day.Last year Christopher Grabowski returned to Poland, which is his native country, after an absence of ten years. He found Warsaw to be exciting and vibrant and a scene of great cultural activity. At a gallery opening he heard a well-known film director speak of the poverty he had seen twenty years earlier, amongst the coal dumps in the industrial and coal-mining district of Silesia, which is about half a day’s drive south of Warsaw. The film director assured Grabowski that conditions in Silesia were not like that today. »»
I went to the babysitter’s to pick up Julia, who was two and a half years old, and she said that she had been “a little bit sad for a while” because her mother, who had a new part-time job and had dropped Julia off a few hours earlier, had gone away for “quite a long time.”
When the reviews of Douglas Coupland’s Miss Wyoming (Random House) first came out, I was sitting in a diner on Yonge Street eating scrambled eggs and hash browns. This time Coupland’s lost souls are John Johnson, a movie producer, and Susan Colgate, an actor and child beauty pageant star.
Though the title of Soulmates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationships by Thomas Moore (Harper Perennial) is sappy, the book’s marrow is tough: Moore talks about the struggle to find meaning and intimacy by invoking the mythopoetic tradition of therapeutic discourse. Like Carl Jung and James Hillman before him, Moore explores that which distinguishes human beings from other animals—the imagination.
Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art (North Point Press) is a wonderful book of old stories about Hermes in Greece, Raven and Coyote in North America, Krishna in India and Eshu in West Africa, and new stories about Picasso, Fredrick Douglas, John Cage and Allen Ginsberg. Hyde’s thesis is that the “liveliness and durability of cultures require that there be space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that culture is based on.” In my work as a psychotherapist, ancient and modern stories about shamans, monks, gurus, Zen masters, Hasidic rabbis and philosophers are often the best sources for understanding what goes on between patient and therapist.
In Chapter 10 of The Voice of Aliette Nouvelle by John Brooke (Nuage Editions), police inspector Aliette Nouvelle sits on the toilet and meditates “the way people do, on the nature of things inside myself.” She is contemplating the slippery mucus that tells her she is fertile today and she is feeling lonely. She feels she is working at cross purposes with herself: she is committed to her career but her body is operating “just as it was meant to.” The Voice of Aliette Nouvelleis not just another detective story, and you don’t have to wait until Chapter 10 to figure this out.
I started Hal Niedzviecki’s Lurvy: A Farmer’s Almanac (Coach House Books) while on the way to a rural retreat with a bunch of book publishers. Lurvy is a bizarre retelling of the children’s classic story Charlotte’s Web, this time told from the point of view of Lurvy, the farmhand.
I was eager to read Stephen Miller’s The Woman in the Yard (Picador) because I had enjoyed Miller’s previous mystery novel, Wastefall. His publisher did not respond to my requests for a review copy, but fortunately Miller is a neighbour of mine and when I ran into him at the grocery store he offered to lend me his copy.
I almost didn’t read Luanne Armstrong’s book The Colour of Water (Caitlin) because the cover put me off, but when I was reminded of how much I had enjoyed an earlier Armstrong book, Annie, I gave the new one a chance. The Colour of Water covers four generations of a family who live in what we in B.C. call the Kootenays, a land of small towns and big mountains, cold snowy winters and hot dry summers.
By Craig, Gary, Liesl Lafferty, and Richard Brunanski, Jones, Lafferty, and Side
Reviewed by Helen Godolphin
Aside from a grade school crush on Richard Brodeur, I have never been able to work up much enthusiasm for hockey, but when two hockey plays were running concurrently in Vancouver last winter I seized the chance to prove myself Canadian without having to watch any fights. Home Ice by Craig Brunanski and A Town Called Hockey by Gary Jones, Liesl Lafferty and Richard Side are both littered with characters who are angry, drunk and bitter about the elusive dream of NHL stardom, and American interference in the game.
