The Cutting Room: Louise Welsh

In Louise Welsh’s debut novel, The Cutting Room, Rilke, an auctioneer, is an unlikely detective as he combs the streets of the underworld in which the dirty, the dark and the unseen are the norm.

While the narrator’s proclivities keep him hovering both above and below the lines of the law, his ethos is strong. We – both the audience and Rilke – discover his boundaries when he finds evidence of a gruesome crime that propels him through the underground in search of its origins.

We trudge along the streets of Glasgow, into alleys and through velvet curtains to backrooms filled with stacks of pornography. We find that the world of antiques and dealers offers a portal to another, hidden sphere in which objects of sexual fantasy throughout history have secretly collected.

Some backstories develop through Rilke’s conversations, and, for the most part, this is satisfying; however, the main character’s own history is missing. We have the impression – and, indeed, another character implies – that Rilke’s need to solve this mystery is personally motivated but the details are absent. The pace of the novel lags as these backstories develop but this seems insignificant in the overall impact of the work itself.

Secondary characters consistently reflect an awareness of the city’s dual nature and, unsurprisingly, each bears some connection to the world of crime. Imagery and actions of the underground come to the fore in vivid detail. We are chillingly reminded that crime in the world of the criminal often meets swift, brutal justice and that people are reduced to expendable resources.

Most prominently, the dialogue is comfortable: it is that of the redeemer, the gossip and the secular sinner; it illustrates the carnivalesque and the profound, the ugly and the beautiful, the criminal and the lawful, in equal measure. It lulls us into each conversation with an immediate sense of intimacy. To great effect, Welsh uses references to popular culture, poetry and stunning figurative language as she pulls us into the world of pubs, auction houses, hospitals and dimly-lit, side-street stores.

We stare unflinchingly at the unsavoury details conjured through language that is both clear and poetic, but it is a novel of immense compassion. In fact, its spiritual tone is captured in Rilke’s own words: “… there are some bad individuals, but most people do their best to be good and everybody slips up sometimes.”

In our narrator we find a credible male voice and his thoughts, appetites and character strike us with force and precision. Through him, we smell garbage and litter in alleyways and we see blood and corpses under dark, grey skies but we also hear fear in the voices of those compelled to dwell here and sense the tragedy of those who, now immobile, would rather be elsewhere.

In the end, The Cutting Room is not merely a work of crime fiction; it is also a poignant essay concerning decisions and events that push us beyond our own expectations and the power of self-acceptance.

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
First Canadian Edition
Trade Paper, 294 pp

Published September 10, 2006
www.bookfetish.org

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Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close: Jonathan Safran Foer

In Jonathan Safran Foer’s second novel, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, we find a very credible and intelligent narrator in nine-year-old Oskar Schell. We discover him—inquisitive and resourceful-- in his family’s home in New York City.

Though we are not privy to the details of the tragedy that he has suffered during September 11, 2001, we begin to see the immediate post-cataclysmic world from Oskar’s perspective. It’s a reality filled with dangerous gaping spaces left by generations, politics, histories and personal mysteries.

We learn of unspeakable realities and the need to talk about them, of trauma and coping mechanisms and the parodoxical. The author captures the discomfort felt by many who desperately needed to be around family and yet who unexpectedly embraced strangers instead. If tragedy visits questions upon us, then the answers force us to separate, at least temporarily, in order to discover how our common pain is accommodated by our individual plight.

In this light, then, we expect a novel of this emotional density to be sparse in levity but Foer manages quite a feat: he injects intense, laugh-out-loud humour right from the start and it seems to promise a smooth story.

Though its highs are high and its lows low, it isn’t, unfortunately, a rolling narrative terrain. The flow is interrupted unpredictably by other narrators who develop backstories. As impressively as the novel pivots on single events from perspective to perspective, it also jags because the narrative shifts are choppy. They hinder pace and render the unfolding of the main story altogether too sluggish.

The backstories illustrate another historical tragedy. By unflinching juxtaposition, the writer presents the horror of two particular events in vivid detail and we are spared no information that would make us uncomfortable. We are reminded that tragedy freezes us in time, creating tableaux that are released only when we have the information that we need to be able to move. Life becomes a matter of standing still, coping, and opportunities a matter of avoidance. The shadows cast by other lives dart around us, voices become invasive notes that threaten to remove hope and breathing is measured equally with tears and trepidation.

Nevertheless, reading fiction should not be labour-intensive. Questions about whether or not they belong in a novel targeted to a mature readership aside, the presence of photographs forces a continual disengagement of the reader from the text. When an author reminds us that we’re reading, he immediately places us at a distance from the imagined world, making the suspension of disbelief a matter of strife.

It is difficult to understand how a literary novel’s graphics could enhance an understanding of the work’s substance. If Mr. Foer’s illustration of the novel creates within us a sense of the alienation felt by someone who did not directly experience loss as a result of the attacks, then he succeeds. The chasm between those experiencing 9/11 and those watching the events unfold on television is unbridgeable. In the novel, we are still watching and painfully aware of this fact.

If the use of photographs, moreover, demonstrates the real-life understanding that even in our common experiences, we are separated by personal knowledge of individual circumstance, then the author, again, succeeds.

If, however, the decision represents Mr. Foer’s concern that we remember that the events of 9/11 were not imagined, it isn’t necessary and the illustrations render the flow choppy. Besides, through the use of traditional devices—the language of tragedy and a seemingly innate grasp of the machinations of a child’s mind—he keeps the horrors of that day to the fore.

In the end, it is a novel complicated by a sense that the ineffable needs to be recorded and this, too, is Jonathan Safran Foer’s success.

Trade Paper
356 pages
Mariner Books (2006)
ISBN: 0-618-71165-1

Published July 15, 2006
www.bookfetish.org

Notes On A Reading Experience


Last night, I introduced Charlie Parker Played Be Bop to both my child and my husband. It's one hip book. (I even provided a preamble on Thelonious Monk.)

The story was well received last night and there were requests for an encore or two.

From Horn Book:

"Raschka has created a memorable tribute to jazz great Charlie Parker in
this rhymic, syncopated, compelling, funny celebration of a man and a musical
form. The brief text sings and swings and skips along, practically of its own
volition, while the pictures add humor and just the right amount of jazziness to
the mix. One of the most innovative picture books of recent times."

It stood neglected on our shelves for a very long time. What a shame! Its time had come, I suppose.

My little girl imitated every sound that she heard and asked me to repeat some phrases.

To get a sense of the story, go here. But having the book in hand, turning pages, and returning to favourite sounds is an experience I wouldn't want to miss.

Madonna, My Confessions

I have to admit that I didn't think I'd ever get around to reading The English Roses by Madonna. Something about the idea repelled me: did I believe, perhaps, that this most recent self-invention of the popstar could not be much more impressive to me than her non-literary pursuits? I couldn't tell you.

I will say that I was nicely surprised. The narrative style is engrossing, the narrator engaging and the messages were, if not original, effective. (After all, how many original messages in children's literature are available to the writer?)

What impressed me was a motif about the tendency to form cliques. Madonna doesn't sugarcoat the fact that young girls can be mean; what she offers is the message that girls, if encouraged to empathize, are capable of stepping on firmer ground from which to form their beliefs. The clique doesn't disappear--because that would be an unrealistic expectation in the reader--it grows, it matures.

I love the illustrations by Jeffrey Fulvimari whose name, I note, tends to disappear in the Madonna glare. The colours are bright, feminine-looking in combination and characteristic of youthful tastes. There is also an elegance found not only in the textures (metallic adornment, striped and geometric furnishings) but also in both the figures and features of the characters: large eyes, larger-but-well-defined faces).

I will read this to my little girl when she's older (between 5 and 8 years of age). At that point, she may even read it herself.

I Stole A Book

I honestly don't know how I became a reader. In Grade One, teachers told my mother that I read many grades above my expected reading level, that I should advance a grade, etc., but she wasn't interested. I didn't own a book until I was twelve years old!

After I'd outgrown Little Golden Books--which she occasionally could be convinced to buy me at the local grocery store--my mother seemed to have lost interest in supplying me with reading material (or toys, come to think of it). So, when I read, it was possible because of the school library.

At any rate, at the age of twelve, my family and I were living in a high-rise apartment building on the bad side of town. I didn't have much supervision when my mother was working and I often visited my maternal grandmother who lived many floors above us. Stepping into her home really seemed like stepping into another world. Sometimes, I simply escaped to her apartment without permission.

She was an academic: she had received a few undergraduate degrees and a Master's before marrying my grandfather. Considering my mother's lack of education and disinclination towards reading, it was hard to believe that these two women were even related much less mother and daughter.

She had books: mostly hardcover, mostly vintage or antique. Often, I would kneel on the floor while browsing her bookshelves. She was not a woman of excess by any means but she owned many works of nonfiction and poetry.

I'll probably never know why I did it. I can only guess that, when I held a small, leather-bound collection of Wordsworth poetry, I felt as if my world was smaller than it had to be. I think I felt cheated. I think that this little book, in my hands, reminded me that life with my mother wasn't going to last forever, that there was something to which I might look forward.

I still have the book. That day, as I, surreptitiously, closed my grandmother's door behind me, two aspects of my life changed: there would be distance now between my grandmother and myself because she would detect my thievery and because I would deny it; importantly, I now owned a book.

I read it often, allowing my mind to wander around odes and verse about nature and love:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze

Of all the books that I own, it is in the best condition. Now, I own thousands of books (acquired legitimately) and my child's personal library contains many hundreds. I collect and I read or I accumulate and I read; sometimes it's both. I still borrow from the library, too, on a regular basis.

So, I may not know exactly how it is that I became one but I think that I can pinpoint the very moment at which I knew that I was, in fact, a reader.

Is It Just Me?

This is going to sound like a small urban legend of sorts but I know both people involved. I'll change names for the sake of privacy.

Jane lent Sally a hardcover Diana Gabaldon book. Sally took a long time to read it (which doesn't surprise me and shouldn't have surprised Jane). When Jane received the book back, there was a tiny tear (apparently, less than one cm) at the top of the dustjacket. Sally hadn't even noticed it.

Jane, it transpired through her boyfriend, was very upset about the condition of her book and expected it to be replaced. Sally knew that, in order to preserve the friendship, she would have to buy another copy for Jane.

Wow. How many people are this, er, fussy about the condition of their books?

For one thing, I don't EVER lend books (shame on me) and I don't borrow anymore, either. My impatience would have to weigh more heavily than my cheapness in order for me to buy a hardcover. If I DO read a hardcover, I always remove the dustjacket until I'm finished.

If someone is THAT concerned about the condition of her books, I should think she wouldn't want to lend them to others.

I don't know if Sally actually did replace the book and I don't know the status of the friendship but this situation strikes me as, well, odd.

Do others consider Jane's reaction to be overly much?

A Good Find, A Provocative Title

One of my favourite sources of buyable books is the library. At the local branch today, I found a copy of The Professor and The Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary for $1.00 (Cdn).

It's in excellent condition since it was read, obviously, by someone who is careful enough to avoid creasing the binding. That people can do this has always perplexed me. I mean, doesn't the process of losing yourself in a book mean that you must throw yourself into the relationship, come what may?

Author: Simon Winchester
Genre: History
Publisher: English Harper Collins Canada (2005)
Format: Softcover, 242 pp
ISBN: 0060839783