Category: Biblioasis

2016 Giller Prize, Author, Biblioasis, Book review, Books in translation, Canada, Catherine Leroux, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, USA

‘The Party Wall’ by Catherine Leroux

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The Party Wall

Fiction – Kindle edition; Biblioasis; 200 pages; 2016. Translated from the French by Lazer Lederhendler

“I guess we’ll never really understand where we come from.” So says one of the characters in Catherine Leroux’s The Party Wall, a quote that basically sums up the entire premise of this Giller Prize shortlisted book.

In this complex, multi-layered story — or set of stories bound together by common themes and characters who are connected with one another — there is a strong focus on kinship, biological parentage and the ties that bind siblings together.

Reviewing the book in any great detail, however, isn’t an easy task, because, as my fellow Shadow Giller jury member Naomi has explained, the less you know about it, the more rewarding it is to read. I concur entirely.

Four tales in two halves

Structurally, the book is divided into four sets of characters — sisters Monette and Angie; husband and wife Ariel and Marie; siblings Simon and Carmen; and mother and son Madeleine and Édouard — whose stories are told in interleaving chapters.

Each narrative thread hinges on a revelation that leaves the characters reeling. These revelations all revolve around secrets associated with family history.

While each set of stories (two chapters per pair, though Monette and Angie get seven much shorter chapters) is strong enough to be read as a standalone, the fun is working out the connections between characters in different stories. But this task isn’t entirely straightforward, because the stories are set in different time periods. When the pennies begin to drop, however, it’s quite a mind f**k.

Focus on pairs

Along with the aforementioned focus on kinship, biological parentage and siblings, there are other common themes relating to pairs — twins, polar opposites, “spitting images”, different halves, duality — running throughout. For example:

The world is an unjust place where the good go bad from never being rewarded, where the truly wicked are very rarely punished and where most folk zigzag between the two extremes, neither saints nor demons, tacking between heartache and joy, their fingers crossed, knocking on wood. Every person split in two, each with a fault around which good and evil spin.

And:

We were on the track that splits the Great Salt Lake exactly in two. Because of the railroad ballast, the lake is divided in half, and the composition of the water isn’t the same in both halves. The northern side is full of wine-red algae, but on the southern side it’s green. The clouds were perfectly mirrored on the surface and took on the colours of the lake. The train rolled along slowly. The air was warm and soft. There was no sound; it was as if the universe had come to a standstill. Right then, I had the feeling that I would never again be hungry or cold or in pain or afraid.

As those extracts may demonstrate, Leroux’s prose style, ably translated from the French by Lazer Lederhendler, is sublime, often filled with vivid imagery, startling similes and universal truths. I found myself highlighting a quote on almost every single page, because there was so much here that surprised me or struck a chord.

I loved all the characters, too. Each story is peopled by deeply flawed humans, all of whom are good-hearted but struggling to come to terms with past hurts or slights. I so enjoyed accompanying them on their individual voyages of self discovery that I felt slightly bereft when I reached the final page. Interestingly, the author explains that most were based on real characters, or inspired by them, but that her characters “should not be regarded as copies of actual persons”.

All in all, The Party Wall is an often startling book about identity and self-discovery, and the things that connect or separate us. It’s an intelligent, innovative and exhilarating read.

This is my 3rd book for the #ShadowGiller2016

Author, Biblioasis, Books in translation, Canada, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Samuel Archibald, Setting, short stories

‘Arvida’ by Samuel Archibald

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Arvida

Fiction – paperback; Biblioasis; 300 pages; 2015. Translated from the French by Donald Winkler. 

I would not normally describe myself as a short story fan — my preference is usually for novels or novellas — so it came as somewhat of a surprise that I enjoyed Samuel Archibald’s Giller Prize shortlisted Arvida so much. In fact, I championed this one to win the Shadow Giller Prize, when the jury cast their votes on Friday, because there was something about this volume, a glorious mix of ghost stories, road stories, family tales and rural folklore, that really grabbed me.

It may have been the fact that pretty much all of the stories — there are 14 in all — have a distinctly Canadian feel (many are set in the author’s home town of Arvida in Quebec) and that they were written in such an immediate style (by which I mean they transport the reader effortlessly to times and places that feel so real you could touch them). Or perhaps it’s just that having read a string of rather so-so books on the Giller shortlist ( with one exception, that being Martin John, which we have selected as our Shadow Giller winner), I was waiting for one that had the “wow” factor. It just turned out that this was the last one on my reading list, proving that the saying “last but by no means least” is, indeed, true.

Tales that draw you in 

Each story in the collection, expertly translated from the French by the Donald Winkler, is rounded and complete, drawing you into a world which is sometimes fantastical (in A Mirror in the Mirror a woman wastes away in a lonely house waiting for her husband to return from Montreal, where he has gone to “chase his artistic ambitions”); sometimes scarily surreal (Jigai, the only story set outside of Canada, is about ritual mutilation between Japanese women); and sometimes downright tawdry (in América, two losers foolishly agree to smuggle a Costa Rican women across the border into the US just after the 9/11 attacks when border control is on high alert).

It also features two series of interlinked stories — Blood Sisters I, II and III, about one family’s secret history, and Arvida I, II and III, which all begin with the words: “My grandmother, mother of my father, always said”, which have the ring of autobiography about them.

The stand-out story — in what is a collection of exceptionally good and occasionally extraordinary stories — is the penultimate one titled House Bound, a terrifically slow-burning haunted house tale that oozes paranoia and reads like something Stephen King might have written. (I suspect Archibald is a fan, because in the next story, which reads like non-fiction, he claims that as a child he used to type out stories by Stephen King, whom he describes as “the world’s coolest writer at the time”.)

In it the narrator buys a dilapidated house once owned by three generations of a well-to-do family whose fortunes have fallen by the wayside and renovates it to create the dream home he’s always wanted. But his wife and young daughter feel uncomfortable in the house and believe it is haunted. This belief is further cemented when the narrator finds a hidden room up in the loft, which has a pentagram, or “devil’s symbol”, drawn on the floor. When the family dog later disappears and is found floating, mutilated, in water at the bottom of a nearby cliff one can’t help fearing that things are only going to get worse…

The challenge of writing

The final story, Madeleines, draws on the idea that Proust’s entire In Search of Lost Time begins with a man remembering his whole childhood by merely tasting a little cake, but for the author, who wants to be a writer but does not know how — “the only story that comes back to me from taking a bite of something has to do with a mouthful of McNugget” — this seems like an impossible task. And yet in writing this story, of how it is difficult to write stories, he has written one that shows how stories are all around us if we care to look. And in writing this particular tale, he shows in a deceptively clever way, how the entire volume of Arvida came into being. Reading it made all the pennies of the previous 200 or so pages fall into place for me, and I came to the last page only wanting to turn right back to the start to read it all over again. If that’s not the sign of a good book, I’m not sure what is.

Unsurprisingly, Arvida has already won a literary prize — the Prix Coup de Coeur Renaud-Bray in 2012 — and on Tuesday we will find out whether it takes the 2015 Giller Prize as well. If it does, it will be the first translated work to win the award.

For another take on this collection please see Roughghosts’ excellent review. 

Anakana Schofield, Author, Biblioasis, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, London, Publisher, Setting

‘Martin John’ by Anakana Schofield

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Martin-John

Fiction – paperback; Biblioasis; 322 pages; 2015.

If budding writers wanted to learn how to best use refrains in their work they should read Anakana Schofield’s Martin John, which has been shortlisted for this year’s Giller Prize.

This new novel, Schofield’s second, is dotted with refrains — “harm has been done”, “it is never defined”and  “rain will fall” are just a handful of examples — that form a kind of hypnotic litany that works a spell over the reader. It’s hard to pinpoint how the author has achieved this without detracting from the storyline, but somehow the refrains add to the musicality of the prose, which is stripped back and very simple, the kind of style that particularly appeals to me.

It’s no secret that dark subjects in fiction appeal to me, too, and Martin John is about as dark as they get.

A man with a problem

The story is about a man — the Martin John of the title — who is, to be perfectly frank, a pervert or sexual molester.  He likes women and girls. He specifically likes “flashing” his you-know-what at them. He also likes rubbing up against women, touching their feet and sometimes putting a hand on their leg, in order to get even closer to them. He does this in public, usually in parks, alley ways or on public transport. He once did it in a dentist’s waiting room — to a 12-year-old girl.

He’s been caught, of course, and spent time behind bars. He’s been in a mental facility at a hospital on more than one occasion. He’s also received many, many warnings from police. But this has never deterred him from what he likes to do. It’s almost as if he can’t stop himself:

Because she was a woman in that room there’s bound to be a problem. Whenever he is alone in a room with a woman a problem follows. He waits for the problem to come and follow him. He waits for the knock.

Whose perspective?

The narrative is told in the third person, but it’s done so cleverly, you’re not quite sure if it’s been told from the perspective of Martin John himself or his hapless Irish mother, who hasn’t so much as disowned him but given up trying to help him. Although she’s always on the end of the telephone and will happily give him advice, she did make him leave Ireland for London, presumably to start afresh in a city where no one knew of his wicked ways — or maybe it was simply to rescue her own reputation? No one wants to be the mother of a sexual pervert, after all.

Occasionally, the narrative even appears to be told from the perspective of the victim. This quote from a 32-year-old mother of two children shows how she’s still grappling with the impact of the crime committed against her 20 years after the fact:

She never lets her children sleep the night at any house, apartment, bunk bed but hers. This is how she remembers. It is within those decisions she remembers. Every person she comes into contact with she must assess for danger. This is how she remembers it. Within the cracks of possibility she remembers.

If I’m making the book sound a bit oppressive, I don’t mean to. The serious nature of the crimes committed here (none of which, by the way, are ever trivialised) are lightened by humour. The prose is ripe with witty remarks and ridiculously funny, if absurd, situations, so much so that you can’t help but feel a little empathy for Martin John. Yes, he’s manipulative, yes, he’s a liar, yes, he harms others, but somewhere along the line you realise it could all be stopped if he received the right treatment, for Martin John is not normal.

At the risk of diagnosing a fictional character, I’d say he’s got some learning difficulties and is perhaps sociopathic. He doesn’t appear to learn from any bad situations he’s in — and while he can hold down a job (as a security guard) and look after himself, he doesn’t appear to be able to make friends or get along with others. He’s the perfect example of a social misfit.

He also has paranoid tendencies, which worsen as the story develops, and he firmly believes that his flatmate, whom he dubs “Baldy Conscience” is out to get him. Martin John’s solution to this “problem” is to try to oust his flatmate in a series of ludicrous of ways, none of which have a remote chance of success. (At times I was reminded of Matt, the completely delusional character in Henry Sutton’s Get Me Out of Here, who justifies all manner of crimes, including murder, and of the nasty unnamed narrator in Michael Dibden’s Dirty Tricks, who carries out an affair right under his wife’s nose. Both books, I must point out, are black comedies.)

Perhaps the weakest point in the novel is the ending, but on the whole Martin John is a darkly comic story about a deeply troubled man, and Schofield’s dissection of his motivations and preoccupations helps to show us that we can’t fix things by simply labelling such characters as “monsters” and then forgetting about them. In posing the question, is it the mother’s job to stop such perverted behaviour, she also gets us to think about who should take responsibility for those people who can’t (or won’t) take responsibility for themselves.

This is an intelligent, deeply thought-provoking — and brave — novel. For what it’s worth, I think it would be a worthy winner of the Giller Prize, which will be announced next week (10 November).
UPDATE Sunday 8 November: The Shadow Giller Jury has named “Martin John” as our winner for 2015. You can read more about our decision on KevinfromCanada’s blog. The real Giller Prize winner will be named on Tuesday. 

Author, Biblioasis, Book review, Fiction, Kathy Page, Publisher, short stories

‘Paradise & Elsewhere’ by Kathy Page

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Paradise-and-elsewhere

Fiction – Kindle edition; Biblioasis; 158 pages; 2014.

Kathy Page’s extraordinary short story collection Paradise & Elsewhere has been long listed for this year’s Giller Prize. I say “extraordinary” because it’s the best word I could come up with to describe the book in its entirety. Each of the 14 stories within it are magical little portholes into other worlds, or, as the author puts it herself (in the Acknowledgements), “explorations into the hinterland between realism and myth”.

Indeed, reading many of these stories is a slightly dislocating experience. That’s because the places in which Page sets them feel real and recognisable — deserts, rural communities, suburbia, to name but a few — and yet somewhere at the mid-way point of each story, or near the end, she drops in a little detail that makes you realise these are not places you’ve ever been — or are likely to want to visit.

Some are set now, others in the future after an unexplained and presumably catastrophic event has changed civilisation in subtle but oh-so important ways.

Dark tales

There’s definitely an undercurrent of menace in many of these tales. People are never to be taken on face value, never to be trusted, because underneath they’ve all got their own private, self-interested agendas. Many characters are manipulative, dark and dangerous. Others are weak and naive — and are always taken advantage of.

This all adds up to some pretty edgy and deeply disturbing short stories, I must say, but Page reigns it in beautifully. There’s no pyrotechnics or melodrama, although the climax of each story is often surprising or unexpected. The writing is restrained throughout; there’s almost a journalistic quality to it and I was often reminded of the very best kind of travel reportage that not only transports you to foreign climes but describes the culture, the food, the people and tries to put it into context.

Some tales also read as fables — not dull, overly simplistic, fables, but ones with dark moral messages at the core reminiscent of British writer Magnus Mills.

Trouble in paradise

As an example, one of the early stories in the collection (and possibly my favourite), Of Paradise, explores what it is to accept new people into our communities. It is set in an oasis — the paradise of the title — in the middle of the desert where a relatively peaceful community has been living in seclusion for a very long time. One day a distressed person arrives, “dragging itself towards us across sand and rock”, and she is given water, food and shelter. While the community nurses “the traveller” to good health they fall a little bit in love with her, but when she is fully recovered opinion is divided about what to do with her:

I said that she must be taught our language. Then she could decide whether she would stay or not, and if so she would have to be told our methods of cultivation and given a home and responsibilities. Others agreed that she should learn how to speak to us, but only so that we could find out where she had come from and send her back to it; there were limits to hospitality. However well-taught and well-loved she was, these people said, she would always feel slightly apart from us who had always been here.

The community becomes increasingly afraid of the stranger in their midst and want to cast her out, not least because they feel she is a burden they can no longer support.

The traveller, I pointed out, might well be a gift as much as a responsibility. She might have some skill we did not practise, she might have reached some understanding we were still groping for. Perhaps we should accept the unfamiliar and learn from it?

I won’t elaborate on what happens to the “foreigner” — you’ll have to read the story yourself to find out — but I couldn’t help thinking of all the issues associated with immigration (both legal and illegal) and border controls that fill our newspapers and TV screens on a daily basis.  And perhaps that’s the greatest strength of Paradise & Elsewhere: Page takes seemingly familiar issues, places and people but alters them ever so slightly so that they’re recognisable without being completely “other”.

As a whole, the book is a wonderful exploration of an old topic — what it is to be an outsider — but it is done in such an original and refreshing way I couldn’t help but be impressed by it. I can be a bit so-so about short story collections, but I loved this one, not least because each tale gave me something to mull over and “chew”. For that reason it’s not one to race through, but one to saviour and enjoy.

Finally, I can’t finish this review without pointing out that I read the Kindle edition of this book and was rather annoyed to find the table of contents located at the rear . I didn’t even know it was there until I got to the end of the book, by which time I had no need to use the table. This might be something to bear in mind if you purchase the Kindle edition.