 Note from Editor Editor's Note by Olga Stein
by Olga Stein
BiC congratulates Colin McAdam. Some Great Thing is an arresting novel in many ways.
There are the contrasts it sets up: Jerry McGuinty, whose story we hear, is a plasterer, a
labourer with an artist's soul. Refined civil servant Simon Struthers, the other main
character, was born into privilege and wealth, but lacks imagination and drive, and is
immured in the solitary, prosaic dailyness of a life empty of passion for someone or some
thing
Read more... |
|  | The Book of Loss
by Julith Jedamus
McArthur & Co
244 pages $24.95 paper
ISBN: 0297848607
|  | Empress Orchid
by Anchee Min
Thomas Allen
346 pages $19.95 paper
ISBN: 0618562036
|
Book Review Formidable Women at Court
by Nancy Wigston
Born in China, Anchee Min experienced the Cultural Revolution first hand. She has
written about her country in several books, notably the bestseller Becoming Madame
Mao. This edition of her new novel, Empress Orchid, comes with book club questions
and a short interview, in which she clarifies her goals in writing about China's last
Empress. "In China," she says, "children learn that the collapse of every dynasty was the
fault of the concubine . .
Read more...
|  | The Nettle Spinner
by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
Goose Lane Editions
326 pages $25 cloth
ISBN: 0864924224
|
Book Review Northern Ontario Woods Transformed
by Theresa Kishkan
As a girl, my favourite fairy tale was "The Wild Swans". In Hans Christian Andersen's
story of loyalty and resourcefulness, a beautiful maiden, Elise, weaves shirts of stinging
nettles for her brothers, changed to swans by a wicked stepmother. When the shirts are
pulled over the swans' heads, the birds become young men again.
Read more...
| | Book Review Candour in Kandy
by Nick Smith
In a world where new books are increasingly drafted by marketing departments and
commissioned by accountants, it's good to see HarperCollins, if not exactly bucking the
trend, then at least making a genuine editorial contribution in the form of Christopher
Ondaatje's best book to dateùa refreshingly creative illustrated biography of Leonard
Woolf in the pre-Great War years.
Read more...
| | Book Review Crossing Siberia not by Express
by Erling Friis-Baastad
Over the summer of 2002, the Irish traveller and author Dervla Murphy journeyed from
Moscow by train, steamer and decrepit bus across the Volga, through the Urals, over the
steppes and along Lake Baikal, venturing as far east as Tynda and Yakutsk. Murphy is a
famous long-distance cyclist. A bicycle expedition in 1963 became the basis for her
break-in book, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle (John Murray, 1965).
Read more...
| | Book Review Libertines, Liars, and Other Writers
by Matt Sturrock
It was the book's sub-title that spoke to me: Three Centuries of Good Writing and Bad
Behavior. Those feelings of apprehension, envy, and even animus that can threaten when
first cracking the spine of a review copy were instantly banished by spiking levels of
prurient interestùan interest that peaked with my reading of the author's preface.
Read more...
| | Book Review Guiding Back to Poetry
by Todd Swift
Al Alvarez (he no longer uses A.) is one of the twelve most important "poet-critics" that
English-language poetry produced in the 20th century. If one stops to consider who the
others might beùPound, Eliot, Empson, Auden, Jarrell, Stevens, Hamilton, Heaney, and
Hill come quickly to mindùthis might seem like opulent praise; in a way, it is.
Alvarez makes it onto such a list not because of his poetry, which is far better than most
people think but not as good as posterity may demand.
Read more...
| | Book Review Fluttering Without Soaring
by Linda Besner
Almost all of Erling Friis-Bastaad's poems address, in some form, Yukon landscape and
lifestyles. The early poems in Wood Spoken (which contains selections from one
previous book and three chapbooks) give us bears and bartenders, gold prospectors and
dancing girls who stay for a season and vanish, leaving the author behind for the winter's
long endurance.
Read more...
| | Book Review The Comfort of Unique Society
by Michelle Ariss
"I went to heaven, 'twas a small town
Lit with a Ruby, lathed with Down.
Stiller than the fields, as the full Dew,
Beautiful as pictures no man drew.
People like the Moth of Mechlin frames.
Duties of Gossamer, and Eider- names almost û
Contented I could be 'mong such unique society
Read more...
| | Book Review Review of: Remember, Remember: A Victorian Mystery
by M. Wayne Cunningham
UBC professor Sheldon Goldfarb's doctorate in Victorian literature, his life-long interest
in history and his previous publications on William Makepeace Thackeray have served
him extremely well for his debut young adult historical mystery novel, Remember,
Remember. His story is an intriguingly entertaining mix of blackmail, murder, and
youthful romance, shot through with large dollops of tension and suspense, and set in an
age in England when the East India Co
Read more...
| | Book Review Riderly Obsessions
by Barbara Julian
The subtitle of Ted Bishop's road memoir is Reflections on Motorcycles and Books,
which may make some readers wary. These are disparate subjects, and devotees of oneù
books, for instanceùmay be fairly indifferent to the other subject of motorcycles. But on
the whole, Bishop makes this marriage work, and he even conveys the lure of both of
these passions
Read more...
| | Book Review The Cuban Realm
by Gordon Phinn
David McFadden has always been partial to a bit of a jaunt. He just loves to open himself
to the spirit of place and embrace all the sentient beings he discovers there, or at least as
many as he can stuff into his suitcase-sized heart. In this he is as much a bodhisattva of
the commonplace and curmudgeonly as a fancier of the elfin and ineffable.
Read more...
|  | Bastardi Puri
by Walid Bitar
The Porcupine's Quill
96 pages $14.95 paper
ISBN: 0889842671
|
Book Review Small Beacons
by Patrick Warner
Playful, disingenuous, bitter, comic, ironic, and randy for ambiguity, the poems of Walid
Bitar's third collection, Bastardi Puri, present us with a not altogether unfamiliar
postmodern window on the world. He has a gift for opening lines: "The hours promenade
without a pedigree" or "The places we've never been to are only moods".
Read more...
|  | Malraux: A Life
by Olivier Todd/Translated by Joseph West
Knopf Canada
541 pages $50 cloth
ISBN: 0375407022
|  | The Way of the Kings
by AndrT Malraux/translated by Howard Curtis
Raincoast Books
172 pages $19.95 paper
ISBN: 1843914069
|
Book Review Review of: Malraux: A Life; The Way of the Kings
by George Fetherling
People are writing about Malraux: A Life, Olivier Todd's new biography of the French
writer and activist AndrT Malraux, as though it were another example of what Joyce
Carol Oates once called pathography (like the pathographic bestseller of the moment,
Edward Klein's The Truth about Hillary). True, Todd doesn't usually flatter or even
defend his subject.
Read more...
| | Book Review Beastly Understanding
by Barbara Julian
These stories, both subtitled "A Fable", are witty, delightful and tinged with sadness.
Appearing in print simultaneously, both are by well known writers whose combined
careers embrace psychiatry, animal studies, history and broadcasting.
Read more...
| | Book Review Early CanLit and the Lure of New York
by W. J. Keith
The provocative title of Nick Mount's book draws attention to a historical phenomenon
that students of early Canadian literature have recognized but have failed to explore to
any depth: the fact that Canada and Canadians in the late nineteenth century wanted a
distinctive Canadian literature but were not prepared to pay for it.
Read more...
| | Book Review Pamuk and his "Second Self"
by Michael Harris
Both of Orhan Pamuk's recent books have heroes who hail from Istanbul. In both, the
protagonist is a world-weary writer. One of these offerings, Istanbul, is a memoir of the
author's youth. In it, Pamuk describes (with formidable skill) a city rent by an all-
consuming depression and pained by the memory of its lost grandeur, as a lover might be
on losing his beloved.
Read more...
| | Book Review Obeisance to Art and Bizarre Coincidence
by Ron Stang
Paul Auster's Collected Prose: Autobiographical Writings, True Stories, Critical Essays,
Prefaces and Collaborations with Artists, helps fill in the gaps for any fan of this
contemporary American writer's work, from his novels to nonfiction, screenplays and
poetry.
It has been approximately 20 years since Auster's first major novels, City of Glass,
Ghosts, The Locked Room (compiled in the New York Trilogy), first appeared.
Read more...
| | Book Review Perspectives by Arthus-Bertrand
by Christopher Ondaatje
Being a Photographer is a book about the extraordinarily versatile French photographer
Yann Arthus-Bertrand. The text of the book by Sophie Troubac has been translated from
the French by Simon Moore. It is an interesting character study of a determined
photographer who broke several barriers with his masterpiece, Earth from Above,
published in 1999. That book's first printing of 120,000 copies sold out in a mere two
weeks
Read more...
| | Book Review New Principles for Decoding Ancient Myths
by Gwen Nowak
Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul T.
Read more...
| | Book Review A Larger Heart
by Eric Miller
Ross Leckie's third book of poetry, Gravity's Plumb Line, feels permanent. It evokes the
work of writers such as Wallace Stevens, Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop and Eric
Ormsby. Yet the cadence and phrasing of most of the poems are unmistakably Leckie's.
If the book's title should cause readers to imagine that the poems consistently prize
velocity over obliquity or free-fall over artful, careful hovering, they will be surprised.
Read more...
| | Book Review Clear Vision
by Zach Wells
Deceptively simple: the shopworn phrase of the blurbing alchemist who would make gold
a leaden text. When in the opening poem of From Sarajevo, With Sorrow Goran Simic
announces that he "would like to write poems which resemble newspaper reports," the
poetry connoisseur is apt to balk.
Read more...
|  | Guests of Chance
by Colleen Curran
Goose lane Editions
310 pages $29.95 cloth
ISBN: 0864924380
|
Book Review The Charms of the Sink or Swim Approach
by Ann Diamond
Wanted: one very strict fiction editor. With a little 'training and discipline', Montreal
playwright Colleen Curran could really be a novelist, possibly an excellent one. And if
she ever hooked up with Robert McKee, popular guru of dramatic writing, there would be
no stopping her. Armed with a few of his recipes for bringing order out of chaos, she
could be a Canadian Maeve Binchy or Barbara Pym
Read more...
| | Book Review Mnemonic Collage
by Patricia Robertson
In Umberto Eco's playful, nostalgic new novel, a man wakes up "suspended in a milky
gray" and discovers he's in a hospital bed. His mind fills with quotations about fog from
the world's literatureùPoe, Simenon, Hesse, Sandburgùbut he has no idea what has
happened to him or who he is. "A slight case of retrograde amnesia," his doctor tells him.
He still retains the memory of common objects and information, but he has lost the
episodes of his own life.
Read more...
|  | Wild Roses
by Deb Caletti
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
304 pages $21.95 paper
ISBN: 0689867662
|
Book Review Review of: Wild Roses
by M. Wayne Cunningham
Living with a world renowned musical genius on Seabrook Island, Washington, isn't
always fun, especially for 17-year-old Cassie Morgan, whose cellist mother has dumped
the dull but steadying company of her accountant father for the volatility of a life with
violinist and composer Dino Cavalli. Dino's official biography trumpets his boot-strap
rise from the poverty-stricken obscurity of a small town in Italy to the riches and
applause of the world's concert stages.
Read more...
|  | Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon
by Nicole Brossard/Translated from the French by Susanne de LotbiniFre-Harwood
Coach House Books
237 pages $27.95 cloth
ISBN: 155245150X
|
Book Review Femininscription
by David Ingham
I can't imagine anyone reading this review who doesn't know of Nicole Brossard's
work. She is, after all, a celebrated poet, novelist, feminist, and theorist, author of over
thirty books, winner of two Governor General's Awards and the Prix Athanase-David,
among other distinctions. Still, knowing of her work isn't the same as knowing her work;
though much has been translated into English, I fear that too few anglophones have
grappled with her writing.
Read more...
|  | The Wreckage
by Michael Crummey
Doubleday Canada
368 pages $34.95 cloth
ISBN: 038566060X
|
Book Review The Rain of Incident and Circumstance
by Cynthia Sugars
"There is a tide in the affairs of men," says Brutus in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. At the
flood, it yields up riches; if passed over, the voyage of one's life "is bound in shallows
and in miseries." These lines provide an apt summation of a central theme in Michael
Crummey's new novel The Wreckage: the ebb and flow of human destiny. A recurring
scene in the novel describes a tidal wave that plows through a coastal community in
Newfoundland, leaving wreckage in its wake.
Read more...
| | Books on Kids MYSTERIES/THRILLERS FOR TEENS
by Heather Birrell
In this, the fourth in Valerie Sherrard's Shelby Belgarden Mystery series, our eponymous
heroine finds herself embroiled in some back-handed office politicking right in her own
home town of Little River, New Brunswick. Supposedly alone for the summerùwith her
boyfriend Greg away with his father and her bosom buddy Betts on vacationùShelby
follows her nose, and an ambulance, only to find that an acquaintance, the elderly Mr.
Stanley, has broken his hip.
Read more...
|  | East
by Edith Pattou
Harcourt Inc
512 pages $25.95 cloth
ISBN: 0152045635
|
Books on Kids Kids' Lit
by OR Melling
This is a retelling of the classic fairy tale "East of the Sun, West of the Moon", better
known as "Beauty and the Beast." Thankfully Pattou's rendering bears no resemblance to
the Disney version, but is reminiscent of CS Lewis's haunting interpretation in his
novella Till We have Faces (A Myth Retold). When fairy tale is translated into literary
form, it either rises to the art of mythic fiction or descends into pulp fantasy. Pattou is a
fine myth-maker
Read more...
| | Interviews Interview: Tracking the Other Woolf. Interview with Christopher Ondaatje
by Olga Stein
John Fraser, the current Master of Massey College, said that "in Canada, his adopted
home, Christopher Ondaatje is an officially controversial person, much served up in the
media and sometimes dressed down. He elicits both admiration and anger, depending on
what he is up toùhis unpredictability being as fascinating to journalists as his great
success . .
Read more...
| | Essays An Ambassador of Sorts
by David Solway
The garden flew round with the angel,
The angel flew round with the clouds,
And the clouds flew round and the clouds flew round
And the clouds flew round with the clouds.
Read more...
| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews. Non-Fiction
by Jeff Bursey
This collection of letters and addresses reads like a handful of scribbled mash notes from
one artistic schoolboy to another. The notes are filled with affectionate, sweeping
pronouncementsùDali to Lorca (1927): "I think no epoch has ever known the perfection
of ours"ùencomiums or imprecations against those who just don't get what's newù
Lorca to Dali (1927): "All of us are a little like St.
Read more...
|  | Alphabet
by Kathy Page
McArthur & Company
261 pages $29.95 cloth
ISBN: 029760788X
|
Brief Reviews Brief Reviews. Non-Fiction
by R. Gray Mitchem
As Kathy Page in her astute novel, Alphabet, has demonstrated, one emotionally cleft
young man, examined or deconstructed, yields up his pathetic yet hopeful passage
through the penal system as an example of our undying belief that corrupted individuals
can be not only punished but simultaneously redeemed. It is a painful but uplifting saga.
Read more...
| | First Novel Award 2004 Amazon.ca/Books in Canada. First Novel Award: Judges' Comments
by BILL GASTON
As I feared, this was a tough go, not because of the uniformly high quality of the workù
which I expectedùbut because the five books were so utterly different from each other.
All five had wonderful qualities. What is Remembered leapt from a strong, almost
relentless premise, and was a stately piece of writing. Skinny was a painfully accurate
portrait of family, sisterhood, and the dangerous fragility of self-image.
Read more...
| | First Novel Award 2004 Amazon.ca/Books in Canada. First Novel Award: Judges' Comments
by MICHAEL WINTER
A fine shortlist, a wide range of subjects and styles. I congratulate W. P. Kinsella for
choosing an excellent stack of novels.
What's Remembered by Arthur Motyer was a reading experience that reminded me of the
summer when I was twenty-three and read The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary. It's that
sort of roiling, intellectual, very male book that requires a lot of drinking and reflection in
a kitchen full of food.
Read more...
| | First Novel Award 2004 Amazon.ca/Books in Canada. First Novel Award: Judges' Comments
by CAMILLA GIBB
As a judge, you sincerely hope you're going to like/love the books you're asked to
consider. Let's face it, since much of your summer reading has been determined for you,
you at least want to enjoy it. But even if you do enjoy each one in its own way, as I did,
you don't want to end up feeling they are all good, good enough, but none great, none
worthy of being set apart and awarded.
But my job has been easy, thanks to Colin McAdam.
Read more...
|
|
