolds with the detachment and organization appropriate to a story with an archivist at its heart. Equally apropos is how the story shifts and switches focus as more evidence comes to light.

Though the historical events dominate readers’ imaginations, Jane proves to be an unpredictable yet thoroughly believable protagonist as she undergoes a metamorphosis of sorts. Forever marked by the loss of Lily, Jane has spent most of her adult life avoiding attachments. After her encounter with Lily’s father, she begins to break out of her passivity and engage not only with her own history, but the people around her.

The World Before Us is a subtle, evocative work that draws in its audience with ease. Even as Jane goes to great lengths to find answers to the questions that have bothered her for years, some mysteries can’t be solved. By threading Jane’s contemporary life through the lives of so many others, Hunter reminds readers that we are never really alone – we occupy the same space as those fallible humans who inhabited the world before us even as we face the world that lies ahead.

Erin Anderson is a marketing and communications professional who reviews books, music and theatre in her spare time.

Aislinn Hunter will read from The World Before Us at a gala event at Victoria Writers Festival on Nov. 8 at 7 p.m., along with Jordan Abel, Nancy Lee and Darrell Dennis. The festival runs Nov. 6-8 at Oak Bay United Church. 

Henderson’s new novel shocks with depth and heart

The Road Narrows as You Go

By Lee Henderson

Hamish Hamilton

512 pp. $32.95

Reviewed by Aaron Shepard

Set almost entirely in the mid-1980s, The Road Narrows as You Go is both satire and Künstlerroman, chronicling the rise and fall of Wendy Ashbubble, a budding cartoonist who dreams of a career like her hero, Charles Schulz. She resides at No Manors, the home of San Francisco’s beloved artist Hick Elmsdales, who succumbs to AIDS at the story’s beginning. The aftermath of his death includes a two-day wake attended by both fictional and real legends such as Art Spiegelman, Berkeley Breathed and Schulz himself. There’s also a cannibalistic ritual initiated by the mysterious artist Jonjay, Wendy’s muse, which establishes the novel’s anarchic tone.

Wendy’s strip, Strays, finds success thanks to Frank Fleecen, a financial wizard and junk bonds trader who hooks her up with increasingly lucrative syndication and merchandise deals. No Manors becomes a comic strip factory, a commune fueled by coffee, weed, sex and a collective love of comics and art.

Wendy’s story is narrated by her four assistants, who serve as a Greek chorus to this ribald tale. The assistants’ Sisyphean task of creating an animated Strays Christmas television special anchors the narrative and allows for interesting digressions on the history of animation and other art mediums. Much like A.S. Byatt, herself a passionate art historian, Henderson unapologetically fills pages with cultural quasi-lectures. It’s tempting to skim at times, but the patient reader is rewarded with moments of insight and arresting detail: “A drawing was the soul of all art….His fences weren’t Berlin Walls, they were barriers between childhood and adulthood, or between the imagination and its prey, easily climbed over, spied through, vandalized and whitewashed.”

Wendy is a conflicted character: ambitious but naïve, free-spirited but insecure. Among her quirks is her belief that Ronald Reagan is her father, though she’s largely ignorant of his politics and – like this reader – the world of finance in general.

If Reagan is the distant father figure, Frank is the sexualized embodiment of Reaganomics. Frank and Wendy rocket through the story riding the shotgun energy of frontier capitalism. As Wendy’s hunger for mainstream acceptance grows, a series of crises presages her downfall: the disappearance of Jonjay; a snooping Securities and Exchanges Commission; the emergence of her polar opposite, Bill Watterson, the famously anti-consumerist creator of Calvin and Hobbes.

John Ralston Saul recently remarked on Nikolai Gogol’s influence on dark comedy in the modern novel. Akin to Chichikov’s encounters in Dead Souls, Henderson’s frequently hilarious and raunchy scenes brim with a manic, moral energy. While the novel pays homage to the comic strip heyday of the ’80s, it is also concerned with the phenomena of excess, the creative impulse colliding with capitalist greed. Even set among motifs particular to that decade – the rise of AIDS, the hysteria over satanic cults – things like “the deregulation of the financial market and privatization of the prison industrial complex” feel immediate and urgent, the roots of our social and financial crises laid bare.

The final chapters, which speed through the next two decades while still engaging the reader, offer a poignant, surprising denouement that recasts the entire story in a wondrously different light. As in Henderson’s first novel, The Man Game, there is a note of yearning here, a desire for a world where aesthetics and the pleasures of art are accorded greater value than they’re given in our humdrum, market-driven reality. Like a good comic strip, beneath all the hijinks, The Road Narrows as You Go shocks you with its depth and heart.

Everything Aaron Shepard knows about Ronald Reagan he learned from reading Bloom County as a teenager in Salmon Arm. When is a Man (Brindle and Glass, 2014) is his first novel.