REVIEW: The Flight of Gemma Hardy
By Dafna Izenberg - Thursday, January 26, 2012 - 0 Comments
Book by Margot Livesey
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.
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Mitchel Raphael on the Belinda connection to MacKay's hot date
By Mitchel Raphael - Thursday, November 25, 2010 at 1:00 PM - 8 Comments
MacKay’s new romance?
There was much buzz about Defence Minister Peter MacKay’s date for the True Patriot Love fundraiser for Canadian troops held in Toronto. MacKay arrived at the dinner with former Miss World Canada Nazanin Afshin-Jam. Rumours of a romance have been reported. The interesting twist is that back in 2006, Afshin-Jam was on the Hill talking to MPs and fighting to save the life of another Iranian who shares her first name, Nazanin Fatehi. Fatehi stabbed one of the men who attempted to rape her and was sentenced to hang. (She was eventually released.) One of the MPs who helped Afshin-Jam at her Ottawa press conference was former Liberal MP (and former MacKay girlfriend) Belinda Stronach.Coffee, compost and the PMO
The closest coffee place to the PMO, which is in the Langevin Block, used to be a Tim Hortons. A while back it was replaced with a Bridgehead café, known for its fair trade and organic coffees. Not only does Bridgehead have recycling bins, it has compost bins as well. Bridgehead staff say they see a lot of PMO staffers come in and also note that NDP Leader Jack Layton gets his hot beverages there too. When PM spokesperson Dimitri Soudas was spotted with a Bridgehead hot apple cider, he said his choice of coffee purveyor was based purely on convenience and was in no way a political statement. -
'Something very special'
By Cathy Gulli - Thursday, November 25, 2010 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments
Their long courtship provoked ridicule. But William and Kate were friends first. They test drove marriage. And he gave her plenty of time to back out.
David Davies/PA; Michael Dunlea/Daily Mail; UK Press/Keystone Press
There was nothing stately or demure about Kate Middleton that night in March 2002. Barely clothed, the lithe brunette sashayed down a dimly lit catwalk toward Prince William, who—sporting a wide grin and dark suit—appeared every bit an aristocratic frat boy. Having secured himself a front-row seat at the charity fashion show for $450, William now saw Kate, heretofore his friendly roommate, in a whole new way: stone-faced. Sexy. Hand on hip. Her straight hair twirled into tight ringlets and laced with yellow ribbons. And wearing nothing but a black band across her breasts, a bikini bottom, and—in the spirit of peekaboo flirting—a sheer, turquoise-trimmed wrap around her long torso. That’s when, it’s been said, William first saw in her his future queen consort.
That image, of course, couldn’t be more different from recent pictures of the newly engaged couple at St. James’s Palace on the day their forthcoming nuptials were announced in a 104-word press release by Clarence House, the Prince of Wales’s private residence. Arm in arm, William and Kate, both 28, stood and smiled elegantly for the requisite “photocall” to appease the press and the public’s increasingly voracious interest in their relationship status. Her royal blue dress—discreet yet celebratory—perfectly complemented the giant sapphire-and-diamond engagement ring that William gave her after proposing during a 10-day safari in Kenya in October. It had belonged to his late mother Diana.
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A romantic comedy—plus sex. Lots of it.
By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments
‘Love and Other Drugs’ mixes Viagra, rare chemistry and screwball satire
The studio trailer conveniently omitted any mention of the story’s premise—Anne Hathaway’s character has Parkinson’s disease | David James/Twentieth Century Fox
Now here’s something you don’t see everyday: a romantic comedy from a Hollywood studio featuring ample nudity from two beautiful Oscar-nominated stars who perform a lot of hot-blooded sex scenes. Got your attention? The actors are Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal, who first appeared together as a sexless married couple in Brokeback Mountain but are now tearing each other’s clothes off in Love and Other Drugs.
The film presents one of the most sporting displays of sexuality between two glamourous, big-eyed A-list movie stars since . . . well, you have to go back to the 1970s to find anything like it. R-rated studio rom-coms these days are rare. And those that do come along (There’s Something About Mary, Wedding Crashers, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, It’s Complicated) tend to earn their scarlet letter “R” with jolts of gross-out profanity and flashes of shock-and-awe nudity—the male frontal variety being the latest gimmick.
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The Memory Project – Paul Dumaine, Love during WWII
By Philippe Gohier - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 0 Comments
‘They said, “Dumaine, you have a visitor.” She was so beautiful.’
Paul and Joan Dumaine on their wedding day in England on July 4, 1945 | Courtesy of The Memory Project
Click play to hear Paul Dumaine’s complete audio story
Between getting engaged and his marriage in July 1945, Paul Dumaine, an infantryman with the Fusiliers Mont-Royal, survived serious wounds on the beach in Dieppe, and three years as a prisoner of war.
I met a young woman, Joan, who I became engaged to. We didn’t want to get married because the war was going strong and I could have been hurt or killed. So we said that we would wait. On A
ug. 19, 1942, I arrived in Dieppe. My fiancée had no idea where I was. The battle was poorly organized. We landed in broad daylight. We got there and the beach was ablaze. The battle was full-on. Everyone was getting killed and falling down all over the place. It was terrible.I collapsed after an hour. My head was injured. I couldn’t walk. It was like I was paralyzed. I was bleeding. I wanted to go wash myself off in the ocean. My legs were paralyzed from the shock. I had to drag myself on my elbows to the ocean. I washed my head. There was a great big boat called a tank landing craft; a boat that carried tanks. The doors opened and the tanks came out. One of them had foundered on the beach. We used it as a shelter to hide from the Germans.
After three years as a prisoner of war, I was released. I was ill. When I got to England, I stayed in hospital for a month. Joan was still in the army. The colonel called her to his office and said, “Joan, I have some good news.” She thought it was news from her parents. “Your fiancé is in England, at Aldershot. I know that you would like to see him.” She said, “Yes, yes, yes.” “I am giving you a pass. Get dressed in civilian clothes and go see him.” I was lying in my bed. They said to me, “Dumaine, you have a visitor.” She was there. It had been three years. When I saw her, she was so beautiful. I took her in my arms.
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Rachel wants a baby
By Kate Fillion - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 12:40 PM - 0 Comments
This year’s Massey Lectures take the form of a five-hour novel by Douglas Coupland about apocalpyse and romance in an airport lounge
Adrianna Williams/Corbis/ Photograph by Brian Howell
Douglas Coupland—clothing and furniture designer, biographer, artist and sculptor, screenwriter, landscape architect and, oh yeah, author of Generation X and 12 other novels—insists he is not a Renaissance man but “just someone who went to art school. It makes you perpetually curious and you learn there’s always some new way of looking at an object or situation.”
Case in point: his five-hour-long Massey Lectures, which begin on Oct. 12, will take the form of a real-time, five-hour story—a novel, in other words. Player One is set in an airport cocktail lounge, where apocalypse and romance are on the agenda along with the Big Ideas you’d expect from a lecture series that has previously been helmed by the likes of Northrop Frye and Charles Taylor.
Coupland says he “wanted to take everything I’ve been doing since 1990 and to put it in Superman’s hand and have him crush it into a diamond.” Accordingly, Player One revisits quintessential Coupland themes, chiefly, how the speed of change, both technologically and socially driven, is altering the world, our own sense of self and our souls. “The future is happening so fast and furious right now, there’s no language to describe all these new sensations, so we have to begin inventing one,” says Coupland, who in Player One delivers a glossary for the future with such terms as “Bell’s law of telephony: no matter what technology is used, your monthly phone bill magically remains about the same size.”
For someone who’s been avant-garde for almost 20 years, Coupland is surprisingly down-to-earth, with a deep, jolly laugh that sounds too sincere for a hipster. Comments on his versatility are deflected with oh-but-you-could-do-it-too charm. “Look, even on the best day of writing you’re ever going to have in your life, it’s only going to be about 2½ hours of actual, ‘Wow, this is really shooting out of my brain’ time,” he says. “And then there’s the rest of the day. What are you going to do, go ride in a boat? No way. You’re here to feel and experience and interpret life.”
And, apparently, express those interpretations in every medium possible, with a minimum of artistic angst. “When something feels like homework, I’m out of there,” says Coupland. That can’t happen too often, judging by his output over the past 12 months: a biography of Marshall McLuhan, the opening of a Toronto park he helped design, a commission to create a monument in Ottawa honouring firefighters, the launch of a new clothing line for Roots, the unveiling of a new sculpture at the Vancouver Convention Centre, and now, Player One, which is already on the long list for the Giller Prize.
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'Right now I want to hold you so badly'
By Jane Christmas - Thursday, September 16, 2010 at 3:20 PM - 0 Comments
The love letters a famous columnist wrote to woo his wife were his most important assignment
David Royko/ University of Chicago Press/ istock/ Illustration by Bradley Reinhardt
She had grown into a tall, gorgeous blond, but it was her intelligence and kind heart that won him over. He was thankful to have grown into a taller-than-her fellow, but he was gangly and shy with a prominent Adam’s apple and an even more prominent nose. He fell in love with her when they were just children in Chicago, but he could never muster the courage to tell her how he felt. Instead, he became her best friend, playing Cyrano to her Roxane, and vetting suitors for her. He did such a good job that she married one of them.
Crushed, he packed up for military duty in Korea. But a year later, when he returned to a new posting in Blaine, Wash., he learned that she had filed for divorce. Wasting no time, he grabbed pen and paper and wrote to her, boldly and finally declaring his love.
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Our steamy bodice-ripper wedding
By Cathy Gulli - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 at 10:04 AM - 6 Comments
A new line of books has romance novelists embellishing the love affairs of real couples
Photograph by Maria Teijeiro/Getty Images
“What if they turn you into a crazy drug dealer and I’m a manic depressive transvestite?” That was Anne Miller’s initial question to her husband, Michael Davoli, when they were contacted by a publisher about starring in a new genre of romance novel—one based on real couples. “You don’t know what to do when strangers say, ‘Let us tell a fictionalized version of your story, please,’ ” says Miller. “You have to think the worst.”
The couple, who live in Albany, N.Y., was discovered by HCI Books, which publishes inspirational non-fiction titles such as the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, after their wedding appeared in the New York Times’ “Vows” section. HCI was starting a line of “reality-based romance” books—a unique literary venture. The first three novels, marketed under the banner “Vows: Life Romanticized,” will launch in October. They’ll be penned by bestselling authors, who between them have published more than 150 romance novels: Alison Kent (A Long, Hard Ride), Julie Leto (Stripped), and Judith Arnold (Barefoot in the Grass). Miller and Davoli’s story should capture readers, says HCI editorial director Michele Matrisciani, because it has the elements of a juicy romance: “The conflict, drama, love, quirkiness, personality.”
It’s also rich in innuendo-laced encounters. Before they started dating, Davoli considered renting an apartment in Miller’s building. They ran into each other in the lobby, and Miller offered to “watch his dog if he moved in,” she recalls. Davoli took the place above hers. When he got locked out one night, Davoli knocked on Miller’s door for help. “So I picked his lock,” she says, “and after that we went on our first official date.” They fell in love—buoyed by their enthusiasm for sports. “Going upstairs to watch the game” became code for “something else.”
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Dead: happily-ever-after endings
By Martin Patriquin - Friday, June 12, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment
Lasting romance, if not dead in contemporary literature, certainly isn’t winning any prizes
“If you look at our prize-winning literature, you would think we are humourless, violent and pathetic.” So says Ben McNally, an influential Toronto bookseller whose voice—think James Taylor after a bottle of Xanax–belies the sting of his zingers. He has a point: lasting romance, if not dead in contemporary literary novels, certainly isn’t winning any prizes these days. Sex, death, violence and depravity, yes, but true happily-ever-afterness? Dodo bird. “Conflict is where it’s at,” McNally laments before hanging up.A review of winners of the Giller, Canada’s top prize for literature, shows that not a single winning book has a happy ending for a romantic couple since its inception in 1994. It is much the same for the Governor General’s Literary Awards. Since 1936, the winners of the award have been showered in superlatives—2007 winner Divisadero, by Michael Ondaatje, is replete with “tenderness, compassion and grace”—yet hardly any of the winning titles end with the ultimate culmination of tenderness, compassion or grace.
