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
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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
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My Self

Just bought: Junk Mail (2006) by Will Self (his literary journalism, bought last week) and Edmonds's translation of War and Peace. This afternoon I had occasion to read the first article of Junk Mail. Typical, hot Will Self. In this piece, he's hanging out with drug dealers and describing the subculture. Deceptively casual, reminds me of banter.

It's 1991 all over again for me when I connect with him. The Quantity Theory of Insanity Together With Five Supporting Propositions, see "The North London Book Of The Dead" and "The Quantity Theory of Insanity." Actually, read it. Doris Lessing did:

Very funny and very good, with that unmistakable sign of the genuine comic writer: absurdity unfurls logically from absurdity, but always as a mirror of what we are living in- and wish we didn't. (Back cover blurb.)

I love Dr. Jules Smith's description:

His narrative voice, whether in short stories or lengthy novels, is relentlessly surreal-comic, smart and vehement... (British Council Arts, Biography: Will Self)

Camilla Gibb's Sweetness In the Belly

Camilla Gibb’s most recent novel, Sweetness In The Belly, tells the story of Lilly. We discover her in London, England, but we quickly learn that her sense of self develops in Africa.

It is on this continent that she absorbs the culture and the religion of those around her in earnest—at first because she must and then because it becomes her own—and the reader falls headlong into her powerful tale.

The story develops on two continents. As it gently rocks back and forth between Ethiopia and London, we revisit eras marked by the consequences of corruption and the different faces of human pain. In the midst of poverty and alienation in Ethiopia, Lilly discovers beauty. In the midst of political tumult and upheaval in general, she discovers personal passion. We eventually learn the circumstances and details of her relationships.

It is a moving tale of romance. It is also a probing and profound exploration of the concept of personal identity. Whether derived from religious instruction, the product of a formal education or a matter of cultural identity (trying to gain acceptance or trying to escape), there are any number of ways through which we may—actively or passively--define ourselves.

The story isn’t dry. In the tiniest details, we glimpse the sound and the animation and the decay of living and, in this way, the author’s prose captures life: the sounds of sewing machines in the market, the light of a new day in a Muezzin’s call to prayer and the isolation of a sleeping city in the sounds of prowling hyenas. She even manages to convincingly trace an instance of human frailty to its ultimate cause in a long deterministic chain of events.

The author does something difficult with seeming ease: from the political, she extracts the personal; from culture-specific events, she extracts the general in human experience and we are forced to accept this one thing: movement in the world of government and organizations is not isolated to some dry, political arena. Rather, it stirs the individual. The effectiveness with which she conveys this point renders her appropriation of Lilly’s voice—a character with which the author seems to share little in common—beyond question.

Finally, she accomplishes all of this with an enviable sense of pace, language and the breathtaking realization that life can change in a single instant.

Published June 1, 2006
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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.