This year's Beach Reading

The Ladies' Lending Library / Janice Kulyk Keefer

Toronto : HarperCollins Canada, c2007.

I should start by saying that I am of Ukrainian background, so I am always interested in what Janice Kulyk Keefer is writing. When I heard this book was coming up, I was delighted. It deals with the intertwined lives of a group of first-generation Ukrainian-Canadian women who, in the 1960's, spend their summers at the beach with their children. (Husbands appear on weekends). To liven things up a little, they start a 'lending library'; a book club of sorts, primarily made up of sexy novels (Tropic of Cancer, Lady Chatterly's Lover, Valley of the Dolls, etc).

How could I resist this triple threat? Kulyk Keefer, Ukrainian mothers and daughters, and books -- what else could I ask for? I read through this novel very rapidly, and I did like it, though I had been expecting something a little different at the start. It wasn't a straight-ahead narrative leading to a crashing climax; rather, it was a gathering of impressions, moments that cumulatively led to a great change in all their lives. Kulyk Keefer's last novel was an imaginative retelling of Katherine Mansfield's life, entitled "Thieves"; the germ of this novel was found in Mansfield's short story "At the Bay".

It tells the stories of women like Sonia Martyn, Sasha Plotsky, Nadia Senchenko, and their various daughters and sons. The lives of the women as friends, wives and mothers are explored, filling out their characters bit by bit. The lives of the pre-adolescent daughters are also captured, in a very visceral way. This is set the summer that "Cleopatra" was released, and this is made much of - perhaps a bit too heavily at times. The idea that Liz Taylor and Richard Burton willfully follow their passions in an affair both repels and attracts these women, and this motif plays out in their community. Both in reading their 'dirty' books and in their fascination with Taylor and Burton's affair, these women

"are all pretty incorruptible...that is, they remain afraid. That's why what happens this summer appears to them a calamity, the social equivalent, Sasha thinks, of an earthquake or a hurricane. ... Because it will end up changing everything: they will lose their innocence by gaining imagination, understanding that it can happen to any of them. That you don't have to be Elizabeth Taylor to give way, to give yourself away. That it can happen in Hamilton as well as Hollywood. That you can make it happen."

Near the end, shocking events occur that change the way they all relate; one of the single mothers is discovered to be beating and abusing her daughter, and one of the husbands runs off with another of the wives. The love affair is nothing very shocking to us now, not as it would have been in the 60's. It's the importance of it to the women, shown in the quote above, that makes it such a defining moment in the novel. I think, though, that due to the lack of one subjective character to follow throughout the book, we see the terrible events but don't really feel them. I was more alarmed by the scene in which clumsy daughter Laura accidentally snips a hole in the bodice of her mother's party gown and then shoves it into the back of the closet; you feel Laura's panic and knowledge that she has once again proven her awkwardness, in contrast to her two lovely sisters. Another scene more powerful that the final romantic flight is one in which a developmentally disabled boy is tricked into trying to kiss another boy decked out as a girl. The tension in that scene between all the boys, the two involved in the action as well as the group of instigators, make it fairly snap with electricity.

Still, I think this is a lovely summer read; you can smell the lake, feel the hot sand sticking to you, and recognize the boredom of the children which causes them to do various unadvisedly foolish things. It is a story of a summer in which darkness slips up between the cracks of an apparently idyllic season. The long, lazy unchanging summer days lead into big changes that shake up this group of nice Ukrainian Ladies.

A Fairy Ring

Fairy Ring / Martine Desjardins; trans. by Fred A. Reed & David Homel.

Vancouver: Talonbooks, c2001.

This is a Québecois novel set in Atlantic Canada, 1895. It follows an epistolary format, though is not strictly written in letters; some journal entries, log book entries and newspaper columns are interleaved. It is like looking into a family fonds at some forgotten archive and finding it is Pandora's Box.

The basic premise is that Clara, wife of obsessed mycologist Edmond Weiss, is being isolated in a rented house on the coast of Nova Scotia in order to take the "sleep cure" for her hysteria. This involves sleeping for 15 hours a day, and eventually also being injected with morphine. The novel is rife with the dark side of Victorian pseudo-science; Freud's paper on hysteria had just been published, and both Edmond and Dr. Clavel of Dr. Clavel's Clinic recommend and carry out horrendous "treatments" with the passive Clara as their subject. The story also cuts to the log book of Capt. Ian Ryder, whose home the Weiss' are renting while he is off on a quest to reach the North Pole. He has seen Clara in passing on her wedding day and fallen deeply in love. He goes to the Arctic to try to freeze out his passions, just as Clara's passions are being frozen out both literally, with Dr. Clavel's ice water baths and compresses, and figuratively by Edmond's abusive attempts to force her to fulfill her marital duties.

This is not a book for the faint-hearted. Psychological and sexual abuse, graverobbing, cannibalism, sadomasochism, insanity, hinted-at-murder; all find a place here. Yet somehow it is also extremely erudite and compelling. Very Québecois, I'd say, from the French books I've been reading recently -- the Gothic imagination is alive and well in Quebec. It feels like a modern Poe, his suggested horrors taken one step further and viewed through a feminist eye.

The fairy ring suggested in the title ties in to Edmond's occupation as a mycologist. Fairy rings are circular growths of a mushroom fungus that may kill the grass encircled. There is also the legend that anyone who dances inside a fairy ring will be taken by the fairies, or become fey. Either of these explanations can be applied to Clara, who is being suffocated by the small circle of people surrounding her, who feed off her condition. Edmond needs her to be ill so he can continue his abusive behaviour, her sister Irene likes to make use of Clara's isolation to arrange assignations for herself, plus of course it is easy to feel superior to someone undergoing treatment for hysteria. It is only Capt. Ryder, miles away, who understands her position. He himself is prisoned on a boat locked in ice, surrounded by his mutinous crewmen. He says, "How repelled I feel by this promiscuity with individuals for whom I truly feel nothing but aversion." This could stand in for Clara's emotional state as well.

The story progresses in elaborate, cystalline Victorian prose. The intelligence in the vocabulary and breadth of familiarity with the irregularities in the Victorian psyche make this novel a disturbing yet somehow distancing feat. Indeed, ice, sculptures of glass, the wild northern ocean, frigid temperatures and solitude play a large part in this story. How Clara escapes Edmond and feels a spark of the possibility of connection with the returned Capt. Ryder depends entirely on her challenging her own passivity. The conclusion is ambiguous; Clara feels the new possibilites yet she returns to the scene of her worst degredations. Will she prevail? There is no certainty of it, but no certainty of failure, either.

This was a challenging but rewarding read, an outgrowth of a unique sensibility. The author has two more novels, which I may have to now search out.

Smart Weeping

I've just reread the tiny book by Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. (on the suggestion of Yann Martel) This was a poetic novel she penned based on her passionate love affair with a married poet, George Barker, whom she fell in love with through his poetry. Smart was from a fairly well connected Ottawa family, who were sensitive about their social position. When she first published this (1945) her mother was horrified and used her connections to officials to have publication banned in Canada; any copies that slipped in from elsewhere were sought out and burned.

I read this first in university, lo these many years ago, and reading it again was quite a different experience. I read it the first time for the story of overwhelming passion and self-pity, love and loss; this time around it was much more about the language. It is an extended prose poem, with echoes of the Song of Solomon recurring throughout, and the title drawing on the Psalms. When I was 19 I was swamped by her longing, her agonies of love; this was passion, I thought. Upon rereading at an more advanced age, I realize I just wanted to smack some sense into her. "He's not worth it!" I wished I could yell at her. He was older, married, and much practiced at seduction. I imagine his Frequent Philanderer points were sky high. He seemed to be an addiction for her; he was a heavy drinker and so was she when she was with him. As it happened, it was a typical but long-standing affair; promising to leave his wife, he never did. Smart had four children by him.

That sordid summation is not really what the book is about, however. It is about how it is written. Smart (or her narrator) seemed to want someone to act as the focus of her infinite capacity for love; she decided upon Barker. The language is baroque in its ornamentation, pulling in the whole world, natural and literary, to describe and reflect their passion, glorious and squalid simultaneously. Read it as a poem and it carries you along on waves of emotion. The images crowd in upon each other, and some of them are startling, catching the eye like a diamond in the setting of golden prose.

Fear will be a terrible fox at my vitals under my tunic of behaviour.

My heart is its own destructive. It beats out the poisonous rhythm of the truth.

But I have become a part of the earth: I am one of its waves flooding and leaping. I am the same tune now as trees, hummingbirds, sky, fruits, vegetables in rows. I am all or any of these. I can metamorphose at will.

For an extended vision of the interior life of a woman in the throes of an unquenchable passion, read this cult classic. Admire her facility with language, if not with life.

Update: over at DoveGrey Reader, she talks about an essay by Ali Smith:

Relating the tale of Angela Carter's inclusion on the editiorial committee of Virago Books in the mid 1970's and the reason she gave for joining, "by the desire that no daughter of mine should ever be in a position to write By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, exquisite prose though it may contain. By Grand Central Station I Tore off His Balls would be more like it I should hope"

Remembering the bones

Remembering the Bones / Frances Itani (Harper Collins Canada)
Sept. release date


I received this as an ARC at Book Expo, and began reading it while waiting in line for Frances Itani to sign it (which she did, delightfully). I then picked up 2 bags full of other books throughout the day, but when I got on the train to go home, this is the book I couldn't keep away from. I read it all the way home, and then stayed up to finish it. It drew me in and I did not want to let Georgie or her family go. It is wonderfully written; I think it will be one of my favourites this year. (n.b.: this is a Phyllis Bruce book, so I knew I was in good hands from the start. Phyllis Bruce is an editor with her own imprint; I bow to her!)


Georgina Danforth Witley has been invited to tea with Queen Elizabeth II, along with 98 other Commonwealth citizens who happen to share her Majesty's birthday: April 21, 1926. Georgina lives in Ontario, Canada, so all she has to do to get to her rendezvous with royalty is drive to the airport and hop her flight to London, where she intends to stay for ten days and see the sights as well as Queen Elizabeth. Georgie has followed Elizabeth's career since childhood, and has all sorts of memorabilia of her coronation, her marriage, her children. However, in her excitement over the upcoming events, Georgina makes an split-second driving error and her car goes off the road where it tumbles to the bottom of a ravine, ejecting her. She lies injured at the bottom of the ravine, where to keep herself alive she goes over the facts of her past, telling herself stories of her family and going over the names of the bones in the body as she evaluates her injuries.


Her old habit of naming bones stems from her younger days of reading her grandfather's 1901 Grey's Anatomy. He was a country doctor who died young, in WWI, but Georgie fosters a sense of closeness to him by resting in his dark cool library and reading his medical books. She is so fond of Grey's Anatomy that she gives the diagram of the skeleton a name: Hubley. She recalls this as she lies in the ravine, hoping that somebody will see evidence of her car's escape from the road before she becomes the female counterpart to Hubley. On first hearing the synopsis of this book, I was a bit sceptical that an 80 yr. old woman would not be missed while she lay there stranded. To Itani's credit, she gives a wonderful explanation of the reasons why it is entirely probable. At one moment, Georgie reflects that "on Wednesday the 19th of April, the day of the Queen's Lunch...the Queen will be the only person in the whole world who will know I am missing."


Throughout her ordeal, Georgie lyrically recalls her grandparents, her parents, her sister, her own marriage and children, all alongside the Royal Family's parallel lives. The story weaves in and out of the past; WWI, small town Ontario, the Windsors, modern theatre, houses and husbands. She draws on the strength of her mother and grandmothers to keep herself conscious and hoping for rescue. She worries about the effect her death might have on her daughter and her sister, but simultaneously worries about the breach of protocol in missing the Queen's tea and hopes they don't think badly of her for it.


I really loved the writing, so crisp and yet with so much power in the vagaries of recollection. Georgina is a strong, complex character who fully inhabits her life; even as she lays aged and hurt in a ravine, her memories of her childhood and young adulthood feel contemporaneous. Itani captures the essence of the youthful soul which remains even as the body ages. She takes her place among the constellation of writers featuring old women looking back on life, which seems to be a theme in Canadian literature, and she stakes her claim very convincingly.


The proposed cover is the only difficulty I see with this novel (and this is really the only iffy thing). My ARC has a lovely, spacious cover image, with the Queen edging in on the sky and a silhouetted tree. The cover I see in the HarperCollins catalogue, on the other hand, is mustard yellow with an orangey bird and flower shapes stamped on. It has no relevance to the story nor any appeal to the eye. I hope that it is not the final cover, because I can't believe that it will have anything but a negative effect on sales; it expresses exactly nothing about the deep fascination of this story. This is a perfect novel to give to those Royal watchers you know, a novel for women wanting to read about a very female oriented life, a novel of family ties to give to friends & relatives of all description - come on, guys, put the Queen on the cover! Even my husband's eye was caught: "Is that the Queen?" he asked and picked it up to read the blurb. Perhaps in Canada it has more of a direct link to our past than in the US, but I don't think she would be utterly unrecognizable to US readers. This is one occasion where I must strongly advise you not to judge a book by its cover, but to buy this as soon as it is available. You will not regret it!

Past lives, past loves

I read Susanna Kearsley's Mariana a few weeks ago now, and have been inspired to give it a write-up since it deals with some of the same themes as Green Darkness. It is the story of Julia Beckett, who since seeing a 16th century farmhouse in Wiltshire at age five, knew she was destined to live in it someday. The story opens with Julia finally able to purchase the house as an adult, but once she moves in she starts to experience strange flashbacks to the plague year of 1665, when she had lived as Mariana in the same house. The reincarnation issue has some similarities and a few differences from the treatment in Green Darkness. First off, when Julia experiences her life as Mariana, she does not remember being Julia. She can not change anything about the past. In GD, while Celia is reliving her past, she is lying comatose in hospital. Julia, however, steps back into time as she goes about her daily life, and comes to herself hours later, not knowing where she has been or how much time has passed. It made the story a little more immediate for me.In both books, the point is made that a person will be surrounded by the same group of individuals as they were previously, when the unfinished issues arose. Somehow, the same personalities reentangle themselves. I found it curious that even so, they all reincarnated in the same gender and in similar familial relationships as previously. But that's a small concern.

Julia finds herself surrounded by new(old?) friends; Vivian, who works in the pub, Ian, a local farmer, and Geoffrey de Mornay, descendent of her doomed lover in 1665. (I am also seeing a theme of doomed lovers in these reincarnation stories...) All the way through, she is attracted to Geoffrey, but it is fairly obvious early on that he is a red herring, and the real love interest lies elsewhere. For plotting purposes, this is wonderful stuff. However, in order to promote the red herring, Kearsley does not give enough spark to the relationship between Julia and the real reincarnation of 1665's Richard; at the conclusion, it seems to come out of nowhere, and simply because he identifies himself as "Richard" she swoons. That is my only quibble with this story, a romantic historical along the lines of Mary Stewart or Barbara Michaels. Otherwise, it is tightly written and atmospheric. A good first novel for Susanna Kearsley, whose follow up books have been better and better. My personal favourite: The Shadowy Horses. Ghosts, archaeology and Scotsmen. What more can one ask?

The Little Country

I've always been fond of books about tiny people; The Borrowers or The Littles series were favourites as a child. Charles DeLint's fantasy novel The Little Country has partly to do with such creatures - he calls them Smalls. This novel is really two parallel novels, with both stories progressing side by side until they merge at the end. It begins with Janey Little, who lives in Cornwall with her grandfather, discovering a magic book in a trunk in the attic. She proceeds to read it - that's the second story - alternating chapters until you can see how they reflect each other. This book is full of magic and legend, is heavily dependent on folk music, and is also flavoured with esoteric conspiracy. All of the chapter titles are names of traditional tunes, except for a couple of recent compositions. (Charles DeLint and his wife are both folk musicians, who I was once able to watch do a reading; he read from his newest, and then they performed for a while. Amazing.)
I enjoyed this read, and it was a quick one, lots of action to keep you moving forward. There were a couple of false notes for me; the fantastical world within the magic book has a feel of a classic children's story(witches, magic, Smalls), but in the next chapter, in Janey Little's world, there suddenly appears sex, drugs and murder. A bit startling. I got a bit muddled with circular logic near the end; the magic in the book means each reader reads a unique story, which works until Janey's "story" seems to become an alternate reality in the last few pages. Is she reading the story or is it reading her? Enter the funhouse. A small quibble though; overall it was a wonderfully creative entertainment. I've always felt I should be reading more of Charles DeLint, a talented and well respected Canadian fantasy writer who I certainly know a lot about, though I don't know enough of his work first hand. This was a good one to pick up - and, it has music notation for some of his tunes in the back! Who can resist?