Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master’s Son (Random House, 2012)
Johnson explores the horrors of life in North Korea, from a prison colony to the internal operations of the security services. Employing the tools of magic realism – perhaps the only tools that could possibly capture the insanity of the world he reveals – Johnson creates a masterpiece that, despite its grim storyline is nonetheless a paean to courage and sacrifice.
Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary (McClelland & Stewart, 2012).
I usually like Tóibín’s work, but was disappointed by this short novel. In my edition, it weighs in at 104 pages, but felt like hard work to slog through. Imagining Jesus’s mother as a sad, angry and guilt-ridden elderly woman, Tóibín tries to humanize her and to undermine the myths that grew around the Galilean […]
Philip Roth, Indignation (Viking Canada, 2008)
Lesser Roth is still Roth: vital, ribald, deeply human. Without the profound insight of the Zuckerman novels, Indignation is still a bildungsroman of depth and charm.
Lisa Moore, Caught (Anansi, 2013)
Moore keeps being considered for major prizes, but remains the bridesmaid, so to speak. I am not sure why, as her narratives are strong and her writing is exuberant yet remarkably precise and filled with powerful images. Caught is the story of David Slaney, an attractive young convicted drug trafficker who escapes from prison determined […]
W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Vintage Canada, 2001)
A world masterpiece, in my view. Sebald was a German academic who spent most of his career in the United Kingdom, where he grew tired of the rigidities of scholarly writing and turned himself into one of the most innovative “creative” writers in the English language. Austerlitz contains strong narrative flow but is also part […]
John Banville, Ancient Light (Viking, 2012)
Banville is one of my favourite contemporary novelists. He is heir to the great Irish tradition of good storytelling and lush language. But to my mind he displays a discipline that precludes sentimentality. This story is beautiful, but shocking: a young boy falls in love with the mother of his best friend and causes a […]
John Irving, In One Person (Simon & Schuster, 2012)
A brilliant novel that explores the complexities of desire and sexual identity. The protagonist, William Abbott, grows from a naïve but unusual and courageous Vermont boy to a somewhat jaded New Yorker. His sexuality is fluid, but so is that of many people he encounters in a rich life. The author and the narrator are […]
Kim Thúy, Ru (Vintage Canada, 2012)
Winner of last year’s Governor-General’s award for fiction, Ru is a lyrical account of a young woman’s journey from the elite of South Vietnam to boat person to immigrant in the cold of Quebec’s Eastern Townships. Variously gentle, sensual and brutal, the story is told in short chapters that are close to blank verse, such […]
Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (Random House Canada, 2011)
Barnes is a truly great writer, but I do not think that this slim volume deserved the Man Booker Prize. Characteristic of Barnes is the precise sketching of scene and character, the sense of wistfulness that accompanies all attempts to recreate (or at least to unearth) the past. The central character, Tony, digs deep into […]
Alice Munro, Dear Life (McClelland & Stewart Doubleday Canada, 2012)
I think that Munro is, quite simply, the best writer that Canada has yet produced. Her prose is tight but fluid, and her characters rich and complex within the narrative discipline required of the short story form. Despite the extraordinary resilience of her mostly female protagonists, there is always something brittle and fragile on the […]
Vikram Seth, From Heaven Lake (Vintage Departures, 1987)
Seth is best known as the author of the sprawling novel of Indian family life, A Suitable Boy, which I loved despite its messiness. From Heaven Lake is an entirely different beast, a taut travelogue of a hitchhiking journey through China in the early 1980s. Seth was a graduate student in China, and near the […]
Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince (Penguin, 1973)
Purely by accident I have recently read three books published in 1973, two by Murdoch (she was quite prolific) and one by Gordimer (see entries for November 2012). All three novels are strongly shaped by the politics of their time, in Murdoch’s case the politics of gender relations, and in Gordimer’s the politics of African […]
Meaghan Delahunt, In the Blue House (Bloomsbury, 2001)
This book is magical, and I found it gripping. The now-standard feminist insight that “the personal is political” is given voice in this beautiful work. Ranging from the cold Kremlin bedroom of a brutal Stalin to the warm courtyard of Frieda Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s Blue House in Mexico, the spaces of this novel are […]
Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Flanders Panel (HarperCollins, 1994)
I recently discovered this Spanish writer of devilishly clever literary mysteries. The characters are well-drawn, and the mystery revolves around a Flemish painting and the intricacies of chess. Wonderfully paced, and urgently compelling, this is a great read on a long plane ride, or at the cabin.
Gao Xingjiang, Soul Mountain (Harper Perennial, 2004)
Gao was the first Chinese author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, although he did so from exile in France. After the publication of a work dealing in part with the massacre at Tiananmen Square, all his writings were banned in China. In awarding him the Nobel, the Committee referred to his “œuvre of […]
Iris Murdoch, The Bell (Vintage, 1999; first published in 1973)
I first began to read Murdoch when I was studying in England in the 1980s and was drawn to her complex characters; no-one is ever good or bad, everyone is an amalgam. The Bell is no exception, for here we have a religious community of deeply confused people struggling to find a way to live […]
Tim Winton, Dirt Music ( Scribner, 2001)
I discovered this book browsing in a New York bookstore. Winton is a youngish Australian whose novels have twice been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. Dirt Music is the story of a couple of outcasts who find each other, lose each other, and against pretty remarkable odds, connect again. I have rarely read any […]
David Mitchell, Black Swan Green (Vintage Canada, 2007)
Mitchell is probably best known for Cloud Atlas, now, as they say, “a major motion picture.” I thought that The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) was fabulous. Mitchell’s diversity of subject matter and style is remarkable. In Black Swan Green he writes in the voice of thirteen-year-old Jason Tyler, who lives in a […]
Nadine Gordimer, A Guest of Honour (Penguin, 1973)
Gordimer’s writing is simply brilliant, but her stories always leave me with a profound sense of sadness. Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1991, Gordimer is closely associated with the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. But she is no naïve optimist! A Guest of Honour is the story of a colonial-era British civil servant, Colonel […]
Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan (Penguin Canada, 2009)
Part of a series on “extraordinary Canadians,” I was drawn to this brief biography because it coincided with the 100th anniversary of McLuhan’s birth, and because I thought it a stroke of genius to ask Coupland to write on McLuhan. The result is a fresh, insightful and at times psychedelic exploration of the McLuhan era. […]