Tuesday, January 10, 2017

"Canadian' shakin'"

Sept. 13, 2016 "Canadian shakin'": I cut out this article by John Semley in the Globe and Mail on May. 30, 2015:

Recently, desirous of some Big Ideas, I began reading The Idea of Europe, George Steiner’s essay on, well, the idea of Europe. In it, Steiner – once called “the polymath’s polymath,” and what a distinction – takes a stab at establishing a cohesive, binding notion of Europe and Europeanism in the early 21st century, in the face of looming superpowers effectively laying waste to a millennia of European imperialism, hegemony and philosophical-intellectual roost-ruling.

“It is vital,” he writes, “that Europe reaffirm certain convictions and audacities of soul which the Americanization of the planet – with all its benefits and generosities – has obscured.”

Steiner locates all kinds of axioms of contemporary, and historical, Europeanism: the primacy of the coffee house intellectual life, a shared debt to the intellectual and cultural traditions of Ancient Greece and Judaism, the walkability of the cities, and so on. But in the passage quoted above, the whole holistic Idea of Europe is defined negatively, in antagonism to the “Americanization of the planet.” Whatever Europe is at the dawning of the new millennium, it’s for sure not American.

It’s a line we’ve grown accustomed to in Canada. Granted, we share something of Europe’s tension between economic and political unity and social particularity (the whole “cultural mosaic thing”). But, most of all, we share this anxiety re: Americanization. Maybe this is why Canadians are often told to wear those dumb maple leaf patches on their knapsacks when they travel abroad, in Europe and elsewhere. To be not-American is a show of solidarity, pretty much everywhere in the world except America.

But what if our anxiety about the sleeping giant to the south isn’t just a broad cultural neurosis? In War Plan Red, Kevin Lippert indexes the multiple instances in which Canada’s concern about American colonization was more acute, more literal. The book looks at multiple instances in which the United States has idly schemed, and actually endeavoured, to move its military north, right into our own personal home and native land. Lippert also looks at cases of Canadians eyeballing an invasion of America, as when Brigadier-General James (Buster) Brown surveyed a number of border states to see if they were ripe for annexation, hoping to push back against the United States’s “baleful influence on Canada.”

The threat of America invading Canada has served a number of flights of fictional fancy, be it in books (the North American super-union of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which sees most of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico amalgamated into a European Union-style confederacy) or films (Michael Moore’s Canadian Bacon and the South Park movie come to mind). There’s a certain ludicrousness inherent in the idea – and not just because, strictly as a military scuffle, the whole thing would seemed wildly lopsided, like when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia. It just seems silly. Why invade poor ol’ Canada?

As War Plan Red points out, the more common question from America’s perspective has been, “Well, why not?” With a comically light touch (verging on flippancy), Lippert runs through plenty of examples of American-Canadian hostilities: notorious warmongering Kentucky politician Henry Clay calling for an invasion of British North America, the Pork and Beans War of 1838-39 (where militias were rallied to square off over the territorial borders of New Brunswick), and an 1859 incident where a skirmish almost erupted after an American shot a pig belonging to a Hudson’s Bay Company merchant (no shots were fired, save for the one that felled the swine).

About a third of the text is given over to a reproduction of the titular War Plan Red, a detailed plan for a full-scale U.S. invasion of Canada dating back to 1935, along with Defence Scheme No. 1, Lieutenant-Colonel Buster Brown’s crudely sketched blueprint for a counterattack against the U.S. With classic Canadian passive-aggressiveness, Defence Scheme No. 1 was actually an offensive plot, framed as a counteroffensive. (Hilariously, Brown assumed that Japan and Mexico would swiftly rush to aid a Canadian assault on the United States.)

Beyond being funny, if a little harrowing, in that stranger-than-fiction way, War Plan Red comes around to arguing that a merging of Canada and America (halfway-parasitic, halfway-symbiotic) has already occurred. As Lippert notes, the formation of the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) following the Second World War constituted a “de facto absorption of Canada into the American military-industrial complex.” The commingling of Canadian and American commerce and culture constituted other prongs in this silent invasion, yoking the two nations together even as they have “slipped quietly into peace.”

It’s the sort of thing that may kick-start another Canadian identity crisis. But then again, the Idea of Canada has rarely been resolved, with the question of what, exactly, it means to be Canadian seeming tantalizingly, frustratingly, unresolved. War Plan Red significantly undermines that common, anxious notion that to be Canadian is simply to be not-American. When WikiLeaks revealed a 2005 document detailing a “North American Initiative” to further entwine the Canadian and American economies (warning of restrictive Canadian regulatory measures), it seemed as if a different kind of War Plan Red was still on the table.

Why, after all, should that “Americanization of the planet” George Steiner warns about not extend to its neighbour to the north? Why is it so ludicrous to assume that some day, whether by full-scale military invasion or economic/culture commingling, we Canadians find ourselves paved into that great, sprawling Denny’s parking lot known as the United States of America?


Review: Kevin Lippert’s War Plan Red lo...

 "I'm not a fan of grownups telling youngsters that they 'should' read this or that Great book": I cut out this article by Neal Stephenson in the Globe and Mail on May. 30, 2015:

An award-winning writer best known for his works of speculative fiction, Neal Stephenson’s most recent books are Reamde, Anathem and the Baroque Cycle – Quicksilver, The Confusion and The System of the World. Stephenson, who lives in Seattle, just published Seveneves, which follows the descendants of the survivors of an apocalyptic event on Earth as they return to their ancestral home 5,000 years later.

Why did you write your new book?

My new book is an idea that was banging around inside of my head for seven or eight years. Every so often I would feed it a little love. Finally it grew big and strong enough to kick its way out.

What question do you wish people would ask about your work (that they don’t ask)?

My favourite questions are the ones where the questioner has become so involved in the fictional world of the book that they have actually joined in on the creative process. They usually start with words like “Did it occur to you that…” or “Wouldn’t it be interesting if …” Frequently, I don’t know the answers to such questions, which is part of what makes them interesting.

Which historical period do you wish you’d lived through, and why?

“Lived through” is a pretty important part of that question, since it implies I would survive the dangers of tetanus, plague, fire, predatory beasts and random violence that would be part and parcel of any journey into the past. My answer may not strike you as terribly original, but I would like to have seen Rome at its peak. Not necessarily Rome itself. I’d settle for an outlying city that was part of the empire. It was, in many ways, an odious culture, but extremely good at getting things done and I’d like to have a better understanding of how that worked.

What scares you as a writer, and why?

I am worried that trends in the publishing industry may lead to a situation in which writing is no longer even remotely viable as a livelihood, except for a few lucky people. You could say that this has already been true for a while, but it seems to be getting more so.

What’s a book every 10-year-old should read, and why?

Whatever’s near to hand, fun to read, and as much of a guilty pleasure as possible. I’m not a fan of grownups telling youngsters that they “should” read this or that Great Book. Better to get in the habit of reading – you can find great books later just by following your nose.


Writer Neal Stephenson spent years deve...


Small Press Books: Here's a couple of reviews by Jade Colbert in the Globe and Mail on May. 30, 2015:

A Free Man
By Michel Basilières, ECW, 216 pages, $18.95

Michel Basilières’s long-awaited sophomore novel – 12 years after Black Bird was published to wide acclaim – sadly does not live up to expectations. It combines two of the author’s literary interests, sci-fi and Beat writing, which sounds fun. Here’s the problem: Stories of drug-fuelled spiritual awakening and robot-propelled time travel can both be exhilarating, but they can also be boring, each in their own way. A Free Man opens with Basilières finding at his door Skid Roe, an old friend with a crazy story about chasing a girl way out of his league and then meeting a robot from the future. Basilières is chewing an interesting problem: Skid faces constraints at every turn, so does he really have free will? The novel unfortunately gets mired in tedium: an uncompelling story of unrequited horniness with tacked-on futurism bogged down by the physics of time travel. Great premise, flawed execution.

The Bastard of Fort Stikine: The Hudson’s Bay Company and the Murder of John McLoughlin Jr.
By Debra Komar, Goose Lane, 288 pages, $19.95

This is a book about a murder, but more importantly it’s an indictment of corporate misrule and a history of the fur trade (and therefore this country) like you probably haven’t read. Forensic anthropologist Debra Komar’s third book in a series on historic crimes in Canada opens the file on the murder of John McLoughlin Jr, who was shot dead by one of his own men one night in April, 1842. McLoughlin was the chief trader at Fort Stikine, a remote outpost of the Hudson’s Bay Company, where the “honourable company” sent the known criminals in its employ. By the evening of McLoughlin’s murder, it had devolved into a cesspool of paranoia, violence and conspiracy. HBC, fearful of public opinion, held a private investigation to cover up any scandal – the murderer was never tried. Thoroughly researched and in dramatic, evocative prose, Komar gives McLoughlin and HBC the trial they so justly deserved.

Review: Jade Colbert looks at new books...



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"Magna Carta"/ "Ain't nothin' like the real thing"

Oct. 10, 2016 "Author examines the storied history of magna carta": I cut out this article by Michael Hingston in the Edmonton Journal on Nov. 27, 2015:

Unsure about visiting the Magna Carta exhibit, currently on display on the legislature grounds on the final stop in its four-date Canadian tour? Perhaps this conversation, overheard between two kids on a field trip during my visit earlier this week, will help convince you.

“Is this it?” one asked, rushing to the display case in the centre of the temperature-, light-, and humidity-controlled Borealis Gallery, and then looking a little crestfallen once he got there. “It’s a piece of paper.”

His classmate, frowning, swiftly corrected him: “It’s an 800-year-old piece of paper.”

Technically, the version of Magna Carta on display here in Edmonton is only 715 years old. It’s one of the seven surviving copies reissued by Edward I in 1300, 85 years after his grandfather, King John, sealed the original, and it has spent nearly all of those years inside Durham Cathedral. But you don’t keep a piece of parchment around that long unless it means something — and wrinkled old documents don’t come much more interesting than the Great Charter. Especially when you can see it with your own eyes.

“A lot of people find it fascinating to be in the presence of such historic documents,” agrees Carolyn Harris, author of the official tie-in volume to the exhibit, Magna Carta and Its Gifts to Canada (Dundurn). “It’s not often you have the opportunity to see Magna Carta on Canadian soil.”

In 2012, Harris, a historian and author who teaches at the University of Toronto, delivered a series of public lectures about British royalty, during which she was approached by a woman who was also co-chairperson of the group that was in the process of bringing Magna Carta to Canada. The woman asked if Harris would write an article for the group’s website.

From there, Harris says, “One article became a series of articles, which became an opportunity to write a book. So it’s been a pretty incredible process.”
The Magna Carta exhibit — which also features a copy of the similarly elderly and similarly influential Charter of the Forest
— includes a good primer on the charters, the circumstances under which they were drafted, and their unlikely influence on the modern world. For the full experience, however, I recommend delaying your trip by a couple of days, and first spending some time with Harris’s thorough and thoroughly enjoyable book.

It begins with the context in which the charter was first sealed by King John (you know, the thumb sucker from Robin Hood?), and the very limited application it was intended to have.

“English society, in 1215, operated according to a very strict social hierarchy,” Harris says. “The ideas of democracy were viewed with some degree of suspicion — democracy was seen as almost synonymous with mob rule.”

In other words, the barons who pressured King John to sign the charter weren’t imagining a utopian document that would guarantee universal human rights; they were gunning for a protection of their rights, as well as those of similarly privileged groups such as the clergy. It wasn’t until centuries later, after a long period of relative obscurity, that legal scholars such as Sir Edward Coke saw the potential of the Great Charter and began to argue its relevance for the general population: “Magna Carta,” Coke famously said to the British Parliament, “is such a fellow, that he will have no sovereign.”

Coke’s championing had a massive snowball effect, which Harris’s book also documents, influencing the American Declaration of Independence, France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, among others.

None of which was on anyone’s mind back in the 13th century.

“The barons, who envisioned the document as applying to a comparatively small social elite, would be surprised by the degree to which it’s become a touchstone for universal rights in various parts of the world,” Harris says.

Here in Canada, Magna Carta’s influence has been more symbolic than literal. Foundational documents such as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms are certainly inspired by it, and it has been cited in all kinds of court cases, but it’s no longer considered a legally binding document — as was made clear, Harris points out, by a ruling by the British Columbia Court of Appeal in 2003. Neither does the Canadian constitution contain language plucked straight from Magna Carta, or at least Coke’s interpretation of it, as happened in the United States (with clauses about arbitrary taxation and property law seeming particularly useful).

Precise legal applications are beside the point, anyway. Regardless of its original intent, Magna Carta has become international shorthand for human rights, and it remains one of a handful of pieces of legislation that pretty much everyone recognizes — even if they don’t know what’s written on the page (and not just because they aren’t fluent in Medieval Latin).

“What’s interesting is that many people have heard the name ‘Magna Carta,’ but they don’t necessarily know what was in the document,” Harris says. “They know it was historic, but not exactly how the origins of the common-law system came out of Magna Carta, or the fact that this was the first instance of a king of England accepting limits on his power imposed by his subjects.

“It’s become a cultural touchstone, as well as a political and legal touchstone.”

Carolyn Harris will be signing copies of Magna Carta and Its Gifts to Canada at Audreys Books (10702 Jasper Ave.) on Friday, Nov. 27 at from noon to 1:30 p.m.


Oct. 29, 2016 "Ain't nothin' like the real thing": Today I found this article by David Sax in the Globe and Mail.  It's about publishing and how there is so many things going digital like the newspaper:

David Sax, author of The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter, on the endangered pleasures of tangible culture
The first story I ever published as a journalist ended up on the front page of The Globe and Mail. It was a short article about Tel Aviv’s vibrant nightlife in the midst of war, and how young Israelis were steadfastly dancing in discos, despite the threat of suicide bombings. By some sheer stroke of beautiful luck the paper not only accepted my story, but printed it on my birthday.

I can still remember my mother screaming over the phone. After all, this was the paper she read each morning, and she had run out at dawn, to buy up every copy in the neighbourhood. Two days later, a courier arrived at my friend’s apartment in Tel Aviv, Isreal with an envelope. I tore it open, and pulled out the neatly folded front page my mother had cut out, which smelled like my family’s kitchen table. There was my story, and name, sealed in ink before my very eyes, in a newspaper I’d been brought up to revere. Not a bad start to a career.

I have written countless stories since then, as well as three books, and nothing has ever graced any publication’s front page since that first one. But each time I see my name in print, I experience a small version of that initial thrill, which seems to justify everything it takes to make it happen: the fruitless pitches to editors, interviews that go nowhere, countless drafts and a constant cloud of self-doubt that hangs over me right until the moment when I see my idea in its finished state.

These days, that moment is something I largely experience virtually. As the journalism business has tilted increasingly toward digital over the past decades, the opportunities to actually hold my work in my hands are quickly diminishing.

Online publishing has its advantages. When a story goes “live” on the Internet, I can watch its reception in real time. Within minutes, I’ll receive messages of praise and scorn from total strangers, compelled to reach out because something I wrote struck a nerve. Each message and comment delivers another hit of adrenalin, buoying my fragile ego for one second, before smacking it around the next.

But one thing has become clear: The more my work moves online, the more I crave the fleeting sense of accomplishment that only print can deliver. Why? For one thing, online journal- ism pays terribly. Digital offers the promise of great riches and limitless exposure, but most of the time it compensates in pennies, if anything at all. All the advertising dollars that were supposed to flee print publications for their online equivalents have instead been dispersed more widely. The classifieds money went to Kijiji and Craigslist, dating ads went to dating apps, and the rest was swallowed by Google and Facebook, which collectively take in threequarters of all online advertising dollars. Pay rates for print publications may not be what they once were, but they remain vastly higher than what I get paid online, even though the work is identical. Digital offers sizzle, but sizzle doesn’t feed a family. I need steak to survive.

Print, meanwhile, remains a stubbornly steady beast. Though bloodied and bruised, most of the newspapers and magazines that were supposed to die off are still selling ads and publishing regularly, including this one. People will still pay money for something they can hold in their hands, and even if that group of readers is smaller than it once was, the dollars they spend (at the newsstand, with subscriptions, and through ads) are undeniably real, and consistently make up the bulk of most publications’ revenues. Magazines and newspapers that ditched a certain paper present for a dreamy digital future have come to realize how costly this can be.

But there’s something deeper and more emotionally significant to those moments when I see my name in print. The sense of accomplishment feels more real … a physical translation of my ideas and toil, sprayed and pressed onto dead trees, and carried by truck, plane and human being into the hands of someone who cares enough to pay for it. A final product, put out into the world at a set time and price. An object of consequence with quantifiable heft.

Our world is awash in simulations, virtual experiences and products that don’t actually exist. Our music, our culture, our news and even our memories largely live as invisible lines of code on distant servers, accessed through the same flat glass surfaces. When digital goods and ideas are ubiquitous in pretty much every aspect of our personal and professional lives, the archaic slices of analog reality we once dismissed are becoming increasingly valuable again.

You see it in the revival of vinyl records and cassette tapes, books and bookstores, and even instantfilm cameras, all of which have been growing in recent years, despite the widespread assumption that they would simply be extinct. The more endangered real things have become, the more we seem to want them around.

This is not a logical, practical choice, but it is a deeply human, romantic one. There’s no shame in that. I know that the days of seeing my work in print will be even more rare. But that doesn’t lessen the pleasure I get when I hold a book I have written in my hands for the first time, see my name embossed on the cover, and think, for one fleeting moment, that once again, it was worth it. David Sax’s latest book, The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter, will be published, in print, on Nov. 8 by Public Affairs. His mother has reserved several dozen copies.




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Monday, January 2, 2017

"A laughing matter"/ "The line between comfort and cruelty"

Sept. 10, 2016 "A laughing matter": I cut out this article by Philip Marchand in the National Post on Jul. 14, 2012:

Alan Clay, the hero of Dave Eggers’ novel A Hologram for the King, is a type not unusual in real life but rather rare in literature — the compulsive joke teller. “He’d been tested, even,” Eggers writes. “A group of friends, a few years ago, had made him tell jokes for two hours straight. They thought he’d run through all that he knew by then, but he’d only begun. Why he remembered so many he’d never know. But whenever one was wrapping up, another appeared before him.”

That Clay loves jokes is understandable. Humour is solace, and Clay, a 54-year-old freelance business consultant at the beginning of the novel, could use some. Eggers, savvy in the way of narrative, starts off with his hero in a pickle — he’s out of work, he’s deep in debt, he can’t pay his daughter’s college tuition. A firm called Reliant has hired him, however, to pitch their system of Internet technology for the King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC), now being constructed in the deserts of Saudi Arabia. Clay has a passing acquaintance with the king’s nephew, and the Reliant executives believe that may give them an edge. It’s one of many delusions in the novel.

The firm’s real ace is a holographic teleconferencing system — a salesman in London can physically remain in London while appearing to stand and talk to an audience at the KAEC. It’s an astounding technological feat, like conjuring spirits. Clay hopes it will clinch the deal, and that his share of the IT contract will solve all his problems.

Meanwhile he has jokes to fall back on. They are more than an individual’s idiosyncrasy. They have an affinity with the author’s style. Nothing kills a joke like an elaborate set-up, and Eggers’ style in this novel has the brevity of a welltold joke — he doesn’t exactly stint on details but he never lets them weigh down the narrative, and this quality, combined with the equivalent of quick cuts in a movie, lend the narrative its headlong impetus.

The absurd logic of jokes and the scenario of a bad dream combine in the novel, whose action is the long nightmarish delay in the promised appearance of the king. The novel begins with an epigraph from Samuel Beckett, and it could certainly be retitled Waiting for Abdullah, but Kafka also casts his spell in this novel, with people and places that seem to come out of nowhere, and a king who also seems to be everywhere and nowhere. In this dark comedy, a lump on Alan Clay’s neck becomes almost a fetish — Clay hopes it will explain, with its malign presence, all his deficiencies, and that its removal will constitute an exorcism.

But Clay’s story is more than an individual drama. His fate is closely intertwined with recent American economic history, another dark comedy. His part of that history begins with his selling bicycles, a product he loves, made by American workers — until the company abandons its factory in Chicago. “We’d tossed out a hundred years of expertise,” Clay reflects. “You want your unit cost down, you manufacture in Asia, but pretty soon the suppliers don’t need you, do they? Teach a man to fish. Now the Chinese know how to fish, and ninety-nine percent of all bicycles are being made there, in one province.” In the end, Clay has no job and only the voodoo techniques of the door-to-door salesman he first learned as a Fuller Brush man.

The three technical wizards at the Reliant display at KAEC — Alan refers to them consistently as “the young people” — have never sold actual things. Selling actual things is so pre-Facebook. Instead they commune all day with their laptops with the concentration of chimpanzees investigating food sources, and regard Alan as useless. They are comic figures in what is basically a comic novel, a novel in which the most crucial aspect of a person is how he or she dresses. The long white tunic in traditional Saudi dress, the sleek business suit, the white shirt and khakis of a technical consultant, all identify the wearer. Attacked by a mob of Asian workers, Alan can’t believe they don’t get the message of his white shirt and khakis — it signifies he’s a Westerner and invulnerable to the likes of them.

Eggers’ challenge is to keep our sympathies engaged with his comic hero while not probing too extensively into his feelings. Too much information about Alan’s daughter and his ex-wife, for example, would throw the novel off its axis. An exuberant romantic finale would have the same effect.

What Eggers does do is maintain a certain level of yearning in his hero that the reader can identify with, while at the same time not steering his narrative into the domain of tragedy or brutal realism. The key is contrast. On one hand, Alan finds himself in a desperately ugly environment, a flat, relentless desert unfit for human habitation. The existing buildings at the KAEC are not beautiful — there is an empty pastel-pink condominium, a welcome centre “vaguely Mediterranean in style, surrounded by fountains, most of which were dry,” and a 10 storey glass office building, “squat and square and black.” His motel smells of chlorine. No wonder he is dying to get out into the night air and the stars.

Contrast also arises between Alan’s present occupation of selling holograms and his memories of camping out in a rugged mountain with his father, and, as an adult, of building a stone wall in his garden. What fun that was — lifting the rocks, spreading the mortar, constructing an object that wouldn’t collapse under pressure. Manly stuff, pre-information technology. Too bad the officials of the local zoning department made him tear it down.

When a Saudi friend takes him to visit his home in the mountains of Saudi Arabia, Alan can hardly believe his good fortune. His host and some of the villagers give him a rifle and let him in on their hunt for a wolf that has killed some sheep. No more telling contrast can be imagined between this wolf hunt and his present occupation of sitting around waiting for the king to see a hologram.

In this situation as well, however, the spirits of comedy rule. They will not allow the hero to savour a primitive triumph, an affirmation of his natural manliness. That would be too easy. Instead, Alan almost causes a disaster. In this novel, he is doomed forever to be at least partly thwarted, doomed never completely to satisfy his yearnings.

Meanwhile the suspense about the king’s visit is maintained to the very end. The actual denouement, after the resolution of the suspense, is not very satisfactory. It doesn’t matter. We have had a bitter taste of life in the global village, but not a despairing one, and our acquaintance with Eggers’ hero has been most agreeable.



"The line between comfort and cruelty": I cut out this article by Donna Bailey Nurse in the National Post on Jul. 14, 2012.  This is a sad book review:


Daughters Who Walk This Path tells the story of Morayo, a Nigerian girl, whose life is cruelly altered when she is sexually molested by a relative. The novel spans three decades — from Morayo’s blissful, Yoruba childhood in the 1970s, through her traumatic adolescence, into her troubled twenties and thirties. The assaults occur early in the novel, and the remainder of the book explores how rabid patriarchy, sexual superstition and cultural tradition work together to exacerbate the pain of abuse. At the same time, Kilanko demonstrates how family custom and African traditions serve to strengthen, uplift and guide.

Superstition plays a major role in the story, which opens when Morayo’s baby sister is born albino. In-laws blame Morayo’s mother for the little girl’s condition, preposterously accusing her of spending too much time in the sun. Naturally, Morayo resents this new baby who has brought dissension into their home. But her mother soothes her fears; she explains that people are often superstitious about things they don’t understand. Over the years, Morayo and her little sister develop a deep attachment, emblematic of the sisterly bond between African women.

Author Yejide Kilanko lives in Chatham, Ont., but was born in Ibadan, Nigeria. She belongs to a wave of Nigerian women writers committed to examining the intersection between gender equity and female sexuality. Her writing also reflects the influence of Chinua Achebe, particularly in the way certain passages unfurl as virtual pageants of the African rituals and traditions surrounding engagements, weddings, births and deaths. Like Achebe, Kilanko embraces many customs and beliefs as life affirming, while deeming others dangerous and cruel.

This web of cultural ambivalence snares Bisoye, Morayo’s mother. She is the one who first warns Morayo about the dangers of ignorant attitudes. But it is also her blind adherence to family custom and sexual superstition that sets the stage for her daughter’s rape. Custom insists that Bisoye welcome her troubled nephew into her home, even though he has been caught breaking into a female student’s bedroom. Foolhardily, she leaves him alone with Morayo overnight, which is when he rapes her — the first of many times.

Morayo is afraid to tell her mother about the abuse, mostly because in the past she has responded hysterically to the most innocent queries about sex. After Morayo divulges the truth, she wonders if she should have remained silent. Her parents treat her like damaged goods. What’s worse, they act like her knowledge of sex threatens to contaminate her little sister. By the time Morayo reaches university, she feels worthless and behaves accordingly.

An older cousin, Morenike, offers Morayo friendship and, most significantly, an example of survival. A single mother, Morenike, is a scholar and political activist. At 15, she was raped by a family friend, an assault that resulted in the birth of a son.

With Morenike’s rape, Kilanko hints at the pervasiveness of sexual abuse. She lays out a more helpful response. Morenike’s famously fiery mother publically humiliates her daughter’s attacker, a powerful member of the community. She sends Morenike to the country to live with her wise maternal grandmother, who affirms the child’s value daily. In the village, the women meet weekly to weave baskets. It is an opportunity for young women to ask their elders for advice about fertility difficulties, a stubborn husband or a challenging situation.

It is not often a novel contains such an array of finely etched female characters; every one of them as individual as a woman you might encounter on the street. The interpersonal dynamics between mothers and daughters especially are masterfully achieved through dialogue, cadence and inflection of voice.
And yet, Kilanko relies too heavily on this gift, which remains limited in its ability to convey visual and political context. Kilanko does not manage to strike a tone that encompasses the theme of the novel: Good and evil lie side by side. The reader is repeatedly caught off guard; when an unruffled Morayo sees a dead body hanging in a field, for instance, or when political thugs assault Morenike in the market. These incidents do not merely surprise; disconcertingly, they seem to come at us from outside the world of the novel. It is possible that Kilanko fails to reconcile the presence of good and evil on the page because she has failed to reconcile the presence of good and evil within her culture. Or maybe there’s too much love in her life.

On the other hand, the novel’s design is sophisticated and beautiful — an elaborate interlace of story, African proverbs, traditional fables and contemporary works by African women. Daughters Who Walk This Path has its imperfections, but like the Nigerian society it depicts, it is elevated by a richness of story and tradition.





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"Spring picks"/ "A swimmer's dreams go adrift"

Sept. 10, 2016 Spring picks: This was in the National Post on Mar. 12, 2011:

The book I’m most looking forward to this spring is Jessica Westhead’s story collection And Also Sharks, a great title for her style of play, which can explore the brutal obstacles the world throws up in the way of nice, reasonable people. Like a patient photographer, she catches polite, anxious urbanites in hot, mumbled flashes of passion before they have a chance to notice, blush and recede into the weeds. In her vision of city life, clos- ing a door can be a breathtakingly heroic act, because, after all, that man out there might not be a shark at all, he might be a very nice person, despite all the evidence, and if you’re wrong and you’ve done something so bold and rude as to close the door on him, you might embarrass yourself, and that could really suck for you.

❚ Sean Dixon is the author of the forthcoming novel The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn. Weekend Post

The spring release I’m most hungry for is also a book the gives me the howling fantods: David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel The Pale King. Hungry for, because it’s new work by DFW, who changed the way many of us thought fiction could and should be written. Anxious because I haven’t really stopped mourning Wallace since his 2008 death by suicide and the book will be a big, fat reminder of what we’ve lost. Hungry for, because the novel, a mock memoir, promises to excavate intense boredom (set among accountants in an IRS centre in Peoria, Ill.) without being boring. Anxious (queasy?) because, is this what DFW wanted, this panting of acolytes over the publication of an unfinished book? But hungry for, yes, hungry.

❚ Zsuzsi Gartner’s new short-story collection is called Better Living Through Plastic Explosives. Weekend Post

Sept. 12, 2016 Young adult books: Here are a few reviews by Lauren Bride in the Globe and Mail on Feb. 21, 2015:   

No Parking at the End Times
By Bryan Bliss, Greenwillow, 272 pages, $21.99

Everyone knows that families can sometimes be tough to deal with, and Abigail’s family is no different. Her parents have made many mistakes, one of them being when Abigail’s father, in an act inspired by his faith, moves their entire family across the country to San Francisco in order to be near Brother John, a quasi cult leader who’s been preaching that the apocalypse is imminent, and remains stubbornly unswayed when the world doesn’t end. One person who doesn’t believe in Brother John’s teachings is Abigail’s twin brother, who begins sneaking out at night to hang with a group of homeless kids, leaving Abigail torn between two sides of her family. No Parking at the End Times is an excellent, well-written story of faith and families, fanaticism and the lives of street youth. The novel is heavy reading, but captures the moment in all young people’s lives – well, at least some – when they realize their parents’ judgment might not be perfect.

Gabi, A Girl in Pieces
By Isabel Quintero, Cinco Puntos Press, 208 pages, $24.50

Isabel Quintero’s debut novel came out in October, but it deserves attention. Gabi Hernandez keeps a journal, in which she details the minutiae of her life during her final year of high school. She writes about poetry, pregnancies, the food she wants to eat and deeply-revealing stories about her family, which includes her meth-addicted father and her mother, who constantly bugs her about her weight and gives terrible advice. She has enough to worry about as it is, including getting into college, her algebra grades and fitting in both at school and at home. Gabi is funny and smart, with a self-deprecating wit that makes her seem realer than most literary characters. Gabi, A Girl in Pieces is a timely, important and totally charming novel, and is an especially good choice for readers looking for a bright, independent, female narrator.

Playlist for the Dead
By Michelle Falkoff, HarperTeen, 288 pages, $21.99

The titular Playlist for the Dead happens to be an actual playlist; one song per chapter. If readers follow along as they read, song by song, a warning: It may very well prove to be a totally debilitating experience. It is, however, well worth the pains. Adding songs to a narrative – a reliable tactic employed in film, and sometimes in books, too – deepens the experience. In the case of Michelle Falkoff’s debut novel, the protagonist, Sam, listens to songs in order to try and understand his best friend Hayden’s unexpected death. The novel tackles the absurdity of grief, and the extra difficulty that comes when processing it while still young. Falkoff is a real dab hand when it comes to breaking apart emotion and the novel might just break your heart. This one is recommended for everyone with a pulse.

"A swimmer's dreams go adrift": I cut out this article by Monique Polak in the Edmonton Journal on Apr. 11, 2014:

“He was the strongest, the fastest, the best.”

These words are repeated like a mantra in Christos Tsiolkas’s new novel Barracuda. Barracuda is the nickname the other boys at a posh Australian private school give Danny Kelly. Danny’s working-class parents could never afford to send him to the school. He’s there on scholarship because of his swimming — and his single-minded desire to come in first.

Tsiolkas lives in Melbourne, Australia. This is his fifth novel; his fourth, The Slap, won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was longlisted for the 2010 Booker. Barracuda is a novel about what can happen to us when our dreams fail to come true and when it feels as if there is nothing left to hope for. Though this novel has its flaws — it lacks subtlety, occasionally teetering on the brink of melodrama — Barracuda still makes for an enthralling read.

For most of this novel, Danny is difficult to like. When he’s winning, he’s cocky and self-absorbed, unappreciative of the sacrifices his family makes to accommodate his swimming. When he loses, he’s even worse, descending into a rage that will earn him another nickname at school: Psycho Kelly.

The narration shifts from first to third person, and from the present — Danny is 30 and has served prison time for a violent crime — to the past, when he was a teenage competitive swimmer. These shifts allow Tsiolkas to explore the complex theme of identity and how our pasts remain an intrinsic part of who we are.

From the moment he turns up at private school, Danny is aware he does not belong: “The other guys all knew each other; they had been destined to be friends from the time they were embryos in their mothers’ wombs.” When he is invited to the other boys’ homes, he feels ashamed of his family’s humble circumstances.

Danny is also confused about his sexuality, unable to make sense of his attraction to a classmate — and to the classmate’s elegant older sister. It’s only in the water that Danny finds some peace: “then it came, the sense that he was no longer conscious of the individual parts of his body ... the stillness came, and he was the water.”

But when Danny stops winning, his fragile sense of self implodes and he gives up swimming altogether. And then, to distinguish himself at school and to prevent the other boys from ridiculing or pitying him, Danny becomes the worst kind of bully, terrorizing the younger boys.

It isn’t until late in the book that the crime that landed Danny in prison is revealed. But it is in prison that Danny begins to come to terms with who he is and who he can still become. It’s also in the prison library that Danny discovers another escape that will be almost as good as swimming: reading.

My opinion: I'm going to put this in my inspirational quotes.

Tsiolkas spins a good story, but Barracuda could be more subtle. The references to identity feel heavy-handed, and several scenes, including one where Danny catches the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics on TV, would be more effective if they were toned down.

After a series of dead-end jobs, Danny finds work as an aide to men who have had severe brain damage. Just as these men need to learn to speak and move again, Danny, too, must find a way to start over. He begins to understand there is life after defeat, “that everything could be relearned … it could be taught and it could be learned, how to navigate the world again.”

My opinion: I'm going to put this in my inspirational quotes.


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