What Winnipeg is reading
Local creators, critics and consumers of literature divulge their current reads below. This will be a monthly series.
Brandon Christopher, English professor, U of W
Jonathan Lethem, Girl in Landscape
Girl in Landscape recounts a brief period in the adolescent life of Pella Marsh, who is, with her brother and father, an early colonist on a distant planet know as “The Planet of the Archbuilders.” The book opens with the death of Pella’s mother in New York and then shifts for its latter two thirds to the desolate, alien world on which Pella’s father, a defeated politician, is desperately determined to found a new society. This is Lethem’s last novel before he came to prominence with Motherless Brooklyn (1999) and The Fortress of Solitude (2003). It’s also, perhaps not coincidentally, his last science fiction novel. Heavily influenced by the Western (Lethem writes elsewhere of his obsession with John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) - an obsession that is in full view here), the novel demonstrates, as Motherless Brooklyn would after it, the way in which genre fiction, in the hands of a skilled writer, can be as impressive in terms of theme, characterization and style, as more critically and culturally valued “literary” fiction. Lethem’s prose is confident and moving; his love of and skill with language are apparent throughout the book, perhaps most obviously in the Archbuilders, a decrepit alien race whose use of English is primarily aesthetic rather than communicative, resulting in their adopting names like “Lonely Dumptruck,” “Hiding Kneel” and “Somber Fluid,” among others. Though not a difficult read, the book offers a challenge to fans of science fiction and literary fiction alike in its unabashed commitment both to its outlandish setting and to its painstakingly crafted prose.
Anita Daher, award-winning author, editor
Craig Francis Power, Blood Relatives
Power is a Newfoundland writer who read on the main stage during this year’s Thin Air Winnipeg International Writers Fest. His words were visceral, and his manner pleasing. I was struck by how handsome he was, and as I often choose my literature based on writer sex appeal and clothing choice, I placed Blood Relatives at the top of my festival reading pile. I kid…sort of…which has something to do with back-to-back deadlines and lack of sleep, I suspect. In any case, when I am not working or sleeping or tearing out hair I’ve been falling deeply into this character rich story set in Newfoundland. From its opening at a funeral in a chapter entitled “Losers of the World,” it has held me.
Kipp Kocay, musician
George Eliot, Adam Bede
I’d never heard of the book and I wasn’t actively dying to read it, I just happened to come across it at the antique store at the Forks. It was sitting, unsurprisingly, next to Middlemarch, which I have already read and enjoyed. There were actually two copies there, I bought the more expensive $6 one, because it was a Penguin edition and I just adore how they use details from fine-looking paintings on their covers. It’s a pastoral about the seduction of an alarmingly pretty farm-girl by the rich local young handsome extraordinarily charming squire. Typical 19th century. Lots of beautiful natural scenery, lots of local dialect and some old words that no one could possibly put in a natural modern sentence without looking extremely affected. I don’t usually read books written by women; as a man I like to side with my own gender’s opinions, but she changed her name to George so I thought I’d let it slide. Thanks to the editor’s notes at the back of the book I can catch the topical allusions to a day and age of which I have no real knowledge; this is how I’ve learned all the textbook ideas that I know on history and art and famous people that did stuff that I don’t really care about. The book is full of religion, and as I’m interested in the Christian religion, Christian morals and Christian mythology, it seemed like a good choice. I particularly like reading descriptions of young maidens. As a songwriter who writes songs on the singular topics of sex, love and women, this book is full of “babes” with long eyelashes and perfect pink complexions.
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
It’s quite tongue and cheek, very naughty and full of Greek Gods. It’s a collection of stories told by a motley crew of stereotypical medieval characters. Every story is about one type of love or another and some poor hero who fails to win the hand/heart of the woman he cherishes. All in rhyme! I have to be in the right mood to read it and again I have to use the editor’s notes occasionally for some obscure references to ancient ideas that have now been disproved or rewritten. I have caught myself smiling to myself while reading it. So far I like both books, a bad ending could ruin Adam Bede, though - we’ll see.
Kelly Hughes, owner of Aqua Books
Craig Ferguson, Between the Bridge and the River
Ferguson is the second-funniest person I can think of, next to me. But I didn’t write a book. And if I did, I wouldn’t read it.
Wayne Tefs, award-winning novelist, critic, anthologist
Asne Sierestad, A Hundred and One Days: A Bagdhad Journal
The inveterate Norwegian journalist, author of The Bookseller of Kabul and The Angel of Grozny, among others, spends 101 days in war-torn Bagdhad. Her strength as a writer is that she spends time with ordinary people - cab drivers, mothers of school children, car mechanics - and she lets them tell their stories, without judgment but in searing detail. Sometimes frightening, always informative, an excellent balance to CNN and the general round of “embedded” journalistic reportage coming out of the USA.
David Adams Richards, The Friends Of Meager Fortune
A compelling yarn about families in the Maritimes, at once gripping narrative and popular history. Richards is intrigued by people in trouble and on the verge, and in this book there’s a winning passion to his writing as he unfolds ordinary lives made extraordinary by the clash of personal desire and impersonal fate.
Jonathan Raban, Bad Land
Missed this one when it was published (in 1996). Raban, author of Coasting (boat trip around England) and Old Glory (journey down the Mississippi) spends the better part of a year in Montana, interviewing the descendents of the first settlers of the area, who were told wild lies about the new Eden of the West by land agents at the turn of the nineteenth century. Their dreams of having their own spreads and being masters of their own fates came to dust, and their descendents’ stories are poignant and sad.
Robert Fisk, The Age of the Warrior
The Age of the Warrior is a collection of some 80 pieces, columns from The Independent, where Fisk is a war correspondent. A native of England who lives in Beirut, Fisk writes about the Middle East with surety and grace, but mostly with disgust at the position of the U.S. and England in prolonging conflict there by siding with the Israelis, who refuse to honour agreements hammered out in the international community. Telling stuff. Canadian foreign policy comes in for a few shots too.
M.J. Hyland, This is How
Stunning writing from a veteran who understands craft as well as storytelling. Lucid and compelling account of a young man who leaves his family to work as an auto mechanic at a seaside town. He doesn’t want much - steady work, a good pub lunch, a girl to spend Saturday night with. You know from the beginning that things are going to go bad but you keep reading because the writing is so fine.