Up with the Lark

Mothers and Sons

Colm Toibin is a great favourite of mine.  His novel The Master was one of those exquisite books that you read slowly so it won't be over.  This book of short stories Mothers and Sons is also a work of great depth and beauty.  The relationship between mothers and their sons is a complicated and profound one and each story reveals something of the inherent struggle for balance, for love, and for power. This a nuanced book and there is much to think about.  In a really strong collection of stories A Long Winter stands out as a particularly wonderful piece.  A young man waits for winter to be over to recover the body of his mother who leaves her family to return to the house of her brother, haunted by  how it might all have been different. Buy at Amazon

The Law of Dreams

I loved every minute of this book.  The Law of Dreams by Peter Behrens had me transported instantly to Ireland.  Set at the time of the potato famine in the mid-nineteenth century the book is beautifully evocative.  My daughter and I spent some time in that part of Ireland and visited the heartbreaking Potato Famine Museum in Skibbereen, but we were most surprised travelling around the country side to see that there were still small stone dwellings dotting the hills, abandoned and unchanged for the past 160 years.  The history of the place is everywhere and the unthinkable poverty and squalor in which these people lived is still evident.  The novel follows the character of Fergus as he is buffeted through this despairing time like so much flotsam.  He is a young man with nothing left to lose and so is willing to risk his life just to be gone from the place.  Poverty, starvation, illness, and betrayal are his lot.  There is a lot of page turning plot to this novel, but it's really the characters that make it come alive. Even the minor characters stand out in your memory. A really wonderful book. Buy at Amazon

Bang Crunch - A Rebuttal of sorts

Bang Crunch was reviewed here last week by my son Hugh Alter.  I wasn't going to write another review, but I don't entirely agree with his assessment of this book by Neil Smith, so I thought I would beg to differ.  I didn't find the subjects mundane (when you are approaching 50 the story of someone surviving cancer is anything but mundane), but I did feel that some of the stories worked better than others.  My favourite was the title story - tightly written and as brief as the main character's life.  Isolettes was another strong story and made me cry, although I should admit that just about anything involving babies or dogs makes me cry.  The only story I didn't like was Extremeties (Hugh and I agree on that) which just seemed a bit silly to me, rather than surreal.  I do think that Smith has a beautiful writing style and some wonderful imagery.  I found something worthwhile in every story and think it was worth the read. I think this is an interesting writer to watch. Buy at Amazon

The Blood Spilt

I seem to have quite a lot of Scandinavian mystery stories on my reading pile these days.  I find them very different in tone from English or North American mysteries.  There is a kind of formality and perhaps more civility to them.  I'm not sure if that comes from their society or if it is a function of reading a work in translation.  The urban mysteries don't have the kind of nastiness and grit you associate with Ian Rankin or Ken Bruen and the small town mysteries don't have the kind of fey charm of something by Simon Brett.  There is also a very strong sense of place in most of these novels.  This seems to me to be true of The Blood Spilt, the second novel by Asa Larsson.  I enjoyed this book, but my biggest complaint is that the plot is too close to her first novel, Sun Storms. I should let you know that if you read this book first, then you'll know who committed the murder in the first novel.  I always find that annoying in mysteries with recurring characters, but in this case you can see that Larsson wrote herself into a corner and really had to reveal the information, otherwise the behaviour of her main character wouldn't make sense.  I'll certainly give her third novel a try when it appears. Buy at Amazon

::XS: Small Structures, Green Architecture

This review was written by Lloyd Alter for Treehugger.com

In 2001 XS:  Big Ideas, Small Buildings by Phyllis Richardson created a sensation. Small, light prefab buildings were so 21st century and it was an inspired collection. Now, She has written a followup: XS: Small Spaces, Green Architecture and we wish we could say we are as excited as we were with the first volume but alas, we are not.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that whoever wrote the dust jacket description does not appear to have read the book. "The design goals of the 40 houses included here are to build as small as possible, to harmonize with the site, to use natural heating and cooling techniques, and, above all, to combine aesthetic beauty with ecological sensitivity. The houses are striking in appearance, inexpensive to build, and totally functional, and will serve as inspiration for architects and potential owners."

The book has garden pavilions, sculptures, cameras obscura and treehouses but there is nary a totally functional and inexpensive to build house to be found. That is fine, there are some lovely, innovative and inspiring structures that are worth the price of admission. There are also some of questionable green credentials and others that have been around the block a few too many times.

But while it may be true that "a new generation of architects and builders is creating warm, inviting homes that cause only a fraction of the ecological impact of conventional building methods," they aren't here. The author might have been better served if the blurb said what her introduction does: " almost none of the projects here is an end in itself. Rather, each suggests inroads in a journey to a host of answers."  Buy at Amazon

 

Ragged Islands

Ragged Islands by Don Hannah is a novel of secrets.  The story follows the thoughts and memories of Susan Ann as she lays dying in a Toronto hospital.  There are many things about her life that she doesn't understand and in her mind she goes through time searching for meaning. She is trying to make sense of the secrets in her life and in the lives of those around her.  Her parents give her away to relatives to be raised and although she is neither the first nor the last of their children, no one ever tells her why she is the only one to be sent away.   We are also led into her past through the cards and letters and scraps of things that her son Carl finds as he is cleaning out her belongings.  Unlike Susan Ann who wants to unravel her mysteries, Carl has no questions about her life, or indeed, his own.  He reads through all the things his mother has kept for upwards of eighty years and then tosses it all out as junk. Hannah writes about the secrets, the grief and the knowledge that people take to the grave - including their own identity.  Susan Ann doesn't really know anything about her real parents and nothing at all of her grandparents, not even their names.  My grandmother who lived to 102 told me once that she was sad that there was no one left in the world who knew her as a little girl.  That particular sense of loss permeates this book. Set in rural Nova Scotia and covering roughly the period from World War II to current times the novel teems with a sense of history and of family.  What I do not understand is why Hannah has seen fit to toss in 9/11.  I've noticed a number of writers who include event this in their work without it having any bearing on their story - The Emperor's Children being the most recent I've read. It doesn't work thematically or in terms of any of the characters or in the setting and I just found it annoying.  For the life of me I can't figure out what the life and death of an elderly rural Nova Scotian woman has to do with a terrorist attack in New York.  Perhaps Hannah is linking the effects of the two World Wars on Susan Ann's family and suggesting that this is her grandchildren's armageddon, but I don't it doesn't work for me. Buy at Amazon

Arlington Park

About 5 pages into Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk I thought - this book will have a character named Jocasta -  and sure enough, 50 or so pages later on she comes (albeit in a bit part). If you laughed in recognition then that's probably all you really need to know about this book.  If you didn't get it then I'll tell you that Arlington Park is about a bunch of women. These women are English, middle class with certain pretensions and aspirations thwarted (they feel) by marriage and motherhood. These women are unhappy, unfulfilled, resentful and sometimes downright angry.  I've read a few of Cusk's books and she seems quite put out by children, although she's had a lot of publishing mileage out of them.  As a writer she always strikes me as a surly adolescent screaming "alright I'll have a sodding baby, but you can't make me like it!"  What exactly are these women in Arlington Park so miserable about?  I don't know.  Their husbands are not philanderers. They are not physically or emotionally abusive and they all have responsible, respectable jobs.  Their children are not handicapped, chronically ill, autistic, or even particularly plain looking.   I've read critics of Cusk's previous work who talk about social satire, but I don't find it here.  Cusk is a really tight, insightful writer - her prose is quite wonderful to read and she doesn't waste a lot words, but thematically I find it a bit hard going.Buy at Amazon

Kitchen Diaries

When my son first started showing an interest in cooking in his mid-teens  I gave him a cookbook by Nigel Slater.  Slater's attitudes encompass all of the cooking things that make sense to me - use what you have on hand, understand simple ingredients that taste good together, toss things in and don't worry about it and if you make a mistake don't spend the whole dinner apologizing.  Dinner is about sharing, not about showing off (although there are many who would disagree with that).  This new book by Slater entitled Kitchen Diaries follows a year of his cooking and has the hallmark of those earlier books but with the added idea that he wouldl use local ingredients in season when he could and that he would avoid supermartkets as much as possible.  Kitchen Diaries is a beautiful book filled with all kinds of insights about eating and cooking and thinking about cooking.  Slater isn't a fussy cook and that is one of the great strengths of this book.  There are a lot of recipes and most of them have very few ingredients.  He does assume that the people who use his books know their way around a kitchen, so he doesn't go into exhaustive detail about how to do things, but that's okay - if you are a beginner, you can figure it out.  Really. Unfortunately I don't live in the same place as Slater so I can't follow his dinner suggestions by the calendar.  His March 19 diary exaults in the first alfresco dinner of the year - I live in Canada and March is still ski season. The photographs are beautiful and show simple food that looks like someone made it rather than some food stylist putting the photo together.  My one quibble with the book is that the photographs aren't labelled so you don't know which recipe it is depicting, but that's a minor fault.  I've tried a bunch of these recipes and they are simple, straightforward and taste great.  What more can you as for at dinner time? Buy at Amazon

Bang/Crunch – Neil Smith.

Hugh Alter wrote this review.

There is a particular merit to the short story form. It allows you to skate by on pure literary talent when purpose you are working with a premise that would not stand up to anything longer. Neil Smith has clearly perfected this art; Bang/Crunch is a collection of stories that are charming, perfect, and beautifully written, but would be completely insufferable were they any longer.

Of the nine short stories in the collection, there are a few that have frustratingly mundane concepts – including the after school special topics of a teenager questioning his sexuality and one about surviving cancer. These premises, although dull, are rescued to a one by delicate and finely crafted prose; there're few words out of place in the book, and not a sentence that doesn't feel like it has been distilled down. 

Those stories where the quality of the concept matches the writing – the title foremost among them – are marvelous things, and all of the stories do end up compelling. I don't mean this to be a negative review, because Bang/Crunch is wonderful to read and the product of a spectacular writer. It's just that it feels a bit like a nice new paint job on a rickety shack. Very nice on the outside, but I wouldn't want to stay long. Buy at Amazon

Special Topics In Calamity Physics

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl is a book that I was really looking forward to reading.  I loved the character of Blue and her pedantic professor father. I loved Pessl's writing style, her imagery, her language.  The love affair lasted until roughly the end of the first third.  Then I considered writing to the publishers to suggest that they retitle it Marisha Pessl's Big Book of Similes.  By page 200 I was counting the number of similes per page, then by paragraph.  This was not a good sign.  By page 250 I was ready to throw the book across the room and I was only about half way through it.  I get annoyed when authors write very long books when it isn't necessary.  I get annoyed when editors don't say "You know this book would be much better minus about 150-200 pages".  I start mumbling under my breath about Tolstoy.  The centre section of this novel had me thinking that Pessl is a clever writer but more flash than substance with a certain amount of self conscious "look at what I can do" to her.  But I thought about how much my son said he loved the book so I plowed onwards.  And I'm glad I did.  Around the beginning of the final third of the novel Pessl throws in a plot twist (whatever you do, don't read the back of the dust jacket) and the book takes off.  Suddenly I was totally engrossed in the story and back in love with our narrator, Blue. The writing became tight and focussed with somewhere to go and something to say.  That part of the novel met my expectations..  This is a first novel for Pessl and I'm hoping she will realize that she can write and that she doesn't need to put in every beautiful phrase that has ever come to her.  She can save some for her next novel. Buy at Amazon

Restless

What a fun ride it was reading Restless by William Boyd.  A bit of a mystery, a bit of an English spy story and a bit of a family drama all rolled into one.  The book is broken into two narrative streams.  The first is Ruth who teaches English to foreigners rather than finishing her doctorate. The second is the story of her mother Sally (real name Eva)  who in fact, was a Russian who gets hooked into spying for the English immediately prior to and during World War II.  The sections surrounding Ruth are fine and have the aura of a small town mystery story as she is surprised to learn about her mother's past, but it is really Eva's story we want to know about.  Those sections crackle with a real sense of danger as Eva makes her way through the world of espionage while trusting no one.  I liked the juxtaposition of Ruth's mundane, simple post-war life with the covert life of Eva, truly surviving only by her wits.  I'll never look at a very sharp pencil the same way again. The story is clever, as are the historical twists and Boyd tells it in an engaging style. This is a something akin to a literary page turner and it's about the length that you could curl up one evening and devour whole. Buy at Amazon

Old Filth

Old Filth is an exquisitely wrought novel by the English novelist Jane Gardham. It is the story of Teddy Feathers, nicknamed Filth (Failed in London, try Hong Kong).  It's a heartbreaking tale of a "Raj Orphan" so called because they were sent back to England from the East at the age of 4 or 5 for their schooling and many never saw their parents again.  Filth becomes a soliciter and joins the monied and titled of society.  The writing is crisp and conveys the nuances of the upper classes; the schools, the families, their friendships. At the heart of this novel is a secret from Filth's childhood which he has repressed. The book works its way back and forth through time uncovering bits about his childhood, his war years, his marriage and eventually the secret which has been hinted at is revealed. Gardham has a terrific sense of character.  She portrays Filth from his earliest days running barefoot in Malay through his school years, his awkward adolescence, his young adulthood to his end as the stiff Sir Edward Feathers.Buy at Amazon

The Library at Night

The Library at Night is for anyone who has ever said "Yes, actually, I do need all of these books."  Alberto Manguel has written an inspiring book about keeping books.  He explores all aspects of libraries dropping little facts and bits of wisdom that he has gleaned over the years from collecting and living with printed material. He has so many books that when he lived in Toronto he was forced to shelve them on his front porch.  His children complained that they felt the need of a library card in order to enter their home. There is plenty of information here regarding the history of libraries, great collections, famous library buildings, great librarians and certainly Manguel's own library.  A charming and erudite writer, Manguel is no book snob.  Detective fiction, poetry, history, fiction, non-fiction all have a place in his book room.  One of my favourite chapters was about organizing libraries - do you organize them by language (Manguel reads in 5 or 6 languages)?, by country of origin?, alphabetically by author?, by category?, do you separate works by best friends because they don't write in the same category?  These are weighty issues for anyone with more than a handful of books.  I have a library and I have a lot of books, although not nearly as many as Manguel, so I was interested in his response to the ever popular question "Have you actually read all of these books?".  His simple reply is "Well, I've certainly opened them all".Buy at Amazon

Little House on a Small Planet

This review was written by Lloyd Alter for Treehugger.com   

Just as hunger isn’t caused by scarcity of food, homelessness and our “housing crisis” aren’t caused by a lack of houses.

So says Frances Moore Lappe in the foreword to Little House on a Small Planet- a wonderful book by Shay Salomon with photographs by Nigel Valdez. Shay asks the question "How much space does it take to be happy?" and then proceeds to answer the question: not very much. She then proceeds to ask why there are big houses (Keeping up with the joneses, easy financing, "because we can") and instructs us to find new Joneses or forget the Joneses.

It is not just about how you design, but how you live. Chapters with titles like "Choose what you need" and "build a glove, not a warehouse" and "make a room of your own." It is a lovely book that teaches you how to "live in less space and have more room to enjoy it. Dozens of tiny houses are beautifully photographed with what must be a very wide angle lens- one of my favourites was a 180 square foot "cob cottage where a couple lived for ten years, and apparently still talk to each other.

                           

                              

I must point out that with a few exceptions these houses would fall into the crunchy granola school of design built by free spirits who believe that (we quote out of context) "architect designed" is synonymous with "don't ask how much it cost" and that there is a bias towards warm climates where one can always go outside.

Nonetheless it is the spirit and conviction of the people in this book, who not only believe as I do that we should all live with less, but actually make the decision to go out and do it and explain how. It is an informative and inspiring addition to the canon. Buy at Amazon

                              

I must point out that with a few exceptions these houses would fall into the crunchy granola school of design built by free spirits who believe that (we quote out of context) "architect designed" is synonymous with "don't ask how much it cost" and that there is a bias towards warm climates where one can always go outside.

Nonetheless it is the spirit and conviction of the people in this book, who not only believe as I do that we should all live with less, but actually make the decision to go out and do it and explain how. It is an informative and inspiring addition to the canon. Buy at Amazon

A Good Life

This review was written by Lloyd Alter for Treehugger.com

Every week we turn to the Guardian for the latest missive on ethical living, a subject introduced by Leo Hickman and carried on by Lucy Siegle. Many of these have been collected and published in A Good Life. The book attempts to "explain in detail some of the problems and injustices our habits and lifestyles are causing and them presenting practical solutions to reducing their impact, from eating less meat and lowering car emissions to domestic cleaning advice."- it is not just about global warming, it is about the state of the globe and what we can do to make it, and our lives, better.

Graphically, it is more of a magazine format, with lots of sidebars asking questions like "should I eat the New Zealand organic apple, the Kent non-organic apple or the Fairtrade apple from South Africa?" or dotted with windows with tidbits like "driving a 13 MPG SUV instead of the average 22 MPG care for one year wastes more energy than if you left a fridge door open for six years or left a TV on for 28 years"

Strange Piece of Paradise

Strange Piece of Paradise is the true story of Terri Jentz and her girlfriend who undertake a cross country cycling trip at the age of 19.  Only days into the trip while sleeping in their tent they are run over by a pickup truck and then attacked with an axe.  The perpetrator was never caught.  The attack leaves the friend with serious head wounds resulting in blindness and complete amensia regarding the attack.  It leaves Jentz with rib and shoulder injuries where she was run over and axe scars where her arm was almost severed.  But for Jenzt it also left deep psychological scars.  After years of denial, rage and phobias that keep her from accomplishing anything Jentz decides to face her demons straight on and see if she can discover who it was who changed her life so dramatically.  She returns to Oregon and begins a search that reunites her with the teenage couple found them, the nurses who saved them, the police who maybe did, or maybe didn't look very hard for the man who did this to them.  It's a long journey that takes a number of years and Jenzt is incredibly thorough.  The book has many aspects to it - a coming of age story, a travel book, a mystery, a thriller.  Jentz is a wonderful writer and a great story teller. The tale is harrowing and macabre but it is also filled with a sense of purpose and a coming of wisdom.  The book is long and there is a certain amount of repetition within the last 100 pages, but this is a minor quibble.  This is a book that keeps you thinking about it long after you've put it down. Buy at Amazon

Lullabies for Little Criminals

Heather O'Neill's Lullabies for Little Criminals was one of the best books I read from the 2006 season.  It is the story of Baby, a 12 year old girl who lives with her heroin addicted father Jules. They live perilous lives, but Baby doesn't mind because she loves her dad and they are together.  When Jules goes into rehab Baby is placed in foster care and her life spirals away from what little protection and stability it had  The narrative voice of this twelve year old was completely believable.  O'Neill captures the essence of the child teetering on the edge of a very nasty adulthood.  The little girl who sits down and plays with dolls after turning tricks is heartbreaking.  Baby's relationship with the nerdy kid Xavier in her class is one of the joys of the book. With him she can be a child, have a friend, be openly as smart as she is and feel the stirrings of first love (even though she is already a prostitute).  This is a book that you sometimes have to put down and walk away from, but you always come back because the writing is so sharp and clear and the character of Baby is so well drawn that you really care about what happens to her.  Buy at Amazon

Hardboiled & Hard Luck

These two stories by Japanese writer Banana Yoshimoto reveal very deep emotions while at the same exercise exquisite restraint.  Both stories centre on the lives of young women touched by the untimely death of other young woman.  Hardboiled is a ghost story where the ghost appears on the first anniversary of her death. Hard Luck has the ghost-like spectre of a woman who is just about to die.  There is serious grief involved in both stories, but with an air of detachment that is completely believable. Yoshimoto's prose is spare and delicate and cuts directly to the heart.  These stories are deceptively simple. There is sadness and grief but there is also the resurgance of hope that fuels the two narrators by the end.  I think this is a book you could keep on your shelf and take down every few years and find a new insight on rereading. Buy at Amazon

The Emperor's Children

I found The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud a bit of a disappointment.  I think part of my problem with the book is the huge amount of hype it has received.  It's not that it's a bad book - it was quite readable, but it's really just another novel about tedious 30ish New Yorkers who haven't achieved the great things they expected.  The characters are predictable - Marina the beautiful, wealthy, vapid daughter of a literary lion Murray, Danielle the quirky smart artistic best friend, and Julius the poverty stricken gay guy who rounds out their trio.  Messud offers up some interesting plot (and character) possibilities, but she doesn't really follow through with them.  Murray's nephew Frederick insinuates himself into their lives, writes a damning article about his uncle and then literally disappears without his character having any of the impact on the others that the reader is led to expect.  Messud also builds a sense of impending doom regarding the upcoming marriage of Marina and Ludo, an Australian journalist. Why the his serious interest in her father?  Why the whirlwind romance?  What is it that he really wants from her? Why do all of the characters other than Marina mistrust and dislike him?  Then the whole situation fizzles out after the nuptuals and nothing happens. The section that really delivers is between Julius and his lover. I was constantly torn between enjoying Messud's writing and wondering why she wasn't delivering more. Buy at Amazon

The Uses of Enchantment

The title of this novel by Heidi Julavits refers to the classic book The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim regarding the telling of fairy tales and their effects on the minds and development of children.  While the story unfolds we begin see the connection.  As a teenager, the character of Mary is abducted and returns one week later.  But was she abducted or is it an elaborate fantasy that she has concocted?  The novel is broken into three interlocking sections.  We see Mary as a teenager with The Man who may or may not have taken her, notes from Mary's psychologist and then Mary as an adult returning to her childhood home after the death of her mother. This is a compelling novel that keeps you wondering about fact and fantasy, about the secret lives of girls and their sexuality and how they come to view themselves in the world. Buy it at Amazon