The Art of the Short Review

Reviews written by participants in The Art of the Short Review workshop on October 27, 2007. During the workshop participants wrote 4 sentences in 3 hours and some participants submitted their finished reviews to this web page. The workshop was taught by Patty Osborne, a frequent contributor to the “Endnotes,” the book review section of Geist.

Pratfalls

Watch Yourself by Matt Hern illustrates how litigators and insurers have successfully created a culture of idealized safety as well as how “risk” is measured and appraised. Through personal anecdotes, examples from current events and photographs of warning signs, Hern shows us how a lack of personal responsibility has compromised how we raise and educate children, changed man’s relationship to nature from subservient to oppressor, and society’s willingness to sacrifice privacy to protect itself from technology that was created to streamline life within it. Depressing at times and dry in parts, Watch Yourself is less cautionary tale and more how-to book on avoiding the pratfalls of paranoid thought. Whether you play by the rules or not, don’t be surprised if by the end of the book you find yourself walking on the grass, feeding the animals, or sticking out your tongue at the security camera monitoring your ATM transactions.

Getting Lost

In Finding Home (Cormorant) by Eric Wright, Will Prentice, a middle-aged Canadian, returns to England to bury his mother and then takes a road trip around the country with his twenty-year-old nephew, it’s a relief that, among other things, he’s pursuing the solution to a tiny but intriguing mystery because there is little else in the story to persuad the reader to go along for the ride. Many people, the tax man included, are wondering where Will’s mum has hidden the money she must have made running her boarding house, but Will is thinking of writing a travel book so most of the book is filled with descriptions of pubs, hotels and tourist attractions, as well as Will’s ruminations on the differences between Brits and Canadians and when his nephew asks a few innocent questions about Canada, Will fills up the rest of the book with a verbal tour of Canada that includes a history of the First Nations, Will’s opinions on violence in hockey and an analysis of French-English relations in Quebec. Eric Wright is well-known for his excellent detective stories but this attempt to break out of that genre lacks the direction and energy that drive a good story. It’s a good thing the nephew was driving most of the time, otherwise he would surely have been put to sleep by his uncle’s rambling monologues.

—Patty Osborne

 

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Reviews written by participants in The Art of the Short Review workshop on April 22, 2006.

Genius

Proof, David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize winning stage play (Farrar Straus Giroux), takes us into the mind of the reluctant author of a ground-breaking mathematical proof she fears the world will believe was written by her aging, schizophrenic father. After much agonizing, Catherine shows the proof to Hal, an attractive young graduate student searching through her father’s notebooks for any shred of brilliance he may have left behind after his sudden death from an aneurysm. Catherine has a hard time convincing Hal and her irritating, financial analyst sister, Claire, that she, indeed, conceived the proof. This insightful play, and its current film adaptation, makes us wonder how many students and college dropouts in our neighborhoods carry within them the seeds of genius. The world may never know.

—Sandra Filippelli

Good Eats

Told by an internet survey that I will be spending eternity in the eighth level of hell, I was compelled to read Jim Crace’s The Devil’s Larder (Penguin) mostly to see what I will be eating in the afterlife. As a menu of the damned, The Devil’s Larder does not disappoint. In this collection of sixty-four micro stories, Crace offers us a virtual tapas bar of gastronomic perversion: impregnated omelettes, magic mushroom muffins, urine, mold and human remains all make an appearance at Crace’s table. A salacious read for the foodies among us, but not for the weak stomached.

—Leah Rae

Roads to Reason

Ladykiller (Thomas Allen Publishers), the debut collection of seven stories by Vancouverite Charlotte Gill, speeds you along with beautifully dangerous characters careening down the road to self-inflicted disaster. A couple trapped in a wrecked truck waiting for rescue with a load of marijuana; a man abandoning his dying mother in a department store to chase a skirt; a past-his-prime scuba instructor letting himself fall for his sixteen year old student. Lyrical and witty, Gill's fast-paced tales of horrifying dysfunction end with you skidding to a rest sideways saying, “Wow, what a ride!”

—John Mavin

Out of Line

Kill the Robot (McGilligan Books), a first novel by zinester Maggie MacDonald, will make you want to read this challenging book twice as it takes you with a dizzying thud into Moore White’s fragmented memories of an alternative reality of city checkpoints and the aphoria of the all-encompassing E-Soft Corporation. Moore’s memories are related in such an intriguing nonlinear fashion that you will find it hard to resist rereading random sections to more deeply understand her mind-body connection. The hand-drawn illustrations are startling revelations of the ethos of a dystopian era that is dominated by rules, private police and the overwhelming constant buzzzz and hummm of the E-Soft InterTeeVee. MacDonald tells a strange compelling tale that offers unsettling parallels to the undercurrents of modern social change.

—Patricia L. Foster

Fun With Letters

Most contemporary, purportedly avante garde poetry is boring; an overdetermined fetishization of b.p. nichol’s work that serves no purpose other than to prove that the writer has perhaps read the entire Martyrology, and you haven’t. Donato Mancini’s Ligatures, (New Star Books) while echoing elements of nichol in a certain eroticization of the letter, is not one of those books. The title poem, “Ligature,” creates resonance by using the last half of each word to form the first half of the next (“lemur murmur murder derange ranger angered”) in seemingly endless permutations, and the “Starfield Series” splashes white words and letters against a black background to form elegant constellations that are visually, aurally and semantically arresting. In one inventive piece, “@phabet,” Mancini takes the circled a, (@) better known as ‘at,’ and develops his own shorthand alphabet, for example, a circled ‘s’ becomes a symbol for she/her/hers. Patient readers will have fun using this alphabet to decipher the pulp fiction-esque cartoon “@phabet readers.” The Concise Oxford Dictionary tells us that a ligature may be “two or more letters joined, e.g. œ,” or “the act of tying or binding.” The alphabet may in fact never recover from the binding (and gagging?) performed by Donato Mancini in this stimulating first collection.

—Nikki Reimer

Smooth Ice

Poetic language and the isolated landscape of a small fishing village in Maine form the smooth ice across which the blades of enigmatic, cruel, and sometimes frustrating, characters glide or cut in Deborah Joy Corey’s novel, The Skating Pond (Vintage Canada ). The story begins with a focus on Elizabeth’s beautiful, skating mother and artist father but after a devastating accident it follows Elizabeth’s teenage and adult relationships as she learns that art cannot be separated from infidelity and tragedy. The hypnotic and cinematic writing, along with arresting, although at times disjointed, scenes left me wondering when this novel will appear on the silver screen.