The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

by David Mitchell

It was through reading reviews of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel when it was first released in hardcover that I learned of David Mitchell and his work, which lead to my reading two of his other books (Black Swan Green and the brilliant Cloud Atlas) before tackling this rich and impressive novel.

Jacob De Zoet is a young Dutch man, working for the Dutch East India Company at the turn of the 19th century.  He has been sent to Dejima, the small island trading factory in Nagasaki Bay, at a time when Japan was kept strictly off-limits to foreigners.  The Dutchmen of the Company, with their various slaves and servants from other parts of the world, are practically kept prisoner, but are also the source of much lucrative trade, and the power that comes with it, and so are accorded a level of respect and deference.

De Zoet has arrived on Dejima with a new manager, the previous one having been revealed as a thief and scoundrel.  De Zoet's job is to perform some forensic accounting on the Company's books, and to determine how bad the damage is.  His goal is to raise enough money for himself through his honest work that he can return to Denmark and be with the girl he wants to marry.  Of course, it's not long before he meets the mysterious Orito Aibagawa, and he falls for her.

To all intents and purposes, the first third of this book gives the impression that the whole novel is a historical romance of manners and status, kind of like a historical multicultural Remains of the Day, but anyone who has read Cloud Atlas should know better than to expect that kind of adherence to conventions from a writer like Mitchell.

Soon enough, the book becomes more concerned with the goings on at a mountaintop shrine owned by a powerful Lord.  At this place, women are systematically 'engifted' with the seed of the monks at the shrine, although the purpose of this ritualized rape is unknown to just about everyone.  At this point, the book becomes a little more adventurous in nature, reminding me of a Kurosawa samurai movie.

Later still, a British frigate appears in the harbour, looking to take over Dejima and the trade that takes place there, and the novel tacks in yet another direction.

What makes all of this work is the steady hand of Mitchell's writing, and his strong sense of character.  As the story progresses, the characters, especially De Zoet, and his favourite Japanese interpreter, undergo a number of changes, and hold the reader's attention.

Mitchell does an excellent job of breathing life into such a foreign and distant point in History.  His description in the book is phenomenal, often using short declarative, almost haiku-like sentences to paint the scene for each new chapter or setting.

I really enjoyed this novel.

The Orenda

by Joseph Boyden

Joseph Boyden is one of my favourite contemporary authors, and I was pretty excited to dive into The Orenda, his newest novel.  It is set in 17th century Huronia, and is narrated by three people whose lives have become intertwined, despite the way they feel about one another.

Bird is a Wendat (Huron) warrior whose family was taken from him in an assault by a group of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois).  While travelling one summer, Bird and his group come across a Haudenosaunee family and slaughter them, taking with them a young girl as a hostage.  Later, Bird chooses to adopt this girl, named Snow Falls, as his own daughter.  Our third narrator is Father Cristophe, a Jesuit priest sent to live among the Wendat to learn their ways and to convert them to Christianity.

The novel is basically a chronicle of how contact with Europeans led to the downfall of the Wendat people.  Christophe means well, but he brings disease into the community, and sows distrust.  Bird frequently wishes to kill him, but as the Wendat become more dependent on the tools, weapons, and favour of the Iron People of Kebec, he has no choice but to protect the priest, and eventually grow to admire him.

Snow Falls cannot harbour her anger towards Bird forever, and over the course of the book we watch her grow into an independent and strong woman.  Bird is the most unchanged person, yet he is the one who most fully has to absorb the brunt of the changes brought to his people as they are devastated by sickness, and subjected to increasingly harsh and large skirmishes with the Haudenosaunee.

Basically, Boyden has written a fictionalized accounting of what happened at Ste. Marie Among the Hurons, a Jesuit mission founded on the shores of Lake Huron.  Christophe is a stand-in for Father Jean de Brebéuf, and meets an incredibly similar fate.  He does a terrific job of recreating the society and values of the Wendat people, bringing their culture back to life, and not bogging down the story too much in exposition.

Having studied this time period, and having read other novels such as Brian Moore's Black Robe and William T. Vollmann's utterly superb Fathers and Crows, much of what was on display here felt familiar and perhaps a little predictable.  When Boyden had his priests pull out the Captain of the Day, a wind-up clock used to mystify and command potential converts, I groaned a little, thinking of the Captain Clock scenes in the film version of Black Robe.  I don't know if this was a common trick, or something that was invented for the film, but I found it a bit repetitive here.

Still, despite all that, this is an incredible study of three people in a time that we don't think of often enough in this country.  Boyden's mastery of their voices, and the inevitable violent ending to this book kept me riveted throughout.  I especially liked the small nod to his other novels, which felt like a bit of a reward for loyal readers.

The Instructions

by Adam Levin

When reading dense, gigantic novels, I tend to fall into a headspace where finishing them is less a cause of celebration (i.e., "I can finally stop lugging this giant thing around"), as reason to begin mourning the characters and their world after spending so much time with them.  To me, The Instructions, Adam Levin's 1030 page tome, belongs alongside books like Willam T. Vollmann's Fathers and Crows, John Sayles's A Moment in the Sun, Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, Harry Mulisch's The Discovery of Heaven, and Roberto Bolaño's 2666, as a book that I found completely immersive and consuming.

Unlike those other books, which are all have a sprawl to match their heft, Levin takes just over 1000 pages to detail only four days in the life of his narrator, Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, one of the most unique and believable (while not being plausible) characters I've ever read.

Gurion believes he may be the long-awaited Jewish messiah.  Having been kicked out of a pair of Jewish schools for violence, and being expelled from the Chicago school system for more violence, Gurion has washed up at Aptakisic Junior High School's CAGE program, a lock-down class for troubled students.  He must spend his days sitting in a study carrell, facing forward, and not talking to anyone, at the supposed mercy of Monitor Botha, the hook-handed Australian who runs the program like the petty tyrant he is.

Gurion is an incredibly bright (and verbose) ten-year old, who became revered among students at the Jewish schools for his scholarship and leadership.  While their are few Israelites (never Jews) in the Cage, it's not long before Gurion begins to bring these violent, strange, and just misunderstood kids together under the banner of The Side of Damage.  Before this happens, Gurion falls in love with Eliza June Watermark, and has many long conversations with just about everyone around him.

Levin has crafted a very complex look into a junior high school.  Aptakisic has a number of groups, from the traditional basketball stars, the band kids, and the everykid no-ones, but also has the Main Hall Shovers, a thuggish group that model themselves on British soccer hooligans, but who also are concerned with the design of their uniform neck scarves.  Levin's school has complex rules around detentions and hall passes, and the Cage system is almost medieval in its inability to meet anyone's needs.

This book is full of fascinating characters.  Leaving Gurion aside, his friends and enemies are all complex and fully realized.  His best friend, Benji Nakamook is a brutal thug with a very clear and demanding understanding of loyalty.  Bam Slokum is the god of the school, a position he is both very aware of and beholden to.  Eliyahu of Brooklyn undergoes the biggest transformation in the book; a recently orphaned Orthodox youth with little understanding of other kids, he becomes a powerful leader in his own right under Gurion's tutelage.  There are many other memorable characters in this book - Ronny Desormie, the pervy gym teacher; the Five, a group of young Israelite friends; Leevon, the elective mute; BryGuy Maholtz, the nasally bully; the fascistic Monitor Botha; Call-Me-Sandy, the psychology student with a crush on her professor; Boystar, the child popstar who attends the school; and Main Man Mookus, a Cage student who has Williams Cocktail Party Syndrome, a form of retardation that causes him to speak in great long, complex sentences, the meaning of which he doesn't understand.

And then there are Gurion's parents.  His mother is an Ethiopian-Israelite psychologist who was in the special forces in Israel.  His father is a civil rights lawyer who has taken on a venomous Neo-Nazi as a client.  Their scenes in the book were the only ones that felt a little too long, but their support for and strange parenting of Gurion make the story possible.

Gurion himself is a rare character in literature.  He analyzes everything he does, but often finds that the best response to a situation is violent action.  He comes across as very loveable, but also vicious and dangerous.  He has armed his followers with pennyguns (devices made of pop bottles and balloons that can fire coins with great accuracy) and his own dogma, called Ulpan (or, in English, The Instructions).

The text of this book is meant to be Gurion's own scripture, as he himself wrote it.  To that end, Gurion (or really, Levin) often chooses words that are more 'scriptural' in nature.  When loading up on ammunition before launching the attack on the gym that sets off The Gurionic War, The Side of Damage choose to forsake the dimes, not pass them over.  It is these little touches that make this book so successful.

It's been a long time since I've read a book that has affected me the way The Instructions has.  Levin's consistency of vision, ear for dialogue, constructions of logic and scholarship, and most of all, wicked sense of humour (because this book is funny - I don't think I've conveyed that yet) make this a book I am dying to share with others.  This is an absolute gem, and one of my favourite books of all time.

Monsieur Pain

by Roberto Bolaño

I am a huge fan of Roberto Bolaño's writing, but am at the point where I've read all but a few of his novels.  That means I'm picking up some of his earliest written pieces, and of course they don't hold up against his greatest work, like 2666.  At the same time, it's enjoyable to see where Bolaño began as a writer, and to try to recognize his genesis.

Monsieur Pain is an odd little book.  It's basically about a mesmerist who lives in Paris just before the beginning of the Second World War.  M. Pain sometimes helps with the medical treatment of patients (it's never made clear how), and the widow of a former patient of his (who he is in love with) wants him to help a friend of her's.  The friend is the wife of the Peruvian poet César Vallejo, who is himself in hospital with what appears to be a terminal case of the hiccups (this and a fever are the only symptoms he is showing of some unknown malady).  Pain wants to help, but he is being pursued by a pair of young Spanish men, who wish to bribe him into staying away from the case.

Things get a lot less structured from there, as Pain gives in to his own paranoia, and begins wandering the city at night.  Bolaño introduces us to a few strange characters, such as the brothers who like to construct model disasters in the bottom of fish tanks, and a few odd situations, such as the night Pain spends sleeping in a bathtub in a deserted warehouse.  This book touches on the Spanish Civil War, Mme. Curie's daughter's suitor, and features a hospital designed in such a way that the corridors seem endless.

Bolaño's ideas are strange, but sadly, the book never quite comes to life until the reader arrives at the epilogue, which fills in what happened to a variety of characters after the book ends.  This is not one of Bolaño's best, but it was a diverting read nonetheless.

A Case of Exploding Mangoes

by Mohammed Hanif

The figure of the dictator is a fascinating one to explore in fiction.  These people manage to hold together a country (to varying degrees of success) simply based on the power of their personalities and their desire for power.  In A Case of Exploding Mangoes, Mohammed Hanif explores the last days of General Zia ul-Haq, who controlled Pakistan until his death in 1988.

Hanif portrays Zia as deeply religious, and prone to great acts of self-deception.  His Zia places the entire country on Red Alert because of a Koran verse he randomly reads one morning.  He also deludes himself into believing that the people of his country love him, and is continually shocked when evidence to the contrary surfaces.  In short, he's a petty, boorish man who enjoys wielding his power, but has convinced himself that everything he does is for the general good.

His story is contrasted with that of Ali Shigri, a young officer whose father, a colonel, once worked closely with Zia's circle, and whose apparent suicide was likely anything but.  Ali commands a drill squad that is expected to perform for the General, and he is entertaining notions of using the opportunity to kill the man.  Before he can put his plan into motion, he is detained because his roommate and best friend has gone missing.

The two stories carry on parallel to one another for most of the book.  Ali suffers imprisonment in a medieval dungeon, while Zia remains confined to the Army House, where he is at the mercy of his over-protective guard and his unhappy wife.  The reader becomes privy to the plots against Zia, most notably by his Intelligence head General Akhter.

This is historical fiction - Zia was killed in a plane crash in 1988, alongside many of the people portrayed in this book.  Hanif has done a wonderful job of blurring fact and fiction, and writing a novel that is satirical while sticking to established facts.  This is a very well-written book, which brings to mind many of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's books that also portray brutal leaders in the waning days.  I enjoyed reading it.

McSweeney's #43

Written by Charles Baxter, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, TC Boyle, Noor Elashi, Catherine Lacey, and William Wheeler

Since I began subscribing to McSweeney's, Dave Eggers's wonderful literary quarterly, I don't think I've received such a slim volume before, but when it's packed with this much quality writing, it's all good.

This issue (which was packaged with a collection of writing from the new nation of South Sudan that I haven't read yet) contains four short stories, and two pieces of non-fiction.

Charles Baxter starts things off with an excellent and touching story about a young man whose life basically falls apart after he returns to the United States from a stint volunteering in Ethiopia.  He ends up being dependent on a boyfriend he met while there, and Baxter does a great job of showing how their love fails.

In Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's story, a young woman and her mother end up having to care for the mother's first husband's mother, as economic inequality becomes entrenched in modern-day Russia.  There are interesting parallels to the first story.

TC Boyle's story 'Burning Bright' is the best part of this collection.  He uses multiple narrative streams to tell the story of a tiger in a zoo in San Francisco, and how it impacts on the lives of others.  Boyle is such a terrific writer, but I realize it's been years since I've read one of his novels.  I should probably do something about that.

Catherine Lacey's story 'Moment Stay' didn't really do a whole lot for me, but I'm willing to admit that that may be my fault and not her's, as her writing is superb in places.

Noor Elashi (who helped compile a section on the Egyptian Revolution a few issues back) writes with great honesty about visiting her father, who is currently serving a sixty-five year sentence for funding a terror organization, in his federal prison, which is known as 'Guantanamo North'.  Elashi travels with her mother, grandmother, and two younger brothers, and she shares all the intimate details of their visit. It's a moving piece; at their first visit, the father tries to show off his yoga skills, but the second becomes very strained under family dynamics and the sense that a year's worth of meaningful interactions have to be condensed into a short visit.  That Elashi pere's guilt is not certain makes it all the more poignant.  This could not have been easy to write or share.

This volume ends in a long non-fiction piece by William Wheeler about the rebel activities in Libya that led to the over-throwing of Mouammar Khadafi.  He writes about the ways in which the rebels and their collaborators planned to take Tripoli, and then sticks around for a while after that.  It's very good reporting, and he gives space for the major players, and some of the more colourful minor ones, to develop as people.  Good stuff.

On to the South Sudan book.

Taddle Creek No. 30

Edited by Conan Tobias

One sure sign that summer is on the way is a new issue of Taddle Creek, Toronto's best literary magazine. Behind it's lovely cover, this issue contains four great pieces of fiction, and some other cool stuff.

Dani Couture shares an excerpt (of a novel?) called 'Salt', which has a young woman struggling to reconnect with her absent mother after her death.  David Ross's story 'No Blood' is somewhat similar, in that it's about a man who is struggling to reconnect with his own past after learning that his childhood babysitter has died.

'The Canadian Grotesque' is a strange story by Michelle Winters, about a woman who is cheating on her husband with a man living (or squatting) in a house hidden in a ravine.

Andrew MacDonald's story 'Four Minutes' is probably the one that is going to stick with me the longest.  The protagonist is involved in helping his developmentally delayed twin sister to have her first sexual experience with a man in similar circumstances.  It's both straight-forward and kind of creepy, and MacDonald handles it all perfectly.

Among the fiction, there is also an interesting piece of reportage about the two men who now own the bulk of the film collection that the Toronto Reference Library discarded a few years back.  I can completely understand the temptation to take ownership of such an eclectic and unmanageable mass of cultural heritage, and would probably feel as equally overwhelmed by the task of cataloguing and housing it all.  Maybe Nicholson Baker would take it...

I rather enjoyed looking over the covers of past issues of Acta Victoriana, the literary journal published by the University of Toronto's Victoria College.  The covers do a terrific job of chronicling the changes in choices of graphic design among probably pretentious students over a period of a hundred years.  Cool stuff.

And then there's Dave Lapp's 'People Around Here' strip.  It's always the part of the book that I most look forward to reading, but half the time that's just because I know it's going to annoy me.  Once again, Lapp doesn't tell a complete story in his first page, instead giving us the beginning of a conversation wherein a guy (Lapp?) recounts being solicited by a strange woman on the street, who manages to con a cab ride home out of him.  I don't need to know if the guy ended up sleeping with her, but I would have liked to have seen him get to the part in the talk where he tries to justify his actions to his friend.

Anyway, if you live in the Toronto area, go buy this magazine.  It's good.

Foul Pus From Dead Dogs

by Crad Kilodney

When Mary Brown, the Chairman of the Ontario Film Censor Board arrives at work one day, she discovers the particularly gruesome, decaying corpse of a dog sitting on the front steps.  Later, Mary suffers from the sudden appearance of a painful, pus-filled boil that bursts and heals quickly.  This affliction begins to affect everyone who works at the Board, and Kilodney does not shy away from details in this forty-page book that he self-published back in 1986.

This is not a typical Kilodney story, because of its length, and also the greater depth of detail which he entertains throughout.  He takes his time and reveals that the people tasked with protecting the people of Ontario from film filth are mostly pretty twisted themselves.  Mary likes to imagine herself in Biblical scenes of a sexual nature, while one of her colleagues likes to spy on the residents of an exclusive boarding school for girls.

Kilodney's point is pretty obvious, but it's still a pretty entertaining story, if one can see past all the pus.

The Skating Rink

by Roberto Bolaño

The Skating Rink is quite unlike any other Roberto Bolaño book that I've read.  To begin with, while two of the three narrators are poets, there is almost no discussion of poetry and writing in this book, a first in my experience.  Secondly, the plot is very tightly focused, and the book does not meander in the way that most of Bolaño's other novels do.

The Skating Rink is narrated by three men who live in Z, an unnamed town on the Costa Brava of Spain.  Their lives intersect in a number of ways, but most significantly because of a secret skating rink built in the ruins of an abandoned estate on the city's edge.  The book alternates in sequence through the narration given by Remo Morán, a Chilean writer and owner of various businesses in Z, his friend Gaspar Heredia, an illegal migrant and nightwatchman at a campsite Morán owns, and Enric Rosquelles, a functionary for the mayor and the person who built the skating rink.

You see, Rosquelles has fallen in love with Nuria Martí, a figure skater who has been dropped from the  Olympic team.  To help her, he builds the rink using embezzled money.  Morán begins to date Nuria, and Heredia falls for a homeless girl who begins to camp out in the estate.  Eventually, there is a murder at the rink, and things begin to fall apart for all of these characters.

This is easily the most mainstream of Bolaño's books, but that does not detract from his ability to create compelling characters and use some very interesting turns of phrase.  This is not the book he'll be remembered for, but it is a good place for a reader to start tackling his collected work, and it's an enjoyable read.

Sex Slaves of the Astro-Mutants

by Crad Kilodney

To read a book of Crad Kilodney's today is to be transported back to a simpler, perhaps better time, where all one needed to be a writer was a typewriter, access to a small printing press, and the desire to stand on street corners selling your book, with it's prurient and silly title, to anyone who you could convince (in 1982) to part with $2.50.  Of course, I didn't read Crad Kilodney in the 80s (I was seven when this book was released), but discovered his genius just before he retired from the street, and have been on a slow hunt for his work on eBay and in used bookshops ever since.

Sex Slaves of the Astro-Mutants contains six short stories, which are made up of the usual Kilodney tropes;  there are the silly titles ("The Extremely Sane Postal Workers of Yellowknife", "The World's Dullest Story", and "Duh", to say nothing of the title story itself), and sillier character names (Dr. Biff Zorkulon, Wilmot and Penelope Proviso, Osgood Bean, Butch Masters and his midget assistant Oafie, Dr. Ignatius Duh, Professor Eigenvalue, and Zoltan Greep), not to mention the silly non-twist endings, somewhat reminiscent of the classic Kilodney story "Lightning Struck My Dick", not included in this book.

Kilodney was either just having fun with his stories, or he saw in them some level of authorial truth which my impoverished reading of them has yet to uncover.  Either way, his stuff is a treat to read, if taken in very small doses.  Sure, it's juvenile and silly, but that's completely the point.

The Amazing Absorbing Boy

by Rabindranath Maharaj

The old adage of not judging a book by its cover rather applies to The Amazing Absorbing Boy.  I only noticed the book because of the cover by the incredible Michael Cho, which led me to seek out a copy.

The Amazing Absorbing Boy should have been right up my ally - it's a coming of age novel set in Toronto filled with comic book references, telling the story of a teenager who has to come to Canada from Trinidad after his mother's death.  He moves in with his father, who left the island when the boy was eight, and who is more than reluctant to take up the burdens of fatherhood with a complete stranger.

The problem is that the book kind of fell flat.  I found it hard to warm up to Sam, the protagonist, as he wandered the city and became obsessed with different potential father figures (and the occasional love interest).  Each chapter has him falling under the spell of a different eccentric - the old man who hangs out at Coffee Time with his friends, the doctor who drives a cab and makes up wild stories, the old man who likes to rent B-movies and write his own film scripts, the guy who works at the library and has been toiling for twenty-some years on the second line of a poem he began; the conspiracy-minded customer at an antique shop, and so on.  One or two characters like this would have been believable, but the endless parade is mind-numbing, especially since they don't really contribute to the book, or Sam's development, in the least.

Towards the end of the book, author Rabindrinath Maharaj seems to realize that he's never addressed the issues between Sam and his father, nor the reason why the book has the title it does, so he crams in the father's back story, and another eccentric character; this time a young boy with scaly skin.  Neither of these payoffs work, as both are devoid of emotion.

As for the comic book references, they are as heavy-handed and awkward as much of the characterizations.  Unlike Junot Díaz, who weaves pop culture and comic references seamlessly into his writing, Maharaj's stick out.  "He looks like he was drawn by Jack Kirby," is one example, while others reference things like Frank Miller's Daredevil run, but in such a way that neither fits with what actually happened in Miller's run, nor with the reality of a boy who would have been growing up in Trinidad in the late 90s and early 00's (based on the fact that the story contains the relocation of residents of Regent Park).  I kind of felt like someone told Maharaj that peppering the book with geek references would make it popular these days, and so he went back and added it in where possible.

Furthermore, I found the generally poor copy-editing to be distracting.  Sam narrates the book, but not in the argot of his island - that is saved exclusively for his dialogue.  The problem is, many prepositions are used incorrectly in the narration, but not consistently.  It made me a little crazy while reading the book.

There could have been a good story here, but it would have needed a lot more attention from an editor, and some more workshopping before it was ready to be published.  On the other hand, the cover is really lovely.

McSweeney's 42

Edited by Adam Thirlwell

I'm not often let down by an edition of McSweeney's - while there are often stories or other pieces that I don't like, there are always just as many, if not more, that I enjoy.

This latest volume, Issue 42, is one of the more experimental editions of the long-running literary quarterly.  The premise behind it is that twelve stories, originally all written in languages other than English, have been translated and translated again.  The original is sent to one translator, who writes his or her translation in one language.  That story is now sent to another writer/translator, to be put into another language (English more often than not - every second translation is always in English), with the end result being a story that is both markedly different, and remarkably similar, once it's reached the end of the chain.

It's a good idea.  I've often wondered, when reading favourite authors like Kafka, Borges, or Bolaño, how much of what I'm reading is provided by the translator, and how much is original (I speak no other language well enough to read books outside of English).  I think the problem with this book was threefold though.

Firstly, reading a couple of versions of the same story in quick succession, or in proximity to one another made faithful translations rather dull.  Sometimes it really felt like reading the same story twice in a row.  When drastic changes were made, there was a sense of liberty that wouldn't have been there without the other, less thrilling translations being slogged through, but still.

Secondly, I see some fault with the choices of original stories.  I get it that editor Adam Thirlwell needed stories from established and well-known writers that weren't themselves well-known, and that were short, but a lot of the originals were a little too pensive, philosophical, and kind of dry.  I would have loved to have seen this type of experiment performed on a short crime story, or something with a little more drama to it.

Thirdly, I hated the design of the book.  A big part of the thrill of each new issue of McSweeney's is seeing how the book itself is constructed, but this one had some problems.  When you look at the picture above, it's important to note that the blue parts of the cover are constructed out of standard matte cover stock.  The yellow or buff part of the book is constructed out of a sturdy textured cardstock.  The white, final third of the cover is just interior paper, fully exposed to the elements, fingertips, and prone to folding, especially on the back.  I like to keep these books neat, and this, coupled with the extra-wide format, difficult.

Anyway, I don't want to completely trash this book.  It was an interesting experiment, and I enjoyed reading some of the translators' notes about how they approached the task.  I especially like the Icelandic writer, Sjón, who doesn't speak any English, who had his high-school aged son read the story, and then tell him about it many days later.  He just transcribed that story from memory, making it very different from the original (or so I assume, not speaking Icelandic).  In the final analysis, this type of project is deserving of thought and praise, if not really a complete reading.

Arkansas

by John Brandon

I really enjoyed John Brandon's Citrus County when I read it a couple of years back, so I thought I should check out his first novel, Arkansas.

This novel is a story about three men - Kyle, Swin, and Frog.  Frog is a drug lord who has created a network in which to hide himself, dispatching packages with instructions for the various people in his network to follow.  His story, from his earliest days to a time commensurate with the action of the novel, is interspersed throughout the book, and strangely told in second person.

Kyle is a recluse, with a good head for crime, if nothing else.  Swin is a more interesting character, a health freak whose very generous assessment of his own intelligence is also the reason why he's had trouble finding success in the world.

These two guys find their way into Frog's operation, and are eventually assigned to work as Park Rangers in a National Park overseen by a man named Bright, who is one of Frog's most valued men.  After Bright is killed in a strange incident, Swin and Kyle try to go it alone, maintaining the park and their side business much as was done under Bright, but it's not possible for them to manage this for long.

I don't read a lot of crime novels, and so I appreciated how Brandon eschewed many of the usual tropes of that genre, instead just telling a good story about some people in some strange and compromising situations.  His prose goes down easy, and this is an enjoyable read.

A Hologram For the King

by Dave Eggers

A Hologram for the King marks the first fully fictional book that I've read by Eggers, since What is the What, his brilliant novel about a boy fleeing the war in Sudan, is really non-fiction in its basis, as is Zeitoun, his account of a family's struggles in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.  Both of these books show the strength of people in the most extreme of situations - war, famine, natural disaster, and America's Kafka-esque approach to fighting terrorism.

Hologram is not like that at all.  Its focus is on the decay of America's middle- and working-class, and American industry in general, as well as its diminishment on the world stage.  Alan Clay is an aging salesman who finds himself in late middle age with no idea what has happened to his employment, marital, and social status.  As a young man, he was a hugely successful executive at Schwinn, the bicycle company, before its business evaporated, a victim of its own drive for efficiency and cost-reduction through out-sourcing.  Now Clay is struggling to pay back the debts accrued through his attempts to start his own bicycle business, and to pay for his only daughter's college education.

Clay has been sent to Saudi Arabia to pitch a holographic communication system to the King Abdullah Economic City development, with the hope that Reliant Inc., the company sending him and three assistants, would become the IT provider's for the King's dream city of the future.  This is Alan's last chance at reaching anything approaching success, and he knows it.

The problem is, he and Reliant's team are clearly an afterthought.  They are left to languish for days in the KAEC's presentation tent, and no one has any idea when the King is going to arrive.  Alan succumbs to his own apathy, with the help of a little boot-legged siddiqui, and perhaps a mysterious growth on the back of his neck.

Alan is not the most sympathetic of characters at times; his bewilderment of the loss of privilege he, and by extension, his country, has suffered can be a little annoying, but there are a few very memorable characters filling this book.  The best is Yousuf, who we first meet as Alan's driver when he misses the shuttle bus to KAEC on his first day there.  Yousuf has been educated in the US, is the son of a very successful sandal shop owner, and is utterly and overwhelmingly bored in his country, where there are no opportunities for someone like him.  Much as Alan has become the face of America in this book, Yousuf, and later a female doctor, becomes the face of KSA, underscoring the differences between the two countries.

Eggers is an easy, capable writer.  He captures the present moment remarkably well, and writes Clay from a full cloth.  The other characters are not as well-developed, but that's because we really only see them from Alan's perspective, despite the use of 3rd person narration.  Alan's the American; of course all other characters are peripheral.

Taddle Creek No. 29

Edited by Conan Tobias

It's always cause for excitement when a new issue of Taddle Creek shows up in my mailbox.  I like supporting this most local of literary magazines (although I feel that they are really relaxing the rules around where contributors have to live, and have stopped including the specific neighbourhood of residence in each author's bio), and am always rewarded with some very good fiction, and some decent comics.

This time around, the best piece in the magazine by far is Emily Schultz's 'The Side Sleeper', a fictional portrait of a woman who moves through life lying and stealing from just about everyone she meets.  She's found a new man, who she is happy to spend her nights with, but she's already back to her usual habits of deceiving him, and swiping objects from his home.  This is an excellent story.

Many of the other excellent stories were incredibly short, often only one page in length.  This includes great tales by Tony Burgess, Alexandra Leggat, and Gary Barwin.  Stuart Ross's one-pager is classic Stuart Ross, if you like that kind of thing (I don't think I do).

In terms of longer pieces, there is a nice one by Zoe Whittall which is narrated by a girl whose father was just arrested for his improprieties, and by Jessica Westhead, who shares a story about a family gathering at a Chinese buffet.

Marguerite Pigeon writes an interesting story about a woman who meets her double one day on the street, except unlike the narrator, this woman has a child.  Matthew Firth's story is about a Canadian man living in Scotland who can't handle his upstairs neighbours, a pair of Greek brothers who like to wrestle with each other.

In terms of comics, Joe Ollmann gives us 'Movie Night', about his relationship with his son, and Jason Kieffer provides his recipe for do it yourself nude pickling.  I think the nudity is optional.  Dave Lapp writes about the first engagement ring he ever bought, and also provides us with a collection of his recent Biblical drawings, which are rather strange.

There is also an interview with novelist Grace O'Connell (who is adorable), and a piece on the design elements that the cartoonist Seth incorporated into his wife's new barber shop in Guelph Ontario.  There is also a great deal of poetry to read, and enjoy.

In all, a very worthy magazine, and well worth the $6 you will pay for it on the stands.

Distant Star

by Roberto Bolaño

Sometimes, reading Bolaño, I begin to suspect that he really only ever wrote one book, but published all of its chapters separately.

Distant Star takes its start from Nazi Literature in the Americas, wherein Bolaño profiles a variety of invented fascist and right-wing writers, who interact with the real literary world of North and South America.  It's an interesting book, but it's ultimately a fictionalized encyclopedia.  That book's shining moment is the entry on Carlos Ramírez Hoffman, a poet/pilot who wrote his poems in the sky and who was also a vicious killer.

It would seem that these twenty-five pages resonated with Bolaño, because he revisits the story, expanding it into a complete, if somewhat disjointed novel.

In this book, the character of Hoffman is given a different name - Alberto Ruiz-Tagle.  He, the narrator, and a third young poet, Bibiano O'Ryan are the only poets to attend two weekly workshops, run by two of Chile's better poets, who, while being friends, were ideological and stylistic opposites.  Ruiz-Tagle, the self-professed autodidact, is a bit of a mystery to the two young poets, and they make a point of following his non-existant career.

After the military coup, Ruiz-Tagle becomes involved with people in the Pinochet regime, and uses his new position to exact a gruesome revenge on the beautiful Garmendia sisters.  After that, he is never heard from again under that name, but does resurface as Carlos Wieder, the skywriting poet.  Wieder becomes an object of fixation in Chilean literary society, both for his page-defying poetic practice, and his disturbing art exhibition.

This book splinters and fragments all over the place, much as Chile's exiled literati did, as Wieder becomes an object of fascination for the narrator and O'Ryan.  As is typical in a Bolaño book, however, many chapters are not about Wieder at all, as we get short biographies of some of the other writers in the book.  Later, an ex-police officer goes looking for Wieder, and presses the narrator into his service.

This book presents many of Bolaño's usual themes - the search for a missing writer, and the invention of an entire literary scene.  As is usual, the narrator is living in the moments when these things happen, but they never really affect him, even on the rare occasions when he becomes personally involved.

Bolaño is always a fascinating writer, and I found this novel to be among his more accessible.

Born With a Tooth

by Joseph Boyden

Sometimes approaching a new writer through his most acclaimed work, and then working backwards to his earliest published writing can be disappointing.  Having read The Savage Detectives and 2666, I've found that everything else written by Roberto Bolaño has been not disappointing, but diminished.  I wondered if the same would happen with Boyden when I started into Born With A Tooth, his collection of short stories which was published before Three Day Road and Through Black Spruce solidified his place in contemporary Canadian literature.

I needn't have worried - the stories in here are wonderful.  There are thirteen of them, divided almost evenly into four sections, each given a compass direction and a theme (East = Labour, South = Ruin, West = Running, and North is saved for Home).  As with his other writing, these stories are almost exclusively written from an Aboriginal perspective, and tell of the challenges faced by Northern Native communities in Canada, and of the people who either stay in them, or those that have left.

Through this book, we hear from characters like a homeless Native man living in Toronto who witnesses some awful things one night, a woman who leaves her young children to fly south with a pilot she quickly learns she doesn't even like, another woman who works at the Bingo Hall her late husband railed against, and a woman who fronts Canada's longest-lasting (and probably only) all-girl Native punk band.  The last four stories, in the 'North' section, tell aspects of the same story, of the suicide of a young woman who left her reserve to attend college, from four different perspectives - her uncle (the reserve drunk), her younger brother (a gas-sniffing troublemaker), her grandfather (thought to be one hundred years old), and the priest sent to the reserve from Toronto (who most definitely does not understand his congregation, their culture, or what his role within it should be).  One story, 'Bearwalker', which tells the story of a shape-shifter who terrorises his girlfriend and his best friend, was so gripping and thrilling that I wanted to stay on an airplane and finish it.

These stories are funny, heart-breaking, and in all ways, very strong.  Boyden portrays the verities of Native culture and living, but beyond that, he is a damn good writer.

In My Home There is No More Sorrow: Ten Days in Rwanda

by Rick Bass

When I got the latest issue of McSweeney's, bundled with it was In My Home There Is No More Sorrow, a travelogue of sorts by Rick Bass, detailing his short trip to Rwanda in 2011. Bass travelled to Rwanda with his wife, daughter, and close friend, writer Terry Williams, to assist her in a two-day workshop for writers at a university in Kigali.

Bass opens the book with a visit to some of the churches that have been made into memorials for the genocide that took place there in 1994.  These churches were promised as safe havens for Tutsis looking to escape slaughter at the hands of their Hutu neighbours, but they were in fact used to corral the victims more easily.  Many of these sites have been turned into memorials, displaying skulls and bones, bloody clothing, or in one instance, the barely-decayed bodies of the dead.

Bass visits these sites as an American outsider, and his perspective is probably the only one I would be able to relate to.  His guide at one site, who he discovers wishes to be a writer herself, becomes a central figure in the book, with her quiet determination and dignity.

The writers' workshop takes up the centre of the book, and it is probably the only instance I can think of where a discussion of writing has ever affected me as emotionally as this one has.  Bass and Williams recognize that their contribution is small, but they are in a country with no publishing infrastructure at all.  The young writers that make up the audience do not have any outlet for the stories and poems they write largely for themselves, although they desperately crave one.  When one student takes Williams to task for avoiding the difficult issue of the genocide, she returns the next day determined to open a door into the traumatic childhoods of the participants.  It's like opening a floodgate, legitimizing their feelings and need to tell their stories.  This part of the book is immensely powerful.

Following the workshop, the author and his group travel to the north, to visit the national park where Dian Fossey studied gorillas, and so that the Americans can see some themselves.  Bass is an incredible writer, and he conveys a great amount of wonder in this part of the book.  The family tries to find their lodge in the middle of nowhere on their own in the dark, and the apprehension of Bass's passengers, as he drives along switchback roads in the middle of the night near the border to Uganda is palpable.  Even better though, is the writing about the next day, when they travel into the jungle and observe a group of gorillas at play.

There are two things this book does exceptionally well.  It gives a small platform for Rwandan writers to share their stories.  There are four pieces (three poems and one story) by the participants in the workshop included at the end of the book.  While they are not quite as strong as they could technically be, they mark the first time that I've read actual Rwandans writing about the genocide.  Prior to this, the only accounts I've read have come from North American writers (I cannot recommend Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families enough), so it's good to experience that authentic response.

The other thing that Bass does well here is show us that Rwanda is not what it once was.  We are given example after example of happy, well-adjusted people, a vibrant social life, and pride in what the country has to offer (while being very realistic about the state of its ecology).  The people are shown as kind and solicitous, eager to help or look after visitors from another place.  Reading this book makes me want to visit the country, and especially go see the gorillas before there are none left.

I Am A Japanese Writer

by Dany Laferrière

There are certain things that I've come to expect from a Dany Laferrière novel, and this novel did not deliver any of them.  I haven't decided if that's a good thing yet or not, as I do like my traditional Laferrières, but that doesn't mean I think the author shouldn't change and grow.

I Am a Japanese Writer doesn't really have a plot - it weaves and meanders, and contradicts itself at times, and is really more about identity than it is story.  The narrator (who for a change I don't feel is really Laferrière) sells his publisher on his new novel just by giving him the name - I Am A Japanese Writer.  It's a bold statement for a Haitian-born writer who has settled in Montreal to make, and it has unexpected consequences.

Having decided that he is a Japanese writer, the narrator sets about making it true, which means he spends long stretches of time reading Basho, the 17th Century Japanese poet, and musing on the writings of Yukio Mishima.  He also decides to meet some real Japanese people, and becomes a little fixated on a group of university-age girls.

His story becomes known to the cultural affairs people at the Japanese embassy, and soon enough the narrator has become a cultural phenomenon in Japan itself, despite the book's having never been written.  People begin calling him from Tokyo nightclubs, and he is interviewed for the television.  Through all of this, all he wants to do is give his landlord a hard time about the rent and read for hours on end in the bathtub.

As I said, Laferrière is all over the place with this book.  About thirty pages in, I was convinced that I was reading a book by William T. Vollmann and not Laferrière, as he was rambling in a very Vollmann-esque way (I think it was the introduction of the Japanese girls that did it).  Still, I found it very easy to get wrapped up in Laferrière's odd ideas, and enjoyed the notion that, in our increasingly cosmopolitan world, a Caribbean writer can declare himself an Asian one.

Taddle Creek No. 28

Edited by Conan Tobias

From the very nice Ethan Rilly cover through to Dave Lapp's visit to the Toronto Humane Society comic strip at the end, this is a quality issue of Taddle Creek, my favourite Toronto-centric literary magazine.  Which actually makes it my favourite Canadian literary magazine.  Although, in the interest of fair disclosure, the only other Canadian magazine I read is Spacing, and while it's great, it's not the least bit literary...

Anyway, this issue opens with a strong story by Stuart Ross about a man who wakes up while on a family trip to Black Creek Pioneer Village to find the place completely abandoned.  I haven't been to Black Creek in probably 25 years, but much of it came back to me while reading this story, and it reminds me that this is probably not somewhere I want to go.  That is one of the better features of good literature.

Kevin Chong's story 'Professions' is the strongest in the magazine.  Julian is a young lawyer who accompanies his fiancee to a ski chalet with her family, a group of upper class liberals, with whom he has no end of problems.  I love the scene where the brother takes Julian to task for having an iPhone, and then whips out his clunky FairSmart, the phone "made in Denmark from recycled materials by an industrial design collective with the help of at-risk youth and sex workers leaving the trade who are paid a living wage."  Brilliant stuff.

Sara Heinonen contributes a story about teens on the verge of going off to university that helps show the effect of underemployed parenting on the next generation, and Stacey May Fowles writes a strong story about dangerous flirtation at a cocktail party.  There is also a tough little comic strip by Nina Bunjevac about the politics of lesbian friendship and depression.

The magazine also has a nice little piece about author Lauren Kirshner, and another on the fading villages of Digby Neck in Nova Scotia.  There is an article about the changes in TTC street signage, and about an artists collective that decorated phone booths in the city to make an artistic point.  My favourite non-fiction piece in this issue is Sarah Gilbert's short article about attempting to access the beautiful art deco restaurant in Montreal's Eaton's store that has been boarded up for years.

In all, another very good issue of a very good magazine.