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Tonight Half-Blood Blues, by Esi Edugyan, won the 2011 Giller Prize!
I did really like that book, which was also shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize.
Here is a list of the shortlisted books, as well as links to the reviews the Shadow Giller cooked up for them.
- The Free World, by David Bezmozgis (Mookse, KFC, Kimbofo)
- The Antagonist, by Lynn Coady (Mookse, KFC, Kimbofo)
- The Sisters Brothers, by Patrcik deWitt (Mookse, KFC, Kimbofo)
- Half-Blood Blues, by Esi Edugyan (Mookse, KFC, Kimbofo)
- Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, by Zsuzsi Gartner (Mookse, KFC, Kimbofo)
- The Cat’s Table, by Michael Ondaatje (Mookse, KFC, Kimbofo)
Tonight the 2011 Giller Prize will be announced. You already know that we on the Shadow Jury already picked David Bezmozgis’s The Free World (my review here), but it wasn’t the easiest choice to make. I liked five books on the shortlist, four of them very much indeed, including this one, The Antagonist (2011), which is my sixth and final review of this year’s shortlist.
First off, I really enjoyed the basic form of this novel. It is a classic epistolary framework, only here the principal character is writing angry emails to an old acquaintance (perhaps too much of a stretch to call him an old friend, though at one time, yes, they were friends). I realize that this may seem gimmicky, but Coady, who is a completely new name to me, pulls it off and then some. Here the form really does suit the story.
Our epistolarian (I can’t call him the protagonist since he is, by way of the title, the antagonist) is Gordan Rankin, who grew up with everyone calling him “Rank.” It was such a familiar appellation that it wasn’t until much later in his life that he recognized the unpleasant association. Since there is no omniscient narrator, we know nothing about Rank before he begins his first email to Adam, a college friend (Rank is now around forty):
There you are in the picture looking chubby and pompous [. . .]
It turns out that Rank and Adam have recently been in touch briefly because Adam has published a book. Rank, putting on a mask, said he was excited to read it and was, in fact, hoping Adam might help him with a bit of writing he was going to do. Adam said sure, and then must have been surprised at the way the above email began. The picture Rank is referring to is the author’s photo on the book, the book Rank had already read and was infuriated by.
Coady let’s Rank riff on about Adam’s weight gain. Sure, Rank is showing his anger, and we know he is angry about the contents of the book, but he is having a hard time articulating the source of that anger. I liked imagining the growing chill Adam must have felt as the first email got more and more menacing, especially here:
I had to stop for a while. I got a bit worked up after writing that and went off to drink and watch a little TV and now I am drunk. I just realized I can write you however I want — drunk or sober — and there’s nothing you can do about it. Isn’t this great.
Adam is, understandably, afraid of what Rank might do. We learn about that fear through little clues in Rank’s emails, including this opening from the second one: “Do what you want. Keep as much of a “paper trail” as you want, I haven’t made any threats.” Adam has no idea where Rank is these days, and as Rank tells his story — he’s setting the record straight that Adam perverted in his novel — we understand a bit why Adam might fear Rank.
Rank is and always has been a large man. In college he played hockey, even had a scholarships — his sole job was to go out and be brutal.
That had been his role for some time. Rank’s father, also Gordan Rankin, only he went by “Gord,” was a small man who, one unfortunate day in 1981, chose to open an Icy Dream franchise instead of a Java Joe’s. After all, the town of 7,500 would never buy into that coffee fad (Rank now, the summer of 2009, looks around and sees six Java Joe’s around his father’s Icy Dream — KFC remarks on how well Coady portrays this transformation in his review (here)). Rank, of course, worked at his father’s Icy Dream, but his main job was to keep it clean of miscreants. If a particularly unseemly crowd of juveniles entered, Rank was to ask them forcefully to leave. His father loved to watch his son throw around his weight; it helped him feel as if he had some power.
Naturally, this leads to several unfortunate incidents, and Rank is well on track to becoming a first-rate loser. Which is all people really expect from him anyway.
At college, Rank meets Adam and a few other rather average, unathletic boys, who were as different from his father as he could find. The stories, particularly the one Rank doesn’t divulge for a long time about the death of his mother, are the ones Rank feels Adam has exploited. Worse, he let everything go the predictable way and in the process made it all false. The emails, principally angry at first, eventually turn into a retelling, a revision of Adam’s false novel.
While we on the Shadow Giller didn’t select The Antagonist, there were times after I finished it that I almost put it in my first-place slot. I was captured by Rank’s voice, which is brutal and vulnerable, and often funny. In the end I opted for a book that I think had more complexities of character, though I wouldn’t be disappointed if Coady pulled an upset and won the prize tonight.
If you haven’t already, please go over to KevinfromCanada’s blog to see who won the Shadow Giller’s vote (click here). We all really enjoyed this year’s shortlist and the longlist, and we had a difficult time choosing the ultimate winner. I still need to review one book on the shortlist, but, as you may have noticed from my absense here, I haven’t had much time lately. I’ll get back on track, get that review up, and look forward to more Gillers in the future!
The real Giller Prize will be announced tomorrow.
Ah, another finalist for this year’s much-maligned Man Booker Prize. In part because of the criticism (much of which I agree with, particularly criticism about how some of the judges have responded), I really didn’t want to read Half-Blood Blues (2011), even if it did eventually win the prize (it helps that the book still isn’t available in the United States, though it is finally slated for publication by Picador in late February 2012). But then Half-Blood Blues was shortlisted for the Giller Prize, making it mandatory reading. But I was further encouraged when the book went on to be a finalist for Canada’s Governor’s General Award and Canada’s Writers Trust Fiction Prize (that’s finalist for four prestigious prizes, folks). So, even if the Booker judges had it mostly wrong, perhaps this book was a ray of light on the list.
I say yes, a ray of light indeed. It’s not my favorite book of the year, but so far it is my favorite book of the Booker shortlist (I have only not read or attempted to read Julian Barnes’ A Sense of an Ending, which I suspect I’ll like very much when I get to it, but who knows?). If Half-Blood Blues wins the Booker Prize tonight — in just a few hours — then I say a good and worthy book won, and we can put behind us the rest (well, most) of the issues with the Prize. I’ll try not to spoil things for the Shadow Giller by ranking it on the Giller shortlist just yet.
The premise and the well rendered voice of the narrator, Sid Griffiths, an American black octogenerian, are the book’s two main strengths. First, to the premise. In the 1930s many of America’s best black jazz musicians fled to Europe in order to escape Jim Crow laws. In Europe the jazz culture flourished, for a while. Our central characters, the narrator Sid and his childhood friend Chip Jones, are two American black men who went to Berlin where they formed an exceptional jazz band. Here, to highlight Sid’s jazzy cadence as a narrator, is Sid’s introduction to this background:
See, I was born here, in Baltimore, before the Great War. And when you’re born in Baltimore before the Great War you think of getting out. Especially if you’re poor, black and full of sky-high hopes. Sure B-more ain’t south south, sure my family was light-skinned, but if you think Jim Crow hurt only gumbo country, you blind. My pals and I was as much welcome in white diners as some Byron Meriwether would be breaking bread in Jojo’s Crab House. Things was bitter. Some of my mama’s family — two of her brothers and a schoolteacher sister — they was passing as whites down Charlottesville way. Cut us off entirely. You don’t know how I dreamed of showing up there, breaking up their parade. I ain’t so sure about it now, I suppose they was just trying to get by best they could. We could’ve passed too, said we was bohunks or something, but my pa ain’t never gone for that. Negro is what the lord made us, he always said. Don’t want to be nothing else.
Edugyan, to me, does a great job of creating this voice without overdoing it and forcing the reader to reread simply to decode what was being said about Jojo’s Crab House.
In Berlin, Sid and Chip meet up with a couple of other jazz players, one in particular, “the kid,” twenty-year old Hieronymous Falk (or Hiero), would go into history as one of the best jazz trumpeters ever. Hiero’s back story is also very interesting. His mother was German, but his father was one of the black soldiers sent by the French to occupy Germany after World War I; he’s the “half-blood” of the title (“Half-Blood Blues” is also the name of one of the groups most famous songs, which, again, has a fascinating history). These soldiers would be known as “the Black Shame, the Scourge, the Black Infamy”; it was presumed that any woman who had a child with one of the soldiers was either a prostitute or a rape victim. Hieronymous Falk is a legend (and Edugyan doesn’t hesitate to create verisimilitude by listing real jazz musicians who were inspired by this fictional character), but there’s little of him. The book opens in Paris in 1939. The group fled Berlin when the Nazis rose to power, but they didn’t get as far away as they should have. At the end of the first section, Hiero is arrested by the Gestapo, never to be heard from again (we lovers of literature know that it is not rare this story of a legendary, obviously masterful artist whose life was cut tragically short by the Nazis).
Half-Blood Blues then moves to 1992. Sid is old. As the “dependable” member of the band, he never became famous. Chip, on the other hand, has had a successful international career. Still, the most famous of all is Hiero, who allegedly died shortly after the war. Chip visits Sid at his home in Baltimore. Some filmmaker has made a documentary about their jazz band, focusing in particular on Hiero and on their last days together when they recorded “Half-Blood Blues,” their masterwork that was almost lost. The documentary will premiere in Berlin at the new “Hieronymous Falk Festival.” Sid wants Chip to attend with him. Unexpectedly, Chip also tells Sid that ”the kid is alive”; living in Poland, Hiero heard about the documentary and sent Chip a letter asking him to come to Poland to visit while on his trip to Berlin. Chip wants Sid to go with him there too (though Sid soon reads the letter and realizes never does Hiero ask for him to visit).
Reluctantly, Sid says he’ll go to Berlin but not to Poland. He doesn’t really believe Hiero is alive anyway. We quickly learn there’s more to it than that. At the premiere, Sid is mortified when he watches part of the documentary where Chip is being interviewed and says this about Sid:
“A shame, the trust we all put in him.” Chip took a long deep breath, reflecting. “But he’s a lesson, really. A lesson in what jealousy’ll do to a man. To betray such a genius musician, and a kid at that, over a woman. Over the kid’s talents, and over a woman. I mean, there he stood, denying his friend, pretending he didn’t even know him, while they dragged the poor boy away. I ain’t saying he pre-arranged it. I ain’t saying that. But handing Hiero over to the Boots, to the Gestapo, like that . . .” He shook his head. “That’s mind-blowing, ain’t it? I don’t have to tell yhou what a great blow that was to the legacy of jazz. I mean, here we was on the verge of that groundbreaking recording . . . I know, I know, we still got a pretty good take, but imagine what it could’ve been. Hell. It’s a crime. It’s a crime for which Sid ain’t never been held to account.”
Love, jealousy, betrayal: the book will go back and forth in time (next to Berlin in 1938) as we trace the exciting story and find out what happened to these characters (these characters that, by this time, I already cared deeply about). I really enjoyed this book and am a bit baffled by some comments I’ve heard that it was boring. I certainly didn’t find it boring. I do have a gripe though: I felt that the pieces were set up by an expert hand who had absolute control. Sadly, when they started moving, that hand seemed to disappear, allowing the pieces to progress more predictably, as if much of the work was done in the setup. Again, that’s not to say I didn’t like how this book played out (I was attached to the characters, and even knowing what was going on didn’t prevent me from caring or being affected when things happened); I just felt like the incredible premise didn’t quite play into the later events. Still, I recommend the book — may it do well in its awards season.
The 2011 Giller Prize shortlist has been announced.
- The Free Word, by David Bezmozgis (my review here)
- The Antagonists, by Lynn Coady
- The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick deWitt (my review here)
- Half-Blood Blues, by Esi Edugyan
- Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, by Zsuzsi Gartner (my review here)
- The Cat’s Table, by Michael Ondaatje
One this is for sure, the judges gave themselves a lot of good books to choose from. We were very impressed with the longlist. Sad to say, though, that from our discussions (aside from Kevin, most of us have read only a third or so of the longlist), the books we thought good but not great made the shortlist. I’m particularly lost as to why Gartner’s short story collection made the shortlist. I thought it was full of mixed metaphors that made no sense (and not in a good way). I’m also pretty sure that, of the two Westerns, the deWitt is the lesser (I have not read the new Vanderhaege book, but I’m pretty sure I’ll think it is a better book that The Sisters Brothers). Well, I guess we can’t be happy all the time, and I’m still thrilled at the great reading that the Giller panel gave us this year.
The Shadow Giller jury has been very impressed with the longlist and supplied their own thoughts on a potential shortlist yesterday (we were way off! getting only The Free World right), so please click here to go to KfC’s webpage to see our thoughts. Kevin will be updating that post later on to share some of our thoughts on the official shortlist.
Well, I don’t have a lot of reading to do to get this shortlist out of the way. I think KfC has to read only one title — Better Living Through Plastic Explosives. I have The Cat’s Table on had, so that will be next. I hope to get to a few of the long list titles that missed the cut, in particular Vanderhaege’s A Good Man and Laferriere’s The Return.
The winner will be announced November 8, 2011.
Last year I had some problems with Giller shortlisted story collection This Cake Is for the Party, by Sarah Selecky (my review here). In the acknowledgments page of this year’s third story collection, Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (2011), author Zsuzsi Gartner thanks Sarah Selecky for “jetpacks of psychic fuel.” Knowing nothing more about this book or about Gartner’s relationship with (or literary similarities to) Selecky, just that mention made me wary to read this story collection. I can say, with certainty, that Better Living Through Plastic Explosives is much better than This Cake Is for the Party. The writing here is spontaneous and interesting, if not always (or even mostly) on target. Gartner eschews both formal and substantive realism (one story ends with a page-long string of “huh”; a marmot has a point of view; a man digresses to adolescence) as she pokes and prods contemporary North America, while Selecky’s collection was rather conventional and drab and rote. All of that is not to say that I think Better Living Through Plastic Explosives to be a good short story collection. Cheers to Gartner for stripping whatever constraints she felt within realism and cheers to her for making each sentence its own, but the end result is a scatter-shot style that says little and that is often quite unfun even as it basks in its freedom.
This collection contains ten stories. Their titles should give you some sense of Gartner’s ability to intrigue: ”Summer of the Flesh Eater,” “Once, We Were Swedes,” “Floating Like a Goat,” “Investment Results May Vary,” “The Adopted Chinese Daughters’ Rebellion,” “What Are We Doing Here?,” “Someone Is Killing the Great Motivational Speakers of Amerika,” “Mister Kakami,” “We Come in Peace,” and “Better Living Through Plastic Explosives.” What I found when I read each story, though, was (much like that page-long string of “huh”) interesting details and clever observations piled on top of each other but teetering well before it reached anything. For the most part. At the same time, I did read with interest each story, and it was only at the end of each that I realized I didn’t really like it for its too many missed hits.
A good example of this is the first story, “Summer of the Flesh Eater,” subtitled, “Field Notes on the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type.” In this story Gartner takes us to one of the collection’s many cul-de-sacs, and, as usual, what looks contented and civilized on the outside is really a collective mess on the inside, going nowhere, of course. Here’s how the story opens:
Understand that pity is not what we’re looking for. We are men, we remind each other as often as we can, and we must bear that burden. Forgetting is what got us into trouble in the first place.
This third-person plural narrator is made up of the men on the cul-de-sac, and they represent the peak of masculine evolution. All of that evolution, though, does nothing to prepare them for the arrival of a lesser evolved man who shows up with a truck and loads of red meat. I think this is an interesting, if not entirely new, idea. Gartner will need some style to make all of this add up to something new. Sadly, one of the first express ties to the evolution motif (as if we needed it to be explicit) doesn’t really go anywhere:
But this isn’t about Kim. You could say this is about evolution. You could say we’ve developed a deep personal appreciation for Darwin, the man and the theorist — his dyspeptic stomach, his human frailties, his ability to cling to contradictory desires. We’ve weighed anchor aboard the Beagle, if only in our dreams, charted our own Galapagos of the soul and found it wanting.
Quite honestly, I have no clue what this passage is saying. I cannot make sense of the Beagle metaphor in the last sentence, and it doesn’t seem like the kind of thoughts that would occupy these “evolved” male specimens. Just check out how Gartner portrays them (and presumably, to her they really do represent contemporary male contentedness). Here they are completely befuddled when they attend a barbecue hosted by the new neanderthal neighbor:
The “Q” stood in the centre of the yard like a Mayan shrine in the cloud forest of Cobán, feathered in smoke and snapping and spitting as fat hit the fire. Mosquito torches on bamboo poles flanked the barbecue. (Trevor’s wife deemed this “thoughtful.”) The patio table was leaden with platters of raw meat, the variety defying categorization, but our host was all too willing to lead a tutorial. There were slabs of porterhouse steaks, rib-eyes, short ribs, spareribs, pork loin chops, lamb shoulder chops, and lamb leg steaks. He eschewed terms like “well-marbled” in favour of “nice and fatty” and smacked his palm down soundly on cuts he deemed particularly “bodacious.” We hardly need point out that there wasn’t a rub or a marinade in sight.
I do like that passage, though I’m not sure I’ve ever met men quite like this. Oh, sure, a man like this, yes, but as a type? No. These men become even more unrecognizable in this later passage that ties back nicely to the barbecue:
Patel made his Lapsang souchong-smoked duck breast with pomegranate sauce. Kim made dolmades using grape leaves from his own garden. Then there was Karlheinz’s oyster foam-filled agnolotti, Trevor’s quail stuffed with raisins and quinoa, and Stefan’s saffron risotto with truffle oil and mascarpone. Marcus’s silky black cod with Pernod mole sauce (70 percent pure, fair-trade cocoa) filled the role of dessert.
Well, the story was interesting, but the metaphor didn’t work for me — at least, not when it is so often smacked across the page — and in the end, while I could follow this story, I didn’t follow whatever it was trying to say about masculinity — and it was obviously trying to say something. Because of the faulty caricatures, “Summer of the Flesh Eater” came off vague and general.
Masculinity also gets a bit of a knocking in the next story, “Once, We Were Swedes,” when the narrator’s husband, in his forties, starts to revert to adolescence, thrilled to start the new Warcraft game, sifting through his Pokemon cards at night. But that is more of an interesting tick to this story about a journalism teacher who, a couple of years ago, spent time in the violence of Sudan (her name, is it a coincidence? is Alex Dinesen). Now she’s teaching students, who don’t care at all, about who, what, where, when, why and how in a room with a terrible smell. How Gartner describes that smell still has me confused: “the fumes that insinuated their way into her sinus cavities and then slumped there like a belligerent toddler, half-dressed and shrieking.” From what I recall, there is no toddler in this story, and how does a half-dressed and shrieking toddler represent a smell, especially with no other reference point in the story? This isn’t the only place I had to stop and think huh? — though not for a full page — when I came across a comparison that did nothing more than draw attention to itself. Here’s another: “He smelled hairless, like peeled cantaloupe.” So, does he smell like peeled cantaloupe? Or is it that the smell of peeled cantaloupe has a hairless quality, and so does he?
Well, as I said above, I think it’s great that Gartner is taking formal and substantive risks. One thing I did not like, though, was her treatise and defense disguised as the short story “Floating Like a Goat,” which is subtitled, “Or, what we talk about when we talk about art.” “Floating Like a Goat” is a reference to the Chagall painting where a goat floats above the ground. This story is made up of a letter from an upset mother to her six-year-old daughter’s art teacher. On the last report card, the teacher reported that the daughter is “not yet meeting expectations.” The husband is not concerned, “It’s only art, my husband told me. She’s only in grade one.” But the mother whips up the fury, based on her own discouraging experience as a failed artist (she’s now an actuary, calculating risk but without taking any), to write “a defense of artistic expression, not of my daughter’s abilities. Or rather, a defence of art itself.”
One “rule” the teacher has is that when the children draw people or animals, their feet should be touching the ground — hence the reference to Chagall’s goats. This sort of realism, though, should not be encouraged, says the mother. If that is what is expected, then good for her daughter:
The point of art, Miss Subramamium, is in not meeting expectations. Ha! Yes, that is the point! I surprise even myself with this revelation. So Georgia, in “not meeting expectations,” is, in fact, at the top of her class. Art, and here I include dance, music, film, and belle lettres, is perhaps the only human activity where not meeting expectations corresponds with success, not failure.
I just couldn’t help reading this story as Gartner’s own defense of this story collection, of the criticisms she may expect since these stories do not conform to conventional ideas of form and substance. She’s defending those smells that are represented by peeled cantaloupe and that half-dressed child. The story is made more interesting by its look at the heart of an artistic actuary with a chip on her shoulder, but in the end it feels like a personal manifesto for something that really doesn’t need defending anymore. After all, Gartner’s prose is highly influenced by, among others, the late David Foster Wallace, with its paragraph lists (see the food above) and its constant — constant! — references to culture, including the little ™ symbol — no, if Gartner needs to defend her writing it is because it doesn’t match those she is emulating, and there’s no better example of this than the final story in the collection, “Better Living Through Plastic Explosives.”
In this story, we meet Lucy, an ex-terrorist – no, that’s “recovering” terrorist. She’s moved away from her days of fighting corporate corruption after her involvement led to the death of an innocent child. Lucy now has a husband and her own innocent seven-year-old son. I think that’s an interesting premise to a story, and I think Gartner has the writing ability to make it pay off, but she insists on injecting the strange only, it appears, for the sake of strangeness. See, Lucy is recovering with the help of her support group, complete with its twelve-step aphorisms. Years have passed since the tragedy she was involved in, and her conspirators are being release from prison. They are celebrities now. Annie Liebovitz, making just one of a few appearances in this collection, is photographing them.
It is sad, to me, that the many interesting ideas in this story collection become reduced by excess, whether that excess be the off-target metaphors or that sense that something strange is here and wasn’t edited out simply because it was strange, as if that adds a degree of irony or gravity. So, I didn’t like Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, though, to be honest, I did enjoy getting to know some of Gartner’s work for its pure desire to do something different, even though it fails.
The Giller Prize does it again: The Beggar’s Garden (2011) is another excellent short story collection, and another from a debut author. The author’s blurb says that Michael Christie “worked in a homeless shelter in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and provided outreach to the severely mentally ill.” His experiences there have made there way into this collection with striking emotion and clarity.
The Beggar’s Garden is made up of nine short stories, each centering on someone dealing with some form of mental illness or homelessness or both. Each story stands entirely on its own, though throughout Christie has them slyly referencing each other. No story was a failure, though I have to admit that I liked the ones in the first half quite a bit more than the ones in the second half. That said, I’ve gone back to those early stories and found that they not only held up to my memory but have strengthened.
The first story is called “Emergency Contact,” and it begins with an excellent line: “They sent the wrong paramedic, one I’d never met before.” Here we meet a woman whose loneliness is so heightened and so well portrayed it feels rapturous. Her soul is bursting. Her loneliness has driven her to seek companionship by calling ambulances so she can savor the human contact, taking her back to a long illness of her youth that kept her happily in a hospital for months. One paramedic was particularly kind and, while treating her for nothing, complimented her on her nightgown. That was two weeks ago, and ever since she’s been dying to call for another ambulance at the same time she’s afraid of coming off as desperate. The way Christie ties this state of mind to a physical malady that needs treatment shows just how strong a writer he is:
Tonight after dinner I’d put on the same interesting nightgown before dialling 91 at least thirty times, snatching and replacing the phone for over an hour. There should be someone who picks up when you just dial 91, someone reassuring and pleasant, a service for people in almost-emergencies, because that’s what this was, not really in the life-threatening category. I just needed to see someone specific, but it was the sort of longing that could corrode something essential inside me if it stretched out for years.
Of course, she finally calls, and as we saw in the first line the wrong paramedic showed up. The pain and longing is so delicately handled, we can see that Christie is basing these people on his own experiences and his own feelings for them. She finally does make it to the hospital, hoping to find her paramedic, but just being at the hospital is a great start:
I’ve always liked how they make the ID bands impossible to remove without destroying them, how for this reason you could never wear the bracelet of another, how they, and the belonging they bestow, must be earned.
“Discard,” the next story, begins with an older man named Earl roaming around a garbage can, scoping out its contents, spying a promising clean cake. But rather than attempt to get the cake, the Earl attempts to set a half chicken in the trash in such a way it won’t be soiled, the smell coming out “a smell so bad it graduated to taste.” As it turns out, Earl is not homeless. Rather, a while before he lost his wife and, in the destitution that followed, he saw his estranged grandson on the television in a line for a soup kitchen. He assumed his grandson, whom he helpd raise, was dead, but there he was. So now he has taken it upon himself to make his grandson’s life a bit easier. It took him a long time, but eventually he found his grandson and learned his daily routine:
He found himself strangely proud of his grandson, proud of the steady way he carted the things he found and of the resourcefulness the task required. Earl knew that he himself had never worked so hard in his life.
And now, knowing his routine, Earl hopes to help his grandson feel a bit luckier, though it doesn’t go quite as planned.
“Goodbye Porkpie Hat” is one of the strangest books here. Structured like a science paper — “Purpose,” “Materials,” “Method,” etc. — here we meet a crack smoker who has found a deep love for science. This helps him out a great deal when a somehow alive J. Robert Oppenheimer who hopes to have some assistance smoking crack.
In another heartbreaker, “The Extra,” we meet a mentally ill narrator who lives in a basement (no, not a basement apartment, a basement) with a man named Rick. The narrator’s voice is optimistic and innocent: “Most of the time I forget it’s damaged. Maybe it’s too damaged to know it’s damaged. Or maybe it’s not damaged enough for me to notice. Either way, it’s not very bad.” Rick isn’t actually terrible to him, but at the same time he is taking advantage.
Rick needs my help. He can’t get welfare because years ago he got kicked off for not telling them he had no job while he was still getting cheques. But Rick says we’re lucky because I have a disabled brain and we get more money than the regular welfare pays anyway, so it works out, and we split the disabled money right down the middle.
As the story progresses, Rick finds the perfect job for them: they will be extras in a movie one of Rick’s high school friends is working on.
Each of these stories is different. The characters are impoverished in a variety of ways, but Christie is consistent in his presentation: it is caring without in the least romanticizing the characters or their situations.
A shortlist contender? I hope so.
So here we have the interesting case of an author born in America (and who currently lives in California) finding his way onto a Canadian literary prize list for a book he wrote that appropriates the voice and experience of South Asian immigrants. And thank goodness, too, because The Meagre Tarmac (2011), one of the three short story collections on the Giller Prize longlist, is excellent.
Though this is a collection of short stories, there is a caption above the table of contents that says, “These stories are intended to be read in order.” I recommend that as well. The first three stories center around the same family, and I don’t think the third with no relation to the first two would be as strong. The fourth story takes us somewhere new, but throughout the stories refer to one another, and I believe that it is really when taken line-upon-line and then as a whole does this book succeed.
The Meagre Tarmac is an immigrant book. It focuses on the successes and troubles of (usually) first generation Indo-Americans, as they attempt to make it in a foreign land while dealing with culture and family. They are dedicated to business and the sciences (never the arts!) and succeed beyond their wildest expectations only to find that something is missing. While this book is precisely about what I’ve just described, I want to say that I’ve purposefully begun this review with such a generalized description that sounds in many ways just like thousands of other books about the immigrant experience. Indeed, one of the characters in The Meagre Tarmac is a book editor who specializes in such novels: “They featured potent memories of ancestral homeland, twisted loyalties, religious and sexual and political schisms.” The Meagre Tarmac features all of these, but for me it is more and better, in part because of how well it delves in such a personal manner into the nature of that intangible, inexplicable something that is missing.
The first three stories — “The Sociology of Love,” “In Her Prime,” and “The Dimple Kapadia of Camino Real” — focus on the Waldekar family. Here is how the first story, narrated by the patriarch, begins:
A monstrously tall girl from Stanford with bright yellow hair comes to the door and asks if I am willing to answer questions for her sociology class. She knows my name, “Dr. Vivek Waldekar?” and even folds her hands in a creditable namaste.
Vivek Waldekar is one of those successful immigrants. He left his wife and newly born son in India while he received his education and finally secured a job in the emerging tech industry in California. Plans went perfectly and he eventually brought them over to America where they had another daughter. He is quite proud of his upbringing and how he has managed to meld the best of it with the best of American culture. Of course, underneath his pride, he’s confused. And with good reason. We learn in the next story that his thirteen-year-old daughter, Pradmilla, whom he barely mentions while extolling his less talented son’s endeavors, is quite content to be the current conquest of her ice skating coach, who thinks that girls of thirteen are perfect in every way. No one in the family knows about this secret relationship, but when moving back to India is brought up, Pradmilla simply says that she will commit suicide if her father takes her back to India, and she means it and we believe her. Mrs. Waldekar has her own secrets that arise from an attempt to catch something she felt was missing, but really it just makes whatever is missing that much more conspicuous.
Most of these characters are unhappy, and it shocks them. A character in a later story, “Dear Abhi,” articulates it perfectly:
When something is missing it’s not exactly easy to place it. I have given this some thought — I think it is called “evidence of things unseen.” Despite external signs of satisfaction, good health, a challenging job, the love and support of family and friends, no depressions or mood swings, no bad habits, I would not call myself happy. I am well-adjusted. We are all extremely well-adjusted. I believe my situation is not uncommon among successful immigrants of my age and background.
I’m focusing on the “overall” experiences that are common to all characters in the book, but I also want to show just how well Blaise takes a moment and injects it with a very personal response, familiar to us all, while maintaining the type of detail that includes the character’s unique cultural make up. Here is an older man looking back on the moment he first felt a sexual awakening. The girl would become the great love of his life, though their situations would take them in completely opposite directions. They are playing tennis.
We lost a point, but she ran up to retrieve the ball even before I could scoop it, and when she bent over, and when she turned to toss it back to me, I saw for an instant the entirety of her body as though she had disrobed in front of me. She was as naked to me as if we had been in the shower. It was a lascivious moment in a young man’s chaste trajectory. It meant that new terms had been introduced into the rather simple-minded equation of work+study+success=fulfillment.
Blaise’s stories are filled to the brim with those unexpected and intangible “new terms” and that “evidence of things unseen,” and the reader can feel it, too. One of my favorite stories, “Potsy and Pansy,” deals with the intangibles — and the tangibles – involved in love and sex. The main character, “Chut,” is Parsi, and for most of his life he has done things right to achieve his modest success in Pittsburg while his parents worked to arrange a proper Parsi marriage. It was completely unexpected to Chut when he found contentment in the arms of an American girl named Becka. But now his parents have found the perfect marriage candidate, a Parsi movie star up in Toronto. On the one hand, he feels he owes it to his parents to meet his marriage candidate. On the other hand, he isn’t particularly attractive and cannot see himself in a relationship with a movie star; plus, he’s content with someone already. On another hand, he sees the possibilities for a completely new life for himself as this movie star’s husband. It’s the perfect opportunity to grab a hold of something that’s been missing, even though he’s smart enough to know he’ll also be losing something else.
I enjoyed the bits and pieces of the book, and they add up to something even greater. Three cheers to the Giller for bringing Blaise to my attention.
There weren’t many Giller Prize longlisted titles available in the United States when the list was announced, but one you can get for the Kindle is Genni Gunn’s trip into a family’s history, Solitaria (2011). Gunn has written two other novels and two collections of short stories (and some poetry, and even an opera). She was born in Trieste, Italy (and has also translated a couple of books of Italian poetry), and in Solitaria she takes a Canadian with Italian heritage back to Italy to learn about his past.
The book is set in the midsummer of 2002. As it opens, we wander through a dilapidated Italian villa that is finally being restored:
Once, this villa was the pride of its owners, nestled in a sprawling lot facing the Tyrrhenian Sea, surrounded by palms and oleanders on manicured lawns where children played and cats sunned themselves. Over time, the children grew and moved to the cities. When the owners died, the villa was sold to foreigners who came only in summer. In the winter months, small boys climbed over the fence and played in the tall grass no one tended. Sometimes, they built fires on the beach, and tried to pry open the green shutters. The villa was sold and resold, neglected and abandoned by owner after owner, none of whom lived there.
Besides representing the gradual disintegration and dispersal of the Santoro family and the gradual collapse of memory and the past, something grand becoming dust, the disintegrating villa also brings us to the story’s shocking catalyst. During the restoration, workers discover the body of a man who, it is determined, was murdered in the 1950s. A television crew for the television show Chi l’Ha Visto?, which reports on unsolved crimes or disappearances (“Our answering machine receives approximately 40,000 responses a year”), arrives to film their report. When the clip airs, Piera Valente and Teresa Santoro, two older women with a terrible relationship, are stupefied when they realize that the body is that of Vito Santoro, Piera’s oldest brother and Teresa’s husband, the father of her son Marco. For nearly fifty years, the whole Santoro family, Teresa included, believed that Vito had emigrated to Argentina. They all believed it because through all the years Piera said she was receiving letters from him.
Vito and Piera are two of seven Santoro children born in the early twentieth century to a poor man and woman who were against fascism when it was unpopular to be so. Over the years, the family has dispersed across the globe, and the mother and father have — obviously — died. When the other siblings hear the news, they come back to Belisolano, Italy, where Piera and Teresa live, to attend the funeral and get some answers.
From this, we go to Canada where David hears the news from his mother, Clarissa, one of the Santoro siblings, a world-class soprano. Piera, it turns out, has locked herself in her room, refusing to let anyone enter and refusing to answer any of their questions. The only person she wants to talk to is David, the nephew she has always favored. Like many members of the once-close family, David is a bit of a rootless recluse. He is involved in a long-distance relationship with a woman he has only been with, face-to-face, a few times, and that suits him okay. In fact, though he doesn’t necessarily want to go to Italy, it is an opportunity to avoid a long vacation with his girlfriend, a vacation that would more than double the amount of time they’ve actually spent together. So, off to Italy he goes.
When David arrives, we meet several other members of the family, though Piera has remained locked in her room. Gunn does a great job introducing these elderly siblings and their children. In fact, when the novel takes us into narratives of the past, when I met these same characters as children I felt a bit of glee in meeting them at that stage of their lives, so nicely drawn are they at the beginning of the book, though they are introduced only briefly. Not long after the introductions, David makes his way to Piera, who feels attacked and misunderstood (as she has felt for most of the past half-century), and she begins telling him the story of her youth, and we settling into “the oppressive heat of memory.”
Much of the book is her stories about the past, going back to the 1920s and 30s, when her father was fed up with fascism and the family was young, up to the mid-1950s, when the family broke apart for various reasons. Rather than focus on this time period in Italy’s history, though, making the book a vehicle to explore territory that is perhaps familiar, Gunn keeps the focus on the family. This, for me, was a good thing, and rather than become a poorly disguised, politically correct reexamination of the past, the family’s personal trials remain front and center. Though history can destroy, this book very much focuses on this statement from Piera:
And family, too, can become the rubble around you, the millstones and boulders, the pebbles and stones — a virtual quarry impeding your every step.
We learn that Vito, the eldest child, was always the black-sheep of the family. Perhaps this is in part due to the fact that he was often sent away to care or be cared for by others as family circumstances determined, but whatever the case Vito never fully settles into his family. For the children, Vito often feels like a visitor rather than a brother. This causes problems for Piera, in particular:
Sometimes, I daydreamed that he was not my brother at all, but a stray boy my parents had taken in and sent away and welcomed back, a boy I could fall in love with without the shame, a boy who would usher me into the pages of a romantic novel, with whom I would live happily ever after.
For his part, Vito’s love for Piera tended less to the brotherly and more to the romantic, and he frequently makes little advances to let her know this. At least, that’s Piera’s version of the past. When David goes downstairs to report, the other siblings don’t believe it happened quite that way: “Anyway, as always, Piera is making this her story instead of Vito’s,” Clarissa says. “Self-centered as ever.”
“Appropriately vague,” says someone at the house. “Ah. The nature of truth.” Sadly, Solitaria is not vague at all. As much as I enjoyed the setup and the character, the novel deflates considerably when it becomes obvious it is becoming less and less a character study and more a family melodrama, complete with much wailing. Even the characters start flattening as we move quickly to the big reveal, which is quite predictable at about the three-quarter mark.
I still rate the book highly because its first half is nicely done: the narrative is well balanced and both the characters and the setting are nicely textured. It doesn’t make good on the promise it makes at the beginning, but I found it enjoyable, well done on the whole, and, as I’ve often found with the books on the Giller lists, interesting and compelling despite its flaws.
Last year The New Yorker included David Bezmozgis when they highlighted twenty young fiction writers in their “20 Under 40″ series. Bezmozgis’s piece, “The Train of Their Departure” (my thoughts here), was one of my favorites, a somewhat rare case when I felt like the excerpt from a novel worked as a complete and interesting short story. The novel it came from is The Free World (2011), which was recently placed on the Giller Prize longlist. KevinfromCanada considers this one of his favorite books of the year (his review here). I personally thought the short story was better (his debut, Natasha, was a highly regarded collection of short stories; The Free World is his first novel). However, don’t take that to mean I’ll be putting up a fight should this turn out to be a contender as the winner of the Shadow Giller; it’s a wonderful book.
The book begins with dislocation. We are on a train platform in Vienna, which is neither the origin nor the destination for the Krasnansky family. It is 1979, and, somewhat against the odds, they have just left Soviet Russia and are headed to Rome, thence to who-knows-where — maybe the United States, maybe Australia, maybe Israel, maybe even Canada. The first member of the family we meet is the philandering Alec. They family has arrived in Vienna and must transfer all of their luggage from one train to the next, but Alec takes a moment to look around at the many people in transit.
His own family roiled among them: his parents, his wife, his nephews, his sister-in-law, and particularly his brother, Karl, worked furiously with the suitcases and duffel bags. He should have been helping them but his attention was drawn farther down the platform by two pretty tourists.
Alec goes so far as to imagine a quick conversation with the two pretty tourists, imagining them being from Chicago, happy to talk to him because he will tell them that is where he is going. Meanwhile, in the back of the reader’s mind is a question: didn’t we just read that he has a wife who is busy working with the luggage? Somehow in these first few pages, Bezmozgis, with understatement, gives us a selfish character that we can’t help but be attracted to, and we get a sense of his relationship with the whole family. As I mentioned above, for me Bezmozgis works best when he’s working on the smaller scale, and this opening scene could be a short story in and of itself — a fantastic look at flux through the eyes of a few well drawn characters.
The story doesn’t focus all of its attention on Alec. In fact, soon it is Polina, his wife, who takes center stage as her own dislocation is developed. Polina was unhappily married when she met Alec. It’s not that her husband was bad to her; on the contrary, he was entirely proper, and she felt a severe lack of passion. As we saw from the first page, Alec is eager to supply passion. Interestingly, though the bulk of this novel is about how the Krasnansky family toils in Rome to find passage to anywhere where they can settle down, Bezmozgis spends a lot of time developing Polina’s back story, including her brutally detached courtship with her first husband (“The Train of Their Departure” focuses on this as well). Polina’s story was a highlight for me, and maybe that’s one reason I found some of the rest of the book wanting. I just didn’t feel as connected to, say, Karl and his family, or even Alec, and passages dedicated to their point of view paled a bit in comparison to the richness of Polina’s.
I don’t want to give the impression that the other stories — the onest that show the brothers’ attempts to get a leg up in Rome as they try to both expedite their departure and plan for an indefinite stay — are weak. They are not, and I believe they make Polina’s story even stronger when we consider her own dislocation. Another character I didn’t want to stop reading about was Samuil Krasnansky, the patriarch of the family. Samuil is 65 in 1979 and lived through the revolution. He knows what life was like before the Soviet state was formed, and he’s devoted his life to supporting the Soviet state. He cannot comprehend why his family would want to leave. Sure, maybe things were not perfect, but they were better than when he was a child. His own children grew up knowing only the Soviet way of life, and without anything to compare it to all they saw were its flaws. His wife, Emma, for her part, really just wants the family to be together:
– You know, I’ve thought about it, Emma said, and what is this except another evacuation? Emigration, evacuation; I don’t see such a difference. At least this time everyone is together.
– Think before you speak, Samuil said. In the war you ran from the enemy. Now who are you running from?
Throughout the novel, Samuil appears to be on the verge of death. At first, he is a bit like Grandpa Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, he just didn’t want to leave and it’s had to imagine he’ll stay alive long after being torn from his roots (Grandpa Joad dies on the first day of the trip). However, Samuil becomes, along with Polina, one of the most fascinating characters I’ve read about this year. Yes, death is next door:
There had been a point — once it became obvious that his sons would leave Riga, that no manner of threats or appeals would deter them, and that his family and his reputation would be destroyed — when Samuil had, for the first time in his life, contemplated suicide. The idea plagued him for weeks. He sought a reason to keep living, to justify his waking-and-breathing participation in the future. Almost certainly he would be expelled from the Party.
But the way out will not be so simple for Samuil, and Bezmozgis shows that a man may be wilfully on the verge of death but “the habit of survival” cultivated through his life doesn’t allow it. Consequently, Samuil, despite looking like a shell after leaving his past behind, becomes a very full character who struggles as the family adopts a new life, a life which includes the tentative reintroduction of of Judaism, which for Samuil is no real root at all.
The Free World is very much a novel about characters grouped together by circumstance, and so those circumstances — Communism, emigration, corruption in the free world — are nicely explored; however, and thankfully, The Free World is more interested in the individual character’s lives. This is not a book that uses prop characters to get something off its chest. As I said above, some of these character’s lives are better done than others, and for me the strongest aspects of the novel were the ones done in miniature, making the book as a whole feel a bit unbalanced. Nevertheless, as Giller season heats up, this is a book to pay attention to, and it deserves that attention despite any of my misgivings.
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