I first fell in love with Banana Yoshimoto’s writing in CEGEP when we had to read Kitchen as an international component of a Literature class. Actually, thinking back, the entire literature program offered by the International Baccalaureate was just fabulous. We also read Cymbeline, King Lear, WWI poetry by Owen, Sassoon and Rosenberg, Kiss of the Spider Woman and The Wars. From this list are four of my favourite authors and one of my favourite Shakespeare plays as well as my favourite poem… And just this week i was thinking that the IB was a huge waste of time… I must rethink that.

Goodbye Tsugumi was exactly what i expected of Yoshimoto. I can’t really explain what that means though for her writing is … light, almost trite, yet profound and unexpected. Her characters approach the world from a perspective so radically different from my own i find it difficult to believe how caught up i get in their memories, feelings and relationships. The main character, Maria, returns to the seaside town where she grew up after a year living with in Tokyo and has to come to turns with her adulthood, her relationship with her frail yet passionate cousin Tsugumi and the nostalgia for things past. It’s just lovely… Tsugumi is a great character, unbelievable at times, but since the story isn’t told from her perspective it isn’t entirely a problem. I love how Yoshimoto always has at least one transgressional romantic relationship in her books… and this one was no exception.

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I know i have been neglecting the online world. I haven’t posted in over a week, am not checking my emails and just don’t feel like being caught up in my own head right now. I figure it will pass. Another chapter is due tomorrow… i am scared about being able to pull off what now looks like the impossible again. Eep. My time has pretty much been completely devoted to Latin and working lately… and if you need to contact me… try facebook.

Lisa Moore, Alligator. Grove Press: 2006. 320 pgs.

My last BMV Books trip with Veronica included the purchasing of some Canadiana by Lisa Moore. I am usually opposed to buying something just because it is written by a Canadian author (and my strong dislike of Margaret Atwood and Alice Munroe continues this trend), but the cover was snazzy and it was on sale, so i thought it at least deserved my reading the back cover.

Alligator was a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Winner and a Globe and Mail Book of the Year. Two pretty prestigious accolades for something written about Newfoundland. i will admit, i had been meaning to get around to reading some of the great fiction about Newfoundland recommended to me over the years by my LAC colleagues. I was sold.

I had a hard time getting into Alligator - and i can’t decide if this is because i am finding it hard reading these days (i had the same problem with The Historian and The Eyre Affair, both of which i ended up liking immensely) or if it was because of the wide array of characters whose perspective was adopted in individual chapters. Furthermore, each character was, well, an extreme example of their “type.” Usually i am all for playing with stereotypes, but i couldn’t get myself to attach to either Colleen or Madeleine and their roles were substantial in the plot development.

Much like Middlemarch, by the end of the novel all the characters were connected, but unlike Middlemarch, i didn’t mourn every time the perspective was switched. My overall verdict was that this is an excellent light read, or beach reading for those of us who understand what that means (that’s for you Veronica). However, Lisa Moore is also the author of an award-winning short-story collection which i think i will check out in the near future… the book shows much promise. Maybe it just wasn’t my cup of tea. Some of the descriptions were stunning and the plot at times highly unexpected. I will be open-minded.

The back cover reads:
Moving with the swiftness of an alligator in attack mode, Lisa Moore’s award-winning first novel is a wickedly fresh introduction to St. John’s, Newfoundland. Its denizens jostle one another in uneasy arabesques of desire, greed, and ambition, juxtaposed with a yearning for purity, depth, and redemption. Colleen is a seventeen-year-old would-be ecoterrorist, drawn inexorably to the places where alligators thrive. Her mother, Beverly, is cloaked in grief after the death of her husband. Beverly’s sister, Madeleine, is a driven, aging filmmaker who obsesses over completing her magnum opus before she dies. And Frank, a young man whose life is a strange anthology of unpredictable dangers, is desperate to protect his hot-dog stand from sociopathic Russian sailor Valentin, whose predatory tendencies threaten everyone he encounters. Alligator is a remarkable book, a suspenseful, heartfelt, and sexy story that examines the ruthlessly reptilian and painfully human sides of all of us.

Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair (Hooder: 2002).

I haven’t read any adult-oriented fantasy/science fiction in quite a while. On Harley’s recommendation (and his kind loan), i started to read The Eyre Affair with little idea what to expect and, although it took me a good 200 pages to reach this conclusion, i do believe this series may now be included among my favourites.

Thursday Next is a literary detective (and yes, this took me quite a while to get my mind around) in 1985. Her 1985, however, is not like ours although the similarities are large enough to make the differences shocking. Britain is still fighting the Crimean, Wales is a Socialist Republic, there is a loose boundary between “reality and fiction” and, perhaps most shocking, people actually care about literature. Fforde’s social commentary is weaved into a catchy narrative that makes you laugh.

I can come up with two analogy’s: The Eyre Affair is much like The Incredibles, which i honestly think is one of the funniest movies i have ever seen.

Reading The Eyre Affair is like watching really good theatre. Although you know you’re caught up in something artificial and unreal, nevertheless, you disbelief is suspended and you can no longer feel your butt in the seat.

While the first hundred-or-so pages were slow going, the last hundred were read at 3am even though i had to get up at 9:30am. I just couldn’t put it down.

Umberto Eco. The Island of the Day Before. Translated by W.Weaver. Harvest Books: 2006; 528pgs.

The latest Eco that i have laid my hands on, The Island of the Day Before, was conveniently in the discount books at Chapters last time i went with Veronica. I am a big fan of some of Eco’s other works, like The Name of the Rose and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanna. I was not that impressed with Baudolino.

The Island of the Day Before is going into the “take-it-or-leave-it” category. Perhaps in the past year, i have entered a new realm of appreciation for the philosophical problems of the early modern era, but often, i found the main character’s musings, well, trite. Not that Eco presents Roberto de la Griva, shipwrecked on the antipodal meridian within sight of what he believes is the legendary Island of Solomon, as a great thinker. Rather, his letters to his Lady, met in a salon in Paris with whom he has had all of one very abrupt conversation, are to be taken with a grain of salt. His fascination with what we now call the International Dateline - or the idea that 100 feet from where his ship is moored it is “yesterday” - is touching. But, i wasn’t caught up in the narrative and found myself skimming the last 50 or so pages.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the novel, for me who is relatively acquainted with the different arguments for and against a heliocentric solar system and the other clashes between Jesuit and “Parisian” astronomy, was the way Eco presented the material as rewriting and conjecturing from the letters Roberto left behind. Problems of interpretation - with which i am very concerned - were a main theme of the book and Eco, as a leader in his academic field, has an interesting take on the topic.

Would i recommend The Island of the Day Before to my readers? Yes and no. If you are interested in some of the philosophical, astronomical and theological topics of the early modern period, you will likely find the book very enjoyable. There were sections of narrative about Roberto’s life that had me completely enthralled. But, if you, like me, didn’t particularly like Baudolino, I’d recommend leaving it. If anyone would like my copy… let me know. I enjoy passing along books.

I was under the impression that Knopff was a good publisher. I recently read a review in the New York Sun that has challenged this assessment.

From what i can gather, Burton has published a five hundred some odd pages on a subject i have seen covered NUMEROUS times in 30-page articles in the Journal History and Theory.

I mean, really, am i supposed to find the statement that not until the Renaissance does history become recognizable to us as a discipline, deep, meaningful or worth reiterating for the fifth billion time? The Middle Ages was a period of darkness, was it? (i’m SO tired of people unconcerned with the philosophical, theological and epistemological concerns of medieval intellectuals critique them for not being “deep.” Perpetuating historical misconceptions is just evil. ). And WHAT about The British Book of Kings? And hagiographies in general?

Ugh. You can read the article here if you must. I won’t be reading the book.