The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

A Dorito asks nothing of you, which is its great gift. It only asks that you are not there.

I can't honestly say that I enjoyed reading The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, but the constant upset and frission that it produced in me means that Aimee Bender certainly wrote a book that affected me, and I'm having trouble deciding where that places it on the like-to-love scale.

Just before her ninth birthday, Rose Edelstein developed a curious gift: with just a bite of any food, she can read the cook's emotional state. That she recognised a hollow sadness in her mother's lemon cake was a confusing and terrifying realisation for Rose, and although she tried to describe her problem at first, her mother didn't understand (It's empty? Like I forgot an ingredient?). Years go by and Rose tries to negotiate the emotions in the foods she eats -- from the school cafeteria to her friend's lovingly packed lunches to the welcome sterility of factory-packaged junk food -- and although she makes a few attempts to explain to other people what it is she goes through, Rose remains distant from most people -- and especially from her own family -- only getting edible glimpses of her mother that she tries to suppress. 

What I found upsetting about this book is just how isolated everyone was. Rose's mother, Lane, is beautiful and lost; she is naturally good at everything but could never find what she wanted to do with her life. Rose can taste her mother's pain, but doesn't ask her about it, and other than an early breakdown where Rose cried uncontrollably about wanting to remove her own mouth, Rose never tried to tell her mother what she went through. Instead, she decided to become her mother's secret keeper:

I knew if I ate anything of hers again, it would likely tell me the same message: help me, I am not happy, help me -- like a message in a bottle sent in each meal to the eater, and I got it. I got the message.

Rose's father Paul -- a kind and decent Provider who was blind to the unhappiness around him -- has his own quirk: he is unable to enter hospitals; had to watch for news of his children's births from the sidewalk across the street. Wanting to make some kind of connection with him, Rose started to watch TV with him in the evenings:

It was like we were exchanging codes, on how to be a father and a daughter, like we'd read about it in a manual, translated from another language, and were doing our best with what we could understand.

Rose's brother Joseph is a genius, averse to human touch, and his mother's favourite (her it). There's a strange ritual (once Lane takes up woodworking) where Joseph would spend an hour every week removing the splinters from his mother's hands, but even this wasn't really about touch or human connection:

That at the same time of this very intimate act of concentrating so carefully on the details of our mother's palm and fingertips, he was also removing all traces of any tiny leftover parts, and suddenly a ritual which I'd always found incestuous and gross seemed to me more like a desperate act on Joseph's part to get out, to leave, to extract every little last remnant and bring it into open air.

So there's all this pain and no one is acknowledging it and the years go by and it isn't until Rose hits her twenties that anything changes and she learns that she may not be the only one in her family with a special power **spoiler** Joseph worked on transforming into furniture until, unable to bear the pain of existing in the real world any longer, turned into a folding chair for good. Paul revealed that, not only could his father "read people" by smelling them, but he suspects that he would be able to heal people in hospitals and that's why he avoids them. ** end spoiler**  And then the book ends with maybe a glimmer of hope for Rose as she explores how she might use her gift (which has evolved into her also being able to separate out ingredients in food and identify what State or factory or farm they came from). 

People who apparently know the difference declare that The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake isn't magical realism so much as surrealism, but either way, there's an element of unrealism that prevented me from connecting with these characters and their story: for a novel about emotions, I didn't get these people emotionally, and that might be the point, and I might not be smart enough to see what's really going on here (since critics seem to universally love it). But it can't be dismissed either: the writing was consistently very interesting, and like I started with, this book shook me up. I'm having a heart and head conflict about this one, and that's likely Bender's intention, and therefore she succeeded, so it's a hesitant and qualified four stars.

I read this book because Aimee Bender wrote the only short story referenced in The Storied Life of A. J. Fikrey that I couldn't access online (or at my library). In that story, Ironhead, apparently a mom and dad with pumpinheads give birth to a son with an ironhead and it's considered a grave birth defect and doesn't lead to a happy ending. That should have tipped me off to the kind of surrealism that Bender works with, and although this book isn't on my list of favourites, I would be interested in exploring her work some more in the future.

My Salinger Year

The big picture of My Salinger Year is an enjoyable read: Fresh from dropping out of Grad School, Joanna Rakoff moves to NYC, falls in love with an older, Socialist wanna-be writer/amateur boxer ("like Mailer, only better"), and lands her first grownup job. Over the next year, Rakoff is forced to examine who she is and who she wants to be, and like all of us, makes that painful transition into adulthood. Because the year is 1996, Rakoff is also able to capture a time right on the cusp of going digital -- which was particularly momentous in the publishing industry where she worked -- and this lends her story a sheen of historical importance. All of this is good stuff.

But what annoyed me (and what might be of further historical interest to other readers) is how in the details Rakoff is a protohipster: carefully describing each vintage, thrift shop outfit (paired with the expensive Italian suede loafers her mother bought her); humblebragging about her Williamsburg apartment that had no heat or kitchen sink (but, hey, to live in this neighbourhood, who wouldn't wash dishes in the bathtub?); everyone she knows wear large, unflattering glasses and carry satchels full of notebooks and manuscripts; her boyfriend casually tosses a guayabera into a duffle bag (which I had to look up, because dumbo me, I didn't know what a Mexican four pocket wedding shirt was); and Rakoff writes about her poverty (which, with the surprise bills her Dad hands her, I don't doubt), but she constantly eats out and attends rooftop parties (where she and her friends ironically drink their parents' favourite cocktails) and keeps herself afloat in NYC. To further distance herself from the common experience, she writes:

Before I'd moved to New York, it seemed as though everyone was there, playing cockroaches in experimental plays, or making broody films at Colombia, or working at galleries, or teaching dance to the poor kids in Brownsville or to the rich kids at St. Ann's.

Yeah, that's what everyone I know was doing. But Rakoff takes a job as an assistant to a literary agent -- and she refers to them throughout only as "my boss" at "the Agency", but apparently everyone knows it's Phyllis Westberg at Harold Ober Associates -- and Rakoff spends her days listening to a Dictaphone through oversize headphones and typing out letters on a huge, humming Selectric (and how hipster is that?) Fairly quickly, Rakoff learns that J. D. Salinger -- or Jerry as they call him -- is her boss' number one client, and to her alarm, she must speak to the near deaf author on the phone (which is pretty funny), and eventually, to send off form letters to people who send him fanmail (which is pretty touching since the form letter states that Mr. Salinger requests that nothing be sent on to him). This old fashioned agency, with its leather chairs and shaded lamps, is contrasted nicely with the fluorescent lights and white cubicles of the textbook publisher where Rakoff's friend works, and even though the friend calls the agency funereal, it's easy to see the appeal it had for Rakoff -- even the people are old-fashioned, with courtly manners and ivory cigarette holders. 

And as interesting as the Agency was, here's my further complaint: Rakoff, from nearly the beginning, could apparently see where the Agency needed to get with the times. She also implies that despite her boss' legendary status in the publishing industry, if Rakoff had been in charge, they wouldn't have lost Judy Blume as a client. And, incredibly, although Rakoff was a poet and an English major, she had never read any Salinger and resisted doing so until she had been at the Agency for eight months. After bingeing on his complete works over a long weekend, she declares:

Salinger was not cutesy. His work was not nostalgic. These were not fairy tales about child geniuses traipsing the streets of Old New York.

Salinger was nothing like I'd thought. Nothing.

Salinger was brutal. Brutal and funny and precise. I loved him. I loved it all.

Something about this -- as though Rakoff had discovered Salinger on behalf of all of us -- just turned me off, and here's my biggest complaint of all: as someone who actually met Salinger, as someone who intimately knew how the man valued his privacy, there's a whiff of betrayal in her memoir. Rakoff recreated here some of the most emotional fan letters that passed through her hands, told of a Salinger book deal gone sour, even described that his flannel shirt and jeans both looked pressed, his hands warm and large -- I think that these are precisely the kind of details that Salinger became a recluse to avoid disclosing. This wouldn't be a best-seller without "Salinger" in the title (even though this book isn't really about him and has plenty of merit on its own) and that feels cheap to me. Even the treatment of her boss (and the revelation of her private affairs) had a gossipy The Devil Wears Prada vibe. The ending -- thirteen years after leaving the Agency, Rakoff learns of Salinger's death -- was redemptive, however, and I was invested enough in Rakoff to be glad to hear that her own story seems to have worked out okay.

I've read The Catcher in the Rye twice and Franny and Zooey once, and because of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikrey, I recently read A Perfect Day for Bananafish. I should read more Salinger (and should keep in mind that Rakoff calls Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters one of the funniest books in the English language). It would be good to do some rereads in order to review the ones I've read already, but on the other hand, I'd hate to look like some kind of crumbum phony...

Once Were Friends

Mark Victor Young uses two epigraphs to introduce Once Were Friends: a quote from Shakespeare's Henry V and one from Shakespeare on Management, and in these two quotes lie the crux of the story -- like A Thousand Acres or The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, Young has updated a Shakespearean play by placing the narrative in a modern scenario; in this case, transposing the battlefield to the boardroom. And just as that sounds like a natural leap when you think about it, it works out really well on the page.

Much like Henry V, Hal Mercer has inherited his father's company -- his kingdom -- after a raucous, carefree youth; but as with Henry V, it would be wrong to underestimate this newly focussed leader. Hal determines that the only way to strengthen (perhaps to save) the company he has inherited is to merge with -- and if need be, make a hostile takeover of -- the much larger rival: D'Arville Industries. Hal must also confront the re-emergence of Kate D'Arville into his life; the only woman he has ever loved, and the daughter of the rival CEO. What Young does really well here is to make both sides sympathetic -- through the back and forth of the boardroom battles, even if the reader would like to see Hal come out on top, Kate is also fighting for the survival of her family's company (and is not helped by the actions and attitudes of her powerful brother and heir apparent, Chuck). Ultimately,the drama is resolved at the big industry Trade Show (fittingly held on October 25th, the date of Henry V's own decisive Battle of Agincourt).

There are many such tie-ins with the play and real history (from character names like "Archie Bishop" for the Archbishop of Canterbury to plot points that I might have anticipated if I knew the source better) and each chapter has an epigraph from Henry V which were of varying degrees of effectiveness: famous quotes like "once more unto the breach, dear friends" or "we few, we happy few, we band of brothers" are interesting to see tied in, but often, the epigraphs seemed to serve the structure instead of the story. I also wasn't convinced about the turn that Pete's character takes, and if that's from the play, I think it could have been better foreshadowed. And one last complaint -- it was really distracting to me that I didn't learn what Mercer Incorporated or D'Arville Industries were manufacturing and selling; widgets or wingnuts, a book that has people talking corporate lingo about efficiencies and units should have told me what those units were.

On the other hand, the writing was interesting ( His thick red hair and salt and paprika goatee was flecked with sweat and sawdust) and the characters were strong, and as I've never read or seen Henry V (or have a ready knowledge of English history), I didn't know how the story would end -- and was eager to find out. I also liked this bit:

Here was he, embracing the purity and the whatsit of Art and staunchly, resoundingly rejecting the perversity and infamy of the world of commerce. This final act the punctuation at the end of what could have been a life sentence.

So far as I can tell, this is Young's first novel and it was an enjoyable read. I would probably give it 3.5 stars if I could, but will happily round it up.

Born With A Tooth

"Born With A Tooth" was a fairly common Native surname where I used to live in Lethbridge, Alberta, but even so -- and I'm not eager here to make myself sound like some dumb wasichu who is condescendingly charmed by nature-based naming practises -- but even so, I always found hearing or reading that name to be jarring; maybe because it refers to something not quite natural? Maybe it hints at some innate power that is inaccessible to me? There must be something universally compelling about the name for Joseph Boyden to have used Born With A Tooth as the title of this fine collection.

These thirteen short stories run the gamut from funny to serious to tragic, and if they have a common theme, it would be that Native Peoples are at a crossroads: having lost their traditional learning through generations forced to attend Residential Schools, the youngest Band Members on the Reserves need to decide, moving forward, whether they will try to reconnect with the old ways (with drumming, dancing, sweat lodges) or whether they should embrace -- or at least adapt -- the dominant culture (with bingos, casinos, going away to college). What Boyden does especially well is to populate these stories with fully human characters: there are the damaged drunks and gas huffers, but there is also an all-Native/all-girl punk band, an activist who works within the legal system to stop the damming of a river, and a girl who falls in love with a wolf. There are quiet scenes about nature and loud scenes about anger and grief; and surrounding it all, are the tricksters and the windigos; shapeshifters and Gitchi-Manitou; as though, even if the people have become disconnected from the ancestors, those ancestors are still around and watching.

Some standout scenes include the mute Painted Tongue, old and homeless and drunk on a Toronto street, being surrounded by a group of young white men:

I will count coup on you, baseball cap motherfucker, Painted Tongue hummed. The tones of his war chant came to him. I will take a knife and cut your scalp from your skull for calling me Iroquois. I will rip your ears from your head and eat them in front of you. He let his head drop, dangling the bottle. The boys backed away a little.

Lookit that! He's got attitude, one of them shouted as they formed a circle on the sidewalk around him.

Painted Tongue began to pace slowly around the inside of the circle. He felt a warrior's control suddenly, all eyes upon him, watching closely his every move. When Painted Tongue walked by one of the boys, he stared at the boy's eyes until he recognized the wolf spider of fear in them. He walked carefully, slowly by their feet, watching their faces pass his. The boys widened the ring. Painted Tongue concentrated on his own feet moving. He picked up the pace. He could hear the pound of drum in his head. The boys began clapping in time. Check it out, one said. He's on the warpath.

Painted Tongue reached out and touched each boy as he passed. He counted coup upon every single one in the group and watched the look of shame and disgust on their faces as they shrank away from his outstretched hand. He was happy. He was a warrior. He moved faster, bent far forward, lifting his knees high. He closed his eyes and danced the circle. It was effortless, like a strong wind lifting him up and carrying him.

And I'll cut that scene off while Painted Tongue is at the height of dignity. My other favourite scene was from the story Kumamuk. This story hit all the right notes: about the excitement of having "pro wrestlers" (or at least, wrestlers that the Reserve has watched on TV) come to fight in their community center, it beautifully demonstrates the relationships between those on Reserve and those from away; the relationships between the generations (and those who have embraced the white man's church vs those oldtimers who still believe in vision quests); about hero worship (and false heroes when it's revealed that Chief Thunderbolt -- naturally, everyone's favourite Native wrestler -- is actually Puerto Rican); but mostly, about a young boy whose enthusiasm and joy are universal. That he kind of accidentally had a vision quest, and that his vision animal was a flock of butterflies, was a beautiful scene. And when he attends the final wrestling match with his grandfather:

This was Noah's chance. He pulled the stocking he'd carefully painted in the bright colours of the butterfly from his coat pocket and pulled it over his head, adjusting it so he could see through the little holes he'd cut for eyes. He tore off his coat and kicked off his jeans to reveal the costume he'd created, ran from his seat and pulled himself onto the side of the ring. He quickly scrambled up the ropes and balanced himself on the top turnbuckle, lifting his arms wide to reveal the cape he'd painted orange and red and green, the wings of the butterfly. His wings. "I'm doing it" was all he could think. His ears were filled with the roar and rush of his blood, with the butterflies whispering to him, "You're doing it!" Beneath his cape Noah wore another pair of his mother's pantyhose, these ones black like a butterfly's body, and pulled up to his chest.

For the first time he could hear the crowd. He could make out Thomas' and Gerald's voices in the shouting. Some of the women screamed. Others were laughing with excitement. Noah looked across the ring at the awestruck face of Kid Wikked. He raised his arms higher for the crowd to drink in his costume and shouted, "I am Butterfly Warrior!"

With his back still to Noah, Diesel Machine was still completely unaware of his presence. Noah looked down at Chief Thunderbolt. The Chief looked surprised. He slowly, haltingly raised his arm from the mat and gave Noah a thumbs-up. Noah tensed, then leapt.

It's a cliché, but my heart soared with Noah, and throughout this book, I identified with the characters, and no matter how terrible their situations, Boyden created understanding instead of pity. 

Not all of these stories were my favourites (Men Don't Ask, Shawanagan Bingo Queen, and Legend of the Sugar Girl in particular didn't work for me), but the final four -- as four perspectives on a tragedy -- were outstanding. What I most appreciated was Boyden ending on a note of hope: as the hundred-year-old patriarch of the Cheechoo clan regards his relatives engaging in a solemn drumming circle, he thinks, And I began to feel something good that I'd not felt in a long time.

I didn't want to say it on goodreads, but the only time I ever heard or saw the surname "Born With A Tooth" would have been in connection with some petty crime -- and the name did come up often enough, and like I said, it was kind of jarring. I googled the name before I wrote this review and found this person: Milton Born With A Tooth, an activist who went to prison for diverting the Old Man River so that it couldn't be dammed (and flood the Peigan burial grounds). There's obviously something wrong with a world where flooding Native burial grounds in the name of progress is a good idea; where imprisoning someone for preventing it is normal. These two facts associated with the name -- the petty crimes of mostly hopeless drunks and the selflessness of true activism -- couldn't be unknown to Joseph Boyden and can only underscore how thoughtful a writer he is; this is the crossroads where these stories converge.

Also, the character of Painted Tongue is such a reminder of my own Uncle Allen, who spent his final years as a homeless drunk on the streets of Toronto; someone who would have looked Native enough to attract the special kind of scorn that these young white men heaped upon Painted Tongue; yet, someone without any Native history or traditions to fall back upon. Would Allen (and for that matter, his twin brother Alvin) have turned out better if he could have fit into one or the other (Native or white) world better? No small wonder that my own Dad pretty much disavowed any Native heritage.

The Lyre of Orpheus

A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory -- and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life -- a lie like the scriptures, figurative.  

                                                                                                            -- John Keats

As the third book in Robertson Davies' The Cornish Trilogy, The Lyre of Orpheus does a good job of wrapping up the whole narrative, but it's probably the only volume in the trilogy that would be a disappointing read on its own: without the in-depth introduction to the academic characters from The Rebel Angels and the full biography of Francis Cornish in What's Bred In the Bone, a reader might think that this book is just about completing and mounting a lost opera, without realising how it ties everything up. (And I mention this because I've heard many people say that these three books can be read in any order -- since they don't have the linear storyline of a The Lord of the Rings -- but why not read them in the order written?)

The Cornish Foundation -- chaired by Arthur Cornish and rounded out by his wife, Maria, and the familiar cast of professors -- is looking for a large, ambitious project to fund and decides on endowing a PhD candidate: the rude and dirty, but absolutely brilliant, Hulda Schnakenburg, who intends to finish an opera by E. T. A. Hoffman (an actual composer and author of Tales of Hoffman) in order to earn her Doctorate of Music. The source material "Schnak" has found is thin at best and there is much interesting information revealed about how an opera is scored, the libretto written, the production cast and directed and mounted. The opera itself is Arthur of Britain, or The Magnanimous Cuckold, and as the love triangle between King Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot is fleshed out for the stage, it also plays out in real life.

In a secondary storyline, Simon Darcourt is still working on his biography of Francis Cornish, and when he happens upon Cornish's triptych, The Marriage at Cana, his subject's life and work finally come into focus. Recognizing the painting as a representation of Cornish's personal mythology, Darcourt then explores what his own myth might be (that of The Fool from the Tarot) and helps others to see how their own lives are simply the playing out of their own mythologies. This is the key to the whole trilogy, and as Davies says in this interview:

I write novels that I hope will be interesting just as stories, but they also have implications and byways which I think would interest people who have more information. That may conceivably lead them to form conclusions about the persistence of myth in what we are pleased to call real life. I get awfully tired of people who talk about real life as though it had no relation to the life of the imagination and the life of legends and myth. They would do better to look again, though the trouble is they don't know enough in order to know where to look.

As in the previous two books, there is a shift in focus (and an opportunity to make third party assessments) with, in this case, intermittent scenes featuring Hoffman watching the progress of his opera from limbo. Trapped for hundreds of years because of his unfinished work, I couldn't help but be put in mind of Robertson Davies himself, who left his own final trilogy unresolved. As for myself, I identified with this statement of Arthur's:

Increasingly, I'm glad I never went to (university). As a reader I've just rambled at large on Parnassus, chewing the grass wherever it seemed rich.

I wouldn't say I'm glad to have not finished university, but the paths my reading has led me down has brought me that much closer to discovering what my own personal mythology might be. If I were grading this book on its own, it might only merit three stars (because I can't truly say I loved it), but for the way it completes the trilogy, I'm bumping it up to four.

This is the final book for the Lit Course, and for the way that they tie into the discussions we've been having there, here's two more relevant quotes. The first is from that interview linked above:

I've often observed how very difficult it is to give anything to the public. It's certainly very difficult to give things to a university. I had experience of that when the Massey Foundation gave Massey College to the University of Toronto. The university almost had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to accept a handsome gift. There are always conditions imposed, and they give the impression of some hidden motive. People are extremely suspicious of generosity. It's not a very pretty characteristic of humanity, but there it is.

And another from The Lyre of Orpheus:

Madame Laoutaro and Yerko were not crooks in the ordinary way; it was simply that they had no moral sense at all in such matters. Gypsies through and through, aristocrats of that enduring and despised people, they thought that taking every possible advantage of the gadjo world was the normal course of life. The gadje wanted to hunt and crush their people; very well, let the gadje find out who was cleverest.

*****

Edit added after the class talked about this book:

For the final class, I would have expected more of a tying-in of all five books we read, but mostly, we just talked about The Lyre of Orpheus. I wonder if the Prof was just responding to the interests of the class and ultimately decided to keep away from the political at this point, but for a course called "The Perils of Patronage", I certainly never learned what those perils were.

Once again, the two class members that I feared would be the most annoying (the poet and the ponytail) didn't show up, and the discussion was monopolised by one senior woman (who at least had some interesting ideas about literature), and the Gypsy (who, while being very opinionated about literature, seems to be coloured by a real dislike for Robertson Davies).

The Gypsy started by saying that she didn't like this book -- that it didn't make sense to her that characters would behave the way they did (and especially that Arthur would consent to being a magnanimous cuckold). Others agreed with her, and the old lady said, "It makes sense for King Arthur to forgive Guinevere because Merlin was in the shadows making it all happen. But we're supposed to believe it would happen in real life?" The Prof asked if anyone saw it differently, and for only the second time, I spoke up. "Well," says I, "I think this book was about finding your personal myth and then living it out. Simon was The Fool and Arthur was the cuckold. It was in the cards, bred in the bone, there was no escaping it -- he didn't need Merlin in the shadows because it was going to happen anyway." Without actually agreeing with me, the Prof went on about fate and predestination and pointed out that Arthur was the third generation of magnanimous cuckolds in his family and that that must surely mean something.

The Gypsy stuck to her dislike of the book, saying that the problem really was that the characters were flat and two-dimensional; that considering the quality of the first two books in the trilogy, Davies really lost it here -- like he wanted to write about an opera and didn't care about anything else that was happening in the book. More people agreed with her. The Prof then said, "Keep in mind that Davies, while getting old at the time, still wrote two more books after this one. He was in complete control of his writing and you better believe that anything he put on the page was exactly what he wanted there. There's a literary device known as 'roughing the reader' where an author makes the narrative feel a little off, and when that happens, we as readers should slow down and try to figure out what the author is trying to tell us to pay attention to. In this case, if the characters feel two-dimensional, that's because they're archetypes. If you ever read an epic -- like The Odyssey, or Gilgamesh, or even Mort D'Arthur -- you would find that the characters are two-dimensional because they aren't what's important; they're only there to frame the action, which is the point."

And as she always does when the Prof tries to point out her errors, the Gypsy said, "Yes, I see, but what I really didn't like was..." (and I think this time she went on about how the book didn't tie everything up or she was waiting for a surprise or why was Little Charlie brought back for just one scene...all of these complaints were brought up eventually). But what really bothered me was when the Prof did try to tie the biography that Simon was writing in this book to the biography we read of Davies (and how impossible it is for anyone to discover all of the facts of someone else's life -- how we don't even always know all the facts of our own lives as Francis discovered in What's Bred In the Bone) and the Gypsy made another personal attack on Davies: "What I think is sad," said she, "is that other than the literature, what legacy has Robertson Davies left behind? He had three daughters and you never hear anything from them. I think that means they couldn't have been very close to him and so what, other than the books, did Davies ever accomplish? It's like his genius died with him."

I don't even know what that was supposed to mean. I don't ever hear about Margaret Laurence's or John Steinbeck's families, and if the messed up Hemingways are supposed to be  the correct model for leaving a "legacy", who would want that?

As I said before, a course like this (essentially a book club led by an English Professor) is only as interesting as the people who contribute to the discussion, and as interesting as the books were, I would have to think hard about joining again (and this Prof might be available to lead another course next Spring).

Perhaps I really am only suited to a solitary rambling on Parnassus, chewing on the grass wherever it seems rich. 


All Five Titles:

Robertson Davies : A Portrait in Mosaic

None is Too Many

The Rebel Angels

What's Bred in the Bone

The Lyre of Orpheus

Frog Music

“Well, they don’t make their music just to pass the time,” says Jenny, grinning. “Got to want something to sing about it, no?”

With Frog Music, author Emma Donoghue started with a real life, unsolved historical murder, and after combing through old newspaper articles, censuses, and passenger manifests, she was able to populate an entire novel with actual people and the details of their actual lives. According to this article, Donoghue needed to invent only five fictional characters -- including a nice journalist (because there wasn't one in the historical record) -- since what she had found was so rich in detail. And these actual people had the potential to be fascinating: a female, cross-dressing frog catcher; a Parisienne burlesque dancer; her maques (a dandified gambler and his friend who lived off her avails); and various other people that these main characters would have known. With the central murder, the setting of post-Gold Rush San Francisco, a smallpox epidemic, mob-fuelled racism against Chinese immigrants, the horrifying living conditions of unwanted children, and plenty of sexy-sex, it's hard to credit how this book turned out to be so boring.

Having amassed the non-fiction details listed here, it seems that all Donoghue needed to do was to bring the characters to life and set up a plausible whodunit for the murder -- but the characters were much less interesting than their brief descriptors might suggest and the murderer wasn't a big shocking reveal (although the whydunit remains a bit murky). **spoiler** As soon as John Jr was found with a sore shoulder the night Jenny was murdered with a shotgun, I knew he pulled the trigger and was waiting for the big reveal of why, but murder-for-hire-by-proxy-because-Jenny-hurt-Blanche was lame. **end spoiler** Jenny Bonnet, the frog catcher, was repeatedly arrested in real life for dressing in men's clothing -- and for drunken brawling -- and all of the interesting details that come out in her story are true (from her sister's time in an insane asylum to her own time at the Industrial School). She is by far the most interesting character in the book, but Frog Music is told from the perspective of the French prostitute -- and Blanche only knew Jenny for a short while and not very well. And Blanche is just so wishy-washy: she insists that she's a dancer and a prostitute because that's what she loves to do, but it doesn't take much prodding from Jenny to make her question it; she claims to be fiercely protective of P'tit, but she's always forgetting about him; she plays detective after the murder and takes us down so many wrong paths that it becomes annoying (and especially when she just happens to stumble upon the solution in the end); and mostly, I never for a second believed the love story between Blanche and Arthur. 

According to this article, half of Donoghue’s six pre-Room novels were set before the 20th century. (That many were coming-of-age or love stories featuring gay characters ghettoized Donoghue for a time as a Lesbian Writer.) I'm not looking to ghettoize Donohue, but Frog Music makes the most sense if you think of it as a political work: the only power women wield over men is sexual, and Jenny, by daring to dress as a man, threatened to undermine the whole power structure. The women=good, men=bad, sex=power theme was played out in the other two books I've read by Donohue (Slammerkin was also a historical fiction based on the true life of a good-girl-gone-prostitute that attempts to provide a back story for murder and Room is basically about a man denying a woman's right to wield sexual power), so Donoghue is consistent, anyway. I think I am most disappointed because this book didn't realise its potential: I need to give it two stars because I just didn't like it.

I was also annoyed by the inclusion of so many French songs and little stories about frogs which other readers, apparently, found charming -- to me, it felt like a lazy way to extend the research into a novel. I also hated that this is the lithograph that Arthur loved and insisted on hanging in their apartment:

Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe

If Blanche didn't know how Arthur and Ernest felt about her when she was looking at this every day...bah...it felt pretty heavy-handed to me...

Last complaint: I found it very sad to read, in the source materials, that Blanche died of throat cancer six months after witnessing the murder. That's such a compellingly ironic fact (the prostitute dies within months of trying to go straight) that I don't know why it isn't in Frog Music. Was Donoghue trying for a happy ending, or at least the possibility of one? Once again, I'm just so disappointed by the way that this book doesn't realise the full potential of what it could have been.

History of the Rain

We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling. That's how it seems to me, being alive for a little while, the teller and the told.

History of the Rain (Book 3959, Bloomsbury, New York) is a quirky kind of book with lyrical Irishness, circular storytelling, poetic narrative, a wise-cracking protagonist, and my God, the rain. It had me rereading sentences and paragraphs to savour the words (sometimes to decipher the meaning), and in two different places, had me bawling my eyes out. There is tension and mystery, beauty and truth and that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know (thanks Keats) and I could ask for nothing more from a reading experience.

The narrator introduces herself, I am plain Ruth Swain, bedbound, here, attic roof beneath the rain, in the margin, where the narrator should be, between this world and the next. Stacked in precarious piles to the ceiling are the 3958 books that belonged to her father, and although Ruth has a Terminal Something, she plans to read them all before she dies. I am going to read them all because that is where I will find him. Ruth proceeds to tell the history of her family, dipping back and forth between the generations, and making literary allusions from the stacks of books she has already read (and especially from her favourite author, Dickens). Most of the references were obscure to me (and even though I have read Great Expectations, the only referenced characters I remembered were Miss Havisham and Pip himself), but not getting the references isn't a problem -- they're only there to make a point about books and the readers who love them. The following is as good a case as any against ereaders:

(T)here's that smell the fat orange-spine Penguins get when their pages have yellowed and the book bulges, basically the smell of complex humanity, sort of sweat and salt and endeavor. Like all the fat orange Penguins, it gets fatter with reading, which it should, because in a way the more you read it the bigger your own experience of the world gets, the fatter your soul. Try it, you'll see.

There is a bit of something lost in imagining leaving someone your fully loaded kindle, no? No marginalia, no dog-ears or food stains, no life. I must confess that I felt an extra connection to this book because it is set in County Clare; a rain-soaked corner of Ireland in which I spent three entranced weeks as a fourteen-year-old (in a Shannon River-side village that the author refers to as "the saintly surrounds of Killaloe"). And I must confess that I took pleasure in the minor character of Nurse Dowling because my own grandmother happened to be a Nurse Dowling (although the young tots on the Children's Ward where she worked always called her Darling). And although there was something kind of timeless about the setting, I appreciated that this story was set in the present; after the Celtic Tiger had become, once again, Those Irish; after the Boom and the Bust and the Rationalisation. For many reasons, I may have made more of a connection to History of the Rain than another reader might, but for that I can't apologise; all reading is personal, although I reckon the pull of the following is universal:

I know what the river is like at night. I know how it tongues the dark and swallows the rain and how it never sleeps. I know how it sings in its chains, how steadily it backstrokes into eternity, how if you stand beside it in the deeps of its throat it seems to be saying, saying, saying, only what you cannot tell.

This is the second title I've read from this year's Man Booker Prize longlist and it's ahead by a long shot (by a high jump?). Well, wouldn't Ireland win the World Cup of Writing? At least eleven times?

Honestly, this is the book that The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry wants to be when it grows up. So pay attention girls: if you ever do come looking for me in the books I've read, know that one like this that made me cry (twice!) is a clearer window into my heart and soul than the stacks of mediocre novels I've read. You don't need to go through 3958 books like Ruth Swain: I'm doing the winnowing for you.

What's Bred In the Bone

I first read What's Bred In the Bone 25 or so years ago and the only things that I remembered from it were: Francis Cornish sketching at the autopsy of the dwarf tailor; the Drollig Hansel; and the huge triptych of The Marriage at Cana. I only remembered the art: and while this book is certainly about art, it is more about those lucky few who are able to access the deep well of common experience -- the Collective Unconscious -- and drag forth images to interpret and present as their own; it's about artists, whether painters or writers, and their efforts to grasp and personalise the universal. 

What's Bred In the Bone picks up a few years after the timeframe of The Rebel Angels : Simon Darcourt is explaining to Arthur and Maria Cornish that he has hit a roadblock in his efforts to write a biography of Arthur's late uncle, Francis. There is very little information to be found on the great man, and what there is has a whiff of scandal (Perhaps some art forgery? Perhaps some homosexuality?). As the three debate whether or not the biography should be pursued, the point of view shifts to that of two mythological creatures with an interest in the matter: the Lesser Zadkiel ( the angel who interfered when Abraham was about to sacrifice Isaac, so he is an angel of mercy, though a lot of biographers aren't), who has recorded all of the events of Francis Cornish's life, and the Daimon Maimas (a type of creative spirit assigned to very few humans who, in this case, presented his charge with many difficulties because A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life). These two then review Francis' life, starting with the histories of his grandparents and then parents because, after all, what's bred in the bone will not out of the flesh.

After reading Robertson Davies : A Portrait in Mosaic, I could recognise that Davies gave Cornish a biography similar to his own. Both were raised in wealthy homes set in coarse, remote Ontario towns ("Jumping-Off" places where the residents are sewn into their longjohns for the winter, presumably not bathing again 'til Spring), were sent to a snooty boys' boarding school, attended a respectable Toronto University, and then took a degree at Oxford. But while Davies retreated back home as WWII loomed, Cornish pursued his art studies in Bavaria (and spent his evenings counting the cattle cars that made their way to the local concentration camp). Through Cornish's failed efforts to adapt his outmoded artistic tastes for modern audiences, I got the sense that Davies was describing his own literary efforts. In a way, this is an old-fashioned book and a lament for an earlier time; one richer in myth and legend.

Science is the theology of our time, and like the old theology it's a muddle of conflicting assertions… It's the most overweening, pompous priesthood mankind has ever endured in all its recorded history, and its lack of symbol and metaphor and its zeal for abstraction drive mankind to a barren land of starved imagination.

Like The Rebels Angels, this was a book of dichotomies: Cornish attempted to reconcile the male with the female; the "normal" with the "grotesque"; New Money and Old Money; the New World and the Old World; Old Masters and New Masters; Catholics with Protestants; and wanting to be a benefactor but loving his money a bit too much. There are layers of symbols -- from the obvious iconography of paintings new and old to the quest for the three aspects of womanhood -- and the occult looms large through astrology and alchemy. Once again, it is always amazing to me to read a Davies book that is crammed full of unfamiliar information and situations, yet never feel confused or patronised. And, of course, I love the Canadian bits:

Sorry, sorry, sorry! Of course you're a Canadian. Do you know what that is? A psychological mess. For a lot of good reasons, including some planetary influences, Canada is an introverted country straining like hell to behave like an extravert. Wake up! Be yourself, not a bad copy of something else!

I watched the movie Pan's Labyrinth the other day and it was a good companion piece for this book: aside from the Communists fighting the Fascists in Franco's Spain (which two characters in this book run off to do), it's a movie rich in allegory; a deep meditation on the protective power of myth and storytelling. Of course, it also reminded me of The Monuments Men and could just see Cornish taking his place beside George Clooney in the repatriation of looted art.

Kennedy is taking a minor in Art History, and in her first year, she was surprised to find herself a leading expert on Christian symbolism and iconography in her classes.  She hasn't been particularly surrounded by religious images, but she did go to nominally Catholic schools, and in her first Intro to Art History class, she was the only student who knew that Jesus wasn't crucified alone; the rest of the class was shocked by a painting depicting three crosses; the rest of the class had thought that crucifixion was a special punishment only used for Jesus in the history of the world. Naturally, her class wasn't made up of just Muslims and Buddhists -- the class also included the descendants of people who once knew these things. I am all for secularization, but I can't help but feel like maybe the disconnect we're all feeling from each other is the loss of a shared history and mythology. It's probably a good thing that public schools don't say the Lord's Prayer anymore and I can understand why people bring lawsuits to have the Ten Commandments removed from courthouses, but when it comes to art, there's something lost when we no longer have a shared language -- and maybe that's one of the points made in this book: although Cornish couldn't express the truths from his own deep well through modern art, maybe there is more truth to a Jackson Pollack (more shared understanding) than a Philistine like myself can recognise.

And because I can, here are some paintings referenced by Cornish:

Love Locked Out

Allegory of Time

Harrowing of Hell

We talked about this book at the Lit Course last night, and again, it was a motley discussion. The Prof began by reading this part (the final dialogue of Zadkiel and Maimas):

Of course, we know that it is all metaphor, you and I. Indeed, we are metaphors ourselves. But the metaphors that shaped the life of Francis Cornish were Saturn, the resolute, and Mercury, the maker, the humorist, the trickster. It was my task to see that these, the Great Ones, were bred in the bone, and came out in the flesh.

The Prof then explained the difference between a metaphor and a simile (did anyone there not know this?) and then said, "If I said, 'My love is like a red, red rose', that's a simile because it used 'like'. But if I said, 'My love is a red, red rose', that's a metaphor. If I said, 'My love is a red, red rose', what does that make you think of?"

People responded, "love is beautiful and perishable", "thorny", "sweet but temporary", and the Prof liked all of these answers and said, "Yes, that's what a metaphor is." But, in my mind, I was like, How would those answers be any different if she had asked, "What does it make you think of when I say, 'My love is like a red, red rose' "? I didn't think this was a good example at all (but kept my yap shut) and then, later, she accidentally supplied the perfect example (when we were no longer discussing metaphors): When Cornish painted The Marriage at Cana, he was able to create a work of genius because Meister Saraceni had not taught him to paint like an Old Master, but as though he was an Old Master. But back to her point: since we, as the readers, are sitting with the Daimon and the Recording Angel as Cornish's life is played back, and since they are just metaphors, then we must be metaphors, too, and what does that mean? I have no idea what that means (although there was some talk about how Davies expected the reader to filter his books through their own experiences) and that question was never really answered.

More odd discussions:

The Prof pointed out that with Davies writing Canadian characters who work for MI5 and as international art experts, he never thought of Canada as a small place. An old lady then said that she had gone to Camp-X a couple of years ago and learned that Canada trained a lot of the spies for WWII, and incidentally, it's a shame that it's crumbling away, and even now, all of the artifacts are held in one quonset hut and opened up to tourists by volunteers for two hours a week. The Prof used this as an excuse to take a swipe at the Harper Government's "questionable priorities".

This led into the character in the book, Ross, who became the Director of the National Gallery, and who wanted to raise it up to international standards with the acquisition of Important Art. After bemoaning that the (fictional) Minister responsible for the gallery's funding thought more of keeping her seat (and therefore, didn't want to be seen wasting tax-payers' dollars), the Prof said much later, "And then there's the Voice of Fire controversy, and tell me what you think $3 million is worth." Okay, but which is it, Prof? Is choosing political power over support for the arts narrow-minded? Or is it just a waste when you don't like the art? 

Voice of Fire

And by the by, the article says that the National Gallery paid $1.8 million, not 3. And another odd mistake for an English Prof: while talking about The Little Mermaid, she twice referred to it as a Grimm fairytale, even though I knew it was Hans Christian Anderson, but like always, I'm not trying to undermine anyone. (Publicly, lol.)

Another odd point: The old German woman (the "newbie" from the first class) said that she thinks the over-medication of psychological problems is "the new Holocaust" because "anyone who is different is expected to fit into a box or pffft, you're out of here". Curious statement from a German of a certain age...

And finally, and I can't even remember how this came up, but the Professor made a point about a European Philosophy Professor -- Slavov Žižek, the "Mad Serb" -- who compares the Marxist view of Capital to Freudian Dream Analysis. She asked someone for a coin and said, "What is this?" People shouted out, "A quarter" "Twenty-five cents", and she said, "No, it's just a circle of metal. What's it worth?" "Twenty-five cents!" "No, it wouldn't have that much metal in it, but we agree that it has an exchange value of twenty-five cents. And what Žižek is saying is that we are constantly suppressing the rational -- what we know to be true, like the true value of this circle of metal -- in order to raise up the reasonable -- what we collectively agree to be true. And that goes back to our last book and the old Gypsy, Mamusia, and the drive to suppress old knowledge in order to raise up what we think is reasonable. And it goes to Harper refusing to keep Camp-X going because this government has a narrow-minded focus on the ever-present now. And the tie to the Holocaust is that Germany was the prime example of a society that had, through logic and reason and an embracing of the modern, suppressed the rational in order to commit the monstrous." She then invited us to check out some Žižek movies on Netflix (The Pervert's Guide to Cinema and The Pervert's Guide to Ideology), but I was only able to find the latter listed. As an aside (and in keeping with my view of our Prof and her progressive worldview), this is the first review for the film on Netflix:

If you grew up thinking Ayn Rand was a brilliant thinker and not a grumpy lady with a hateful ideology, you're going to despise this movie. It might even make you extremely angry. In fact, this movie has the capacity to infuriate a great many people, from Catholics to Atheists to the United Nations and beyond. Though one has to squint and clench just to cut through the soup of speech-barriers between the narrator and the viewer, the concepts being explored are complex and at times rather profound, attacking and picking apart not just one particular ideology, as the Randians will certainly feel is the case regarding capitalism, but ALL ideologies, and the notion of 'ideology' itself.

That was the last talking point and the Prof ended by saying, "It's always fascinating to see where discussing Robertson Davies will lead, but I think that was his goal: to get us thinking and talking."  Good enough, that.

Further Edit:

I did watch The Pervert's Guide to Ideology and it was interesting enough -- for a Marxist filter of commonly held beliefs, as seen in movies. What I couldn't help but wonder, though, is if these movies actually demonstrate the subconsciously held ideological beliefs of their creators or did Žižek simply choose movies that demonstrated the points he wanted to make? It's interesting to see him link Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver and John Wayne in The Searchers with the invasions of Afghanistan and Viet Nam (in that Americans see themselves as heroes and will go in, guns blazing, to rescue even those who say they don't want it) but is the shark in Jaws really a manifestation of the western world's "fear of the other"? Couldn't it just be about a shark? What Žižek's movie did do was make perfectly clear what kind of filters our Prof is seeing the world through.


All Five Titles:

Robertson Davies : A Portrait in Mosaic

None is Too Many

The Rebel Angels

What's Bred in the Bone

The Lyre of Orpheus