Going back to the Munro...methinks my attention span is getting shorter and shorter. I have this and one more book from the Seattle Public Library and then I'm TAKING A BREAK from the lists and reading some other stuff that I've been dying to read for a long time... 

Wow, it has been FOREVER since I posted. Okay, so people who know me well, know I read voraciously, I read like some people drink, hence the title of my blog right? Okay, well these same people that know me well also know that if I'm not particularly enthralled with a book or if in fact I HATE IT, then it takes me FOREVER to finish it...I drag my feet, find other things to entertain myself, daydream about all the other books I'd love to read...So, I finally finished A Discovery of Strangers early this(Saturday) morning. I was determined, it's already 4 days overdue, and I didn't want to be paying for a book that I wasn't really that into, but OH WELL. So, I REALLY wanted to like this book...Wiebe's writing was compared to Faulkner, who I absolutely adore and idolize as a writer, and so I was super excited. Yes, that was a fairly good comparison, but somehow I found myself getting distracted on a fairly regular basis and just plodding through, having to constantly reread whole pages because I wasn't paying attention to what was going on. I liked a lot of parts of the book, though. The most prominent female character, Greenstockings, was a great protagonist. Her passages(for the most part the book is narrated from many characters' points of view, in stream of consciousness format) were beautiful and showed her intelligence, strength and knowledge of her own self-worth. She speaks frankly about love, her love for the white explorer Robert Hood, and her feelings towards her lover Broadface, and her parents and sister. Her observations of her world are lovely and heartfelt, but not in a flowery sort of way. In one passage when she is watching Robert Hood draw her she says(via 3rd person omniscient POV) "Why does he keep trying to make her outline on paper? If he wants it, why doesn't he feel it with her face between his hands? Perhaps she can tell him that--her lips, if he felt them with one hand surely his other one could find them too, even at the end of a pencil or brush. He is different, so quick to understand and so stupid, she says to him whatever she want and even without words he often does not know anything. Her hand lifts the blazing stick as she considers that: she has never thought it before about a man; she will tell him anything, whatever has always been unspeakable, his incomprehension gives her freedom" (Wiebe 160). Greenstockings' very pragmatic outlook towards the men, both white and native is also very interesting...especially in light of the fact that Keren and I have had many discussions of her research of the rampant sexual abuse of women in native communities(both between partners and family members). I think that our discussions coloured my reading of the book a little, because I was constantly on the look-out for how men behaved towards women, whether or not they were treated like a commodity, etc(I guess circumstances surrounding a reading of any novel, outside events occurring in the reader's life, serve to colour any book that you read). At one point during the novel, Greenstockings is kidnapped and raped by one of the native guides along to help the whites, it is a brutal brutal attack, told from many different sides, and does display to an extent how a woman is a possession or meant to be possessed by the men of the community. Rudy Wiebe did some things very well, that I was glad to have read...When the white men are all starving to death, the written word at that part is exactly how you would imagine one to be thinking while they are deliriously dying from lack of food, the insanity eating away at your brain. That part was tough to read and follow, but you did feel like you were living it(remember Benjy in The Sound and the Fury? As hard to follow at times as that). The other thing that I found to be really interesting was how the author tried to depict native thoughts on the oncoming of white civilization, its inevitability and perhaps their own demise because of it...it is of course with great hindsight, but one can also imagine their apprehensions towards an unknown possibly destroying their way of life...If they only knew how bad it would get for them, they probably would have killed all of the white explores on the spot...One of the funniest parts of the book was when the natives are talking about the white man "creation myth". They CAN'T wrap their heads around it, and told from their point of view it IS hilariously unbelievable. Okay, so all in all, I wasn't CRAZY about this book, but it had some decent parts. I don't feel like it was a waste of my time(at least not WHOLLY a waste), though it reminded me a lot of when I read Virginia Woolf...most of the time I read her I spend going "What the fuck are you talking about?" But when I reach the end, I usually feel like a better person for having read her. This is also one of those times where I take a hard look at my own writing and what a reader may think of MY stuff...It's so easy to be critical when you aren't the writer...Anywho, in the words of Queen, another one bites the dust. GGs-18, Pulitzers-15.

Next up...Rudy Wiebe is an author that has been recommended to me before...He is also a two-time GG winner for fiction(this won in 1994)...Wiebe has been compared to Faulkner, who as we all know is one of my all-time FAVORITE authors...Looking forward to it! 

The past few days have been very thought-provoking in many many ways...I spent the majority of my free time this weekend(work was a positive shitstorm on Friday and Saturday) ensconced in an entry for a poetry competition(we'll see), however, I also caught up on some episodes of LOST. LOST combined with this book that I just finished, M.T. Kelly's A Dream Like Mine, as well as listening to some of Keren's research results on Native American women's health and watching a very large protest against a new Bush administration bill on immigration, has made me think a lot about PEOPLE(yes, I know this is TYPICAL of me). LOST, the television show, seems to me to be an interesting study in human behavior...how people behave during stressful situations, when encountering people and things they are unfamiliar with, and of course dealing with their own demons. The people in LOST may have lost some of their literal luggage, but they are surely weighed down by plenty of their own mental baggage. M.T. Kelly's book is about a reporter who goes into the Ontario wilderness to write a light piece on Ojibway shamans...what happens is far beyond his expectations in a hellish sort of way. Much like the people of LOST he is trapped in a situation in which he has little control and which is constantly terror-filled. He becomes an unwilling accomplice in a plot of a Native American male who is taking revenge on all the white people who have done him and his people wrong...the male kidnaps the head of a paper mill whose company has polluted all of the local waters, according to him, killing his people, using him as a symbol as he avenges his people. Well, today(Monday, I haven't gone to bed yet, so even though this will post Tuesday, it's not Tuesday yet for me) I watched a protest in which approximately ten thousand people peacefully demonstrated against Bush and his policies. This guy Arthur(the Native American, the reporter remains unnamed throughout the book), takes matters into his own hands, very very brutally...leading the reporter and the paper mill man(Bud is his name, Bud Ricketts)on a canoe trip that is very reminiscent of another book that I read many years ago...Deliverance...the unnamed reporter even makes a comment in reference to that novel(ugh, I have a really hard time thinking about that book since it is soooo beautifully poetic, the author James Dickey is the poet laureate of Georgia, but it is so so violently nightmarish as well)...Arthur has every right to be pissed at white people, at his situation, and the reporter realizes this in a Patty Hearst kind of way, and of course so does the reader. One of the best lines(if not the best line) in the whole book is: "Every book I'd read on native people was a lie. Romantic cancer" (Kelly 61). Between Keren telling me about the overwhelming amount of Native American women who have been sexually abused both as adults and children and reading horror stories in this novel about the mistreatment of natives by first settlers and then present-day white men...I'd been exposed to a bit of this before in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, but that is a BEAUTIFUL, LYRICAL not so IN-YOUR-FACE kind of book about native people. M.T. Kelly's book is brief(156 pages), but I think it still makes a decent point...I did think there could have been more elaboration of plot, though: it seemed to jump right into action, not really giving enough development to me, and I felt like I was watching something violent unfold, without any real association to any of the characters...That is something Dickey's and Erdrich's books did very well, the attachment created towards the characters is very intense, so that when all the bad shit happens to them(of which there's plenty) you feel it so much more. However, Kelly's book is not without some poetic passages, like this quote, the final one I chose: "It must seem odd, putting despair, putting minor concussions, putting a dislocated knee into an historical context. But being a witness to torture, and the squalid reality of my discomfort, didn't stop for a single minute echoes of the past in all that I felt. We are victims of our own mythologies, and my incessant reading, and thinking, about native people had caught up to me, but it also let me see that what I'd imagined about the Iroquois, although real, was only part of the story" (Kelly 105). I grew up near reservations, I also went to a sort of liberal public school and learned all about the poor treatment of Native Americans. It gives me a little glimmer of glee to see them now running tribal casinos and taking money from the white man who has fucked them over for so long...it in no way will ever compensate for the genocide that was committed in the name of westward expansion, the destruction of a way of life, but at least it's using the almighty dollar, that which the white man holds so dear, as a small but thrifty weapon. The ruination of Native Americans is so sickening, demoralizing and humiliating. Kelly's novel reminds us of that all too well...and whatever I have to say about the shortcomings of the writing itself(which at times the book was a major ehhh...), its message is worthy of a prize if even one other person is left feeling regret, frustration, and aware, as I was, during the read and at the end. GG's-17, Pulitzers-15.

Next? Winner of the 1987 Governor General's Award. Hmmm...it is supposed to be about a clash between white big business and the Ojibway people...and it is borrowed from the Truth or Consequences Public Library in Truth or Consequences, NM...Yes, Alanis, it is a "little too ironic.":) 

When I was just a little girl, I asked my mother what will I be? Will I be pretty, will I be rich? Here's what she said to me...(Now you can start singing, since you know what's coming next:))...Actually, when I was in 10th grade, we were studying the Middle Ages and had to decide on a career path that we would have had if we had lived during that era. They were all MALE professions, mind you...so I chose(out of court jester, knight, peasant, monk) monk. If we had actually had female options, I would have chosen nun. Why? Lots of reasons...I'm a person who likes time to think in a meditative state, I prize self-education, and I enjoy teaching, music, working in gardens and cooking, amongst other things...I also am always searching for(and have done a decent job I think of creating) a sense of community in my life, which I think the church was for many people back then. So, service to God it is...Why this tangent? The Edge of Sadness, Edwin O'Connor's 1962 Pulitzer-winning novel, is told from the point of view of a Catholic priest. This was an interesting departure for me. I've read the Bible tons, I've read books about religion, I've read C.S. Lewis, I've read books with priests as secondary characters, but I don't think I've ever before read a book with the entire story told by a priest. What I found remarkable, was how honest the prose was. The protagonist, Hugh Kennedy(Ironically he has the same first name as the protagonist in one of my favorite books of ALL TIME, How Green Was My Valley) is a man who by his occupation is an outsider...people look to him as confessor, not as confessee. He is a keen observer of people in a very straightforward, often comically so, approach. In this novel, he attempts to tell the story of the Carmody family, or so he promises:"This story at no point becomes my own. I am in it--good heavens, I'm in it to the point of almost never being out of it!--but the story belongs, all of it, to the Carmodys, and my own part, while substantial enough, was never really of any great significance at all" (O'Connor 3). However, he is in the entire story, not only colouring the reader's views through his narratorship, but also as a character to whom many others turn. We even, as the reader, get many opportunities to hear about his background history. The story of the Carmodys may not be his own, but the story of The Edge of Sadness very much is. Not only because he is in it, but because he is TELLING it, he is its creator. What made me think about my earlier tangent(remember, me as a nun?) was that I read what this narrator had to say, and much of it struck a chord with me because I have had similar thoughts...In fact sometimes I felt like he had snatched the ideas right from my very brain! (Too bad I was born 18 years after the book was published!) I think that even now, the notion of priest is romanticized(and not always in a good way) and we forget that priests are servants to God, but they are also first and foremost men: full of innate desires, prone to human error. We are reminded of this through all of the clergymen that are prevalent in this novel: Hugh himself, his childhood friend John Carmody, and Hugh's assistant pastor, Father Danowski. Father Carmody is especially fascinating because he is such an oxymoron: a shepherd who doesn't want to have anything to do with a flock! He even says, towards the very end of the novel: "There's always one thing more. Every day. The same old whimpers and whispers and groans and tears from people who can't manage their own lives and who can hardly wait to bolt down their breakfasts before rushing up to the rectory to tell me they can't. And it's all nonsense, it means nothing. I'm a priest, not a wastebasket. These people who every morning sing to themselves, 'Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and take them up to Father'--I want them for once, just once, to stay at home. Or at least to stop talking. To shut up. That's all. Just for a while. Because I'm tired, Hugh. Dead tired. Worn thin. It can't go on this way" (O'Connor 409). There is a plot to this novel, it is about the characters and their dealings with the patriarch of the Carmody family, Charlie, who is a domineering, not exactly good nor well-loved person, who has made his way to the top through shrewd business dealings and nickel and diming every person he can. Charlie is very real, as are the people who surround him: his children and his "friends," for even the narrator is unsure as to whether these men could be considered Charlie's friends or if they have just grown up together and known each other for so long(after all they are all old men) that they are just too familiar to let go. It is Hugh, though, with whom a reader can fall in love, both as a person and a narrator, for what he says about the people he meets and life in general is just so true. "We all share in a shattering duality--and by this I don't mean that soggy, superficial split that one so often sees: the kind of thing for example, where the gangster sobs uncontrollably at an old Shirley Temple movie. I mean the fundamental schism that Newman referred to when he spoke of man being forever involved in the consequences of some "terrible, aboriginal calamity";every day in every man there is this warfare of the parts. And while all this results in meanness and bitterness and savagery enough, God knows, and while only a fool can look around him and smile serenely in unwatered optimism, nevertheless the wonder of it all is to me the frequency with which kindness, the essential goodness of man does break through, and as one who has received his full measure of that goodness, I can say that for me, at least, just as much as in the magnificence of heroes, that the meaning and glory of man is revealed"(O'Connor 253)...This novel is full of poetry in the guise of prose, seeds of knowledge strewn throughout a field of pages. Hugh is a priest, who is also a man, a man who saw into the depths of despair after the death of his father, and through help was able to pull himself together and become, if not a better priest, at least a generous observer of the human spirit. He sees with wit, intelligence and a good dollop of sarcasm every once and a while...If only all of us could be such. In the vein of being true to one's thoughts and situations, I must admit that I wasn't always held firmly to the book, my mind did wander(though I also have to wonder if that is due to the fact that I've been reading SO much lately that my mind just has to take breaks sometimes), though to what it wandered at times was relevant. The irony of course, did not escape me that I finished most of the book in the library at UW, in a room that much resembled the interior of a Catholic church...Churches, though they all at once fill me with a sense of wonder, nearness to God and overall peace, also fill me with trepidation. According to Catholic dogma most specifically, I'm not what you would consider an ideal citizen of the kingdom of God. Priests also concern me slightly due to a fear that they might be too judgemental, too condemning...The Edge of Sadness reminded me that, at least with fictitious priests(and this is probably true for most of the human race), one is often far more judgemental of oneself than others...Perhaps I have nothing to worry about;). GG's-16, Pulitzers-15.

Next? This is the first Pulitzer prize winner I will have read in over a month(won in 1962). I hope that the title isn't too indicative of what it provokes in the reader, since the last book I read wasn't exactly cheerful. We shall see.

You know that feeling that you get in the pit of your stomach when you're on a rollercoaster and you're climbing, climbing, climbing to the pinnacle? The tracks are creaking and shaking slightly, everyone is quiet or making idle chitchat...You know what's coming, and you're not sure if you're ready for it, but because you're stuck in this cart, you've already paid your money and you're hundreds of feet above the earth, you also realize you have very little choice in the matter. The only thing you can do is brace yourself and hang on for the ride...Have you ever had the experience of watching, as a not so active participant, a close friend or family member deteriorate in an attempt to kill themselves? Once again, you have very little choice in the matter, you see them in a rapid downward spiral, out to self-destruct and you are powerless, because there is no way you can help. Like a watching a car wreck, however, (wow, look at these metaphors and similes) you want to turn away, but you just can't. That's what it's like to read David Gilmour's A Perfect Night to Go to China. The protagonist in this book, Roman, leaves his young sleeping son alone one night to go out for a beer by himself for an hour...When he returns, the son is missing. He spends the rest of the book first relentlessly searching for his son in real-life and through his dreams, trying to contact his son somewhat telepathically, eventually coming to the conclusion that the only way to be reunited with his son is by committing suicide. It is not hard as a reader to figure out what the outcome may be, and like in the case of the roller coaster, brace oneself as you watch this man plunge into despair. It is, suffice to say, not a very uplifting book. However, it is very beautifully written in a simple yet poetic kind of way. You are gripped by the prose and its sparseness, making the emotions so stark and clear at times it is painful. And, thank God, it's less than 200 pages(179 to be exact) so it doesn't take long to reach the ending, which though not entirely cheerful is at least happy for some. If it had been a more normal novel length(200-400pp.), I think it would have been a very tough read, emotionally. I liked though, the idea of escaping to be with the ones you love, even if they are deceased, through your dreams. And, the heaven of his dreams is what some would consider heaven on Earth, the Caribbean. The prose is amazing and the thoughts/themes of the book are very different, perhaps the reason why it won the Governor General in 2005. Words are chosen well here, thoughtfully. The quote that I chose to use to illustrate the writing style, etc. is actually the quote which gives a clue as to where the title comes from.
"Finally I said, 'God it's a beautiful day.'
He looked at me with mild surprise as if I had just plucked that very thought from his head. 'A perfect day to go to China.'
I leaned forward in my seat. 'I'm sorry?'
'My mother used to say that. Whenever it was a perfect day, she would open the window and say, 'Why look at that! It's a perfect day to go to China.' ' He checked the lane over his shoulder. 'I don't know why she said it. We never went to China. Not once, not ever. It was just one of those peculiar things that your parents say.'
'That you never forget,' I said.
'Exactly, sir.' He laughed suddenly. 'It makes no sense but still you rememember it for the rest of your life.'
It is a warm world, I thought. It is a warm world and I have been lucky to live in it" (Gilmour 145-6).
This was a peculiar novel, but it is certainly one that I won't forget for a long time. It was very sad, but very moving as well. I know, too, at the end, that at least it was a perfect day for the protagonist. I also know that "a perfect day[or night for that matter]to go to China" both in terms of the novel and in terms of an adage, can mean different things to different people. This small novel packs a large whollop, and a perfect day for me is not always the same thing for you.Good night just the same, hope you turned your clock forward.:) GG's-16, Pulitzers-14.