The Dominion - Robert Kotyk

Teenage Punk-Rock Vampire Novel & Prose Poetry on Plays

hillarybain — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 05:16:10 +0000

New works by Krilanovich, Ball

The Orange Eats Creeps
Grace Krilanovich
Two Dollar Radio, 2010.

The minute you tell someone you’re reading a novel about teenage vampires these days, you’ve got a lot of assumptions to recover from. Tell them it’s a teenage punk-rock vampire novel full of “narcissistic gypsy-slut shitheads” and “slutty teenage hobo vampire junkies,” and then they might get an idea of what The Orange Eats Creeps reads like. This novel is like notorious punk-rocker GG Allin showing up at a Green Day concert. And that’s not to say Grace Krilanovich is simply out to shock, although she shocks in almost every paragraph she writes. The shock comes in equal doses of blood, sadness and Robitussin, as she chronicles a crew of vagrant vampire punks that kill, steal and fuck their way around the northwestern United States.

All this overlapping blood, sex and death becomes both unsettling and normal as you get fired through this short novel. The evocative prose keeps the gore constantly in focus, yet the teenage narrator emerges as a reflective traveler lost in her own thoughts, in her own flesh. Then, every few pages, she is almost irrevocably lost in someone else’s flesh: either devouring or being devoured, and finding affirmations of life somewhere below the skin. The vampire motif is a perfectly morbid metaphor.

Although it sounds like an elaborate teen-angst allegory, the endless creepy details of bodily destruction in The Orange Eats Creeps act as a warning against literary deconstruction. This is a vampire novel: an unapologetic, bloody and brutal vampire novel. But somehow it doesn’t matter if these kids are supposed to be real vampires, or if their death-obsession is a nightmarish reflection of their crumbling insides. The novel is also a well-crafted memoir of a punk scene that has never quite found a literary voice. Anyone who even vaguely encountered the punk scene rooted in Washington and Oregon in the 1990s will chuckle as Krilanovich recounts the unintentional hilarity of interwoven Krishna Punks, Rockabillies, and riot grrrls. The vampire punks are just another clan of kids heading to Oregon to find death or life or whatever they can find.

Krilanovich draws from these scenes to build characters that most other first-time novelists wouldn’t dare attempt, and she writes it all in unrestrained profane language that you wouldn’t expect from someone garnering serious mainstream praise. This nervy novel is emblematic of the work coming from the excellent Ohio-based publisher Two Dollar Radio. This is fiction defined by its distaste for moderation. It is also fiction that’s guaranteed to offend and alienate many readers, but I’m sure Krilanovich would be happy to lose those readers to an entirely different kind of popular vampire novel.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

Clockfire
Jonathan Ball
Coach House, 2010

The actors reveal, for a small audience, the significant world events of the next fifty years. The audience listens, absorbs everything. When the play ends, all return home, silent. Now it is the audience's turn to act.

An exercise in formal cross-pollination, Jonathan Ball’s excellent new book of prose poetry describes a series of plays, theatrical experiences, and surreal art happenings that never (and in many cases, could never) occur in reality.

Written in weighty but never overly serious free verse, the book often induces a feeling of darkness and horror (“The play hollows them. What they once were bleeds out.”), and reads with a pleasingly antiquated tone, like a collection of literary feuilletons by Robert Walser or Peter Altenberg. The pieces are organized one per page, and the quickly shifting focal point of each poem—the audience itself, the strange happenings on stage, the effect produced afterward—is as stimulating as it is unsettling. If art is the result of the imagination’s confrontation with a series of material restrictions, what happens when those restrictions are lifted?

The actors improvise a scene. Then they improvise another. Until nothing is left to improvise. All possibilities are exhausted, put to bed.

Like the film Synecdoche, New York, in which a theatre project grows so large that its rehearsal period threatens to exceed the lifespan of its author, the poems in Clockfire find meaning in the gap between the practical realities of stagecraft and the infinite scope of what can be dreamed up on the page. Ball’s voice—peculiar, dark, and cultivated—is a welcome one.

—Robert Kotyk

Robert Kotyk reads and writes in Montreal. Shane Patrick Murphy co-edits The Dominion's Literature & Ideas section.

The Orange Eats Creep

Clockfire2

April Books

hillarybain — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 09:27:15 +0000

New works by Xiao and Carson

The Cave Man
Xiaoda Xiao
Two Dollar Radio: Columbus, Ohio, 2009.

For Ja Feng, the protagonist of Xiaoda Xiao's autobiographical novel The Cave Man, the physical hardships he endures during a stint in a Maoist prison camp are overshadowed by the emotional turmoil that follows him, unshakably, out of captivity.

Convicted on a trumped-up charge of associating with a "counterrevolutionary organization" (i.e., a small group of friends), Ja Feng finds himself inexplicably sentenced to eight years in a camp. Soon afterward, following a complaint lodged in protest of another prisoner's murder, he is placed in solitary confinement—"the stone womb," as one prisoner remarks—for a total of nine months, the state in which we find him as the novel begins:

He could not sleep at night, and grew nervous during the daytime, watching through the food hole to see if soldiers or prison officers passed by. When they did, he would beg them to let him out, and shouted curses at them when they ignored him. Finally he got tired, and grew too weak to shout. It was then that he began to get used to sleeping with his body coiled. His dreams always lasted a long time, sometimes two days, sometimes three or four. They would continue even in the daytime when he was awake, so the old warden poked fun at him and said he looked like a madman.

Only the first 20 pages of the novel take place within the dank confines of Ja Feng’s solitary confinement cell, but like childhood, its influence stretches far beyond release from the condition itself. And like children who suffer abuse at home, the remainder of his life is spent reacting, in tragic hindsight, to the memory of a time when the sum of his experience was defined by the cruelty of his keepers.

Released after his brother-in-law calls in a favour, Ja Feng is stricken with nightly screaming fits and terrible nightmares. He moves from relationship to relationship, job to job, occasionally escaping into nihilism and finding comfort in the thought that "in less than a hundred years none of them would exist in the world."

Xiao himself was imprisoned for seven years for accidentally tearing a poster of Mao. The story of Ja Feng, he writes in the novel’s preface, is based partly on this experience, and partly on the lives of other camp survivors in his acquaintance, who “had expected that they would be able to enjoy the remainder of their lives freely when they stepped out of the iron gate, only to find themselves living in another prison camp larger than the one they had survived.”

Despite the intensity of its emotion, The Cave Man advances with a calm, straightforward candor that seems at once appropriately stripped of post-modern gamesmanship and somewhat lacking in narrative or artistic guile. But only within the book’s last quarter does this unambiguous style becomes its strength. Eventually, Ja Feng seems to find his metier as an artist and teacher in America. A reader is tempted to assume the protagonist-as-obscured-version-of-the-author has finally caught up to the present. Xiao, we know from the preface and author bio, made it to America after his release and became a writer. At this juncture in the novel, one imagines Ja Feng will find some form of fulfillment after all, teaching art and speaking about his experiences to groups of sincere undergraduates.

But Xiao has a skill for lining up his characters on trajectories that play on our need for narrative cohesion—a success story, a triumph over adversity—only to pull the rug out from under his reader by moving along, as life does, to a new chapter. Ja Feng's last years are as fraught as his first ones outside of prison, but when he returns to China for the last time, the tragedy of his adult life after prison comes into full relief. In the end, success, love and geography are all just illusions, or feel that way, compared to the reality of remembered pain.

—Robert Kotyk

Nox
Anne Carson
New Directions: New York, 2010.

A reticent professor who taught Classics at McGill for several decades, Anne Carson has found a surprisingly broad audience of devoted and adoring readers who would generally be more likely to read David Sedaris and Chuck Palahniuk than Sophocles and Sappho. Even though she operates in an obscure genre that straddles original poetry and literary translation, Carson's readers elevate her to mythic proportions. I would have never believed a cult could arise from such an assuming writer, but I've met several people willing to tattoo their bodies with her words and travel several hours to attend her readings. In universities she has always maintained her academic credibility, but she has successfully shaken off the potential stigma of an esoteric scholar by bringing poetic voices and individual passions to the forefront of her work.

Nox, Carson's latest and most personal writing yet, powerfully demonstrates her ability to radiate beyond a specialist audience. Two challenges run parallel throughout the book. First, she sets out to lament the death of her brother, a man who removed himself from his family as a young man and rarely connected later in life. Second, Nox documents Carson's struggle to translate an elegy written by the Roman poet Catullus to mark the death of his own brother. Through tracing her own losses, the act of translation becomes unflinchingly personal. As a poet, translator and scholar, Carson wields all her tools in Nox to painfully tie literature and mourning together.

While Nox blurs the lines between translation and original poetry, it is barely presented as a book. Packaged as a "book in a box," each page folds out like an intricate accordion. Words are laid out among family photographs and colourful prints to form a collage of Carson's life and work.

By the last page and picture, the translation of Catullus's elegy is an unfinished blur. Nox provides no conclusion to Carson's own elegy or her translation of someone else's. Coping and poetry both appear impossible tasks, but Carson's genius has never been better demonstrated than in the attempts she makes here.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

Robert Kotyk reads and writes in Montreal. Shane Patrick Murphy co-edits The Dominion's Literature section.

Xiaoda Xiao Cave Man

Nox

June Books

Moira Peters — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 05:02:27 +0000

New release by Bolano, new work by Fiorentino

Nazi Literature in the Americas
Roberto Bolano,
New Directions, 2008

Roberto Bolano’s Nazi Literature in the Americas operates on a principle expressed by the narrator of another of the late Chilean’s novels, The Savage Detectives: “In one sense, the name of the group is a joke. At the same time, it’s completely in earnest.” The speaker is talking about a literary faction, but he could easily be referring to the enterprise that is Nazi Literature, a book structured as a “Who’s Who” of the Latin American literary community’s extreme right wing. With each chapter taking on the form of a short biography followed by several handily provided appendices, the project reads initially like a Borgesian prank. But in the end, the sheer doggedness of the work (the joke-teller shows no signs of abatement) lends the tone a strange bleakness that persists after the formal novelty has worn off.

In reading Bolano it becomes apparent almost immediately that he was an insatiable reader and active literary scenester. But Nazi Literature’s peculiar strength is that it evinces a mind actively channeling, re-coding and at times parodying all of the writing that has been so zealously absorbed. Beyond the virtuosic, universe-creating scope of the book, Bolano tests the limits of readerly empathy with his characters; a parade of fascist monsters striving to make their own art through personal strife and political turmoil. Within such stories of artistic development, we are conditioned to root for success: the publication of the novel, the acquisition of enough means to pursue one’s craft, the achievement of some expression of vision. Such assumptions do not hold up, however, when what follows is a sentence like the one that concludes the chapter on fictional poet Jim O’Bannon: “He remained firm in his disdain for Jews and homosexuals to the end, although at the time of his death he was beginning, gradually, to accept African Americans.”

With this mysterious and bracing book, Bolano the mischief-maker reminds us that writers are neither saints nor saviours, that they ought not be lionized by virtue of their vocation and that they are, above all, a product of their time and place. It's a joke worth hearing.

Nazi Literature in the Americas is newly available in paperback.

–Robert Kotyk

Stripmalling
Jon Paul Fiorentino
ECW Press, 2009

Whenever someone gets around to writing the Great Canadian Novel, it ought to take place in a land of big-box stores and cluttered, unremarkable suburbs. It is not an easy place to write about. For the bulk of its population, Canada isn’t a country of wide-open spaces and endless, frozen landscapes. From most angles, it’s a practical place full of modest lives that don’t offer a lot of dramatic material for epic narratives. Jon Paul Fiorentino seems to be looking in the right place for a truly Canadian narrative in Stripmalling, his debut novel/autobiography with illustrations by Evan Munday.

When he keeps his story in the suburbs of Winnipeg, Fiorentino explores the darker aspects of the standard strip mall upbringing: the hopeless teenage jobs, the promiscuity, the fights and the boredom. But these familiar fragments are not at the core of the book. Stripmalling is really a novel about a young man who uncovers a creative instinct and leaves the strip mall to eventually write a novel called Stripmalling. Fiorentino attempts a quirky metanarrative, but nothing remarkable materializes in the text itself or the world beyond.

This is a diary of sorts. And you probably shouldn’t publish your diary until you’re dead. Too much of Fiorentino’s writing contains insights he should have kept to himself. An opening paragraph which references the “necessary unreliability of memory” serves as an early warning that for a book hyped on its comedic charm, someone is trying to make it awfully heavy. And there would be nothing wrong with that if so much of the novel didn’t come across as juvenile pontificating. For every nostalgic and vaguely beautiful image of a sprawling landscape, Fiorentino provides at least one empty rumination (“I do not want to thrive in YOUR world,” “Mine is a static literature.”). We never get the hidden stories of strip mall lives; we get romanticized pictures of places young Canadian authors glorify too often. Jonny ends up in Montreal (where else?), in the same cafes where, “Everyone is a writer, or was.” Despite initial promises, Fiorentino spews out stories of poverty, drugs and heartbreak like any other gloomy Mile-End amateur. Instead of sparking a literary imagination in under-explored places, Stripmalling reminds me of so many of my own strip mall nights: disappointing and easy to forget.

–Shane Patrick Murphy

May Books

Moira Peters — Sun, 24 May 2009 05:00:52 +0000

New work by Connolly, new release by Green

Revolver
Kevin Connolly
House of Anansi Press, 2008

It’s painful to admit, but poetry can be pretty predictable. This is especially true for Canadian poetry that gets nominated for major literary prizes. A reader can usually expect some variation of contemplative, lovelorn verses building up toward a climactic, self-realizing epiphany. Kevin Connolly, in his new Griffin Prize-nominated collection, Revolver, is refreshingly aware of these conventions without falling victim to them. Instead of adopting a lone voice to examine a set of well-trodden themes, Connolly pursues a gamut of unexplored poetic possibilities. Nearly every poem touches upon a different subject matter and engages a different structure. Connolly rejects the role of the poet as sullen narrator. Disarming as it is upon an initial reading, there is no unifying voice, tone, or narrative in this collection. This is a poet clearly enamoured with poetry itself, making verse out of whatever sparks his gushing imagination.

The risk, and maybe the downfall here, is that Connolly’s collection can feel more like an anthology than the work of a single author. From the goofy to the downright depressing, Connolly bounces between the extremities of inspiration without any segue or transition. You can almost hear Connolly's muse asking: How about a nature poem? A love poem? Got any about sports?

What first strikes you as plain novelty and quirkiness gradually becomes endearing as Connolly's many personalities all carve out original and gripping poems. From the start, the book opens with a table of contents that lists the names of vaguely familiar rock songs. A turn of the page reveals that these are not the actual titles of the poems at all. We're left guessing whether this was Connolly's soundtrack while writing the collection, or if it's a poetic collage on its own. Once the poems get started, we are given one poem that sounds like a graduate-school admission exam from hell, one that parodies the catechism, and another that is composed of a few columns of disconnected words under the heading “Three Sonnets (Assembly Required).”

Connolly's inspirations are spelled out explicitly in his notes, ranging from Mark Twain, contemporary American poets like Charles Simic, and the Welsh noise rock band Mclusky. After taking account of his sources and then reading the collection a few times, Connolly becomes strangely cohesive and coherent. Even as the poems clash stylistically, his reoccurring preoccupations provide a tiny modicum of unity that gives this eccentric and disparate collection its own vitality.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

Back
Henry Green
Dalkey Archive Press, 2009

Back, Henry Green’s 1946 novel of wartime homecoming, is loaded with enough individual suffering that it could almost take place on the battlefield from which its amputee-protagonist, Charley, has been salvaged.

Charley returns home to England to find that his pre-war sweetheart, Rose, has died in his absence, while her look-alike half-sister, Nancy, remains tortuously close at hand. The novel’s chief complication arises here, out of the sad fact that Charley’s wartime trauma and accompanying waves of self-preserving amnesia bar him from fully absorbing the news of Rose’s death. In meeting Nancy, Charley incorrectly assumes that he’s being reunited with his departed lover. Moreover, when Nancy rejects his affections, Charley descends into a confused turmoil, at one point enlisting the services of a handwriting expert to prove that the two sisters are one and the same.

Just as Green’s more touted masterpiece, Loving, documents the hermetic world of a tightly knit group of servants in a secluded Irish castle, Back bends around the wounded psyche of its protagonist with engrossing singularity. In one passage, the setting perfectly captures the muddled roiling of Charley’s simultaneous grief over Rose’s death and his hurt over Nancy’s persistent brush-offs.

He fled Rose, yet every place he went she rose up before him; in florists’ windows; in a second-hand bookseller’s with a set of Miss Rhoda Broughton, where, as he was staring for her reflection in the window, his eyes read a title, “Cometh up as a flower” which twisted his guts; also in a seed merchant’s front that displayed a watering can, to the spout of which was fixed an attachment, labelled ‘Carter’s patent Rose.’

Green emphasizes the inescapability of Rose’s memory by using the past tense of the verb “to rise” (“she rose up”) in the very sentence that introduces the ubiquity of her namesake. And amid Charley’s solipsistic bewilderment, Green the master stylist is out in full force. Beautiful, simile-laden descriptions like “[s]he was crying so much it made her face look like a pane of glass in the rain” crop up generously, appearing in scenes filled with Green’s meticulous simulation of English working-class speech.

Back is newly available from Dalkey Archive Press with a brilliant afterward by screenwriter and academic George Toles.

—Robert Kotyk

March Books

Moira Peters — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 06:00:31 +0000

New translations by Bolaño and Storm

2666
Roberto Bolaño
Translated by Natasha Wimmer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008

The reception of 2666, Roberto Bolaño’s latest and last novel to be translated into English, has often resembled an exercise in literary myth-making more than literary criticism. Critics have been competing for more lavish adjectives to praise 2666 ever since Bolaño’s other major novel, The Savage Detectives, gained a cult following. Now, just a few months after its release, the discussion has turned away from the novel itself and to the biographical details of the man who wrote it. Bolaño enthusiasts defend his romantic-bohemian image and viciously debate whether he really opposed Chilean President Pinochet, whether he was a drug addict, or whether 2666 was even close to complete when he died almost seven years ago.

So how did a 900-page tome by a formerly obscure Chilean nomad spark a fanatic following with English audiences? Its success has less to do with plot or genre and more to do with Bolaño’s ability to submerge his readers in hundreds of interconnected plots while he borrows from countless genres. To link its disparate parts, the novel has two thematic poles which become entangled by the end. The first narrative link—a reclusive German author who writes under the name Archimboldi—frames the first and last sections of the book. But the major backdrop is Santa Teresa, a fictitious stand-in for Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and the ongoing mass killings of women there.

Bolaño’s depictions of rape and murder in Mexico go beyond merely graphic. They are painful to read, and that’s exactly the point. Bolaño’s political and moral outrage is expressed by forcing his readers to confront the carnage in its rawest form. There are times when every reader will pause and wonder if Bolaño is perversely enjoying the excuse to spew out lurid details that would make “true crime” fans salivate. After the hundredth continuous page describing the decomposed remains, the coroner’s report, and the known details of another teenaged victim, you’re either shocked, repulsed, or bored.

This boredom is one of Bolaño’s central concerns and it surfaces throughout the novel, starting with the epigraph from Baudelaire: “An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.” Bolaño doesn’t expound the banality of evil; instead, evil becomes one escape from banality and poverty. Creativity and literature, as embodied by his character Archimboldi, form the alternate sort of escape. Unlike his other books, which obsessively document the creative process, Bolaño rarely details Archimboldi’s motivations as a writer. In one of several indications that 2666 is not quite a finished work, Archimboldi is left as a vague literary silhouette in a world of beauty and boredom where it seems everyone writes books, makes love, or kills people.

Bolaño once wrote: “We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.” The several life stories in 2666 inevitably intersect, drift apart, and get forgotten. To digest each of these stories would require never-ending re-reads. And for Bolaño, now the most acclaimed Latin American author since Gabriel Garcia Marquez, his life and legend seem to be more vital than ever.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

The Rider on the White Horse
Theodor Storm
Translated by James Wright
New York Review of Books Classics, 2009

Theodor Storm's classic novella The Rider on the White Horse contains some meaty pearls of wisdom nestled within a portrait of Germany's sodden Northern Friesland region, but blink and you'll miss them: these flashes of Storm's perceptive strength never take precedence over his evocation of the setting. The land emerges as the focal point for Storm and the novella's characters—a rural community of no-nonsense types who would rather discuss the structural efficacy of their town's protective dykes than allow themselves the sinister distraction of philosophy.

Nevertheless, pearls there are, such as the disturbingly clear sketch of the protagonist Hauke Haien's seething drive to become the town's dykemaster:

Suddenly he felt furiously angry at those faces, and he actually reached out to grasp them, for they obviously wanted nothing better than to block his way to the very position which suited him and only him. These thoughts were never wholly absent from his mind. In such ways, in the living presence of the honor and love in his young heart, ambition and hatred grew up side by side. But they rooted deep inside him, and even Elke failed to suspect their existence.

If the heart of Storm's story offers pastoral beauty and occasional peace (albeit within a community where a catastrophic flood could strike at any time), there is a tension to be felt at its edges: the main tale comes mediated by no fewer than three mysterious narrators, layered one upon the other as the narrative slowly rolls out in the opening pages. We are offered at once a haunting ghost story and the poignant recounting of the life that produced it, a wondrous blend of fantasy and futility that spans over a century and a half and still feels remarkably contained, flanked by the North Sea's frigid depths.

—Robert Kotyk

February Books

Moira Peters — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 17:04:26 +0000

New works by Romanik and Gass

10 Things to Ask Yourself in Warsaw and Other Stories
Barbara Romanik
Enfield & Wizenty, 2008

Barbara Romanik’s short fiction rips along with streetwise verve, displaying an eclectic sense of style and some beguiling idiosyncrasies along the way. Several of the stories take place in the prairies (the author is described in her bio as a “Polish Canadian from Edmonton who now resides in Winnipeg”), but Romanik has an outsider’s eye for the details. Consider the way the prose comes alive when she begins to describe the prairie cityscape, as in the following evocation of Edmonton’s “slumburbia” in “Caught Up”:

At its worst, downtown lets itself go east of 97th street. It turns into a crumbling concrete, broken glass and rotting plywood on buildings, parking lots, and street alleys behind the restaurants, bars, and sexshops. There the pavement gives birth to resignation, a numbing stench of nuclear proportions, as moldy as cheese. Yet both Little Italy and Chinatown manage to rise to the top of it like cream. The wind and the snow, winter’s avenging angels, have covered most of it up and masked the stale odour.

Those who have lived in a prairie city will recognize a trace of themselves in “the pavement gives birth to resignation” amid a paragraph that perfectly conjures forth the bleak atrophy of life in a deep freeze. Intermingling interview transcripts, newspaper articles, advertisements, and other “found” documents, Romanik isn’t afraid to mix genres: a kind of patchwork that suits her characters’ conception of themselves as misfits. It also seems logical that this literary mash-up aesthetic would suit a longer form, meaning that if Romanik follows the most common career trajectory from a first short fiction collection, readers will be hearing about a novel at some point in the future.

Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas
William H. Gass
Dalkey Archive Press, 2009

William H. Gass is one of the senior practitioners of American literary postmodernism, and he comes by it honestly. Of the works collected in Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas (first published in 1998 and newly available from Dalkey Archive Press), “Cartesian Sonata” appeared in 1964, making Gass one of the early experimental writers to join in the movement’s mid-century flowering. Gass’s reputation was achieved not by appropriating a set of pre-established conventions, as is the case with many “postmodern” writers (an increasingly empty descriptor) emerging even today, but through the gradual refinement of an aesthetic and years spent reading and writing on the vanguard. The book collection in Gass’s St. Louis home reportedly contains upwards of 19,000.

It’s a fascinating glimpse into the foundation of these techniques, in abundance over the last several decades to the point of cliché, at play for the first time. The title novella comes soaked in the kind of metafictional conceit instantly recognizable as one of the defining hallmarks of the postmodern sensibility: a story begins, and almost immediately the anxious writer’s own personality insinuates itself within the narration, explaining, fretting, and ultimately deconstructing. But Gass’s work is not without its straightforward rewards. For example, a passage in “The Master of Secret Revenges” enunciates with glittering precision the ethos that drove postwar writers of Gass’s ilk toward the subversion of established fiction writing technique:

[R]evelations are rarely the result of the minds climbing a ladder, each clear and definitely placed rung surmounted foot after foothold like a fireman performing a rescue; they are achieved more in the devious way cream rises to the top of its countless globules of fat are floating free and slipping upward . . . until gradually, nearly unnoticed, the globs form a mass which forces the blue milk beneath, whereupon the sweet cream crowns the carton, waiting to be skimmed.

Gass’s is the kind of work born of an artist’s total immersion within a form, to the point that, at some stage of development, the artistic enterprise begins seeking to change that form’s rules entirely. The latter novellas are the most controlled execution of Gass’s style and, as a result, feel the most accomplished. In general, the novella demonstrates a peculiar insularity, transient yet sustained, that sets it apart from the short story, perfectly suiting Gass’s more mature sensibility.

January Books

Moira Peters — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 10:56:09 +0000

New works by Gander, Dodds, Cole

As a Friend
Forrest Gander
New Directions, 2008

When a successful poet sets out to write a novel, the results can often be mixed. From E.E. Cummings to Al Purdy, major poets often see their ventures into prose go long forgotten while their poetry remains revered. By the time a poet has become established – which often takes far longer than a single lifetime – it may be in the best interest of both writer and reader to stay within the bounds of pre-established technique. Forrest Gander, a leading American poet and translator, has carefully taken this plunge into the world of prose with his recent novel, As a Friend. However, Gander’s work remains immensely successful by making only the slightest concessions to the novel as an established form. At only 106 pages, As a Friend consists of four distinct sections that cover an admirable amount of stylistic and thematic territory. Gander’s greatest accomplishment is that he consistently knows when to inject his poetic observations and when to sit back and allow the story to unfold.

The novel opens with a mother in a hospital watching her teenage daughter struggle through a difficult birth. Gander’s depiction – interspersing poignant asides throughout a clear and neutral narration – becomes so palpable and gripping it feels as though he has gone through labour himself. From that loosely connected introduction, Gander explores the unintended consequences that extend from individual choices. The central figure of the novel is a poet and part-time labourer committed to exploring the multiple and often contradictory opportunities that life offers. He marries one woman, lives with another, sleeps with a revolving cast of extras. His goal is to find a “different way to be in the world,” but through love and friendship his iconoclasm leads a path of failure and pain, death and grief. It’s a stark and somewhat dreary tale, but Gander’s instincts as a poet allow him to build a mass of emotional insight without sentimentality, clichés, or wasted words.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

Crabwise to the Hounds
Jeramy Dodds
Coach House, 2008

The title of Jeramy Dodds’s Crabwise to the Hounds suggests a connection to circuitousness (crabwise) and surrealism (ditto), but the result is an unambiguously confident debut collection from a rich new Canadian poet. If one of the creatures from a Marcel Dzama watercolour got its paws on some John Ashbery, the result might sound like Dodds, whose voice is unmistakably local though far from provincial. Running through the collection, in other words, is a rigorous sense of taste, as several of the poems’ first stanzas open with a provocative declaration (“In his stovepipe hat, he hunted / to extinction the animals that brought / us déjà vu.”), that beckon the reader towards the subsequent lines packed with the most lushly rendered imagery.

Dodds’s spectacular diction and the wide range of his subjects reveal an unconventionally educated imagination and spirit of inquiry aimed at the natural world. Strange, pseudo-Canadian landscapes appear in “Crown Land,” ("Some warped beasts pinched off / the rag-and-bone rack, ones that / bit by barbed bit were forced to / fisticuffs in the scrub slump of hills"), while the breathless showstopper, “Glenn Gould Negotiates the Danube in the Company of a Raven,” provides the capstone for this dazzling book by a young talent already refined.

—Robert Kotyk

Things on Which I’ve Stumbled
Peter Cole
New Directions, 2008

Peter Cole is a major American poet and translator based in Israel who brings Hebrew and Arabic poetry to the English-speaking world. In the title poem of this collection, Cole attempts to make a new and original work out of fragments of medieval Hebrew texts he discovered in the archives of Cambridge University. The Cambridge collection contains what was found in an uncovered geniza in Cairo – a storeroom of abandoned Hebrew texts. The fragments are not always poems; they include legal contracts, commercial correspondence, and brief personal letters. As Cole weaves these texts into his own poetry, the result is a strange amalgamation of the sacred and the profane in writing that ranges from highly lyrical to purely pragmatic. In less capable hands, the results might have been a mess, lacking in either historical insight or poetic expression. However, Cole’s multifaceted talent allows the poetry to thrive, turning these obscure fragments into a unique work all its own.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

November Books

hillarybain — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 08:05:56 +0000

New works by Stifter and Endicott

Rock Crystal
Adalbert Stifter
Translated by Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore
New York Review of Books Classics, 2008.

Rock Crystal, a 19th-century Austrian story now available in an attractive little edition from NYRB Classics, is written in pure, evocative language, never too virtuosic but not at all plain, and the narrative is relayed with majestically broad omniscience and a bountiful sense of history. It is a story that starts off calm and easy but gradually becomes a tale of excruciating suspense. It is about Christmas, but it is not insipid or Christmassy.

A boy, Conrad, and his little sister Sanna embark on a hike to their grandparents' village on the other side of an alpine mountain range. Their grandmother, whose hunger to lay eyes upon the pair "amounts to a morbid craving" (a perfect characterization of grandparental longing), receives them, feeds them until they are full, loads them with snacks and gifts for their parents, and sends them trundling home. On the way back, the children run into trouble: it begins to snow and they take shelter in a mountainside cave. Their grandmother's bundle keeps them warm for the night, a canister of coffee staves off sleep and cold, and in the morning they are found by a search party, to the supreme relief of their mother, whose fears have brought the village to the family's aid. These themes of communal living and of the constancy of rural communities emerge near the beginning of the story, as the narrator surveys the region and its customs:

"The village people thus constitute a separate world, they know one another by name and are familiar with all the grandfathers' and great-grandfathers' tales. All mourn when anyone dies; all know the name of the new-born; they speak a language which is different from that used in the plain; they have their quarrels and settle them; they help one another, and if anything unusual happens, come flocking together."

The author, master stylist Adalbert Stifter, lived from 1805 until 1868, but did not do so with the assistance of any such flocking. When his father died young, Stifter was sent to boarding school. He was barred from speaking to the love of his life, and, when he did marry, one of his adopted children ran away and another was killed. Suicidal, he bled to death from a self-inflicted wound.

How painful it must have been to know tranquility and to have lived its opposite, and how rare to have retained the gift to describe it so acutely. There can never be too many lucid evocations of the past in literature, partly because of the memory-distorting effects of nostalgia, which, as Austria would find out less than a century after Stifter, can usher in problems for the present by erasing those of the past. Stifter is worth reading because he evokes nostalgia without succumbing to it. It should come as no surprise, then, that the late, great W. G. Sebald, possessor of the most clear-sighted vision of the past in recent literature, admired Stifter's powers of expression. So should we all.

– Robert Kotyk

Good to a Fault
Marina Endicott
Freehand Books, 2008.

It is unusual to come across a contemporary novel that takes up moral themes as modestly as Endicott does in her latest work, Good to a Fault. Goodness, in this meditation, is a functional thing, a hospital corridor where reluctant visitors brush past each other on their way to confront realities larger than themselves. Clara Purdy, a middle-aged insurance clerk, is driving to the bank one July day, “thinking about herself and the state of her soul,” when she plows into a beat-up Dart conveying (and housing, as it turns out) the Gage family: hardscrabble parents Lorraine and Clayton, a mulish mother-in-law, and three children; Dolly, Trevor and baby Pearce. Clara’s life is transformed; with Lorraine in the hospital for an extended period, Clayton deserts the family and Clara ends up taking over the care of the three children.

There is immense subtlety in the way Endicott handles her characters and themes; when Clara looks at sleeping Lorraine, Endicott observes, “her mouth had fallen slightly open, relaxed, and her hand lying nearest to Clara had opened too. Long fingers, nicely shaped. She was worth helping.” While the Gages’ lower-class status fundamentally shapes their interaction with Clara, her childlessness acts as an equivalently handicapping ‘status’ marker. At the grocery store, “They got the special grocery cart with the red baby seat. Secretly, Clara supposed, she must always have longed to use this cart. And now she had every right to pop Pearce into the vinyl seat and wrestle with the knotted straps and bent buckles.” Good to a Fault is a work of nuanced social portraiture, and the slow romance between Clara and her (Anglican) priest draws out the problem of childlessness and societal worth in a surprisingly modern way.

– Linda Besner

October Books

Moira Peters — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 03:29:14 +0000

New works by Bolaño, Lerch and Ohle

The Romantic Dogs
Roberto Bolaño
New Directions Press: 2008

Five years after his death, it’s hardly surprising that Roberto Bolaño’s name is becoming increasingly familiar in the English-speaking world. The lauded Chilean’s works reverberate with sex, exiled Latin Americans, literary obsessions, literary pretensions, violence, politics, and, well, more sex. While Bolaño is mainly known for his novels and short stories (The Savage Detectives being the best known), he wrote in prose only as a reluctant admission that, like many of his characters, poets earn one lousy living.

This collection of his poetry, the first to be translated into English, serves as an intriguing complement to Bolaño’s prose, but it probably won’t convert many readers who haven’t encountered Bolaño before. Although his romantic subject matter is well represented here, Bolaño’s novels are addictive largely because of the wild, ecstatic voices of his narrators. In his poetry, Bolaño takes on a more contemplative, detached tone that makes his poetry, if nothing else, less fun.

Most of the pieces in this collection are short vignettes that recall the loneliness and desperation of Bolaño’s formative years as an exile from Pinochet’s Chile. In front of this political backdrop, we find his preoccupation with love and literature. The short pieces give us some glances into Bolaño’s sense of black humour and satire: “Father, in the Kingdom of Heaven that is communism, is there a place for homosexuals?” (from “Ernesto Cardenal and I”). But it is the longer pieces that allow Bolaño to really be himself. One of the longest, “Visit to the Convalescent,” gives us a youthful narrator who has escaped from a fallen country to run wild in Mexico City while “the rest of the world’s cities are drowning in uniformity and silence.” Such sentiments show Bolaño at both his best and most irksome. These laconic verses make it nearly impossible to determine the depth of his irony and naivety. Bolaño’s writing is impossibly cool to the point that we are never sure whether the author is laughing at himself or his readers. In these short poems, Bolaño still manages to draw us in with his wanderer’s tales. Then once we are comfortable, he offers the occasional stab to the rest of the world who sat at home while he spent his life drifting from country to country, book to book, and love to love.

– Shane Patrick Murphy

Witness and Resist
Marilyn Lerch
Morgaine House: 2008

The very first poem in Marilyn Lerch's Witness and Resist makes clear what the poet feels a poem should accomplish: “to witness for beauty and resist despair.” This is a collection that confronts the state of the world with all the compassionate empathy and emotional activism essential to giving the individual a voice and sense of importance within that world. Lerch boldly takes on a wide range of personalities: Chilean tour guide Maria Luz, who has flashbacks to being raped and seeing her baby burned alive; dead soldier Joseph Terry Riordon, who "dutifully toured the First Sitting Duck Gulf War;" and widely looked-up-to intellectual role model Dick Clapp, who became a small town judge and "put a bullet in his brain." Lerch ups the ante by assuming the viewpoint of a dying man whose black skin is “shiny on knobs of bone:”

My life,
like the diamonds and zinc and oil
that lay under those black voids
on the old maps,
is being taken from me.

This powerful New Brunswick poet not only plays the empath, but unashamedly includes herself in a universe of vulnerability with a ten-page exploration of and letter to her father: "Your absence was our intimacy, so/ how could I not believe/ this profound indifference to life/ included me?" Although the narrators' unselfconscious tales do at times get lost in obscure references that over-shelter the greater implications of the work, any confusion is quickly surmountable. Fearless of dealing in darkness, it is no surprise that this wide-eyed work also catches sight of the light: "Yes,/ always the dark and/ new stars in the making,/ the bombs will fall, compassion/ always possible.”

— Maya Rolbin-Ghanie

The Pisstown Chaos
David Ohle
Soft Skull Press: 2008

Whatever one might think of Cormac McCarthy’s father-son doomsday travelogue The Road, it is a novel that may present as doleful an elegy for the debasement of the American family as anything yet written this century. In a related (but different) vein, The Pisstown Chaos, the zany and strangely beautiful new novel by David Ohle, exhibits none of McCarthy’s penchant for scenes of sad kinship at the end of the world as we know it, even as it mines our cultural moment of extreme uncertainty in the service of a similarly apocalyptic mode. Ohle’s novel is a family dystopia in a more eccentric key: it whizzes between the radically divergent fates of its characters, the formerly wealthy Balls clan, with scatological merriment, from one depredation to the next, like some strange unproduced episode of Arrested Development collectively written by Anthony Burgess, George Saunders, and the Marquis de Sade.

In so doing, Ohle frequently opens up space for trenchant satire in the form of short news stories and community bulletins, collagistically laid out before each chapter. As one begins: “An imp herder working one of the Reverend’s meadows is fit to be tied. He found his most productive female dead in her pen yesterday. The belly was scissored open, the teats cut, the heart carried off. The herder wants to blame stinkers for the latest raid on his stock. The incident is doubly sorrowful, coming so soon after the same herder discovered the wings of his favorite banty imp nailed to the stump of an oak. Neighbors testify that he now spends his time stalking the reaches of the Reverend’s property, pistol drawn, so anxious to shoot a stinker that he has accidentally killed three of his best stud imps.” The bulk of the story pits ordinary citizens against the “stinkers,” a parasite-ridden lower caste of zombies, while the nation’s despot is a political bloviator and reverend seemingly modeled after right-wing American talk show host Bill O’Reilly. The result is a weird and precious addition to the growing literature of the gloomy. Bleakness has never looked so rich.

— Robert Kotyk

September Books

Moira Peters — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 11:27:32 +0000

New works by Venart and Stiles

Woodshedding
S.E. Venart
Brick: London, 2007.

If her work is any indication, S.E. Venart’s poems are made up of dispatches from a writing life that is underway with admirable vigilance. Woodshedding, her first collection, ferrets out space for its intellectual labours around the contemplation of the ordinary, but time moves neither too fast, nor too slow; the poems emerge from life’s infrequent furrows of solitude with refreshing tranquility.

The poet shares this pursuit with bird-watchers, monks and joggers: inhabitants of what Venart calls “privileged openings,” pockets of inspiration that open up with circumstance (“There are sudden canopies/of silence between the low tones/of speedboats”), but which become worthy of safeguarding when the moment lingers (“Touch, I think, is mostly overrated.//It makes for only the luckiest/misunderstandings. I prefer the syllables of birds.”).

The full end-stop between the line about touch and the next reflects the exalted status that Venart affords to this sense of aloneness and sequestration, but the poems encourage a certain level of interior play even amid the hustle and bustle of one’s daily commute. This dual mode, mingling worldly tumult with the concerns of the self, can be heard in a line from “Sightings”: “I’m back in the city, stopped for a red light, reading the off-ramp’s/sprayed messages,” which echoes an earlier poem, “Lanes,” ending with “The sun overcoming me. . . /throwing light down on me as I bring/flesh and soul together, and fall/again into the moving traffic of myself.”

When a musician friend of mine makes a trip “out to the woodshed,” he means to remain there; anywhere, that is, so long as he cannot be reached by phone, e-mail, Facebook message, or any of the other brazenly intrusive gizmos of this early 21st century; for as long as it takes to learn a part on his tuba.

References to musicianship pervade Venart’s work-—her own epigraph invokes the improvisatory play of a jazz musician—-but as another definition of the collection’s title included in the epigraph attests, “woodshedding” also refers to the administration of a “sound parental thrashing.” Venart perhaps means that her work reveals itself only with the avoidance of easy pleasures and through an embrace of an ascetic self-discipline. If so, her collection reflects this principle with uncommon beauty and maturity.

– Robert Kotyk

Taking the Stairs
John Stiles
Nightwood: Gibson's Landing, BC, 2008.

Stiles' protagonist, Jarod, is a struggling writer whose phone is simply ringing off the hook with job offers. His friend Elliot wants to pay him exorbitant amounts of money to write a screenplay, and it's all Jarod can do to evade his would-be benefactor so he's free to endlessly re-read his abortive short story attempts and fret about his unfinished novel. High doses of implausibility and inaction can kill just about any novel and Stiles' choice of subject matter only furthers these problems.

The “writing about writing” genre is an extremely tricky one to make engaging and Jarod spends a tedious amount of time bellyaching about what a chore it is to stuff his work into envelopes and mail it off to literary magazines.

Although Taking the Stairs is written in the first person, Jarod's personality remains curiously opaque. He fights with his girlfriend; he works odd jobs; he holds circuitous telephone conversations with people he's trying to avoid. Stiles has included in Taking the Stairs several excerpts from Jarod's oeuvres, which are bad without being atrocious enough for comic effect and it's unclear just how much we are meant to sympathize with Jarod.

Stylistically, there's not much here to save this book from itself. “He says that when people jump off bridges, they land on their feet and their legs get jammed up inside their bodies and have to be pulled back out with a huge set of tongs,” is as interesting as it gets, unless you count the anatomical curiosity of the phrase, “She looks fine with her round spanish ass in a tight, tasteful blouse.” Must be quite the figure.

– Linda Besner

March Books

hillarybain — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 12:25:30 +0000

New works by Trussler, Adamson, Snider, and Friedman

Accidental Animals
Michael Trussler
Hagios: Regina, 2007.

There's an openness to Trussler's stanzas that's oddly relaxing—his speakers seem willing to accept whatever comes, even defeat. The unabashed autobiographical bent of these poems provides continuity and context, which allow some of the most difficult moments to resonate. A recently divorced parent writes to his daughter about the mistakes made by “your Mom and Dad, and the other/big people around you—all of who/ will never touch who you really are.” Though this kind of pronouncement occasionally verges on preciousness, it's not all sentiment; there are also some great lines like, “My face sweats so much sometimes it's/ like snails are copulating on the lenses.” The engaging authenticity of the content allows the reader to look past some awkwardness in the form. Trussler uses devices that other poets have employed to great effect, but here the slashes and numbered stanza breaks that don't actually divide the poem feel like exercises. Trussler's meditations, however, feel fruitful, and the collection gives a refreshingly honest sense of reflection rooted in experience.

--Linda Besner

The Outlander
Gil Adamson
Anansi: Toronto, 2007.

The Outlander, set in the early 1900s, chronicles the adventures of “the widow,” a 19-year-old woman who has killed her husband and is now fleeing his vengeful twin brothers across Western Canada. Adamson has done a fine job of endowing the widow with a complicated character, giving her so many faults it's a wonder the reader manages to like her—but we do. The niggling technical question in Adamson's execution is a distracting inconsistency in point of view. The narrative voice stays, for the most part, fairly close to the protagonist, but occasionally bolts into startling omniscience, remarking, as the widow fails to recognize the edible plants surrounding her in the forest, “Abundance lay about her, but she starved.” This, paired with phrases like, “August dandelion seeds floated across their path, as if nature itself hoped to bewitch them from their purpose and dream them into the trees,” lends The Outlander a kind of Hardyesque grandiosity, at the heart of which is a ballad's tall tale of a love story. Gather around the campfire and listen to Adamson spin this one out.

--Linda Besner

On Performing
Bob Snider
Gaspereau: Kentville, 2007.

This is intended as a self-help book: Bob Snider, the Canadian folk musician, gives a series of tips for whoever, in his words, wants to learn to be “a ham.” Here's a sample of his prose style:

Timing is the art of saying or doing the right thing at the right time. Let's say you're standing one the street with a friend and you decide to tell a joke.'I always wanted to be a tree surgeon,' you say, 'but I faint at the sight of sap.' This is a good joke and will probably get a laugh or a smile. But if your friend happens to mention that he had some tree surgery done in his yard and you then tell him your joke it will benefit from the addition of good timing.

This earnest explication doesn't seem to match what most people mean by the word “timing” in comedy. There is a vagueness here that plagues the book from the outset, as Snider gives would-be performers generic, flatly phrased advice like, “Anecdotes are interesting and illustrative.” Snider may be an entertaining performer, but he's not much of a writer.

--Linda Besner

Long Story Short
Elyse Friedman
Anansi: Toronto, 2008.

The situations depicted in Elyse Friedman’s new collection of funny and often unsettling stories are mounted with droll, crisp dialogue. Particularly likable is the Journey Prize-nominated “Truth,” which imagines a dating world in which the commitment to spoken veracity (Him: “My self-esteem will be temporarily boosted if I get you into bed tonight, and that waitress is making me horny.” Her: “I have masochistic inclinations and I’m feeling self-destructive.”) exposes the everydayness of game playing and self-deception. While amusingly told, the collection’s novella, “A Bright Tragic Thing,” about a young man who befriends a washed-up sitcom actor for the inside joke-generating potential afforded by their taped phone conversations, is overlong and, in the end, verges on preachiness. Cruelty aside, doesn’t the occasional lending of a disingenuously sympathetic ear to a bad-tempered friend constitute a necessary, even quasi-noble component of lasting companionship? Friedman privileges empathy in the story, upbraiding a youthful culture of detachment, but her targets feel too easy here, straw men (boys, really) who never quite evolve out of a caricature of their videogaming demographic.

--Robert Kotyk