A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson

A God in Ruins is the follow-up to Atkinson's critically acclaimed Life After Life, which I reviewed last week. While Life After Life traces the many incarnations of Ursula, this volume explores the experiences of her younger brother, Teddy. Teddy is the pet of the family; he is clearly his mother's favourite, his aunt bases a series of boy's adventure books on him, and he grows up to be a fighter pilot and hero during World War II. While much of Life after Life focuses on Ursula's experiences on the ground in London during the Blitz, A God in Ruins explores similar events from the perspective of a bomber pilot who brings the same indiscriminate rain of death to German towns and civilians. This juxtaposition of experience creates intense moral ambiguity and ethical tension throughout the novel.

As one would expect from Atkinson, A God in Ruins is rich with observations that are simultaneously funny and profound. For example, when the 11 year old Teddy tries to explain the beauty of the lark to his aunt: "It was impossible to instruct on the subject of beauty, of course. You were either moved by it or you weren't. His sisters, Pamela and Ursula, were. His elder brother, Maurice, wasn't. His brother Jimmy was too young for beauty, his father possibly too old."

If you were like me and were disappointed at the end of Life After Life and wished there was more, this book is for you.  It brings back to life the eccentric and heroic Todd family, and provides a fresh and illuminating perspective to the times they lived in.

Four out of five smileys. 😀😀😀😀

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

This is another re-read, picked up because I want to refresh my memory before I begin reading her follow-up title, A God in Ruins. But when it comes to Kate Atkinson one doesn't actually need an excuse; she is always worth reading multiple times.  Life after Life follows the life of Ursula Todd, or more accurately the many lives and equally frequent deaths that Ms Todd suffers.  In her first incarnation, she is born during a snow storm on February 11, 1910, and is instantly strangled by her own umbilical cord, failing to draw a single breath. But in her next incarnation, the doctor arrives at the house just in time and saves her. And so her story continues, but it constantly circles back to that snowy winter night.

The novel has a definite Groundhog Day quality, leaving the reader with the impression that, like Bill Murray's weatherman character, poor Ursula will be condemned to live this life over and over again until she finally "gets it right." But unlike Murray, she can not remember her past experiences, although they leave traces on her consciousness resulting in chronic deja vu. "And sometimes, too, she knew what someone was about to say before they said it or what mundane incident was about to occur--if a dish was about to be dropped or an apple thrown through a glasshouse, as if these things had happened many times before."

Reading it, you begin to think about your own life and the many small meaningless decisions and events that have shaped it. Like that time your friends dragged you to a party even though you didn't want to go, but you went and met the love of your life; or that time you stayed to chat with a co-worker at the end of the day, so you didn't arrive on the street during the drive-by shooting but 10 minutes after; or that one unacknowledged email that sent your career spinning in an unexpected direction.  Thoughts like these can eventually overwhelm you with visions of possible futures and pasts folding in on top of each other endlessly, until you can no longer distinguish between what actually happened and what might have happened or what should have happened.

The story is served up with Kate Atkinson's signature wit and linguistic inventiveness. Atkinson has a brilliantly ironic voice that serves up terse observations with the aplomb of the Dowager Countess on Downton Abbey. Yet, even as the irony and absurdity builds, she forges deeply human characters whose individuality and authenticity shines through and touches the reader's heart.

Four and a half out of five smileys. 😀😀😀😀😶

Firewater: How Alcohol is Killing My People (and Yours) by Harold Johnson

This book came to my attention because of my interest in the impacts of mental health and addictions issues within the criminal justice system.

Firewater is a small but powerful book that explores the almost taboo topic of the devastating impact of alcohol on Indigenous people in Canada. As Johnson explains it, Indigenous people do not want talk about it because it feeds the stereotype of the "drunken Indian" and non-Indigenous Canadians don't want to address it for fear of being deemed racist. So with apologies, he promises "I am about to drag this filthy, stinking subject out into the light where everyone can see it. It is my hope that the light kills it."

Harold Johnson is a member of the Montreal Lake Cree Nation and is a senior Crown prosecutor in La Ronge, Saskatchewan.  His position within the justice system provides him with unrelenting exposure to the negative impacts of alcohol.  He points out that in Northern Saskatchewan 23.4 percent of deaths are from injury (compared to 6.4% for the entire province). Many of these deaths--suicides, car accidents, drownings, stabbings, beatings, house fires and freezing to death--are alcohol related.

After providing an historical overview and detailing the costs of the "alcohol story," he makes an impassioned plea to tell a new story: a story that embraces traditional culture, strong leadership, and the need to heal grief and build safe communities. Ultimately the story that Johnson tells is one of hope and empowerment.

Although the subject matter may seem narrow, Firewater addresses fundamental social challenges in a way that will expand and focus our current understanding.

Three and half out of five smileys.😊😊😊😶

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose

This title has been on my re-read list for a couple of years now. I originally read it when it came out in 2006, so the pages of my old hardcover are starting to get yellow around the edges and it gives off the musty smell of long neglected dreams. 

This is not so much a writing manual as a guide to reading. The first thing that every aspiring writer will be told is that you must first be a voracious reader; the advice often focusing more on the amount you read rather than how well you read. Francine Prose instead explains how to read: slowly, carefully and deliberately. Drawing on passages from some the greatest writers, she breaks down and analyzes their techniques to show how they have created certain literary effects. Starting with the simplest building blocks of words, sentences and paragraphs, she moves on to issues of narration, character, dialogue and gesture. She ends with a list of “Books to Be Read Immediately” which if I took literally would provide enough material to keep my 52 Books in 52 Weeks project running for the next two or three years.

This is a splendid guide to reading deeply and consciously and, if you are so inclined, to applying the lessons to your own work. Well worth re-reading every decade.

Four and a half smileys out of five. 🙂🙂🙂🙂

Close Your Eyes by Michael Robotham

I love a good mystery and Michael Robotham is one of my favourite writers in the genre. This is the eighth book in his series featuring clinical psychologist Joe O’Loughlin. As Close Your Eyes opens, O’Loughlin is still longing to reconcile with his estranged wife and is given new hope when she invites him to spend the summer with her and their two daughters. Even though he promised her that he had given up consulting with police, he finds himself reluctantly being drawn into a case about a mother and daughter who were murdered in a remote farmhouse. The police have been investigating the crime for weeks and turn to O’Loughlin to provide fresh insight into the stalled investigation. Even though the case may put his hoped for reconciliation at risk, he agrees to conducting a review with the help of his friend retired London detective Vincent Ruiz. As O’Loughlin explains his own inability to refuse: “People sometimes say the three most powerful words in the English language are ‘I love you’, but they’re wrong. The three most powerful words are ‘Please help me’.”

The plot is well-crafted with a long list of suspects and enough twists and turns that the reader keeps guessing what will happen next right up until the final dramatic denouement. I found myself staying up to the wee hours of the morning, promising myself I would go to bed shortly, but instead reading it straight through to the end.

If you like your mysteries fast-paced and not too gory with a little domestic drama thrown in, I would recommend Close Your Eyes or, even better, start with earlier titles in the series, if you have not yet read them. 

Four out of five smileys. 🙂🙂🙂

The Two of Us by Kathy Page

Another book club title, this collection of short stories was long-listed for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize for fiction. The sixteen stories are in many ways small vignettes with enormous human emotion and need hidden under the calm surface of everyday life. The characters are familiar and ordinary: a married couple go to the hospital to receive the results of a medical test, a hairdresser does a special assignment for a long-time client, a young gay man spends an excruciating evening with his mother, and an autistic child wants nothing more than her own dog. Each story is small and self-contained, focusing on tiny details and the inner monologues of the characters. 

Throughout there is a tone of tired resignation; the sense that for most characters their needs and desires will always outstrip their reality. As a homeless character in the story “Bees” explains: “What pisses me off is that the things you want are easier to get than the things I want…Most of the things I want are impossible. It isn’t fair.” 

When read one after the other, the stories can start to take on a melancholic sameness that I found tiring toward the end. But I simultaneously wanted to go back and reread some of my favourite stories to better savour the nuance, the fine visual details and the profound beauty they offered.

Three out of five smileys.🙂🙂

Waste-Free Kitchen Handbook by Dana Gunders

Why worry about food waste? As my mother used to say “Better to waste it, than waist it.” Well, actually it is pretty important. In the United States about 40% of all food does not get eaten, and I expect things are no different in Canada. That is absolutely insane, which is why one of my New Year’s resolutions is to reduce the amount of food I waste. It is the perfect resolution for me: allowing me to combine the parsimoniousness of the newly retired with the sanctimoniousness of someone trying to reestablish her enviro-street cred after trading in a Corolla for a RAV4. Another fun fact: “in the United States, greenhouse gas emissions from uneaten food are equivalent to that of 33 million passenger vehicles.” So there, the RAV4 doesn’t look that awful anymore, does it?

This book delivers exactly what it promises—it is a handbook. It offers a brief overview of the issue and its ecological and human impacts. For example, in the US, “reducing losses by one-third would save enough food to equal the total diets of all 50 million food-insecure Americans.” Wow! It then moves on to discuss the reasons why food is wasted and offers strategies to plan your meals, shop, store and use food more effectively. Her approach is realistic, acknowledging that people have busy complicated lives and that eliminating all food waste is an unrealistic goal. Much of what she offers is just basic domestic economy. These are strategies that our grandmothers or great-grandmothers feeding a family in the Depression would know, but we have forgotten in the rush of modern life and the illusion of plentiful and (relatively) cheap food. Among the main reasons we waste food is that we buy too much, are overly optimistic about how much time/energy we have to cook or we don’t store it properly. Personally, I know that when I am in the store I often make impulse purchases because I think about “how” I am going to prepare the food rather than “when” I am going to prepare it. If I can’t envision using it within five or six days, why not leave it and pick it up next week if I still want it?

She also explains how to store food effectively in your refrigerator, unlocking the mysteries of the high humidity and low humidity drawers. Apparently the one on the right is not actually the “beer crisper”. Who knew? And she includes handy recipes to use food that would otherwise go to waste. I can’t wait to try Sneaky Black Bean Brownies. Most importantly she discusses food-borne illness and how to know when it is safe to eat food that may be past its freshest ideal state. I have spent my entire life a slave to best-before dates and have been too disdainful to even contemplate consuming slightly wilted greens. For me this section was a revelation, almost completely eradicating my fear of becoming an accidental mass-poisoner.

Almost a quarter of the book is devoted to a directory that lists common foods and explains how each food should be stored, when it is freshest, how to freeze it and suggestions on how to use it up or revive it once past its prime. Much of what is in this section seems to be common sense, but it also includes lots of helpful surprises—did you know that you should not store onions near potatoes because they will cause the potatoes to sprout? I didn’t—and I’m from PEI!

So if you want to reduce the food you waste, this would be an excellent starter guide.

Three and a half smilies out of five. 🙂🙂🙂

Yiddish for Pirates by Gary Barwin

Oy gevalt! What to make of this meshugeh geshikhte? Ver vaist? I’m no Yiddisher kop!

This is the chosen book, in this case chosen by my book club. So it’s not something I might normally pick up. As the title promises it offers lots of Yiddish and lots of pirates, but I must admit I wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition. Narrated by a 500 year old parrot, it is a mad rollercoaster ride of persecution, daring escapes, murder, adventure on the high seas, loyalty and revenge. The text is amply punctuated with Yiddish words, and at first I tried to look up each unfamiliar word. A glossary would have been helpful. Seeking to understand the meaning slowed me down and this is not a book to read slowly. The language has the frenetic pace of pirates attacking a Spanish convoy. I eventually relaxed and let the language flow over me, around me and at times through me and this is when I began to appreciate the power of the text: the puns, the word play, and the verbal gymnastics. It can be dizzying and magical and every now and then you need to stop yourself short and spend a few minutes analyzing the layers of meaning, literary and historical allusions and childish puns all toppling over each other to gain your attention. If you like Michael Chabon or Tom Stoppard—or have fantasized about combining the two, this book is for you.

Three and a half out of five smileys 🙂🙂🙂