A Paris Apartment by Michelle Gable

A Paris Apartment is a fictional treatment of a fascinating real life event. In 2010, a 91-year old woman died in the south of France, leaving in her estate an apartment in Paris that had not been touched for 70 years.  She had inherited it from her grandmother, but abandoned it in 1942 and never returned. Her grandmother, Marthe de Florian,  had been a Belle Epoque courtesan, and her apartment was a time capsule filled with fine furniture, books and newspapers, and most spectacularly a never-before-seen portrait of de Florian by the Italian artist Giovanni Boldini. I recall hearing about it at the time and thinking, "What a fantastic idea for a novel." Apparently Michelle Gable did as well.

Gable builds her fictional world around April Vogt, an antique furniture appraiser working for Sotheby's to catalogue the find and help prepare it for auction.  She is enduring a rough patch in her marriage, so she jumps at the chance to leave New York and work in Paris.  Upon arrival she falls in love with the Boldini portrait and becomes obsessed with finding out more about the original owner, the glamorous and mysterious Marthe de Florian. The two women's stories are interwoven, as April slowly reveals her own secrets while also reading entries from Marthe's diaries.

The novel offers rich and fascinating details of Paris in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century and the author has a talent for pacing and creating suspense. However, it struck me as somewhat formulaic.  There seems to be a current fashion in novels where the author takes some historical period or incident, overlays it with a modern narrator, throws in both a romance and a mystery, fills it with lots of historical detail, shakes vigorously, and shazam, it's a bestseller.  Gable has managed to combine all, but occasionally falls into predictable and cliched situations.  At times I was left wondering if I was reading an art history text book, a contemporary travel guide to Paris or perhaps a Harlequin romance.

In order to keep the interest level high, Gable layers multiple stories into the narrative, so we are introduced not only to April's husband, his ex-wife, her step-children and the handsome Parisian lawyer Luc, but also learn about her conflicted relationship with her own father and mother--in addition to all of Marthe's loves, friendships and rivalries.  Eventually it feels a bit too much. Like the apartment it describes, the novel is jam-packed full with the beautiful, the arcane and the trivial, all demanding the reader's attention.  A Paris Apartment might have been more successful, if it had been slightly less ambitious.

Three smileys out of five. 😀😀😀

How to Run a Government by Michael Barber

A couple of months ago, I wrote a review of What is Government Good At? by Donald Savoie. In that book, Savoie explained the disconnect in government between the creation of policy and the implementation of policy.  Michael Barber's How to Run a Government is the perfect followup book, as it looks entirely at implementation. Anyone who has been working at the policy level in the public service would have heard and possibly been confused by the latest buzz word "deliverology." Barber, or more formally Sir Michael Barber, is one of the founders of this new approach to government. From 2001 to 2005, he was the first head of the Prime Minister's delivery unit in the UK. Since then the concept of deliverology has spread around the world, including to Dalton McGuinty's Ontario and Justin Trudeau's federal government.

At its essence, this is a "how to" book (as the title would indicate). Barber sets out the process of how to apply his ideas in a government organization.  He sets out his 57 rules of delivery, that range from Rule 7: "Consult without conceding on ambition (opposition is inevitable)" to Rule 44: "There is no substitute for sustained, disciplined political leadership" or my favourite Rule 33: "Government by routine beats government by spasm (it's not even close)." Throughout he illustrates his rules with examples from projects that he has worked on from all around the world, in both developed and developing nations.

Barber's idea is really rather simple--choose a small number of priorities, set targets, focus relentlessly on achieving those targets, and build in irreversibility.  It seems fairly obvious, but it is not how government often works.  Instead the tendency is to try to be all things to all people, claiming that everything is a priority, preparing endless reviews and reports, and failing to follow through on implementation.  Most helpfully, Barber explains the elements of government culture that will resist change and how to overcome them.

This is clearly a title that will appeal to the more wonkish reader, however, it is written in a clear accessible style and provides insights into how organizations function that crosses outside the narrow world of government and public service.

Four smileys out of five: 😀😀😀😀

Hunger by Roxane Gay

This is the book that everyone was talking about on my Twitter feed a few months ago.  Written by Roxane Gay, the acclaimed social critic and author of Bad Feminist, it is a excruciatingly honest personal memoir that looks at sex, gender, violence, body-image and healing.  Subtitled “A Memoir of (My) Body,” Hunger relates Gay’s struggles with her body, how society views her body, and her need to find a way to heal and love her “unruly body and unruly appetites.” Superficially the problem with her body is its size; at her heaviest Gay weighed 577 pounds at six feet, three inches. But don’t expect a predictable narrative of weight-loss and triumph, instead she offers a sophisticated critique of how women’s bodies are defined in our society, how they are weighed and judged and valued, and how they are ignored and mocked.  She says about writing this memoir, “I’ve been forced to look at my guiltiest secrets. I’ve cut myself wide open. I am exposed. That is not comfortable. That is not easy.” It is also not comfortable or easy for the reader.  We are not accustomed to confronting such raw, unfiltered intimacy.  And for me, as a woman who has been fat, and thin, and then fat again, I am shocked to see so many of my own guiltiest secrets articulated, shared and rendered slightly less powerful or shameful.

At the heart of Gay’s story is a terrifying incident that happened when she was twelve years old. She was lured to an isolated cabin by a boy she liked and was raped by him and several of his friends.  Be warned, her telling of this incident is graphic and horrifying.  Her life can be clearly bisected into the before and after of that traumatic assault, and it was after this event she started to gain weight.  Throughout the memoir she circles back to what happened, her response to it, and how it altered her relationship with the world and her own body.

Much of the memoir relates the day to day humiliations of living “in a world where the open hatred of fat people is vigorously tolerated and encouraged.”  The humiliations come from the cruel and vindictive people who attack her regularly on social media; from those who at least try to appear to be well-meaning (“People are quick to offer you statistics and information about the dangers of obesity, as if you are not only fat but also incredibly stupid…”); but some of the worst humiliations come from simply living in a world not designed to accommodate your body. She has a whole chapter on the dangers of chairs: the ones that may collapse under her weight, the ones with narrow unforgiving armrests that bruise her, and the ones she can never expect to fit into.

There is definitely a therapeutic element to her memoir, she herself says “Writing this book is a confession.” But overall, it feels more like an exorcism; a violent attempt to expose and banish the demons that have been tormenting her since that day in the woods when she was twelve years old. And there is also a tone of vindication, an insistence that her body deserves love and compassion, and that eventually we cannot continue “to delude ourselves that our bodies [are] our biggest problem.”

I am hesitant to recommend this book, because it is so raw. Yet, Hunger is also a source of liberation for women who must constantly overcome their own "unruly body and unruly appetites.” And let’s face it, isn’t that all of us.  For what is a woman’s body if not, by definition, unruly, and in constant need of sculpting, reducing, enlarging, plucking, shaving, being made up, to become in the end both hidden away and publicly displayed.  And a woman’s unruly appetites are even worse, driving humankind into a vortex of anxiety, fear and sin since the Garden of Eden.  But if you dare, read Hunger, and experience a whole new way to look at the world from inside another body.

Four smileys out of five: 😀😀😀😀

Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

This is an odd little book.  I was attracted to it because of its title. After my sister died, I spent the first year reading books about grief: mostly memoirs, but also books on the psychology and philosophy of loss and the rituals of grieving.  So like a crow that spots some bright shiny object, I wanted this book.  And as today is the anniversary of my sister's death, it seems appropriate to dip back into works on grief.

Its title page describes it as a novel, and for once I actually appreciate that clue. I would more likely think of it as a prose poem or a traditional trickster tale or even a meditation on a dream about death. I could even imagine it being performed as a play. It challenges our traditional understanding of genre as well as our understanding of grief.

The story is told in three voices: the dad, the crow and the boys (although at times each boy attains his own individual voice). The father's wife has died suddenly, and he must deal with his own bereavement, single parenthood and meeting his publisher's deadline for his academic study on Ted Hughes' Crow. Meanwhile the two brothers are left, in many ways, on their own to deal with their bewilderment and grief, sometimes acting out their pain with the unique savagery of angry children. Amid this chaos arrives Crow: mythic, primal, trickstering, threatening, protecting, and meddling.

The story takes us from shortly after the wife's death and far into the future when the boys are grown and can reflect back on the years of bereavement and can claim "...something more or less healthy happened. We miss our Mum, we love our Dad, we wave at crows.  It's not that weird." Along the way there is humour, violence, myths to unfold, dark visceral moments, and much earthy Crow-iness.

I am at a loss on how to rate this book.  It was not to my taste, but I recognize the beauty of its language, the brief heart-breaking insights into human nature, and its ultimately reassuring message on our capacity to heal.

Three smileys out of five. 😀😀😀