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 […]