 Note from Editor Note from the Editor
by Olga Stein
I'm pleased to present this year-end issue of Books in Canada. As the cover indicates, this issue is stacked with superlative reviews of a number of this year's hottest works of fiction. Among these is Cindy MacKenzie's excellent treatment of Richard B. Wright's Clara Callan, a story that follows the divergent lives of two sisters, and this year's winner, remarkably, of both the Giller prize and Governor's General Award.
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| Book Review Revelations through Documents and Letters
by Nathan Whitlock
Early on in Henderson's Spear, Ronald Wright's second novel, the character of a professor condemns what he sees as contemporary literature's woeful lack of ambition and unhealthy infatuation with the quotidian. "No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea," he intones, "That's what I tell my creative writing class churning out watered-down Updike." Clearly, Wright has conscripted this character to communicate his own feelings.
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| Book Review Comfort Fiction
by P. Scott Lawrence
By now we know pretty much what to expect from a John Irving novel; since The World According To Garp (his first wildly popular success, and his fourth book), he's held resolutely to a few defining concerns. This is not a criticism. Most writers, once they've found their voices and subject matter, tend to work and then rework a limited set of themes and pet peeves.
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| Book Review The Creator of the Universe a Fallible Deity
by Joan Givner
One of the characters in David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion speculates that the world might be the first crude effort of an infant Deity, or of an inferior Deity whose work is ridiculed by his superiors, or of a superannuated Deity in his dotage. A similar conceit informs Nancy Huston's latest novel, for it is narrated by a somewhat fallible creator of the universe who is mischievous and contradictory.
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| Book Review Built in Canada. A History of Canadian Architecture
by Sarah Bassnett
Harold Kalman's A Concise History of Canadian Architecture is a revised and abridged edition of his two-volume History of Canadian Architecture (1994) by the same publisher. In its modified form, the book is an excellent reference work aimed at a wide audience of both academic and general readers.
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 | Clara Callan
by Richard B. Wright
HarperFlamingo Canada 2001
415 pages $32 cloth
ISBN: 0002005018
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Book Review Clara Callan, A Story of Two Sisters
by Cindy MacKenzie
Richard B. Wright wins the Giller Prize & the Governor's General Award
With eight highly acclaimed novels behind him including the Giller and Governor General-nominated The Age of Longing, Richard B.Wright has written yet another novel that has clearly marked him as a formidable presence in Canadian literature.
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| Book Review For Whom the Poets Spoke. Orators and Playwrights of Antiquity and their Audience
by Nicholas Maes
Most surveys of ancient literature are based on the principle of utility, not pleasure. Designed as reference books that students will consult for an explanation of the epic cycle, say, or the historical sources of Ammianus Marcellinus, these surveys discourage even the professional scholar from absorbing their contents from start to finish. Literature in the Greek and Roman Worlds (henceforth LGRW), a series of essays edited by Oliver Taplin, diverges from this utilitarian model.
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 | Tell it Slant
by Beth Follett
Coach House Books
149 pages $17.95 paper
ISBN: 1552450813
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Book Review Ghostly Muses Dispensing Advice
by Malca Litovitz
The story of Beth Follett's lyrical, passionate novel is largely that of Nora Flood, named after a character in Djuna Barnes' famous lesbian love story of 1937, Nightwood. In his introduction to Barnes' novel, T.S. Eliot wrote that poets would appreciate the novel most, and he meant that as the highest praise. The same can be said for Tell it Slant. The novel consists of five sections written in the present tense.
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| Book Review Island of Obdulia Limb
by Maureen Garvie
Early in Down There by the Train Levon Hawke interrupts as an old friend digresses from a rambling tale: "Sweeney, what's this got to do with the story?" Sweeney defends himself indignantly. Stories follow on from other stories, he says. Cut them off short, and you threaten their vital force. "You can't just knot them and break off any old where or they die out."
Kate Stern's second novel is a testament to the organic vitality of stories.
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 | Thinks
by David Lodge
Random House
340 pages $39.95 cloth
ISBN: 0670899844
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Book Review Skewering the Pretentious Academic
by Nancy Wigston
In the satirical novel of ideas, David Lodge is king of the hill. When it comes to skewering the pretentious, nobody does it better than Lodge, Honorary Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Birmingham. Lodge had great fun with academics and literary theorists in Small World and Nice Work. Therapy brilliantly exposed the mid-life woes of a successful media type and introduced us to the pilgrim trail in northern Spain long before Shirley MacLaine got there.
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 | Fury
by Salman Rushdie
Alfred A. Knopf Canada $34 cloth
ISBN: 0676974406
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Book Review Waste of Fury
by Derek Webster
With Fury, Salman Rushdie has established a new depth to sink to from the brilliant heights of Midnight's Children and Shame.
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| Book Review A Door to No Past
by Gloria Hilderbrandt
Alex Haley's 1977 Roots is remarkable for its story of the power and longevity of oral historyùhow three words in an African language, handed down through seven generations, provided the evidence that could trace a genealogy back to a particular village in Africa, before slave hunters tore a young man away to exile in a new world.
A Map to the Door of No Return is Dionne Brand's exploration of her family's African origins.
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| Book Review A Slave Nerrative
by George Elliott Clarke
In her autobiography, That Lonesome Road (1977), the Tribune of Black Nova Scotia, Dr. Carrie Best (1903-2001), provides this nation-haunting paragraph:
Hidden in fear and shame, ignored by historians, excluded from the curriculum of the public school system, the story of slavery is nevertheless an historical fact. It is contained in the unpublished volumes of The History That Never Was: written by unknown authors unable to read that which they had written with their own blood.
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 | Stubborn Bones
by Karen Smythe
Polestar Books
177 pages $18.95 paper
ISBN: 1551923645
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Book Review Stubborn Bones Without Linguistic Muscle
by Nikki Abraham
Let's start with the good things about this collection of stories. Each main character is nimbly drawn, solid and true. Though most of the characters and all of the narrators are female, each one has her own distinct identity. They do not appear to be aspects of the author's own psyche, but rather distillations of observed and imagined othersùwhich makes them interesting.
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 | Northern Wild
by Edited by David Boyd
Douglas & McIntyre Publishing
278 pages $22.95 paper
ISBN: 1550548247
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Book Review Writing of Wilderness
by Anne Cimon
Nature writing as a genre has not caught on in Canada as it has in the US. Such revered authors as Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, and today's Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez, are steady sellers. In fact, since the 1990s, there has been an explosion of American nature writing anthologies, but none in Canada, and this is the void that David R. Boyd, the editor of Northern Wild, intends to fill.
Boyd is an environmental lawyer and a professor at the University of Victoria, B.C.
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 | Spadework
by Timothy Findley
HarperFlamingo
408 pages $35 cloth
ISBN: 0002255081
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Book Review All of Stratford is a Stage in Spadework
by Robert Allen Papinchak
Timothy Findley does something remarkable in his latest novel, Spadework. He weds the classic nature of a Shakespearean domestic comedy with subjects and themes from W.H. Auden's poem, "Detective Story." The result is a bristling examination of the consequences of overweening ambition on both professional and personal happiness. The novel is also an entertaining love letter to the Stratford, Ontario, Shakespeare Festival and to the town itself.
Findley has always been an audacious writer.
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| Book Review Disproving Economic Determinism
by Brad Walton
Money makes the world go round. Or does it? Both Marxists and neo-classicists have their own versions of economic determinism. Niall Ferguson rejects economic determinism in general. In The Cash Nexus Ferguson re-examines the link between economics and politics and argues that political institutions have shaped modern economics, not vice versa.
Ferguson's analysis is based on theoretical foundations laid by the historian and economist Douglass C. North.
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| Book Review Transnational Family Compact
by Douglas Brown
What Shelley said of poetsùthat they are the unacknowledged legislators of the worldùcould be said more truthfully of journalists. Journalists, especially those who stick with their stories for years, can have a defining impact on how people and legislators understand, not just single issues, but the world as a whole.
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| Book Review The display of Addiction
by Gordon Phinn
The modern cult of confessional memoir has fascinated both the reading public and literary critics for some years now. It is not enough to be dopey or dissipated or depraved, one must scream one's secrets to the sky, either on camera or in print, and be redeemed by the public's pointed approval.
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| Book Review Herr Greve and Mr. Grove
by Eric Miller
Toward the end of Oscar Wilde's 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Grayùtranslated by Felix Paul Greve in 1903 as Das Bildnis Dorian Graysùthe protagonist once again confronts his painted portrait. This accusatory picture reconfigures the details of its appearance in accordance with the conduct of its subject, Dorian Gray himself. The man remains pristinely youthful even while the artifact diagnoses his moral degeneration.
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| Book Review Arctic Lessons
by Sherrill Grace
For centuries Europeans and Euro-North Americans have travelled to the Canadian North in search of wealth, exploration fame, physical and scientific challenge, sheer adventure, or escape and freedom. These travellers, usually men, have worked in the North for the Hudson Bay Company, or rival organizations, and, in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for the institutions of church, state, and industry.
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| Book Review How Much Do You Count?
by Frank Smith
A flourishing new genre in the trade book market might be called "academics rushing into public print with abstruse speculations and an occasional joke." Many of these books, if not about cosmology or molecular biology, focus on the human brain. The question often asked is something like "Why are we as smart as we seem to be (or think we are)?" and the answer is usually a put-down: "Because of an evolutionary accident.
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| Book Review Lessening Canada's Youth. Liberal Arts Studies in Jeopardy
by Harold Hoefle
Graduate
Capitulate
Suffocate
ùgraffito sprayed on concrete walk outside McGill's Leacock Building, May 2001
In his third book on education and culture, David Solway again attacks our technophiliac society and government policies bent on "accomplishing our docility and servitude.
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| Book Review Michael Taube
In the December 1929 issue of the left-wing periodical The Canadian Forum, Professor Frank H. Underhill heavily criticized the United States' approach to "private ownership propaganda" as compared to Canada's interest in "public ownership enterprises.
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| Book Review Trusting St. Paul
by Daniel A. Smith
For a long time now it has been generally agreed that the earliest source we have for the origins of Christianity is the body of epistolary literature left by Paul. This is so despite the implicit claim of the canonical gospels to the contrary: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are later compositions, most (if not all) coming into existence after the critical moment of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE.
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| Book Review The Religion of Rasputin
by Hugh Graham
"Without Rasputin", said Alexander Kerensky, "there would have been no Lenin." And ipso facto no twentieth century as we know it. History, of course is inscrutable. Even the driest account of this Siberian peasant's ascent to power over the Russian throne, his grisly murder and its prompting of the revolution of 1917 amounts to a medieval horror tale which culminated within living memory.
But then Rasputin is explained more easily by the late Russian middle ages than by the twentieth century.
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| Book Review Wasting Lives Behind Bars in America
by Stephen C. Richards
As an ex-convict, now a university professor, who served years in a number of the most infamous U.S. federal prisons, I am well familiar with the horrors of penal punishment. Unfortunately, the United States now has the dubious distinction of having the highest rate of incarceration in the Western World, and the most severe conditions of custody.
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| Interviews Inside a Good House. An Interview with Bonnie Burnard
by Linda Morra
Bonnie Burnard is a writer, creative writing teacher, and reviewer whose work has been widely anthologized and dramatized. Her collection of short stories, Casino and Other Stories published in 1994, won the Saskatchewan Best Book Award and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. Women of Influence, her first collection published in 1988, won the Commonwealth Best Book Award. She is also a recipient of the Marian Engel Award and, for two years, was on the Giller jury panel.
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| Prose/Poetry A Stroll Down a Short Street
by Carmine Starnino
I f one's love for a tradition can be measured by the fervency of one's participation in it, then I love Canadian poetry. The difficultyùif not outright challengeùin declaring my affection is that as a Canadian poet I belong to a confederacy that regards its official existence with a pride I can't, in good conscience, endorse.
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| Prose/Poetry Talking Poetry in Letters. Robyn Sarah and John Unrau on Free Verse vs. Chopped Prose
by Robyn Sarah
25 June 2001
Dear Robyn,
I've just read your review in the Globe* andùfeeling some sympathy for Hilles despite the awfulness of those linesùwonder if you could give me a clearer idea than I can work out for myself about the difference between "chopped prose" and most unrhymed poetry in English.
How about this from Ondaatje?
For 14 years of marriage
each of them claimed he or she
was the injured party.
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| Up Front A Note from our friends at Amazon.com
by Marven Krug,Steve Duda,Tom Nissley
OK, we'll admit it, at Amazon.com, we're book lovers (actually, we're beyond being book lovers, we're book geeks) and we have always looked on the holidays as a chance to share with other people the books that we have loved over the past year or the books we knew they would love (while of course accumulating a sizable nightstand stack for ourselves at the same time).
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| First Novels Homel's point de vue
by David Homel
From Kigali to Montreal: Gil Courtemanche Breaks Out
The Quebec novel in French has long been an inward-turning thing, a place of intimate landscapes, with little concern for the big picture of historical realities. Rare are the works of fiction that open up the closed rooms of the traditional themes of family oppression and madness. Yet all the while, Quebec readers, while happy to inhabit these spaces, must have been secretly longing for larger horizons.
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| First Novels First Novels
by W.P Kinsella
Kevin Chong, another of that talented young group of UBC writing graduates, gives us Baroque-a-nova (Penguin Books, 232pages, $24.00, ISBN: 0141000252). Saul St. Pierre is your typical confused 18-year-old, but manages well considering he lives with his ex-stepmother, and is the son of a famous folksinging duo from the 70s. The novel covers eight days in Saul's life, from the time he learns that his long vanished mother has committed suicide in Thailand, to the day of her funeral. The St.
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Shannon Cowan
Fiction
Although the inside cover of Jared Mitchell's latest novel, Becky Chan (Dundurn Press, 291 pages, $21.99 paper, ISBN: 088924300X), would have you believe that the novel is "strictly a work of the imagination," Mitchell exercises his formidable talents crafting a seamless backdrop to lead you to believe otherwise. He does this almost too well
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Tom Nissley
Fiction
There was a time when novels were mainly about marriage or money, or, preferably, both. Now they seem mostly to be about food. In our age, more concerned with consumption than with property, the chefùwhose ephemeral creations are long gone by the time they show up on the credit card billùhas acquired the sort of heroic appeal once reserved for marriageable landowners and ocean-mapping sailors.
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by John Sinopoli
Fiction
Warren Dunford's Making a Killing (Penguin, 334 pages, $24.00 ISBN: 014100480) is the kind of book that the CanLit establishment tends to frown uponùa commercial piece with lots of plot and action, little artistic expression and just enough craft to keep it all together.
The novel's protagonist Mitchell Draper, a screenwriter, has just been fired from 'Fun Five Fish', a "pseudo-educational kid's TV show".
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| Children's Books Children's Books
by Jeffrey Canton
November is always an important time in the children's book world here in Canada. We celebrated the 25th annual Children's Book Week organized by The Canadian Children's Book Centre with 28 authors and illustrators and three storytellers participating in a tour that reached across Canada, spreading the word about the great books for children and young adults that this country is producing.
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 | Stained Glass
by Michael Bedard
Tundra Books
312 pages $22.9 cloth
ISBN: 0887765521
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Children's Books Children's Books
by Jeffrey Canton
It's been eleven years since Michael Bedard graced the literary scene with a young adult novel. Eleven years though certainly not silent ones for one of our finest writers for children. Bedard has offered us in the last decade extraordinary picture book biographies of writers Emily Dickinson and Willa Cather, glimpses into the imaginative inner lives of the BrontT children and a child's eye view of those amazing Toronto sculptors, Loring and Wyle, best known as "The Girls".
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 | The Game
by Teresa Toten
Red Deer Press
196 pages $9.95 trade paperback
ISBN: 0889952329
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Children's Books Children's Books
by Julie Glazier
When Danielle Webster, better known as Dani, is admitted to Riverwood Psychiatric Clinic for an overdose of drugs and alcohol, she can only remember pieces of her past. She recalls retreating with her younger sister Kelly into the world of "the game" which they played to escape the abusive perfectionism of their father. The game is an elaborate ritual that the sisters play in the ravine near their house
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 | Box Girl
by Sarah Withrow
Groundwood Books
181 pages $7.95 trade paperback
ISBN: 0888994362
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Children's Books Children's Books
by Lena Coakley
Sarah Withrow's first novel, Bat Summer, was the winner of Groundwood Books' 20th Anniversary First Novel for Children Contest and garnered her a nomination for the 1998 Governor General's Award. With her second novel, Box Girl, Withrow establishes herself as one of Canada's finest writers of realistic fiction for middle readers.
On the first day of grade eight, Gwen Bainbridge meets Clara, a girl who seems blissfully oblivious to her own lack of cool.
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| Children's Books Children's Books
by Mariella Bertelli
Although books of fairy tales abound, it's always a pleasure to read a new version of a well-known story, probably because recognition augments the reading experience. Different versions of folk or fairy tales offer young readers fresh ways to explore old material which is rich in the folklore of many cultures.
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| Children's Books Children's Books
by Mary Anne Cree
What would we do without our friends? Life would be a bleak and lonely prospect indeed. Priscilla and Rosy are rats who are best friends. They live behind a restaurant, working all week pilfering food and "scaring lots of people". On their day off, Rosy invites Priscilla to come over and put together her new puzzle and Priscilla agrees. But when another friend, Rudolph, asks her to come sailing on his uncle's boat, she promptly forgets all about the puzzle.
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| Children's Books Children's Books
by Jeffrey Canton
Eva Wiseman's My Yellow Canary Star joins some of the outstanding Holocaust literature for young adults created by Canadians that includes books like Kathy Kacer's Clara's War and the chronicles of the Holocaust created by Carol Matas from Lisa to Daniel's War and beyond. What makes Wiseman's book so memorable is its subject matter. The focus of much Holocaust literature has been on Jews of Poland and of Germany.
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 | Seven for a Secret
by Mary C. Sheppard
Groundwood Books
189 pages $12.95 paper
ISBN: 0888994389
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Children's Books Children's Books
by Lena Coakley
Mary C. Sheppard's first novel, Seven for a Secret, is a rich and evocative immersion into the daily life of an isolated Newfoundland town. We spend the summer of 1960 with three cousins, bookish Kate, Rebecca the creative beauty, and our loquacious narrator, the sexy, spunky Melinda. But the novel's main character is really Cook's Cove itself, an inaccessible community with no electricity and no road connecting it to the outside world.
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 | Mary Ann Alice
by Brian Doyle
Groundwood Books
168 pages $12.95 paper
ISBN: 0888994540
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Children's Books Children's Books
by Jeffrey Canton
We've waited a long time for Brian Doyle's Mary Ann Alice.His last novel, the award-winning Uncle Ronald was published in 1996 and rumours of the imminent publication of this book have had to be dispelled more than once, but here it is at last. And it's sublime, whichever way you look at it. This is Brian Doyle at his very best, walking that thin line between comedy and tragedy, and creating a book that rings as sweetly as does the church bell at St.
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