Review: Barney's Version

This article originally apears in THIS Literary Magazine

BARNEY'S VERSION
directed by Richard J. Lewis
Screenplay by Michael Konyves, based on the Mordecai Richler novel
December 2010, 134 minutes

It's too bad Barney's Version, the motion picture adaptation of Mordecai Richler's 1997 Giller Prize-winning novel, didn't hit the big screen nine months ago with the Montreal Canadiens waist deep in a run for the Stanley Cup. Richler, a Montreal native and cultural satirist, used the legendary hockey team as a symbol in all his novels. In Richler-lit, the Habs hover around as the epitomic hometown heroes, a cultural constant to believe in and stick by.

The film's Barney Panofsky (played by Paul Giamatti) is then, what you would say, Richler's Rocket Richard. Epic, nostalgic, filled with valour, Barney's is the story of an underdog with brute strength against all odds, fighting for dignity to win back those he loves.

A memoir told to set the record straight about the suspicious death of his lifelong friend Boogie (Scott Speedman), the story opens with twenty-something Barney living the artist life in Rome in the seventies. Here we meet the Barney that loves life, fine Canadian rye, a Romeo y Julieta cigar, Israeli hash. But things quickly sour when his first wife Clara (Rachelle Lefevre), a brazenly modern poet, commits suicide.

After this, Barney craves his hometown Montreal. He returns there to a job at a relative's TV studio, Totally Unnecessary Productions (zing!), through which Barney is introduced to the Second Mrs. Panofsky (Minnie Driver), a business-daddy's-girl looking to settle down. Barney jumps at the prospect of family and financial stability, thinking a quick marriage will mend his tumultuous life.

That's when Barney's issues really multiply. In literal love at first sight during his own wedding reception (night of the 1986 Stanley Cup final in which Montreal defeats Calgary for their twenty-third championship), Barney finds Miriam (Rosamund Pike). He ends up marrying her after he catches Boogie in the sack with his current wife, perfect grounds for divorce.

But getting to Miriam means losing Boogie, who eerily ends up dead amidst a raging booze-fest, and the only thing keeping Barney from a murder conviction is the absence of Boogie's body. It's an odd subplot that haunts Barney's life with Miriam, hinting that murder may be within his capabilities. He ultimately maintains his innocence, but the whole debacle brings light to how we should view Barney: he is a limit pusher, an excess junkie. So, in philosophical terms, what does this represent?

This question is key to Barney's Version. Barney, himself, offers us his last word when everyone around him no longer cares. Surrounded by feminism, modernism, generation X-ers, and other things that threaten him, Barney's habits are politically incorrect. He's slipperier than a bottom feeding carp; it's no wonder he ends up alone. If it weren't for his downfalls, his loved ones would drift from his pessimistic, grain-pushing ways. But for some reason, like Miriam, we still love him.

We, the viewer, do want to know Barney's version, because Barney gives all the underdogs, forgotten and obsolete, a model for redemption. This is sly Richler style. He, too, was an underdog, a Jewish Montrealer trying to make it in a literary business neglectful of his opinions. In his novel, Richler successfully brought the Jewish immigrant story out of the closet with all its shameful skeletons. He denounced Quebec separatism when an English shop sign in the Francophone province meant jail-time. He liked being the pickle up popularity's ass. Richler-lit is underdog-lit in its purest form.

And that's where the Habs come in. No matter how many contenders threaten their integrity, they always pull through. Like a rock, they prevail through ups and downs, grow tougher with every bruise. That's Richler, patriarch of custom, believer in what's right through what works, in a world too polite to appreciate him. Hollywood would love a movie about the Los Angeles Kings, but it just wouldn't have the same squeeze.

Book Review: The Matter With Morris by David Bergen

This review originally appears in This Literary Webzine

THE MATTER WITH MORRIS
by David Bergen
Harper Collins
(September 2010, CAN $29.99, 254 pages)

A link is drawn between Morris Schutt, fifty-one year old writer and main character of David Bergen’s Giller Prize-nominated novel The Matter With Morris, and Haggai, whom Bergen’s third person narrator tells us is “a less than minor prophet [. . .] who in the Bible gets two chapters.” The image of Haggai – a silenced prophet – is a lot like Morris. Once a syndicated columnist read by people worldwide, he loses his writing contract when his thoughts turn sour. Wouldn’t yours after your son dies at war?

Indeed, the matter with Morris and the Schutt family is the death of their son and brother Martin while serving in the Canadian army in Afghanistan. The fallen infantryman haunts this text; his absence tears apart a modern family along with their aging home. Solemnly, Morris and his wife, Lucille, part by way of a death they never expected. And Morris holds squalid relations with his daughters: Meredith, a working class mother with a grudge toward her selfish father, and Libby, a distant teen too smart to be trapped by adulthood’s hypocrisy. In a touchingly realist depiction of the new millennium as war era, the Schutts are today’s army family strewn by tragedy.

Living alone in a condo, Morris is patted down by moral anguish. Museless and desperate, he focuses on his life’s worst moment: a father-son huff, daring Martin to join the army. To boot, Martin was killed accidentally by one of his own men. For Morris, it’s just as well as pulling the trigger himself.

Mentally and spiritually unhealthy, Morris copes through self-destruction. Most pertinent of all, he is hooked on a woman’s touch and hires prostitutes to relieve his inner tension. There is also Ursula, an American reader of Morris’s column who, too, lost her son to war (in Iraq). Ursula and Morris become intimate pen pals, and eventually meet. Contemplating his choices in a hotel room as Ursula sleeps, Morris yearns for the solace he is searching for. Eventually, he does declare a breaking point. Things will change, he will get his family back, even if it takes some extreme measures.

Bergen admits in Morris’s afterword to borrowing ample inspiration from Cicero, Plato, Socrates and Bellows when creating Morris’s deep philosophical rhetoric. For some readers, his pondering of freedom, humanism and rabid individualism may seem pretentious, constantly lathered on without letting the last big question settle. However, I empathise with the abstractness needed to make sense of this character’s gall-filled world.

This empathy solidifies in many scenes that war parents and families can relish in. “[Morris] had heard of the Highway of Heroes near Toronto,” Bergen writes in sardonic prose, “he wondered how it was that he had come to live in a place where a fallen soldier was driven ignominiously past warehouses and big box stores.” Revenge is also offered through Morris’s habitual letter writing, one to the Prime Minister and another to the company who manufactured the gun that killed Martin. Morris notes the absurdity of sending a letter that will never be read, nodding at Bergen’s apostrophe technique and the simple closure the act offers.

Aside from lashing outward, Morris’s hurt drives hard toward nihilistic tendencies too. His son’s death causes him so much despair, loneliness, inadequacy, guilt, and scepticism, it’s no wonder he contemplates suicide more than once. His existential traits, borrowed from Kafka and Kierkegaard, lead him to declare solitude and to have feelings of despair and worthlessness. Don’t worry Morris, we hear your story, along with the 152 lonely Canadian fathers that live it every day. It’s the bleak story of modern global politics and its disastrous impact on the family. And, it’s something Bergen obviously wants us to consider.

Book Review

WHAT IS LEFT THE DAUGHTER
by Howard Norman

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
(October 2010, US$25.00, 256 pages)

At the beginning of Howard Norman’s What Is Left The Daughter, Wyatt Hillyer, a teenage boy recently orphaned by double parent suicides, embarks on an apprenticeship to his uncle Donald as a toboggan maker. Odd, but these two scenarios are more closely knit than you may think. They set up the depressing chain of events that this World War Two era novel follows.

Written as a letter to Wyatt’s long-lost daughter Marlais, this novel’s most striking trait is its focus on tragedy-touched characters. The fatal theme flourishes quickly, once Wyatt is moved from Halifax to Middle Economy, Nova Scotia, a small town in the maritime province where his aunt and uncle live. Here, Wyatt reunites with Tilda, his adopted cousin whom he secretly loves. Also in her late teens, Tilda decides to become a professional mourner – yes, she weeps alongside deceased loners whom no one else will pity. In diverse representation, Wyatt isn’t the only one full-up on sadness. The man Tilda eventually marries is Hans Mohring, a German exchange student of philology at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

And then there is Tilda’s father, Wyatt’s toboggan-making mentor Donald, overcome with paranoia caused by German U-boat attacks off Canada’s east coast. Donald withdraws from the family, gives up the sleigh racket, and starts bunking alone in his work shed like a soldier. On her last night in town before travelling to Newfoundland on a family visit, Wyatt’s aunt Constance, Donald’s wife, breaks the shield and sleeps with Donald between walls tacked up with war stories from the newspaper.

Things climax when a German torpedo takes out a ferry with Constance onboard. With this, Donald’s hate for Hitler peaks; his paranoia proves its worth. He even goes as far as smashing his beloved Beethoven and Bach gramophone records, the ones that always got caught in the last groove before the needle could lift: a broken record repeating its last note over and over again, like the newspaper and radio reports Donald couldn’t ignore.

In one last, foul move, Donald tricks Wyatt into inviting Tilda’s German husband, Hans, to their house, apparently to make peace. Instead, Donald’s rage overpowers wit when he kills Hans with a steel toboggan runner. Daughter takes on a small town, court drama feel for a couple chapters. Donald gets life in prison for the murder; Wyatt receives a couple years for his involvement.

Upon his release, Wyatt slowly becomes part of Tilda’s life again and one night they conceive a child: Marlais. However, Wyatt is once again abandoned when Tilda moves to Denmark with Marlais, and until the point that the book is written—March 27, 1967—Wyatt goes without seeing his daughter for nearly thirty years. The story ends with Wyatt encountering more death (from both important characters and not), old friends, and living his life as a dedicated gaffer at the Halifax Harbour.

Daughter is a bleak and empathetic story, dissolved slightly with pockets of classic, uppity, home front war era scenes. To Norman’s credit, there are many unforeseen right turns that follow constant tragic foreshadowing. From page one, death is on the mind, and the avenues in which the theme is experimented with are not obviously revealed. Like any wartime novel, Daughter does have flavours of stories told once before. Hitler’s encroach on Middle Economy, even though he and his troops are distant, is represented only by a foreign sit-in. When it’s revealed that there are Nazis posing as RMC soldiers roaming around Nova Scotia and that a friend of Wyatt’s was attacked by them, you start to sympathize with Donald, the unabashed defender of reasonable revenge. Although he sacrificed an innocent bystander, he had the right intention. I guess that’s the worth of any good war novel: breaking down misconceptions loaded with controversial politics.

Published by This Literary Webzine

Oh, Winston.

I find it interesting how we stumble over the things we end up reading. What makes us pick up a certain newspaper, magazine or book, only to have it become one of our favourites? In hindsight, I sometimes realise odd licks of fate that initially guide me to a certain trend in writing, only to view it later as something monumental. For instance, I’ll always remember the cornerstone novel in my life being Orwell’s 1984. I first read it on a philosophical whim when I was thirteen years old; I was coming of age and getting interested in world politics, and had heard how prolific was the novel’s satire of modern democratic society, derived from a premonition. I not only fell in love with Orwell (since having read most of his catalogue), but 1984 influenced my perception of the world. Whenever I reminisce on how I forged my left-wing, anti-establishment, down-with-globalisation ways, I often think of how trapped Winston Smith is, constantly evading Big Brother, and how the thought of becoming him forever changed my outlook.

It seems like lately, in a much less momentous way, I have oddly stumbled over more reading when titles jumped out at me for some reason and became some of my favourites. Here are a few that I have tripped over in the past few weeks.

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer
I fell upon Packer while reading an article about the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 list in this a few months back. Skimming through the finalists, the words Drinking Coffee Elsewhere pulled me in for a couple of reasons. One: It reminded me of the movie “Coffee and Cigarettes,” one of my favourites, a documentary about rock and roll warlords. Two: Because it sounds so good (I know, but if you share this sentiment, you know what I mean). Thankfully, the witty title of this collection of stories was not a guise to lure in readers, only to have them disappointed at some lame, poorly written life story. Contrarily, ZZ Packer’s style is sensational. She not only attacks identity and gender theories, racism, and other contemporary controversial topics in Coffee, but does it with some of the best writing I’ve ever read. I highly recommend.

Anton Chekhov
I recently reviewed a book of modernised Chekhov tales and while doing so realised that I had never actually read anything by Chekhov. It’s hard to say this as an English major, but true. I had only heard of his prowess – how he is the best Russian story writer of all time and second to Shakespeare in the world-scope of bards. And, I’m pretty sure a few Simpsons episodes are taken straight from Chekhov‘s pages. Needless to say, I had to do some buffing up. What I mainly love about Chekhov’s over two hundred stories (and a number of plays) is the focus on everyday life. Whether drawing characters from working class Russia or writing about important national landmarks, Chekhov had an unbelievable knack for depicting reality in a highly important era.

Death In Venice by Thomas Mann
The other day I was reading the arts section of the newspaper and came across a review of a new opera in Toronto, Death In Venice, based on the novella by Thomas Mann. Once again, and I don’t know why, this title leapt off the page at me. I instantly hit the library. Now, if there is one thing I love about literature, it’s being able to get entranced by writing. Venice opens with its hero Gustav von Aschenbach taking a very Poe-esque walk by the cemetery where he bumps into an eerie stalker. From this, I was hooked. But the story is more than a Gothic stroll; it deals with everything from ancient philosophy, Shakespearian tragedy and the Narcissistic archetype. Check this out if you enjoy quick reads and allusion rich literature requiring an afternoon or two full of research.

Published by This Literary Webzine

Book Review

CELEBRITY CHEKHOV
by Ben Greenman
Harper-Perennial
(October 2010, $13.99, 205 pages)

Anton Chekhov meets the twenty-first century in Ben Greenman’s latest novel, Celebrity Chekhov, in which Greenman rewrites a selection of the master Russian storyteller’s works with modern day celebrities in place of the original characters.

The shift in rhetoric may be easier for humour readers to stomach than students of Russian literature. Chekhov’s romantic, classical picture of Russian life during the industrial revolution and pre-Communist revolution takes a back seat to current Hollywood headlines. The plots of the twenty reworked stories, which include “An Enigmatic Nature,” “Death of a Government Clerk,” “The Darling,” and “A Classical Student,” are the same, but Greenman’s contemporary symbols encompass a world of difference.

For example, in Celebrity’s opening story, “Tall and Short,” based on Chekhov’s “Fat and Thin.” The original story portrays a pair of childhood friends all grown up and, by way of the fat friend becoming a privy councillor, examines the fear capable of being instilled by Russian elites. Less politics are tied to Greenman’s “Tall and Short,” which replaces Fat and Thin with Paris Hilton (Tall) and Nicole Richie (Short) a few years after falling out of BFF-ship. The looming elitist comment is personified in Paris, but the story loses Chekhov’s intent.

Chekhov’s “A Transgression” is a perfect fit for Greenman’s take on David Letterman’s life. The story depicts a practical joke played on a rich socialite by his angry maid, who gets back at him by leaving a baby on his doorstep and leading him to believe it is the product of an affair. He jumps through the hoop, and the rich man/David Letterman fesses up to his wife about an illegitimate child he does not have, and an affair he did. Although “A Transgression” is a quirky anecdote, it is muddled by a Letterman we see acting out of character. He mopes, worries, and shows a soul, which is hard to imagine in the egotistical late night king. The Letterman character seems like it could be any cheating celeb.

The same feeling comes in “Bad Weather,” which focuses on Tiger Woods’ recent infidelities. The story is consuming - big names and Chekhov style draw you in - but Tiger is not himself. It’s almost like a Mad Magazine interpretation of the stars: inflated and satirised to a point of absurdity, where it’s hard to find any reason for reading them at all.

Greenman gets his impressions right at the end of Celebrity in an adaptation of a Chekhov trilogy, consisting of “The Man In A Case,” “Gooseberries,” and “About Love.” Here, Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson converse about tragic love stories in a truly cinematic way. The anecdotes are witty and funny and, most importantly, when you imagine the dialogue in their voices, their renowned personalities fit the roles. “The Man In A Case” even makes Jon Lovitz look like the paranoid shut-in we all think he is, but tastefully of course.

Greenman obviously brings classicism into the new millennium in Celebrity Chekhov and shows how story archetypes are recycled everywhere in literature. But it might be too far out for purists, who value Chekhov’s perception of turn of the century Russian society - symbols much more inspirational than flashy Hollywood gossip. However, to Greenman’s credit, there are a few smirk inducing scenes that show how certain celebrities actually do match-up with some Chekhovian characters. For a Hollywood obsessed gossip queen looking for an unsurprising reiteration of the past year‘s biggest scandals, this book is perfect.

Published by This Literary Magazine

CanLit Book Review

CHEF
By Jaspreet Singh
Vintage Canada
(CA – April 2008; US – April 2010, CAN $19.95, 246 pages)

In 1984 India carried out the military operation Meghdoot, which saw the successful invasion and occupation of the Siachen Glacier in the eastern Karakoram range of the Himalayan mountains. Ensuing from this invasion, India and Pakistan have continually warred atop this highest battlefield on earth, raging over the rights to the 70 kilometre stretch of frozen land.

For retired Indian-Sikh military chef Kirpal Singh, the main character in Jaspreet Singh’s Georges Bugnet Award winning novel Chef, his experience of the Siachen Conflict burns deep inside him. Literally, Kip (Kirpal) suffers from cancer. Symbolically, his cancer is war’s destruction personified. Eating away at Kip are memories of serving a corrupt government concerned more with right to land ownership than the will of its people.

Chef opens with Kip embarking on a long train ride from Delhi to Srinagar, his former camp, to cook a feast for the Governor of Kashmir’s daughter’s wedding. The Governor was Kip’s commander, one General Kumar, fourteen years earlier when Kip joined the army and became protégé to expert military chef, Kishen. As Kip flashes back to his war days from behind the closed kitchen quarter doors where higher rank officials stayed away from, we learn how Kip witnessed the sour fundamentals of Indian bureaucracy and, most importantly, how important political dignitaries are in bed with the military.

Kip’s first lesson in the army is understanding his role as chef which, with fierce allusion to the Indian caste system, means answering to those above him. Young and naïve, Kip adapts to his place in military society, and through his chef-minded perspective, Singh’s allegorical binding of food to cultural tradition becomes clear. When Kip visits the home of a Muslim girl, he is propositioned by her brother to marry her, and the girl serves a metaphorical dowry of tea. Kip simply wants to observe her cooking, and wonders why she does not join them for tea. Her place, like Kip’s, is in the kitchen, and he learns something about both Muslim culture and elitism along lines he understands. A similar scene unfolds later when Kip becomes flirtatious with a nurse who is Kishen’s lover. She bats him away, saying “I have no tea to offer you.” Hence, enjoying tea, a mainstay in everyday life, symbolises age-old interaction between the sexes.

As Kip grows into adulthood, Singh’s food metaphors sink deeper. Cultural faux pas extending from food preparation relate to social class when Kishen feeds a non-vegetarian dish to a group of Muslim clerics visiting Srinagar. The clerics are there on official, sketchy business, and for the offensive act marring the General’s reputation, Kishen is sent on permanent leave to a camp on the peak of the Siachen Glacier. Here, food leads to a perfect depiction of the power an elite has over a peasant.

Early in part three of Chef, an assumed insurgent, a Pakistani woman named Irem, is captured. Kip is the only one able to interpret her Kashmiri language, and is ordered to learn everything about her. Still a hormonal twenty-something virgin, Kip becomes obsessed with helping Irem, who turns out to be ‘clean’, or not a terrorist. In fact, she warns the General is being targeted for assassination by real Pakistani insurgents and, with Irem’s tip-off, Kip prevents the incident. Irem also provides Kip with information that Kishen is planning to commit suicide. This curdles Chef Kip’s stomach, and he travels to the freezing camp to help his mentor.

Atop the second coldest place on Earth, Kishen lures Kip into kidnapping a group of Indian army officials for a publicity stunt that bluntly lays out Chef’s discourse: “More dead Indians at the front means more profits for officers and their friends in Delhi. The question I ask today is: Are we dying for nothing?” Kishen proclaims. “We feed the army, we work hard, and those at the very top have failed us. [. . .] And I say the same thing to the bastards on the other side. What are they dying for, the Pakistanis?” If that isn’t enough for Singh to get his message across, Kip echoes more accusations toward corrupt India and Pakistan. He says “Kashmir was a beautiful place and we have made a bloody mess of it.”

At the end of his journey, Kip’s cancer is near fatal, linking his suffering to a nation strung up like a punching bag for corrupt war mongers to bruise and bloody. Arriving at Srinagar, he reveals the true reason for his painful escapade, having less to do with preparing the wedding feast than one might assume. His recurring phrase of “India passing by” resonates profoundly as he reunites with Rubiya, the bride, and she reveals shared feelings of a sad, lost Kashmir instilled within her by Irem’s haunting life as a political prisoner. Now, back in Srinagar, Kip is satisfied. Poetic and romantic, Chef unravels the underbelly tale of modern India being dragged through meaningless, catastrophic destruction.

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CanLit Book Review

NIKOLSKI
By Nicolas Dickner, Translated by Lazer Lederhendler
Alfred A. Knopf
(Published in Canada, February 2005; U.S., January 2010 CAN $29.95, 287 pages)

Nicolas Dickner’s 2010 Canada Reads Winner, Nikolski, originally written in French and translated into English by Lazer Lederhendler, follows three unknowingly connected characters. As the book opens in 1989, we meet a Montreal bookstore owner, who remains nameless, dealing with the death of his mother. An odd character, he points out trivial things like how he has never left the city of Montreal, and while sorting out his mother’s belongings he comes across a compass, a forgotten gift from the father he never met. The compass does not point to true North, but thirty-four degrees West, aligning with the Aleutian Islands town of Nikolski.

We are introduced to Noah Riel next, a modern day nomad who grows up travelling Western Canada with his mother in their old camper. Noah never met his father, Jonas Doucet, and in hopes of a connection sends letters addressed for General Delivery to various Canadian cities decided on by keen cartographic estimations of Jonas’ nomadic routes. His father’s absence holds strong, a depressing reality that remains with Noah forever, one way or another. Nikolski’s third main character is Joyce Doucet, Jonas’ niece. Joyce is from Tête-à-la-Baleine, a small Quebec town, and is under the assumption that her mother is dead. Raised by her grandfather, Joyce grows up hearing his romantic tales about their ancestors who were world travelling pirates.

In their late teens, Noah and Joyce both move to Montreal. By the mid-nineties Noah is working on a graduate degree in anthropology researching the significance of waste left behind by ancient civilisations, desperate to know why people leave things behind. While in university Noah tries to contact his ever-moving mother by way of more General Delivery letters, only to relive his depressing childhood as they returned unread. Meanwhile, Joyce ends up in Montreal by way of inspiration. Upon reading a news article about a woman running from authorities for piracy, whom Joyce assumes is her mother, she steers her future course: “… the ambition of carrying on the family tradition seeped into her mind,” Dickner writes. “[Joyce] was destined for a pirate’s life, shiver me timbers!” She takes a job at the Poissonnerie Shanahan, and by night sifts through back alley dumpsters in Montreal’s business sector for abandoned computers.

Eventually, Noah and Joyce find their callings. After reuniting with past lover Arizna, a prominent media publisher in Venezuela, Noah meets his son Simôn. Noah then moves to Venezuela to provide the toddler with the fatherly role model he never experienced. Joyce fulfills her burning ancestral calling by hacking bank accounts and stealing identities, an e-pirate of the twentieth century. Eventually, Joyce, Noah and the unnamed bookstore owner’s paths ironically intertwine, and their final destinations become wherever true north lies for each of them.

There is a strong set of symbols in Nikolski that lead to Dickner’s overall comment on modern society and identity. His main allegorical tool is the sea: from Joyce’s likening to a plaice fish swimming around the streets, deep-dumpster diving, and living off the bounty of larger beings to Noah’s convoluted illusions of inland ships and swimming through prairie fields, Nikolski is filled with images “straight out of Salvador Dali’s surrealist menagerie” as Dickner puts it. These fish-like nomads never stop moving, searching, evolving, and waiting for reality to finally unfold some truth.

Among the seascape imagery there is a lot of Canadiana in this book, often looking like a Richler-esque romanticised portrait of Canada. Noah and Joyce Duddyly romp around Saint Urbain Street, Saint Laurent Boulevard, and other popular CanLit landmarks, becoming contemporary images spray-painted over Montreal’s traditional ambience. But in Nikolski, Dickner brings Canada into today’s generation. Subtle sly comments on the Oka crisis, the Bosnian War, and other political topics of the nineties represent a bigger landscape than inner-border mainstream Canada, which really only turns out to be where the characters in this story are born, nothing else. Searching for something personified by their distant parents, Noah and Joyce are Canada’s minorities, cover-ups forgotten and lost. This survey of contemporary life deeply rooted in the past provides a frank realist interpretation of how one little, yet life changing event, can boggle the compass for generations to come.

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CanLit Book Review: Tell-All by Chuck Palahniuk

TELL-ALL
by Chuck Palahniuk
Doubleday Books
(May 2010, CAN $29.95, 179 pages)

Tell-All is the story of fifties Hollywood starlet Katherine Kenton, whose long life on the A-list has led her to an over-the-hill movie-star plateau. Miss Kathie's days are now spent downing booze and prescription drugs, and reminiscing about her past trophy marriages, literally engaged in to receive reputation enhancing awards. At night, she is either hosting or attending lavish dinner parties with the world's most famous people: "The attendant celebrities seem to stretch from Samuel Beckett to Gene Autry to Marjorie Main to the faraway horizon." Like any celebrity tell-all, Kenton's story surfaces by way of a fact finding insider, her lifelong maid, Hazie Coogan. Hazie is looking to steal the spotlight, and puts on an interesting show for the reader. Her reliability wavers early on with snarky comments explaining how she "lives in her [Miss Kathie's] shadow", setting up a hidden bitterness for her boss that ultimately never gets voiced aloud. Instead, Hazie projects that she is the mastermind behind Kenton's success. She picks the roles for her, and says she moulds her as "her body and my vision". With all of Hazie's self-conscious boasting, you still recognize her as a jealous nobody, living among higher class people, and indeed thriving for recognition.

It makes sense, than, when Hazie puts up a shield toward Miss Kathie's latest suitor, Webster Carlton Westward III, the actress' next cheekily dubbed "was-band", once the appropriate business necessitating a formal relationship is looked after. Webster presses hard for Kenton's affection and wins her over, the two are a couple of real love-birds, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. But Hazie discovers what Webster really wants when she stumbles over a book he is working on. Entitled "Love Slave", the piece is a celebrity tell-all of his time spent with Kenton, but, to Kenton's protestations, is highly fictional. This "lie-ography", as Hazie calls it, depicts a steamy relationship between Kenton and Webb with a fatal twist. The final chapter of Love Slave depicts the scene of Kenton's death, with Webster present and desperately trying to save his lover. Amidst Miss Kathie's latest project, a World War Two production written and directed by Lillian Hellman (whose own career hit rocks in the fifties when she was linked to the communist party), it becomes Hazie and Kenton's task to dodge Webster's predicted death scenes, forcing him to rewrite his fatal chapter over and over again. Tell-All's last chapter gives you the final piece of the puzzle that, in true Palahniuk fashion, nobody sees coming.

Tell-All is a mystery novel, but uncharacteristically. In fact, I'm not sure a book has ever been written like this before. Hazie's narration is largely a set of director's notes, taking you behind an invisible camera and effectively giving Tell-All a lively cinematic feel. This technique lends to the Hollywood theme, of course, but also pulls you in as a reader. "The next sequence depicts a montage of flowers" opens Act One, Scene Six (yes, the chapters are in play-form), to give you an example of the style. It is like Palahniuk plunks you in the director's seat for the making of Tell-All the movie - there is never discrepancy over what image he tries to create.

Also experimentally, Palahniuk peppers the novel with words in bold text to highlight his characters' "name-dropping Tourrette's syndrome". Virtually every World War Two era movie star has worked with Kenton on a previous film, and she has played all the biggest roles, including Marie Antoinette, Mrs. Louis XIV, and the list goes on. On page one you are a bit floored by the constant type-set changes, but by the end of Tell-All the unconventional bold faced name-dropping is so extensive, its satirical qualities of what an actual A-lister's vocabulary would be like is hilarious.

Set away in a romantic, pre-Internet Hollywood hills landscape, Tell-All's often ludicrous depictions of fast-lane celebrity life sheds a satirical light on today's paparazzi fuelled media. From Miss Kathie's selfish need to adopt a child but not care for it, her anti-depressant addiction, and the name-dropping, this look into a fictional star's life is a mirror image of real/fake stars today. Palahniuk drives this angle home with allusions to Dorian Gray and a Wilde-esque use of a mirror which Hazie etches with Miss Kathie's tears, while the woman's true emotional self stays hidden. Likewise, Webster's self-projection transforms into a ravenous dog-like image as his murder plans continue to fail, and you really understand how this animal business works. Hazie's delusional account of the events in Tell-All are the biggest play on how the line between fiction and reality gets blurred in the tabloids' perspective.

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CanLit: Joey Comeau's Supernatural Serial

The National Post’s literary arts section, The Afterword, is featuring daily excerpts from Joey Comeau’s new novel, One Bloody Thing After Another. The novel was released in May on ECW Press. The serial began July 12, with the horror novel’s prologue, continuing with another two chapters each day. There is still a link where you can check out a running compilation of everything posted.

One Bloody Thing After Another blends aspects of horror and the supernatural with a storyline following several young people met with troubling life encounters. Jackie, a vandal with a heartfelt cause, is met with legal obstacles; sisters Ann and Margaret are busy dealing with their mother, who spends her days chained up in the basement; ghosts, violence, and lesbianic lust fill in the rest of the horror novel. One Bloody Thing stays along the same lines as previous Comeau work. The comedic and sensational grapple with the abysmal for a blunt, empathetic depiction of human experience. For an in depth look at the novel, read this formidable review at Fangoria.

Comeau, aged 29, is one of Canada’s leading transgressive fiction authors. He is best known for his collaboration with visual artist Emily Horne on the superlatively acclaimed webcomic A Softer World. He has published four novels, including Lockpick Pornography, a self-attributed “genderqueer adventure story”, and the experimental Overqualified which is told through a series of darkly worded job application letters. Comeau is an openly queer author, often satirically and absurdly picking apart societal sexual constructs in his fiction.

Published by ThisZine

CanLit Book Review: Beatrice & Virgil by Yann Martel

BEATRICE & VIRGIL
By Yann Martel
Alfred A. Knopf

(April 2010, CAN $29.95, 197 pages)

Yann Martel’s new novel, Beatrice & Virgil, is noticeably less reliant on Martel’s masterful lore-ridden prose exemplified in his Man Booker Prize winning novel Life Of Pi. Beatrice is obsessed with two popularly tackled, yet uniquely portrayed literary themes: a bard with artistic challenges, and the Holocaust. Main character Henry, a world famous author living off the success of his last novel, is working on a half essay/half novel flip-book aimed at providing a fresh account of the Holocaust. Henry’s inspiration is historical realism’s domination of the theme in art, in response to which he thrives for an aspect of wonder: “A work of art works because it is true, not because it is real. Was there not a danger to representing the Holocaust in a way always beholden to factuality?” But after twenty pages of Beatrice, Henry’s unique post-modern stab at Holocaust representation is shot down by his publishers, who see hollowness in is his idea.

Upon the negative feedback, Henry takes a break from writing, and he and his newly pregnant wife Sarah move to an unnamed city. Henry attains a job in a cafe and volunteers in the local theatre company; Sarah works in an addictions clinic. Beatrice drops its budding rhetorical discourse of differently representing the Holocaust to more closely follow the theme of life as a writer: Henry begins regularly coaching a lowly, old taxidermist, also named Henry, on a play he has been working on all his life. Now, Beatrice mainly becomes an examination of the taxidermist’s play.

The play centres around two fervently symbolic, Dante-esque characters: a donkey named Beatrice, and a howler monkey, Virgil. The play becomes infused in the story, at times lengthily, with multiple page excerpts that follow the two animals as they lapse in and out of comi-tragic scenes. The first snippet of dramatic dialogue is six pages of Virgil describing to Beatrice what a pear looks like. It takes a while to decipher why Martel focuses on discussions of arbitrary things, at times difficult to link to any real symbolism. However, Beatrice eventually reconnects with Martel’s Holocaust motif, offering depressing, empathetic scenes where Virgil is sought out by an elusive secret police squad, and the taxidermist lividly pieces together parts of dead animals (“the mouth was a tongueless, toothless gaping hole revealing the yellow fibreglass jaw of the mannequin. [. . .] It looked grotesquely unnatural, a cervine version of Frankenstein”). Martel spells out numerous Holocaust metaphors, but it somehow takes the genius-like Henry until Beatrice’s final pages to understand the taxidermist’s theme, and realize there is a real-life Nazi nearby.

Martel, like Henry wants to do, cleverly creates an original viewpoint for Holocaust representation in art, which drives Beatrice’s self-reflexive capability home. By Martel leading us through the taxidermist’s play, reader and writer, fiction and reality become synonymous. Suddenly, Beatrice’s function is just what Henry’s art is, an imaginative story shedding new light on the Holocaust. Martel is begging us to look at his work as a reflection of real events and to pull fruitful reality out of fiction. This said, an entertainment reader seeking a Life of Pi adventure will be drawn away by Beatrice and Martel’s attempt to paint a new picture not so in your face as most would like it.

Published by thiszine.

CanLit Book Review: More Good News by David Suzuki and Holly Dressel

Environmentalist, activist, scientist, and super-Canadian David Suzuki has teamed up with best-selling author/environmentalist Holly Dressel for a new novel, More Good News: Real Solutions to the Global Eco-Crisis, released last month on Greystone Books. More Good News is the follow up to the writing team’s 2003 Good News For A Change: How Everyday People Are Helping The Planet.

As the two titles suggest, the books provide an optimistic vantage point on current world environmental issues. Instead of focusing on where environmental tactics go wrong, Suzuki and Dressel acknowledge the many people and organisations that promote and enact real green change everyday. Good News For A Change, which sold 35,000 copies, insists global sustainability and the technology needed to provide it is within reach. More Good News updates readers on new issues not covered in the 2003 book. For example, Suzuki and Dressel discuss how declining global economies have since halted governments from seeking major environmental solutions; and how renewable energy sources have been thrust into the foreground of environmental debates. With these additions, Suzuki and Dressel keep with the overall theme that sustainability solutions are real and need to be accessed in the near future.

Suzuki and Dressel provide refreshing optimism for a change, proving that with a little promotion and hard work, future environmental crises can be successfully treated, or even avoided. But, the buck doesn’t stop with the book. Readers, voters, and the average citizens must lobby governments to take sustainability issues seriously before any widespread change takes effect.

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Conversations Unheard: Speaking Out and Keeping Quiet in Joseph Boyden's Through Black Spruce (Critical Summary/Review)

Recall Romeo drinking the fatal elixir so he can be with his beloved Juliet for all eternity, only to realize, once it is too late, that his maiden’s plan was to fool everyone else about her apparent death, not him. The ignorant hero’s quickness in action ironically befalls him when it matters most. The message that Friar Lawrence failed to get to Romeo: Juliet is alive. It is easy to recognize missed messages and their symbolism in drama on a strictly linear plot.

However, showing multiple characters missing integral messages becomes a daunting task, which Joseph Boyden masters in his Scotiabank Giller Prize winning novel, Through Black Spruce.

The novel opens with alcoholic bush pilot extraordinaire Will, the grandson of Elijah Whiskeyjack whom Boyden’s first novel, Three Day Road, follows. Speaking to his nieces Suzanne and Annie Bird from his hospital bed, not until the climax is the mystery of Will’s hospitalization revealed. But it only takes until the second narrative, led by Annie, to understand that Will is in a coma, and unable to speak. Thus, from the onset, a conversation is constructed between two people – Will and Annie – who cannot hear what each other is saying.

The novel bounces back and forth between Annie and Will’s narratives with each chapter. We learn that Annie is visiting her uncle on a regular basis, and has been told by Will’s nurse Eva, also a family friend, that speaking to him will help with a bountiful recovery (if a recovery is possible). Via Annie’s attempt to nourish her uncle’s brain, we learn her story.

Annie is back from a wild adventure in search of her long-lost sister, Suzanne, who is a semi-renowned fashion model. Still oblivious to her sister’s track to New York City, Annie makes her first stop in Toronto, the last known whereabouts of Suzanne to her family. Here she meets Painted Tongue, who is later revealed to be named Gordon, and turns out to be Annie’s self-proclaimed “protector.”

Painted Tongue does not speak, and we only understand his thoughts through Annie’s perception of his actions, moans, and moods. The mute Native character is actually a previously dawned character of Boyden’s: the protagonist of a short story, aptly named Painted Tongue, which makes up part of Boyden’s first book, a compilation of his short stories entitled Born With A Tooth. The short story explains why Painted Tongue does not speak: he chooses not to, in protestation to the way he is treated while living on the streets of Toronto. An alcoholic, Painted Tongue moans his way through life, refusing to converse with the neo-colonial symbols he encounters personified in police officers, construction workers, and elite businesspeople. The reader is forced to analyse why he is silenced. And, since he does not converse through language, how Annie Bird always knows what he is thinking – right up to the point of their consummation late in the plotline of Through Black Spruce.

From Toronto, Annie and her protector move on to NYC on a tip that Suzanne is there. Here, Annie is shadowed by the spirit of her missing sister, they fuse into one being. Annie meets Suzanne’s sketchy model-world friends, frequents her clubs, and begins modelling herself. After a while, though, Annie eagerly wants to know what happened to her sister, essential to Will’s current vegetative state. Annie begins to send postcards to her mother back in Moosonee, signed by missing Suzanne, offering another tweaked message image: the sender is absent. Ironically, Annie learns that there are more postcards being sent from Suzanne from around Europe, and Annie and Gordon quickly flee home.

Meanwhile, as Annie tells Uncle Will about her laborious, often life threatening adventures, Will pseudo-responds to her from beyond consciousness. He recounts his life as a bush pilot, flying hunters and travellers in and out of uncharted territories around James Bay, which took a turn for the worse when his family was killed in a house fire. In response, he intentionally crashes his plane, but is saved by the volunteer fire department. So, he drinks to ease his pain.

Will’s conceived purpose in life triggers an adventure of his own to live in the wilderness surrounding James Bay for almost a year. He is seeking solitude, but is unaware of the outer world following him. Among many plot diversions, he comes across a beached whale’s skeleton, representing the larger-than-life obstacles he is faced with. He decides to sit in it for a while and enjoy a few nips of whiskey, when suddenly he is not alone. Will is met with a set of grandparents and their two granddaughters, who mirror Annie and Suzanne with a highly effective linking seagull feather image, and his newly recovered shame of skipping town pushes him back to his problems at home. Climactically, a keepsake of Will’s grandfather from World War One debuting in Three Day Road saves him from falling to his biggest enemies, alcoholism and depression aside.

What do all the missed messages mean? Firstly, Annie’s silence regarding an important piece of information creates the initial tension in the story. Then, she must deal with this by ironically sending many more unheard tales to her laid up uncle. Eventually, the silence theme that looms about throughout the novel transforms into a humbling force for all the characters.

Originally published by campusintel.com