Perhaps Edna Ferber and Gwethalyn Graham are going to be my two lost sisters of literature. They, so far are the two most underappreciated and undervalued women writers I have come across since I started this project. I just finished, today, Edna Ferber's So Big. It was amazing! It makes me want to read all of her other books right away(however I'm sitting on a James Alan McPherson and a Booth Tarkington that need to go back to the library...). On a tangential note, when I was living in upstate NY, working at that resort in the middle of nowhere, I looked and looked for novels about farm life, since I'm not so shyly obsessed with farm life and books about it. I couldn't find anything while roaming the search engines at the library. Perhaps I just wasn't plugging in the right words...So Big is a farm novel, as well as a novel about the development of the Chicago area around the turn of the 20th century. It is also a novel about people and their expectations of life and then what they do with those expectations when they truly realize how life is going to go...:) Ferber's main character Selina DeJong is a great character. She grows up with a gambling father who manages to keep her in nice clothes and good schools even when his luck is down, and books are her main source of her companionship. Perhaps this leads to too many romantic notions, but when her father unexpectedly dies, leaving her with no real path in the world, she goes off to be a schoolteacher in High Prairie, IL; the country in what was then turn of the 20th C. Chicago...She gets the job through the father of her best friend Julie Hempel, who is of meat-packing fame and fortune(will hit for a little while a skid during the muckracking of which of course The Jungle will feature). She lives out there for a year and in that time meets a local farmer, who is handsome and sweet but thoroughly unimaginative(very unlike Selina, who when she first goes out to High Prairie with Klaus Pool, the patriarch of the family with which she will board while she is still single, comments on the beauty of the cabbages along the way and calls them "chrysoprase and porphyry" and Mr. Pool cannot help laughing, it becomes a joke between the farmers for the rest of the book, the joke will be on them though.). Pervus DeJong is the handsome bachelor of the area, and the most desirable, but he is also the most unimaginative farmer who is clearly not determined to get ahead and takes Selina's ideas to be folly when she suggests "new-fangled notions" about farming. Selina sticks it out, though, and it is clear that she loves him in her way and he worships her; but her romantic notions, though not quashed are put aside in favor of survival on a Midwestern farm. The couple has a son, Dirk, and it is into him that Selina throws all of her romantic ideals and desires; she wishes for him all the best and will get it for him. This becomes much more feasible when, sadly enough, Pervus dies. It is she who has to take over the family farm and make the money. She is determined and like a shrewd businesswoman, takes advantage of a niche market in selling beautiful, perfect vegetables to wholesalers who then go on to sell to hotels. She never ever loses her zest for life, her excitement for it, even when she is on the farm. She wishes to hear all the stories her son can tell of life in the big city at the fancy parties, what people eat, what they wear. She even travels to Chicago occasionally for a vacation where she explores all areas, even the places where the blacks are starting to become more prevalent and in the novel it is hinted that the area is less savory especially to the likes of the people that her son Dirk, now grown up, hangs out with. Dirk goes to an okay university, and does fine, but conforms to societal standards, living within them and has no real passion for anything. It is this that does not make him or even his worshipper, his mother, proud. What is interesting to think about here is what this means, and how this happens all the time even now...A parent works and works to climb their way to the top and give their children the best, wanting them to be like them, but perhaps because they don't HAVE to work so hard for everything and they aren't forced to work to survive, they have no real appreciation or love for anything. Perhaps when you are put in a situation where you are against odds then it begins to create that passion in you...I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA. All I know is that when Dirk finally does fall in love(even though his childhood playmate as it were, Paula Storm, of the Hempel line and he have a very significant non-affair, at least perhaps not in the sexual way, but they hang out together ALL THE TIME...)with an artist, her main argument against being with him is because he never really had to struggle for what he believed in, and lacks passion. She even tells him that if he HAD worked at the crappy architectural firm he started at before he got whisked into opportunity after opportunity with friends)and worked his way up, struggling with crappy pay to finally make a beautiful SOMETHING that improved the skyline of Chicago, she would admire him more. HE DOESN'T GET IT! He tells her that if it would make a difference he would go back!!! She talks in the same conversation though, of how admirable his MOTHER is. The woman who still holds her head high, and still works the field. And, the characteristics he admires in the woman(Dallas O'Mara), are that of a working girl(nails unkempt, etc.) and that she is proud of those features/doesn't care about them as much as the other uppity society women that he hangs out with. The most interesting bit is the end when Roelf Pool, the only bit of artistic genius that High Prairie has ever seen, who left High Prairie after his father remarried to struggle in Paris and become a world-renowned sculptor, returns to his first real mentor, Selina, after years and years and years. It is bittersweet and beautiful. Selina, who never left the farm, makes such an amazing impact on all she comes across. There's more to think about there...but I'm not going to do it today, I'm tired of typing....What is impressive though is this is the same woman who wrote Showboat, Cimarron, and Giant, and no one today has even heard of her. She is, I guess, known for her strong female characters. Well here's one to think about for a long time.:) She was also considered one of the most preeminent authors for about thirty years surrounding her publications...How come we don't read her anymore???There's a lost sisterhood: Gwethalyn Graham, Edna Ferber, Shirley Ann Grau...I'm sure I'll discover others. Maybe some day I'll be lucky enough to do work in women's studies and make a course featuring all of these women...Until then, I'll just keep plugging away and discovering...:) PPs-44, GGs-37.

On a completely random note, I seem to be having a hard time counting the number of books I've read for this project. I keep highlighted lists in a folder(hard copy style) and I have it through here, I guess, but of course I always have my excel sheet to look at. My last entry said I had read 42 Pulitzer Prize winners, but I just counted on Wikipedia, and unless I'm missing someone, even though I just finished Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, this year's winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, I'm still at 42. Very very odd.
Anywho...:) I must say that I'm very glad that I have such a diverse wealth of experience. Perhaps not such a huge wealth of life experience, but let's just say this: I know a little bit about a lot of things, and it definitely helps when reading a book like Oscar Wao. It's about a boy who becomes a man, named Oscar Wao, a Dungeons and Dragons playing, comic book reading Dominican fat kid(do all of these epithets go together when talking about a Dominican boy? The narrator seems to say no, but my experience with people from the DR is limited, I have one friend from culinary school who is from there and who returned to work and live there after she graduated, I'm going to tell her about the book and maybe she'll read it...she was pretty unhappy when she read the depiction of the Mirabel sisters in In the Time of the Butterflies, but I dunno, maybe this is truer to life?)who is obsessed with women. And given his rather robust appearance and his inherited not-so-much looks, he can never get laid. He has all the machismo of the Dominican male without the looks to go along with the "player" attitude. To boot, he throws himself into this world of sci-fi/fantasy, writing his own novels, obsessing over comic books and anime and everything else that that dorky world entails. And let me say this fellas, most girls aren't into that shit. Some like parts of it, some ARE D&D geeks too, but I don't think I've ever met a woman who is so head over heels in love with the gamers/comic book world like some men are. I know a little bit about a lot of that stuff because over the years I've had several male friends that are into that stuff on various levels; comic books and comic book superheroes are the top pick for my two closest guy friends, but since I'm a card-carrying lesbian, I have no problem being friends with people who are into that stuff. They're not trying to get into my pants, and I AM CERTAINLY not trying to get into theirs.:) Most women, though, don't care about that stuff at all, though, they'll go to the new Batman movie, because it's the "it" movie of the summer, but they aren't generally going to sit in the car with a boy afterward and talk about the nuances of the differences between Bruce Wayne in the comic book versus his portrayal in the latest Hollywood release. So, if you're morbidly obese, not super attractive, and are constantly spouting gamer lingo, and you're heterosexual, odds are, you're NOT screwed. That's the point. However, Oscar's constant searching for love is endearing, if not depressing as the book progresses. You want him to be in love so badly, which he is constantly, but you want him to be loved back...which he isn't. His propensity for love is so great...The book is not only about Oscar though, it is about the term "fuku"(with an accent aigu over the last u) or "curse" and what that does to a family, if there really is one...and it's about the fuku on the Dominican people and their history with Trujillo, something that I knew very little about until I read this book. In order to make the reader realize how the idea of fuku translates into Oscar's love life, or lack thereof, the narrator, presumably an ex-boyfriend of Oscar's sister, Lola, goes back in time to show how FUCKED the Wao family has been. He travels back to the Dominican Republic in time, to show what it was like during the Trujillo realm for Oscar's mother, whose entire immediate family got annihilated by Trujillo, mainly because her father refused to submit to the dictator's will regarding the virginity of his eldest daughter...Some references are in footnotes, to different people in the Trujillo regime, etc...but a large chunk of the novel is told through flashback to La Inca(Oscar's mother's cousin cum mother)'s life and Oscar's mother's life before she moved to the United States. The book shows us all the time how everyone's life is a spinoff of someone else's life and how interconnected we all are, and how like dominoes, we can be propelled forward by a chain of events that are sometimes out of our control. I loved this book. I love Hispanic culture and how the heat in some of these areas creates tempers that are just as hot? hmm...All I know is that I have a little bit of a thing for the literature from Hispanic cultures, especially that of the Dominican/Haitian/South American bent. There's something about the creativity that comes out when you've been kicked in the head so long by dictators that's really inspiring. More of this book takes place in the DR than you would think, but that's cool too. I think that part of what makes someone "American"(since after all, the Pulitzer is supposed to award people who depict some aspect of American life) is the fact that you're constantly reconciling your past to your present. I loved all the references, the phrases in Spanish, Oscar's obsession with The Watchmen. I felt like I was sharing in this part of a culture that I know nothing about. However, when I was talking to people at work about this book, one co-worker in particular didn't like the book because of all of the references. She felt like it was a secret handshake that she just didn't get or something. She thought the book dragged and was boring as well as hard to follow with all the narrators. I didn't really get that it was hard to follow in terms of narrators, but then again, my love for modernism has compelled me to read many a stream of consciousness novel. I didn't find this to be confusing like that. Though, I thought about this after the fact quite a bit: I started it and almost finished it(was shy by about 60 pages)in one weekend, devoting hour after hour to this book. I think that I had the time to sit with it and enjoy the experience. I'm not so sure this is a good book in the spurts that usually come when you're taking your reading stints where you can get them. I don't know that I would have even heard of this book had it not won the Pulitzer, which is sad, for it is very good...I'm, for some reason, much more with it when it comes to new Canadian literature. It doesn't help, either, that the Pulitzer nominees aren't advertised in advance. I think that would be cool to help hype it up. What I do like is this book may have its uppity characteristics(you can tell the author/speaker is educated), it's about poor people who are of immigrant background of one of the not so desirable racial classes. The Pulitzer is at least, with this book and others, showing that the "American life" that is written about and can win awards is not necessarily the "White Man"'s American life.:) PPs-43??, GG's-37.

Reconciling why something wins a prestigious literary award is one thing, figuring out why some books, in the years that pass, get chucked to the wayside and others get put on high school/college level reading lists for eternity, is an entirely different ball of wax.:) We've all read tons of books for classes that some higher authority, whether it be a high school curriculum or a university English Department, has deemed noteworthy that winds up being a boring piece of shit, or not nearly as interesting as The Da Vinci Code(and with this statement I'm not offering up The Da Vinci Code as the prime example of great American literature, it's just fuel for my fire), or irrelevant to our generation or any other generation's lives.
When I got ready to do this project I was prepared to read several books like the ones I've just described, boring pieces of irrelevant crap. I must say I've been pleasantly surprised. Sure, there have been some duds, books that definitely weren't my favorites, but there's been something of merit almost every novel I've read so far for these lists(and I'm more than halfway now), and an overwhelming majority of them I never would have read unless it was on these lists, books that I had never heard of otherwise or didn't really hold any outward interest for me. In the midst of not really being disappointed by anything I've read so far, I've found some amazing gems, books that are hidden from the general public due to their out-of-date/out-of-print status. I know I've gone crazy over the Gwethalyn Graham novels that won the GG in the late 30's and mid 40's and others from that era that have been sitting in some library's storage facility for the past 30-40 years, but I've got another one that was quite, quite good. This one is G. Herbert Sallans' Little Man. It won the Governor General in 1942. I could find nothing on this book before I began to read it, except, after I scrolled through Google Search Results page after page, I finally found two sentences about the plot, and now that I go look for it again, I'm sure it won't be there...:) The two sentence description said something about the fact that it was about a father and son's experience with war...but it is so much more than that. It is a 420 page tome about a man's life and experience as he lives through one of the most tumultous periods in history. George Battle, the protagonist, starts off in Chapter 1 as a gunner in the trenches in France in WWI, a young guy who has idolized war all his life but has no real clue about what to do once he gets there. Then Chapter 2 shows his son visiting George's brother's grave, his namesake, Hal, who died in France during the first war. Then the book goes back to the very beginning as it were, to George when he is a little kid growing up at the turn of the 20th century. His mother has died and his father leaves him and his older brother and sister with relatives to make money and then returns to claim them and start a new life out West with their Uncle Jim and Aunt Sadie in Saskatchewan. We watch George all through his growing up, and his interactions with Jim and Sadie's daughter Pitch, who will dog George until the end of the novel, she who wants him but pursues him utterly wrong, then when she loses him, she sets herself on trying to destroy his marriage however she can, but it only serves to make her look bitter and pathetic. George goes to Winnipeg to attend university and follow his dreams of becoming a writer, meets his soon-to-become lifelong friend Bo, and then eventually goes off to WWI, following in the footsteps of his brother Hal. George does this while there is a boom in farming and speculation that then comes crashing down like a house of cards in the early part of the 20th century, and the book's background always sets up the other worldly events that came to shape up the first half of last century...George goes to war only to find out that his brother is already dead, ends up running into Bo, and through him meets the woman of his dreams, Josephine Olive Yorke(Joy), an Englishwoman, living in London, who he will briefly court and then marry and who is his lifelong rock and partner. She is amazing, almost like a Melanie from Gone With the Wind...George comes back to Canada after the war, moves to Vancouver and works for a newspaper, writing about the little man and his struggles, for freedom, for equality, for financial security, for the little man to be heard. For, George is the epitome of the little man, one realizes as the book progresses. He can write, surely, but he is not loaded with old family money, he is not rich due to his own career path, he is pretty much an average guy who gets lucky by the situations he falls into. But, he too is not unfamiliar with tragedy, and he too saves his best friend from a shell attack in France, and he too has to watch his family members fall either to old age, illness or accidents. Sallans creates in George Battle not only the Little Man, but the Everyman...which is why I found this book engaging possibly, as well as the style is pretty easy to read and the characters are interesting...:) The other thing that I like about this book is it was written about a time that is so proximate to the publication date. The book ends with the start of World War II, and the book was published in 1942. There is not this long distance hindsight that comes from novels written even after the war and to the present day. When Sallans wrote about the Depression, it was only a few short years behind him. The first World War had ended less than three decades prior. Sallans, like my favorite, Gwethalyn Graham, is writing about the time in which he was living, a tumultous time, a scary and strange time, but with the wisdom of someone who has lived beyond it and since. To me, this book seems timeless and true, and yet the only way I got a copy of it was through interlibrary loan from the Tulsa City-County Library in Tulsa, OK, a far cry from Seattle, WA. It was another book that was sitting in storage before I requested it. And now it is almost two weeks overdue...Yikes! Wanna read a cool, all encompassing book about the first half of the 20th C. spanning all kinds of provinces and countries? This would be a great choice.
There are two quotes I particularly like...One is almost an entire page, 248, in the first edition copy I have from the library:
'"But who would ever write a book about us? And why?' 'Because we're commonplace, George. If you were prominent, you wouldn't be worth mentioning. Neither would I. But we're typical of the herd, so we're good book material.' 'But you've got to give people inspiration. That's all most of them have to live for. What's the use of telling them about themselves?' 'Because you can never lift your little man into the stars by making him feel like a palooka. He may be the poorest heel on earth, but there comes a time when he parts his hair and wants to stand before the crowd as a peer. Do I make myself clear?' 'As clear as mud,' George confessed. 'What I mean is this. We have no national literature worth reading for the same reason that we have no national culture of any value, and no national traditions. We try to ape other people. Outside a few things on forests and streams, and bits about Indians who were here before us, the rest of our stuff is the same old slavish worship of the aristocracy, of which we have none, and of success, which we measure by the length of time it takes the hero to get rich.' 'If you're right, Bo, Shakespeare was wrong.' 'With just this difference, my old one. Shakespeare was the Gilbert and Sullivan of his times. He dragged out his tinhorn dukes and fake top-hats and exposed them for the cheap farces they were. We haven't conceded that yet. That's why any literature we have on this soil can't tolerate the little man, and anyone with perspicacity, like yourself, knows that no worthwhile literature can get along without him. We're too self-conscious. We're so afraid we'll be recognized for what we really are, that we either dress up our little fellow like a god or we clown him and make him a boor.'"

The other quote I liked was much shorter, though also interesting. "'Here is my life,' he whispered to himself, 'reaching another chapter, another clean break-away from the past. Always breaking. Is there anyone whose life has been connected all of a piece, who can look back down the little lane of his years and say, 'This is my life.'--No, that is not so. Our lives are fashioned out of separate links, all foreign to one another, and only memory and sentiment can weld them together. There is no other welding.'" (266)

These kinds of books make me excited, like I'm on this archeological dig of literature and that I now found this super-valuable rare work that no one else knows about...But like I said, it also makes me sad, because if that's true and I AM the only one to know about it, then everyone else is missing out! and what else am I missing out on by having been a student of structured English programs? Well, I'm sure I'll have more opportunities to delve into this idea as I keep on trucking...GG's-38, PP's-42.

So, it's been a while since I've blogged, but it's also been a while since I've finished a book, which will be especially evident when I return this one, The Champlain Road by Franklin D. McDowell. It won the GG in 1939, and this copy that I just finished last night(finally!) was from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. It was due June 13th, and what is the date today? July 1. I am charged 25 cents a day for overdue fines. I'm not excited about getting the final tally.:( The Champlain Road ended up being not too bad, although it was certainly boring for a lot of the time, until about the last 100 pages. Although that could have been because I was compelled to finish it on my days off this week so that I could return it. I'm in library hell right now! I have another book that I just started called Little Man which won the GG in 1942, and it's due TODAY at the library. It is from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and I have my first book club meeting next Monday(in 6 days!) and I haven't read that book either. Not to mention the scads of other books taking up space in Keren's closet that have various due dates. All of this put wicked pressure on me to finish The Champlain Road. I was actually a bit dismayed, too, because my parents decided to come, for the first time in over 3 years, to visit and I'm so inundated with the books that I really just wanted to spend the weekend reading. But, I finished it...And now another one is crossed off the list. The Champlain Road is one of the books on the GG list that I had a really hard time finding out anything about it. There are quite a few of the early winners that there is NO information about at all, except that they won the award in a particular year. I finally found something on the book buried in someone's thesis on someone else. I hit Ctrl+F to get at it in the University of New Brunswick student's paper. I think it's interesting, and also somewhat sad that there are so many of these books that just get forgotten. The Champlain Road was kind of on the boring side, but it made some interesting points, and referenced a time in history that we definitely don't talk about much. The book takes place for the most part in between the years of 1648 and 1650, when the Iroquois extermination of the Hurons was at its peak to final conclusion. I know nothing about any of the Native Americans and their relations at this time and any time we spent on this in history class growing up was focused on the U.S. relations with the Native Americans, not the Canadian. The title of the book, The Champlain Road comes from the name of a "road" about 700 miles long of waterways and portages that Samuel de Champlain used to go from New France to Huronia in 1615. It was the northernmost passage of three routes and by the time the book opens, it has been all but closed off by the Iroquois. The back story on the fight between the Iroquois and the Hurons is that the Hurons used to be part of the Iroquois nation(what is now New York State is for the most part where the Iroquois lived, the Hurons lived up by Georgian bay in what is now Simcoe County, Ontario.), but they chose to ally with the French who came as missionaries to their land and trade with them. The French began to convert them to Catholicism and the Hurons also became wealthier because of the lucrativeness of the fur trade that the French were engaging with them. The Iroquois were pissed off and thus started war on the Iroquois. The book takes place long after this war has begun and focuses on the Frenchmen, for the most part priests, but also one or two soldiers or traders, who are trying to preserve the Huron people and their way of life, in the face of almost certain extermination. What amazed me were these missionary priests who came from France to the New World completely sold on the fact that they would become martyrs for the cause, several of course did. It is their passion for God and their passion towards the safety and health of the Natives that is heartbreaking in this book, as they systematically are slaughtered or burned at the stake or tortured and then meeting these fates, all the while praying to God for the salvation of the Huron people. Then there are the civilians, Godfrey Bethune, a soldier in New France who is stationed with troops in Huronia(Ouendake)to defend Fort Ste. Marie against Iroquois invasion. He is looking for a seigneury, but he befriends the priests and the Hurons and lives amongst them. Diana Woodville is the clear heroine, named Hinonaia, by the Hurons, or Little Thunder, she was captured by the Iroquois as a young child and they, believing she was the descendant of one of their gods, would never trade her back to white people, no matter what the price offered. It is her defect to the Huron people, to live with Godfrey at Fort Ste. Marie, that eventually gives them some victory. She escapes to no longer be part of that Iroquois world, to no longer be the goddess behind battle, but creates much dissension in the Huron camp because of Arakoua, a Native princess who sees Diana as stealing her man Godfrey's heart after Diana rescued him from the Iroquois camp and ran away with him. Diana has to go to war against the Iroquois herself to prove where her loyalties lie, and as well, she provides the true insight into the minds of the Iroquois warriors that hitherto the Hurons and French have not had. It finally, though it is the evening of war, rapidly approaching the end, gives them a leg up in battle. Diana and Godfrey fall in love because of or in spite of all of this too, which is sweet as it is condoned by the priests who witness their passion for the people that they all share. A couple of really great quotes from the end stood out: "Diana looked at the grey faces. 'Ahouendoe is behind us, Father. It is a day that is gone.' 'The past is that which is part of us. It is something peculiarly our own. It makes us what we are,' Father Ragueneau admonished her. 'And what we shall be in the days to come,' Father Le Mercier added. 'If there were no living past, my daughter, there could be no true religion.'" (309) The other quote from the book that I thought was interesting, may be an explanation for why there is a cross sitting on top of Mount Royal in the city of Montreal...:) "The voyageurs skirted the Island of Montreal to sight a low group of buildings on the flatlands by the river, with Mount Royal rising majestically in the background, its tree-clad heights surmounted by a great white cross. Godfrey pointed it out to Diana. 'That was carried up by Maisonneuve[governor of New France] less than a year ago. The river overflowed and threatened to sweep away the fort. He vowed that if the waters receded without doing further damage he would carry that cross himself up the mountain and plant it there. The river fell back and he carried out his vow.'" (316) There is still a cross(an electric one) on top of Mount Royal in Montreal to this day. This book was interesting in that it filled in some gaps in history that I knew nothing about, and the author in this "Huronian edition" which was published in 1949 talks about what has been excavated in terms of old Forts from this era, especially since the book was published and created interest in this area of Western Ontario. This is an era of history that should not have been forgotten(as no history should be forgotten)and it is a pity nothing can be found about this book. It wasn't always super interesting, but it values a part of history that made a huge difference in the making of the Canadian nation. GGs-37, PPs-42.