Courtesy of Gaspereau
Press

McKay, Don
The Shell of the Tortoise
Gaspereau Press, 2011
Softcover, 149 pages

Review by:  Kerry Riley

 My life, as far as I understand these things, is very much like that of countless others of my late boomer generation, in the western world, in the opening decades of the 21st century. For the most part, it unspools in a repetitive sequence of familiar, quotidian banalities — work, sleep, laundry, and etc.  And, for the most part, I exist unquestioningly and certainly, within these confines.  From time to time, however, without warning or explanation, and often in the midst of some extreme of ordinariness, I will be suddenly struck, as if by stray voltage, by the inchoate strangeness of it all, the complete and utter absurdity of the details of existence. Folding socks, I am suddenly forced to consider why on earth, out of the myriad possibilities available to it, the universe should have conspired to fashion socks at all, and why the infinite energy of the cosmos should have arranged itself just so, in just this moment.  It’s a small step from this to an encounter with the monumental improbability of one’s own existence, and the teetering tower of unlikelihoods upon which it rests. In no time, one’s usual frame of reference has disintegrated, leaving one anchorless in the space-time continuum. At this point, as a good friend once described it, “I have to tell  the ‘I’ that’s me to stop thinking about me, because the gears of my brain are beginning to spin.”  I have nicknamed this experience “existential vertigo,” in recognition of its disorienting effect.

As one might well imagine, my periodic attempts to articulate this sensation to those around me is met, at best, with bemused incomprehension.  It was, therefore, with a mixture of relief, gratitude and the thrill of connection that I encountered what I believe to be a minor variation on the idea of existential vertigo in Canadian poet and man of letters, Don McKay’s fascinating book, The Shell of the Tortoise. It would, of course, be more accurate to say that “existential vertigo” may be a minor variation on McKay’s ideas of the “defamiliarization” that results from encounters with “deep time,” as he has developed the concept far more thoughtfully, articulately and comprehensively than I.

Sharing the fate of most Canadian poets, Don McKay is well-known in literary circles, but hardly a household name. His academic career included a doctorate from Swansea University College, in Wales, where he studied the poetry of Dylan Thomas, followed by teaching stints at the University of Western Ontario, and later the University of New Brunswick, where he also served as editor of The Fiddlehead.  He is a co-founder (with Stan Dragland) of Brick Books, a publisher of Canadian poetry. A member of the Order of Canada, McKay won the Governor General’s Award for poetry for his collection Night Field, in 1991, an accomplishment he repeated in 2000 for Another Gravity, after having retired from teaching in 1996. In 2007 he won the Griffin Poetry Prize for Strike/Slip, the same year he took up residence in St. John’s, Newfoundland. His most recent poetry collection, Paradoxides was published in 2012. An avid amateur birder, and geologist, McKay’s work is noted for its close scrutiny of the natural world, and meditation upon the essential otherness of the wilderness. 

The Shell of the Tortoise consists of four essays and an “assemblage,” a collection of McKay’s responses to his time spent in the pristine Muskwa-Kechika wilderness in northern British Columbia.  The first essay, “Ediacaran and Anthropocene: Poetry as Reader of Deep Time,” provides an entertaining explication of his ideas about the necessary role of poetic imagination in the sciences. A capacity for astonishment, he says, is a faculty shared by poets and groundbreaking scientists alike, and provides a point of intersection between the arts and sciences, between mysticism and materialism, two traditional solitudes whose estrangement “has not served us well, nor the planet we inhabit with so little reverence or grace.” The geological period known as the Ediacaran, (beginning roughly 575 million years ago) is notable for being the newest addition to our geological time scale, and for being the chronological home to the planet’s oldest multicellular organisms.  Although the period is named after an area in Australia where the first fossils were found, McKay derives his inspiration from a far superior Ediacaran fossil bed on the southern end of Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula. An encounter with these fossils, he notes, forces a stretch in one’s perception sufficient to encompass the realities of their existence so many eons ago and all that has come between. In the passage which spoke so clearly to me and my experience of existential vertigo, McKay explains that,

That stretch is, I think, not only epistemological (having to do with knowing) but ontological [having to do with being]; it involves wonder at the manifold possibilities of being in general and these beings in particular (…) The poetic frame permits the possible (…) to be experienced as a power rather than a deficiency; it permits the imagination entry, finding wider resonances, leading us to contemplate further implications for ourselves. For although we are palpably here, our presence is no less a remote possibility in the long accident-ridden course of evolution than is that of the Charnia wardi and other Ediacarans embossed on the rock.

At the far other end of the time that measures life on Earth, is the Anthropocene era, which, as McKay explains, is the proposed but not yet official name for our times. The name recognizes that the defining characteristic of the period is the change wrought upon the Earth’s systems by just one species — ours.

Whatever the starting point, it is judged that the innovative technologies of anthropos — levelling forests, making cities, producing networks of roads, eliminating some species and domesticating others — have altered the workings of the planet’s cycles in a way analogous to an ice age or a collision with an asteroid.

Giving our time its own geological name, McKay feels, pulls us out of the safe and timeless bubble of the present, and forces us to locate ourselves in geological time – in other words, forces a destabilizing encounter with deep time and the accompanying humbling stretch in our perceptions. At a time when the effect of our species on the planet is felt to be worthy of its own geological place-name (the Anthropocene) this stretch seems more necessary than ever.

In “Great Flint Singing:  Reflections on Canadian Nature Poetries,” the second offering in the book, McKay takes a fascinating look at what happened to the Romantic, Wordsworthian approach to nature (which emigrated to Canada along with many of our ancestors) when confronted with the immensity of our wilderness.

There exists, McKay explains, deep within our human natures, a preverbal wildness which underpins all of creation, and which, under certain conditions of light or landscape, when the noise of everyday life is, for one reason or another, quieted, reveals itself to us, or perhaps more accurately, reverberates within us. As he so beautifully explains, there is

a pristine other which addresses a companion “inarticulate part” in our species and affords our “strange being” (…) “one moment of release” such as it will not find within the covenants of time and language

The Romantics, of course, recognized weak emanations of this force in their gentle, pastoral landscapes, and called it the sublime (a la Edmund Burke), in which incarnation it lent a frisson or two to many a gothic novel. The challenge which faced new Canadians, and by extension, their poets, was to confront wilderness landscape on a Canadian scale with Romantic sensibilities honed to detect faint vibrations of the sublime.  As McKay notes,

 It’s as though the thread of terror which lends to the sublime its tremolo and edge were jacked to full volume.

A small dose of this fundamental natural energy, McKay explains, allows one to experience the sublime; an overdose flirts with mental derangement. It was this overwhelming encounter with a force which exceeds and precedes language (and thus baffles the mind) McKay contends, that shaped our Canadian approach to nature and landscape, and thus our literature, and which also produced one of our first Canadian literary archetypes — the “bushed” woodsman — someone “overwhelmed by wilderness energy and made strange to human society.”  As he explains in a later essay,  “This energy discharge is dangerous the way all occurrences of wilderness are dangerous — not because it wishes us harm, but because it represents a potency beyond our control.” Contrary to Wordsworthian Romantics, who, as McKay explains, sought to subsume nature to human purpose, to use it as “rocket fuel for the spirit,” a respectful awareness of the danger implicit in wild energies on a scale confronted in the new land lies close to the surface of much of our best Canadian poetry.

These ideas provide (happily for me) an alternative to the “sinister wilderness,” and “garrison mentality,” approach to Canadian literature put forth by Northrop Frye and, later, Margaret Atwood, in her groundbreaking work, Survival. Written in the early 70′s,  Atwood’s ideas about the sense of victimhood experienced by European pioneers encountering a vast and ever-threatening wilderness, were, as she herself stressed, intended only as a starting point for a theory of Canadian literature, developed to fill a vacuum.  The problem with her ideas, for me, was that they did not match my personal experience. My great-grandparents were Susannah Moodie’s contemporaries, people whose purported reaction to Canadian “nature,” formed the basis of Frye’s and Atwood’s theories. The family was well-read and literarily minded and could not have escaped Wordsworth’s influence.  Furthermore, their experience of the Canadian wilderness was direct and intimate. My grandfather, in particular, was known for disappearing into the bush for months on end on various trapping and prospecting ventures.  In my childhood, my family still had a direct connection with pioneer experiences through the living memory of my father.   Ideas of a malevolence, or sinister intent, residing in the wilderness, if they existed, should surely have been transmitted to me, via my father, but nothing could be further from the truth. The dangers presented by the wilderness and its undeniable mystique, were acknowledged, certainly, the particular type of wiliness required to thrive therein, revered, but there was no sense of persecution or victimhood. As a child, the wilderness was presented to me as something to be actively sought out, and closely observed, and encounters with various wildlife (while never foolhardy) were regarded as a sort of wondrous, privileged glimpse into other worlds. 

In a delightful and learned ramble, his love and extensive knowledge of the subject everywhere evident, McKay discusses a strain of Canadian poetry, from the phenomenologic poets (specific mention given to Archibald Lampman, Ethelwyn Wetherald (whose name, in my humble opinion, is a poem in itself) Marjorie Pickthall, John Steffler, Daphne Marlatt, Sue Sinclair, Stephanie Bolster, Brian Bartlett, Elizabeth Philips, Maureen Harris, Tim Bowling, Sid Marty, Peter Trower) which seeks to know its subjects through close observation and  “initiate[s] a slow-growing wonder wrought of many parts rather than peak moments and grand unifying themes such as one finds in English Romantic vision poems and American Transcendentalism.” Considering the ever-present danger of overexposure to the elemental wilderness energies that Canada presented, this seems a prudent approach.  It is, McKay also points out, a very ecological approach to wilderness and one which, certainly, accords more happily with my own familial inclinations.

McKay has much more of interest to say about the evolution of  Canadian literature, providing fascinating connections between the early poets’ encounters with wilderness energy and the work of modern poet’s such as Dennis Lee, who surmises that a part of a uniquely Canadian ethos may be “‘a groping to reaffirm a classical European tradition which taught that reverence is more fully human than conquest or mastery’” and that “‘we are subject to sterner necessities than liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’”  Perhaps contrarily, I’d be happy with that identity.

In his final essay, from which the book gains its title, McKay develops the idea of the non-human energies underpinning existence, of which encounters with wilderness and deep time can afford us a glimpse, and existential vertigo is, perhaps a symptom. McKay reiterates the story of the lyre of Orpheus and how Hermes (a trickster god of transitional realms) in a flash of inspiration, fashioned this instrument of the poets from the shell of a tortoise.  We humans, in our pride, may believe we are playing the tortoise, domesticating nature to our uses, but, perhaps (oh, destabilizing, vertiginous thought!) the tortoise is playing us, its “primal otherness” speaking through the instrument.  In just this way, it may be that we have misconstrued our relation to language, that most domestic of human tools, and that through it we have constructed a conduit by which pre-human, pre-verbal energies can discharge.  As McKay points out, a classic case of the tail wagging the dog.  How else, though,  to explain the constant searching in poetry, the reaching, like the tendrils of lightning seeking its ground, from thing to expression, and the flashes of “inappellable” connection to be found therein? 

 At this point, something must be said about the book itself — and here I mean the book as a physical object.  Published by the ruggedly individualistic Gaspereau Press, it is a small, beautiful wonder in itself.  Although soft cover, it is a lovely soft cover — a warm, heavy caramel bond wrapper over a lustrous gilt-marbled cover.  My limited grasp of printing terminology* is rendering an explication of its loveliness elusive, but suffice to say, this book graces one’s shelves. 

Don McKay’s work, has, for me, been an important find, and very much in the spirit with which this blog was conceived.  My encounter with The Shell of the Tortoise has left me with a notebook full of ideas to pursue, new poets to discover, and old favourites to reconsider.  Indubitably erudite, a serious academic, McKay’s prose, nevertheless, suffers from none of the inscrutability of much of current academic literary writing.  His skill as a poet lends clarity and simplicity to his prose, and he expresses very complex ideas with entertaining and accessible beauty.  And, since these intriguing ideas examine the very essence of Canadian poetry, they are a double joy to read.  There is much to learn here for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of our literature.

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*Helpful as well as ruggedly individualistic, Gaspereau Press sends the following details re: the book’s construction:

“The book is sewn and perfect bound and wrapped in a letterpress printed jacket.  Inside paper is  Rolland Zephyr Book Antique Laid. Cover paper is Mohawk Felt.”

Courtesy of House of Anansi

Hage, Rawi
Carnival
House of Anansi Press, 2012
Hardcover; 289 pages

Review by: Kerry Riley

Born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1964, Rawi Hage, as a child, experienced both the Lebanese civil war and exile in Cyprus. He eventually emigrated to New York City, where, isolated and lonely, he found work as a warehouse labourer and a cab driver. His New York years proved to be a dark time in his life, one he has described as being, in some ways, more difficult than the war years in Lebanon. It was during this period, however, that he discovered a talent for photography, an aptitude which shaped the next phase of his life.  He began studies at the New York Institute of Photography, continuing at Dawson College (photography) and Concordia University (Fine Arts) after moving to Montreal, Canada, in the early 90′s. He has exhibited in Canada and internationally, and his works are included in the Canadian Museum of Civilization’s collections. According to a Quill & Quire author profile Hage’s subsequent transition from visual artist to author was serendipitous — a chance experimentation with short stories inspired by the subjects of a photography project led to publication in literary magazines and, eventually, to the publication, in 2006, of DeNiro’s Game, his first novel.  Critically acclaimed from the start (shortlisted for both the Governor General’s and the Giller) DeNiro’s Game swept Hage to the forefront of the Canadian literary scene in 2008, when it won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award — the world’s richest prize for a single work of fiction.  His second novel, Cockroach, was published a mere two years later, and was again recognized on shortlists for both the Giller and the Governor General’s awards. Carnival, his latest work, was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize for 2012, losing to the recently reviewed Siege 13 by  Tamas  Dobozy.

The son of a trapeze artist and an itinerant carpet merchant, a circus orphan raised by a Bearded Lady, Fly, as the protagonist of Carnival is known, is the ultimate outsider, even before the demise of the circus precipitates emigration. After burying his mother “somewhere between the Danube River and the heel of the Italian peninsula” Fly and The Bearded  Lady head to the Americas, the home of her distant cousin who “lives in a city where a carnival takes place.”  This “Carnival City” is never named, but has settled in my imagination as a composite of New Orleans and Montreal. 

An observer by inclination and experience (he performed as a weight-guesser in the circus) his job as a cab driver in the Carnival City provides ample opportunity for Fly to observe and mirror the parade of humanity which flows through and past his cab every day. Fly’s sense of reality is, for the most part, anchored in the day-to-day details of his life as a cabby.  He leads a humble, unassuming existence, living alone in a small apartment, (surrounded, however, by an extensive library of surprising sophistication and depth) eating and sleeping and working, preferring to drive mostly at night.  Although reclusive by nature, his interactions with others seem, in general, impeccably proper, kind and respectful. For the most part, Fly’s gaze is non-judgemental, his commentary merely recording and reflecting the range of behaviour he observes, although much of this behaviour, seemingly, falls far below his personal standards.  On one point, however, he is obdurate:  “the customer always pays.”  Failure to recognize the value of a fellow human’s labour, be they cabby, prostitute, or shopkeeper, is, for Fly, it seems, a moral line in the sand, and he proves ruthless, implacable and violent, if necessary, in its defence.

The series of short vignettes chronicling Fly’s daily interactions are loosely draped over a larger narrative line — the story of Otto and Aisha — a social-activist couple who befriend Fly in his early years in the city, helping him when he needed it most.  The high costs of a commitment to the ideals of equality and justice are documented in Otto’s history, and his story hangs as a sombre backdrop to the more quotidian struggles of the inhabitants of Carnival City.

In counterpoint to the prosaic facts of Fly’s existence lies his imaginative life, and from the start, parsing the precise state of Fly’s mental health is problematic.  Besides his wildly improbable early history, there are the troublesome issues of his book-hoarding behaviour, and his highly idiosyncratic indexing system, which, as he explains it to Zainab, a concerned neighbor, whose quiet, scholarly ways Fly finds attractive, reads like a textbook flag for compulsion.  His childhood recollections of the difficult time between his father’s defection and his mother’s suicide, provide ample psychological fuel for a dozen compulsions and repressions, and evidence of an early conflation of sex with flight. When he matter-of-factly notes that,

Now when I remember my mother and her collection of bare-assed companions, when I lie back on one of my father’s carpets and float above the world, I journey through those ancient lands of guns, trenches, and blood, the troubled lands of Slavs, Germans, Latins, Assyrians, Arabs, Turks, Kurds, and Greeks. In those nations where young men were drafted and women wept and populations were transferred and people starved and burned by the millions, I witnessed, I rectified, and I flew again.

he presents as, at best, delusional, with a potentially dangerous saviour complex. Further, Fly suffers from “episodes” and as Zainab, notes, there are times when he is “not all there.” A local doctor of dubious morals, but, one assumes, adequate credentials, diagnoses “some malfunction in the brain,” based on symptoms which include shifting eyes, jerky hand movements, and conspiracy theories involving librarian monkeys. Fly himself takes no pains to conceal the fact that he frequently resorts to masturbation to induce hallucinatory “flights” on his father’s magic carpet, as a means of dealing with his sense of imprisonment in his daily existence. As Fly describes,

When the fantasy is right, when the world is rescued and saved by the ecstasy of my creation, when every word is valued, every conversation timed, and every bullet hits its target, when the folly of history comes to a fitting end and short dictators are slain on Christmas Day by orphans with guns, it makes me happy…

Taking the pragmatic view, Fly’s story is all too familiar — an essentially decent soul, and one possessed, it must be said, of a remarkable, gentle dignity, but isolated and relegated to the fringes of society by mental illness.  And yet, there is something compelling about Fly, that defies classification and dismissal, something revelatory in a Quixote-esque fashion.  Perhaps it is that he does witness, and in many matters, large and small, rectify.  It is Fly who protects the dignity of the Bearded Lady, when she dies, who extracts fair wages for fair work, both for himself and for others, from drunken boors with the ferocity of an avenging god, who feeds lost souls, who helps a customer escape her abusive husband (although, in the end, he can not save her from the church) and who catches Otto, brave warrior in the fight for truth and justice, when he falls. Perhaps it is because his incantations are infused with great force, beauty and historic sweep,  and because he speaks truth to power, fearlessly.

When Fly defends a fellow cabby being threatened with legal action by the wealthy father of two boys who had tried to rob the man, this encounter, as recounted by Fly, ensues:

Mr. Patel, I said, I shall be brief. My friend did what he did because he was scared. We taxi drivers are under threat all the time.  In our profession, we are vulnerable. I am here to ask you to reconsider and to drop the lawsuit. The truth is your kids misbehaved and my friend did what he did to protect himself, out of fear for his life…

The man interrupted me.  Your friend broke the law, he said calmly.

And who doesn’t break the laws? Does your grand enterprise always obey the laws when it ravages these lands from above and below?  When it pollutes villages and rivers with poisonous liquids? And how many deformed faces and crippled kids should sue you back?

When Fly, a non-believer, is accused of being evil, by a Christian priest somewhat befuddled by a recent near-death experience, the following exchange occurs:

Well, Father, I think the only evil is you and your lot of delusional believers who make women suffer, who tell Africans to abstain from sex and not to protect themselves. I believe you are a hater of misfits, a suppressor of clowns’ laughs, scissors to the ropes of mountain climbers, chains to the wanderer, and a blindfold to the knower: a hater of men. But you are also a lover yourself, a lover of power and buffoon dictators, a protector of arms dealers and thieves, pardoner of hypocrites with pious tongues and dirty hands…

May God forgive you, my son.

May your god, if there truly is one, forgive himself for these inferior creations.

In these utterances (and others like them) Fly identifies and voices the reader’s inner outrage provoked by the basic injustices of life– one which, in everyday life, seems to be more often buried and denied than acted upon, perhaps out of a sense of futility. The final statement also echoes the ancient Gnostic belief that this world was created by an inferior god — providing a hint of  some of the deeper philosophical considerations upon which Fly’s story rests.

His watchful ways, and his experience with what Hage calls “the other side of things” make Fly wise, although this wisdom is disguised in a humble, perhaps slightly mad cabby, who exists, precariously, on the fringe of society. This, coupled with his penchant for speaking truth to power, as noted previously, identify Fly as that most powerful of literary characters:  the Fool.  Frequent references to clowns and jesters percolate through the story.  Fly, for example, keeps clown figurines on his cab’s dashboard and lends his neighbour Zainab books from his library entitled The History of Court Jesters and The History of the Comic Grotesque. When he asks her,

Is there anything on earth or in heaven more potent than a good dose of mockery and laughter?

he might just as well have been voicing the Fool’s credo.  At least since Shakespearean times, the Fool has also been associated with his sceptre — a sort of rod or wand which he carries with him.  Fly has his feathered stick — a baton of sorts he keeps under his cab seat, for protection, and which he wields as necessary, in the service of truth and justice.

Compare Jan Knott’s much quoted description of a Shakespearean fool,

The Fool does not follow any ideology. He rejects all appearances, of law, justice, moral order. He sees brute force, cruelty and lust. He has no illusions and does not seek consolation in the existence of natural or supernatural order, which provides for the punishment of evil and the reward of good.

Shakespeare Our Contemporary, page 136

with the Bearded  Lady’s observations about what separates the circus folk (of whom Fly is one) from their audiences:

We know that after this grand act of life nothing is left but the dust beneath the elephant’s feet and the sound of the monkeys’ clapping.  When they come to you with prophets and promises of heaven of honey and mills, remember that we are no more than flowers having our last glance at the world before we die, with grace and with gratitude for the wonders we witnessed, for the magic box we built, the animals we loved, the carpets we flew, the stars we encountered after the spectacle ended and the spectators were left to lament and to wait for the coming of their phantom trains to take them to their imaginary heavens.

The key to Fly’s character came from a comment made by Hage in an interview with Michael Enright on CBC Radio, in which he explained that his approach to a novel “is as a criticism of life.” Entertaining the reader, he says, is secondary to role of the story as protest. The protest results from the continuous contrast between the light (the ideals of truth, justice and compassion as represented by Otto and Aisha, the goodness of Fly and a few others) and the dark (the myriad, banal individual moral failures that make up the human carnival)  As J.M.G. Le Clezio, the writer quoted in the book’s epigraph, and whose influence is felt throughout, says,

Life is full of madnesses.  They are only little everyday madnesses, but they are terrible if you look closely.

The coolly observant Fly forces the reader to look closely, and the protection traditionally afforded to Fools allows him to criticize, and give Hage’s protest a voice.  As Fly notes,

Man’s laws are self-serving, nature’s laws are arbitrary, and God’s laws, (…) are in need of some serious updates.”

Hage’s writing has, in the past, been preoccupied with issues of war, isolation, alienation and the immigrant experience, his style noted for its juxtaposition of workaday prose with intense, incantatory passages.  These qualities continue in evidence in Carnival. There is a haunting sense of restless and sad impermanence, which infuses book from the outset — a sort of distillation of the loss which occurs when connections to one’s homeland and culture are severed There is, as well, a jaded weariness that comes from a familiarity with war and other various atrocities of which we humans are capable. A number of Fly’s euphoric oratories hold hints of just such experience. It is Hage’s brilliance to have linked, through Fly, the immigrant sense of impermanence, isolation, alienated witness, and often, at least temporarily marginal position in society, to the traditional role of the Fool and to have thus so effectively shown us to ourselves. 

Fly’s mythic beginnings, his experience with alternate realities, his link to the world’s history and pain through his library, his role as a witness to human foibles, and his, at times,  soaring prose imbue him with an “out of time,” quality.  Like the wandering planets described to him by a good doctor, Fly is an aimless wanderer, and lost.  But he “gets to know more and reach farther places.” When Fly says that the clown’s intention

was never to step on the elephant’s feet, never to sing in such a horrible voice, never to wobble in clothing that was not his own, shoes that could never be tied, flowers that spat in the crowd’s face. His real intention, ladies and gentlemen, was to bring the audience to their senses, let them realize that soon all would be coming to an end, and that all shall disappear to no return,

I am inclined to believe him.

1. When you read over a newly written passage of your own with a self-critical eye, what qualities in the writing identify it as successful to you?  No doubt the specifics will vary from case to case but are there general qualities that you strive to achieve in your writing?

Yes. Clarity of expression is key to me. I always try and write from a reader’s or listener’s perspective. The sentence has to give pleasure on that level—be clear in its meaning, graceful in its rhythms, compelling in its suggestiveness. And the story as a whole has to be entertaining, understood in the broad sense of keeping one interested or fascinated but not necessarily in the mindless or passive way of Hollywood romances or sitcoms. This attitude on my part is really a long work in progress. I tried for years and years to be a stylist, to show off as a writer, only to realize this was a selfish and uninteresting pursuit. I only really started writing work I felt was worthwhile when I gave up on this and just thought: I’m not going to bother thinking about style one bit; I’m just going to try and write clearly and in a way I think will bring readers into the text rather than reminding them of the presence of the writer and his expertise and ability. This is when storytelling became central to what I did. To not have any style at all would be the ideal. I always say that I found my style when I stopped looking for it. Needless to say, I rework my stuff endlessly, sometimes ending up with two different versions of the same story because I can’t decide which one I prefer. It would be interesting to publish a book like that, filled with duplicate stories that branch off in different ways . . . Maybe for the next one.

2. Have you had any significant mentors or writers who have influenced your work?  What writers do you admire?

I haven’t had any mentors. I’m too isolationist, thin-skinned, and stubborn. But the writers I admire are legion: Mavis Gallant, Alvaro Mutis, Kenzaburo Oe, Mikhail Bulgakov, J.M.G. Le Clezio, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Thomas Pynchon, Paul Bowles, Peter Nadas, Bohumil Hrabal, and others.

3. The stories in Siege 13 seem to be carefully ordered.  I think this is part of what imparts the sense of a novel-like  narrative arc to the collection as a whole.  Could you comment on this?  Did you have a specific strategy?

Yes I did. I’m glad you noticed this. It took me a long time to get the sequencing right. There’s an earlier draft of this book called “Siege Sixteen,” but I ended up taking out those extra three stories because they destabilized the pattern or weakened it. Of course, certain characters and families reappear throughout the collection in a way that expands upon their stories, but the main movement is thematic, where the stories are in dialogue on certain themes or ideas, such as “friendship” in the first two stories, then “loyalty” in the next two, and so on. I also wanted a movement from the siege as horrific to the siege as gradually becoming a contact point, even a positive one, between characters and their situations, as demonstrated in the “Assassins” story and also the “Doomsday Machine” story.

4. Could you comment briefly on the ways in which you have explored identity in the stories of Siege 13?

Like reality, identity is a fiction, the result of a certain social order and communally sanctioned expectations. What many characters come to realize is that when society or community disintegrates their sense of self disintegrates with it. Selfhood is always thought of as biologically innate, but I think this is a ruse, and self, more often than not, is what society makes it, as was amply demonstrated by the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews; or Communism’s treatment of the bourgeoisie, etc.

5. The stories in Siege 13 are infused with a sense of a mutable reality. Identity, as well, is malleable and often lost, erased, or reconstructed. Would it be over-analyzing the situation to make a connection between the disintegration of civil society (with its perceived certainties) as experienced in the siege, and the disintegration of personal identity?

No it would not be over-analyzing at all. I had exactly this in mind while writing the stories. See my answer to number [4] above.

6. The dream is a motif which occurs very often in this collection.  Would you talk a little about its function or meaning in your writing?

It’s funny, but I’ve never thought much about dreams in terms of this collection. I think that there are dream states or dream fugues characters enter into, or maybe that some of the circumstances and landscapes they experience and travel through have a dreamlike quality, but in the end this is a reflection of the historical circumstances they find themselves in, which turn the world unreal. I think the real point is to demonstrate how fragile a thing “reality” is, often the result of a certain political or cultural stability rather than an actual connection to nature or truth or certainty, and when that stability disappears then our sense of reality disappears with it. And of course there’s the flip side, where totalitarian or authoritarian regimes try to obscure the dreamlike quality of our existence by nailing it down with hard and fast truths; this has an appeal to a lot of people who can’t function without both physical and conceptual certainties, “universal truths” that stay true no matter what moment in history it is, and that absolve them of the need to reflect on and confront change, and we see that even today especially on the right with the Tea Party and other groups such as this, and also on the left of course.

7. As I mentioned in the review of Siege 13, it seems to me that the stories all, in one way or another, explore the burden of survival – the challenge that reintegration into “normal” life poses for survivors of extreme situations. Comments?

Yes. As I said above in one of my questions, there are no heroes in this work, just as I don’t really think there are heroes in real life. I’ve certainly never met a “good guy” in the Hollywood sense of the words. I think that most of us do some good things, and then some bad things, all as a part of trying to enable our individual existences. Some do worse, some do not so bad, but none of us gets through unsullied, and in extreme circumstances we’re likely to do extreme things, and then somehow try to justify it or explain it away. Reintegrating with normal life, once the extreme situation passes, depends on how successfully the explanatory narrative has been constructed, which is also what I mean, above, by storytelling being a means of survival both psychically and physically. The characters who can best hide or alter the moral sense of their survival through an explanatory framework that others can buy into are the ones who come out the best, though “best” in this sense doesn’t mean anything more than being skillful.

8. My own curiosity demands that I ask you if, in the story, “Days of Orphans and Strangers,” you are making deliberate reference to the “third man” phenomenon in Jeno’s “second presence?”

I’m sorry, I don’t know what the third man phenomenon is. Let me look it up. Wow, that’s interesting. The road to Emmaus is, I guess, the classic example of this. No, I wasn’t thinking of it, but it sure works. I guess this is a great example of a kind of zeitgeist or unacknowledged cultural patterns worming their way into my work.

9. What advice or guidance would you offer to a grade 11/12 high school student approaching Siege 13 for the first time, in search of understanding?

I would tell them to just enjoy the stories, to put themselves in the characters’ situations and imagine what it would have been like to be there, in the midst of a war, or its aftermath. Beyond that, if they were truly interested, I would tell them to read about the Second World War in Eastern Europe, to acquaint themselves with the historical background that informs the stories. Try and read historians in translation, because Allied historians often miss the nuances. And try very hard to ignore historical movies by Steven Spielberg and the like, who wouldn’t know history if it slapped them in the face.

b)  Could you suggest a few ideas, in regards to Siege 13, which might prove
helpful to a senior English student in search of an essay topic?

a)    Who writes history? Who makes history? Are there really good guys and bad guys?

b)    In what way do these stories reflect historical crises?

c)    What is the role of information in politics?

d)    In what way is storytelling a survival technique?

10. My family is 4^th generation Canadian Anglo/Irish.  We’ve lost our stories of immigration. Our defining stories tend to be about pioneering in south/central Ontario and even those are at least two generations removed and getting a bit anemic.  When I hear the quite astounding stories of friends and acquaintances who are much more recent immigrants, I’m often forced to conclude that I’ve led a rather small life.  It seems that these stories may provide an important new source of energy for our collective narrative.  Any thoughts?

Someone recently came to a reading and told me he felt “ashamed” for having lived all his life with some of the people from my stories (Eastern European immigrants) and never having had any idea of what they went through, much less inquiring into it in any basic way. I think it is important to understand just how different these cultures are from our own (this is very difficult to do), and how differently those people experienced the world and the same moment in history as we did. Is this going to help our “collective narrative?” I think it will, or at least I hope so. History is not one story but an infinitude of them, in a way that can’t be captured by the way we write history because it’s always a single overarching narrative that doesn’t do justice to the sheer variation of experience, so we’re really hampered in this pursuit even before we start off on it.

Further Resources:  http://rhodahassmann.blogspot.ca/

                                     Milkweed Questionnaire

                                     Kerry On Can Lit Siege 13 review

These are fun.   No surprise that “book” and “life” are so prominent and close!

http://www.wordle.net/

In the summer of 1974, Gerry Fostaty was a gangly eighteen-year-old serving as an NCO on a cadet training assignment at Canadian Forces Base Valcartier, located just north of Quebec City, where, in an horrific accident, six young army cadets were killed and fifty-four others injured. As You Were: the tragedy at Valcartier is a painstaking account of the events of that day and its aftermath.

The recounting of the incident, thirty years later, has clearly been a therapeutic exercise for the author. In the preface, he notes that it “gave me the opportunity to organize the events and map everything on a timeline and to assemble the narrative in one place,” and that he needed to tell his family “what had happened to [him] in 1974.”  No doubt this need grew out of the fact that, with the exception of some, according to Fostaty, largely erroneous newspaper reporting immediately after the event, the incident was mostly ignored — passively by the Canadian press and public, and actively by the military, with little thought given to the emotional needs of those directly involved.

The reporting is straightforward and unadorned.  Fostaty describes himself, that day, as a young and very earnest NCO, in the midst of typing a report while his group of cadets, some of whom would be among the dead and injured, attended an explosives safety lecture in the same building.  Something of the military report style has remained in his writing which is careful, detached, and with a tendency to emphasize factual detail at the expense of emotion, although the story told — of being amongst the first on the scene of a live grenade explosion in a roomful of young boys, some now dead, many seriously injured, his own brother possibly amongst them – must have been one of extreme emotional impact. Indeed, Fostaty himself comes to realize the extent of the impact many years later, when we, as a society, had a name for it — post traumatic stress disorder.

As You Were: the tragedy at Valcartier provides a factual account of an important incident in Canada’s military history, told by a first-hand witness, and some interesting insight into our own, and our military’s, evolving attitudes towards the psychic impact of tragedy.

Courtesy of Thomas Allen

Review by:  Kerry Riley

NEWSFLASH:  Siege 13 wins the 2012 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize!

Tamas Dobozy’s new work, Siege 13 is a haunted book,  a series of thirteen interconnected stories whose common point of reference is the 1945 siege of Budapest, Hungary, when the Russian and Romanian armies encircled the Hungarian capital city in the dying days of World War II.  By all accounts the forty-six day siege, which ended in unconditional surrender by the German and Hungarian defenders, on February 13, 1945, was a period of almost unimaginable horror.  Photographs from the time show a charred, rubble-strewn city, its outward appearance bleak testament to what was, for the people who experienced it, a near total disintegration of civilization.  Civilian casualties are variously pegged near 40,000, and those for the German and Hungarian soldiers many times that. Accounts of the siege and its horrific end speak of corpse-ridden streets, widespread starvation, the extraordinarily brutal rape, abduction and murder of civilian women, and random executions by the Soviet troops.

Dobozy, Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies at Wilfred Laurier University, is a second-generation Hungarian-Canadian, and the author of two previously published collections of short stories, Last Notes: Stories (2005) and When X Equals Marylou: Stories (2002).  This, his latest work has been named as a finalist for the Governor Generals Award, the winner of which will be announced November 13, 2012.

In past interviews, Dobozy has indicated that his writing has often been preoccupied with the negative relationship between immigrants and place — the sense of not belonging to either new or old homeland or the difficulties which arise from an inability to adapt sufficiently.  While, in Siege 13, he continues to broadly reference the Hungarian immigrant experience as a whole, the focus can be more specifically identified as the burden of survival.

We are, perhaps, in our stories, more accustomed to celebrating survival, a happy point at which, as David Bezmozgis, another powerful new teller of immigrant tales has noted in his book The Free World, any self-respecting fairytale ends, with the assumption of a golden “afterwards.” But, as many of the characters in Dobozy’s stories and thoughtful readers come to understand, survival should not be confused with triumph.  The siege of Budapest occupies a well-earned place on a short list of the extremes of human experience.  Everyone involved was wounded. Some died of these wounds at the time while others survived to carry the repercussions forward.  The great challenge for survivors was to find a workable new approach to existence in light of their past experience.  As Benedek Gorbe, a character in the opening story, “The Atlas of B. Gorbe,” observes,

It happened. It was bad. And afterwards?

This opening story establishes a central premise:  for those who experience them, atrocities on the scale of the siege of Budapest fracture the world into two irreconcilable halves, the world as it is, encompassing incomprehensible horrors, and the world as we need it to be to continue to believe in life; more metaphorically, real, waking life and the dream. For Dobozy’s characters, this also translates as war-ravaged Europe, recently and rudely awakened, and North America — a place still comfortably dreaming.

Gorbe, of the title, is an Hungarian children’s author, having defected from post-war, Communist Hungary, an act characterized at the time as, “an escape towards the dream. ”  His lavishly produced books, published by a prestigious American press, are known collectively as The Atlas of Dreams, and have made him a great deal of money.  The stories follow three child protagonists who meet each other and have adventures in, a dream world.  While, initially, the goal is to find a way to return to waking life, this evolves over time, and as the ugly details of their real lives are revealed, they increasingly search for a means to remain asleep and dreaming.  As the narrator of the story notes,

the later stories are haunted by the fear that what separates dream from reality is as thin as tissue, and once it’s torn, they’ll never again find their way back to the jester* and the endless continents of sleep.

(*the one character in the stories whose illogical mind can decipher the dream world)

The reader meets Gorbe through the eyes of a struggling young writer, a son of Hungarian immigrants, whose aunt had known Gorbe in his youth in post-war Hungary, decades earlier. The narrative is driven by the younger man’s attempts understand the older, to reconcile the slovenly, pugnacious boor he meets with the handsome, dreamy idealist of his aunt’s memory, and the beauty of the stories with their apparently monstrous creator. Both the reader and the narrator gradually begin to recognize that the fault lies not with Gorbe, but with their own meagre understanding of the world and that Gorbe’s oddness identifies him as a wakeful stranger in their dream world, he alone aware of how precious and fragile that dream state is. In the process of this slow awakening, themes and motifs which will infuse the rest of the stories begin to pulse and take life:  strange schisms and meldings of time and memory, dream and reality, the mutability of identity, irreconcilable loss, regrets, secrets and yearning for escape, the schizophrenic consequences of extreme survival, and the past manifest in the present. These motifs will be so skillfully woven through the succeeding stories, will ebb and flow, echo and reverberate, rumble and ping so subtly, yet intensely, that each narrative seems supported and infused with the psychic equivalent of whale song.  Gorbe’s isolation, loneliness and terrible understanding inform all of what follows.

“The Animals of The Budapest Zoo, 1944 – 1945,” the second story in the collection, whisks the reader back to the scene of the crime, as it were, telling the story of the heroic but futile efforts of zoo keepers Jozsef and Sandor, to protect their charges during the siege, and what can happen to the human spirit when conditions which begin as unbearable then deteriorate exponentially and the yearning for escape becomes an unconquerable force. With physical escape impossible, musings turn to transformation, as Sandor notes, somewhat wistfully that

[the] characters in myths and stories and fairy tales turned into horses and flowers and hounds and back again, or into other people entirely, crossing limits as if they didn’t exist, becoming something else.  (…)

But, [he wonders] did they stay themselves, I mean, when they became something else?

The “limits” here are multifaceted — physical and moral. The war forced ordinary citizens into impossible situations, requiring impossible choices.  Having chosen to survive in inhuman conditions, can one ever be human again? For the survivors, Sandor’s question becomes a crucial one, as it does, in a less extreme way, for any immigrant, forced to adapt in unforeseen ways to a new environment.  How much can you adapt before you lose yourself? Do you stay yourself, after you become something else? And if not, can you ever go back?

As the situation descends into desperation and madness, the boundaries between nightmare and reality blur, and Sandor seems to effect a dark transformation of his own, his humanity lost and his will become incarnate and seeking justice.

Besides raising the crucial question regarding identity, this story serves other functions within the collection as a whole. First, it provides a standard by which innocent readers may measure their own comprehension of the siege experience.  Without an understanding of the conditions of the siege, which, I guarantee you, you do not have, one cannot begin to comprehend the meaning of survival or intuit what might have been required to effect it. Dobozy sketches out the situation in passages like the following:

…Budapest’s population would be driven to looting and stealing and scavenging and murder — and there would be much of that, down by the banks of the Danube where the Arrow-Cross executed the Jewish men, women, and children after marching them naked through the snow from the ghetto; or Szell Kalman Square after the failure of Hungarian and German soldiers to break through the Soviet encirclement, bodies piled in doorways and cellar stairs and in other pile of bodies in an attempt to shield themselves from the rockets and snipers and tanks the Red Army had stationed along the routes they knew they would take — when the dead, whether half buried in ice, the muck of the river, or the frost that settled on them from their last laboured breaths, would speak to Sandor..

or

When Marti, another of the attendants, was shot in late January as she was trying to tear up a bit of grass for the giraffe in the nearby Verosliget, and somehow managed to stumble back to the zoo, she described in a sleepy voice what she had seen out there in the city.  (…) she kept speaking of the shapes of flame as a child might speak of clouds, seeing in them animals dead or dying, their souls somehow escaping the bodies trapped in the zoo, transmigrated into fire, taking revenge on the city.  She said it was burning, all of it — the Western Station, the mansions along Andrassy Boulevard, the trees in the park like used matchsticks. She’d seen a street where blue flame was dancing through every pothole and crack, playing around the rim of craters, the gas mains ruptured underneath, continuing to bleed.  ‘It was like a celebration,’ said Marti, before closing her eyes and falling into a sleep neither Jozsef nor Sandor tried waking her from.

“The Animals of the Budapest Zoo,” preemptively settles any question of the weight of the burden of survival. This becomes important in subsequent stories, where the characters’ behaviour can appear, at best, quirkily inscrutable, to a second or third generation who, unlike the reader, do not have the benefit of prior knowledge.

Secondly, the story develops the idea of the consequences of unbearable situations, and the psychic slippage that can occur when reality is impossible and one yearns too intensely for escape.  The sense of a mutable reality, of dream worlds, of the instability of truth and the brilliantly subtle transitions from reality to dream and back, can be understood, in this light, not as writerly triumphs of atmospheric manipulation (although they are this too) but as actual manifestations of the characters’ states of mind. Once one has adjusted the boundaries of reason, it seems, they are never again  fixed absolutely. These ideas will continue to percolate through succeeding stories which explore the ramifications of the siege experience.

The perspective then shifts to the approximate present, and, for the most part, to North America.  The common focus of these next stories is the problem of “the afterward,” and the challenges of existence in a reality that does not encompass one’s past experience.  Time and distance lighten the mood, somewhat.  The situations are sometimes presented from the perspective of younger generation, and Dobozy does mine the humour implicit in the attempts of children to parse their elder’s, at best, quizzical, and at worst, damaging behaviour.

The stories have a depth and infinite complexity that render any attempt to isolate single key ideas a frustrating exercise in reductionism. Rather than examining themes or motifs,  these stories embody them. There are no weak entries, but particular highlights include:

“The Restoration of the Villa Where Tibor Kalman Once Lived,” a haunting tale of limits crossed, the impossibility of redemption, and the terrible need of Zoltan, the protagonist, to forge a new identity, to retrieve what was once possible, and “to hear someone, anyone, say that they too would have done what he did.”

“The Beautician,” in which a young man comes to understand  “that our responsibility to others sometimes requires us to bury knowledge, even destroy it, though we’ve been told, over and over, that there’s nothing worse.”

“Days of Orphans and Strangers,” and “The Encirclement,” which examine the question of identity in a community in which everyone, to a greater or lesser extent, has reconstructed themselves and their history, according to their own needs, and what happens when contradictory histories intersect.

For me, the twelfth story, “The Ghosts of Budapest and Toronto,” manages to distinguish itself even amongst its august company.  An unforgettable, moving and disturbing portrayal of the power of limitless regret, guilt, and loss, to haunt the present, it tells the tale of Maria, one of the many victims of rape and abduction during the siege, who  survived, only to be abandoned by her husband’s family (although the situation was far too complex to be captured in this simple statement.) The family (sans Maria) eventually emigrate to Toronto.  The past, however, cannot be left behind so easily, as the central characters continue to manifest in each other’s lives.  Once again, the life of the mind manages to slip the physical constraints of existence, as incidents in the characters’ lives are mirrored across time and space.  The strange mixtures of guilt and envy that colour the Torontonian’s visions of Maria are fascinating, as is the manner in which  Dobozy uses the story to examine the ramifications of choice (to stay or go) so central to the immigrant experience. The transitions here are virtuosic — resulting in a intensely unsettling, psychologically deep, darkly plausible ghost story, which, at the same time, encompasses and enlarges our understanding of the preceding stories’ complexities.

Dobozy’s work is an astounding new discovery for me.  Like the work of Alistair MacLeod, the depth, intricacy, and psychological reach of his writing make it intensely frustrating to try to review — impossible to isolate any one element without hopelessly diminishing it — but infinitely satisfying to read and study. This irreducible interconnection of the stories’ components and their truths, signal, for me, a profound, intuitive, and holistic understanding of his subject, on the part of the writer. I have, in my life, come to know a number of immigrants and their stories of escape from impossible conditions, some of whom have, in unguarded moments, talked of their own sense of distance and isolation, and their inability to fully engage in the North American “dream,” their inescapable awareness of how fragile it all is, and the sensation they sometimes have, when observing our blind optimism about life, of watching fools at play. More darkly, they spoke, also, of the grim and secret affirmation they felt, when catastrophes, large or small, temporarily shake us dreamers towards an awakening.  The stories of Siege 13 reverberate for me, and like all great fiction, have vicariously enlarged my understanding of the human experience.  I wholeheartedly recommend that you let them do the same for you.

______________________________

May 2013:  Siege 13 is short listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award

………………………………

Further Resources:

10 Questions for Tamas Dobozy

Interview with Shelagh Rogers on The Next Chapter

Rights and Rightlessness: Rhoda Hassmann on Human Rights
(Comments on Siege 13)

Milkweed Questionnaire

The Rumpus Interview

       The full version pdf

Canadian Literature Interview

Courtesy of House of Anansi Press

Review by: Kerry Riley

Peter Behrens came to prominence with the publication of his first novel, The Law of Dreams, which won the Governor General’s Award for fiction in 2006, a year that found me fully occupied with non-literary life issues.  Hence, I am making my acquaintance with his writing rather late in the game through his second novel The O’Briens. 

The O’Briens, as the title implies is an epic family saga, centred around the life of Joe O’Brien, first introduced to the reader as a young boy growing up in Pontiac County, Quebec, in the early 1900′s.  The five O’Brien siblings, of whom Joe, at thirteen, is the eldest, are third generation famine Irish.  There are tales of a quixotic grandfather, a horse trader and buffalo hunter, who periodically left his family to pursue various ventures and who eventually disappeared, his ultimate fate a family mystery.  Quixotic restlessness seems to be part of the O’Brien genome, as Joe’s father Michael also chose to leave his family to volunteer to fight in the Boer War, where he was killed. As Behrens explains,

There was a restless instinct in the family, an appetite for geography and change. 

At thirteen, Joe finds himself the de facto head of his family, a burden which might have crushed a less sturdy sensibility but one for which he seems constitutionally suited.  Although his family’s situation teeters on the brink of destitution, from the beginning he displays a talent for entrepreneurship and a fiercely protective sense of family responsibility. Having inherited the Black Irish colouring (a bloodline associated seers and healers) Joe is a strange mix of practicality and intuition. 

Joe understood that his father had left his power behind and that he, as eldest son, had inherited it.  He believed this without having to think about it.  The power was nothing supernatural or even extraordinary; it was just a sense of his own inner strength. It gave him self-confidence and boldness. And he wouldn’t squander his power the way his father had; he would use it to protect them all.

With surefooted business acumen and impeccable timing Joe boldly seizes the opportunity to turn experience supplying neighbours with firewood into increasingly large and lucrative logging contracts in Pontiac, becoming a citizen of some local importance and providing very well for his family, before the age of twenty.  With a calm decisiveness that belies his age, Joe also foresees the decline of the lumber industry, and recognizes new opportunities opening in the West, where a great new railroad was being built through the Rockies. After carefully arranging for the future of all his siblings, he heads west to make his fortune.

Enter Iseult Wilkins — a young,  newly orphaned  New England heiress, beautiful, romantic, and with artistic sensibilities — everything that Joe wasn’t, or hadn’t had a chance to be.  Having just settled her mother’s estate (her father died when she was young) she is, at the moment that her path crosses Joe’s, extraordinarily free and just as directionless.  Dynamic and single-minded, Joe desperately needs some beauty and softness in his life.  Iseult needs an anchor.  Together, they forge a dynamic partnership, heading to the Canadian Rockies, where Joe’s engagement in the high-stakes business of  rail line contracting, leaves him a wealthy man. The story follows the family through two world wars, the focus shifting somewhat to the next generation by the time of the second war. 

It’s a grand story, a great Canadian rags-to-riches saga, spanning the historical period in which we found ourselves as a nation. Behrens is a deceptively smooth writer, almost to the point of invisibility. The seamless flow of the story is both its strength and its weakness.  Reading is effortless; chapters fly by. In the end, however, the effect is somewhat diffuse. The early chapters which deal with Joe and Iseult’s courtship are genuinely charming, and the young lovers’ adventures in the Rockies entirely believable, the excitement of nation building palpable and nicely in sync with the formative years of the couple’s relationship.  Iseult’s character is finely crafted, particularly in the early passages where we meet her as a young woman making her first tentative steps out into the world as an autonomous being.  Joe, however, despite hints of a deeper nature, remains essentially an enigma, to himself and to the  reader–unresolved emotional issues suggested by occasional lonely drinking binges, but never fully explored.  The emotional succession of a marriage is convincingly portrayed, as Joe and Iseult’s relationship evolves from youth to  maturity, accruing wounds small and large, different stages of life testing its weaknesses as well as its strengths.

A fascinating, fictionalized slice of our history, convincingly presented in an epic style, unapologetically naming our places and illuminating our foundation stories — Canadian literature could use more of this!     

Courtesy of House of Anansi

Crosbie, Lynn
Life Is About Losing Everything
House of Anansi, 2012
Paperback, 348 pages

Review by:  Kerry Riley

One day, long ago, and as a result of some long-forgotten plumbing catastrophe, I found myself, in the fading light of a dismal, sleeting afternoon in late November, the sole occupant of a laundromat.  Laundromats (and coachbus stations) even on brightly sunlit days emit an oppressive emotional tone for me — a melancholy mix of transience and dampness.  On this particular day, waiting out the cycle, and quite unaware of my danger, I was keeping the funk at bay by reading  John Updike’s Rabbit, Run — not, as it turns out, the best weapon against ennui. There is, in the story, if memory serves, a scene in which Rabbit, a former high school basketball star, now in his early twenties and contemplating his future as suburban family man and kitchen gadget salesman, is suddenly overwhelmed by the implacable banality of the life ahead of him.  It’s an epiphany of despair for him, and, as it must explain his decision to run, Updike lavishes his very considerable talent on its evocation of bleakness. To the mournful thumping of an off-kilter spin cycle, overlaid by the thrum of sleet on metal roof, in the raw, damp gloom of the dying day, surrounded by malign connotation and immersed in Rabbit’s wretchedness, I had a small, shiverous epiphany of my own — and I came to understand that it is possible to overdose on ennui.  Like Rabbit, I bolted.  Several fudgesicles, a healthy dose of  “happy music,”  and a rousing round of “Where’s the kitty?” with the always effervescent Miss Phoebe (the cat, I hasten to add) were required to restore emotional equanimity. 

Making my way through the opening chapters of Lynn Crosbie’s latest book, Life Is About Losing Everything, I am reminded of this incident and begin to tread with care. As the author explains, the work “follows a period of trauma, excess, then morbid solitude,” and is both a chronicle of, and part of the process by which she found her way back to life.  The story is told through a series of  short (some are only a page or two) interconnected, but not chronological, occasionally fantastical, meditations and memories, strung together like beads in a necklace. We first meet Lynn in the throes of what seems to be a magnificently lurid midlife crisis:

I have entered middle age.

I am overweight, and I live with a little dog and two cats. I have been alone for more than seven years.

I have let myself go.

Beginning with the perkily titled chapter, “The Wretched Life of a Lonely Heart,” we learn, further, through a few well-chosen images of steak fat and yellow custard, that her body image is toxic and that she is a college instructor whose students rate her as “approximately average or lower.” She explains that what follows was written after the death of a high school love, who “died of a heart attack” and that “he died alone.”  What follows is, at the outset, a nearly unrelenting sluice of despair, and squalid wallow –

As for me, I am huge and indolent

I was almost beautiful once, and am the trash of that now.

At meetings, I draw myself trudging in the snow, holding heavy bags.

Most nights, [in dreams] the dead appear and disgust me with their ardour. Alternately, I throw up filth, and start cleaning, ineffectually, with a sponge.

By the time, not far in,  I get to the friend with the pet squirrel named “Blackness,” I am, once again, ready to bolt. 

There are other small sources of concern.  Hints, for example, of the “addict memoir”  — a subgenre of my own devising which features a compulsion to name the addictive substance, repeatedly and lovingly, and for the narrative to degenerate from time to time into pharmacological incantations of abstruse complexity.  Somewhat reminiscent of endless post-romance analysis sessions with girlfriends, the past love object remains the obsessive centre of interest for the teller, but a source of tedium for the listener. To her credit, Crosbie  only flirts with this compulsion — many of the anecdotes accompanied by an inventory of the chemicals in play.

Another  irritant is the tendency to recount, in the most matter-of-fact manner, grievous errors in judgement in matters of drug abuse, and male companions, and great depths of self-loathing despair, without, necessarily, seeming to connect the two.  Here, Crosbie is more guilty, offering passages such as:

I helped him [boyfriend] wedge his new shirts and slacks into the suitcase’s plastic-bagged hanger compartment; filled a bag with fruit and diagonal-cut sandwiches, a selection of sleeping pills.

I got no love, Christopher says. He is my [different] boyfriend and crack dealer.  He is beautiful in a saintly way, a saint fasting on Freezies and having knife fights.

I take a glass of bourbon and a tray of cookies with me and sit in front of the TV.  And by a tray of cookies I mean a foil-wrapped square of cardboard covered with plump, immaculate OxyContins.

without further explication.

“Lynn,” one wants to shout, “you have too many elephants in your rooms.” 

And yet…the earlier necklace analogy is not inappropriate, for each vignette is gem-like.  The beauty, precision and polish of the writing cannot be ignored — the darkly lustrous wit and the minimalist confidence in the power of image, worthy of admiration, despite an almost unrelenting fascination with squalor, decay and ugliness.  Although I do insist that the collection of quotes above provides a sense of the tone of much of the book, they are, of course, taken out of context and strung rudely together.  In situ, they are no less dolorous, but more beautifully displayed. Within the same span of writing can be found an equal list of heart-rending and/or exquisitely funny lines such as:

If I were being sold on The Shopping Channel as a piece of Joan River’s jewellery, I would be described as a “chunky, hammered comfort bracelet” or “faux-python teardrop necklace.”

Loneliness has attached itself to me like suction cups.  I do not know what to do.

She then opened up a bit about her boyfriend, her Ricardian Poetry prof, who I assumed was a known sex offender with a walrus moustache. (…) Her tiny eyes sparkled when she told me they dressed as the Great Vowel Shift on Halloween.

One does come to appreciate that the wit with which Crosbie has impaled the poetry professor and his date is also in play in her self-descriptions, as when she tartly observes in the entry “Experiment 44. How to get through another day”:

The days are long and difficult to fill.  There are only so many times you can walk your dog or lurch around in chaps and a tube top, making pancakes.

or describes her state of mind as being,

as jumpy as a cat I once had who always seemed to be having complex Vietnam flashbacks.

And so, one is compelled to continue through the story in a heightened state of conflict — one’s exasperation at war with one’s appreciation.

Somewhere in the second half of the work, things brighten subtley. There is glancing mention of having quit drinking.  No doubt, the two are connected.  It is fascinating to watch strength begin to seep into the writing, some softness and light allowed to manifest, lists taking on a brighter aspect, decisions improving.  We are never led out into bright sunlight, but tentative concessions begin to be made to life’s small mercies, contentments and fragile moments of beauty. 

In a moment of candour about the work, Crosbie notes that poet Ann Sexton (the focus of Crosbie’s doctorate studies) influenced her thinking. 

I  had wanted to engage in an inherently false struggle with the ending of this book, like Anne Sexton did with Live or Die. 

That book is one miserable poem about addiction and suicide after the other, but it ends with transformative imagery

and she seems to have taken to heart the advice given to Sexton by Saul Bellow, which was to

Live or die, but don’t poison everything.

She had wanted, she admits,

 to write a happy ending, like the ones in the only books I can read anymore, books about fat women who modify their appearance, and are loved, in the end, for their lively intelligence and carnality. 

Having identified this struggle as false, however, she refuses to engage in it, choosing, instead, to

slowly [put] everything back together, which means holding the sharp, broken pieces and fitting them into an imperfect whole of my own design.

What happens when a sharply perceptive, creative, idealistic and strong-willed intelligence, with a streak of narcissistic perfectionism crashes head on into life?  Well, some truculence, denial, self-pity (actually, quite a lot) and thrashing about, a  few concessions, recalibration and a gradual establishment of a new equilibrium, admirable wordcraft and some pretty wicked wit.  Something very much like Life Is About Losing Everything.

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Further Resources:

CBC Books interview with Shelagh Rogers

Courtesy of House of Anansi

Heti, Sheila
How Should A Person Be?
House of Anansi Press, 2012
Paperback (expanded edition) 306 pages

Toronto writer Sheila Heti’s new book How Should A Person Be? has already garnered significant attention, with commentary in Quill & Quire, The Globe and Mail, and the National Post as well as international reaction in The New York Times, Slate Magazine (and also here) The Paris Review, and perhaps most notably from James Woods in The New Yorker. Reactions are mixed.  Applauded on one hand for genre-bending inventiveness, artistic courage, brutal honesty, sexual frankness, and biting wit, she is criticized on the other for fatuous self-absorption,  pretention, artistic laziness, detachment, evasive vagueness and an irritating style.

The problem…

The difficulties in interpretation arise, it seems, from the book’s unusual premise. This play-like novel, presented in five acts, is narrated by a young woman named Sheila who lives in Toronto, struggles to write, has a coterie of artistic friends with names like Misha, Margaux, Ryan and Sholom and is filled with an exasperating mixture of unbridled ambition and sense of entitlement, narcissim,  paralyzing uncertainty and self-loathing.  The thing is, Sheila the author (as opposed to character) is, herself, a young woman writer who lives in Toronto, and who has a coterie of artistic friends with names like Misha, Margaux, Ryan and Sholom.  Whether she has unbridled ambition and sense of entitlement, is narcissistic, paralyzed with uncertainty and filled with self-loathing, I can’t really say, not knowing her personally. In any case, the intertwining of her fiction with her nonfiction (including names, events, and what are, apparently, actual email communications and transcriptions of taped conversations) makes it difficult for the reader to know where to draw boundaries between fictional Sheila and factual Sheila and whether to approach her writing as autobiography or fiction.  Is the book a loose conglomeration of incidents, stolen straight from real life, lumped haphazardly together by a maddeningly self-absorbed author who leaves it up to the reader to draw some ultimate meaning from it all? Or, is it an admittedly at times perplexing prose experiment that seeks to explore critical aspects of the artistic experience and life, whose quixotic surface floats on accomplished writing that is anything but haphazard and which yields some surprising rewards? This is not a small problem. Based on my own experience, I can state that even rationally defended convictions about Sheila as a created character can be rapidly eroded by the text itself.   Despite its difficulty, this question is, I believe, the critical one for readers, and one which, to a large extent, determines one’s reaction to the book. 

I have, personally, chosen to believe that fictional Sheila is just that–an invention — neither pure nor simple, but a fiction nonetheless, used to explore very serious and perceptive questions about art and existence in a quirky, but for me, ultimately successful way.  Why?  For a number of reasons. Firstly, the author herself has said so — giving her book the subtitle, A Novel From Life.  There is really no point in ignoring the obvious.  As she explains in The Paris Review interview, the question of the boundaries between a first-person narrator (in particular) and author has always been troublesome and that it’s a well-recognized if not always overtly acknowledged fact that every writer brings aspects of themselves to their characters.  As she describes, she creates her characters by seeking fragments of her own persona pertinent to the book’s central exploration, and by focusing on these, exaggerates them, while the normal counterbalancing parts of her real personality recede to the background.  She then inhabits this fictional caricature of herself, acting out responses to situations derived from her real environment. She goes on to explain that our modern relationship to fame and celebrity was a  concern for her when writing the book, and she wondered what she might have in common with tabloid starlets like Lindsey Lohan and Paris Hilton when imagining the fictional Sheila into being.  Thus, when fictional Sheila, confronting the book’s deeply philosophical central question of how a person should be,

can’t help but answer like this:  a celebrity

and in the same breath, and without apparent contradiction, claims to want

a simple life, in a simple place,

we see the caricature at work. She goes on to elucidate her idea of a simple life:

…I mean a life of undying fame that I don’t have to participate in.  I don’t want anything to change, except to be as famous as one can be, but without that changing anything. Everyone would know in their hearts that I am the most famous person alive — but not talk about it too much.  And for no one to be too interested in taking my picture, for they’d all carry around in their heads an image of me that was unchanging, startling, and magnetic.  No one has to know what I think, for I don’t really think anything at all, and no one has to know the details of my life, for there are no good details to know.  It is the quality of fame one is after here, without any of its qualities.

and the caricature and the connections become even more obvious. This is not author Sheila Heti accidently revealing her essential self-centred bubbleheadedness through her character, it is a few small fragments of her personality that include narcissism and a lust for celebrity (common to all artists, and, to be honest, all humans) excised from other moderating influences, and set free to play in the world. It’s a starting point.

 So many ideas, so little plot…

There is, admittedly, not much plot — a series of loosely connected episodes, often, on the surface, quotidien in the extreme. Young writer Sheila lives in Toronto, marries, separates, struggles to write a commissioned play, tries to rationalize her way out of completing it, hangs out with her artist friends, works at a beauty salon, makes a new painter-friend, negotiates the terms of this female friendship, has a submissive sexual dalliance which teaches her a thing or two about freedom, control and the dangers of empathy, worries about wasting her genius on the wrong project, learns she doesn’t have much baggage after all, and tries to organize what she sees of beauty, art, craft and love around her into some sort of life plan.

If one wants to find development, arc, movement, and thus evidence of deliberation on the part of the author, one must look past the plot and notice, instead, the progression of ideas, the way in which Sheila quite meticulously examines different ways of being– the practical life, the creative life, the life of service, the religious life, the virtual life, and the increasing confidence with which she begins to answer her own question. We are first introduced to fictional Sheila as the caricature described above, so irritatingly, vacuously, well … young, and apparently shaped only by the external pressures of her time, who says things like,

I know personality is just an invention of the news media. I know that character exists from the outside alone, (1)

and can dismiss the regard of her friends as illusory because,

they like me for who I am, and I would rather be liked for who I appear to be, and for who I appear to be, to be who I am

(a statement which should provoke some soul-searching for anyone with a Facebook account.)

Yes, the character is irritating, self-absorbed, and is, at times, completely wrong with great conviction, yet she must be loved for asking the questions she does. Saved by her honesty and intelligence, in her perplexity she manages to articulate obstacles to self-actualization that bedevil an entire generation. Questions that plague a thoughtful young artist about modern life are, it turns out, remarkably universal.  

The issues, for Sheila, can be broken down into two main, interrelated areas:

1. Identity anxiety 
2. How best to spend one’s life (in the sense of exchange for value)

The real Sheila Heti was once described, affectionately, as “a keen hairsplitter,” and this skill is put to excellent use in the service of fictional Sheila’s examination of identity.  For the obsessive narrator, it splinters into a myriad of sub-questions. Is identity (which she closely equates with destiny) for example, innate, or can one construct one?  If one can construct one’s identity, can one construct any identity, and if so, how on earth should one choose? The early Sheila claims to be a blank slate, with no internal sense of herself.  She, therefore, spends a considerable amount of time analyzing other people in the hopes of finding admirable qualities which she might cut and paste to her own image file. In this sort of proto state, she often betrays a strong allegiance to her external image, as when, reminiscing with Margaux about a trip to Miami, she says:

I am so happy with how we were making everyone jealous with how happy we were in the pool.

On the surface just another vacuously cringe-inducing comment from fictional Sheila, but one which should reverberate darkly with any honest citizen of the social media. Acknowledged here is a part of real self that craves the envy of others.

What if nobody gets it?

Further questions plague the desperately inquisitive Sheila and she quite correctly identifies the essential conundrum of the age of image.  What if one pours one’s life energies into one’s external image (i.e. celebrity) only to find that the audience does not see in it what you intend them to see?  What if the spectators were not really jealous of the happiness, but rather amused, or scornful, or dismissive, or oblivious? This problem of interpretation — that unknowable gap between what the artist means to communicate and what, in fact, the audience finds in the work — is as old as art itself (2).  In an age bewitched by celebrity when everyone can create, curate and broadcast their own artful image, the gap is a vital concern.

So, if a faked, idealized and totally controlled virtual life, (or one stolen from one’s friends) is not the answer, one must, it seems, find a way to live one’s actual life. But what if your genius, your specialness, which your society has led you to believe you must possess and is essential to your self-image, is not immediately apparent?  What if you don’t know what it is?  What if you choose the wrong outlet and you end up ordinary and not famous, and part of you believes this might be the very worst thing? When is the right time to bail on a project in search of more and quicker fame and how many times can you do this before you become just a quitter? Should one pursue beauty methodically with persistent craftsmanship (it takes so long!) or trust in random inspiration (what if it doesn’t come)? Which is the higher form of artistic practice?  What happens when your big fat sense of entitlement slams into a brick wall of personal limitation?  One could, supposedly, revert to devoting oneself to one’s image (indeed, it occurs to me that here may lie the origins of our present cult of celebrity) but there’s that pesky problem of perception again.

A good portion of the book is occupied with setting out these questions, and many other important ones such as what constitutes love, or friendship, or betrayal, or the nature and consequences of cheating, but as the reader progresses through Act 3 and 4, one can see fictional Sheila making startling progress in her quest to assemble some sort of credible manual for life. She peeks sideways at the possibility that she may not be chosen for greatness, and through the parable of the grilled cheese, articulates a response:

It was not what I wanted, not what I had been picturing, but I adjusted myself to the reality of it. 

and

Better to have your failure right in front of you than the fantasy in your head.

In a particularly poignant epiphany, she understands that she must devote herself to her life and work with or without external validation and accept that she may not be one of the elect.

But if my fate is truly my fate, then trying to escape it by doing whatever I can to make my life resemble some more  beautiful thing will only lead me more quickly to the place I most fear. If there can be no escape from who I am, then I ought to reach my end honestly, able to tell myself, at least, that I have lived it with all of my being, making choices and deciding[...] Who am I to hold myself aloof from the terrible fates of the world?  My life need be no less ugly than the rest.

Sense of entitlement? Checkmate.

Later, having allowed herself to acknowledge the dark as well as the light within herself, she comments on the results of her epiphany

I made what I could with what I had. And I finally became a real girl.

Sheila, here, is far removed from the one we first met, who could proclaim celebrity her ultimate ambition.

Not Random, Not Lazy, Not Haphazard

When one steps back from the plot, or lack thereof, one can see that the book is actually a structured inquiry into life’s most important question. The loosely connected episodes all help, in some way, not necessarily made explicit, to illuminate the fictional Sheila’s questions, dilemmas, and conclusions, and it is a small miracle of writing that Heti manages to convey so much with so little.

Besides a discernable structure, there is much evidence of sly wit and learned seriousness, all of which also speak against randomness. When weighing the advantages and disadvantages of a practical versus a creative life, Sheila makes this comment:

when I compared it [working as a helper in a hair salon] with finishing my play, it seemed so nice and easy. 

A smiley face seems called for.

Fluffy pop-punnery aside, there is biting social commentary as well. Any pretensions we may harbour about the cultural advantages of our www existences are annihilated in this ascerbic observation:

We live in an age of some really great blow-job artists.  Every era has its art form. The nineteenth century, I know, was tops for the novel.

Jungian psychology is explicitly mentioned — fictional Sheila has a Jungian analyst, who has identified her fear of sustained committment to her work as a Peter Pan complex. Jung’s ideas about the archetype of rebirth and the transmutation of personality are also suggested in Sheila’s initial state of having “sould” her soul, the erasure of her image at the hands of Uri when he dyes her hair grey, and her emergence as a new person. 

Matthew Arnold (someone who worried quite a bit about how we might be) and his haunting poem, Dover Beach, are beautifully invoked in the following lines, found in the chapter examining love:

Above me, the seagulls were lifted across a sky that was dark with night and clouds.  In the distance, it was brighter blue where the clouds broke.  Before me, the ocean was the color of steel.  The waves were coming up onto the shore and pulling themselves back from the shore. I felt exhausted with how long the sea had been doing that for–always, without end.

There are, as well, numerous references to Judaism and the Old Testament which I can only note, being unable to explicate them with any certainty.

There is one further aspect of the book which must be addressed and that is the sexually explicit content which arises from two main sources. First is the submissive, demeaning relationship that Sheila initiates with control-freak Israel. (The name, of course, invites further analysis, but for the moment we’ll agree it’s just a name.) Sheila, eventually and quite satisfactorily, thinks her way out of the predicament, but not before exploring the act of fellatio from a female point of view with exceedingly pithy candor. One simply admires her courage and thanks her for saying things that need to be said.  More troubling is a sado-masochistic undercurrent which surfaces, in particular, in the horrific dream sequence encountered soon after Sheila comes to believe she has betrayed her new girlfriend Margaux’s friendship.  There are clear parallels in content to the blatant manipulation of sex, and the subjugation and objectification of women in mainstream movies, video games and the current epidemic of internet pornography.  It’s as if fictional Sheila’s subconscious teems with these memes, and one intuits a connection to a profound, and probably societally-induced, self-loathing.  Indeed, this sort of content tends to surface in moments of intense existential despair, moments when subliminal and explicit cultural messages about her worth threaten to overwhelm her own shakey sense of self. As such, it has something important to say about the forces arrayed against any modern young women in search of self-definition.

As acknowledged earlier, an encounter with Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be?  can be, at least initially, confusing and readers will have to draw their own conclusions about narrator Sheila’s precise relation to her creator.  The book will, however, reward thoughtful reading with surprising and interestingly intuitive insights into the conundrum of modern existence, a quality I can’t help but relate to the author’s unique method of exploring her subject.  The effort rang true and deep for me.

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1. for interesting background see Heti’s interview with a real Ryan

2. Heti has had to contend, head on, with this gap as a result of the publication of this book.