Category Archives: what I’m reading

Fair warning: the following post includes mild spoilers.

If you haven’t yet read anything by Michael Crummey, you need to correct that ASAP. Not because his books are capital-G, capital-L Great Literature (though they are), but because in not reading his work you are denying yourself a great pleasure. I’d rank him as one of the best prose stylists currently writing, but never does his talented wordsmithing distract from his stable of vibrant, humorous, tragic characters or his superb storytelling. Reading a Michael Crummey novel is a balancing act between wanting to read slowly to savor the prose and race ahead to see what happens next.

And because you can’t swing a dead cat in St. John’s without hitting a great writer, I can also personally attest to the fact that he is one of the nicest people you could ever meet (he didn’t even get upset with me for hitting him with a dead cat).

Sweetland is his fourth novel, and like the three previous, it is about Newfoundland’s fraught relationship with its  history. In River Thieves (2001) he tells the story of the extinction of the Beothuk as seen from the perspective of British naval officer; in The Wreckage (2005), he depicts a romance between a Catholic young man and a Protestant girl, and the intrusion of the Second World War into Newfoundland in the form of the recruitment of its young men and the presence of American military bases. Both novels are solid pieces of storytelling, beautifully written; but it was his third novel Galore (2009) that truly blew me away. Set in the fictional outport of Paradise Deep, it is a multi-generational narrative (I hesitate to use the word “epic,” though it comes close to being appropriate in this case) that tells the story of a community and their struggles: with each other, with their own selves, but especially with this hostile geography to which they have been brought by hope, misfortune, or happenstance. Galore is a magical realist novel whose most obvious influence (or at least precursor) is One Hundred Years of Solitude. Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s landmark novel, Galore is about a small village beyond the fringes of civilization, in which anything can happen and indeed often does. Crummey employs a combination of harsh realism to describe the hardships endured by the community, and a host of legends and folklore from Newfoundland’s past; the result is a narrative that pivots between a painfully tactile sense of reality and outsized events and circumstances.

Sweetland, by contrast, is set in the present day in the midst of what has become the most recent wave of Resettlement. If you wonder why that word deserves a capital R, you need to know that in the aftermath of Newfoundland joining Confederation in 1949, premier Joey Smallwood embarked on a project of modernization. He had been able to sway the province’s opinion to his side on the Confederation issue by making lavish promises to rural Newfoundland about the financial benefits that would accrue by joining Canada. Part of fulfilling those promises entailed resettling huge swaths of outport populations to more central locations, where they would have access to both the promised financial benefits and such infrastructure as roads and electricity, health care, and education. Huge amounts of money were spent in payouts to those being relocated, and in literally uprooting entire villages.

One of the many bewildering images from Resettlement: a house being towed across the water to its new home.

Resettlement remains a painful wound in Newfoundland’s modern history, as it was carried out more or less by fiat and destroyed countless communities with, in many cases, hundreds of years of history.

Today, there is a similar move (this time termed “Relocation,” presumably to avoid the painful connotations of “Resettlement”) as Newfoundland’s economy, largely buoyed by oil revenues, booms; outports, many whose only connection to the rest of the province is by ferry, find their populations shrinking and aging as the young move to St. John’s or farther afield to Alberta. The government is again offering money to those wishing to relocate—and in the process leaving behind villages that will no longer need ferry service or electricity. But with Smallwood’s high-handedness and the resentment it incurred (and still incurs) ever in mind, the deal now is that Relocation can only happen if a community votes unanimously for it.

Which brings us to Sweetland, which is about a fictional island outport called Sweetland and the argument about Relocation. The village is mostly on board, but for one or two holdouts—among whom is Moses Sweetland, a stubborn old bachelor who refuses to sign on even as his few allies fall away and leave him standing alone. He resists the blandishments of his neighbours, which eventually come to comprise threatening notes, vandalism, and a few gruesome messages in the form of mutilated rabbits.

When a certain tragedy befalls the village, however, particularly affecting Moses, he finally agrees to sign the papers. Perhaps predictably, he does not leave with the rest but effectively fakes his own death by setting his boat adrift and hiding until the village has emptied.

The novel’s first half—which is all about Moses’ relationships with his friends and neighbours, and in particular his autistic nephew Jesse—is a wonderfully nuanced and textured depiction of Moses’ life in his village, and dramatizes the political context to great effect. But it is the second half of the novel, when Moses is left alone on the island without power or any means of contacting the outside world, that Crummey’s narrative reaches virtuosic levels. For one thing, it leaves the political argument behind and becomes the story of a man very slowly losing his mind as solitude and winter implacably close in on him. But it is also where the political argument of the first half opens up into symbolic and indeed allegorical dimensions. Left alone with only the ghosts of the past—and his neighbour’s mutt—for company, there is nothing to mediate between the two Sweetlands, the man and the outport with which he shares a name.

The more I reflect on Sweetland, the more I find it functions as a companion piece to Galore. Where the former is a sweeping story in the mold of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Sweetland is a minutely observed story about a single person in a narrow corridor of time. And yet what they have in common is the vivid sense of the mystery of place, the invidious way in which geography conflates with history in ways that are by turns comforting and pernicious. Galore, by its nature as magical realism, romanticizes a certain dimension of Newfoundland history, but it most emphatically does not sentimentalize it. It is romantic in the true sense of the word, in that it depicts a space outside the settled, domesticated world. If not literal wilderness, Paradise Deep is nevertheless as close as one can be to it while still being inhabited: a marginal space that, in the tradition of romance, is also a mythic space home to the embellishments of reality that extreme geographies spawn.

The first half of Sweetland is neither sentimental nor romantic; the romance of Galore does burble up in the second half however, but only in suggestive, fleeting ways, and only at the fringes of Moses’ decaying sanity. His explicit connection to the village, made first by their common nomenclature, develops allegorically as he erodes along with its structures, as he cannibalizes the village for supplies. Seeking toilet paper (which he kicks himself for not having stockpiled), he plunders his neighbour’s collection of Harlequin romances. Among the pulp novels are a handful of “literary” texts the woman’s daughter had attempted to get her to read, one of which has the bookmark at the halfway point. It is a novel about Newfoundland, he sees, and as a means of passing the time decides that he will finish what she had started:

Half an hour later he was ready to throw the bloody thing in the stove. Three afternoons in a row he sat in the day’s last light with the book, feeling like a man sentenced to dragging beach stones up the face of the Mackerel cliffs. He looked at the cover each time he quit reading, flipped it to inspect the back. A quote from a Toronto paper about “authentic Newfoundland.” Whoever wrote the book didn’t know his arse from a dory, Sweetland figured, and had never caught or cleaned a fish in his life. “Jesus fuck,” he whispered.

This comic reaction to a novel about “authentic” Newfoundland (my money is on The Bird Artist) speaks to one of Sweetland’s subtle themes, which is the fallacy of authenticity. Though Sweetland is adamant in his refusal to abandon his home, even in the face of overwhelming opposition and threats, he cannot articulate his reasoning to himself. He offers no speeches, articulated either internally or externally, about history or community roots, about the depredation of traditional Newfoundland, about the need to hold fast to one’s principles in the face of nefarious societal change. He is no sentimentalist, and in the final stages of his life bears little in the way of affection for any of his neighbours (with the exceptions of Jesse and his longtime friend Duke).

So why does he reject Relocation for so long, and after capitulating, go to the extreme of faking his own death in order to stay behind? Crummey leaves that questions unanswered, and it is in the very lack of articulation of Sweetland’s motives that the novel ultimately rests. As mentioned above, it is in part the mystery of history and geography: Sweetland’s home as both a lived reality but also an imaginary space, which functions as a representation of Newfoundland more broadly. The fallacy of authenticity on display in the nameless novel he reads finds a somewhat more symbolic articulation in the final few pages of the novel. Not long after winter starts to set in, Sweetland takes refuge from a snowstorm in a cabin once owned by the thuggish Priddle brothers. In a delirium of near-hypothermia (as well as the alcohol and stale pot he finds stashed there), he annotates a map of Newfoundland tacked to one of the walls. He takes the map with him when he escapes back to the village, but forgets about it until the final pages, when he looks at what he has written:

Noticed the map there, spread across the table’s surface, the paper kinked along the rough creases where it had been folded in his knapsack. Stay Home Year scrawled across the top. Sweetland shook his head at that now, at the long list of fanciful harbours and coves and islands and straits he’d pencilled around the coast. Along the entire length of Newfoundland’s south coast were the words Here Be Monsters with a shaky emoticon happy face drawn beside it. His handwriting, though he couldn’t for the life of him remember settling them there.

In one way, Sweetland is a novel about the impossibility of writing a novel about Newfoundland—or rather, the impossibility of reaching an authentic understanding of what I’m calling the conflation of history and geography and its effects, of the representation of place as being at once a set of lived realities and necessarily imaginary. Moses’ literally ecstatic over-writing of the map, especially with the warning Here Be Monsters, evokes the medieval cartographic imagination and the long tradition of romance in which the spaces beyond the known are invariably filled with the stuff of legend. It also however evokes the geographies of Galore, which articulate the truths of story and myth and the unreality of history.

In the end, Moses Sweetland’s very name provides one of the novel’s central ironies: if his surname explicitly speaks to his apparently absolute connection to place, his first name is a cruel reminder that there is no Promised Land, and that the exodus his people undertake is a movement away from home. If there is an epiphany for Sweetland at all, it is at best an ambivalent one, which occurs as he nearly drowns trying to escape his self-imposed solitude:

This was the sway of things, Sweetland knew. There was fighting the sway of things or improvising some fashion of riding it out. And then there was the sway of things beyond fighting and improvisation. It was almost impossible to know the difference between one and the other.

I didn’t post that much this summer … I had all the best intentions, as exhibited in my folder of unfinished blog posts, some of which barely made it past a sentence or two. All of which speaks to the fact that I had a lot on my mind these past few months, but little in the way of closing. Always be closing! Dammit, now Alec Baldwin will deny me coffee …

I hope that will change in the coming months. I am now eleven days into my very first sabbatical, and while my favourite new pastime has been walking up and down my department hallways and making faces at my colleagues as they teach, I do mean for this to be a productive year. And given that being prolific on this blog tends to reflect being productive in other areas, I mean to be posting a lot more here.

I haven’t done a “What I’m Reading” post in a while … which, again, isn’t for a lack of fragmentary paragraphs in my work-in-progress folder. I read a lot this summer, though much of it was re-reading, as I was doing a directed reading course with one of our doctoral students. And there were some unfortunate reading choices (most notably, the Guillermo del Toro collaboration with Chuck Hogan on The Strain), but I also read some pretty extraordinary books. I’ll give you the highlights here.

Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby and Men Explain Things to Me

This was the summer when I discovered the writing of Rebecca Solnit and fell deeply in love with her gorgeous prose and genre-defying vaguely-autobiographical essays. I had read her without being aware of her for some time, as she is prolific and frequently turned up on online journals and magazines. But it was her now-famous (or notorious, depending on your perspective) essay “Men Explain Things to Me” that stuck the landing for me and made me sit up and take notice whenever I saw her name on a byline.

I was in San Francisco for a few days in June and made the requisite pilgrimage to City Lights bookstore. And because I cannot enter a bookstore without giving them money, but also not wanting to be a cliché and buy something by the Beats, I picked up The Faraway Nearby. Next door to City Lights is the bar Vesuvio, made famous by a list of clientele in the 50s and 60s that reads like a who’s-who of San Francisco arts and letters: Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Neal Cassady, among others … and the pictures crowding the walls show everyone from Dylan Thomas to Bob Dylan dropping in for a drink or three (or, presumably in Dylan Thomas’ case, a dozen). Because I’d been tramping all over the city, I had a pint there and started reading Solnit—which turned out to be serendipitous, as she lives in San Francisco. (Lest I felt like too much of a cliché, reading in a famous literary bar, I was out-cliched by a magnitude by a fellow in hipster glasses and big mutton-chop sideburns sitting in an alcove reading On the Road).

The view from my seat in Vesuvio.

Suffice to say, The Faraway Nearby is one of the most gorgeous collections of personal essays I’ve ever read, moving effortlessly between Solnit’s fraught relationship with her mother and her mother’s descent into dementia, through a dizzying series of meditations on winter, Iceland, adventuring, rafting, and the proper methods of preserving several bushels of apricots she finds herself with. The essays are deeply erudite without being esoteric, personal without being mawkish, and written in prose that I can only envy with the white-hot intensity of a thousand stars.

I then read Men Explain Things to Me, a slim volume of essays on women and violence prefaced by the original essay that inadvertently gave rise to the concept of “mansplaining.” Solnit has expressed ambivalence about having become associated with the term, not because it is not a real thing (and as someone who has occasionally been guilty of it, there was a lot of internal cringing when I first read the essay), but because it is reductive. The essays grouped in this short but incredibly powerful book remind us—forecfully—of the original essay’s main thesis, which is that the phenomenon of men condescendingly explaining things to women (even, or especially, when they’re ignorant on the topic) is reflective of the gendered structures of power in the world today and systemic violence that proceeds from it.

Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment: A Biography

I won’t say much about this book, as I’m slowly working on a blog post talking about it in greater detail. I will say this: it is a bracing and very concise read that manages to make the endless debates in and around the Continental Congresses, and all of the court rulings on the Second Amendment since, not merely not tedious but gripping. It is a persuasive and balanced discussion of the Second Amendment’s origins, interpretations, and evolution, but in some ways, the focus of the book isn’t really the right to bear arms at all: rather, it’s a polemic against constitutional originalism, the judicial philosophy holding that the Constitution must be interpreted in terms of what were the Framers’ original intentions. As it turns out, the Second Amendment (for a variety of reasons) is the perfect departure point for this argument.

As I said, I’ll have more to say about this book at a later time.

Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

As I said in my post of July 5^th, I’ve been rationing the remaining Discworld novels against the unthinkable day when Sir Terry will not be around to write any more. Equal Rites has been sitting on my shelf for a long time, both because of my rationing but also because I don’t care as much for the earlier novels. Equal Rites was the third, after The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic; what’s slightly off-putting about the earliest novels (when you have, like me, initially entered Discworld with the more recent novels) is that everything still feels a little formless—as if the landmarks and characters still await greater definition, like rudely shaped clay. Granny Weatherwax makes her first appearance here, and while she is very identifiably Granny, she is also … not. Or not quite. Nevertheless, the novel is hilariously funny: a baby girl is accidentally chosen by a dying wizard to take his place, precipitating a protracted argument between Granny and the wizards of Unseen University about what defines magic, about what is specific to men and women—or wizards and witches—respectively, and how those definitions are arbitrary.

What I loved about this book, coming at it as I am from the far end of Discworld journeying, is how you can see Sir Terry’s shift from the overt parody of his first two novels (in which he’s just basically taking the piss of fantasy as a genre) to a more thoughtful use of fantasy and its conventions to offer a critique of “real world” social and societal mores—which in the end is what tends to define the Discworld novels overall.

Lev Grossman, The Magician’s Land

Speaking of parodic fantasy that isn’t really parody at all: if you haven’t yet read the first two installments of Grossman’s trilogy about a school of magic and a Narnia-like alternative world, you really must do so. Like, now. The Magician’s Land completes the story begun in The Magicians and carried on in The Magician King, the story of narcissistic and self-absorbed Quentin Coldwater, who is inducted into a secret school of magic called Brakebills at the age of seventeen. As critics have pointed out, it’s like Hogwarts for grownups.

Again, there will be a more in-depth blog post in the future on this book, and the trilogy as a whole. But for now, let me just say: this was about as perfect a conclusion to a fantasy series as has been written.

N.K. Jemisin, The Killing Moon

No, I didn’t read this because it shares a title with an Echo and the Bunnymen song. My broad research project of the moment is all about humanism and fantasy; one of the problems I have right now is one of representation. That is to say: my current list of authors on whom to focus is almost entirely male, and so I have been on the hunt for fantasy written by women that fits the criteria of the novels I want to look at. N.K. Jemisin was a repeated recommendation, and so I started on her Dreamblood trilogy, set in an alternative world modeled vaguely on Ancient Egypt. Reading fantasy that moves outside the medieval European model is wonderful in and of itself, but Jemisin is a very talented writer who renders her world with wonderful tactility and establishes its mythology with an enviable economy of storytelling. The overarching conceit is that in the city-state of Gujaareh, an elite priesthood exist to harvest “dreamblood,” the magic that exists in sleeping minds. Dreamblood is used for healing and other positive ends, but its reaping by the “Gatherers” kills … and so the Gatherers move at night across the rooftops to harvest it from those who have been judged corrupt.

For several reasons, The Killing Moon is not a novel I will be able to use to argue my broader thesis, but the second book of the trilogy (The Shadowed Sun) sits in the pile of my eagerly anticipated reading.

Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop

About three weeks ago I wrote a post about the crisis in Ferguson, Missouri, the rise of police militarization, and The Wire. Largely due to the fact that a friend of mine posted it to Reddit, it received the most hits this blog has ever received, by a magnitude (my average post gets between sixty and seventy hits when it goes up; the most I’d ever had was just shy of three hundred, back when I posted on the whole David Gilmore and guy-guy Lit fiasco; the post on The Wire and Ferguson received twelve hundred, and a comment from David Simon himself. That’s not actually relevant, I just like reminding people of it). While reading the various news items and opinion pieces that ultimately informed the post, I kept hearing about Radley Balko’s book, conveniently just out in trade paperback. So I ordered it.

The book is … terrifying. It exposes in excruciating detail the violence done to the Fourth Amendment—for the rise of SWAT teams in towns with populations as low as fifteen thousand or less has not, ultimately, been about responding to well-armed criminals, but the use of the militarized groups to kick in doors for drug raids. And as the book chronicles, the sheer number of botched raids in which ridiculously armed and armored cops burst into the wrong house, terrorizing the inhabitants and destroying property (and, distressingly, shooting an awful lot of dogs in the process) is bewildering—especially considering how rarely the wronged citizens receive anything resembling remuneration.

Just today there was an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about the spread of military equipment and munitions to campus police at various universities in the U.S. Campus. Police. Armed with grenade launchers (seriously) and equipped with armoured vehicles. Even before reading that, I’d concluded that Balko’s book is required reading for the contemporary moment.

So as not to end on such a down note, here is “The Killing Moon” by Echo and the Bunnymen—which on reflection, is also kind of a downer, but would weirdly work as a not bad theme song for Jemisin’s novel.