News and news

My goodness, haven't things around here been anticlimactic since Family Literacy Week ended. You want to know the best thing about Family Literacy Week though? That it was totally made up. True story. Family Literacy DAY was the real deal, but I thought one day wasn't enough, so I dragged it out for another six, and then people started walking around thinking it was legitimate. At least two people that I know of! This is certainly not the first rumour I ever started, but it's probably one of the more productive ones. It was a very good week, and I am so grateful for everyone who contributed. And I am sorry if I misled you...

Since then, however, I've been busy with deadlines, and preparations, plus I've been exhausted thanks to this baby whose sleep habits are beyond appalling. Thanks to all of this (save the baby), however, we are on the cusp of some very exciting things. Amy Jones is coming over tomorrow afternoon for her interview (and I've baked scones for the occasion.) I'm starting Wild Geese tomorrow, and my Canada Reads Independently update will be posted this weekend. And sometime soon I'll be rolling out my gorgeous new website over at my own domain! I hope you'll all adjust your links accordingly, and follow me there. Stay tuned for the official announcement...

Of course, lately I've also been reading. Barbara Pym's A Glass of Blessings, and Canadian Notes and Queries. From the latter, I especially enjoyed Clark Blaise's story "In Her Prime", Seth on Canadian Cartoonist Doug Wright, Ray Robertson (of the Canada Reads Independently Moody Food) "In Anticipation". I've been reading Sylvia Plath's The Bed Book with illustrations by Quentin Blake, and The Tree of Life by Peter Sis on the recommendation of Genevieve Cote. I've been reading Annabel Lyon on writing and motherhood. Mark Sampson on email interviews. Steven Beattie's "The problem of sustained reading in a distracted society". Meli-Mello celebrated Family Literacy Week also last week, and this week she's talking about toys.

Can-Reads-Indies #2: Hair Hat by Carrie Snyder

Well-executed books of linked short stories such as Century or Hair Hat have the rare power of making the novel look mere. Mere as in only linear, one-dimensional, and narrowly focussed, which is nothing like life or like the world. Whereas the shape of a book of linked stories is like the world, or rather, like the world if it had edges-- polyhedronal. Multitudinous sides, perspectives, but only glimpses of these. And so perhaps the novel has the advantage of providing the reader with more satisfaction in its illusion of wholeness, but for the reader who is seeking something a little more true, linked short stories are as close as it gets in fiction.

The stories in Carrie Snyder's Hair Hat are linked by a man whose hair is cut into the shape of a hat. A creepy cut to ponder, and even someone standing immediately before Hair Hat Man declares the style only "plausible". Of course, I had to google it, and this guy seems to be the most famous Hair Hat Man on the internet. Carrie Snyder's Hair Hat Man, however, looks a little different. In fact, he looks a little different to everyone who encounters him, older or younger, shabby or less so, weary or sinister, friend or foe.

"Yellow Cherries" is told from the perspective of a young girl staying with her Aunt, Uncle and cousins while her mother is having a baby. A later story, "Comfort", is the Aunt's perspective of the same events, but the events subtly different, calling into question notions of memory, narrative authority and underlines the gulf between what adults and children understand about one another. "Tumbleweed" and "Third Dog" are both stories of motherhood, the first about a mother taking her children on a disasterous beach outing on the day her husband has (perhaps?) left them, and the second a grandmother taking her grandson for a walk one summer day, pondering her daughter's unhappiness as she relieves her of her maternal duties for a small time. A most vivid moment is the daughter upon their return home, (the narrative is in second person, spoken from granddaughter to grandson): "Give me the baby!" said your mother, running to the back door to greet us. "

It doesn't take much: the urgent nature of her exclaimation, that she is running, that it's the backdoor. Snyder uses her materials with such deftness that she almost makes prose look easy, and indeed Hair Hat is a breezy read. But each word, every sentence is weighted, to be considered. Such a wide range of characters, but Snyder is deliberate in showing the different ways that each one speaks.

The narrator of "Harrassment", for example, who speaks like he's spouting off, and then we realize he's erupting. He's one of several characters who are loners, for whom the Hair Hat Man is a point of connection. Queenie, the obese doughnut shop employee in "Queenie, My Heart" who has just lost her father is another, and on her second encounter with the man, on the subway, the beginnings of a romance are sparked. In subsequent stories, we view this odd pairing from afar, but there is something heartening about their relationship. We've only been watching Hair Hat Man from the periphery, observing him as an oddity, but we're beginning to connect with him too, and he's somebody we care about.

As the book progresses, we move back and forth in time to get closer to the Hair Hat Man's story. When we finally encounter him directly, he is so familiar that the hair is plausible, and perhaps the least remarkable thing about him. But still, this is only an extended glimpse. This story "Missing" is from the perspective of his long-lost daughter's own daughter now grown, given up for adoption and now returned to find him, Hair Hat Man, her grandfather. "I should have brought along a camera. I should have asked a passerby to take a photograph of the three of us. Next time, I thought. But next time is so rare. It's a hummingbird in the rose bushes: blink and its possibility is gone."

Not so much for a book, however, for like Century, Hair Hat is a book that begs for rereading. Unlike Century, it is also a book that I would have found my way to, even if not for Patricia Storms' recommendation. Carrie Snyder's book with its distinctive cover had been turning up before me increasinly often of late-- at the library, at the Eden Mills Festival in September at The New Quarterly booth where I entered a draw to win it but didn't win. Carrie Snyder had stories published in the most recent TNQ as well, and I was excited to read more of her work once I'd finished reading them.

All right, this ranking thing is terrible when all of the books in question are wonderful. Like choosing between your children, it is, when none of them have colic and they sleep for twelve hours every night. I am going to have to rank Hair Hat over Century, however, because for being less ambitious in its vision, Hair Hat realizes that vision with more success. Or perhaps that I'll have to read Century thirty-five more times before I get my head around it finally, or that no matter how many times I read it, I never will. For all my derision of readers "seeking the illusion of wholeness", perhaps I want a bit of it myself, and Hair Hat offers. But this doesn't mean, I promise, that I love Century any less.

Canada Reads Independently Rankings:
1) Hair Hat by Carrie Snyder
2) Century by Ray Smith

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

In Alan Bradley's novel The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, our heroine, eleven year-old Flavia de Luce opines that, "Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week." So that it occurs to me that heaven must also be a narrator like Flavia de Luce, who is perfectly precocious in all the right places and suitably limited in others. The latter point being particularly important, because Flavia is the first fictional detective I've ever encountered who solved the crimes slower than I did. Not that she's stupid, oh no, not Our Lady of the Periodic Table of Elements, but hers is a refreshing perspective when her youth shows through.

And yes, in this, she's much like Harriet the Spy. Or rather, Flavia is a tribute to Harriet, though I wonder how consciously? At first glance, the connections could be coincidental. Flavia is sleuthy, and keeps a notebook, and that she's charged with the spirit of her late Mother, who was called Harriet. This last point I doubt Alan Bradley means for us to interpret as Flavia being of Harriet (M. Welch) born, mostly because I don't think male readers identify with Harriet that strongly. (And this, by the way, I'd love to be wrong about).

But I encounter the following paragraph: "I was me. I was Flavia. And I loved myself, even if no one else did." And I can't help but think that Bradley was channeling his inner-Fitzhugh after all.

Flavia lives Buckshaw, a grand home outside the English village of Bishop's Lacey. Her eccentric father scarcely pays her attention, her older sisters torture her mercilessly, the entire household lives under a shroud of sadness from her mother's death, but Flavia contents herself mixing poisonous concoctions in her chemistry lab at the top of the house. When a dead bird lands on the doorstep, however, with a postage stamp stuck through its beak, and then then a body turns up in the cucumber bed in the garden, Flavia is aware that life is about to get interesting for the very first time. And when her father is arrested with murder, she becomes all the more determined to solve the crime herself and clear his name.

Bradley writes Flavia tongue-in-cheek, his novel a send-up of detective fiction, but he manages to create a rather intriguing mystery all the same. Involving philately, libraries, English reticence, postmistresses-- a whole host of infinitely nerdy pleasures. A whimsical book, Bradley writes gorgeous turns of phrase to match-- my favourite was when Flavia steps into her dead mother's long-undisturbed bedroom and feels as though she were "an umbrella remembering what it feels like to pop open in the rain."

The Sweetness in the Bottom of the Pie is a book built on a the back of other books, on the back of a whole literary tradition, and its charm lies in its references to a world already much beloved. The connections it draws and its own twisty plot make for a deliciously readable delight.

Kiss the Joy as it Flies by Sheree Fitch

Two and half days of my last week were spent in the absolute bliss of reading Sheree Fitch's first novel Kiss the Joy as it Flies (shortlisted for the 2009 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour). I'd previously only read Fitch's wonderful children's book Kisses Kisses Baby-O!, but love it so much that when I discovered Fitch had written a novel for adult readers, I had to read it. Though I began reading with a degree of uncertainty: the story of Mercy Beth Fanjoy, who receives a troubling medical prognosis and decides to stage a clear-out of her messy life in the time she has left. This sort of formula could go either way, and very quickly in, I was pleased to find Fitch had gone in the right one, with sprightly prose and a narrative packing a punch. The novel is wonderfully original, although if pressed, I'd have to call it as Fannie Flagg meets Miriam Toews.

In Kiss the Joy as it Flies, it's not so much plot that accelerates as the language itself operating on sheer gumption, and the spirit of Mercy Fanjoy picking up speed as she comes into her own. Though things happen-- people die, hopes are dashed, love is born, battles are fought, illusions are shattered, triumphs are won, and lessons learned. The stuff of life with a wacky cast of characters who are constructed as types-- religious zealot mother, loyal friend, hippie daughter, enigmatic dead father, sex god-- but each of them excellently crafted with the most remarkable ability to surprise you.

Mercy Fanjoy is wholly embodied by Fitch's prose. The fact of the disease that lurks inside her, and her buxomness, and her sexuality, and when she expresses milk from her engorged breasts into the bathtub during a flashback in which she remembers her teenaged, single-mothered, basement-apartmented self. Two decades on, Mercy has come a long way-- she's reconciled with her difficult mother, earned a university degree, she pens her own column in the Odell Observer, has raised her daughter, bought her own house, teaches a creative writing course, and has maintained a lifelong relationship with her best friend Lulu. She still holds a grudge against horrible Teeny Gaudet (who has since gone onto fame as bestselling author of the "Burt the Burping Bear" series of children's books), but you can't win them all.

Over the week she seeks to put her life in order, Mercy finds herself becoming unhinged, and emerging from a rut she's been stuck in too long. In the end, just about everybody in her life surprises her, but she manages to shock them right back, tenfold. And while it's raw, we'll get our hearts warmed, and Fitch also pulls of a satire so slick, we can't help laughing, and I suppose that this is what she means by "the sheer mad joy of all of it."

Can-Reads-Indies #1: Century by Ray Smith

Its sombre cover coupled with my misunderstanding that Ray Smith had eschewed story for higher principles would have kept me from Century: A Novel, were it not for Dan Wells' recommendation. I thought this was a book that wasn't for me, not only in a "not my cup of tea" sense, but that it was meant for a more erudite kind of reader for whom the act of reading is not meant to be a pleasure cruise ("Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song... Wallala leialala").

So it is my surprise to find I love this book, that it contains everything I look for as a reader, including that most unfashionable self-contained universe. That Smith may have eschewed traditional narrative structure, but he has done so only to compress a 500+ page novel into his first 98 pages, to represent the disintegration and disorder present in the universe the book contains, to have Century be what it's meant to represent. And that his writing possesses a sympathy for and understanding of women that I found surprising, and striking, and even (dare I suppose in a book such as this?) somewhat heartening.

Heinrich Himmler didn't shock me. Perhaps I'm just being defiant in my reactions, but Jane Seymour, the young woman in 197o's Montreal who receives his ghostly visitations in her bed, the nightmares in which he touches her naked body (but oh, I was struck by the details-- "the buttons on the cuffs of his sleeve caught on the sheet when he reached under to touch...")-- there is context for her, precedent. Of course, her friends suppose that she has undergone a trauma, perhaps she has been raped, which has led to the visions, which leads to her suicide. And that may be so, but the whole thing is the extreme end, I think, of how ordinary girls become obsessed with Nazism, which manifests in more usual terms with an Anne Frank fascination and YA books about the Holocaust. As a kind of dangerous experiment in empathy, though of course the Holocaust is so sanitized in such literature, but there is a thin line there, and I just think that Jane Seymour has crossed it for one reason, or for many.

But now I'm off on a kind of tangent. Kenniston Thorson, protagonist of the latter half of Century (and perhaps Jane Seymour's grandfather) goes off on something similar, its conclusions more succinct than mine, but this result, he is told, "comes not from your mind wandering, but rather from your mind turning its subject round and round as a sculptor considers his piece". Which is a good way to describe a reading and/or consideration of Century for two reasons: one, because it has so many angles, perspectives that I don't think it could be taken in all at one time, as one thing; and two, because in reading Century, the reader does become sculptor, a book so fragmented requiring its reader to engage by putting the pieces together, thus coming to recreate it in their own way (so I am very sure that your Century will be altogether different from mine).

"The truth is to be found in the way many different things fit together in relation to one another. In a sense, because the relationship, not the parts, has the truth, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." Though Century is doubly complicated in that its parts are so much apart, and yet this makes the relationships between them all the more remarkable. Between the first four stories in the book's first half "Family", which in various ways tell of Jane Seymour's family. The first story about the troubled Jane from the perspective of a male acquaintance who sees her problems as emblematic of women in general during these difficult times, the second story of Jane's brother and his reunion with his wife following a period of estrangement, the third of Jane's father after the death of his wife and at the end of a long career in African development and international diplomacy as he ponders what he has made of himself, and fourth about Jane's mother some years earlier and we learn that her husband truly didn't know her at all (and that though he suspects he didn't know her, he has no idea just how much).

The second half of the book "Continental" is in two parts, from the perspective of American Kenniston Thorson, in Paris 1892, and Germany in 1923. Written as a period piece meant to be Jamesian (and where all the women talk like women in TS Eliot poems, sometimes deliberately word-for-word), the pace is different here, story less the point. And though the concerns of Kenniston and other characters intriguingly overlap with those from "Family", I chose to see this part of the novel as a key to the first half. That is, in Kenniston Thorson's conversations and deliberations about art, music, history and even French Onion Soup, we achieve an understanding of what Smith is accomplishing in "Family", of how we might put its fragments together and regard them (or how we might choose not to and why).

But being a reader who seeks story, who traces plot, I did note the connection between Kenniston Thorson and Gwen Seymour, and I seized to that in order to steady myself. And though the plot was moving backward here, it didn't matter, for we look back at history in just this way. To see that Ray Smith has encapsulated a century (and not just "a" century, but "the" century) in a scant 165 pages, in the story of a family, of a marriage, of just one single woman.

And that woman doesn't even exist, "there never was a Jane Seymour." And as a reader who seeks story, who traces plot, this kind of trick didn't deter me one bit, because I am also a reader who tries with reading to make sense of the world, and such blurred metafictional lines are the best way to do so: "These encounters enable me to hold the phantasm and the reality in my mind at the same time; this is much more interesting than either one alone."

Century's is a pessimistic vision, "a world that bears too much truth". A world in which the weight of being a woman leads to suicide, where imaginary gardens are not enough to shore against one's ruins, where politics are an unchanging morass, and rapists are ordinary men, where "if man is only appetite: then all is barbarism..." And yet.

Always "and yet", because there is art at all made of it. Because at the beginning of the novel (which is close to the end in a sense, which is "now"), we find men and women finally not in opposition and that there is empathy; and because of the last line of the second story (which just might be the end, this is a novel in fragments after all and we can do with them what we may): "and they lived fairly happily for quite a while afterwards." Which is really the best we can hope for in this life.

And is Century a novel? I vote yes, because its truth indeed lies in how its pieces relate to one another. Because I read the Gwen story "Serenissima" on its own once upon a time, and it seemed to "just be another piece of improbable pornography", but it the context of the rest of the book, I knew everything about her and she broke my heart.

Anyway, it occurs to me that this response to Century has done it no favours. That its biggest problem is that no one is ever going to to say, "Hey, read this" with a snappy one-sentence reason why. That it raises questions without answers, and begins an engagement that is unceasing, and it's more like someone handing you pieces of a puzzle than recommending you a book. Except you get to rearrange the pieces over and over again, which is infinitely more interesting, but frustrating too.

It will be hard to compare this book to others, because its level of engagement is on its own kind of plane. I'm not sure whether this will be points for or against it when it comes time to rank it against the other books. Apples to oranges perhaps (though both are delicious). So I'm glad I read it first, and I'm glad I read it at all, and I do hope I'm passing something on of its spirit, and others are inspired to read it too.

Canada Reads Independently Rankings:
1) Century by Ray Smith

A recent bookish intersection

"It is past midnight. One of the joys of marriage, thinks Roger, is this late night dissection of events in the privacy of bed, and the glorious intimacy, when the rest of the world is locked out and only you and she exist."

--from Penelope Lively's novel Family Album
**
all day

i wait all day
for these ten minutes
awake in our bed,
your minted breath,
lick of dark
across my eyelids,
and the little clicks
your glasses make
as they’re folded
and set on the nightstand

-- from Kerry Ryan's collection The Sleeping Life

Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women by Harriet Reisen

I was confused every time I came across the name "Louisa" in Harriet Reisen's biography Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Woman. Louisa? Who was this "Louisa"? For I was reading about Jo, wild, topsey-turvey, irrepressible Jo March, of course. Jo, whose identity was claimed by Alcott unabashedly, because her fiction was an amalgam of her own experiences and dreams of better things. That Louisa May Alcott had to tone reality down a bit to make Jo's story believable, however, means that her biography is bound to be devourable. And in the most capable hands of Harriet Reisen (who writes like a novelist), the book most certainly is.

Admittedly, as Alcott's biographer, Reisen did have certain advantages. Louisa May Alcott left quite a paper trail, of journals and scribblings, and an enormous volume of work produced over a very prodigious career. She annotated her own journals over time. Her parents, siblings and many associates all kept journals throughout their lives. She was associated with characters such as Thoreou and Emerson who themselves are objects of great interest. And Reisen is following in the footsteps of other Alcott biographers whose literary sleuthing resulted in the uncovering of Alcott's pulp fiction and thrillers that were published under the pseudonym of A.M. Barnard.

Reisen's other advantage was that Louisa May Alcott was absolutely fascinating. The daughter of famed Transcendentalist Bronson Alcott (who Reisen contends made his greatest fame on the back of his novelist daughter's reputation), a peer of Thoreau and Emerson, Louisa grew up in a family guided by his eccentric whims. These whims make a storied tale, though their result was that the Alcotts were frequently destitute, desperate, much in debt, so that the four daughters had to work for a living from a very young age, constrasting them much from their mother's socially prominent Boston family.

Work, which became the name of one of Alcott's autobiographical novels, is one of the most interesting themes of her life. Seeking independence from and support for her family, she work as an invalid's companion, as a teacher, a governess, as a seamstress-- "Needlework offered one great advantage over teaching: 'Sewing won't make my fortune, but I can plan my stories while I work, and then scribble 'em down on Sundays.'" She served a nurse in the American Civil War, which was the subject of her book Hospital Sketches. And yes, she wrote, exhaustingly-- children's stories, fairy tales, thrillers and lurid tales, novels and sketches, and short stories-- earning enough to support herself, which Reisen notes was as rare for a writer then as it is today.

Of course, Louisa was not exactly Jo. Reisen reports of fans that flocked to her house and were disappointed "(sometimes to the point of tears) to find an old curmudgeon instead of spunky Jo". Alcott was subject to extreme moods, periods of ill health, and the positive outlook so prized by the Marches was more easily aspired to than attained. Her own childhood experiences had been mined of their most extreme hardship before appearing in Little Women, she'd given Jo a different type of father, the March family's was a much more just kind of world.

But Jo she was, nonetheless, just as her older sister Anna signed fan letters as "Meg"-- noting that she lacked Meg's good looks, but Louisa had decided that "someone had to the beauty". Louisa may have even referred to herself as "Jo" in her journals, or else her first biographer had made the error whilst transcribing the journals, which is emblematic of how the fact and fiction began to further blur.

Which means that Reisen had some literary sleuthing of her own to perform, and she did turn up long-lost transcripts of interviews Alcott's neice Lulu (who was one of the last living people to have known the author). Having such an enormous number of resources at her disposal must certainly have been an advantage, but to pick and choose and then join them so seamlessly would have been no mean feat, and Reisen proves herself up to the task. To have brought Alcott to life, in such vivid Jo-ishness is a remarkable achievement, a credit to the subject, and the whole book is absolute marvelous and inspiring to read.

L.M. Montgomery and The Blythes are Quoted

My Quill & Quire review of Jane Urquhart's Extraordinary Canadians: LM Montgomery and Montgomery's The Blythes are Quoted (edited by Benjamin Lefebvre) is now posted online. I enjoyed both of these books immensely, and found The Blythes are Quoted fascinating to consider as a example of Montgomery's work in progress, though perhaps not a typical one as this book has something of a peculiar genesis. And the Urquhart biography is wonderful-- as enlightening as Mary Rubio's but in an accessible package for a more casual read. There is so much about Montgomery her readers don't know, and how much richer is her writing once they do.

Anyway, my review is here.

Burmese Lessons by Karen Connelly

As I received this book for Christmas and read it over a couple of days of bookish holiday bliss, my brain is far too mushy in regards to it for a formal review, but I don't want to miss my chance to let you know how wonderful it is. I read Karen Connelly's novel The Lizard Cage in 2007, it's stayed with me ever since, and it made a Burma a place that's important in my mind. I certainly thought of Teza as I read news coverage of the Saffron Revolution later that year (which was not really a revolution in the end, but for a while it was the promise of something). Connelly's novel was formidable in and of itself, but that a Canadian woman had managed to so well articulate the story of a male Burmese political prisoner was quite remarkable.

Connelly's new book Burmese Lessons is partly the story of how she came to write The Lizard Cage. I say "partly", because Burmese Lessons is "about" many things, strands of experience from that time in Connelly's life, plaited together in a gorgeous construction. The book is subtitled "A Love Story", and much of it is the story of Connelly's love affair with Maung, a Burmese dissident guerrilla fighter. But theirs is not the only "love story", strictly speaking. In the book, Connelly writes of her effusive love for the whole world, this one country in particular, and every corner of it, and its language and its people, and its beauty, and she seeks an understanding of its ugliness too. Her passion resonates throughout the text, whether she is describing the people she sees, the food she eats, those she conflicts with, the politics of Burma, the situation on the Thai-Burmese border, or sex with Maung (and there is much of the last one). Burmese Lessons is very much a story of the body, of sex, of violence she witnesses inflicted upon Burmese protesters, of the sick children she sees who are dying of malaria, of her own experience with malaria, of living in the jungle and not having a bowel movement for days and days and days. Connelly holds nothing back here, and her passion is clear with every line.

As well as a novelist, Connelly is a poet and a non-fiction writer, and her prose demonstrates such deftness. After more than a decade dealing with Burmese politics, she also knows her stuff, and holds nothing back either regarding the brutality of the Burmese junta, the realities of life in the Burmese refugee camps in Thailand, and the violence that human beings enact toward one another. This is not an easy book by any means, but its various strands are entwined so as to counter heavy with light, to enlighten and enliven, to make reading the whole thing in a day or two a serious delight.

If you haven't read The Lizard Cage, you really should. And then when you're finished with that, read this to find out everything else, what Connelly couldn't hope to contain in her other book. Which is to say that Burmese Lessons is a serving of leftovers of a sort, but it would have been a sin to have them go to waste.

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer

I love a novel with a house at its centre, as its core. To the Lighthouse, most books by L.M. Montgomery, Rebecca, Virginia Lee Burton's The Little House, and I mean all that. I love a novel in which the house is the main character, and the rest is just rearrangement of the furniture, and how the house is the constant through history and time, changing and unchanging. The present, the future, and the past.

The house in Simon Mawer's The Glass Room (shortlisted for the 2009 Man-Booker Prize) is Landauer House, built on the eve of the 1930s for wealthy newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Landauer. Set on a hillside overlooking the fictional Czech city of Mesto, Landauer House (which has a real-life precedent; see here) is a stark, modern building without adornment. Designed by an architect who doesn't call himself one: "'I am a poet of space and form. Of light... Architects are people who build walls and floors and roofs. I capture and enclose the space within.'"

To the Landauer's, and to everyone, their house represents modernity, which seems to be synonymous with "the future". In the newly formed Czechoslovakia, with the old order overthrown, to believe that now is the future is not entirely naive. Now is a time of idealism realized, when people live in glass houses, entirely trusting of peace, and live their lives in the open, with nothing to hide. In such an era of freedom and inhibition, the Landauers' marriage bonds begin to unravel early on. Viktor begins an affair with a common seamstress he meets on the streets of Vienna, Liesel's passionate relationship with her best friend Hana grows deeper. In the Glass Room of their house, overlooking the city, these two live a new kind of ordinary life that is without precedent.

History is the culmination of such quotidian details, however, and history eventually arrives to show how precarious their peace has all along been. Viktor Landauer, who is Jewish, pays close attention to political events unfolding in Germany and Austria, and though Liesel has protested that these events have nothing to do with them, Viktor is proven right when the Germans invade Czechoslovakia in 1939. However he's been squirreling money away to Swiss bank accounts and he and his family escape just in time, but they leave Landauer House behind, of course. And so the house continues through history without them to the present day and a satisfying (perhaps too much so?) epilogue.

The story loses some momentum once the Landauers and their associates have parted from it, but the house as an achor is compelling enough. The house is abandoned, used as a labratory by Nazi scientists, and then as a physiotherapy clinic during the 1960s and the Velvet Revolution (and here it begins to read like a Milan Kundera novel, but maybe I'd think that about any narrative containing a Tomas).

The prose is devourable, with smart dialogue, and interesting in that English is used to stand for a hodgepodge of languages and dialects spoken in that part of Europe at that time. Mawer is able to bend English to differentiate between these different ways of speaking, and apart from some conspicuous Britishisms, this is effective. (Or maybe it was only conspicuous because I don't speak British-English myself, but a few "bloodys" and "jolly-well"ish lines read a bit oddly for people who were supposed to be speaking Czech or German.)

I had reservations as I read this book-- initially, its characters seem all too conscious of their places in history. Of course, the personal is political, but never once did the Landauers or their friends have a dinner party conversation that didn't have massive implications. I sincerely doubt that anyone has ever uttered a line like, "Viktor, you are losing your nerve. It was you who wanted a house for the future and now you seem to hanker after the solid ideas of the past." There is no subtlety as to these characters' places in time (and let us just say that James Wood would hate this book). There is also a scene that eroticizes breastfeeding, which I've never seen before, and I just couldn't buy it. But maybe that's just me...

As I read the book, however, I gave up the reservations. Yes, its characters stood for too much, but that's why they're characters and not people, and this is a story after all. A story that sweeps, and it did it to me, and so I was enthralled by all its twists and turns and coincidences as I followed the Landauers through the years, through History:

"The coincidence might seem some kind of predestination but he knows that it is not so-- it is pure caprice. You can call it malicious if you like but in fact it is neutral. Things just happen. One country occupies another; people flee, scatter across the countryside, some here, some there, like thrown dice... What was one chance in a million suddenly becomes a certainty. Because it has happened."

On The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Though I suspect my aversion to all things science-fiction/ fantasy might be genetic, I can also trace it to having to watch a cartoon version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe during one rainy indoor recess back in grade one. That witch, the way one character spoke about "strangers in these woods", what a strangely terrifying thing is whatever is "turkish delight", and then when they cut the lion's mane off! I remember it all vividly, and with such a frisson of horror (and don't even get me started on the indoor recess where we watched The Neverending Story and the horse drowning in the quicksand).

I've had a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe sitting on my shelf for a while now, and this weekend I finally got around to reading it. Because it's a children's classic, and you can't judge a book based upon a cartoon adaptation you watched when you were six (as the adage goes). And I can see why I was creeped out all those years ago, but I did enjoy it and will pass it along to Harriet to read when she is bigger. Christian allegory or not, it was an absorbing story, I loved the role of the Professor who confirms that Narnia is not just the children's fantasy, the obtrusive narrator, the complicating nature of Edmund's treachery, connections to Lewis Carroll and Wonderland, and idea of a world where it is always winter and never Christmas (which sounds a little like February).

It was an absorbing story indeed. If I were ever to give advice on how to start a novel, I'd advise a writer to have a character discover a secret world ("ok, I'm intrigued), explore it, and very quickly return back and then discover the world's portal has shut ("ok, I'm reading this book to the end now just to figure out what this is all about"). It's a double-bait, and it's excellent.

I'm also now thinking much about book titles that are itemized lists of what the book contains. There are plenty with one item, many with two, but how many others with three items? (Off the top of my head, I can only think of an old YA book called Maudie, Me and the Dirty Book.) Such a title would hardly be inspired, would it? Though alliteration certainly works in its favour here.

I don't imagine I'll be reading further chronicles of Narnia, because not being a small child, I've come to these books much too late. But I'm glad I finally read this one, particularly in order to discover that (SPOILER ALERT) Aslan doesn't die!! Or he is reincarnated, or... something. I don't know how I missed that during Indoor Recess. Perhaps I was so traumatized by him being shorn of his mane that I missed the rest of the film? Nevertheless, I was much relieved by this happy ending.

Carol Shields: Evocation and Echo

I once wrote a story in response to Carol Shields' story "Scenes" (from Various Miracles). The story was rather niftily structured as a "prose glosa" around four lines of Shields' story, and I fell completely in love with it. I submitted it only once for publication, however, receiving a rejection remarking upon how Shields' prose next to my prose only made clear that I was no Carol Shields. And that was sort of devastating, of course, though it was nothing I didn't know already.

There is something about Carol Shields, though. How her death seems to have left a conversation hanging, unfinished in the air. How impossible it seems to consider her work, and that we'll have no more of it. And this is the reason I've been so eager to get my mitts on anything that's been published about her since she died-- Eleanor Wachtel's book Random Illuminations, Blanche Howard's letters A Memoir of Friendship. To discover more about Shields is to gain deeper access to the work she left behind. This is also the reason why I so enjoyed using her work as a starting point for my own story. And all of this not just because we don't want her literary life to be finished, but rather because her literature is such that it never will be-- begging to be reread, picked apart and put back together, toyed with, read again, examined from a different angle, a few years down the line. With Carol Shields' signature generosity, she's created a legacy that refuses to be left alone.

Carol Shields: Evocation and Echo is a collection of reader responses to Shields and her work. Edited by Aritha van Herk and Conny Steenman-Marcusse and published throught the Association for Canadian Studies in the Netherlands, the responses range from critical takes on Shields' work and her feminism, to fiction and poetry using her work as a springboard. Susan Swann writes from the point of view of Mary Swann regarding Shields as her creator; one of my favourite pieces "Moving On" by Charlotte Sturgess has one of Shields' creations reporting to a rather inspired fictional bureaucracy called the Character Complaints Office; several writers created fictional amalgams of ideas presented in Shields' incredible collection Various Miracles, Alex Ramon advances the story of Larry Weller. Typical for a writer for whom the domestic and professional were so closely linked, two of Shields' daughter make appearences. Friends and associates have presented eulogies, some of which were first published in newspapers around the time of Shields' death.

As with my little prose glosa, a response to Carol Shields is a long way from Carol Shields, but these "evocations and echoes" are still very effective-- her spirit is evoked in these pieces, and her work opened wider by the echoes they've inspired. I particularly appreciated the European focus, writers and scholars who put a different spin on Shields than I'm used to, examining her outside of the Canadian Literature context. This curious scrapbook is a tribute to the engagingness of the work of Carol Shields, and a celebration of readers and reading.

Help Me, Jacques Cousteau by Gil Adamson

On the back of Gil Adamson's success with The Outlander (a popular novel even before it became a serious contender for Canada Reads 2009), House of Anansi has republished her first work of fiction, Help Me, Jacques Cousteau (published in 2000 by The Porcupine's Quill). Which is kind of strange, actually, seeing as Help Me, Jacques Cousteau has little in common with The Outlander-- they're siblings a decade apart, after all. Somehow, I just don't see Nicholas Campbell getting behind this one, but the very good news is that I can. While The Outlander was not quite my cup of tea, I delighted in this story collection.

Essential to note, however, that Help Me, Jacques Cousteau is a linked story collection, which follows a character called Hazel from young childhood into her late teen years. And though episodic, these stories do come together to create a narrative arc that would satisfy a reader with a craving for a novel. A little bit like Emma Richler's Sister Crazy, but not quite as leaden in the end, and with a dash of the spirit of Adrian Mole, what Help Me... has in common with The Outlander is prose constructed with a poet's deft hand, attention to each sentence, and the paragraphs. Rhythm, cadence, alliteration, precise imagery and perfect word choice. Two sentences stuck together like these ones: "My mother is physically fantastic. She's long, tall, elastic."

But what Help Me... also has is wry humour, and a remarkable narrator in Hazel, who is blessed with remarkable powers of perception. Her voice is an anchor in this text of eccentric characters and bizarre goings-on, a voice unchanging as the world around her spirals out of control. This unchangingness works, however, because what does change are the things that Hazel perceives with her remarkable powers as she grows older-- eventually, her parents' fallibility, the strain in their marriage, that things fall apart, that no one (including herself) is quite who they're supposed to be.

Adamson attributes to Hazel a peculiar deficiency of long-term memory which keeps the collection from being an exercise in nostalgia. Also notable, that Hazel is not the stereotypical misfit, in that she has friendships (however fraught, but this is high school) and boys willing to make out her (plenty of them actually, which is a novel plot device for a poetry-loving teen) so that we're not taken down that familiar road that always ends with bulimia and somebody's initials carved in a thigh.

So though its formula is tried and tested, Help Me... is infused with originality. Hazel's family and her neighbours come to life through her eyes-- her fantastic tall mother, strong enough to open any spaghetti jar; her brother and his solar curtains; her experience pet-sitting for a neighbour in a house of tropical fish; a grandfather who frequently turns up unexpectedly, and makes himself comfortable in a bath; a bevy of uncles and aunties; a bed full of cousins; a father who rewires the house when he's anxious.

Help Me... begins with an epigraph from the Talking Heads' song "Heaven": "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens." Hazel's life, on the other hand, is a place where something always does, and though Hazel might desire a bit of a reprieve, at least we get the good fortune of reading all about it.

Leave me alone, I'm reading

I spent the weekend enjoying Maureen Corrigan's book Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading. (My copy is an ARC I picked up at the Vic Book Sale, and may I say it makes me happy to know that an ARC can have its life extended?) Other than the fact that I'm into reading books about reading books (lately, Howards End is on the Landing and Shelf Discovery), before I picked it up, this book didn't hold a ton of appeal to me. I've never listened to Corrigan's reviews on Fresh Air, and her focus on detective fiction and Catholic martyr stories didn't exactly turn me on, but she's a wonderful writer and the whole book was engaging. Also, I realized I recognized the "Catholic martyr story" Karen and With Love From Karen by Marie Killilea, which I don't think I ever read, but I remember from the paperback rack of every school library I ever browsed through.

Like most books about a reader's relationship with books, the shape of the narrative was bizarrely (but pleasingly, I thought) random. Corrigan weaves the books of her life into the story of her life-- how women's "extreme-adventure" tales led her to her adopted daughter from China, how detective fiction helped her find her way out of the mire of academia, how she remembers her father through the WW2 history books he used to read. Also, how Maureen Corrigan finally found love, her quest for "work" in the novel, how a woman who reads for a living could be two generations away from a grandmother who never learned literacy. She also mentions Barbara Pym (whose books are proving hard to find used, by the way. Seems those that like her books also like to keep them).

As I read Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading, I had to keep going online to put books on reserve at the library-- in particular, and in transit to me as I write this (!), I am excited to read Gaudy Nights by Dorothy L. Sayers (which features a literary Harriet) and Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott. And Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym. After discovering Corrigan's reviews online, I'm also looking forward to reading The Man in the Wooden Hat.

I just finished reading Lost Girls and Love Hotels by Catherine Hanrahan, which was too gritty for my English old-lady tastes (though I am Canadian and thirty. I am just not cool). From that experience, I realized that I get incredibly irritated reading about people spiralling toward rock bottom, and that is just my sensibility. The ending of the book, however, made it for me. Shocking, gross, and brilliant.

Now I am reading Cleopatra's Sister, which is a novel by Penelope Lively, which means that I'm enraptured. (The book has a whiff of Moon Tiger about it, which has been my favourite Lively novel yet.)

Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing by Lydia Peelle

Perhaps Lydia Peelle's stories seem a bit old fashioned because most of them are so blatantly about something. So that I finish reading one, for example "Phantom Pain", exclaiming that the story was amazing, and when I'm asked what it was about, I can say, "A one-legged taxidermist and a mountain lion on the loose." And then, naturally, whoever I've been talking to wants to read the story now.

A bit of their old-fashionedness also comes from these stories' deep investment in history, and a focus on farming and the land. "The Mule Killers" is three generations contained in one single tale, which navigates changes in farming life (mule killers are tractors). "Sweethearts of the Rodeo" looks less far back, an elegy-that-isn't-an-elegy to a summer two girls on the cusp of adolescence spent working on a horse farm. "Kidding Season" takes place in the present day, but recounts a troubled young man's experiences working on a goat farm. In "Shadow On A Weary Land", a motley collection of characters (one of whom is apparently communing with the spirit of Jesse James) search for treasure buried by James' brother on property outside of Nashville that is rapidly being developed into subdivisions.

Peelle's agrarian history is no idyll, however. A seminal moment in the "Sweethearts of the Rodeo" summer involves the head of a dead pony in the jaws of a dog. The ending of "Kidding Season" is so sickeningly devastating, you'll read the final paragraph again and again, willing it to say something different. The narrator of "Shadow On A Weary Land" is an octogenarian stroke victim/former drug addict, and the yarns he spins are a product of his past.

"Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing" reminded me of Birds of America Lorrie Moore. The stories "Phantom Pain" and "The Still Point" paint the underside of the present day in stunningly vivid terms. "This is Not a Love Story" chronicles an abusive relationship, displaying a wonderful treatment of the "life as a flowing river" metaphor, when that river is a man-made lake that had flooded a town, and how there's nothing else to do but go around and around. This story in particular undercuts any notion of the good old days: "But wasn't it worth it?' she said. 'Wouldn't you do it all over again?'/No, it wasn't worth it, I told her. Not any of it./ Not one damn minute of it./Trust me."

Peelle displays some self-awareness in "This is Not a Love Story", her narrator a girl from Connecticut who in the early '80s decides to become a photographer and "move to the South, where I had never been and which seemed so mysterious: raw and dangerous and full of relics of a long-gone era." Peelle, a native of Boston, might have been similarly naive when she moved to the South, when she started writing about the South, but her stories show she's since learned that the dangers are elsewhere, that the long-gone era is an illusion, and relics aren't the things you might have chosen to last.

But writing about the South, she treads on a dangerous tradition, and thus come the comparisons of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. There are moments when it feels like she might be striving toward these voices, but on the whole I would posit that, as an outsider, Peelle comes at the South from a unique point of view, and hers are even less elegiac than these writers' non-elegies for a long-gone era that never was and never went.

Where Peelle is like O'Connor, however, is in these moments in which she digs in her knife and twists it, and then you realize that the story you've been reading is darker, its people more awful, what has happened is even more tragic than you've ever imagined. I mentioned the end of "Kidding Season" already, and can't get explicit or I'll ruin it, but Peelle manages to synchronize her readers' awareness of dawning horror with that of her protagonist in a way that is absolutely masterful. "Phantom Pain" has a similar impact. Everything is loaded.

I like this book for the lines it crosses-- Peelle's history isn't dead and buried, but keeps coming up again year after year (and kudos for that wonderful asparagus image in "The Mule Killers"). Which is perhaps where she gets her lack of elegy from, for its hard to elegize something so close to the surface. Peelle's stories mix urban life and farm life, they're stories of home and of the road (and neither of these so much like the home and road you read in books). I like that if you picked up this book, and read it straight through, you'd have a hard time telling whether it was written by a woman or a man, and in that ambiguity, I think, Peelle's writing takes on tremendous power.

This is a stunning collection that deserves to be read and celebrated, and I think the one only leads to the other.

It had to be stories

I just finished reading the short story collection Reasons For and Advantages of Breathing, which I finally picked up after having it recommended by Lauren Groff and seeing it was selected as one of The National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 Fiction Selections for 2009. I am much excited about the book and its author, Lydia Peelle, and I'll be writing a review this weekend, but in the meantime, why the internet is great as follows.

Her book's playlist at Largehearted Boy. Her story "The Mule Killers" for your reading pleasure. Lydia Peelle interviewed by Gillian Welch, and in particular this:

"It is like making an album. A short-story collection is like an album in ways that a novel is not; your hope is for the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts. What you want is for each song or each story to stand on its own, but for them to say something greater when collected in one album or between the covers of a book. And sequencing is so important—as I know it is with a record—the way you order the stories; you think about the emotional arc to the whole book. I wouldn’t want a reader to skip around the book, but to read the stories in order. As for the stories, well, I knew it had to be stories …"

Mother Knows Best: Talking Back to the Experts

I suppose it's not so different to those mothers that wish to see themselves in their children's books, that I've been looking for me in my own reading. Or rather seeking representations of my experience since becoming a mother, not because I'm so entirely self-interested, but because the politics of motherhood are hard to understand. And motherhood is politicized, the whole of it, which is natural in the case of any group of people lacking power enough to properly go around.

Mothers are also a group of people desperately trying to tame chaos, which makes them perfect targets for authority of all kinds. And these authorities, I've noticed, do tend to be men and childless women, which is probably because these are the only people unlearned enough to think that babies could be a science. In Mother Knows Best: Talking Back To The "Experts" (published by York University's Demeter Press, which also published Motherhood and Blogging: The Radical Art of the Mommy Blog), writers address this notion of "expertness", and discuss the impact of these authorities on modern mothering.

And it is "mothering", which the carefully benign "parenting" is usually an euphemism for anyway. Mothering a baby is scientific like the tide is, natural as anything, tied to the moon, but much more difficult to time by a clock. So that an expert will tell you that your breastfeeding pain is impossible, because Baby's latch is fine, but feeding makes you want to die. Another will tell you that babies don't get fevers whilst teething, even though you've had three children and it was the case for all of them. I read a book by a breastfeeding champion who said that babies do not require burping, that gulping does not cause gas, but he's obviously never met my daughter. A baby's poo (oh, of course I was going to talk about poo! Can you believe I waited until the third paragraph!), says the baby books, will always be yellow, but I've met mothers of the healthiest of babes with veritable rainbows. (And even worse, even the "experts" don't agree with one another. This is very confusing. In making any major decisions about my child's wellbeing, I've found the best solution so far is to throw the baby books out the window. They make a mighty thunk. What fun!)

All of this expertism serves to undermine a mother's instinct and confidence, and the idea that there is just one way to be a baby or a mom is what pits women against one another so mercilessly. The conflict is apparent even in the anthology-- in "Deconstructing Discourse: Breastfeeding, Intensive Mothering and the Moral Construction of Choice", Stephanie Knaak questions studies that find any difference between breastfed and formula-fed babies. In the next article, Catherine Ma begins "If the Breast is Best, Why Are Breastfeeding Rates So Low?" with "The consensus on the benefits of breast milk is undisputed on both institutional and individual levels."

So which is it? But in this anthology, that is not the point, which is instead to examine the politics of these ideas, which it does so effectively. And novelly as well, which is novel itself with arguments that have been rehashed over and over again. In "Making Decisions About Vaccines", Rachel Casiday writes about those parents who "know" that the MMR vaccine was behind their child's autism, just as that mother I mentioned before "knew" that fevers came with teething. Whether or not these parents are right is not the point either, and Casiday's thesis is that this kind of parental "knowledge" has to be taken into account by authorities regardless. These parents have their own particular brand of expert knowledge, and the dismissal of their concerns by authorities is what leaves other parents torn between experts (for it was a scientific study, however now debunked, that made the autism/MMR link) and wary of having their own children vaccinated.

Mother Knows Best also examines breastfeeding and attachment parenting, and how these inform ideas of "the good mother". How many feminists have embraced these practices, though they run so contrary to feminist politics. The fetisization of "the natural", to justify breastfeeding and attachment parenting, though these ideas are out of place in the society in which we live (and in America, in particular, where maternity leave is pitiful). I have become quite accustomed, in the liberal circles in which I run, to turning my nose up at sleep training and Nestle, but it was interesting to interrogate these ideas, and question where they come from. To consider whether it might be egocentric to forego a career to be there for your child, and assume your presence will make up for whatever material goods the child will lack. How ultrasound imagery renders the fetus subject rather than object. How pregnancy guide advice compares to actual women's experiences.

Though academic theorizing is odd to those of us outside the academy, I've found it quite useful to examine the politics of motherhood within this construct. Because discussions of motherhood get so personal, otherwise, and then defensive, mean and ridiculous. And all the experts who claim to come without agenda, but nobody is, so to take a step back is really worthwhile. An anthology like this is the closest thing to "the big picture" that I've been able to grasp yet of the big, big picture that motherhood is, and for that reason among many, I'm glad I read it.

What Boys Like by Amy Jones

I'd previously read Amy Jones' "The Church of the Latter-Day Peaches" in The New Quarterly, and as I read the story again in Jones' new collection, I was hoping that this time the story might be different. This time, could it possiby have an ending that wouldn't break my heart? It didn't, though I was so hopeful that a little trick with italics caught me once again, and I dared to be tripped up by the same trick that caught me before.

And how engaging is that, I ask? To read so far into a story, that it wraps itself around me, and then I get all wrapped up in it too, and the whole thing is an untenable knot?

What Boys Like is a lot like its cover. Though its tone is not upbeat, the colours are so vivid that you'd never find these stories bleak. And yes, the girls are often steeley-eyed, dangerous, tough as nails. The comic-strip touch suggesting a pop-cultural bent, and indeed, Jones' characters listen to pop music, they play video games, sports is playing on TV, and references are tied up in zeitgeist.

Jones displays impressive range, writing in first, third and an impressively-executed second-person. Her characters are male and female, young and older than young, on the cusp, over the edge, or past the point of no return. They lead such desperate lives, and then there are these moments of grace-- the pregnant lady who shares her peanut butter sandwich, the man who dares a young girl to be something, that Jenny goes home at all, Marty looking for bats in the garden, and all that love. The baby inside her. And when those who really get it had it coming anyway.

These are stories mostly of Halifax, in and around. In "The Church of the Latter-Day Peaches", the first sentence tells the story: "There is nothing more unseemly than a pregnant widow at a funeral". "Places to Drink Outside in Halifax" is the story of the first party of high school, drinking on Alexander Keith's grave. In "An Army of One", a woman attends the wedding of her male best friend (who she's been sleeping with for years). "All We Will Ever Be" is two sides of a woman from the perspective of the man she's just about to throw away and the other she's just sinking her teeth into.

In each of these stories, premise is realized into someting vivid and whole. Amy Jones' stories are easy to fall into, but complex enough that there is something new upon returning to them again and again.

There is no excuse

There is no excuse for the accompanying photo, except that my baby is adorable. Alright then, bookishly. I thumbed through the new Pierre Trudeau biography the other day, and now I am afraid I'm the only woman in Canada who never slept with him. He didn't even want me to live with him and have his child, like Liona Boyd (who is Liona Boyd?) on the cover of Hello. This may or may not be unfortunate. I just finished reading What Boys Like by Amy Jones (review forthcoming!) and have just started Mother Knows Best: Talking Back to the "Experts". Patricia has directed my attention to what seems to be the worst picture book ever: The Mischievous Mom at the Art Gallery by "high-octane duo" Rebecca Eckler and Erica Ehm. A new level of narcissism-- we have to be reflected in our kids' books now? "Finally — a picture book for the Starbucks-armed, BlackBerry-checking, gym-going working mother." Perhaps you're meant to read it on the treadmill. Chapters/Indigo includes a "Green Matters" option on its online catalogue, narrowing searches to books printed on FSC/Recycled Content. On the best Sesame Street songs (in honour of the show's fortieth birthday). They forgot ladybug picnic. Charlotte on The Children's Storefront, a neighbourhood institution that was lost in a fire last week. Rona Maynard's secrets to decades upon decades of marriage. I've been enjoying books/music site Sasquatch Radio. WriterGuy directed me towards the interesting "How Waterstones killed bookselling" (in light of my recent post about how Waterstones killed book buying, for me, at least). And I'm wondering if I'm the only one who starts carrying around my next book to be read once the current read is down to the last fifty pages or so. Indeed, if I don't have something fabulous to read within arm's length at all times, I do start to get a little nervous.

Do we really need a cup of tea?

"Perhaps there can be too much making cups of tea, I thought, as I watched Miss Statham filling the heavy teapot. We had all had our supper, or were supposed to have had it, and were met together to discuss the arrangements for the Christmas bazaar. Did we really need a cup of tea? I even said as much to Miss Statham and she looked at me with a hurt, almost angry look. 'Do we need tea?' she echoed. 'But Miss Lathbury...' She sounded puzzled and distressed and I began to realize that my question had struck at something deep and fundamental. It was the kind of question that starts a landslide in the mind." --from Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

I am so glad to have finally read Barbara Pym, having been thinking about doing so since I read this piece on the Barbara Pym Society way back in 2007. Though when the book began, I wasn't sure-- it seemed dated, a little too concerned with high and low churches (between which I can't distinguish) and the sexual life of curates and vicars, and then perhaps about two chapters in, it became clear that Pym had a wicked sense of humour. And yes, her Englishness is quite delightful, for those of us who delight in English novels as we do, and that someone is putting the kettle on to boil every other page, and when the tea is too weak or too strong-- the agony of it all! Throughout the book, I adored her acuity and her awareness, even when her narrator had less of the same (or did she?).

And how wonderful to know that now I've got a wealth of unread Pym novels before me. Better still-- she is unfashionable and therefore the books will be readily available used (and I'll purchase them as such without compunction, for as Barbara Pym is dead, she's doesn't need the royalties).