Review: Whirl Away, by Russell Wangersky

Any critic who posits that Canadian writers don’t focus on the working lives of their characters really needs to read Russell Wangersky’s Whirl Away. With skillful and eerie verisimilitude, Wangersky places most of the protagonists in this new collection of short stories squarely inside the dark hearts of their respective occupations. The breadth of Wangersky’s knowledge of and research into different jobs is truly astounding and worth the price of the book alone.

Indeed, the occupational and geographic range of this collection is quite impressive. We’re given a carpenter (“Bolt”), an amusement park caretaker (“McNally’s Fair”), a paramedic (“911”), a divorce lawyer (“Family Law”) and a travelling salesman (“No Harm, No Foul”). These and other stories are spread across a number of Canadian locales, including Alberta, Newfoundland and the Maritime provinces. In each instance, Wangersky fully inhabits the life, work and place of his characters and creates a whole universe around them. He brilliantly realizes each story’s world for 15 pages before moving on to a completely new and different world.

And while Wangersky is adept at depicting the exterior circumstances of his characters’ lives, he is also skilled at capturing the tiny details that illuminate their inner turmoil. There were a number of scenes in the opening story, “Bolt”—about a carpenter named John who is accidentally killed and leaves behind a mystery for the two women in his life—that captures so well the dynamics and secrets between a man and a woman. Here’s a passage with John building a new table and Anne coming to see him:

Anne had brought his lunch down to the shop every day while he was working on the big table. She had caught him looking along the grain, his face a serious, complicated map, and when he’d seen her and straightened up, rubbing his hands on a piece of cloth, his eyes changed, like someone moving quickly away from the edge of a window and letting the curtain fall back into place.

This wonderfully subtle moment helps to underscore the deeply entrenched inscrutability that John holds in his heart right up to the moment of his death.

My favourite story in the collection is “Sharp Corner.” This tale, about a man who becomes obsessed with telling stories (much to the chagrin of his wife) about a succession of car cashes that occur at the base of their driveway due to a tight turn in the road, is a tightly drawn and symbolic exploration of psychology. The out-of-control cars can be seen as stand-ins for this man’s out-of-control marriage, but Wangersky never overplays his symbolism when making these connections. There is a Ballardian obsession with death and automobile wrecks that lends this story a creepy tone, but we never escape the deeply held emotional tension in the story either.

While not every story in Whirl Away is as riveting—the last two pieces felt a bit withered on a vine by the time I reached them—there is no doubt that Wangersky has a rich sense of story and a deeply held investment in his characters. This was a pleasurable read through and through.

Review: Drifting House, by Krys Lee

It’s always impressive when a short story collection can hold within it both a unity of subject matter and a range of approaches. This definitely applies to the debut collection from Krys Lee, called Drifting House. The topic is clear across all nine tales: Korea—both as a place and as a mentality, the social mores and circumstances driven by a unique set of histories and traditions.

But the range within this central vision is vast. Lee writes about Koreans on their native soil as well as Koreans who have immigrated to America. She writes both about South and North Korea. Her protagonists are men as often as they are women. It’s as if she doesn’t want to privilege one type of Korean tale over another; she wants to, if not run the gamut, at least provide a generous cross section of contemporary Korean life.

And she does. There is a tale about the invidious position Korean women find themselves in a divorce (“A Temporary Marriage”); there’s a story about the love that still dare not speak its name, even in a city as cosmopolitan as Seoul (“The Goose Father”); there is an examination of the IMF crisis in the South in the late 1990s (“The Salaryman”) as well as the famine and the fleeing refugees in the North (the title story). In each piece, Lee commits herself to the world she has created for each of her characters and embraces the nuance of their multitudinous experiences.

Unfortunately, there is a regrettable strain of melodrama—another facet of the Korean mindset, perhaps—that comes on near the end of almost all of these stories. It’s frustrating to have a tale carry you along with its sharp language and fully drawn characters, only to have that world undermined by a burst of unearned or overstated emotion at the end. Only the final story, “Beautiful Women,” manages to avoid sentimentality completely. This piece, so exquisite, so breathtaking in its vision and execution, never lets emotion get out of hand; it leaves so many wonderful gaps for the reader to fill in what his or her own heart feels about what has transpired. If only the other pieces in the book did this a bit more.

Still, this is an impressive collection overall. Having lived in Korea for two and a half years and researched many elements of its culture for my own writing, I had plenty of little moments of recognition reading this book. Krys Lee is an immense talent and someone to expect big things from in the future.

Review: Stasiland, by Anna Funder

There is a pivotal point near the end of The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s critically acclaimed 2006 film about the East German secret police known as the Stasi, where the movie changes from a pre- to a post-fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall period. In one swoop, the paranoia, the personal treachery, the surveillance, and the grim monotony of communism that marked the German Democratic Republic are washed away, as if they had never existed. The secret police are made instantly irrelevant. The country itself ceases to exist. The people embrace the freedoms of their western neighbours, and never look back.

Anna Funder has a much different take on German reunification and the lingering effects of the Stasi and communism on eastern German society. Her nonfiction book, Stasiland, researched and written between 1996 and 2000, paints the portrait of a country struggling to let go of the past and move beyond a system that held, in a clearly demonstrable way, human control and social conditioning as its chief tenet. Funder goes out of her way to find both victims of the Stasi who are still seeking justice and the men and woman who were part of the regime who refuse to let go of the political beliefs that define their identities.

Funder provides us with a rich cast of these characters. There is Miriam, a woman whose husband was taken away by the Stasi and died in a East German prison. The authorities claimed he committed suicide but Miriam is convinced he was murdered. There is Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, the face of the regime’s propaganda machine, who was beamed into the television sets of East Germans for decades for the sole purpose of critiquing western media. He remains a committed and unapologetic despot when Funder finds him. There is Hagen Koch, who at 21 was the young man who drew the line with a bucket of white paint that eventually resulted in the Berlin Wall itself. When Funder finds him, he has turned his honeycomb apartment into a shrine to the Wall. And there are the ‘puzzle women’, a group of workers whose sole job it is to re-assemble, with excruciating attention to detail, the thousands of documents that the regime had hastily shredded as communism was collapsing.

With each of these people, Funder tells a rich and robust story. Much like Barbara Demick’s recent book on the real lives of North Koreans (see my review of it here), Funder knows that historical background and broad geopolitical descriptions can get you only so far. The real story resides in the people who suffered under—or dedicated their lives to—the brutal regime that was the GDR. There is a warmth and openness to Funder’s storytelling, even when she’s describing the most heart-wrenching scenes.

What’s more, Funder also takes a rather nonconventional approach to assembling her narrative. There are times when Stasiland does not feel so much like a memoir of the GDR’s secret police as it does a memoir of a woman who is writing a memoir of the GDR’s secret police. At first this insertion of herself and her research methods into the story felt a little intrusive and narcissistic. But over time, the reader realizes how key it is that we see just how Funder goes about assembling her story. That method, in its own right, tells a lot about how the Stasi presence continues to hold a grip over the subjects of this book.

In an age where the chief struggle facing the west is religious extremism and our responses to it, it’s good to be reminded of a time when the threat we faced was far more secular and geographic. Stasiland is a wonderful window into the Cold War and its lingering impact on real people. It is also a cautionary tale about a world we may not yet have completely escaped.

Acceptance: This magazine (Toronto)

I was excited to get word late this week that I've had at least three poems, possibly four if there's room, accepted for an upcoming issue of This magazine. This has been around since the 1960s and is available across the country, and I'm really excited about my work appearing in its pages. I'll keep you posted when I find out exactly when the magazine comes out.

M.

Review: The Master, by Colm Tóibín

If you read Jeet Heer’s recent G&M essay on kid-versus-adult lit, you were probably left with the impression that Henry James was a fuddy duddy. And while reading Colm Tóibín’s Booker-shortlisted novel The Master may not disabuse you of this notion, it will certainly give you a more in-depth portrait of this singular—and singularly complicated—literary heavyweight.

Indeed, that is the whole point. Tóibín’s expansive if somewhat dense tome captures the inner turbulences and emotional life of Henry James (1843-1916) during the years 1895 to 1899, when he was living in England and Italy. The historical detail captured therein is impressive—we get to see, for example, James following the machinations of the Oscar Wilde trial with the quietly rabid interest of both a rival and closet homosexual—but it is the workings of James’s creative mind that draws us in the most. Tóibín’s intention is nothing short of showing us how James could manipulate, alter or otherwise distill experience into fodder for his art. In one flashback, he meets a young and sharp-minded girl named Minny Temple, and her personality and circumstances go on to inspire—sort of—the character of Isabel in The Portrait of a Lady. Or how an anecdote, about two women who have charged themselves with protecting a literary legacy, went on to inspire The Aspern Papers:

The implications and possibilities of this story filled Henry’s mind for some time afterwards. He took note, as soon as he went back to his quarters, of the picture of the two fascinating, poor and discredited old Englishwomen living on into a strange generation, in their musty corner of a foreign city with the letters their prized possession. But as he considered the core of the drama, he saw that it lay in the hands of the scholar. The story of the three figures locked in a drama of faded memories and desperate need would take time and concentration. It could not be done in the mornings in Florence. Nor could he set his story in the city without everyone there believing that he was merely transcribing a story already known and often recounted. He would move the story to Venice, he thought, and, as more invitations came in, he decided he would move himself to Venice also, and work there on a story whose properties he came more and more to relish.

This one passage has it all—the capturing and manipulating of a idea, as well as the challenges a writer faces in the implementing of it. Anyone who has tried to write creatively will see shadows of their experience in The Master.

There are other delights. Tóibín’s loyalty to the period lies not only his attention to historical accuracy but also in the very style of his prose. There is a certain 19th-century quality to the interactions between characters, the dialogue and exposition, where implication through body language and what is not said is just as important as the exchanges themselves. It’s remarkable how Tóibín’s prose is able to conjure the tone of a previous century without making itself seem antiquated.

The other great strength of this novel is how Tóibín handles James’s hidden sexuality. There is no overt reference to the author’s gayness or even his latent desire for certain male characters. Instead, The Master uses more covert means to show us what James was struggling with. Examples include his obsession with the Oscar Wilde trial and especially what will happen to Wilde once he’s convicted of sodomy, and the awkward bodily joys James feels as a young man when he is forced to share a bed with another lad.

While there’s much to love about The Master, there’s also some elements that frustrate. I sometimes felt there wasn’t enough narrative arc, or even narrative raison d’etre, to hold the various chapters together and propel them forward. The novel, upon lengthy reflection, feels like an overly episodic read. It also relies a lot on flashbacks and memories, and this often divorced me from what was supposed to be the “present period” in the book. I’m not sure whether it was a good strategy to centre the novel on these specific years of James’s life when so much of the story relies on his history. Perhaps it should have followed the model of something like The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, Wayne Johnston’s fictional take on the life of Joey Smallwood, which examines its subject from a much higher chronological perch.

While these are not small quibbles, they don’t undermine the novel as a whole. There’s no mistaking the power of this exploration of a literary giant, or of Tóibín’s skill as a stylist. The Master is truly masterful.

In which I'm so starved for attention...

... that I'll even link to a (mostly) negative review of Off Book. I'm not sure what's up with the universe these days, but this makes two reviews of my obscure, hard-to-find 2007 novel in as many months. What gives? This one comes courtesy of fellow blogspot blogger/CNQ contributor/thoughtful curmudgeon Brian Palmu, who knows his stuff and whose knives come rarely sheathed. Lord knows where he found a copy of the thing. Anyway, I find it hard to argue with anything he says - good (and there is some good) or bad - about the book. What to say? I was (and still am, frankly) a rookie with no mentor.

The one saving grace is that Palmu, like the previous reviewer, alludes with pleasant curiosity to the status of my Korean novel. Yes, it is completed; yes, I am trying to find a publisher; no, it hasn't been accepted yet; no, I haven't abandoned hope; yes, I am drinking more than I was this time last year. But so what? I also have a poetry manuscript I'm peddling around; I'm writing short stories again after a half-decade hiatus; I'm blog-reviewing pretty much every book I read; I'm freelancing; and I work a full-time office job. The planet rotates, you're 36 and this is what your life is.

On a COMPLETELY unrelated note: Have you, ahem, seen that Arc magazine has posted its shortlist for its $5,o00 'Poem of the Year' Prize? You have, ahem, until April 15 to go to the website and vote in the 'Readers Choice' portion of the award. And you should. Cough. Ahem. Yes, you really should.

M.

My Q&Q review of Dave Margoshes' A Book of Great Worth

... has been posted online. I love writing reviews for Quill and Quire but one of the drawbacks is that the word count often limits how much I can praise (or damn) the book in question. Margoshes' latest, a collection of interconnected stories about his father, deserves every accolade it gets. I could go on and on about how much I loved A Book of Great Worth, but you should just go check it out for yourself when the collection is released later this spring. Trust me, you won't be disappointed.

M.