Review: Forms of Devotion, by Diane Schoemperlen

Not to let the cat out of the bag or anything, but I think it’s safe to say that Diane Schoemperlen’s 1998 short story collection Forms of Devotion is going to make my top 10 list this year. The book, which won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction when it came out, is one of those very rare things: a highly stylized example of experimental writing that is also compulsively, addictively readable.

Each piece in Forms of Devotion is framed like a fairy tale, accompanied by drawings (many of which by the author herself) that lend the stories some pertinent dimension. In this collection, Schoemperlen is often concerned with taking a non-narrative premise and rendering it into story in a deliberate, calculated way. For example, her piece “How Deep is the River?” begins very much like a grade-school math problem – two trains traveling at different speeds race towards the same bridge in opposite directions; which one will get there first? – but soon explodes into an elaborate tale about the passengers on board, about loss and love, fear and the places we come from. “How to Write a Serious Novel about Love” takes on an instructional tone about the craft of writing but slowly unwinds a gripping narrative about the pitfalls of relationships. “Rules of Thumb: An Alphabet of Imperatives for the Modern Age” is a self-improvement guide writ large that rapidly veers, as most self improvement does, into the domain of vanity and its relation to the lies we all tell ourselves.

But the story that stuck with me the most did not follow this premise-as-narrative formula. “Innocent Objects” – the tale of a solitary, small-town woman named Helen who leaves on a mysterious trip into ‘the city’ and the thief who breaks into her large, empty house while she’s gone – could be the most powerful, most wrenching, most emotional and most intellectually challenging short story I’ve ever read. Schoemperlen’s craftsmanship hits this piece on far too many levels to do justice in this simple blog post. Her playful structuring of temporal space – Helen’s time in the city vis a vis the thief’s time roaming her house – is beautifully juxtaposed by the layering of the two characters’ perspectives as they move through the story. Nearly every page is accompanied by a David Foster Wallace-like footnote that describes some physical object that the thief is handling while in Helen’s house, which in turn is accompanied by a beautiful drawing of that object. Yet, none of the footnotes are random – each one provides a little extra dimension on Helen’s story, on her creepy solitude, on her deep emotional life, and the trip she takes into the city. And still, this story offers no easy answers. We never fully understand Helen’s motivations and what her relationship is to the thief. What we are left with, strangely, is a unnerving tension near the end of the story that we could never have anticipated, and the feeling that Schoemperlen has kept just the right amount of this tale hidden from our eyes. This is, without a doubt, postmodernism done right.

If there is one misstep in this collection, it would have to be “Count Your Blessings (A Fairy Tale)” – but only insofar that its problematic concept can’t seem to reach a satisfactory finish, as the other stories do. The piece tells the tale of the lovely homemaker Grace who seems to have by any measure the perfect life. She meets and marries a wonderful man named William who is flawlessly devoted to her; they have a vigorous and satisfying sex life and a beautiful home that they decorate together. William gets a high-paying job as an accountant, full of regular promotions and generous bonuses, and these allow for Grace not to have to work. The two give birth to amazing, perfect children and their domestic space becomes a domain of love and generosity and happiness. Grace continues to stay at home even after the children enter school, attaining a housewife’s life of leisure that most work-a-day husbands couldn’t even imagine. And yet. And yet – a profound depression slowly seizes Grace. The perfect life that she has attained becomes the last thing that she wants. Her husband and children watch helplessly as she descends into a kind of hysterical sadness. Her old girlfriends tell her that she’s being ridiculous, that she doesn’t know how good she has it. William, relentlessly uxorious, tries everything he can think of to snap his wife out of her funk. At last, he seeks the help of a “doctor”, but this comes, as I mentioned above, to an unsatisfying end. The piece, while wonderfully written, paced and structured, feels a bit muddled by the last paragraph, as if Schoemperlen had wanted to say something deep about feminism, the domestic life, and the teeming mysteries of a woman’s inner world – and yet painted herself into a corner she couldn’t get out of.

This story aside, Forms of Devotion is one of the most satisfying collections of short fiction I’ve read in a long time. Schoemperlen’s experiments and craftsmanship keep the rewards coming with nearly every turn of the page. This book is definitely worth reading again, and again.

Review: Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino

I must admit, I’m a little low on juice today to commit myself to a full review of this book, but I’ll give it my best shot to say something about it. Invisible Cities packages itself like a novel but really it’s closer to a collection of beautifully rendered prose poems. The narrative frame, such as it is, involves the great Tartar emperor Kublai Khan discussing the many cities in his empire with the intrepid traveler Marco Polo.

Through a highly stylized and poetic language, Polo provides Khan with a perspective on his empire by describing cities both real and imagined, with fanciful and sometimes absurdist situations that rest at their heart. Many of the sections are repeated several times throughout the book, each following their post-modern concept(s) through to their logical or illogical conclusions.

It was all really beautifully written, but I have to admit I was looking for something a bit more structural to hold it altogether. Thankfully, the last paragraph – written with a stunning aphoristic precision – left me breathless and glad I read this book. For anyone out there who feels a little bushwhacked by the ludicrousness of the modern world today, who feels like it’s so easy to cave in to the insanity that surrounds us at every turn, these words may provide comfort (as they have to me). Here they are in their entirety:

And Polo said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

Brilliant.

Review: The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard

Don’t say I never give an author a second chance. After my relentless thumping of J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash last year, you’d think I’d never touch anything by the man again. Not so. Truth be told, I became a little obsessed with Ballard following that initial and disappointing foray into his work and decided I wanted to try something else. His short stories seemed to make the most sense, since a good portion of his reputation is built upon them.

To start, though, the collection known as The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard is a bit of a misnomer. My edition is a reprint of the 1978 original (it even includes, happy day, an introduction by Anthony Burgess) and thus doesn’t contain any of the great stories Ballard wrote after that year. (For example: the ingenious tale “The Enormous Space,” which you can hear Ballard read aloud at the tail end of this audio interview, and you can also watch the creepy BBC production of it, renamed “Home”.) Still, the anthology provides a decent cross section of the best pieces he wrote during the first epoch of his long literary career.

Many of Ballard’s early stories fall into the category of “straight” science fiction, but of course that is not where their true strength lies. Ballard was forever obsessed with “inner space”, and so even when a tale is set on another planet, its primary preoccupation remains human psychology. For Ballard, the key to many of these early stories was to establish a fantastical technological or political future and then play out that premise to see what impact it has on his characters’ inner worlds.

The most successful of these early pieces really get that marriage of premise and psychology right. In “The Concentration City” we discover a future Earth that has been completely covered by a single megalopolis, and meet a man determined to ride its infinite transit system in the hope of finding the mythical and elusive notion of “empty space.” (Through his travels, he reveals that humanity has lost the knowledge that the Earth is actually round.) “Chronopolis” is a kind of post-post apocalyptic story where keeping track of time – owning a clock, wearing a watch, etc. – has actually been outlawed following a brutal dictatorship built on highly regulated time. “Billennium” explores the idea of overpopulation writ large: people are forced to live in smaller and smaller cubicles of space for increasingly more expensive prices (residents of Toronto may relate!) as the Earth’s population explodes out of control.

As weirdly fun as these stories were, I found that the further Ballard got away from straight SF, the more I enjoyed his work. “End Game” is probably the strongest story in this collection, and it tells the (relatively simple) tale of a man named Constantin, sentenced to death for his participation in some vague, unnamed revolution, who is forced to share a villa with a man named Malek, who will be his executioner. The problem is that, as part of Constantin’s sentence, Malek will reveal neither the time nor the method of Constantin’s execution – it could happen at any moment and through any means. The two men spend most of the story playing chess together in the villa, with Constantin dreaming up new ways of squeezing Malek for information about his looming fate. It’s a taut psychological exploration and one of the tensest short stories I’ve ever read.

The last four pieces in the collection might be categorized as the beginning of vintage Ballard – i.e. the kind of surrealist, postmodern writing he is best known for. Their titles are predictably po-mo – “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race”, “The Atrocity Exhibition,” “Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy,” and “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” – and their emotional/intellectual impact will vary, naturally, from reader to reader.

In the end, I felt that The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard accomplished what I hoped it would, which was to wash out the bad taste that Crash left in my mouth and get me on board with why so many people see Ballard as one of the preeminent British writers of the post-war, late 20th century period. There’s no denying the power of this man’s twisted genius and the cautionary tales it has left behind.

Review: A Season in the Life of Emmanuel, by Marie-Claire Blais

My reaction to this 1966 novel by famed French Canadian author Marie-Claire Blais was similar to my reaction to Sylvia Fraser’s Pandora. Both books seem to belong to an age that no longer exists: there is something so relentlessly serious here, a solemnity to tone that is almost encoded into the craftsmanship of the writing itself. In an age where so many of our authors strive to be not only cute but cutsie, it was so refreshing to engage with novels that don’t even speak that same language.

It would be hard to overstate Blais’s accomplishment with A Season in the Life of Emmanuel, a novel she wrote while still in her twenties. It tells the bleak story of a poor Catholic family in rural Quebec run by its overbearing grand-mére Antoinette. The theme is what you’d expect it to be: the tension between the corporeal needs and desires of the real world and the obligations foisted by religion. But how Blais executes that theme through her characters and narrative structure is quite remarkable. This is the rarest of things – a complex satire with no pretense towards humour. Blais’s intention is to show the dehumanizing heart of religion, especially Catholicism, and to do so through the prism of a morose and exaggerated absurdity.

The results are startling, insofar as how incredibly engaging it all is. The book is engrossing despite the fact that the ‘story’ of this family is told in such a distant, aloof, and almost elliptical manner. And it’s engaging despite the fact that none of the characters – from the young poet in the making Jean-Le Maigre, the damaged young nun Héloise or the boy named, simply and ridiculously, Number Seven – are really all that knowable. This is another example where Blais distances herself from our more contemporary writers here in Canada. There is a pervasive trend in our literature today of making sure that characters are ‘likeable’ or ‘sympathetic,’ that the most impressive thing an author can do is forge a ‘community’ between her readers and her characters. Blais resists this temptation, since it would run counter to the grander thematic vision she has for this book, the statement she wants to make about Catholicism. The results are, paradoxically, more heart-felt and harrowing because she doesn’t simply hold a one-dimensional mirror up to her readers.

The last thing I want to say about A Season in the Life of Emmanuel is how prescient it is in spotting and illuminating the sexual deviancy of the Catholic Church. Written 40 years before stories of molestation and abuse became front-page new, Blais examines the incestuous transgressions of the Church as if they were and have always been common knowledge. But again, she does it with a remarkable sense of controlled distance, an elusive approach to illuminating this aspect of her story.

I’m hesitant to dub A Season in the Life of Emmanuel as a ‘lost classic’, as I’m in no way well-versed in the canon of French Canadian literature or Blais’s place in it. All I can say is that this book, and its writer, came to me as an undiscovered treasure, brilliant in the way it breaks so many of the rules that we take for granted today.

Is this a scam?

Okay. So on Saturday morning, whilst reading one of our national newspapers over a bagel and coffee, I stumble upon a full-page colour ad for a discount airline offering seat sales for the upcoming summer. The ad brags a cost of $98 to fly from a certain southern Ontario city to certain Maritime city – the former of which I live in and the latter of which I’m in the market to fly to during the same timeframe as the airline’s sale. Conveniently, this discount airlines flies out of Toronto’s “Billy Bishop” island airport, which is not very far from my day-job office.

Now being the brainiac that I am, I understand that the “$98” is clearly a lure, that it’s only the one-way price and does not include any of the myriad taxes and service fees that are the accoutrements to the modern-day airline ticket. Still, I think, surely the final round-trip cost can’t be any more than three times the advertised price, which would put it at a maximum of $294 for a round-trip flight, everything in. This is still a mighty fine price to fly home in the middle of summer. The ad indicates that, to take advantage of this wonderful offer, I need to book my ticket by May 18.

So during lunch today, I check out the airline’s website. Curiously, after selecting (through its online booking engine) my dates and destination, all in accordance of the ad’s offer, I discover that the price is wildly different from the ad: $585! Surely this is some mistake. The offer, I think, must be available only by calling in person, and perhaps this was mentioned in the microscopic, 3-point font fine print that went on for two paragraphs at the bottom of the ad, which - my bad - I didn’t read all that closely.

So I call the airline’s toll-free reservation number. After spending 13 minutes on hold (Wow, I think, everybody’s got the same idea as me!) I get through to a human being. I tell her about the sale and my desired dates and destination. “Let me check,” she says. “Oh I’m sorry,” she says, almost instantly. “There are no more tickets available at that price.” Before I have time to point out that today isn’t, in fact, May 18th and, in the spirit of the ad, the price should still be available to me at the advertised price, the lady retorts with, “But I can give you right now a 30% discount on the regular price.”

Through some magic of mathematics, the final price she offers me – round trip, everything in – is $428. Which is still $18.50 more expensive than 30% off of $585, and still preposterously more expensive than the $294 I thought I’d pay – at most – for the ticket before I called. Needless to say, I curtly ended my conversation with her and hung up.

So is this a scam or what? Is there anything stopping this or any other airline from advertising a too-good-to-be-true seat sale, a sale that the airline has no intention of honouring, a sale that it is only used to goad people into calling and then offering them an inferior discount on an already over-inflated price? I mean, are these sorts of advertisements in our national newspapers not regulated? Or am I just being naive and should just go back to ignoring them altogether? Can someone shed some light?

Review: Absurdistan, by Gary Shteyngart

Oh my. Ahem. Alrighty, then. Take that, traditional immigrant novel. It’s virtually impossible to know where to begin describing and assessing Gary Shteygart’s high-octane and deliriously brilliant 2006 book Absurdistan. I don’t think I’ve engaged this much with (and laughed so hard over) a novel’s complexities since Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated. All I can say is that when I hear people talking smack about Canadian literature – the dourly formulaic immigrant coming-of-age tomes, the reflexive holding up of mirrors to quotidian minutiae, the survival-in-nature themes, the menopausal navel gazing in small-town Ontario – I think this is what they’re talking about. I think they’re asking: Why can’t Canadians write books like that?

Ahem. Okay. Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, a little bit of assessment. Absurdistan serves up the monstrously comic protagonist Misha Vainberg: a corpulent (he tips the scales at 325 pounds) young émigré, son to the 1,238-richest man in Russia, nicknamed “Snack Daddy” by his buddies at the fictitious university he attends in the US Midwest called Accidental College, Misha’s appetites and humour are as large as his frame. When Misha’s father kills a high-profile Oklahoman businessman, the entire Vainberg family is barred by the INS from re-entering the United States. Consequently, Misha finds himself stranded back in his native St. Petersburg (which he, having grown up during the Communist era, refers to hilariously as St. Leninsburg) and is desperate to return to America and his one true love, a stripper named Rouenna, whom he met in a New York City ‘titty bar.’

Alrighty, then. What follows is a mad caper of epically sarcastic proportions. When Misha gets a chance to acquire a fake Belgian passport, he travels to the fictitious nation of Absurdsvanϊ (“Absurdistan”), located on the Caspian Sea near the Iranian border. An ex-Soviet republic, Absurdistan has, thanks to its alleged oil reserves, become a poster child for globalization, perestroika, free-market economics and classy Hyatt hotels. (All you really need to know is that the nation’s main urban area has been dubbed “Gorbigrad.”) Misha arrives to acquire his phony passport but soon finds himself embroiled in a burgeoning civil war between Absurdistan’s two main ethnic groups – the Sevo and Svanϊ. (The crux of their conflict is based on a dispute over which way the "footrest" of the Orthodox cross should be tilted.) Of course, the war is actually nothing more than a concoction of the Halliburton corporation, and hilarity ensues as Misha attempts to flee the country with his life.

Try pitching all that to a Canadian publisher, would you.

It’s really difficult to sum up the vast array of sacred cows, current affairs and cultural phenomena that Shteyngart is skewering in this novel. Capitalism, communism, strip joints, the Iraq War, the “immigrant experience”, senses of national identity, 9/11, porn, globalization and Mother Russia herself all fall victim to his fearlessly satiric eye. Shteyngart shows tremendous skill in creating a protagonist like Misha, who is as lovable as he is repugnant. (Beyond his unapologetic obesity, he also, over the course of the novel, sleeps with his stepmother, watches online porn, and tears a strip off a super-Orthodox fellow Jew who refuses the kosher meal on an airline flight.) But like any lasting humour, Absurdistan’s comedy is as engrained in its language as it is in its situations. Take this passage, lifted from one of the novels many tangential scenes set in Russia:

Club 69 is a gay club, but anyone who can afford the three-dollar cover charge – in other words, the richest 1 percent of our city – shows up there at some point during the week. Homosexuality aside, this is without a doubt the most normal place in Russia, no low-level thugs in leather parkas, no skinheads in jackboots, just friendly gay guys and the rich housewives who love them. It brings to mind that popular phrase bandied about by expatriate Americans over their bagels and cream cheese: civil society.

Nearly every paragraph of the novel is written with this kind of verve. Shteyngart has not only created a character as obscenely memorable as Ignatius Reilly and a picaresque worthy of Cervantes; he has created an entire world, one caustically similar to our own but infinitely more comic, and more tragic.

My Q&Q review of Something Fierce, by Carmen Aguirre ...

is now online at the Quill and Quire website. It's actually been a few months since I read this book, but I'm glad to see it's getting some attention. (There was also a review of it in one of the national papers on the weekend.) While I didn't enjoy every aspect of Aguirre's "Memoirs of a Revoluntary Daughter," I still think this is an important piece of nonfiction and worth picking up. You should do so if you get the chance.