on book clubs and snobbery

Dear Jocelyn Bowie:

We totally don't know each other, which is probably a good thing, as you apparently hate book clubs.

Which, of course, explains why things didn't work out so well for you. It appears you joined a book club in your new town for the sake of networking, which was probably your first mistake. Book clubs aren't about making business connections, they are about eating good food and making new friends and enjoying general awesomeness.

You got all snobberiffic about your new friends' book picks. I kind of get that. We've all had those moments. I recently got totally high school because a co-clubber chose The Catcher in the Rye, and I followed up his selection with Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. It was a bad move. All revenge-y, very ninth grade. But generally, I am in a book club so that I can read stuff I would never think of picking up on my own. If I only wanted to read books I expect to like, why would I be in a book club?

(Imagine all the beautiful works I would have missed if not for book club? Like Sweetness in the Belly? Black Bird? The Time in Between?)

But, Miss Bowie, did you really have to give an interview to the New York Times mocking the hell out of your former fellow book clubbers? If you think you were being polite when you told them you weren't into fiction, you totally scratched that by telling the New York Times you lied. People, like, read that newspaper, eh? All over the world.

Not cool, dude. And the Library Girl glasses only make you seem more pretentious. But maybe I'm the only person in North America who read this article and felt the need to share?

Sincerely,
Assy McJudgesalot

read it

It seems like forever since I started this gorgeous book. Inexplicably, it took me weeks to get through, and not because it was boring or bad in any way. I can’t think of a person I wouldn’t recommend it to, but I have difficulty trying to write (crap) while reading (excellent, prize-winning) fiction.

Call it an inferiority complex.

I believe the main character, Lilly, is the loneliest literary character I have ever come across. She fits in nowhere. Have I said that before? In so many ways, this is a tale of Lilly’s journey to feeling part of something.

Or maybe not. Maybe it’s the journey from belonging somewhere to belonging nowhere.

Whatever the case, Camilla Gibb’s beautiful prose throws question on what makes home home. What makes heritage heritage. What makes faith faith.

I can’t sort out whether Lilly’s love drives her, or her imagination. It’s as though she’s possessed by memory…. I can’t sort out whether it makes any sense for someone to love another for so long without any real hope of seeing that other person again.

But Lilly is not the only fascinating character in this book.

(I’m sorry, am I gushing about how great this book is? I can’t help it.)

There is, for example, Amina, Lilly’s friend and “co-wife” (only a joke, Lilly is not actually a co-wife). At first Amina is like Lilly, a woman without a proper place. But her children centre her. Later, she begins to give up tradition in a way Lilly can’t (because Lilly doesn’t just identify with tradition, but uses it to make her own identity?). Later still, she is swayed to a different kind of Islam, perhaps in keeping with another political comment altogether.

At the end, Gibb’s Lilly questions the future of Islam in a multicultural society. The questions, the hints, remind me of the end of the movie Munich, when the World Trade Centre towers -- still standing and at least two decades before their destruction -- loom. Their appearance at the edge of the screen is supposed to tell us something. A comment I don't know how to best put my finger on.

sweetness

It is closing in on Christmas here; I'm reminded of this every day by the (alarming? over-the-top?) presence of bright decorations in the foyer of my apartment building, even blocking the elevators. And, this morning.... afternoon.... snow blows around outside my window.

But I am reading about a land where heat settles on the skin. Camilla Gibb's tale of an outsider in Ethiopia is seeping into my dreams.

Sweetness in the Belly is an absolutely gorgeous novel. Gibb writes about Lily, a British woman whose parents take her to Africa as a child, leave her with a Muslim scholar in Morocco, and then die. (Not ruining anything for you, that's the intro.) From there, she pursues her own studies of Islam across the continent to Ethiopia. At the same time, the reader is introduced to her several years later in the United Kingdom.

There's so much loneliness in Lily's voice, both in Ethiopia and London. Meanwhile, Gibb seems to draw this other world so perfectly. Obviously, I've never been there. But I feel like I'm there when I'm reading it -- take a look at this:

We took off our shoes and entered the last room, a place of discretion, dark and small, without windows. I felt burlap beneath my feet and could barely make out faces, but I could see the forms of several people, both young men and women, reclining against pillows lining the walls. In the middle of the room was an enormous pile of qat amassed on a scarf, and beside it, a tray with two thermoses of tea, a jug of cold water, plastic cups with daisies printed on them and the ubiquitous clay pot for burning incense. (p. 115)

It's just so fascinating, and really the best kind of book -- escape and intelligence weaved through a really strong voice.

another episode of being wrong

I would like to note my friend Shannon is always right, and I do not mean this in a sarcastic or bitter way at all.

So, as I continue to read Sweetness in the Belly, I will get to understand why my first assumption -- that the main character aids a woman giving birth in a dark London alley in the early 80s, then performs a circumcision on the girl child -- is wrong. But this is the graph in question, which threw me off and set me in the wrong direction altogether:

I cut the umbilical cord with the razor blade I'd packed along with a towel and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. I'd feared I might have to use that blade for something else. If the woman had been infibulated the baby might have been in distress, might have even suffocated by the time we'd moved her into an operating theatre. In that case, I would have had to cut through her scar tissue to open up the birth canal, at the risk of injuring the baby, at the risk of the woman hemorrhaging or going into shock. But we were lucky; it was just a minor circumcision: clitoris and labia minora. (p. 14-15)

See where my confusion lies? This graph kind of shocked me last night, but I was too tired to keep reading. So when I shared my shock with Shannon today, she assured me I was wrong, wrong, wrong. I will see why soon enough.

Camilla Gibb's novel has enjoyed heaps of praise and so doesn't need more from me, who has not yet begun Chapter 2.... But suffice to say despite my misunderstanding the paragraph I've highlighted, the tone and prose are things to fall in love with.