| Book Review Perestroika In Publishing
by Greg Gransden
FOR NINE YEARS, the pride of Larissa Eryomina`s life has been an
eclectic literary compilation that she edits every year for Moscow`s Kniga. publishing house. Entitled Memorable Dates in Literature, it is an annual collection of articles, bibliographies, biographies, photographs, and reproductions of cover artwork, all tied to important anniversaries in world literary history and contributed by the country`s most prominent writers.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews-Fiction01
by Pat Barclay
IT`S CLEAR THAT the mystery story is alive and well and living in Canada. Less than a decade after the appearance of a similar collection (Maddened by Mystery, edited by Michael Richardson, Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1982), Alberto Manguel has managed to unearth a respectable group of mostly new tales for Canadian Mystery Stories (Oxford University Press, 296 pages, $17.95 paper).
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews-Poetry3
by Barbara Carey
IT`S STRANGE TO think that a poet can be hailed as one of the finest of her generation, and then be all but forgotten within a few decades of her death. Such was the fate of Anne Wilkinson, who died in 1961 at the age of 50; in the last 10 years of her life she published a memoir, a children`s book, and two volumes of poetry, which were praised by such notables as A. J. M. Smith and Desmond Pacey The Poetry of Anne Wilkinson and a Prose Memoir (Exile Editions, 212 pages, $19.
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| | Book Review Skin The Colour Of Money
by Isabel Huggan
In September, 1989 in this magazine`s Field Notes column, I wrote that living in Kenya was teaching me silence. Ironically, no sooner had I declared my reasons for not writing than I began to write again; perhaps acknowledging the culpability of innocence awakened me to its value as a toot in fiction, and I`ve since been working on stories in which the central narrators are Canadians in an African setting.
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| | Book Review Last Words
by Alec Mcewen
ALTHOUGH ABBREVIATED forms have been a part of the English language for centuries, the proliferation of words collectively known as acronyms is relatively recent. Acronym, which first entered a dictionary in 1943, means the result of joining together the initial letters or parts of a compound term to produce a new expression that is treated as a single, pronounceable word.
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| | Book Review Books By Design
Although we may not always be consciously aware of it, the pleasure of buying and reading books is not just an abstract intellectual experience.
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| | Book Review The Elegant Bare Bones
by Doris Cowan
APPROPRIATELY, this book`s dedication is to a friend "who can find her way through the` labyrinth of the mind" Anne Szumigalski charts a path through the labyrinth as she outlines the birth, the nurturing, and the mature action of the poetic consciousness, as she herself has lived it.
The Word, the Voice, the Text is an autobiography (of a poet who is approaching her 70th year), but it is not a conventional one.
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| | Book Review Disorder At The Border
by Eric Mccormack
AFTER READING several pages of Changelings, I thought: Tom Marshall`s been watching too much Geraldo and Oprah for the last few years, or he`s come under the influence of Shirley MacLaine. Mediums, channellers, reincarnation, child abuse, incest, sundry sexual deviances, and life behind bars are the grist for this novel; not to mention the fact that the two main characters, a brother and sister, are afflicted with multiplepersonality disorder.
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| | Book Review More Than Meets The Eye
by Richard Sanger
"SPEAKING OF PERSONAL matters, the first time I felt the necessity or inevitableness of verse was in the desire to reproduce the peculiar quality of feeling which is induced by the flat open spaces and wide horizons of the virgin prairie of Western Canada" Thus wrote T. E. Hulme, one of the founders of the Imagist movement, in 1908.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews-Slopes Of The Andes
by Amy Friedman
"THE ONTARIO WAY with ideas is, in general, to regard ideas as orthodox or heretical, rather than as true or false," Royce MacGillivray writes in The Slopes of the Andes: Four Essays on the Rural Myth in Ontario (Mika Publishing, 192 pages, $35 cloth, $30 paper). If we believe him - and this unusual and fascinating volume helps to convince us to do so - no doubt Ontarians, and especially Ontario historians, would label MacGillivray`s book heretical.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews-Fiction02
by Richard Perry
"OTHER PEOPLE HAVE a nationality," Brendan Behan. "The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis" In his third crime novel, Kaddish in Dublin (HarperCollins, 281 pages, $19.95 cloth), John Brady attempts the onerous task of weaving together strands from both Irish and Jewish skeins of anxiety.
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| | Book Review Old Masters, New Forgeries
by Pat Barclay
EARLY IN Sharon Sparling`s new novel, there`s a scene in which Greer, the young heroine, and Connie, her antique-dealing grandfather, discuss the morality of passing off fakes and forgeries as genuine art. "If I find a good fake and a gullible buyer with more money than brains, I`ll palm it off as Hitler`s booty" explains Connie, adding: "Don`t worry. I only say that to
people who deserve to be cheated .
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| | Book Review On The Road With Jim Christy
by Allan Levine
Author, Artist, Adventurer, and Actor are among the roles
in this multi-talented performer`s repertoire
IT`S TUESDAY NIGHT, October 9, 1990 at the Unitarian Church in Vancouver. Jim Christy is working the crowd, shaking a hand here, parrying a clever quip there, pausing while an enthralled woman jots a fact on a scrap of notepaper.
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| | Book Review Writing A Life
by Rosemary Sullivan
BOOKS SAY: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you. Life is where they aren`t .... Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people`s lives, never your own." So says Julian Barnes`s pseudo-biographer in his novel Flaubert`s Parrot.
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| | Book Review Facts And Fictions
by Carole Giangrande
BOTH LEE MARACLE`s account of growing up Native on Canada`s West Coast and her more recent collection of short stories show us the growth of a gutsy survivor, a woman who tackles adversity like a tough weed pushing through concrete. Read them in tandem: the first for its toughedged picture of Native realities, the second for the maturity and insight that years of living and writing have added to Maracle`s earlier experiences.
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| | Book Review The Pleasures Of Effrontery
by Merna Summers
KENNETH RADU is interested in the ways in which human beings seduce and exploit and neglect each other, in the inner workings of the exploiters, and the effects in the lives of their victims.
In "Black Tulips," one of 14 stories in this new collection, the main character is an actress who is a monster of heedlessness. She has promised to pay return fare for her son`s nanny to return to her home in Lichtenstein. "I can only afford bus fare as far as Halifax," she says
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| | Book Review Keeping The Faith
by Michael Coren
THEOLOGIANS are not what they were. If, indeed, they ever were. What is certain is that this post-Christian age holds little brief for religious pundits, and instead turns to politicians and secular "experts" for explanation and succour. In the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries it was the the, ologian who provided the panacea, propounded the ideology that divided the world into immutable camps. No longer
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews-Poetry2
by Charlene Diehl-Jones
THERE`S Room FOR more than 100 Caribbean women poets to speak their divergent voices, styles, and languages in Creation Fire: A CAFRA Anthology of Caribbean Women`s Poetry (Sister Vision, 349 pages, $16.95 paper). This book has a thematic cast, and the list of sections - The Artist, The Lover, `The Exile, The Guerrilla, The Worker, and others -articulates its own eloquence about the lives and concerns of its contributors.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews-Non-Fiction
by Paul Stuewe
THE IMAGE OF the stern Victorian patriarch, ordering his family`s life along rigid moral lines, is one of the standard cliches of both conventional social history and current feminist discourse.
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| | Book Review The Poem Goes On
by Stephen Scobie
WELL, IN THE FIRST PLACE what is this book called? The title 1 have given it above is what appears on the front cover, more or less: Gifts might more accurately be transcribed gIFTS. G is, after all, the seventh letter of the alphabet, and this is
(isn`t it?) Book 7 of The Martyrology. But as we rum over the first few pages, other possibilities emerge.
Perhaps this book is called gifts / given
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews-Poetry1
by Wayne Grady
WHILE QUEBEC LITERATURE was undergoing a quiet revolution in the 1960s, a similar `Acadian Renaissance` was taking place among French-language writers in the Maritimes. Unfinished Dreams (Goose Lane Editions, 172 pages, $16.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews-Fiction03
by Rachel Rafelman
Two WOMEN acquaintances motor through the south of France in Clive Doucet`s The Gospel According to Mary Magdalene (Black Moss, 70 pages, $12.95 paper), a tightly written and poignant novella about love, loss, belief, and survival. Jane, a painter in her early 20s, is looking for artistic inspiration, but also has a "notion to say a prayer in the grotto" where Mary Magdalene lived.
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| | Book Review A Circle Of Clarity
by Nino Ricci
Nino Ricci`s Lives of the Saints, published by Cormorant Books, is the winner of the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award for 1990. The novel, which also won the 1990 Governor General`s Award for Fiction in English, was the clear choice of our panel of judges.
Lives of the Saints is set in an isolated village in Italy`s Apennine mountains, where even the recently concluded Second World War has made little change in traditional ways of life.
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| | Book Review Language In Her Ear
by Erin Moure
READING Telling It, I was struck by its differences from another recent anthology of women`s words. In Language in Her Eye, the voices were writerly, singular, they didn`t interact; some even suspected each other without having spoken directly. What was missing, I thought, was listening, without which there is suspicion and blockage, fear that culminates in refusals.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews-Fiction05
by Richard Harvor
IN CARY FAGAN`s short stones, collected in History Lessons (Hounslow, 164 pages, $14.95 paper), characters continually misinterpret both the feelings of those around them and the dangers of their environment, with sometimes disastrous consequences. This is most evident in "The Village Angel," a Bernard Malamud-like account of an old man`s involvement with an experimental theatre troupe in New York City.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews-Fiction04
by Mary Langille
IF YOURE LOOKING for experimental Canadian fiction, look no further than Hard Times (Mercury, 168 pages, $12.95 paper). Each of Beverley Daurio`s editorial selections is innovative in terms of either subject matter, style, or both.
In terms of content, the most striking of the stories is Ann Diamonds "The Ape Diet." A Japanese Buddhist monk comes to America to teach his religion, but fears that his students will never understand the essentials.
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| | Book Review Really The Blues
by Phil Hall
ONE RICH VAUDEVILLE opera here, folks. Old, lost wherewithals and last summer`s garden bronzed: unofficial history, fullblown romance, quiltish narrative, password blues, news clippings, archival photos ... all toward finding, praising, and preserving "Beauty."
In Whylah Falls, Nova Scotia, a Black, back-water fishing community, meet X (die poet), Amarantha, Pushkin, Othello (the murdered), and others: "These poems are fact presented as fiction.
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| | Book Review Emerging Imperatives
by Janice Keefer
READERS WILL FIND much of interest and delight in No New Land, M. G. Vassanji`s account of a "particular East African Asian community" in contemporary Toronto. The denizens of 69 Rosecliffe Park Drive, an apartment building "just this side of dissolution," are linked by a common place of origin - Dar es Salaam - and a common condition, that of the first-generation immigrant trying to make good in an often bewildering, begrudging land.
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| | Book Review A Storyteller In Orbit
by Susan Whaley
THE 10 STORIES in Ven Begamudre`s first collection fairly leap from the page. Here is a spirited, energetic voice that obviously delights in spinning tales. It is also a humane voice and a courageous one, for it examines life from points of view both male and female, young and old, Caucasian and East Indian. Begamudre presents familiar themes such as relations between the sexes, between generations, and between cultures in unfamiliar ways.
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| | Book Review Poet'S Corner
by Maurice Mierau
READING A HEFTY pile of poetry books for a round-up review is a bit like being trapped in a room with a dozen salespeople. You get collared, buttonholed, stroked, offended, entertained, bored - and it`s not easy to describe the experience. Erotic metaphors, allusions, and jokes abound, though, and there`s something very Canadian about the constant sublimation of the erotic into product.
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| | Children's Books Children'S Books
by Anne Denoon
control of her technique, there`s something cold and slightly repellent about these images; and certain passages, like the "smiling" faces looking out of the school bus, definitely enter the realm of the macabre. (I thought of James Ensor`s skeletons and masks.) It could be argued that the pictures merely reflect the book`s anxiety-ridden text, a joint effort by Ginette Lamont Clarke and Dr.
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