More reviews - this time of books
The Colony of Unrequited Love
and
The Navigator of New York
By Wayne Johnston
An election co-worker got me onto Wayne Johnston. A great writer from Newfoundland. Colony is the story of Joey Smallwood, the Liberal Premier who brought Newfieland into Confederation after the Second World War.
Great book.
Joey Smallwood was a relentless little bastard who tried to make his name by organising the rail workers and fishermen of Nova Scotia. By walking or sailing around Newfoundland in the snow. He didn’t do so well on the left but the Liberals spotted his potential and made him their whipping boy and eventually he got the Premiership.
Mostly the book is the tragedy that was his personal life – his alcoholic father, his unrequited love for the journalist Fielding, who delighted in tormenting him and whose hilarious History of Newfoundland a satirical look at the history of The Rock interspaces the fictionalised biography.
The Navigator is more fiction, but has biographical elements to it. Set in Newfoundland and New York, it is the story of a boy, abandoned by his father who ran off to be a polar explorer, who grew up and went to New York to be a polar explorer. And got in with Peary. Who sounds like a right little bollocks.
Not as good as Colony, but probably just as if you are into polar exploration.
The Delicate Storm
and
Forty Words of Sorrow
By Giles Blunt
My eternal hunt for the new James Lee Burke led me to this crime writer who writes out of Algonquin Bay, northern Ontario, a place I have always wanted to visit, due to its isolation and natural beauty. But it sounds terribly grim in the winter-time. Which is most of the time.
Detective John Cardinal is the same type of tortured soul that Robicheaux et al are, this time it’s money he stole from a crime boss to pay for his daughter’s expensive American education, and a wife with a bad dose of the blues. The crimes are pretty good though, the side-kick is a well-drawn female character and I can see myself following this series for a while.
Other detective novels
Pegasus Descending
By James Lee Burke
And
Hard Revolution
By George Pelecanos
Two of my favourite American crime writers. Pelecanos writes about DC, still mourning the loss of one Eoghan Barry. James Lee Burke writes about Louisiana and the bayou, still mourning the loss of most of New Orleans.
New Orleans gets mentioned. Surprisingly, Eoghan Barry does not. But then again, Hard Revolution is set around the assassination of Martin Luther King, a bit before his time.
So maybe that’s why.
Skin Divers
By Anne Michaels
I was blown away by her novel Fugitive Pieces a few months back, so I bought a book of her poetry just to see.
We roll over the edge into the deep field
Rise from under the rain,
From our shapes in the wet grass
Night swimmers, skin divers.
Very nice it is too to be reading poetry again. This is a book of love poetry and in the third section, usually the most innovative in your average book of poetry, Michaels takes on the personae of Marie Curie and Kathleen Scott and imagines their emotional state after the deaths of their spouses.
Did you know that when Scott was dying, he crossed out the word wife, which was on the inscription - ‘give this to my wife’ printed on the front of his diary and wrote ‘widow’ instead?
Bad Land
By Jonathan Raban
A history of the badlands, by the second best travel writer in the world – the best being Colin Thubron. Haven’t finished it yet, but it’s great so far – organised thematically as well as chronologically – Fences, Pictures, Heavy Weather, Clinging to the Wreckage – stuff like that. He captures the mournful emptiness brilliantly and following on Keepers of Truth, gave me some idea of what it would be like to live in Manitoba, which is why I didn’t want to move there.
Keepers of Truth
By Michael Collins
This guy is Irish apparently. I’ve never heard of him. Keepers was shortlisted for the 2000 Booker Prize, but I’ve never heard of it. I must have been out the day they announced it that year.
Again, annoyingly, this was in the Literature section of Doulls and not in the Irish literature section. I was about to move it as I always do (some day I will get caught doing this and barred from the shop forever) but I decided to buy it instead.
Wasn't I the lucky girl!
I really enjoyed this book. It’s a rant about the destruction of Middle America and I’d love to hear his take on things now that Bush and the Neo-Cons have swept the boards in that part of the world.
Bill, the narrator is the sub-editor on a small town newspaper in a once-prosperous manufacturing town. He gets caught up in a murder he’s reporting on with disastrous results. The characters and their over-intense interaction are well drawn and he has a great eye for the American media and the nuances of a small town and their intersection in the modern world.
Saving the World
By Julia Alvarez
My birthday book.
A story within a story. Author Alma Huebner is caught in writer’s block and ambivalent about her husband’s trip to the Dominican Republic to run an environmental project. She loses herself in the story of Isabel Sendales y Gomez, the head of a Spanish orphanage who, by chance, ends up accompanying the first expedition to bring the smallpox vaccine to the New World. Lots of story in a story parallels about the joys of being in love with an obsessive man and a ripping good story – two stories in fact – that intertwine very well. This woman is an Allendes who knows how to structure a story without making her protagonist fly when necessary.
Ta very much Mrs. Monkey.
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