Small book wins big prize

Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists winning the Giller Prize, Canada’s highest literary achievement, does more for CanLit than for Skibsrud. That’s taken lightly though, because the young, thirty-year-old author of a highly esteemed novel will feel the Giller effect of worldly recognition and mass sales in the ball park of 75,000 copies. But even that sounds miniscule compared to the real story behind The Sentimentalists. When this novel was first published in 2009 by Kentville, Nova Scotia micro-press Gaspereau Books, it was in a wiry run of 800 copies.

That’s what makes this year’s Giller so unique in the world of CanLit, and so groundbreaking. The Sentamentalists is the smallest book ever to win the prize, which pays a pleasant $50,000, and beat out two big commercial novels, David Bergen’s The Matter With Morris and Kathleen Winter’s Annabel. Winter’s novel was also nominated for the Writer’s Trust and Governor General’s awards. Last year’s Giller winner was long time CBC newscaster Lynden MacIntyre for his widely successful novel The Bishop’s Man. In its fifteen year existence, past Giller winners include Alice Munro, Joseph Boyden and Margaret Atwood. No one saw the major literary award centering in on something as obscure as Skibsrud's novel, an account of her father’s life as a soldier in the Vietnam War.

At the same time, The Sentamentalists contended with other underdogs, including Sarah Salecky’s This Cake Is For The Party and Alexander MacLeod’s Light Lifting, two considerably smaller books, thought their quantities were at least in the thousands when recommended by the jury.

Once the 2010 Giller longlist was announced, Gaspereau owner Andrew Steeves turned down commercial offers to mass produce copies of The Sentamentalists. “If you are going to buy a copy of that book in Canada, it’s damn well coming out of my shop,” Steeves proclaimed in an interview with the Globe and Mail. He’s since changed his tune, telling the press on Monday that Vancouver publishers Douglas & McIntyre will be producing 30,000 paperback copies by the end of the week, with an additional 20,000 lined up when demand bubbles again.

Also currently hitting the news is a dash of Giller controversy. Ali Smith, British author and one of the three Giller jurors this year, reportedly tipped off a publishing friend during the middle of deliberations about her love of Skibsrud’s novel. The National Post reported that Smith’s friend, Tracy Bohan of The Wiley Agency, may have taken the advice a little too seriously, because she sold foreign printing rights of the book to a UK Random House imprint with a release date set for next March. Giller president Jack Rabinovitch acknowledges the information sharing was out of line, but was done innocently.

Meanwhile, Steeves at Gaspereau in Kentville, Nova Scotia is trying to keep his head above water while pumping out 1,000 hand-printed and hand-bound copies a week, with enough on backorder to keep them in business until e-books really do take over the world. Oddly enough, The Sentamentalists is available online as an e-Book from Kobo. Since the announcement of Skibsrud’s win last week, Amazon.ca has her novel topping the bestseller list ahead of Keith Richard’s Life and George W. Bush’s Decision Points. Beating out famous names like that is no little feat.

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CanLit Award Predictions

CanLit awards season is heading into its last few weeks (our big three prizes will all be handed out by mid-November). Thus, it’s time for predictions, and, if you are a real lit-junkie, some serious bets. First, a few quiet observations.

What everyone is perhaps not so quietly talking about is Kathleen Winter’s triple nominations for the Giller Prize, Governor General’s Award and Writers’ Trust prize for her novel Annabel. It is Winter’s debut novel after her 2008 Winterset Award winning short story collection boYs.



Feeling two-thirds the heat as Kathleen Winter is Emma Donoghue, up for the Writers’ Trust and GG for her novel Room. The novel was also short-listed for the Man Booker earlier this fall.

There are lesser hopefuls that may surprise Canada with a big win after all. David Bergen’s new novel The Matter With Morris has had its share of recognition this season. It is up for the Giller and may just take the cake out of Winter’s mouth.

That said, it would be doggishly ironic if Sarah Selecky’s This Cake Is For The Party won the Giller. It is her debut work and has created considerable buzz in critic’s circles. Perhaps if the GG and Writer’s Trust accepted story collections, it would also approach taking those awards.

On to my predictions: be warned, the following is purely unfounded speculation.

On November 2, Michael Winter’s The Death Of Donna Whalen will win the Writers’ Trust award for fiction. In non-fiction, Sarah Leavitt will win for her graphic memoir Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me.

A week later on November 9, Emma Donoghue will win the Giller Prize for Room.

And in mid-November the Governor General’s Award for fiction will be presented to Kathleen Winter for Annabel. In non-fiction, Allan Casey will win for Lakeland: Journeys into the Soul of Canada.

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CanLit: John Leigh Walters wins Edna Staebler Award

This week, Kitchener, Ontario author John Leigh Walters was awarded the 2010 Edna Staebler Award for creative non-fiction for his first book A Very Capable Life: The Autobiography of Zarah Petri.

Walters’s A Very Capable Life is the story of his mother, Zarah Petri, and her life as an immigrant during the twentieth century. Walters is being heralded for mastering the first-person autobiography of another person. He writes Petri’s stories in her voice, from her point of view, and creatively reinterprets landmark twentieth century events through her perception.

Now retired, Walters hosted and produced television shows in Canada and the United States for most of his life. Most recently, he hosted a program on CTV in Waterloo.

The Edna Staebler Award, established by Staebler in 1991, annually acknowledges the best first or second non-fiction work of an author that significantly portrays Canadian culture or takes place in a Canadian locale. The winner receives $10,000 from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. Wilfrid Laurier University recently published a collection of Staebler’s diary entries entitled Must Write.

Edna Staebler was one of Canada’s most well-known writers, regarded widely for her Mennonite cookbook series Food That Really Shmecks. She also wrote for popular Canadian magazines Maclean’s, Chatelaine, Reader’s Digest and Star Weekly. In 1996 she was awarded the Order of Canada.

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White Moustache

by John Coleman

I read in the newspaper
about a man with a white moustache
who said he wanted to burn the Qur’an.
His moustache looked just like Hulk Hogan’s,
and it reminded me of white bread.
Fake, like white bread -
so overworked and distant from nature.
Bleached, misshapen, manipulated, unnatural.
Unreal – like wrestling.

The moustached man said that
if they built a mosque where
(people can pray)
so many innocent people died,
that would comply with the enemy.
He didn’t have mighty arms like Hulk Hogan does,
but he worked in the same way:
to bring down the enemy.
And I thought,
I belong to the most violent generation.
But not like,
My generation is so violent, it’s absurd.
My thoughts wandered to the conclusion that
I live in the most violent generation ever.

That’s all burning the Qur’an is anyway, right?
Violence.
Instead of burning the Qur’an,
this man really wants to burn the enemy.
He really wants to burn human beings.
But burning the Qur’an sends the same message:
red-white-and-blue
(so easily, how it flows)
wants you to die.

Target, burn, kill your enemy
preached the white moustached man.
It made me want to burn
red-white-and-blue mentality.
I want to burn my Wonder Bread.
I want to darken my white bread mind.

Because my side
(culture)
is being strung up
(hung)
like a(n) flag
(enemy).
I feel misrepresented.
I don’t believe in flags.
Because of the man with the white moustache
I will never believe in God
because believing in God means being hung.

There is a mosque in my neighbourhood in the GTA.
Little mosque on the concrete prairie.
It’s like a church in a school gym
with a Coke machine in the entrance
where my neighbours pray to
Jesus.
But opposite
(wrong).
Right, white moustached man?

I later read that Hulk Hogan
stepped down from his challenge
and that bruised his integrity
because he was fake.
If he was real he would have
burned all the Qur’ans.
But some Hoganites were still going to
carry out the crusade,
the original plan.

They said:
This is the right thing to do.
The only thing left
but more so right
thing to do.
Burn people that burn you.

And a friend, or two, or many of mine read the Qur’an.
Read, or pray, or wander in thought,
then we all watch wrestling.
Hulk Hogan on the screen in fiery yellow and red.
When he powerslams the enemy, the violence is
fake, thin, blank.
Like Wonder Bread.
But there is always a small city who thinks
it is worth standing up to say
“Hulk Hogan is the best,
I would do anything he tells me.”
It is the most violent generation.

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Dig Below The Mainstream

I must confess I’ve felt snobbish lately – my range of authors being a tad one sided in favour of the big press. It’s not that I need sales or reputation to respect an author, not at all – it’s just that I’ve been blindsided by a few bigger, highly anticipated novels in the past few months. But being the rebel I am (insert laughtrack here), I know that big press is a euphemism for the man, and I won’t have that being the log in my literary fire.

So, in an attempt to dig below the mainstream, this is what I am reading while the leaves change colour outside my window:

Best Canadian Stories: ’08, ed. John Metcalf (Oberon Press). While perusing my local library I found this gem, a compilation of short stories by ten lesser known CanLit authors like Clark Blaise, Kathleen Winter, and Amy Jones. Despite being edited by one of Canada’s top literary critics, this book really pushes some unheard names into reader’s faces. These are top notch intuitive stories, but their authors probably wouldn’t catch the attention of Penguin editors.

What Is Left The Daughter, by Howard Norman (HMH). I’m reviewing this book for this and so far, from the fifty pages I have read, it is amazing. Set during World War Two on the East Coast of Canada, it is a life tale of extreme hardship at a young age (double parent suicide) and the further aftermath of a growing young man.

The Matter With Morris, by David Bergen (Harper Collins) In honour of making the Giller longlist, I must mention that Bergen’s story is highly intriguing. I’ve only read a condensed version of Morris in this month’s Walrus, but it definately makes me want to buy a copy. With themes like war, romance, writing, and pot – how can you say no?

Mordecai Richler Was Here, ed. Adam Gopnik (Madison). Ahh, I know, there’s nothing small time about Richler. But I don’t care, he’s my favourite author. His satirical wittiness, mastering the underdog story, putting CanLit on the map – he’s the best. This book brings together a wide array of Richler’s journalism coinciding with relevant snippets from his fiction. It’s Richler’s perspective on politics, writing, and success in his own words, a definite read for budding writers in need of guidance.

I have also been paying attention to Joey Comeau’s blog posts over at Open Book Toronto this month. Comeau is gaining a heap of recognition in Canada lately with his most recent novel One Bloody Thing After Another. He also provides captions alongside Emily Horne’s photography on A Softer World, an ongoing web comic.

And yes, I realize this is all CanLit.

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Giller

The longlist for the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the leading literary award for Canadian authors, was announced Monday, September 20. This year’s judges – Canadian journalist and broadcaster Michael Enright, American author and professor Claire Messud, and renowned UK author Ali Smith – decided on thirteen titles from ninety-eight submissions from a wide variety of Canadian publishers.

This year’s selections are diverse and somewhat surprising compared to previous years, with a balanced list of big and small presses, male and female authors, and novels and short story collections.

The 2010 Giller Prize for Fiction longlist is:

The Matter With Morris by David Bergen (Phyllis Bruce Books/HarperCollins)

Player One by Douglas Coupland (House of Anansi Press)

Cities Of Refuge by Michael Helm (McClelland & Stewart)

Light Lifting by Alexander MacLeod (Biblioasis)

The Debba by Avner Mandelman (Other Press/Random House)

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman (Dial/Random House)

This Cake Is For The Party by Sarah Selecky (Thomas Allen Publishers)

The Sentimentalists by Johanna Scabbard (Gaspereau Press)

Lemon by Cordelia Strube (Coach House Books)

Curiosity by Joan Thomas (McClelland & Stewart)

Sanctuary Line by Jane Urquhart (McClelland & Stewart)

Cool Water by Dianne Warren (Phyllis Bruce Books/HarperCollins)

Annabel by Kathleen Winter (House of Anansi Press)

The shortlist will be announced at a Toronto news conference tomorrow October 5 and the 2010 Giller Prize winner will be announced November 9.

While I have you here, I’d like to mention that the five nominees for the City of Toronto Book Award were announced recently. They are:

Prince of Neither Here Nor There by Sean Cullen (Penguin)
Valentine’s Fall by Cary Fagan (Cormorant)
Where We Have To Go by Lauren Kirshner (McClelland)
The Carnivore by Mark Sinnett (ECW)
Diary of Interrupted Days by Dragan Topologic (Random House Canada)

The Toronto book award has been running annually since 1974. This year’s finalists will read selections from their works at the Word On The Street book and magazine festival in Toronto on September 26. The winner will be announced October 14.

October 5, 2010:

The Shortlist for the 2010 Giller Prize was announced Tuesday, October 5. Selected from the longlist of thirteen publications announced September 20, the five shortlisted candidates are:

David Bergen, for the novel The Matter With Morris

Kathleen Winter, for the novel Annabel

Johanna Skibsrud, for the novel The Sentimenatlists

Alexander MacLeod, for the short story collection Light Lifting

Sarah Selecky, for the short story collection This Cake Is For The Party

Think you know which one of these authors will win? If so, enter the Guess The Giller contest for a chance to win VIP passes to the 2011 Giller Gala.

Stay tuned November 9 for the 2010 Giller Prize winner announcement.

Oversung and Underpraised CanLit Authors

The National Post recently ran two pieces in its literary section, The Afterword, entitled Don’t Believe The Hype: 10 Overrated Canadian Authors, and, the next day, Flying Under The Radar: 10 Underrated Canadian Authors. The articles were penned by critics Alex Good and Steven W. Beattie.

In response to the articles, I would like to play devil’s advocate. Albeit I agree with some of Good and Beattie’s slams on big time CanLit monopolisers (I won’t sour you with my opinions), I feel that more than a few toes were stomped on in the more than pretentious analytical/critical slice of opinion. Below I reflect on what they think of CanLit today.

First off, the word Overrated. It’s no doubt that Yann Martel made the list, especially since his recent novel, Beatrice and Virgil, got almost all negative, and really negative, reviews. Yes guys, you saw the headlines too, thanks for the recap. Also on their hitlist are Douglas Coupland for being too much like Kurt Vonnegut; Michael Ondaatje for romanticising the new millennium in a cliché manner; and Anne Michaels and Jane Urquhart, more or less for having top sales.

If I may interject with one opinion, Joseph Boyden should not be on the overrated list. Good and Beattie knock Boyden’s two novels Three Day Road and Through Black Spruce for being stylistically and interpretively off the mark. Missed, however, is an acknowledgment of Boyden’s attempt to slash the colonial view of Native culture. Maybe if more than a handful of Native authors would be accepted into the scene, Boyden could be ruled out for bad writing. Until then, I praise any NativeLit authors, Boyden included, who truly represent Native culture in literature – a form, I remind, absent until the nineteen-eighties.

To give Good and Beattie some credit, they publicise writers who a lot of people don’t, although should, know in their Underrated list. And I agree, if it weren’t for corporate publishing labels worried most about the bottom line, there would be a chance for amazing writers currently dwarfed by Coupland, Michaels, Munro and Atwood. Almost all in the Underrated list were praised for stylistic mastering and pushing unconventional form, such as Sharon English, Clark Blaise, and Ray Smith. These authors, among others, are highlighted on the list for the average daily newspaper reader.

Enough about my take, what do you think? Is one of your favourites deemed overrated? Does an unsung writer you know fit the role of an underrated CanLit author? Are we just becoming too snobby? Or, is commercial literature an oxymoron – should it be chastised for ruining smaller writers’ chances? Leave a comment and have your say; one voice can’t speak for all of us.

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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: Head's Up! CBC Literary Award Submissions

Submissions for the 2010 CBC Literary Awards are now being accepted until November 1. Go here to enter and get all the information on how to format your submission. A twenty-five dollar (CAD) fee applies for each entry, and you can enter as many works as you want. The CBC Literary Awards competition is the only literary competition that celebrates original, unpublished works, in Canada’s two official languages.

There are three categories, one of which your submission must fall under: Short Story for short fiction narratives 2,000 to 2,500 words; Creative Nonfiction between 2,000 and 2,500 words, including humour, memoir, and research articles written for general audiences; and Poetry for long narrative poems or groups of poems totalling between 1,000 and 2,000 words. You must be a citizen or permanent resident of Canada to enter. All works must be unpublished and original.

Between November and January a shortlist of about twenty or thirty submissions will be decided on by a judging panel of top Canadian literary editors and writers. The winners will be announced in March 2011. There are twelve prizes awarded: For both English and French language works, first place in each category wins $6,000 and second place wins $4,000. Winning pieces will be published in Air Canada’s enRoute magazine, and will also be spotlighted on the CBC website.

There are many different ways to stay informed and get involved with the awards. Join over 1,300 followers by “liking” the Facebook Group and receive ongoing updates about the competition. Get writing tips from 2009 Short Story Juror Michael Helm, who propagates the importance of original writing. Read the 2009 winning entries and gain some indie author inspiration. Most of all, get writing! Only three months left!

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CanLit: Faber Hits Toronto

The world renowned Faber Academy has announced that its first North American campus will open this fall in Toronto.

The inaugural course, commencing September 29, is ‘Writing A Novel’ and will be led by Miriam Toews. She is the author of four novels: Summer of My Amazing Luck; A Boy of Good Breeding; the 2004 Governor General’s Award winning, 2006 Canada Reads winning novel A Complicated Kindness; and 2010 novel The Flying Troutmans. Also lined up for guest lectures are big CanLit names such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Redhill and Anne Michaels.

Miriam Toews

Beginning October 1 at the Toronto campus is the ‘Becoming a Poet’ course led by Ken Babstock and Karen Solie. Babstock is an acclaimed Toronto writer and poet. His first collection Mean won the Atlantic Poetry Prize and the Milton Acorn People’s Poet Award; his latest work Airstream Land Yacht won the 2006 Trillium Book Award for Poetry in English; and he is the winner of a K.M. Hunter Award. Currently Babstock is the poetry editor for House of Anansi Press.

Ken Babstock

Karen Solie's latest book, Pigeon, won the 2010 Trillium for English Language Poetry. She has released two other poetry collections: Short Haul Engine, which won the BC Book Prize Dorothy Livesay Award, and Modern and Normal, which made the 2005 Globe and Mail Best Books List. Her writing has also been included in various literary journals including Geist and Other Voices.

If you’re quick, you can make the September 1 deadline for applications, which applies to both programs. However, the Faber & Faber site stresses that “the course will be selective.” The Faber Academy is widely respected and most of its graduates go on to lead successful careers as professional writers. What more do you expect from the publishing firm where T.S. Eliot got his start?

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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: Trillium Book Award Winners

The 2010 Trillium Book Award winners are Ian Brown’s The Boy In The Moon for best English language book, Ryad Assani-Razaki’s Deux Cercles for best French language book, Karen Solie’s Pigeon for best English language book of poetry, and Michèle Matteau’s Paraselles for best French language book of poetry.

CanLit heavyweights Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro were beat out by Brown in the most anticipated Trillium category, best English language book. Perhaps not to much surprise, The Boy In The Moon: A Father’s Search For His Disabled Son (Random House) already won the B.C. National Award, Canada’s highest paying non-fiction prize at $40,000, in January, and the 2010 Charles Taylor Prize. The Boy In The Moon is a compilation of articles Brown wrote for the Globe and Mail on living with his eleven year old son Walker, who has Cardiofaciocutaneous Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder.

The French language prize for best book was also in hot contention with writers like Nicole Champeau and Daniel Soha in the running. Ultimately, the judges liked Ryad Assani-Razaki’s debut work, Deux Cercles (VLB Éditeur), published in April 2009. The book is a compilation of short stories about dealing with the difficulties of immigration in everyday life.

Karen Solie’s English language poetry winner Pigeon (Anansi) is becoming her catalyst for success in 2010. Pigeon is Solie’s third poetry compilation and, among the Trillium, has also won the Griffin Poetry Prize and Pat Lowther Award this year. Her two earlier works, Short Haul Engine (2001) and Modern and Normal (2005) earned many award nominations (Engine won the 2002 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize). But this year, Pigeon is topping best-seller lists while rooting Solie in the CanLit scene.

French language poetry winner, Passerelles (Les Éditions L’Interligne), just means more success for acclaimed Francophone writer Michèle Matteau. Poet, playwright, novelist, Matteau has published nine French language books. She won the 2001 Trillium Award for her novel Cognac et Porto, and the 2005 Prix Christine Dimitriu-Van-Saanen Award for her novel Un Doigt de Brandy dans un Verre de Lait Chaud (A Finger of Brandy in a Glass of Warm Milk).

The Trillium Literary Award is the highest award for authors in Ontario. Funded by the Ontario Media Development Corporation, the Trillium Award for best English and French language book was established in 1987. Categories for best English and French language books of poetry were added in 2003. Popular previous winning authors include Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Thomas King, and Alistair MacLeod. Best book winners receive $20,000, best book of poetry winners receive $10,000.

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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.

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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.

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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

NativeLit 101

I am about half-way through my NativeLit research project for my final Honours course before graduating this spring, and have found a plethora of interesting reading to share with you. Be warned - I am not an expert in this field, but I am passionate about it.

NativeLit is possibly the hottest literary genre in Canada right now. There are many reasons for this: it’s a relatively new genre in the scope of CanLit, making its debut, arguably, between 25 and 40 years ago. Another reason people are chattering about NativeLit is the controversial discourse: This isn’t a fluff genre, there are real social topics coming to a head in Canadian politics - like land claims, residential school abuse, racism, and stereotyping - being represented in the new NativeLit of our country. So, I am passing on a brief who’s-who on the genre so you can get started on reading some excellent texts.

Phase One: The Old-School

Around the early 18th century, in the earliest days of Canada’s formation, there were some interesting texts being written in the New World by the colonisers. A lot of travel-logs, frontier novels, and general creative fiction obsessed with the colonisation of North America. As a reference point, early Canadian writing gives a glimpse of how the colonisers perceived North America. However, it does not tell the whole story. Before the mid 20th century, there were no Native authors in Canada being published. The vision of Canada represented in literature was biased - and out of this vision comes a clear stereotypical Native archetype in literature that was recycled in nearly all texts concerned with Native topics.

Essentially, the Native was used as an objective tool: The Native character is flat, one-sided, and almost always represents the Other compared to the coloniser. They are one with nature, uncivilised, the “noble savage.” This may not sound too ignorant at first, but think about what is not conveyed about Native peoples at the time. Topics like assimilation, dying cultures and languages, unfair land treaties, and the industrialisation of a previously unhindered land mass. The writing of the colonisers paid no attention to these themes.

Look up John Richardson’s Wacousta, a frontier story written in 1832 about the first encounters between Natives and Colonisers, and which also happens to be the first published Canadian novel. Also, the poetry and legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott from the early 1900s offers examples of the flat Native archetype. Campbell Scott actually was head of Indian Affairs during the early 20th century, and worked to outlaw traditional Native dance ceremonies, on a loosely based argument that they wasted time and produced no good. American literature during the time also produced biased images of the Native, like in some of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories, for example.

1972: A National Recognition of CanLit, and the Dawn of NativeLit

In 1972, Margaret Atwood published Survial: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature with help of a small publishing company, Anansi. The book was firstly intended to generate revenue for the young author, and also provide Canadian teachers with a guide on how to go about teaching CanLit. Up until this point, there was little recognition in Canada, or globally, of an actual Canadian literature scene. Miraculously, the book sold over 30,000 copies in its first year. People started to recognize Canada’s own literary genre, and the unique Canadian themes it projected.

In Survival, Atwood broke ground by addressing the problem of Native representation in CanLit up to that time. The chapter, entitled “First Nation,” acted as a battle-cry for the need of real, positive, Native themes to be recognized within CanLit. Thank Atwood, because almost instantly Canada was reading literature written by Natives authors and Native activists alike, writing about the opposite of what the colonisers saw: the negative effects of colonisation. Before long, post-colonial literature in Canada had a sore thumb for all to see, the genre of NativeLit.

After the ‘70s, Until Today

NativeLit is established, recognized, and in full force. First on the scene were the unrecognized Native writers of the past: Margaret Laurence, Pauline Johnson, and Maria Campbell, for example, were pulled out of CanLit’s camouflaging woodwork for all to hail as forgotten prominent authors. Thomas King also got his start in the early ‘80s, a man who is now considered new NativeLit’s forerunner. King is still a proficient novelist. Check out a book entitled The Native in Literature, a compilation of essays that were presented at the University of Lethbridge Native in Literature conference in 1984, for which King provides the introduction. King’s most famous work is Green Grass, Running Water, which takes an honest look at the state of North American Native culture in the ‘90s.

Also getting started in the ‘80s was Canadian playwright/author Tomson Highway whose first play, The Rez Sisters, first staged in 1987, made huge waves in the CanLit scene. He is still writing new plays in his residential school themed series, and has a new novel, Kiss of The Snow Queen, largely about the same topic. You also may have seen some of Highway's tragi-comedies that were adapted to the big screen.

I won’t be able to list off all of the new NativeLit authors, but here are some great ones to consider checking out: Joseph Boyden, who has written two novels, Three Day Road, and Through Black Spruce, which are excellent reworkings of the original Native archetype in CanLit. Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach is also great. Not only is it a suspenseful read, it addresses many current Native themes like residential schooling and stereotyping. Also, I praise Beatrice Culleton’s novel In Search of April Raintree, which addresses, among other issues, the niche problem of inner city violence on Native women.

So there you have it. Now all you have to do is read, and remember how NativeLit came to be.

Originally published at campusintel.com