hurtling to the end of a road trip

Well, I finished The Flying Troutmans.

I guess.

If, indeed, Miriam Toews actually finished The Flying Troutmans.

Coming to the end of the tale of Hattie -- a woman who loves her family but is not a star when it comes to making good decisions -- and her road trip with her sister's children, I was struck by how Toews seemed to be hurtling to an end-point. The last hundred pages seemed hurried and disorganized and not thick on character development. Which is really too bad, because I actually think there are some real gems when it comes to character in this tale. It just, unfortunately, falls flat.

I feel like I need to qualify all these criticisms -- I love, love, love A Complicated Kindness. I think A Complicated Kindness should be taught in school, if it isn't already. And, from that, I still believe Toews has a magic touch when it comes to writing about children in a way adults can relate to. But her aim with the Troutman family is off.

In other news....

The BBC offers a sneak peak of their Emma project.

Bookshelves! These are pretty. And this site is meant to inspire. C'mon. Give into your book nerd.

What would you say to you when you were 16?

And.... Ok, I'm not sure I trust myself to read Audrey Niffenegger without a box of Kleenex nearby. Nonetheless, I'm willing to take a gamble on her new book....

Ayesha

My loves keep colliding!

First hot dogs and books, now Bollywood and Austen. (Again, actually. And since Bride and Prejudice was not very good, I probably shouldn't be so excited. But it's Emma! What could go wrong with a Bollywood adaptation of Emma? And Abhay Deol, whom I've just discovered on YouTube, is adorable. Two thumbs up if he is to play Mr. Knightley.... although technically Knightley is one of my least favourite Austen men.... Right. I'm happy. I'll stop criticizing now.) I hope there will be dancing.



If things continue going my way, there will soon be a vending machine in the legislature. It will carry Skittles.

vacation!

This is what I'm taking on vacation:

Silver shoes for dancing? Check.

Flirty zippers on shoes? Check.

Bandage for sprained ankle? Sigh. Check.

I know, I know. It's hard to feel sorry for me when I get to take a break from work, etc. And when I spend so much time feeling sorry for myself.

Anyway, dear readers, I'll be taking a break from blog posting for the next bit. While gone, I plan to read Elizabeth Hay's Late Nights On Air. My not-so-secret subversive plan is to leave my copy at a hostel to spread the Canada summer lovin'. (Hey, it's not all just Atwood and L.M. Montgomery, people. There's more CanLit to love.) (Um, yes I do realize I haven't yet read Hay. But as if I won't love a Canadian author some have compared to Alice Hoffman.)

Your homework while I'm gone? Well, for book clubbers, it's time to pick up Hey Nostradamus!

Otherwise, I offer you a handful of first impressions:

".... it is sometimes a disadvantage to be so very guarded. If a woman conceals her affection with the same skill from the object of it, she may lose the opportunity of fixing him; and it will then be but poor consolation to believe the world equally in the dark. There is so much of gratitude or vanity in almost very attachment that it is not safe to leave any to itself. We can all begin freely -- a slight preference is natural enough; but there are very few of us who have heart enough to be really in love without encouragement. In nine cases out of ten, a woman had better show more affection than she feels...."

-- Pride and Prejudice

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.... The real evils indeed of Emma's situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself; these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived, that they did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her.

-- Emma

It sometimes happens, that a woman is handsomer at twenty-nine than she was ten years before; and, generally speaking, if there has been neither ill health nor anxiety, it is a time of life at which scarcely any charm is lost.

-- Persuasion

annual navel gaze

My favourite books of 2007:




Looks like a short pile, you're thinking. And yes, there are a few missing. Most notably Black Bird, by Michel Basilieres. This is because I send almost all book club books (um, not the one by Judy Blume) to my friend who moves to non-English countries where Canadian literature, in particular, is difficult to find. (Except Atwood, I guess. But I wonder how Atwood translates to Eastern European sensibilities? Or South Korean ones?)

(Um, another interruption. CBC is playing Bridget Jones's Diary again, and they actually SKIP the part at the end when Bridget says, "Nice boys don't kiss like that," and Mark says, "Oh yes they fucking do." Or something like that. My defense on this one is I've not necessarily memorized all the lines so much as the Van Morrison song at the end just skipped rather noticeably.)

Back to my points....

Big surprise of the year? I liked Nick Hornby. Not enough to ever try Fever Pitch again, but certainly enough to try About A Boy, for example.

Other discoveries.... Short stories can be inspiring, rather than boring. (I maintain the problem with Charlotte Gill's book was it felt like a paint-by-numbers, this-is-how-you-win-an-award collection of stories. I'm sure I'm wrong. And I'm probably just jealous.)

.... I can get through a year without reading a single Atwood novel. I feel kind of sad, though.

.... I didn't actually include Carol Off's Bitter Chocolate in my eye-pleasing pile here, but I loved that book. And a year without chocolate wasn't bad at all. Which is good, because I'm now entering Year 2.

No surprises: A soppy romance by an Irish writer was fun to read in about 24 hours. Still looking forward to the movie, even though the Americans will probably ruin it. And, a second soppy romance written by the same writer was even more fun to read in even less than 24 hours.

The author whose next work I'm most looking forward to? Alison Pick's. Read The Sweet Edge, people.

the cool table: we meet again

Cool things I discovered while in Ottawa, thanks to my brother and his partner:

1. Ted Leo.
2. A handful of cool, laid-back pubs in the capital.
3. I like Nick Hornby.

I know, you're rolling your eyes at me. You're thinking that anyone who has the patience to read Helen Fielding probably has the patience for High Fidelity. Turns out you are right.

Sometimes I make quick decisions, quick judgements. (Eh? Emma? Okay, I'll stop.) So if a guy at a bar makes a lame joke, or stares at a girl's breasts for too long, I assume he's an idiot. Similarly, I read the first two or three chapters of Hornby's Fever Pitch, and I jumped to a conclusion about his writing in general....

But High Fidelity is really something special. And not because I feel like I'm hanging out with John Cusack, and he's quietly reading to me, or perhaps we are sitting on a couch together and he is listening to utterly cool indy music on his headphones while I read a novel on which a movie he starred in was based.... (Who wouldn't want to hang out with John Cusack? Honestly.)

To be honest, I have little else to say on this topic -- yes, it's written by a man. Yes, it's popular. Yes, Hornby's actually quite a good writer. But it's still fluff. So I'm not going to bore you with a full-out dissection.

I will bother you with some prose pulled from the pages, however:

"What came first -- the music or the misery?.....

"People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody ever worries about kids listening to thousands -- literally thousands -- of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives." (p. 25)

*Additional notes: Stay tuned for my giddy, over-the-top, yes-I-clapped-my-hands-all-through-it review of film based on The Jane Austen Book Club. Really. I clapped my hands. Also, I am still reading Blindness. But I was on vacation, you understand.

define "romance"

So…. I’m about to talk about Jane Austen again. I promise this will be the last blog entry, for awhile, that mentions her. Because really, I’ve been obsessing. Not to mention alienating a certain friend who thinks she hates Austen.

Before I get to my well-argued (hah) argument, however, a few side notes for anyone planning to skip the 19th century stuff:

• I get to practice my skills at being judgemental and bitchy! A round of completely non-celebrity judges have been recruited for this project to help weed out the utter crap before it gets to the real celebrities. Apparently the serialized thriller/competition format was a total success at the Vancouver Province. Will it have legs in Edmonton?
• There’s something about filling out a passport application that makes me really excited. Like, ridiculously so, as I rip through pages of my address book to make sure I have the correct digits for my best friend’s latest abode. And yes, I had to tick off the box on the application indicating I have no firm plans for travel anytime soon. But I’m hoping to hit Italy and France this year, and Poland. Poland is where one of my other best friends lives now, and, according to my Lonely Planet guide to Europe on a shoestring, it’s a very cool place. “Poland’s relatively undeveloped coastline, with its attractive, sandy beaches, and the rugged mountains of the south are sure to delight…. There are lots of off-the-beaten-track destinations to discover, from picturesque mountain villages lost in time to big towns where foreigners are still a rare sight.” Sounds good, no?

Okay, on to the focus of my thoughts today…. And one more warning, people. Total spoiler ahead. I’m completely going to ruin the end of Emma for you, but to be honest, it’s been around for 191 years, so it’s not like I’m about to tell you what happened at the end of a Dan Brown novel or something.

Mr. Knightley is gross.

Okay, read this, and your heart’s going to melt a little around its crusty edges:

“I cannot make speeches, Emma…. If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. But you know what I am. You hear nothing but truth from me. I have loved you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have borne it. Bear with the truths I would tell you now, dearest Emma….” (p. 290)

Aw, sweet, right? I mean, quite fitting for a guy who is kind of boring, really. Kind of dry. Stodgy, even.

But read this:

“I do not believe I did you any good. The good was all to myself, by making you an object of the tenderest affection to me. I could not think about you so much without doting on you, faults and all; and by dint of fancying so many errors, have been in love with you ever since you were thirteen at least.” (p. 312)

Ew.

Sure, sure, 19th century sensibilities, yadda yadda.

Ew.

While reading much of the second half of this classic, I was preparing to make a whole argument about the somewhat despicable formula we love to read or watch in love stories: girl knows boy; boy irritates, mocks, belittles girl; girl realizes she’s not as smart as she thought she was; boy and girl live happily ever after.

Sure, I’ve made the argument before, but I found this passage in a favourite book that suited my points so well:

“The movie When Harry Met Sally did a grave disservice to single people everywhere, by forcing them to look at every friend of the gender towards which they are drawn and wonder: is that who I’m going to end up with? And most of the time, this is not a hopeful, happy question, because if you wanted to end up with that person, you’d already be dating them. Imagine if somebody had told Meg Ryan on that drive from Chicago to New York that she would spend the next twelve years of her life single, punctuated by a handful of relationships that would be both unfulfilling and short lived, and then, finally, just as she is about to give up all hope, who will she be happy to see waiting for her at the end of the aisle? The idiot who just spit grape seeds on her window.” (p. 192, The Big Love by Sarah Dunn)

But now I have to just be vaguely uncomfortable. Yes, Austen tells you from the start that Knightley is about twice Emma’s age. To have his long love spelled out, though, is something else. Even in 1816. And especially when you read how Emma coddles her own befuddled father, a man infantile in his inability to make decisions and immature in his worries. She parents him, so who was parenting her when she was growing up, after her mother died?

Her future husband. Ew.

channeling Austen

(May I preface this entry by apologizing to my friend Erin, who thinks she does not like Jane Austen -- and so is probably sick of reading about her on this blog -- even though she’s only ever read Persuasion. Not that I could ever judge someone for making such a decision since I think I do not like Mordecai Richler even though I have only ever read the first 30 pages of Barney’s Version. Three times. But Erin has never read Pride and Prejudice, regarded in most circles as Austen’s best book and one of the best English-language works of the late 17th century.So I think I’ve finally found her.

The One.

The character created by Jane Austen who I can best identify with.

If Austen’s women were characters in Sex and the City, I think most people would identify with Elizabeth Bennet the way most women think they are shades of Carrie Bradshaw. Miss Bennet has the best lines, Ms. Bradshaw the best shoes. Miss Bennet sees the irony all around her, ditto Ms. Bradshaw. Mr. Darcy? Mr. Big.

For those who see themselves a bit more Charlotte, I offer up Sense and Sensibility’s Marianne -- ever the dreamy, frankly not-swift romantic.

Samantha? The sexually avant garde Ms. Jones does not lend herself to 17th- or early 18th- century comparison. Mr. Wickham was too much a cad. Mary Crawford too sly. Mr. Willoughby too stupid.

Now, I have always thought of myself as something of a Miranda. Career-driven. Cake-driven. Prone to obsessing the failures of technology.

Miranda isn’t just commitment-phobic. She doesn’t need to be in a romantic relationship.

Love it, love her.

Love Emma.

Just hear me out for a second.

I have no familiarity whatsoever with Northanger Abbey. But the balance of Austen’s work is about relationships between men and women. Not love stories, really, though certainly stories about the importance of marriage.

Not necessarily marriage for love -- though that’s all well and good if you can put aside your pride and your prejudice, etc. etc. Instead, marriage to keep a woman going, keep her under a roof with food in her mouth, yadda yadda.

But Austen’s Emma deals with a girl who does not need to marry at all. Emma Woodhouse will do perfectly well, thank you very much, with a very large inheritance. And, while “it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife,” not so for a single woman in possession of the same.

Thank you very much.

Yes, Emma is snobby. Very smart, but given to stupidity because she lets her imagination run away with her.

(Me! Me!)

But she isn’t some wimpy Anne Elliot. Or sad sack Fanny Price. Or chin-up martyr Elinor Dashwood. Or vaguely bull-shitting Elizabeth Bennet.

Emma doesn’t just think she doesn’t need a man.

She knows it.

She thrives on friendships and family. She honestly wants for nothing.

Take this haughty line, in the middle of a heated argument with her sister’s brother-in-law, Mr. Knightley:

“Oh! To be sure,” cried Emma. “It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage. A man always imagines a woman to be ready for anyone who asks her.”

I know, I know, just halfway through the book I’m getting ahead of myself.

Anyone who’s familiar with the Austen formula, or who has watched Clueless, knows what will happen. Emma will surely get her come-uppance. Probably more than once. She’ll realize snobbery is bad, or at least not to be celebrated as a virtue. She’ll hook up with the naggy brother-in-law. Who seemed rather less naggy and more hot when played by Paul Rudd.

I guess I might just be early Emma, rather than fully-developed Emma.

Sort of like being early Miranda rather than lives-in-Brooklyn-with-a-baby-and-a-puppy-and-a-bartender-husband-and-his-Alzheimer’s-stricken-mother Miranda.