In the pre-time being, in the rehearsal period for the real, Marj wrote to Kate, “I’ve been doing exercises between visible and invisible, between imagining touch and really touching.” At the moment of meeting they are not surprised by the alchemy that instantly changes imagination into reality. They don’t say a word; their two dissimilar bodies recognize a long, predetermined assent. They are speeding away from the airport in Kate’s little car; Marj's right hand closes over Kate’s small, sunburned left hand.
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).
My maternal nerve-ends were still vibrating from that article a few days later when I went to see Crumb, a film by Terry Zwigoff about the American comics artist Robert Crumb. The film is a shocking, riveting but not lurid meditation on what shapes an accomplished, controversial artist/writer—including the family he grew up in.
Susan Griffin’s A Chorus of Stones (Anchor Books), is a long meditation on war. She takes war into her self, into her body, and in writing about it she seems to give birth to it.
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).
Some of the books that come in over the transom I scoop up for other members of my family. But somewhere between the office and home I often find myself sneaking a read. I took home The Garden Letters by Elspeth Bradbury and Judy Maddocks (Polestar) for the gardener in my family. It’s a collection of letters exchanged between two avid gardeners, one in New Brunswick and one in British Columbia.
Stan Persky has been hailed as a great prose stylist. He has also been hailed as a possible pervert (the word wasn’t used, but that was the implication) for his interest in young boys. Young men, rather. Male prostitutes. Both statements are true. They may be connected. Then We Take Berlin, Persky’s book on the New Europe, is a long reflection on this question. How is desire connected to will?
I also take home books that are intended only for me. The stories in After the Angel Mill by Carol Bruneau (Cormorant) are about Cape Breton, and the characters come from four generations of one family.
I didn’t expect to like Bastion Falls by Susie Moloney (Key Porter) because the back cover describes it as spine-tingling. I don’t usually like having my spine tingled, but Bastion Falls was a pleasant surprise.
Greg Gatenby must be stopped. A couple of years ago he edited a collection of remarks about Canada by various foreign writers. Now he has followed up with a second thick collection, The Very Richness of That Past: Canada Through the Eyes of Foreign Writers (Knopf Canada). Not only that, he threatens in his introduction to the new volume to keep on going until he has exhausted his entire collection of 1500 writers (“at last count”) from various countries who happen to have written something about Canada.
