You Are Not What We Expected by Sidura Ludwig

You Are Not What We Expected by Sidura Ludwig
House of Anansi, May 2020 

Short stories set within a Jewish community in Ontario, and connected through recurring characters.

Marriage and divorce, childhood and old age, death and new babies: these thoughtful stories dip in and out of intergenerational family life with humour and a warm heart. Some of these Jewish family members are religious and some are not. Central figures in several of the stories are Elaine Levine and her cranky brother Isaac, whom she convinces to move back to Canada in order to help her care for her two grandchildren after they were abandoned by their mother. 

In 'The Flag,' Isaac misses the California sun, and thinks back to his time on a kibbutz in 1969:

        His arms were a Sabra brown. His forehead blistered from the heat. When he showered at the end of the day, the water ran brown off his body, as brown as the roads they were paving in Tel Aviv. Brown, he once thought, was the true colour of renewal, the beginning of a seed, the colour of potential. All of Israel was brown then, and he could fade happily into the landscape.
        But now here? In Thornhill, north of Toronto? Isaac sees a lot of white. Even when it isn't winter, he sees clean white pavement, white stucco houses, pale white people translucent in the spring as they emerge from their hibernation. Forget multiculturalism; Canada is the whitest country he has ever known, as if nothing ever changes.

In 'The Elaine Levine Club,' Isaac watches his great-nephew and great-niece, immobile for hours in front of their respective screens.

        Ava, nine, lies on the couch with an iPhone close to her face, watching some sitcom. Isaac thinks about all the wannabe actors in LA coffee shops, the ones chasing careers on the big screen, and how everything boils down to this -- a performance that can fit in the palm of your hand. If entertainment is supposed to be an escape, how can anyone get lost in a dream that small?

Not everyone has small dreams. Escape from the constraints of others' expectations is within reach for several of the characters in these stories. A widow resists her daughter's manipulations. A teenager decides to find his father. A young person refuses to wear a dress to their sister's traditional wedding, and instead wears a black hat and black suit on the men's side of the festivities. The heartbreaking title story is my favourite: a new bride, who has travelled from Australia to live with her husband's family in Thornhill, doesn't live up to their expectations. 

This collection exceeded my expectations. I was caught up in the lives of these people. Clues hint at the continuing sagas from other stories. They reward rereading, a quality I admire.

Giller chances: MEDIUM - I'm not sure if this will catch the eye of the Giller judges, but I do recommend reading it.

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.

Watching You Without Me by Lynn Coady

Watching You Without Me by Lynn Coady
Anansi, October 2019

Suspenseful domestic drama.

Karen Petrie has lived away from Nova Scotia for 10 years, and comes home when her mother dies of cancer. Karen's older sister Kelli, who has developmental disabilities, has up until this point been cared for by their mother. In addition to settling her mother's estate, Karen's most important task is to sort out Kelli's future. Kelli has caregivers who come in to help with such things as bathing and exercise, and one of those helpers is Trevor. There is something off about Trevor.

        I sipped the beer he'd cracked open and handed me moments before. Every so often an alarmed yet muted part of my brain would sort of sit up, look around at what was going on, and demand an explanation. But then I'd just stare at Trevor's blond forearms with their tendons hypnotically flexing and contracting beneath the freckled skin and after a while that part of my brain would lie back down again. 

As you can see in the previous passage, Karen's narrative voice is wry and self-mocking. She's immersed in a fog of grief and guilt. Even so, she is intelligent and is able strategize during the times when the fog lifts. Occasional references to the Nova Scotia setting help to ground this story, even though it mostly takes place inside a house.

        I knew, also, that Trevor was not a man who could turn down a proffered cup of tea. That was the traditionalist in him, the slavish follower of Maritime social etiquette -- he could no more turn his nose up at tea than he could a rye or two with a buddy after work.

Contemporary Canadian society is multi-ethnic and I appreciate novels that recognize that fact, along with something we need to talk about more openly: the undercurrent of racism which exists across the country. 

        Yet my mother was nice in the tradition of many a Nova Scotian lady of her generation and upbringing -- it could be a stiff, dogmatic niceness of the schoolmarm stripe, a niceness of propriety and parochialism outlined with a filigree border of intolerance. I may as well come out and say that my mother could be irredeemably racist in that same nice-lady way, but even so, manners came first and she set great store in "keeping one's opinions to oneself." Once when I was visiting, the Sri Lankan family that had moved in down the street invited her to a party for a newborn baby ("I suppose you wouldn't call it a Christening," she mused to me). And my mother, by god, she defrosted a shepherd's pie, blotted her lipstick, and floated down the sidewalk on a cloud of benign tolerance. "They were so welcoming!" she enthused to me afterwards, dumping all the delicious-looking food they had sent her home with into the garbage.

There are similarities between Watching You Without Me and another contender from the Scotiabank Giller Crazy for CanLit list: Andrew David MacDonald's When We Were Vikings (review link here). Both are about someone with disabilities being cared for by a sibling after their mother dies of cancer. Both have a element of outside threat. Coady's work, however, has the craft of an experienced writer. The characterization is superb, and the novel feels more layered and real.

Giller chances: MEDIUM HIGH - Lynn Coady was awarded the Scotiabank Giller in 2013 for her collection of short stories, Hellgoing. Winning this year with Watching You Without Me is a longshot, but I can see it making the longlist.

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.

The Diamond House by Dianne Warren

The Diamond House by Dianne Warren

HarperCollins, June 2020

Audiobook (11 hours, Harper Audio) read by Marisa Blake

A family saga centred on two nontraditional white women.

The narrative follows a family line for more than a century, from Ontario to Saskatchewan, where Oliver Diamond establishes a brick-making factory in Regina. Secrets revealed in old letters, the succession of a family business, daughters not accorded the same respect as sons, elderly people asserting their rights to independence: it‘s got all the stuff for an absorbing read. 

The two women who take centre stage are vivid, engaging characters. One is Salina, an aspiring ceramics artist and Oliver Diamond's first wife. They first meet each other in 1902. The other is Estella, the youngest of Oliver Diamond's five children by his second wife. We experience Estella's life from early childhood into her nineties. I love indomitable old women in fiction, so the contemporary part was my favourite.

The opening paragraph:

     For all the years there were children in the Diamond house, and long before a woman named Emyflor Santos lost control of a rogue vacuum cleaner hose, a white, hand-thrown teapot sat on a corner shelf in the dining room. It was clearly the work of an amateur: oversized, indelicate with its evident throwing lines, and heavy as a ten-pin bowling ball. The children had a vague idea that it had been made by an Aunt Salina they'd never met. They imagined a woman bent over a muddy potter's wheel, an eccentric old relative back east in the town their parents had come from. They knew nothing of that town. To them, East was a foreign country.

Estella is intelligent and curious, always chafing against expectations of her family and society. When she hadn't yet started going to school, her mother asked her what she was doing under the table.

     "Thinking," Estella said.

     "Don't think too hard. You'll ruin your brain." 

Besides the role of women in society, another aspect that hooked me is the portrayal of lakeside summer holidays. The Diamonds spend time at the same cabins every year, a ritual familiar to a certain cohort of Canadians. This tradition realistically shifts over the years, as the younger generations grow up, have children of their own, and move to other parts of the country. In the contemporary part of the novel, the land on which the cabins sit, which had been a 99-year lease, will soon be back in the control of a Cree band, its original owners.

I recommend picking up the text version, rather than the audiobook. It's read by Marisa Blake, whom I assume is an American because she doesn‘t know how to pronounce Regina, Métis or Tagalog.

Speaking of Tagalog, it's an interesting reflection of contemporary reality that women from the Philippines are caregivers for the aged in two novels that I read recently, this one and Misconduct of the Heart. The Filipinas are portrayed as selfless and hardworking. While in both cases they are secondary characters, their inclusion made me reflect on the situations for many women who travel to Canada with aspirations for a better life, spending years apart from their families while sending their earnings to the Philippines.

Giller chances: LOW. I had high expectations because of Warren's earlier, Governor General award-winning novel, Cool Water. While The Diamond House is enjoyable and grapples successfully with the issue of gender inequality, it doesn't quite have the spark to lift it into award territory.

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.

The Certainties by Aislinn Hunter

The Certainties by Aislinn Hunter
Audiobook (6 hours) read by Sandra Flores and Steve Cumyn
Knopf, August 2020

If you've been following my blog, you already know that I like epigraphs. One of the two that open this slim, sorrowful novel is by Federico Garcia Lorca:

        Narcissus.
        My sorrow.
        And the likeness of my sorrow.

The same book will hook different readers in different ways. A philosophical, character-based story of refugees, with references to Roman mythology, already has several hooks for me. And then there's the description of an aging body.

        I shift my legs in the bed and the left leg begrudges the movement. I know my heart isn't what it ought to be but the left leg's reticence these past months is a mystery. To will the body and have it refuse you is a strange thing because it makes you, like our friend Narcissus, see yourself doubly, as both self and obstinate other.

The narrator is a German Jewish professor fleeing the Third Reich with a unfinished manuscript in his briefcase and Ovid on his mind. It's 1940. After making it across the Spanish border, and while waiting for his fate to be decided by the authorities there, he addresses his thoughts to Pia, a small child he met by chance.

        This was late June, when the roads out of Paris were a slow parade of cars, horses, carts and bicycles. And the occasional French soldier riding against the tide on a motorcycle, or walking dejectedly toward some town he'd left when he was a different man. Everyone was barking out news and all the news was contradictory. We are losing the war! We are winning the war! Though the German planes overhead and the German soldiers who sometimes strafed the fields or walked alongside us until veering off to secure the next commune told the true story.

In an alternating storyline set in 1980, a woman named Pia helps recover bodies from a shipwreck, the bodies of people who were obviously refugees. In the audiobook edition, two different readers delineate the switch back and forth.

War can change you utterly. You can become completely unlike your previous self. Powerless. Stateless. A refugee. Our only certainty is our mortality. In this understated and mournful novel, readers are asked to bear witness.

Giller chances: MEDIUM HIGH - This one is likely to hover on the periphery of the longlist. I'm uncertain whether The Certainties will make the cut.

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.

Aubrey McKee by Alex Pugsley

Aubrey McKee by Alex Pugsley
Biblioasis, April 2020

As you would expect from a book titled with a person's name, this novel is deeply character-based. Even the city of Halifax is a character here. Everyone, including the city, is full of surprises. The story is told in first person chapters that can also be enjoyed as standalone short stories. The timeline starts when Aubrey was five. He ran away from one of his sisters' birthday parties and met a strange child named Cyrus Mair.

        I thought him reckless and exuberant and smart. He was fabulously weird. I wanted to know what he knew. I couldn't really guess what he was dreaming up in his mind, nor what games and inventions occurred there, but I liked him. His world was in a constant state of becoming, and this September afternoon was the beginning of a fascination that would last a sort of lifetime for me because, even if I didn't know what I wanted, like everyone else I would not be able to stop paying attention to the creature known as Cyrus Mair.

Cyrus becomes not only a friend but an inspiration. Aubrey comes to understand that what you choose to believe in can determine what you become. He spends his growing up years floundering, trying to understand other people, such as his English teacher, Theo Jones.

        He is working, he tells me, on a long poem. "Miranda," it's called. He keeps his drafts and fragments in a wooden box on his desk. the box, as I contemplate it now, seems like a piece of his own personality, so confidential it is, so worn with care. "I've been working on it for eight years," he adds. I nod appropriately but privately I think: Eight years? To a thirteen-year-old it's more than half a lifetime. On one poem? A poem was homework you did between TV shows. What was it doing taking eight years? I walked away reverential, astonished at Mr Jones's conception of his own poetry, yet to my young mind there was something odd and flawed about the enterprise. 

Mr Jones sums up Aubrey -- and the point of this novel -- in a comment on Aubrey's report card:

         "A vivid mind slowly coming to grips with itself --Theo"

An oddball cast weaves in and out of the narrative. Much alcohol is consumed.

        My mother grabbed a plastic juice glass from the dishwasher and poured herself four fingers of white wine. "They're anti-war, you know, these people. Flower children. They think anything's possible. The wife's a women's libber. Vivien. But very sweet. Him? I'm not so sure. Wes is the saintly type. Wants to do good. Like build a barn for mentally retarded kids in New Brunswick." She tossed back half the wine. "Sure. Why not? But what are they going to do with a barn -- shear sheep? Honest to God. Be careful of these so-called saints, children. Believe me, people who act like saints -- a lot of so-called saints are trouble. Living in a dream world."

A strong sense of time and place is created using cultural references like Pixy Stix and Lik-a-Stix candy, drinking Orange Crush and Kool-Aid, his sisters "stockpiling Barbies in a velvet Crown Royal bag," the smell of Tide laundry detergent, and watching 'The Six Million Dollar Man' on TV. Music plays an important role too.

        The last year I live in Halifax, the winter I decide to leave the city for good, I arrive at the Palace much more drunk than sober. I am twenty-two years old and grief-struck by the recent death of a friend. So I stare at the giant video screens on the walls. I am watching the music video for The Police's "Wrapped Around Your Finger," sort of trying to figure out how Sting can be dancing in slow motion in a maze of tall candlesticks while his lips are in sync with the song, which is not in slow motion, when I become aware of someone beside me also watching Sting. It's Theo Jones, holding a beer to his chest, and swaying slightly. He is past forty now, but looks roughly as he once did, though puffier and shorter.

Unfamiliar (made up?) words make perfect sense in context, like when Aubrey talks about his uncle Lorne growing a "greebly" moustache. Lorne is only eight years older than Aubrey. He came to live with them when "Nanny and Dompa, living Montreal, were moving into some marital hurly-burly." When Lorne reaches adulthood, he can no longer bear living in Halifax. He tells Aubrey:

        "This burg --" He sighed as if unable to delay a judgment that had become screamingly obvious. "It's like living in the Bottle City of Kandor. It's so cut off, it's bogus. It's beyond bogus. It's so bogus, it's rogus. It's an embarrassment of rogusness. And everywhere fossified. Fwa!"

It takes nearly 400 pages to get there, but eventually, Aubrey has had enough of Halifax too. Sometimes the bantering wordplay between Aubrey and his friends gets to be a bit much, but it's an enjoyable experience overall. I've now lived an alternate Nova Scotia childhood and adolescence, and I've met vivid characters who will live on in my head.

Giller chances: MEDIUM HIGH - Not only is this the kind of literary fiction that you can really sink into, it also contains layers that reward rereading.

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.

Home Sickness by Chih-Ying Lay

Home Sickness: Stories by Chih-Ying Lay
Translation from Mandarin by Darryl Sterk
Linda Leith Publishing, March 2020

Ten insightful, melancholic stories set in contemporary Taiwan.

Born in Taipei, Chih-Ying Lay is now a microbiology research scientist in Montreal, as well as a singer and the author of previous short stories and a novel. This is the first time his fiction has been published in English. The author is gay and some of his stories include gay characters. In 2019 (which is after these stories were originally published), Taiwan was the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage.

Music is a common element in these stories. Here's a passage from 'The Seafaring French Horn.' 

        The sound of the French horn isn't overbearing like the trumpet's. It often struck me, as I listened to you practise, that the sound was just like the shape, convoluted, meandering. It was like liquid light that would fill a room -- a sunbath of notes, so languorous and warm.

Lay introduces every story with an epigraph and I happen to be fond of epigraphs. I like the way they open my brain to the author's possible intentions. Like a corner piece for a jigsaw that I'm about to start, they put me in some sort of frame of mind for what comes next. In this book, they also help to give a sense that Lay's writing exists within a larger context of Asian literature and culture.

The epigraph for 'Epitaph for a Worm' sets its nostalgic mood. 

    I don't even know how long I've been melancholy. -Wang Anyi

I flagged many passages that struck me, whether for their originality, or vividness, or because they had me looking at something in a new way. COVID-19 has quashed my travel plans, so this part in the title story caught my attention:

        At university, you'd read a book by the writer who'd killed himself in the inn. He claimed that people used to be fearful of travel, avoiding it when they could. Leaving the realm of their daily life was a kind of exile. It represented danger, maybe even death. What travellers were most afraid of in the olden days was to be stuck in a forest at night, far from the nearest town, when the sight of any light would turn anyone into the proverbial moth to the flame.

Darryl Sterk lives in Taiwan and is highly regarded as a translator. I heard him speak at the Vancouver Writers Fest last year about his translation of Wu Ming-Yi's The Stolen Bicycle. In the introduction to this collection, he explains Chinese kinship terminology as its used here, particularly in the last three stories, and advises: "If you get lost, check the dramatis personae at the beginning of 'Tomb Raiders.'"

While there are aspects of the stories that clearly belong to Taiwanese culture and landscape, the human motivations will be familiar to anyone. People looking for love and respect. People grieving. People wanting a better life for themselves or their families. People balancing the pull of tradition versus the desire for modern convenience and style. People coming to terms with things that cannot be changed.

Giller chances: MEDIUM HIGH - Not every story is equally strong, but the characters tend to live on beyond the page. I think this collection might be on the periphery of the longlist, so it will depend on the strength of the other contenders whether this makes the list or not.

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.

The Red Chesterfield by Wayne Arthurson

The Red Chesterfield by Wayne Arthurson

University of Calgary Press, October 2019

A delightfully odd crime novella told in vignettes.

A bylaw officer investigates a complaint about a yard sale, then spots an abandoned chesterfield nearby and then things go sideways because he also finds a severed human foot. But this story isn't about that mystery. It‘s about a man's relationship with his brothers and his girlfriend and …that intriguing piece of furniture that keeps showing up.

Wayne Arthurson lives in Edmonton and I've read his previous novels, so I knew going into this one that he is of Cree and French Canadian descent. In The Red Chesterfield, I enjoyed the way that M, the bylaw officer, is slowly revealed to be Indigenous:

• First, there's a comment early on about his people having “a long history with the authorities, a lot of it bad.”
• Later: “I light some sage, let the smoke blow over me. I‘m too jittery for the smudge to work.”
• Midpoint, there's an example of typical Canadian racism that I can imagine this bylaw officer is familiar with: “Who is it?” [...] “Some Indian,” he says with disdain.

Surrealism with gritty realism. I was entranced from start to finish. 

Giller chances: MAYBE. An unusual premise, well executed. If novellas qualify, I can see this making the longlist. The Scotiabank Giller eligibility requirements don't mention novellas. Novels, graphic novels and short story collections qualify. YA novels, comic books and poetry collections do not. The Red Chesterfield does not appear on the Scotiabank Giller Crazy for CanLit list, but novellas can be considered a type of novel, right?

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.