opinion

Reviews
A Fairy Tale for Our Time

What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.

Reviews
A Few Essential Words

I met Alejandra Pizarnik in Buenos Aires, in 1967, five years before her death. I had asked her to contribute to an anthology of texts that purported to continue an interrupted story begun in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: “There was a man dwelt by a churchyard.” She agreed and wrote a haunting piece called “Los muertos y la lluvia,” “The dead and the rain.” The book was never published, but we became friends.

Stephen Henighan
Columns
A Pen Too Far

On March 5, 2006, a group of people gathered in a small Ontario city in the expectation of having books signed by an author who was not present.

Daniel Francis
Reviews
Afghanistan

One thing Canadians have learned from our armed incursion into Afghanistan is that we do not have a vocabulary for discussing war or warlike events.

George Fetherling
Reviews
Adventures in the Nib Trade

No one knows quite how to account for the well-established shops in Vancouver, Toronto and other cities that deal exclusively in fountain pens and fine fountain-pen accessories.

Daniel Francis
Reviews
African Gulag

The atrocities were carried out in the name of some version of “civilization” that the Queen represented.

Stephen Henighan
Reviews
Against Efficiency

Stephen Henighan argues that efficiency has become a core value that heightens social divisions.

Dispatches
Art and Blasphemy

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

Daniel Francis
Columns
At the Margins

In Chicago, where he settled, William Henry Jackson, British settler, transformed himself into Honoré Jaxon, Métis freedom fighter. He identified so closely with the Métis struggle for justice that he became one of them. He had no trouble convincing others that he was a Native and probably had no trouble convincing himself either.

Stephen Henighan
Reviews
Bad Spellers

Mordecai Richler, in a withering put-down, once dismissed the novelist Hugh Garner as “a good speller.” In the summer of 2003, grinding through 160 Canadian books as a jury member for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction in English, I learned that for many contemporary Canadian writers, Garner’s level of dubious distinction remains out of reach.

Stephen Henighan
Reviews
Becoming French

For an English-speaking Canadian who has been exposed to French from an early age, Paris is the most disorienting city in Europe. It is grandiose, but it is mundane.

Stephen Henighan
Reviews
Before Lonely Planet

Lonely Planet readers no longer travel in Bolivia or Thailand, but within the elastic, infinitely portable boundaries of the Lonely Planet nation.

Stephen Henighan
Reviews
Bologna Erases Canada

Bologna, Italy, known as both “the Fat” and “the Red,” is a city to a make a bookish vacationer salivate. Less overrun by package tours than Rome, Florence or Venice, Bologna combines superb food with the wonderful bookstores that seem to be the inevitable companion of left-wing politics.

Daniel Francis
Reviews
Boob Tube

Richard Stursberg’s memoir of his years in CBC programming raises the question: How did someone with no sympathy for public broadcasting get the job in the first place?

Stephen Henighan
Reviews
Building Bohemia

Since the Wall came down, East German socialists in Prenzlauer Berg are free to sip coffee and talk about art.

Daniel Francis
Dispatches
Buffalo Bill’s Defunct

In the sun-streaked barroom of the Irma Hotel on the main street of Cody, Wyoming, late one afternoon in June, I made a big mistake. “What’s on tap?” I asked.

Reviews
Burning Mistry

Alberto Manguel examines a modern-day book burning and asks: how is this still happening?

Stephen Henighan
Reviews
Cakchiquel Lessons

Cakchiquel, the third most widely spoken of Guatemala’s twenty Mayan languages, is understood by more than 400,000 people. It is blessed with a larger population base than most Native American languages but is cursed by its location.

Stephen Henighan
Reviews
Canada for Spartans

Stephen Henighan exposes the errors, omissions and problems with the Conservative party's study guide for Canadian citizenship.

Daniel Francis
Reviews
Canada's Funnyman

A misogynist, a racist and an academic walk into a bar...

Reviews
Cautionary Tales for Children

Some years ago, Susan Crean amusingly suggested that nations might be defined or understood through their emblematic children’s books and according to whether the protagonist was male or female.

Stephen Henighan
Reviews
Chariots of China

A bibliophile's worst nightmare: being stuck on a plane with a terrible book. A book mistaken for a work of serious history.

George Fetherling
Reviews
Civilian Camo

From the trench coat to the Hummer, what does the militarization of style say about us?

George Fetherling
Dispatches
City of Neighbourhoods

In Bangkok as in major centres all over Asia, there is life everywhere, on every street, in every shop and at all hours.

Reviews
Closing Time in the Gardens of the West

Cyril Connolly’s writings have been republished, as The Selected Works (Picador, 2002). I remember reading his work in my late adolescence and wondering how someone could write like that, in fragments and half-formed ideas, allowing his thoughts (and the reader’s) to go in a thousand directions at the same time, and yet lend his texts an overwhelming feeling of cohesiveness.

Reviews
Cooking by the Book

I'm always looking for the moment in which a character must stop to eat because, for me, the very mention of food humanizes a story.

Stephen Henighan
Reviews
Court Jester

One of the indispensable figures of contemporary journalism is the cutting-edge cultural commentator. The columnist who offers sardonic insights into trends, fashions, television shows and publishing personalities has become an institution.

Columns
Dark Hearts

I first tried to read J. M. Coetzee in 1994, when I was twenty-three. I failed.

Reviews
Dante in Guantánamo

After fol­low­ing Virgil down through the var­i­ous infer­nal cir­cles, Dante reaches the frozen lake where the souls of trai­tors are trapped up to their necks in ice.

Columns
Detective Samuel de Champlain

One of the pleasures of reading for no particular reason is coming across hidden stories, involuntary essays, samples of what someone once called “found literature”—as opposed, I imagine, to the literature that states its official identity on the cover. Leafing through a book on Samuel de Champlain, I came across, of all things, a detective story.

Daniel Francis
Reviews
Deviance on Display

Daniel Francis investigates the practice of visiting asylums and penitentiaries as entertainment in nineteenth-century Canada.

Reviews
Eldorado

Art museums and geographical exp­loration curiously share a common story. The first chapter of the story takes place in Peru. In 1540, the conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro, lost in the strange Amazonian jungle, entrusted one of his men, Francisco de Orellana, to take their remaining brigantine and set off down the Napo River in search of provisions.

Reviews
Ethical Juices

Parables, cautionary tales, morality plays, allegories—the notion that we can study literary works as texts of ethics is as old as literature.

Reviews
Europeans

When I was in school in Argentina, Europe (our notion of Europe) was a vast and powerful conglomerate of culture and wisdom. From there, from across the Atlantic, came the history to which, magister dixit, we owed our existence; from there came the writers whose literature we read, the musicians whose music we listened to, the filmmakers whose films we watched.

Reviews
Final Answers

For most artists, the learning of the craft never ceases, and no resulting work is fully achieved

Reviews
Geist’s Literary Precursors

The Geist map has a venerable ancestor that goes back four centuries and halfway around the world.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Dispatches
Grey Matters

It all started with a zesty little book about getting old.

Reviews
Hospital Reading

When you find yourself laid up in a sterile hospital room, which books do you want to have with you?

Stephen Henighan
Reviews
How They Don’t See Us

During the 1980s the literary critic Edward Said organized occasional research seminars at Columbia University in New York.

Daniel Francis
Reviews
Identity Crises

Several years ago Ian McKay, a Queen’s University history professor, published a book called The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (McGill-Queen’s University Press) in which he argued that the image many of us have of Nova Scotia as a tartan-wearing, bagpipe-squealing mini-Scotland is pretty much a fabrication.

Daniel Francis
Columns
Identity in a Cup

Is it the icons of Canadian pop culture—hockey fights, Tim Hortons coffee, Don Cherry’s haberdashery, Rick Mercer’s rants—that reveal the deepest truths about us?

Reviews
Idiot’s Fare

Dear George Szanto, I write in answer to your letter describing your difficulties in finding a publisher for your new novel.

Reviews
Imaginary Islands

In order to discharge ourselves of certain problems, why not simply erase from our maps the sites of such nuisance?

Reviews
Imaginary Places

Alberto Manguel remembers a golden era in Canadian writing, comments on our current cultural climate and proposes a brighter future.

Reviews
In Memoriam: Mahmoud Darwish

When a poet friend was found dead after two days because of the do not disturb sign he had hung outside his hotel room, Darwish swore never again to hang the sign or lock his door. “When death comes,” he said, “I want to be disturbed.”

Stephen Henighan
Reviews
In Praise of Borders

I remembered past ordeals: a U.S. official who squeezed out my toothpaste tube on the train from Montreal to Philadelphia, another who hauled me off a bus for a lengthy interrogation.

Reviews
Images of Work

Six days before the Passover festival in Bethany, the sisters Martha and Mary gave a dinner in honour of Jesus who (the gospels tell us) had raised their brother from the dead. Martha worked in the kitchen while Mary sat herself down at the feet of their guest, to listen to his words. Overwhelmed by the many tasks to be done, Martha asked her sister to come and help her. “Martha, Martha,” said Jesus. “You fret and fuss about many things, but only one thing is necessary. The part Mary has chosen is the best, and it will not be taken from her.”

Columns
In Praise of the Enemy

The epic genre suffers from disregard. To the Iliad, our new century has preferred the Odyssey: the encumbered return of the warrior matters more to us than his laborious swordplay.

Reviews
In the Shadow of the Castle

Immediately after the New Year, both my daughters became victims of the First Great Snowfall of 1999.

Daniel Francis
Reviews
It's a Free Country, Isn't It?

During the 1950s the RCMP used a machine to identify federal employees who were homosexuals. The name of this bogus device? The "fruit machine," of course.

Reviews
Irony-Free Reality TV

There may be more to reality TV than meets the eye.

Reviews
Jewish Gauchos

European Jewish artisans on horseback in Argentina.

Columns
Karl Kraus, Everybody's Neighbour

He is one of the strangest crea­tures of that strangest of lit­er­ary bes­tiaries.

Stephen Henighan
Reviews
Kingmakers

The Giller Prize is the most conspicuous example of corporate suffocation of the public institutions that built our literary culture. True, the Giller hasn’t done as much damage as the throttling of the book market by the Chapters-Indigo chain.

Stephen Henighan
Reviews
Language and Nation Now

Do shared languages form the natural boundaries of any nation in the world?

Stephen Henighan
Reviews
Latinocanadá

Military coups, civil wars, and NAFTA are the cause of trilingual labels in Canadian big box stores.

Reviews
Letter from France

For reasons I can't make out, organizers of congresses and literary get-togethers throughout the world appear to have been inspired by a common theme: America. In Germany, in Spain, in France, in Holland, writers are being asked to talk about this faraway place that is either an overwhelming country or an underdeveloped continent.

Reviews
Light and Dark

There are two big trees in my garden under which, when friends are visiting, we sit and talk, sometimes during the day, but usually at night. Especially at night, when talk seems less inhibited, wider-ranging, strangely more stimulating.

Stephen Henighan
Reviews
Lost Nationalities

It is not only the children of British mothers who have lost one of their nationalities; Great Britain, too, has lost a part of itself

EVELYN LAU
Reviews
Love Song to America

Reflections on John Updike's death.

Reviews
Moving Books

Congratulations to Annabel Lyon on winning the 2009 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.

Stephen Henighan
Reviews
Moribund Multiculturalism

My neighbour Jiwani immigrated to Canada from Africa with her husband and three children. A medical doctor, she was barred from practising in Ontario. Jiwani set up her own business, giving classes in traditional African arts. Last summer Jiwani and her husband were awarded a prize by an association in Toronto devoted to promoting the culture of their country of origin. When I congratulated Jiwani on the award, she grew restive.

Reviews
My Friendship With Rat And Mole

The books we love become our cartography.

Stephen Henighan
Reviews
Nations Without Publishers

In 2002, when my essay collection When Words Deny the World was published, people started behaving strangely. Ambitious young writers scurried out of sight when I entered a room, as though afraid that irate authors might banish them from Toronto for having spoken to me.

Michael Turner
Columns
Oh, Canada

Michael Turner questions a US-curated exhibit of Canadian art that exoticizes Canadian artists while suggesting they are un-exotic.

Stephen Henighan
Reviews
Phony War

"We know that life-altering and possibly cataclysmic change is coming, and we continue to live as we have always done."

Reviews
Pictures and Conversations

"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?" —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Reviews
Reading at a Time of Catastrophes

A few years after Kafka’s death, Milena, the woman he had loved so dearly, was taken away by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp. Suddenly life seemed to have become its reverse: not death, which is a conclusion, but a mad and meaningless state of brutal suffering, brought on through no visible fault and serving no visible end. To attempt to survive this nightmare, a friend of Milena devised a method: she would resort to the books she had read, stored in her memory.

Reviews
Reading Beyond the Grave

"There are people," Chateaubriand comments, "who, in the midst of the collapse of empires, visit fountains and gardens"

Reviews
Reading Up on War

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.

Stephen Henighan
Reviews
Reading the City

A city is an atmosphere defined by a history. A great city's streets may reflect its past, but only art makes a city's history, like its distinctive mood, present to the world.

Dispatches
Role Models and Readers

Ruskin's readers have the power to know that there is indeed room for Alice at the Mad Hatter's table.

Stephen Henighan
Reviews
Separate Crossings

Dr. Portillo, a Mexican physician, lives with her husband and son in a balcony-festooned six-bedroom house in a gated suburb. The adobe walls that enclose the garden, the coloured tiles embedded in the walls and the servants’ garden house are all typical of the home of a prosperous Mexican family. The multi-generational collection of relatives who occupy the spare bedrooms also reflect Mexican tradition. Dr. Portillo receives her patients in an office located in a tower in the northern Mexican city of Tijuana; since many of the patients are American, much of her working day takes place in English. When she goes home at night, she relaxes by speaking to her husband and son in Spanish. Her son, however, often responds in English because Dr. Portillo’s typical Mexican home is located in suburban California.

Stephen Henighan
Reviews
Totalitarian Democracy

In 1982 I had my first argument with an American about Saddam Hussein. As an undergraduate at an American liberal arts college where everyone read the New York Times, I supplemented my reading by browsing the British papers.

Dispatches
Wordplay

Descartes believed that monkeys could speak, but that they preferred to remain silent in order not to be forced to work. The intellectual process of granting reality to an invention and then applying to that invention the rigid rules of reality is nowhere more splendidly demonstrated than in our relationship to language.

Daniel Francis
Dispatches
Writing the Nation

Reconsidering the faintly embarrassing Pierre Berton.

Stephen Henighan
Dispatches
Writing the City

As Canada is one of the world's most urbanized countries, a reader knowing nothing of contemporary Canadian writing might expect to find a surfeit of urban novels in our bookstores. Yet novels explicitly set in Canadian cities form a mere sliver of our novelistic production.

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