Category Archives: Reviewers

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Novelist undismayed by publishing changes

Ann Ireland’s new book, The Blue Guitar, has just been released by Dundurn, an Ontario literary press. The author spoke to Lynne Van Luven via e-mail from her winter pied-a-terre in Mexico.

I’ve been following your career as a fiction writer since A Certain Mr. Takahashi (1985), and I notice that you seem intrigued by the dynamics and power differentials in learning situations where we have a student/instructor relationship. Could you comment on that?

When I was young, [I had] various teachers who exerted a strong influence on my greedy mind. In a way, I wanted to become the person I admired. This must have been creepy for those concerned. I saw getting close to the teacher as being a short cut to a certain degree of sophistication and knowingness. Now, as a long -time writing instructor (Ryerson University’s continuing education division) I have a strong radar for students who want to get too close, and I find myself backing off. I know too well . . .
In my new novel, The Blue Guitar, I wanted to investigate how caring for someone who has had a severe breakdown creates an uneasy power imbalance in a relationship. It can be tantalizing to save someone, to feel his dependence.
When the younger, cared-for Toby decides he wants to make big steps on his own, it is an affront to his lover, Jasper, who is afraid that Toby will be hurt again. And yes, perhaps [even] more afraid that Toby will manage on his own. So easy to confuse Control with Loving.

Ann, The Blue Guitar — in this era of endless television reality shows as well as oppressive celebrity culture — addresses the tensions and fears behind competition, in this case among a group of classical guitarists. Can you talk a little about your view of the pressure to excel in culture today?

I wouldn’t confuse celebrity with achievement, but perhaps these two concepts are getting mucked about these days. It’s dead easy to achieve celebrity via the Internet. Heck, I have been flailing about on Facebook and various social media sites, getting out the word on The Blue Guitar, and I feel the narcissism in this sort of activity. More me! Here I am again! Another ‘like’ on my author’s page!
I recall, when I was a little girl and drawing my name on the dusty surfaces of mirrors, my mother would recite: ‘Fools’ names and fools’ faces/always appear in public places.’
I hear that voice whispering into my ear, constantly. However, real achievement– playing the recital of your life after putting in ten thousand hours of practicing – that is another matter entirely. That is climbing the mountain; that is sticking your flag at the summit. It’s the result of immense personal effort and even, dare I say, ‘talent.’ Talent exists. Maybe even a talent for celebrity.

Toby, your main protagonist in The Blue Guitar, has had a breakdown due to competition stress a decade ago, but is driven to try again. Do you see him as more “heroic” than Lucy, who’s a talented amateur who just wants to push herself beyond playing at weddings.

I’m not sure that I see Toby as more ‘heroic’ at jumping back into the fray, after such a god-awful mishap ten years ago when he played in Paris. He is a huge talent and knows it. Lucy is not a huge talent and knows it. Each of them imagines a life that would change drastically if s/he were to win this competition. Yet they are at such different points in their lives, Lucy being middle-aged mother of two teenaged sons, Toby not quite 30, feeling the last ten years have passed him by. I’m not sure for whom I’m cheering. Lucy was the ‘me’ character, except she’s way more accomplished as a musician. She operates at the competition in my stead –if only I had more courage, more musical talent . . .

You understand “competition nerves” very well. Do you play an instrument yourself?

I have played most instruments known to man in my life – and none of them well. Classical guitar, piano, oboe, cello, banjo, recorders. I don’t play in front of people, or hardly ever. Nerves tend to play havoc with my performance. In high school, I liked playing in orchestras, band, trios, quartets. It’s one of those ‘if I had another life to live’ deals.

Ann, you’ve been publishing fiction for over 20 years now. What’s your opinion of the current bouleversement in Canadian publishing?

Thanks; I had to look up that word. Maybe that’s because I’m writing this from Oaxaca City, Mexico, and Spanish is in my ears. You are speaking, no doubt, of the upheaval due to e-books and the end of the old ways: warehousing books, packing them into cartons and sending them across the country to book stores, then the unsold ones getting packed up again and sent back to the warehouses . . . It wasn’t viable to continue that way, books being a commodity that were sold on consignment.
Technology has slammed all of this and I think it may be a good thing. Writers MUST make sure they get a fair shake on e-books. E-books don’t have to be printed, shipped or warehoused. They are much much cheaper to produce. Yes, the publishers still have to acquire/edit/market books and print ‘tree books,’ and those costs remain. But there is no getting around the fact that the e-books circumvent many of the traditional costs. In the future we may see more writers’ co-operatives, selling e-books and print on demand books with no middleman.
I also note that the smaller, independent publishers are quicker on their feet and more flexible – and they don’t have to answer to the mother ship in Germany or New York or wherever.

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.

 

Novel’s politics undermine its art

Imperfections
By Bradley Somer
Nightwood Editions,
256 pages, $21.95

Review by Sushil Saini

“The idea of political art is a monstrous thing,” [sic] argued Bertolt Brecht referring to works of art that are lauded for their political message rather than the integrity of the art itself. Great art can be political, but political art cannot be great. So it goes with Bradley Somer’s novel Imperfections, a meditation on our society’s fascination with youth and beauty. To be clear, I am a fan of Somer’s point of view and welcome any book that asks us to critically reflect on how ludicrous and tragic our collective obsession with beauty has become. However, Somer is more in love with making his point than making his story. The result is a sometimes-clever read with a strong point of view like the line of perspective on a flat horizon.

Meet Richard Trench – a lonely skinny man-child who remembers his parents’ rejection of his imperfections from the moment of birth. His childhood, and subsequent rise to modeling superstardom during the 80s and 90s, is rife with pop culture references. To his credit, Somer cunningly incorporates seminal moments in our society’s recent beauty revolution into the tale. Characters discuss events like Vanessa Williams as the first black Miss America and the rise of the undernourished waif as a beauty ideal. For anyone over the age of 35, these references add resonance and much-needed depth to the story.

Trench’s career peaks around the millennial turn over and his descent into idleness and insecurity would be more compelling if his character were more sympathetic. His choices are more befuddling than amusing. And when he finally finds love, his low self-esteem provides the plot twist that leads to his grotesque downfall.

The tone of the book oscillates between Can Lit sad childhood tropes and a French farce. Characters make the author’s points through ponderous commentary on beauty and perfection, but they are rendered one-dimensional by their role as mouthpieces rather than people. From the alcoholic mother looking for the perfect life to the creepy plastic surgeon offering the perfect look, there is no fresh air to breathe life into these characters.

After my first read, I thought that maybe I just didn’t get it. Maybe Somer was actually attempting a higher concept book, one that reflected his points in form as well as content. Could the one-dimensional characters represent the superficiality of physical beauty? Perhaps the farcical plot twists were supposed to mirror the preposterous paths this obsession can take. Possibly the tragic results of this obsession are supposed to be exemplified in Trench’s horrifying end.

If this was Somer’s intention then he succeeded, but the results are unsatisfying. Politically, Imperfections is a valid and sometimes insightful social commentary. As a novel it is far from perfect.

Sushil Saini is a bibliophile based in Victoria, B.C.

 

A novel to break your heart

The Round House
By Louise Erdrich
Published by Harper Collins, 317 pages $27.99

Reviewed by Arleen Pare

Louise Erdrich is a fine American writer. With over twenty-five books to her name, she is also prolific. Nor is she limited to one genre, besides her fourteen novels, three works of non-fiction, one collection of stories, six books of children’s literature, Erdrich has published three collections of poetry. Her writing is diverse and literary.

She is among my favourite novelists, which is not to say that everything she writes is perfect, though many of her novels come close. Erdrich is an expert craftswoman. She can shift novelistic techniques from book to book to meet the demands of the story. Her primary fictional territory is Ojibwa country, North Dakota (Erdrich is part Ojibwa). Her characters are mainly Ojibwa, often related contemporaneously or from generation to generation. Her literary opus spans centuries.

In her latest novel, The Round House, Erdrich tells a difficult and complex story about a violent rape that shakes up a small upstanding family living on the reserve. The fact that the exact whereabouts of the incident is clouded, and that the perpetrator is non-native, complicates the legalities of crime, prolonging the crime’s unfortunate aftermath. Because the story pivots on this bitter legal detail, an inheritance from the colonial history of American Indians, Erdrich’s novel must also be understood as an admirably political text.

The Round House is told from the point of view of Joe Coutts, the thirteen-year-old son of the woman who has been raped. He is also the son of the reservation’s court judge. Still a boy, Joe is both innocent and troubled, trying to come to terms with the world and the violence that rocks his mother and father. This adolescent POV shapes the novel, at least partly, into a coming-of-age story. Joe is a typical adolescent boy; his friends are too. They sneak cigarettes, beer, marijuana; they are interested in sex and they ride their busted-up bicycles everywhere. But they become embroiled in the crime’s mystery, the whodunit, the revenge. In this way The Round House takes on the flavour of a crime novel. Erdrich is covering a lot of ground in The Round House and tackles a number of important issues. Each issue is covered sensitively, accurately (her research is impeccable), and convincingly. The story’s action unfolds with appropriate drama, the voice is consistent, and best of all, her writing is poignant, eloquent, lucid.

In the bedtime scene that follows the rape, Joe’s mother isolates herself in the bedroom. Joe observes the sadness: “My father was looking so intently at the head of the stairs as he climbed, step by deliberate step, that I crept around the couch to see what he was peering at – a light from beneath the bedroom door, perhaps. From the foot of the stairs, I watched him shuffle to the bedroom door, which was outlined in black. He paused there and went past . . . . He opened the door to the cold little room my mother used for sewing. There was a daybed in that room, but it was only for guests. . . . The sewing room door shut. I heard my father rustling about in there and hoped that he’d emerge again. Hoped he had been looking for something. But then the bed creaked. There was silence.”

These are the details that can break readers’ hearts. Be prepared to have your heart broken.

Arleen Pare is a frequent reviewer for Coastal Spectator.

Shoe image dances life into novel

The Apple House
By Gillian Campbell
Brindle & Glass, 240 pages, $19.95

Reviewed by Jennifer Kingsley

I loved the shoes! They are everywhere in this charming story about life on the West Island near Montreal, Quebec, and they will make you pay attention to footwear everywhere you go. In the novel, shoes spark new love, beckon the unknown, weather the years like old friends and represent a time when handmade objects held real value. The shoes are perfect for a story that centres on Imogen Jackson’s life and love affair with the town cobbler, Thomas Laviolette. When Thomas’ death is foretold in the first few pages, Imogen must sort out the family shoe store and come to grips with her future and her past.

B.C. author Gillian Campbell fills The Apple House with life-affirming details that ground this 1970s story in reality. The Apple House itself is a clapboard building that sits down the street from Imogen’s childhood home. This house was the site of early childhood romps and raids for the protagonist and her friends. It resurfaces as the fixer-upper she and Thomas planned to live in before his death by car accident. It takes on further meaning when Thomas’s trouble making friend moves in after Thomas’s death.

The house helps to connect the narrative, which unfolds in three interwoven time periods. Although the reader may find the multiple narratives and shifting points of view (Campbell uses first, second and third person) confusing at the outset, Campbell soon trains you to shift from place to place. For me, the childhood narrative sometimes lagged behind the others, but the different threads allowed compelling and diverse scenes to emerge. The funeral of an old man, for example, is replete with sharp details that would only be remembered by a child. The shoe store, on the other hand, evokes anxieties that we only encounter in adulthood.

The Apple House draws out the contrasts of life in small-town Canada, and that is one of its greatest strengths. While life-long relationships build a strong community, they also make it hard for characters to change. Misunderstandings can last for years. Also, small objects and a shared landscape create a culture that is unique to each town — whether it is a French and English village from 40 years ago or the communities we live in now.

Campbell has embedded worth in her first novel by using a tiny geography to sketch the drama of a close-knit community, thereby reminding us of the power of everyday objects.

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

 

British Columbia’s Italian Story

Whoever Gives Us Bread:
The Story of Italians in British Columbia
By Lynne Bowen, D and M Publishers
368 pages, $32.95

Reviewed by Jessica Kluthe

Lynne Bowen’s Whoever Gives Us Bread tells us the full story. Through Bowen’s expert, meticulous research and constant resistance to telling us what can be shown through story, we both learn about the rich history and the lasting contributions of Italian immigrants—a story of a province and a story of Italian-Canadians—and we also see it all unfold.

Bowen, who lives on Vancouver Island, details the complex history of what was happening, simultaneously, in 1860 and the hundred years that followed, on either side of the ocean. This structure gives readers a clear impression of the motivations for such mass emigration and why “26 millions Italians emigrated from a land they had no wish to leave.” We encounter both the social and political situation on the Italian peninsula, and that of the booming United States and Canada. Against this historical backdrop, Bowen reveals how separation shaped the story of individual families.

Almost immediately in Bowen’s narrative, we encounter Maria Valle and read the letters she had dictated to her emigrant husband Felice; a friend later found these papers in Felice’s pocket after he dropped dead among his mules. Through careful research and creatively bringing all the pieces together, Bowen has given us stories that would otherwise be lost; thus she makes evident the weight of immigrants’ contributions to the development of British Columbia. Bowen’s dedication to uncovering the facts is unwavering. The ongoing contract with the reader to make clear what has been lost or what we cannot know is clear and is just one of the aspects that demonstrates her expertise as a historian. For instance, in the story of the Valle family, she explains that what’s “missing from official documents is any mention of where Valle is buried,” and that there was not a photo of his son among those papers found in his pocket. Bowen’s clarification of the absent, the lacunae, reveals the tremendous losses—a dark shadow trailing these migrations: A Felice Valle who, after leaving from the Stazione Marittime in Genoa, never again saw his son.

I was invested in this history as someone whose relatives were among those early Italian-Canadian migrant workers, but I finished this book with the certainty that Bowen’s book, which has won the 2012 F.G. Bressai Prize for Creative NonFiction, is an essential read for all Canadians. Whoever Gives Us Bread: The Story of Italians in British Columbia is an important, substantive, chapter of the Canadian story.

Jessica Kluthe’s first book about a Calabrian midwife titled Rosina, The Midwife (Brindle & Glass Publishers) will be available in March. Readers can preorder a signed copy through her website: www.jessicakluthe.com.

Coming-of-age novels differ in structure

The Shore Girl
By Fran Kimmel
NeWest Press, 229 pages, $19.95

Swallow
By Theanna Bischoff
NeWest Pres, 283 pages, $19.95

Reviewed by Joy Fisher

These two Calgary, Alberta, authors have more in common than their place of residence. During this past year, NeWest Press published coming-of-age novels by each of them about girls growing up in distressed circumstances.

While the general theme may be shared, the authors’ approach and the resulting impact of the stories are markedly different, inviting a comparative analysis. The most striking difference is the structure that organizes the two novels.

While Rebee Shore, the protagonist of Fran Kimmel’s first novel, is given a voice in the telling of her story, the majority of the sections are narrated by others who observe Rebee as she struggles through a chaotic childhood guided, as the book jacket, says, “less than capably by her dysfunctional mother.”

Rebee is shown at various stages of her young life through the eyes of her Aunt Vic, her teacher Miss Bel, an older man, Jake, who treats her like a daughter, and Joey, a young man whom Rebee is able to guide through his own stressful adolescence once she has grown into the wisdom of maturity. Like lights on a multifaceted diamond, the various narrators illuminate the many facets of Rebee’s character, which emerges, finally, as rich in understanding and compassion. Rebee is someone who will touch you; she is someone I wish I could know.

The story in Theanna Bischoff’s novel Swallow, by contrast, is narrated entirely by the protagonist, Darcy. What we see is her perspective, organized primarily around flashbacks to her childhood and young adult years as she and her younger sister, Carly, struggle to survive being reared by a mentally unstable mother.

Carly doesn’t make it; the opening line informs the reader she has died, and the remainder of the book gradually reveals the circumstances of her death and the guilt Darcy feels over her sister’s suicide. By the end of the novel, Darcy has become an unwed mother living with her own mother who has recently also attempted suicide for the second or third time. The language in which this ending is written makes it clear that it is supposed to be somehow uplifting. I was not convinced. Far from wanting to know Darcy, I wanted to give her shoulders a shake and tell her to stop wasting my time and to seek professional help.

The Shore Girl builds to a carefully-crafted climax that reveals the secret of Rebee’s birth and her mother’s life-long distress that provides the satisfaction of unravelling a family mystery. Swallow, on the other hand, merely builds, progressively, the lyrics of the childhood song, There was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, with a few more lines added at the beginning of each major section. I found the story hard to swallow long before the old lady swallowed the horse and died.

Joy Fisher is a fourth-year student in the Department of Writing

 

 

Two Local West Coast Cookbooks

Flavours of the West Coast: A Cookbook from the Celebrated TV Series
By Cedarwood Productions with Steve Walker-Duncan and guests
Touchwood Editions, 168 pages, $29.95

Seasonings: Flavours of the Gulf Islands
By Andrea and David Spalding
Harbour Publishing, 240 pages, $29.95

Reviewed by Candace Fertile

Being able to taste all the food in these two lavishly illustrated books would be quite the treat; reading about the love poured into the dishes, along with the skill of the food producers and chefs, runs a close second. And, given that the food celebrated in these books represents BC at its best, readers have some splendid taste possibilities ahead.

Flavours of the West Coast: A Cookbook from the Celebrated TV Series is the more basic book of the two. Like the TV program from which it hails, the book features the recipes of numerous chefs, along with such simple classics as vinaigrette. The ingredients are generally available, and if something special is called for — Sea Cider Kings & Spies cider in Cider Glazed Free-Range Chicken with Roasted Apples and Lemons — a note explains that a good quality dry cider will do. The recipes are unfussy, and occasionally the chef’s tip will suggest a packaged substitute, anathema to serious cooks, but a valuable aid to those short of time or skill.

From sauces to cocktails, Flavours covers a wide swath of ingestibles, and the most enticing recipes are the homey stick to your ribs and other body parts concoctions, such as Southwestern Meatloaf from Chef John Cantin of John’s Place in Victoria; the unfortunately named but apparently delicious Toad in the Hole; Moroccan Spiced Vegan Rissoles with Rhubarb Gravy; and Whole-Wheat Ricotta Gnocchi with Vodka Sauce. Seafood and fish lovers will salivate over the numerous dishes collected in the chapter “River and Sea,” and serious locavores will head out with rubber gloves to collect nettles for creaming.

The book’s divisions are somewhat arbitrary: Basic Sauces and Dressings, Forest and Field, River and Sea, Farm Fresh, and City Cuisine, but each is illustrated with pictures of the dishes or the environment. More pictures of the food would be great. But as a dip into the world of BC food and how easy it is to make wonderful meals with local fresh ingredients, Flavours does a lovely job.

Because Seasonings: Flavours of the Gulf Islands is written by a husband and wife team, Andrea and David Spalding, who have written numerous books separately and one other together (The Flavours of Victoria), it’s a little more focused in style than Seasonings. It’s also more adventurous and definitely more precise in its ingredients as the Spaldings are showcasing the food producers of the Gulf Islands. Nettles came up in this book as well. Scavenged food has its charms, and I was delighted to learn that Galiano has Nettlefest, a day-long celebration of all things nettle.

Seasonings uses the seasons as its organizing principle, and it divides each season’s recipes into Beginnings, Entrees, Sides, Finishes, and Celebrating. The book is filled with information about food producers, and the authors are keen advocates of small scale farmers and other food producers. Not only does the book offer dozens of delicious recipes, but also it is an exposition on food diversity and individual creativity. Many people are devoted to organic practices, and the Spaldings let us in on their world. Roger Pettit of Galiano grows over 20 varieties of potatoes. His nickname is “The Potato Man.” Juliet Kershaw and Michael Pierce of Saturna have developed an olive consortium. Debbie Lauzon of Salt Spring makes Soya Novu tofu, and now she can do it with soybeans grown on the island. I can hardly wait to try Mushroom, Runner Bean and Spaghetti Squash with Crispy Smoked Tofu. Or maybe I’ll just get my mitts on the tofu and see what I can do with it. The book includes sources for the specialty foodstuffs and suggestions for further reading. I’m already planning Beddis Blue (a Salt Spring Island Cheese Company product) and Fig Tart for next summer when figs ripen on a friend’s tree. And I think I’ll have to test the Salt Spring Chèvre and Cherry Clafouti with Rye Caramel Sauce. And the Caramelized Onion and Zucchini Galette.

Both of these books provided me with tons of fun, information, and inspiration. They do different things well, and they’d be a welcome addition to any BC cook’s bookshelf. The emphasis on making meals with what can be grown nearby is excellent. Both books avoid any hectoring about what people should eat, other than providing strong evidence that healthy, tasty food makes for happy people.

Candace Fertile loves to read about food and also enjoys eating.

Murder-mystery cares about environment

Business As Usual
By Michael Boughn
Published by NeWest Press
354 pages, $22.95

Reviewed by Jenny Aitken

Michael Boughn, who has written plays, books of poetry and a young adult novel grounded in myth has now tried his hand at a new form: the mystery novel. In Business as Usual, Boughn weaves together a multi-faceted plot line that includes illegal toxic waste dumping, amateur detectives, Mafia, murder and a whole lot of intrigue.

Like most mystery novels, the story begins with a crime – a murder to be more precise. But it is not the police or criminal detectives that step forward to save the day; in fact no one seems to care about Bernie Donatello, the truck driver who went missing along the 89 highway in Toronto. No one, that is, except Clare Dumont and her boyfriend David Sanders. After receiving a call from a friend, Clare, a professor of botany, agrees to investigate the sudden plague that has befallen her friend’s grape vines, seemingly overnight. Her boyfriend David, a struggling poet in need of some excitement, begs to go along. Reluctantly Clare agrees, and they set off for Niagara Falls.

When the pair discovers an abandoned trailer, along with evidence of toxic waste having been emptied into the quarry surrounding the vineyard, they are left with more questions than answers. Is someone purposefully using the quarry as a dumping ground for poisonous chemicals? And if so, why leave a licensed trailer as evidence? Clare wants to let the mystery remain just that, but David, hoping to get a publishable story out of the find, coerces her into looking for answers. And so the two set out to discover the truth, jokingly imitating Nick and Nora Charles. Little do they know that it will throw them into the path of the Mafia and a corrupt cabal of government officials.

Boughn’s novel may follow a “business as usual” approach to a mystery, starting with a violent crime and then introducing the unlikely heroes, but despite its occasionally formulaic nature, the vivid descriptions and lively characters more than compensate.
Business as Usual is bolstered by thorough and engaging character descriptions, and the protagonists are endearing and complex. Clare is a levelheaded professor, but also practices martial arts and can deliver a Charlie’s Angel style spin kick. David, on the other hand, is excitable and goofy, more willing to go head to head against a member of the Mafia than to clean his own apartment.

Despite the witty repartee and exaggerated circumstances throughout, Business as Usual still works as a reminder of the danger of treating the environment like your own personal dumping ground. Without being preachy or melodramatic, this novel demonstrates the importance of paying attention to environmental issues, and the dangers of going one on one with the mob (although I suspect most of us probably knew that.)

Jenny Aitken enjoyed this novel after her end-of-semester assignments

Margoshes’ stories capture Jewish New York

A Book of Great Worth
By Dave Margoshes
Published by Coteau Books, 250 pages, $18.95
Reviewed by Isa Milman

Dave Margoshes captivated me from the first page of his book of linked stories. I thought I was reading a memoir of his father and his family life in New York, but it was only after the first two pieces that I realized that it wasn’t really a memoir, but short stories masquerading as memoir. A beautiful hybrid, a labradoodle of a book. Far from confusing me, this boundary blurring increased my pleasure, as Margoshes’s story-telling is a feat of seamless cross-breeding, bringing out the endearing qualities of each genre, while creating something adorable, in the original sense of this word.

I was grateful to be brought back to Jewish New York of the 1920s and ‘30s, the life and times of a Yiddish newspaperman and his newspaper sons, and the cast of characters that made up their world, a world now virtually gone. I saw the sunset of this world as a young woman in the ‘60s, when I tramped the streets of the Lower East Side, frequenting the delis and coffee shops and dives, reading The Forward ever so haltingly in Yiddish while looking for summer temp jobs, but you don’t have to be Jewish to appreciate Jewish New York. Margoshes brings you home to meet his parents, invites you to the local haunts for a drink and a schmooze, rides the subway with you to Harlem, Brooklyn and Coney Island, even takes you up to the Catskills. He delivers a complete experience, including matters of the heart and soul, in a language and style that’s rich in all the important details and note perfect.

I save my pleasure reading for bed, which is a good and not so good thing when a review is called for, because it’s hard to take notes. Every night for a week I’d read a story or two, before turning out the light with a smile on my face. I managed to put a pink sticky note at the beginning of the title story, which is probably my favourite of the collection, but they are all so damn good. Mazal tov, Dave Margoshes, on a book of great accomplishment.

Isa Milman is a poet and visual artist who has called Victoria home for the last sixteen years. Her first two poetry collections have each won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry. Her new collection, Something Small to Carry Home, was recently released