##

# Endnotes

#

summer flavour

Michael Hayward

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel (Doubleday), is a huge “doorstopper” novel (almost 1,000 pages in hardcover; the paperback edition is three volumes and nearly 1,200 pages), so I decided to read the first chapter before committing to it entirely. And I must admit, it immediately pulled me in. 1Q84 opens in the year 1984 with Aomame, a young Japanese woman, sitting in the back seat of “a hushed Toyota Crown Royal Saloon on the gridlocked elevated Metropolitan Expressway in Tokyo.” Nothing very dramatic happens: traffic is completely stalled. You get some digressive asides: about the music playing on the car radio (Janáček’s Sinfonietta); some background on Aomame (“She rarely read fiction, but history books could keep her occupied for hours”). Specific product names are scattered casually throughout the text in an attempt at authenticity. But things are almost too detailed, too precise, and when the driver looks in the mirror and tells Aomame, “Please remember: things are not what they seem,” it only adds to the feeling of unreality. Chapter 1 ends with Aomame walking away from the cab through gridlocked traffic and descending an emergency stairway into the urban chaos of Tokyo below. I decided then that I would have to wait until I had more reading time; as with Alice and Wonderland, I just know that something interesting is going to happen to her down there. I hope to find out what it is this summer.

You never “complete” a cookbook, but I’ve only tried one recipe from Plenty: Vibrant Vegetable Recipes from London’s Ottolenghi (Chronicle) and summer seems like a perfect time to sample Globe Artichokes with Fava Beans or Chard Cakes with Sorrel Sauce. We already own dozens of vegetarian cookbooks, but this one offers a fresh look at familiar ingredients. The author, Yotam Ottolenghi, operates a small chain of well-regarded restaurants in London, England, that offer “inventive yet honest food.” He’s not exclusively vegetarian himself—but then neither am I; Ottolenghi explains in the introduction that, having been brought up in Israel, he was “exposed to the multitude of vegetables, pulses, and grains that are celebrated in the region’s different cuisines.” I like the way that Plenty is organized into sections that each highlight one vegetable or family of vegetables: “Funny Onions” has a half-dozen recipes featuring onions, leeks and garlic; “Brassicas” gathers recipes for cabbage, broccoli, kohlrabi and cauliflower; “The Mighty Eggplant” offers, well, eggplant recipes. And the cover photograph (of Eggplant with Buttermilk Sauce) made me salivate; but what’s with the padded (i.e. quilted) cover?

acoustic silence

Mandelbrot

George F. Walker, the talented wood engraver and “book artist,” has composed The Mysterious Death of Tom Thomson in 109 woodblock engravings presented in a handsome volume by Porcupine’s Quill. While reading Walker’s wordless narrative, one becomes eerily aware of silence: wordlessness itself becomes a mode of silence, and an agent of voiceless voicing, unheard dialogue and mute interrogation. In fact, it’s not easy to use words to describe what happens once you are engaged in this sequence of woodblock images: events proceed: a man, Tom Thomson, emerges as an increasingly solitary figure, slowly withdrawing from urbanity and emerging in the wilderness, where, as different versions have it (and Walker’s is one of them), he meets his fate. The effect of the wordless imagery is strangely acoustic: a silence filled with echoes. The book does not want to be be put down; instead the reader, the observer, re-re-engages again and again, returning to read into the images a story that eludes understanding just as understanding seems to elude stories without words. This is a book for the shade on a bright summer day.

grief-in-progress

Kelsea O’Connor

The appeal of Nox (New Directions), Anne Carson’s collection of poems eulogizing the unexpected death of her brother Michael, is not only its skillful verse but also its unusual format: it is printed on a single long piece of paper, which is folded like an accordion into a sturdy box. The book opens with Catullus’s ancient poem of brotherly loss in Latin (“Catullus 101”); Carson proceeds to give a dictionary-length definition of each word in the poem on the left-hand pages, while the right sides are reserved for her poems, black-and-white photographs, collages, graphite smudges and/or fragments of handwritten letters, each appearing to be pasted onto the page. The poems themselves are understated remembrances of Michael’s “windswept spirit” and his absence in her adult life. The power of the collection comes from the juxtaposition of the debris of Carson’s sorrow and the Latin vocabulary that makes up Catullus’s two-thousand-year-old elegy: Carson suggests that grief, like the work of translation, is forever a work-in-progress.

stranger on a bus

Caroline McGechaen

A few years ago I saw a man on the bus reading American Psycho. In my mind, this was the equivalent of watching pornography on a laptop in public. Having read the book myself, I knew what he was reading, and now I was somehow intimate with him. Julie Wilson’s book Seen Reading (Freehand Books) riffs on exactly this feeling: the indefinable connection between reader and watcher and the muddling of private and public spaces. She watches for people reading on Toronto transit and, based only on the book a person is reading and his/her physical description, she crafts a short fictional response. These micro-fictions explode the boundaries between reader, writer, audience and author, allowing the stories to unfurl at oddly unexpected angles: the woman reading Misery by Stephen King who has a tub full of stripped bones at home; the man reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins who once witnessed his mother and the minister floating naked together side by side in a lake. Wilson’s writing takes large leaps at a swift pace—thousands of readers and their own stories whip by on trains, buses and streetcars, and she interprets these readers with the few clues she has. In some uncomfortably intimate way, I knew the man reading American Psycho, but as Wilson writes in her prologue, “there is no one way to know a reader.” Even if you know the words that are being read, you do not know how they are being read, and Wilson’s stories are no more or less real or truthful than reality or truth itself. In a clever way, Seen Reading is the frame that gives this idea meaning. And I don’t know the man on the bus at all.

on arrival

Patty Osborne

In his excellent book Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World (Knopf), Doug Saunders takes us around the world to neighbourhoods on the edges of cities like Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro, into the middle of cities like Toronto and Los Angeles, or anywhere in or around cities where immigrants touch down in their quest for a better life. Saunders argues that we are in the midst of humanity’s last great migration—from rural areas to cities—and that this does not have to be a bad thing. He labels as “arrival cities” any large area where immigrants (either from rural areas in their own country or from other countries) gather, and he measures the success of an arrival city by the number of its inhabitants who are able to move into the middle class. Success seems to depend on a delicate balance between government intervention and free enterprise: too much government intervention, such as tearing down shantytowns and putting up public rental housing that makes no allowance for tiny business ventures, will deny inhabitants the chance for home or business ownership that is vital to capitalizing on assets; too little government intervention, such as insufficient policing, can lead to a community where might makes right. At each stop in Saunders’s world tour, we meet locals who tell us stories of their achievements and setbacks and their ingenious solutions to difficult problems. I recommend this easy-to-read and engrossing book to everyone (even dedicated fiction readers like myself) because it will open your mind: those people living in shantytowns will almost always be poor, but they don’t have to always be the same people.

cracking the genre

Lily Gontard

The Klondike, a graphic novel by Zach Worton (Drawn and Quarterly), came into my possession in an unusual way: a friend and I were in our local bookstore looking at the northern books display, which included The Klondike, and discussing the reviews we’d each read of TK, when we decided to share the purchase of the book 50-50. He’d get the first shift and take it on his two-week canoe trip, and I’d get the book when he was done. He likes graphic novels; I’d never cracked the cover of one. Two weeks became six, then eight, during which the book travelled in a canoe on the waters of a river deep in the Yukon, then back to Whitehorse; it hung out at my friend’s house for a while, then relocated to the office of another friend, where it lay forgotten before finally reaching me. “What did you think?” I asked. He never finished it. “That bad?” No, he just put it down and didn’t get back to it. This did not bode well for TK. Of my vast collection of books perhaps half are books I’ve started, lost interest in, put down and never picked up again. I settled in to begin reading. Within the first ten pages I found myself wondering if all graphic novel dialogue was so corny. I wrote an email to another friend who is a graphic novel aficionado, asking if it’s the genre: was I missing the point? To which he replied “No,” and “Don’t abandon the genre!” When a man who makes his living writing for a high-profile men’s magazine tells you not to abandon a reading project, emphasized with an exclamation mark, you continue reading. I laboured on. I speed-read the rest of TK, almost skimming over the crowded black-and-white images. The characters are drawn so similarly, and there are so many of them, that it became difficult to differentiate them and to keep track of whose story ended where and when another character’s story began. What struck me most about the characters was how angry they were. Each was short-tempered and pissed off or about to be pissed off. The emotional arc of the story starts at a high pitch and never really lets up: there is very little tenderness or relief from violence, hate and/or anger. Worton set himself a gargantuan task in trying to tell the story of the Klondike Gold Rush in such a compressed form: the characters must constantly explain their actions and motivations in small bubbles of text. All this said, at about the halfway mark in the novel, the dialogue began to shift away from the expository and into the story of a meaty and complex character, Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith, gang leader and terror of Skagway and the Chilkoot Trail. Reading The Klondike hasn’t turned me off graphic novels, but it has me wondering what else is out there.

triangles and atoms

Lauren Ogston

The Hayflick Limit, a collection of poetry by Matthew Tierney (Coach House), found its way into the Geist office after it was discovered that a piece of student writing published at geist.com more than resembled Tierney’s poem “The Rocket Scientist.” The book is a substantial, meaty collection, printed on thick, stiff paper that lets one know at first touch that this won’t be lost behind the toilet. The title, The Hayflick Limit, refers to the fixed number of times a cell can divide before it dies—preparing the reader for the science-steeped poetry within. Tierney combines art and science (once considered natural enemies) so effortlessly that you forget you’re reading poetry and simply wonder at how a story about right triangles and hydrogen atoms can break your heart.

false readers

Stephen Osborne

“Readers of books are ever more false” is the title of one of four novellas by the Italian writer Gianni Celati, translated by Stuart Hood and collected in Appearances (Serpent’s Tail), a slim volume that disappeared from my desk the day I brought it home from the library. I waited for it to reappear until the renewal periods had run out and then went back to the library and confessed that I had lost it. The librarian granted a waiting period of another couple of months in case the book should reappear, which it failed to do; eventually the cost of a replacement copy appeared on my account, and I paid the bill. A few days later Appearances reappeared on the shelf above my desk, where it must have been all those months. To claim ownership of this “orphaned” copy, which still bears the imprint of the public library, seems an impropriety at the least; but to return it will only cause the over-extended library system more shelving and acquisition headaches. So I have resolved to do nothing until I have read all four novellas, later in the summer, outdoors in the shade. The first story opens with these words: “I shall tell the story of how Baretto, coming home one evening, was bereft of thoughts, and of the consequences of his living as a mute for a long time.” The second story is about a landscape painter who, in the words of the second sentence, “knew very well how the light falls from the sky, how it touches and envelops things.” The last story, “The Disappearance of a Praiseworthy Man,” I intend to read in direct sunlight, well out of the shade.

mnemonic devices

Michael Hayward

I first got hooked on Theresa Kishkan’s writing via Red Laredo Boots, her 1996 collection of personal essays and recollections about camping and travelling through BC. I’d lived my own version of some of those experiences as well, but Kishkan had somehow seen more clearly; she had remembered better. Mnemonic: a book of trees (Goose Lane), Kishkan’s newest collection of essays, contains some of her best writing yet. Each essay takes a specific period or incident in Kishkan’s life as its point of departure: in “Young Woman with Eros on her Shoulder,” she begins by recalling time spent in Greece at age twenty-one, and her love affair with a young Greek man with “eyes like almonds”; in “Makeup Secrets of the Byzantine Madonnas,” the core memory is of a time when she was muse and model to an older man in Victoria, BC, a painter who “wore little glasses when he painted, and […] peered at my body through them in a clinical manner, not missing a thing.” But the essays in Mnemonic transcend their autobiographical origins as Kishkan uses the personal as a lens through which to explore a broad range of interests, among them natural history, First Nations culture, literature and music. Memories of camping among the sage and the ponderosa pines on the shores of Nicola Lake (in “A Serious Waltz”) lead naturally to a consideration of the mountain pine beetle epidemic, and to her attempt to fashion a basket from pine needles, inspired by baskets seen “at the Big Sky gas station at Skeetchestn.” There’s a wonderful sense of place throughout, and Kishkan’s observant curiosity makes you think of Forster’s exhortation in Howards End: “Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted.” Mnemonic exalts.

dichotomous

Kacey-Neille Riviere

Fawzia Koofi’s memoir, Letters to My Daughters (Douglas & McIntyre), reads like a novel. A village girl from Afghanistan, Koofi survives civil war and the Mujahideen, global war and the Taliban, and the political aftermath of the war on terror. Her journey is compelling because of all its dichotomies: she was born the nineteenth child of a local politician and her father taught her the value of serving her country, but also largely ignored her as a child; her mother loved and protected her throughout her early life, but also wanted her dead the day she was born. She goes from having her education and freedom torn away from her, to questioning her identity as a woman in her beloved country, to becoming a major political figure in Afghanistan in the post-Taliban regime, a historic achievement in a country famously hostile to women. Even more incredible is the knowledge that at the time the book was written, Fawzia herself was only thirty-five years old, and yet her words ring with the passion and purpose of a life lived far beyond her age. By the end, I got the sense that this was not just the story of her life, but a story of love and hope for her daughters and her country.

anterior shore

Stephen Osborne

Empire of Signs (Noonday Press), two dozen brief essays by Roland Barthes (translated by Richard Howard) about the fictive nation, the “system of signs,” that he calls Japan, makes a perfect companion for a summer stroll through the city. Each of these meditations provokes the reader to offer a response, an observation of particulars, of the nearby, of that which presents itself to the receptive eye. Chopsticks, for instance, which “in order to divide, must separate, part, peck, instead of cutting and piercing, in the manner of our implements.” Packages, pachinko, sukiyaki, the eyelid, bowing, writing, wrestling: the Barthesian eye is relentless, and his sentences push on toward surprising destinations; the haiku, which Barthes conceives of as an “awakening to the fact,” represents “an apprehension of the thing as event and not as substance, attaining to that anterior shore of language.” I found my copy of Empire last summer in Portland, Oregon, in Powell’s Books, the best bookstore in the world, and itself a sign and proof of the reading life that seems too often to be disappearing from the postmodern world.