When I lived in Ottawa in the 1970s, I used to enjoy passing lazy afternoons at the National Gallery looking at the pictures. I remember how surprised I was when I first encountered the Group of Seven collection. These paintings were completely familiar—I’d seen them in schoolbooks and on calendars, posters, t-shirts, everywhere—yet at the same time they were completely unexpected.
When the Bosnian peace agreement was announced in Dayton, Ohio, I wanted to ask Elma Softic what she thought of it all. I had just finished reading her book Sarajevo Days, Sarajevo Nights (Key Porter: translation by Nada Conic), and I wanted her to cut through the political rhetoric for me—to let me know if this peace agreement was really going to work.
Yann Martel’s novel Self (Knopf), seems aptly titled for a book that depicts a character growing from childhood into adulthood. Martel’s first book, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, kept me on my couch for chapter after chapter with tears in my eyes.
The title of Artists & Writers Colonies: Retreats, Residencies and Respites for the Creative Mind, by Gail Hellund Bowles (Blue Heron/Orca) just about says it. This is a well-conceived, well-organized and apparently well-researched list of getaways, annotated with everything you’d want to know: where is it, how much, do I qualify, etc.
True or False: Breast cancer always shows up on a mammogram, early detection is your best protection, studies show a low-fat diet is linked to a lower incidence of breast cancer, mortality rates for breast cancer are going down. Answers: False, false, false, false. That’s only a sample of what’s to be found in Patient No More: The Politics of Breast Cancer by Sharon Batt (gynergy books)—an inspiring, liberating narrative by a rigorous thinker who happens to be a breast cancer survivor.
Recently I was thinking about the difference between Brecht’s poetics and Rilke’s. Brecht seems to be entirely ironic.... This conundrum came back to me when I read George Stanley’s Gentle Northern Summer (New Star), which is a beautiful and powerful book in every way.
Joanne Arnott in Breasting the Waves: On Writing and Healing writes with great effort, feeling her way toward expression and sense without giving her life away as if it were in the “miscellaneous” box at a garage sale. Arnott begins and ends with her story of being held hostage and beaten by a man she met on her way to university.
John Irving’s The Imaginary Girlfriend (Knopf) is an attractive little hardcover book that is a pleasure to look at and to hold. But to read it is another matter.
Joy Kogawa doesn’t write easy books. Obasan jump-started the Japanese Canadian Redress movement and Itsuka documented the movement’s battles, internal and external. Now Kogawa has taken on another leviathan: sexual abuse of children by clergymen. Her novel The Rain Ascends (Knopf) is Millicent’s story, Millicent being a woman who finds out in middle age that her father, a beloved and respected Anglican priest, has been molesting young boys for many many years.
