The FLIP Festival: Head over Heels in Parati, Brazil

AS PUBLISHED IN POETS & WRITERS MAGAZINE

Mountains thick with tropical vegetation rise behind the coastal town of Parati, Brazil; the bay spreads before it, dotted with fishing boats. Along the old wooden docks, fishermen, shirtless and shoeless, prepare their nets with quick, strong hands. In streets paved with oversized cobblestones, women serve doces, sweets like maracujá (passion fruit) tarts made with condensed milk. Parati—which, until the 1970s, was accessible only by boat—lies equidistant from Brazil’s major cities, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, and is home to the last of Brazilian royalty. it is known throughout Brazil as somewhere special, a retreat and an oasis…. Continue reading about Festa Literaria Internacional de Parati (PDF format).

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Risking Adventure: Mountaineering Journeys Around the World: Book Review

AS PUBLISHED IN QUILL & QUIRE

In spite of what Haberl claims in his introduction, Risking Adventure does not explore what motivates people to climb mountains. It chronicles the camaraderie that comes from climbing together. It also chronicles difficulties and hardship on climbs. It travels to Africa, South America, and Alaska and introduces characters like the ballsy Czech at Kilimanjaro and the Peruvian helicopter pilots. But it does not, as Haberl says, “explore the notion that risk and adventure need to be part of our lives.” It is a diary of exotic trips rendered in flat prose, peppered with dazzling photographs. It does not explore. It testifies.

As the first Canadian to climb K2, Haberl’s authority on climbing must be trusted. His skill is matched by his love for fellow climbers, especially his friend who died after also successfully climbing K2. It’s a pity therefore that Haberl’s prose makes for dull reading and that the main idea behind the book is thoroughly skirted. To ask, “Why climb mountains,” is like asking, “Why do humans put themselves in jeopardy?” It’s a difficult question to explore, but one Haberl is potentially in a position to answer. He has, as he says, been asked it many times. And we can imagine that when he’s hanging off a 2,000-foot mountain face by his fingertips, and night descends and ice jams belay lines, he must feel the will to live firing inside him like a dragon smoked out of her cave. But his literal-minded storytelling turns this delicate moment into a timed and dated weather report: “At midnight we were still on the rock. We were tired. I was nervous.”

Sprinkled into this are literal transcriptions of conversations: “Gosh it’s a long way down, Rob. Yeah. It sure is, Jim. Can we make it? I don’t know, what do you think? Yes we can. That’s what I like about you, your positive attitude. Thanks, I like your positive attitude, too.”

After almost having lost his footing, or else a limb, and if not a limb then a dear friend, exhausted and disoriented but triumphant and intoxicated by the danger overcome, Haberl will only say, “Gosh that was scary.”

Haberl’s writing does injustice to his adventures but his pictures make them vivid. Like those in National Geographic, the photos make for a spontaneous sense of what the snow tasted like, what the pack felt like, what kind of effort it took to climb with altitude sickness, and so on. When the real Haberl shines through, as he does intermittently in the prose, the reader gets a chance to appreciate how dedicated and talented a climber Haberl is, and how spectacular the risks he takes are. Too bad for us that the question of “Why climb?” is not truly explored or, at least, that the mountains explored have not truly been captured in words.

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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.

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Breasting the Waves: On Writing and Healing: Book Review

AS PUBLISHED IN GEIST MAGAZINE

Joanne Arnott in Breasting the Waves: On Writing and Healing writes with great effort, feeling her way toward expression and sense without giving her life away as if it were in the “miscellaneous” box at a garage sale. Arnott begins and ends with her story of being held hostage and beaten by a man she met on her way to university. The meaning of “hostage” (but not “victim”) is questioned over and over in the book as Arnott remembers growing up female, Métis and abused. She approaches herself respectfully. The essays blur seminar-style information and fiction-style narrative; but straight fiction might have allowed her more intensity. Also, the title of this book undermines Arnott’s seriousness with an unnecessary play on words. And while I loved the shape and feel of the cover, the image seemed wrong; at first glance it made me skeptical of the contents.

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My Messy Bedroom: Book Review

AS PUBLISHED IN GEIST MAGAZINE

I like good deals but sometimes a good tip will serve the same purpose. I was happy to find in Josey Vogels’s My Messy Bedroom (Véhicule Press) an intriguing tip on buying bras. In the chapter called “Booby Trap” she answers the question I’ve always had: how do you find a bra that does the job it’s supposed to? My mother tended to shoo me into the teen section and leave me there while she stood on the sidelines with her handbag. The bargain aisles of Eaton’s and the Bay haven’t taught me much about how a bra should fit or what it should feel like when it’s doing its job. The chapter’s opening sentence gives the store’s coordinates: “Thee Lingerie Shoppe on Hamilton Street in Regina” and the next time I’m in Saskatchewan I plan to drop by. Vogels’s chatter in favour of well-fitted bras is worth reading too, and helped banish the sugar-high feeling I got from reading her “fun” journalistic prose.

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Honour: Book Review

AS PUBLISHED IN QUILL & QUIRE

Ann Decter’s second novel, Honour, tells the stories of three friends in the midst of self-discovery. Honour is a feminist melting pot from which Decter pulls her characters Marie, Jane, and Shulamit Weiss and molds them into a friendship that holds the plot in place while the women wrestle with their demons. Decter introduced the trio in her first book, Paper, Scissors, Rock (1992) in which Jane was coming of age. In Honour, we see Jane writing her master’s thesis about her mother and the NDP, while her two friends fall in love on the coast.

The matrilineal search for history, the search for mothers and family, is a poignant one for post-second-wave feminist daughters; it is this idea that drives Decter’s novel and that ultimately keeps the reader interested. However, the women’s lives often seem more like symbols of 20th-century tragedies than lives of real people. Marie, of Métis ancestry, was conceived of a rape by a Catholic priest, and Shulamit wrestles with her family’s loss in the Holocaust. Their dialogue is expository; it moves information rather than creating relationships. Conversations do not much resemble everyday ways of talking. They are further undermined by what they say: in an attempt to illustrate how comfortable the friends are together, Decter has them shortening their words: “second” becomes “sec’,” “Marie” becomes “ ‘Rie,” etc., stilting the dialogue. Descriptions of crises, such as Shulamit’s memory of her lover Gloria’s murder, are forced and melodramatic. The murdered woman seems to represent harassed and threatened women rather than being one herself. Throughout the book, emotion is awkwardly rendered, so that most experiences, but especially the very politicized ones, fail to convey the appropriate distress and outrage. So heavy is the responsibility to articulate and resolve their histories – enormous histories, brutal histories – that the characters teeter and careen, sometimes captivating the reader, sometimes alienating her.

An ambitious, though in the end unsuccessful, attempt.

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Princess at the Window: A New Gender Morality

AS PUBLISHED IN QUILL & QUIRE

If you watch TV or read the popular press, you probably know more about the rebellion against feminism than you do about feminism itself. Nay-sayers to the women’s movement have been popular since Camille Paglia, queen of provocation, cleared the way in 1990. Most of these books that promise to throw a wrench in the works of social change, including Toronto Star columnist Donna Laframboise’s The Princess at the Window, are being issued by big houses (Kate Fillion’s recent and much-excerpted Lip Service from HarperCollins; Katie Roiphe’s Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism from Little, Brown; Wendy Dennis’s Hot and Bothered: Sex and Love in the 90s from Key Porter) perhaps because they promise high sales due to their controversy. These books are quintessential pop-psychology, café talk dressed up as exposé and inquiry, the sort of stuff pop-culture loves. Their writing masquerades as intelligent rumination on the nature of things (in this case feminism) for those of us who don’t have the time or attention spans to read the real thing.

I agree with Laframboise’s summaries of the strife and discomfort within women’s groups. Internal politics suck, and women, like anyone else, get sidetracked from their good intentions by squabbles and power-grabs. But groups by their very nature demand conformity, and conformity always brings on rebellion and disillusion. Also, as Laframboise says, men are not inherently evil. She would like to re-entrench everyone in the moderate, mature castle of gender issues, not simply women’s issues. But while Laframboise argues, my mind wanders to a dear law student I know, a serial monologist. He, who could articulate his thoughts well and support them with evidence from reports, statistics, and whatever else was at hand, managed more to alienate than to convince me. His point, it seemed, was the argument itself, not my involvement in conversation.

Perhaps the similarity between Laframboise and my friend is tone. Although she provokes real thought in some chapters, she is always exasperated and yelling; possibly she worries that the rabble of card-carrying feminists will stifle her message. As well, she begins paragraphs with variations on, “don’t get me wrong, I’m as feminist as anyone, but….”; “rape is very serious but…” etc.; paragraphs that barely begin to acknowledge what feminism has done and why it is important before they’re cut short and brought back to the agenda: berating mainstream feminism. And Laframboise, like Fillion, approaches feminism as if it were a monolith that’s compromising our government and laws, and the safety of the general public, without ever defining what she takes to be mainstream feminism and why. Laframboise, who has a master’s in Women’s Studies and years, she says, of advocacy experience, has turned her back on the establishment; she’s handed in her membership card and the onus is on her to justify her position. She does not. And when her defensive tone meets her unwillingness to acknowledge the positive side of feminism, Princess at the Window becomes tiring. Even Paglia writes in a cooler, more palatable style.

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Lonesome Monsters: Book Review

AS PUBLISHED IN GEIST MAGAZINE

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?

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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?

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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.

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Tokyo Cowboy

AS PUBLISHED IN GEIST

Canada Post hired me in January, and at first I worked at a station in my own neighbourhood, meaning I left my house at 6:48 a.m. to arrive at 6:52 a.m. Life seemed fair; I could have been posted in the suburbs. It lasted only two weeks, but back in those days, feeling optimistic, I went to see Tokyo Cowboy, Kathy Garneau's first feature film, in which one of the characters is a postie in full regalia—blue jacket, grey pants and navy blue satchel, embodying all that I had yet to become: fully uniformed, excellent at sorting his mail and familiar with all the houses and occupants on his walk. I realized that posties symbolize Canada to me almost as much as those relentless Mounties do. Maybe it's the corporate logo you see everywhere, or maybe their reputation for friendliness, or their omnipresence (ever counted how many post office trucks you see in a day?), or perhaps the distances they travel and the weather (not to mention the dogs) they negotiate to deliver the mail. Even if it raises stamp prices too often and delays important mail, Canada Post (it suddenly seemed to me) was one of the mother-structures of the Canadian Identity, invisible and essential. "Hey, that's me," I whispered as the postie on screen walked into a bar, in uniform, and ordered a beer. In the film, a Japanese boy obsessed with cowboys flies to rural B.C. to meet his childhood cowgirl/penpal. She's grown up and got a fine arts degree from Vancouver, moved back to her home town, and moved in with her girlfriend, but has yet to come out to her community. Her mother tries to get the low-down, or at least get her daughter together with the nice Japanese boy. Meanwhile, the Japanese boy appoints the postie as his cowboy sensei. The climactic scene, at the Hallowe'en dance, underlines the racial, sexual and relational tensions in the community. The postie, dressed as a First Nations chief, meets a First Nations youth who demands that he de-mask and defeather, while the Japanese boy masquerades as a geisha girl and winds up outside behind a pickup truck, kissing the cowgirl's girlfriend, and the cowgirl, enraged and armed, manages to shoot the Japanese boy in the arm. Not shouting about being Canadian, but not concealing it either, not making an overly pointed display of discriminations, but portraying them as they normally occur, this film got my heart and my interest. Caroline Adderson, a friend of Garneau's and winner of the 1994 Governor General's award for fiction, wrote the screenplay and, believe it or not, the next day at work—refreshed by this good flick—as I sorted mail into the lock-boxes of an east Vancouver housing complex, I noticed that the Book of the Month envelope was going to none other than Caroline Adderson. "Hey, do you know who this is?" I asked my postie-trainer. "Nah," he said, not caring much more after I enlightened him. I folded and wrestled the envelope into its box and scraped the skin off my knuckles in the process.

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