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Tuesday, November 17, 2009 05:47 PM
Triple whammy?
I'm beginning to wonder if being short-listed for all three Canadian fiction prizes in the same year carries some sort of curse. A couple of years back, Rawi Hage's Cockroach earned him short-listings for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor-General's and the Writers' Trust. In the event, he won none of them.
This year, Annabel Lyon hit the short trifecta with The Golden Mean. Last week, she lost the Giller to Linden MacIntyre. Today, she lost the G-G to Kate Pullinger's The Mistress of Nothing. Which leaves the Writers' trust…
Of course, here's a possible consolation: Denied the prizes at home, Rawi Hage won the Dublin IMPAC for a payoff of about $170,000 and all the plaudits that come with that.
And speaking of Linden MacIntyre, I imagine The Bishop's Man is already contemplated as a top choice in the second edition of the just-published Atlantic Canada's 100 Greatest Books (Nimbus Publishing, $24.95), a fascinating compendium of just what it says it is. I doubt he's going to displace #1, Alistair MacLeod's No Great Mischief (that would be rank ingratitude to one of the Giller jurors who chose him), or #2, L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables. But he could sneak quite comfortably into the Top 10 (Frank Parker Day's Rockbound currently occupies 10th spot).
In the 100 Greatest, a colourful affair, you'll also find such familiar contemporaries (their number indicates just how recent and strong is the surge of Atlantic Lit) as Wayne Johnston, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Kenneth Harvey, Michael Crummey, Donna Morrissey, Michael Winter, Lisa Moore, Ami McKay and David Adams Richards, as well as one of my own favourites: Joshua Slocum's wonderful memoir Sailing Alone Around the World weighs anchor at #47.
Oh, and the writers needn't be Atlantic Canada natives; setting a book there is good enough, which accounts for the presence of Farley Mowat (Sea of Slaughter is #89) and the veddy English John Wyndham. The Chrysalids is a very interesting choice at #72.
mlevin@globeandmail.ca
Link to this postThursday, November 12, 2009 09:57 AM
A modest proposal
Kudos to Linden MacIntyre for pulling off what was at least a mild upset at Tuesday night's Giller Prize extravaganza. And his acceptance speech was lucid and magnanimous. So magnanimous, in fact, that I'm going to make a suggestion.
MacIntyre as much as said that all five finalists (the others being Annabel Lyon, Colin McAdam, Kim Echlin and Anne Michaels) were equally deserving of the prize. Well, then, how about sharing the largesse? MacIntyre may be nearing retirement age, but he, so far as I can tell, is the only short-listee with a permanent job. That $50,000 might be a nice nest-featherer, but it would be a spectacularly generous gesture to share it with the others, for each of whom $10,000 would be a windfall. (Yes, I know that Colin McAdam found a twonie on the floor Tuesday night, but that's rather a pallid consolation prize.)
Of course, I'm not sure I would do it. Draw what conclusions you may from that admission.
Thursday, November 5, 2009 04:57 PM
Takin' it to the country
What could be more Canadian than the confluence of literature and hockey. I was in Midland, ON, earlier this week as part of IFOA Ontario, the International Festival of Authors' new road trip. As I hunkered down to do an on-stage interview with two wonderful writers of wildly variant styles and themes -- Canadian Miriam Toews, who needs no intro here, and Brit Sarah Hall, already multiply honoured and assuredly bound for more -- I could hear unmistakably icy sounds emanating from the adjoining hockey rink. It was oddly comforting -- and relaxing.
A night earlier, apparently, the readers were accompanied by the sounds of a tribute band called Almost Abba.
"Sure, and I'm almost Faulkner," quipped Scottish novelist James Meek.
Friday, October 9, 2009 04:47 PM
Herta mother
I have a theory about why the Nobel committee gave the Literature Prize this year to the unheard-of (and I don't admit to Western ignorance of Euro-lit; she is unheard of) Herta Muller. It's by way of making up for Inglourious Basterds. Quentin Tarantino's film not only mocks the Nazis (no plot-spoiler here), but also the ambitions and pretensions of Germania itself. So what better response for a "neutral" country than to give the award not merely to a German author, the first since Gunter Grass in 1999 and 13th writer of German since award was established in 1901, but also to the politically dissident daughter of a member of the Waffen-SS.
Oh sure, the committee did its usual sanctimonious "let's give the award to an unknown but courageous somebody who's lived under tyranny for decades" number (Muller's a Romanian German from the town with the Marx Brothers-ish name of Nitzkydorf), but I also think it delights in withholding the prize from well-known figures who might have merited it. I have no idea whether Muller's a good writer, though she did win the Dublin IMPAC Award in 1998 for The Land of Green Plums. But for my money, which I'll admit is entirely notional, it should have gone to Alice Munro or Philip Roth. After all, Roth's literary world contains Nazis too.
mlevin@globeandmail.ca
Wednesday, September 30, 2009 05:11 PM
Darwin's Rottweiler and his pups
Last night off to see atheist-in-chief Richard Dawkins, touring for and discussing his new book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (to be reviewed in Globe Books this Saturday). Dawkins insists he's had his say on God and the godly in the wildly successful The God Delusion. But ungodliness was certainly a major theme last night. Though Dawkins took the capacity crowd on a tour d'horizon of his book, speckling it with judiciously chosen readings, what the audience seemed most interested in, at least judging by the majority of questions, was forms of blasphemy ("a victimless crime," Dawkins insisted).
Despite the occasion's having something of the reek of idolatry - many seemed to have come for a quasi-priestly attestation of the correctness of their faithlessness - Dawkins was both informative and entertaining.
And often convincing. For instance, of biblical literalists who would insist the story of Noah's Ark is truth, not metaphor, he'd enquire: Exactly how did all those marsupials on the ark decide to migrate to Australia? And how did they get there from the summit of Mt. Ararat?
Delightful, yes. Instructtive, sure. Still, I was hoping for just a bit more science.
mlevin@globeandmail.ca
Thursday, September 24, 2009 11:38 AM
Winning by Lightning
Warmest congratualtions to Joan Thomas, yesterday evening named winner of the Amazon.ca First Novel Award for Reading By Lightning. It was both surprising (smart money, though I'll never admit that Canadians bet on such events, was on Mary Swan and Patrick Lane) and gratifying. Gratifying because Joan has been associated with Globe Books ever since I've been editor (plus she's a fellow Manitoban). Early on, she wrote an astute and perceptive column every two weeks, but began to review less frequently when she decided she'd like to try her hand at writing novels, not just writing about them.Turns out she's a mistress of both trades.
Here, in part, is what our reviewer of Reading by Lightning, David Jays,wrote:
I was going to say that Thomas writes like an angel, but on the evidence of this novel, I'm not sure she'd thank me. And anyway, her prose isn't exultant, bright, set to dazzle - anything that we might imagine the angelic hordes would produce. Rather, it's carefully considered, troubled, alert to the texture of experience, taking off into a confused blur in scenes of heightened anxiety. Lily tends to experience emotion as a palpable force ("some days sadness and anger came off her like a smell"), which produces some odd stylistic moments: On various occasions she feels a shock of fear or a throb of pleasure move down the back of her leg (how does that work?).
The plot may be a bit saga - voyages across the ocean, illegitimate children, thwarted romance, telegrams bearing life-changing news, all backed by the storm clouds of war - but Thomas's treatment of it is quite singular, thoughtful writing that makes the world seem strange.
Maybe we should have seen this coming. The novel, published by Fredericton's Goose Lane, previously won the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in the Canada and Caribbean Region.
And now that she's discovered her second true metier, Joan's got a second novel coming. McClelland & Stewart will publish Curiosity next spring.
mlevin@globeandmail.ca
Monday, September 21, 2009 01:49 PM
No men, no Newfies ...
Such were my first thoughts on perusing the Scotiabank Giller Prize long-list of a dozen novels (no short-story collections this year) released this morning. Colin McAdam, for Fall, and Linden MacIntyre, for The Bishop's Men, are the sole representatives of our unfair sex, while stellar Newfoundlanders Michael Crummey (Galore) and Lisa Moore (February), both of whom have been short-listed for previous Gillers (Moore twice) failed to make the cut, which saddened me personally.
On the other hand, there's a very nice balance between the big houses and the smaller ones and it's especially nice to see nods go to Coteau (for Jeanette Lynes' The Factory Voice), Pedlar Press (for Martha Baillie's inventive The Incident Report) and McArthur & Company (for Kate Pullinger's The Mistress of Nothing). I'm particularly pleased for Annabel Lyon (pictured above), who undertook a very ambitious subject in The Golden Mean -- the relationship between Aristotle and Alexander, later the Great -- and who is a contributor to Globe Books.
A couple of errant thoughts:
* Globe Books has reviewed every one of these titles, but by no means a rave in every case. I don't say that opinions on fiction are entirely a crapshoot (I think there's general agreement that Anna Karenina is a great novel and that The Bridges of Madison County is not), but there is a strong element of de gustibus non est disputandum involved and all a poor review editor can do is look for the intelligent and sympathetic reader.
* I still do not love long-lists. I know the arguments for them: give worthy books an extended life; may boost sales (very disputable); give more authors a chance for at least minor glory. But they also remove a large element of surprise, as i've argued before. When the Scotiabank Giller short-list is announced a few weeks hence, there will be no gasps of "who's that?" because the field has already been narrowed from a hundred or so, to 12. And second, failure to make the long-list must be doubly disappointing to writers. Missing the short-list, one can at least plausibly think: "I must have been in the final discussions." No such luck here.
mlevin@globeandmail.ca
Monday, September 21, 2009 01:42 PM
A night at the Oprah
Her appearance in Toronto during TIFF may have had Oprah-watchers in a tizzy, but that's nothing compared to the buzz she created today, when, broadcasting live from Central Park in New York, she picked as the next lucky winner of her book club lottery, Say You're One of Them, a collection of stories by the soon-not-to-be-unkbnown Uwem Akpan (interviewed here).
Such is the power of O that the book's publisher, Little, Brown, is printing 650,000 copies of a work that has actually not done badly at all since its release in July, 2008, moving 31,000 copies in hardcover and trade paperback.
The thing is, an Oprah pick has traction in Canada as well. In fact, if you didn't follow her picks at all, and then happened to see an obscure title pop up on The Globe bestseller list, it would be more than resaonable to conclude: "Ah-hah! Op-rah!"
mlevin@globeandmail.ca
Monday, September 14, 2009 05:41 PM
Journey to the end of Celine
And no, it's not Dion I refer to, but someone much more destructive. That would be Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Nazi collaborator, Hitler enthusist, anti-Semite. It also happens that he was a writer of genius who produced a couple of superb modernist novels, Mort à credit (Death on the Installment Plan) in 1936, and Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night) in 1932.
For years, I'd been almost willing to overlook his virulent fascism and racism on the grounds that great art need not be made, often is not made, by good persons. But a review by Karl Orend of three Céline works in the Times Literary Supplement of June 19, and a responding letter in the July 3 issue (and subsequent correspondence) have made me reassess whether the continuing presence of this monster's work in my library is polluting. And, logically, I suppose, whether to take a moral inventiory of other writers.
In the late 1930s and early '40s, Céline wrote three ferociously anti-Semitic pamphlets which have never, for reasons good and plenty, been translated into English: Bagatelle pour un massacre, École des cadavres and Les Beaux Draps, which, collectively, more or less approve Hitler's extermination program for Jews.
In his review, Karl Orend seems to attribute Céline's attitude to his pacifism, but the letter from Ramona Fiotade of the University of Glasgow seems to me to undermine that argument fatally.
In Les Beaux Draps (1941), she points out, Céline is unequivocal in his support for the Nazis and Hitler: "The clause of the true pact, the only one respected: Vote for the Aryans. Urns for the Jews."
And this from a man who, just months before the Nazis left Paris in 1944, begged the German embassy for documents to get him out of the country. Ugh!
mlevin@globeandmail.ca
Tuesday, September 8, 2009 04:33 PM
Dead to rights
The attrition in the publishing world continues. The announcement today that Random House Canada and McClelland & Stewart will be closing their in-house subsidiary rights departments and instead forging a foreign rights deal with the Cooke Agency International is good news for agency heads Dean Cooke and Sally Harding, but bad new for those losing their jobs in the rights departments. I'm particularly sorry for the loss of two women who have long proved their skill and dedication in M&S rights director Marilyn Biderman and her Random House counterpart, Jennifer Shepherd.
It may be a question of needs must, complex foreign needs really must, and economic needs must absolutely, but the industry will be poorer without them, so I do hope they're snapped up pronto.
mlevin@globeandmail.ca
Shelf Life Contributors
Martin Levin
Martin Levin has been Books Editor of The Globe and Mail since 1996. Before that he wrote the Climate of Ideas column for The Globe for several years. He has been a group publisher for health and safety at Southam, won several international editorial awards as editor of the Jewish Post in Winnipeg, and written about music for, among others, The Times Literary Supplement and Toronto Life.