It takes guts
June 24, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · 1 Comment
Yeah, what she said:
Thanks to Bookninja for pointing out This plea for more book reviewing in Canada, and in particular at the CBC. And I agree, Canada Reads is not enough. In my humble opinion the problem has to do with a lack of guts. Yes, guts. It takes guts to be a good reviewer, a good publisher, a good producer and/or editor. One can’t wait for someone else to say what’s worth reading, one needs to go out on a limb and make more daring choices. And then open up those choices to the common reader.
Notes from the dark side: UPDATED
June 24, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · 1 Comment
Bookninja George Murray and I recently had a little e-mail exchange about the culture of book blogging and the implications for readers of a digital environment.
Quoth George:
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in six years of blogging it’s that the internet reader who will attach him/herself to your site and stay loyal isn’t someone who’s settling in for a long gawk at a good book or magazine. S/he’s an information addict who wants to pick and choose among info bits (what I call infochum) and meatier pieces. I’ve always done the blog side of Bookninja as a kind of newslog, in which I make brief, pointed commentary on news items and link out to longer articles. The Magazine allows for longer, in-depth forms.
Quoth yr. humble correspondent:
Last year, The Atlantic published an article called “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” which quoted Maryanne Wolf, among others, suggesting that the Internet changes not only what we read but how we read. We read horizontally online, we “power browse,” but we don’t allow for a deep immersion in content, and our sense of nuance and ambiguity is affected. Nicholas Carr, the author of the article, writes, “Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.”
The entire interview’s up at Open Book Toronto, should you be interested.
UPDATE: Okay, the interview was up earlier this afternoon, but it appears to have been taken down. I’ll let y’all know when it’s back live once again.
UPDATE: Link’s fixed. Thanks, August.
Sometimes you need to get away from the conventions of realism a little bit
June 22, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
The Afterword has posted the text of Pasha Malla’s Trillium Book Award acceptance speech, which is well worth reading, especially as it makes a point with which yr. humble correspondent could not agree more:
Lately I have been reading a book by Lawrence Weschler about the visual artist David Hockney. The title, fittingly enough, is True to Life. Hockney’s work is concerned with capturing human visual experience and accordingly addresses the failures of photography and photo-realism. People do not, after all, see in fixed-perspective snapshots and moments, but fluidly, over time. With this in mind, in the 1980s Hockney made a series of collages, inspired by cubism, meant to address not what we see, but how we see it. “Hockney’s collages,” writes Weschler, “are a record of human looking. It is exactly the point that an automatic machine could not possibly have generated them.”
For David Hockney, standard photography fails to capture human experience; if unimaginatively used, a camera is only an “automatic machine,” better to be tossed into the uncanny valley. And I agree: what we really need from art are not mechanistic reproductions of the real world, but more expressions of our experience upon it and how those experiences make us feel. And to do that, sometimes you need to get away from the conventions of realism a little bit.
CNQ launches new website
June 22, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · 1 Comment
The new issue of Canadian Notes and Queries is out, complete with a brand-spanking-new website. Yr. humble correspondent has a couple of pieces represented on the new site, both of which find me in a characteristically cranky mood.
The first, from issue #75, is a roundup of the 2008 Scotiabank Giller shortlist, including commentary on the winner, Joseph Boyden’s Through Black Spruce. Essentially, the piece argues that, notwithstanding the vaunted newness of the five nominated authors, by awarding Boyden’s novel the big prize, last year’s jury in fact behaved exactly the way the vast majority of Giller juries before them did:
Set largely in the north, Through Black Spruce focuses on a fractured family riven by alcohol and drug abuse. From its opening lines, the novel offers sentences burnished with simile and metaphor:
When there was no Pepsi left for my rye whisky, nieces, there was always ginger ale. No ginger ale? Then I had river water. River water’s light like something between those two. And brown Moose River water’s cold. Cold like living between two colours. Like living in this town.
The narrator here is Will Bird, a comatose Cree bush pilot confined to a hospital bed in Moose Factory. From his coma, he narrates his story to his two nieces, Annie and Suzanne. Will’s narration is cast in the mode of rugged naturalism, but the naturalism is constantly larded with images that, although presumably meant to be evocative, actually come off feeling artificial and unconvincing. Living “between two colours” is only one example. In the frozen north loneliness “grew like moss,” memories “can’t be burnt or drowned,” and winter “settl[es]” on the land, “laying herself out over the forest and the muskeg and the water.” In a similar fashion, Will recalls his youth: “I believed that the northern lights, the electricity I felt on my skin under my parka, the faint crackle of it in my ears, was Gitchi Manitou collecting the vibrations of lives spent, refuelling the world with these animals’ power.”
There is nothing inherently wrong with using metaphoric language to develop character or heighten narrative; what is troublesome is the notion that this approach is somehow new or groundbreaking in the context of Canadian fiction. In its citation, the Giller jury – made up of novelists Margaret Atwood and Colm Toibin and Liberal MP Bob Rae – stated that in Through Black Spruce “Joseph Boyden shows us unforgettable characters and a northern landscape in a way we have never seen them before.” That we have seen such characters before – and in just such a northern landscape – will be obvious to anyone possessed of even a passing familiarity with Canadian fiction. Notably, the frigid loneliness of the north provided the setting for last year’s Giller champ, Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air. Beyond that, Through Black Spruce would fit comfortably on the shelf with such accepted CanLit mainstays as The Temptations of Big Bear, Tay John, and Wacousta.
The second piece, titled “Fuck Books,” appears in the current issue (#76), and takes up a related theme. Building on a formula that teasingly appeared in Nathan Whitlock’s debut novel, A Week of This, the essay argues that CanLit’s penchant for highly stylized, pseudopoetic writing is antithetical to creating a vibrant literature that is able to fully engage with the reading public. Two authors in particular find themselves in the crosshairs, Michael Ondaatje and Anne Michaels:
Fugitive Pieces is emblematic of a persistent and virulent strain in CanLit: books that rely for their force and effect upon prose of heightened poeticisms and lyrical trills, language predicated upon an accretion of rococo metaphors and cascading adjectival phrases. The none-too-subtle condescension in such writing is easily identifiable by casual or occasional readers, whose impulse upon encountering it is likely to mirror the vituperative two-word epithet in this essay’s title.
Writing in The Globe and Mail recently, Michaels defended her prose style as a manifestation of her abiding respect for language, “a respect that has been forged out of the deepest despair of language, out of urgency and impotence.” Words, for Michaels, constitute “a moral question,” a “way of grasping at a truth,” and “an argument against loss.” This description of language’s function recapitulates the condescending tone that runs through her fiction, but it also illustrates what I take to be a fundamental misapprehension: there is no writer I’m aware of who would argue that language is unimportant, but instead of using language as a means to communicate emotional truth, Michaels brandishes it like a cudgel, the better to bludgeon her readers into submission.
There’s also material from last year’s notorious Salon des Refusés (which, incidentally, includes my review of this year’s Trillium Book Award-winner, Pasha Malla’s The Withdrawal Method), book reviews by Michael Carbert, Rebecca Rosenblum, and Kerry Clare, among others, a feature on small presses by Andrew Steeves, and on the future of the book by Jack Illingworth. Check out the site, then go subscribe to the mag.
The outsider
June 19, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
Whatever. Michel Houellebecq, Paul Hammond, trans.; Serpent’s Tail, $14.99 paper, 156 pp., 978-1-85242-584-5.
It’s easy to argue that Michel Houellebecq is the poet laureate of alienation in the late-20th and early-21st centuries, but this is at once too facile and too reductive. Houellebecq’s brand of disaffected nihilism owes a debt to literary forebears such as Céline and Nietzsche, but it also incorporates a vicious antipathy toward Western capitalism and its spoils that was largely absent from the work of those earlier writers. Houellebecq shares with Céline a passionate outrage against the dehumanization of modern life, but his vision is distinct (at least in part) from that of, say, Camus. In contrast to Meursault’s recognition of the universe’s “benign indifference” (in L’Etranger), the worlds Houellebecq creates are fiercely inimical toward his characters’ attempts to forge any sort of connection or meaning. Tibor Fischer’s assessment of Whatever, Houellebecq’s acerbic 1994 debut, as “L’Etranger for the info generation” is a glib sound-bite, but one that does the novel, and its author, a disservice.
Which is not to say that Houellebecq doesn’t invite such comparisons. The unnamed computer programmer who serves as Whatever‘s narrator speaks of his “total isolation, the sense of an all-consuming emptiness,” which he feels will be relieved by goading his colleague, the hideously ugly 28-year-old virgin Tisserand, into committing murder. The scene of the intended crime is the same as that in which Meursault murders the Arab – a beach – and the aura of racial tension is replicated, even ratcheted up a notch: the narrator suggests that Tisserand kill a woman he’s been eyeing, but the latter replies that he’d rather kill her “half-caste” lover. “Well then, I exclaimed, what’s stopping you? Why yes! Get the hang of it on a young nigger!” That the narrator wants Tisserand to kill the woman (or her lover) with a knife is not terribly subtle in its symbolic resonance: the notion of Tisserand, the virgin, penetrating one or the other of his would-be victims is the culmination of the narrator’s own debased sexual odyssey throughout the novel.
In the book’s early pages, the narrator, who has just turned 30, tells us that he has “had many women, but for limited periods,” and has been celibate in the two years since he broke up with his most recent girlfriend, Véronique. The “feeble and inconsistent attempts” he has made at sexual liaisons in the interim “only resulted in predictable failure.” To assuage his sexual frustration, he writes bizarre animal stories, such as “Dialogues Between a Cow and a Filly,” in which a breeder artificially inseminates a Breton cow, allowing the cow “to get stuffed”:
And stuff her they do, more or less directly; the artificial insemination syringe can in effect, whatever the cost in certain emotional complications, take the place of the bull’s penis in performing this function. In both cases the cow calms down and returns to her original state of earnest meditation, except that a few months later she will give birth to an adorable little calf. Which, let it be said in passing, means profit for the breeder.
Actually, let it not be said in passing, but rather let it be dwelt upon, since for Houellebecq, sex and commerce are inextricably linked. This connection will reach its apogee in the sex tourism business that Michel and his girlfriend, Valérie, establish in Houellebecq’s third novel, Platform, but it is here, too, in the narrator’s belief that economic liberalism and sexual liberalism are “strictly equivalent”:
Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It’s what’s known as “the law of the market”. In an economic system where unfair dismissal is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their place. In a sexual system where adultery is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their bed mate. In a totally liberal economic system certain people accumulate fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment and misery. In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude.
Thus does the laissez faire attitude promulgated by the sexual revolution reduce some members of society to the level of erotic paupers. Sexual liberalism, like economic liberalism, is “an extension of the domain of the struggle,” reaching “all ages and all classes of society.” Or, in the formula the narrator posits: “Sexuality is a system of social hierarchy.” This is bracingly satirical, and exemplifies what Houellebecq is best at: the snidely pithy diagnosis of modern urban anomie.
The phrase “an extension of the domain of the struggle” is the literal translation of Whatever‘s original French title: Extension du domaine de la lutte, a phrase that is at once more appropriate to Houellebecq’s core concerns in the novel and more teasingly elliptical. The debased English title highlights the narrator’s ambivalence toward pretty much everything – his life, his job, other people – but elides the righteous anger that seethes underneath it: anger at a society that has consigned itself “primarily to consumerism,” the sole remaining “consolidation of [its] being.” This consolidation is made manifest in the “leprous façades” of Paris, “behind which one invariably imagines retired folk agonizing alongside their cat Poucette which is eating up half their pensions with its Friskies,” and in “the inevitable advertising hoardings flashing by, gaudy and repellent.”
Here we find one of the most evident cleavages between Whatever and L’Etranger: whereas Camus wrote about an existence devoid of God, in which Meursault is forced to reckon his free will in the face of what Warren Zevon termed “the vast indifference of Heaven,” there is a God in Houellebecq’s novel: money. The narrator (like Houellebecq himself at the time) is a middle manager at a computer software company, where employees are counted as “assets,” and he moves in a society in which losing a car “is tantamount to being struck off the social register.” (It’s no accident that one of the few characters described as “happy” in the novel is a socialist.) The God of commerce hovers remorselessly over the novel, and this God, like the breeder in the narrator’s short story, is “not … a merciful God.”
Early on, the narrator spots a piece of graffiti that reads “God wanted there to be inequality, not injustice,” and “muse[s] on who the person so well informed about God’s designs might be.” The note of sarcasm is readily apparent, but it’s undercut later on by the acknowledgement that “a totally liberal economic system” fosters and exacerbates the very inequality that a capitalist God must want. It is only at the novel’s close, when the narrator finds himself in a meadow, with none of the appurtenances of modern consumerism at hand, that he feels, “with impressive violence, the possibility of joy.” He goes on: “The landscape is more and more gentle, amiable, joyous; my skin hurts. I am at the heart of the abyss.” This is perhaps the final, ironic twist in Houellebecq’s aversive little narrative: under the rubric of modern consumerism, divesting oneself of material desires only serves to lead one to the heart of the abyss.
Malla, Dodds win Trilliums
June 17, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · 1 Comment
Last afternoon, at a luncheon at the Park Hyatt in downtown Toronto, the 22nd Annual Trillium Awards were handed out. Jeramy Dodds, the author of the debut collection Crabwise to the Hounds, won the Poetry Award, and Pasha Malla took home the Trillium Book Award for his debut, The Withdrawal Method. Malla’s acceptance speech was notable for using the new Pixar movie Up to illustrate why writers need not cleave to a naturalistic approach in their fiction, and for challenging journalists to come up with the correct spelling of the term “choked-uppedly” (which is how he described accepting the award).
Speaking about the books in the running for this year’s prizes, the National Post‘s Afterword blog quotes one of this year’s jurors, who sounds eminently sensible (and is probably knee-shakingly handsome to boot):
Juror Steven W. Beattie said he was struck by range of work coming out of Ontario. He was also encouraged to see the prizes go to two young writers – Dodds is 34, Malla is 31.
“You hear so much these days about the death of the book, and the fact that nobody’s reading anymore, and the fact that there’s nobody coming up to take over from the old guard of the Atwoods and the Ondaatjes, and I think that’s bollocks,” he said. “I think this award, and certainly the strength of the younger writers who were shortlisted for the award … is really hopeful and a good sign for writing both in Ontario and in Canada.”
The other two English-language jurors for the 2009 Trillium Awards were the estimable Emily Schultz and Meg Taylor.
Are there any world-class CanLit writers?
June 12, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · 13 Comments
There’s a bit of a contretemps going on over at Quillblog (which seems these days to be where I’m getting all my material) about an interview that Nigel Beale did with John Metcalf, in which Metcalf defends the utility of negative reviews, even those that resort to invective and insult to make their points. I’ll let that debate simmer away over at Quill; what most interests me in the Beale/Metcalf interview comes later on, when Metcalf turns his attention to the Canadian canon and asks whether Canada can be said to have produced a world-class writer. In Metcalf’s view, this country has produced only one work worthy of being set alongside the best writing from England and the United States: Mordecai Richler’s St. Urbain’s Horseman. Beyond that single novel, Metcalf claims, anyone looking for important literary writing must look outside our home and native land:
Anybody with any literary sense whatsoever knows that a really important book of literary fiction comes maybe once every ten years, out of England or the United States and not here, because we don’t have an audience hard enough to exact one.
[ ... ]
The Canadian critic’s duty is to be vitally aware of what is happening in England and what is happening in the United States and to compare Canadian output with the best from those two countries. Of course, when you do that, the result is painful. I mean, we’re not even on the same planet.
Metcalf’s detractors will put this down to simply more colonial bitterness from an inveterate curmudgeon and complainer, but this knee-jerk response gives his argument short shrift. One presumes that Metcalf is confining his attention to literature written in English, which is why he singles out Britain and the United States (and not, say, Latin America) as the twin hubs of significant literary output. Were Metcalf to look past Canadian literature written in English, he might be surprised at the wealth of talent coming out of Quebec, even that small percentage that has appeared in translation. (It wouldn’t be hard, for example, to make a case for Marie-Claire Blais’s stature as a world-class author.) And there is a sense that Metcalf is engaging in a bit of hyperbole to make his point: even he admits that Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant are important Canadian writers.
Still, his basic contention is worth considering: if one were to build a literary canon of significant books from the past 50 years or so, how many works of Canadian literature would fit comfortably on it? I would suggest, for example, that Cat’s Eye and The Robber Bride – arguably Margaret Atwood’s two best novels – are important works in the annals of Canadian writing, but would their lustre not be the least bit diminished were they to be placed alongside the best of Philip Roth (Sabbath’s Theater, American Pastoral)? Or Don DeLillo (White Noise, Underworld)? Or Jeanette Winterson (The Passion, Written on the Body)? In such august company, would Atwood’s novels not come off looking just the slightest bit parochial and twee?
It’s been pointed out that in the chronology of world literatures, Canada’s is a relatively young one. We may indeed now be entering the period of literary development that the States found itself in at the mid-20th century. Still, by that point American literature had produced Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, not to mention Flannery O’Connor, Willa Cather, Nathanael West, James Baldwin, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, and Carson McCullers. Where are the Canadian writers to compare with these canonical names? Where in Canada are we to find such technically audacious, philosophically inquisitive, or cosmopolitan writers as José Saramago, Julio Cortàzar, Vladimir Nabokov, A.S. Byatt, Iris Murdoch, Roberto Bolaño, Michel Houellebecq, Alasdair Gray?
In his essay “Confessions of a Book Columnist,” Philip Marchand wrote, “Not even the most fervent partisans of Canadian literature will say that Canadians have done fundamentally new things with the novel form, or changed the way we read in the manner, say, of a Joyce, a Kafka, a Nabokov, or a Garcia Marquez.” Perhaps this partially explains the experience of a colleague of mine on a trip to France. Speaking about her work in the field of CanLit, she was questioned about imortant Canadian writers. Atwood’s name drew blank stares. The people she was speaking to had some vague notion of who Michael Ondaatje is, but that was about it. If being world class means being recognized abroad, this anecdotal experience suggests that we’re not doing terribly well.
Metcalf thinks this is because we don’t have a culture of tough criticism, and I for one would be hard pressed to disagree. The culture of boosterism and cheerleading to which we have consigned ourselves precludes us developing “an audience hard enough to exact” a literature that is able to compete with the best of what’s being produced internationally. Even Canadian writers feel this: ask anyone working in the trenches of CanLit about what’s exciting them in literature these days, and they’re more likely to name Joseph O’Neill than Anne Michaels. This is a shame. Where are Canada’s answers to Bolaño and Saramago, to Ali Smith and Haruki Murakami? They don’t exist – yet. But it is only by holding ourselves to the highest literary standards that we may hope to rectify this situation. We need to develop the “hard” audience that Metcalf advocates. We should not hesitate to judge Canadian writing against the best of what is being produced internationally, nor should we hesitate to point out those instances in which our writing comes up wanting.
Don’t tell me what the poets are doing
June 9, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · 2 Comments
Yesterday over at Quillblog, yr. humble correspondent published a post with the admittedly provocative title, “Why do people hate poetry?” The post began by pointing out a piece by Harry Eyres that ran in this past weekend’s Financial Times online. Eyres argues that instead of mouthing hypocritical platitudes about the benefits of poetry, it would be more honest to own up to the form’s marginalization and to address the reasons why people hate poetry:
It might be better to ask ourselves why, on the whole, we hate poetry – that is to say why we ruthlessly marginalise it and exile it to a cold place of almost total neglect – than to utter dishonest platitudes about how great it is.
Poetry is “up against it” in our modern, media-saturated culture, Eyres contends. “Unlike video games, reality television, amateur dance troupes, it is not a cultural phenomenon that is generally welcomed into people’s lives.”
In response to this, I posted an excerpt from the speech that James Wood gave at the Griffin Poetry Prize ceremony last week. The speech was reprinted in The Globe and Mail, and the passage I excerpted reads as follows:
Poetry waves a flower in the face of a highly utilitarian age. That great secular hybrid, pragmatic evolutionary psychology and neuro-aesthetics, is busy telling us that art is a slightly puzzling evolutionary superfluity. Art is defended as “cognitive play,” crucial for the evolutionary development of homo sapiens. Art, for such people, must always somehow be justified. But poetry sings the song of itself, and offers a musical gratuity. Just as no one should have to justify, in pragmatic terms, playing the piano or listening to Bach, so no one should have to justify reading Keats or Wallace Stevens. And I am not making the weak case that poetry evades or exceeds such pragmatic cost-counting, but that it challenges such utilitarianism, makes it doubt itself. It faces down the enemy.
There, I thought – I’ve presented two sides of an argument in point-counterpoint, and that should be that. Of course, I expected some reaction, if only to the aggressive title of the post, but what I didn’t expect was the vitriol hurled at Wood by people working in the field of Canadian poetry. (Remember: Wood is defending poetry here.)
Zach Wells, a highly articulate poet and critic, excoriates Wood for his “caricatures” of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience (okay, “neuro-aesthetics”) as they apply to art. Wells – an aficionado of Steven Pinker’s thought on the interstices between neuroscience and linguistics – castigates Wood for his “pseudo-religious gabble,” which, in his view, “misses the point by a barn’s width.” Jonathan Ball, a poet with a collection forthcoming from BookThug, says in response to Wells that he “could not have said it better.” Angel Guerra, a book designer, calls Wood’s comments “[s]nobbish and hectoring,” and says that “[h]is was a language aimed at an exclusive audience.” Bill Douglas, the book designer responsible for the design of A.F. Moritz’s Griffin Prize-winning collection, The Sentinel, decries Wood’s “tired lament” and implies that the critic is a “wryly funny blowhard.”
What’s interesting to me is that these are people actively involved in the Canadian poetry community, attacking someone who was offering a passionate defence of poetry. The language of this attack is all too familiar: Wood is accused of elitism (apparently because he uses big words) and exclusivity. Wells comes closer to the mark when he criticizes Wood for not recognizing the way poets are working to incorporate modern theories in neurology and linguistics into their art, but that was never Wood’s purpose. His speech was a valediction, not a critical assessment. It was a song of praise for art that exists for its own sake and does not, in his words, require justification.
Anyone who does require justification of poetry’s vast rewards need not look terribly far to find it. It does not take a “stuck-up pseudo-intellectual” like the ones another anonymous (natch) Quillblog commenter mentions to enjoy the rollicking humour in Jeramy Dodds’ definition of the word “raccoon” as “A sexual position favoured by the limbless,” or the stream of mangled clichés in his poem “The Epileptic Acupuncturist”: “People who get their rocks off / in glass houses are the same people / who’d bend you over a rain barrel / just to give you the wet T-shirts / off their backs.” Or the brutal juxtaposition of the organic and the mechanical in Sina Queyras’s image of a cancer patient “Lying on the examination table, her bowels / On the ultrasound in front of her.” Or Kevin Connolly’s paean to baseball: “It’s Posada, never an easy out, but the hook / is there for Lilly. It’s the seventh and his old team, / the 250-million-dollar Yankees, have beaten the / shit out of us all week.” Not a stuck-up pseudo-intellectual image in the bunch, just a group of poets delighting in the compression and torque of language.
So why is poetry so marginalized? Why does it sell less than even the redheaded stepchild of prose fiction, the short-story collection? Perhaps one reason is that those who are supposed to be promoting it can’t help but express knee-jerk disdain, even toward people who are in the process of defending the form.
A 21st century Conrad
June 5, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · 1 Comment
Love and Obstacles. Aleksandar Hemon; Riverhead Books, $32.50 cloth, 212 pp., 978-1-59448-864-1.
The first sentence of “Stairway to Heaven,” the opening story in Aleksandar Hemon’s new collection, begins on “a perfect African night, straight out of Conrad.” The reference to Conrad is appropriate, not only in context, but because of Hemon’s own biography. Possessed of only a rudimentary command of the English language, Hemon left his native Sarajevo in 1992, travelling to Chicago for what he assumed would be a brief visit to the U.S. While he was away, however, war broke out in his home country, and Hemon was prevented from returning. Like Conrad, Hemon was in his twenties before he became fluent in English, which makes the extraordinary linguistic facility the author displays throughout his new collection all the more astonishing.
It’s worth quoting that opening paragraph in full:
It was a perfect African night, straight out of Conrad: the air was pasty and still with humidity; the night smelled of burnt flesh and fecundity; the darkness outside was spacious and uncarvable. I felt malarial, though it was probably just travel fatigue. I envisioned millions of millipedes gathering on the ceiling over my bed, not to mention a fleet of bats flapping ravenously in the trees under my window. The most troubling was the ceaseless roll of drums: the sonorous, ponderous thudding hovering around me. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer, I could not tell.
That Hemon writes with an uncommon suppleness is clear: how many other writers would characterize darkness as being “spacious and uncarvable”? But it’s useful also to note the sensuousness of the prose, the way it appeals to a reader’s sense of smell (“burnt flesh and fecundity”) and of touch (the air “pasty and still with humidity”). There’s a brute physicality to this language, an immediacy and incipient violence (which, in several instances throughout the collection, will erupt into actual violence).
Hemon’s relationship to the English language can perhaps be seen in the character of the father in “The Bees, Part 1,” himself a Serbian immigrant who drops out of his English class because he is “furious at the language that randomly distributed meaningless articles and insisted on having a subject in every stupid sentence.” Hemon’s own ferocity is evident in the way he tugs at language, constantly testing its elasticity. If he occasionally tugs too hard (the “ineluctable sadness of hotel rooms” in one story becomes “the crushing sadness of hotel rooms” in the next – it’s unclear whether this subtle change is meant as an indication of a shift in the narrator’s attitude, or if it’s merely a matter of a repeated image), he always manages to rein himself in before he reaches a breaking point.
Of course, it’s tempting to view everything about Love and Obstacles through the prism of the author’s own biography. The eight linked stories in the collection follow the growth of a narrator who, like Hemon, leaves Bosnia for Chicago, where he eventually becomes a writer. The collection’s title first appears as the title of a poem the young narrator pens in an early story, then reappears in a later story as the title of a piece of short fiction that the narrator publishes in The New Yorker (the magazine in which six of the book’s eight stories first appeared). But fact and truth – like biography – are slippery things in the hands of the fiction writer. The father in “The Bees, Part 1″ has developed a “hatred of the unreal” and borrows a Super 8 camera from one of his coworkers so that he can shoot a biographical film about his life. When his wife asks him what the film will be about he replies, “The truth … Obviously.” In the father’s mind, fiction and truth are mutually exclusive; when the narrator gives his father a book called The Liar for his 45th birthday, “he read nothing of it but the title.”
But the father’s objection to fiction (“Not only that words – whose reality is precarious at best – were what it was all made from, but those words were used to render what never happened“) is incomplete, Hemon seems to be suggesting, because fiction has the unique ability to approach reality in a way that “the truth” cannot. The father writes a story entitled The Bees, Part 1, in which he relates the history of his grandfather’s apiary and the way the neighbours pillaged the family’s hives during the height of World War II:
They opened the hive and shook the bees off the frames. The bees were helpless: this was late October, it was cold, and they couldn’t fly or sting. They dropped to the ground in absolute silence: no buzz, no life; they all died that night.
This scene is recapitulated at the story’s end, when the narrator relates his family’s emigration from Bosnia to Canada, leaving 25 beehives behind. The family’s neighbours, “all drunken volunteers in the Serbian army,” descend on the hives and kick them over, and when the bees attempt to escape, “the neighbors [throw] a couple of hand grenades and [laugh] at the dead bees flying around as though alive.”
The massacre of the bees at the hands of “drunken volunteers in the Serbian army” is a fairly clear reference to the genocide in Bosnia during the infamous Siege of Sarajevo, an event which hangs over the entire collection like an albatross. Indeed, in “The Conductor,” the narrator confesses to feelings of “helplessness and guilt” as he watches images of the war being played out on his television from the safe confines of America. The narrator’s commingled feelings of dislocation and betrayal of his homeland pervade his time in the States, and finally find an ironic inversion in the final story, when he returns to Bosnia and invites a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist back to his parents’ home for a disastrous lunch. The novelist’s new book is about an American soldier in Iraq who is “dishonorably discharged for not corroborating the official story of the rape and murder of a twelve-year-old Iraqi girl and her entire family,” an incident that is propagandized as “an unfortunate instance of miscommunication with local civilians.” The ex-soldier returns home, where he tells people not to believe what they read in the newspapers about the war. “‘We are tearing new holes in the ass of the world,’ he says, ‘We are breaking it open.’”
In his preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus, Conrad wrote, “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see.” Hemon – Conrad’s literary descendant – wants, before all, to make you see. The fictional soldier in the novelist’s book – itself contained within a piece of fiction – is an instrument of truth. He is the avatar of Hemon’s sensibility, which is brave and clear, mordantly funny, and – above all – true.
A.F. Moritz wins 2009 Griffin Prize
June 4, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
The perennially (some would say criminally) overlooked Toronto poet A.F. Moritz finally got his moment in the sun last night. Moritz picked up the 2009 Griffin Poetry Prize for his latest collection, The Sentinel. A jury consisting of Michael Redhill, Dennis O’Driscoll, and Saskia Hamilton chose Moritz’s book over the two other shortlisted volumes, Kevin Connolly’s Revolver and Jeramy Dodds’ Crabwise to the Hounds.
This year’s $50,000 prize honours a poet whose work is deceptively simple, employing straightforward language to capture aspects of the human condition that frequently elude more abstruse versifiers. Indeed, Moritz frequently rails against the kind of poetry that assumes a haughty position or adopts a condescending tone toward its readers. In “Arrogance,” for example, a faceless mass of urban denizens “easily recognized the reprehensible arrogance / of the poet vilifying ‘a whole population / that goes about its business and doesn’t know / it is no longer human.’” The poem’s subjects, by contrast, “valued common things,” and “acknowledged that to walk / at such times past the form lying against a wall, / wrapped with thick blankets despite torturing humidity, / shamed them and assured them they were alive.”
Writing in The Globe and Mail, James Adams quotes the Ohio-born poet as saying, “I am looking at poetry as a kind of affliction that separates you from the rest of people, yet one of those proud afflictions where you pin the insult to your flag and raise it high.” Indeed, the title poem in the prize-winning collection, about a nightwatchman guarding a camp perimeter, could easily be read as a metaphor for a poet’s function in the world: “The one who watches while the others sleep / does not see. It is hoped, it is to be hoped / there is nothing to see.”
Moritz sees: plainly and honestly. His poetry is steeped in the specifics of the physical world, in which a jar is “[n]ot a vase, not a piece of the potter’s art / but glass, from a store shelf.” He acknowledges “that the good part / of the word is wind, and the adequate part / an image.” Whether his subject is nature or a woman’s mastectomy or a pleasure yacht seen from a harbour pier, Moritz brings to his poetry a clear eye and a powerful empathy, traits that are liable to pass unnoticed in the cacophonous din of our post-postmodern world.
What more is there to say except, it’s about time.