Literature from Around the World

When I was a child, my parents would assign me intellectual projects for the summer. I remember one such summer I got a lot of research done on Cleopatra and delivered my findings on a long car ride. 

This summer I am assigning my own project and will attempt to read as many novels from around the world as possible. I may or may not be cheating by including authors my book club will be reading or books that I had planned to ready anyway, but I figure I'm reading something so it's all the same thing. 

Here are the first ten countries (I must apologize for clumping all the countries of Africa together in one massive mess). I need some recommendations and of course if you think the authors I have chosen just do not reflect their country well enough, by all means give me someone else to read. 

I start with Canada, because that is my home and native land. Michael Ondaatje fits perfectly because he's coming up in book club and I have never read The English Patient so that will be a first. 

Next up are those Americans to the south and though I have tried and failed on many occasions I think it is time for me to give Stephen King another chance. He is one of the best selling authors in the world. In terms of sales the options were hard to choose from but I have read one too many Danielle Steel's novels for my liking.

Now I need some help as I venture down the continental divide. I would love to read a good Mexican novel and maybe something from Colombia or Brazil? 

Moving across the sea I have chosen Sjón from Iceland. I'm really excited to dip into some Icelandic contemporary folk tales. 

Then I'm skipping over most of Europe and going home to my motherland of Poland. I'm going to re-read my favourite novel that I last read in high school. Written by Antoni Libera, Madame is "a novel about Poland during the grim years of Soviet-controlled mediocrity which nonetheless sparkles with light and warmth." 

Sweden lucked out and got included only because the next author for book club is Jonas Jonasson and his novel about The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window and Disappeared. 

I can't decide who to read from Africa. This is challenging as there are numerous countries, nationalities and untranslated authors to chose from. I was thinking of Wilbur Smith but I'm worried I may get a skewed look at Africa. 

And last but not least, as I skip over Russia, India, China, Australia, New Zealand, all of South East Asia I end my literary journey in Japan. Haruki Murakami will hopefully begin the next leg on my literary journey into the Asian countries and I can work backwards through all those countries I missed. 

Farm City by Novella Carpenter

I never thought I would read a book that literally sucked me in at the first sentence. But how can you not keep reading after Novella Carpenter tells you, “I have a farm on a dead-end street in the ghetto.” It turns out she wasn’t exaggerating.  

Although Oakland, California is known to be one of the most diverse major cities in the U.S. it also has a high crime rate and in 2007 approximately 17% of the general population were living below the poverty line. Gertrude Stein famously described her Oakland childhood home in these few but telling words: “There is no there there.” On the bright side, Oakland gets, on average, 260 sunny days per year and is ranked at No. 1 in the U.S. for using electricity from renewable resources.  It’s an interesting place to grow a farm, that’s for sure.

Farm City is divided into three chapters; Turkey, Rabbit, and Pig. But this book is so much more than its livestock. Carpenter takes the reader on a journey through the heart and soul of farming. And the gaggle of characters that help and inspire her are as rich as the writing. I was really drawn in by Carpenter’s tone and her no-bullshit attitude in telling her story. This is no cookie cutter, country farming. There are gun shots in the background, a homeless watchman, a highway zooming by overhead and the threat that the ‘farm’ which is on an abandoned lot might be sold at any moment to a condo developer. 

Recently I have been reading a lot of farming memoirs or back-to-the-land stories and while most of them are inspiring and generally well written they can be a little cliché at the same time. I understand that I’m probably jealous that all these authors got the chance to grow their own food and then write a book about it but if I have to read another book about how easy and soul-fulfilling it is I might be sick. Farming is hard, plain and simple. Whether you do it in the country on many acres of land or in the city on an abandoned lot. Animals die, plants suffer from disease or drought, predators can come and kill your crops and livestock in one night. And what a lot of these authors don’t write about is how hard and yet rewarding it is to keep going and find ways to bounce back. Carpenter is tough as nails and yet soulful in her own way. She makes the reader appreciate how hard it is to raise these animals, kill them, cure them and also how delicious it is to enjoy your hard work.

Carpenter is gutsy, wickedly funny and the bravest person in Oakland. While dumpster diving for her pigs she is caught and told ominously to talk to Christopher Lee.  When she comes back to speak with Chris, the owner and chef at a swanky Berkley restaurant she explains why she dumpster dives and grows her own food.  “I had all kinds of reasons. Because I’m an ecofreak, because of bacon, because I can’t bear to see food wasted. In a way, the answer was: because I could.” And why not? We so often tell ourselves we can’t do things because of all kinds of reasons but Carpenter shows us that its more than doable. With a little sweat, animal blood and some tears. 

French Milk and Relish by Lucy Knisley

Every time I say how much I love Lucy Knisley I feel a bit like a stalker. I should rephrase that and say how much I love her work. But it’s through her work (that is primarily autobiographical) that I feel like I know her so well. Check her out through her LiveJournal, tumblr, Twitter, and other internet stalking methods.

A few years ago when Graphic Novels (not just comic books) were becoming the thing to be seen reading I picked up Knisley’s French Milk and first fell in love. French Milk is a travel journal (or as the French say, Carnet de Voyage) from a trip Knisley took with her mother to Paris in January. It’s a glimpse into the touristy things we all would love to do with our mothers in Paris, if we had the kind of relationship that Knisley has with her mother. There are lots of sketches of baguettes and cheese. All the ‘je ne sais quai’ of Paris is rendered into full page panels with little notes of what was seen and experienced.

What I like most about Knisley’s writing is that she doesn’t shy away from telling it how it is. Amongst the beautiful sketches of cobblestone streets in Paris there are anecdotes of her momentary meltdowns over turning 22 and not being financially responsible. (Oh, if only I could be 22 again, I’d tell myself to relax more.) We see how not all travel moments can be magical, that it can rain and be freezing in the most magical of places on earth. French Milk is a personal and wonderful story of a young woman’s journey through adulthood. It may sound cheesy but the more stinky the cheese the better.

You can imagine my excitement when I saw that Knisley was coming out with a new book in the Spring of 2013. As a bookseller I am lucky enough to be surrounded by books everyday but the biggest perk of the job is getting to read those books that everyone is waiting for first. I asked for an advance reader’s copy not expecting anything but hey, it never hurts to ask. And when I got approved and got the first look at the beautiful, full colour illustrations I nearly lost my mind.

Relish: My Life in the Kitchen (Published by First Second) which comes out in April is so cool. Just imagine the super fan girl (that’s me) with wide eyes clutching this book as I tell you how cool it is. First of all it’s in colour. Not that I mind reading comic books and graphic novels in black and white but when you see the work that you love so much in Technicolor, well there’s no going back after that. Not only is this book in colour but it’s all about food.

Good food is such a wonderful thing. We as humans can have such visceral reactions to food. Just notice what happens to you when someone bakes you a fresh batch of chocolate chip cookies. Or how nice you feel, if even for a moment, when you’re sick and someone makes you chicken soup just the way you like it. Humans can be very emotional eaters it’s only one of the many reasons we’re having such problems with obesity in North America. There’s always a valid excuse for that bucket of ice cream. And who hasn’t celebrated a momentous occasion with a good meal?

In Relish we see Knisley’s life told through the food that has helped her become the person she is today. It doesn’t hurt that her parents were total foodies even before she came into this world. Her mother worked in a cheese shop while she was pregnant with Knisley and thinks that perhaps the cultured dairy had an effect on the unborn artist? In French Milk the readers got to see the complex relationship that isn’t always perfect between a young, not yet fully adult woman and her mother. Being in your early 20s is still an awkward time and even more so in the age of “you can be whatever you want to be”.  But in Relish we get to see how Knisley’s relationships were formed not only with her mother but with her father and extended family, friends, coworker by the food they enjoyed together.

Scattered throughout the book are visual recipes for some of the special dishes Knisley mentions. I love how each ingredient magically jumps into the bowl. I hope Knisley makes prints of these recipes. This book is one part cookbook and 2 parts memoir.

The only trepidation I have about these types of autobiographical and deeply personal graphic novels is that the artists can sometimes go off on tangents. There’s a fine line between telling the whole story and going overboard. Food is clearly a very important part of Knisley’s life but I sometimes felt that there was only so much to be said about one’s nutritional history. Nonetheless I really enjoyed this book and would highly recommend it to anyone who loves to eat and read comics. Or both at the same time!! 

The Savage Detectives

I was really excited when my book club chose to read Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. I had never ready anything by Bolaño but I had heard so much about him. When I worked at Pages (one of Toronto’s coolest indie bookstores of yore) I prided myself on knowing what a customer might want to read based on what they looked like. There were a lot of smart (and very hipster) looking people who would pick up either Bolaño, Murakami or Miranda Hill. Those were the 3 heavy hitters at the time and every time I recommended one of those 3 to a hip looking book lover I felt slightly guilty that I hadn’t actually read the first on my list of “3 authors all hipsters will love”. So here was my opportunity, years later with a group of not quite hipster but very smart ladies.

Initially I felt very intimidated by The Savage Detectives. I have a rule when I read a book, I have to get to at least 100 pages before I think of quitting or making any generalizations. Well, I reached page 100 and thought to myself, “What the hell?” I’m still not quite sure why this book is regarded so highly in the literary community but I have a few ideas. (Maybe it’s all the sex.)

Maybe the truly confusing books are seen as genius works of art, because people are too afraid to say they didn’t understand them? But perhaps I’m not being fair.

The book is separated into 3 parts, the first is from the point of view of 17-year old Juan Garcia Madero, a drop-out law student turned amateur poet. Garcia Madero joins up with a radical group of like minded poets called the visceral realists. His diary of the last few months of 1975 offers a first hand account of the sex, drugs and confusing literary opinions that the visceral realists had. Garcia Madero and everyone else in the group idealize two men who seem to be their leaders. Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, the leaders of the visceral realists are quite literally Bolaño and his buddy Mario Santiago, in case you skipped the introduction by Natasha Wimmer at the beginning of the paperback edition of the book. Also the literary allusion to Ulysses is something you may have not picked up on but please feel free to make the literary connections at your leisure.

The second part of the book is the longest and most frustrating. It spans 1976-1996 and has numerous narrators who talk about Belano and Lima on their quest for Cesarea Tinajero in the Sonora Desert in 1976 as well as their debaucherous lifestyles in Europe later on. Tinajero is the poet that Lima and Belano idolize even though there is only one magazine with her printed work, a magazine that no one has ever read and no one has seen or heard from Tinajero in decades. Like their hero, Belano and Lima have a group of followers who never talk about their work nor mention that they are great writers. The reader never even really gets a good sense of what or who the visceral realists comprise of. I think the very term itself is redundant and meaningless. But perhaps that is a comment on life and art. Belano, Lima and even Tinajero are demi-gods in their community not because of their work but because of what they represent. But the fact that I had to read almost 400 pages of random testimonials to come to that conclusion is tiresome to say the least.

The last section in the book is perhaps the most rewarding for the reader. We go back to Garcia Madero in the first few weeks of 1976. Belano, Lima, Garcia Madero and Lupe are on the run from Lupe’s pimp and also conveniently on the search for Cesarea Tinajero, both of whom find them in the end. We finally get some plot and excitement but reality is more visceral than any of the characters can handle. (See what I did there?) The reader finally pieces together the narratives they read in the lengthy middle section and understand why Belano and Lima run away to Barcelona and Paris. But is their search worth it in the end? What have they learned? What has the reader learned?

I left the novel with a general sense of disappointment and fatigue.  Did Bolaño mean for me to feel this way, perhaps like his characters felt after meeting their hero and coming face to face with reality? On top of everything, I got really annoyed with the constant name dropping within the novel. This was a book about literary movements, politics and Latin America. But as a North American reader I couldn’t quite keep up and I wondered if perhaps some things were lost in translation. The Latin American authors the characters were constantly referring to might not even have been real literary figures for all I knew.

I wasn’t the only one in my book club who had issues with the novel. But we all felt bad that we disliked the book because weren’t we suppose to love it?! It was one of the 10 best books of the year according to The New York Times Book Review, there was even a sticker on the front of the book to remind us of the fact. Bolaño was an author we were all suppose to read. And I’m not sorry I did read him but would I recommend the book? No!

Maybe I should give him another try with his poetry which he’s more famous for but first I need a break. Maybe I’ll read something I might actually like for a change. Is that so wrong? And no, I don’t mean a 50 Shades of Grey type book. Why can’t a book be smart and entertaining at the same time?

Have you ever read a book that you were suppose to love and had been heralded by all critics only to discover that you hated it? How did the fact that you hated the book make you feel as a reader? I’m curious to know what others thought of The Savage Detectives and if anyone can convince me to appreciate it more.

A Canadian Fiction

What makes a book a part of the Canadian Literature canon? Does the author need to be Canadian? Should the story be set somewhere in Canada? Do you need both plot and writer to be Canadian? And do Canadian novels get judged on a different playing field? Are critics kinder, more lenient, more 'Canadian' in attitude because it is a Canadian book?

These are interesting questions to ask and perhaps more interestingly they are difficult to answer. There has always been some speculation as to what makes a person or book "Canadian". And does labelling a person or object "Canadian" make it better or worse? 

In my quest to define myself as a Canadian I have come to the personal understanding that not having a black and white definition makes it more clear what being a Canadian means to each person. Without sounding too nationalistic, I believe that being a Canadian means that you usually have a multi-layered identity and cultural background. 

I was born in Poland but have spend most of my life in Canada. I have never felt that my being born in Poland has made me less of a Canadian. Nor have I felt that I have had to suppress my Polish-ness in order to become a fully Canadian citizen. I enjoy watching hockey but don't necessarily view it as a prerequisite for being Canadian. (Although I wouldn't know who to cheer for if the Polish hockey team ever played a serious game against the Canadian team.)

Some of my favourite Canadian authors are David Bezmozgis, Esi Edugyan and Michael Winter if I only had to name 3 but I think that what makes them great is not because they are Canadian but because I think their writing is fantastic. They may deal with some quintessentially Canadian situations and characters but I think those situations and characters that they so brilliantly depict are universal and can be taken out of the Canadian context and still stand on their own. 

So, why do we lump our Canadian writers into the Canadian literature section? Why not just mix them in with the rest. I'm reminded of an incident I had as a young bookseller, oh how naive I was then. A black lady approached me and asked me where we kept the black authors. I was a little confused and asked her to clarify. Turns out she was looking for novels that were specifically written for and by black people. I didn't know how to respond because of course there was no such section. And I thought how odd it was when she stormed off in a visible huff. I realize the situation is a little different but I think I'm experiencing the same kind of confusion when thinking about Canadian literature. 

I'm left right where I began, still not knowing what to think. I suppose I have to keep in mind that Canada is really a small country and yet the amount of talent it churns out is truly impressive. (There must be something special in all the maple syrup we consume.) I guess not having a clear answer is a somewhat Canadian way of continuing to ask a question that I think makes Canada an interesting place to be. I welcome your thoughts on the matter.