”My travels have become so focused on books and islands that the two have merged for me. Books, islands, islands, books. Lake of the Woods in Ontario ”My travels have become so focused on books and islands that the two have merged for me. Books, islands, islands, books. Lake of the Woods in Ontario and Minnesota has 14,000 islands. Some of them are painted islands, the rocks bearing signs ranging from a few hundred to more than a thousand years old. So these islands, which I’m longing to read, are books in themselves.”
Louise Erdrich decides to take her eighteen month old daughter off to the land of her ancestors...Ojibwe Country. She needs to shake off this surprise pregnancy and introduce her newest daughter to her father and the land that spawned her. Tobasonakwut is the father of her daughter, Kiizhikok. He is a seerer, a seeker, a healer of his people. He is busy going wherever he is needed. It is difficult for Erdrich to contact him, but she knows that it isn’t for her to find him. He will find them.
”His people were the lake, and the lake was them. At one time, everyone who lived near the lake was essentially made of the lake. And the people lived off fish, animals, the lake’s water and water plants for medicine; they were literally cell by cell composed of the lake and the lake’s islands.”
She is 48 years old and the mother of a baby. It’s terrifying and exhilarating.
Erdrich has a bookstore in Minneapolis, one she opened with her daughters to do something together that they all enjoy. Books line the walls of their homes, lay in piles wherever there is a flat space, and when a quilt is thrown over the top of a square stack of books, they form a table. Books are as infused into their lives as the need for eating and breathing. While on this trip, Erdrich becomes enthralled with a book called Austerlitz by Sebald, and she talks about reading it deep in the night to take her far, far away from the cheap motel and to somewhere all of her insecurities will become smoke. ”Books. Why? For just such a situation. Marooned in this uneasy night, shaken by the periodic shudder of passing semi trucks, every sentence grips me. My brain holds onto each trailing line as though grasping a black rope in a threatening fog. I finish half a page, then read it over again, then read the next half of the page and then the entire page, twice. Not many books can be read with such intimacy, nor are there many so beautifully composed that the writing alone brings comfort.”
Last night I woke in the middle of the night and began to read Austerlitz. Sometimes we read the right book at the right time, and certainly this book was exactly what Erdrich needed. I respect the obsessiveness and warmth with which she writes about the reading experience. It didn’t take me long to discover why she was reading and rereading pages. The paragraphs are composed of long, sinuous, complex, and lush sentences. Readers are not used to encountering sentences like these. Few read James Joyce or William Faulkner anymore, and most give up on those books practically before they begin to read them. An editor will read Sebald, and she will itch to break these sentences up into smaller bites, which will make them easier to read, but will turn a feast into a series of snacks. It took me a while to adjust, but I didn’t feel agitation, just excitement. Here is a challenge for my mind. How long can I hold a thought before the threads start to unravel?
More about Sebald when I finish the book.
Ojibwe Country sprawls across Minnesota and into Ottawa. Erdrich meets up with Tobasonakwut on the Canadian side of the border, and he shows her the rock paintings of their ancestors. The artists used sturgeon oil to preserve their paintings, and that is how paintings that are 400-1000 years old are still vibrant with color. She visits an island of eleven thousand books and finds a book that has her muttering “my precious, oh my precious” like Gollum in Lord of the Rings. In that moment, she understands the need for collectors to possess.
She has an encounter with the Border Patrol that leaves her and I shaken. ”What have they done to me?” I heard myself saying out loud, “Tell them who you are; tell them to google who you are.”
Can you prove this baby is yours?
What?
Our country has become a nightmare.
This book is a National Geographic Directions book. I’ve read the Jan Morris book about Wales, and there are many more that look interesting. In the back of the book, there is a list of the writers who are participating, and most of them will be names you recognize. They are short books, but so far, they are proving to be powerful books. Who better to travel with than literary writers with special connections to the places they will take you?
***Basis for the hit Canadian TV series Cardinal.***
”It gets dark early in Algonquin Bay. The forty-sixth parallel may not be all that far north; you ***Basis for the hit Canadian TV series Cardinal.***
”It gets dark early in Algonquin Bay. The forty-sixth parallel may not be all that far north; you can be much farther north and still be in the United States, and even London, England, is a few degrees closer to the North Pole. But this is Ontario, Canada, we’re talking about, and Algonquin Bay in February is the very definition of winter: Algonquin Bay is snowbound, Algonquin Bay is quiet, Algonquin Bay is very, very cold.”
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Billy Campbell and Karine Vanasse star in the hit series based off the books.
John Cardinal thought he was permanently booted off murder cases until a young girl, viciously murdered, is found. Despite his boss’s animosity, he knows that Cardinal is the best chance for the department to catch a killer. He is assigned a new detective who just transferred over from the Canadian equivalent of the US IA department. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist brain for Cardinal to realize that Lise Delorme is his partner to investigate him.
But even if your dirty, Cardinal, solve the case.
His wife, Catherine, is suffering from mental illness, which is proving a constant distraction for him. ”Catherine was his California--she was his sunlight and wine and blue ocean--but a strain of madness ran through her like a fault line, and Cardinal lived in fear that one day it would topple their life beyond all hope of recovery.”
Besides the fact that Delorme is probably investigating, well almost certainly investigating, him, she is also attractive. ”Delorme had a disturbing tendency to hold your gaze just a little too long, just a split second too long with those earnest brown eyes. Well, it was as if she’d slipped her hand inside your shirt.
In short, Delorme was a terrible thing to do to a married man. And Cardinal had other reasons to fear her.”
So his wife is in treatment, and he misses her tenderness. His partner is hot and investigating him. He is stressed to the max because he is trying to catch a serial killer with no serious leads, and he is Catholic, so any guilt he might feel about anything he has done in the past weighs on him like a thousand pounds of Bibles.
The randomness of how most serial killers pick their victims makes it almost impossible to catch them. A detective has to hope for a mistake. The question is, will Cardinal get a break in the killings case before Delorme gets a break in the case against him? Will Cardinal succumb to desire and do the be-bop bang with Delorme and possibly crater a marriage that is very important to him? Will the killer kill again before Cardinal can string together enough slender leads to stop him/her?
This is a bit of a slow burn, but it fits the story because Algonquin Bay is a relatively remote area, and the constant snow slows everything down. In that regard, it reminds me of some mysteries I’ve read in Iceland. Cardinal is a Scotch and Jazz man who broods with the best of them. He has reached a point in his life where he has accumulated some regrets, and as he sorts through them, he has to finally decide what he can live with and what he can’t.
The three seasons of the TV series is available on HULU, which I don’t currently have, so I will have to wait for it to show up on one of the many platforms I already subscribe to. Patience is a virtue I’ve been told, and maybe I will have time to read another book or two in the series before venturing into the small screen interpretations.
”She herself was a victim of that lust for books which rages in the breast like a demon, and which cannot be stilled save by the frequent and plentifu”She herself was a victim of that lust for books which rages in the breast like a demon, and which cannot be stilled save by the frequent and plentiful acquisition of books. This passion is more common, and more powerful than most people suppose. Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of a drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at command. They want books as a Turk is thought to want concubines--not to be hastily deflowered, but to be kept at their master’s call, and enjoyed more often in thought than in reality. Solly was in a measure a victim of this unscrupulous passion, but Freddy was wholly in the grip of it.”
Fredegonde “Freddy” Webster is a supporting actress in this novel, but for those who have developed an addiction to Flavia de Luce’s adventures, you will find a like minded young lady in Miss Freddy. She has a still in the gardening shed, with which she makes passable wine and suspect champagne. She is, from what you can see of the quote above, a book fiend. She is, in other words, a wonderfully interesting individual.
She is quite content to let her older sister Griselda have center stage. She is a lovely young woman at the age to be perfectly in bloom. Mr. Webster, a widower, is frequently taken aback by the rather aggressive opinions expressed by both his daughters. He has his own interests that he likes to putter with, and the raising of his daughters is left to themselves for the most part. ”He had allowed his daughters to use his library without restraint, and nothing is more fatal to maidenly delicacy of speech than the run of a good library.”
Then please do let more young women have the run of a good library.
As Griselda says at one point, ”I can’t help it if I’m not stupid enough to be good company.” Reading books does do that.
When the Salterton amateur theater group decides to put on a production of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Griselda finds herself at the center of the attention of three vastly different men. Hector Mackilwraith is an unlikely suitor for anyone. He has never really shown interest in women before, but the theater has a way of raising the libido of all those involved, even a man with a steady pulse like Mackilwraith. He is a math teacher, a very good one, and is very set in his ways. ”’I know what I know,’ said Hector, ‘and it is sufficient for my needs.’” What a tragic sort of personality to be chasing after such a girl with so much promise. She would suffocate under such regimented thinking. I can’t imagine ever saying I don’t need to know more. There is also Solly Bridgetower, a good sort but crippled by his devotion to his mother. The other suitor is Roger Tasset, who is a bit of a player. A man who is into sampling everything in the store without offering to buy any of it.
The play itself is on the edge of disaster at any moment. I am in these cases always reassured by the quote from the movie Shakespeare in Love.
”Philip Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. Hugh Fennyman: So what do we do? Philip Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well. Hugh Fennyman: How? Philip Henslowe: I don't know. It's a mystery.”
Despite all the hazards of ego, ineptitude, and lovelorn actors, it will somehow all be fine.
I checked to see when I’d last read a Robertson Davies novel and was stunned to discover that it was 1996. I read him in a flurry in the early 1990s, and then, like many strange aspects of my reading choices, it is a mystery as to why it has been so long since I’ve indulged myself with the dry wit and laugh out loud humor of one of the greatest Canadian writers. The characters are all so deftly drawn that it deepens the humor as we experience their trials and tribulations. Poor Hector Mackilwraith will be as real to you by the end of the novel as people you’ve known your whole life. The intellectualism infused in the plot is as enjoyable as sipping a fine cabernet sauvignon while listening to Bach’s Air on a G String.
If you like theater, audacious characters, and a fine combination of wit and witless dialogue, you really should add Robertson Davies to your future reading experiences.
“Shall he dwindle, peak, and pine. Though his bark cannot be lost, Yet it shall be tempest-tossed.”--Macbeth
”The thing in the tub was not a statue, but a man—a dead man, and a naked one at that. Save for his face, he seemed to have been carved out of copper.”The thing in the tub was not a statue, but a man—a dead man, and a naked one at that. Save for his face, he seemed to have been carved out of copper.”
Flavia de Luce has been summoned for an investigation. This is the first time she has been asked to investigate a case. Usually she stumbles upon a corpse and can’t resist the urge to inveigle herself into the situation until she finds the clues that lead to the resolution. She's precocious and frequently finds herself in trouble with the local constabulary as she tries to discover the truth before they do.
This is a short story that falls between The Dead in their Vaulted Arches and As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust. Although after reading it, I’d say a fan would be fine reading it at any time within the series.
One of the things I love about this series is the fascinating explanations of science that Flavia provides. ”The chemical and electrical action had electroplated the man. Electrodeposition, to be precise.”
It is always a pleasure to spend some time with my favorite girl detective. When you just need to touch base with the young lady, this short story will do nicely.
”Ban-ban Ca-Caliban, Don’t need no master, I am not your man! So stuff it up your hole, gimme back what you stole, Tellin’ you it’s late, I’m fillin’
”Ban-ban Ca-Caliban, Don’t need no master, I am not your man! So stuff it up your hole, gimme back what you stole, Tellin’ you it’s late, I’m fillin’ up with rage, I’m gettin’ all set to go on a ram-page! Ain’t gonna work for less than minimum wage--- Live in a shack and piss in a pail, You earn yourself money by puttin’ me in jail!
You kick me in the head, you dump me in the snow, Leave me there for dead, ‘Cause I’m nothin’ to you. Ban, Ban, Ca-Caliban, You think I’m an animal, not even a man!
Now Hag-Seed’s black and Hag-Seed’s brown, Hag-seed’s red, don’t care if you frown, Hag-Seed’s yellow and Hag-Seed’s trash white, He goes by a lotta names, he’s roamin’ in the night, You treated him bad, now he’s a sackful of fright, Hag-Seed!”
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Djimon Hounsou plays Caliban in the wonderful 2010 movie of The Tempest, starring Helen Mirren as Prospero.
Felix is just too busy to notice. He has his head buried in his work, directing plays at the Makeshiweg Theatre. He has been doing it so long, with such success, that in theater circles, he is in fact a bit of a legend.
While he works, others plot.
He is caught in the clouds of his own dreams.
Well, until two large men from security appear, flanking his arch-nemesis (An)toni(o). Felix is frogged marched out to the alley, with a laughably small severance check and a few bags of belongings which are stuffed into his car by Burly #1 and Burly #2.
Just like that, he is deposed, usurped, overthrown, dethroned.
Felix decides that he needs to escape the city. Everything about the city just reminds him of the theater and his past glories. He finds a shack in the country, a hovel really, a cell. He tries to read all those Russian classics he always meant to read, but finds himself instead reading children books to his daughter Miranda.
Felix broods. He ponders. He grieves for his lost magic. He plots elaborate revenge scenarios. One thing he has learned from Shakespeare about revenge is that it is best served cold.
Get to know thy enemy.
”There was Felix, alone in his neglected corner reading the Google Alerts, and there were Tony and Sal, bustling about in the world, not suspecting that they had a shadower; a watcher, a waiter; an internet stalker.”
After many years of self-imposed exile Felix decides to apply for a job at a correctional facility teaching a literature course. He is, of course, grossly over qualified, but with a wink and a nudge at the Interviewer who recognized him, he was able to take the job under the name F. Duke.
His nod to Prospero who was the deposed Duke of Milan. He hoped to make his return from exile be Prospero’s escape, as well, from the dusty corners of Felix’s past frustrations. His plans to make The Tempest, cut down in infancy by his enemies, can now finally be realized. He throws out the curriculum at the correctional facility class and makes it all about Shakespeare.
Doomed to failure right? How can mostly uneducated, criminal minds get into Shakespeare?
Remember the pit at The Globe where the unwashed, the dregs, the petty criminals, and prostitutes filled the theater to capacity to watch Shakespeare’s plays? They were there to get away from their own lives for a couple of hours, but also to revel in the sword fights, the treachery, the intrigue, the ghosts, the magic, the star crossed love affairs, and the madness. Maybe they didn’t always catch all the higher ideal references that are sprinkled liberally among the tombstones, blood spilling, and flying spirits of Shakespeare’s plays, but the level of success Shake and Bake enjoyed attests to the fact that the mob as well as royalty and gentry enjoyed his productions.
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Yo, Shakespeare, lay some words on me bro. Painting by Mathew McFarren.
Those incarcerated with the help of The Duke started to see Shakespeare for the badass dude he was. Literacy rates increased. The program because immensely popular. ”Watching the many faces watching their own faces as they pretended to be someone else---Felix found that strangely moving. For once in their lives, they loved themselves.”
With such a hugely successful program the government should be excited about duplicating what Felix is doing in every prison in the country, right? Erhhhh not exactly. ”In their announcement, they’re going to call it an indulgence, a raid on the taxpayer wallet, a pandering to the liberal elites, and a reward for criminality.” I know this is Canada, but they must have stolen their talking points from the Republican party in the United States. Justice is about punishment not rehabilitation. In their minds those who have crossed swords with the law don’t deserve the help they need to be something more than just ex-cons when they step out of prison.
And the politician with his cronies, who are coming to visit this program and see with their own eyes the overindulgence of these miscreants, is none other than Felix’s old friend Tony. As Felix dons the coat of many stuffed animals and transforms into Prospero can he set revenge aside to save the program or will all of his work just be a springboard to destroy his enemies?
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Doesn’t Margaret Atwood look capable of casting a spell or conjuring a tempest at will?
This is yet another great retelling of a classic in the Hogarth Shakespeare series. I would highly recommend reading The Tempest before reading this, but if not you can read the synopsis of The Tempest in the back pages of the Hag-Seed and that will give you an idea of how wonderfully Margaret Atwood has transformed the original into a heartwarming, brilliant new story. I could not put this book down. Highly recommended!!
”All the same, Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word---musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase”All the same, Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word---musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.”
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Sketches made of Grace Marks and James McDermott during their sensationalized trial.
Grace Marks, at the age of 16 in 1843, was arrested along with James McDermott for the murders of their employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his mistress/housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery. The murders were rather sensationalized in Canadian society, what with the cold blooded brutality and the fact that a young, rather beautiful, young woman was involved. McDermott was sentenced to hang, while Marks was saved from the gallows by the spirited defence of her lawyer. She spent the next thirty years of her life incarcerated, first in an asylum and then in a prison.
This story really picked up several years later when Doctor Simon Jordan decided to make a study of her and hoped to unlock some of her missing memories.
See, there were key elements that she didn’t remember about that day that would help him to determine if she was truly a murderess or merely an unwilling accomplice. Jordan was struck by her from the very first moment he met her.
”Her eyes were unusually large, it was true, but they were far from insane. Instead they were frankly assessing him. It was as if she were contemplating the subject of some unexplained experiment; as if it were he, and not she, who was under scrutiny.”
And then there was this observation of Grace by Jordan, as well:
”She’s thinner now, less full in the face; and whereas the picture shows a pretty woman, she is now more than pretty. Or other than pretty. The line of her cheek has a marble, a classic, simplicity; to look at her is to believe that suffering does indeed purify.”
“Other than pretty” implied further depths to her beyond just the surface beauty that captured the imagination of a ghoulish public. He might not know it, but he was already smitten with Grace and in danger of tumbling head over heels in love with her. It is hard to keep control of a series of interviews if you have become interested in more than just the deeds of the individual. As an added distraction every mother in Toronto with a daughter was trying to manufacture ways to throw their pretty daughters in front of this very eligible bachelor.
He was a doctor after all.
”As one season’s crop of girls proceeds into engagement and marriage, younger ones keep sprouting up, like tulips in May. They are now so young in relation to Simon that he has trouble conversing with them; it’s like talking to a basketful of kittens.”
They were fresh, so new they were barely out of the packaging of their youth, and of course virginal. What every man should desire,...right? Well, if one doesn’t mind vacuousness.
As fascinating as Grace’s story is, I found myself becoming even more engrossed with the story of Dr. Simon Jordan and his desire driven demons. His landlady, whose husband had absconded on a bout of debauchery, was also proving to be a damsel in distress as her only source of income became her one lodger. ”Her face is heart-shaped, her skin milky, her eyes large and compelling; but although her waist is slender, there is something metallic about it, as if she is using a short length of stove-pipe instead of stays. Today she wears her habitual expression of strained anxiety; she smells of violets, and also of camphor.”
She was a beauty past her prime, but still she was compellingly sexy. He felt this attraction against his will. There was no hope for a relationship. She was married and too old to ever be acceptable to his family or his class. He was supposed to marry one of those inane, young ladies. ”It would be one way of deciding his fate, or settling his own hash; or getting himself out of harm’s way. But he won’t do it; he’s not that lazy, or weary; not yet.” I can’t help, but think of Newland Archer from The Age of Innocence, who allowed himself to be trapped into what was expected of him, as well. What if Archer had escaped with Countess Olenska?
I still pine for him to escape.
So even though the landlady was forbidden, bruised fruit, he couldn’t help, but notice that...“Her lips are full, but fragile, like a rose on the verge of collapse.”
This was one of the many times when I had to read a Margaret Atwood line many times, rolled it around the surface of my tongue, so that I could taste the sweet, the bitter, and the savory of that beautifully written line.
Dr. Jordan was starting to have odd thoughts and unsettling dreams of murders committed by himself. He started digging in the garden under the pretense of planting a garden, but it seemed, even to his subconscious self, that he was loosening the soil for...the corpse of his landlord if he should return or maybe a stack of bodies of those from which he wished to escape. It would put him on an equal footing with one particular woman. ”Murderess, murderess, he whispers to himself. It has an allure, a scent almost. Hothouse gardenias. Lurid, but also furtive. He imagines himself breathing it as he draws Grace toward him, pressing his mouth against her. Murderess. He applies it to her throat like a brand.”
This novel is based on the true story of Grace Marks. History lost track of her once she was released from prison after nearly thirty years of incarceration. No tombstone is known to mark her grave. She simply vanished into the woodwork of a new America. Atwood has not only brought her to life, but has seamlessly and creatively put words of putty and glue into the missing pieces. I wonder every time I finish an Atwood why I don’t read her more frequently.
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Sarah Gadon plays Grace Marks in the series
Netflix has recently launched the first season of a new show based on Alias Grace. It spurred me to get this book read that I had planned to read three years ago. I was wooed by other more pressing books, and what a fool I was. I don’t know how I feel about watching the series. I’m as sure that it is good as I am sure that it will disappoint. I will eventually work up the courage to watch it, but I think I will luxuriate in reverence for the book for a while.
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