A Jest of God (Margaret Laurence)

"I do not know how many bones need be broken before I can walk. And I do not know, either, how many need not have been broken at all."

I've had A Jest of God on my bookshelf for almost three years, but until today I had never read it. It's a relatively short novel of about two-hundred pages, but its emotional depth is profound. Rachel Cameron is an elementary school teacher in her mid thirties who is single and still living with her ailing mother in the apartment (above a funeral home) that she grew up in. 

Rachel suffers from anxiety, insecurity and what can only be described as low self-esteem. She constantly apologizes to others and to herself for everything she says and for every action. Even as she has sex for the first time, she's saying "I'm sorry."  She is afraid of people--of doing the wrong things when she interacts with people. 

Early on in the novel, Rachel speaks with the principal at her school, and I was struck by these lines: "I know I must not stand up now, not until he's gone. I am exceptionally tall for a woman and Willard is shorter than I." 

Her insecurity over her height immediately drew me to her and allowed me to like her. I empathized with Rachel through every awkward moment she experienced talking to her co-workers, feeling trapped and claustrophobic in a crowded church, and her inability to relax while making love to the first man that had entered her life in years. 

A Jest of God is, in many ways, a painful novel to read, but the ending was rewarding. As G.D Killam writes in the introduction to my New Canadian Library Edition, "Margaret Laurence's fiction is about . . . the individual coming to terms with his own past and himself, accepting his limitations and going on from there, however terrified he may be." Rachel is able to, in the end,  face her own past and limitations, and begin to overcome them and move on with her life.

I look forward to reading more of Margaret Laurence's work.

Return of the Sphinx (Hugh MacLennan)

Today I spent most of my afternoon reading Hugh MacLennan's Return of the Sphinx.  Originally published in 1967, this novel approaches the French-Canadian independence/separatist movement from a reactionary and nationalist perspective. The movement, as the novel's title alludes to, is portrayed as a sphinx. "In the old Greek legend," says the plot synopsis on the back cover, "the Sphinx made the cities sick, tore families asunder, and set sons against fathers and daughters against mothers." For MacLennan, evidently, this is effect that the political atmosphere in Quebec had in the 1960s. In Return of the Sphinx politics literally tear the Ainslie family apart.

Through his older, wiser character Alan Ainslie, MacLennan does his best to tear down and discredit the legitimacy of the French-Canadian subjugated and separatist perspective. He condemns the separatist movement and the generation of the 1960s as being the immoral product of a break down in morals and education. He likens it to a kind of insanity in which people have become victims of their own thinking and narrow perspectives. MacLennan portrays Alan Ainslie's son, Daniel, as a lost and manipulated victim who needs to be saved from his insane and misguided perceptions of the world which are leading him towards terrorism. For MacLennan, as portrayed through Alan, the only correct way to view separatism seems to be from a nationalist perspective.

As with many of his novels, MacLennan also draws on the First and Second World Wars, using them to explain why his older characters are wiser, and why they are disenchanted with radical political ideologies. For Alan Ainslie, the Quebec independence movement is nothing more than  a continuation of the conflicts, civil wars, and disorder that have always been occurring.

While I enjoyed this novel, I found MacLennan's condemnation of the separatist movement problematic. While violence was not, and will not ever be the answer, the separatist movement did and does have legitimacy and should not be discounted as the product of insanity or the misguided victims of radical political ideologies.

Overall, though, Return of the Sphinx is worth the read. Regardless of MacLennan's political perspective, the novel is a beautiful and fascinating portrayal of 1960s Canada.

The Watch that Ends the Night (Hugh MacLennan)

First published in 1958, this Hugh MacLennan novel is set in Montreal primarily in the 1930s and 1950s. Written while MacLennan's wife Dorthy suffered from a fatal illness, The Watch that Ends the Night is a novel about continuing to live while waiting for death. As Jerome, a doctor and veteran of multiple wars puts it near the close of the novel, Catherine--who has had a fatal heart condition since birth-- is living her death. George, Catherine's second husband, and the narrator, describes his marriage with Catherine as beginning in the early evening of her life. Quite literally, George and Catherine are on a death watch.

Like many of MacLennan's novels, The Watch that Ends the Night is also about coming to terms with the First and Second World Wars. More than once MacLennan mentions Hemingway. For MacLennan, his characters as he portrays them during the 1930s--as products of the First World War and the Depression--are his lost generation. Jerome, Catherine's first husband who turns up at the start of the novel after having been thought dead for a decade, is the most symbolic figure of this generation. Jerome, after enduring the horrors of the First World War, was swept up in a political ideology and climate which, combined with his need to find a new "god" caused him to abandon his wife and daughter. 

Also hanging over this novel is the threat of nuclear war. The Watch that Ends the Night is more overtly political than some of MacLennan's other novels. George, who is a radio personality for the CBC, has come to the conclusion that events cannot be controlled or understood, and even when you believe that you can understand them, it doesn't do you any good. George, like many people in the 1950s, is disenchanted. He's very cynical towards any political system that claims to understand everything. "In the thirties we tried to make gods out of the political systems and worship and serve them," he tells the reader (p.334). For George, the cold war environment wields a sword over the heads of everyone which could drop and kill them all at any moment, in the same way that Catherine's bad heart wields a sword over her life and his life. 

Overall, The Watch that Ends the Night is beautiful novel. I won't pretend that the final two chapters didn't nearly bring me to tears because they did. Once again I'm left wishing that everyone would read Hugh MacLennan. 

Fifth Business (Robertson Davies)

Fifth Business is the first novel in Robertson Davies' Deptford Trilogy, but it can easily be read as a stand alone. I first came across Fifth Business in one of my high school English classes. I admit, at the time, I didn't really like the book, and I didn't understand it. I recall that it's treatment of religion made me a little uncomfortable. 

Having now re-read this book a number of years later, I understand it and I enjoyed it in a way I didn't before. As the novel's introduction notes, Fifth Business is "a novel about moral responsibility."  Davies wanted to explore the question of to what extent a person should be held accountable for the outcome of their actions. The catalyst of the novel is a snowball with a stone in the middle thrown by Percy Boyd Staunton at ten-year old Dunstan Ramsay, which misses him and hits a pregnant Mrs. Dempster in the head. After she gives birth prematurely and becomes "simple-minded," Dunstan feels partly responsible, but Boyd chooses to try and forget that the event ever occurred. An event which occurred by chance sends the two boys down two very different paths which culminate in an ending that appears very much like fate. What roles chance and fate ultimately play in this novel, I'll leave you to decide for yourself. I'm not sure I know yet myself. 

It's not the initial question of moral responsibility that intrigues me so much, as Davies' treatment of religion and myth. One of my favourite passages is, I would say, also one of the most thought provoking passages in the whole novel: "religion and Arabian Nights were true in the same way. (Later I was able to say that they were both psychologically rather than literally true, and that psychological truth was really as important in its own way as historical verification"(p.64). The narrator, Dunstan Ramsay, seems to see religion, myth and history as--in a way-- one in the same. The meaning we see in history, in religion, in our personal lives and in our interactions with others are only what we make them to be, or need them to be. However, we cannot always control meaning or control our interpretations of events. 

I would highly recommend this classic work of Canadian literature to anyone who hasn't yet read it. The Penguin Modern Classics edition if lovely and fairly inexpensive.  Plus, Fifth Business is a good introductory work for any any reader looking to explore classic Canadian literature. 

The Precipice (Hugh MacLennan)

If you've never read a Hugh MacLennan book, please do so now. Go out and buy this book or Two Solitudes, or Barometer Rising, or any of his novels. Even if you've never heard of MacLennan until now, don't put it off any longer. Today it occurred to me, as I closed the back cover of The Precipice, his third novel, that Hugh MacLennan is, without a doubt, my favourite author. 

The Precipice is a love story set during the Second World War. Lucy is Canadian from small-town Ontario, a setting that I am very familiar with as I've spent my entire life gazing out over Ontario cornfields and forests, and the Great Lakes are the closet I've ever come to the ocean. Steven enters Lucy's life when he, an American, comes to oversee bureaucratic changes to a porcelain bathroom fixture manufacturer that has been bought out by an American company. Lucy, who lives alone with her two sisters, soon finds herself falling in love with Steven. The novel follows her through the wartime years of her marriage. 

While the plot of this novel sounds like that of countless other novels of the era,  it's not. It is a novel about rejecting Canada and then returning. It's about the ups and downs of making a marriage last and about the differences between the two countries on either side of the 49 parallel. It's about coming to terms with the war, and with progress (which is portrayed as an American fixation), which has come to, as the novel illustrates, a precipice. 

One of the most poignant passages in this novel appears near the end. "Each day for years," writes MacLennan, "they measured out the distance they'd advanced.They were trained to believe there was nothing any of them had to do but keep on travelling in the same way. And then suddenly they were brought up short at the edge of a precipice which hadn't been marked on the map. There they were with all their vehicles and equipment, jostling and piling up on the front rank. For of course the ones behind didn't know the precipice was there and couldn't understand why the one's up front had stopped advancing. The pressure from behind kept increasing on the front ranks and they were all shouting so loudly nobody could hear anything"(336). This criticism of progress seems to be a theme of more than one of MacLennan's novels. In this novel, the theme is key to understanding everything. 

Although Elspeth Cameron, in the introduction to my edition, dishes out much criticism against this novel, charging that MacLennan "fumbles awkwardly and inconsistently to make sense of the human condition," and  MacLennan himself had his doubts about the quality of this novel, I love it. 

Voices in Time (Hugh MacLeenan)

First of all, I really love this edition of Voices in Time. I'm glad that I was able to order not only this book, but two more of Hugh MacLennan's novels in these editions. Secondly, I loved the book.

Based on the reviews that I've read, and on the Introduction to this edition, Voices in Time is considered, by many, as MacLennan's worst novel. At the time of its publication in 1980, it was not well received.

As Micheal Gnarowski writes in the Introduction, "a major shift was taking place in Canadian writing and Voices in Time would be its victim in public and critical perception. No longer were conflicts of ideology, the growing pains of nationhood, or the tensions between founding races and founding cultures of prime importance or concern" (xxx).

If Voices in Time had been published ten years earlier, then perhaps the novel could have been a success.  I  consider it a modernist work published too long after Canadian modernist literature had faded in popularity. 

Voices in Time is a novel about history, and about trying to make sense of not only the First and Second World Wars, but also the October Crisis of 1970. It is also a novel about the uncertainty of the future, the dangers of an overly bureaucratic state, as well as the dangers of disorder. MacLennan presents a binary of order and disorder within the state, which he never reconciles. Perhaps this is partly why I find the novel so compelling. He leaves the reader to decide which ideology is the correct one. 

Set in Canada in 2030, the novel opens with John WellFleet, one of the last remaining people to remember what life and civilization was like before the Great Fear, the term used to describe the destruction of civilization and of all the major cities by bombs. History has been suppressed in order to protect the people and ensure order, but John is forced to explore his past and the past of his family members when a young man uncovers some metal boxes with papers and videos tapes from the wreckage of an old apartment building. As John reconstructs the past, he shares with the reader the stories of Conrad Dehmel, a German during the Second World War, and Timothy, a TV host in 1970 during the October Crisis. 

Although the futuristic setting is not typical of Canadian literature, or of Hugh MacLennan's other works, Voices in Time is a masterpiece. It moved me almost as much as his most famous novel Two Solitudes did the first time I read it. The prose, like in all of MacLennan's writing, is beautiful. It spoke to me. I found myself underlining phrases here and there that I felt embodied truths and questions I have about today's world. Voices in Time embodies the uncertainties of yesterday, but also the uncertainties of today. It's also a tragic love story, which makes it doubly hard hitting. 

Value Village Book Finds

A new Value Village second hand shop went in not far from my home about a month ago, so I rode the bus out today and browsed their book section. I found seven books, including an Everyman's Library and few vintage New Canadian Library paperbacks.

My favourite find today was this expo67 guide book. It only cost me $1.50. I've been fascinated with the Montreal 1967 World Exposition since I was 15. I'm happy to be able to add it to my collection of expo67 and Canadian centennial memorabilia. 

I found two New Canadian Library editions. I already own Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches if a Little Town in another edition, but since I collect these vintage NCL editions, I was pleased to pick it up.  

I also found an NCL edition of Anna Brownell Jameson's Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, a work which I was introduced to while taking a class in early Canadian literature last summer. 

Additionally, I picked up the Coles Notes for Hugh MacLennan's Two Solitudes, a Canadian classic which I've loved since high school. I don't really need the Coles Notes, but they're a neat collectors item for my Canadian Lit. collection. 

I was pleased to come across A Military History of Canada by Desmond Morton, a book which I've heard good things about. The synopsis indicates that it questions that idea of Canada as a peacekeeping nation. With our current involvements in the war against ISIS and in the Ukraine, I think this is a very timely book for me to read. 

Last of all, I picked up this 1950 Everyman's Library edition of Peer Gynt by Isben. 

Pierre Vallières' "White Niggers of America"

While the title of Pierre Vallières' book--part memoir and part political treaties--is  quite obviously offensive today, at the time of its publication in 1968 Vallières meant to illustrate what he saw as a striking parallel between the experience of the Québécois and African Americans. Whether or not his parallel goes too far is up to the reader to decide. While I understand Vallières point, personally, I think his comparison takes things a little bit too far. 

Pierre Vallières, a Québécois journalist, writer and intellectual, was arrested by American police on the request of the Canadian government while picketing outside the United Nations in New York in 1966. While awaiting deportation to Canada to face what he described as trumped-up murder charge related to his involvement with the FLQ, Vallières hastily penned this book. After serving as his own defense in court, he was sentenced to life in prison. Vallières considered himself a political prisoner, and criticized the court for convicting him of murder based on his political activities and opinions. 

In his book, Vallières explains that French-Canadians were--in many cases--forcibly brought over to Canada by the French government, where they were mistreated by first the ruling class, then the Church, and the Anglo-Canadians and Americans. He chronicles how French-Canadians were paid less, denied economic opportunities and treated as a source of cheap labour-- treated like "slaves." 

Vallières draws on his own childhood growing up in the slums of Montreal in the 1940s and 50s with no running water, no sewage system, and poor educational opportunities. Driven by the desire to escape a meaningless and oppressive life in which he could only ever hope to be satisfied with "half a loaf," he pursued his education and focused on his writing, while trying to reconcile himself with the Church and with his own nation--Quebec. 

Vallières concluded that the only answer for Quebec was a Marxist one. The only path which would allow the Québécois to be free was, in Vallières' view, a path of "radical changes in the relations of production" which could only happen through revolution. By necessity, the revolution would need to be a violent one, and would need to be organized; it would not simply happen on its own. 

For Pierre Vallières the FLQ was "the armed avant-garde of the exploited classes of Quebec." He saw Quebec as one piece or front of a global revolutionary movement. Quebec was, to use his words, the avenue through which he had chosen "to pursue the struggle against imperialism."  

As a piece of Canadian political history, this book is a gem. Not only does it shed light on one of the many perspectives which drove the separatist movement after the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s, but it also provides a unique look at the FLQ and at the application of Marxist theory in the Canadian political sphere. 

Reading Again

Over the past month I haven't had a whole lot of time to read or to write about anything not related to my classes. Now that I've handed in my last final paper and written most of my exams, I can finally dig into the pile of books I've been anxiously anticipating and hopefully post on here more frequently.

I started this blog almost exactly two years ago at the end of my first year of university. I wanted to make sure that I was absorbing what I read and thinking about it as well. Two years later, that's still what I want to do. The major difference between two years ago and now--apart from my ever evolving taste in reading material--is that now, unlike then, someone occasionally reads my posts.

To kick off my return to leisure reading, I thought I'd share a couple of the books I've bought over the past two or three months. Even when I'm not reading, I'm buying.

To start, I'll share my most recent buy, The Battle of London: Trudeau, Thatcher, and the Fight for Canada's Constitution by Frederic Bastien. When I pre-ordered the new Dean Brody CD that comes out April 21st (go check out his music!) I threw this in to get free shipping. Canadian Constitutional law and history have fascinated me for a long time, but until recently my reading and exploration have been fragmented. 

Next, I have Fifth Business by Robertson Davies. This was mandatory reading in my grade 12 English class back in high school. I hated it at the time, but it's been a few years and for whatever reason it keeps coming back to me. I will always be grateful to my high school English teachers for introducing me to Canadian Lit. I think it's time for a re-read. I couldn't resist the Penguin Modern Classics edition. 

Finally, I picked up Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, an author who has quickly become one of my favourites. It should be a fascinating and perhaps challenging read as there don't appear to be any chapter or even paragraph breaks anywhere within the text.