Eduardo Galeano’s Soccer in Sun and Shadow (Verso) collects his ruminations on the history and future of soccer, and consists of vignettes describing famous players, unlikely goals and every World Cup final since 1930. The book contains much little-known trivia: Albert Camus played goalkeeper all his life because in that position your shoes don’t wear out quickly.
Attention, Joyce Nelson fans: we no longer need to scan the contents pages of Canadian Forum and the Georgia Straight for her astute essays on culture. In June 1996, Nelson started publishing Lynx, a Monthly Newsletter in the Public Interest from James Bay on Vancouver Island, and she already has readers in six provinces.
Word of Mouth (Thistledown) is M.A.C. Farrant’s fourth collection of fiction and is in two parts: stories about Sybilla, a nineteen-year-old mother struggling to survive in suburban Vancouver Island, stretching welfare cheques and coping with perverted, judgmental neighbours (“The McHates”); and the story of a woman raised by her aunt and often absent parents.
During a trip to Ireland last spring, I remembered Charles Foran’s The Last House of Ulster: a Family in Belfast (HarperCollins), so when I got back to Canada I tracked it down at the library. It describes Foran’s fourteen-year relationship with the McNallys, a Catholic family of seven living in North Belfast that he first met as a backpacking teenager in 1979 and has visited many times since.
When Bill Buford took over Granta magazine in 1979 it was a burned-out case, bankrupt and generally unread. Seven issues later he cut a deal with Penguin that gave the magazine access to a worldwide distribution network and a stable of big-name authors.
The Utne Reader served us coffee aficionados a treat this month, by devoting the November/December issue to a study of the enigmatic bean. Of the nine pieces included in the “Coffee Madness” section, Mark Schapiro’s “Muddy Waters” is the most enlightening.
The Real Guide to Canadian Universities compiled by Sara Borins, and written by students, has longer entries than the older Linda Frum Guide, a more adventurous layout and information that could only come from people who know what they’re talking about (with sections like “Residence Reality,” “Beyond the Books” and “Top Ten Reasons for Not Making it to Class Friday Morning.”) The writing quality varies, but the information is solid.
One of the April New Yorkers contains a wonderful piece by Robert McCrum on Graham Greene’s library, an archive to be coveted not for its size (a mere 3000 volumes) or its variety (from Planet of the Apes to Sanctum Jesu Christi Evangelium, a gift from Pope Paul VI), but for the thousands of notes Greene scribbled in margins, on flyleaves and end-papers (I think it was Joseph Conrad who said no writing is ever finished, just abandoned at some point): plot summaries, notes for novels in progress, word counts, snippets of dialogue. In The Waterfall by Margaret Drabble, he writes, “Flying to Helsinki 17.8.69—Coming into a new capital at night still has its spell”; while visiting Fidel Castro he writes, “A man who is discovering things for the first time …
In a recent Vancouver Sun, Don McGillivray had a note on what Americans think Canuck means to Canadians. He quotes the 1992 American Heritage Dictionary, which defines Canuck as: “offensive slang used as a disparaging term for a Canadian, especially a French Canadian”; the 1985 Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage: “a Canadian-American, especially one of French-Canadian ancestry, an oddity”; and the Columbia Guide to Standard American English: “some people consider it an ethnic slur.”
