When Malcolm Lowry’s shack on the beach at Dollarton, B.C., burned to the ground in 1944, he and his wife Marjorie were able to save the manuscript of only one of the novels that he was working on at the time. A few months later the same manuscript had to be rescued again when the house that friends found for them in Oakville, Ontario, also burned to the ground.
Lennah Nanke Mothimit, age thirty-eight, visits with her sister Anna in the resettlement camp at D’Kar, Botswana. Nanke contracted aids in 1999 when she was raped. She is one of the few women in D’Kar who is open about her HIV status.
I’ve always had mixed feelings about Stuart McLean’s Vinyl Café show on CBC Radio One. Sometimes it seems a bit twee or corny, but if I’m driving around town on a Sunday I’ll always tune in because I know that somewhere along the way, Stuart McLean will make me laugh.
The summer issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism provides a glimpse into the state of narrative writing in North America. A great many stories in its pages open with reporters reporting on themselves: “I’m standing at reception in the X hotel”; “I first meet X outside the Y”; “Standing inside X, I’m watching Y”; “I’m sitting in a government office in X, waiting for Y”; “I’m standing inside the lobby of X, looking for Y.” We read these sentences and we can hear the imaginary cameras running.
Adolf Hitler is the second man examined in the film Neighbours: Freud and Hitler in Vienna by Manfred Becker, which played recently at the Pacific Cinémathèque in Vancouver. Both the narrator of the film and the psychologist who spoke after the screening (who claimed that she was not “a Freudian” even though the early Freudian theories could easily be read with contemporary eyes) said that Hitler grasped control of a nation’s unconscious and led it into demagoguery.
I still can’t figure out why the cover of The Optimists, a novel by Andrew Miller (Sceptre), is covered with blue butterflies when the story is about atrocities committed under the orders of an African politician. Clem Glass is a photographer who documents the aftermath of a massacre in Africa and then returns to his home in London to recover from the horror.
British books and movies are some of the best exposés of the evils and absurdities of the class system, but a new book by a Canadian introduces another class system. In Shani Mootoo’s novel He Drown She in the Sea (McClelland & Stewart), the main characters’ lives begin on a tiny Caribbean island where the lowest class consists of the Africans who were taken there as slaves.
When W. G. Sebald died in an automobile accident in December 2001, just four of his books were available in English translation. Those four books had earned him considerable praise (Michael Ondaatje called him “the most interesting and ambitious writer working in Britain today”) and critical attention (Austerlitz won a National Book Critics Circle Award). Four more books by Sebald have been published since his death, and with the latest, Campo Santo, translated by Anthea Bell (Hamish Hamilton), there are signs that the well of previously unpublished (or untranslated) material is finally beginning to run dry.
Mariko Tamaki’s Fake ID (Women’s Press) is a collection of short stories about a young woman who moves to Toronto after finishing university in Montreal. “The Tea Pary Chronicles” peeks into a role-playing community of goths and misfits who dress up and pretend to be wizards in the woods.
