| Book Review Transfigured Distances
by Erin Moure
THE SO-CALLED Prairie anecdotal or narrative tradition is one of those categories that reflect largely the eye of the beholder, blinding it to other streams and processes. The work of Claire Harris, a Calgary poet, is one cure; it is one of the most varied to come out of that elemental
Western landscape. Especially in Fables from the Women's Quarters (1984), Harris uses the long sequence in a way that both integrates and pushes forward many voices.
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| | Book Review Work In Progress Nightadders
by Ernst Havemann
When I talked about getting some
white infiltrators, the Congress chiefs laughed at me.
So I decided to do it myself
OF COURSE I belong to Mkhonto, Umkhonto we Sizwe, the Spear of the Nation. Everyone who wants to get anywhere in the movement tries to get into Mkhonto. It shows you are dedicated to the Armed Struggle. I worked with Mbaimbai Ntombela on a couple of operations and then lost faith.
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| | Book Review Obituary Charles Perry Stacey 1905-1989
by Desmond Morton
ON NOVEMBER 18th, 1989, Colonel Charles Perry Stacey died, without pain, happily married and, at 83, still at work on one of those innumerable reviews in which he chided, encouraged, and corrected colleagues.
Stacey was one of the great Canadian historians. Carl Berger, in The Writing of Canadian History, called him "the best technical historian" the country has known.
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| | Book Review The Spirit Of Crazy Horse
by Terry Goldie
RACE AND the authority of the writer is a major issue in Canadian literature today. At a time when many have accepted the "death of the author," the liberation of the text from the human being who produced it, others are saying that the author is very much alive, alive with cultural roots and cultural responsibilities.
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| | Book Review Of Tires And Fishes
by Lawrence Jackson
INSTEAD OF sending anthropologists to places like Borneo and Upper Volta, we should post a few on Parliament Hill and a couple more on Bay Street. The beliefs and habits of obscure peoples are worthy of interest, but most of us more urgently
need to understand the powerful in our own midst. So when a reporter offers lively insights into business culture and the burden of inherited wealth, we should rejoice and cry for more.
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| | Book Review Available Light
by Gary Draper
IF YOUVE been wondering about the health of the short story in Canada, I have some good news. Not only is it alive and kicking, it's in extremely capable hands. The evidence is in these two annual short-story collections from Oberon Press.
Let's look at Best Canadian Stories first. Anthologies are, by their very nature, provocative
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| | Book Review Man Of Steel
by Maurice Mierau
STEVEN HEIGHTON'S first book of poems, Stalin's Carnival, is a promising if uneven debut. The first section carries the Blakean title "Energy is Eternal Delight," and it features what is probably the strongest poem in the collection, "Icarus." The choice of subject is no accident, because Heighton's aesthetics are rooted in the great modernist poets: William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Dylan Thomas.
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| | Book Review Painting The Lily
by Norman Sigurdson
LILY COOLICAN, the heroine of the two previous novels in Heather Robertson's The King Years trilogy, is nothing if not a namedropper. Witness this snippet of dialogue (based on an actual incident with Paraskeva Clark) from near the beginning of Igor, the final volume of the trilogy.
I remember once when Norman Bethune
"You knew Dr.
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| | Book Review Ruin Of The Country
by I. M. Owen
PUBLIC-OPINION polling arrived in this country in November 1941, when George Gallup set up the Canadian Institute of Public Opinion in Toronto. This made Mackenzie King very nervous. He was five months away from his plebiscite on conscription, and was afraid that the Institute would publish a poll on the subject that would reveal a deep division in the country along linguistic lines. (The plebiscite itself, of course, would do just that; King's thought processes were sometimes hard to follow.
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| | Book Review Blowing Up The Bridge
by Geoffrey Stevens
PLAYING FOR KEEPS: THE MAKING OF THE PRIME MINISTER, 1988 by Graham Fraser, McClelland & Stewart, 491 pages, $28.95 cloth, (ISBN 0 7710 3208 0)
ON THE day that Brian Mulroney called the 1988 federal general election, his Progressive Conservatives enjoyed the support of 43 per cent of the Canadian electorate, according to an internal party poll. On election day, 51 days later, the Tories won their second consecutive majority government -- with 43 per cent of the vote.
But don't be misled.
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| | Book Review Dead Reckoning
by Di Brandt
ERIN MOURE'S virtuosity dazzles. WSW (West South West), her newest collection of poems, is filled with the kind of energy, the quick movement from hand or eye to sudden landscape, dream, or memory that we have come to expect in her writing.
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| | Book Review Counterpoint Of Meaning
by James Reaney
Before you know it, you're watching
Northrop Frye bicycling through
the prophecies of William Blake
THIS IS the story of a great teacher who discovered the answer to one of our epoch's great soul problems. If a story is not true, what use is it? Since Northrop Frye believes that story and metaphor are the artefacts that hold our societies together, his answer to the above question is supremely important: stories are neither true nor untrue.
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| | Book Review The Control Of History
by Christopher Moore
THERE is a John Updike story about two undergraduates in the 1950s who set out to rank the English poets in order of excellence. They employ a rigorous and methodical technique of explication that eventually proves that the greatest poet in the canon must be Lord Byron. The narrator is troubled by this outcome, but Ed, the leader of the enterprise, is undismayed. "He has the necessary hardness," concludes Ed, who upon graduation joins the C.I.A.
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| | Book Review Work In Progress Flesh And Blood
by Don Hannah
CAST Loretta Estabrooks Bobby Estabrooks, her brother Mildred Estabrooks, their mother Norman Estabrooks, their father Philippe Chaisson, Loretta's husband Mickey Chaisson, Loretta and Phil's son Nancy Hebert
SET
Flesh and Blood is set on a beach in southeastern New Brunswick. The beach is not realistic, but it must have elements of the real and should be adaptable for all scenes. The events of the play span the mid-'50s to the present.
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| | Interviews Image And Memory
by Pleuke Boyce
'The word for "junction" in German is "knot," and how knotted
everything was, then! The Wall had been standing for two
years ...
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| | Letters to Editor The Ring Of Truth
HISTORIANS ARE no exception to the rule that all of us have our specialties and are fish out of water when we attempt to pontificate on other. matters. Theirs, of course, is the past, where we cheerfully allow them to muck about with their documents and to surface periodically to throw mud and suchlike at each other`s books.
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| | Letters to Editor A Pall Of Silence
by Susan Crean
To MY SURPRISE, Carole Corbeil's article on the Toronto portion of the PEN Congress follows the feckless lead of the newspaper reporters who stopped looking for stories once June Callwood uttered the "f-word" outside Roy Thomson Hall the night of the gala. There is not a little irony in this.
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| | Profiles The Melting-Pot Lady
by Joel Yanofsky
EVERYTHING HAPPENS by accident. Some 30 years ago a UCLA drama professor passing through Calcutta was invited to the home of Bharati Mukherjee's prosperous and prominent father. Mukherjee's father, an unlikely combination of patriarchal and progressive attitudes, took the opportunity to ask for advice about his daughter's future. "I want her to be a writer. Where do I send her?" His American guest replied, "Send her to Iowa.
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| | First Novels A Version Of Pastoral
by Dayv James-French
STORIES OF the Miramichi are not unknown to Canadian audiences: it's an ungenerous area that naturally lends itself to grim tales of spiritual bankruptcy. Herb Curtis presents a disarmingly atypical view in his oddly titled The Americans are Coming (Goose Lane, 263 pages, unpriced).
I mention the title first, because my major quibble is with the expectations it raises, cf. Atwood passim.
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| | Field Notes The History He Lived
by Merrily Weisbord
In my lifetime, the last of the people born before the Russian Revolution will die. My father is the
very last of that generation,
aged four in 1917, just old enough to remember the bayonets glinting like glass below the
window of the house in
Petrograd on the morning the soldiers stormed to the Duma and said they had had enough of
hunger and war
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| | Field Notes He Sold The Shop
by Don Nichol
NEWFOUNDLANDERS, NOW MORE than ever, need something to laugh about. Expectations for the 1990s spell more of the same old gloom and doom: our appalling unemployment statistics, political pandemonium, child abuse, and the ever-widening gap between rich and poor. Political placebos range from the ludicrous to the outrageous on the centre stage of the Arts and Culture Centre.
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| | Field Notes Anglo Extravagance
by John Goddard
MONTREAL'S ENGLISH-LANGUAGE writing community is like its hockey team: rich in tradition and glorious achievement. At any gathering of the city's anglophone writers, the great names are conjured up like old photographs circling the dressing room, or banners hanging from the rafters.
"In the past when one did something significant in poetry," said D. G. Jones at the latest event, "one would get invited to Frank Scott's living room.
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| | Field Notes Who'S Really Who
by Phil Hall
THE 10th International Festival of Authors (held October 13 to 21 in Toronto) ended with an awards brunch that left me, and, I suspect, most of the people in attendance, sockless! Tomson Highway won the Wang Festival Prize of $7,500 in cash, and a desktop publishing system from Wang Canada, Ltd., worth an additional $20,000! Why the exclamation marks? Why no socks? Because of how much money that is, because of what a prestigious award it is, and because of the judges' choice.
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| | Field Notes Inside The Fringe
by Kenneth Brown
THAT THE EDMONTON Fringe Festival has been phenomenally successful is now obvious. From its modest beginnings in 1981, when about 7,000 tickets were sold, to its present status as an international theatrical event, with theatre and streettheatre attendance of something over 150,000, it has played host to a variety of theatre artists creating shows that have diverged widely in theme, style, and, of course, artistic merit.
Boasting about the numbers is not my point here.
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| | Field Notes The National
by Nigel Hunt
CANADA HAS NEVER really had a national theatre. Blame it on our tiny population scattered from sea to sea, the schism of having two official (and many unofficial) languages, or the decision to locate the national capital in Bytown; the fact remains that even if we could agree that we wanted a national theatre, it would be hard to imagine ever reaching consensus on where to put it.
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| | Brief Reviews New Icelandic Canadian Writing
by John Oughton
CANADIANS WITH Icelandic roots -- many of them living around Gimli, Manitoba -- represent one of the rarer threads in our multicultural fabric. Rumour has it that Iceland is fiercely literary, with uncommonly high numbers of small presses and avid readers.
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| | Brief Reviews Memories Of War, Promises Of Peace
by Pat Barclay
THE WORLD of Jack and Rita Leddy is not about greatness but about goodness, not about great goodness but about genuine goodness. This is why it bears retelling, 11 writes Mary Jo Leddy in Memories of War, Promises of Peace (Lester & Orpen Dennys, 170 pages, $22.95 cloth). Jack and Rita Leddy -- he a doctor, she a nurse -- committed themselves to the Allied war effort in July 1941, just a month before their marriage.
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| | Brief Reviews A Note To Our Readers
by The Editors
THIS FIRST issue of Books in Canada in the 1990s marks new beginnings for us in several ways. We have a new proprietor, Bedford House Publishing Corporation, which has undertaken to maintain our editorial character and policies, and allow us the opportunity to expand and improve. Our new general manager, Anita Miecznikowski, comes to us from McClelland & Stewart, where she worked as marketing co- ordinator in the college division
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| | Brief Reviews When The Whalers Were Up North
by Pat Barclay
THIS IS an attractive book about a now highly unattractive subject: the pursuit and killing for profit of one of the most intelligent mammals on earth. Dorothy Harley Eber began When the Whalers Were Up North (McGill-Queen's, 187 pages, $29.95 cloth) after showing a hundred- year-old photograph to a group of Inuit in Cape Dorset and being astonished when they recognized the Inuit hunter in the photo. "'This picture makes me remember the stories my grandmother told,"' said one man.
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| | Brief Reviews Straight No Chaser
by Pat Barclay
THE DUST jacket photo says it all. Jack Batten faces the camera with tweed collar up, muffler arranged, spiffy glove displayed, and hair with a shine like kitchen floors had before Betty Friedan. Straight No Chaser (Macmillan, 310 pages, $19.95 cloth) is Batten's second time out as a mystery novelist and, by gumshoe, he's dressed for the part. The photo suggests what the novel reveals: Batten himself is having a whale of a time with his lawyer-sleuth, Crang.
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| | Brief Reviews F.Linchong`Srevenge
by Bruce Serafin
COMIC BOOKS are on the move! From Art Speigelman`s Maus at the more literary level to Frank Miller`s The Dark Knight Returns at the level of commercial books, some truly absorbing work is being done these days. I don`t know if it`s entirely fair to call Lin Chong is Revenge (Water Margin Press, 63 pages, unpriced), with text by Frank Chin and illustrations by Gao Shi, a comic book, since it forgoes dialogue balloons and in fact is graphically more like an illustrated children`s book.
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| | Brief Reviews Fear In Chile
by Barbara Carey
BLANCA WENT into hiding after escaping from a firing squad, and for several years didn't dare contact her children to let them know that she was still alive. Carlos is a student activist whose experiences of police repression on campus convinced him that "violence is necessary" for selfdefence. Juan, a mayor and retired army officer, believes that the 1973 military coup was "the best thing that could have happened" to Chile.
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| | Brief Reviews Creating The Country
by John Oughton
MODEST AND soft-spoken, Rhona McAdam's new poems create their effects by exactness of tone and a careful accretion of imagery. Usually written in complete sentences, eschewing the exploration of the politics of language that many other contemporary women poets undertake, the contents of Creating the Country (Thistledown, 80 pages, $9.95 paper) achieve distinction by attention to the exact harmonies in shifting relationships, the flavours of loss, exile, and change.
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| | Brief Reviews F.Ashortwalkintherain
by John Oughton
THIS SECOND volume of the "collected short stories" of Hugh Hood A Short Walk in the Rain (Porcupine`s Quill, 174 pages, $10.95 paper) includes 13 previously unpublished tales from his apprenticeship period that were not in volume one, Flying a Red Kite.
As Hood himself acknowledges in a rather lengthy introduction, not all of the stories are successful or even terribly original
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| | Brief Reviews An Exchange: In Defence Of Pen
I WAS greatly saddened to read your coverage of the PEN Congress in your December issue.
Although I was pleased that your Montreal reporter, Joel Yanofsky, actually mentioned the Writers in Prison work that for me is PEN Canada's main raison d'etre, it was too bad that he had not a word to spare for the organizational meeting of the global Women Writers' Network.
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| | Brief Reviews Federico Garda Lorca
by Erin Moure
IAN GIBSON'S Federico Garda Lorca: A Life (Pantheon (Random House), 552 pages, $29.25 cloth) is a meticulous work, in the classic tradition of biographical obsessiveness.
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| | Brief Reviews Runaway
by Laurel Boone
WHEN SHE was 14, Evelyn Lau ran away from home. Until she was 16, she roosted sometimes with relatives, more often in group and foster homes, and finally in her own quarters in a rooming house. An obsessive writer, she won literary prizes and gave readings while ingesting a daily pharmacopeia and turning tricks to support her habits and herself Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid (Harper & Collins, 341 pages, $5.95 paper) is an edited version of the journal she kept in those two years
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| | Brief Reviews Towards An Aesthetic Of Opposition
by Barbara Carey
WHY is Michael Ondaatje a star in CanLit circles, while Rienzi Crusz, a fellow Sri Lankan-born poet, is relatively unknown? Why does the work of many immigrant writers remain marginalized, confined to small presses and critical neglect or dismissal? In Towards an Aesthetic of Opposition (Williams-Wallace, 108 pages, $14.
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| | Brief Reviews Unauthorized Action
by Desmond Morton
IN ITS predictable futility as much as in its 3,300 dead, wounded, and prisoners, the Dieppe raid was the worst disaster Canadian arms have so far suffered. Brian Villa wanted to know why it happened. The result is Unauthorized Action: Mountbatten and the Dieppe Raid (Oxford University Press, 315 pages, $24.95 cloth), a detailed, sometimes tendentious, almost always fascinating account of British military policy- making in 1942
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| | Brief Reviews The Lawn Jockey And Other Cartoons
by Bruce Serafin
AISLIN'S The Lawn jockey and Other Cartoons (McClelland & Stewart, unpaginated, $12.95 paper) is his 20th book, and it's a treasure. There is nothing scratchy or thin here -Aislin's drawings are sumptuous. He uses rich, velvety blacks and dense cross-hatchings to create what are among the most expressive cartoons being drawn in North America, and even those fly- away dots beside the faces of his characters add to the work's brio.
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| | Brief Reviews Great Musgrave
by Anne Denoon
DESPITE ITS rather coyly hyperbolic title, which is also the name of a deserted English hamlet, Great Musgrave (Prentice-Hall, 207 pages, $12.95 paper) offers the usual mix of pleasure and disappointment found in most collections of previously published prose. Susan Musgrave's journalistic style is punchy, and her predominant mood is attractively situated somewhere between irreverent and jaundiced
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| | Brief Reviews Sir John A.
by Christopher Moore
LAST YEAR when Cynthia M. Smith and Jack McLeod presented the Oxford Book of Canadian Political Anecdotes, our only complaint was being given a slim volume when a fat one was obviously called for. In exchange, we may get a whole stream of anecdotal sequels, starting with Sir John A.: An Anecdotal Life of John A. Macdonald (Oxford University Press, 192 pages, $24.95 cloth).
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| | Brief Reviews The Voyage Of The Komagata
by Bruce Serafin
RACISM, VIOLENCE, fanaticism, heroism, determination, and above all a kind of cold-blooded insistence on self interest are all a part of the story of the 400 Sikhs on the ship Komagata Maru who in 1914 attempted to disembark in Vancouver harbour and become Canadian citizens. They were eventually turned away after putting up fierce resistance and were forced to go back to India, where in Calcutta troops trying to control the passengers eventually opened fire and killed a number of them.
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| | Brief Reviews The Dark Side Of Life In Victorian Halifax
by Laurel Boone
JUDITH FINGARD paints The Dark Side of Life in Victorian Halifax (Pottersfield, 224 pages, $16.95 paper) in all its ugliness, yet the book's cheerful tone seems to echo the author's delight in finely sifted scholarship. Court, newspaper, and other records show that, between the 1850s and about 1900, an underclass with its own rules and customs existed on the streets of Halifax just below the citadel.
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| | Brief Reviews Wild Gooseberries
by Bruce Serafin
IT'S QUITE an experience to read the more than 400 pages of letters in Wild Gooseberries: The Selected Letters of Irving Layton (Macmillan, 448 pages, $29.95 cloth), edited by Francis Mansbridge.
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| | Great Authors The World God Loves
by Jennifer Bennett
Lois Wilson has little time for the 'comfortable pew.'
She is a tireless advocate of the rights of
oppressed and silenced people
LOIS WILSON's autobiography, which is more likely to be read by members of the United Church than anyone else, will not reassure those already convinced that Canada's largest Protestant denomination has taken a feminist, socialist path away from the gospel
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| | Great Authors Familiarity Breeds Quotation
by I. M. Owen
QUOTATIONS OUT OF PLACE: Some quotations, especially from Shakespeare, are so familiar that they are used by writers who have forgotten -- or perhaps never knew -- their original context and hence their meaning. Mavor Moore draws my attention to a Contract Bridge column in the Globe and Mail that says:
One notrump tells partner you have 16 to 18 points, notrump distribution and cattered strength.
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