November 25th, 2010

Reviews again

Before Once came out, I was pretty scared of reviews. To get over the fear, I gave myself several excellent peptalks about how it any serious attention to my work would be an honour, and I didn’t need everyone–or anyone–to like it, that I could learn from criticism and improve, etc., etc. I still pretty skittery, especially since reviews could jump at me from nowhere, in a journal or on a website I was reading, with no prior warning. It’s bad enough when someone blindsides me with a criticism of dayjob work, or my appearance, or the way I’ve arrayed my groceries on the conveyor belt (happens all the time; apparently, I can’t get that one right)–I try to be mature, especially if I sense they’ve got it correct. But the writing’s so important to me, I feel like I want to be alone in a quiet safe place when a stranger says something not 100% enthusiastic. Hence the utility of the self-Google–you decide when you’re ready, you lock the door, and then if you read something truly harsh (like the word “boring” several times), you can pace around your locked apartment in small circles until the urge to Facebook the reviewer with a lengthy rebuttal goes away. You take a lot of deep breaths, and decide you can’t please everyone. You eventually permit yourself to go outside.

I’m, er, a little sensitive, which is a pointless way to be when you are trying to publish work so that other people can read it–other people’s reactions to my work, and the fact that they differ from mine, is the whole point of publishing. Which is why I tried so hard to toughen up, and now can’t even remember the name of that reviewer who used the word “boring” so many times. Really!

But I’ve let my toughness muscles go a bit slack over the past year or so, after the reviews pretty much died down. So I was really startled when this week I ran into two reviews of my book, utterly unexpected. I was quite alarmed before reading–I hadn’t given myself a peptalk in ages!

Thank goodness the reviews were positive, insightful, and generous–no need for bracing! If you’d like to hear more about it, you can try the Canadian Literature website or the print edition of the current issue of The Fiddlehead.

And if you have advice on how to cope with reviews you disagree with, other than weeping or sending embarrassing rebuttals, let me know.

And a few notes:

1) I believe there are occasions when it is useful and wise for an author to respond to a review, and not at all cringe-worthy. I just can’t think of any right now.
2) Reading reviews by strangers is altogether different from receiving workshop or editorial feedback, or comments from readers–not sure why. Maybe it’s because I have the opportunity to engage and ask questions, or maybe it’s because, in the first two cases anyway, the criticism is offered for my own good, to try to help me improve the work…
3) I was totally going to do something clever with the title of this post–something rhyming or alliterative, or maybe both–but I couldn’t think of anything that made sense….

November 22nd, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews *He’s Just Not That into You* (book and film)

The premise behind the self-help book and romantic comedy film, He’s Just Not That Into You is that women are socialized to look frenetically for any shred of male affection, and to believe in it where none exists, and this is a formula for vulnerability, sadness, and occasional humiliation. It’s funnier than it sounds.

The first time I saw the movie, I thought it an above-average romantic comedy. It’s in the same vein (but not as charming/more realistic) as Love Actually, with a half-dozen loosely connected couples struggling to find happiness. Chronic romantic loser Gigi (Ginnifer Goodwin) is willing to do anything for love, but her desperate attempts at flirting always go awry. The only thing man-related thing she’s really good at is analyzing them with her office mates, Janine and Beth, both of whom have their own problems. Janine’s problems are with her home renovations and her husband, Ben; Beth’s are with her engaged sister and her unwilling-to-marry boyfriend. Then Ben strikes up a fliration with a girl named Anna, who was already involved in a weird sexless romance with real-estate agent Conor. Anna’s friend Mary works at a gay newspaper and the film’s only major point about her is that the homosexual guys in Anna’s office offer the same kind of very p0sitive but useless romantic advice that Gigi, Janine, and Beth offer each other.

It’s all very confusing, but you don’t have to know who is related to whom to understand that all the women are lying to themselves and each other when they pursue men: “He’s totally into you” “I know he’s going to call” “You just have to give him a little encouragement” “You just have to be patient” “You should give him a little space” etc., etc. Women–so sweet, so giving, so kind–so eager to believe in love that they’ll believe almost anything. My gender does not come off very well in this film, but most of the performances are surprisingly nuanced.

Gigi suffers a series of standups and humiliations, and during one she meets Alex, a male bartender with no interest in sugarcoating the truth–he tells her that if a guy likes her, he’ll show it; everything else is just delusion. This starts Gigi on the road to some dignity, but it’s a tough road, because she eventually develops the theory that it’s *Alex* that’s into her. It’s complicated, but she’s sweet, he’s sweet, they hook it up by the final frames. Hope I’m not spoiling too much for you–it is a romantic comedy after all.

The central Gigi-Alex relationships hews to that rom-com formula, but the others are more various, and a bit truer to the core of the very depressing book–which is that women put up with too much and ask for too little in the quest for love. I read the book after enjoying the film, hoping it’d be funny in the same vein, and it is…but it made me really sad too. The titular comment is followed by “if” statements–if he doesn’t call, doesn’t compromise, doesn’t care… The first few chapters were empathizable and at the same time wince-worthy: who hasn’t assumed she wrote her email address down wrong, or checked the phone for a dial tone? (for a great, cringey depiction of such behaviour, try Amy Jones’s new story, Atikokan Is for Lovers. But the book points out all kinds of other stuff women excuse in men: from calling her fat to flirting with others, it gets pretty painful in the text version JKMTiY, and I was sort of a wreck when I finished it. My poor sisters!

Ironically, I felt the movie did a better job than the book of showing why ladies feel the need to put up with anything to land a man. The social pressures that women feel to be in a relationship before they can have the home they want, or be accepted by their families, or just to get that big lavish wedding are experienced by various main and secondary characters, in ways that you sympathize with–or at least, I did. I am neither smart nor patient enough to get into all the various story tendrils, but to just cover one more, I thought Jennifer Connelly’s portrayl of Janine–the only married woman in the bunch–was the most touching in the film. Janine is basically a tight-assed home-renovation nut, who eggs poor Gigi to get herself married off though Janine is not particularly enjoying marriage herself–and her husband certainly isn’t. When Ben admits to Janine–in a big box home supply store–“I slept with someone,” Janine clenches with rage. However, she only gets to wield her anger for about 30 seconds, because when Ben announces that he’ll move out, the woman is back in the position of supplicant, pleading, “Don’t you want to…work it out?” Because he cares less than she does, Ben’s admission of guilt poses less threat to him than to her.

The best moment in the movie–or any rom-com I’ve seen in a while, come to that–is when Janine discovers another layer to Ben’s deception and finally loses it. She’s at home alone, and smashes a mirror in her perfect bedroom. Then she seems to go limp for a moment, walks out of the room, then returns with a broom and dustpan, to clean up the mess while she continues to weep.

The movie is of course limited by it’s genre–even if the rhetoric around finding love is broken, romantic love is still the one and only answer. No one seems to be at all interested in their jobs, let alone to have any interests outside of work, and though friends and family are supportive, what they are supportive of is the quest for love. When Gigi decides not to concentrate on hooking up on Saturday night, she spends it alone watching brat-pack movies. In rom-com world, no one but single men want anything to do with a single woman on Saturday night–and there aren’t even any decent movies at the rental place.

I would definitely say watch the movie if you like this genre–it’s lots of fun (and Ben Affleck has a boat!) I’m not sure I recommend the book unless you are a woman prone to getting jerked around by men and don’t know why. Even then, I’m not sure it would help–I’m not sure many women are as deluded as the ones depicted therein. But I worry I’m wrong, and I was basically reduced to a puddle of woe by the book, albeit with a sad little feminist fist in the air. But then I got to call my beloved to relate said woe, so I’m not in ideal position to judge.

October 30th, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews *It’s Kind of a Funny Story* and *Frownland*

I saw It’s Kind of a Funny Story because it looked like the kind of zany, not-very-bright Hollywood comedy that I usually like in spite of myself, and it is–but this one uses as it’s backdrop not high-school back-stabbing or the single-girl blues, but a psychiatric ward at a big-city hospital. Despite some fun gags and the presence of the genuinely talented Zach Galifianakis, I just couldn’t stop thinking that this movie is so blithely politically incorrect, so completely irresponsible in it’s treatment of real problems, that I could not feel good about laughing (and I did totally laugh).

But maybe I’m a bit too PC (it’s been suggested) because this movie’s been getting fairly good reviews, many of which seem unconcerned with this depiction of a smart, priviledged white teenager feeling stressed about school and girls, checking himself to Brooklyn hospital because no one seems properly impressed with his problems. I exaggerate–Craig the protagonist is genuinely worried about his suicidal dreams, but I don’t know why the admitting physician in a Brooklyn emergency room would credit this. And I’m sorry, I know I’m lame about these logistical details, but hospital admission for an entire week in the US costs a fortune–where was this boy’s health insurance paperwork?? Did he just happen to have it on him?

The details that bug me about his life inside the hospital are more serious–there is a clearly two-tiered system of mental illness in the screenwriters’ minds. There are attractive, fun, nice people like Craig and the girl he falls in love with, Noelle, who maybe have a few problems and feel blue once in a while. Noelle self-harms, to the point of having long claw-marks down her her face, but we never learn anything about her background or problems and her performance is typical pretty-girl high school, and could be taking place at a beach instead of psychiatric hospital. By the end of the film she’s “better” and being released, apparently on charm alone.

On the other hand, the rest of the patients in the ward are the lower tier–not attractive and almost impossible to interact with, tagged by amusing tales of drug overdose and paranoid delusions, unlikely to get any better. So what is the point of them? Well, the attractive people can *learn* from them, you see–and realize they are lucky. So useful, those unattractive crazy people!

Zach Galifianakis does the only interesting acting in the film, poised as his character is between the two categories–he’s funny and likeable and loves to interact with Craig (bonus points for loving the protagonist) but he has real problems and has made genuine (we hear) attempts at suicide. We don’t really learn too much about his actual life, but Galifianakis is enough of an actor to let a history of hardship show in his face and voice. He is the only character in the entire hospital ward who appears to actually be suffering.

I probably wouldn’t have judged this film quite so harshly if I hadn’t seen it in such close proximity to a vastly different work that deals with the same themes, Ronald Bronstein’s Frownland. I tried to watch this meandering nightmare of a film the night before the other one. Having read various reviews that compared the movie to an unceasing panic attack, I had fortified myself with a supportive viewing companion and delicious snacks to get through it.

This was exactly the wrong way to go about it–in a warm happy environment, protagonist Keith’s struggle to exist is so insane and depressing and alien that the film was utterly unwatchable. In the first 20 minutes, he is disturbed from watching a monster movie by the sound of the door buzzer. When he answers, the only sound on the speaker is hysterical sobbing. He says “I’ll be right down.” Downstairs, he sits in a car, watching this woman sob more. Then they drive around for a while, her at the wheel, tears mainly under control. Meanwhile, Keith is twitching and squirming violently, trying to work up to saying something. It emerges he has a bad stammer–it takes him perhaps 120 seconds to make it clear that when he was a child, he never cried much. When he finally gets it out, she parks the car and goes into a store.

Waiting for her, Keith holds his eyes open and emits a groaning noise–eventually, it’s clear he’s trying to imitate tears. When the woman returns to the car, he shows her his wet, red eyes and she, incredulous, begins to sob all over again. There have only been two lines of dialogue so far.

We turned it off after not too much longer, but the night after *It’s Kind of a Funny Story,* I was ready to try again. This time, I did it right–alone, in the dark, in the fetal position on my couch, with nothing to distract or comfort me. The DVD has no chapters, so I had to essentially start back at the beginning (my fast forward doesn’t seem to work too well) and live through the whole 106 minutes of Keith’s tragic madness–mad tragedy?

At least there is more narrative and dialogue after that first sequence–we learn that Keith sells coupon booklets door-to-door in ritzy suburbs where homeowners’ associations are always trying to chase him and his colleagues away. For a while it seems that Keith simply lives alone in a kitchen (the oven door opens to make a bedside table) but it emerges that there is another actual room in the apartment, inhabited by his viciously mean roommate, who humiliates him at every opportunity.

But the roommate’s anti-Keith diatribes are a little funny, or at least resonant, because Keith is utterly repellant. The struggle for speech is so intense that he is constantly grimacing and grunting and repeating himself. But he demands attention–he feels entitled to it, and he won’t shut up even when he can’t really speak. His boss–who drives the coupon team around in an industrial van–is about as mean as the roommate, but Keith persists in trying to apologize to him for some unknown offense, despite the boss’s complete lack of interest and then aggressive contempt. Over and over, Keith says, “I’m sorry, you’re totally right,” to no particular end. When a woman refuses to buy his coupons, he tells her how his father died. I lost a lot of the content in the garblings of Keith’s speech, but the content was not the point anyway–he just wanted to be heard.

To me, the saddest scenes are with Sandy, Keith’s one “friend.” It’s not really clear how true a term that is for their relationship, but before the movie starts, they had spend an evening at Sandy’s pleasant quiet apartment, talking. Keith leaves a dozen messages thanking him for that, which Sandy does not answer until Keith calls at 3 am, insisting he left his work badge there. Sandy says he would have seen it, but Keith asks him to look in a series of unlikely places, until Sandy finds it under a book–clearly Keith has hidden it there for the excuse to return, like a woman dropping an earring in a man’s apartment.

Keith’s interest in Sandy is not sexual; he just wants to be near another human being who doesn’t hate him (he falls asleep soon after he arrives). But Keith is so far out from social norms, so weird and needy and constantly desperate, that he is extremely hate-able. The only calm, coherent conversation in the entire film is with his psychiatrist, and even that only barely. What’s interesting about that dialogue is that it’s completely irrelevant to Keith’s problems–earning a living, keeping his apartment, protecting himself from violence. To ignore all this and talk about a strange (and funny) incident from his childhood seems a strong joke against modern psychiatry, especially in the warm’n’fuzzy cure-all version of films like *Funny Story.* But then again, take note: Keith is having the time of his life on that couch. He has an unencumbered audience, and that’s all he really wants.

In the end, the job, the apartment, and the relationship with the woman from the beginning of the film–who turns out to be a high school student–all fall apart, and even the borderline functionality Keith had been maintaining crumbles. He turns to Sandy, but so great is Keith’s hysteria and his grief that it feels he has turned *on* Sandy–shrieking into the apartment intercom that if Sandy doesn’t let him in he will kick and scream at his door doesn’t feel much like friendship, but Keith is beyond all reason. As it must, this search for comfort eventually turns stupidly violent.

I never did figure out what was wrong with Keith–another reason the scene on the psychiatrist couch was farcical. Aside from the crippling speech impediment, it seemed almost as though he suffered from a disease of metaphor–he kept trying to explain his problems using a code of images no one could crack. His last interaction with Sandy featured a repeated shouted story–fractured beyond my comprehension–about an old woman with black teeth. Having watched the earlier scenes, I knew this must have something to do with Keith’s violent evil roommate, but Sandy hadn’t been watching the movie and didn’t know even that–it just sounded like mad ranting.

Films like *Funny Story* want to draw a firm thick line in the sand between the real crazies and the film-ticket-buying public. *Frownland*, though it’s protagonist is terrifyingly weird, never draws that line. I loathed Keith, but sometimes, when I could understand him, I knew exactly what he meant. That is *Frownland*’s genius and it’s horror–that it gets the viewer (well, this viewer) to empathize with Keith’s loneliness and his desire to explain himself in complicated metaphors, to somehow get the details of his soul known by another human. The scary thing about Keith is not that he is so alien, but that he is so relateable. It made me feel that that line between sane and insane wasn’t thick or clear at all.

After watching *Funny Story*, I went out for dinner and joked around with my brother; after watching *Frownland*, I lay in bed sweating and stiff as a board and thought about how lucky I am to have people in my life who care about me, as well as (most of the time) a reasonable articulateness. Watching *Frownland* was a ghastly experience that I can’t really recommend to anyone, but it is a work of emotional art and I will never forget it.

October 20th, 2010

Rose-coloured Reviews *The Social Network*

I came home from The Social Network in the mood to write about it, having absolutely no idea that it’s being called one of the best movies of the year and that *everyone’s* talking about it (see above link). Hello, I’m Rebecca, would you like to step under my rock?

In case you have your own rock, this is a fictionalized (some would say heavily) bio-pic about Mark Zuckerberg, the founder (some would say one of several) of Facebook. It starts with his life in college–being simultaneously condescending and insecure to his girlfriend, and conceiving of complicated cruel websites with his dorm-mates when she dumps him. From this, his social site-building turns more ambitious, more universal and less misognistic, and we’re off to the races.

The first thing you need to know about this movie is that the screenplay is by Aaron Sorkin who has written films, plays, but most memorably tv shows. It’s been a while since I watched much tv, but back when I left, Sorkin was the acknowledged televisual genius of homosocial bonding–in shows like Sports Night and The West Wing a group of smart, sweet, friendly guys tried to help each other navigate the world, their chosen professions, and those kooky kooky ladies–and it was brilliant. Other things, Sorkin can do well, but for cerebral male banter, he’s #1 (in my opinion).

So it’s funny, and fascinating, to see in this film the same intellectual snap and punch as Sorkin always employs, but with guys who aren’t sweet, who don’t like each other and who aren’t trying to help. Most of the characters in *The Social Network* are jerks by any normal standard, but Sorkin never succumbs to that Hollywood impulse to make the bad guys stupid.

And really, that’s my Hollywood impulse talking when I use the term “bad guys” because there aren’t any, exactly, in this film (except maybe Lawrence Summers, at that time the president of Harvard, and a big meanie in the film). Sorkin creates multi-dimensional complicated conflicted characters, who enact their internal conflicts by being more than a little externally mean. But even the worst behaviour shown here–and there’s some pretty bad stuff–is obviously justified in the characters own minds, and it’s Sorkin’s achievement that you can see those minds working.

The screenwriter has been getting some flak for the misogyny of the charcters, and some of it really is quite fierce. In contrast to all the previous times this accusation has been made of Sorkin, this time he has a defense–the characters he wrote about were jerks to women and did not think of them as equals. And maybe because that’s a feeling that Sorkin has wrestled with so often in the past, he is able to make the bad-boy behaviour seem pretty human, awful as it is.

But let’s be straight about it–there’s lots of awful in this film. It’s basically a couple hours on how people screwed each other in various ways. The music–here’s a helpful clue I spotted in the opening credits to help me brace myself–is by Trent Reznor–creepy, clangy, and dark. The director is David Fincher who did, along with a host of serial killer movies and music videos, Fight Club. Again with the homo-social bonding, again with the amoral, weirdly intelligent male leader.

But it’s a dark movie with some bright streaks–like I say, the dialogue is sharp and witty, even more so about halfway through, when Justin Timberlake shows up. You can just shut up about my early aughts affection for *NSYNC, I think JT is genuinely talented. And even if I’m wrong about that, he’s definitely charming as Sean Parker, some guy I’ve never heard of who apparently founded Napster (I’ve heard of that) and is a unequivocal jerk. Not a brainless one, though, and he does some interesting things in the movie, but on the whole I found him less so than most of the jerks in this film, because of the rest of them do equivocate, and that’s more interesting.

There’s exactly one main character that you can empathize with and root for, and that’s Eduardo Saverin, Zuckerburg’s one-time friend and business partner. As played by Andrew Garfield, Eduardo is a sweetie-pie but an eager dupe, and for most of the second half of the film appears to be on the verge of tears. Not easy to watch.

Which is how I felt about the whole thing in the end–there’s only so much power-mad conniving youth you can watch before you start to, as I told my viewing companions afterwards, wish you were dead. Despite my boundless admiration for this film, I did not actually enjoy watching it.

October 5th, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews *Light Lifting*

There is pleasure in liking something other people like too–who doesn’t want to stand for an ovation for something great and think, “All these people are feeling what I’m feeling.” Which is why I was so happy reading Alexander MacLeod’s *Light Lifting* in the midst of the of all the wonderful press the book has been getting. It was a pleasure to nod and agree to all the praise–it’s not hype if it’s true. And I’m not really sure I can add much to the general consensus that this book is excellent, but it’s that shared ovational feeling that makes me want to try.

It’s no secret that I thought I was going to like this ahead of time. The first story–and some say the strongest–in the collection is “The Miracle Mile,” which Lee Henderson, Camilla Gibb, and I chose to include in The Journey Prize Stories 21. I love that story, as I do all those in JP21, but since I’ve read those pieces (and another dozen that almost made it) more times and with more intensity than I’ve read perhaps anything ever, I’m afraid I don’t have much more to say. “Miracle Mile” is a brilliant story about passion finely channeled into long distance running, and as many times as I’ve been over it, I read it again in the collection (because when I read a book I read every word, including the copyright page; is that weird?) and it’s still brilliant.

It was exciting to keep going this time, though, and find that the next story is completely different. “Wonder About Parents” is written in choppy elliptical fragments, way out of chronology, and a reader just has to work it out for herself. And it makes total sense–the narrator is an exhausted young father coping with three kids and a houseful of lice, looking back on a time when things were far worse. The prose reads like the thoughts of someone so tired, looking back on something terrible that has been somewhat softened by time and distance. The unusual prose style also keeps what is essentially a story about parents’ fierce and baffled love for their kids from becoming even a tiny bit sappy. This is my favourite part:

“Delousing. Then rinse. Naked kids, braced between our legs, standing under the shower. Facecloths over their eyes and mouths. Don’t swallow any of this water. Spit it out. Spit right now. A scar on our daughter’s stomach from before.”

Choppy, gross, a snag of memory on something the reader doesn’t understand, no setting off of dialogue–but, it’s so sweet and funny, too! It’s that “Spit right now!” that kills me.

It’s silly to pick a favourite story in a collection this uniformly strong, but because I always do it, let’s say it’s the title piece. A grim, detailed, slow-moving story about brick-workers in the summer, “Light Lifting” ends with a horrific depiction of brutality that I was convinced I had never seen coming. However, flipping back to the beginning (I do that sometimes when I’m freaked out by an ending), I found that it was all there from the start. How could a story that starts like this end any other way but brutal?

“Nobody deserved a sunburn like that. Especially not a kid. You could see it right through his shirt. Like grease coming through waxed paper. Wet and thick like that, sticking to him. Purple. It was a worn out, see-through shirt and the blisters he had from the day before had opened up again.”

Shudder–no wonder I tried to forget about that as quickly as possible, but how great is that prose? So exact, so precisely something you can see. (Thought: didn’t Pasha Malla have a great gross moment with sunburn in *The Withdrawal Method* too? What is it with short story writers and this topic?)

Even if this collection weren’t near as good as it is, I would probably still like it for the care it gives the subject matter nearest my own prose-writing heart (currently): work, how it’s done and how people feel while doing it. You can tell so much about a human from how she or he relates to the work at hand. This bit about working on a van assembly line is from “The Number Three”, which some have said is the weakest in the book. Maybe it is, but it’s still pretty stellar:

“People outside think people inside must hate the machines, but it’s not like that. The Local has to fight for every job, but precision is precision and a person working on something likes to see it done right. When he watched those hydraulic shoulders rotating, lifting 1,300 pounds and holding it perfectly still, always within the same range of a hundreth of a millimetre, he felt something, but it wasn’t hatred; it was more like confusion or a stab of deep-down uncertainty.”

This collection blew me away, start to finish.

September 23rd, 2010

Rose-coloured and Mark reviews Lucky Stars Candy

We taped this review ages ago–the candy has long since been eaten–but I forgot to transcribe it until today, when Mark and were discussing the *next* item we might review. So better late than never!

RR: Lucky Stars candy come in a little tin Chinese takeout container. It’s red…

MS: There are pictures of roses on it and a Hello-Kitty-esque cat.

RR: I’m pretty sure that’s Hello Kitty.

MS: Is that Hello Kitty? Ok.

RR: I think…yes, that’s the [same] brand–it’s made by Saurio and the “o” is shaped like a heart. In the tin are red and white stars. (surprisingly loud sound of crunching) They’re crunchy. Maybe you’re supposed to suck on them.

MS: I think you are. I think they’re a bit too hard to bite through right away.

RR: Well, I can do it, but I’m not sure I’m supposed to do it.

MS: It’s quite a bit of flavour there if you…sit there and suck.

RR: So they’re red and they’re white…is there a difference?

MS: Mmm, I don’t know. (crunching)

RR: These were a gift to me from a friend who went to Vancouver island where apparently you can get a lot more Asian stuff than you can in Toronto. I mean, the writing on this is in English but

MS: there are some Chinese characters on the side.

RR: I wonder where it was manufactured. Hold the recorder?

MS: Certainly.

RR: Made in China, but distributed by Boston America Corp.

MS: Well, that is something. Yeah, I think the white ones do taste different.

RR: They kind of remind me of a SweeTart. Yknow, compressed dextrose?

MS: Yeah.

RR: It’s *cool*. Like, instead of sugar, which is gritty, when you finally bite into these it’s a very soft cool powder.

MS: Yup, you’re right.

RR: I’ve had this forever, I had like 2 when I opened it, but they haven’t gone stale.

MS: I wonder who the target audience is for these. They seem a bit small to give to a young child.

RR: I think that probably the target audience is people who love adorable boxes and are willing to buy them and eat whatever’s inside, in order to later put paperclips or jewellery in this box.

MS: Yeah.

RR: I mean, the candy’s nice enough, but most candy makes me want to eat all of it immediately, and this does not make me want to do that.

MS: No, this is a candy that you just sort of take little nips at and savour.

RR: It’s really just sweet, and a little tiny bit of flavour. And it’s more adorable than anything. It’s designer candy. I shudder to think what this cost.

MS: I think it should also be noted that the candies themselves actually have a little bit of design to them. The stars have little raised edges on their arms.

RR: They’re really pretty. Good to decorate a cake or something. I’m not not enjoying them, but I’m kinda done now. I’ll have more later, or next week.

MS: Yeah, I think we’re done.

September 4th, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews *Ysabel* by Guy Gavriel Kay

My review of Guy Gavriel Kay’s Ysabel must be somewhat lacking in context, as I know it is one of hundreds of books in a genre of which I’ve read, in last 15 years, pretty much zilch. It’s the tale of a teenager, disregarded and pushed around by the adult world, who discovers amazing powers within himself and is able to step in and stop a wrong that e no one else could even fathom. You see–popular story-style.

When one is starting to read in new territory, it is wise to start with the best–so that even if the material is not particularly attractive, the talent of the writer and the intricacy of the structure can help suck you in. Which is why Scott wanted me to read something by Kay, one of Canada’s greatest and most vivid storytellers, as well as a global bestseller and pretty much the only writer I have ever encountered whose readings draw such crowds that people arrive a couple hours early to ensure they get seats.

There’s a reason–Kay is damn good. My somewhat snippy summary above does not at all encompass the 12-character, fast-moving, action/adventure/historical novel that is *Ysabel*. The book takes place in the south of France, where 15-year-old Ned has been dragged so that his famous photographer father can shoot images for a new coffeetable book on the area. His had is accompanied by three assistants, so Ned has no real role to play other than sulk and do homework.

On the first day of shooting, Ned wanders into an old cathedral where, in short order, he meets a pretty exchange student from New York and a 2600-hundred-year-old gentleman who climbs out of the floor, threatens them with a knife, and later springs from the roof.

Unlike some fantasy books I could mention (and most of the vampire-related ones), *Ysabel* does not simply use history to organize or weight the plot, or to sound cool and deep. The plot is intrinsically rooted in Greek/Celt relations (such as they were) from millenia ago. It seemed that Kay had done an incredible amount of research, but to be honest, if he muffed stuff, I could never have caught him, and I doubt most readers could have. That’s the advantage of choosing an esoteric point in history of course.

But a sensational one–if Kay is to be trusted, even the unimproved history contains bloody sieges, obscure marriage rites, seafaring adventure and midnight rituals. Not to mention skull worship. The events that Kay makes use of are so serious and strange that sometimes the improvements he does make on them–the story that Ned walks into involves a eons-old love triangle, and an elaborate game of hide-and-seek–can seem trivial. But most of the time, the book makes a powerful case for history being still with us, always, and the worst crimes never being truly forgotten.

So the man in the cathedral must fight another for the hand of the beautiful Ysabel, and Ned and his new pretty friend Kate get wrapped up in it–first a little, then a lot. And the interesting thing is, then Ned’s dad does too. And his dad’s assistants. Ned’s mom, his aunt and uncle round out the cast.

Since the Brothers Grimm, books have featured plucky young heroes whose parents were either dead or dastardly, and who thus had to fight their battles all all all alone. I have long maintained that there is nothing Freudian in this; it is simply easier to right an adventure story about one or two rather than about a family (try it!) It is really nice to see Ned scrambling along alone and then–in honest 15-year-old fashion–having to turn to his folks for certain kinds of support. *Ysabel* is at times very sweet, but almost never sappy.

All the characters were well-drawn, if not particularly nuanced. Most were strong, conflicted, kind, smart, and frightened, although perhaps each in a slightly different order. There was a long backstory related to Ned’s mom and his aunt which is rather overdramatic and does not have a satisfying resolution, but the more quotidian interactions of the family are natural and smooth–everyone’s pretty panicked by the violence and craziness (supernatural wolves keep attacking) but someone’s always hollering after Ned to bring his cellphone and wear a hoodie. The acknowledgements mention that Kay is a dad of young men perhaps slightly older than Ned, which would explain why his insights, while not exactly profound, are so accurate.

Sometimes I get so caught up in my short-story universe that I forget how other forms work. A 400-page fantasy novel is about as far from short-story as you can get; characters read aloud from historical wall plaques in this book, not just once but several times. They also read from guidebooks, websites, and the occasional poem. And it’s weird to get massive chunks of exposition like this, yes, but honestly, it seemed to work well enough. I guess it is a question of pacing–if you are going into 1000s of years of character backstory, countless wars and sieges,  3/4 of a page on a google search seems about right.

It also helps that Kay’s prose is crystal clear. It’s brilliant in the sense of being invisible–the words just exist to bring you the images. *Ysabel* was the most movie-like book I’ve read in a while. Even sitting beside the massive hardcover, I still feel like I watched it more than read it. And the best way to see the clean *serviceableness* (that’s a compliment, actually) of the prose is to open a page at random. Read/see:

“Ned got back in and slid the door shut. Greg looked back at him for a second, then put the car in gear and started forward again.

“They passed through that closed-in arid canyon in silence, came out of shadow into springtime fields and vineyards and sunlight again. Moments later they saw the Roman arch and a tower on the left side of the road…”

The ending is very very exciting–involving the characters racing up a mountain at dusk towards the site of an ancient murder of 200 000 souls, a crime still present for Ned because of his nascent gift for a kind of second sight. Reeling from the proxy pain, Ned struggles to save a life and (what, I’m not wrecking anything, it’s that kind of book) succeeds. The bittersweet way his victory plays out is touching and my eyes actually watered a bit (it’s been a tough week, though; Kay can’t take entire credit for that).

There is some weirdness going on with the male-female relations in this book, I can’t not mention that. The Ned-Kate relationship is actually pretty natural, quirky and chaste, but quite believeable. There are a couple of really inappropriate sexual jokes from one of the adult characters though. These came early in the book and then went away, so I took it as Kay’s soon-abandoned attempt to be edgy, but the theme comes back right at the end. Way to take the edge off a nice moment, Mr. Author.

More innocuously, there is a way-too-long scene of men-are-idiots-women-are-smart banter that made me insane. I hate those sorts of “women rule the world by telling men where their socks are” jokes: you got so much respect for women, find your own damn socks. And while you’re at it, evaluate on a woman-by-woman basis, instead of a blanket statement. But this is my own personal bugaboo more than anything; the scene is not all that long.

I have not at all really delved into the intricacies of the plot because, well, it’s really intricate. And Kay explains it really well, but I don’t think I could. This book is a fast fast read–you don’t feel at all hard-done-by (there are too many hyphens in this post) reading 400 pages, though it’s a bit much to lug around the hardcover.

Oh, and another cool thing? The main characters are all from Montreal, so while in France, everyone’s speaking French. Neat-o.

Ok, that’s it.

August 7th, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews *The Book of Awesome*

I got The Book of Awesome as a gift, but I was already aware of it because Fred pointed it out as very similar to our penta-annual (that’s the word, right?) listing of 1000 Things We Like. I was happy to read the book to help fill the time until Fall 2012, when we do the third thousand!

Neil Pasricha’s book is based on his blog, which is very close to our concept except a) it’s all one guy, not a collective liking team (as far as I can tell), and b) he writes little blurbs about how the good thing works or, often, the bad thing that is avoided/thwarted by the good thing.

This is a happy-making project and it works: I smiled a lot remembering simple pleasures like the unsafe playground equipment of my youth, the chip crumbs in the bottom of the bag, and the cool side of the pillow. I was also fascinated by pleasures I’ve yet to experience: guess who’s going to be staying up for a while trying to catch someone laughing in their sleep?) Pasricha has a frat-boy prose style you don’t read very often (at least, I don’t), and it’s charming although repetitive and I don’t *really* think he had to manipulate each entry to end with the word AWESOME (yes, in caps!)

In truth, I probably went at this book wrong–I think it’s some sort of coffee-table or occasional book, something you are supposed to dip into, scan, flip around in. I did try to do this, sorta: I kept it by my bedside and tried to read one awesome thing before I went to sleep each night. This was actually an excellent idea, a really good way to go to sleep cheerful, though perhaps a little terrified of all the things that can be done with fast-food. But I am not a dip-in reader, and I would sometimes crack out and read 15 or 20 awesome things in a row, and get to a giggly hyper place not at all condusive to sleep. Finally I just gave up and started reading it on the bus, my ideal reading environment. Which led to it being my second-ever bus book conversation (the other was Special Topics in Calamity Physics).

So I wound up reading it pretty much straight through, and getting a little obsessive about stylistic quirks that probably should have been ignored. Like, Pasricha clearly has a persona of a goofy suburban everydude who likes to eat and commutes to an office job in a car. This comes out in his voice, and the things he chooses to write about: cars and food and childhood and…there’s a lot about food (which made me happy; I like food too and am actually eating curry while I type this). But someone (an editor?) seems to have made a rule that the book be for everyone, and that Pasricha not use too many examples from his personal life.

So all the entries are written in the second person (“You’re lovin it lots!”) and the gender of pronouns often flips back and forth within a paragraph, which made the author seem not inclusive but MPD. And even though he was clearly mocking those who relish finding the last of a particular item in their size at a clothing store and much more sincere in his love of the Man Couch (apparently, a couch in mall stores where women can leave their pouty partners while they shop), he keeps on trying to be all things to all people. There’s even an entry on getting into clean sheets with freshly shaved legs–yes, that is actually an amazing sensation, but how would *he* know?

The best of these entries are actually the most personal. There’s a really really really sweet one about halftime orange slices when you are a kid playing soccer, which isn’t about orange slices at all but about his awesome mom. I’m pretty sure it would be worth the purchase price to just photocopy this entry and give it to your mom for Mother’s Day. And an entry towards the end about a friend who had passed away sort of anchored the book and made clearer its purpose.

Of course, it goes without saying there are no intellectual pleasures on this list, not even ones like, “When a frustrated crossword doer mutters a clue out loud and you happen to know the answer.” This is about more basic, visceral stuff than that–when you get the nacho with the most toppings, when the batteries in the remote control work a little longer than they should, when someone gives you a really solid hug. Those things deserve to be celebrated, and the inclusiveness of this list does show how similar we all are in the end. And that made me feel pretty AWESOME!

June 18th, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews *And Another Thing* by Eoin Colfer

Finally, after nearly a year of rereading the other 5 books in the series, plus Douglas Adams’s post-humously published collection, *The Salmon of Doubt*, I finally sat down to read the sixth book in my beloved Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, And Another Thing written by Eoin Colfer after Adams’s death at the request of Adams’s widow.

Let’s be honest and say that I could not be completely objective with this book. I loved the original 5 despite their myriad flaws because of their author’s deft touch and weird mind. Writing is personal, and it disturbed me profoundly that someone was going to try to write in someone else’s style–seems like wearing someone else’s underpants to me.

Colfer does come, at times, tantalizingly close–some of the gags and non-sequiteurs and, truly, a lightness with language are refreshing to see: “I’ve seen a few things in my day and in my night too” “Ford’s fingers tapped the air impatiently, eager to wrap themselves around a tankard handle.” Someone killed by a laser is “frittered by the beams” and a cheese-worshipping cult fears “Edamnation.” Haha, to all of it.

Though I enjoy that stuff, and read hopefully and attentively throughout, I knew what the problem was going to be as soon as I saw the book, and I am surprised someone else (aka the editor) didn’t have the same immediate reaction: it’s enormous. 340 page, in a 6×10 format. I have the first four books in an omnibus format close to 6×10, and none of them weighs in at much more than 150 pages (albeit a bit smaller font). In that, I think Adams knew what he was doing–these are books of Pythonesque jokes and silliness, nothing you want to see endless extended. While the HHG characters are much stronger than most mainstream genre parody comic novels, they are still not *all* that well-fleshed and one tends to get sick of them and their prat-falling ways after oh, about 150 pages. I was surprised to read in *The Salmon of Doubt* that Adams agonized endlessly about these creations, because they feel so fresh and also so slight–something he and friend might have come up with on a long car-trip and written down on the pitstop at Denny’s.

So while I can’t disagree with critics who say that Colfer nails Adams larkiness very well, I am pretty adamant that what his misses is Adams’s judiciousness with the use of lark. There are a number of “guide notes” in all the books in the series–short passages explaining the esoteric alien concepts that Adams (and Colfer) created to flesh out the galaxy. These notes are supposed to be quoted from the actual Hitchhiker’s Guide, so they have that famous wit and irreverency. However, Adams’ notes are pretty rare, a light and goofy sprinkling, whereas Colfer’s come up every couple pages or, on a few occasions, twice on the same page. One of them, quite late and at the height of the action, actually announced that it was short so as not to interrupt flow, and I almost stamped my little foot–this book is precious short on flow.

Another flow issue is that every character has a plotline or at least a point of view, and there are a lot of characters. For our usual contingent, Trillian wants to recapture her daughter’s love but finds herself meeting the man of her dreams, Arthur is reunited with his true love but in digitized form, Zaphod gets involved with the gods of Aesir, Random loses a husband and plots to gain control of the galaxy and destroy her mother’s happiness (Random’s events are the most, er, random of anyone’s), and Ford…well, Ford doesn’t actually have much going on in this book, but we see a bunch of scenes from his POV anyway. He’s as funny as ever, and somewhat nicer than ever before (this is Colfer’s first book for adults and he seems a bit fonder of people learning their lessons and seeing the power of good than Adams ever was).

In addition to our old friends, we gain some new ones: Wowbagger the Immortal, who had a very few lines in a previous book (I think it was *Life, the Universe, and Everything*, but I refuse on principle to look it up–the principle being that I know no one cares); a Vogon father and son team that are (still!) bent on exterminating the humans, Thor and many of his godly and demi-godly friends (Adams devotees will note that while Thor has never before shown up in a HHG book, he was in one of the Dirk Gently novels); a faux-Irish flimflam man, and…I think that’s everyone. But who knows!

My point is that there was way too much going on in this book. I read it in less than a week and I don’t think I am a sloppy reader, but I would often put the book down for half a day and be simply unable to work out what was going on when I picked it back up. Adams’ books, in addition to being shorter, were far more focussed than AAT–often several of even the major 4 characters were left out, or largely so. In addition to being confusing, Colfer’s rapid cutting back and forth made it difficult to even care what happened to anyone. I admit, this has long been a problem with the series–after umpteen jokes, it’s hard to care who falls in love or into an abyss–but it is even harder when you can’t remember anyone’s names.

I actually don’t know a lot about Eoin Colfer other than that he is a successful kid and YA novelist, but I suspect him of watching a lot of TV and perhaps writing for it. Many of his scenes were utterly impenetrable to me until I pictured them on a soundstage–and then they were funny. There was a lot of bickering and people popping in and out behind walls and radioing each other from afar, and pretending to do one thing while doing another–I wasn’t around for Laugh-in, but I am pretty sure I have the reference right.

And in that sense, I think the new book is true to the series’ roots as a radio show–disjointed, episodic, gag-oriented and inconsistent. I laughed, I admit it, but ten minutes later I usually couldn’t remember at what.

The flap notes state that AAT is going to bring HHG to a new generation of readers–presumably that means the new generation is expected to *start* with the 6th book, since it is shiny and new, and then be drawn into the back-catalogue. I admit, I am old and not of the hyperlink generation, but I can’t imagine how this is going to work. The book makes vague reference to many of the events in the preceding books, but not so that a neophyte could actually understand them. But the past is rarely abandoned, so you can’t just read AAT as a stand-alone novel–you are constantly being reminded of what came before, even if no explanation follows up. Even I couldn’t follow it all, and I’ve read all the books in the past year! Of course, maybe I’m not so smart as I think I am!

What this review basically boils down to is that I really liked Douglas Adams and I wish he weren’t dead. He was *not* an A+ writer, and many of the issues Colfer is encountering he inherited from the master (not least of which is how to write a sequel to a novel which ended with all major characters being killed). Colfer does an ok job with a tough gig, but if there is a 7th book (as was strongly hinted), I’m afraid I’m just going to have to bow out of the party. Time to let that new generation take over.

June 17th, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews The Pornographers June 15 concert at The Sound Academy

The nicest thing, in my opinion, to do before the concert is to have a good cheap meal downtown and avoid the baffling expense of trying to eat in the Distillery District (The Old Spaghetti Factory throws in salad, bread, tea/coffee and ice cream with all entrees! And the ice-cream is spumoni!). Failing that, one could likely have gotten something delicious en route at T&T grocery story on Cherry Street, or else the hotdog vendors outside the venue. And then walk–the buses from Union station and Pape station baffled us, but it was a perfectly pleasant 45-ish minute strolled the The Sound Academy, which is down by the Docks (where I had never been).

The Sound Academy turns out to be a nice big venue with enough bars and restrooms and a nice sort of patio area where you can go with your wristband and buy (expensive) snacks and pops. There was a lot of space (the whole second floor, it seemed) devoted to VIPs, but I guess VIPs have to go somewhere.

News of the opening acts didn’t interest me at all, as they went on really early and I hadn’t heard of them. We missed the Dukes and Duchesses entirely but we caught the The Dodos mainly by accident and they were wicked good. This seemed to be a three piece band (I couldn’t really see very well; there could have been more stuff up there), one and a half piecesof which was drum kit. So one guitarist, one traditional drummer, and one guy who played some drums, some xylophone, and a few other instruments I didn’t really understand. Let’s talk about how much I like xylophone music. Let’s talk about the song when Mr. Ambidextrous played one stick on the drums, one stick on the xylophone. Swoon!

The NPs had a very simple stage set up–just illuminated letters spelling their name hanging above a smoke and light filled stage. It was so great to see them in person (I never had before!) There are so many of them! I think I knew that but forgot–I’m a fan, but not a rabid one. But let’s talk about how in awe of Neko Case I am–and there she was with all that red hair in some sort of Grecian shiny headband-crown. Swoon! I love her voice so much–friends I ran into at the show said they thought she got a little squawky at times, but I thought she was perfect, especially on “Go Places,” which has never sounded sweeter to me.

It was so nice and fun to run into people I hadn’t seen in years in a big crowded concert hall. One great thing about Toronto is how often I think I am surrounded by strangers and then a face looms out all friendly and familiar. Of course, I wasn’t completely surrounded by strangers anyway, as I went to the show with B., who had given me the tix as a birthday gift (along with a tin of custard powder and a card that read, “To a Great Grandson”).

What else did I like about the show? Man, I bad at reviewing concerts–I don’t even think I attend them right, as I sucked hard candies at intervals and danced in my spot. Almost no one danced at this show–has that gone out of fashion now? Or maybe it was the age of the crowd. Someone commented, when I said I was going, that the band had been around more than 10 years so they are really The Old Pornographers, which I think is laughable–being born in the 1990s is not old! But the crowd was, in places, old*er*–some grey hair, some paunchiness, some real eagerness to get home and sleep when the show ended. But then fully half the crowd was probably a lot younger than me. I don’t know what my point is, but I am happy to announce that I now think I’ve finally figured out what a hipster is, so I can join the rest of you in laughing at them!

I dunno, this is a terrible review, but the show made me really happy. Maybe I have to go to concerts more than once every other year. Maybe I need to adjust to staying out later. Maybe they really should have played “Letter from an Occupant” just for old times sake. Maybe tonight is another late night and I should really get to bed…