His hair is red and shaggy and longish, and he’s pale and slim and six feet tall. Music is everything to him, which makes sense because he’s fifteen. I was twenty-two when he was born. I’d never had brothers or any other close male relatives and I’d always dreamed of having a brother or a son. The idea of it was strange and exotic, and when he was born, it was as if I had given birth to a llama or something.
We look back and so much of the past seems to portend what would come later. The man in the seat in front of me on the Greyhound bus was returning to Edmonton from his annual vacation in Las Vegas, where in the off-season you can get a cheap room with everything you need, colour tv, air conditioning, room service, no windows, but who needs windows in Las Vegas?
Many years ago my father-in-law, who had been a British prisoner of war in Japan, gave me a small pocket anthology, The Knapsack, edited by the undeservedly forgotten Herbert Read. The book (which I have since passed on to my daughter) had been put together for the Ministry of War to be given to its soldiers: its proclaimed intention was “to celebrate the genius of Mars.” Surprisingly, however, the general tone of the anthology was above all elegiac.
When you spend time with someone you love whose mind is deteriorating, there is no rest or relief: it is like having your eyelids taped open. The intervals in which I can forget that my mother is sick, or just not think about it, diminish to split seconds before I know it.
When you spend time with someone you love whose mind is deteriorating, there is no rest or relief: it is like having your eyelids taped open. The intervals in which I can forget that my mother is sick, or just not think about it, diminish to split seconds before I know it.
When you spend time with someone you love whose mind is deteriorating, there is no rest or relief: it is like having your eyelids taped open. The intervals in which I can forget that my mother is sick, or just not think about it, diminish to split seconds before I know it. The moments when she laughs or tilts her head the way she used to, or fights back against some small indignity instead of bowing her head and acquiescing. During my last visit with her, I thanked God for the twenty-seven-inch colour TV and satellite dish that my father had installed, but also for a small stack of great novels.
What is there to say about Glenn Gould that hasn’t already been said? Anyone who is interested in the subject is already familiar with the many mythologies surrounding this gangly, pill-popping agoraphobe who wore winter coats year-round and played the piano with neurotic precision and stunning clarity. Yet Glenn Gould: A Life in Pictures (Doubleday)—filled with rare black-and-white photos from the CBC, the National Library of Canada and Columbia Records, as well as family snapshots—is still a fresh and relevant book.
Tara Ariano wrote Untitled: A Bad Teen Novel (Writers Club Press) when she was thirteen. It is, she claims, “quite awful,” and was only rescued from obscurity because Tara had friends who persuaded her to share her shame with the world.
My local library has introduced a program called Speed Reads. In the interests of increasing the circulation of the most popular books, a patron may borrow a best-seller for just a week, and very steep fines are imposed for late returns. Under these onerous conditions, I took out a copy of The Story of Lucy Gault, a novel by the Irish writer William Trevor (Knopf). The story begins in Ireland in the 1920s, when the owner of a country house takes a potshot at a group of would-be arsonists, wounding one of them in the shoulder.
One dark afternoon in December, a few of the Canadian-ephemera-loving Geist staff sat down to play The All Canadian Trivia Board Game (Outset Media). The board itself is a huge map of Canada, showing places from Victoria to Goose Bay via Iqaluit.
