The Point

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Life seems swell

I CAN'T SAY WHY, BUT SOMETHING ABOUT THE TIDE OF LIFE SEEMS TO SUGGEST THINGS are on the up, so I'm going to take a step back this week from keeping you abreast of my musings on serious events things and let you in on what I have been somewhat more abstractly contemplating lately. Not to say you shouldn't keep up on certain happenings in the world today. This might turn out to something of a preview of books you'll see more about on here later.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about Edmonton, about home, about where the borders and edges of this place are, and I'm very interested in a new book by the Edmonton Journal's own Todd Babiak that seems it might be going some way to exploring these things. We're a new city, you see, our historical narrative is not quite deep enough to swim in at the moment, and stories about ourselves are, when written, either seen as humdrum (especially in light of Canada's more glamorous, glitzy metropoli) or not worth reading at all. So The Garneau Block, a book first serialised last year in the Journal, comes as something of a welcome sign to me that we finally be ready to tell our own stories.

I haven't read a page of it yet, though, except for a few snippets I caught last fall, so I'm pretty excited to rip into what's been described as a fairly engrossing novel about a neighbourhood not too far from where I live. I've spent the last few months rediscovering my city, figuring out my own interpretations of our particular mythologies, and trying to seek out the stories here. There are a lot to be told. This books looks fresh, funny, and Todd is also a really compassionate and interesting person, so I am thoroughly looking forward to this read.

At the moment, I'm reading a book called What We All Long For, by Dionne Brand. Brand won the Governor General's award a few years ago for a book of poetry called Land to Light On, and What We All Long For reads like poetry, in a way only really well-written novels can, and it has its stumblings, but I'm interested to see where it lands. It's a book about a city, really, as much as about the characters it follows; we talk a lot about multiculturalism in Canada, but if you're looking for a city where cultures really collide in this country, Brand's Toronto is one place you'll really smell its curried, peppered, shapka-wearing, cab-driving, briefcase-carrying, djambe-playing shapes in all their strange beauty, and her characters breathe this city's hopes and contradictions out of every pore of their bodies, melting into the streetcar tracks and 7-Eleven grunge of College and Spadina. It's keeping me up at night.

What really catches me about this book is the way Tuyen and Jackie and Carly and Oku's histories are shaken up, scratched out, to reveal who they're becoming. Brand is a secretive mistress, and sometimes I feel like her desire to let us sketch out our own mysteries is unnecessarily difficult, but she has a great way of catching you up in their fallacies and graces. The story follows these four young friend's lives as they accelerate forward, and backward, and into and between one another, and there's a subtle sense of pain here in their voices that pulls you into them. It's also about Quy, Tuyen's brother, who was lost in the mad rush of refugee boats on a shore decades before the story happens, as their parents fled Vietnam -- for safety? for democracy? out of selfishness? Brand makes it intentionally difficult to place anyone's motives on firm ground, and challenges your assumptions about choices and dreams her characters move through. She has an inconspicuous but deft hand, and I recommend exploring it.

This last book is one I've had recommended to me through routes that seem to suggest the universe is trying to tell me something. In the past little while, I've read more than a few books, purely by coincidence, that seem to be exploring the same ideas of weight and lightness and questions of the soul, and what path it takes. Have you ever heard of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being? (Well, if you read this regularly, maybe you have). It's a book about a question, really, of whether our lives repeat, or whether they only happen once, whether when we are dreaming we are really seeing our lives ahead or behind us, already being lived. Purely by accident, I happened to read One Hundred Years of Solitude immediately after, and I was somewhat taken aback to see Gabriel García Márquez, one of the most prominent Colombian authors, has been plumbing some of the same depths as Kundera, a Franco-Czech writer whose connections to Márquez, if they exist at all, I have been unable to find. There's something to this question of alchemy, something I don't quite understand yet, that I will have to get back to you on.

Anyway. If on a winter's night a traveler, by Italian author Italo Calvino, seems set to be the next novel in this vein I stumble into. That's all I can tell you for the moment, and I apologise if you were looking for something more politically satisfying this week. Who can write about the state of the world today, when Naguib Mahfouz has met his end? Ah, life looks intriguing these days, my friends. Write me and tell me what you think about it.

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posted by Christopher at 10:40 p.m.

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