Blog featured on Wolsak and Wynn

I got word earlier today that Free Range Reading has been featured on the Wolsak and Wynn Publisher Ltd.'s website as a highlighted blog. Naturally, I'm as pleased as punch to see it there.

For those of you who don't know, Wolsak and Wynn is a literary press based out of Hamilton specializing in poetry and nonfiction. Checking out their Recent Titles page, I notice they've published fellow Atlantic Canadians Richard Lemm and Lesley Choyce. I'm looking forward to checking out some of their books in the future.

Review: The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak

The cover of Markus Zusak’s novel The Book Thief depicts a finger pushing down the first in a long, snaking row of dominoes. It’s a fitting image for the book, set in Nazi Germany, about the causality of events and how they can set moments of both tragedy and pathos into motion.

The Book Thief tells the story of Liesel Meminger, a young girl whose brother is killed and mother is taken away by the Nazis, who despite being illiterate steals books and becomes obsessed with the written word. She eventually learns to read from her foster father, Hans, and her growing knowledge of words corresponds with her growing knowledge of what’s happening to her country under Hitler’s rule. Liesel is subtly aware of the factors of fate that play a huge role in her life: the fact that she is alive while her brother is not, and that her foster father survived World War I only to have that survival come with a price tag: decades later, his family must hide in their basement a young man named Max, the Jewish son of one of Hans's fallen comrades.

The Book Thief deploys one of the more interesting conceits of recent literature: it employs Death itself to act as the narrator. It’s an apt enough approach, considering that the story is set in early years of World War II when Hitler’s death machine was at the peak of its power. Zusak has gone to great pains to make Death's voice both human and, oddly enough, humane. By revealing the events of Nazi Germany through the prism of Death as a character, Zusak is able to show us the very human cost of this grand historical catastrophe.

What I find most interesting about Zusak’s book, though, is that it’s labeled and marketed as a young adult novel. This is curious considering its length, gruesome subject matter and, most strangely, the fragmented approach that Zusak uses in telling his story. The Book Thief is not a straight-up narrative: several of the key events in the book happen out of sequence. I suspect this is a departure from most YA literature, and I applaud Zusak for taking the risk. Still, I often felt like some of the best or most climatic moments in the book are deflated by this tactic, since we often know what’s going to happen in a pivotal scene because Death as already told us in a previous chapter.

Despite this questionable approach, there’s no denying the raw power and heart-wrenching emotion on display in The Book Thief. Zusak does not shy away from the immensity of the Holocaust, nor does his book roam into some untenable allegory. He sticks with his overarching conceit and uses it to tell a raw and engaging story. I hope lots of kids discover this book. It is traditional storytelling at its best.

Review: The Year One, by David Helwig

I find something so soothing about the works of David Helwig. As one of Canada’s most prolific and versatile authors, he seems equally comfortable with the demands of prose, poetry and essays; and everything he writes is so quietly sensible, so unassumingly brilliant. I first discovered Helwig’s work when I was asked to review his novel The Time of her Life for The Halifax Herald back in 2000. Since then, I’ve read his recent novel Saltsea and his 1976 novel The Glass Knight, both of which I loved. And now, I’ve finished his astounding poetry book The Year One, which I picked up last month while vacationing in my home province of PEI (where Helwig now lives).

The Year One is a single long poem divided into 12 sections, one for each month of the year, and the year in question is the first year of the new millennium – 2001. Helwig takes us on a lengthy, contemplative walk through this time period, ruminating on everything from the quotidian detail of his domestic space to the world of politics, the tragic events of that year, and his own memories of the past. The poem moves with a quiet, almost effortless grace, capturing so many wonderful moments of illumination. The Year One tackles a variety of poetic approaches, from the narrative to the lyrical, from the aphoristic to the fragmented. Helwig is capable of shifting gears between these styles without causing the reader to jar, and this is one of the strongest skills on display in this very skillful book.

What makes The Year One so strong is the confidence that Helwig shows in incorporating multiple ideas or approaches into a single section of poetry: he references personal friends (some of whom have passed away) in nearly the same breath as he describes the beauty of the natural world around him and what’s happening in the news on any given day. Each passage feels buffed of the rough ends that would cause the reader to jar. Part of the skill is in the way he breaks his lines and his stanzas. But mostly it’s the contemplation behind each section that gives it its heart, that allows it to inhabit multiple approaches at multiple times.

These are lines free of sentimentality or cheap emotion. They are eloquently crafted and arranged in seamless, timeless rhythms. The Year One is a phenomenal achievement for a poet at the very top of his game.

Review: The Imperfectionists, by Tom Rachman

During the years I lived in Seoul, South Korea, I often picked up a copy of The International Herald Tribune, one of the three English language dailies available in the city at the time. Even if I didn’t have an undergraduate degree in journalism, it would have been easy to notice the struggles that this small, feisty international paper had in filling its pages with genuine news. I often lamented to anyone who’d listen that nearly half of the paper’s daily page count was dedicated to advertise-friendly subjects like business and entertainment. So when I heard that Tom Rachman, who used to work for the IHT, had made a fictional rendering of the newspaper the setting for his debut novel, The Imperfectionists, I leapt at the chance to read it.

The Imperfectionists has received a number of glowing reviews since its release – notably from The New York Times, The Globe and Mail and The New Yorker – and I’m happy to add my voice to the chorus of praise. Rachman’s novel is a near-perfect exploration of the gritty, stressful and often hilarious world of daily journalism. The book captures both the ideal of journalism as a concept and the (increasingly sad) reality of journalism as a business.

Each chapter of The Imperfectionists is named after a newspaper headline that is vaguely a propos of the chapter’s content itself (examples include “World’s Oldest Liar Dies at 126” and “The Sex Lives of Islamic Extremists”) and features a character who is associated with the unnamed newspaper in Rome in some way. There’s the washed-up, old-school freelancer Lloyd Burko – he still doesn’t own a computer, types everything on a word processor – who struggles to score one more big bi-line by exploiting his own son. There’s the paper’s tyrannical corrections editor, Herman Cohen, who is in charge of pointing out to staff writers and editors (“nit wits”) their various violations to the in-house style guide (“The Bible”), and he often goes around randomly yelling “Credibility!” when he’s especially pissed off. There’s the feckless young Cairo stringer Winston Cheung, who is bullied and exploited by a much more seasoned journalist. And then there’s my favourite character, news editor Craig Menzies, a man who appears never to leave the newsroom at all – he’s there long before anyone else arrives in the morning, he’s still there at night after everyone leaves – and yet he has a profoundly complex and problematic personal life that no one sees.

Each of the characters in Rachman’s novel is beautifully crafted and bang-on accurate. Anyone who’s worked in a newsroom will recognize the motley ensemble of up-tight eggheads and fucked-up posers whose combined efforts put out a paper day in and day out. There’s also little touches of newspaper history in this book that give it such personality. Example: in a flashback scene, some of the guys in the newsroom use the pneumatic tubes – prior to computers and networks, this was how copy was transported from one department to another – in order to fire live mice into the secretaries’ typing pool. (Newspapers also used to have typing pools.)

Ultimately what makes Rachman’s novel special is the way he balances the quotidian detail of a daily newspaper’s operation with the larger social impact that the concept of newspapers has on the world. It’s ultimately a sad story – the fate of newspapers, including this one, seemed to be sealed by apathetic, even hostile corporate conglomerates – but it is a story worth telling. Bravo to Mr. Rachman for telling it so well.

Lisa Moore's February on the Booker Prize long list

Interestingly, Lisa Moore's novel February - which received what could be best described as mixed reviews here in Canada - has made it on the long list for this year's Booker Prize. I know this book has caused quite a bit of debate on this side of the pond about its various merits, but it's good to once again see Canada get recognized for this major international award.

Review: Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, by Helen Simonson

It’s one of the worst clichés that a reviewer can spout: that a book comes along that makes you believe in the power of the novel again. I for one have never doubted the power of the novel, but it certainly is great to read a book like Helen Simonson’s Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand and have one’s beliefs reaffirmed.

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand tells the story of Major Ernest Pettigrew, British fuddy-duddy of the highest order, and his sudden and consuming romance with local Pakistani shopkeeper Mrs. Jasmina Ali. The two are aging and widowed and just beyond the edge of caring about what kind of scandal their budding relationship causes in the small English village where they live. But what a scandal it does cause – muted but no less detectable.

What makes Simonson’s novel so great is the way it uses the small to illuminate the large. Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand is full of the manipulations of grown children, petty squabbles over property and possessions, obsessions about religion and dinner parties and climbing the social ladder. But the relationship between Pettigrew and Ali stirs up the much bigger issues of race and class, multiculturalism and tolerance, progress and tradition, colonialism and religious extremism. It is a humorous comedy of manners that owes a debt to the great British novels of the Victorian period, but it is also a novel that very much belongs to the 21st century, tackling so many of the complexities of our modern world.

It isn’t a perfect book, mind you. Simonson has a tendency to overwrite and explain too much about what her characters are thinking. There is an entire swath in the middle of the book where nearly every instance of dialogue is accompanied by a gesture, a thought, or a judgment occurring below the surface of what’s being said. Sometimes these extrapolations are necessary but for the most part Simonson needs to trust that her carefully crafted dialogue says enough on its own. A better editor could have come along and excised so many of these redundant add-ons to the characters’ exchanges.

But it’s a petty grievance. Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand is an accomplished novel and very serious literature. You’ll fall in love with the Major and Mrs. Ali as they fall in love with each other, and you’ll marvel at how their simple lives can teach us so much about the modern condition and how to find the humanist medium between so many competing extremes.

Review: Crossing Lines - Poets Who Came to Canada in the Vietnam War Era

I tend to hold a lot of skepticism toward poetry anthologies with really specific themes or criteria for entry. I find their exclusionary nature a bit problematic; and the so-called unifying force behind these types of books can often drown out the merits of individual poems. Crossing Lines, edited by Allan Briesmaster and Steven Michael Berzensky, does have a rigid formula for inclusion – poets born in the United States but who immigrated to Canada during (though not necessarily because of) the Vietnam War – but aims at the broader theme of Canada’s relationship with the United States in times of conflict and the impact of such a mass exodus of poets-to-be from one country to another during a specific time (1965 to 1975). In their introduction, the editors confess that these are somewhat wobbly premises on which to build an anthology, and have wisely allowed their poets to explore the themes however they choose, or to not explore them at all.

There are a number of extremely talents poets included in this anthology. These include Leon Rooke, Ellen Jaffe, Dave Margoshes, Bernadette Rule, George Amabile and George Fetherling. The work from these poets is nothing less than what you’d expect from them, and their high quality make up the heart of this book.

But like any anthology of this size and type, you’re also going find a mélange of poems that just don’t work, that are undone by their attempts to answer the book’s perceived themes. The subjects here are war, migration, a lost sense of home, as well as activism and protest, and the results are mixed. I can say the poems that explore the current war in Iraq or George W. Bush are uniformly bad. The conflict is too close in our collective conscious, the emotional response to its perpetrator too blunt and trite. Other poems spin their wheels trying to say something truly new about the Vietnam War, a cultural touchstone that has been blown well beyond its historical significance simply as a result of the dominance and hegemony of the Baby Boomer generation.

The best poems in this anthology are the ones that don’t forget to, well, be poems. That is, they don’t get bogged down by the theme to forget all of the techniques and artistry that can make a poem sublime. Thankfully, there are plenty of selections in Crossing Lines that stand up well on their own, that would count as great poems no matter where or under what circumstances they were published.