A Little Treat

Here is a complete story by Richard Ford who writes about men and women and their relationships and their flaws and the whole damned human drama in terms I recognize -he engages me.

Sedaris is coming to Toronto

I've marked June 29th on my calendar.

The Dive From Clausen's Pier

The Dive

Carrie Bell asks, ""How much do we owe the people we love?"
Loyalty, guilt and responsibility feature prominently in this "before and after" novel. Carrie was ready for a change even before the tragic accident that rendered Mike, her fiancee, a paraplegic. She takes the same dive, albeit symbolically. What damage has she done to herself?
She flees to New York and begins to make a new life there but she's constantly reminded that Mike doesn't have the luxury of making choices for himself, he has to play the rotten hand he's been dealt. Carrie blames herself for the accident, believing that, if she'd loved him more, Mike wouldn't have felt compelled to make the foolhardy dive. She's hurt by the rejection of her friends in Madison and feels guilty for hurting, knowing that Mike faces emotional and physical challenges that dwarf her own concerns. They move separately through the stages of coming to terms with the outcome of the accident. Mike experiences fear, anger, frustration and depression. Carrie comes to realize that she is just one person and she can't do everything but she can do something. She ultimately decides to do what she can do. Her journey is influenced by the father who abandoned her and her mother when Carrie was just a baby. She wonders if she's like her father. She takes some comfort from her mother's assertion that "people aren't defined by what they do so much as they define what they do". The story is all about Carrie's deeply felt struggle between loyalty and her own freedom. The characters of her hometown friends and family and her hipper New York circle could be cliched but Packer does a good job of presenting them in a balanced way and this allows the reader to share Carrie's pain. Carrie would like to have it all, to have all the good parts of her life wrapped up in a neat little package, to have her difficult new York lover move to Madison where she and he and Mike can all be best friends. Knowing that she can't have what she wants, of course, creates the tension in what could be a very bland novel. Packer teases out the conflict skilfully, in a down-to-earth way that reminds me a lot of Jane Hamilton and Sue Miller. I'm becoming a more ruthless culler so I won't keep this book but it was a good read- I like that there was no fairy-tale ending- and I'll make sure I find it a new home with someone I like.

The Mystery of the Urine Soaked Books

They don't know if the two incidents are related? Get Sherlock Holmes on the case pronto! I wonder if one of the targetted tomes was The Rusty Bedsprings by I.P. Knightly.

Bullshit

On Bullshit
by Harry G. Frankfurt
Princeton, 67 pages, $12.50
Your Call is Important to Us:
The Truth about Bullshit
by Laura Penny
McClelland & Stewart, 278 pages, $22.99

I'd like to read these two books reviewed in The Toronto Star today (if they ever arrive at the Book Depot). It was the quote from the Laura Penny book that hooked me:

"Corporations evade taxes, cook their books, create big toxic messes, and screw their workers for the best possible reasons: because they can; because it pays; because we, the chumps, are willing to pay for it so long as we get our little sliver of the tasty pie."

And I'd just begun to muse that age might be eroding my socialist tendencies!

On the Black Hill

On the Black Hill

I've been curious about Chatwin and the cult that surrounds him for a long time. I have many of his books and a couple of biographies kicking about. This is a truly marvellous little book that unfurls the lives of Lewis and Benjamin Jones, twins born at the turn of the century on the border between England and Wales. They are sweet and kind and hard working and remain that way all of their lives. They love their farm, their mother and their animals and have a deep, twinnish bond with one another. In their final years they share not only the farm but a bed. It's a thin book but I feel I know all there is to know about the twins, their family and their neighbours. It's a gentle story and beautifully written, almost like a pastoral painting. We see the seasons pass but the brothers live such a sheltered life that little changes over the eighty year span of the novel. Nothing much happens; it could be boring but it's not. I hated to see it end. More Chatwin soon I think.

Looking for something to read?

Great books that are not on this week's bestseller list. I'm salivating.

Family Matters
"A Fine Balance" turned me into a huge Rohinton Mistry fan (having read his descriptions of life in Bombay I can certainly see why he lives in Brampton). Nariman is an elderly man, suffering from Parkinson's disease who has an accident and is forced to rely on his family for care. His well-to-do stepchildren, whom he lives with, cannot cope with the responsibility and send him to live with his daughter and her family who live in crowded and impoverished circumstances. It sounds like a depressing novel but it's not at all. He has such a way with dialogue! It's funny and there is enough of a plot to keep it moving along. His insight into family relations is deep and keen and hits its mark. I also like an epilogue and this has a good one, providing closure and hope for the future.

Gravity's Rainbow Illustrated

Zak Smith has drawn illustrations for each page of Thomas Pynchon's opus "Gravity's Rainbow". He must have had a lot of time on his hands.