fiction

Sleeping Weather: Book Review

AS PUBLISHED IN QUILL & QUIRE

Leon Stone, Cary Fagan’s leading man in Sleeping Weather, is a Toronto character who’s spent some time in Kingston penetentiary and who urgently wants an explanation for his childhood. Fagan gives him lots of emotional snarls to untangle: a daughter he’d clearly die for, a forgiving marriage (which he feels undeserving of), a business that eerily mimics his father’s, and a new neighbour named Vasily who reminds Leon (reluctantly) of himself. As Leon moves through his daily joys and trials, the contrast between his adult satisfaction in marriage and his devastation as a son grows starker.

Fagan’s expressive details create a strong sense of people and place. The reader really feels familiar with his Toronto. And from his base of accurate and compressed language, Fagan can risk making simple parallels between Leon’s troubles and those of other characters. In fact, he makes many, many parallels, which form a net of plot around Leon, his family, and his past. For instance, when Leon grudgingly befriends Vasily (the neo-father figure), his wife suddenly befriends a difficult patient who reminds her of her mother. Leon’s father bet on horses; Leon carves wild-eyed rocking horses. Leon’s workshop is in his basement; Vasily drinks himself to death in his basement next door. Fagan weaves Leon’s troubles into each scene, spreading the idea of neglect, conflict, and struggle for resolution over the narrative like a heavy mist.

In spite of this, Sleeping Weather is an uneven book. Exciting events happen with too little build-up. Others occur with too much, and the intended jolt falls flat. Characters like Vasily come across as overly symbolic; he seems more of an idea at Fagan’s fingertips than a truly broken man. There also seems to be a punch line to the book as the reader waits to learn what drove Leon to jail, then caused his housebound condition in Toronto. When the reason is revealed, it doesn’t seem new, or particularly compelling. This is disappointing in a book set so pleasingly in historical and contemporary Toronto featuring characters who have such nifty biographies.

Self: Book Review II

AS PUBLISHED IN GEIST MAGAZINE

Since my review of Yann Martel’s novel Self (Knopf) in Geist No. 21, I have retrieved it from my bedside table and read it to the end. It’s an attractive hardcover with a creamy yellow sleeve and the story, which stumped me at first, enthralled me when I continued where I left off. The way the character is initiated into sex, academics, travel, work and love is moving and often amusingly perceptive. I was so transported into her world that I thought about her even when I wasn’t reading the story, and when it came, the much-discussed ending jarred me as it was meant to. Self is worth pursuing past the sluggish part near the beginning; it is sure to win big literary prizes.

Speaking of jarring but effective writing, Bud Osborn’s Lonesome Monsters (Anvil) successfully dramatizes the harsher side of urban life. This book, though it doesn’t break new ground in form or content, depicts the Main-and-Hastingses of North America in unpretentious and straightforward poems. The modesty with which each poem is constructed underscores the sadness and despair that their characters feel. Osborn’s sense of humour and his portraits of violence, exploitation and heartache, easy to overdo, survive my distaste for melodrama and even survive the text’s unflattering typeface. Apparently Osborn’s been writing for twenty-five years. Where has he been all this time?

Self: Book Review

AS PUBLISHED IN GEIST MAGAZINE

Yann Martel’s novel Self (Knopf), seems aptly titled for a book that depicts a character growing from childhood into adulthood. Martel’s first book, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, kept me on my couch for chapter after chapter with tears in my eyes. Self displays Martel’s breadth of knowledge, his skill at prose and his lovely imagination. In spite of this, it has been resting at the bottom of my bedside reading pile with a bookmark stuck in about a third of the way through for at least a month now. Perhaps Martel’s obsession with bodily functions (really: pages and pages on acne, shit, masturbation, menstruation; with sex and a flesh-eating disease no doubt lurking in the pages I didn’t reach) turned me off. Or perhaps it was the moment when the main character, a male, without warning wakes up female. Not once does she look in the mirror to assess her new self, although she continues with his/her litany of other observations. The bodily change brings no change in thought process, not even surprise. So my interest waned. And, as is true for much of my life, I wish my faith in Self would return, because in spite of its faults I still have hopes for it.


Round Two
Since my review of Yann Martel’s novel Self (Knopf) in Geist No. 21, I have retrieved it from my bedside table and read it to the end. It’s an attractive hardcover with a creamy yellow sleeve and the story, which stumped me at first, enthralled me when I continued where I left off. The way the character is initiated into sex, academics, travel, work and love is moving and often amusingly perceptive. I was so transported into her world that I thought about her even when I wasn’t reading the story, and when it came, the much-discussed ending jarred me as it was meant to. Self is worth pursuing past the sluggish part near the beginning; it is sure to win big literary prizes.