I posted a brief review of Clapton's Guitar - Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument, by Allen St. John over at The Bookworm Collective.
One day Tuffy P. came home from work with a copy of this book. She said our friend IR thought I would enjoy it. IR was right. Thanks very much!!
See my short review of The Art of Possibility by Roz and Ben Zander over at The Bookworm Collective
Read my review of Blair Kilpatrick's book, Accordion Dreams at the Bookworm Collective
I posted a short review of Dewey - The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World over at the Bookworm Collective.
A book review...
Postcards was Annie Proulx's first novel, published in 1992 to some critical acclaim. Many readers will be more familiar with The Shipping News, which was made into a fine film, and also another film based on one for her stories - Brokeback Mountain.
The book is set at a time in America not so long ago when the family farm has become increasingly difficult to maintain. The world is changing. Loyal Blood kills his girlfriend. He says it is an accident but nobody will believe it. He hides the body in a stone fence and tells his family he is leaving with her to start a new life on their own. This event really spells the end of the life the Bloods knew, and the book follows the various members of the family as they try deal with new and different lives across America.
I had difficulty reading this one until I was three-quarters through it. The book is very choppy as it goes from the life of one family member to another, and it takes some time before it establishes a satisfying cadence. This reminded me of another of her books, Accordion Crimes. In that one, just when I was beginning to identify with the characters, the book moves on to a new set. In Accordion Crimes, the story is tied together by a single green accordion that passes through the hands of many people throughout the book. In Postcards, Proulx uses Postcards as a unifying feature. Each chapter is started with a postcard that somehow relates to the story.
Proulx's empathy seems to be with the mother of the family, Jewel, who, freed from the tyranny of her always angry husband, discovers joy in life, and discovers there are many things she can do in this world which she never even imagined. Still the focus of the novel is on Loyal as he travels the country, mining, farming, collecting dinosaur bones, trapping, ever traveling through his lonely and often very sad existence.
I give this book a quiet recommendation. It's a decent read, but don't be expecting a book as rich as The Shipping News.
Tonight, I posted my review of The Meaning of Night - A Confession, by Michael Cox, at The Winter Reading Challenge
How we became a Gourmet Nation, by David Kamp
I finished reading this book tonight, as part of the Fall Reading Challenge, and that's where you'll find my review.
Bon Appetite, eh
I bought a copy of a lovely little book called On Performing at Bob Snider's show at Hugh's Room last Wednesday night, along with a copy of his new CD, A Maze in Greys. I wasn't sure what to expect from the book. I wasn't aware that he had written it, or his previous book from 2005 On Songwriting.
In about 50 pages Mr. Snider introduces the reader to his ideas about performing - structuring a performance, building a relationship with the audience, timing, overcoming nervousness, coping with hecklers, and more. Mr. Snider is known in Toronto not just as a concert performer, but also as a street performer. Having done a little busking myself, I know it teaches you a lot about performing - the difference between toonies in your case and nothing.
On Performing offers plenty of tips to becoming a better performer, but also provides some insight into Bob Snider the performer. Even if you never plan to perform, this book is well worth the read.
Redemption Falls is the most recent novel by Joseph O'Connor. Mr. O'Connor also wrote The Salesman, which is fantastic, and The Star of the Sea, also a favourite, among other novels.
I'm not sure where to start discussing this book. It is set in Civil War and post-Civil War America, several years after the famine ship Star of the Sea landed in New York. It is a long book, and that is accentuated by the fact that it is written in layers of narratives and posters and testimonies, fictions, and scraps of journals, a collection of stuff that forms the story and develops the characters and themes through many digressions. As well, all is not what it may seem all the time. Many of the characters are complex and understandings of them the reader may develop through the book change along the way as more 'evidence' is presented. Points of view are divergent and passionate.
Characters include O'Keefe, a failed Civil War General and former escapee from an down-under prison colony, who is made Acting Governor of the Mountain Territory - as punishment for screwing up in the war, his millionaire wife, her possible lover, a young boy who has witnessed wartime hell, his sister who has walked from Louisiana to the Mountain Territories (must be Montana - the Missouri is referenced)to find him, and Confederate rebel Outlaw robber murderer Johnny Thunders.
I had a little trouble with this book through the first hundred or so pages because the layered development and the cadence of the novel takes a while to settle into. At a certain point though, as the relationships between disparate parts begin to be revealed, and the characters begin to live in your imagination, this novel takes off. Redemption Falls is a historical epic Irish-American novel and much more.
This book will stay with me for a long time.
On the 5 anchovy rating scale, I give this one a case of salties.
I just finished reading Midnight at the Dragon Cafe, a first novel by Judy Fong Bates. It is a lovely and sad novel, written as a memoir of a Su-Jen, or "Annie", who comes to Canada from China with her mother, at an early age. They move to a small town outside of Toronto, where her father has been running a Chinese and Canadian food restaurant. The book, set in the 60s, deals with the Su-Jen's experiences as the only Chinese child in town, at the same time coping with what turns out to be a complex and twisted family situation. Su-Jen becomes fluent in English and lives very much in the world of English-speaking Canadians, but at home, her parents are isolated by their limited English language skills. Su-Jen walks a line between the two cultures.
The first chapter of the book is available here.
Mid-afternoon, under a hot sun, is no time to be casting fur and feathers at trout. It is, however, an excellent time to catch up on one's reading.
Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad
I think the entire western world is aware of this novel on some level. I studied it in high school. Did you? This is my third read of it. Marvelous. That Marlow really goes around the block telling the tale. Jim though, was much more direct. After making the decision to let that treacherous blackguard Gentleman Brown go, he says, "Men act badly sometimes without being much worse than others." Bingo.
I loved the descriptions of Cornelius throughout the book. Descriptions of this character might as well be descriptions of specimans from Stein's collection of beetles. "That accomplished diplomatist and confidant of the Rajah, on leaving the fort to go back to his master, took into his boat Cornelius, whom he found slinking mutely amongst the people in the Courtyard"....
and.... "By-and-by Cornelius, in his week-day attire of a ragged dirty head, was made out vaguely, sidling up to the defences, hesitating, stopping to listen in a peering posture."
Lord Jim remains fresh today because the book is all about core issues - how we think we ought to live, and how we actually behave. If you haven't read it in a while, I think it is well worth revisiting.
Stanley Park a first novel by Timothy Taylor from 2001.
The main characters -
A chef, trained in France, obsessed with local ingredients, runs a money-losing but interesting restaurant in Vancouver. His father, the professor, engaged in 'participatory anthropology', living in a tent in the forest in Stanley Park. Dante, a pig of a guy who runs an enormous coffee shop empire (sound familiar?).
At the core of the novel is a story about two kids murdered in Stanley Park a long time ago, a story that somehow pulls the various threads of the book together. The Professor is living in the park, learning to use peanut butter and epoxy to trap starlings, and a fly fishing net to snare ducks. We see a community emerge in the park, a community of people who find their roots living there as latter-day hunter-gatherers. To the city people, the park residents are bums and crazies, but we come to see them instead as people who for one reason or another, have chosen to reject the city lifestyle. The narrative is convincing, as chef Jeremy gets drawn into the park life.
The chef is a financial fuck-up and it gets to the point where ruin is imminent. Dante is ready to form a partnership arrangement - and transform the restaurant into what market researchers have come up with as very hip and very popular. It is obvious enough that Jeremy has sold out to the devil (Dante haha).....but he has an interesting plan.
First of all, if you've spent any time in Vancouver, I think this is a must-read. It makes good arguments against the corporate monster, and for community, roots, local food, and the peculiar stories of individuals. It also has an intriguing story-line, and it is a tremendously fun read.
I enjoyed getting to know the various characters living in the park. Things aren't necessarily what they seem. Community is where you find it. When people are very different, when they have sets of values in stark conflict with our own - we are quick to label them mentally ill. While I was reading the book, I recalled hearing Utah Phillips talking about what he called 'The Traveling Nation'. He said something like, a hobo works and wanders, a bum drinks and wanders, a tramp dreams and wanders.
I give this novel a large pod of anchovies washed up on the beach when the tide went out. It's a very good book.
The other morning at work, B drops by my desk with a bag of books. They belonged to a former newspaper columnist, no longer with us, B was asked if she knew any fly fishermen. The bag contained a copy of Walton, a copy of Haig-Brown's Primer, a couple books of stories, and a book called The Incomplete Anglers, by John D. Robins, that turned out to be a treasure.
This book is copyright 1943, and it was a Governor-general's Award winner for Creative Non-Fiction. The first thing that struck me is that this was written by a Canadian author about the 'near-north' of Ontario. It is the chronicle of a canoe trip taken by two not-very-experienced paddlers, into the interior of Algonquin Provincial Park in search of Salvelinas Fontinalis - the brook trout.
The Incomplete Anglers was a delightful read, and it charmed me from the first page.
Here is an excerpt:
I had nicely crawled into my pinned-up sleeping-bag before I realized that there was a small, somewhat pointed stone embedded in part of the soil area, just about where my lumbar region should have rested, but could not. I was unwilling to disarrange my completed retirement for one little stone, and tried to move away from it. I could do this, but so diabolically situated was it that as soon as my vigilance was relaxed through drowsiness I rolled exactly upon it. I finally gave up the effort to avoid it and squirmed round and out enough to reach my tormentor, cursing myself for not having done so before. It was so difficult to get at, and so surprisingly tenacious of its position that I was forced to come still farther out. I grubbed around that stone, no longer small. It was a stone apart. I knew that, for I could wiggle it slightly. At last, I abandoned the attempt to clear away the obstruction to my peace while remaining in bed, and emberged. I scratched madly at the ground, like a dog burrowing under a root. I had not imagined there was as much soil in the whole district as I was throwing up around me. The stone grew larger as it went down and down. Suddenly there was the crackle and the flash of a match.
"Hey, what are ou doing? Burying a bone?" Tom called out.
Then he roared with ill-timed laughter. I was undoubtedly a sight, but I was in no mood to appreciate merriment. I thought it abominably ungrateful, because for half a moment I almost persuaded myself that I had deliberately taken this side of the bed to spare him the stone. Actually, of course, I was on the side which custom assigned to me; custom as set up by myself the first night of the trip. However, I said nothing to him, even when he switched on the flashlight. By that time I was down about a foot, and the boulder was uncovered, a great brute of a pyramid that could not hold its own against my seething wrath when its earthy protection had been removed. I heaved it up, flung aside my carefully piled dunnage, raised the tent-wallopposite, and rolled the damned thing outside. The rest of the night I spent settling into and crawling out of the hole into which the stone had fitted
This is an old favourite I pull out of the vaults from time to time. It was written in 1964 by Robert Traveraka John D. Voelker. Traver is best known to the world at large for writing Anatomy of Murder, the novel that was turned into a movie by Otto Preminger, and starring Jimmy Stewart. To fly fishermen, he is best known for a collection of stories called Trout Madness, one of the finest collection of fly fishing stories I have ever read. Traver / Voelker lived on the Upper Michigan Peninsula, in the Marquette area, and fished the Escanaba and countless other trout streams.
In Anatomy of a Fisherman, he collaborated with Life Magazine photographer Robert W. Kelley. The book is exquisite, full of photos of the UP, along with Traver and his buddies plying their trade.
The Best Time to Go Fishing: "My old father, who was my youthful supreme court, once said it all. One day out at South Camp I squinted up at the sky and asked him if it looked all right to go fishing. Does it, Pa? Now old George was not a man who discussed his views with any man - he simply announced them. Son, he said, looking me square in the eye, the best time to go fishing is when you can get away. Now scat.
Some men will fish only when the moon is full, others when it's empty, and still others only in between. But sun, moon, fog, mist, time, tide and crashing barometers are all alike to the real gone fisherman. In his secret heart he still knows that the best time to go fishing is when he can get away."
I'm looking at this book because spring is in the air and I long to get out on a trout stream. Anatomy of a Fisherman, if you haven't guessed, is perfect porn for the fly fisher. I confess, I'm real gone.
How strange it was on the day I stumbled across Chess by Stefan Zweig to also stumble across The Girl Who Played Go by Shan Sa. This novel is set in 1930s Japanese occupied Manchuria. It is about a young woman who is a master Go player, a Japanese soldier disguised as a Chinese traveler, who challenges the the girl who plays go to a match - and two young revolutionaries. The narrative is set within the framework of a game of go. It is written in two voices, that of the girl and that of her opponent, the soldier. The novel evolves as the game evolves.
The young woman develops a complex relationship with the two young revolutionaries....she has a physical relationship with one of them, but she needs the relationship with both of them for that to happen (I'm not going to try to explain this....read the book). At the same time, she learns about the soldier by the way he plays go, and although they do not even know one another's names, they are drawn closer and closer together.
This book reminded me of two other authors - Isaac Babel (particularly his accounts of riding with the Cossocks) and Italo Calvino (If on a Winters Night a Traveler, etc), and I found those associations pleasing. There is plenty historical detail, yet at the same time, it is written in a spare and lyrical prose style.
I did not know what to expect from The Girl Who Played Go, but I was quickly drawn into the novel and into the lives and thoughts of the characters. I'm looking forward to reading more Shan Sa - she writes in French the The Girl was the first of her works to be translated into English.
Book Review: Chess by Stefan Zweig
Chess is a novella written in 1943 by Stefan Zweig. It appears to have been newly translated in 2006, when it was published as a Penguin red Classic. It is a story revolving around some chess games that take place on a ship between a champion player and a group of duffers - a stranger appears and makes suggestions for moves that suggest he is a very accomplished player, yet he claims to have not sat in front of a chess board in 20 years. The heart of the story is a second tale - that of the stranger and his curious expertise in chess. This second tale involves the WWII, during which the protagonist was captured by the Gestapo...
Chess is an odd story, but compelling.
New Orleans
Playing a Jazz Chorus, was written by noted jazz and blues writer Samuel Charters, and published by Marion Boyars in 2006.
Mr. Charters lived in New Orleans in the 50s and at that time knew, interviewed and played with some of the old school jazz greats. He later moved on, but his son and daughter-in-law still live in the city, and several months after Katrina, Mr. Charters returned to New Orleans to see what remained and what was gone, and to look for a seed of rebirth in the Big Easy.
New Orleans - Playing a Jazz Chorus starts with a set of considerations, really quotes about the disaster. Ben Glover, from the band Bipolaroid, is quoted from Anti-Gravity: "I had my tarot cards read by my ex-girlfriend the day before I evacuated. They said I was fucked. Right after the reading, I went outside and found a squirrel devouring a lizard, head first. I knew at that exact moment I had witnessed an omen and the city was fucked. I had never left for a hurricane before."
Clarinet great Pete Fountain said, "I have two of my best clarinets. I can still toot."
Michael Brown, Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, testifying before Congress: "It's my belief that had there been a report come out from Marty Bahamonde that said, yes we've confirmed that a terrorist has blown up the 17th Street levee, then everybody would have jumped all over that and been trying to do everything they could, but because this was a natural disaster, that has become a stepchild within the Department of Homeland Security..."
This book is a personal and powerful portrait of New Orleans today, struggling with the devastation of the hurricane, struggling to rebuild and revitalize the city. He finds terrible damage but also some reason for hope. He discovers a young brass band scene and some hot new jazz and a drummer named Johnny Vidacovich.
If you love jazz or if you love New Orleans, read this book.
On the 5 anchovy rating scale, mister anchovy says: 4.5 salties, baby
