Book Reviews: Italian Migration (Donna R. Gabaccia: Italy's Many Diasporas; Filippo Salvatore: Ancient Memories, Modern Identities; Luigi Romeo: Canadian Poems; Nicholas de Maria Harney: Eh, Paesan! Being Italian in Toronto.) p.145

Canadian Literature Issue #177 book reviews (accessed: December 17, 2013) Forthcoming book reviews are available at the Canadian Literature web site: http://www.canlit.ca Making Places Happen Michael Aleksiuk and Thomas Nelson, eds. Landscapes of the Heart: Narratives of Nature and Self. NeWest $24.95 Laurie Ricou The Arbutus/Madrone Files: Reading the Pacific Northwest. NeWest $34.95 Reviewed by Charles Dawson Read or buy both these books! Ricou's The Arbutus/Madrone Files is a loving homage to story and place that remains alive to all the possibilities and limits of such a work. I am struck by the ways bi[bli]odiversity informs and extends the reach of this single work across "different limits and shifting centres." Its mix of confidence and respect recharged the field for me. The publishers describe the book as the first to focus on the Pacific Northwest as a literary region, specifically that area marked by the natural range of the Arbutus menziesii, spreading throughout Cascadia and across national borders. The tree name transforms at the 49th parallel; does anything else? That's just one part of the web of inquiries in this book that will appeal to readers of Canadian and U.S. literature, those who live in or know the Northwest (or are ready to reconceptualize the place) and indeed anyone who wants to see what good ecocriticism can look like. Just as the Northwest is many places and many stories, The Arbutus /Madrone Files is many books, focused by its generosity of attention and scholarship. 120 Ricou claims that "Our stories told and written many times make places happen." He honours the "delight and texture of place-writing," noting that "any conclusion is only one further extension of the binational region this book has been imagining, a pacific Northwest whose stories incorporate the transnational and the bioregional." Inclusiveness, as reader and scholar, is one of Ricou's strengths: "With the writers gathering in this book, and with the arbutus/madrone trees of varied forms, I have learned to be at home—often uneasily—in a region that crosses the pacific with the north and again with the west!1 This sense of overlap and tension extends to Ricou's shrewd analysis of crosscultural storying and silence. Much of Ricou's poised scope comes from his use of "files" as a structural method. So notions of transposition (Intertidal File, Woodswords File) overlap (Rain File, Salmon File) to challenge cultural or critical complacency (and mighty seriousness). A generous series of "AfterFiles" discuss further readings and other details. In their selfcontained but overlapping reference to a Canadian and a U.S. text, each file concentrates Ricou's assertion that "a regional literature and culture might be discovered where the boundary becomes indeterminate, perhaps it must be discovered in a shared ecology far too international to claim." Ricou examines story and place in work by Daphne Marlatt, Ursula Le Guin, Ken Kesey, Joy Kogawa, David Wagoner, Jack Hodgins, Lee Maracle, Kim Stafford and Canadian Literature 177 / Summer 2003 numerous others (including artists generously reproduced in the centre plates); he also looks at fundamentals like rain, salmon, and "things sasquatchian." Files often pair older work (Martin A. Grainger's "journey into the heart of Carr-ness," Woodsmen of the West [1908] and Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion, for instance) while tracking cultural and historical contexts. The mix is rich but not cloying. Files is an illuminating and enjoyable book. There's plenty that will bring readers closer to their own place stories, not least Ricou's own inclusiveness. His attention and commitment enliven and sustain the work of the critic in this time of scattered story and modified seed. Both books under review are personal and political. In part, place writing attempts to align the cultural/aesthetic realm to the earth outside the text. Landscapes of the Heart: Narratives of Nature and Selfsuggests, from its title on, that this bridging work begins with an emotional response to place. Many of the essays link that personal response to subsequent political action. The essays inspire one to take up pen, placard and field book. Generally Alberta/BC based, they still refer to global issues (such as genetic modification and community work). Edward O. Wilson writes: "let us all be environmentalists, in order to avoid the ignorant mistakes of previous generations." All of the essayists share a passion for local places and intimate modes of belonging. The essayist's desire to protect is often fuelled by a personal experience of habitat loss. Fondly recalled havens are altered or damaged, courtesy of local/transnational exigencies. Michael Aleksiuk's essay speaks to this worldly assault. But it's not all doom: J Douglas Porteous's essay is called "Slaughterhouse: How Vandals Destroyed My Home and What I Did About It." A number of the writers describe local projects that have given them a stronger sense of history and community. 121 Women authors make up just three of the eleven essayists. Aritha van Herk's "Body Shock" is a marvellous work of grounded rapture; Lisa Lynch shares her moving reconnection with the river of her childhood; Cheryl Lousley's "Fragments of Potential" works rage and doubt in agonized (and supportive) ways. Richard Pickard's valuable meditation on work and place notes: "I don't think that any of us expected that through professional and scholarly success I would feel as if I had lost the earth." Michael M'Gonigle discusses global environmental diplomacy and local activism. In his view, middle-class people must take responsibility: "that sector of society is where so many of our environmental problems originate and it is there too where the power lies to originate change." He goes on to assert that "as a culture we have not yet begun to live with our places, and until we do that, we cannot know what we are losing." Loss is central to Robert G. Williamson's "The Arctic Habitat and the Integrated Self," which shares (effectively) decades of collaboration with Inuit communities. His example of collaboration with First Nation groups is instructive in a book like this. He proposes formation of an international indigenous environmental monitoring agency with indigenous leadership guiding the work of Aboriginal people on the ground. A Cosy World? Paul Almond and Michael Ballantyne High Hopes: Coming of Age at the Mid-Century. ECW $19.95 Reviewed by John Xiros Cooper Now living in comfortable retirement, the authors remember their very pleasant university years at McGill and Oxford in the early 1950s. Poetry was their passion. It co-existed, at least on the evidence of this book, rather easily with a privileged Canadian Literature 177 / Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w upbringing in Westmount, the Eastern Townships, Bishop's College School, McGill in its WASP-y heyday, and vacations at St. Andrews, New Brunswick (with GovernorGeneral Earl Alexander of Tunis nearby). Ten years later the Quiet Revolution would say goodbye to all that. Early in the book Michael Ballantyne refers to that older world as "cosy," its undemanding "existence" in mid-century Montreal characterised by a "quite appalling indecency." "Campus unrest," we are told "meant only that you didn't get enough sleep before an exam." Old Montrealers will recognize this little world very well. After the McGill frat parties (they were both loyal Zetes) and the annual St. Andrew's Ball, most of Paul Almond's and Ballantyne's contemporaries entered the "'respectable' professions, the banks, corporate life." They, however, did not. They were both undergraduate poets and, in Ballantyne's words, "budding literary types." Upon graduation, they forwent the respectability of the old domed Bank of Montreal in Place d'Armes or the M.A.A.A. on Peel Street or the grey monolith of the Sun Life building in Dominion Square. They chose, instead, a different kind of respectability. Ballantyne turned to journalism with the Montreal Star (before its demise) and then went on to the Reader's Digest offices in Westmount. Almond, after Oxford, found his way into the film and TV business as a director and producer. In making the book, the Bishop's College School chums pooled their old letters to each other, interspersed letters from influential poets and writers like Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, John Lehmann, John Hayward (T. S. Eliot's invalid London flatmate) and wrote a linking commentary to give the collection a narrative coherence. This is a different kind of memoir, where the voice of a single memoirist recedes and an ensemble of 122 voices is allowed to emerge. We hear the two young tenors in full-throated ease in the early Fifties, followed by the worldly counterpoint of their ageing baritones, recalling fondly the youthful lyricism. The duet is broken here and there by the letters to Paul of the British writers he idolised. The book ends with a strange chorale funèbre of newspaper obituaries of the famous and almost famous people for whom they (but especially Paul) had provided groupie services when young. The letters begin when Almond decides to go to California to look up Isherwood. Not that he's invited of course. The author of The Berlin Stories is, according to the boys, the most prominent writer on this side of the Atlantic and, therefore, fair game for the starry-eyed Paul. Luckily Paul has a friend with an MG who happens to be driving across America to LA and so in May 1949, they set off for the West Coast staying in the network of Zeta Psi fraternity houses across the continent. Not exactly On the Road stuff. Paul then decides Oxford University is the only university wide, deep, and high enough to suit him, so off he goes to Balliol College for three years, leaving Michael behind at McGill. As a portrait of life among the well-heeled Anglos of Montreal in the last decade before their recession as a force in Québécois society, the book is very good. For one thing, the letters reveal the endemic cultural colonialism. Even in 1999, Almond laments the passing of "Westmount. . . which tribalism has plunged into a sad eclipse but where remnants of the great British civilization can still be seen." That "the debutante balls in the Windsor Hotel" in the 1950s don't count as the sign of an even more pernicious Anglo tribalism in Montreal is part of the blindness that makes this book such an accurate portrait of the age. We also learn about Canadian Oxford, like Almond's own successes on the Oxford Canadian Literature 177 / Summer 2003 drama scene and his pride in winning an ice hockey blue. Peter Dale Scott, F.R.'s son is there, as is "Chuck" Taylor, the philosopher. We hear also about the coming generation of British directors and actors who will help re-shape British theatre, film, and broadcasting in the years to come, Tony Richardson, Maggie Smith, John Schlesinger, the BBC's Mitchell Raper, to name a few. We also have a portrait of the literary scene in and around McGill University in those years. Unfortunately, Ballantyne's letters are not as vivid and self-promoting as Almond's and McGill ends up sounding rather sophomoric. The effect has the usual colonial tilt: vital, edgy living is to be found in Oxford and London, backwater inconsequence at McGill and Montreal. On 30 May 1952, Ballantyne proudly begins a letter: You may address me henceforth as J.M. Ballantyne B.A. I graduated the day before yesterday & will go into law next fall. This does not mean, of course, that I am giving up my literary ambitions. Meanwhile Almond is adventuring with the Oxford and Cambridge Players staging plays across England heading for the Edinburgh Festival. The contrast couldn't be more clear. The book does have a number of positives. One is the prescience of John Heath Stubbs, the poet, in recognizing that Geoffrey Hill was the talent to watch among the student poets at Oxford. Another is the extent to which the Auden generation— Auden himself, Spender, Isherwood, Day Lewis—were still the top dogs on the landscape long after they had produced their best work. A third is the reminder of T. S. Eliot's pre-eminence in post-war AngloAmerican culture. In 1999, Almond and Ballantyne remember reverently Eliot's presence and jeer at recent scholarship, my own included I suppose, that has attempted to shift criticism away from the usual Tomolatry to something approaching a historically accurate assessment. 123 And finally, the book's greatest value lies in reminding us of a great Canadian poet, now long forgotten, who spent the 1940s in Montreal teaching at McGill. Patrick Anderson is the real hero of this self-indulgent book. The mention of his name brought back memories of my own reading and my own coming of age in Montreal a decade and a half after Almond and Ballantyne. It sent me to my bookshelf and my battered copy of Anderson's Selected Poems. Erudite, gay, marooned in Anglo Montreal for more than a decade, living among philistines and being indulged by undergraduate prigs like Ballantyne and Almond, Anderson captured wartime Montreal in his cool, elegant, witty lines. There was nothing cosy about Anderson. Poetry was not an adolescent "passion"; it was quite simply the air he breathed. Men's Business Tim Armstrong, ed. American Bodies: Cultural Histories of the Physique. New York UP us$55.o(/$2o.oo Daniel Coleman Masculine Migrations: Reading the Postcolonial Male in New Canadian Narratives. U Toronto P $4O.OO/$22.OO Angus McLaren The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870-1930. U Chicago P US$25.00 Reviewed by Terry Goldie In some Australian Aboriginal cultures, like many others which might be called "traditional," there is an absolute division between men and women in many matters. In the spiritual realm, there are knowledges so absolutely gendered that no one of the opposite sex can have the slightest inkling. Contemporary Australian English refers to this as "women's business" and "men's business." Liberal intellectuals accept this barrier as part of the value of Aboriginal cultures. There is little discussion of how Canadian Literature 1771 Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w alien it is from western gender claims, where many of us try to liberate knowledges from gender, even irritatingly recalcitrant matters such as menstruation and pregnancy. Our gender divisions are attributed to the persistence of male hegemony. And yet the attractions of tradition go beyond patriarchal nostalgia. There are many ways in which masculinity studies is caught in this bind between the assumed evils of patriarchy and the lure of tradition, even in examinations of modern cultures. While the proponents of "maleness" tend to be kin to Robert Bly's mythopoeic drum-beaters, most of those who study masculinity in the academy are male feminists and not a few are gay (including the present reviewer). Studying the problems produced by masculinity, for both men and women, comes easy to us, but asserting the value of maleness much less so. are many similarities between Allen's and McLaren's work, not the least of which is the conflict between the claim that most aspects of behaviour are socially constructed and the underlying assumption that male behaviour is inevitably dysfunctional. McLaren notes that the late nineteenth century saw the absence of "real men" as a major problem. People feared the effeminate male but also the cad. The one, through homosexuality or transvestitism, demonstrated feminine weakness. The other did what a real man would never do, which is abuse the weakness of the female (as opposed to participating in the quite acceptable general oppression of women). On the other hand, criminal acts which were seen as excessive versions of reasonable masculinity, such as murdering a man who had stolen a wife, were usually deemed understandable. Two of these books demonstrate this dichotomy while a third only glimpses it. American Bodies, a collection of articles by participants in a British American Studies conference, looks at many aspects of the bodies of both sexes, usually in the tone of removed observation common to masculinity studies rather than the overt feminism that is still part of most work on women. As is often the case with such conference proceedings, many pieces cover familiar territory while the more innovative are limited in argument. "Wearing their Hearts on their Sleeves," by Simon P. Newman, considers tattoos on American seamen of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but offers only vague suggestions about what the tattoos might signify. McLaren's precise analysis holds him in good stead. When in the last section he turns to "medical discourses" he shows that he has learned his Foucault lessons well and ranges through the important studies of sexuality in the late nineteenth century to demonstrate its applicability and its influence. He shows the uneasy balancing acts, of the sexologists on the one side, many of whom would have been judged by society to be perverts if their personal proclivities had been known, and of the enforcers of hegemonic society on the other, the courts and the journalists, who yearned to show how their actions and statements conformed to the latest scientific studies. Daniel Coleman and Angus McLaren have more to say. McLaren's The Trials of Masculinity is a social history created from legal records. The original impetus for such work is no doubt Michel Foucault, but I first encountered it in this form in Judith Allen's Sex and Secrets: Crimes Involving Australian Women Since 1880 (1990). There 124 McLaren's study is well worth reading but he slips too easily over the vast geographical differences between his various cases, as suburban London provides the material for a discussion of men fooled by a false matrimonial agency and rural British Columbia is the setting for his examination of murder. Equally problematic is his time frame. His key case of transvestitism is from a trial in 1931, although his conclusion makes a Canadian Literature IJJ I Summer 2003 strong claim for the First World War as the watershed for changes in views of masculinity. On the other hand, his focus on criminal trials sometimes makes him miss alternative sources of insight. He is interested in Oscar Wilde as a defendant but he mentions Wilde's Portrait of Dorian Gray only briefly. Yet Portrait is a particularly interesting text in terms of McLaren's argument as it explicitly links effeminacy and the cad. The plot shows the foppish homosocial man as exactly the type to mistreat weak females. Coleman's Masculine Migrations is the best of this group. Fittingly, as the one literary study, it is the most pleasurable to read. Coleman introduces with ease a number of theoretical models as he examines six Canadian works of fiction. Still, while his readings of works by Austin Clarke, Dany Laferrière, Neil Bissoondath, Michael Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry and Ven Begamudré are apt, none will surprise most readers. However, Coleman also includes autobiographical reflections about being a married heterosexual white male who grew up in Ethiopia as the child of Canadian missionaries. The links between his readings and his personal life are honest, sometimes very much at his own expense, and they are excellent examples of the associations we all have while reading but so seldom articulate, especially in print. While I was reading the criticism with a certain sense of duty, I was looking forward to the next autobiographical section, not least to see the insightful links to the novels. As a teacher of postcolonial studies, I often find graduate students overwhelmed by white privilege. I have already offered Coleman's work to two of them as a way of dealing with this problem. Still, while Coleman confronts his silver spoon he remains constrained by his apologies for it. This suits the reminiscences but limits his analysis. For example, he seems easily to accept the Oedipus complex as a model for the western heterosexual male but rejects it 125 for everyone else. Well, no. There are many of the former who are far less Oedipal than Freud imagines and many studies which show us outsiders to be profoundly Oedipal in many ways. We are still waiting for the straight white male, the primary beneficiary of men's business, who can look beyond the good side or the bad. The wealth of men's business is a coin with many edges. Producing Culture Alison Beale and Annette Van Den Bosch, eds. Ghosts in the Machine: Women and Cultural Policy in Canada and Australia. Garamond $24.95 Clarence Karr Authors and Audiences: Popular Canadian Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century. McGill-Queen's UP $27-95 Reviewed by Janice Fiamengo The more things change, the more they remain the same. Women and people of Colour are more visible now in the Canadian and Australian arts scenes than at any time in the past, yet there are some depressing continuities: women artists still have lower status and incomes than men; government funding for the arts fails to make gender and race equity a top priority; and technology remains a predominantly male domain. The persistence of these problems is made more urgent by the shift, in the last decade, towards efficiency and downsizing in state policy, which means a reduction in arts support. What is the position of women in this fragile cultural sphere? How does cultural policy reflect and shape gendered hierarchies? And to what extent can feminist and anti-racist cultural workers influence how decisions are made and arts funding allocated? The essays in Ghosts in the Machine address these questions. Two essays near the beginning of the collection frame the competing perspectives Canadian Literature 1/71 Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w on cultural policy that structure the volume. Andrea Hull takes a pragmatic approach to arts funding, viewing the move to private and corporate financing of the arts in a positive light. Speaking of the "cultural industries," Hull advocates ever greater integration of culture into government economic agendas in order to produce "rewarding new partnerships." That such industry partnerships usually cast the arts as valuable only in business terms is not addressed by Hull, but it is a theme taken up by other contributors. Barbara Godard, for example, speaks directly to problems in "a rhetoric of market place success in which exchange is the only criterion of value." Far from celebrating the new partnerships fostered between artists and financiers, Godard portrays artists trapped by the need to placate funding bodies of whom they are (rightly) suspicious. Examining the increasing emphasis on the arts as a business where innovation equals new technologies, Godard calls for artists and cultural theorists to disseminate alternative notions of the public good. Many of the contributors take up Godard's focus on the difficult necessity of feminist intervention in government policy. Patricia Gillard relates her experiences as a policy advisor on multi-media services, noting how thoroughly the language of high-tech and consumer choice has subsumed that of creativity and citizenship in government policy; however, she stresses that involvement by artists and activists has the potential to shift the emphasis from commercial profit to equity, accessibility and community development. Monika Kin Gagnon examines three anti-racist cultural forums organized by First Nations and artists of Colour; although they met considerable resistance and ultimately foundered on internal tensions, such efforts prove that inclusivity need not mean integration "into existing dominant (white) structures." Annette Van Den Bosch traces 126 the devaluing of women's artistic work to the persistence of the Great Master model of artistic development to argue that feminist critique of patriarchal models can help to promote appropriate funding mechanisms for women. Andra McCartney considers how women are alienated from technology in electroacoustic institutions, providing specific recommendations to make these crucial places of apprenticeship more useful to women. The volume is weakened by sloppy editing: comma and apostrophe errors are rife throughout. Nonetheless, Ghosts in the Machine usefully outlines the many arenas in which gender intersects with cultural policy and may aid in its transformation. Many of the contributors acknowledge what Alison Beale examines in detail, that the 1990s has seen a new gendering of the cultural sphere, in which export industries— films, cd roms, telecommunications and broadband equipment—are supported by government as remunerative products while other forms of cultural production, such as the fine and performing arts, are relegated to the soft, private sphere; thus we have a new-old division between "the feminine welfare state sector" and "the export earning, technologised world of the masculine 'bottom line."' Although the contributors disagree about the extent to which women have the power to shape policy, all agree that without feminist and anti-racist intervention, "the conventional relations of ruling will be scripted all over again in new fields." Taking a more optimistic view of the possibilities for writers to achieve popular success without selling out their values, Clarence Karr's Authors and Audiences is a study of popular fiction in Canada from 1890-1920 that focuses on five best-selling novelists: Charles Gordon (Ralph Connor), Robert Stead, Nellie McClung, L.M. Montgomery, and Arthur Stringer. Karr analyses the material factors—including improved communications, the proliferation Canadian Literature 177/ Summer 2003 of inexpensive magazines, increased literacy, more leisure time, and the spread of advertising—that enabled writers from obscure parts of Canada to become internationally loved and financially successful. His chapters on their literary apprenticeships, relationships with agents and publishers, and audience response yield fascinating information and make a significant contribution to the history of the mass-marketed book in Canada. We learn, for example, that Charles Gordon was a procrastinator with little faith in his own talents; without the emotional support of his publisher and friend, who often had to cajole and berate Gordon into meeting deadlines, Gordon would never have been the publishing sensation that he became. Arthur Stringer, in contrast, was a meticulous and selfdisciplined writer who profited from prepublication magazine serialization and an astute agent to promote his lucrative professional career. Nellie McClung found a friend and supporter in her editor at the Methodist Book and Publishing House, who wept over the concluding chapters of Sowing Seeds in Danny. Not so fortunately, L.M. Montgomery was swindled out of thousands of dollars in royalties by an unscrupulous publisher who took advantage of her inexperience to lock her into a disadvantageous contract; she learned from the experience, however, suing the publisher and guarding her future interests carefully. A number of these writers experienced the exhilaration and frustration of having their fiction dramatized on the silver screen. All wrote unselfconsciously as Canadians at a time when the distinction between elite literature and popular culture had not yet solidified. Fascinating nuggets of fact and useful contextual overviews are abundantly available in this well-researched study. study should not be regarded as conventional writers of sentimental and romantic fiction but should instead be understood as modern authors responding to the complex experience of modernity. That popular literature should not be dismissed or ridiculed seems inarguable, but Karr does not convince me that these five writers, beloved for their moral seriousness and tearful scenes, were "often on the cutting edge of modernity" and he too often exaggerates the bold subversiveness of their fiction. In order to claim that such fiction deserves serious consideration, it would be more useful to read sentimentality and romance conventions as themselves complex responses to modernity. Karr's chapter on the letters fans wrote to Montgomery, Stringer and Connor amply demonstrates the impact these novels had on their readers: one Lutheran pastor broke from his church to begin a new ministry after reading Connor, while Stringer inspired outrage and thankfulness with stories of divorce and female independence. Karr's analysis of gender's relative unimportance in reader response (men wrote of weeping and self-transformation as frequently as women) is a valuable contribution to theories of reception. Karr's study of early Canadian popular fiction makes for a compelling read and will surely dispel the lingering prejudice that Canadian literature did not properly begin until the 1920s. The five writers considered here earned substantial international recognition for their work and proved that one could become famous without leaving Canada at the turn of the century. The fact that Karr is largely breaking new ground in addressing the import of their work says something about our continued forgetting of a complex cultural history. Less convincing in a book focusing on cultural history are some awkward forays into literary and cultural theory, particularly Karr's contention that the five authors in the 127 Canadian Literature ijy I Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w Des bons usages du Je Jean-François Beauchemin Les choses terrestres. Québec Amérique n.p. Hélène Desjardins Le dernier roman. La Courte Echelle n.p. Reviewed by Christian Delacampagne Si vous demandez en librairie le dernier roman d'Hélène Desjardins, vous achèterez un livre qui s'intitule précisément Le dernier roman et qui raconte, comme il se doit, l'histoire d'un écrivain mettant la dernière main à son dernier roman, dont le texte constitue justement la moitié du livre que vous venez d'acheter. . . . Mais que ces jeux de miroirs ne vous préoccupent pas : Le dernier roman est avant tout un excellent thriller. On pourrait même lui prédire un grand avenir cinématographique, à ceci près qu'une adaptation en images de ce récit narré par deux voix parallèles—celle du bourreau (le mari, écrivain à succès) et celle de sa victime (sa femme et principale inspiratrice)— risquerait de dissiper, au moins partiellement, le nuage d'ambiguïtés dans lequel il baigne, et qui en constitue le charme essentiel. Le spectateur du film, en effet, ne tarderait pas à s'apercevoir que la femme dont parle le mari et celle qui parle en son nom propre ne font qu'une seule et même personne. Pour le lecteur, en revanche, cette "clef" ne finit par devenir évidente qu'au bout d'un certain temps, après une longue période de doute savamment entretenue par le fait qu'AnneMarie, l'héroïne d'Hélène Desjardins, nous est présentée, au départ, comme amnésique : dès lors, toutes les hypothèses qu'Anne-Marie tente de forger pour trouver un sens au comportement énigmatique de Pierre, qu'on lui présente comme son mari, possèdent chacune un grain de vraisemblance—jusqu'à ce que, peu à peu, finisse par s'imposer la bonne (Pierre est un criminel paranoïaque), et que le roman coure alors à grandes enjambées vers sa fin tragique (qu'on ne vous racontera pas). 128 Très différent à tous points de vue, le dernier livre de Jean-François Beauchemin, Les Choses terrestres, n'est pas du tout un roman d'action. Le "suspense" y est en fait réduit au minimum : Jérôme, assisté de sa femme Joëlle, prend en charge son frère Jules, un jeune handicapé mental devenu aphasique au lendemain de la mort de sa mère, et de surcroît atteint par une sorte de cancer auquel il va heureusement échapper, à la fin de l'histoire, grâce aux effets bienfaisants d'une énergique "cure de beauté" administrée par une infirmière de choc (et de charme). L'intérêt du roman est évidemment ailleurs. Dans la description, d'abord, d'un milieu populaire composé de braves gens un peu loufoques, chômeurs, fauchés, oisifs, clochards, mais également rêveurs, bricoleurs et recycleurs toujours prêts à s'entraider les uns les autres puisque, dans le monde tel qu'il va, les pauvres ont intérêt— c'est du moins ce qu'affirme Jean-François Beauchemin—à ne pas trop compter sur l'assistance de Dieu. Dans la langue inventive, truculente et souvent poétique de l'auteur, ensuite, qui joue avec les mots, la vraisemblance et la logique dans une ambiance de liberté totale : monsieur Poussain, ancien "inspecteur des mercredis dans une fabrique de calendriers," ne parle que par phrases interrogatives, le chauffeur de taxi demande à son beau-frère au chômage de lui tenir lieu de "compteur" à voix haute un jour par semaine, les chiens tiennent des propos désabusés sur le sens de la vie et les souris jouent du violon, tandis qu'une vieille pantoufle enterrée dans le sol du potager donne naissance, quelques jours plus tard, à un magnifique "arbre à pantoufles rouges." On l'a compris : les meilleures pages des Choses terrestres ne sont pas sans rappeler le Vian de L'Ecume des jours—ce qui n'est pas une mauvaise référence ! Il n'y aurait donc, à première vue, pas grand chose de commun entre ces deux romans, si ce n'est qu'ils ont tous deux pour auteurs de jeunes écrivains québécois Canadian Literature ijj I Summer 2003 qui n'en sont plus tout à fait à leurs débuts. A mieux y regarder, cependant, on ne peut qu'être frappé par la manière dont ces deux romanciers ont choisi l'un et l'autre d'exploiter toutes les ressources (qui sont considérables) du récit en première personne, une forme narrative que les expérimentations littéraires des trois ou quatre dernières décennies semblaient avoir provisoirement discréditée. Cette réhabilitation du "je" estelle surprenante ? Pas vraiment, si l'on songe que Marguerite Duras, Claude Simon et Alain Robbe-Grillet eux-mêmes sont récemment revenus, dans leurs derniers textes, à la première personne (que Nathalie Sarraute, pour sa part, n'avait jamais abandonnée). Comme si, après tant d'années placées sous le signe d'un "objectivisme" influencé par le roman américain, nos romanciers actuels, vieux ou jeunes, avaient choisi de se laisser porter, à rebours, par la mode du "retour du sujet." On se gardera bien de leur en tenir grief. Plus que tout autre genre littéraire (à l'exception de la poésie proprement dite), le roman est un exercice de construction qui suppose, pour matière première, l'autobiographie. Et il est finalement plus honnête—et plus difficile—d'assumer ce fait que d'essayer de le refouler (du moins lorsqu'on n'est pas un romancier joycien ou bien un membre de l'Oulipo). Certes, la part de l'autobiographie est probablement moins importante—ou moins apparente—dans le roman d'Hélène Desjardins (bien qu'elle raconte l'histoire d'un écrivain) que dans celui de Jean-François Beauchemin, qui ne se cache guère de donner, au personnage de Jérôme, ses propres vues sur l'existence. Mais le lecteur ne saurait dire plus précisément quelles sont, dans chaque cas, les proportions respectives de la réalité vécue et du fantasme. Une fois refermés, ces deux livres conservent en effet, chacun sur son mode propre, leur part de mystère. N'est-ce pas la meilleure preuve, au fond, de l'inépuisable vitalité du roman québécois—voire du roman en général ? 129 Looking at Narcissus Steven Bruhm Reflecting Narcissus: A Queer Aesthetic. U of Minnesota P $44.95 Reviewed by Stephen Guy-Bray Like everyone who has actually read classical literature, I have been puzzled and irritated by the fact that the story of Narcissus is understood as a story about self-love rather than a story about homosexual love, which is what it is in Ovid. Furthermore, I have been alarmed by the fact that when homoeroticism does enter discussions of Narcissus, the myth has been used to stigmatize homosexuals as self-involved. The term "narcissism" has even entered popular culture, and the misreading of the Narcissus story has thus been perpetuated on a large scale. I am happy to report that Steven Bruhm's new book provides a solution to this problem. Bruhm does not offer a new reading of the Narcissus story itself, although there is some discussion of the various ancient versions; he concentrates on how the story has been used and misused in the last two centuries in both literature and psychoanalytic writing. Perhaps the strongest section of his book is the introduction, in which Bruhm deals effectively and concisely with Freud's use of narcissism and with more recent responses to Freud, particularly from queer theorists. Freud's distinction between narcissistic and anaclitic modes of sexuality is of particular importance to this section and, indeed, to Reflecting Narcissus as a whole, and Bruhm's discussion of this distinction and the use to which it has been put is very interesting. Ultimately, of course, both homosexuality and heterosexuality can be defined as either (or simultaneously) narcissistic or anaclitic. Bruhm's insistence on this point should help to open up new ways of looking at sexuality. Reflecting Narcissus makes frequent use of Freud and of psychoanalytic theorizing more Canadian Literature 177 / Summer 2003 B o o k s i n Re> generally. It is a densely written and argued book that requires considerable familiarity with these theories. Readers who do not have this familiarity may find the book somewhat daunting, but they should persevere. For one thing, Reflecting Narcissus provides a very perceptive and efficiently executed introduction to recent psychoanalytic debates within queer studies. For another, Bruhm also provides a series of interesting readings of texts. The first chapter looks at poems by August Schlegel, Coleridge, and Byron. For me, this was the book's highpoint, as I think these are the most interesting of the writers Bruhm discusses. The book continues with explorations of Gide, Wilde, Hesse, Tennessee Williams, Nabokov, and Peter Straub. Bruhm's choice of literary texts will probably appear idiosyncratic to most people (and I had hoped never to have to think about Hesse or Nabokov again), but in each case his analysis is interesting and deepens his discussion of the theoretical issues that are his main concern. Reflecting Narcissus has a brief conclusion that contains a look at Reginald Shepherd, a contemporary American poet about whom I would have liked to hear more. Bruhm riskily, but perhaps wisely, resists the temptation to sum everything up too neatly, although I would have appreciated a slightly more general treatment of his subject at the very end of the book. These quibbles apart, I think Reflecting Narcissus is a valuable book that will be interesting and instructive to a wide range of readers. Théâtre et traduction Normand Chaurette. Linda Gaboriau, trad. AU the Verdis of Venice. Talonbooks $15.95 Michel Marc Bouchard. Linda Gaboriau, trad. Down Dangerous Passes Road. Talonbooks $14.95 Reviewed by Alain-Michel Rocheleau En 2000, Talonbooks de Vancouver publiait la version anglaise de deux pièces fort 130 appréciées du public québécois: Je vous écris du Caire (1996) de Normand Chaurette et Le Chemin des passes-dangereuses (1998) de Michel Marc Bouchard. La fable du premier texte peut se résumer de la façon suivante. Fait prisonnier à la Scala de Milan et menacé d'une arme par le directeur du lieu, le compositeur Giuseppe Verdi se voit forcé d'écrire en quarante-huit heures un opéra en cinq actes (Don Carlos), commandé un an et demi plus tôt, pour célébrer la splendeur de l'Italie unifiée. Même si le maestro souhaite se rendre au Caire pour terminer l'écriture d' Aida, il acceptera la commande du directeur en autant que Tereza Stolz consente à interpréter le rôle de la reine d'Espagne. Tout en composant Don Carlos, Verdi se remémore les lettres passionnées envoyées jadis à sa cantatrice préférée. Le départ momentané de cette dernière donne lieu à un dialogue intensif entre le compositeur et son double, le Souffleur (Verdi II), prenant vite l'aspect d'une crise de conscience identitaire que Chaurette met subtilement en évidence tout au long de l'histoire. Ce qui ressort avant tout de la lecture de All the Verdis of Venice, c'est la complexité du système sémantique à l'intérieur duquel la déconstruction du personnage de Verdi prend forme. Alors qu'au départ, le maestro et le Souffleur possèdent une identité clairement définie, un mécanisme d'appropriation de souvenirs, de sentiments et de répliques provoque, au terme de l'action, l'amalgame du statut identitaire de ces deux personnages, alors appelés Verdi I et Verdi II. Grâce aux effets dynamiques qu'il provoque, ce mécanisme, véritable système en miroir auquel s'associent d'autres modes de dédoublement-répétition comme le jeu dans le jeu ou la pièce dans la pièce, altère les limites perceptuelles entre le rêve et la réalité chez l'ensemble des protagonistes, tout en participant à la structuration de la fable. Outre les qualités attribuables à cette septième pièce de Chaurette, le travail de tra- Canadian Literature 1/71 Summer 2003 duction de Linda Gaboriau témoigne d'un sérieux désir d'adéquation à 1' œuvre originale. Dans l'ensemble, la version anglaise suit assez fidèlement l'économie verbale du texte de départ, dont elle se distingue néanmoins par l'élimination (ou parfois l'ajout) de bouts de répliques et de didascalies. À titre d'exemple, "On voit bien que la Gazetta di Milano qui paraît le jeudi ne se rend pas jusqu'au Caire" devient "It's obvious that the Gazetta Musicale di Milano never reaches Cairo." Sa volonté de rejoindre le contexte récepteur se manifeste aussi dans l'adaptation d'expressions ou d'idiotismes comme "Dieu merci" et "Fini les a parte avec le maestro," qu'elle traduit respectivement par "Perfect" et "No more tête-à-têtes." Dans quelques passages, Gaboriau semble animée par l'intention d'expliquer le message de certaines répliques et n'hésite pas à traduire, avec pertinence, "Au timbre printanier. C'est encore l'hiver" par "With his youthful timbre. Time spares no man!" D'autres choix de traduction sont, par contre, beaucoup plus gratuits, comme "Ce papier date d'il y a trente ans" qui devient "That article was written more than twenty years ago." La démarche traductive accomplie dans Down Dangerous Passes Road de Michel Marc Bouchard semble elle aussi motivée par une recherche d'adéquation au texte original. Aux niveaux onomastique et toponymique, par exemple, la traduction a retenu le prénom des trois personnages (Ambroise devient cependant Ambrose, dans la version anglaise) et de l'endroit où se déroule l'action. Certaines adaptations sont aussi destinées à faciliter la réception de la pièce dans un contexte d'accueil autre que québécois. Ainsi, "T'es ben smatte d'être-là" devient "It was nice of you to come" et "sportif en ciboire!" devient "what a sport!" Puisque le texte de Bouchard (de facture hautement réaliste) est écrit dans une langue comportant de nombreux idiomes régionaux, la version 131 traduite les reproduit par des élisions empruntées à la langue orale comme "Pa" pour "Pepa," et par des contractions de mots comme "Where's" pour "Oùsqu'y est." Enfin, d'autres traductions relèvent purement du jugement esthétique de Gaboriau, comme "You're such a snob" pour "Laisse faire tes phrases de snob." Accessible mais sans être facile, ce neuvième texte de Bouchard met en scène trois passagers d'une camionnette qui n'ont d'autres choix que de se parler, à la suite d'un accident les impliquant dans le tournant du chemin des passes-dangereuses. En attendant d'être secourus, ces trois frères (toujours vivants ou déjà morts . . .) renouent avec des souvenirs lointains, se témoignent des sentiments tendres et de rancœur qu'ils n'ont jamais pu s'avouer, puis deviennent les auditeurs impuissants des rêves inachevés de chacun: Cari, le cadet, ne cesse d'espérer une vie traditionnelle déjà toute tracée; Ambroise, homosexuel, aimerait vendre son appartement montréalais et prendre soin de son amant sidatique, alors que Victor, l'aîné, planteur d'arbres et père de famille, voudrait changer son existence qu'il juge insignifiante. Au-delà des différences de chacun, ces trois individus parviennent à s'écouter véritablement et finissent par avouer, d'un commun accord, la honte qu'ils éprouvent envers leur père, un "ivrogne griffonneux," mort noyé au même endroit quelques années plus tôt. Sans être impudente, cette pièce nous amène à poser un regard critique sur la société contemporaine, sur des individus vivant en marge de celle-ci et préférant tous le rêve à la réalité. Pour eux, d'ailleurs, l'activité onirique constitue la seule manière qu'ils ont de survivre à une existence par trop décevante. À l'aide de structures en abyme dans lesquelles s'imbriquent jeu et réalité, mensonge et vérité, l'auteur trace le portrait d'un univers familial sclérosé, où l'impuissance d'un père, le désespoir d'une Canadian Literature 177 / Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w mère et l'embarras de jeunes garçons, bien qu'à peine dévoilés dans les dialogues, sont évocateurs. En traitant de ces thèmes toujours délicats par l'entremise d'images allégoriques, Michel Marc Bouchard conserve aux relations de ses personnages leur part d'humanité mais aussi d'ambiguïté. Explorations Commercial & Personal Jean Murray Cole, ed. This Blessed Wilderness: Archibald McDonald's Letters from the Columbia, 1822-44. UBC P $75.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper) Philip Teece A Shimmer on the Horizon. Orca $24.95 Reviewed by Bryan N.S. Gooch Jean Murray Cole's edition of a generous selection of letters by the Hudson's Bay Company Chief Factor Archibald McDonald is a welcome supplement to the body of printed primary source material concerning western exploration, fur trade, and settlement; it is also a useful companion to Morag Madachlan's The Fort Langley Journals, 1827-30. While journal entries can be succinct and somewhat impersonal, revealing essential details regarding trade, the maintenance of company establishments, problems with food supplies, and so on, the letters of a chief trader or factor, not only to his commercial masters, but to friends and colleagues, are usually far more discursive, and reveal, often at some length, the minutiae of outpost life and travel, domestic scenes, reactions to hardship and privation. They also discuss delights of various kinds, for example, successful trading forays, and sufficient salmon to carry a fort through the winter, and they give news of happy, growing children. McDonald is articulate, perceptive, good humoured, honest, professional, and without malice. His prose is easy and conversational; he writes, one suspects, very much as he would talk to his correspondents, 132 who range from Sir James Douglas, Sir George Simpson (the grand man of the HBC), and Professor Sir William Hooker (Glasgow University, later Keeper of Kew Gardens) for whom he collected specimens, to friends like Edward Ermatinger (retired from the Company and living in St. Thomas, Ont.) and missionary Elkanah Walker (who settled in the Columbia territory). Cole begins with a helpful introduction in which she discusses, for instance, McDonald's background, the character of the letters, the amalgamation of the North West Company and the HBC, the nature of the Columbia territory. The letters, carefully edited and annotated when necessary, are divided into four main groups reflecting McDonald's appointments: 1) Fort George and Thompson River, 1822-28; 2) Fort Langley, 1829-33; 3) Fort Colville, 183444 (near and now flooded by the Grand Coulee Dam); and 4) "Envoi," 1845-49 (covering McDonald's retirement, including his journey east and eventual resettlement near Montreal). An Afterword provides details about his family and in an Appendix, brief notes on individuals mentioned in the text. A bibliography and index conclude the volume. What emerges from the correspondence is not only courage and dedication but a revealing, first-hand view of the journeys of far brigades, camp and boat construction, and day-to-day life marked by the arrival of traders, friends, and other visitors. It becomes abundantly clear that much of the area McDonald knew was thoroughly well-known before mid-century, and one is drawn to the conclusion that Moberly, Rogers, and other explorers decades later were not really pushing through a trackless wilderness, however romantic that notion might seem. A few detailed route maps would have been useful, especially for the reader unfamiliar with the territory discussed. Philip Teece's A Shimmer on the Horizon brings the reader to another kind of explo- Canadian Literature 177 / Summer 2003 ration: sailing single-handed up British Columbia's inside passage to Haro Strait in company with a female friend sailing a second boat. This is a voyage of discovery, geographical and personal, as they move away from the marine traffic of the Strait of Georgia into the remote, sheltered inlets of the northern waters. Their quest, both in terms of self-discovery and finding a place to which they can eventually return to build the perfect escape-cottage, is successful, and the tale, with its account of joys and tribulations, is told in a sensitive, reflective way. This is not simply a kind of travelogue of the sights-along-the-coast variety, though vignettes of locations visited abound (for instance, Lasqueti and Cortes Islands, and the incomparable little Mittlenach Island, a miniature mid-Strait wilderness preserve with its rather unique ecosystem), but a personal and visual account of a summer's voyage into waters both tranquil and challenging. Like McDonald's letters, Teece's narrative offers the directness of the firsthand view, and does so with honesty, good humour, and felicity. Linked Stories Libby Creelman Walking in Paradise. The Porcupine's Quill $18.95 Gail Anderson-Dargatz The Miss Hereford Stories. Douglas & Mclntyre $18.95 Rick Maddocks Sputnik Diner. Knopf Canada $29.95 Reviewed by Roderick W. Harvey Linked stories are often unified through recurring characters, distinctive settings, or the persistent explication of various themes. If read together, they can form the chapters of a novel, as in Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women. The linked stories in Libby Creelman's Walking in Paradise, Gail Anderson-Dargatz's The Miss Hereford Stories, and Rick Maddocks's Sputnik Diner 133 vary in their successful management of the common ground that connects their narrative segments. Creelman's stories are preoccupied with the rituals of family life. There is no consistent group of characters here, but the family activities—holidays, swimming, sailing, going to the beach—provide a common link between a variety of families. Often there are strong images of the effects of time. In "Three Weeks," a family visits their aging house in Maine: "The house itself is a small cape with pitched roof and weathered, nearly white, clapboards. Black shutters had long ago fallen off and were stacked now in an attic corner, the paint lifting like the wings of dark moths." "Sunken Island" describes a family at a cottage where the grandmother entertains the narrator with stories about the past. These stories are mainly set in New England holiday places, and in some cases there are links with aspects of regional family history. In "Pilgrims" the main character, Charles Standish Avery, is said to be descended from "Myles Standish himself, and from Barbara, the woman Miles married when he couldn't marry Priscilla, though Great-Aunt Rebecca said there was no truth to that romance." Thinking of these "undisciplined pioneers roaming the New England woods, half-naked, filthy, starved," Rebecca is "mortified." History is re-created and made real in the present through the reminiscences of various characters. In no sense didactic or moralistic, Creelman presents moments of realization, small epiphanies, as they appear in the course of daily experiences. At the end of "The Biggest Mistake," for example, there is the simple but telling assertion about human selfinterest: "The truth about children, Roy realizes, is that no matter how you measure your love for them, you love your own best." In the context of growing up, these stories are successfully unified as they describe the development of human awareness. Canadian Literature 177 / Summer 2003 Books in Ri A different kind of linkage is provided in Gail Anderson-Dargatz's The Miss Hereford Stories, a collection set in the rural community of Likely, Alberta. In the western Canadian tradition of W. O. Mitchell and Jack Hodgins, these are humourous, earthy stories that depend on a tradition of frontier humour, tall tales, and the daily activities of local citizens. Comic characters, fragmented anecdotes, comparisons between farm animals and the people who work the land—this is a kind of humour that depends on an accurate, detailed perception of small-town rural life. This is often new information to an urban reader, but the reader from a farming background would recognize such activities as just another part of growing up. The successful characterizations in Anderson-Dargatz's stories are eccentrics who avoid the limited comic stereotypes of frontier humour and who seem to exist as individuals living real lives. Like the eccentrics in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, they seem memorable because they are so different from the norm. One such is Al MacLean, the bank manager who moves to Likely to "take advantage of the cheap land and houses." Unlike most of the other residents, he insists on jogging while carrying on "conversations with himself," conversations that exclude politics because "it was difficult to maintain an interesting conversation about politics without a little heated debate." Instead, he talks about the Oilers and how difficult it is to park his car in Edmonton. Though her emphasis is comic rather than philosophical, there are lessons to be learned from these stories. AndersonDargatz presents the world of Likely with sympathy and humour, showing tact and feeling for the absurdity of common social situations. This amused, tolerant attitude certainly is different from the point of view presented in Rick Maddocks's Sputnik Diner. These stories revolve around activities at the 134 Sputnik Diner in Nanticoke, Ontario, a part of the truck-stop world often portrayed in modern country music and films. The three main characters in these stories—Marcel, the owner; Buzz, the cook; and Grace, the waitress—reveal themselves through scenes of eating, drinking, and talking. The reader discovers that on most afternoons, the eccentric Marcel "hung the Closed sign up in the window, sat behind the counter with his gin and lemonade, and jawed with George and George, a couple of old pisspots grinning across from him." Marcel usually expresses himself by using malapropisms and profanity. Grace is somewhat more reflective and insightful than the other characters, though she seems exhausted and self-defeating: "And she's lifted up, perhaps across days or months, and she's set down in the back seat of a noisy car where glass towers and redbrick buildings fall away on all sides and there are feathers or cottonwood parachutes floating thick in air." The stories portray individuals who live in a rather physically limited universe. Like many contemporary writers, Maddocks uses a combination of postrealist irony, campy pop humour, and stream-ofconsciousness. The most interesting and revealing story in this collection is "Lessons from the Sputnik Diner," in which the narrator reveals the fragmented nature of what he—and the reader of the stories—can learn from the diner world. Evil, and All That Lynn Crosbie Dorothy L'Amour. HarperFlamingo $26.00 Caroline Adderson A History of Forgetting. Key Porter $24.95 Reviewed by Brett Josef Grubisic For better or worse, Douglas Coupland's Generation Xhas come not only to name a demographic group but to define its char- Canadian Literature IJJ / Summer 2003 acteristics. Accordingly, we might expect members of such a group to engage with a serious topic like evil with a mixture of avoidance, anxiety or apathy. Lynn Crosbie and Caroline Adderson, both born in 1963, suggest the frailty of Gen X generalities. Though their novels meditate on evil in distinct styles, they are united in their creativity and refusal to overlook horror (when ironic detachment à la Gen X would be so much easier). Like Lynn Crosbie's "critfiction" Paul's Case, Dorothy L'Amour is a formally complex work that manipulates thoroughly mediated crimes in order to shift and undermine the "facts" of the cases and the "lessons" we learn from them. Crosbie examines the life and times of Dorothy Stratten, the former Vancouver Dairy Queen counter girl, Playboy Playmate of the Year and actor who was murdered by her estranged husband in 1980. The subject of numerous biographies, films, and sundry journalistic articles, the Stratten whom Crosbie portrays is daringly unrealistic. Unlike most fictional investigations of a historical figure, Dorothy L'Amour expresses little concern with verisimilitude. Yes, Crosbie's novel is "about" Dorothy Stratten, celebrity murder victim. Yet on the surface Crosbie's raunchy and funny narrative discloses a journal-writing Stratten whose delirious incoherence places her well outside victim status. At the same time, Crosbie's approach provokes questions about celebrity and our fascination with it and forces readers to ponder the very nature of representation. Stratten's beguiling journal begins with her i960 birth, recalled as an operatic calamity: "My mother's anguish broke the windows, her aria of love soaring higher, into rage: My God why have you repaid me this way?" From that point on, Stratten traverses the cultural map; she'll discuss an obscure Roman manuscript, and a moment later wander the Playboy Mansion, smoking 135 marijuana in peek-a-boo lingerie. All the while her inflated, elaborate language is redolent of Pater and the French Decadent writers who preceded him. Patently false in biographical and elocutionary details, Dorothy's picaresque reminiscence establishes a resounding but clearly suspect life story. Under Crosbie's direction, self-important and narcissistic Hugh Hefner, Playboy founder and author of The Playboy Philosophy, plays a pivotal role. Forever speaking in the first person plural ("used in works of philosophical exposition," he explains), Hefner has an ambivalent role in the making of Stratten's diary. In the final section, another popular icon, Madonna (Ciccone), discovers Hefner's journal, and inadvertently reveals that Dorothy's autobiography may have been penned in fact by Hefner as an odd hagiographie gesture. He has reformed banal blonde Stratten (whom, he recalls, "was a sweet girl, who liked to roller-skate, play checkers") perhaps in order to give her brief life greater pathos than he felt it actually had. In any case, via Crosbie the meaning of "Dorothy Stratten" remains resolutely opaque. It's not so much the banality of evil as its pervasiveness that draws Caroline Adderson's attention in the absorbing A History of Forgetting. Set in present-day dreary, rainsoaked Vancouver, Adderson's tale begins with a foreboding second-person account of a taxi journey to Auschwitz. Adderson then returns to tense domestic relations in the novel's first sections, focussing on the painfully slow separation of a long-term couple, Malcolm and Denis. The elder of the two men, Denis, suffers from Alzheimer's disease. His decline is marked by forgetfulness, of course, yet also by his increased anger, frustration and aggression. Faced with a lover he no longer knows, Malcolm must make the awful decision about how to best provide care. Malcolm's old-fashioned sense of decorum (and his equally old-fashioned sense of Canadian Literature 1771 Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w homosexual discretion) keeps him at odds with his fellow stylists at his hair salon job. Formerly a star employee at a shop catering to elderly Kerrisdale women, Malcolm with the dun-coloured dye-job as snobbish and outmoded when the salon is bought and given a fashion makeover. He is befriended by Alison, the shop's apprentice, who is naive and apolitical, a generation or two from Malcolm and surely a world apart. The murder of another hairdresser by a troupe of homophobic neo-Nazis cements their awkward friendship. While the pair's spontaneous trip to Poland to confront the wellspring of evil at Auschwitz does not result in catharsis, it does suggest the possibility for the kind of deep personal bond that helps make community vital. With A History of Forgetting, Adderson challenges the myth that bad things happen far away, or else on the TV news. Her vision is bleak, brightened only briefly by transcendent moments of connection. Théâtre franco-ontarien Jean Marc Dalpé Le chien. Prise de parole $11.00 Michael Gauthier L'hypocrite. Prise de parole $15.00 Robert Marinier L'insomnie. Prise de parole $15.00 Reviewed by Sylvain Marois Depuis près de 30 ans, les Éditions Prise de parole font connaître les œuvres des créateurs franco-ontariens et plus particulièrement des auteurs dramatiques de ce coin de pays. C'est grâce à la diffusion réalisée par cette maison d'édition de Sudbury qu'il nous est possible de lire les œuvres de Michael Gauthier, de Jean Marc Dalpé et de Robert Marinier. Ces trois auteurs représentent bien la richesse et la diversité de la dramaturgie ontarienne contemporaine. Le Chien, traduit en anglais par Dalpé et Maureen Labonté, présenté en lecture 136 publique le 3 septembre 1987 à Québec, s'est mérité le Prix littéraire du Gouverneur général 1988. Ce texte, aux dialogues forts et percutants, nous raconte le retour de Jay dans son petit village du nord de l'Ontario la journée même de l'enterrement de son grand-père. S'il avait quitté sept ans auparavant, suite à une altercation avec son paternel, il revenait "pour faire la paix." Ce ne sera toutefois pas possible . . . L'action se déroule sur une période de quelques jours, mais nous entraîne, dans un collage de monologues habillement enchaînés, du début du siècle à aujourd'hui. C'est ainsi que chacun des personnages nous raconte sa vie, sa perspective, ses souvenirs et nous offre son point de vue sur les différents drames qui ont ponctué la vie de cette famille et contribué à son éclatement. Jean Marc Dalpé démontre, encore une fois—comme dans Lucky Lady (Boréal, 1995). P a r exemple—son grand talent de dialoguiste. La langue de Dalpé est média et message à la fois. C'est une langue qui dit tout, autant par son contenu que par sa structure, et qui révèle les personnages en même temps qu'elle intéresse le lecteur. La structure interne du texte n'a pas qu'une valeur esthétique : elle participe à la construction de la tension, de la progression et au rythme de la pièce. C'est aussi cette langue qui permet à Dalpé d'aborder la relation père-fils, un thème tout aussi usé que riche, et d'en synthétiser l'essence dans un bref échange entre Jay et son père. [Jay] : "J'veux tu m'dises que j'suis correct! J'veux tu dises que tu m'aimes! J'veux tu serres dans tes bras, Pa!" [Père] : "J'peux pas. C'est trop tard." Le Chien a connu depuis une belle carrière, car en plus du Prix du Gouverneur général, il a été joué en France et au Canada à plusieurs reprises et a été enregistré par Radio-Canada en vue d'une diffusion radiophonique. L'Hypocrite, précédé de Crime (2001), dans Contes sudburois, chez Prise de parole, Canadian Literature iyy I Summer 2003 est le premier texte dramatique professionnel pour adolescents signé par Michael Gauthier. Ce choix de public a des conséquences sur le récit, sa structure, les dialogues et le style de l'écriture adoptée. L'Hypocrite nous raconte l'histoire de Éric et Chuck qui connaîtront, à la suite du passage vers l'école secondaire, l'ensemble des passions et émotions normalement rattachées au monde dit "des adultes." Mensonge, manipulation, amour, amitié et cruauté se superposent et s'entrechoquent dans ce bref texte dramatique pour en faire une sorte de fable didactique sur les difficultés et maux quotidiens des "jeunes d'aujourd'hui." Les trente-six courtes scènes, bien adaptées au public cible, nous entraînent dans la réalité de ces deux jeunes adolescents dont un, Éric, qui tombera amoureux d'Hélène, délaissant ainsi son meilleur ami Chuck. .. S'ensuit une valse qui exposera les "dangers de l'hypocrisie." La force de ce texte de Gauthier ne réside pas tant dans l'originalité du thème que dans les dialogues. En effet, bien que certains anglicismes utilisés semblent parfois parachutés en milieu de phrase, les dialogues sont solidement construits et ponctuent bien la progression dramatique. De plus, leur ton, parfois saccadé et souvent simple, colle bien au langage associé aux "ados" tout en révélant une certaine candeur. L'éternelle dualité amitié-amour y est bien décrite et la tension associée aux choix des personnages y est, elle aussi, bien présente. L'Hypocrite est un bon texte dont l'efficacité dramatique ne masque toutefois pas les ambitions pédagogiques de l'auteur. Son désir avoué de faire du théâtre pour les adolescents—et peut-être encore plus précisément pour les jeunes FrancoOntariens—est présent à chaque page et pourrait avoir un résultat opposé de celui souhaité, soit de ne pas intéresser son public cible parce que trop caricatural, trop didactique : trop ado. 137 Robert Marinier, auteur de L'Insomnie, est bien connu dans la famille dramatique franco-ontarienne. Il a, par exemple, agit à titre de conseiller dramaturgique pour L'Hypocrite et a co-écrit Les Rogers (1985) avec Jean Marc Dalpé. L'Insomnie est une très belle fable, magnifiquement écrite, qui nous transporte dans le monde sans sommeil de Gilles Boudin. En effet, ce dernier n'a pas dormi depuis six mois! De sa première nuit d'insomnie à la suite du départ de sa femme et de ses deux filles, Gilles nous raconte comment il devient incapable de dire "je." comment il vit, partagé entre une incertaine réalité, affecté par le manque de sommeil et de nombreux "flash-back" qui l'exposent à des moments, parfois vrais et faux, de sa vie passée, présente ou future. Incapable de dormir, et ne sachant comment remplir tout son temps libre, Gilles décide de "travailler, travailler, travailler" jour et nuit. Ensuite, dans de sublimes juxtapositions des inconvénients de la réalité quotidienne, de questionnements philosophiques et de retournements absurdes, Gilles Boudin errera entre les mesquineries de ses collègues de bureau, les insondables méandres de l'âme humaine et les bienfaits thérapeutiques trouvés au fond d'une sécheuse . . . Ce one-man show contient une juste dose d'originalité du discours, de "spleen" existentiel et de surprises formelles. Boudin se demande, au moment de suivre Ti-Bé dans la sécheuse de la buanderie, s'il devrait suivre un inconnu tout en sachant, au fond de lui-même, qu'il le suivra. Il se demande donc si "c'est la preuve que les choix, les décisions ne font pas partie des hautes fonctions de la conscience humaine, mais font plutôt partie des fonctions plus primitives du cerveau? Ou est-ce que c'est tout simplement le désir inconscient qu'on retrouve chez bien des gens de vouloir savoir ça serait comment rentrer dans une sécheuse?" On constate bien le Canadian Literature 1771 Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w changement de style et le glissement vers l'oralité entre la première et la deuxième questions. Enfin, le ton naïf de certains échanges, l'apparente perte de contrôle du personnage principal et sa continuelle stupéfaction, véhiculent un contenu métaphorique très contemporain. On pense, par exemple, au repli du personnage sur son travail—seule activité signifiante pouvant tout autant distraire son cerveau malade qu'occuper ses nuits—et qui n'est pas sans rappeler le workoolisme envahissant la société actuelle. L'Insomnie est un texte solide et bien écrit qui, derrière le malaise social de son personnage principal et son vocabulaire parfois lyrique et coloré, n'est pas sans rappeler un certain Achille Talon . . . Les trois textes présentés ici témoignent de la vivacité et de la diversité de la dramaturgie franco-ontarienne actuelle. Si la qualité dramaturgique est naturellement inégale, la structure linguistique et l'efficacité des dialogues de Jean Marc Dalpé, le public cible (un public trop négligé) de L'Hypocrite et l'originalité du discours et de la forme de L'Insomnie démontrent et confirment la bonne santé cette écriture dramatique de l'Ontario français. Homosexualité et Suicide Michel Dorais Mort oufif.La face cachée du suicide chez les garçons. VLB éditeur $14.95 Reviewed by Alain-Michel Rocheleau À l'heure où bon nombre d'individus hésitent encore à reconnaître une possible corrélation entre la stigmatisation de l'homosexualité et le nombre effarant de tentatives de suicide chez les jeunes gays, le dixième ouvrage de Michel Dorais tend à illustrer ce fait et à démontrer que, contrairement aux adultes, les homosexuels de quatorze à vingt-cinq ans ne disposent d'aucun réseau de ressources institutionnelles capable de les aider. 138 Après avoir colligé des témoignages de gays et de garçons identifiés comme tels, qui ont accepté avec courage de parler de leurs tentatives de suicide, Dorais fait ressortir dans Mort oufif quelques-uns des contextes et motifs directement liés à ces gestes de désespoir. Le but de cette étude qualitative, dans laquelle les récits de vie occupent un large espace, vise d'ailleurs à mettre en lumière les déplorables conditions d'existence réservées à ces jeunes, aussi bien à l'école, dans leur famille que dans leur environnement social, conditions le plus souvent reflétées dans les représentations négatives de l'homosexualité que diffusent les médias et qui en ont incité plus d'un à tenter de s'enlever la vie. Selon les dires de l'auteur, ces secteurs jouent, dans un premier temps, "un rôle déterminant dans [le] malaise [de plusieurs homos] face à leur orientation sexuelle et dans leurs ideations puis leurs tentatives de suicide ultérieures." Dans un deuxième temps, ils sont souvent à l'origine d'un tarissement moral étroitement lié à une claustration psychologique (et parfois même physique) à laquelle la majorité des jeunes gays ont été confrontés depuis leur jeune âge du fait de leur "particularité," "de l'incitation à la honte d'être ce qu'ils sont et de la stigmatisation (réelle ou anticipée) qu'ils encourent en raison de leurs désirs." Dans cette étude, Michel Dorais parvient à nous convaincre—si besoin est—qu'une absence d'écoute, d'aide ou de soutien, permettant à ses répondants de confier à quelqu'un leur désarroi, d'obtenir du réconfort et de nourrir l'espoir de jours meilleurs, figure parmi les facteurs qui incitent les homosexuels de quatorze à vingtcinq ans à vouloir se suicider. De toute évidence, le silence, l'indifférence, l'irrespect, l'intolérance que les jeunes homosexuels subissent dans leur milieu de vie et dans la société, en général, restent toujours hautement problématiques. En situant sa démarche exploratoire dans Canadian Literature ijy / Summer 2003 une perspective de type sociologique et tout en référant aux travaux d'auteurs réputés comme Erving Goffman, Howard Becker, Heinz Leyman, David Plummer et Christine Flynn Saulnier, Michel Dorais, de l'Université Laval, a su élaborer une typologie des hommes gays aux épithètes plutôt originales, de façon à décrire le profil de ses trente-deux répondants. Cette classification met en évidence \efifde service (qui, très tôt dans son existence, est la cible de moqueries, d'harcèlement ou de violence en raison d'une orientation homosexuelle perçue chez celui-ci), le parfait garçon (qui cherche à se conformer aux attentes de son milieu social, quitte à nier son homosexualité), le caméléon (qui joue à être ou à se montrer hétérosexuel, en dépit de ses fortes attirances homosexuelles) et, enfin, le rebelle (qui, tout en refusant l'intolérance et l'homophobie de son entourage, développe une résistance qui le protégera d'une possible dépression). En fonction de ces quatre profils, les jeunes homosexuels développeraient différentes stratégies de survie, que Dorais appelle "scénarios adaptatifs au rejet." Si Mort ou fif: La face cachée du suicide chez les garçons a le mérite de se faire un appel pressant à une prévention plus rigoureuse du suicide chez les jeunes gays, démarche qui passe par une meilleure information ou campagne de sensibilisation auprès des personnes que ces jeunes côtoient quotidiennement, on se doit d'avouer en contrepartie que cet ouvrage de 112 pages, destiné "au grand public [...], [p]arents, éducateurs, professeurs et aidants de toutes sortes," aurait pu être beaucoup mieux documenté. Par exemple, l'auteur écrit: "Quand on connaît le haut taux d'abandons scolaires des garçons du Québec, on peut se demander si l'on peut se permettre d'ignorer le phénomène chez les jeunes homosexuels si, comme nous le croyons, les répondants à notre enquête sont indicatifs d'une tendance dont l'ampleur serait insoupçonnée." À quel taux 139 d'abandons scolaires et à quelle période Dorais fait-il référence ici? Aux cinq dernières années? Enfin, l'échantillon final sur lequel s'appuie l'étude de l'auteur, soit trente-deux jeunes hommes (vingt-quatre gays, huit hétérosexuels), nous apparaît plutôt "limité," pour dire le moins. Ce petit échantillon, certes, n'invalide nullement les résultats de cette recherche qualitative mais réduit la portée d'une éventuelle extrapolation des données et témoignages recueillis. The Story's the Thing Jennifer Duncan Sanctuary and Other Stories. DC Books n.p. Helen Pereira Birds of Paradise. Killick $12.95 Robyn Sarah Promise of Shelter. Porcupine's Quill $14.95 Reviewed by Neil Besner That powerful currents of short fiction written by women flow through some of the richest veins in our contemporary writing is not news. Nor is it news that another generation of writers, Gallant and Munro chief among them, now seems to have prefigured this one, and continues to write from a different, if still warmly resonant time. Anxieties of influence notwithstanding, Jennifer Duncan's and Robyn Sarah's collections can be added to recent books of stories by writers like Elyse Gasco, Zsuzsi Gartner, Debbie Howlett, Sarah O'Leary, Frances Itani, Julie Keith, Alyssa York, and Brenda Baker—all well worth re-reading. Helen Pereira's Birds of Paradise adds to another growing assembly: competent, engaging writing that does not surprise, that is not unpleasant to read, but that does not really enlarge or modify one's sense either of life or of art. The title story typifies Pereira's mildly attractive kind of inspiration: Emma, a retired schoolteacher in Toronto, literally has her dream come true when an exotic and erotic Eastern poet Canadian Literature 177 / Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w materializes at a reading; they meet as if pre-ordained, and they plan an enchanted life together. There is nothing very wrong with "Birds of Paradise": Emma's actualized fantasy has its attractions, counterpointing the aridities of her previous waking life, and no-one would begrudge her this dreamworld or misunderstand its origins. But there is little very right with the story, either—no striking word, phrase, or image, not a great deal to think about in plot or character or conception. At best there is a fresh and appealing naivete in Emma's new hope, but that is not enough to sustain the story. Ordinary lives and their disappointments and aspirations can make for exciting writing, to be sure, but that does not happen here, or in any of the other stories in the collection. Much more is afoot in Jennifer Duncan's first book. These nervy wired stories fibrillate with the energy of their raw inquiry into the trippy fastdance of contemporary identities adrift and amok in downtown TO. and environs; at this level, the stories revel in a stark new naturalism sharply attuned to a stark new milieu. But these are stories that also preen, first, in language, at once swooning through their speakers' poetic riffs and disowning them with an elaborate knowing shrug. Duncan's narrators enact streetkid and punk sensibility from the inside; think of Russell Smith's characters, but one step more self aware, two steps more poetic, and three steps younger. Duncan makes this ethos at once available enough and strange enough to middle-class readers that the writing mockingly invites us into the lurch and careen of staged identities strutting amidst eerily familiar relationships (the late sixties inverted in the late nineties?), invoked as kitchen-sink spectacles in dingy lofts with dirty skylights. Duncan is always aware that writing, reading, and life are intimately related and radically different, and that representation requires faith in 140 language, not in the thing represented. There are real, eloquent, and unanswered questions posed in these stories about what constitutes an identity for these versions of selfhood, and these characters' styles of speech and thought, of love and desire and pain, are palpably invoked and performed. The only reservation I have about her writing is with its narrow range: even on first reading the cumulative effect of her stories threatens to become repetitious, which is too bad, given her abundant talent. And a cavil: her openings, by the time I got to the end of the book, it had begun to seem overworked, reading a bit too much like set pieces because their verve simply could not be sustained at such a keen pitch for more than a paragraph (or stanza). If Duncan's stories glory in preening and strutting, and they do, Robyn Sarah's in Promise of Shelter perform a more mysteriously subtle art, and finally, it's Robyn Sarah's stories that invite longer, more measured, and, I think, more deeply satisfying reflection on the range and the staying powers of the contemporary short story. As much as I admire Duncan's talent, I recognize that, in part, I have been invited into a lurid antechamber and that I read, in part, as a voyeur. Nothing wrong with that; I like William Burroughs for related reasons. But Sarah's stories speak from a temperate middle ground. They are written directly from the centre of conventional realism. They have no glitter or flash. They are not magical. But their powers are plain and ample, and they are not afraid of depicting the common ground of ordinary experience in a quiet and luminous prose. Consider the opening story, "Unlit Water." Baldly summarized, the story tells of two contemporary families in Montreal who live together in mildly straitened circumstances in a duplex. The husbands are brothers; one couple has two children, the other none. The group goes down to the St. Lawrence on a warm summer night to watch the annual fire- Canadian Literature 177 / Summer 2003 works festival from the water's edge. One mother is afraid of the children getting too close to the unlit water and falling in. The others in the group can't understand what they see as her excessive fear. That's it. Of course this brutal summary leaves out everything important: the quality of the mother's fear is made to seem totally ordinary, altogether terrifying, completely plausible, and altogether unavoidable. It simply is, and all of our psychology and intuition and interpretive skills will not read it away. That is why and how the story ends in this way: Almost crying, she felt that all she wanted in the world was to pull up stakes, to move back and keep moving back, to pick up their blanket and tow it safely away from the water. But people had piled up in a dense wall behind them now, and the fireworks were beginning. Yes, we can observe that the ground might seem fluid (the blanket "towed" safely along), and yes, we can push the beginning fireworks towards larger frames and modes of meaning; but neither move is imperative and neither is insistent. This is language in the service of another cumulation, circling around the mother's fear, which is the insistent core gathering at the story's centre, and which radiates, quietly, throughout, assigning its meanings as it goes, until we apprehend the whole extended family through the mother's eyes. Eloquent with plain-speaking, these stories have just made me feel foolish exclaiming over them, like some poor Gabriel Conroy with his thought-tormented music. I think that is because they are very fine. Wartime Memories H.A. Enzer and S. Solotaroff-Enzer, eds. Anne Frank: Reflections on Her Life and Legacy. U of Illinois P $34.95 Michel Mielnicki and John Munro Bialystok to Birkenau: The Holocaust Journey of Michel Mielnicki. Ronsdale $19.95 Reviewed by Norman Rawin Two counter-images run through Anne Frank: Reflections on Her Life and Legacy, a volume described by its editors as an "anthology" gathering the "disparate facts and interpretations" concerning Anne Frank. These two images stand in opposition to one another: they are the final scene of the 1955 play The Diary of Anne Frank, in which the Broadway Anne asserts that "In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart"; the second is an eyewitness account of her in Bergen-Belsen, "in rags . . . her emaciated, sunken face in darkness." This latter image has not, of course, been a part of Anne Frank's legacy, and it is the goal of a number of the writers collected here to make it so. By including early writings on the diary from personal acquaintances, critics, and historians, the editors convey how the reception of the diary and its author's growing celebrity have changed over the years. Part of this change has to do with the diary's publishing history—a 1947 Dutch version, a 1950 German one, English translation in 1952, culminating in the Critical Edition, Dutch and English versions of which appeared in 1986 and 1989. A number of the pieces in Anne Frank: Reflections on Her Life and Legacy take account of editorial decisions by Otto Frank, translators, and publishers, which affected the way the diary was presented. Selections by Philip Roth and Berteke Waaldijk also point to Anne's own editing, during which she rewrote the sections dated from June 1942 to March 1944 with an eye toward the 141 Canadian Literature IJJ I Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w possibility of postwar publication. It is the writerly aspect of the diary that now interests many critics and readers, and has even driven the claims of a wide range of Holocaust deniers that the diary is a hoax. Deborah Lipstadt's short piece, "Twisting the Truth: The Diary of Anne Frank," catalogues the twisted claimants who have dedicated themselves to such work. The list includes David Irving and Robert Faurisson. The involvement of these men in the argument for the diary's fraudulence should give pause to readers who are willing to give their scholarly methods credit in other contexts. Scandal and conspiracy theories have shadowed the diary in other, less sinister ways. Meyer Levin's obsession with the diary's legacy is described in Judith Doneson's "The American History of Anne Frank's Diary," as well as in Lawrence Graver's "Don Quixote and the Star of David." Focused on the impact of the dramatic adaptation of the diary, these essays tell a fascinating narrative that touches on 1950s American politics, the nature of Broadway success, the place of Jews in postwar society, and the ability of art to contend with the events of the war. Included in Anne Frank are a number of important reviews of the play based on the diary, which convey the broad range of discomfort, satisfaction, and ambiguous feelings raised by the dramatization undertaken by Frances Gooderich and Albert Hackett under the supervision of Lillian Hellman. A1997 revival of the play, rewritten and, one might even say, readapted from the diary, is also discussed in a reprinted New York Times review. These review articles are short, with a somewhat ephemeral quality, though a few do convey a deeper sense of the problems raised by the legacy of the diary. Of the works included in Anne Frank, it is the "Femme Fatale" section from Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer that conveys these problems most succinctly, though the entire 142 novel makes for more satisfying reading than the single chapter taken out of context. Among the other pieces included in Anne Frank are James Young's essay on the memorialization of Anne in Holland; an essay on the impact of the 1959 Hollywood film version of the play; and a description of Anne's reading during her time in hiding. The most startling essays are personal accounts of the Frank family's capture and imprisonment in Westerbork, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen. Alongside these is Bruno Bettelheim's much-criticized "The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank," which takes the provocative view that the Franks, in part, brought their doom upon themselves by trying to hide as a family. Though recent representations of Anne Frank have tried to attend to the specific horror of her death, she remains a relatively soothing symbol. Memoirs like Michel Mielnicki's From Bialystok to Birkenau present an alternative. A child himself when the Germans invaded his hometown, Wasilkow, in northeastern Poland, Mielnicki presents a detailed and matterof-fact portrait of the war as it came to his part of the world: his family flees their home; enters the Bialystok ghetto; manages to remain together in the relatively benign ghetto of Pruzany on the border of a primeval forest; then arrives at the loading ramps of Auschwitz where his parents are killed. Mielnicki survived the majority of the war in Birkenau, then another bout of slave labour at Mittelbau-Dora, near Weimar, then, finally, a forced march in the winter snows of 1944 to Bergen-Belsen. One might argue that this is an archetypal Holocaust narrative, and Mielnicki is successful at retelling his catalogue of suffering, while reflecting on such concerns as the prewar Jewish life of the shtetl, the Polish response to German invasion, and the ineffability of the survival instinct. It is on the latter topic that Mielnicki's book is especially instructive, since he focuses on key events Canadian Literature IJJ I Summer 2003 and decisions that led him on to new circumstances and (relatively) improved possibilities for survival. In Birkenau he "networked" his way from one work assignment to the next, keeping himself under the eye of protective Kapos—both Jewish and not. He is willing, as well, to point to the unpredictability and absurdity of occasions in the course of camp life, which might have led to his death. Among the most bizarre of these is his recollection of two encounters with Joseph Mengele: I have never forgotten the scene: I come • up, click my naked heels, stand straight, and salute, "Herr Oberst, number 98040." Mengele, elegant and aloof in his immaculate, starched, white doctor's coat and beautiful, shiny, knee-high black boots, casts a critical eye over my thin body with its blonde fuzz and asks, "Bist du Deutscher?" I reply, "Nein, Herr Oberst. Ich bin Jude." "What a pity," he says, then smiles, "go to this side." The second time I came before Mengele was a few weeks later. Same procedure. I was as skinny as the first time. I raised my arm in salute, and said in effect, "Yes, Sir, here I am at your service." He looked at me, and responded, "You are here again? Good for you. Go." Mielnicki knows to report on an event like this, and not philosophize about it. His willingness to frame parts of his account with black humour and profanity, alongside an otherwise even and relatively colloquial prose, helps convey the memoirist's sense of loss and bafflement before the experience he is describing. Bialystok to Birkenau is co-written by the Canadian historian John Munro, who describes in his epilogue the hundreds of pages of transcribed interviews that served as the foundation of his efforts "to make Michel's voice a living part of the text." Collaboration is a tricky aspect of autobiographical writing, and though we can assume that Munro has helped to edit and organize 143 Bialystok to Birkenau, the reader does gain an intimate sense of Mielnicki's lost childhood, his parents' small-town Jewish world, and his willingness to commit himself to Holocaust education. Mielnicki's book, then, portrays a Holocaust life: what came before, the awfulness of wartime, and the consequences of survival. This broad tableau makes Bialystok to Birkenau a personal record as well as a text well suited to Holocaust education. Cultural Mediators Jutta Ernst, Klaus Martens, eds. "Je vous écris, en hâte et fiévreusement." Felix Paul Grevé-André Gide: Korrespondenz und Dokumentation. Rôhrig Universitàtsverlag n.p. Klaus Martens, ed. Pioneering North America: Mediators of European Literature and Culture. Kônigshausen & Neumann n.p. Reviewed by Rosmarin Heidenreich The publication of the correspondence between André Gide and Felix Paul Grève, better known to Canadian readers as Frederick Philip Grove, is a milestone in the research of Greve/Grove's European years. It sheds an entirely new light on the relationship between the two men, eloquently subsumed in the phrase quoted in the title, variations of which characterized the closing of many of the letters on both sides of the correspondence. Meticulously documented, carefully but not pedantically annotated, the correspondence itself is preceded by an illuminating introduction and a penetrating essay, both by Martens, the latter piece indicating the degree to which Greve's fortunes, after he had served his prison term, were affected by the machinations of his rival Franz Blei. This volume conclusively lays to rest the hitherto prevailing notion that Grève was a kind of Gide groupie. In his introduction Martens observes that the correspondence Canadian Literature 177 / Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w reveals that Grève was at least as important to Gide as Gide was to Grève. Martens' interpretation of the relationship would also explain the intensity of the two men's first encounter, in which a central issue is the opposition between life and art: Gide argues for the supremacy of the artist, who prefers to faire agir rather than act himself, a position he will reiterate in his letters, while Grève avows his preference for action: "L'œuvre d'art n'est pour moi qu'un pis-aller. Je préfère la vie." Gide's attraction to Grève was essentially narcissistic: Grève the man-of-action fed Gide's artistic inspiration, which involved observation from a distance. Gide, awaiting Grève in Paris, knew that the latter had just been released from prison, while Grève was initially unaware that Gide had been informed of this. It is Greve's life, and, one senses, his dramatic appearance on arriving in Paris that left such a lasting impression on Gide. In his diary Gide writes: "Je vis aussitôt cette figure glabre, comme passée au chlore, ce corps trop grand pour qui tous les sièges sont bas . . . Je souhaitai ardemment que ce fût lui. C'était lui." Indeed, the letters support Martens' contention that for Gide, Grève was a sort of alter ego in whom Gide saw a reflection of a possible version of his own life. This explains why, after the first meeting, he preferred correspondence to personal encounters. In one of his early letters, Gide writes to Grève: "De toutes les figures que j'ai rencontrées, vous êtes une de celles qui m'a le plus intéressé [. ..] Vous m'intéressez autant que le premier jour, et c'est là, si je puisse ainsi dire, un intérêt de cœur autant que de la tête, mais à moins que ce ne soit pour pénétrer un peu plus avant dans votre vie, je n'éprouve pas le besoin de vous revoir." Martens, who has also published a new study of Greve's European years that greatly expands and in some cases contradicts the earlier findings of Douglas O. Spettigue (Felix Paul Grèves Karriere: Frederick Philip Grove 144 in Deutschland), offers an intriguing analysis of Grove's motivation in writing his "autobiography": in In Search of Myself, Grove cites the biography of the "young Frenchman" that has been brought to him as an incentive to write his own life story. Martens suggests that this act has a subtext: while Gide's life is written about by someone else, Grove must write (act) himself. What may have been crucial, according to Martens, in motivating Grove's oblique allusions to Gide in his "autobiography," was his frustration at the absence of any references to Grove (as Grève) in Gide's biography or, indeed, his autobiography (Si le grain ne meurt). The correspondence consists mainly of Greve's letters to Gide, the other side of the correspondence presumably having been destroyed or lost after Greve's "death" in 1909. However, thanks to the cooperation of Madame Gide, the book does include drafts of a number of Gide's letters to Grève. Taken together, these letters reveal much about the relationship between the two writers, and document Greve's astonishing productivity as a translator and writer. They also chronicle Greve's desperation for ever more translation work, in order to pay his crushing debt to Kilian, and his exhaustion and increasing hopelessness at the circumstances in which he finds himself. In a poignant letter dated August 28,1906, he writes to Gide: "Je ne crois plus au succès. Je ne suis plus qu'une machine à écrire, et je deviens stupide, inintéressant. Je convoite une cahute pour m'étendre sur une paillasse. C'est triste mais c'est vrai. À force d'être surexcité et fatigué on devient comme ça." The text is interspersed with copies of manuscripts and letters as well as beautifully reproduced, full-page copies of title pages of the works of Grove-Greve and Gide. The correspondence is followed by a number of excerpts from Grove/Greve's writings, and concludes with the transcription of Gide's journal notes describing his first encounter with Felix Paul Grève. Canadian Literature IJJ I Summer 2003 The second volume under review reveals the richness and breadth of the concept of cultural mediation when it is imaginatively and systematically applied. The book contains twenty highly specialized and divergent essays thoughtfully grouped into four sections, and a brief but graceful explanatory preface by editor Klaus Martens, who directs the Saarbriicken project on the mediation of world literature under whose aegis this collection was undertaken. The opening section consists of three essays devoted to cultural mediator par excellence Felix Paul Greve/Frederick Philip Grove and one by Irene Gammel on the extraordinary role of his onetime commonlaw wife, "Baroness Else," in the modernist project to "renew American culture" led by The Little Review and other "little" magazines. In the second section, titled "Mediators of Literature," an intriguing essay by Katharina Bunzman documenting the mutual influence of Djuna Barnes and European surrealism functions as a sort of transition to the first, given the close connections between Barnes and Else von Freytag-Loringhofen. Three of the contributions in this section examine various aspects of translation. Wolfgang Gôrtshacher's essay discussses Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton's translations which facilitated the reception of many German writers in the United States, despite the ignorance of and prejudice against all things German in 1940s Britain. Three highly original contributions conclude this eclectic section. In a piece by Stephen Shapiro titled "The Moment of the Condom" the introduction of condoms into the U.S. through a Philadelphia bookstore run by French colonial exile Moreau de Saint-Méry becomes an act of cultural mediation read in terms of Foucauldian concepts of sexuality. Another essay by Martin Meyer describes how the U.S. Armed Services Editions, which provided free reading material for millions during and shortly after the Second World 145 War, functioned as an instrument of transatlantic cultural mediation. The essay also discusses the economic and political dimensions of the ASE. The final contribution in this section by Dirk de Gees, looking at intercultural phenomena in terms of functionalist analysis, examines the relations between Flemish and foreign cultures with a closer look at the role of American literature in Belgium during the Second World War. The third section of the book focuses on issues of theory and genre and includes a fascinating piece by Werner Reinhart on the occurrence of the Hansel and Gretel theme in American poems by women, while contributions in the fourth and last section, titled "Literature and the Other Arts," range from Delsarte's influence on American theatre in a piece by Wendel Stone to photography. Christoph Ribbat's superb essay "The European Eye: Refugee Photographers from Nazi Germany" is an eloquent conclusion to this remarkable volume. Italian Migration Donna R. Gabaccia Italy's Many Diasporas. U of Washington P us $22.00 Filippo Salvatore. Trans. Domenic Cusmano Ancient Memories, Modern Identities. Guernica $20.00 Luigi Romeo Canadian Poems—Bilingual Edition. Pentland n.p. Nicholas De Maria Harney Eh, Paesan! Being Italian in Toronto. U of Toronto P $17.95 Reviewed by Jacqueline Samperi Mangan At first glance these four books have little in common beyond Italian subject matter. Romeo writes intellectual and vibrant poetry; Gabaccia studies Italian global migration; Salvatore interviews young authors who reveal their ambivalent North American identities; and Harney explores the identities of Italian immigrants Canadian Literature IJJ I Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w in Toronto. Yet each author illuminates the rich complexities of Italian migration in North America and in the world. Gabaccia's lengthy migration study shows the recent emergence of Italian identity. Since Italians were never a "victim Diaspora" like, for example, Africans and Jews, migrant Italians did not feel a great sense of loss for their nation and did not form a national community. It was common for the men to migrate and leave behind their families. Unlike persecuted groups, who fled their land and were unable to return, the Italian migrant had the intention of returning. Only in these past decades have Italians come to identify with a national identity, much of it stereotypical. Some migrants return to Italy to experience high fashion, car racing, Tuscan food and other "corporate versions of modern urban pleasures of Italian style." But the vast majority are descendants of the workers who travelled the world in search of economic security. These migrants distrust the Italian state and commit themselves more readily to their local community and family. The Catholic faith is the sole pillar for these globally dispersed Italian migrants whose identities are linked by Gabaccia to "the everyday pleasures—of food, family, parish and home place, all things that can be enjoyed and savoured anywhere in the world that people call home." In Ancient Memories, Modern Identities Salvatore's interviews recount Italian settlement stories in large cities like Montreal and Toronto. The birth and lives of the various "Little Italies" in Canada form the first part of the book. The second part traces the origin of the Italo-Canadian literary corpus from the early 1930's onwards to its blossoming in the 1970s and beyond. Highlighted in this section are works by Liborio Lattoni, Mario Duliani, Giose Rimanelli, Pietro Corsi, Tonino Caticchio, Ermanno La Riccia, Dino Minni, Marco Micone, Mary Melfi, Lisa Carducci, Vittorio 146 Rossi and Nino Ricci. Antonio D'Alfonso has most effectively disseminated Italian Canadian literature by founding Guernica Editions and focusing on literary works by minority writers. The third part of the book dicusses three film producers who describe the identity of an Italo-Canadian artist caught in a political ideology. Ancient Memories, Modern Identities reflects on the identity crisis that writers and artists must undergo in the modern Canadian world and the shadows of the ancient culture of their Italian villages that follow them. Romeo's Canadian Poems finds beauty in the memories of childhood, of Tropea, the hometown in Italy, and in the nature of a distant time. The poems "Non Sequitur" and "Quinta dimensione" denounce the madness of the human race. In the Preface and the Explanatory and Historical Notes, Romeo writes about the creation of the poems and their historical place in his life. Nicholas DeMaria Harney writes about the Italians in Toronto and, transcending Italian stereotypes, studies the impact that Italian culture and people have had on an Anglo-Saxon Canadian city. Beyond the clichés of Mafia guys and poor ignorant peasants lies a reality that is contradictory and varied. Moving from how Italians perceived themselves and how they evolved in the social and political micro-structure of the city of Toronto, to the perception and occasional misperception of the Italians by the anglophone population, Harney digs deep into all social, historical, ideological and political strata of Italian identities. Schools and get-together bars, government and regional clubs, church and speciality shops, all contribute to keeping the Italian community healthy despite the conflicts within it. But most important is how the city of Toronto has been influenced by this dynamic culture. What makes the Italian culture so popular among non-Italians and why has it been absorbed so readily by North Americans in Canadian Literature J77 / Summer 2003 these last decades? Is this popular culture one that Italian migrants perceive as congruent with their own identities? A kaleidoscope of answers is found in these very different books. Gabrial's Lowry Jan Gabrial Inside the Volcano: My Life With Malcolm Lowry. St. Martin's $24.95 Reviewed by Miguel Mota Two pages into Jan Gabrial's account of her relationship with Malcolm Lowry, we read of the aftermath of their first meeting in Granada in 1933: "In Paris and Berlin I'd juggled dates, three, four, and sometimes five a day, but they'd been carefree, lighthearted, undemanding. Now, drowning in ardor, exhaustion had set in. I was back at the pension by ten, praying for sleep, but Malcolm was waiting and Malcolm wanted to walk. For three more hours, then, we walked, words bubbling forth from Male as from a stream. Parting, we pledged we'd meet in London during August. Before dropping rocklike into bed, I managed a few lines: 'Why do my love affairs always come in dusters?'" This is heady stuff. And it is indicative too of the often breathless prose in which Gabrial tells her story. There is scarcely a "touch" in the book that is not "titillating;" rarely does someone walk when he can "dash." The result is a charming, frequently melodramatic, at times necessarily idiosyncratic tale of Jan Gabrial's years with Lowry—from their meeting in Spain in 1933, through their marriage in Paris in 1934, to their bitter separation in Mexico three years later. Undoubtedly, some will see this kind of book typically as the exploitation of a genius by an opportunistic, lesser mortal. But the "genius" in this case has had a long list of supporters and apologists, while Jan Gabrial, until relatively recently, has been largely vilified, when not ignored out- 147 rightly, by Lowry readers. And although Gordon Bowker's biography of Lowry and Sherrill Grace's collected letters have begun to flesh out a more complicated character, it is good to see Gabrial contributing her own fuller voice here to the Lowry legend. Gabrial expends much effort in providing a corrective to previous portrayals of her as a superficial and faithless traitor by such Lowry companions as Arthur Calder-Marshall in his Malcolm Lowry Remembered and Conrad Aiken in his novel Ushant. Neither is she reluctant to chastise such Lowry biographers as Douglas Day for what she considers lack of proper research and a too-easy acceptance of others' accounts. There is, perhaps naturally, a touch of defensiveness here and there throughout the memoir, with the result that, perhaps not unexpectedly, Lowry himself often comes across as a minor character in someone else's story. The now familiar tales of drunkenness, insecurity, charm, and genius are all there—and of course, Lowry's now too familiar small penis makes the odd cameo appearance— but alongside these we are given a glimpse into how a human being who obviously cared deeply for Lowry managed to survive co-existing with such a volatile personality while still pursuing her own desires. Though Gabrial declares that she has "tried not to give a one-sided picture of our life together," there is, thankfully, still much innuendo and accusation of the kind for which, let's acknowledge it, many of us hope from this kind of memoir. Thus, when referring to Lowry's spiteful, scathing final letter to her in 1940, after their divorce had become final, Gabrial writes: "There was an odd thing about this quasi diatribe: for the first time, in all the countless letters he had written me over the years, my name was misspelled on the envelope, and the letter itself was dated, another variant." The barely concealed implication here, of course, is that it was Margerie Bonner, by then living Canadian Literature îyy / Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w with Lowry in Vancouver, who had composed and sent the letter, the same Margerie who, referred to this time simply as "the lady," is heard shouting "savagely" in the background during a telephone conversation between Gabrial and Lowry: " Tell her to go to hell! Tell her to go to hell!" Gabrial uses a theatre conceit to title her chapters—"Prologue," "Curtain Raiser," "Act One," and so on—which is appropriate, for what we have here is a different performance of Jan Gabrial's and Malcolm Lowry's lives together during the 1930s. In Gabrial's version, Lowry finally is a "dazzling man," who loved her dearly but loved his misery more. This book may not achieve the seriousness or depth of scholarly work, but neither is it meant to. It's a highly pleasurable read. Story and Desire Douglas Glover 16 Categories of Desire. Goose Lane $18.95 Norman Levine By A Frozen River. Key Porter $21.95 Reviewed by Claire Wilkshire Douglas Glover's 16 Categories of Desire begins and ends, appropriately enough, with stories of insatiable lust, of death and wanting. Norman Levine's By A Frozen River opens and closes with stories built around family photographs—here too, death and desire are at the centre, and while the most important threads of the final story have to do with family and mortality, the book closes on a strong image of desire unfulfilled. 16 Categories of Desire is an uneven collection, the work of a highly gifted writer not always on top of his game. The book starts and ends well but bogs down in the middle. "Iglaf and Swan" is a tiresome, self-absorbed story about tiresome, self-absorbed characters. The narrator of "The Left Ladies Club" is permitted to ramble on with cheery vac- 148 uousness for nearly twenty pages. "Abrupt Extinctions" (told from the point of view of the last dinosaur) and "The Indonesian Client" (lji&fish: escape from the excesses of the corporate world) suffer from their gimmicky premises. That having been said, one solid Glover story is worth a good deal, and several such stories appear here. By far the most striking of these is "My Romance." It deals with a couple whose child dies in infancy, and in typical Glover style manages to encompass not only sock-you-in-the-gut grief but also a weird assortment of episodes involving the philosophizing of desire, a pet monkey who escapes death by Russian roulette and vanishes into the backwoods, the narrator's affair with the masochistic Dr. Tithonous, and a trigger-happy ATV driver who stops drinking when he discovers his motel-owner parents loved each other after all. The tone slides easily from an almost amused self-reflexiveness to horror figured in deceptively simple images, with a variety of modalities in between, and this versatility is one of the story's chief strengths. In "La Corriveau" and the title piece, the protagonists (both women, both first-person narrators) tell their stories with panache, with an air of defiance. "La Corriveau" is a historical-allegorical-ironical rewrite of a legend in which a helpless woman lures men with her pathetic cries for help and then slaughters them; she was allegedly hanged and left to rot in a cage. In this story, La Corriveau is an EnglishCanadian tourist in Quebec: so relations in the story strain along cultural-linguistic as well as gender lines ("they have that motto Je me souviens, which I translate loosely as 'I remember myself"). In "16 Categories of Desire" the narrator fondly recalls the nymphomaniac nun, Sister Mary Buntline, who taught her about smoking and sex when she was twelve. The Sister's categories of desire form the basis for a comic narrative of excess which is full of nostalgia— nostalgia being here a doubled desire, since Canadian Literature IJJ I Summer 2003 it represents not merely longing for the past but for that particular past because it was full of longing. By A Frozen River is a handsome collection, one which includes stories from throughout Levine's career. Norman Levine is one of Canada's great neglected writers, someone whose work seems to receive more praise outside this country than inside it. There are (at least) three important reasons for this. One is that expatriates are often viewed with enormous suspicion: in the past, reviews of Levine's work referred almost obsessively to Levine's extended residence in England, and the merits of the collections appeared less interesting than the question of where he lived and why. Another is that his work was seen to be autobiographical, and this notion distracted from a serious assessment of the stories as fiction. Finally, the issue of style: like Mavis Gallant (another expatriate), Levine creates relatively detached narrators who do not make clear and obvious pronouncements about how aspects of character or incident are to be understood. This does not make for light reading. As John Metcalf writes in the Introduction, "Levine refuses to explain or interpret his scenes for us; requiring us, in a sense, to compose the story for ourselves. It is that act of composition that turns these stories into such powerful emotional experiences." Impossible to comment here on twentyseven beautifully crafted stories. Even choosing some especially good ones is a problem: the list grows long. Consider, for example, two lines of dialogue from "A Visit." Writer-protagonist Gordon and his family in Cornwall endure a visit from Canadian relatives. His sister Mona surveys the "shabby furniture" and suggests a change of job: "You could work yourself up and become a journalist." Gordon replies: "Journalists come down to interview me." These two brief statements communicate everything about Mona's attitude toward 149 her brother: her condescension, her inability to understand what he sees as valuable, her aggressive obsession with social status. Gordon's response, with its play on "come down," underlines his determination to pursue his career as a writer; the assertion demonstrates his resolve. At the same time, the mildness with which he expresses himself suggests that Gordon is not, in the end, as certain as he would like to be about the choices he has made. As is always the case in Levine's stories, simple statements are more suggestive than they appear on the surface. In Glover's collection, desire leaps off the page—it's not uncomplicated, but there is no mistaking it. "Mama," says the protagonist of the title story, "why it so hard to get a man to do you? Seem like it ought to be a simple thing. Say come here fella and bathe me in your jets of sperm. Mama pretend she don't hear me." In Levine's stories desire is just as present, but in an utterly different form—it appears as a kind of quiet ferocity of feeling, rarely stated directly. Levine's narrators lay out perfectly constructed images like place settings— the implements are there, but it's up to the reader to decide how to handle them. Chasing Tales Grey Owl Tales of an Empty Cabin. Key Porter $18.95 Armand Garnet Ruffo Grey Owl: The Mystery of Archie Belaney. Coteau Books $14.95 At Geronimo's Grave. Coteau Books $14.95 Reviewed by Stephanie McKenzie One assumes that Key Porter's decision to reissue Grey Owl's last book, Tales of an Empty Cabin, had something to do with the fact that Richard Attenborough directed a popular, yet poor, movie about Grey Owl in 1998. One might assume so because Key Porter's text is limited by its lack of a preface or afterward. There is a short, introductory Canadian Literature 177 / Summer 2003 Books in R( "Note on the Author" which gives bare information about the counterfeit guise Archie Belaney adopted and which praises Grey Owl for his "passion for nature" and his "empathy for the land that nurtured him." However, there is neither an explanation why Key Porter picked up the publishing rights to Tales of an Empty Cabin nor any indication why this text was reprinted at a time when contemporary Native literature is thriving and when debates about appropriation of voice have been challenging old publishing practices. The text is attractive, though. The cover boasts a seductive photo of Grey Owl which was taken by W. J. Oliver and which shows Grey Owl sitting pensively on his canoe in front of one of his famous log cabins. This printing also includes a number of photos which, aside from one snapshot of Archie Belaney as a thirteen-year-old in Hastings, England, all capitalize on the solitary, adult Grey Owl who preferred time alone, or time alone with his beavers, to time with his numerous wives. Published a year before Key Porter's reissue of Tales of an Empty Cabin, Armand Garnet Ruffo's response to the enigma of Grey Owl, Grey Owl: The Mystery of Archie Belaney, is one of the finest books I have read for quite some time. The Mystery of Archie Belaney is poetic, historical biography, and it is every bit as thorough as Lovat Dickson's popular biography, Wilderness Man: The Strange Story of Grey Owl (Macmillan 1973). Ruffo provides a chronological account of Grey Owl's life, imagining Archie Belaney's years as a troubled child in Hastings, re-creating Grey Owl's adventures in Temagami, Temiskaming, Bisco, Temiscouata, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and tracing his harried lecture circuit in England, Canada and the United States. The Mystery of Archie Belaney is also a fantastic love story. Grey Owl's loss of Anahareo plagues Ruffo's readers. Ruffo leaves his readers wishing there were one 150 more poem which defied recorded history and which permitted these lovers one more moment together. Above all else, though, this is the story of a writer. Ruffo has identified Grey Owl as an artist, and Ruffo's book is, more than anything, a tribute to a solitary soul who must write, even to the point of death. The Mystery of Archie Belaney is as conflicted as Grey Owl himself, but, unlike Grey Owl, Ruffo's poetry boasts of its contradictions and does not try to cover them up. Indeed, the tension which The Mystery of Archie Belaney creates is the book's greatest strength. Ruffo does not condemn Grey Owl's decision to be "an immigrant extrapper from England, / [who] promote[s] an indigenous philosophy for Canada" ("Archie Belaney, 1931"), although Ruffo does take some playful jabs at his hero. Ruffo portrays Grey Owl as the conflicted counterfeit he was—as a Brit-turnedIndian, a confused bigamist, a knife-wielding drunk, and a proponent of animal rights and aboriginal values. But he does not deem Grey Owl to be one of those "other so-called Great Canadians / who pass and continue to pass their kind of legacy / on to their heirs, always at the expense of the country" ("Grey Owl, 1936"). Ruffo's readers must decide what to make of this tale, this memory, this man. There is great sympathy here for Grey Owl, especially in that opening poem which depicts Archie Belaney as a scared child, distraught beyond belief that his father, as he has come to understand it, has left him to live "out there / among the Red Indians" ("Influences"). Published in 2001, Ruffo's next poetic response to a well-known historical figure, At Geronimo's Grave, is not as strong as The Mystery of Archie Belaney. Here, Ruffo's narrator tries to commune with the past and with Geronimo in an attempt to understand the present and to offer up a prayer for those who are "lost to this century / turned highway" ("She Asked Me"). Canadian Literature ljy / Summer 2003 However, this collection is not as cohesive a work as The Mystery of Archie Belaney. Moving as it does between unknown characters who speak from the present about love, the destruction of aboriginal cultures, and the environment and specific characters who remember Geronimo and what he fought for, this text does not entice its readers to bond with Geronimo in the same way as the readers of The Mystery ofArchie Belaneybond with Grey Owl. Ruffo loses his readers' interest somewhat when he moves into the abstract and philosophizes in a general way ("Contemplating Surrender," "Birth of the Sacred," and "Raining Ice" are notable examples), and his writing is strongest when he is more concrete and when his poems respond to specific epigraphs which provide an immediate frame of reference. For example, "World View," which is prefaced by the explanation that "suicide in Canada among Native people between the ages of 12 to 25 is the highest in the world," is a shocking and memorable record of the "walking wounded." The collection grows stronger toward the latter half of the second section, "Drum Song." Here, Ruffo's polemical and prosepoetic style captivates readers, and it is at this moment that one is reminded that this is a style which has been mastered, and, perhaps, created anew, by a significant number of contemporary aboriginal authors in Canada. One is reminded here of Maria Campbell, Lee Maracle, Thomas King, Jeannette Armstrong, and Greg Young-Ing who write crafted, poetic essays which are not choked by theoretical language but by a desire to tell readers something important and by a desire to be understood. These concerns aside, my favorite poem in this collection is "Rockin' Chair Lady," the story of Native jazz singer Mildred Bailey who," . . . [b]ound for the city, / . . . got a job with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra .. . and hit the jazz scene / big time, in a world of big band swing." This poem is as strong as any of those included in The Mystery of Archie Belaney, and along with both of these collections, announces the arrival of a gifted and important voice in both contemporary Canadian and Aboriginal literary history. Body Count Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon Bodily Charm: Living Opera. U of Nebraska P $39-95 Reviewed by J. L. Wisenthal The hero of Bodily Charm: Living Opera is not an operatic character or a singer or a composer, but rather a god: Dionysus, god of wine, ecstasy, dance, and for Linda and Michael Hutcheon the real god of opera. The authors of this book by no means deny the restraining role of Apollo, but their argument is that in some contemporary responses to opera the Apollonian tends to suppress the Dionysian, and they have set out to restore a proper balance. This means asserting the central value and importance of what they call "the Dionysian body" in opera, and making their readers see opera as well as hear it. If Dionysus is their hero, then their villains are twofold: audiophiles and musicologists. Audiophiles reduce the experience of opera to one of listening to disembodied recordings, while musicologists (or many of them) reduce the experience of opera to its music alone, at the expense of language and drama. The Hutcheons demonstrate the extent to which "the production and reception of opera are intensely bodily acts," and what they advocate is full carnal knowledge of opera, an experience, in the opera house, of the medium's Dionysian physicality. It is in actual, live performance that one becomes properly aware of the importance of bodies in opera, in three different ways. First, there Canadian Literature ljy I Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w is the body as represented in operas, and the book shows (in convincing detail) "how operatic plots persist in telling the story of the Dionysian body, however much Apollonian artistic convention may attempt its repression." Second, there are the bodies of the performers to be seen on the stage, and third, there are the bodies of audience members, reacting in powerfully physical ways to the performance. For the study of a composite art like opera, it is highly appropriate to have a composite author-or at least authors from diverse disciplines. The academic diversity of this volume, as in the case of the Hutcheons' earlier Opera: Desire, Disease, Death, is impressive. The encounter between Linda Hutcheon's knowledge of literature and literary theory and Michael Hutcheon's knowledge of medicine and medical history yields a rich approach to the nature of opera, an approach in which the body is solidly grounded in both critical theory and medical research. The generous endnotes, which occupy almost a third of the volume, range from Umberto Eco's Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages to Wright's The Nose and Throat in Medical History, and Troup and Luke's "The Epiglottis as an Articulator in Singing," and we learn a great deal about such subjects as disability theory (in relation to the deformed bodies of operatic characters) and the physiology of listening (in relation to the experience of audiences). There is also an interesting discussion of Maria Callas's celebrated weight loss in the 1950s, although no firm conclusion is reached as to whether this affected her voice adversely or whether in general a big body is a necessary condition for a powerful voice. The Hutcheons are reacting against "the continuing valuing of music over drama by some musicologists writing about opera," and this leads to what some readers might see as a slight devaluing of the essential musical element of opera. The book does have some extremely valuable and percep- 152 tive accounts of musical effects in operatic passages, but there are no musical quotations from scores, and libretti are given considerable prominence, as is suggested by the Hutcheons' practice of citing operas by both composer and librettist (as in "Gluck and Calzabigi's Orfeo edEuridice"). In their discussion of Rigoletto, they note that "Perhaps in part because of Verdi's music, Rigoletto is considerably more moving a character than [Hugo's] Triboulet"-the cautious "perhaps in part" is a qualification that not every student of opera would want to retain in this sentence. Bodily Charm engages with a wide range of operas, from the early seventeenth to the late twentieth century, and it includes some marvellous accounts of many individual works. The Hutcheons' most memorable bravura performance, in my view, is their presentation of Salome, in which they place Strauss's 1905 opera in such contexts as Dionysian dancing and medical discourses of the late nineteenth century. They offer fine insights into contradictions between Salome as young virgin and as femme fatale, and into contemporary medical views of female physiology and behaviour. Salome is an opera in which the body is obviously crucial, but the Hutcheons' study makes us aware that physical human realities are present in all of opera, and that for a full, proper experience of the medium they are not to be ignored. Historical Novel & Bildungsroman Wayne Johnston The Navigator of New York. Knopf $37.00 Reviewed by Lothar Hônnighausen In chapter nine of The Navigator of New York, the hero, seventeen-year-old Devlin Stead, reads up on explorations because both Dr. Francis Stead, the man he believed Canadian Literature 177 / Summer 2003 to be his father, and Dr. Frederick Cook, the man who actually is his father, are explorers. Devlin, a student of Bishop Feild's, takes "from the library and reads Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations [1589]," the venerable book on British explorers from the Cabots to Sir Walter Ralegh. Noting that in this book "explorers were referred to as navigators," the hero and narrator assists Johnston in explaining the archaic term in his title. But why use such an archaic term to begin with and why the "navigator of New York"? Because navigator, like sot-weed factor in the title of John Barth's novel, comes with a historical aura and, in some respects, The Navigator of New York is a historical novel. Among its main characters are historical figures such as Robert Edwin Peary (18561920) and Frederick Albert Cook (18651940). The Encyclopedia Britannica identifies Peary as an "American Arctic explorer usually credited with leading the first expedition to the North Pole (1909)" and Cook as an "American physician and explorer whose claim that he had discovered the North Pole in 1908 made him a controversial figure." Further, the time covered in the novel, 1881 to 1909, is made to tally with Peary's three Greenland expeditions and the actual or alleged discovery of the North Pole—by either Cook in 1908 and/or Peary in 1909. Finally, Johnston draws a detailed historical picture of contemporary New York, with panoramas of Manhattan and Brooklyn, with shanty towns and a ball at the Vanderbilt's, with the leitmotifs of the el train and Brooklyn bridge, with crowds of immigrants and traffic jams of horsedrawn and horseless carriages: There [in Brooklyn] were far more motor cars than in Manhattan, though they were still greatly outnumbered by horse-drawn vehicles. A gleaming barouche with its hood raised to shield its owners from the sun went by, drawn by two horses as well 153 groomed as the driver, who was standing at the reins as if to signal the priority of his vehicle over all the rest. Lively city scenes are a particularly attractive feature of this novel. In fact, the "realistic" descriptions of its three narrative spheres (Devlin Stead's narrow and oppressive Newfoundland milieu, the turn-of-the-century New York he moves to, and the far North of the polar expeditions he undertakes with Dr. Cook, his father) show an obsession with getting even the smallest details of his historical painting exactly right. And yet The Navigator of New York reminds one more of Doctorow's postmodern fiction than of the historical novels of the nineteenth century. Indeed, a closer looks reveals that Johnston's interest is not so much in capturing a milieu than in recreating it as aesthetic ambience. He uses this ambience in establishing the social context of Amelia's and Cook's love affair in New York, of their son Devlin's very different lifestyle in the metropolis, and of the novel's quests and explorations. However, Johnston approaches his vivid descriptions with an artistic distance reminding one of the parodie quotations in postmodern architecture. Although he combines historic and fictional characters like the historical novelists of the nineteenth century, Johnston does not want to lend additional credence to his fictional characters by juxtaposing them with historical figures. Rather, his goal seems to be to fictionalize historical figures in order to transcend their historical limitations and open up their fictional potential. In the following scene in Etah (North Greenland), Johnston vividly contrasts Peary's wife and daughter with the Inuits, among them "Peary's Eskimo wife." It is a good example of his postmodern delight in reenacting the poses of late Victorian colonialism. She [Mrs. Peary] was dressed as though for a chilly day at Coney Island. She wore a long serge skirt, a waist-length cloak Canadian Literature 1771 Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w that buttoned up the front, a flat cap with a spotted veil. .. She exuded many forms of aloofness all at once: that of a woman from the coarse company of men. . .that of a white woman among Eskimos, to whose level she would never sink no matter how long she was stranded with them in the Arctic. . . Sometimes the Eskimos, clad in light pelts and furs and moccasins, all with the same shoulder-length tangled mass of black hair, would come down from their tupiks on the hill and follow in a train behind the Pearys, chattering and laughing, some of the women bearing babies on their backs. What must have particularly recommended the Peary and Cook material to Johnston in his postmodern reworking of history was that as far as the discovery of the North Pole is concerned, "The truth remains uncertain" (Encyclopedia Britannica). It is also uncertain who the Navigator of Johnston's title is. Obviously, Peary and Cook, and even Francis Stead have a claim, since they are all "navigators" and they all use New York in order to court the necessary support for their expeditions, but it is Devlin Stead who most deserves the epithet "the navigator of New York" because he does not participate only in arctic expeditions but in the course of the novel appears as the explorer of New York. It is through Devlin's eyes that Johnston makes us see how turn-of-the-century New York is the economic and cultural context of the period's fascination with explorers and exploring. As recipient of his father's letters and as partner of his conversations Devlin imbibes the boosterism of New York: "In every field—science, commerce, transportation, communications—inventors file for patents every day. . . .The tendency of almost everything is 'up'." The most remarkable icons of this upward tendency are the skyscrapers: There is no room left in the sought-after parts of Manhattan for new building sites, 154 so they are tearing down the old buildings. . .Last year, when a building of twenty storeys was completed, the papers said that no higher building could be made. Now higher ones are being built and even higher ones being talked about—thirty, forty-storey buildings that will make the greatest of cathedrals seem like a parish church. The spuriousness of the culture of which the navigations are a central expression is intimately related to the duplicity tainting Devlin's family relations. Dr. Cook is the central embodiment of this duplicity, in his professional life as an explorer and in his personal life as Amelia's lover, as husband, and, above all, as Devlin's father. Ironically, it is precisely this duplicity that makes him the catalyst in Devlin's maturation process. Devlin first experiences the trauma of the absent father when Dr. Francis Stead leaves his family. This situation changes dramatically, but hardly improves, when Devlin learns from Dr. Cook's first letter that he is Cook's natural son. Rather, the boy is thrown into a confused state of tumultous hopes and anxieties. These ambivalent feelings undergo subtle modifications when Cook, not acknowledging Devlin as his son, makes him his secretary and allows him to live in an unused, Kafkaesque wing of his wife's mansion. Devlin's quest for a mature attitude towards his father, whose faults become more apparent as their relationship becomes more intense, is as fascinating as his exploration of New York and the Arctic with which it is intimately connected. Johnston has devised a kind of postmodern parody of traditional plots, with a series of carefully timed revelations. But what readers will remember most are the splendid scenes, the sharp style, and the lack of closure. When Devlin and the reader learn that Dr. Frederick Cook, not Dr. Francis Stead, is his father, that the reason for Stead's escape into exploration and for his neglect of Amelia and Devlin is his jeal- Canadian Literature IJJ / Summer 2003 ousy, that Amelia did not commit suicide but was murdered by Francis Stead, they are forced to revise and rethink the entire structural and psychological configuration of the novel. This book is a major accomplishment. Writing, Self, & Sex Evelyn Lau Inside Out: Reflections on a Life so Far. Doubleday Canada $29. 95 Simone Poirier-Bures Nicole. Pottersfield P $16.95 Bill Brownstein Sex Carnival. ECW P $22.95 Reviewed by Chinmoy Banerjee Inside Out is Evelyn Lau's memoir of the ten years since the publication of her first book, Runaway: the Diary of a Street Kid. It records the years of Lau's life in writing, a life she has sought with an intense passion and singular focus. Lau's life and writing are possessed by her past, the writing always attempting to control the confusion of experience with "words as neat as pins." She grew up, Lau says, both at home and on the street, "without a sense of where lines should be drawn," and this blurring of the boundary between the inside and the outside becomes the program of her writing. Setting "no limits to what I could reveal about myself or others in my life" becomes her signature, the mark of her integrity, making her writing into her authentic body, the site where she lives out of the power of those who control her physical body. That's why she responds to Kinsella's lawsuit against her for her article on their relationship with an enormous sense of surprise and violation. Prostitution, Lau says, "has left its seal and shadow on everything," setting her apart, as she had feared it would, and also hoped because it protected her with a wall, making relationships less possible. It is 155 art she wants, not the claustrophobia of a relationship. Lau's dedication to art is Flaubertian: it is an altar at which she is ready to sacrifice all life, her own and that of those involved with her. She makes art out of her pain and will not take medication to relieve it. She notes the tediousness of people who talk about their depression but she then writes vividly and interestingly about her own depression. She makes us feel the emotional and physical wrenching of her bulimia. At the end she writes movingly of finding a room of her own but dreams that the hideous purple dresser of her childhood is sitting in it, real and immovable. Despairingly, she thinks, "it would be there in the days and dreams that stretched ahead," but one hopes for the sake of her art that she will be able to move it out and produce a writing that moves beyond her own pathology and develops an interest in others. Simone Poirier-Bures combines memoir and autobiographical fiction to reconstruct the experience of growing up poor and Acadian in Halifax in the 1950s and early 1960s. Brief stories sketch the life of a family with an elderly candyman father, a schoolteacher mother, and a basement full of candy. Nicole discovers betrayal when her friends abandon her as she throws up after a tram ride downtown. A lady in a car takes her home. She wants to reward the lady with candy from her basement but takes a step from disappointment to growth when her mother doesn't offer the candy and explains that the lady wouldn't want it. From what her mother tells her, Nicole speculates that making babies is like the mass, "When a man and a woman say the wedding vows, the man's sperm automatically enters the woman's body, just as Christ's body enters the host when the priest says the words." On a visit to her relatives after having won a scholarship to the U. S., Nicole finds them speaking to her in their thickly accented English, wishes to let Canadian Literature 1771 Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w them know that she still speaks French but can't bring herself to speak their way. But her aunts and uncles, who "had always seemed so smart, so funny" seemed "different, now, speaking English . . . diminished somehow, speaking in that slow, halting way." Poirer-Bures manages to say a good deal in a few words. Bill Brownstein offers an amused survey of the contemporary explosion in sexual expression and its commodificaton by looking at conventions in Las Vegas, the porn industry, Hugh Hefner, fellatio training in Hollywood, S & M in New York, the sex mart in Amsterdam, the difference of the Parisians, and swinging in Montreal. He situates the porn industry morally by placing it beside the $1.5 million wedding of Céline Dion at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, with Berber tents, camels, jugglers and belly dancers: "To many persons on this planet, an indulgent wedding circus with dromedaries and jugglers is more perverse than anything coming out of the adult-video biz—including a ten person anal gang bang." Indeed, people in the porn industry turn out to be remarkably moral. Annabel Chong, who broke the world record by sleeping with 251 men in ten hours, sought "horizontal fame" while studying fine arts the University of Southern California and attempting to be a dutiful daughter. Disturbed by finding that all the men involved in the marathon had not been screened for HIV and not being paid what she had been promised, she went back to school to finish her degree and returned to the industry as director, producer and star in her own films. Monet, another porno star turned director to take control over her work, made a documentary, Porn: It's a Living, out of her annoyance when a fellow dogowner ran away from her when learning of her career. There is so much porn around—more than ten billion dollars were spent in the 156 U.S. on porn-related products in 1999; there are about sixty thousand sex-oriented Web sites—that John Leslie, one of the greats of the industry muses, "With all the porno out there, is anybody having actual sex anymore? I really wonder." Variations autofictives Didier Leclair Toronto, je t'aime. Vermillion n.p. Christian Mistral Valium. XYZ éditeur n.p. Reviewed by Janine Gallant On assiste, depuis un certain temps, à un regain d'intérêt pour le genre de l'autofiction. Parmi les nombreuses tentatives récentes dans le paysage littéraire canadien francophone se distinguent deux romans qui feront l'objet de ce compte rendu, soit Toronto, je t'aime de Didier Leclair et Valium de Christian Mistral. Tous deux, classés comme "roman", sont narrés par un "je" qui présente des ressemblances, à des degrés variables, avec l'auteur lui-même. Là s'arrête toutefois leur parenté. Didier Leclair, né à Montréal, mais ayant grandi en Afrique, vit et travaille à Toronto depuis quelques années. Son premier roman, Toronto, je t'aime lui a valu le Prix Trillium 2001. Raymond, Béninois vivotant tant bien que mal à l'aide de travaux ménagers et du marché noir, décide un jour de quitter cette misère et de s'envoler pour Toronto, où habite un ami, Eddy, parti plus tôt pour faire carrière au cinéma. Une fois projeté dans Toronto, "Ray" apprend qu'Eddy s'est momentanément éclipsé à Montréal. Il se voit donc obligé de partager un logement exigu, enfoui dans un quartier pauvre de la Ville reine, avec les nombreux colocataires d'Eddy. C'est Joseph Dorsinville, Haïtien bon vivant qui s'amuse à conter des histoires abracadabrantes sur son passé. C'est encore Bob, "Jamaïcain de Détroit" habité par la haine contre l'ordre établi de Toronto, Canadian Literature 1771 Summer 2003 le rendant peu accueillant, voire hostile, à l'égard du nouveau venu d'Afrique pour qui l'Amérique est une terre promise. C'est aussi Koffi, qui "boulonne" dans des boîtes de nuit. À ce microcosme torontois qui entoure Ray viennent bientôt s'ajouter Maria, Portugaise d'origine, ex-toxicomane, ex de Joseph puis amante d'un jour de Ray, et les fréquentations riches de cette dernière. On le sent bien, le roman offre davantage des impressions qu'une véritable intrigue linéaire. Et c'est sans doute une de ses forces, cette manière de présenter au lecteur un univers par petites touches, tels ces personnages, d'abord mystérieux puis se construisant au fur et à mesure que le texte avance. Le narrateur lui-même se laisse découvrir peu à peu par le biais de retours en arrière fréquents, fruits d'une rêverie que provoque la douleur de son exil. Les atmosphères psychologiques, comme cette tension qui s'installe entre Ray et les amis d'un ami, Noirs d'Amérique auxquels il ne peut s'identifier, sont bien transmises au lecteur et souvent touchantes. De plus, tous ces lieux arpentés par le narrateur qui se bousculent dans sa tête sont évoqués avec verve, de la pauvreté du quartier où il loge à l'étourdissant et envoûtant centre-ville, en passant par les lieux qui ne sont maintenant présents que par les souvenirs, ces bords de mer béninois que le narrateur tente de ramener à son esprit presque toutes les nuits. Toutes ces qualités ne masquent cependant pas complètement certaines imperfections, notamment sur le plan formel. Certes, il y a ça et là des passages d'une très belle poésie, mais le style est le plus souvent convenu. On rencontre aussi par moments des changements brusques de ton ou de registre de langue qui semblent plus attribuables à la maladresse qu'à la recherche d'un effet. Même certaines réflexions, étouffées par un symbolisme un peu lourd, laissent deviner une inclination à cultiver les poncifs. Si le roman de Leclair ne laisse que 157 deviner des rapports avec ses propres souvenirs et son propre vécu, Mistral explore à fond l'autofiction en relatant dans Valium les événements entourant la publication de son premier roman, Vamp. C'est donc un certain Christian Mistral qui narre le récit et qui s'apprête à fêter ses vingt-quatre ans au moment où s'ouvre le roman. Le jour de son anniversaire sert de prétexte au narrateur pour présenter ses fidèles compagnons : le fantasque Fantasio, poursuivi par "deux ou trois gars" à qui il doit de l'argent, qui se verra bientôt obligé de s'enfuir vers l'Ouest canadien, un long périple en autobus dont on aura des bribes par le biais des lettres qu'il envoie au narrateur, et Léo, Espagnol "quichottesque" qui gravite autour du narrateur tout le long du roman. À cet univers de fête oscillant entre le joyeux et le tragique, vient se greffer peu à peu une histoire d'amour double : Christian se met d'abord à fréquenter Jo Genêt, journaliste qui l'avait interviewé naguère et qu'il revoit au moment où il assure la promotion de son premier roman au Salon du livre de Montréal. À ce même Salon, l'écrivain est frappé par la grâce de Marie-Raspberry qui se mettra bientôt à lui envoyer des missives de plus en plus passionnées auxquelles l'amant de Jo ne saura résister. Le chassécroisé culminera dans une fin tragique. Cette trame événementielle qui ne craint pas la démesure s'avère tout à fait réjouissante dans sa forme. Ainsi, le vocabulaire souvent recherché rencontre par moments le jouai, créant un mélange insolite qui confère une certaine fraîcheur au roman. Les jeux d'intertextes cherchent à créer un effet similaire, Sartre voisinant avec Astérix. Par ailleurs, la prose truculente de Mistral revêt un caractère ludique indéniable. Les expressions consacrées seront par exemple déformées avec humour au gré des événements ("faisant la ronde autour du pot," "propos anodins sur la pluie et la tempête," "m'ont mis la puce au tympan," etc.). Cette originalité donne l'impression de voir se bâtir un Canadian Literature 1771 Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w précieux florilège de l'écriture mistralienne où s'enchevêtrent de manière ingénieuse des éléments a priori incompatibles. D'autre part, le narrateur, qui ne tente jamais de masquer sa présence et qui cultive même le dialogue avec son lecteur, n'est pas sans rappeler celui de Diderot. Il conviera le lecteur à une sorte de réflexion sur le pouvoir de la littérature, comme lorsque la trame narrative va vers sa fin tragique et qu'il se penche sur le caractère littéraire qu'ont pris les personnages de son récit, ces amantes devenues "femmes de papier." La présence ouverte des effets de la littérature et de ses diverses formes possède d'autant plus de ramifications que presque tous les personnages s'improvisent écrivains à un moment ou à un autre dans le récit, le résultat de leur création littéraire venant se nicher dans le roman lui-même. Bref, Valium se présente comme un petit laboratoire fort intéressant où l'on explore les limites du langage et des formes littéraires, en restant toujours à la frontière du tragique et du comique. Frye on Christianity Alvin A. Lee and Jean O'Grady, eds. Northrop Frye on Religion. U Toronto P $75 cloth $29.95 paper Reviewed by Graham N. Forst The title of this book, which represents volume four of the projected thirty-one volumes of the University of Toronto Press's megaproject, The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, is at once a misnomer, and, in a way, a redundancy. First, the misnomer: Frye here (as elsewhere) has virtually nothing to say about religion in general (Buddhism rates two minor entries in four hundred pages of text, Hinduism six, and Islam twelve: the world's native religions are limited to one entry, under "North American legends"). Thus, when, in the very earliest (1933) piece in the collection, the twenty-one-year-old Frye states 158 that "our civilization is so far committed to Christianity. . . that we [may regard] 'Christianity' and 'religion' as interchangeable terms" we sense Frye had arrived early at a position that he never substantially modified over the next sixty or so years. The redundancy in the title stems from the fact that virtually everything Frye ever wrote about, here and elsewhere, whether it be language and literature, human love, nature, politics, history, time, philosophy, sex, psychology, education and the social role of the university and so on, was amplified and influenced by his Christian convictions. In other words, everywhere in Frye hovers a "philosopheme" as Derrida called it, of a "Presence which is ourselves yet infinitely bigger than ourselves, which lives with us but will not disappear into death when we do." (In Frye's defence, this "philosopheme" is not the creator demiurge of the "P" narrative of the Pentateuch, but a "humanized god" in the literal sense of the word "humanized": a god who "has entered human life . . . works with human instruments under the limitations of the human condition [and] suffers with man's humiliation as well as sharing his rare genuine triumphs.") This belief feeds directly into Frye's never-failing conviction of the liberating power of imaginative language, a conviction which drives almost all his essays and addresses to an "anagogic" conclusion, as can be proved by just looking at the last sentence of virtually every piece in this collection. Northrop Frye on Religion assembles all Frye's occasional and periodical writings on Christianity. It excludes, of course, his two late books on the Bible and literature ( The Great Code and Words With Power) but includes the two short monographs Creation and Recreation (1980)—which contains Frye's mature thinking about the origins and social impact of the creation myth in the Old Testament—and The Double Vision (1990), which is a condensed (but wonderfully eloquent) statement of Canadian Literature 177/Summer2003 the arguments of Words With Power. Also included are various addresses, editorials, sermons, memorial services, wedding services, baccalaureate services and prayers (which are, in a way that reminds us sharply that Frye was an ordained minister, addressed to "the eternal father in Heaven" and to "Our Saviour and Redeemer"). Throughout Northrop Frye on Religion, the too-often clichéd subjects of God, sin, and redemption are invigorated (as we should expect from Frye) by an ever-present wit, and a freshness of thought and style: one almost wouldn't mind going to church to hear the traditionalists' god referred to as "a dead, stuffed, grinning Santa Claus." There is, of course, a great deal of repetition throughout Northrop Frye on Religion, not only of language and examples and citations, but also of those driving ideas which Frye held to to the end, although they became increasingly unfashionable: the Bible as a unified text (a "comic Romance"), the Bible as a repository of myths and metaphors that have "shaped the western mind," the need to understand the Bible "spiritually" rather than historically, the primacy of poetic language, the socially transforming force of the arts, and of course, the social need for intelligent criticism, which teaches us how to make the crucial distinction between myth and ideologies. As with all the volumes released so far by the University of Toronto Press in this series, Northrop Frye on Religion is meticulously edited: I found only two minor errors: a reference to a non-existent Biblical verse (I Samuel 5:17 (sic]), and an erroneous dating in the index of Beckett's Waiting For Godot as 1956. In a crabby little Foreward to the Princeton University Press' recent (2000) re-issue of Frye's classic Anatomy of Criticism, Harold Bloom speaks disdainfully of the "irenic" pietism of this "Low Church minister." In fact, however, the lasting impression from reading Northrop Frye on Religion is how 159 thoroughly Dionysian Frye's take on Christianity was: no gentle-Jesus-meek-andmild-here—Frye's Jesus, like Blake's, is a "revolutionary and iconoclast" who, when asked where the Kingdom of Heaven was, pointed within, not to the sky. Bloom's slur (and it wouldbe a slur to Bloom) is less defensible: one wonders for example whether Frye would have noticed, or cared, that in the index to Northrop Frye on Religion, "Catholicism" receives its own entry, rather than a sub-entry under Christianity. Peopling the Wound Mark Macdonald Home. Arsenal Pulp $15.95 Jan Thornhill Drought and Other Stories. Cormorant $18.95 Madeline Sonik Drying the Bones. Nightwood n.p. Reviewed by Stuart Sillars The opening item in Mark Macdonald's collection, headed "Contents," is a series of short paragraphs each sketching an item suggesting the person whose identities it has shaped and whose life it records and distorts. This sparse, garage-sale suggestiveness conveys with an immediate yet imprecise force the displaced world that the volume generates, along axes of both character and narrative. Sometimes, objects dominate lives: the central figure in "Walls" becomes obsessed with protecting an inherited house against its inner decay, in a tale in which physicality stands as metaphor of bodily corruption and the second law of thermodynamics. Elsewhere the displacement is psychological: the narrator in "Puss" is both cat and cat-like, out-felining the literal to suggest a being both sinister and touching in its power to consume and sleep. "Deaths" is a macabre chronicle of an old man who lives in a cycle of deaths and resurrections; it ritualizes the pains of Canadian Literature 1771 Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w the care-giving relatives to translate the rhythm of crisis and slackness familiar to visitors in suburban care-homes into something darkly comic yet, in its longer current, ultimately unredemptive. At times the world thus generated is sombre indeed, a subtle lyricism provides some relief. "Crying Outside" could be merely another catalogue of urban loneliness, but instead the close detailing of sounds and appearances—though not so close to mark its narrator as obsessional—redirects it to a kind of strangeness that hints of the cathartic, perhaps even the redemptive. These stories move us, inexorably but with lyrical gentleness, to a dignified grasp of existential absurdity. Jan Thornhill's Drought is billed as the first work for adults by this much-published writer and illustrator of children's stories. Thornhill's exuberance, free-spinning sense of fantasy, and complex combination of moods make her voice instantly recognizable and, in the best of these pieces, quite compelling. All of the stories are concerned with the difficulties of human relationships—between men and women, between adults and children, between children— and many draw a parallel relation with the natural world that at once offers consolation and further complicates the business of staying alive. All have a lightness of touch that conceals genuinely original humour, combined with a sense of control that paces and moderates the darker tinges, of which there are many. "Simple Solutions," a tale in which a couple's battle against mice is balanced against burgeoning domestic violence, shows Thornhill at her best. As the story develops, the two conflicts are cross-cut to show an intimate symbolic relation all the stronger for never being made explicit, but this is more than a tale of the appallingly easy slide into brutality. There is humour, for example, in a list of explanations headed "Possible Responses to Questions about the Origin of Black 160 Eyes," and in the increasingly bizarre suggestions about the noisy private lives of the mice, the latter almost, but not quite, cancelling the seriousness of the former. There is also a disturbing sensitivity to the complicity of violence, in the "absolute awe" with which the woman narrator responds to the first blow and her subsequent realization of "the power in making him hit me." Similar cross-cutting is used in "Extremes" where a woman's unachieved affair with a married man is balanced against an operation for breast cancer. Her delight that her rival has chipped nail varnish is matched by her immediate response to the operation, but the latter is shocking because of its brief revelation: "I'm 20. I'm strong." At the end, as she clutches flowers against her, "cradled like a baby" to cool the bruises, there is both loss and courage. The volume is full of similar alarming reassurances, delivered in writing of immediate authority and with an unusual sense of structural rhythm and pace. Madeline Sonik's debut collection, Drying the Bones, may initially appear more conventional, but this should not conceal the precision and narrative of her stories. This is a larger volume—25 stories, 223 pages— and the inclusion of so many pieces, and the range of styles they demonstrate, initially put it at a disadvantage. The first group of stories shares a landscape of the dispossessed—refugees from poverty, child abuse, sickness, drugs and alcohol. The usual suspects multiply to generate a kinetic energy of unease that almost becomes parodie, so that the powerful effect of these pieces, initially published separately, decreases rather than multiplies when they are ingested together. Yet, just as this is becoming oppressive, the approach shifts: the most effective of these earlier pieces are probably "Cellar Dust" and "Home Sick," where humour—albeit not technically of the subtlest order in the latter—allows erstwhile victims their revenge against exploitation Canadian Literature 177/ Summer 2003 by corrupt care-givers, both familial and institutional. A pair of stories, "Lucky Boy" and "The Cherry Tree," play with Japanese settings and structures to develop a new, twisted form of folk tale; a final set move towards the kind of inventiveness that is invariably labelled "magical realism," a reference that is perhaps a little more fitting here because many share a loose Latin setting and a mingled sense of displacement and wonder amidst their violence. While the stories are much closer to established categories, this should not be taken as a mark of weakness, save in the Blakean sense: though flawed, this is a collection of industrial, global stigmata that are revealed under raking light. The war between Mama Cassava and the animate evil of the government buildings that "want to cut apart the moon" in "The Overseer," the dark, Lamialike elision of dancer and snake in "The Apostle," and the twisted nurture and revenge of the title story all suggest an appropriation of other traditions in the sounding of a new voice. Truth & Time Linden Maclntyre The Long Stretch. Stoddart $29.95 Don Dickinson Robbiestitne. HarperFlamingo $32.00 Reviewed by Lisa Grekul Writing from their experiences in two very different regional contexts, first-time novelist Linden Maclntyre and veteran writer Don Dickinson, at first glance, seem to have little in common. Maclntyre, an awardwinning journalist (co-host of the CBC news program the fifth estate), divides his time between Toronto and Cape Breton. Dickinson, on the other hand, is an awardwinning short-story writer and novelist (author of Blue Husbands and The Crew), born and raised in Saskatchewan, and presently living in British Columbia. In The 161 Long Stretch, Maclntyre documents a rural Maritime community's regional particularities, while the backdrop of Robbiestitne is a small prairie tourist town. But, insofar as the narrators of both novels are entangled in the aftermath of the Second World War, haunted by events that took place before they were born, The Long Stretch and Robbiestitne are more similar than we might initially expect. Set in Port Hastings, Cape Breton, 1983, The Long Stretch is a complex story that spans half a century as it chronicles a small town in the process of losing its Gaelic roots to the machinery of modernity. The novel focuses on two generations of three families and the uneasy relationships between those who have stayed "home" and those who have gone "away." Infused with the drama of love, war, and mystery, the narrative is structured around a dialogue between two cousins who are coming to terms with the destructive repercussions of family secrets. Maclntyre's prose is deceptively simple and straightforward, rich with local colloquialism and humour, and moving in its honest portrayal of a community in crisis. Narrated by John Gillis, a recovering alcoholic who (aside from four years of migrant mining work in his youth) has always lived on a rural section of road called the Long Stretch, the novel begins when John's cousin, Sextus, returns from Toronto for a surprise visit. The two cousins commence a night of hard drinking and truth-telling during which the details of their troubled relationship slowly unfold. In fact, the source of their "bad blood" can be traced back to the complicated connections between John's father (Alexander "Sandy" Gillis), Sextus's father (Jack Gillis), and Angus MacAskill; their children—John, Sextus, and Effie—form a second trilogy of characters, deeply wounded by the actions of the first. Why were there tensions between Sandy, Canadian Literature 177 i Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w Jack, and Angus? What was the "awful thing" between Sandy and Angus, in particular, that "kept bringing them together"? And why must John, Sextus, and Effie spend "years dealing with the fallout"? John is reluctant to discuss the past with Sextus who, after all, wrote a scandalous book based on John's life (he "stole my life and ran with it") and then ran away with John's wife, Effie. Sextus, however, insists on talking about their shared history because "some of us have a responsibility to the future." Over the course of their conversation, multiple secrets are uncovered— secrets that involve adultery, suicide, incest, and murder. But it is only through dialogue between John and Sextus, through their sharing of stories, that the full truth comes to light. Ultimately, and ironically, what the two men discover is that the truth is less important than healing the damage done by years of supposition and speculation. Narrated by eleven-year old Robbie Hendershot, Robbiestime revisits the coming-of-age story of a boy on the prairies (in many ways, it invites comparison with WO. Mitchell's Who Has Seen the Wind). Like Maclntyre, Dickinson explores one family's struggle to cope with the emotional "fallout" of World War II. But Dickinson's novel, set in Wasagam, Saskatchewan, 1958, deals with the matters of more immediate post-war displacement and dysfunction. For Robbie, the business of growing up—learning about God, friendship, and family—is complicated by events that took place before his birth, in a country he has never seen. Indeed, distinguishing between "home" and "away" is no easy task for the Hendershot family uprooted after the war (from Aylesbury to Prince Albert to Wasagam) and, in particular, for Robbie's mother who longs to return to her family in England. As with The Long Stretch, Robbiestime hinges on a mystery: why have Robbie's mum and dad always fought? What is the secret 162 behind their wedding photo, the "something Dad did so terrible so disgusting that he never told anybody about it not even Mum"? What is it that "Mum did" as a result? While in The Long Stretch Maclntyre rather problematically glosses over the ways in which the women are affected by the war and by family secrets, Dickinson explicitly addresses the situation of women in postwar patriarchal family and community structures. And one of the most compelling aspects of the novel is its exploration of enduring (post) colonial relations between Canada and England. In a narrative rife with run-on sentences and invented words, Robbie's voice is unforgettable both for its stylistic naivete and for its sophisticated insights into human nature. His story begins with reflections on his family's history as a timeline, as a collage of pictures, as, perhaps, "a coal black tunnel like a mine shaft where all the ghosts from way back stumble around." Robbie's parents, Jake and Meg, met and married in England during the war, then moved around Saskatchewan, struggling to make ends meet with four children (Lyle, Stephie, Robbie, K-man) and little money. Meg, impatient with her impractical husband and disillusioned by this "empty" country, constantly compares their life in Canada to her childhood in England. And Jake, while well-meaning, exacerbates her misery with his boyish approach to the practicalities of life. Robbie, then, spends a great deal of time trying to sort out the reasons for his parents' unhappy marriage. He is aided by his best friend and spiritual advisor, the "wise old duck" Eugene Kozicki, and his brilliant older sister Stephie, with her ubiquitous Encyclopedia Britannica, who models herself on Joan of Arc. Stephie (who experiences her own growing pains as she makes the transition from girlhood to womanhood) becomes Robbie's philosophical mentor. She surmises that, in order to understand Canadian Literature 17// Summer 2003 their parents' problems, they need to understand their parents' lives beforethewar, duringthewar, and afterthewar. In fact, every person, according to Stephie, has his or her own timeline, though it "doesn't have to be divided up at a l l . . . I've got Stephiestime and Lyle's got Lylestime and Kman's got K-manstime and you've got Robbiestime? As Robbie tries to make sense of his mother's trip to England, his grandfather's death, and Eugene's accident, he builds on Stephie's timeline theory: "what if I carry everybodystime, what if I did? Then nothing would end, everything would go on forever . . . maybe Robbiestime is everybodystime" History, for Robbie, is transformed from a mysterious burden to a triumphant gift. These are novels about place, but they also transcend the "local" in their treatment of community and family history. In the end, what matters for both novelists is not that we condemn the ghosts of the past but, rather, how we accept and ultimately overcome the repercussions of history. Re-Visioning Crusoe Yann Martel Life of Pi. Knopf $32.95 Reviewed by Linda M. Morra The tripartite structure of Life of Pi, Yann Martel's second novel and winner of the 2002 Booker Prize, corresponds to three major periods of the protagonist's life: his adult life in Canada where he meets the narrator and divulges his life-story; his childhood in India followed by a traumatic experience at sea; and his rescue and recovery in Mexico. Initially, some cursory narrative details of the second and third of these parts suggest parallels with Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Pi—whose equally resonant birth name, Piscine Molitor, is derived from the "crowning aquatic glory of Paris"—is lost at sea after a 163 shipwreck. Like Crusoe, he survives the cruelties of starvation, isolation, loneliness (if one disqualifies the presence of Richard Parker, a Bengal tiger), and the elements, as he also becomes preoccupied with making a raft and the tools and means upon which his survival depends. Martel's novel, however, is no simple variant of the Crusoe adventure story. In fact, Life of Pi seems designed to impugn the bourgeois Puritan ideology that underlies Robinson Crusoe. An examination of the protagonists and their respective circumstances demonstrates this significant difference. Crusoe, the son of a wealthy merchant, initiates a sea voyage of his own volition rather than entering into business, as his father desires. No such option is given to Pi, whose sea voyage is born of necessity, not whimsical inclination. Notwithstanding the series of misfortunes he encounters, Crusoe is adept at duplicating his father's business practices: he not only survives the shipwreck, but also applies the work ethic he has inherited from his father and amasses a small fortune. In contrast, Pi is obliged to relocate to Canada from Pondicherry, India, with his family and their menagerie of animals (which were part of a zoo, the family business) because of the country's economic instability and political turmoil. No amount of hard labour would have transformed the zoo into a lucrative business since, as the narrator observes, "the Greater Good and the Greater Profit are not compatible aims." The shipwreck is purportedly caused by a combination of bad weather and a mechanical failure; however, the shipping company demonstrates an utter lack of concern for its missing passengers, including Pi's family, "a lowly Indian family with a bothersome cargo," and for its ship, a "third-rate rustbucket," because both were deemed economically insignificant. Within the ship itself, a hierarchy exists: there are the offi- Canadian Literature 1771 Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w cers, who had "little to do with us," and the passengers, whose physical containment at the bottom of the ship's hold indicates their social position. If social rank, as Martel observes about the animal kingdom, "determines whom [one] associates with and how," then it also determines one's significance and worth: not only are Pi's parents obliged to relocate from India as the result of their dire financial situation, their disappearance is virtually overlooked because of their low social status. Martel's novel is a kind of fictional biography, and, as such, displays certain hagiographical tendencies: presumably, Pi's life is meant to be regarded as an exemplar. In this respect, the book also seems to critique the confessional, instructional facet of Defoe's book, which derives its moral orientation from its resemblance to Puritan moral tracts. The autonomy and economic rewards that Crusoe and an upwardly mobile middle class enjoyed may have been the result of a solid work ethic, but they were also the product of imperial exploitation. Martel's choice of an impoverished Indian for his protagonist seems implicitly to make this point about Crusoe's position in the world. Moreover, if Crusoe himself discovers religious belief and experiences a conversion because of his hardships, Pi demonstrates a kind of spiritual precocity since he has explored—even celebrated—three major religious belief systems in advance of his ordeal at sea. A religious conversion is not engendered by his sufferings; instead, religious beliefs and rituals sustain him throughout his perils. Narrative itself becomes a means of sheltering from the cruelties of survival. The two versions of Pi's life conveyed to the Japanese investigators at the end indicate that narrative, like religion, renders the cruelties of survival more tolerable. Still, the narrator's claim at the opening of the book is somewhat overwrought: that this is a "a story that will make you believe 164 in God" seems to suggest a level of profundity and sophistication that the novel does not quite attain. The expectation built into Martel's fiction is that it will transform reality in order to effect a transformation in its readers, but that expectation overestimates the power of the story. While Life of Pi is, at turns, interesting, clever, and layered, it is also inconsistently compelling and occasionally contrived. Canadian Gardening Carol Martin A History of Canadian Gardening. McArthur $29-95 Collin Varner and Christine Allen Gardens of Vancouver. Raincoast Books $36.95 Reviewed by Gisela Hônnighausen This richly illustrated book describes four centuries of Canadian gardening beginning with the agricultural achievements of the Iroquois and the Hurons long before the Europeans arrived. The second chapter is dedicated to the early explorers and their interest in the flora and fauna of the newly discovered land, their collections and descriptions of plants and the trading of plants and seeds between the continents during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When the first French settlers came to the East Coast, their main concern was the supply of food. Thus a history of Canadian gardening differs greatly from the history of European gardening of the same period. Early gardening in Canada was mainly limited to vegetable gardens and orchards ("Gardening for the sake of beauty was a luxury [the early settlers] could not afford"). Nevertheless, even in these vegetable gardens, an urge for "symmetry and luxurious layout" was clearly noticeable. New challenges in gardening confronted the American Loyalists moving to the west of the country and the Hudson's Bay Company trying to Canadian Literature 1771 Summer 2003 grow vegetables in the North. It is the second and third generations of newcomers who—after the pioneer work of the first settlers—were able to care for the garden for beauty's sake. The creation of the first nurseries, the publication of the first seed catalogues and gardeners' handbooks, and the invention of the lawn mower are symptomatic of a new concept of gardening. The horticultural changes of the nineteenth century caused a transformation of the Canadian landscape. Emerging with the rise of big cities and the social reforms accompanying them, the new horticultural spirit led to the City Beautiful Movement. The belief in the restorative powers of nature moved gardening into a new moral light. Public Gardens were established in the big cities and became a part of urban planning. Further, gardening was introduced in the school curriculum through the so-called Macdonald Movement, and railway stations became targets of a newly awakened interest in gardening and in beautifying an otherwise dull environment. This widespread interest in gardening is mirrored in a number of publications and the rise of garden clubs and horticultural societies which facilitated the exchange of seeds and plants among friends and hobby gardeners. In the Canadian context, as the author points out, gardening can never be isolated from farming. The foundation of the Central Experimental Farm (1886) and the development of an experimental farm system was a milestone not only in Canadian farming but in horticulture as well. The often inhospitable climate of the Canadian regions requires thorough research for new species. While the experimental farms go back to the nineteenth century, most of the Botanical Gardens were established throughout the twentieth century. The book introduces some of the most famous Botanical Gardens with their special areas of concentration "often based on the climate and geography of their loca- 165 tion." The development of "new seeds for a new land" became the main goal of twentieth century horticulture. In the late 1960s and the 1970s the back-to-the-land movement with its nostalgic search for a simpler life made home gardening once again extremely popular. A new attitude towards nature and environment also sharpened the eye for Canadian heritage. Native seeds were rediscovered and propagated in the Heritage Seed Program. Wild flower gardens and road beautifying programs mirror the recent interest in the protection of the environment. "Gardens, Gardens, Everywhere", the final chapter, sketches new tendencies in gardening. Despite the fact that Martin seeks to write a history of Canadian gardening, some references to international tendencies might have been useful. A number of the phenomena described are not typically or exclusively Canadian, but part of more general movements: The City Beautiful Movement, for example, should be considered within the context of the social reforms of Ruskin and, in particular, William Morris which resulted in building the first Garden Cities in England. This is not so much a question of direct influence but of comparable social conditions entailing similar reactions. The back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 70s is related to the foundation of the "Green" parties in Europe and originates from the same political and social situation. Moreover, road beautifying programs and wild flower gardens are just as popular in Europe as they are in Canada and derive from the same newly awakened concern for the environment. However, this undoubtedly is a valuable book for all garden lovers interested in cultural history. The author has an admirable way of putting the right pictures and the right quotations in the right place. Carol Martin's A History of Canadian Gardening is not merely a history of Canadian gardening, it is more: it is a cultural history of Canadian Literature 177 / Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w Canadian gardens, full of information and beautifully illustrated. "Since a garden is always a work in progress, a volatile thing" it is the authors' aim "to record a few of the best [gardens] at a moment when Vancouver is in the midst of a gardening renaissance." An introductory survey of the history of gardening on the West Coast by Christine Allen is followed by the presentation of 26 outstanding private gardens of Vancouver, classified according to the different types of influences (English Influence, Cottage Style, Courtyard Gardens, Grand Estates, Tropical Visions, Oriental Influences, Plant Collections, North American Influence). A quotation summarizing the owner's concept serves as an epigraph for each section. The beautifully designed and coloured garden plans provide an insight into the individual garden while the wonderful photos by John Dowell capture the highlights in greater detail. This book conveys the intimate atmosphere of private gardens which one would otherwise not have the opportunity to share. The text, which combines poetic description and botanical information, is a real treasure for every garden lover. This is a most delightful book to browse through and a mine of inspiration. Rewriting Identity Ashok Mathur The Short, Happy Life of Harry Kumar. Arsenal Pulp $19.95 Neil Bissoondath Doing the Heart Good. Cormorant $34.95 Bharati Mukherjee Desirable Daughters. HarperFlamingo $34.95 Reviewed by Katherine Miller Metaphors of identity and place permeate these novels, whose characters careen between different countries, cultures, and languages, often feeling at home in none. 166 Neil Bissoondath's narrator is an Englishspeaker living in Quebec. Ashok Mathur's title character has an English mother and an Indian father; consequently, he is left "haplessly in the middle and, as was his wont, hopelessly confused." Tara, one of Bharati Mukherjee's desirable daughters, feels "lost inside an Salman Rushdie novel, a once-firm identity smashed by hammer blows, melted down and reemerging as something wondrous, or grotesque." With varying degrees of success, the writers reconfigure the many permutations of their characters' identities, rewriting myth and personal history. The Short, Happy Life of Harry Kumar follows the adventures of Harry Kumar who is, in his own words, "an ordinary guy who holds out promise to do ordinary things for the rest of his ordinary life." Fortunately, this novel is short, clocking in at only 223 pages. For the first third, Mathur describes Harry's life in mind-numbing detail; he then resorts to the surreal for dramatic impact. After Harry's friend, Sita, is kidnapped by a god, Anna Varre, Harry follows a number of clues embedded in the oddest of locations: the voice-recognition software in a bank; the leg of a picnic bench on Galiano Island; a computer print-out in a non-existent Writer's studio. As the narrator tells us: it's up to Harry and his global peripateticisms to find her [Sita], thus beginning an island quest that takes him to Galiano Island, Toronto Island, the island continent of Australia, and soon to an islandoff-an-island on the continent's west coast, and yes, finally to yet another south Pacific island where all will come clear. Can you feel the gusto of the travel narrative, truly bringing vigour into tired old sedentary bones? The above paragraph captures many of the novel's problems and obsessions: the frequent plot reiterations; the run-on, clauseladen sentences; the annoyingly self-aware questions; the focus on islands as a Canadian Literature 1771 Summer 2003 metaphor for the postcolonial condition. A final showdown between Harry and Anna Varre at Hell's Gate, Rotorua, results in Sita's rescue; however, in true postmodern style, little changes. Using the central characters' names as clues, the narrator rewrites the Ramayana tale of the kidnapping of Sita by the demon Ravanna. Harry's dog, Han (named after the monkey-general, Hanuman), contributes the occasional moment of energy and humour. A description of Han endlessly climbing the sandstone Pinnacles in western Australia, a "crazed canine . . . searching for something lost, potentially never to be refound," suggests some examination of temporal dislocations, of the eternal quest for meaning behind narrative. However, after Han bites someone for the fifth time and Harry claims that this has never happened before, the humour begins to wear thin. Ultimately, the novel fails at the most basic task of narrative: keeping the reader interested. To rewrite history/myth, something more is needed than an attractive but bland hero, his vicious sidekick, a beautiful but passive heroine, and a long-winded god/narrator. Mathur promises a rewriting of story but, as his own narrator acknowledges, "sometimes stories change in such subtle ways that they tell the same old saga." In Doing the Heart Good, Neil Bissoondath also attempts to make the ordinary interesting. Alistair Mackenzie, a retired English professor, moves in with his daughter, son-in-law, and grandson after his own house is destroyed. Mackenzie begins scribbling his memories on sheets of vellum, originally bought for his daughter as a Christmas present. He recalls his first meeting with his wife, his friendship with an obnoxious writer (which allows Bissoondath to slip in a few caustic comments on pseudo-writers who spend their days in bars), his mentorship of a blind student—all of the people, now gone, who were once part of his life. Mackenzie's 167 eventless life is offset by snapshots of eccentric characters: his wild sister who married a circus performer, a maimed war veteran, a dwarf accountant. Through his evocation of the past, Mackenzie displays his faith in memory as a form of magic, "which permits events a life long after they've ended." More than faith, however, this novel examines the power of language, both to recreate the past and to create identity. Speaking of his relationship with Jack, his francophone his son-in-law, Mackenzie marvels at "the unfathomable fervour his language inspires in him," how "his language, that of the book, that of first endearments and early scoldings, the language that speaks to him beyond meaning, in which he dreams, is the language of his very breath." In a moving comparison, Mackenzie looks at his own language, English, which is also his lifeblood, but which for Jack has the harsh connotations that German has for Mackenzie, a World War II veteran. Unfortunately, such moments of lyricism are undercut by clunky metaphors and by the narrator's dull life. The passage quoted above is marred by the pretentiousness of the concluding sentence: "This language that was like a cradle chiselled from crystal containing swift shards of light and edges of dreams, subtleties as surreptitious as salamanders." Towards the second half of the novel, I increasingly felt that I was listening to the disjointed ramblings of an elderly man, past the prime of life, anxious not to be forgotten. While the evocation of this voice is technically admirable, the story itself bogs down in unrealistic details and unbelievable or stereotypical characters. When Mackenzie's house burns down after his neighbour's Quebec flag is set on fire, the overly obvious symbolic event brings about rapprochement between Mackenzie and his neighbour, Monsieur Tremblay, but the incident seems forced. Just as Mackenzie's limited French allows him "no subtlety," Canadian Literature 177 f Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w the novel makes its points bluntly. I wanted to enjoy Doing the Heart Good. In the end, however, I felt I had simply tolerated it. Desirable Daughters succeeds where both of the previous novels fail: it engages the reader in a dizzying and absorbing journey through the complications of modern life. Bharati Mukherjee's novels and short story collections, which include Jasmine, Wife, and The Holder of the World, explore the shifting identities of diasporic women, both in the present-day United States and India and in the past. Desirable Daughters opens with the story of Tara Lata, the Tree Wife, who is the narrator's namesake and ancestor. Through the impact of the past upon the present, Mukherjee examines "the stubborn potency of myth in the face of overwhelming change" in the lives of the three desirable daughters: Padma, Parvati, and Tara. Tara, the divorced wife of a Silicon Valley billionaire, lives in a remodelled house in San Francisco with her fifteen-year-old son and her red-bearded, ex-biker Buddhist boyfriend. When Chris Dey shows up in her living room, claiming to be the illegitimate son of her oldest sister, Padma, Tara questions her perceptions about her life with her family in Calcutta in the late fifties and early sixties. As Chris's involvement in her life becomes more sinister, Tara struggles to unravel the secrecy surrounding her past, to discover the truth behind her sisters' prevarications and fragmented stories. Plot recapitulation would only spoil the novel's many surprises: read it for yourself. Desirable Daughters confirms Mukherjee's place as a complex writer with a keen eye for the subtleties of Indo-American life and a superb gift for characterization. 168 This Book Will Go On Susan Musgrave Cargo of Orchids. Knopf Canada $32.95 Blanche Howard Penelope's Way. Coteau Books $19.95 Helen Humphreys Afterimage. HarperFlamingoCanada $28.00 Reviewed by Shannon Cowan Although I like happy endings, I also appreciate believable awful endings, novels pitted with landmines, because as duly noted in the tradition of Canadian writing, reality often results in frostbite. Can the level of optimism with which a writer writes affect the credibility of a novel? Keeping in mind that tolerance for optimism is highly subjective, I think it can. The following three novels by Canadian women apply optimism to different degrees, painting different portraits of what is credible and believable in fiction writing today. To begin with, take a convicted murderer living on death row charged with the killing of her only son. Add addiction and poor judgment, South American drug cartels, women who will shoot you in the heart just as soon as look at you, backstreet crime combined with sweltering tropical weather, and you have the bones of Susan Musgrave's latest novel, Cargo of Orchids. Sound a little dark? It is, but Musgrave is so cunningly witty, that you find yourself laughing out loud despite the fact that you are shocked. While she awaits her execution in the Heaven Valley State Facility for Women somewhere in the United States, an unnamed narrator writes the story leading up to her incarceration. With this character and others, Musgrave is skilled at speaking the language of inmates, at expressing the sharp irony of those condemned to death yet expected to sign release forms approving their own execution. Beneath a running depiction of the bread and circuses of the American justice system is the pain of drug Canadian Literature 177/ Summer2003 addiction responsible for leading so many into jail in the first place: I don't know if anyone would have acted differently had they been in my place. It has been more than ten years since I've used cocaine, but even today, or whenever I think about it, my mouth waters and my palms start to sweat. Somewhere deep in my old brain there must be a memory stored from the first time I did a line and cocaine became my fate, my sweet annihilating angel. But you never understand the nature of the drug—you only understand the nature of the sorrow. As with her past work, Musgrave is careful to frame the darkness of her characters' situations with humour, a humour that is less angry than despairing. This tenuous balance is expressed in a conversation between the main character and her classification officer: '"Do you think you are a good risk to be let back into society?' my classification officer asks. A good risk? Well, I tell her, I won't invade Kosovo." As impossible as it is to read this book without feeling some of that wit and inevitable sorrow, it is equally impossible to keep a distance between the characters' lives and our own. In and out of penitentiaries, on bottomless airplanes stuffed with contraband drugs, inside stolen cars and trucks and stinking hotels with rotting plaster ceilings, Musgrave's characters rise off the page, demanding shock and sympathy. Blanche Howard's new novel Penelope's Way chronicles a year in the life of North Vancouverite Penelope Stevens. Like Musgrave's, Howard's quirky humour is clean and compelling. Her paragraphs languish on the page as if you had all day to read them. Therein lies my only complaint with this novel: thick on description and all those lovely details we have come to love in Howard's writing, Penelope is thin on reality. Although Penelope—a septuagenarian, a scholar of the Meaning of Life, a lover of Rum Baba, an occasional adulteress, and a 169 player of bridge—is memorable, she is so, well, happy. Despite the fact that her son, a Unitarian minister, is seeing auras; despite the fact that her out-of-work librarian daughter is a shipwreck zone for relationships, is raising a son single-handedly, and later, is struck down by illness; despite all of these things and more, there is always the sense that everything will work out fine in the end. Little surprise when everything does. Still, Howard has a knack for description and knows her settings. In the final fifty pages of the novel, Penelope's motives and those of her family surface with a clarity that is a relief to the reader. This uplifting novel in the end is well worth the read, particularly for a brilliant scene involving Brenda, Penelope's daughter, and a pair of skis. Annie Phelan of Helen Humphrey's Afterimage is an Irish maid working in nineteenth-century England. The novel opens with Annie's arrival at a new household belonging to wealthy, unorthodox gentry, both of whom are angst-ridden artists. The triangle formed by these three characters is fascinating, structured around portraits inspired by the work of Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. Humphrey's brings up so many interesting questions about the nature of art, sexuality, power, and relationships, that I was amazed when the novel came to its stunning (and not entirely expected) conclusion. Like Musgrave, Humphreys is careful with her optimism: people in Ireland have been recently displaced by "the hunger," while expeditions to Canada's Arctic have been known to end in cannibalism, lead-induced mania, or frozen boots. Set during a time in history when photography was changing the way things were seen, Afterimage gives us the portrait of three people struggling to come to terms with their own stations. So much of the text is stunning visual reflection that at times we are almost unable to access the characters behind the backdrop. As Eldon Dashell points out: "Isabelle is Canadian Literature 1771 Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w right. The future is the photograph. And a photograph is always a destination. It is not concerned with getting there, but being there." Humphreys exercises her tremendous poetic talent bringing us "there." There are times, however, when we would like to move beyond surfaces. Split Self: Single Nation Sonia Mycak In Search of the Split Subject: Psychoanalysis, Phenomenology, and the Novels of Margaret Atwood. ECW Press $19.95 Margaret Atwood, Victor-Levy Beaulieu Deux Sollicitudes. Éditions Trois-Pistoles n.p. Reviewed by Nathalie Cooke The link between these two books is Margaret Atwood: her novels are the subject of Mycak's critical analysis; and Deux Sollicitudes records interviews between Atwood and Quebec writer Victor-Levy Beaulieu. But whereas one book is about division—specifically in those complex and, Mycak argues, "divided" protagonists who narrate Atwood's novels—the other involves Atwood in a symbolic and historic gesture aimed at overcoming division—on the cultural and national level. Deux Sollicitudes, as its play on "Two Solitudes" suggests, represents a symbolic coming together of Canada's two distinct cultures. The book transcribes an extended discussion—in French—between two of Canada's foremost authors, which took place in their homes in Toronto and Trois-Pistoles in 1995 (the year of the referendum), and aired in twenty segments on Radio-Canada between January and June 1996. Indeed, that Atwood spoke French throughout these discussions is itself a clear gesture on her part towards cultural unity. Further, the book opens with a discussion of common cultural ground—as Atwood talks about her childhood near Temiscaming—and moves towards a frank and amicable 170 acknowledgement of differing opinions about national politics only towards the end of the book. As Doris Dumais says in her preface, "c'est dans une fraternelle complicité qui'ils se raconteront l'un à l'autre." The preface, clearly addressed to a French Canadian reader, provides a brief introduction to Margaret Atwood while assuming a familiarity with Victor-Levy Beaulieu. By the end of the book, however, all readers have had a leisurely introduction to both writers through discussions on such wideranging topics as cultural background, childhood, writing, literature, politics. The Atwood section (when Victor-Levy Beaulieu interviews Atwood) tends to follow her life and career in loosely chronological fashion as the two writers begin to get to know each other; the Beaulieu section (when Atwood interviews Victor-Levy Beaulieu), largely a function of Atwood's interviewing technique and Beaulieu's engaging willingness to speak openly and daringly, moves quickly from a discussion of his personal life to larger discussions about philosophy, literature, life. That his literary interests have led him towards such well-known writers as Balzac, Hugo, Joyce, Kerouac and Melville makes the discussion accessible for those not intimately familiar with Quebec literature. Those same readers might notice typos relating to names of English-language writers (Margaret Lawrence, Moody, Munroe, Beatrix Porter, Seaton, Shelly) and book titles (Proulx's The Shipping Years, for example); but these strike me as technicalities in a book which provides, in interesting and readable form, a wealth of information about both writers as well as a glimpse into their perspective on the cultural contexts of their time. The divided "Atwoodian subject" lies at the heart of Sonia Mycak's critical book. Mycak uses psychoanalysis, phenomenology and poststructuralism (particularly notions of discursivity), not to mention a pretty sophisticated vocabulary (despite Canadian Literature 1/71 Summer 2003 Mycak's glossary of terms, I still found myself needing a dictionary in places), in the service of a surprisingly traditional premise. Working on the assumption that, as she puts it, "character analysis is a perfectly respectable form of literary criticism," Mycak explores the divided, "fractured, disintegrating, alienated, or displaced" protagonists in six of Atwood's nine novels in order to provide close readings of the novels and to investigate and explain the divided self. Period. That is actually where Mycak distinguishes herself from other critics, most of whom do acknowledge the problematically divided protagonists in Atwood's work, but do so in order to make a different point—about the author, her narrative strategies, the reader or reading process, or about the divided self's relevance to the novels' larger feminist, postcolonial or ideological concerns more generally. As if to compensate for the lack of these secondary critical objectives, at the beginning of each chapter Mycak is careful to summarize her argument and to point out how her reading of the novel challenges or goes beyond those of other Atwood critics. The effect is that Mycak proves herself to be very aware of the critical context of her work, and in clear control of her own argument. Mycak is careful to point out that she is not a psychoanalytic theorist per se, but rather that she uses the "nontherapeutic function of the discipline" so as to render more precise her analysis of character. She aims, that is, to describe Atwood's characters rather than to suggest "cures" for them, as many critics have done to date. How often, for example, have we heard that Joan Foster of Lady Oracle should just "get it together"—phrased in more formal critical terms, of course! Of the missing novels: in an appendix, Mycak argues that The Handmaid's Tale and Surfacing are "fundamentally different in form," and would, therefore, be better served by approaches focusing on gender difference and genre; and, because of the 171 timing of publication, no discussion of Alias Grace is included. The latter is particularly unfortunate since Grace Marks is surely one of Atwood's most obviously divided protagonists. But Atwood is hard to keep up with. As it is, Mycak's close reading of The Robber Bride is one of the first commentaries on the novel published in book form. Detailed discussion of Alias Grace is also absent from Deux Sollicitudes, because the discussions were taped as Atwood was in the process of writing the novel and she is superstitious about commenting on a work in progress. Beaulieu, on the other hand, does talk about his various literary projects, but he is such a prolific writer (three books written by Victor Levy Beaulieu were published by Éditions Trois-Pistoles in 1996 alone) that constraints of time and space make detailed commentary on individual works impossible. (One exception occurs when Beaulieu outlines his family's reaction to the partially autobiographical novel, Race de monde.) Both books make a significant contribution to the dialogue surrounding the work of these well known writers. They also remind us that, for Atwood and Beaulieu, the work of writing is ongoing and (happily) so is the dialogue between writers in Canada. Patience & Perseverance & Integrity David Adams Richards Lines on the Water: A Fisherman's Life on the Miramichi. Doubleday Canada $18.95 The Bay of Love and Sorrows. McClelland and Stewart $29.99 Mercy Among the Children. Doubleday Canada 832.95 Reviewed by Gordon Fisher "Patience and Perseverance and Integrity" is the name of a fishing lure used by a fisherman in Lines on the Water: A Fisherman's Life on the Miramichi. It appears in an Canadian Literature 177/ Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w anecdote which illustrates these virtues, not in terms of public acclaim, but as the key to individual dignity and peace in a confused and troubled world. These virtues, along with monumental unfairness, unrelenting torment, and moral uncertainty, are at the heart of David Adams Richards' two novels, The Bay of Love and Sorrows and Mercy among the Children. Lines on the Water: A Fisherman's Life on the Miramichi is a meandering account of the author's fishing experiences. He writes of childhood memories and adult adventures; he describes friends and acquaintances for whom the Miramichi is home. Only rarely does he refer to the "sports," the wealthy outsiders who hire the local people as guides, luxuriate in the catered comfort of their fishing camps, and take their memories home to distant cities. Unlike many fishing writers, Richards does not go into the details of lures (flies), but he does describe the topography of favourite rapids and pools, and the various fishing techniques appropriate to different rivers and fish. His style is anecdotal, not pedantic, and his tone reflects his obvious love for the region and the people who live and work there. Mindful of the knowledge and experience of those people, he is modest about his own successes and unabashed by his failures. Richards won the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction in 1998 for Lines on the Water, but its appeal is not immediately apparent to a non-fisherman. Despite his careful delineation of the distinct features of the rivers that form the Miramichi system, the rivers and pools blur into one after a while. Writing about fishing can often lead to quasi-mystical rhapsodizing about sparkling rivers and dark forests, the farflung sweep of a salmon's life, and the cosmic connection between the fisherman and his prey—concepts that are almost never adequately captured by words on a page— but while Richards does reflect an awareness of these unfathomable mysteries, there 172 isn't much rhapsodizing in Lines on the Water. Instead, Richards puts it all in perspective on the last page, with a touch as light and precise as a fly touching the water above a lurking trout. After he has recounted the anecdote about Patience and Perseverance and Integrity to a longtime fishing companion, his listener responds: "David. Don't let anyone else hear you talking like that. I can take it—because I know you." "Well," I said, finishing my tea, "tomorrow is another day—" Tomorrow is a long time coming for many of the characters in The Bay of Love and Sorrows and Mercy Among the Children. In these novels, the picture postcard view of the Miramichi is darker and clouded by something like an invisible mist, noxious and stifling, that touches almost everyone and every relationship, and dampens all but the most strenuous effort to escape its coils. In The Bay of Love and Sorrows, this invisible mist is a form of moral uncertainty and inertia that holds people back from taking the actions they know to be sensible or right. The first half of the novel is largely occupied by the events of the summer of 1974. Michael Skid, a young man from a wealthy family, alienated by a dispute with an old friend, Tom Donnerel, gets involved with some new friends and a manipulative ex-convict, Everette Huch, who embroils him in a scheme to make money by selling drugs. Imbued with a vague sense of rebellion against his family values and an equally unfocused drift towards excitement and adventure, Michael is unable to recognize or resist the malevolence he encounters as the drug scheme gets more serious. His new friends look to him for leadership, but he fails to give them the help they need to escape the physical abuse and crushing poverty that circumscribes their lives. Tom Donnerel, painfully shy, inarticulate, but with a fierce integrity, cannot bring himself to put the past aside and renew the friend- Canadian Literature 1/71 Summer 2003 ship with Michael when the opportunity arises. He suffers in self-imposed isolation as his girlfriend Karrie is drawn away, in her innocence and romantic optimism.and unknowingly becomes part of the drug scheme herself. Like the proverbial butterfly whose wingbeats in Beijing set in motion a train of atmospheric events that lead to a thunderstorm, a cruel Fate determines that individual actions of the summer give rise to consequences far beyond any reasonable expectations. The first half of the novel culminates with a murder. How individuals and the community as a whole reacts to that murder is the focus of the second half of the novel. The murder leads to the accidental death of a retarded man; further misunderstandings turn the local community against an innocent man. In the face of such hostility, and racked by his own pain, the man refuses to defend himself and is sent to jail. A determined police officer continues to investigate the murder; new evidence comes to light. Guilt begins to haunt those linked to the murder. But there is no dramatic dénouement as in mystery novels where the detective confronts the villain and ties up all the loose ends in a brilliant summary of the case. Bit by bit, the truth is revealed. By the end of the novel, three more people have died, and many lives have been changed in the aftermath. Richards takes the reader deep into the lives of Michael, Tom, and Karrie, revealing their hopes, their fears, and their uncertainties, and their ignorance. The reader learns more about Everette Hutch than Michael and Karrie ever know, and in this case, it is ignorance that is tragic, not self-knowledge. Other characters are treated sympathetically for the most part, and one of the most poignant aspects of the novel is the reader's awareness of the pain that most of the characters feel: their desperation, their suffering, and their awareness of being trapped by poverty—and their pasts. meticulously drafted watercolour, Mercy Among the Children is a large oil on canvas. Winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction in 2000, co-winner of the Giller Prize for Fiction in 2000, and winner of the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year in 2001, Mercy Among the Children is remarkably similar to The Bay of Love and Sorrows, not just in the Miramichi setting, but in a wide range of details. It is almost as if the earlier novel, written in 1998, was a trial run for the later one. Mercy Among the Children spans a longer period of time, from the 1960s to the 1990s, but the action develops as slowly and deliberately as in the earlier novel. From the very start, the central character, Sydney Henderson, is victimized by a cruel and unrelentingly malign Fate that had almost destroyed his father. The narrator, Sydney's son Lyle, describes how wellmeaning actions are taken at exactly the wrong time: events are easily misinterpreted and motives meanly twisted; injustice piles on injustice. A crime is committed, a young man is killed. Sydney Henderson, with good—or defensible—reasons for acting the way he does, is pathologically unwilling to defend himself from charges of murder and the lynch-mob mentality of the local community. His wife and children suffer cruelly as a result. As in The Bay of Love and Sorrows a retarded man is involved in the crucial events. Again, a beautiful, promiscuous young woman plays a prominent role in those events. A university professor is shown to be shallow and unhelpful in The Bay of Love and Sorrows ; in Mercy Among the Children, a university professor, reputed to be a defender of the poor and downtrodden, proves to be arrogantly dismissive when asked for help. The person who is responsible for the death is violent, deceitful, and manipulative. The police officer who appeared in The Bay of Love and Sorrows investigates this murder after everyone else considers the case closed. In Where The Bay of Love and Sorrows is a 173 Canadian Literature 177 / Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w the end, the guilty parties are punished, not so much by the justice system as by their own awareness of what they've done. But along the way, good people die and lives are broken. The parallels are not exact. In Mercy Among the Children, the story has more threads, the cast is larger, and the issues are broader. We learn more about the past history of Sydney and his father, about the people who have maligned and abused him; we get a fuller sense of the economic and social power structures of the community. The relationships between the characters are more convoluted, and many important connections are not revealed until late in the story. An environmental issue—the belated impact of careless use and disposal of toxic herbicides—underlies a large part of the story. The power of the local millowner, the hypocrisy of the local priest, the slyness of a local lawyer all affect the course of events in both predictable and unpredicted ways. In Mercy Among the Children , extreme poverty is the miasma that envelopes protagonists and antagonists alike. Without the sense of self-worth that comes from fulfilling a traditional role of provider for, and protector of, a family, men seem to turn unthinkingly to the only power they have: the ability to hand out physical punishment. Abusive fathers and beaten women and children form the social background of the poorest families. No wonder that their struggle is for self-respect as well as for simple survival. Both novels present a bleak picture of the world. There is little happiness in these novels. For most people, rich and poor alike, happiness is a something small and temporary. Chance and coincidence play a large role, and while random theory would indicate that both good and bad things happen by chance, ill-fate looms much larger than good luck in the lives of most characters. There are not many admirable characters, and only a few are fully devel- 174 oped; we don't know much about why they are strong or loyal or how they remain unswayed by the dark currents of hostility and intolerance that swirl around them. Worst of all, they are not exempt from the vagaries of Fate. For some, tomorrow never comes; for most, their lives continue with little improvement over the past. A better tomorrow is still a long way off. Yet the major strength of both novels is Richards' awareness of the human condition. He knows that people are not perfect; he portrays strength alongside weakness, compassion alongside callousness. Bad things do happen to good people, and there are "good" reasons why some people are "bad." Reading these novels, moved almost to tears by concern for the characters, by the depth of suffering and pain, one wants to cry out "Don't do it!" or "Speak up!" or "Defend yourself!" just as a pantomime audience warns the hero or heroine of the villain's approach. But the poor know that speaking up, while important, is not enough, and in Mercy Among the Children, in particular, Richards presents a moving indictment of the social forces that still make it hard for people to escape the stigma of their pasts and find the dignity that every individual deserves Are patience and perseverance the answer? Although they seem to be positive aspects of several characters in both novels, they also seem to destroy Tom Donnerel and Sydney Henderson, and bring torment to Sydney's family. They also seem to be inherent traits, not ones that can be learned and adopted from the outside world, and they don't serve to change the world, or one's position in it. Or do they? Perhaps that is the question that Richards is addressing in these novels. Readers will have to provide their own answers. Canadian Literature 177 / Summer 2003 Risk-taking Emma Richler Sister Crazy. Knopf Canada $29.95 Jane Finlay-Young From Bruised Fell. Penguin $22.99 Kate Sterns Down There by the Train. Knopf Canada $29.95 Melissa Hardy The Uncharted Heart. Knopf Canada $29.95 Reviewed by Afra Kavanagh All the works in this review are by Canadian women, all excellent writers who take risks and succeed in subverting our expectations, either through their choice of content or viewpoint. Three of the works deal with the challenges of women's developing subjectivity. Two write "being" in new and exciting ways: Sterns surprises us by her Gothic and humourous treatment of love and loss within families, and Hardy depicts the lives of a variety of people whose world was dominated by mud, ice and daily violence in Timmins, Ontario, during the gold rush in the early 1900s. The other two, Richler and FindlayYoung, write memoir-like elegies narrated by daughters to whom family is everything. While it is now conventional in some areas to blame most mental illness on inadequate parenting, new research and personal accounts of depression tell a different story—like Richler's—of an individual who has loving parents and is a connected person but nevertheless suffers from depression or is unable to cope with external pressures. Richler writes about a family that seems to work, and about children who have vast resources. But her narrator, Jemma, is a depressive who is unable to form relationships outside the family. Her great sorrow is that she cannot hold on to the golden years before her older brothers began to break away from the family. She becomes, after leaving home, the knife-wielding "author" of her self-inflicted wounds. She sees herself as a stigmatist, a modern St. Francis of 175 Assissi, and imitates him—he spoke to birds and other creatures and called all things Brother or Sister—by referring to herself as "Sister Crazy." In the final paragraphs, in an unlikely but clever blending of the legend of the Eucharist and the theory of relativity, Jemma offers her body and blood in memory of her family. The novel is an illuminating study of Jemma and her family, and reveals the discord between her and her world and the resulting disjointedness of her character and motives through the discontinuities in her thinking as reflected by the text; episodes or images are connected only through associations that are personal and capricious. But the novel does not clarify, any more than personal experience or a doctor can at this time, why, for example, Jemma's "almost-twin" brother is able to make the transition from home to the wide world, and she is not. The book's real strength is in reproducing for our benefit the solace the protagonist finds in words and images, in books and movies. The richness of meaning they bring into her life sustains her and keeps the reader engaged. Being sustained by the word and by writing things out is also the fate of Missy, the narrator of From Bruised Fell. This novel focuses on the pain and loneliness of Missy, who describes the trauma of being rejected by her mother. This repudiation begins at a place that Missy tells us about in a way that reveals the difference between her mother's sensibility and her own: "Mummy calls this place Bruised Fell because of the colour. I don't like that name; it makes my tummy turn to think I am walking on something hurt, something soft and purple that has fallen." Clearly, her mother relishes the drama of the place while she (Missy) is already becoming a writer, focused on the name and the feelings it evokes. The novel ends with Missy sitting down to write the novel we have just finished reading in which she describes how she and her sister, Ruby, are Canadian Literature IJJ j Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w so affected by their mother's repudiation that they too become dysfunctional, and remain obsessed with her even after they move away to Canada with their father. Missy sees her family's story as the dramatic interplay between her mother's wildness and her father's caution, and between her mother's damaging words and her own silence, self-imposed because of the mother's swift and cruel reactions to her speaking up. She waits and watches, and finally breaks her silence at the suggestion of her analyst as a way to deal with the pain she feels as she watches the anorectic Ruby shrivel. Missy uses the powerful images of wind and rain to describe her mother's abandon, seeing it and depicting it as force of nature. She sees her mother as the major influence on her and Ruby, even as she is inscribing the potent role of character and choice in personal development—evident in the differences between her and Ruby and between the mother and her own sister. Even though Findlay-Young uses a traditional linear narrative to depict mental illness and other problems of growing up female, she takes the risk of entrusting the story to a ten-year-old narrator. The risk pays off. From Bruised Fell succeeds because of Missy's voice and her wrenching account of a child's fears and desire for "normalcy." Down there by the Train, the last of the novels in this group, is disappointing because it does not balance sufficiently the elements of comedy and romance. But Kate Sterns is a first-rate wordsmith, and this, her second novel, is full of clever dialogue and dazzling images. The novel begins well enough with Levon Hawke out on parole after two years in prison for an unlikely break-and-entry. He heads out across a frozen lake to the island where he will work at his cousin Simon's bakery, and meets the heart-sick Obdulia, whose mother committed suicide ten years earlier. That first night is rendered as a wonderful dreamscape, but Levon's falling in love with Obdulia, as strangely 176 handled as it is, is the last "normal" event in this narrative; after this, the action is dominated by characters and schemes that more rightfully belong in a script for the Addams Family television show. Because Sterns may have intended to satirize certain practices and therapies, we can forgive the obtrusive narrator and innumerable word-plays (some of which recall adolescent movie humour). What we can't forgive is her inability to make us care about these eccentric characters whose current preoccupation is to prepare a life-size dough replica of Obdulia's dead mother that she would then eat, thus incorporating the mom and getting over her grief. The last work in this list, Melissa Hardy's The Uncharted Heart, is a collection of short stories. These read like tall tales and do not, like traditional short stories, focus on a single "subject" or event. Instead, they focus on encounters between local characters and, for example, Natives, Chinese or manifestations of the supernatural. The title story describes a man who leaves the city to escape the repressive society he grew up in and to seek a place that is both vast and private. He finds this in the form of an uncharted lake and a mysterious Native woman and keeps both secret. "Paper Son" tells the story of the remorselessness and cultural arrogance of a Chinese house boy who causes the opium addiction and death of his Canadian employer's wife. Hardy's stories are realistic in detail despite a "magical" element. They are also rich in insight and give us a sense of the author communicating "the mysterious and difficult truth of things," but with wit and humour. Canadian Literature \jy I Summer 2003 Encounters: Literatures in English Robert L. Ross Colonial and Postcolonial Fiction: An Anthology. Garland Publishing Inc. $75.00 Reviewed by Stella Algoo-Baksh In his controversial and provocative essay, '"Commonwealth Literature' Does not Exist," Salman Rushdie claims that: if all literatures could be studied together, a shape would emerge which would truly reflect the new shape of the language of the world, and we could see that English literature has never been in better shape, because the world language now possesses a world literature, which is proliferating in every conceivable direction. The selection of postcolonial works contained in Colonial and Postcolonial Fiction: An Anthology demonstrates the profound wisdom of Rushdie's assertion. The book contains thirty-five selections from major postcolonial writers, among them V.S. Naipaul, Margaret Laurence, Peter Carey, J.M. Coetzee, R.K. Narayan, Chinua Achebe, Doris Lessing, and Margaret Atwood, and foregrounds indigenous and settler cultures while drawing upon works from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is divided into four sections, each focusing on a specific kind of encounter. The first section, "Colonial Encounters" investigates themes such as personal isolation, cruelty, fortitude and tenacity. The second "Postcolonial Encounters," centres on issues such as dislocation, relocation, violence and victory, while the third, "Immigrant-Encounters," explores the vicissitudes or joys of immigration and the divesting of the past. The final section, "Personal Encounters," highlights experiences in specific countries such as Australia and India which "at the same time are ordinary occurrences within boundaries." The book also offers a highly informative gen- 177 eral introduction, while each selection from the authors represented is preceded by pithy bio-critical information. The general introduction examines a number of significant issues. One of these concerns the use of English in the literature of countries where the language was foisted on the colonised and could therefore be perceived as marginalising or even erasing local culture, history and language. The introduction explores the argument of many postcolonial writers who defend their use of English as a visible means of reaching an international readership. Also broached is the question of configurations of the English language, its metamorphosis in numerous countries where it is not the mother-tongue but where it has been "adapted, revised, colored, twisted, accented, disfigured, augmented, and reworked" by "non-literary and literary users around the world." It is noted also that even in countries such as Australia, Canada and South Africa where English is the mother-tongue of the major groups, the language has been affected by the indigenous languages and is reflected in such elements as its dialect, slang and syntax. Colonial and Postcolonial Fiction eschews "theoretical bases or biases, the kind of linguistic political, cultural, gender or territorial matters that occupy postcolonial theorists." Its aim, the editor asserts, is to offer "the best that has been thought and said" of "writing from the colonial and postcolonial period." As he notes, however, selection is always a thorny issue since it is dependent on a specific individual's choice. As such, this collection may not meet the approval of many readers or academics. Nevertheless, it is a valuable text for the lay reader, the undergraduate in colonial and postcolonial, Cultural Studies and literature in general. Ross provides a sampling of the wealth of international literature in English. In accomplishing this task, he opens up new Canadian Literature îjy I Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w territory for the uninitiated and makes accessible, in Rushdie's words, "new angles at which to enter reality." This anthology, furthermore, illustrates Rushdie's point that "the English language ceased to be the sole possession of the English some time ago." The "rough beasts" have actually slouched into Bethlehem. Technology in the Wilderness Wade Rowland Spirit of the Web: The Age of Information from Telegraph to Internet. Key Porter $26.95 Reviewed by Christopher Keep A group of adventurers making their way through the densely wooded terrain of Northern British Columbia in 1872 stumbled into a wide clearing near the Nacharcole River. There, to their collective amazement, stretched a line of telegraph poles proceeding for a few miles to the north, great coils of cable hanging limply from outstretched arms. Hundreds of miles from the nearest city, unlinked to the main communications lines, and now somehow strangely abandoned, as if remnants of some ancient telegraphing civilization, the sight evoked an understandable awe and wonder. "A telegraph in the wilderness!" exclaimed one of the travellers. "What could it mean?" This curious episode in the history of communications technology is one of several such telling and engaging anecdotes in Spirit of the Web. The telegraph in the wilderness, it turns out, was part of a little remembered attempt to connect North America to Europe by running a cable from San Francisco, up through the BC interior, across the Bering Straits, and then from Siberia to St. Petersburg. The project was bankrolled by Western Union, and construction began in 1865. Large sections of 178 the line had been completed in the remote regions of both Canada and Siberia when news came that Cyrus W. Field's fifth attempt to lay a trans-atlantic telegraph cable between Britain and North America had finally succeeded and, in the process, rendered the much more hazardous and costly land route useless. Western Union recalled its engineers, and left the completed portions to be slowly reclaimed by the forest, but the episode provides a telling critique of the very book in which it is included. For Rowland, the ill-fated venture is but a momentary misstep in the grand march of human progress. The "spirit" of his title refers not so much to the communications technologies, from the alphabet to the internet, whose stories form this narrative, but to humanity's "innate" need to communicate, and the way in which this essentially egalitarian and liberating force has informed the information revolution. The analogue technologies of the industrial age, such as the telegraph, radio, and television, Rowland argues, were "top down" in structure, that is, owned by governments or large corporations that controlled the nature of the information that passed through their networks; digital technologies, and in particular the personal computer, are "bottom up" devices: they place the means of production in the hands of the individual user, thus subverting the hierarchical organization of society preserved by the analogue devices. Where radio and tv were unilateral, allowing only one message to be transmitted from a central authority, the internet is bilateral, allowing information users to be producers also, to become in effect their own content. The Information Age, Rowland concludes, "holds the promise of a truer, more authentic political and economic democracy, not only by providing the tools to make the sought-after ideal a functioning reality, but by stimulating a social structure within which it is not just desirable in the abstract, Canadian Literature IJJ I Summer 2003 but a practical necessity." Such unabashed optimism is refreshing given the technodoomsaying of Sven Birkerts, Neil Postman and others, who have seen the rise of network society as the end of literacy, democracy, and the humanist ideals that have guided society in the past. Rowland sets out his argument in a clear and lucid fashion that shows a real talent not only for explaining the scientific intricacies of the technologies—one comes away from the book with a good sense of how a semiconductor actually works—but for drawing out the larger conceptual and philosophical ramifications of such innovations. To this end, Rowland provides a useful introduction for the lay person of the historical development of communications technologies, sketching colourful glimpses into the stories of the inventions and their inventors, from Samuel Morse and the telegraph to Marc Andressen and the web browser. But the book is much weaker when it moves away from the history of ideas and ventures into the terrain of cultural and political analysis. The way in which the telegraph helped consolidate the project of empire in the nineteenth century, or the relationship between the campaigns for female emancipation and the role of women workers in the telephone industry, go largely unexplored as the book strives to show how communication technologies represent a return to "our roots as a literate people, roots that reach back nearly two millennia." Rowland cites Marshall McLuhan to back up such claims, but not entirely accurately: electric media were not, for McLuhan, a means of returning us to the democratic forms of society characterized by Ancient Greece and the alphabet, but to an even earlier point in our historical development, the preliterate "tribal man" whose fundamental orality stands in marked distinction to the culture of the eye that followed: the development of the computer marked not the consolidation of the 179 humanist subject, but its dissolution. Which brings us back to the telegraph line discovered in the woods of British Columbia. Evincing a particular fondness for evolutionary theory and analogies, Rowland gives us the history of communications technologies as a progressive and teleological process whereby those forms and devices that are best adapted to the needs of the individual gradually triumph over those which are not: the telephone supersedes the telegraph, and the personal computer succeeds the mainframe in a kind of technological version of the "survival of the fittest." Such a neat and orderly progression, however, is largely an effect of Rowland's own master narrative, of the manner in which he has constructed his argument such that the analogue "naturally" gives way to the digital. The connection between Charles Babbage, the nineteenth-century inventor of the "Difference Engine," a mechanical device for the calculation of navigational tables, and the designers of the ENIAC computer, a connection which Rowland follows many other recent writers in affirming, is spurious at best. Babbage was not, in any simple sense, the "father" of the computer; the electronic engineers who worked on the early circuitry were in fact largely unaware of Babbage's failed plans and certainly did not understand their work as a development of his efforts. Indeed, it is just as possible to argue, as Maurice Wilkes has done, that Babbage did more to delay the advent of the computer than to usher it in. Such attempts as Rowland's to construct a clear line of succession from the telegraph to the internet, tell us more about our desire to accommodate the strange and the new within our assumptive world, to ground historical change within familiar (and familial) patterns of cause and effect, than they do about the cultural specificity and meaning of these devices. The glass insulators that are still used for tea mugs in Canadian Literature 177 / Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w Siberian farmhouses, like the suspension bridge that the First Nations people in B.C. built from the telegraph poles left behind by the Western Union construction crews, are the archaeological evidence of the impossibility of any single master narrative to accommodate the complex and uncertain nature of technological development at its interface with culture. The Continuing Story Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Hillman Waterston, eds. The Selected Journals ofL.M. Montgomery, Volume Four, 1929-1935. Oxford UP $36.95 Reviewed by Cecily Devereux The Selected Journals ofL.M. Montgomery currently number four volumes: the first presents selections from the years between 1889, when Montgomery was fifteen years old, and 1910; volumes two and three represent the years from 1910 to 1921, and 1921 to 1929; the fourth volume, published in 1998, covers 1929 to 1935. (The fifth volume will take readers to her death in 1942.) These journals, the handwritten originals of which are held at the McLaughlin Library, University of Guelph, are extraordinary documents, not only in terms of the information they provide about living, writing, and being a woman in English Canada in the first half of the twentieth century, but also because they have radically complicated our understanding of Montgomery. They have revealed a figure who was profoundly unhappy for much of her life; who struggled with her desires as they conflicted with her sense of social hierarchies; whose commitment to Presbyterianism was intense, even dogmatic, at the same time as her ideas of God and prayer showed a strong opposition to dogma and organized religion; who was intensely ambitious; whose massive international appeal was hardly ever a factor in her relations with 180 family and community; who was mobbed by adoring fans, appeared to take both criticism and international popularity in stride, but obsessively revisited the petty slights she had suffered at the hands of neighbours and family; who was endlessly generous in her support of family members in need; who often demonstrated a need to control the circumstances of her life and her family, and felt a frustration at not being able to do so. The book is sometimes depressing reading, as there is so little joy in these years for Montgomery, but it is also, like the three preceding selections, compelling. In volume four, Montgomery is often deeply unhappy. (One of the most moving aspects of the journals is their account of Ewan Macdonald's depression, the urgency with which Montgomery struggles to hide the signs of his episodes of despair and her own fear and exhaustion, and the failure of social and medical systems to support him.) But Montgomery dramatizes her unhappiness. Her journal, clearly, was for her a place to organize and make sense of things in her life by constructing them as story, connecting events, and by situating occurrences and people in relation to herself as the story's heroine. In this volume, however, there is none of the coyness of the early years; here, readers are given an image of Montgomery as a figure whose life is "one of torment." "After all," she writes in 1934, "spring must come even in my tortured life . . . " Montgomery always intended her journals to be published: she was constructing an image of herself for the reader of the journals, even, indeed, editing and rewriting the journals as she traces and reorganizes the account of her life. In the years represented by volume four, Montgomery is producing work at her regular pace: between 1929 and 1935) she published Magic for Marigold (1929), A Tangled Web (1931), Pat of Silver Bush (1933), and Mistress Pat (1935). She also contributed to a collection of biographical Canadian Literature IJJ I Summer 200} essays, Courageous Women (1934). The writing of books, however, is hardly mentioned. While it is not unusual for Montgomery to be reticent about her fiction (she generally did not say much in her journals about her writing, other than to note the completion of a work, or to note payment or cumulative earnings), it does seem that by the early thirties writing has become more of a struggle. "I could not write last night," she notes on 20 October 1934. "For a long time now I have noticed this." Volume four shows the same scrupulous attention to detail and accuracy that has characterized the editing of all of the preceding volumes. The editors have provided relevant and necessary information without disrupting the text. Supplementary material is included in chronologically organized notes that are easy to read. The Introduction is, as always, generous, instructive, and clear. It may be a poignant indication of Montgomery's difficulties during these years that Volume four has, as Rubio and Waterston note, "comparatively less material omitted . . . than . . . the earlier volumes." No Free Lunches Sarah Sceats Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women's Fiction. Cambridge UP $86.95 Reviewed by Nicholas Travers Food is at the centre of our lives, and in ways many of us have rarely considered. This book shows that cannibalism, starvation and sex (among other issues) are as significant to a discussion of food as, say, table manners. Sceats also demonstrates that food can be a key to explicating fiction. Bringing together women writers of foodsaturated fiction, this text is essential reading for students of food, but also for readers of Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Dorris Lessing, Michèle Roberts and Alice Thomas Ellis. 181 However, Food, Consumption and the Body lacks a unifying argument. An attempt to sum up the text leaves us with the underwhelming thesis that the above writers are all, indeed, food-obsessed. Neither the text as a whole nor its chapters push toward conclusions or generalizations. Chapters rarely achieve critical syntheses. Perhaps the scope is at fault: attempting to cover food and what it entails, attempting to include the novels of five authors, and to do so from a multitude of critical perpectives is asking a lot of two hundred pages. That said, the reader is still likely to marvel at Sceats' range as a scholar. The author seeks "to mirror the contradictory, integrative and associative functions of eating itself." Sceats is at her best extending her discussion away from the novels to consider the wider implications of food in our society. In chapter one, for example, the author sketches the connections between food and sex. Metaphorically the two are inextricable, and psychoanalytically, sexual desire finds its earliest object in the original source of food, the mother's breast. Indeed, Sceats suggests that food and sex are pleasures of equal psychic importance—that perhaps we don't think of sex in terms of food any more than we think of food in terms of sex. Sceats' discussion of cannibalism is also remarkable. In chapter three the author proposes that eating is an attempt to control the threat of the outside world—literally, by ingesting and incorporating what is beyond us. Through her analysis of Carter's fiction we are urged to reconsider cannibalism as much less extreme as is commonly assumed: from babies seeking to absorb mother at the breast to metaphorical ideas of incorporating what is outside us, cannibalism hovers much closer to the commonplace than we might expect. Food provides women's bodies with empowerment or subjugation. Chapter three discusses starvation and the destructive Canadian Literature 1771 Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w ideal of thinness. By contrast, the fat woman in Carter and Atwood is a thriving embodiment of appetites, both sexual and gastronomic. Hailing Mary Diane Schoemperlen Our Lady of the Lost and Found. HarperCollins $32.00 Reviewed by Michelle Hartley Diane Schoemperlen's novel begins with an engaging premise: what would happen if the Virgin Mary, in need of a much-deserved rest, landed on the doorstep of your average citizen? Schoemperlen follows this premise down its logical paths: well, she'd want a shower, and some space, and maybe a trip to the mall. The difficulty with the novel, and why I think the book ultimately fails, relates directly to this quotation from Schoemperlen in an interview with Studies in Canadian Literature (1996): "It seems to me in retrospect that the most important thing about a novel is that you must have a story to tell, and the fact that it's longer than a short story is really what makes it different." A novel is more than a long short story. Short stories can rely on an interesting premise and an innovative form; novels require character development and the novelist's ability to make the reader care what happens enough to finish it. Here is where Our Lady of the Lost and Found comes up short. The initial idea would have made an intriguing short story—especially the section where the middle-aged narrator and the middleaged Mary head to the Mall, a section which allows Schoemperlen to use her talent for gentle satire towards Canadian society, and provide the Virgin with some good quips—but it cannot withstand the extended treatment of a novel. The structure of the novel, with its oneword thematic chapter headings such as "Facts," "Time," and the repeated presence 182 of "History" (a chapter heading for eight chapters), demonstrates the author's central concern with the relationship between history and fiction. She cites Merilyn Simonds' article in Brick, "Liars and Damned Liars" (1997), as solidifying her own interest in "the fiction/ non-fiction continuum" and "the question as to when they took the story out of History.1' A compelling subject and question for any writer. However, Schoemperlen seems to allow her enthusiasm for non-fiction to overrun her story in this novel. There is a tension between the author's obvious fascination with her Marian research and her fiction writing. Perhaps her attachment to her sources did not allow enough scope for creativity; perhaps she did not take enough time to adapt her research to her purposes. The details of daily life that authors like Carol Shields invest with meaning are here often presented solely as minor details, sometimes generating a disquisition on luck, calendars and history, sometimes not. There are some times when history and fiction marry quite nicely, as in the cleverly imagined scene when Mary warns the author/narrator of the consequences of letting the world know of her presence. Historically, those who have had visitations have led desperately uncomfortable lives afterward—or they died young. "Divine wrath?" the narrator suggests, as one consequence; however, Mary responds (with one of the novel's truly humourous moments of dialogue): If you break this promise, divine wrath will be the least of your problems. . . . Divine wrath will not even be necessary. If people find out that I have been here, that I have talked to you, eaten with you, and slept in your house, they will descend upon you in droves. They will make a plague of locusts look like a minor inconvenience. She took a deep breath and her voice became that of a fire-and-brimstone Canadian Literature 177/ Summer 2003 preacher hectoring his flock. Clearly, this was nothing like the casual conversation she had made over lunch. The understated humour works in this passage, as, to give Schoemperlen her due, it does at numerous moments in the novel; it is unfortunate that they are overshadowed by superfluous details that are meant to prove the normalcy of her narrator and deflating the reader's assumptions that with the divine comes the exciting. Lovers of lists and facts will love this novel for the breadth and variety of knowledge the author supplies (Schoemperlen's narrator points out that we can divide the world "between those who make lists and those who do not"). Schoemperlen's fascination with history leads her to provide the minutiae of character, including the classical allusions inherent in Mary's running shoes: "Most people who wear this brand do not know that Nike was the goddess of victory and constant companion of Zeus. She was one of a family of abstractions who were the offspring of the Titan Pallas and the goddess of the River Styx. Nike's brothers were Cratus (Strength), Zelus (Emulation), and Bia (Violence). Whether or not Mary knew the genesis of their name, the backs of her runners were broken and the left lace was knotted and frayed." Those who are not lovers of the details of the quotidian will want to steer clear of this promising yet disappointing novel. 183 A Safari with a Difference Robert Sedlack The African Safari Papers. Doubleday Canada $32-95 Reviewed by Evelyn Cobley Readers expecting a travelogue or serious treatment of Africa may well be disappointed by this darkly comic fictional journal narrated by Richard, a highly neurotic teenager accompanying his parents on the family trip of a lifetime to Africa. The setting for an exploration into the dynamics of a dysfunctional group is well chosen: a safari affords family members no escape from each other. What makes this setting even more claustrophobic is the father's decision to pay for a private safari. There are no other tourists to mediate the relationship between the three characters; there is only their mysterious Kenyan guide, Gabriel. Sliding between Western and African ways of communicating with the family (he has studied medicine in London), Gabriel interferes in the family wars and complicates matters. In less exotic settings, it is possible to defuse a tension-filled situation by going out to meet other people; On a safari, any thought of taking a walk is immediately checked by the realization that one could be killed and eaten by a lion, a crocodile, even a hyena. Since the focus of the novel is elsewhere, the treatment of Africa is disappointingly cursory, with the author making little attempt to present a general portrait of Kenya or its people. Comments on "the native Africans, who continued to stare with hatred," or on the "thrill" of experiencing the country and its animals tend to remain superficial. But the author seems to have some first-hand knowledge of the typical safari experience. The background to the family drama is evoked with a good eye to the reactions any tourist might have to both the joys and discomforts felt Canadian Literature 1771 Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w when one is a visitor in a land belonging to wild animals. Although Richard's objections to mass tourism, to the "overweight, pasty, white mediocrity circling the lions and snapping and pointing and giggling and gasping and burping," are fully justified, his criticism is rarely relieved by a more positive appreciation of animals. His encounters with animals are always about his reactions: watching a lion kill a zebra, he is nauseated; swimming across a river, he is scared of hyenas. His most authentic African moment comes when he is being stared at by a lion and realizes that he is being regarded as food. Yet the portrayal of the fluctuating and ultimately deteriorating relationships between the drug-addicted and sex-crazed son, the depressed and increasingly suicidal mother, and the alcoholic and frustrated father makes The African Safari Papers a novel well worth reading. Using a selfincriminating narrator, the author is able to play on many registers of comedy, irony, and sadly human folly. Written in the brash style of a Generation Xer, the journal is focalized through a consciousness whose self-image is often at odds with the image others reflect back to him. The "frustrating dynamic"—"When mom is down, dad is up. When mom is up, dad is down"—is observed with painful accuracy. Richard himself alternates between hating his parents and feeling sorry for them. Most of all, though, he is self-absorbed, selfish, and occasionally sadistic. Seeking answers to his problems, he interprets the world around him to suit a self-image which the reader recognizes as delusional. Although Richard believes that everybody around him has serious problems, others indicate that it is he who is "messed up," is in "crisis," and needs "help." Far from being innocently blind to his own faults, Richard is at times a most self-conscious character. His self-awareness ranges from subtle hints to outright self-interpretations. In one case, Richard laughs "too 184 hard and too long, a mad, nervous laugh" when asked by Gabriel "Do you think you might be crazy like your mother?" More explicitly, he tends to analyze himself, castigating himself for being "such a baby," "a puking wimp" or "a fucking redneck," for being "concerned for me" rather than for his mother, and for being "so damn selfish." Most of all, he sees himself a "a loser," a "total and complete failure" who has "opinions on everything." In fact, the author has a tendency to editorialize too much; he can never quite stop himself from explaining what would better be left for the reader to figure out. However, much of the pleasure in reading this novel stems both from the narrator's selfincrimination and from the ambiguity created by his unreliability. Not only is his view of others often undercut by how own problems, but he creates many highly embarrassing situations for himself as when he interprets the most innocent gestures and words by women as a sexual come-on or when he imagines that his mother must at some point have molested him. Written with energy and acerbic wit, the novel asks us to sympathize with a character who appeals to us through his selfloathing vulnerability while also repelling us through his callous selfishness. In many ways a highly entertaining novel, The African Safari Papers is at the same time a painfully astute depiction of a troubled teenager and his equally troubled parents. Notions of Love Cordelia Strube The Barking Dog. Thomas Allen $34.95 Dorothy Speak The Wife Tree. Random House $32.95 Reviewed by Susan Wasserman In The Barking Dog, Cordelia Strube's fifth novel, narrator Greer Pentland offers a familiar but nonetheless shocking vision Canadian Literature 177/Summer2003 of contemporary apocalypse. Think Heart of Darkness meets The Silent Spring. A catalogue of human failings and offences punctuates Greer's harrowing account of personal adversity. Divorced from a philandering louse, the single parent of a deeply troubled teenage son, she awakes one day to find her world hideously altered by an aggressive cancer and her son's murder of an elderly couple. Sam bludgeoned his victims with a shovel, an act apparently committed while sleep-walking. Strube draws us into the narrator's physical suffering and her agonizing need to understand how someone she knows intimately and loves unconditionally could be capable of the foulest of crimes. With Sam's transgression—as senseless and motiveless as the violent media stories that fill her with dread—the corrupt world is no longer out there. Throughout, Greer faces her ordeals without self-pity and wields an endearing irreverence for just about everything. Salvaging what she can from her damaged sense of self—her feelings of worth lessness stemming from her disfiguring mastectomy and ebbing strength, her failed marriage, and her guilt for having worked instead of being an at-home mom—she tries desperately to mend her fractured relationship with her son. Devoted as she is to him, Greer struggles to believe in his innocence: "He pulls away from me. . . . I find myself praying even though there is no God. Please . .. make him not evil." Through her exchanges of gloom-anddoom stories—gleaned from daily papers and televised evening news—with her equally socially conscious and outraged 88year-old aunt Sybil, we are taken deep into the slag-heap of the unregenerate: the tragedy of our environmental poisoning, the tyranny of media images, and the assorted atrocities that we commit daily against one another. Greer worries about garbage build-up, carcinogens, and mer- 185 cury rain. She rails against sensationalized news as entertainment, the justice system as a three-ring circus, and the self-absorption and amorality of those around her. In this world, pregnant women shoot their unborn babies and mothers torture their offspring: "A three-year-old girl was raped, beaten, sexually abused with a 'blunt instrument,' whipped with chains and a cat-o'-ninetails, shackled while her feet were burned— all by her mother and her current beau." Embedded in the novel's brutal imagery (and Sybil's insistence that the personal is political) is a cautionary, if somewhat heavy-handed, warning: confront social ills; avoid dangerous passivity; take care of one another. If not, we won't survive. Greer strives to do her part—for example, caring for the deranged daughter of the murdered couple—but ultimately reaches a saturation point, surrendering to her impotence to change the status quo, including her genetic fate. And fasten your seatbelts for the ending—which I won't give away. If I have a complaint, it's that the final segments are overly dramatic, even manipulative. Even so, this is a fascinating read. Strube stuns us with her sharp images and draws us in with her protagonist's heartbreaking and heroic struggle. If The Barking Dog has a placeless, postmillennial feel to it, The Wife Tree, Dorothy Speak's first novel, revels in its Canadian specificity—from the strong evocation of Ontario seasons and prairie landscape to the rich, southern Ontario Gothic style. At seventy-five, "old and crumbling," Morgan Hazzard is reviewing her life—a painful retrospective reminiscent of Margaret Laurence's Hagar Shipley, but without Hagar's irascibility and contempt. Morgan escorts us though a ten-month period in present time, with sweeping flashbacks forming a large part of the narrative, conjuring her grandparents' and parents' rough lives and her own oppressive youth. The book is full of the domestic drama that Canadian Literature 1771 Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w has filled her life: an illegitimate baby, a daughter's suicide, incest, betrayal, abuse, forgiveness, and hopeful beginnings. The diary format evokes another Canadian classic character: the stalwart Mrs. Bentley in Sinclair Ross's As For Me and My House. Mrs. Bentley and Morgan— at least Speak's character is allowed a first name!—share similar trials: loveless marriages, extreme feelings of inadequacy, knowledge of their husbands' infidelity and of their own potential for betrayal. But, in the end, Morgan finds a freedom far less qualified than her predecessor's. Morgan's slow metamorphosis occurs inversely to her husband's slow death. William has suffered a stroke, and is starving himself in the hospital, having lost any will to go on. His paralysis has destroyed his ability to speak. Silenced all her married life by her domineering, emotionally brittle mate, Morgan now articulates her life like someone who has saved herself from drowning. She writes, at first cautiously, then prolifically, intimately, passionately. Like The Barking Dog, The Wife Tree is about the difficulties of motherhood. Morgan's diary entries are often letters to her "girls," her adult daughters who are "scattered all over the globe." She has never had the courage to send these letters, because, she says, they contain too much of the painful past and because she is intimidated by her "worldly-wise" offspring. They mock her—taking their cue from William—making her feel stupid, old-fashioned, and guilty for her failures as a mother. Looking at Morris, the only one of her six living children to remain in the area, she realizes how damaged he is, how "imperfectly" she loved him. And she hasn't inspired enough love and homing-instinct in her daughters to seduce them to visit her or even keep in touch. Both Greer and Morgan had bad mothers, a handicap that Greer overcomes but that haunts Morgan. Greer's attachment to her son gives her the strength to live, whereas 186 Morgan withdraws from her children because they diminish her: '"In recent years .. . my children have made me feel. .. quite insignificant. There's no way to be a good parent.... And eventually there comes a time when it's wise to stop loving your children.'" Similarly, she recognizes the wisdom in shedding a sense of responsibility to her marriage along with the notion of herself as a defective wife, an impression planted in their wedding bed when William declares, "'There's a coldness to you, Morgan. It freezes a man's balls.'" Her emotional separation is boosted by the revelation of William's decades-long affair: "What a relief it is to unburden oneself of the notion of love." This is not loss or surrender, but reclamation and reconstruction. Through dismantling the past, Morgan moulds herself out of the reconfigured pieces. She blossoms physically, too, overcoming nearblindness and relishing in her new muscularity, a result of her daily treks to the hospital. Having survived a tough and unexpected rebirth, she acknowledges her contentment: "The freedom to follow a path of my choosing, to set my own pace brings me deep satisfaction. I see the orange light [of sunset] shining along my limbs like a reviving fire and somehow feel I'm being brought back to life." Languaged Memory Rosemary Sullivan The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out. HarperFlamingo $32.00 Dawn Thompson Writing A Poltics of Reception: Memory, Holography and Women Writers in Canada. U Toronto P $35.00 Reviewed by Rosmarin Heidenreich After her stunning biographies of the tragedy-ridden lives of writers Elizabeth Smart and Gwendolyn McEwen, in The Red Shoes Rosemary Sullivan seeks to identify Canadian Literature lyj I Summer 2003 the circumstances that have made Margaret Atwood a phenomenally successful writer, a veritable cultural icon, who has nevertheless been able to lead a happy, harmonious family life in a household complete with "major appliances," a term used by Atwood to express her subversion of the romantic stereotype of an artist's life. This stereotype is subsumed in the title: The Red Shoes, a 1940s film based on a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, is about a dancer who has to choose between art and love. She ends up choosing her art, which costs her her life. Margaret Atwood saw the film as a child, and never forgot its message. As in her previous biographies, Sullivan makes no attempt to disguise the fact that she is very much in sympathy with her subject. In the case of Atwood, who has been variously described as a Medusa, an intimidating ice-queen, and a man-hating feminist, Sullivan's marshalling of facts and anecdotes attesting to Atwood's personal warmth, generosity and commitment to people as well as causes sets the record straight. Sullivan is equally clear-eyed in her discussion of the critical reception of Atwood's work: she quotes positive and negative reviews fairly, presenting a balanced overview of how the works were seen when they first appeared. The one exception to this is Atwood's critical book, Survival, where Sullivan, adopting Atwood's position, seems to disqualify the criticisms leveled at it as personal attacks. With its strictly thematic approach, Survival, given that it was published at a time when postmodernism was at its height, was seen by many writers as well as critics as simplistic, reductive and unacceptably selective. Established authors whose works did not corroborate, or, indeed, contradicted Atwood's thesis were quite simply excluded. Although the facts of Margaret Atwood's biography, both personal and literary, are familiar enough to serious readers of Canadian literature, Sullivan's book con- 187 tains descriptions of encounters and anecdotes that are not only delightfully gossipy but also highly illuminating: the reactions of the two Margarets (Atwood and Laurence), whose reputations mutually intimidated the two writers, on first crossing paths in the washroom after receiving Governor-General's Awards (for poetry and fiction respectively); Timothy Findley's moving depiction of Atwood's first visit, with Graeme Gibson, to Stone Orchard, his farm in southern Ontario; the account of Atwood's and first husband Jim Polk's bizarre wedding ceremony. What Sullivan has also done, in this meticulously researched and documented book, is to frame the biographical narrative with perceptive, quasi-sociological vignettes of the Zeitgeist that characterized Canadian life from the 1940s to the 1970s. Her sidebars on the cultural life of Toronto through these crucial decades, besides being informative in themselves, reveal Atwood's role in the various subcultures that grew up around institutions such as the Anansi Press and the Writer's Union. In her introduction, Rosemary Sullivan describes her book on Margaret Atwood as a "non-biography" written from "the middle distance," whose intention in examining Atwood's life is to shed light on the transformation of the role of women writers from muse to confident writer. Pointing to the number of successful female writers of Atwood's generation, she remarks that "[T]hese women have irrevocably changed the iconography that attaches to both the male and the female artist." Sullivan makes a strong case that Margaret Atwood has played a unique, but also paradigmatic, role in transforming women writers' understanding of the relationship between life and art. Dawn Thompson's book examines works of five Canadian women writers using the principle of the holograph to describe the constant changes in perception generated by the production and reception of literary texts. Canadian Literature 1771 Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w The virtuality of memory is crucial in applying this holographic principle. Alluding to her epigraphs, in which she cites Foucault and Derrida, Thompson defines memory as a construct, a sort of work-in-progress, that can be rewritten, repositioning its various elements, becoming a vehicle for changing reality and hence a political strategy. Holography is an intriguing and productive concept to apply to literary texts, particularly postmodern ones: in holography there is no horizon, no fixed point of view, thus theoretically obliterating the "horizon of expectation" usually seen to be central to the interaction between text and reader. However, Thompson focuses less on the phenomenological implications of holographic memory in writing and reading literary texts than on its emancipatory potential. This political focus is reflected in the works she analyzes, all with strong autobiographical features, written by lesbian, black, Métis and French-Jewish-Canadian women authors respectively (Nicole Brossard, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Beatrice Culleton, Régine Robin). Margaret Atwood is represented with Surfacing, on the grounds that it "employs experimentation with language and memory to point towards a Utopian integration of women into their environment." The holographic approach Thompson proposes is suggestive and original. It is therefore regrettable that she does not present a full and systematic overview of her theoretical apparatus at the outset. Instead, to augment her brief introductory chapter, she has inserted lengthy theoretical discussions at various points in each of the chapters dealing with the works themselves, which disrupts her readings of the texts and at times threatens to bury them. It also results in some repetition. Thompson draws on quantum physics and neurobiology as well as a great variety of literary theories, making liberal use of the disparate 188 discourses derived from them in each of her applications. This occasionally results in a blurring of the intended focus and in prose that is sometimes ponderous. At only a little over 100 pages, this volume is simply not substantial enough to sustain the multiple theoretical premises that it seeks to accommodate. Inside the House Leona Theis Sightlines. Coteau Books $16.95 Cynthia Holz Semi Detached. Key Porter Books $22.95 Julia Gaunce Rocket Science. Pedlar Press $21.95 Reviewed by Sara Crangle Sightlines is set in Flat Hill, a small Saskatchewan town named after the gentle, crestless slope on which it is situated. The landscape of the stories contained within this volume is as ostensibly unremarkable, shaped and weathered as it is by the upheavals of domesticity: the gullies left in walls from thrown rolling pins, the tunnels dug in the earth by the burial of children's toys, dogs, artifacts, sons. The book is populated by familiar figures: dutiful daughters with the "mundane burden" of being good girls, school bullies named Ox, local alcoholics. The strength of the book comes from its cohesion: it is small-town fiction in which each story and each character intertwines, sometimes unexpectedly, with the others. Theis's "Marking Time" traces Stephen Parker's early adolescence, replete with ill mother, vacuous father, frivolous younger sister and a bedroom without a door. Lured more by boredom than a keening for mischief, Stephen begins to spend time with town roughs Ox and Shiner; on Canada Day Ox suggests a dip in the local water tower from which Stephen, a hopeless swimmer, never emerges. The story briefly Canadian Literature ÏJ? i Summer 2003 skips a beat, then returns to the chronicling of time, circling back to the previous June, and Stephen's preoccupation with a model T-bird kit, his determination to check his impatience as he "[glues] the bits together." "Edges," which follows "Marking Time," depicts Stephen's sister Frances, now an adult, captivated by the need for '"some small calamity from time to time, some real or imagined fear" so as not to'"run out of reasons for just getting through one day after another."' Thus the need to punctuate dogged time is passed on through the siblings. The only difference is that Frances, at her father's insistence, has become an accomplished swimmer. The lack of direction shared by Stephen and Frances echoes throughout the stories. In "Wheels," Old Stumpy, who lost his feet to frostbite when he spent a drunken and unconscious winter's night outside, now sits in his wheelchair and regularly oils and tunes the watch that belonged to his dead wife, whom he neglected when she was chronically ill. Evelyn, Stumpy's daughter, moves to Regina to avoid the shot-gun wedding endured by most Flat Hill girls, but finds she belongs nowhere. The circularity of the stories becomes a kind of honing in: the book opens with Kate, a child playing with matches and aimlessly doodling, and ends with her also, an adult victimized by arson, a frustrated artist in Saskatoon, journeying to Flat Hill just to get out of the city. In "Memorable Acts," the final story, and the only one written in first person, both the artist Kate, and the writer Theis, close in on Flat Hill; Kate observes that its landmarks and population "are nothing more and nothing less than places from which to begin." "Pick one" Kate tells herself, and Theis does, weaving the life of each chosen character into the next. The inertia and domestic strife that flicker through Sightlines also define Cynthia Holz's Semi Detached, which explores the marital experiment of Barbara and Elliot 189 Rifkin. After thirty-three years together, Barbara and Elliot divide their family home into two apartments in order to experience living alone. Both eagerly anticipate solitude and relief from the scrutiny of the other; Barbara is especially bogged down by the domestic drudgery she feels Elliot takes for granted. Minor irritants aside, the primary reason for their creation of shared but separate accommodation, is, as Barbara realizes, their need for "a new way of speaking," something to overcome the tonguetiedness engendered by old age and entrenched habits. This decision marks the major divergence from routine offered by Semi Detached. But in spite of their agreed-upon change in living arrangements, neither Barbara nor Elliot seems to find the language necessary to articulate their new-found selves and needs. From the outset, they neglect to discuss their sexual desires, and this, by omission, becomes the crux of the problems of their new life: how to remain intimate, but apart? In the absence of discussion, Barbara cultivates a hopeless infatuation with a younger man, and Elliot moves in with his cooking instructor, whom he desires largely for her ability to replicate the domestic comforts missing from his life without Barbara. Barbara resolutely accepts first, their lack of sex, and then, Elliot's departure. The couple lives apart as they lived together: resigned to their own, and their partner's, inadequacies. Holz does not intend for inertia to dominate Semi Detached, and deliberately includes elements meant to signify how each half of this couple is positively changed by their marital experiment. Elliot, who has never mastered the domestic arts and has a bad temper, learns to cook a few dishes and to control his body and mind with Tai Chi; Barbara, whose life has been defined by the rearing of children and teaching high school art, spends hours in her basement, working rigorously at a Canadian Literature 1771 Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w potter's wheel—by the end, she has a public show of her pottery, at which her artistry is recognized. And Barbara travels by herself, thereby indulging in a desire that Elliot, who dislikes travel, rarely accommodated. It is while Barbara ruminates over a photograph taken of her by a stranger on a rainy day in New York that Holz's prose excels: "the camera had caught her shy and openmouthed, like an infant astonished by her unaccountable hunger . .. [she was] shiny and wet, sliding into the arms of the world." Elliot's flawless nighttime performance of the 108 movements of Tai Chi Chuan outside Barbara's window is a similarly lovely moment. But these moments are rare. More common are incidents and phrases that betray their heavy-handed construction, as when Elliot, departing their family home to live with his new girlfriend, pounds on Barbara's door while she sits watching a talk-show on jilted women and violent men. Or bald statements like Barbara's observation that the man who lives upstairs "was wearing tight jeans and his ass made a round silhouette." Similarly, Elliot's eventual epiphany about his enduring love for Barbara is muddied by his realization that "[h]is girlfriend required more elaborate pleasures than his wife". Ultimately, this is a novel powered by inertia, as further evidenced by the sub-plots involving Barbara and Elliot's children, and their disastrous relationships that perpetuate the unceasing flow of unconscious human habit. By contrast, Rocket Science is a dynamic and complex rendering of character and family. Mr. and Mrs. Wicker (so called throughout the novel), their daughter Vicki, and Mr. Wicker's mother Peach, live in an apartment building in which Mr. Wicker is a custodian obsessed with duties such as "the trapping and collecting of lint pelts." Mr. Wicker is a self-described "mountain of love" whose vulnerability is stressed in moments such as his tentative 190 purchase of a chisel at the local hardware store, when he "takes his wallet in his mouth like a kitten, fumbles in his pockets for a coupon." His violence and objectification of women seep slowly through the text, culminating in the revelatory passage in which he "thinks tenderly" of the night he brutally squeezed Mrs. Wicker's head "as though [it] were a pumpkin or a pillow, trying to make her stop blinking or to stop staring, he can't remember which." At this moment we understand not only Mrs. Wicker's general malaise, her avoidance of home, and her burgeoning attraction for fellow tenant Mrs. Beele, but also Vicki's desperate categorization of the world around her, which she calls her work. Vicki is attempting to exert a pseudo-scientific order over her fragmented, disordered family life: to understand "freaks of nature" like the night Mrs. Wicker went through the plate glass window of the lobby while Mr. Wicker stood behind her. What draws the novel together is the synecdochic thread of "team spirit," a sporting metaphor that represents each character's relationship to their community. At the dentist's office, Mr. Wicker does not mind having his teeth scraped because he wants "Dr. Shaw to know they are on the same team"; Mrs. Wicker attends a neighbour's garage sale "to show a little team spirit"; and at a pleasurable evening at a karaoke bar, Mr. Beele observes that "[t]here is a lot of team spirit in the air." So ubiquitous is this phrase that when the Beeles are described as lacking team spirit, the statement functions as an alarm; Vicki, especially, is fascinated by their son Tony's shunning of team play. And indeed, it is the Beeles, particularly Mrs. Beele, who shatter the tacit functionality of the Wicker's world, driving a wedge through the gaping cracks of Wicker family life. Mrs. Beele is, as Vicki suspects she will become, "a very special instance of the freak occurrence who may turn out to be a persistent problem." Canadian Literature IJJ / Summer 2003 In Rocket Science the family is constructed as a team within a team. The ties that bind prove elastic, are snipped, and rebound. There is momentum towards change that is scarcely contained by Gaunce's tightly coiled sentences, and her juxtaposition of seemingly disparate observations that become, as the novel progresses, as cohesive as they are contemplative. Her writing is taut and snappy; she is as sparse, in her way, as Leona Theis is in hers, but Gaunce's writing is loaded where Theis's is gentle. It is this punchiness, this aversion to the inertia that marks Semi Detached, that makes Rocket Science such a fabulous read. Critical Allegories Cecelia Tichi Embodiment of a Nation: Human Form in American Places. Harvard UP $64.95 Reviewed by Lothar Hônnighausen Some time ago, a colleague of mine had an argument with her students about the usefulness of studying "old-fashioned" literary forms such as allegory, emblems, and etymologizing metaphors. She explained to them that while these devices did indeed flourish in medieval and Renaissance culture, their use in recent times is also quite widespread. Embodiment of a Nation illustrates how, in the wake of Heidegger's and Derrida's etymologizing wordplay and Irigaray's and Kolodny's metaphorizing gender studies, a mode of scholarly discourse has established itself in which allegorizing, emblematizing and etymologizing serve as major cognitive devices and expository strategies. Although this form of academic writing has become so fashionable that today few doctoral dissertations are without its vestiges, scholars do not seem to have reflected much on its methodological assumptions and implications. Cecelia Tichi's book, dealing with major issues of contemporary 191 cultural criticism, gives ample occasion to observe the advantages as well as the shortcomings of these new allegorizing culture studies. In contrast to previous literary criticism that used causal relationships as a central cognitive metaphor—without acknowledging its metaphoric character— Tichi employs a dominant interpretive metaphor, "embodying /embodiment," that since Annette Kolodny's The Lay of the Land (1975) has been frequently engaged as a critical tool. The popularity of this metaphor is revealing since it reflects the sociocultural Freudianism, emancipatory pretensions, and didactic preoccupation with allegoresis in the cultural criticism of our time. Tichi's originality lies in her dexterous, often ingenious, and sometimes mannered variations on the metaphoric theme of "embodying / embodiment." In her study of embodiments of American culture, she has assembled a system of six cardinal landscape images arranged in a binary, or more precisely, in antagonistic fashion. The concept of "Nature's nation" (Perry Miller) serves her as a kind of epistemic reference point. In part one, "Crania Americana", Tichi opposes the presidential heads at Mt. Rushmore (South Dakota) with Thoreau's Walden Pond; in part two, "Frontier Incarnations", she arranges, in contrapuntal order, the geyser Old Faithful in Yellowstone Park alongside the moon-motif (the moon of NASA as well as the female moon of myth), and in part three, she contrasts the health-giving waters of Hot Springs and the polluted waters of Love Canal. This arrangement of three symmetrical blocks is enhanced by an evolving linear structure running through the whole book, from the negative male image of Mt. Rushmore to the apogee of environmental pollution, Love Canal. At the same time, there is a contrapuntal movement, identified as positive and female, "flowing" from Walden Pond to Hot Springs and the redemption of Canadian Literature 177 / Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w Love Canal through the environmentalist Lois Gibbs. The whole structure is based on a system of ideological oppositions (male=bad= imperialism=economic exploitation of people and resources=pollution vs. female=good=healingpower=ecological responsibility) that are as predictable as those in Edmund Spenser's allegorical epic The Fairie Queene. Readers whose appreciation of a clear-cut world picture is greater than their sense of humour will occasionally be disconcerted by the juggling Tichi has to do to keep the statics of her doll's house under control. But few will quarrel with her when she explodes the ideology behind Gutzon Borglum's monumental sculptures as "de-facing" nature and "the sacred land of the Oglala Sioux" or when she expresses her admiration for "Lois Gibbs as an effective environmental activist in the pollution scandal of Love Canal." However, I for one do not only appreciate the essayistic charm of the allegorical reading and writing of Tichi and others, but also feel a strong temptation to parody their schematisms and ingenious mannerisms. Following Marge Piercy in The Moon Is Always Female, Tichi insists that "The cultural debate converges only on one point: that the moon is always female." One could add further evidence such as the Endymion motif and the iconography of the madonna cult, but one should perhaps remind Tichi that in some languages and literatures the moon is masculine. Although she presents ample evidence of the moon as new frontier incarnation in the context of space travel, she is not overgenerous with her literary examples. Her study of the moon in Norman Mailer's American Dream is thorough and perceptive, but this novel today appears strangely thin and dated; Paul Auster's The Moon Palace (1989) would certainly have been closer to today's sensibility. If Tichi's Embodiment of a Nation seems sometimes a bit mannered, it is neverthe- 192 less a rich and relevant book, offering an enlightened overview of major phenomena of American culture. The Tartan Connection Elizabeth Waterston Rapt in Plaid: Canadian Literature and Scottish Tradition. U of Toronto P $45.00 Reviewed by Sharon Alker Rapt in Plaid combines an extensive literary analysis of the Scottish influence on Canadian writing with a memoir of Elizabeth Waterston's personal experience as a graduate student, professor, researcher and editor within the field of Canadian Studies as it developed from the 1940s. The result is a refreshing and engaging work, a good read for both academics and the general book lover. The substantial range of Canadian and Scottish works Waterston compares is impressive. Familiar texts are re-contextualized. Marginalized works and genres are unearthed and shown to be important links to understanding how Canadian literature has embraced and transformed Scottish forms, themes and sentiments. Examples include the work of James Barrie, whose "Kailyard" novels have been harshly treated by Scottish critics, and the work of Catherine Sinclair, a Victorian Scot whose fiction has been bypassed by twentieth-century readers and critics. The book is divided into four parts, each with introductory and conclusive material that generally blends personal memoir with a critical context for the chapters in that section. The chapters trace the influence of specific Scottish writers on their Canadian counterparts. The first section explores various ways in which Canadian poets, such as Robert Service, Pauline Johnson and Isabella Valancy Crawford, adapt the poetic forms, dialect and themes of Robert Burns and Walter Scott. Shifting genres, Waterston then considers the response of Canadian Literature 177 / Summer 2003 Canadian fiction to Scott's novels, covering work by authors from John Richardson to Timothy Findley. The second section traces the influence of two distinct modes of discourse on Canadian writing. Writers from Susanna Moodie to Carol Shields are seen as inheritors of the pragmatic realism and episodic structure of John Gait. The tumultuous rhetoric and explicit symbols of Thomas Carlyle, in contrast, have also influenced writers such as Northrop Frye and Margaret Laurence. The third section foregrounds marginal genres. Connections are drawn between the children's poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson and that of Dennis Lee; James Barrie's novels and the writings of his long-time fan, L.M. Montgomery; and John Buchan's violent thrillers and the novels of David Walker and Hugh MacLennan. The final section compares the work of Scottish women writers to that of Canadians such as Margaret Murray Robertson and Sara Jeanette Duncan. Scottish women's literature is a relatively new area of scholarship, made accessible only recently by A History of Scottish Women's Writing, edited by Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan. Waterston effectively uses this material, not only to shed light on Canadian literary tendencies, but also to counter the commonplace claim that there was no worthy Scottish literature between Scott and Stevenson. It would have been easy, in a book of this nature, to simply identify areas of intersection in form, narrative patterns and general themes. However, Waterston's methodology is not trans-historical. She traces the complex blend of historical forces and national influences that shape Scottish works and the factors that contribute to their transformation in Canada. At times, the sheer range of literary material she covers makes it difficult to engage in extensive historical analysis. She makes a number of tantalizing references to a geo-political comparison between Scotland and Canada, suggesting 193 both northern nations were uneasy with their overbearing southern neighbours, a contrast that would have been fascinating to explore further. Waterston is also aware of the dangers of her decision to "focus attention on a single, imported strand in the national fabric," as she notes in the preface. Yet, the strong and complex understanding of this Scottish strand that she provides can only contribute to our overall comprehension of the heterogeneity of Canadian literature. An Epistolary Tandem Richard B. Wright Clara Callan. HarperF/ammgoCanada $32.00 Reviewed by Marta Dvorak Following Ondaatje's feat to become the second author to win both the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Award for fiction in the same year, Richard B. Wright has been a cult figure in certain circles since the early 1970s when he published his first novel The Weekend Man. His ninth book, Clara Callan, blending the modes of the journal and the epistolary novel, has generated appeal with its portrayal of early twentieth-century small town life. Rather like Bonnie Burnard in A Good House, Wright sets out to construct the chronicle of a society through the family history of two sisters—the elder, Clara, remaining a schoolteacher in small town Ontario, the younger, Nora, moving to New York to become an actress in a popular radio serial. Organised in sections headed by year reminiscent of Burnard and Shields, the author concentrates on the decade of the thirties, and leaps ahead to the end of the twentieth century only in the afterword. The choice of decade and the Canada/ USA epistolary tandem allow Wright to trace the landmarks of North American social evolution against the backdrop of a larger international stage. Geopolitical events from the Canadian Literature 177 / Summer 2003 B o o k s in R e v i e w Depression to the ascendance of Hitler and Mussolini are blended with local events or the advent of new technologies. Certain writers can weave fictional events into such a historical backdrop effortlessly, but with Wright the effect is contrived yet obvious. The afterword with its fast forward into the future (the readerly present) ostensibly to provide a veneer of veracity, with its casual mentions of McCarthyism, the Vietnam War and so forth, adds no depth or texture, and ends on a pat twist which caters to the tenor of the times. The novel relies on the stereotype, both social—practically all the protagonists are stock characters—and linguistic. Clichés abound, and the narrative patterns are simplistic and predictable. The motifs structuring the novel are quickly identifiable, and just as quickly become mechanical. They include Clara's struggle to keep the old-fashioned coal furnace going, her attempts to write poetry, her sudden loss of faith, the obsession with the man who raped her, and the heavyhanded parallel made between the "real" lives of the two sisters and the (inverted) fictional lives of the sisters in "A House on Chestnut Street," the radio serial that Nora stars in. Nora's radio commercials interweave with Clara's struggles to write, thus foregrounding the Americanization of Nora, and an axiological gap that, as in a crude fable, goes beyond the individual protagonists and synecdochically evokes the Canada/ USA dichotomy. Clara buys Keats's letters, Boswell's Life of Johnson, and Heine's poetry, while Nora buys the novel all New York is reading: Gone with the Wind. compound sentences containing multiple verb phrases with attempts at the slapdash sentence fragments we write when the text is for our own eyes only, as if eliding the first-person subject in a sentence that is nonetheless properly punctuated and capitalized suffices to produce an effect of improvisatory orality. The desired oral register is rarely attained by a language that remains wooden—from precious questions ("what is transpiring these days in that metropolitan life of yours?") and stilted confidences ("So in my heart I fear there will be war with them one day") to the mechanical use of the rhetorical question and exclamation ("What pleasure we took in each other! Don't you agree? Please tell me that you were as happy as I was in that cabin last Saturday?") Happily, Wright does make one voice ring true—that of Evelyn, the cynical script-writer churning out her hackneyed stories. Certain meditative passages are remarkably fine: a schoolteacher's confrontation of the medieval and the modern mind through two quotations from Dante and Pascal, for instance, strikingly calls attention to the power of vision as well as to the ephemerality of our world view. Thankfully, we readers encounter now and again contemplative phrases of an arresting beauty: along with the protagonist travelling over the depths of the sea, we are allowed to glimpse beneath the surface "the abyss that awaits the careless or unfortunate." The collusion of different sub-genres is clumsy, the different forms of life-writing overlapping redundantly: Clara inexplicably retells in letters what she has already recounted in her diary, offering no new angle of vision or fresh representation to speak of. The simulated diary style is awkward and spurious: Wright mixes stilted 194 Canadian Literature 1771 Summer 2003