My life in books

Everything is genre these days. Literary fiction is a genre now. While some of the novels I read that I'm calling literary fiction have some highly fantastic elements, I think they are more this than that.

Margaret Laurence, This Side Jordan
Margaret Laurence, The Fire-Dwellers
Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel

I've been re-reading Laurence's works over the past few years, those that I had read before, and reading the handful I had somehow overlooked in the past. The Fire-Dwellers and The Stone Angel are old friends, part of Laurence's Madawaska sequence that culminates in one of my favourite books, The Diviners. This Side Jordan was new to me, despite being her first published novel. Set in colonial-era Ghana during the lead-up to independence, it looks at the contradictions in the lives and thoughts of both the Ghanese people - torn between their tribal pasts and ancient traditions, their circumscribed and subservient present as second class citizens in their own land, and their varied dreams of an independent future - and the white colonists who are at home neither in the colony they have come to work in nor the Europe they have left behind. in this, her first published novel, Laurence has already become the adept unraveller of inner struggles and social conditions that are so much a part of her oeuvre.


A. S. Byatt, Possession

I saw and loved the movie that was based on this book and always knew I'd get around to reading it. And having done so, I am impressed and delighted by it. There's sonething delightful about the uncovering of a dark literary mystery and the politics of the academy that surround the adventure that deeply appeals to me, and the past that is so revealed, the story of two poets who have a brief affair, and how it affects their lives, their work, and their partners, is well told and strikes true. But the best part among so much goodness was the way that Byatt creates all the primary documents - letters and poems - in the varied voices and styles of the poets and their associates. It was exciting to be able to read the poetry of the two past protagonists and see, not just told, how they influenced each other's work, to examine for myself the little clues to their shared history in their writing.


Barbara Gowdy, Mister Sandman

Gowdy's work is often surreal, and Mister Sandman is no exception. But as surreal as it is, it is a profound examination of the liberation that comes from being truthful and honest to one's self, and those close to one.


Hiromi Goto, Kappa Child

Goto's novel about a Japanese-Canadian woman from a profoundly dysfunction family who, through a fantasy pregnancy in which she bears the child of a kappa, or water spirit, also bears and re-births herself, is both funny and moving, and very, very good.


Jo Baker, Longbourn

As an Austen fan, I was really looking forward to this book - a revisioning of Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of those at the bottom of the social ladder, the servants, the enlisted soldiers. And my anticipation was rewarded. Baker looks closely at the lives of those who toil from sun-up to sun-down so that Austen's gentlemen and gentlemen's wives and daughters can live lives of luxury. By introducing a black servant into the Bingley house staff, Baker also lets us examine issue of race in the era of Austen. Much richer and more rewarding than the last big-nane Austen hommage, Death Comes to Pemberley, Longbourn made me look twice at much I'd simpky taken for granted in Austen's novels, and put them into a class perspective. Highly recommended.

As Constant Reader has probably noticed, I don't read a lot of mainstream fiction, but I do read some. The remaining books in this category to be recorded in my reads for 2009 are:



Tracks, Louise Erdrich - I enjoyed this thoroughly. Erdrich tells a most engaging story and writes compellingly of the circumstances of First Nations people forced to live under the oversight of white settler law and authorities.


Feminist Fables, Suniti Namjoshi - A collection of short - often very short - narrative pieces that are a combination of keen observation informed by feminist vision, and adry and delightful sense of humour.


Bird in the House, Margaret Laurence - another collection of shorter, linked narratives, set in the fictional town of Manwaka which serves as the nexus from many of the characters in Laurence's fiction.


One Good Story, That One, Thomas King - collection of short stories that explore the relationships between First Nations and settler peoples and their perceptions of each other, told with King's trademark piercing humour and truth.