| Book Review A Review of: Call Me the Breeze
by Gerald Lynch
Irish writer Patrick McCabe must now be described as a hit-and-miss
novelist, as must many very good writers. He's had a few big hits: The
Butcher Boy, The Dead School, and Breakfast on Pluto. The first and
third were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. But The Dead School is
his most ambitious and successful work, the one that signalled here is
a young Irish novelist to carry on in the contemporary tradition of
Flann O'Brien, John McGahern, William Trevor, Edna O'Brien, John
Banville-writing the real black Irish stuff, as opposed to the unreal
Disneyfied thing produced by the likes of Maeve Binchy, the nodding
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Best Thing for You
by Cathy Stonehouse
"It ticks like a bomb," says Ulrike, describing an elegant antique
metronome. Ulrike, a minor character in one of Annabel Lyon's new
novellas, collected under the title The Best Thing For You, could just
as easily be describing Lyon's prose. Already known for her punchy,
acidic short stories, Lyon has followed up her first acclaimed
collection (Oxygen, Porcupine's Quill, 2000) not with the inevitable
novel, but with a collection of three thematically linked novellas.
And while Oxygen was merely provocative, The Best Thing For You is
positively dangerous. Open the collection almost anywhere and you risk
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Little Black Book of Stories
by Heather Birrell
Woods-their shadows, beauty, unfathomability and power to absorb and
transform the unsuspecting traveler-also figure in Byatt's fifth
collection, Little Black Book of Stories, although in a much more
pointedly allegorical fashion. Byatt is a writer who understands that
the surreal, raw underpinnings of the fairy tale do not exist outside
the realms of "true life"; they are, in fact, the very stuff of it. As
Penny, in the collection's opener, "The Thing in the Forest", remarks,
"I think there are things that are real-more real than we are-but
mostly we don't cross their paths, or they don't cross ours. Maybe at
...
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|  | Confidence
by Melanie Little
Thomas Allen $23.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0887621198
|
Book Review A Review of: Confidence
by Anne Cimon
"Don't judge a book by its cover" is an old saying, but in this case,
very apt. Cover art has evolved over the last decade, and small press
books are now as attractively packaged as their large press rivals.
The problem remains that the cover can sometimes give a false
impression of the book's content, as has happened with this short
story collection. The cover is bright with happy children: on
Confidence, a ten-year-old girl, coat and hat on, looks back at the
reader with a smile, as she holds her pair of white skates. Would it
not be unreasonable to expect for the stories within to have some
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: EmmaÆs Hands
by Anne Cimon
"Don't judge a book by its cover" is an old saying, but in this case,
very apt. Cover art has evolved over the last decade, and small press
books are now as attractively packaged as their large press rivals.
The problem remains that the cover can sometimes give a false
impression of the book's content, as has happened with this short
story collection. The cover is bright with happy children:Emma's Hands
shows a bucolic scene of two young girls running around a tree in a
sunlit garden. Would it not be unreasonable to expect for the stories
within to have some cheer and sweetness, some joie de vivre? And yet,
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Late Night Caller
by Ernest Hekkanen
The tone and defining conundrum of Michael Hetherington's collection,
The Late Night Caller, is set, appropriately enough, in the very first
story, "Overture". A man sits in the Caf Zinc where he is served crme
caramel for lunch while reading a book. He wishes he could talk to his
dead father and then, spontaneously, he puts his arms around the
circumference of the table in hopes of measuring "a perfect circle in
paradise."
A woman enters. She might very well be the wife he is looking for.
However, she has already been taken, it turns out, by the manager who
...
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|  | The Rottweiler
by Ruth Rendell
Doubleday Canada $37.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0385660251
|
Book Review A Review of: The Rottweiler
by Des McNally
Whenever I am about to read Ruth Rendell's latest offering, I wonder
if this will be the first of her novels to disappoint. However, after
reading more than 30 of her novels, (excluding those under the
pseudonym of Barbara Vine), I am forced to the conclusion that it will
either never happen or if it already has, then somehow I missed it.
Having been the beneficiary of many enjoyable hours of reading,
compliments of Ms. Rendell, I settled down to read The Rottweiler with
anticipation.
The story is set in a not too fashionable part of London. An antique
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Absolute Friends
by Des McNally
It seems obvious throughout Absolute Friends that Le Carr was an angry
man when he decided to write his latest novel. We owe his anger a debt
of gratitude, for it has contributed greatly to this, his very best
offering since his earliest writing days. This may even be his best
book.
The targets of the author's passionate narrative are dishonest
governments that precipitate unnecessary wars and the lengths they go
to in order to achieve their aims with apparent disregard for the
rights of other countries and their citizens.
...
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|  | SAP: A Mystery
by John Swan
Insomniac Press $21.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1894663543
|
Book Review A Review of: Sap: A Mystery
by Des McNally
Let's be honest from the start, Author (and protagonist) John Swan's
latest mystery Sap is not an elegant book. Nor is it written with much
finesse.
In my opinion, Swan's second foray into the mystery genre (his first
effort, The Rouge Murders, was well received), will appeal to a
relatively small market, for despite what I think is an attempt by
Swan to write something akin to the very popular Mickey Spillane
novels, Sap doesn't succeed because there's little if anything that is
attractive about its protagonist.
...
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|  | Standing Stones
by John Metcalf
Thomas Allen $26.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0887621449
|
Book Review A Review of: Mackerel Sky
by Des McNally
If you wish to read a ho-hum type of book requiring little thought,
then do not open Natalee Caple's second novel Mackerel Sky. There is
nothing ordinary about this intense yet touching story featuring four
main characters Martine, Isabelle, Guy and Harry.
At seventeen Guy is seduced by twenty-six-year-old Martine, whose
ensuing pregnancy causes Guy to run away and eventually end up in
Boston.
The novel begins with Guy returning twenty years later to meet his
daughter, Isabelle, for the first time. Strangely, Caple turns this
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Town that Forgot How to Breathe
by Des McNally
At the moment I feel as if I've just returned from the most incredible
and exciting visit to Bareneed, Newfoundland and now must gather my
wits so I can decide why much of Harvey's latest novel seemed so real
and so surreal at the same time!
Harvey, cleverly and thoughtfully introduces Miss Eileen Laracy early
in his novel (you'll hear more about her later), the character who
eases us into Bareneed and the personalities of so many of its
citizens.
Early in the tale we meet Joseph, divorced from Kim, and their
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Ethel Wilson: A Critical Biography
by W. J. Keith
When I was teaching a university course in Canadian fiction between
the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, I always included a novel by Ethel
Wilson (usually Swamp Angel). This seemed an obvious and natural
academic procedure. I saw-and still see-Wilson as the equivalent in
Canadian literature to E. M. Forster within the English tradition: a
writer who combined a deeply personal and humane vision with an
individual fictional technique that avoided the flamboyantly
experimental at one extreme and the unimaginatively conventional at
the other. Clearly, however, this view was not widely shared. Almost
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Most Dangerous Branch: How the Supreme Court of Canada Has Undermined Our Law and Our Democracy
by Martin Loney
The enthusiasm of the Canadian courts for expansive interpretations of
the Constitution Charter has not been universally welcomed. No critic
has yet offered so cogent a critique as Robert Martin. This book is an
eloquent and well-researched indictment of Canadian judicial arrogance
and the complacency of those elites who, sharing the assumptions that
underpin judicial orthodoxy, applaud the court's judgements with scant
regard for the implications for parliamentary democracy. Martin's
argument is not primarily with the specifics of individual rulings but
with the way in which the Supreme Court has invaded the arena
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Ted Hughes
by Christopher Wiseman
When I arrived as a freshman at Cambridge, Ted Hughes and his first
wife had been married eight months and were living there. I saw
nothing of either of them that year. However, Hughes was already a
legend in Cambridge, talked about with awe and admiration, not for his
as yet unknown poetry, but for the Rag Week caper he was reputed to
have pulled off a couple of years earlier. Seeing a crew digging up
the road, he called the police and reported that, for Rag Week, a
group of students, pretending to be road workers, were digging up the
road. He then went to the workers and told them that a group of
...
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|  | Collected Poems
by Robert Lowell
Douglas & McIntyre / Fsg Adult $63 Hardcover
ISBN: 0374126178
|
Book Review A Review of: Collected Poems
by Robert Moore
Within months of its appearance last year, Robert Lowell's Collected
Poems had been widely and warmly received on both sides of the
Atlantic. After marveling at the sheer mass of this collection (it
weighs in at 1200 pages), one of the first things reviewers tended to
remark upon was how long such a manifestly apposite work was in
arriving. Lowell, after all, had passed from the scene, dead of heart
failure in a New York City cab, in 1977. The only other retrospective
collection of his work, his Selected Poems, was published in 1976.
Given the fact that he had been a major-and, in the view of many, the
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, & Co: Middle-Generation Poets in Context
by Robert Moore
One manifestation of the recent initiative to rehabilitate Lowell's
moribund reputation is Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell & Co.: Middle
Generation Poets in Context. The principal focus of this book is
obviously these three poets who knew and deeply influenced one another
(it was Jarrell, then the poetry editor of the Nation, who invited
Bishop to his apartment in 1947 to meet Lowell), but the interest here
is also on the company kept by this core of the "middle generation" of
American poets (the ones, that is, who "published in mainstream
publications and with mainstream presses, won the Pulitzers and
...
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| | Standing Stones
by John Metcalf
Thomas Allen $26.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0887621449
|
Book Review A Review of: New Collected Poems
by Marius Kocejowski
Matthew Francis has seen through the press the most complete edition
to date of W.S. Graham's poetry. Whether or not this was advisable is
a question I will return to at the end of this article. As it stands,
the book is impeccably edited, contains a useful glossary, informative
notes, a bibliography, and a list of people, which includes under
Montgomerie the entry-"William Fetherston-Haugh Montgomery
(1797-1859), physician who described the changes in the follicles
surrounding the nipples in the early stages of pregnancy"-and a
further list of places. (There is a purpose to this exercise, since
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Poems the Size of Photographs
by Jana Prikryl
In his 1983 collection, The People's Otherworld, Les Murray swerved
from his central preoccupations with nature and his own rural youth to
write a series of poems about the modern metropolis. One of those
poems stands out today as especially, eerily, prescient:
The iron ball was loose in the old five-storey city
clearing bombsites for them. They rose like
nouveaux accents
and stilled, for a time, the city's conversation.
In that poem Murray concludes with equal clairvoyance that our
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry
by Kevin Higgins
In its sweeping judgements, hostile tone, and lack of nuance, Andrew
Duncan's The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry is a
book-length version of the kind of strident editorial one might find
in some tiny magazine whose ultimate aim is the overthrow of the
existing poetry establishment. "The reader may be surprised," Duncan
writes, "that I do not discuss poets such as Craig Raine, Tony
Harrison, James Fenton, U.A. Fanthorpe, Tom Pickard, John Fuller,
Carol Ann Duffy, Andrew Motion and Simon Armitage." Indeed, this
reviewer was flabbergasted that he managed to barely mention so many
...
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|  | False Memory
by Tony Lopez, Antony Lopez
Salt Publishing $18.86 Paperback
ISBN: 1844710300
|
Book Review A Review of: False Memory
by Kevin Higgins
False Memory, the new collection by Conductors of Chaos contributor
Tony Lopez, is certainly experimental, but it's an experiment carried
out under strictly controlled conditions-the collection consist of
eleven sets of ten unrhymed (mostly alexandrine) sonnets-and the
results are impressive. Throughout the book, Lopez re-contextualises
the debased vocabularies of the financial, scientific, academic and
political worlds in order to make the reader rethink the ways in which
language can be used. Phrases like "This may involve some unforeseen
social costs" and "Managers of personal equity plans / Ended the week
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Universal Home Doctor
by Kevin Higgins
Simon Armitage's latest, The Universal Home Doctor, is a collection
certain non-conservative poets would no doubt hope to avoid. Indeed
Armitage's poem, "The English", contains one of the traits such poets
like to rail against most: the apparent rejection of the future (and
by implication of change or experiment in either society or art) in
favour of the safely embalmed English past:
Regard the way they dwell, the harking back:
how the women at home went soldiering on
with pillows for husbands, fingers for sons,
...
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|  | Feminine Gospels
by Carol Ann Duffy
Macmillan UK - Trade $17.99 Paperback
ISBN: 0330486446
|
Book Review A Review of: Feminine Gospels
by Kevin Higgins
In her previous book, The World's Wife, Carol Ann Duffy gave voices to
the wives of the great, the good and the notorious: Mrs Darwin, Mrs
Midas, Mrs Tiresias, and Pope Joan. It was a tour-de-force: a book in
which a new-found intellectual seriousness went hand in hand with
Duffy's dry, subversive wit. In Feminine Gospels Duffy continues that
journey. Duffy's poems are accessible and almost always on some level
politically engaged. In many ways her work now resembles that of a
female version of a 1930s Auden writing in slightly less calamitous
times. The agenda is feminist, but the tone is wry rather than angry.
...
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|  | Public Property
by Andrew Motion
Penguin / Putnam $19.99 Paperback
ISBN: 0571215343
|
Book Review A Review of: Public Property
by Kevin Higgins
Andrew Motion is a poet for whom the label "conservative" is quite
apt. Since 1999 he has been Poet Laureate, and when a poet takes a job
which involves writing poems for the royal family, any issues he may
have had with the establishment have clearly long-since been resolved.
Motion is something of a hate figure for many on the British poetry's
experimental wing. He was Larkin's friend and biographer; his
editorship of Poetry Review in the 1980s is cited by Duncan as the
high-water mark of conservative dominance; and Ian Sinclair surely had
Motion in mind when he referred in his introduction to Conductors Of
...
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|  | John Buchan
by Andrew Lownie
McArthur & Company $24.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1552784096
|
Book Review A Review of: John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier
by Greg Gatenby
John Buchan is a frustrating literary figure. On purely aesthetic
terms, he was never in the premier division. Yet there are hints that
both he and his contemporaries believed he might someday enter those
ranks, and his inability to reach the highest artistic stratum carried
with it the smell of failure, the murmuring that he was perhaps just a
tad lethargic, that he had, somehow, tried not quite hard enough.
Certainly the academic critics stayed away from him after his death;
compared to other authors of his time and fame, he is nearly invisible
among the scholarly crowd.
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Jean Cocteau
by Greg Gatenby
The New York house Assouline continues to publish wonderful
introductions to visual artists deserving of wider followings. The
most recent to come my way is Jean Cocteau by Patrick Mauries, a witty
and forthright portrayal. Previous titles in the series include
Picabia and Robert Indiana. All have the same format and trim size,
and all feature aggressively individual introductions with plain
English (not a syllable of Artspeak to be found). One wishes that
Canadian artists were the beneficiaries of such treatment in their own
land. Apart from Douglas & McIntyre, no Canadian house seems to want
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Beginning of Was
by W. P. Kinsella
Beginning of Was is a plodding novel about a woman who has enough
tragedy thrust upon her to last several lifetimes. If Marta was a
sympathetic character this would be a five hankie story, but we really
never get to know or like her. She is the somewhat creepy child of
cold, indifferent, immigrant parents. Her mother, a seamstress, leaves
home when Marta is nine. Consequently, Marta hates sewing because she
associates it with her mother. She also blames her bumbling father, a
failed dentist who becomes a house painter, for her mother's leaving.
Marta moves to Toronto and marries a boy who turns out to be an
...
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|  | No Safe House
by Diane Poulin
Signature Editions $17.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0921833938
|
Book Review A Review of: No Safe House
by W. P. Kinsella
No Safe House is a story whose author couldn't decide at what audience
to aim the story. It is juvenile one moment and adult the next. Two
bratty 12-year-old girls are the main characters. They do the silly
things 12-year-olds do-spy on their neighbors in a quiet Winnipeg
suburb, hide out in a graveyard, keep a notebook of what they see, and
speculate about an odd lady who, wearing a raincoat, walks around the
neighborhood three times a day year-round. But things are not quite as
they seem. There is a slightly deranged housewife with a new baby and
two toddlers, who seduces a neighbor, while one of the teenyboppers is
...
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| | Cherry
by Chandra Mayor
Conundrum Press $14.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1894994027
|
Book Review A Review of: Cherry
by W. P. Kinsella
Cherry is set in Winnipeg, but a very different Winnipeg; it's a city
full of drunks and druggies, and the cold wind that eternally blows
down Portage Avenue. The title is enigmatic: it might be the name of
the narrator, though the narrator does NOT have a name, and it does
not fit any of the other definitions of cherry. This is the first
lowlife girl novel of the year. The narrator (probably about 16) lives
with a gay-bashing, neo-nazi thug with a skateboard, who abuses her
physically, while they and their friends spend 24-hours a day
drinking, smoking and doing drugs. So what else do you need to know?
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Cripple and His Talismans
by W. P. Kinsella
They say that young writers begin with fantasy because they have no
life experience, gravitate to reality as they age, then revisit
fantasy in maturity. Irani is a very young writer with a world of
potential. He is another graduate of the prestigious UBC Writing
Program. Set in Bombay, a young man who has lost an arm, sets out to
find it, and has a long series of fabulous adventures, meeting wild,
weird, and flamboyant characters along the way.
He definitely has a way with words and the pages are spattered with
gold nuggets of language. Describing Bombay : "It is very strange.
...
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|  | Some Great Thing
by Colin Mcadam
Raincoast Books $34.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 1551926954
|
Book Review A Review of: Some Great Thing
by W. P. Kinsella
Some Great Thing is an ambitious novel. Two men live parallel lives
until they eventually intersect. Jerry McGuinty is a working class
young man with grand dreams and the smarts to bring them to fruition.
It is the 1970s and Ottawa is experiencing a building boom, and Jerry
becomes successful and wealthy by building quality houses. His
difficulties stem from meeting and marrying a spirited Irish caterer
named Kathleen Herlihy, who proves to be rancorous and even at a young
age has an inordinate thirst for whiskey. They have a son, Jerry Jr.,
and the final third of the book is Jerry Sr. trying to reconnect with
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: International Date Line
by W. P. Kinsella
This book could have been subtitled The Adventures of Airhead Anna.
Anna Woods could play the roles of both Dumb and Dumber. An immature
23-year-old, living in Toronto, she meets a sleazeball named Jack who
treats her badly, gives her the clap, and then disappears. But she
still loves him. Move ahead seven years and, approaching her 30th
birthday, still thinking with her genitals, Anna reaches total
immaturity when she sells her condo, gives away her possessions,
including her cat, and flies to Budapest to meet Sleazeball Jack, on
the basis of only a few e-mails. He, of course, doesn't show up when
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Monster Trilogy
by Keith Garebian
Poet, filmmaker, and playwright R.M. Vaughan has created a fascinating
monologic triptych about three female monsters-a real-life murderer
who killed her own young sons and two other women afflicted with
paranoia or violence. The triple bill of monologues (all roughly the
same text length) implicitly counts on the reader/audience as a
partner, albeit a silent one. Each monologue can stand on its own, but
taken together, they are strong morality pieces about the "normality"
of monsters and the monstrousness of the "normal." However, they
aren't polemical; nor do they shoot documentary material at us. As in
...
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| | Standing Stones
by John Metcalf
Thomas Allen $26.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0887621449
|
Book Review A Review of: Walter the Farting Dog: Trouble at the Yard Sale
by Olga Stein
You probably have to be a guy. I feel guilty for saying this about a
book so wonderfully illustrated and so well put together, but I simply
don't like it. It isn't just that Walter is constantly farting. It's
crude, but dogs fart, and if you don't find that funny, you can easily
overlook this aspect of Walter. What bothers me about this book is the
story from the very start. Walter joins father and little Betty and
Billy at their yard sale table. The family has all sorts of items for
sale but no one is buying. No one even approaches the table while
Walter lies on the grass, contaminating the air. Suddenly there's a
...
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|  | No Dogs Allowed!
by Sonia Manzano
Simon and Schuster $23.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0689830882
|
Book Review A Review of: No Dogs Allowed
by Olga Stein
This book I loved. A team effort from Sonia Manzano (Maria of Sesame
Street fame) and illustrator Jon J. Muth, it's all about family-in
this instance an extended, close-knit Hispanic family, full of
characters instantly recognizable and endearing. The plot is simple,
but appealing. Iris's parents, sister, and dog, are to join other
family members as well as friends on a trip to the State Park lake.
The resulting cavalcade of people and cars is pure chaos, but Iris has
no difficulty navigating this sea of family members. She has linked
each person with a positive quality-like cousins "Marta the Smart",
...
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|  | The Silver Door
by Terry Griggs
Raincoast Books $12.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1551926857
|
Book Review A Review of: The Silver Door
by Heather Kirk
While reading The Silver Door I was reminded of the famous statement
by C.S. Lewis about how he wrote his books for children: "I put in
what I would have liked to read when I was a child and what I still
like reading now that I am in my fifties." I am in my fifties, and I
did not like reading The Silver Door. There was plenty of adventure,
and I can enjoy that now just as much as I did when I was a child.
Instead I remained bored from beginning to end because Griggs did not
make me care what happened.
The book sounds interesting in outline. Olivier is staying with his
...
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| | Skydancer
by Cathy Brown
Creative Book Publishing $11.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1894294750
|
Book Review A Review of: Skydancer
by Olga Stein
A family of ravens is effectively realized in this book which follows
in the tradition of Lassie and other marvelous works that employ
animals as protagonists. Wulf comes into the world alongside sister
Hesperus and brother Loki, with father Silver and mother Darkfeather
nurturing and teaching them about the exigencies and dangers of life.
Despite the caring and vigilance of the parents, young Wulf is
attacked by a powerful and malicious older raven, Chaos, and sustains
an injury which grounds him and exposes him to the cruel realities of
existence. While his mother refuses to abandon him, his father is
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Girl With A Pearl Earring
by Gordon Phinn
That Johannes Vermeer be considered one of the finest artists this
planet has produced seems to be well beyond any kind of combative
debate. His contribution to the evolution of oil on canvas, though
tiny by the prolific standards of some of his more long lived
colleagues, is considered immutable. Indeed, it could be argued that
our notions of the sublime in domestic life, are, if not entirely,
then largely in part, derived from his thirty-five surviving works,
whose held-breath stillness evoke transcendence from our art craving
souls. While contemporaries such as Metsu, Fabritus and De Hooch
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Between Mountains
by Angela K. Narth
Maggie Helwig's newest novel is essentially a love story, but it is so
much more than simply a tale of romance. Set mainly in The Hague and
Bosnia, this novel spans the final six months of the last millennium,
giving us a rare glimpse into the tense post-Balkan war political
landscape that remained after the attention of the rest of the world
had moved on. It is July 1999. Daniel Bryant, a Canadian war
correspondent, has remained in Sarajevo to follow up on interviews
with suspected war criminals. Travelling to The Hague to pursue his
research, Daniel renews his friendship with Lili, a French citizen of
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Big Rig 2: More Comic Tales from a Long Haul Trucker
by M. Wayne Cunningham
Calgary-born Don McTavish spent forty years of his life
long-haul-trucking across western Canada. Now a Vancouver retiree, he
has shifted gears and spends his time, effort and obviously abundant
energies writing comic turns about his former career as, to use his
jargon, mileage merchant, hi-miler or wagon yanker. And if you're a
pavement pilot at heart looking for guidance in graduating from Gear
Masher U, Donny's your man. What he doesn't know about the industry,
its quirks and its characters probably isn't worth jawing about-at
least to hear him tell it and he tells it well. In fact, it's old
...
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|  | Working North
by Rick Ranson
NeWest Press $19.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1896300731
|
Book Review A Review of: Working North: DEW Line to Drill Ship
by M. Wayne Cunningham
Most authors who have written about the Canadian Arctic have been
explorers or explorers' biographers or anthropologists or activists
and environmentalists justifiably concerned about the exploitation of
northern resources and native peoples. Winnipeg author, Rick Ranson,
however, provides another perspective on the frozen north. As a blue
collar working stiff-a boilermaker and welder-turned-writer-he has
turned out this unique two-part collection of sixteen true tales about
daily working life as a labourer on the DEW Line and in the oil
drilling ships in northern Canada.
...
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|  | Vaudeville!
by Ga+¬tan Soucy
House of Anansi Press $38.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0887846947
|
Book Review A Review of: Vaudeville!
by Douglas Brown
Gatan Soucy has been hailed throughout the French-speaking world as
one of the most accomplished and original of contemporary novelists.
That he is a masterful writer able to draw on almost all the resources
of prose and fiction is abundantly evident in his series of
award-winning novels: L'immacule conception, L'acquittement, La petite
fille qui aimait trop les allumettes, and Music-Hall!. These four
remarkable books are distinguished as much by their deeply original
thematic cohesiveness as they are by the radical stylistic
distinctiveness of each from the others. Fortunately for
...
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|  | An Adoration
by Nancy Huston
McArthur & Company $29.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 1552783731
|
Book Review A Review of: An Adoration
by Gwen Nowak
An Adoration is ostensibly a murder mystery. But in reality Nancy
Huston's latest novel is a mystic manifesto, her theory of everything
written as a Mystery/Morality/Miracle Play. In it Huston/Houdini
artfully slips the bonds of every convention to create a tableau
vivant.
Huston's opening note describes An Adoration as a "phantasmagoria", a
first alert that you are about to enter a shifting scene of illusions,
imaginary fancies, deceptions. Then, in a flourish of paradoxical
whimsy, Huston swears that what she has written is "perfectly true."
...
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|  | Verandah People
by Jonathan Bennett
Raincoast Books $19.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1551926490
|
Book Review A Review of: Verandah People
by Lyall Bush
The best short story writers curve their art around suggestion. The
plume of smoke runs in two directions, too-back down the chimney into
the troubled house, and drifting up into the blue erasure of the sky.
Length can vex the balance: longer tales gravitate to the moral
density of the novel, whose scale demands more than than wispy
suggestion; shorter stories shrink into anecdote or haiku, only rarely
finding the controlled angina of a Beatles song. (I'm thinking of
"Eleanor Rigby".) The great writers of the short story, from Poe to
Chekhov to Joyce and Borges, thread character, scene, scenario and
...
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|  | The Opium Lady
by JoAnne Soper-Cook
Goose Lane Editions $19.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0864923708
|
Book Review A Review of: The Opium Lady
by Lyall Bush
The best short story writers curve their art around suggestion. The
plume of smoke runs in two directions, too-back down the chimney into
the troubled house, and drifting up into the blue erasure of the sky.
Length can vex the balance: longer tales gravitate to the moral
density of the novel, whose scale demands more than than wispy
suggestion; shorter stories shrink into anecdote or haiku, only rarely
finding the controlled angina of a Beatles song. (I'm thinking of
"Eleanor Rigby".) The great writers of the short story, from Poe to
Chekhov to Joyce and Borges, thread character, scene, scenario and
...
Read more...
| | Book Review A Review of: Kilter: 55 Fictions
by Michael Greenstein
Centuries ago, John Gould's characters might have tilted against
windmills; today, they lean against the form of fiction itself. While
some of Kilter's 55 short stories fall flat, many of these
post-Borgesian fictions succeed. "Tell it slant," advised Emily
Dickinson, and Gould slants his microcosms in quirky, zany sketches.
Neither plot nor character development characterize Kilter; and
instead of epiphanies, we are confronted with counter-revelations that
angle into consciousness.
Take "Two Things Together", the first of 55: two plus two do not
...
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|  | Residual Desire
by Jill Robinson
Coteau Books $18.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1550502654
|
Book Review A Review of: Residual Desire
by Michael Greenstein
Jill Robinson's fourth collection of fiction, Residual Desire,
contains a dozen short stories. "Her heart was like an off-kilter
washing machine" appears in "Dj Vu", Robinson's second story. If
Robinson's fiction is not overly "kiltered", it appeals more to the
heart because her characters are given more space to develop.
In the opening story the narrator visits her aging father and
concludes: "Growth and decay ... What an odd mixture. Nothing in its
original form." This odd mixture of growth and decay characterizes
most of the stories in Residual Desire. The negatives in "nothing in
...
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|  | Writers Talking
by John Metcalf, Claire Wilkshire
Porcupine's Quill $19.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0889842744
|
Book Review A Review of: Writers Talking
by Jeremy Lalonde
As I'm sure you already know, The Last Crossing by Guy Vanderhaeghe
won this year's CBC Canada Reads competition. For the purposes of this
review, I'm less interested in Vanderhaeghe's success than the manner
in which Alice Munro's The Love of a Good Woman was summarily shelved
on the second day of the contest. The deciding vote belonged to the
mediator, Bill Richardson, who claimed it was too difficult to
contrast Munro's collection of short stories with the four novels in
the competition.
This is an interesting claim, given that the four novelists (Thomas
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Voice is the Story
by Jeremy Lalonde
As I'm sure you already know, The Last Crossing by Guy Vanderhaeghe
won this year's CBC Canada Reads competition. For the purposes of this
review, I'm less interested in Vanderhaeghe's success than the manner
in which Alice Munro's The Love of a Good Woman was summarily shelved
on the second day of the contest. The deciding vote belonged to the
mediator, Bill Richardson, who claimed it was too difficult to
contrast Munro's collection of short stories with the four novels in
the competition.
This is an interesting claim, given that the four novelists (Thomas
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Loot and Other Stories
by Michelle Ariss
"The short story is a fragmented and restless form, a matter of hit or
miss, and it is perhaps for this reason that it suits modern
consciousness - which seems best expressed as flashes of fearful
insight alternating with near-hypnotic states of indifference."
(Nadine Gordimer, 1999)
"It is surely the morality of fiction that is being questioned by
those who accuse the writer of looting the character of living
personages."
(Nadine Gordimer, 1995)
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The TravellerÆs Hat
by Clara Thomas
Potvin chooses her subjects from the everyday routines of people's
lives and searches out the unique quality of each one of her
characters. Her epigraph, inscribed in italics, is in three parts, the
first from Socrates, "Let him who would move the world, first move
himself," the two following from Hesiod's "Works and Days" and from
Homer's "The Homeric Hymn to Hermes". She means, I believe, to awaken
us anew to the astonishing, ageless surfaces and depths of individual
men and women and to record their variety with keen observation and
compassion.
...
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|  | Way Up
by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
University Of Toronto Press $19.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0864923686
|
Book Review A Review of: Way Up
by Clara Thomas
Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer's stories are set in situations and characters
of the real, familiar, daily world. But hers stay rooted there. There
is no transcendent closing of the circle, reaffirming hope and the
spiritual. Her characters are of the earth, earthy and totally
believable in their particular dilemmas. Her stories are weighted
toward the dark, not the light, and their effect is completely without
an infusion of comfort. The effect of reading them consecutively is
rather like enduring a series of hard knocks on the head, interspersed
from time to time with nods of appreciation.
...
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|  | Hard Boiled Love
by Kerry Ed.; Sellers Peter Schooley
Insomniac $21.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1894663454
|
Book Review A Review of: Hard Boiled Love: An Anthology of Noir Love
by Ibi Kaslik
Hard-Boiled Love: An anthology of noir love, is rather successful at
explaining the pathology of the perverse, deviant and criminal
cravings present in us all. The cover, a slightly blurred photo of a
Bardot-like woman smoking, is a captivating precursor to the twisted
tales of love gone wrong, vendetta, and high stakes. This collection
revels in the power that a literary genre can possess, and most of
these tales subvert notions of Canada as a safe and pleasant place. As
editors Kerry J. Schooley and Peter Sellers note: "The darkness of the
isolated soul has always been a part of our literary heritage."
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Grunt and Groan: The New Fiction of Work and Sex
by Ibi Kaslik
When it comes to reading about sex, one is faced with the quandary of
when to draw the lines between smut and erotica, trash and literature.
Erotica occupies that shady nether region between art and pornography,
as its purpose is to arouse and engage the reader sensually while
offering some semblance of plot, character and style. Artfulness in
exploring the cocksure, whimsical, or perverse also defines erotica
and is the one characteristic that is sadly lacking in Grunt and
Groan, Mark Firth's anthology of sex and work. Although Firth states
in his introduction that "Grunt and Groan is the anthology of work and
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Moon in Its Flight
by Jeff Bursey
Reading this collection of twenty short pieces, which cover
thirty-five years of creativity, is like stealing time for a favourite
pursuit on a summer's afternoon. Despite containing unending marital
strife, heavy drinking, and the casual, occasionally fretted over,
sexual infidelities, the material remains airy. Few of the tales are
conventional, many digress, and one or two never make it past the
setup. None are stories, if one maintains that, among other things,
stories ought to present character development, have plot arcs, depict
settings with realism, and place people in believable situations.
...
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| | Jumping Off
by Laura J. Cutler
NeWest Press $19.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1896300596
|
Book Review A Review of: Jumping Off
by Helen McLean
For most of the female characters in Laura J. Cutler's collection
Jumping Off, the feminist revolution never happened. Women accept bad
treatment from the men on whom their lives are inexplicably centered
as though the idea of being in charge of their own fates had never
crossed their minds. Important decisions are postponed or the wrong
ones made; self-destructive habits hold sway, and what "jumping off"
occurs is often out of the frying pan and into the fire. An alcoholic
goes to an AA meeting, for instance, but backs out. A self-loathing
woman mutilates her fingers with scissors and later prepares to commit
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Rule of Last Clear Chance
by Helen McLean
The characters in Judith McCormack's short story collection The Rule
of Last Clear Chance are human beings rich in spirit-people who can
open themselves fully to the "achy, high-wire joy" that follows the
birth of a child, or the pleasure of so simple a thing as "one of
those sleepy, sunny weekends when the drone of lawnmowers on crewcut
grass make it seem as if time is eddying around, instead of proceeding
in the usual brisk line." But they also have the courage to face pain,
as when a miscarriage occurs, or a beloved husband dies in a freak
accident, or when forced to confront the sort of disillusionment an
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Nobody Goes to Earth Any More
by Steven W. Beattie
Flannery O'Connor, one of the great practitioners of the short-story
form, once commented that "[t]he peculiar problem of the short-story
writer is how to make the action he describes reveal as much of the
mystery of existence as possible." In his dbut collection, Nobody Goes
to Earth Any More, Saskatchewan writer Donald Ward echoes O'Connor's
fascination with the way in which mystery operates in the world, and
with those moments when human beings are forced by circumstance into a
confrontation with their essential natures.
The sixteen stories in Nobody Goes to Earth Any More are wildly
...
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|  | Hair Hat
by Carrie Snyder
Penguin Canada Paperback $24 Paperback
ISBN: 0143015370
|
Book Review A Review of: Hair Hat
by Steven W. Beattie
Carrie Snyder's dbut collection, Hair Hat, also flirts with mystery,
but of a less existential variety. Snyder's volume of eleven stories
is linked by the presence of a mysterious figure whose hair is
sculpted into the shape of a hat. This nameless figure keeps cropping
up-on a beach, in a donut shop, returning a lost wallet-but remains a
peripheral figure, as though inhabiting the blurred edges of a
photograph. Until, that is, the penultimate story in the collection,
when the hair hat man is brought front and centre.
Before becoming the focus of attention, he wanders aimlessly into and
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Fabulous Small Jews
by Sharon Abron Drache
What is it about Jews? Whether they are rich or poor, religious or
secular, there is a bond which defines and unites them-call it paying
dues to collective memory about bad things happening to good people.
Sartre said another thing: "It is not the Jewish character which
evokes anti-Semitism but on the contrary, it is the anti-Semite who
creates the Jew...."
Sartre's statement is the ongoing, sub-theme in this brilliantly
crafted collection of short fiction by Joseph Epstein, born and
educated in Chicago, who has served as a lecturer in English and
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Indelible Acts: Stories
by Heather Birrell
"You know us? People like us? We're touch positive. You press against
us, even hit us, and we lean in to feel it more. We like touching.
We're not ourselves without it." This yearning, this absolute and very
physical need for what may, eventually, harm them the most is shared
by all of the characters in Kennedy's fourth collection of stories,
Indelible Acts. The acts of the title are mostly erotic awakenings,
"the dumbfoundedness, the silly, hot pauses of intention" that
attraction and infatuation precipitate. Kennedy is a master of the
closed, charged spaces of the illicit (extra-marital affairs, closeted
...
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