Last month in Calgary a friend showed me the way to Louise Bridge by sketching a map with her fingertip on the dust jacket of The Wolf King, a book by Judd Palmer that we had been admiring at her kitchen table.
When my friend Barbara heard a description of this photograph of a friend’s aunt taken when the aunt was nine years old, sometime in the early 1950s near the town of Barrington, Nova Scotia, she was put strongly in mind of her own mother, who had grown up in Nova Scotia and who used to tell stories of catching fish when she was a girl.
Douglas Coupland’s homage to Terry Fox, Terry (Douglas & McIntyre), is also a homage to Canada circa 1980. Americans reflect on the day that JFK had his brains blown out and we Canadians remember the 143 days that a one-legged kid from Port Coquitlam was running across the country.
From its title, The Rebel Sell: Why Culture Can’t be Jammed (HarperCollins) looked like it might be a source of new ideas about resisting the fast-paced corporate world. But the polemic of the authors, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, informs us that resistance is futile and I had to abandon the book in disgust.
The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, the latest book by Yann Martel (Vintage), looked to me like a novel, not a book of short stories (which it is). So, when coming close to the end of the first “chapter,” I was alarmed at how fast the story seemed to be wrapping up, with two-thirds of the book still left to read.
Carl Honoré isn’t the first author to investigate the phenomenon of slow living, but his book In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed (Vintage Canada) is the most comprehensive explanation of recent attention to slowing down. Slow food embraces traditional cooking, slow sex turns to Tantric Buddhism, slow cities reduce traffic and waste and promote quiet, locally owned businesses.
When I heard that George Orwell’s Coming Up For Air was being adapted as a one-man stage show (“Which Would You Sooner Listen To, a Bluebottle or a Bombing Plane?”), I couldn’t wait to see it. It’s high time for a new interpretation of Orwell’s work.
