As you can see, I haven’t been expending a whole lot of
energy on blogging endeavours. That’s because I’ve been enjoying all the summer
has to offer! Beaches and beers on patios and what have you.
I’ve also been enjoying some reading that doesn’t strain my
neurons too terribly. It’s no Twilight, but here are a few numbers that I think
are pretty accessible. Read one, and do your part to combat Fifty Shades of
Grey mania.
1. Spadework – Timothy Findley
I’ve read a fair bit of Timothy Findley and he never fails
to please. His prose is what you might call Hemingway-esque: he says a lot with
a little. Findley is one of those great writers that you enjoy as a beach read,
or as a thesis paper—he creates enough plot to keep the pages turning, but if
you want to go deeper you can see he’s saying a whole lot more than what it
seems on the surface. Psychology and psychosis are prominent themes in most (or
maybe all) of his work, and the dark recesses of the mind and universality of
corruption and weakness play heavily the characters here.
All that said, this was not my Findley fave. It started out
like a Nicholas Sparks novel, i.e. a lot of description about what the heroine is
wearing and exactly how happy she is in her perfect suburban life. Golly gee! But then we discover there is actually
nothing picturesque about it. Like a beautiful summer day that dissolves into thunder and lightning and winds that tear down street
signs, the darker side of human nature quickly rears its ugly head.
Then all kinds of crap happens! Obviously I won’t go into
detail, but to tempt you I will say that Findley has a nifty way of
working sex into many facets of his characters. It runs throughout the novel,
but there is one really weird sex-capade (for lack of a better word) that may
almost cause you to stop reading. Listen to your heart. If it tells you to
stop, do, because you probably can’t stomach the rest of what Findley has to
say about YOU, the reader. And all of us. He’s very Jungian, you see.
2. Rules of Civility – Amor Towles
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| There's not a whole lot you can do to make a photo of a book interesting. |
Twenty dollars says this novel is made into a movie inside
five years. It’s got all the makings of a thinker’s blockbuster: Depression-era
New York, a plucky heroine, a love triangle. And it works the rags-to-riches
angle, which is as much a fantasy now as in pre-war USA.
It starts out strong—nothing catches and holds my interest
like a glorious Model-T smashup resulting in an alarming disfigurement. Whenever
we drive past a fender bender I cry to Mitch, “Rubberneck! Rubberneck!” This
stems from my early days in the ’Skatch. We didn’t have computers, or cable, or
sock puppets to amuse us, so we relied on other people’s misery. It remains the
job of the passenger to paint me a poignant word picture, because I’m a
responsible driver who keeps both eyes on the road at all times.
But anyway, things went downhill from the crash… or through
the windshield, as it were. It didn’t exactly crash and burn (there’s a wealth
of wordplay opportunity here) but there was definitely a steady decline. Most
importantly, I felt like the authenticity waned as things went on. There wasn’t
nearly enough 1930s slang for my taste, although the cigarette holders and
martinis were plentiful. And frankly, the heroine kind of irritated me. Her
name was Katey Kontent. Kontent? It’s reiterated several times in the book that
“it’s pronounced kon-tent, like the state of being,” so I suppose Mr. Towles
was trying to get at something with this. Is it that Katey will always take
what she has and be thankful? Or is it that she’s just the opposite? I sure don’t
know, so read it yourself and find out. Either way, I personally have never
encountered a Russian immigrant whose surname began with anything other than “ov[a].”
My final beef is that the primary love interest’s name is
Tinker. Tinker. That’s something my grandpa used to do with his train set, or
something my dad does to the dishwasher when he’s too much of a he-man to call
a professional. It’s definitely not glamorous. Certainly not the name of someone you’d trust to show you the town in
style. But then again this was the era of the nickname, so maybe the
ridiculousness of the moniker positively correlates to the attractiveness of
the gentleman. At any rate, I’ll leave it to you potential readers to decide
how attractive Tinker really turns out to be.
3. I’m Starved for You – Margaret Atwood
Ah Margaret. I’ll never have anything bad to say about you.
This is a short story released exclusively in electronic
format, proving that Ms. Atwood, at 72, is still totally fresh and hep with the
times. Like Findley, she probes into the soul of the everyman and shows us
exactly what we all hate in ourselves. And I love her for it.
But at the same time, she scares the crap out of me. Here
Atwood takes us into the not-so-distant future, somewhere between now and Oryx
and Crake-era, and concisely illustrates what a mess we’ve made of things. In
this particular dystopia the economy has disintegrated and the lack of jobs and
stability has caused society to turn on itself. The solution: get people to
volunteer as inmates. They spend every other month in custody, interspersed with
months spent as civilians. Sort of a giant, sinister make-work project.
There’s not much more I can say about this because I have
nothing to criticize, and it’s so short that to say anything is to say it all. But
Margaret gets it, man. She sees what we’re all afraid to see and puts it down
on paper, or its electronic equivalent. She too can say a lot with a little,
but she’s more inclined to throw in a savoury word or brow-furrowing metaphor
than Findley, which makes her writing a lot more fun to read out loud.
So that’s it. Despite my little barbs I actually recommend
all three of these books, especially for a pleasure read this August on the
beach, or if you’re in Edmonton, huddled by the fire. They may not be
Shakespeare, but I didn’t feel my brain melting to mush as I read, either. So
have at ’er!
