Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve.
Carol Shields
Republic of Love
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Thanks so much for dropping by! If it’s your first time here, you might want to browse the tabs above to get to know me a little. And you might appreciate knowing, right away, that I am spoiler-phobic, so my bookchat tends to be filled with quotes and observations that are general enough to offer a taste of a book without interfering with you enjoying it for a meal yourself (comments with spoilers — and they’ll be mild, arguably not even spoilers — will be marked in advance).
This summer I am still Buried in Print, but I’m only promising to chat about it three times a week. And many of the regular features are on holidays too (short stories, poetry, memoirs and magazines), but I’ll also be adding some classics and some non-fiction into my reading mix for a change. On Fridays I’ll have something to say about bookish books, and when I’m not bookchatting, I might be dallying in the children’s sections of local library branches to re-discover old favourites and scope out some new ones, so there will be regular talk of kidlit too, but July and August are all about planning to not plan every minute of my reading for a change!
It’s nice to meet you: I hope you’ll say hello and come back again!
 Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude
Translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim 1976
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990
I’d never heard of this book until I read Gina Ochsner’s The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight (2009).
There is a link on her website, to an interview, in which she says “my favourite book of all time is Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude. If you’ve not yet read it, you must stop reading everything else and – right now, as in this very moment – run out and find a copy”.
And, well, not much gets my reader’s blood pumping like that kind of enthusiasm for a specific book.
So that’s how I was introduced to Bohumil Hrabal, via his translator, Michael Henry Helm, although it seems that I should have heard of him before (here’s his wikipedia page, but I’m glad that I visited it after I finished reading this novel and not before).
Too Loud a Solitude is one of those slim books, like last Friday’s Fences in Breathing. But, unlike some of these deceptively demanding skinny novels, I felt an immediate connection with Hanta, what with his love of words and books and all that’s contained within.
“My education has been so unwitting I can’t quite tell which of my thoughts come from me and which from my books, but that’s how I’ve stayed attuned to myself and the world around me for the past thirty-five years. Because when I read, I don’t really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or a sip it like a liquer until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.”
Isn’t this just one of those beautiful sentences that you want to pop into your mouth and suck like a fruit drop?
“If a book has anything to say, it burns with a quiet laugh, because any book worth its salt points up and out of itself.”
You know exactly what he means, right? But Hanta’s job is not to revere books, but to crush them. He works as a paper crusher, surrounded by books but required to destroy them.
“But just as a beautiful fish will occasionally sparkle in the waters of a polluted river that runs through a stretch of factories, so in the flow of old paper the spine of a rare book will occasionally shine forth, and if for a moment I look sway, dazzled, I always turn back in time to rescue it, and after wiping it off on my apron, opening it wide, and breathing in its print, I glue my eyes to the text and read out the first sentence like a Homeric prophecy; then I place it carefully among my other splendid finds in a small crate…”
Although, as you can see, he manages to rescue a few. At first I took all of this at face value, and I just loved the bookishness of it all, and Hanta’s determination and spiritedness.
But about a third of the way through the novel, I started to get that niggle that I get when I realize that what a book seemed to be about isn’t only about that. You know the niggle? The one where you start to think that the farm animals aren’t really farm animals after all?
And just as those farm animals had something to say about Stalinism and Communism and Capitalism, Hanta has something else to say as well.
You can see it in his reactions to his tour of the Socialist waste paper compacting station: “But it was the gloves that got my goat: I always worked with my bare hands, I loved the feel of the paper in my fingers, but nobody here had the slightest desire to experience the palpable charm of wastepaper….”
I’m not going to say that you just stop reading everything else and run out and get a copy of Too Loud a Solitude. Gina Ochsner has already told you (and me) that. But I will say that I’m grateful she said so: it’s well worth the time, and I’m certain I’d've missed it without her encouragement. Er, insistence.
Anyone else taken an author’s reading recommendation(s) lately?
 Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore (2005)
Random House, 2008
Sometime in early May I picked up a copy of Peter Temple’s Truth at the library; it was on my hold shelf with a few other books. <cough> (It doesn’t really matter for the purposes of this story that you know how many, only that I was able to recognize my reasons for having asked for each of the others. Not that I would be ashamed by the quantity of books that I often have waiting for me on hold. No, definitely not.)
But I could not remember why I had asked for Truth; I studied the cover, read the blurb, checked the piece of paper that marked it to make sure it was, in fact, my number on it, and brought it home. It turns out that it had been the only title that had been nominated for the 2010 Miles Franklin Literary Award that our public library system had available, so I had put the shortlist out of my mind and didn’t even recognize Peter Temple’s name by the time it arrived for me.
Which is why I also didn’t realize that Truth followed The Broken Shore, so by the time I had a closer look at Truth, I had to put in another request for The Broken Shore, because of course I am compulsive about reading books in their “proper order”. And, by that time, many more people would have taken note of Peter Temple’s name, because Truth won the 2010 Miles Franklin Award.
So I read The Broken Shore in just a few days because suddenly there was a queue of eager readers behind me for an Australian mystery from 2005. Here’s what the Miles Franklin site says about this year’s winner: “Temple’s winning novel is the much anticipated sequel to The Broken Shore and comprehends murder, corruption, family, friends, honour, honesty, deceit, love, betrayal – and truth. A stunning story about contemporary Australian life, Truth is written with great moral sophistication.”
The same themes are present in The Broken Shore, although the main character of Truth plays a relatively minor role in The Broken Shore, but perhaps the theme of restoration is more prominent. Joe Cashin is trying to get his feet back underneath him, having had some devastating experiences in his work as a policeman. In some ways, the world around him has become foreign and unfamiliar and, in other ways, the events he sees playing out around him are all too recognizable and damaging.
Even the title is rooted in death: “It was called the Broken Shore, that piece of the coast.”
They went to see it for the first time when he was six or seven, everyone had to see the Kettle and the Dangar Steps. Even standing well back from the crumbling edge of the keyhole, the scene scared him, the huge sea, the grey-green water skeined with foam, sliding, falling, surging, full of little peaks and breaks, hollows and rolls, the sense of unimaginable power beneath the surface, terrible forces that could lift you up and suck you down and spin you and you would breathe in icy salt water, swallow it, choke, the power of the surge would push you through the gap in the cliff and then it would slam you against the pocked walls in the Kettle, slam you and slam you until your clothes were threads and you were just tenderised meat.
Readers who choose their mysteries for pacing and plot primarily would likely be frustrated by the time that Temple affords character development and setting, but those are two elements of the novel that contributed most significantly to my enjoyment of it.
Temple’s prose is imbued with his thematic concerns. “Weakness, smoking. Life was weakness, strength was the exception. Their smoke hung in sheets, golden where it caught the sun.” Very little is actually said about what Cashin has endured, but he is preoccupied by the possibility of restoring a semblance of what his life was once like, by the ways in which his strength has been compromised, by his need to define strength differently now.
The language in The Broken Shore is not fancy, but it is evocative: “At the last crossroads, two ravens pecking at vermilion sludge turned on him the judgemental eyes of old men in a beaten pub.”
This is evident here as well (see, I’m not just randomly including the single passage about a library, I’m eyeing his simile):
“The street was quiet, sunlight on the pale stone of the library. It had been the Mechanics’ Institute when it opened in the year carved above the door: 1864. Three elderly women were going up the steps, in single file, left hands on the metal balustrade. He could see their delicate ankles. Old people were like racehorses — too much depending on too little, the bloodline the critical factor.”
I had to return Truth before I got around to reading it, but I would definitely read another of Peter Temple’s mysteries; it was unexpectedly satisfying. If you’re still not sure whether you’re keen to try his work yourself, this interview might help you decide.
 David Treuer’s Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual
Graywolf Press, 2006
I can tell you exactly, what the name of the first book that I read from Graywolf Press: Georgia Savage’s The House Tibet (1991). What I recall now, nearly twenty years later, is simply that The House Tibet stood out for me. And, when I discovered Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out Of Carolina and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, I thought they would make good companion reads for Georgia Savage’s novel.
That’s pretty much it; I have a terrible reader’s memory, so the details and even the story are lost to me now, but the Wolf stood out — though I only remember one of them on the spine of the book — and the small moving pack on their website is just as memorable for those discovering their publishing house in the digital age.
So when the Spotlight Series Tour of Graywolf Press was announced, I didn’t need to think twice. The House Tibet was one of the first books that I recognized as coming from a small press, an independent voice that had something stand-out to offer, in a reading world theretofore dominated by rearing horses, penguins, puffins and pairs of significant initials. Since then, I’ve read many of their offerings, with a particular penchant for their works on creative writing and bookishness and because I’ve been considering reading Louise Erdrich’s interconnected novels, I gravitated towards David Treuer’s Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual for this tour.
Treuer’s premise is simple. He believes that “The Indians people imagine, and the Indians that are created on the page, are much more active, much more present, than the Indians in life. The result is a very loud silence. Ours is a ghostly presence.”
And because this is true, we must remember that “most readers come to Native literature fully loaded with ideas, images, and notions, and that the process of interpretation needs to take this into account.”
He asks: “How does one escape this all-pervading thing, exoticized foreknowledge?”
This foreknowledge, Treuer believes fundamentally impacts the way in which works with Native characters are received by readers.
He considers many well known works (like Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, James Welch’s Fool’s Crow, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Cermony, Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree, and Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Road) and challenges many of the commonly held beliefs about these works.
For instance, Erdrich’s writing is often said to mirror native culture and embody those cultural attitudes about storytelling, but when he actually considers the techniques that she uses in her fiction, they are techniques used by writers who have no native heritage, by writers like Faulkner and Garcia-Marquez. She is simply telling a good story.
“To try and read the book through culture or as culture is to miss the chance to interpret and understand what is wonderful and vital about the novel,” he says. And, although at times Treuer sounds critical, more often than not, he is highly complimentary of these works of literature.
Even about Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree, which was exposed as a fake in 1991 (it was originally published in 1976 as an autobiographical memoir). “To ignore the links that Little Tree has with other Indian novels (and as a piece of writing, and this was the point of the essay, it is as Indian as any other Indian novel) is to weaken our novels and our criticism.”
If we ignore a book like Little Tree, he says, “we are committing the sin of not treating literature as literature. We are, in effect, saying that writing doesn’t matter.”
I just finished reading this Graywolf Press book over the weekend, so I’m still thinking about this; I’m not sure that I agree. What I am sure of is that Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual is the kind of book about reading that I truly appreciate. Treuer presents his thesis clearly and consistently, his passion for literature and books and storytelling is obvious, and I enjoy quietly debating where and how I agree (and don’t) with his ideas.
Because one of the few things better than actually reading a good book is reading a good book about reading good books. You got that, right?
Is this the kind of user’s manual you would read? What other books would you like to see a user’s manual for?
 Nicole Brossard’s Fences in Breathing,
Translated from the French (2007),
Susanne de Lotbiniere-Harwood
Coach House Books, 2009
Today’s bookish book was an easy choice because I had chosen Nicole Brossard as one of the writers whose feminist writing I wanted to explore for this year’s Women Unbound Reading Challenge and her most recent novel was translated into English last year and I’d been looking for an excuse to spend some time with it.
Susanne de Lotbiniere-Harwood’s translation allowed me to read about Anne’s work as she “begins to write a novel in a language that is not hers, a language that makes meaning foreign and keeps her alert to the world and its fiery horizon”. But it didn’t help me make sense of the story, which isn’t the usual sort, with a beginning-middle-and-end, but the sort that begs for a discussion afterwards. And not a lazy discussion about bookishness on a summer afternoon on a porch-sit, but a fast-paced debate about meaning and literary construction in an air-conditioned study room in an academic setting.
This slim novel is one of those books that you think will be a delightful diversion for a couple of hours but which you discover takes you ten times longer to read than the baggy Victorian monster that you’ve had kicking around the bedside table for ages, longer still than the collection of essays on that ever-so-significant subject that you are convinced will make you a “Better Person” if you ever actually finish reading them.
It really isn’t the kind of book that I should have chosen to read on a summer afternoon; I’m sure I would have enjoyed it more if I’d approached it as a group (when I read her Mauve Desert a few years ago, I loved it, but I think a good part of the enjoyment was rooted in the discussion our book group had about it), and if I’d been reading it in the context of her work (perhaps alongside some of her poetry, which has been so highly acclaimed).
But, even so, Fences in Breathing is a provocative book and the idea of Anne’s invented language is fascinating indeed. “In my language, the words piano and writing are homonyms, and their definitions, nobody knows why, intersect, with a single exception for the zones of silence inherent to one and the other.”
For readers who are also readers, Anne’s character and musings would likely be of particular interest. “I must look after my solitude. Be able to count on it to astonish me, to plot and to go on with this madness for speaking even as I abandon my own language. In all languages, the writer’s solitude feeds the little pleasures and great frights of infinite nights.”
 And for readers who are keenly interested in the feminine voice, Fences in Breathing will be especially rewarding.
“Each sentence had her own inner tense and I wanted to settle into it to get a sense of its colour. I had also noticed that, though they had the same number of syllables, one of them took longer to utter. Three syllables did not always equal three syllables. Therein lay a clue that, in each language, time could be stretched or it could contract to make it easier to decipher the cumbersome monotony of dailiness and the tenacious enigma of passions.”
You can see why I think her work a good choice for the Women Unbound Reading Challenge.
“At the other end of the bridge, while listening to the wind, I felt the verb to dive station itself sideways across words and I thought about women’s caresses, their hands, the softness of their cheeks, about the slightly crazy heat that rushes to the head and transforms how we see.”
Words and definitions, language and syntax, interactions and intersections: such is the stuff of Nicole Brossard’s novel.
“I could imagine the sentences but I could no longer see myself writing them. In any case, it was impossible to grab them out of the air in full flight or slow them down enough to grasp their meaning or their scope.”
And, yet, I can’t slow her sentences down enough to grasp their meaning or their scope. For a reader with a more scholarly bent, or for a playful reader in the mood to philosophize, Nicole Brossard’s novel has much to offer.
Anyone else over-reached with their reading ambitions recently?
 Maureen Jennings’ Except the Dying
St. Martin’s Press, 1997
M&S, 2004
Remember when I said that I’d be reading mysteries and classics this summer? Well, I’m doing a great job of reading those mysteries.
The classics are definitely taking a backseat. It’s been hot; we’ve been busy (bike-riding, playing games, learning to do paper maché, skipping, and, yes, visiting libraries); I’ve been reading the books with the most gripping plots.
I bought Maureen Jennings’ first Murdoch mystery when it came out in paperback.
It was a little while ago, in Reading Intention Years. You know, they’re longer than regular years. The opposite of the Dog Year phenomenon. Whereby a dog who’s 10 years old in human years is actually 70 years old.
A single Reading Intention Year is the equivalent of seven regular years. So even if it was 1998 when I bought Except the Dying, that’s really only a couple of years, at the outside.
At least, it certainly doesn’t seem as though I’ve been thinking about reading Maureen Jennings‘ Murdoch series for more than a decade in actual years. But, in fact, it has taken me that many years to make Murdoch’s acquaintance.
Nonetheless, I’m fairly certain that I’ll be reading the next book in the series much more quickly. Not only would it fit under the umbrella of what Walter Mosley calls “literary quality”, but it’s a compelling story too. (And, as a bonus for me, it’s Toronto-soaked, albeit a Victorian Toronto, which both is, and is not, the city that I know and love.)
It would also make for an entertaining yet informative addition to those who are reading for the Women Unbound Reading Challenge because it considers the opportunities (and lack thereof) available to women in Victorian times, those in both upper and lower classes. This reminded me, in some ways, of the Anne Perry mysteries I read in my 20s, but I enjoyed this debut Victorian mystery even more than Thomas and Charlotte’s debut in The Cater Street Hangman (1979).
“Because, miss, the body of a female person has been found in the laneway. Practically in your back garden, as you might say.”
He paused for their reaction, but there was none. No expression of any kind, except stillness. They reminded him of two cats who’d come into the yard of his lodging house last winter.
These cats Murdoch is thinking of are the kind who bite and growl and scratch when he tried to befriend them, and the women to whom he’s speaking have had a hard life too: their claws are sharp and at-the-ready. He is sensitive enough to recognize that their actions are rooted in self-defense, and to afford them respect nonetheless, although not so foolish as to fall into the traps they set for him either.
Murdoch is not only a credible character, but a likeable one as well. Well, providing you’re not threatened by his abilities and his pursuit of justice.
His superior is troubled by Murdoch’s determination, which urges him to consider the roles played by every single person who came into contact with the young woman who dies at the beginning of the novel, including members of the upper classes. Murdoch is clever enough to recognize the boundaries and restrictions that accompany his own class and position but he relentlessly pursues the truth within those limitations.
“For God’s sake, Murdoch, you’re snatching at straws. According to you nobody is telling the truth about anything,” Inspector Brackenreid declares. But Murdoch keeps digging.
Except the Dying held my interest even when the temperature was in the high 30s and the girls were making a ruckus; if I was rating books by jungle leaves, as the girls are doing when they’re not ruckus-ing and are quietly reading instead, I’d be giving this one five leaves for sure.
Have you read a good mystery lately? Have you found something to distract you from the extreme temperatures outside (be they extremely hot or cold)?
PS I’m also counting this as my “X” for Titles for the A-to-Z Reading Challenge…X’s are tough, as you might have guessed!
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