Detail from the cover of "Congo Solo" by Emily Hahn
Mini-reviews
Three new books worth a look
staff
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published
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LOST AND LORN
Algoma
By Dani Couture, Invisible Publishing, 323 pages, $19.95
This debut novel by an emerging young Canadian poet has the texture and resonance of a mature work. Maybe that is owing to the story, which explores the universal themes of loss, grief, fear and hope – even hope against hope, and all set in familiar Canadian territory: Northern Quebec. In fact, the title refers to a woman, Algoma, one of seven sisters (the others are sets of twins, twinning being a recurrent motif in the novel). After her son Leo falls through thin ice and drowns, her remaining son, 12-year-old Ferd, launches an obsessive campaign that he believes can return Leo to life. Meanwhile, Algoma is hanging on by threads. The sense of loss is overpowering and Dani Couture brings a poet’s eye, if not always a poet’s ear, to this impressive debut.
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LOST AND HOPEFUL
Retirement’s Harsh New Realities
Protecting Your Money in a Changing world. By Gordon Pape, Penguin/Portfolio, 372 pages, $24
It’s for your own good. Really it is. You might not be keen on hearing about housing bubbles, or shrinking pensions, or how little you’ve saved toward retirement (Freedom 95! should be the new mantra), but Gordon Pape didn’t become a financial guru by telling people what they hoped to hear. His latest reality pill tilts not just against the current dragons, but against their fire-breathing progeny on the way, a potentially devastating assault of economic, social and demographic destruction. Of course, knowing all this is only the beginning. Pape, true to form, offers answers: reforming the pension system, reducing your tax hit, how to use RRSPs and various ways to protect your financial future – or else expect a much lower standard of living after retirement.
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LOST AND FOUND
Congo Solo
Misadventures Two Degrees North. By Emily Hahn, McGill-Queen’s, 274 pages, $24.95
What a delightful discovery! Or, rather, rediscovery. Emily Hahn was a prolific writer for The New Yorker from 1926 to 1996. And yet this travel memoir, published in a heavily censored version in 1933, vanished like King Leopold’s ghost. Restored to its original form through the fine editorial hand of Ken Cuthbertson, Congo Solo is a revelation, fit to take its place with the great narrators mapping the beauty and horror of the Congo: Conrad, Gide, Greene, Adam Hochschild. The journey Hahn undertook was, and is, a dangerous one across a very large country, a country that, surprisingly, had better trains and roads then than it does 80 years on. Aside from the charm of the writing and the many lively anecdotes, what sticks in the mind, what chills the mind, is the everyday brutality, racism and exploitation that marked Belgium’s rule in Africa.
