Book Reviews

Final batch of 2024 published reviews and notes on books recently read

Recent published book reviews:

• The Topography of Pain by Ivan Lesay (2024); translated by Jonathan Gresty (Miramichi Reader)

• Vantage Point: On Media as Trans Memoir by Chase Joynt (2024) (Miramichi Reader)

• The Good Walk: Creating New Paths on Traditional Prairie Trails by Matthew R. Anderson (2024) (Miramichi Reader)

• The Coincidence Problem: Dispatches 1999-2022 by Stephen Osborne (2024) (Miramichi Reader)

• Best Canadian Essays 2025 (2024), selected by Emily Urquhart. (Miramichi Reader)

• Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim by Jacob Wren (2024) (Zoomer)

Other recently read books:

• Toxemia by Christine McNair (2024)

• On Beauty: Stories by rob mclennan (2024)

• Unless by Carol Shields (2002)

• February 1933: The Winter of Literature by Uwe Wittstock (2023)

• The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa (1994, English 2019)

• The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy (1994)

Toxemia by Christine McNair (2024)

Christine McNair’s Toxemia makes for harrowing reading. A memoir told in lyrical essays, prose poetry, photographs and more, this book takes the reader to the edge of life. On the back cover, Elee Kraljii Gardiner calls it “a beautiful etiological study,” a term I had to look up more than once to remind myself: what am I reading here? The question recurred because the purpose seemed to shift, if only in my mind.

I started with a vague sense that this was a story about complications from pregnancy. By the time I finished, I realized what an idiot I was — and I was drowned in respect for McNair for the numerous subtle turns, explanations, and descriptions she provides of multiple near death experiences and the mysterious, tenuous connections between cause and effect, especially as related to the fragility of life and the monstrous uncertainties that regulate (or not) the human body.

Toxemia is the former name for what is now called preeclampsia (webmd.com):

…. happens when you're pregnant and have high blood pressure, too much protein in your pee, and also swelling in your legs, feet, and hands. It can range from mild to severe. It usually happens late in pregnancy, though it can come earlier or just after delivery.

The only cure for preeclampsia is to give birth. Even after delivery, symptoms of preeclampsia can last 6 weeks or more.

McNair has two children. She experienced preeclampsia with each. She also writes of a suicide attempt as a teenager. The narrative is non-linear, looping back and forward, pulling in historical analysis and soaking in poetic reflection. These things happened. They put her life at risk. In past centuries, they killed many women. Modern medicine continues to find them mysterious. Narrative loose ends abound, as in this situation they must. The bottom line is life persists, the book was written. And it’s terrific.

One line jumped out at me: “Every body survives something. Or they don’t.”

Amen.

On Beauty: Stories by rob mclennan (2024)

The line in rob mclennan’s short fiction collection, On Beauty, that jumped out:

All my life, I’ve been attempting to uncover the connections between things. Attempting to comprehend, and articulate, whether chicken or egg.

As I wrote that, I thought, Oh, it’s sort of an etiological study. Hmm.

By my count, On Beauty includes 46 pieces, including “Baby Names” (published by me in The Danforth Review #60, June 2015). The pieces are short, often imagistic. They are often portraits of characters via voice, characters attempting to map their place in the world, their path through events, their pin point in time, per the quotation noted above.

Among the 46 pieces, are 14 titled “On Beauty,” linking all and sundry to the theme. The reader is best advised to approach the work with an open mind and intuition. The narrative logic flows through the subconscious, that is, cause and effect is not always obvious. “Every body survives something. Or they don’t.” You know what I mean.

Unless by Carol Shields (2002)

The mystery about why and how things happen is also central to Carol Shields’s 2002 smash hit, Unless. Spoiler alert: I’m about to give away the plot.

Central here is the narrator’s undergraduate age daughter, Norah, who sits at the corner to Bloor and Bathurst in Toronto, a bowl in front of her to collect change and a sign hung around her neck emblazoned with one word: GOODNESS. The narrator is Reta, who is heartbroken. What has happened to her daughter, raised solidly middle-class and now acting out moral purity and homelessness?

Ultimately, I read Unless as a satire on the cluelessness of middle-class white women. This, of course, is not how this novel is typically presented. LOL. For example, a 2020 piece in The New York Times began this way:

When Carol Shields died of breast cancer in 2003, her obituary in The New York Times remembered her as a novelist whose work highlighted the “profundity of the mundane,” while The Guardian mentioned her “commitment to commemorating otherwise ordinary lives.” Shields specialized in fiction devoted to women characters and their experience; nearly two decades later, the province of “ordinary” women in fiction still needs defending.

As the story of Reta, a writer of modest gifts, a mother and wife, a friend and suburbanite, Unless fits the stereotype of a portrait of an “ordinary woman,” albeit one who finds herself in an extraordinary situation. The reason I read the novel as satire is because Reta’s explanation and presentation of cause and effect is ridiculous — opening up questions of racial presentation and meaning. The racial erasure in this novel is extraordinary itself.

Because the reason Norah is on the street corner is, she intervened when a Muslim woman set herself on fire, killing herself by self-immolation. The Muslim woman is mentioned a total of three times in the novel, twice as a causal aside, then finally as the source of Norah’s deviation from middle-class normality. Who is this Muslim woman? Why did she do such as extraordinary thing? Reta couldn’t care less, nor could many of the reviewers and early readers of the novel, as noted by Margaret Steffler in her essay, “A Human Conversation About Goodness” (Studies in Canadian Literature #34, 2009):

Reviewers and critics of Unless have tended to minimize the details of the actual interaction between Norah and the “young Muslim woman,” largely because of Shields’s own minimalist treatment. Catherine Lockerbie, for example, noting that the “full reasons for Norah’s withdrawal … are almost glossed over,” points out that “Reta’s response to this family crisis is far more moving and involving than the crisis itself, which is resolved with almost unseemly speed.” Lockerbie speculates that “this may be seen as a minor flaw in the structure of the book or a deliberate avoidance of any more grandiose denouement” (H8). The “crisis” is not “resolved” in any sense of the word, but rather than a structural flaw, the lack of attention accorded to the incident deliberately demands the reader’s engagement. The delayed relation of the incident of the burning woman is heavily invested with assumed significance because it is withheld for so long; however, its actual substance is never revealed, despite the apparent “answers” it provides about Norah’s behaviour. Neither Reta nor Shields pauses for very long in the description of the moment when Norah touches the “other” woman, but the encounter is crucial precisely because of its brevity. If Shields writes about “the hidden, the unsaid” (Hughes 138) by concentrating particularly on gaps and silences, it is safe to assume that the mysterious uncertainty surrounding Norah’s act is important. Although the meaning of the moment may be elusive, it calls for its own pursuit. In fact, it is difficult or even impossible to ignore the strange vagueness that hints at so much but tells so little. Shields talks about the way in which readers are often left “tugging after the narrative thread” in order to speculate about what is missing or unrevealed (“Narrative” 20), and there is no doubt here that the reader is compelled to tug and work at the thread connecting Norah’s intervention to her subsequent display of “goodness” on the very street corner where she touched the “other.”

Nora Foster Stovel notes the lack of commentary concerning “the cause of the woman’s self-immolation or the relevance of her religion,” pointing out that Shields concentrates instead on “the effects of witnessing the death on Norah Winters, presumably her despair at this shocking symbol of the powerlessness of women to make their voices heard” (69n19).

Similar concerns are addressed by Smaro Kamoureli in “In/visibility, Race-Baiting, and the Author Function in Carol Shields's Unless”:

Smaro Kamboureli, drawing on Shields’s essay “Writing from the Edge,” reads Unless as a text that constructs the Muslim woman as an authorial ruse in order to both raise and problematize matters of “race.” Keeping in mind Shields’s views about writing and distinguishing between the novel’s historical author and the author as inscribed in the text, Kamboureli focuses not only on the technologies of visuality and control that comprise the protagonist’s first-person narrative but also on the ways in which they are ironically inversed by the author function. It is this reversal, she argues, that both questions and upholds the narrator’s representations of otherness. With particular emphasis on how the narrator visualizes her household, as well as Toronto’s urban imaginary (where her daughter and the Muslim woman are situated), as panoptical and circumscribed constructs, she reads the Muslim woman’s minimalist representation as a calculated manifestation of authorial agency designed at once to lure critical attention and to put Canadian civility to the test.

Kamoureli’s essay is available in Relating Carol Shields’s Essays and Fiction: Crossing Borders, edited by Nora Foster Stovel (2023), which is available from Indigo, if you have $200+. The Toronto Public Library does not have a copy.

February 1933: The Winter of Literature by Uwe Wittstock (2023)

The context here, of course, is Germany, is Hitler. February 1933 is when the Dictator becomes the Dictator, taking on the role of Chancellor and taking over the full levers of power. The subtitle is the theme. What does the Nazi takeover mean for literature? For writers? There are immediate consequences, which some anticipate (and thus flee the country) and others downplay (and therefore dawdle). Further others see nothing to worry about, in fact much to celebrate, thus, ultimately, destroying forever their reputations.

Wittstock has scanned dozens of historical documents, diaries, memoirs, etc., to piece together a day-by-day account of the actions and decisions of Germany’s leading writers. The Mann family, of course, features prominently. They are among the dawdlers, though they (mostly) realize quickly enough that things have changed irrevocably. Arguments break out between writers about how best to respond. Others offer sanctuary to those most at risk, anyone identified as Jewish, obviously, either overtly or more cosmopolitan-ly “integrated” (the Nazis make no distinction, though some writers/intellectuals insist too long upon it, with dire consequences).

Yes, many of the arguments presented (to stay or go; the risk is real or not) read as frighteningly contemporary. Nationalist populism suffers no fools, this requires no repeating, however foolish its own foundations. Inserting Yeats here:

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa (1994, English 2019)

This was a book club book. The plot is, on an island in Japan the population suffers a kind of progressive, forced mental illness. Objects and their respective words disappear from the collective consciousness, one after another. Birds, for example. Suddenly, there are none, and no one can remember what those flighty things used to be called. The world, obviously, gets conceptually smaller and smaller, except for some people, life continues as normal. These are the ones at risk of being picked up and disappeared by the memory police.

The Winter of Literature? Um. Well, the process takes more than a month, though onward it marches. The protagonist is a novelist, and eventually even novels disappear. This is an easy read, if an unsettling one. My query was, why are the bad guys so vague? Yes, the memory police are the antagonists, but what dark purpose are they working for? It remains unstated and, therefore, unsatisfying. Incomplete?

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy (1994)

I listened to this one by audio book. A teenage boy in the early 20th century on the US - Mexico border has an adventure with a wolf, loses his family, drifts hither and yon, as McCarthy does his thing: confronting the reader with existential loneliness. Is there anybody out there? Is there a point to anything? Life in the meantime powers on.