2013: A Time to Re-Joyce

With the New Year rapidly approaching, I want to announce a couple of fun campaigns that will be happening around the Free Range Reading homestead in the not-so-far future. RR and I are in discussions about doing another Co-habitational Reading Challenge (last year we did A Prayer for Owen Meany and it was a lot of fun) but I’m also hoping to reread another, more major work of literature, one that embraces the word “challenge” in every sense of the term. I’m also wondering if anyone out there in the blogoworld would like to join me in this endeavour.

That work in question is, of course, Ulysses by James Joyce. Considered by many to be the greatest single novel ever written, it is also one of the most difficult. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t read it the first time until I was 27, back in early 2003, and haven’t reread it since. But inspired by last June’s engrossing BBC Radio dramatization of the book, as well as by the fact that it’ll be 10 years since I tackled this masterpiece, I thought 2013 would be an ideal time to revisit it. The thing is – I’m not sure I want to do this alone. So please consider this a preliminary invitation to any book bloggers who are interested in rereading (or reading for the first time) Ulysses and blogging about the experience to join me.

Of course, a novel of this magnitude could never be captured in a single post like most of the reviews I do here. I doubt I’ll do an entry for each of Ulysses’ 18 distinct “episodes”; instead, I’ll probably do one post for each of the novel’s three sections, taking a break in between to read and blog about other stuff. I haven’t quite decided yet – I’ll get back to you with more details after the New Year. In the meantime, please think it over and if you want to join me, drop a comment below with a link to your blog. I’m hoping to have the campaign wrapped up by the end of the first quarter of 2013. And really – what better way to spend the dark, cold months of winter than reading a big fat tome of literature?

M.

My Q&Q review of Braco by Lesleyanne Ryan

is now online. I'm not usually the sort of guy that goes in for big fat novels about war, but I found this one fairly entertaining and well-crafted. For some reason the conflict in Bosnia always strikes me as a bit too fresh to render into fiction, even though I realize we're nearly 20 years out; but Ms. Ryan does a great job bringing both the brutality and the concomitant moral issues that arise from it to life. Overall, a decent read.

Review: Open Heart Runner, by Gregory Marchand

Near-death experiences can create great fodder for memoirists, even if they don’t necessarily result in great memoirs. A brush with death can give a writer a reason to reflect on the value of life and his relationship with friends and family. But it can also breed an especially dull strain of schmaltz, one that infects every line of the narrative and creates tough reading conditions for anyone other than the writer and his immediate friends and family.

Fortunately for us, Gregory Marchand doesn’t fall into any of these traps in his memoir Open Heart Runner. The difference between what Marchand has done in this chronicle of the heart attack he suffered at the end of a race and other memoirs of a similar genre is that Marchand is a consummate storyteller. He understands the great paradox of autobiographical writing: that is, in order to generate a truer portrait of yourself and gain a level of pathos, the focus should be as much on others as it is on you.

On January 11, 1998, Marchand was a fit and active 40-year-old participating in a local race in his adopted hometown of Victoria, British Columbia. Other than the day being abnormally cold for that part of Canada, there was nothing setting this particular run apart from hundreds of others that Marchand had gone on over the course of his life. Yet as the race progressed, it became rapidly clear that something wasn’t right. He began experiencing chest pains, tingles in his arms, a shortness of breath, and other struggles as he worked to complete the run. By the time he approached the finish line, he was in serious distress. He collapsed just as he finished, and others ran to his aid to discover that he wasn’t breathing. Luckily, there were a few neighbourhood doctors participating in the race, and they took turns performing CPR on Marchand while waiting for paramedics to arrive. Marchand’s heart had stopped for roughly 20 minutes; and by any measure of reasonableness he should have died on that cold January ground.

What follows is an exploration of how such a catastrophic physical event could occur to an otherwise healthy and athletic man, and how such an experience brought on moments of self reflection during his long recovery. While he does write in the first-person, Marchand shows a remarkable aptitude for inhabiting the thoughts and feelings of the other people who play a crucial role in this story: his young family, his minister, his friends and neighbours, and the doctors who treat him. It is this detached reportage that gives Open Heart Runner its narrative heft. Marchand is able to describe with equal objectivity the science of open-heart surgery and the emotion of prayer, the anguish of his loved ones and his own bafflement over what has happened, the immediacy of the present and the importance of the past. He doesn’t treat these as disparate elements at odds with one another, but rather as parts of a knitted whole that tell a compelling and prismatic story.

The portrait that emerges is of a man who understands how complex and mysterious life can be, and how it takes an event like a heart attack to really bring it all into focus. Marchand doesn’t provide any pat answers or cheap sentimentality. He tells a very personal tale that transcends itself and sheds some light on what it means to live in the moment, to love and be loved.

The Puritan Compendium I

So I just finished reading the beautifully crafted “Best of” anthology that The Puritan launched a week and a half ago at the same event that celebrated the journal’s Thomas Morton Prize for Literary Excellence, for which I won in the poetry category. The Puritan Compendium I collects many of the best works published in The Puritan over the last five years, and I don’t just say that because it also contains my prize-winning poem.

The other prize winner, for the fiction category, is a short story called “Kyle’s Place” by Nathan L. Pillman, which is a well-told (and delightfully unnerving) tale about two pre-pubescent boys who go to great lengths to spy and leer at one of the boy’s attractive older sister. Oddly, it complements my poem well—at least the first sonnet in the cycle, which is also about horny young boys.

The anthology also has a ton of other great fiction and poetry. I was pleased to see Daniel Scott Tysdal’s short story “The Poem” in there, which I read when it was originally published by The Puritan. There is a beautiful poem about a crow by Sachiko Murakami, a writer I’ve been meaning to read more of. I really enjoyed the short story “Ashes” by Nancy Jo Cullen, who won this year’s Metcalf-Rooke Award. (And as you know, I have a certain soft spot for those Metcalf-Rooke winners.) And there is a generous helping of work by other writers I’ve been meaning to read more of, including Matthew Tierney, Jaime Forsythe, Gabe Foreman, and especially Leigh Nash, whose poems I see around from time to time and always blow me away.

Overall, a solid performance by the good people at The Puritan. This compendium is a keeper and I’m honoured and pleased to be published among its pages.

M.    

Review: The Street of Crocodiles, by Bruno Schulz

The story of Bruno Schulz’s death is probably more famous than anything he actually wrote and published. A Jew living in Nazi-occupied Poland, Schulz was protected briefly by a Gestapo officer who admired his drawings, only to be senselessly gunned down by a rival of his protector while Schulz on his way home with a loaf of bread. The body of literature he left behind is very small—the vast majority of his manuscripts did not survive the war—but what he did publish had an immediate and profound effect on 20th century eastern European literature.

The Street of Crocodiles (1934) was Schulz’s first foray into published fiction: it is sometimes called a collection of short stories, sometimes called an autobiographical novel. However you label it, it is a ruminative description of a small Polish town similar to the one the author grew up in, and is focused primarily on his protagonist’s eccentric father, who was modeled on Schulz’s own dad.

The book opens with a flurry of metaphoric writing, a synesthetic tour de force of description about the town, its physical peculiarities, its people and the heat of summer. The book slowly introduces its key characters and then zooms in on the father figure, revealing his strange behaviour and off-kilter obsessions (including importing the eggs of exotic birds and then hatching them in his attic) as a way to counteract the stultifying boredom and narrow-mindedness of small-town life. The book then begins to twist itself into a rictus of magic realism reminiscent of Schulz’s most obvious literary antecedent, Franz Kafka.

Unfortunately, what begins as a breathtaking display of descriptive acumen soon devolves into some fairly purple prose, and there is a restlessness to Schulz’s scene setting that never really allows the narration to find a comfortable place to sit. My interest waned as the book slowly plodded toward something resembling a plot, and I felt that the later chapters (or short stories?) could not live up to the promise of those first 10 or 15 pages.    

Part of the problem might have been the solitary nature of Schulz himself. Prior to his confrontation with Nazism, he lived alone, led a genteel life as an art teacher at a boys’ high school, and wrote and painted in his spare time. He had few friends and very little human contact over the course of his adult life. This reclusive nature shines through in his prose, and not in a good way: while his powers of observation over physical objects and settings are keen, there seems to be very little insight into his human characters, very little care taken with their psychology. I didn’t find there was enough engagement between them throughout the book to sustain my interest.

But no matter. Schulz’s work has been immortalized and cited as a huge inspiration by a number of contemporary Jewish writers. But The Street of Crocodiles left me wondering: how much of this reputation has to do with Schulz’s actual work, and how much of it has to do with the circumstances surrounding his mindless murder?

Review: Under the Net, by Iris Murdoch

There is something to be said about reading the debut novels of accomplished writers you love to see what their work was like the first time out of the gate. I’ve done this recently with A.S. Byatt and again with Anthony Burgess, and I’ve done it here with Iris Murdoch. The discovery has generally been the same each time—flashes of the genius yet to come trapped inside a deeply flawed first effort.

In Murdoch’s case, the book in question is Under the Net, published in 1954 and sub-labeled “A comic novel about work and love, wealth and fame.” The emphasis definitely should be on the ‘comic’: Under the Net is a wild and often hilarious picaresque about one Jake Donaghue, a shiftless hack writer trapped in a love tryst between a singer named Anna, her film-star sister Sadie, and a film studio owner named Hugo. Their central tension revolves around a book that Jake published years earlier called The Silencer, which he basically cribbed from ideas espoused by Hugo during a series of heady conversations they once had together.

Under the Net, while deeply comic, is rooted in philosophy—specifically, the philosophy of Plato’s The Republic. This manifests itself in a number of ways. The Silencer, for example, is written in a kind of neo-Platonic dialogue between a sage teacher and a group of eager students. What’s more, every interaction/misunderstanding that Jake experiences over the course of Murdoch’s novel is a kind of play on Plato’s Myth of the Cave: his perceptions of Anna and Sadie, his strained relationship with Hugo, and even his faith in his own work, are all nothing more that flickering shadows on the wall of a reality he never quite has access to. For good measure, the book also wrestles, as The Republic did, with the poet’s role in a utopia: in this case, the socialist utopia strived for by a rabble rouser (predictably) named Lefty, whom Jakes meets in bar while on one of his adventures.

These allusions, at least to my eye, were all a little too obvious. And while the novel’s saving grace is its humour—and there are many laugh-out-loud set pieces here, including one involving a pub crawl of epic proportions—in the end, the humour is all we’re left with. The relationships and social commentary don’t really hold together, and the revelation between Jake and Hugo at the end is too neat, too easily summed up as a simple misunderstanding.

Murdoch would go on to publish some of the sharpest and most comic novels of the 20th century (see  my reviews of two of them here and here) but this debut shows her as a novice still getting a handle on her power.              

Reminder: Reading and launch party tonight for The Puritan

Just a little reminder that I'll be reading tonight at The Supermarket here in Toronto at an event called "Black Thursday" to celebrate The Puritan's new fall issue, to launch its recently published Best-Of compendium, and to honour the winners in the Thomas Morton Memorial Prize for Literature, for which I took first place in the poetry category. Here are the details - if you're in the Toronto area, please come out and say hello:

When: Tonight, Thursday November 22, at 7:30 pm.
Where: The Supermarket, 268 Augusta Avenue, Toronto. (map)

There will be many readers taking part and, if the Facebook invitation is any indication, a huge crowd, so please come early.

Oh, and of course if you want to read my winning poem, it's now available in the Fall 2012 issue of The Puritan. This issue also includes work from Nathan L. Pillman, Nathaniel G. Moore, Daniel Scott Tysdal, and others. Enjoy!

By the way: Tonight's event kicks off a busy weekend for me. RR and I will be off to Ottawa on Saturday, as she's doing a reading at the Carlingwood library there in the afternoon. See details here. If you live in Ottawa, come on by!

M.