At seven o’clock on Saturday evening, the women’s washroom off the lobby of the Hotel Vancouver is full. All the cubicles are occupied, and three females are washing up at the basin: a child aged one or two, her young mother, and an older woman. They look astonishingly like each other, and they all look astonishingly like Carol Shields.
Robert MacLean’s new murder mystery, Home from the Party (Ronsdale) has a lot going for it: exotic location (Aegean island), a Greek cop who went to the University of Toronto to study under Andreas Papandreou (who lived in Canada until the Colonels were thrown out of power), and a murder mystery that grows into political conspiracy and all that stuff. But the author needs a stronger editor: the exposition (a big problem in the genre) is clumsy and it’s not easy to tell the characters apart (too many of them).
Melanie Bluelake’s Dream by Betty Dorion (Coteau) looked like it would interest my eleven-year-old son. It’s a small book so I didn’t mind carrying it home, and of course, once on the bus, I pulled it out to take a look.
Drawn & Quarterly, an almost quarterly periodical published in Montreal, is the classiest comics anthology on the market. Each issue has knockout stories, rich-but-never-slick art work, and generous design, paper and printing.
Granta hits the big five-oh this year with its fiftieth issue, the last to be put to bed by Bill Buford since he took over the foundering university magazine sixteen years ago and turned it into the foremost literary magazine of its time. There is much to be emulated in the history of Buford’s Granta and nothing to be condemned.
Zine bargoon of the season: Trite Travel Titbits, A Lil Book of Poems by Jim Munroe, a tiny book (two by three inches) published by Lickspittle Ventures (c/o 66 Greyhound Drive, Willowdale ON M2H 1K3). Composed in pencil, printed on an out-of-tune photocopier and bound by a single staple.
Two books full of ice and snow: Icefields (NeWest) by Thomas Wharton, and Smilla’s Sense of Snow (Doubleday) by Peter Hoeg. Peter Hoeg’s sense of snow is utterly convincing: his book had me shivering in August (I actually took to reading it under the covers at night, which was very cozy).
