Foremothers

Foremothers

Honouring 100 years of International Women's Day, I remember my two beloved grandmothers, both born in England under Queen Victoria. Between them, they bore twenty-one children, a fact which, alone, proves just how far we have come.

Winifred Joan Bullen Hayne Bubar

Hilda Marjorie Woodland Bridgeman

And my mother, born in Greenwood, BC. I love this picture of her at home on the ranch in Kettle Valley when she was barely a teenager.

Margaret Norah Bubar Bridgeman

Carol Shields' Unless

Carol Shields' Unless

Borrowed Marilyn's copy of Carol Shield's Unless. Meant to read it before Q's Canada Reads book-of-the-decade competition, but alas, too many review assignments (and research and editing contracts). But I turned away from the CBC competition, not liking the way arguing and competing and dissing each other reduces all, the books, the writers, and the defenders. It seems, by turning art into a popularity contest to be determined by strategic voting that serious writing--using narrative, character, suspense, emotion to tell an important story--is no longer the focus, in the quest for that elusive "younger demographic." [Remember the olden days when the goal was reaching out, to help that "younger demographic" become more fully developed contributing adults?] I am not a fan of irony or satire as I feel they reduce us as human beings, relying on one emotion--smugness--that "I know something you don't know" tongue-sticking out schoolyard stance. But, I will read that winning title, The Best Laid Plans, by Terry Fallis, eventually.

Unless: I really enjoyed Unless, almost the only Carol Shields title I had not read. The story of a mother, Reta Winters, also a writer, worried sick because her eldest daughter Norah has dropped out of university, has left her boyfriend, is living in a homeless shelter, and sits alone on a Toronto street corner with a sign saying Goodness hanging around her neck. I was watching for any hints of an unreliable narrator. Do we really believe Reta Winters or not? Do we believe that such a good marriage and happy life in suburbia exists? I guess we want to, the way we want to believe in utopia, and the way some people believe in heaven, and others in happily ever after. But in Reta, Carol Shields seems to be seriously tackling the subject of how can a happy woman who seemingly has everything still not be content?

Shields uses characters to represent different power positions within society. Danielle Westerman, the writer Reta translates, by pointing out how women may be permitted goodness but never greatness, speaks the truth about a still unequal society. Has Norah come to the same conclusion? Has Reta? Based on her studies, her relationship with Danielle, and her experience of Norah's tragic failure to launch? No matter how good she was as a parent, the unthinkable happened, causing her to despair. No matter how good she is as a translator, her fiction is considered trivial. Is it any wonder that some, like Norah, choose instead to withdraw into passivity as a reaction to striving and being denied? Like Danielle, hiding in academia? Like Reta, refusing marriage yet taking her husband's name? I'm afraid this idea of withdrawal hits a bit too close to home for me. Who wants to be fighting all the time, defending one self, warding off usurpers and back-stabbers? Why not just let it go and retreat, do what you do best and damn the rest? Who needs to eat anyway?

The plot of Unless consists of Reta documenting how the parents, sisters, and others attempt to deconstruct what led Norah to that mute corner. Along the way we are entertained with the horrible disrespectful way we talk to [at] each other. The way we use retail therapy to comfort ourselves when we feel powerless. The way we can share a table but never even wonder about the inner life of another. The way we feel inadequate because we cannot explain abstractions such as the theory of relativity or the theory of goodness. The way we believe, as Tom, the doctor insists, that if the trauma can be identified, it can be addressed. The way the plot suggests that actions are more important than words or rationalizations.

Like Carol Shields always does, Unless forces us to look into mirrors, and, if we dare, to contemplate.

Johanna Skibsrud's The Sentimentalists

Johanna Skibsrud's The Sentimentalists

Borrowed a copy of Johanna Skibsrud, The Sentimentalists, winner of this year's Giller Prize for fiction. Listening to her being interviewed piqued my desire to read the novel which is partly about the Vietnam war. Strange how, even though it was not one of Canada's wars, it has so affected our psyche, and attracted our artists. This story gets eventually to the Vietnam material but, like David Bergen's The Time in Between, focuses also on the damage done to young soldiers either when they commit acts which violate their own moral standards or when they learn that people lie, their coworkers lie, their superiors lie, and their government lies. Both these novels are about how the "sins" of the soldiers, the debilitating stress they bring home with them, are inflicted unto several generations, in patterns including lives of substance abuse, withdrawal, failed marriages, abandoned children.

At first, the poetic style of The Sentimentalists was somewhat off-putting to me; although I like poetry, I don't like it when poetic language gets in the way of story. (See my previous rants about Michael Ondaatje.) But The Sentimentalists is told through the POV of a poet daughter, so the language is organic to the character. Also, it was a bit difficult tugging my editor's toque off my head. When a sentence comes at me with the word "that" repeated at least three times, I scream. [Yes, but the four "lies" above are deliberate, for emphasis.] I learned to forgive, to ignore, to stress the positives--how the build up of incremental detail and symbolic objects and actions helps construct a story, and how the one absent character, as in real life, remains ultimately a haunting taunting mystery. This is an appealing story about a father-daughter relationship with a happy ending, at least happy in the sense that the narrator was able to ask some of the unspoken questions before it was too late.


Found a useful review in The Globe and Mail by Zoe Whittall.
 

Canadian Non-Fiction

Canadian Non-Fiction

Finished reading and writing my reviews for four Canadian non-fiction books--David Carpenter, A Hunter's Confession, Don Gayton, Man Facing West, M.T. Kelly, Downriver: Poems with a prose memoir and a story, and Ian Tyson, The Long Trail: My Life in the West. Sent them off to the editor. Tyson's photographer deserves an award; I nominate The Long Trail for the Most Attractive Cover Design.

The "Indian," the "Other" in the Canadian Quest for Identity

The "Indian," the "Other" in the Canadian Quest for Identity: Four Prairie Novels of the 1970s

Can you believe that a thirty year old Masters thesis is available on line?

http://winnspace.uwinnipeg.ca/handle/10680/31

On Second Reading of Lyon's Aristotle

On Second Reading of Lyon's Aristotle

 When I was in school, Rembrandt's famous painting Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer sold for over $2Million. The picture, which appeared in magazine advertisements, linked twentieth-century readers with nineteenth century English Romantic poets (Keats), seventeenth century Dutch painters, 320 BCE Aristotle, and 800 BCE Homer, a poet who is also still read and studied--his Iliad about the Trojan War, his Odyssey, about Ulysses' prolonged journey home. I see in this painting a comment on how art and the imagination link us through time, or, as John Berger puts it, artists know how "things fit together." Sister Wendy on the Internet suggests that Rembrandt is commenting on the relative values of philosophy versus literature. I'm not that convinced, but she points out that Aristotle is painted wearing a gold chain gifted to him by his former student Alexander after he conquered the world. This chain, she suggests, symbolizes that Aristotle sold out, went for the money and the glory in a way the beloved blind bard of 500 years before him did not. That sounds like a bit of projection to me, the idea that poverty is the ideal and that working for a living, living out loud in the real world, is somehow shameful.

So on second reading, Annabel Lyon's novel about Aristotle, The Golden Mean, made me think of this painting, and the way she was using imagination to make art of Aristotle's story. Is her Aristotle weighed down by the chain of Alexander? Well, in our book club, he certainly was. Alexander received so much more talk time than the teenager in the book warrants. Perhaps this is one of Lyon's points. Movies are made about the unbalanced boy who conquered the world, about the wars and types of action in which teenage boys revel. But who thinks about the teacher? The wise man who attempted to train the conqueror's mind with the same diligence that was spent trying to train his body and to fill his head with military strategy. In Lyon's story, Alexander is one of the specimens, although a beloved specimen, that Aristotle studies. The boy is extreme, reckless, conflicted about his family, and experiences blackouts and flashbacks. Is Alexander's story comedy or tragedy is a question Aristotle asks more than once.

This was what I most enjoyed about Lyon's portrayal of the philosopher. She uses the backstory of how he didn't get the job he wanted in Athens; she shows how networking (having grown up with Philip of Macedonia) led to job offers, pleas to teach the son, opportunities to observe the battlefield first hand. She shows debauchery, rivalries and staff room back-stabbings, the sacrifices bread-winners are forced to make, working in isolation or on long campaigns, far from family. She shows the gap between the women's world of house, home, and children and the men's world of work, war, and court.

Lyon also creates a fully human character, stressing both his strengths and his personal challenges. Aristotle appears to be somewhat uncomfortable at home, passive, confused perhaps. Struggling with the cognitive dissonance between the teachings about women and slaves inherited from his father and his culture and the reality of his interactions with both lesser species. I was shocked to hear that some female readers reject the book because they blame Aristotle for influencing Augustine whose writings were responsible for excluding women from any significant role in the Church. Lyon drops one hint, from the mouth of the witch slave midwife, who said that if Aristotle were to see his wife giving birth, he would feel differently towards her. Perhaps his own desire to see and to know, to experience, to observe the animality of birthing blinded him to seeing women in any "higher" pursuits. If the women in his life are not seen as whole complex individuals, it is because we see them through Aristotle's point of view.

Lyon shows Aristotle as sometimes overwhelmed by his rationalist theories. Perhaps influenced by his feelings for the boy prince, he appears to condone Alexander's hovering at the deathbed and mutilating the body of a friend for the sake of Art (to use the head as a prop in their performance). Later he had to ask the prince whether he hastened the death for his own purposes. The boy's extreme behaviour (reckless, shameless) is addressed in theory rather than in specifics, although others of the court are frequently warning Aristotle to be careful. Lyon's Aristotle also suffers from periods of depression, possibly bi-polar disease, which he treats by forcing himself to focus on some passion, often a close observation of natural objects, or a treatise about one of the subjects which interest him. He also shares that he attempts to treat insomnia by positive visualization.

More than one reader was inspired to look up known facts about Aristotle, to be better able to assess what the novelist has imagined. This too is one of the joys of the book. When fiction inspires us not only to think but also to act, that can only be a good thing. When fiction revivifies the lessons, that too can only be a good thing. Look at the ants. Look at the stars. Close observation. Anatomical drawings. Autopsy. Liberty and self-sufficiency. Order in the Chaos. Balance--the golden mean. Yes!

Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean

Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean

So, perhaps it was a bit of BookClubBurnOut, or just basic frustration, but I worked on "Why read fiction?" as a way to clear my thinking about a novel I re-read and enjoyed even more the second time around. (And isn't that one of the definitions of "literature"? That you can re-read it and, seeing even more, enjoy it even more?)


I first read Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean last summer before going to Toronto. I enjoyed the novel that time more than I expected to. Why had I such low expectations? Because of my personal Why Read Fiction? Checklist: 1) it was set in ancient Greece (territory I have never visited, far down on the bucket list); 2) it is set 300+ years BCE; it is historical fiction, but well past the historic times which most appeal to me personally; 3) it is about Aristotle, a famous philosopher whose name comes up every time you begin to study Western Civilization's version of botany, biology, poetry, drama, political science and many other fields I've never studied (physics, mathematics, logic, rhetoric, astronomy.) But not someone who has piqued my curiosity. Perhaps it's the word "philosopher." I'm seldom interested in abstractions which the word "philosophy" appears to connote. 4) Finally, I'm not exactly sure what the title "the golden mean" refers to. It's not the same as the golden rule, right? It's not to do with Leonardo's famous diagram of Man in the Circle Squared? Something about proportion, perhaps divine proportion? 5) I also hesitated about the cover, a naked youth, bareback on bareback. Is the image an attempt to exploit by titillation? 6) And the complexity of names are a problem for readers like me who try to say every word. The list of characters helps a bit. So why was I on first reading so pleasantly surprised by The Golden Mean? 

• It's about believable characters in a specific setting, humans struggling with challenges we still struggle with every day.
• It reads very modernly, with almost shocking vulgarity, real sensual descriptions, and a convincingly male point of view.
• The cover image relates directly to a scene in the story and is thus not inappropriate. Also, since Annie Proulx and Ang Lee, does anyone else connect bareback/brokeback? The hint of homosexuality is also not inappropriate. Who could write about ancient Greece and not mention this?
• The Golden Mean goes beyond, beneath the surfaces of the known facts about Aristotle, showing how he is a man and also an individual, with his own differences. His underlying peculiarities combined with his own life experiences, Lyons points out, led to his intellectual pursuits and to the works which have resulted in his being remembered into the third millennium. So yes, if you're not shocked by masculine language, the book is recommended. I looked forward to reading it a second time.
• Oh, yes. Lyon is a Canadian writer, from British Columbia. Bonus.