Bestsellers – Week of January 30th, 2011

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 9:11 AM - 0 Comments

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

Soaking up the sunshine

By Nicholas Köhler - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 8:50 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Cole Garside

Horace Austin Bingham was born in 1859 and earned his undertaking papers in Toronto in 1897. An enterprising man, he soon established himself as the most successful mortician in Orillia, Ont., cutting a figure that left a definite impression on Stephen Leacock—one so powerful that Bingham later appeared in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, Leacock’s comic masterpiece about the foibles of small-town folk, set in a thinly disguised stand-in for Orillia called Mariposa. Leacock’s Golgotha Gingham, his surname a single letter in the alphabet from libel, is a “quiet, sallow looking man dressed in black, with black gloves and with black silk hat heavily craped.” He goes on: “such words as ‘funeral’ or ‘coffin’ or ‘hearse’ never passed his lips. He spoke always of ‘internments,’ of ‘caskets,’ and ‘coaches,’ using terms that were calculated rather to bring out the majesty and sublimity of death rather than to parade its horrors . . . I have often heard him explain that to associate with the living, uninteresting though they appear, is the only way to secure the custom of the dead.”

Bingham left no record of what he thought of this alter ego; perhaps the depiction contributed to his decision, late in life, to leave undertaking and become a gold prospector in Timmins, Ont. (his descendents still own one of his claims). His son Griffith, a prominent Orillia lawyer for most of the last century, later said his father felt Gingham “was too preoccupied with the undertaking business,” writes Carl Spadoni, editor of a scholarly edition of Sunshine Sketches. But his younger wife, Annie, and daughter Bessie were horrified by the portrayal of Bingham “rubbing his hands together looking for the next piece of business,” says his granddaughter, Elaine Peterson, 55. “They thought Leacock was poking fun at the greedy undertaker.” Peterson, a legal assistant, believes hers is the last remaining family in Orillia that can still find portraits of its members in Leacock’s gently mocking stories, which legend says split the town when they first appeared in 1912. Though he denied modelling Mariposa on Orillia, no one believed him (a lawyer persuaded Leacock, a McGill University economics professor whom colleagues urged not to publish humour, to further modify some names when the sketches appeared in book form). “We fear that no amount of asseveration on Dr. Leacock’s part will convince Orillians that they do not ‘recognize’ some of the characters,” wrote a reviewer in the Orillia Packet, edited by a Leacock pal, which accounts for the forgiving tone.

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REVIEW: Heft

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 8:45 AM - 0 Comments

Arthur Opp is a morbidly obese recluse who dropped out of academia after a scandal, retreated to his Brooklyn home, and hasn’t been outside in 10 years. Kel Keller is a high school baseball star whose life seems perfect, but is really coming apart at the seams. Moore’s novel is narrated by these two characters, who are connected by Charlene, Kel’s mother and Arthur’s former student and friend.

Arthur’s peaceful if lonely existence is interrupted one day by a phone call from Charlene, with whom he’d lost touch. Charlene asks if he might tutor her son Kel to help him get into college, a request that makes Arthur deeply uncomfortable. Writing a letter to Charlene, he tells her: “The first thing you must know about me is that I am colossally fat,” thinking his deterioration after years alone in his house would shock her.

Charlene has problems of her own. Lonely and depressed, she’s become an alcoholic, and Kel bears the brunt of it. Spending his days juggling a teenager’s life and caring for his mother, Kel doesn’t want to go to college. He dreams of playing baseball for the Mets, his father’s favourite team, which he believes could bring the two of them closer together—his dad disappeared when he was a kid.

Moore’s style is light and engaging, if at times a bit too quirky. The best part of her book is Arthur, who comes to life as a sweet, vulnerable person whose voice is surprisingly relatable and wonderfully unique; Kel’s narration can sometimes seem flat by comparison. Even so, with Heft, Moore has managed to create a novel that’s uplifting despite its somewhat dark and heavy subject matter, just as its title suggests.

EXCERPT: Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

The New York Times Photo Archives/Redux

Vancouver-born and now resident in Washington as the National Geographic Society’s Explorer-in-Residence, Wade Davis, 58, is one of the most celebrated Canadian scientists and authors of his generation. The ethnobotanist, anthropologist and historian has written 15 books, none closer to his heart than his newest, Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest, shortlisted for the Charles Taylor Prize. Davis loves the wild places of the world and has always been fascinated by the social and cultural upheavals wrought by the First World War, still a living memory in his childhood. “Both my grandfathers were in the war, and the headmaster of my school had been at the Somme,” he recalls. “When I was in Nepal I heard the stories of the postwar expeditions—the Englishmen reading Shakespeare to each other in the snow—and I knew by their ages that they too must have been in the war.”

The result is a book Davis calls “the best I’ve ever written,” a beautifully evocative exploration of the inchoate motives of a group of British climbers who attempted to scale Mount Everest in the early 1920s. There was patriotism, of course, but also a desire for cleansing redemption. That ascending the world’s tallest peak was of no practical use added immensely to its appeal; privation and the very real possibility of death, to men who had survived the trenches, was scarcely worth mentioning.

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REVIEW: I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 7:45 AM - 0 Comments

We all know there’s no privacy on the Internet, but we don’t really think about it in terms of how it affects the rights we take for granted. It’s something that Lori Andrews, a law professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, wants us to think about, and that means first of all letting us know just how much we’re being spied on. It’s not just Facebook, which famously makes its money by collecting our information and selling it to potential advertisers; websites everywhere are “harvesting” our online searches. This adds up to what Andrews calls “your digital doppelgänger,” an image of the person you seem to be from your online activity—often a very inaccurate image, but one that can be used to deny you services or jobs. “Virtually every interaction a person has in the offline world,” Andrews warns, “can be tainted by social network information.”

This isn’t the first time new technology has posed a threat to privacy, although in the past, laws were promptly updated to deal with telephones or computer databases. But as Andrews points out, lawmakers and judges have been incredibly slow to change the laws or apply existing ones to the new reality. The result is a system where “according to the courts, the consent of the person whose data is being intercepted is not required.” Once you consent to a website using your information, you give up your right to control how that information is used.

Much of the book is taken up with Andrews’ arguments for a new legal regime to deal with the issues posed by social networking. She proposes a “social network constitution” that will create certain new-media rights (like “the right to connect”) and also protect old ones, such as cracking down on jurors who read about the case on Twitter. Sometimes the book seems a little bit bogged down in pop legalism and statistics about how many words pop up in online discussion threads. But I Know Who You Are provides a succinct introduction to ideas that are going to be a big part of future laws, legal controversies and precedent-setting decisions—and, therefore, are going to make a lot of money for lawyers.

REVIEW: Taft 2012

By Richard Warnica - Wednesday, February 1, 2012 at 8:50 AM - 0 Comments

William Howard Taft, the last mustachioed president of the United States, is said to have been good at everything he did in life, other than running the country. The Cincinnati native, who weighed in at well over 300 lb., was so ineffectual in office that his one-time champion Teddy Roosevelt actually re-entered politics to run against him as a third-party candidate in 1912.

In the American writer Jason Heller’s slapstick debut, Taft gets a second chance. The real-life former president went on to a fruitful post-politics career. In Taft 2012, he instead disappears after his successor Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, only to re-emerge a century later having been frozen the whole time beneath the White House lawn. It’s an absurd premise, and Heller labours pretty hard to establish it. As a result, the book doesn’t really begin to flow until almost midway through. After meeting up with his great-granddaughter, an independent congresswoman, Taft embarks on a national tour and later a presidential campaign. Along the way, he enjoys a sexual tryst, punk music and massive quantities of food, while learning to hate the book’s nominal villain, a spooky agribusiness giant.

Taft 2012 is a clumsy book. The dialogue is overwhelmingly expository and the joke of having Taft react with confusion to every sign of modern life grows old rather quickly. (My tipping point was his reference to “a singer named, what was it, Michael Jackman?”) For all that, it’s a charming read. Taft 2012 taps into a particular American desire for a different kind of politics and does so in a breezy, if morally simple, way.

REVIEW: Guilt

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 at 8:40 AM - 0 Comments

For more than half a century, the words “German” and “guilt” have had a relationship inescapably entangled in history. That legacy of Nazi crime—and postwar repentance—subtly but unmistakably resonates right through von Schirach’s exquisite short stories, and not only because he is a grandson of Baldur von Schirach, head of the Hitler Youth and a Nuremberg-convicted war criminal. Even though the setting for Guilt is present day, it’s impossible not to hear echoes of the past when a woman is asked, long after a child is raped, why she did and said nothing when she saw the girl being forced into a neighbour’s apartment. “It wasn’t my business,” Frau Halbert replies to every question. “It was nothing to do with me.”

Yet the real shadow of Nazism lying over the 15 stories is cast, paradoxically enough, by its absence. The unnamed narrator is a criminal defence lawyer (von Shirach’s former job) who represents or advises clients who have come into some contact with the postwar German legal code, which in vehement reaction to the past, now bends over backwards to protect the rights of the accused. The crimes involved range from the prosaic to the bizarre, the understandable to the horrifying. Some clients emerge scot-free, some go to jail; the narrator, no Perry Mason but a competent and compassionate professional, does his best by them all.

One story—involving psychotic but bumbling career criminals and a laxative-stuffed mastiff trapped in a luxury Maserati—is both appalling and very funny. But the rest, all told in a detached and utterly engrossing manner that plays on the opening quote from Aristotle—“Things are as they are”—leave a reader not amused but wonderstruck. There is guilt aplenty to go around. Two teenaged runaways are invited in from the cold by a friendly seeming older man. He turns out to be a pedophile and in the subsequent struggle the boy and girl kill him, half accidentally, half-deliberately. They get away clean and turn their lives around; 19 years later, solid citizens with two children of their own, they open the door to find cold-case cops with new DNA evidence. They kill themselves. Pin the guilt in that.

That’s more easily done in the jewel of the collection, “Funfair.” There, police and medical personnel must face the fact it was their haphazard handling of the evidence that will allow the perpetrators of a vicious crime to walk free. The narrator, coolly leveraging that incompetence for the sake of his clients, scarcely feels better about himself. But he gets over it, as does almost but not everyone else in Guilt, von Shirach’s ultimate theme.

REVIEW: Girl Hunter: Revolutionizing the Way We Eat, One Hunt at a Time

By Patricia Dawn Robertson - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 at 8:40 AM - 0 Comments

American chef Georgia Pellegrini wanted to get even closer to the meat she prepared in New York’s finest restaurants. Electing to bag her own dinner, the neophyte hunter hit the road to teach the value of self-sufficiency. Girl Hunter is an evocative account of Pelligrini’s gun-to-table experiences. To her credit, she treats every hunting companion and expedition—be it rural Mississippi or England—with an open mind.

It’s an unlikely pairing of Nigella Lawson’s culinary skills and Hemingway’s grit. Long days tracking game are followed by well-earned, upscale dinners. (Each chapter includes recipes.) Pellegrini encounters a fascinating cast of characters on her hunting expeditions. Most of the seasoned American and British hunters are courtly, educated and expert at stalking deer, wild turkey, pheasant, wild hogs, hare, even squirrel. Pellegrini’s only negative encounter is with a rude poacher whom she eludes with the aplomb of a plucky dime-store-novel heroine.

A reader can almost smell the cigar smoke and hear the brandy snifters clink while hunters celebrate the kill. Pellegrini also delves into the tribal mindsets of the hunger-philosophers she meets. “When I’m sitting with men around the fire,” says a Texan, “we often ask ourselves, what is it about this that we like so much? And the truth is that we’re going back. Even though we eat nice food and wear the nice clothing now, it was only two or three generations ago that this is how we provided food for our families.”

For domesticated omnivores who crave the vicarious thrill of the chase, Girl Hunter is a must-read.

REVIEW: Fairy Tale Interrupted

By Jessica Allen - Monday, January 30, 2012 at 8:50 AM - 0 Comments

How did a wisecracking, Howard Stern-loving, twentysomething gal from the Bronx become the personal assistant to John F. Kennedy Jr.? By being sassy, wisecracking—and immune to the charms of the Kennedy scion, once named “sexiest man alive” by People magazine. “He loved that I treated him like a normal person and not like JFK Jr.,” insists author RoseMarie Terenzio, who worked for Kennedy for five years, during which time he launched George, a flashy political magazine, and married Carolyn Bessette. Terenzio’s memoir of their relationship is studded with such delicious detail that even readers who don’t remember the days when John and Carolyn fighting in Central Park made front-page news will devour it.

The two met in 1994 when a co-owner of the New York PR firm where Terenzio worked sold the agency in order to go into business with Kennedy. Terenzio thought she’d be out of a job but at the 11th hour, Kennedy asked her to work for him. The plan? To start a magazine that merged the two worlds of pop culture and politics. No one was more qualified to helm George than him, argues Terenzio, “since he exemplified both.” And, arguably, no one is better at observing the affairs of a magazine than the boss’s assistant: with sprezzatura to spare, Terenzio delivers tantalizing accounts of staff cattiness and celebrity dealings, including cold-shouldering Oprah, a crazy call from Marlon Brando, and Sean Penn behaving like, well, Sean Penn.

Of course, she made mistakes, like forgetting to book the occasional lunch reservation, but Terenzio learned fast, and the perks—courtside Knicks tickets, a week every summer at the Hyannis Cape house, shopping sprees with Carolyn—were plentiful.

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REVIEW: The Flight of Gemma Hardy

By Dafna Izenberg - Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

In 1958, at the age of 10, Gemma Hardy is the unwanted ward of her late uncle’s wife. She is sent off to boarding school, where she earns her keep by cooking and cleaning and where she must fend off the abuse of other students. Clever and hard-working, Gemma is not quite 18 when she goes to work as the au pair of an unruly little girl who lives with her uncle, the mysterious Mr. Sinclair, in the Orkneys in Scotland. Despite the differences between Gemma and Sinclair—he is more than twice her age, educated and of means—a strong connection sparks between them. Then Gemma discovers a secret from his past which she cannot abide.

Sound familiar? It should—the story is based quite closely on Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë’s tale of the feisty, wise-beyond-her-years orphan, still widely read more than 150 years after publication. So why reinvent one of the great classics of English literature? Part of Jane Eyre’s brilliance lies in its portrayal of children as both sophisticated and vulnerable emotionally—they “can feel,” Brontë wrote, “but they cannot analyze their feelings.” Livesey’s adaptation brings those feelings into closer relief, granting readers greater intimacy with the beloved character.

While Gemma, like Jane, is remarkably resilient, she is not immune to the confusion and contradictions that live in all young people. When her aunt puts on a rare show of tenderness, Gemma unwittingly melts—“It was so long since anyone had touched me with a semblance of affection.” When her cry for help lands a teacher in trouble, she atones with fervour. Desperate to discover her roots, she betrays a couple to whom she has become close. And on the romance front—this is, above all, a love story—Gemma is idealistic but also red-blooded. Livesey does not shy away from the inherent discomfort in the story’s liaison between a teenager and much-older man, but Jane Eyre fans will not be disappointed—not one ounce of passion is sacrificed.

Bestsellers – Week of January 23th, 2011

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

REVIEW: Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

It’s the iconic gun of our times. More American cops and more American spree killers carry a Glock than any other handgun. It’s the weapon Seung-Hui Cho used to murder 32 people at Virginia Tech; the gun Saddam Hussein had in his hidey-hole; the gun that football player Plaxico Burress shot himself in the leg with; the gun Jared Loughner fired at Gabrielle Giffords and many others a year ago. And the gun Giffords herself owned. How a weapon made by an unknown curtain-rod manufacturer in Austria in 1980 reached these heights is part wild business story—the true interest of the author, an editor at Bloomberg Businessweek—and part cultural history.

When Gaston Glock learned the Austrian army was seeking a new handgun, he went to work unhampered by any firm opinion as to how a gun should look or what it should be made of. He emerged with the Glock 17. Crafted in part of lightweight plastic, with a large magazine (17 bullets) and only 36 parts, the pistol would still fire after being dropped from a helicopter or lying in snow overnight. Its preference for efficiency over style was nicely captured by novelist David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest: “one ugly and all-business-looking piece of self-defence hardware.”

Its timing was impeccable too. The Glock arrived in America in the late ’80s, just as law enforcement agencies were in a panic about being outgunned by drug gangs. Hollywood and hip hop helped glamorize it: “As we groove down the block, Dre, pass the Glock,” rapped Snoop Dogg in 1992. Then there was the eye-popping business story. Marketing campaigns involving Gold Club strippers, money laundering, tax evasion and illegal campaign contributions are not exactly unheard of in the arms industry. But the company’s brief history also includes a crooked financial adviser who attempted to assassinate—with a mallet, not a pistol—Gaston Glock, now a billionaire. For an Austrian gun, it’s a very American story.

REVIEW: The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish For Our Daughters

By Joanne Latimer - Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 8:40 AM - 0 Comments

Fowler, Mich., is known for one thing: Becker’s Bridal, run by the Mueller family. Some 7,000 brides annually make the pilgrimage to Becker’s three-storey shop, 90 minutes northwest of Detroit, with their moms, bridesmaids, emotional baggage, and wilful optimism. In his touching book, Zaslow uses Becker’s as a prism through which to view different takes on marriage, tradition and love. While the concept sounds sappy enough for Disney, the book is clear-eyed about modern marriage and the wedding industry. Along the way, readers get a fascinating portrait of a one-horse town with a family business threatened by the Internet.

The father of three girls, Zaslow is curious about the magical pull of a wedding dress. Shelly Becker Mueller lets him meet her clients and write about their lives, while dishing about today’s brides. They may know the kind of wedding dress they want, but they don’t have any clear sense of the kind of life they want or the kind of man who might best accompany them. There’s a sense of entitlement that seems to increase every year, thanks, in part, to shows like Bridezillas. Becker Mueller, herself divorced, sees a new intolerance for imperfect relationships, and she has a room, the Dress Cemetery, piled with dresses from broken engagements, to prove it.

Zaslow follows a handful of customers (an “old” bride, a bride injured in a car accident, one who took a vow of purity) on their complicated path to the altar, all the while scattering divorce statistics throughout. In the end, Zaslow’s big heart wins out and the book becomes dangerously sentimental. How does he get away with it? Readers feel him rooting for his daughters, vicariously through Becker’s, and holding out hope for a happy ever-after.

REVIEW: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

By John Geddes - Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

A few years before his death last fall, Steve Jobs gave a commencement address in which he placed surprising emphasis on, of all things, a calligraphy course he took just after dropping out of college. The upshot, the Apple co-founder said, was his insistence on beautiful typefaces in his computers.

There’s something about the shapes of letters. The central figure in The Swerve, Italian Renaissance book hunter Poggio Bracciolini, was famous in his time for helping invent a more elegant handwriting style. This innovation partly propelled Poggio’s rise from scribe to senior official in the papal court. His fine hand more than hinted at the sophistication of his interest in the books he copied.

Greenblatt, the Harvard professor who made Shakespeare’s London swarm with life in 2004’s Will in the World, is just as compelling conjuring up 15th-century Italy. Greenblatt places Poggio in a circle of brilliant, squabbling humanists who loved pre-Christian books, often all-but-forgotten classics they dug out of monastic libraries. Poggio’s greatest rescue mission was an expedition in 1417, likely to the German abbey of Fulda, where he found On the Nature of Things, by the Roman poet-philosopher Lucretius.

In a sense, the mysterious Lucretius, who died around 55 BCE, is the real hero of The Swerve. Next to nothing is known about his life. But his book, after Poggio put it back in circulation, lived large. In gorgeous Latin verse, it conveys the even more ancient thinking of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. His ideas were potently radical in Poggio’s era and long after: everything is made of atoms that “swerve” around randomly; gods, if they exist, have nothing to do with the material world; and that leaves humans only to pursue pleasure and avoid pain.

Whether this tale of an intellectual watershed fulfills the subtitle’s promise to explain “how the world became modern” is debatable. But by making the life of a 15th-century book lover feel as relevant today as, say, that of a 20th-century computer mogul, Greenblatt accomplishes his own improbable feat of rediscovery.

REVIEW: Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil

By Anne Kingston - Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Extra-virgin olive oil is glorious, complex and slippery—as salad dressing and topic of journalistic investigation. That’s bountifully clear in Tom Mueller’s expansive, fascinating exploration that spans continents and centuries to delve into the traditions, chemistry, viticulture and scandals surrounding a distillate that is the lubricant of civilization itself. As vital in antiquity as petroleum is today, olive oil inspired Sophoclean odes and incited wars; the industry created fortunes and attracted crooks. Its use anointing male bodies even paved the way for homosexual love, Mueller posits, with the glistening male form “heightening the body’s erotic charge.”

Fast forward some 2,500 years and olive oil is still turning people on—now as a gustatory status symbol and as a source of bountiful antioxidant propenyls via the salutary “Mediterranean diet.” Today’s olive oil industry is as rife with corruption as ever, writes Mueller, who introduces the farmers, marketers, chemists and mobsters who animate it. The “extra-virgin” designation, established in Italy in 1960 to denote the highest-quality oil, complicated matters further. Labelling fraud is rampant; the priciest oil can be adulterated with cheaper oils and “deodorized” to remove bad flavours and inferior aromas. Yet legislation is scandalously lax, to the point that some producers wish for an exposé similar to Italy’s 1986 tainted-wine scandal to force reform.

Mueller, an American journalist based in northwestern Italy, animates his study with fascinating characters and information about what makes an oil great: “pepperiness, fruitiness, and bitterness” being the holy triumvirate. Occasionally the deluge of facts and multiple threads, including Mueller’s own olive oil obsession, reads like a well-written Wikipedia entry. The pruning essential to olive trees, ironically, could have come in handy here. But that’s a quibble. Mueller manages to fuse the poetry and business of olives into a riveting tale that also sheds light on food politics more broadly. The growing legion of olive oil aficionados are destined to adore it, especially the useful index telling them how and where to buy.

REVIEW: Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 8:05 AM - 0 Comments

For all the author’s slides into academic speak—she calls the Arabian Nights “a polyvocal anthology”—her subject, the world’s best-known and, probably, best-loved story cycle, is enchanting enough to overcome anything. There can scarcely be a soul in the Western or Islamic worlds who doesn’t know the framing tale of 1001 Nights: how Sultan Shahriyar, betrayed in love, takes a virgin bride every night and beheads her in the morning, until he weds Shahrazad, who compels him to issue interminable stays of execution so he can hear the endings of the stories she tells him. In short, the most profound affirmation of the literally life-affirming essence of stories and storytelling ever put to pen.

The tales she tells have sources stretching from Persia (as the names of the sultan and his bride indicate) across the Arab world to as far as India. Their themes are eternal: the wiles of women (Shahrazad herself), the caprices of tyrants (her sultan), and, above all, the twists of fate: beggars become kings, princes are turned to stone. And as soon as they came west in the early Enlightenment, the stories became one of the very few foreign jewels ensconced in the Western literary tradition.

Warner’s own framing story—the Western reception of the Arabian Nights—has tales within tales too. Mozart, given a copy by his Italian landlady, developed themes for The Abduction from the Seraglio; Coleridge read them before he wrote “Kubla Khan”; Dickens had Scrooge try to catch the Ghost of Christmas Past with a candle snuffer, an update of enticing a genie back into his lamp. Then there’s the most important Westerner of all, Antoine Galland, who brought the stories back from the Ottoman Empire in 1704. Modern scholars have concluded that he actually wrote two of the most popular tales, “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba.” And why not? There’s always time and space for another story.

The incredible shrinking short story

By Richard Warnica - Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 9:10 AM - 0 Comments

Corbis; Photo Illustration by Lauren Cattermole

At some point, if you work them right, words eventually become stories. Fragments and sentences turn into paragraphs, and paragraphs, if you’re lucky, become something whole. But the exact moment that change takes place can be hard to pinpoint. It’s not always clear what’s a narrative and what’s something less. That’s especially true in the field of very short fiction, which is enjoying a moment right now.

Writers have long played with prose forms that are shorter than traditional short stories. Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges wrote slices and sketches that don’t fit the typical model. Hemingway once supposedly penned a story in six words to settle a bet. That piece—“For sale: baby shoes, never worn”—has never been definitively tied to “Papa.” But fans of what’s sometimes known as flash fiction, or very-short prose, often cite it as the ur-text of their form.

Until recently, though, that form was a pretty lonely place to operate. Just a few years ago, there weren’t more than a handful of places publishing exciting work in the field. But that’s beginning to change. Fuelled partly by a surge in venues, many of them online, the world of very-short fiction is booming. (In a relative sense. A “boom” in experimental fiction is still a blip anywhere else.)

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Bestsellers – Week of January 16th, 2011

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

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LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

REVIEW: The Invisible Ones

By Sarah Weinman - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 8:45 AM - 0 Comments

Penney’s Costa Award-winning debut novel, The Tenderness of Wolves, combined history, mystery, and an unnerving ability to describe chilling weather in a genre-bending way that deserved its many accolades. Such an auspicious start means her second novel must bear considerable scrutiny. Fortunately, Penney’s produced another standout effort, one that examines the marginalized, misunderstood Roma culture (all too commonly referred to by their pejorative, Gypsy nickname).

Ray Lovell, a private detective, has spent plenty of time putting his half-Romany background behind him. Then he’s hired to trace the whereabouts of Rose Janko, who disappeared after the birth of her child and has been missing for seven years. What’s strange is that no one in the tight-knit Romany clan she married into saw fit to report her disappearance. The investigation leads him to question the nature of familial bonds.

Penney, however, has more on her mind than a standard detective novel, meaty and twisty as the investigation proves. Through the eyes of JJ, a teen member of the Jankos’ younger generation, she evokes the awkwardness of not fitting in and the hope of finding one’s voice outside a cloistered community. Ray, too, is on a constant quest of self-discovery, at war with his dual English-Romany nature. And the Jankos, from Rose’s domineering husband, Ivo, to matriarch Tene, struggle to keep their sense of selves even as Rose’s fate threatens to blow everything apart.

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REVIEW: The Fat Years

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 8:40 AM - 0 Comments

Still banned in China proper, this wonderfully subversive novel was first published in Hong Kong in 2009, when its 2013 setting made it a safely near-future tale. That’s a bit of a problem now, since the plot turns on events from two years earlier—that is, 2011—that Chan’s new Western readers know never happened. Even so, the sly conceit at the heart of his story remains not just metaphorically, but in a very real sense, literally true: a fat and happy China basking in its new-found prosperity, barely aware of a past month almost entirely excised from collective memory.

Something horrible scarred that missing month, but the ruling Communist party has managed to keep it out of public discussion and, somewhat to its own surprise, practically out of mind. The main character, Lao Chen, an inhabitant of Happiness Village Number Two, is as content as anyone with life in a nation that dominates the globe economically. The financial crisis that wobbled the Western world in 2008 took a drastic (fictional) turn three years later, destroying it economically. Only China has managed to thrive, to such an extent that Starbucks is now Chinese-owned.

But not everyone is enjoying the fat years. Chen keeps encountering such people, some marginalized in the new China (a former lover, now an Internet dissident; a former slave worker), some prospering (a real estate wheeler-dealer, a high-price prostitute). None can ignore the pull of the nagging, foggy past. Together they kidnap a senior government official and learn the surprising truth.

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REVIEW: Dangerous Ambition: Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson: New Women in Search of Love and Power

By Sarah Murdoch - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 11:55 AM - 0 Comments

Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson saw two world wars, political ructions across Europe, and social upheaval in England and North America. They documented it all: West, in England, Thompson, in America.

Over the course of seven decades, West wrote 25 books, including her masterpiece, the 1,200-page semi-autobiographical Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, published in 1941. Thompson was named by Time as the second most influential woman in America after Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1934, she was the first foreign journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany. Today, their work is forgotten. They are better remembered for the men in their lives: West had a long, fraught relationship with the much older H.G. Wells (and less famously had affairs with Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian press baron, and Charlie Chaplin); Thompson married three times, most notably to the brilliant but ruinously alcoholic novelist Sinclair Lewis.

Hertog’s book is an unusual project: a dual biography. It draws exhaustively, often exhaustingly, on the careers of these driven and unhappy women and the minutiae of their lives. What makes the book fun is that both women loved a good gossip, hobnobbed with the best and brightest, and left a voluminous personal archive recording every bit of it. Famous people constantly cross paths in unexpected ways. Just one example: distraught when her first husband abandoned her in Berlin in 1925, Thompson consulted Sigmund Freud, who offered this timeless cure for heartache: “Buy a new wardrobe and change the colour of your lipstick.”

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REVIEW: How to Think Like a Neandertal

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

The main point of this absorbing account of our closest-ever relatives, dead now these 30,000 years, is that we already do. Think like Neanderthals, that is. What we know of Neanderthal technology is derived primarily from their stoneworking procedures, because that’s the evidence that has survived. It reveals the very same learning techniques that create modern artisans, musicians and athletes: what’s called embodied cognition (muscle and procedural memory), and practice, practice, practice. Even driving a car, the authors argue, means “thinking like a Neanderthal.” That assertion is vital to Wynn (an anthropologist) and Coolidge (a psychiatrist), who wish to make it clear that Neanderthals are us, and not some sort of hyper-intelligent chimps.

But not entirely us. Our essential kinship established, the authors go on to discuss the behavioural differences clearly revealed by the archaeological record and the far more speculative cognitive capacities that could explain—or result from—those differences. The sexual division of labour universal among modern hunters (males) and gatherers (females) seems absent from Neanderthal life, partly because they consumed so little plant food. Does that mean the sex-linked difference in spatial cognition among moderns—men consistently score better in tests—which some evolutionary psychologists trace to males having to track game across a shifting landscape (while females specialized in memorizing specific, plant-rich locations), didn’t exist among Neanderthals?

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The Word made fresh

By Alex Ballingall - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

The hype it generated has been compared to the waves of unbridled enthusiasm that accompany the release of new Apple gadgets and Beatles reissues. Last October, throngs of Norwegians lined up outside bookstores to get their hands on a new translation of the Bible, which was 12 years in the making and the first in Norwegian since 1978. “We only printed 25,000 copies to start with and thought it would last six to nine months, but it was launched mid-October and by the end of the year it had sold 79,000 copies,” Stine Smemo Strachan, who worked with the Norwegian Bible Society on the project, told the Guardian. Since its release, Bibel 2011 has topped Norwegian bestseller lists every week except one, when respected author Karl Ove Knausgård published a new book. An electronic version is available for e-readers and tablets, as well as a version without verses or chapters that “reads like a novel.”

Norway is a country where the official church (Lutheran) is overseen by a government ministry and 79 per cent of the population are members. So it might not be surprising that people are so excited for an updated Scripture, even if the contents have been around for millennia.

REVIEW: American Dervish

By Dafna Izenberg - Monday, January 16, 2012 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments

On her deathbed, Hayat Shah’s auntie Mina, a devout Muslim, lay reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s letters. She pointed out this passage to Hayat: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Mina is herself a paradoxical character—pious yet enlightened, submissive yet intrepid. When she first came from Pakistan to rural Wisconsin to live with the Shahs, Hayat is 10, at sea in the messy mix of fealty and betrayal that comprised his parents’ marriage, pulled between his needy mother and commanding father. Mina, with her unwavering devotion to Islam, offers Hayat a welcome anchor. As the two settle into nightly readings of the Quran, Hayat begins to experience the world more viscerally, from the stippling of trees with turning leaves to the vivid feel of cotton on his skin. Unable to find security in his family, Hayat finds something else to be certain of: God’s majesty.

But Hayat’s new-found bliss is hampered by his burgeoning sexuality—focused, uncomfortably, on Mina—and by Mina’s deepening attachment to Nathan, a Jewish colleague of Hayat’s father. When Hayat witnesses Nathan being shunned, he confuses faith with anti-Semitism and finds an excuse to interfere with Mina’s life, to predictably disastrous effect.

Akhtar’s first novel provides a rare and authentic window into the richness and turbulence of children’s inner lives. Hayat misses not a beat in the weird, if well-intentioned, ways of the grown-ups in his life. His own religious conviction ebbs away as he suffers through remorse for his behaviour and horror at Mina’s lot in a new marriage. He has a second epiphany of sensation—this time when he lets go of his faith. But Mina’s death leads him back to the Quran, this time à la Fitzgerald—accepting its contradictions and finding solace in its essence.