When the movie director Jean Claude Lauzon died in a plane crash over northern Quebec, his death was noted in a two-sentence paragraph accompanied by a small photograph in the local newspaper. In the photograph he looks like the actor in his first film, Night Zoo—handsome, with pale skin and thick, dark eyebrows and hair. In Lauzon's second and last film, Léolo, the thirteen-year-old boy of the title denies his Quebecois birth by dreaming that his mother was impregnated by an Italian tomato.
The indomitably named Smoking Lung launched five more small books into the world in October 1998, at an extravaganza held at the Western Front in Vancouver. Smoking Lung has become proficient in the art of launching chapbooks and getting them distributed.
I took one look at the cover of In Search of Paradise by Susan Gabori (McGill-Queen’s) and put it right back on the shelf. The abstract landscape on the cover looks static and barren so I thought this would be a book without people.
I am not a fan of action adventure travel tales or extremes of physical exertion: everything I know about mountain climbing I learned from Earle Birney’s long narrative poem “David,” about two boys’ summer around Banff. But once I had started Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air (Random House), an account of the ill-fated 1996 Everest expedition, I couldn’t put it down until I had read all 378 pages.
When I took a west coast vacation in Tofino last summer, I took along Justine Brown’s All Possible Worlds: Utopian Experiments in British Columbia (New Star). This slim coffee table book chronicles the history of utopianism in the most western of Canadian provinces—a place described by some of the book’s visionaries as the North American “end of the line.” Brown tells some wonderful tales of the hopelessly misguided, overzealous and simply ill-prepared folks who tried to construct their own version of paradise west of the Rockies.
I wish I could say that I finished Ferry Woman’s History of the World (Coteau) by Susan Andrews Grace on the ferry ride home, but I didn’t. This is a wonderful book, full of Celtic history, the speaker’s childhood, her confrontations with Jesus, and the matter of acquiring material comfort at the price of the soul.
J.M. Coetzee has written a boyhood memoir in the third person, and this is no mean feat; nor is it a postmodern “novel.” This could have to do with the fact that Boyhood: a Memoir (Vintage) is set in South Africa, a country where life and history still intersect because there’s not enough media between them yet.
Why don’t we hear more about the books of Mary Meigs, who is one of the great prose writers of our time? On her last tour she appeared in Vancouver for a single reading in a bookstore and then she was gone, uninterviewed and unsung. Did this happen in other cities? Why does her name not appear on the short lists for the big honours? Certainly her new book, The Time Being, deserves great notice and great honour; but we hear little about it.
The invaluable Sheila Fischman, whose translations have become a kind of national treasure, has brought us another book by Michel Tremblay: Bambi and Me (Talonbooks) is a small memoir of Tremblay’s earliest movie-going days in Montreal in the fifties. Recounted here is much of the Tremblay family life and more of such masterworks as Cinderella, The King and I and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Barbara Nickel’s The Gladys Elegies (Coteau Books) was the deserving winner of this year’s Pat Lowther Memorial Award for best book of poetry by a Canadian woman. Although there are many things I’d rather do than read sonnets, Nickel’s subtle and delicate elegies won me over.
