The Reading List

Book #62: Intimacy & Locality

2012-03-01T19:28:00.000-08:00

"After one girl has fallen, the rest are explicable; they have a template, a precedent. But before that, it is hard to understand. At the beginning of this problem, then, is a single girl, the first to fall." -Maggie Helwig, Girls Fall Down

Over the weekend, I read Maggie Helwig's Girls Fall Down, which was recently named the Toronto Public Library's One Book, a city-wide initiative to encourage Torontonians to read the same book in April. Although I don't particularly like the idea of going with the herd in terms of my reading, I heard Helwig being interviewed on CBC and was so intrigued that I couldn't resist picking up her novel.

It's set in Toronto, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. One of its central themes is clearly the culture of fear that 9/11 initiated, yet I found Helwig's narrative technique of conveying this sense of mass hysteria to be unusual, delicate. Although the novel is largely told from the perspective of her main character, Alex - a medical photographer who takes pictures of open heart surgery by day, while taking pictures of the grittier side of life at night - many of the chapters begin and end in an omniscient voice that pans over the city and goes into momentary close-ups on the lives of random inhabitants. "Across the river, among the towers of St. Jamestown, a Somali girl tightened her head scarf, zipped up her red jacket and set out on her hike to deliver newspapers, and on the street an Iranian man who had once been a doctor cleaned vomit from the backseat of his taxi. A woman put a pan of milk on the burner of her stove, and stared at the creamy ripples on the surface." It's as though the city itself is a main character, replete with emotions and misery.

This misery takes many forms. In the opening scene, we see a pretty, glossy haired girl at the centre of a clique of high school girls suddenly fall down on the subway, her skin erupting in a strange, vicious rash, while smelling something like roses. The incident precipitates a mass panic that sweeps through Toronto, as other girls mysteriously collapse in the days that follow, while the same paranoia plays out in the mind of our protagonist, Alex, who suffers from diabetes and becomes convinced he's on the verge of going blind. But it soon becomes clear that Alex's physical state is inextricably tied to a deeper turbulence. An old flame (or fling, to be precise) named Suzanne has wandered back into his life, a girl he used to be secretly in love with, back during his misspent youth in the louche establishments of 1980s Kensington Market. He's all too familiar with the feeling of having watched Suzanne for years - Susie-Paul, as she was known back then - flirting, seducing and discarding men at whim, when they used to work together at a small newspaper, and all the while he tried to convince himself that "there was something different between them, sharper and more actual. But he was probably wrong."

The novel beautifully illustrates the past and all his unresolved feelings refracted through the present story, as she seeks Alex's help in finding her schizophrenic twin brother, who has gone missing in the ravines of the city. For the first time, Alex comes to understand why she was so messed up all those years ago and he is brought face to face with all her fears, secrets and vulnerabilities that persist even now, well into her thirties. In this sense, I found the novel deliciously revealing and close to the bone, and I found that the characters drew me into their peculiar circle of intimacy so well, perhaps partly because many of the scenes are set in my own neighbourhood (Little Italy) and other adjacent neighbourhoods, like Kensington, where I've also lived and idled away much time during my wayward youth ... The perfect stimulant to my own writing and emotions, as I embark on writing the final section of my own novel, part of which is also set in Toronto.

And speaking of Toronto writing, the cultural organization Diaspora Dialogues recently interviewed me about the role of Toronto in my own fiction ... If you wish, you can listen to the podcast here.

Photo from: here

My Book Launch

2012-02-15T17:54:00.000-08:00

Normally, I'm not the sort of person who likes being the centre of attention, so I was wondering about how I would perform at my first book launch. Although I'd been jittery and plagued by insomnia a few days before, on the day of the event, a calm came over me, and when I was suddenly there, immersed in all the people who'd come to celebrate and hear me read, it suddenly dawned on me, I'm really enjoying myself! In a strange way, it felt as though my whole life had been leading to this moment (and I suppose it had, since I've been wanting to be a writer since age six). Here are a few photos.... A big thank you to all of you who came out to celebrate and to The Japan Foundation for providing a beautiful venue, as well as to my publisher and agent for hosting the event.

A warm hug from my publisher, Sandra Huh


Having some pink bubbly with my agent, Sam Hiyate

Signing books for some old high school friends

Signing a book for my uncle, Bruce Kuwabara

Reading from my book

With my parents

My boyfriend and I ended the evening by wandering with a couple friends over to the bar on the eighteenth floor of the Park Hyatt and got splendidly drunk. (They felt it was an appropriate venue because the bartender is known to have served drinks to Margaret Atwood and Mordecai Richler and many other Toronto writers, and I was just tipsy enough not to feel like a complete ingenue). We enjoyed the view from the balcony of a skyline ethereal and fading, before joining my agent and his friends for a nightcap around the corner. A memorable evening.

Book #61: One More Week ...

2012-02-07T13:53:00.000-08:00

Just one week until my book launch ... These past few weeks, my mind has been oscillating wildly. I have consulted my doctor, my naturopath and meditation coach about various sleep remedies, with varying results (in the end, listening to the sound of thunderstorms and ocean waves on my iPod seems to work the best).

Of course, I knew this day would come. And I am excited. And yet, there is an unnerving side to the self-exposure of having your memoir published, I've discovered, somewhat belatedly. While having dinner with some friends who are now reading my book, it has, not surprisingly come up as a topic of conversation - particularly, the racier sections. "Which old boyfriend was that?" one friend asked with an arch smile, trying to decode the changed names. She'd heard bits and pieces over the years, over boozy dinners, but never as uncut as this.

I heaved a sigh of relief when she reassured me how much she was enjoying it and didn't object to when I changed the topic of conversation. I guess that's what old friends are for.

Perhaps my insomnia hasn't been helped by what's on my bedside table. When I haven't been writing, I have been reading Haruki Murakami's tome-like novel 1Q84 and I am now nearing the midpoint. Although this novel feels experimental and meandering in structure, and may not be among Murakami's finest works, it is nevertheless strangely addictive to read. It takes the reader on an epic journey through a world, which, on the face of it, is 1984 Japan, but turns out to open outward into a world of double reality. As one of the main characters, a serial killer named Aomame, reflects: "The streets had fewer passersby. The number of cars declined, and a hush fell over the city. She sometimes felt she was on the verge of losing track of her location. Is this actually the real world? she asked herself. If it's not, then where should I look for reality?" Characteristic of Murakami, the world of reality bleeds into another world that is surreal and disturbing and possibly is contained within his protagonists' minds and fantasies, but just as possibly might actually exist. Similarly, it occurred to me, my own perceptions have been feeling weightless and off centre lately ... Perhaps this is what the writing life does to you: it dissolves the world into pure, malleable representation, which can quickly take on a life of its own.

Equally compelling about this strange double world is the quest of the other main character, a writer named Tengo, who has been retained to ghostwrite a novel based on the experiences of a mysterious, almost autistic high school girl, Fuka-Eri, who has lived through some unspeakable childhood in a cult. But who are these strangely mystical beings called the "Little People" that haunt Fuka-Eri's narrative? Don't expect this novel to provide a little soothing bedtime reading ... More likely you'll find yourself up reading until three in the morning, unable to sleep, like me.

Hope to see you next Tuesday at my book launch!

Photo from: here

My Book Launch & Book Giveaway

2012-01-10T16:54:00.000-08:00

The book launch for The Reading List is just a month away - I hope that many of you who live in Toronto will be able to make it!

The event will be held:

February 14, 2012

at THE JAPAN FOUNDATION

131 Bloor Street West

5:30-8:00 pm
RSVP: info@jftor.org or (416)966-1600, ex. 103

Yes, I know it's Valentines Day... Drop by for a glass of wine before heading to dinner with your significant other or spend the whole evening with us luxuriating in literary chitchat. Who knows? Those of you who are single might even meet someone scintillating and well read...

I also want to announce that I will be raffling off two copies of my book to those who wish to participate in this giveaway. To be entered in the draw, you can do one of the following:

1. Become a Follower of my blog;
2. Leave a comment; or
3. Email me at leslieshimotakahara@gmail.com

The deadline for entry is February 11, 2012.

Here is a brief summary of what The Reading List is about:

Leslie Shimotakahara is a young, disenchanted English professor struggling to revive her childhood love of reading. Her father Jack, recently retired from a high-powered corporate job, finally has time to take up reading books for pleasure. The Reading List tells the story of Leslie’s return home to Toronto to rethink her life and decide what to do next. At the same time, she bonds with her dad over discussions about the lives, loves and works of the novelists on their reading list – Wharton, Joyce, Woolf and Atwood, to name a few. But when their conversations about literature unearth some heartbreaking, deeply buried family secrets surrounding Jack’s own childhood – growing up Japanese-Canadian in the aftermath of World War II – Leslie’s world is changed forever. Could discovering the truth about her father’s past hold the key to her finally being happy in love, life and career?

Btw, some friends have recently asked me which novels are included on the reading list that the main character (me) discusses with her father over the course of the book. Not surprisingly, they're some of my all-time favourites. Here is the list:

1. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
2. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
3. Dubliners by James Joyce
4. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
5. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
6. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
7. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
8. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
9. The Professor's House by Willa Cather
10. Surfacing by Margaret Atwood
11. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
12. Obasan by Joy Kogawa
13. Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje

"An engrossing and charming memoir about getting back to basics: home truths, family, and the life-altering, life-saving power of books."

-Emma Donoghue, author of Room

Book #60: My Holiday Reading

2011-12-29T15:30:00.000-08:00

“For weeks the kid been going on and on about how dreadful we sound. He kept snatching up the discs, scratching the lacquer with a pocket knife, wrecking them. Yelling how there wasn’t nothing there. But there was something. Some seed of twisted beauty.”

-Esi Edugyan, Half-Blood Blues

Ever since childhood, my favourite thing about the Christmas holidays has been the lazy, languid days of curling up in my bathrobe and doing nothing but reading all day. And this year has been no exception. Right now, as I write, I’m wearing my favourite black terry cloth robe, a stack of books teetering on the sofa beside me.

Not surprisingly, I got a lot of gift certificates for bookstores for Christmas. The first book I bought was Esi Edugyan’s Giller-winning Half-Blood Blues. I read this novel in just a couple days, unable to put it down. What a pleasure to become immersed in the strange, delicious world of this novel, the underground jazz scene of Berlin and Paris during the Second World War, as seen through the eyes of Sid Griffiths, a “half-blood” musician from Baltimore, whose skin is so light he can almost pass for white. But just the opposite is true for others in the band, most notably Hieronymus Falk, who, despite being the youngest, is the genius of the group. Hieronymus – “Hiero,” as he’s known – is a “Rhineland bastard.” He’s of mixed German and African parentage, fathered by a Senegalese soldier who was serving as part of the French colonial troops occupying the Rhineland after World War One. Despite growing up being reviled for his skin and relegated to a stateless identity, Hiero has musical talents that win him the name “Little Louis.” Sid and the others take him under their wing, as a little brother at first, but as Hiero develops as a musician and artist, his remarkable abilities lead to tensions and rivalry. Particularly where a certain singer, Delilah Brown, is concerned. Sid becomes enamoured from the moment he first glimpses her strangely glamorous turban and thin, stark body and mesmerizing, pale green eyes. Although she returns his affections, to an extent, she appears far more enticed by Hiero’s musical brilliance.

This is what I found so compelling about this novel: Edugyan brings to life a slice of history that until now, I’d known very little about, yet she does so through the lens of a set of characters and relationships that are so rich they’re constantly drawing me in. Who among us can’t relate to the predicament of being jealous of a more talented friend? Yet what under normal circumstances would simply be clashing egos and rivalries over art and women lead to much larger, tragic events in Nazi-occupied Germany. Sid’s guilt and tormented conscience over whether he could have done something to prevent Hiero’s capture by Nazi police, in the riveting opening scene, lays the ground for his emotional journey in the rest of the novel.

And now, I've just started reading Chattering by Louise Stern, a slim, elegant collection of stories that I stumbled upon quite randomly a few days ago at a used bookstore on Ossington. The best $4 I’ve spent in a long time. Narrated from the perspectives of different deaf characters, drawing upon the author’s own experience, these stories give an intriguing glimpse of what it feels like to be constantly struggling to express oneself through sign language, body language and scribbled notes – heightening the ways in which we all feel estranged from language at times. Young and surprisingly adventurous, these characters hitchhike with strange men, sleep on the beach, wake up in weird, risky places. In between stories, I’ve turned my attention back to Haruki Murakami’s tome-like latest novel 1Q84, which is gradually drawing me in…. So much holiday reading to do….

Photo from: here

My Book ... & Postcards from Kaslo

2011-12-17T05:34:00.000-08:00

On Thursday night, I had dinner with my publisher to celebrate that my memoir The Reading List is now in print. We toasted and reminisced about the past year we’ve spent working together and schemed about how to make the book launch a fun event. (It will be at the Japan Foundation mid-February – details soon to follow – you are all invited!) She gave me my author’s copies, some of which I’ll raffle off on my blog in January. The books are now perched on a shelf near my desk to give me inspiration as I immerse myself in writing my second book….

Speaking of which, I was very excited to receive a package in the mail last week. I’d been eagerly awaiting it for some time, this package from the Kootenay Lake Historical Society. It’s an archive that I stumbled upon on-line when googling “Kaslo, BC,” the site of a Japanese-Canadian Internment camp during the Second World War. My great grandfather, Kozo Shimotakahara, was the doctor assigned to provide medical services at the camp and he has long captured my imagination; one of the characters in the historical novel I’m currently writing is loosely inspired by Kozo and he also has a cameo in my memoir. So when I discovered that the Kootenay Lake Historical Society has volunteer archivists who could send me old photographs and newspaper articles, I jumped at the chance – even for just a first taste. One day in the not too distant future I would love to visit Kaslo and wander through Kozo’s hospital and get my fingers dusty perusing the archive myself….

I feel as though doing historical research is a bit like wandering through an antique/junk shop, where you never can predict what you might find and suddenly desire. The set of pictures and clippings I received in the mail contain such a range of ingredients, most of which I have no idea how they could fit into my novel. If at all. Nevertheless, these facts and images beckon to me and maybe it’s not a bad thing if I just let them tease my brain for months or years to come and let them half-consciously work their way into a future novel, perhaps. For instance, I found my eyes lingering on an article written in The New Canadian about Kozo’s trailblazing efforts to treat tuberculosis, which had reached near epidemic levels in the Japanese-Canadian community before the war. The prevalence was six times that of the normal population, largely because the Japanese farming folk in BC were ill-informed about prevention measures, didn’t speak English and were distrustful of doctors. All too aware of this problem, in 1930, Kozo joined forces with a certain reverend to start a tuberculosis clinic that he staffed by lobbying to have “one Japanese girl” accepted into the nurse training program at Vancouver General Hospital (I wonder who she was and what was her story?). They even managed to have an X-ray machine donated and sent over from Japan. “Every Japanese doctor cooperated to the utmost, but among them Dr. K. Shimotakahara, a pioneer medical men, did much to aid in the important steps against tuberculosis,” writes the author of the article. Those must have been heady days, when the community was in its infancy, and I can only imagine what Kozo must have felt being at the centre of it all.

But then the war broke out and the Japanese became seen as traitors overnight, ushering in darker days…. I wonder what became of the clinic or whether it was ever revived after the war. Probably not, since the Japanese-Canadian community was forcibly dispersed and assimilated in the post-war years. The clinic had likely outlived its purpose … a fascinating blip, a glorious footnote, swallowed up by history.

Photos courtesy of Kootenay Lake Historical Society

Book #59: The Other Murakami

2011-11-30T15:42:00.000-08:00

"They don't have compensated dating in America," Jun said. "I wonder what these geniuses would say if an American newspaper asked them to explain why Japanese high-school girls sell it."
-Ryu Murakami, In the Miso Soup

I recently went book shopping and bought Haruki Murakami's latest novel 1Q84, a tome-like brick of a book with a close-up of a pale, beautiful, slightly melancholy Japanese woman on the cover, and Ryu Murakami's much slimmer and lighter In the Miso Soup sporting a photo of a woman in black lingerie, her head cropped off, her skin aglow in eerie red light.

Much as I love Haruki Murakami, there's something a bit daunting about starting a 925-page novel while immersed in my own writing.... I decided to save it for the Christmas holidays and dove into the other Murakami instead.

I have vague, pleasurable memories of reading Ryu Murakami's cult classic Almost Transparent Blue as a teenager and being particularly fascinated by the character named Reiko (perhaps partly because Reiko is my middle name). In the Miso Soup, his more recent novel, provides the same kind of gritty look at Japan's underworld through the lens of the sex trade, yet this novel provides more reflection and commentary, on the part of the narrator, than I recall in his previous work. It closely follows the relationship between two characters: Frank, a slovenly, balding American tourist, freshly arrived in Tokyo to indulge his appetite for the sex trade, and Kenji, the twenty-year-old drifter whom Frank hires to be his guide in navigating the peepshows, lingerie pubs, bars and brothels. While the premise of this novel may not sound overly promising - it could quickly lapse into nothing more than a prurient thrill - Murakami's art lies in his ability to provide an almost anthropological look at the two cultures, Japan and America, which the two protagonists and their strange encounter represent. One of the most interesting concepts central to the Japanese sex trade, we learn, is known as "compensated dating," where school girls go on paid dates with businessmen - but their activities may go no further than singing karaoke. Or they may go further; the line isn't clear. And it isn't only school girls. Middle-aged, frumpy women trying to pass themselves off as college students frequent the same bars where hookers hang out, vaguely entertaining the possibility of selling themselves, too, should Mr. Right walk in. What emerges, as Kenji takes Frank through this bizarre, highly stratified underworld, is a picture of a society where the lines between intimacy, sex and prostitution have utterly blurred and money is the only currency of desire.

I lived in downtown Osaka one summer several years ago, during my undergrad days, and I recall being both baffled and intrigued. Perhaps it was just the area where I ended up living, but the sex trade seemed to be absolutely everywhere - hostess bars tucked between the flashing lights of Pachinko parlours, swarms of garishly made-up girls in stilettos and mini-dress uniforms running into the streets accosting the men. It perplexed (and saddened) me because I guess I held some naive, stereotypical views of Japan as a fairly traditional society. Instead, I found myself immersed in a place where selling sex and sexuality seemed very much in your face and integrated in everyday life.

I don't know whether I ever quite came to terms with that summer in Japan, but Murakami's critique of the extreme loneliness and hollowed out existence that seem to be driving both his Japanese and American protagonists (the latter turns out to be a psychopath) made for a fascinating read. In the end, the novel suggests that Frank and Kenji, though they come from very different cultures, may be equally screwed up. In one of the final scenes, after Frank has gone on a killing rampage, Kenji searches his memory trying to explain what the word bonno means in Buddhism: "I think it's usually translated as 'worldly desires.' It's more complicated than that, but the first thing you need to know is that it's something everybody suffers from."

Photo from: here

Book #58: Writing Unrest

2011-11-16T19:36:00.000-08:00

“My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being. And only recently I’d been going on about how the witnesses to our lives decrease, and with them our essential corroboration. Now I had some all too unwelcome corroboration of what I was, or had been.”

-Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending is replete with all the ingredients I’ve always loved in novels: intrigue, sexual secrets, and a complex matrix of desire kicked into gear by a missing piece of writing. No wonder that it recently won the Man Booker prize. This elegant, 150-page novella opens with the main character, Tony Webster’s glance backward at his high school days in 1960s England, a place where he and his admittedly pretentious clique of friends got high on Baudelaire and Dostoevsky and debated grand questions like the origins of war. “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation,” says Adrian Finn, the genius of the group. Thus, early on, the novel establishes its fascination with the limitations of history and memory and writing – themes that Tony obsesses over, particularly as he gets older.

But “history” in this novel means personal history. Personal history of the most intimate kind. When the boys grow up and go off to university, Tony gets a girlfriend, an elusive beauty named Veronica who strings him along for several months until he dumps her – only to discover that she’s hooked up with his old pal Adrian. Incensed, Tony has a vague recollection of penning a nasty letter. Shortly after, Adrian kills himself for reasons that aren’t at all clear. Through a strange turn of events, decades later, Tony comes in contact with Veronica when it turns out that her mother has in her possession the late Adrian’s diary – again, for reasons that aren’t at all clear – and she has left it in her will to Tony. It might contain the key to the secret of why Adrian couldn’t bear to go on living. Yet Veronica has stolen the diary, setting the stage for a bizarre series of emails whereby Tony attempts to wrest the diary from her. Instead, what she sends him is his old letter – replete with his callow, biting (yet hilarious and sardonic) words. He is brought face to face with the cruelty of his younger self and the disastrous consequences his writing unleashed.

While the ending delivers a perverse twist, the most interesting aspect for me is Tony’s unraveling upon confronting his own former words. It is as though he repressed all memory of his writing; the letter seems as alien as if another person penned it, yet his writing is unmistakable. Fear of confronting and despising but nevertheless being forced to take responsibility for a former piece of your own writing strikes me as a fear that is especially resonant with writers. It certainly is with me. Here we are in November, a few months before my first book is set to be released, and I find myself waking up in cold sweats, tormented not so much by the possibility that readers won’t like my book, but rather by the possibility that two, five, ten years down the road, I may not like the book. Like Tony, I might barely even recognize my writing … or who knows? Perhaps a disastrous train of events is about to be kicked into gear in my personal life, as a result of its publication.

Paranoid? Me?

But what’s written is written.

So as Barnes says in the final sentence of his novel, “There is great unrest,” yet what can a writer do except keep on writing?

Photo from: here

Addicted to House Hunting

2011-11-02T17:49:00.000-07:00

Over the past six weeks, my boyfriend and I have been shopping for a house. I’ve come to realize that I take a strange pleasure in wandering through these houses of varying styles and levels of decrepitude – some still inhabited, others hauntingly empty, others carefully accented with generic furniture brought in by a stager giving the house the feel of a theatrical stage set. The houses that still shows signs of authentic habitation are by far the most interesting. There’s something quite delicious about running my fingertips over a stranger’s bookshelf and pulling down a novel I’ve been longing to read and finding a hand-written message inside, or opening a closet and finding a pair of beat-up ballet slippers or a tangled bathrobe.

Yes, I could imagine myself living here.

Back in my moribund grad student days, I wrote a good deal of my dissertation on the relationship between novels and houses. Although I no longer speak that academic language (thank God!), there’s a part of me that remains fascinated by how novels use houses to tell the story of a protagonist’s state of mind, status and relationship to place. It’s a sad fate indeed for those characters who can’t find a home – think of Lily Bart, the wayward heroine of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, for instance. An impoverished socialite, Lily sponges off her wealthy friends who have decadent country houses, yet it’s the comfort of Selden Lawrence’s more modest home that catches her fancy, the bookshelves in particular: “She began to saunter about the room, examining the bookshelves between the puffs of her cigarette-smoke. Some of the volumes had the ripe tints of good tooling and old morocco, and her eyes lingered on them caressingly, not with the appreciation of the expert, but with the pleasure of agreeable tones and textures that was one of her inmost susceptibilities.” As Lily sinks down the social hierarchy, the novel charts her decline in terms of her increasingly tasteless and dreary surroundings, until she is finally left in a sparsely furnished tenement room: “The shabby chest of drawers was spread with a lace cover, and set out with a few gold-topped boxes and bottles, a rose-coloured pin-cushion, a glass tray with tortoise-shell hair-pins…. These were the only traces of luxury.”

In light of my love of this novel, perhaps it isn’t surprising that the most evocative houses I toured during our house hunt were places that I wouldn’t want to live in. They’re places that give me glimpses into other people’s lives – lives on the “other side of the social tapestry,” as Wharton puts it. On a whim, we visited a dilapidated white clapboard house at Bloor and Lansdowne that turned out to be an illegal rooming house. I know from my father that after the war, my grandparents ran a boarding house in this part of Toronto, and so I felt that in a curious way, I was getting a glimpse of that other world and time while peering into these cramped, dingy quarters and gingerly walking up precarious staircases and knocking on bedroom doors (or at least, the real estate agent did, while I cowered behind). Many of the boarders didn’t want to let us in, and it made me sad to think about how this was their last-ditch effort to claim a kind of squatter’s sovereignty. Yet even as they shut the door in our faces, I found myself peering over their shoulders, entranced by the curious shrines some of these people had set up on their dressers, candles and incense burning all round, the hint of earthier substances in the air, and one woman had a string strung around the entire perimeter of her room, from which dangled hundreds of pairs of colourful sunglasses.

Although we weren’t serious about buying houses of this sort, I remained eager to keep touring them as a kind of research for my historical novel, part of which takes place in the Bloor Lansdowne neighbourhood in the 1950s, in a boarding house similar to my grandparents’…. So for me, the house hunt was doubling as a sort of field expedition, but I think our real estate agent was getting tired of our dithering. Alas.

Yesterday evening, we purchased a fairly decrepit, but structurally sound Victorian house full of architectural possibilities (Chris is an architect, so we are looking to take on a “project” house). The house is at the slightly more gentrified end of the Lansdowne neighbourhood, but close enough that I will be able to walk past my grandparents’ old house every day, communing with ghosts of my family past.

Photo from: here

A Fortuitous Connection

2011-10-20T19:24:00.000-07:00

When I first started this blog a year and a half ago, I was just experimenting with another form of writing.... I had no idea it was going to lead me to an invaluable source for my new novel. As I've mentioned before, I’m currently writing an historical novel partly inspired by my great grandfather, Dr. Kozo Shimotakahara’s life as a doctor at a Japanese-Canadian internment camp during the Second World War. But never did it occur to me that someone with a connection to Kozo would stumble across one of my blog posts and contact me to send me this photograph of my great grandparents taken on their wedding day.

Over the past month, I’ve learned a lot about Kozo’s life from my new online friend, Todd. Todd came across my blog when he did a Google search on Kozo Shimotakahara’s name – not knowing exactly who the man was. He’d become intrigued by Kozo upon noticing his signature upon his great grandmother’s and her cousin’s death certificates, so he gathered that Kozo had been a Vancouver doctor before the war. When he found the above wedding picture in his parents' possession, he figured that the Shimotakaharas might have been old friends of his great grandparents from the old days of Japantown. It seems that when Kozo first arrived in Canada he stayed at a Japanese Christian Missionary in Victoria, BC, where Todd's great grandfather was a preacher. The original photo was mottled with dirt and dust specks, so Todd skillfully photoshopped it (thanks Todd!)

As we discussed in our flurry of emails, Kozo and his wife Shin don’t look terribly happy on their wedding day. Perhaps this is simply due to the limitations of photographic technology at the time: the poser had to remain perfectly still and hold the same expression for a long time, which could be cumbersome. But I can’t help but read a certain hardness in both their faces – their stone-chiseled lips send chills down my spine. Clearly, these are two incredibly willful people, as one might expect of a Christian missionary (Shin was one of the first in Japan) and a pioneering doctor (Kozo was the first Japanese-Canadian doctor and also a highly religious man).

Despite all the mythologizing in my family, discrepancies and lacunae about their lives abound. My grandmother, who was our family historian, used to write hortatory essays based on the stories Kozo had told her. According to her, Kozo left Kagoshima-ken, Japan at age fourteen with a mere 5 yen, which his mother had earned by selling eggs, and immigrated to Vancouver where he worked as a houseboy and enrolled in elementary school to learn his ABCs. Later, he went on to graduate from University of Chicago medical school. I could never understand how Kozo became a doctor just like that. Yet Todd has discovered a more textured narrative through some fascinating genealogical research. He has sent me a border crossing record, photocopied from Vancouver Public Library, stating in the registrar’s slanted, slightly smudged writing that Kozo entered the United States on September 24, 1911, to attend Valparaiso University in Indiana. He had $50 on him and was 5 feet, 2 inches tall. A bit of online research reveals that Valparaiso was a Methodist, no frills institute of higher learning that did not have a med school. So I wonder if Kozo enrolled there and then proceeded to University of Chicago, or whether his journey took a more circuitous route? And why did he never tell anyone in our family about this interlude in his life? Although I may never know for certain, these periods of struggle and self-formation when he was a young man tease at my imagination and after a while he ceases to feel like my ancestor – he becomes a character alive in my head.

Book #57: Writing Memory

2011-10-10T08:01:00.000-07:00

"His skin was warm-toned and Mediterranean and he made her think of Paris when she was twenty-one. Her honeymoon with Marty, and it was Marty she was thinking about, really, and she didn't want to be thinking about him. Marty had remarried and had a child on the way and he called her every night when his wife conked out with exhaustion." -Lisa Moore, Alligator

A few years ago, I took a creative writing seminar and I recall the instructor talking about how important it is for a young writer to read and learn from the early works of the writers she admires. "Pay attention to how the sentences move," I recall her saying. "Passages that you find moving you should copy out by hand and always use a pen you really like writing with. I recommend fountain pen."

In recent days, as I've been pressing on with writing my historical novel, approaching page 130, as of this morning, I've found myself reading and rereading Lisa Moore. I loved her second novel February when I read it last year (and blogged about it here), so I eagerly went out to buy her first novel Alligator, which I've been luxuriating over for the past couple weeks. This novel is peculiarly structured for a novel; it reads more like a set of interweaving short stories, where there are no minor characters. Every character - from Frank, the hot dog vendor, to Colleen, the teenage delinquent and environmental activist - is compellingly rendered and given a unique interior voice and past. And Moore's imagery is nothing short of stunning, even, especially, in rendering the minute details of everyday life: "The egg white stretched itself into opaque skeins and transparent veils and broke away from the yolk and frothed over the sides of the pot and settled back down." But more than the sheer lyricism of her images, it's the way that her characters relate to these lyrical moments that makes her writing so memorable and true to life. Their awareness of the sensuous details of the world around them are constantly taking them on detours into memory, unearthing before the reader all kinds of idiosyncratic facets of their pasts.

In this respect, Madeleine, the aging film director, is perhaps the character who speaks to me most vividly. Her aspiration to make an historical film about Archbishop Fleming becomes the driving force of her life. Although it's never all that clear what the film is about, it's clear that Madeleine envisions her film as something far greater than a local colour documentary about her hometown, St. John's, Newfoundland (Moore's hometown and the setting of her novel). In Madeleine's mind, "The film was about the desolate, violent landscape and human triumph over nature, but it was also, in a much quieter, private way, about evil. A community in the grip of some religious fervour that had sprung out of the tyranny of mild, constant hunger and giving over." But the irony of Madeleine's grand gesture is that her emotions are constantly pulling her away from her historical project and into the recesses of her own memory. In the end, her film fades into the background compared to her continual reliving of the wreckage of her marriage to Marty and her endless, ineluctable struggle to recapture the early days of their passionate affair, in Paris, at twenty-one. While her film may never see the light of day, her own life and the intimate details of all the characters whose lives revolve around the making of her film are elevated to near cinematic proportions. And yet, they always remain wonderfully prosaic and down to earth.

If Alligator is in some ways a novel about the impossibility of telling a straight story about history, in favour of indulging in the digressive pleasures of storytelling and memory, it certainly sparked some thoughts in my mind about how not to write an historical novel.

Photo from: here

Read an Excerpt

2011-10-02T09:36:00.000-07:00

I thought it might be fun to give you a little sneak peak of my memoir, The Reading List: Literature, Love and Back Again, before it's released in February. Click here to read an excerpt. An overview of the book as a whole can be found here.

Book #56: My Return Trip

2011-09-22T17:51:00.000-07:00

“And sometimes in this fantasy I buy the house we used to live in, the rambling house down the highway, in the valley. I have imagined it as neglected, needing paint, new gutters, perhaps even falling apart, everything around it overgrown and gone to seed.”
-Alice Adams, Return Trips

Monday night was a cool, rainy night, and that seemed fitting. I attended my great aunt Sachi’s funeral, where the pianist played her favourite song, “Here’s That Rainy Day.” I came home, exhausted from seeing everyone, made myself a cup of tea and stared at my bookshelf for a long time. I was thinking about her house as I remembered it from my youth: a fascinating, slightly decrepit, rambling house on Gladstone Avenue, with built-in bookshelves jam-packed with books, and more books in teetering piles on the dusty floor. Although most people probably remember Sachi for her paintings (she used to be a high school art teacher and had several striking watercolours she’d painted, hanging on her walls), I would always remember her first and foremost for her tastes in literature. She had been a huge influence on me during my teen years, introducing me to authors as diverse as Haruki Murakami and Alice Adams. In fact, as my eyes swept back and forth along my bookshelf, they settled on a book that had once belonged to Aunt Sachi. I would like to say that she gave it to me, but I’m pretty sure she lent it to me some two decades ago, and I’d conveniently forgotten to return it. And now I never would; tears filled my eyes. The book was Return Trips, a subtle, evocative collection of stories by Alice Adams.

I curled up on the sofa and began reading the title story and was surprised to discover that I remembered everything about it vividly. It is a story about the cryptic nature of memory and first passion. The narrator, a middle-aged history professor, looks back on her youthful love affair with a man named Paul, who was fatally ill with a heart condition, so that “Even love . . . was for Paul a form of torture, although we kept at it – for him suicidally, I guess – during those endless, sultry yellow afternoons, on our awful bed, between our harsh, coarse sheets.” While their affair appears luminous – the love of her life – compared to her troubled two marriages, she comes to realize that her continual desire to remember their affair is more about a desire to revisit a certain moment, or place, within herself. In the same way that she obsessively circles back in her memory to Paul, she indulges in imaginative returns to Hilton, the southern town where she lived for a short while during her adolescence and found a surprising, enchanting happiness that stands out in sharp contrast to her otherwise troubled youth. So much so that she often fantasizes about returning to their old house in Hilton and perhaps even staying there, leaving her husband for good. But when the narrator finally enacts her dream of going back, she finds that the house has lost its magical quality: far from being in a state of romantic decay, it has been modernized and retrofitted to house a bunch of transient students.

These fantasies of return, however alluring, the book seems to suggest, are best kept as fantasies. Upon being probed too closely, the past yields nothing more than that it is no longer as you imagined.

I found it strangely moving to read this story, while thinking about Aunt Sachi. You see, for the past few years, ever since I began writing again, I’ve been harbouring an almost obsessive wish to ask her about our family past. There were certain family secrets to which she’d alluded when I was a child, and I knew she was the one person who’d remained close to my grandfather right up to the time he died tragically, before I was born (I address some of this material in my memoir The Reading List, being published in the spring). And besides, Aunt Sachi must have known things about my great grandfather, her father, the illustrious Dr. Kozo Shimotakahara. After all, she’d lived with him at the internment camp in British Columbia, where he was the camp doctor during the Second World War; she had been right there at the scene that has for so long enticed my imagination. So I often pictured myself going over to her house for tea one afternoon, and perhaps slyly turning on a small digital recorder, while she would tell me everything that I yearned to know.

But I never went to see her, because I knew that in reality things would not play out this way.

My father had already tried to talk to her – confronting her about some of the demons in our family closet – and she had completely shut down. Her face blanched; she excused herself. It had taken them a few years to repair their relationship.

Rereading Return Trips made me feel that I now understood why; the past is best confronted imaginatively and from a distance.

Photo from: here

Book #55: My Book Delayed (& other things making me antsy...)

2011-09-12T16:06:00.000-07:00

"It was October and Isabella felt like she should be going somewhere. Fall always did that to her. It made her restless, like she was late getting back to school; like she should be registering for classes, and buying pencils and notebooks and folders that matched."
-Jennifer Close, Girls in White Dresses

Over the past week, three people have asked me when they'll be receiving invitations to my book launch. Sadly, I've had to tell them that it's now official: my book's publication is being delayed until the spring (February 2012). I won't bore you with the reasons for the delay - suffice it to say that my publisher promises my memoir The Reading List: Literature, Love and Back Again will be out this spring, which she sees as a better time to have the book launch anyway. I can't deny feeling a pang of disappointment when I first heard the news, followed by a whirlwind of anxiety (if publishing a book is a bit like giving birth, the thought of carrying this baby around for an extra few months is disconcerting, to say the least). But now that I've gotten used to the idea of a spring launch, I'm feeling better and, to be perfectly honest, I'm awash with something strangely akin to relief.

Very few people have read my book yet (my agent, my publisher, my boyfriend and the sweet authors who wrote endorsement blurbs - thanks Emma, Kerri and Micah!) and I suspect that when my book is out in the world, I'll go through a period of feeling awkward around everyone, even those people who have no interest in reading, much less any interest in my book. But knowing myself, that's how I'll probably feel. So there's a part of me that relishes the idea of a few more months of mental peace, allowing me to just immerse myself in writing my next book.

In any case, I've been soothing my frazzled nerves by reading something on the lighter side. I just finished Girls in White Dresses, Jennifer Close's delightful, humorous debut collection of linked stories. It's hard to pinpoint what I liked so much about this book, but I have to say it captures a certain mood very well and allowed me to see versions of my earlier selves. These stories focus on the interlocking lives of a group of friends who move to New York in their early twenties, after graduating from university, but instead of realizing their dreams, they embark on a decade of just kind of stumbling through life, mired in anxiety and self-doubts, while drowning in late-night martinis. Isabella, the main character, is "surprised to find that she could do her job in a constantly hungover state," unsure whether to be grateful or to take it as a sign of being understimulated in her entry level position at a mailing list company. Startled by her friend Mary's ability to come up with a "life plan" and apply to law school, Isabella takes the scenic route in searching for her dream job and dream guy - always feeling as if she's somehow falling behind, late at doing everything, like getting married and having kids, envying her friends who seem so much more on track. But as the author skillfully reveals, these friends who seem on track are actually besieged by other pressures, the fissures all too visible in their seemingly perfect lives.

Ironically, when Isabella finally does come up with a life plan, and claws her way up in the publishing industry, she finds that industry unravelling at her feet. And worse yet, her boyfriend Harrison - whom she worries she's been dating too long to end up with - is forced to take a job in Boston, presenting Isabella with the dilemma of whether to leave her beloved New York and go with him. Life in this book is full of these kinks. In the end, coming up with a "life plan" appears highly overrated; far better to just try to adapt to whatever unexpected turns life throws your way, and wash it down with something strong. Which is what I'm trying to do (with varying degrees of success) by not over-stressing about my book delay....

Photo from: here

A Writer's Death

2011-09-05T15:49:00.000-07:00

Feeling a bit melancholy this Labour Day weekend. The weekend got off to a sad start, when I had drinks with some of the other writers in my writing circle at a pub in the queer village. Normally, when I see them it's to workshop our writing or clink glasses at a book launch. But this time, we were having drinks because one of the writers in our group recently died in what appears to have been suicide.

Wendy was a fascinating woman - warm, funny, anxious, vulnerable, fragile. I recall her sexy librarian glasses and dimpled smile and insistence that she "wasn't a writer," even though we all insisted her writing was improving greatly; she was well on her way to finding her voice. But what made Wendy particularly fascinating was that despite her fairly normal exterior, she came from a troubled past, to say the least: she'd been a child sex worker. And she talked very openly about it. After escaping an abusive home, she aged out of the foster care system and found herself on the street working as a sex worker (Wendy was always careful to use the word "sex worker," rather than "prostitute" - she'd made a career for herself as an activist working to advocate for sex worker protection and child protection, and was even pursuing her law degree at Osgoode, when she died).

The memoir that she was working on chronicled parts of her painful past, which, however turbulent, she captured with a good shot of humour. I recall her reading aloud scenes of sex and violence that made my own life feel incredibly tame (one scene involved a hermaphrodite), yet the overriding feeling that came through in her writing, I would say, was a sense of horrible loneliness and searching. Here was a woman who desperately wanted to be loved - because she'd never felt loved - and that made her susceptible to being exploited by a certain man, who occupied a central part of her memoir.

Yet it seemed to all of us that Wendy was at a really positive place in her life, despite the fact that she'd missed the past few workshops, and maybe been languishing in depression. I was stunned by the news of her death.

One of the writers draped a bright pink feather boa over the chair at the head of the table, and we toasted to Wendy's life.

Although her memoir will probably never be shared with the world, I'm glad she wrote what she did. Her words will stay with me.

Photo from: here

Book #54: The Other Side of My Bookshelf

2011-08-25T05:23:00.000-07:00

"Darwinians, with their unconscious teleology, as usual put forward hypotheses about the possible selective advantages of the emergence of consciousness, but, as usual, these didn't explain anything; they were just so-so stories, no more. Then again, the anthropogenic model was hardly more convincing: life had thrown up something which could contemplate itself, a mind capable of understanding it, but so what? That in itself didn't make understanding human consciousness any easier." -Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles

A couple weeks ago, my agent Sam had a bunch of us over, and upon opening the second bottle of wine, one of the other writers there put forth the question: if you had to recommend just one book to the group, what would it be? We went around the room, and people waxed lyrical about Flannery O'Connor, Marguerite Duras and Toni Morrison . . . all beloved friends on my bookshelf. But Sam's choice caught my attention: The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq. I was struck by this title because I have it on my bookshelf - or to be more precise, I should say we have it on our bookshelf. When my boyfriend Chris and I moved in together a little over a year ago, we combined our two book collections into an encyclopedic wall of books, and I often find myself, late at night, if I can't sleep, venturing over to the shelves dominated by Camus, Sartre and Musil - all those existentialist Continental authors whom I've never really gotten into. The Elementary Particles was tucked alongside this set. I'd observed Chris flipping through it and rereading sections a few times; he'd mentioned that the novel had stayed with him. So in picking up this book, I had high hopes indeed: I was hoping to gain insight into both my agent's and boyfriend's unique minds (and the male mind more generally, if such an abstraction can be said to exist).

I was not disappointed. The Elementary Particles puts under the microscope the strange, symbiotic relationship between two half-brothers, Michel and Bruno, who on the surface appear polar opposites. Michel is an almost asexual, brilliantly gifted molecular biologist whose only sense of connection to humanity is through his beloved body of research into the origins of human consciousness and individuality from the primal muck of animal life. Bruno, on the other hand, is animal man incarnate. The novel traces the vicissitudes in their love lives, as Michel is granted a second chance with Annabelle, his childhood sweetheart, a girl of extraordinary delicate beauty, and Bruno find love in the most unlikely of places: at a beachside orgy, where he meets Christiane, a cynical older woman whose taste for orgies proves not at all incompatible with a sensitive, wonderfully generous soul. Fleeting moments of connection and lyrical beauty are possible in such relationships, the author seems to suggest, but in the end both Michel's and Bruno's affections are exposed as elusive and unstable. Perhaps the most moving scene occurs just after Christiane has been paralyzed - depriving her of the carnal pleasure so core to her being. Bruno steps forward for a glimmering moment: "He kissed her on both cheeks, then on the lips. 'Now you can come to Paris and move in with me,' he said. 'Are you sure that's what you want?' He didn't answer, or at least he hesitated."

Ultimately, Bruno's disappointment with his own inability to overcome the bounds of his own selfishness and believe in a form of love that transcends the fragile, ruined body seems to be at the heart of the author's disenchantment with the human race. Yet I was surprised to discover that some reviewers - most notably, The New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani - have dismissed this novel as nothing more than an unsparing case study of humanity's vileness. For me, Michel's and Bruno's search for something more - whatever that "more" might be (a new mode of existence? a new mode of writing? a new way of inhabiting the world and our bodies?) - is a pay-off unto itself. Reading about their search and its tragic limits filled me with melancholy awe and moments of piercing awareness that few authors are capable of provoking.

Photo from: here

Book #53: The Paradox of Holocaust Fiction

2011-08-10T15:59:00.000-07:00

"She closed the door on the little white face, turned the key in the lock. Then slipped the key into her pocket." -Tatiana de Rosnay, Sarah's Key

I just finished reading Sarah's Key, a novel that I wanted to love. I wanted to love it and indeed learn from it, since I'm currently working on an intergenerational historical novel - and who better to learn from than an author whose novel has been made into a successful film? Tatiana de Rosnay carries off her interweaving of past and present storylines with consummate skill, and yet I have to say I found something profoundly unsatisfying about the result.

The historical plot focuses on Sarah Starzynski, a young Jewish French girl who suddenly finds her entire life under siege, when the French police, working under Nazi orders, evict the Starzynski family from their apartment in Paris and throw them into concentration camps in the French countryside. But Sarah's torment is compounded by a personal guilt: in an attempt to save her little brother from the police, she locks him in a tiny closet, and only later, after she and her parents have been dragged away, realizes the consequences of her actions. This strand of the novel I found utterly compelling and moving in how vividly it brings to life the horror of everyday-life-turned-upside-down through the eyes of a young girl.

Yet the present storyline that intersects with this narrative falls flat. Julia Jarmond, an American journalist living in Paris, discovers that the apartment her French husband has inherited was once inhabited by the Starzynski family and the tragic events that unfolded there come to haunt her conscience - leading to upheaval in her personal life. While all the characters are skillfully depicted enough, I found myself unable to become emotionally invested in their crises: a marriage on the rocks, an unplanned pregnancy, the stresses of busy careers. These normal concerns of contemporary life seem trivial and meaningless, juxtaposed with the unfathomable sadness of Sarah's plight.

And yet, don't get me wrong, it isn't that I wished de Rosnay had stuck strictly with the historical plot by telling the entire novel from Sarah's perspective. To do so would have led to an utterly bleak novel (for who can honestly imagine a happy outcome for Sarah?) No, I see why the author felt the need to allow for some moment of redemption through Julia's coming to terms with her sense of collective guilt. Yet by creating Julia as a kind of stand-in for me, the reader, guiding my emotional response, I found my emotions invariably falling short of what I felt they should be, given the history at stake. Perhaps this is the risk or paradox that any novelist may face in attempting to represent the Holocaust? Shedding a few tears over Julia's angst felt like an overly sentimental and self-indulgent response, and yet I can't say how I would have told this story differently.

Photo from: here

At The Glass Menagerie

2011-08-03T15:28:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend, I saw a marvellous play with my mother – The Glass Menagerie, at Soulpepper Theatre. I took her to see it for her birthday. As my mom and I were waiting for the play to start, I was reading Tennessee Williams’ bio in the programme and a couple sentences jumped out at me. I read aloud: “Success came after poverty and odd jobs, a nervous breakdown, three attempts to get his undergraduate degree and a first play that flopped. He was 34 years old.”

My mom looked over with mirthful, ironic eyes. “That is so you!”

I’m turning 34 this year, and my first book will be published shortly (hopefully this fall, though my publisher tells me we may need to delay until early spring….) I’m crossing my fingers it won’t be a flop, like Williams’ first play. My dissertation rather fell on its face, so I’m counting that as getting my initial flop out of my system. And like Williams, I suffered a breakdown while peddling my trade as an adjunct prof in the backwaters of Nova Scotia, which I definitely consider an “odd job.”

My mother smiled and we settled back in our seats to a play that we both agreed was the best we’d seen in quite a while. The matriarch at the centre of The Glass Menagerie is Amanda Wingfield, a faded southern beauty who parades around the living room of her shabby apartment in St. Louis, driving her two adult children, Tom and Laura, mad with stories of all her “gentleman callers” and former glory. The actor who plays Amanda (Nancy Palk) brings just the right balance of manic energy and melancholy nostalgia to the role. That her search to find a husband for timid, awkward Laura is doomed from the beginning is something everyone in the audience can just feel in their bones. Laura is a strange, almost autistic young woman caught in a perpetual state of girlhood, her only interest playing with a menagerie of tiny glass animals. Meanwhile, Tom – a factory worker and would-be poet – proves no less fragile and fallible on his own journey to escape the stifling conditions of home.

Their vulnerability makes these characters fascinating to watch, and most importantly, you can really feel their suffering. And yet, even the darkest scenes are cut through with flashes of levity and beauty – a boy Laura had a crush on in high school nicknames her “Blue Roses,” because he misheard her say she suffers from pleurosis. These fleeting moments of connection, humour and intense feeling somehow make all the suffering of life worthwhile, the play seems to suggest.

The following evening, “Blue Roses” still lingering in my mind, I couldn’t resist renting Blue Valentine – a no less tragic, beautiful movie about lost love and thwarted expectations. Just to make sure I’d thoroughly worked myself up into an emotional lather.

And the next morning, after a lethargic spell of a few days, I found that the words were flowing again. What a relief. I didn’t leave my desk for the next several hours, immersed once again in writing the world of my novel.

Photo from: here

Book #52: What's Historical about the Historical Novel? Toni Morrison's Latest Novel

2011-07-21T13:48:00.000-07:00

"I will keep one sadness. That all this time I cannot know what my mother is telling me. Nor can she know what I am wanting to tell her."

-Toni Morrison, A Mercy

Recently, I've found myself craving historical fiction ... perhaps because I'm trying to write an historical novel myself. Seeking to learn from the master of this genre, I picked up Toni Morrison's latest novel, A Mercy. It's a surprisingly slender novel, but perhaps one of her most ambitious. It seems as though throughout her career, Morrison has been progressively stepping back in time: beginning with her partly autobiographical first novel, The Bluest Eye; winning the Pulitzer Prize for her masterpiece Beloved, set in the antebellum South; and now receding even further into the historical imagination with A Mercy, set in the 1680s when slavery and the very idea of "America" were still in embryonic form.

The mercy at the core of the story concerns a young slave girl named Florens, born into slavery at a plantation in Maryland. Yet Florens is not your typical slave girl; since childhood, she was "never able to abide being barefoot and always beg for shoes, anybody's shoes," leading her mother to accuse her of putting on the airs of a "Portuguese lady," and she is quick to learn how to write from an old Reverend who secretly teaches her. When Jacob Vaark, an adventurer from the North, visits the plantation to claim repayment on a debt, he finds the plantation in financial ruins. In lieu of the debt, Jacob is offered payment in the form of a slave, and although he finds the slave trade distasteful, on a whim, he accepts Florens - perhaps moved by how the girl's mother beseeches him, kneeling on the ground.

But Florens' life on the Vaark farm - particularly after the master dies - proves anything but serene. She becomes part of a strange survivors' colony of displaced women, centred around the master's wife Rebekka, a woman who might just as easily have been a prostitute back in England, had she not opted for her arranged marriage overseas. The voices of these eccentric characters are all vividly rendered, but what I found most enticing about this novel is the emotional conundrum at its core. Uprooted from the only home she knew and torn away from her mother, Florens is stripped of her identity and left flailing to forge a new self in the wild, never able to understand or forgive her abandonment - ironically, the "mercy" that was her mother's greatest sacrifice.

As I thought further about this historical novel, it occurred to me that what makes it so delightfully readable is actually the dearth of historical details. The history of the period is used very sparingly, more implied than explained. For instance, as Jacob tours the D'Ortega plantation, the "tobacco odor, so welcoming when he arrived, now nauseated him. Or was it the sugared rice, the hog cuts fried and dripping with molasses, the cocoa Lady D'Ortega was giddy about?" These carefully chosen details about what he was served for lunch encapsulate a whole history of conspicuous consumption and plantation culture, which, however fascinating, never overpowers the story. History does not intrude on the emotions of the characters who drive the narrative.

A couple weeks ago, I was at my writing workshop, where my friend Diane warned me against the pitfalls of using too much historical research and exposition in my novel. She quoted the author David Gilmour: "It's not what you put into your writing, it's what you take out." Too true. Time to read A Mercy again.... So much to be learned from Morrison's pared down aesthetics.

Photo from: here

Book #51: Stereotypes and Desire

2011-07-11T16:53:00.000-07:00

"Whatever Sam Finkler wanted, his effect on Julian Treslove was always to put him out of sorts and make him feel excluded from something. And false to a self he wasn't sure he had."
-Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

This morning after awaking from a turbulent dream, I made myself a double espresso and curled up on the sofa with Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question, which I've been reading for the past couple weeks. This novel, which won the Man Booker Prize last year, gives a brilliant and hilarious glimpse into the fantasy life of Julian Treslove, a man who has envied his Jewish friend, Sam Finkler, since childhood days, and at some primal level yearns to be Jewish himself. Something of an artist manque and failure when it comes to relationships with women, despite years of womanizing - particularly after landing a job as an impersonator of Brad Pitt - Treslove has a love-hate relationship with Finkler, who seems to be everything he is not. Successful. Bitingly funny. Rich. Centred in his sense of self and heritage. Married to the late Tyler Finkler, an impressive Jewish woman, whom Treslove was disappointed to discover, after their tryst in the sack years ago, was actually only a converted Jew.

That elusive thing Finkler possesses is constantly slipping away from Treslove, eluding his grasp. For the rest of the morning, this book made me smile as I indulged in the happy-sad, melancholy-ironic ups and downs of Treslove's journey through a world where stereotypes and desire map on to each other, and one can only be experienced through the other.

And might I venture as a personal aside, that this absurd yet real predicament goes beyond Jewishness? As I was reading this novel, I found myself thinking about all the bizarre moments in my own life, most of them involving ex-boyfriends, when it became clear that my "Japaneseness" somehow made me desirable. I can recall one or two guys during university telling me that in some strange, inexplicable way they felt Japanese, and dating me was helping to bring this side of themselves out (admittedly a good deal of drinking was involved in these late night confessions). As a fourth-generation Japanese-Canadian who doesn't speak the language, and who had a near breakdown when I lived in Japan for a summer several years ago, I myself have never felt very Japanese and have often felt there's something strangely misleading about my Japanese appearance. But such is the ironic reality of living in an age where stereotypes make people desirable....

Photo from: here

Doc Shimo & Other Ghosts of Kaslo

2011-07-03T08:06:00.000-07:00

About a month ago, I blogged about receiving a mysterious phone call from a woman who used to know my great grandfather, the late Dr. Kozo Shimotakahara, the dashing older man furthest left in this photo. (If you'd like, you can here that blog entry here). Well, over the past month, I have been communicating with this woman quite a bit (for purposes of protecting her privacy - she's an elderly lady who probably values her privacy - I'll call her "Norah"). Emailing back and forth and chatting on the phone with Norah has been very exciting because I'm currently working on a historical novel based on my great grandfather's life during the Second World War, when he was a doctor at the above internment camp in Kaslo, BC. Getting to know Norah and hearing about her memories of my great grandfather - "the great Doc Shimo," as she calls him - has been a fascinating experience.

First of all, I had no idea that he was so adored by the Kaslo locals, or that he was seen as such an eccentric, trailblazing man. According to Norah, a teenager at the time of the war, her experience getting to know Doc Shimo utterly dispelled the government propaganda disseminated about Japanese-Canadians. At first, most people in the community weren't pleased by the prospect of having their little mountain town inundated by 3000 evacuees, who had been labelled as "the enemy," and they were even less thrilled that the internment camp was to be built in deserted buildings right within the town. Kaslo, being a ghost town, had no shortage of deserted hotels and derelict buildings - relics of the gold rush days. These buildings were retrofitted into tenement houses, where dozens of Japanese-Canadian families were crowded in. Not your ideal living conditions. But once Doc Shimo set up shop as the camp's physician, the locals quickly realized that they could benefit from having a doctor of his sophistication and skill set a stone's throw away. Norah told me that when her brother contracted a severe case of bronchitis from working at the local mine, Doc Shimo treated him by giving him one of the earliest shots of penicillin. When the boy asked, "How much?" Doc Shimo said, "Give me your wallet!" Peeling out $3, he said, "This'll have to do."

Norah's father, an artist, who had been deaf since childhood, befriended Doc Shimo. It seems that the two men bonded because Norah's father had also felt discriminated against by certain locals, on account of his disability. Thus Doc Shimo often drove out to Norah's home by the beach (as the camp doctor, he was allowed special privileges; his car was never confiscated, unlike the cars of other internees). He sat to have his portrait painted. Apparently, he told funny stories about his days working as a waiter in Chicago to put himself through med school. According to Norah, he was a very charming man who could be a bit of a ham. Upon glimpsing the boats lining the shore, Doc Shimo begged to be allowed to take one out. Hitching up his pants and climbing into a small life boat, he had a strange way of rowing. Rather than facing backwards, Doc Shimo faced forward rowing fisherman style (probably a habit acquired from his teenage summers working as a fisherman's apprentice).

Later, when Norah wasn't sure what she wanted to do with her life ("there were no school guidance counsellors, back in those days," she informed me), Doc Shimo encouraged her to consider UBC's nursing program. A few years later, she had the pleasure, as a newly minted RN, of assisting with the birth of a baby, working alongside "my idol ... the good Doctor Shimotakahara."

At the end of our conversation, Norah put me in touch with her friend, a local historian, who kindly provided me with the photograph above. It's a beautiful, evocative photo.... Who know what my imagination will make of all these memories, but I couldn't resist sharing them right now.

Photo from Langham Cultural Society

Book #50: My Dad's Pick

2011-06-24T13:17:00.000-07:00

“His jacket caught and tore on the barbed wire and his hands gently framed her waist, his fingers feeling the soaked sweater. He was leaning in, his forehead pressed against the cold metal wire; if there was something sharp there, he didn’t feel it. All he felt was Keiko’s cheek, wet from the rain, as she leaned in too.”
-Jamie Ford, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

A few weeks ago, my dad recommended a book to me, Jamie Ford’s Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. It’s the first novel that my father’s ever recommended to me – in a reversal of our usual ritual. Until now, I’ve been the one to suggest books to him. When he retired a few years back, he turned to me – his bookish, English professor daughter – for a reading list. What a delight that three years later, I find myself no longer a burnt-out prof and my dad has become such an avid reader that he’s telling me what to read.

Like many of my favourite historical novels, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet alternates between past and present plotlines. The novel opens with 56-year-old Henry Lee standing on the steps of the Panama Hotel, a boarded-up hotel located at the threshold of Seattle’s Chinatown and what was once Japantown, before World War Two. After recently purchasing the hotel, the new owner has discovered in the basement a storehouse of treasured possessions that were hidden by Japanese-American families during the war – their attempt to salvage something of the past, before being dispossessed and dragged off to internment camps in remote areas of Idaho and California. But more than simply ghosts of history, these recovered objects hold deeply personal memories for Henry, triggering him to remember his childhood sweetheart, Keiko Okabe, a young Japanese-American girl whom he’s never gotten over, even after they lost touch when she was interned. Bittersweet regret and melancholy thoughts about what might have been linger on in Henry’s imagination, taking him on an emotional odyssey into the past. Although I don’t usually gravitate to sentimental novels, this one is so compelling that I found myself feeling perfectly justified in indulging in a good cry toward the end. Maybe I’m not so highbrow after all….

Perhaps I was also feeling emotional because the novel has a personal meaning for me. The depictions of camp life in Minidoka, Idaho were particularly fascinating, since I know my grandmother was interned there. “There were no trees or grass or flowers anywhere, and barely any shrubs,” Ford writes. “Just a living, breathing landscape of tar-paper barracks spotting the dry desert terrain.” Here is a photo of my grandmother raking mud at the camp (she’s three in from the right).... My dad sent me this photo a while ago, after he discovered it online, and I blogged about my initial reactions here. But now, after reading this novel, I find my thoughts straying to the question of my grandmother’s love life…. What guy was she dreaming about as she raked, that little smile playing on her lips, the murmurings of her heart a thousand miles away?

Photos from: here and here

My New Book Cover

2011-06-16T16:08:00.000-07:00

A couple months ago, my publisher asked me if I'd had any dreams or fantasies about how the cover of my book would appear. I racked my brain ... but nothing came to me. Or nothing terribly original, that is. All I could see in my head was a stack of books (which seems obvious enough, since my book is a literary memoir about finding myself through reading), juxtaposed with a martini glass (since during the tumultuous period I write about I was consuming quite a bit of Grey Goose, indeed).

I guess this is why I'm not a graphic designer.

A big thank you to Natalia, my publisher's graphic designer, who read my book and came up with this cover. I liked it as soon as Sandra showed it to me; it seems to capture the evocative, melancholy, searching-for-happiness mood of my book perfectly. The sepia photo is meant to represent my grandparents, whose turbulent romance casts light on my own journey of self-discovery.

After deciding upon the cover, Sandra and I spent a lovely, somewhat anxiety-ridden morning, drinking coffee and bouncing around ideas about the blurb on the back of the cover. After a few more rounds of revision, which involved chopping a couple hundred glorious words (I'm definitely way too subtle and verbose to ever make my living writing promotional material), this is what we were left with - my book in a nutshell:

"Leslie Shimotakahara is a young, disenchanted English professor struggling to revive her childhood love of reading. Her father Jack, recently retired from a high-powered corporate job, finally has time to take up reading books for pleasure. The Reading List tells the story of Leslie’s return home to Toronto to rethink her life and decide what to do next. At the same time, she bonds with her father over discussions about the lives, loves and works of the novelists on their shared reading list – Wharton, Joyce, Woolf and Atwood, to name a few. But when their conversations about literature unearth some heartbreaking, deeply buried family secrets surrounding Jack’s own childhood – growing up Japanese-Canadian in the aftermath of World War II – Leslie’s world is changed forever. Could discovering the truth about her father’s past hold the key to her finally being happy in love, life and career?

As captivating as The Jane Austen Book Club, and as inspiring as The Film Club, The Reading List reveals how literature can sometimes help us expose our past, understand our loved ones and point us toward our future."

So there you have it. Having the cover and back blurb in place definitely makes my book feel more real. Until this point, I suppose there's still been something kind of abstract or dreamy about the concept of my first book. But now, the book's become a material object and I'm filled with excitement and anticipation. At the same time, another form of anxiety sets in.... No one in my family has read my book yet. I wonder what they will think when my book is published in September?

Book #49: My Phobia of Writing from a Male Perspective

2011-06-08T18:36:00.000-07:00

"I fancied myself a chief in an earlier life, a man of the people, leading them through troubled times, photographed like Sitting Bull, my profile stern in its wisdom. But I didn't get your gifts. Or maybe I did, only just a little." -Joseph Boyden, Through Black Spruce

Last Friday, I met a friend for drinks at Reposado, where I had a curious experience. I walked to the back patio and found my friend perched at the corner table, looking very glamorous, sipping a margarita, surrounded by other stylish people, whom she introduced as architects she works with. I, being the only non-architect, was very interested in hearing about the world of adaptive reuse and mixed use building, but not five minutes into our conversation someone interrupted my question and shifted gears. “I don’t mean to seem like a stalker,” this guy said, “but are you a writer? Were you by any chance having brunch with another writer about six weeks ago at Union?”

I nodded, recalling my poached eggs and peas in hot sauce very well. He proceeded to tell me that he and his boyfriend had been sitting at the table next to us – dreadfully hungover. In fact, they were so hungover that rather than having their own conversation, they’d simply put their heads on the table and listened to two hours of my friend Diane and I talking about what we’re currently writing. So this guy knew everything about me! He knew all about my memoir and the revisions I’d been struggling with at the time, and he knew about my next project, the historical novel I’m trying to get underway. But what was most eerie was that he also knew about my fears and insecurities in embarking on this novel and he quoted verbatim what I’d been saying that caffeine-fuelled morning, as I poured my heart out to Diane about my desire to write the novel from three different perspectives, one of which would belong to my great-grandfather. He was an internment camp doctor during the Second World War. But I have this fear – phobia, really, or mild phobia, let’s just say – of writing from the male perspective. And especially a perspective so removed in not only gender, but also place and time.

Thus my writing and my writing hang-ups became the strange focus of our conversation, making my cheeks burn very hotly, and I felt compelled to reflect on what’s at the root of my hesitancy to doff my gender and identity. Maybe it’s simply the fact that for the past year-and-a-half, I’ve been immersed in writing a memoir…. And much as I’ve enjoyed the process, the memoir genre does have limits. While a certain creative latitude is at the memoirist’s disposal, changing one’s gender or throwing in a rape scene (unless it really happened) simply aren’t options. And there’s the rub. Much as I’ve loved the self-disclosure of writing memoir, I knew at the end of the process that I wanted the creative freedom of writing fiction. So my mysterious run-in with this architect who ventriloquized my fears and anxieties as a writer so well (sadly, I didn’t manage to catch his name, even though we spoke for two hours) made me think about where I’m going and the direction in which I want to grow. More imaginative risks. Proliferating “selves” that go well beyond my own.

The author who’s brilliant at this – and whose Giller Award winning novel I was recently reading on my trip to Spain – is Joseph Boyden. I love how Through Black Spruce takes the reader into the minds of two characters who are polar opposites of each other. Will Bird is a dare-devil bush pilot lying in a coma, as he narrates in a strange, dream-like fashion, the story of his tormented past. Annie Bird is his eccentric, beautiful niece, who’s on her own journey to find herself; she leaves the native reserve where she grew up to become a model and have a taste of the high life in Toronto, Montreal and ultimately New York. The novel oscillates between these two very different voices, which are both utterly convincing, and yet, what’s most striking is how Boyden artfully reveals deeper similarities between their characters, emotions, fears. I feel that any writer could learn a lot from reading Boyden, particularly on the craft of inhabiting other identities and creating voices that are distinctive and real.

Photo from: here

An Interlude: The Drifting, Travelling Mind

2011-05-31T06:51:00.000-07:00

Just got back to Toronto after spending the past couple weeks travelling with my boyfriend in Spain. (This is why I've been sadly neglectful of my blog - the guest computers at countryside inns in Andalusia are positively ancient and me, being a technophobe, I found it quite difficult to navigate the Spanish key board). But my hiatus from blogging aside, the trip was delightful, and I can definitely see why so many writers have found Spain a source of literary inspiration - from Washington Irving's lyrical musings about the Alhambra (this stunning Moorish palace in Granada, which we toured) to Hemingway's deep appreciation for bullfighting. Btw, we did not see a bullfight, for much as I might appreciate how Hemingway describes its unique artistry and rituals of violence, there are limits to what my stomach can take - not to mention the cruelty to animals. We did, however, spend a marvellous, boozy evening at a flamenco club, where the passion, the stomping and pure anguish of the bullfighting aesthetic seem to be perfectly captured in this extraordinary style of dance.

In between gorging on tapas and visiting museums (I loved seeing Goya's "Black Paintings" at the Prado), I managed to do a little reading at sidewalk cafes here and there. I did not do any writing, but instead I just let my mind drift and sooner or later it of course veered around to my writing. This historical novel I've been struggling to get started on.

You see, something strange and exhilarating happened the day before I left on my trip. I was having lunch in the food court of the sleek office building on Bay Street where I work (like most writers, I have a day job), when my phone suddenly buzzed. The place was so noisy that at first, I could hardly make out what this woman was saying through the equally noisy static. Finally, she shouted, "I'm calling from Kaslo, BC." My heart skipped a beat. As you may recall from my blog entry a few weeks ago, I'd contacted the Kootenay Historical Society, on a whim, enquiring whether they might have any information about my great grandfather, Kozo Shimotakahara, who was the doctor at the Japanese-Canadian internment camp established at Kaslo during the Second World War (this family history is part of what I want to explore in my novel). Well, as luck would have it, it turns out that this woman was one of the nurses who worked with my great grandfather, and by the excitement in her feeble voice, I could tell she was just as pleased to have found me as vice versa. "The stories I could tell you about Dr. Shimo...." she cackled. "After he arrived in our little town and quickly dispelled all the government propaganda against the Japs, you have no idea what he did...." But the hustle and bustle of businessmen rushing by with their lunch trays was so great I could hardly make out what she was saying. After telling her I'd be away in Spain until the end of the month, she promised to call me one evening in June so we could talk more. I'm crossing my fingers that she will.

Book #48: Murakami On My Mind

2011-05-15T17:05:00.000-07:00

"Strange and mysterious things, though, aren't they - earthquakes? We take it for granted that the earth beneath our feet is solid and stationary. We even talk about people being 'down to earth' or having their feet planted firmly on the ground. But suddenly one day we see that it isn't true."
-Haruki Murakami, After the Quake

Two months after the earthquake in Japan, I'm not hearing much about it in the media anymore. It's strange how an event can appear larger than life for so many days - earth-shattering, literally - and then just fade away, as other more current current events take over. Perhaps this is what I find so unsatisfying and unsettling about reading the newspaper and watching the news. But fiction, on the other hand, provides a whole other way of seeing the world, where the everyday details surrounding an event are carefully dissected. And so, lusting after this kind of reading experience, I picked up Haruki Murakami's After the Quake earlier this week.

In this collection of short stories, Murakami writes about how the 1995 earthquake in Kobe transformed the lives of ordinary people in Japan forever. What I found so moving about these stories is the way that they don't focus on the most dire instances of suffering; there are no torn limbs or people trapped under crumbling buildings in these stories. No, Murakami's art is a much more subtle, startling form of grief. A doctor attending a conference in Thailand curses her estranged ex-husband - half wishing that he died in the earthquake - only to learn from a fortune teller that he is still alive, bringing an unexpected relief to her tormented mind. A crazy man dreams that a giant frog has saved Tokyo from being destroyed from a quake. And in my favourite story, a writer comforts the young daughter of the woman he's secretly been in love with for years by telling her whimsical stories about "Masakichi the bear" to distract her from her nightmares about "Mr. Earthquake." Strangely, the earthquake pulls them all together into a new kind of improvised family.

Although Murakami was writing about the Kobe earthquake, I can't help but see these stories as illuminating the more recent earthquake, too. And late at night when I, like several of the characters, also cannot sleep, it's comforting to pick up Murakami and get a sense that life in even the most disastrous circumstances carries on, and people manage to find new forms of happiness, however fragile.

Photo from: here

Book #47: A Detour Through the Family Archives

2011-05-09T08:06:00.000-07:00

"Although our material resources were thin, we had achieved something significant: we had reached out and touched the community, we had let them know we were here. And she had no doubt that people who'd never heard of the hospital before would be beating a path to our door."
-Damon Galgut, The Good Doctor

Now that my memoir is complete, I've started a bit of historical research for my second project, an historical novel. My great grandfather, Kozo Shimotakahara, was the first Japanese-Canadian doctor, and his life has long fascinated me. Everyone in our family seems to have revered him. According to a woman I spoke to at the Kootenay Historical Society, in the town of Kaslo, BC, where he was a doctor during the Second World War, Kozo was so esteemed by the townspeople that when he died, the Board of Trade refurnished the childrens ward of the hospital in his honour. And my grandmother also waxed lyrical about him in an essay she published in the anthology Issei - extolling his courage for coming to Canada at age fourteen, praising his ambition to go to medical school and set up the first medical clinic in Vancouver's Japantown.

And yet, I know that the man wasn't a saint. He had a darker side. I've heard rumours from other family members of his violence and vicious perfectionism - if his wife and children didn't please him, he was likely to throw them down the stairs. His eldest son he banished to sleep in the shed. And in conversations, my father has mused about how Kozo truly felt upon moving to Kaslo, a remote ghost town in the interior of BC, during the war. The truth is that he was sent there. The government had set up an internment camp for Japanese-Canadians, and Kozo was expected to be the camp doctor - in return for which he and his family members would retain their freedom and property. Through this peculiar deal that he'd brokered, he arguably assisted in the internment of his own people, and I have often wondered whether he felt any ambivalence or guilt.

It's this doctor - of divided loyalties and ambiguous scruples - that I'm interested in bringing to life. On the outside, he was a pillar of the community, no doubt, but what did the man truly feel? What thoughts raced through his mind late at night?

Recently, I've been reading for inspiration Damon Galgut's The Good Doctor, a novel that brilliantly explores the plight of two doctors at a decrepit hospital in rural South Africa. Although the novel is set in the post-Apartheid era, the past is ever-present. Billeted together simply because they're the two white doctors in this all black region, Frank and Laurence soon discover that they couldn't be more different in their attitudes and outlooks. A cynical, seasoned older man used to working the system, Frank doesn't presume to change anything in the new South Africa. Laurence, by sharp contrast, is fresh-faced and naive - brimming with grand ideas about community medicine and outreach clinics and racial equality. But what makes this novel so fascinating is the way it subtly reveals deeper similarities between the two doctors and suggests how what it means to be a "good" doctor can only be a murky question in this dangerous, politically charged climate. In the end, I found myself sympathizing with both doctors and seeing them as locked in their respective struggles for survival. These two characters gave me a lot to think about in developing my great grandfather's characterization.

Photo from: here

Book #46: Writing the New Toronto

2011-05-01T08:22:00.000-07:00

"The metropolis waits, protects itself from Kafka's prophecy in Arms of the City. The senselessness of the heaven-reaching tower. No absoluteness."
-Rishma Dunlop, "Metropolis Redux"

Three years ago, I moved back to Toronto, the city where I was born, after having been away for thirteen years. My studies had taken me all over - to Montreal, Providence, Paris and Berlin - before my short-lived career as an English professor had landed me in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Growing up in Toronto, I never thought there was anything particularly unique about my hometown, but my years on the road had taught me otherwise. I was homesick - I missed the curry, kimchi, wasabi and all the other flavours of Queen Street, along with the invigorating sensation of jostling up against all these cultures on the crowded streetcar. (I particularly missed eavesdropping on peoples' conversations, the snippets of varied accents and languages). I came to realize that I needed these everday experiences in order to feel at home.

Last week, at the Gladstone Hotel, I attended the book launch for TOK: Writing the New Toronto, volume 6, a publication that captures for me this very experience of inhabiting a city as diverse and intriguing as Toronto. Last year, I was delighted to have one of my short stories published in volume 5, and so I was excited to read this year's volume to see how another batch of emerging and established writers would carry on the tradition. And I was not disappointed.

These nineteen authors of fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry represent an incredible breadth in form and experience, illustrating how varied and textured life in Toronto truly is. There is no single immigrant experience that emerges from this collection; there is no coherent urban experience; there is only the elusive sense, as Rishma Dunlop eloquently puts it, that "In the empty theatres of the city, small productions are played out. Rain-slicked streets. Stories of charred roses, bones of mishap." Identity emerges in this collection as a kind of collage, where ancestral pasts and all-too-real presents intermingle on the same page, and the authors' backgrounds appear comprised of so many different elements - sexuality, history, race, ethnicity, to name a few. This collage-like quality is beautifully illustrated by Jo Simalaya Alcampo's "the inviolable heart," where the author writes of how she "grew up hearing stories about how my great-grandmother escaped torture in a Spanish dungeon, how my grandfather's family was murdered by the Japanese army, how our last name was randomly changed by an American soldier and how my immediate family immigrated to Canada in the 1970s to escape martial law." There can be no simple coming to terms with this past, as the speaker scours the "lesbian of colour community in Toronto" in search of a therapist who can help her unearth a wealth of repressed memories cutting across her body, different times and places.

Although I couldn't begin to comment on all the stories and poems that moved me, I have to mention one that had a personal resonance. Alicia Peres' story "Grace," which explores the strange friendship that develops in the suburbs of Malton between an old woman, Grace, originally from Karachi, and her Sikh neighbour, as they bond over gardening, stirred memories of my own grandmother, Esther Kayaco, in Hamilton. The story brought back for me her intense curiosity about human nature - on the bus, when I was little, she always talked to strangers - and even now, on the rare occasions she leaves the house in her wheelchair, strangers are constantly reaching out to her, perhaps because she puzzles them, this gnome-like Japanese woman with big watchful eyes and a booming voice, or perhaps because people sense her spirit. Grace's spunk - "No cooking - thank God! After all these years I am frankly sick of cooking" - is exactly the sort of thing my grandmother says, interspersed with recollections of her girlhood on the Queen Charlotte Islands, the Internment camps during the war, and her hilarious mimicry of all the people she's met along the way.

Photo from: here

Book #45: Solitude and Self-Invention

2011-04-23T06:09:00.000-07:00

"I heard for the first time his voice, reciting his poems into a lacquered tin funnel as if into the ear of a stranger.... I felt there was something in the articulated voice that suggested a wound, the way one can sometimes recognize a concealed ailment in the slow movement of a king in newsreels."
-Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero

A few days ago, I finished the final revisions to my memoir and handed the manuscript over to my publisher with a rush of excitement and something else... strangely akin to sadness. When I ran into a friend of mine at a book launch the following evening, he assured me that this is quite normal - many writers experience "postpartum blues" after finishing a book. The only cure, he said with an ironic smile, is to throw yourself into another book.

In a little while, I'd like to go back to working on the historical novel I started thinking and dreaming about and writing (in a very preliminary way) last summer. But I don't feel ready to throw myself into that book just yet. My mind needs time to recalibrate. So over the past couple days, I've found myself just reading and reading, immersing myself in my favourite novels with a concentration I haven't had for simply reading in quite a while. While in the final stages of revising my manuscript, I'd made the mistake of picking up Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero. This is not the novel to read if you're looking for light diversion, I soon realized. Ondaatje's experiments with style and genre and the sheer number of unique characters he introduces are too intricate to follow for the distracted mind. So I'd put the book aside, intent on coming back to it as soon as I'd finished my own writing.

What is it about these characters that I find so alluring? Children of the California landscape, they come from mysterious backgrounds and their relationships to each other are ambiguous, shifting with the winds. Coop, Anna and Claire form a peculiar, improvised sibline: orphaned as a young kid after his parents were bludgeoned by the hired man, Coop was adopted by Anna's father, who also adopted Claire after her mother died in childbirth. But since brother and sister are not truly brother and sister, an illicit desire takes root between Coop and Anna - leading to his violent expulsion from the family in a gruesome scene involving a fragment of glass.

Without recognizable origins or family pasts, these characters are cut adrift and forced to invent themselves from moment to moment through acts of artistry and deception that yield a deeper truth. When Anna claims at one point that she comes from Divisadero Street - a street in San Francisco named after the Spanish word for "division" - we know that on a literal level she is lying. Yet her words do have significance. For her identity has been severed from her past so violently that she is left in a state of free fall.... Literature becomes her only refuge, like a surrogate family, and what reader can't relate to that? After becoming a scholar of French literature, Anna devotes her life to studying the enigmatic writer, Lucien Segura, whose voice reminded her of a wound, when she first stumbled across an old recording of him. His life overtakes her imagination in the sprawling second half of the novel, where the parallels in his own ruptured love life come to light, creating the sense of a strange connection between scholar/reader and writer - both are caught up in some archetypal dance.

Having just finished exploring and writing about my own relationship to the novelists who have long haunted my imagination, I found this section of Ondaatje's novel particularly intriguing. I feel as though I could reread it many times and always take away a new insight about how literature shapes life and vice versa.

Photo from: here

Book #44: Looking Back on Thoreau, One Year Later

2011-04-15T15:42:00.000-07:00

“I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life….”
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden

It’s amazing how much my outlook on life has changed since I started this blog almost a year ago. My aim was simple: I wanted to blog about the books that have uplifted and inspired and occasionally infuriated me – particularly at crisis points in my life. I wanted to explore how reading has pulled me through some really difficult times – my career change, my search for love, my grandmother’s death, which unearthed some dark family secrets – and most importantly, I wanted to share my experiences with a community of avid readers, rather than erudite scholars.

When I moved back to Toronto a few years ago, I was walking away from the only world I’d known for the past twelve years – the Ivory Tower. After two years as an English prof in small town Nova Scotia, I’d had a breakdown and burnt out for a variety of reasons, including a couple of bad love affairs, academic politics, and the humiliation of having some students name me “The Worst Professor Ever” on the worldwide web, to name just a few of my troubles. And worst of all, after my three degrees, I’d somehow lost along the way my love of literature. That was what I wanted back most badly. My childhood love of reading and writing.

As I go back and reread my first post on Thoreau from a year ago (you can read it here), I’m struck by how much happier I am now. That post was based on musings in a notebook I’d kept while at the depths of my misery as a professor, so my amazement in looking back is doubly refracted through my remembrance of the “me” I was a year ago and the “me” I was three years ago, as I stared out my university office window at a beautiful, bucolic landscape and could see nothing but my own entrapment in the wilds of nowhere…. At the time, I’d been reading and teaching a lot of Thoreau, and it incensed me that his grand vision of Nature did not, through my depressed eyes, live up to expectation. And his snobbish view that the “works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them” rankled me – it was precisely this view of reading-as-the-art-form-of-the-elite-few that I so desperately wanted to get away from.

Funny how my impression of a text always has so much to do with my mood.

Over the past week, I’ve been rereading Walden, as I put the finishing touches on my own memoir, The Reading List: Literature, Love and Back Again, being published this fall (something else that's making me happy these days.... Not that I'm not still prone to bouts of bluesiness and depression). This time around, I met a different Thoreau, one whose bedraggled beard and constant, poignant searching for some deeper meaning to life filled me with sympathy. What reader isn’t hoping to find some marvelous, inspiring insight springing from the world of literature, lifting her above the drudgery of everyday life? This way of reading isn’t only for the elite few, I see now – it’s for readers as diverse as me and Thoreau.

Photo from: here

Book #43: Reading Yourself Into a New Life

2011-04-02T08:27:00.000-07:00

"She knew she was going to have trouble believing in herself, in the room of her house, and when she glanced over at this new book on her nightstand, stacked atop the one she finished last night, she reached for it automatically, as if reading were the singular and obvious first task of the day, the only viable way to negotiate the transit from sleep to obligation."
-Michael Cunningham, The Hours

What a week. I have been run off my feet at my day job. And at night, I have been stressed - exhilaratingly stressed - finishing off the edits to my book in time for my agent to take it to the London Book Fair. Now that my book is finished (or finished at least until my friend, Diane, another writer, finishes giving it her final read through, for tweaking), I don't know what to do with myself. Last night, I indulged in my first cigarette in months and also began reading The Hours, which I've been meaning to read ever since I saw the movie years ago.

While watching the film, I recall identifying most closely with Clarissa (Meryl Streep), but upon reading the novel, it's a different character, Laura Brown, who pulls at my sympathies most urgently. The avid reader, the repressed housewife. She's the one whose story beckons to my imagination and lets me see shades of my own former miserable self and uplifts me in surprising ways. Laura Brown literally reads her way into another life - gradually, at first, as the simple tasks of caring for her son and baking a cake for her husband's birthday compete with the illicit pleasure of reading Mrs. Dalloway, a novel that she strangely, exquisitely, identifies with, even as it illuminates her own stifled condition. Although it first seems she's simply reading for escape, just the opposite ends up being true. Reading Mrs. Dalloway pushes Laura to change her life in frightening, unthinkable ways. And as I'm reading, I find myself remembering the moment in my own life when reading so transformed me.

It was six years ago, the year I'd moved to Berlin. I was in the second to last year of my Ph.D., and I was supposed to be immersed in my dissertation, writing five to ten pages at Staatsbibliothek every day. But the temptation of being a flaneuse in Berlin's graffiti-filled streets - touring the makeshift galleries and experimental music venues and clandestine bookstores - was simply too great. The grand theoretical intervention that my dissertation was supposed to be making melted away, and I remember the illicit rush of thinking, Screw it, I'm just reading for fun today. The first book I picked up was Accidents in the House by Tessa Hadley. I remember its black cover very clearly. It's a collection of linked short stories about a group of people, primarily women, and by the end of the book their fates have reversed in ironic, inspiring ways. The story stayed with me and my desire to read for pure pleasure, too. A dangerous drug.

Although I did eventually plough through my dissertation, I could never truly envision myself as a professor after I'd read that book, after I'd allowed myself that momentary freedom. And a few years later, I walked away from my life in a small university town, heading for some unforeseeable future.

Photo from: here

Book #42: In the Waiting Room

2011-03-23T18:23:00.000-07:00

"I can't imagine anyone becoming a writer who wasn't a voracious reader as an adolescent. A true reader understands that books are a world unto themselves - and that that world is richer and more interesting than any one we've traveled in before."
-Paul Auster, The Paris Review Interviews, Volume IV

Revising my book has been a curious activity. It's a bit like looking in the mirror and trying to remember how I looked a year and a half ago (when I first began writing my memoir) or better still, three years ago (when I was still trapped in the dreary life of an English professor and having a meltdown in tandem with my father's - our twin breakdowns forming the subject matter of my three hundred pages). But now, as I look back on that time in my life, I feel weirdly distant from the neurotic, panic-stricken woman I was back then (well, still a little neurotic, I guess). Such is the editing process.

My publisher's main criticism was that in certain sections, she wanted "more Leslie." In a few areas, she feels the prose is still a bit too intellectual (the very mousy self I'd come to loathe!) So that's what I've been working on for the past two weeks - injecting more of my authentic, unfiltered voice. And the experience has been therapeutic, to say the least.

There's also been a certain amount of traipsing around the city involved in the final stretch of writing my book. One of the scenes I was reworking is set in the hospital waiting room where I sat for so many hours as a young teenager, chewing my fingernails and awaiting the next round of medieval treatments in store for my scoliosis. Reading over the scene, I was suddenly overwhelmed by this fear that I'd described the waiting room all wrong - that wasn't at all how I remembered the plastic benches and hyper sanitized surfaces and lame murals of dragons and rainbows. The feeling lingered, sharp and disorienting, and later that day I couldn't resist my desire to return to that very place, that very waiting room. I wanted to examine the tiles and breathe the vaguely sweet, antiseptic air and search - once again - for vestiges of my old self. But it was the end of the day, and the waiting room was completely empty.

Still, it was oddly moving to be back there and I found myself wandering around the ortho ward for some time. I paused outside an exam room where I caught a glimpse of a surly, stringy haired girl slouching down in her chair, her arms crossed like her stomach hurt, while a white-haired doctor prattled on. Ah, yes. I had her number. I stood in the shadows of the door, mesmerized.

It must have been around that time in my life that I turned to the solitary, inward compensations of reading.

Photo from: here

Book #41: Disaster, Diaspora, Dispersion

2011-03-15T05:02:00.000-07:00

"Six months now since she'd been sent away to London. Every morning before she opened her eyes she thought, if I were the wishing type I know what I would wish."
-Monica Ali, Brick Lane

Staring at images of the earthquake in Japan has been leaving me nauseous. To watch fields being swallowed by waters like lava and lonely survivor buildings peaking over the mounds of rubble fills me with a very strange, sad feeling, to say the least. I'm wondering if we have family there, caught in the chaos. I emailed my mom to ask, but of course she didn't know - it was my grandfather who faithfully wrote letters to our relatives in Japan, and he's dead now. Neither my parents nor I even speak Japanese. So with my grandpa's death, the cord of communication was cut, and I'm left with nothing more than hazy memories of some distant cousins coming to stay with my grandparents when I was a kid. A couple of teenage boys, dressed all in white. They seemed to embody the mystery and otherworldliness I'd always associated with my ancestral homeland.

As a fourth-generation Japanese-Canadian, perhaps it isn't surprising that I felt like a tourist when I visited Japan for the first and only time. Still, it greatly upsets me to see the photos of rubble and ruined land, as if something of my past is again being swallowed up, and simply clicking a button to give a few dollars doesn't do enough to appease my conscience.

How eerie that when all this struck, I was reading Brick Lane, Monica Ali's brilliant debut novel about diaspora and dispersion. As I read, I was thinking about the parallels between her tale and my own family history. This novel about two Bangladeshi sisters - one of whom resigns herself to an arranged marriage in London, the other of whom runs off to pursue a "love marriage" to a man who beats and abandons her - reminds me in certain ways of the fates of my grandmother and great grandmother.

My great grandmother was a picture bride, a woman sent from Japan to marry a stranger in America, strictly based on her photograph. Well, that's not true exactly. According to my grandmother, she was actually the matchmaker's secretary. When my great grandfather proved himself a particularly picky client and turned down all the ladies selected for him, the matchmaker, on a whim, presented his secretary. "I'll take her," my great grandfather said immediately. Thus my great grandmother boarded a ship for Oregon, but did not find the life of luxury she'd been promised - her husband, it turned out, was merely a drycleaner. Putting on a stoic face, she swallowed her desires, until her desires resurfaced through her daughter (my grandmother). My grandmother, a Japanese-American beauty queen, prided herself on being American, and when the family tried to send her back to Japan through an arranged marriage to a wealthy Japanese businessman, she rebelled. By this point, she was already in love with my grandfather; he was one of the guys who came to play basketball in the part of Portland, Oregon, where she grew up. So she got on a ship and came back to America bringing with her only a beautiful Japanese doll as a memento, and married my grandfather. But her love marriage soon soured. My grandfather turned out to be a violent, angry man blinded by alcoholism and his own thwarted artistic ambitions.

I often wondered, as I discovered pieces of her life through conversations with my father, whether she ever regretted her decision to come back to America. It's haunting to think about the other set of descendents she would have had, had she decided to marry the Japanese businessman, and I sometimes dream about the woman I would have been. My ghostly alter ego......

Photo from: here

Lovely Blog Award

2011-03-08T07:54:00.000-08:00

This morning, to take my mind off awaiting my editor's comments, I've been indulging in quite a bit of social networking. Diaspora Dialogues asked me to do a guest blog about my participation as an Emerging Writer in their mentorship programme, which really helped me gain confidence as a writer. They've already posted my blog entry, which can be read here.

And thanks so much to Anglers Rest for awarding me One Lovely Blog Award! It was such a nice surprise, as I'm still quite new to the world of blogging. I had no idea that in starting my blog about my favourite novels and the book I'm writing I would meet such a warm and embracing community of other bloggers, readers and writers. What a pleasure to be drawn into this world.

Here are the rules for accepting the award:

Accept the award, post it on your blog together with the name of the person who has granted the award and their blog link.

Pass the award on to 15 other blogs that you've newly discovered.

Remember to contact the bloggers to let them know they have been chosen for this award.

This is a great way to be introduced to lots of new blogs and their authors.

Book #40: The Risk of Writing Honestly

2011-03-01T18:55:00.000-08:00

Diana Athill: A sort of shudder of guilt still goes through me about being so - not indiscreet - but about myself. I shouldn't be doing it. But if you're trying to write about something because you're trying to get to the bottom of it, whether it's your own life or something else, there is no point in doing it unless you try as hard as you can to do it honestly, and to say how it really was.

Alice Munro: Well, I got things right, but it didn't always please the people I got it right about. I can remember really hurting people.

-A Conversation between Diana Athill and Alice Munro, Finding the Words

A couple weeks ago, I went with some friends to the book launch for Finding the Words, an anthology of personal writings by various writers who support PEN Canada. Although I went to the event not knowing much about this non-profit literary organization, by the end of the evening I'd learned a bit about its work defending freedom of expression in Canada and abroad, and I was sufficiently intrigued to buy the book (from which all profits go to supporting the organization).

Last night, when I couldn't sleep, I began reading a transcribed conversation between Diana Athill and Alice Munro - two great writers interviewing each other. I don't know why I began reading in the middle of the book, but their conversation instantly grabbed me. Their frank discussion about the risks of writing honestly - the emotional risks of hurting others, the writer's own paralyzing sense of self-exposure - struck a chord indeed.

I suppose it must have something to do with the fact that yesterday I finished editing the final chapters of my own book and sent the manuscript off to my agent and publisher for their feedback. So later that day, I was left lying on the sofa, feeling bored and antsy, and my mind started wandering to the fateful prospect of how my writing would be received. I'm not talking about the requests for revisions that Sandra and Sam are bound to throw at me, I'm talking about the more terrifying question of how the people depicted in my memoir will respond. My parents, my surgeon (now deceased, it turns out, according to Google), a smattering of ex-boyfriends some of whom I'm still friends with (and all of whose names have been changed, don't worry), a cast of dead relatives who come alive in my imagination, et cetera. How will these people and ancestral ghosts respond to their afterlives on the pages of my notebook?

It came as something of a relief to discover via Athill and Munro that I'm not the only one to feel awkward and embarrassed about having undertaken this unabashed exercise in narcissism in writing a book at all. While I was immersed in writing it, I was simply luxuriating in the freedom to write and I felt it was important to allow myself to write in a way that felt authentic and uncensored, as I journeyed back through my defection from the Ivory Tower, my breakdown, my sense of failure, the toll that my career blues took on my love life and all the rest of the emotional turbulence stirred up during that miserable period....

Paradoxically, while writing, I wasn't thinking about the eventuality that others would read my words. But I'm thinking about it now.

Fortunately, just as I was prepared for a night of insomnia, I discovered another essay, "The First Time," by Stacey May Fowles, who reflects at length on the beehive of neuroses presented by publishing her first book. Plenty of alcohol and cognitive behavioural therapy, she recommends.

Photo from: here

Book #39: Looking for Diversions

2011-02-21T15:04:00.000-08:00

"I often fell asleep on top of my manuscript, then woke with a swollen cheek. Sometimes, when the wall clock's silver hands pointed past twelve, I would imagine I was hearing things. Those sounds would recur, like the snoring of the electrical repairman next door, the boom of a crane on a far-off building site in the dead of night, or the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen."
-Wei Hui, Shanghai Baby

After a three day stretch of living in my pajamas, I finished writing the last chapter of my book yesterday. I stole one of my boyfriend's cigarettes to celebrate and huddled in my bathrobe on our snow-crusted patio overlooking the park, a cold lucidity filling my lungs.

I wanted to feel tranquil and savour the moment, but just the opposite was so. Editing. Ugh. I have one week to edit the manuscript as a whole before turning it over to my editor for her final comments and revisions.

I realized this morning that I definitely prefer writing to editing. There's something so much more satisfying about putting pen to paper and forming words afresh compared to cutting and moving stuff around. A few hours of editing simply doesn't make me feel like I've had my dose of writing for the day.

Seeking some diversion from the task at hand, I picked up Shanghai Baby, which I've been reading intermittently over the past couple weeks, and found myself suddenly engrossed in the final chapters. It's an autobiographical novel by Wei Hui, a young Shanhainese writer who lives a madcap, near schizophrenic life - caught between waxing lyrical about Henry Miller and Marguerite Duras and lusting after the latest Yves Saint-Laurent wallet. While writing and secluding herself with her own thoughts - some of which are surprisingly beautiful reflections on the ephemeral quality of twenty-first-century life - she also finds time to engage in games of love and deceit at Shanghai's hot night spots, bringing into focus a city made for film noir, full of old world glamour, decrepit architecture, fast money. My favourite scenes are almost reminiscent of the films of Wong Kar Wai (speaking of whom I may watch Fallen Angels tonight to reward myself for making some headway with this editing business).

Photo from: here

A Friend's Funeral

2011-02-14T19:40:00.000-08:00

Over the weekend, I attended a friend's funeral. Jean's death was sudden and tragic - after a long battle with cancer, she appeared to be in remission. The last time I saw her for dinner over the Christmas holidays, she was laughing and quaffing wine and showing off her new shawl. She told me about her most recent trip to Argentina where she'd bought five pairs of boots (she had extremely long, narrow feet and usually had to get boots custom made, she said, but Argentinian women had her kind of feet).

A woman who fears being on the cusp of death doesn't buy five pairs of boots, I thought at the time, with a sigh of relief.

At her funeral, I found myself thinking about those unworn boots and how naive my assumption had been. Her show of living life to the fullest and carrying on in her delightfully showy manner was a means of trying to put others at ease, as she always did.

Before the eulogy, her best friend - also named Jean - read Maya Angelou's "Phenomenal Woman."

I came home from the funeral and stared at my bookshelf for a long time. I pulled out a book that Jean had given me a couple years ago, My Maasai Life. Tears filled my eyes as I realized I'd never even bothered to read it and now I never would be able to read it and discuss it with her. It was a memoir written by her friend whom she'd met while doing volunteer work for Free The Children.

Jean, see you back in Kenya one day??! read the handwritten note above the author's signature. (Had she meant to give me her own copy? Perhaps she'd only been lending it to me and I'd misunderstood?)

Last year, when I'd told her I was writing my own memoir I recalled how excited she'd been, and a couple years before that, I recalled how supportive she'd been when I told her I was leaving academia to do my own writing. "So creative writing's your passion," she'd said somewhat quizzically (an Iowa farm girl by birth, and an entre preneur at heart, she was amazed by how little pay writers will work for).

I could write more about Jean, for she certainly continues on in my imagination - her candid advice on men, her funny stories about travelling home and running into her old high school boyfriends, her incredible ability to draw others out and make an impression. Maybe one day I will write more about her. But right now writing more would be too sad.

Book #38: Room's Unique Perspective

2011-02-04T19:41:00.000-08:00

"I count one hundred cereal and waterfall the milk that's nearly the same white as the bowls, no splashing, we thank Baby Jesus. I choose Meltedy Spoon with the white all blobby on his handle when he leaned on the pan of boiling pasta by accident. Ma doesn't like Meltedy Spoon but he's my favorite because he's not the same." -Emma Donoghue, Room

I met Emma Donoghue a couple years ago when I had the fortune to have her as my mentor in the writing programme, Diaspora Dialogues. I had just moved back to Toronto the year before after a failed stint in academia, desperately wanting to return to my first love, creative writing. Emma was wonderfully incisive and encouraging in her advice on how I could improve a story I'd been struggling with (it was later published in the anthology TOK: Writing the New Toronto). I recall her advising me, in an email I read many times, to pay careful attention to perspective and which character I wanted the reader to sympathize with at any given moment.

Little did I know that at the time, she must have been putting the finishing touches on her own masterly experiment in perspective, Room. As I said when I saw her at the book launch, had I known I was being mentored by a Man Booker nominee (fingers crossed for you, Emma!), I would have probably been too overwhelmed to write. A couple weekends ago, I read Room straight through - unable to put it down except to shower and eat. I was utterly mesmerized by the freshness of the narrator's voice.

Although the premise of the novel is horrifying - five-year-old Jack has spent his entire life in captivity, born to a sex slave - the tale is strangely uplifting. And I don't think this is simply a matter of the novel's narrative arc, as we follow Jack on his escape. Particularly in the first half, when Jack's entire world consists of Room, I found myself falling in love with how his imagination brings to life the most stripped down environment so that all things appear charged with unique properties and wonder. Meltedy Spoon, Plant and Spider spark the most delightful reflections in the child's mind, as his language itself appears something malleable and one-of-a-kind. I loved the experience of entering his world and perversely, I have to admit, I felt a twinge of sadness when he escapes into the "real" world and is compelled to take on the life of a normal little boy. But Jack will always retain something of his unique perspective, and this is the beauty of Room......

It occurred to me as I was sitting in a room by myself, staring at the white wall, trying to get started on the twelfth chapter of my book, that Room also offers an intriguing metaphor for the writer's life.

Photo from: here

A Japanese Custom

2011-01-27T17:51:00.000-08:00

My short story, "A Japanese Custom," was published in this month's issue of MTLS. If you feel like it, you can read it here. It's loosely based on the stories that my grandmother, Kayaco, told me over the years.... Growing up, I always loved how she would reminisce at family gatherings about her girlhood in BC, back in the days before the Japanese-Canadians had lost everything, and her spunk never failed to astonish to me. I wrote this story two summers ago for U of T's Summer Writing School (Alissa York was an inspiring instructor). Although I liked the story at the time, rereading it now I feel that in many ways this slice of life doesn't do justice to my grandmother. Oh well. I guess my feeling of sweaty-palm-dissatisfaction may push me to write a novel about her....

Photo from: here

Book #37: Breakfast with My Publisher

2011-01-17T19:30:00.000-08:00

"In studying old photographs I am struck sometimes by a sense of my being contemporary with my parents - as if I'd known them when they were, let's say, only teenagers. Is this odd? I wonder. I rather suspect others share in their family's experiences and memories without knowing quite how." -Joyce Carol Oates, The Paris Review Interviews

This morning I had breakfast with my publisher, Sandra, to discuss the first ten chapters of my book. Since this chunk of writing contains some deviations from the chapter outline I'd included in my book proposal, I was a tad nervous, and it didn't help that I was jittery from too much coffee. But as I perched on a bar stool at Canteen, unable to resist another Americano, Sandra told me she was delighted with the new emotional territory I'd broached, and in fact, if I hadn't included the new material, she'd been planning to push me to delve deeper. As if through some beautiful telepathy, I'd intuited that she wanted more vulnerability and self-disclosure, which was wonderful to hear, because at this point I really am having so much fun reliving and revelling in the most miserable periods of my life - my promiscuous youth, my failed career as an English professor, family secrets, my deformed spine, what have you. Writing about all that old misery somehow helps redeem it (at least in my mind).

So now I am down to the last three chapters, which I have the next month and a half to write. No sooner had Sandra and I toasted to saving the best for last than a wave of cold sweat and nerve prickles swept over me.

After we'd wrapped up our meeting, I decided I needed a short break from working on the manuscript to clear my head. So I ended up reading a book that a friend lent me, The Paris Review Interviews, volume three. What a marvellous discovery. I had no idea that these interviews are so revealing and interesting - it's as if these revered writers are sitting down with you and disclosing the most intimate details about their minds and writing habits, over a glass of wine. I love in particular Joyce Carol Oates' reflections on how old photographs serve as inspiration and transport her, almost magically, into the minds of her ancestors. What she's saying resonates with how I feel when I look at the old photos of my grandmother, particularly the pre-Internment photos from her adolescence, and I think to myself, Oates said it perfectly: her memories are my memories.

And so I must finish my current book quickly so I can move on to writing something else. My deepest desire has always been to write an historical novel.

Photo from: here

Book #36: My Wayward Bones

2011-01-09T18:41:00.000-08:00

"The hollow of my hand was still ivory-full of Lolita - full of the feel of her pre-adolescently incurved back, that ivory-smooth sliding sensation of her skin through the thin frock that I had worked up and down as I held her." -Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Today was a lovely day (and I'm not the sort of person who often considers her day "lovely"). I went to my writers' workshop where I shared a chapter in my memoir that has been troubling me for a while - the chapter deals with a painful deformity of the spine I suffered as a teenager. The other writers in my workshop were very supportive and encouraging (which came as a great relief, because the chapter is very revealing about my sexual coming-of-age and I was beginning to second guess my decision to include it at all). This is the joy of belonging to a workshop - a respite from the isolation of writing alone and self-doubts whispering in my head.

Here is an excerpt from the chapter, where I'm reading Lolita and identifying all too well with the heroine:

I stared at the cover for a long time: a close-up on a pair of pigeon-toed legs, clad in ankle socks and saddle shoes, slightly grubby around the toes. “The only convincing love story of our century,” reads the endorsement by Vanity Fair. I’d heard this line before, and yet I’d never found anything the least bit romantic or erotic about this novel. Fascinating, yes. Sexy, no. For me, it had always been a story about victimization and survival and a wily, foul-mouthed little girl struggling to hold onto some shred of self throughout her sordid predicament.

Humbert Humbert tries to control Lolita’s body – cataloguing all her measurements, policing her diet, relishing in running his hand along the prepubescent slope of her spine. As she gets a bit older, the signs of her body maturing – plumping out, growing curvaceous – are the ultimate turn-off. He desires to freeze her as his perpetual lover-child, his “nymphet,” forever smelling of grass stains and ice cream sundaes.

As I flipped through the pages, rereading my favourite sections, Humbert Humbert’s hands turned into the probing hands of Dr. Foote, as he bent me and molded me, exploring the possibilities of my young body, testing the flexibility of my wayward bones.

I wanted to stop reading, yet I couldn’t stop. The pain (and pleasure) of watching Lolita being violated was too immediate, too fascinating.

Photo from: here

Book #35: Looking for Madame Sosostris

2010-12-28T08:10:00.000-08:00

"For years she had drifted into fantasy as she lay in bed at night or sat quietly looking at a book without reading it. Now her fantasies began to serve a more urgent purpose. It was much more bearable to be a princess getting tortured in a dungeon than a crooked little girl being tortured by doctors." -Judith Rossner, Looking for Mr. Goodbar

Last week, my boyfriend took me to his office Christmas party, where I had my fortune told. While mingling over glasses of bubbly, you had the option of slipping off to a table in the corner where an old woman with battle-marked skin and dangly earrings shuffled a pack of Tarot cards. At first, I was skeptical about going up - I've never considered myself the new agey, occultist type, not since junior high at least - but one of the other guests told me that this woman had discerned all kinds of intimate details about her life and yielded scads of insight. Curiosity got the better of me.

Whether working from intuition or mystical powers, the fortune teller did draw out a good deal about my life. She knew (guessed?) that I am a writer and that I'm prone to stress and neck pain (maybe she could tell this just by looking at my posture). But in any case, some cred had been established in my mind. So when she said that something - some key ingredient - is missing from my current project, I sat up straight indeed.

Although she couldn't say what exactly it was, I knew what she was getting at. It's something that has been lurking at the back of my mind, a shadowy territory I've been reluctant to explore in my memoir.

When I was eleven, I was diagnosed with idiopathic scoliosis, a curvature of the spine of unknown cause. For two years, I had to wear a fibreglass back brace, and after that treatment failed to do much of anything, aside from giving me breathing problems, surgery was the only option. Several vertebrae had to be fused and a metal rod was stapled to my spine and I was left with a bright red seam that both tormented and intrigued me for years to come. (It's like the scar's a zipper into me... a reminder of my ability to become undone).

Since this event was so formative to my identity (my sexuality, my relationship to my body, my "escape" into reading and the life of the mind), it might seem obvious that I should include it in my memoir. But I haven't, until now. I haven't wanted to open that closet. I've said to myself that it isn't important or relevant, but now I sense that just the opposite is true.

Thank you, Madame Sosostris.

So over the past few days, in between eating turkey at Christmas parties, I've been reading for inspiration Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Judith Rossner's 1970s bestseller. Based on a true story, the novel tells a dark tale about a Catholic school teacher, who suffered from scoliosis as a child, leaving her with a sense of disfigurement that plays out in her games of seduction on the New York bar scene. While her experience is no doubt different from my own (thank God! I didn't end up being killed by a psychopath), I have to say that there are certain scenes dealing with memory repression, depression and fantasy that resonate with me all too well. Now I have to curl up with my notebook and delve into that morass of my own memories. A little light Christmas reading.

Photo from: here

Book #34: Atavistic Atwood

2010-12-17T13:50:00.000-08:00

"What impressed him that time, he even mentioned it later, cool he called it, was the way I took off my clothes and put them on again later very smoothly as if I were feeling no emotion. But I really wasn't." -Margaret Atwood, Surfacing

A few days ago, when I was at my favourite used bookstore, I stumbled across Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing. When it was published in 1972, Atwood was elevated to a new level of literary recognition for her caustic portrait of the Canadian wilderness and the wilderness within one woman’s tormented mind (establishing Atwood’s longstanding fascination with the seamy side of nature). But what I remember most vividly about this old novel – from when I plucked it off my mother’s bookshelf and first read it at age twelve – are the sex scenes. These were my clandestine thrills as an awkward, curious pre-teen – to pull an “adult” novel off my mom’s shelf, one day Atwood, the next day Danielle Steel. The high and the low occupied a level plane on her shelf, but I quickly discovered my own preference for the darkness and power games and animal-like perversion that characterize Atwood’s best novels.

These memories stirred at the back of my mind, as I began rereading Surfacing, reacquainting myself with the boorish quality of the nameless narrator’s lover, Joe. He’s not a bad guy. More skillful in bed than most, and good looking in a rugged way, if you go for a cross between a buffalo and a bear. She and Joe explore the extremes of their relationship during a week long trip to the remote island where she grew up – her crazy father has vanished there. Her search for her father is the ostensible purpose of the visit, but it soon becomes clear that the real purpose is to explore the cryptic nature of her own sexuality. Who is she? Why does she feel such malaise and lack of desire, even as she goes through the motions of seduction and falling in love? What is this mysterious “amputation” within herself she keeps referring to?

Reading Atwood becomes a form of self-exploration. There have been times when I’ve felt so depressed that my own world seemed to be folding back into the atavistic world Atwood depicts so beautifully, where bare animal survival seems a struggle. A few years ago, I found myself trapped in a career I thought I would love but ended up hating, living in a town of 5000 that, although picturesque on the surface, became reminiscent of a Lars von Trier film. I identified all too well with the Atwood narrator and the primitive, archetypal world she conveys so well. The bone numbing cold seeped in on me, and my libido curled inward and died.

But just when rejuvenation seems impossible in Atwood’s novels, nature shows her softer side. The wilderness works in sudden, mysterious ways to reveal unforeseen possibilities. And it’s for these subtle, always ambiguous moments of change and awakened desire that I love reading Atwood.

Hmmm…. Just the inspiration I need to start writing Chapter Nine.

Photo from: here

When My Mother Was My Age

2010-12-07T18:22:00.000-08:00

When my mom found out I'm writing a memoir about my relationship with my dad, she was very supportive - partly, I think, because she was relieved I wasn't putting our relationship under the microscope. But the truth is that I've always found my mother a deeply fascinating woman, and I'm hoping in a future literary work to use her as a source of literary inspiration. Thus when I found out that Jane Friedman of Writers Digest was hosting a mother-daughter interview series at her blog, called "When My Mother Was My Age," I jumped at the chance to participate. It seemed like a great opportunity to get to know my mom in a role other than "mother" and at the same time, stash research notes for the future. As it turns out, she suffered from similar sources of turbulence in her life at my age. My interview with my mom and my reflections can be read at Jane's blog.

Book #33: The Turbulence of Moving

2010-11-27T06:06:00.000-08:00

"As he walked slowly about the empty, echoing rooms on that bright September morning, the Professor regarded thoughtfully the needless inconveniences he had put up with for so long; the stairs that were too steep, the halls that were too cramped, the awkward oak mantles with thick round posts crowned by bumptious wooden balls, over green-tiled fire-places." -Willa Cather, The Professor's House

Sadly, I have not been able to write or blog much lately, because we're in the process of moving. Our loft has been dismantled into a series of half-packed boxes and our magnificent wall of books is no more. (When Chris first asked me if I wanted to move in with him eight months ago, the thought of combining our book collections to expand his already impressive library was most alluring.... But now, the shelves are bare, leaving my soul feeling a little barren. Tools are cast on the coffee table and the place looks like such a construction site that we've even stopped washing the dishes.)

I was thinking about novels about moving houses.... The Professor's House came to mind. It's a novel about a professor who should be on cloud nine - he's just won a prestigious academic prize enabling him to build a luxurious new house - but instead he finds himself melancholy and nostalgic. In the midst of packing, he becomes lethargic and irrationally attached to his old house, which, despite all its inconveniences and shabbiness, is replete with the memories he associates with "home." So he turns inward, recoils from reality. Curls up in a ball in his attic study. Memories of childhood give way to fantasies of his best student, a young man named Outland who died in the First World War. But before his death, Outland and the professor became close and the stories that Outland told him about his youth linger on in the professor's imagination. Outland spent one summer exploring a mesa in New Mexico, where he discovered the relics of a dead civilization - the treasures of antiquity. The romance of Outland's life catches hold in the professor's mind as everything his own life is not. Vigorous. Manly. In touch with nature. The more he fantasizes about Outland's adventures the more paltry his own accomplishments seem.

Moving, in other words, can be very dismantling to one's identity. All the familiar objects that surround me in my everyday life feel strangely animate, touched with memories and emotions, as I rip them out of their familiar context and box them up. Take them away from me and my very sense of "self" starts to slip away....

Since my undergrad days until present, I've moved thirteen times. Maybe that's why I was so unstable during my twenties, while pursuing grad school, research fellowships and the peripatetic life of a professor peddling her trade, suitcase overflowing with scruffy books and crumpled syllabi..... A lot of packing up house, a lot of purging (my books were always the hardest to part with). I'm glad to have kissed that life goodbye.

Next week, Chris and I will be in our new place, and the front room with the bay window will be set up as our new library, where I will do my writing.

Book #32: My Ideal Therapist

2010-11-16T19:08:00.000-08:00

"From the beginning, I wanted to be a difficult case. I wanted my therapist to feel as if she were being challenged, taken to the limits of her psychotherapeutic powers. I wanted her to have her mind blown by my psyche." -Micah Toub, Growing Up Jung: Coming of Age as the Son of Two Shrinks

Back in grad school, I took seminars on Freud and Lacan, but no one seemed to be teaching Jung. If such a seminar had been offered, I probably would have taken it, because psychoanalytic approaches to the study of literature/film greatly interested me at the time. On the other hand, I have to confess that there always seemed in my mind to be something kind of hippy-dippy about Jung - I don't know exactly where I got this impression, but maybe it has something to do with how he's fallen through the cracks of the Ivory Tower.

Thank god that I've hightailed it from the Ivory Tower.

Coincidentally, it must have been three or four years ago, just as I was becoming disenchanted with the academic monastery, that I first met Micah Toub, a friend of my cousin Alex. She took me to a party at his house and it must have been Alex who told me that he was working on this memoir about growing up as the son of Jungian psychologists, because I don't recall Micah and I exchanging more than an introductory greeting. At the time, I was intrigued by the book concept, particularly because I'd just started therapy myself (sadly, my therapist wasn't a Jungian).

Last week, when I saw Micah at a Spoke Club event discussing his memoir, I couldn't resist buying the book and this time we chatted about the vicissitudes of the memoir genre. Over the weekend, while taking periodic breaks from working on my own memoir (chapter seven just about killed me), I read his at a leisurely pace and, I must say, reading about his neuroses was a lovely distraction from my own. And I stand corrected in my earlier impression of Jung as hippy-dippy at all! Jung emerges in Micah's book as offering a creative, flexible repertoire of tools for analyzing the self and tailoring an identity - so much less off-the-shelf than Freud. The memoir skillfully cuts back and forth between elucidations of Jungian concepts and poignant, revealing anecdotes in the author's life, capturing the awkward, fumbling quality of identity formation and sexual experiences of all kinds. I found myself laughing and indulging in that weirdly pleasurable embarrassment of self-recognition, recalling parallel moments in my own development, so excruciating at the time.

So now I'm ready to start therapy again. Three years ago, when I was tormented about whether I should throw in the towel on my career as an English prof, and seeking utopian compensations in a bad affair, I started seeing my therapist, Harriet, but my treatment was not altogether successful. She was a disciple of the new "positive psychology" which did not, so far as I could tell, have any philosophical depth at all. I recall showing up at my first session with a little Moleskin notebook; over the past week, I had been assiduously recording fragments of my dreams. But Harriet looked at me as if I were as outdated as a character from a Woody Allen movie. I was disappointed to learn that according to "positive psychology," dreams don't occupy a special status or seem to be accorded much meaning at all.

Too bad I'm not still depressed. If I could do it again, I'd google a Jungian.

Photo from: here

Book #31: Not So Hard-Boiled After All

2010-11-04T16:19:00.000-07:00

"I regret that in one respect my father and I were too much alike. We both have a great natural reserve that makes it almost impossible to open ourselves to others. I think he would have liked to confide in me more, but I wasn't ready at that time to push for a more revealing relationship." -Jo Hammett, Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers

Yesterday evening, I was puttering around the library doing research on Dashiell Hammett. It almost felt like back in my geeky grad school days. But no, I'm not working on some dry dissertation, I'm writing what I truly want to be writing - my memoir about how reading changed my life. One chapter deals with The Maltese Falcon. My dad and I read this novel together a few years ago, during a rocky period in both our lives, when everything was spiralling out of control like in film noir. As my dad and I were reading it together, I came to see him as bearing some remarkable similarities to the cynical, hard-boiled anti-hero Sam Spade, and the question of what had made him this way compelled me to delve into his past and discover some family secrets.... (More on this later.... I'm writing this chapter as we speak).

Anyway, I have to confess that the chapter feels like it's missing something, and I'm starting to feel very anxious about it. Nauseous, actually. I get that way when I'm writing. Insomnia, teeth grinding, bizarre cinematic dreams. So this was why I found myself at the library late last night.... I found myself wanting to know more about the author himself, because I'd gotten it into my head that the key to understanding my father lies in gaining insight into Hammett and Sam Spade. Not exactly a logical leap, I'll admit. But this is how my mind works.

How lucky I was to stumble upon a memoir written by none other than Hammett's own daughter! Jo Hammett's Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers gives an unflinching look at the man and the convoluted dynamics of father-daughter relationships, where the daughter is caught between idolization of her old man, guilt at having not done enough when he was dying, and an ever-present yearning to have been closer to him when she had the chance. Hammett was no model father, indulging in bouts of drinking and womanizing and plagued by illness, yet Jo Hammett gives a surprisingly balanced portrait of her eccentric dad. What emerges is a portrait of a very shy, self-conscious person, who needed drink in order to be around people at all, and his solitude was intrinsically tied to his ability to write. Lillian Hellman, his long-time lover, understood this about him and often remarked on how his lust for solitude had taken its toll on her, cutting her off from society, especially as the couple aged.

In a particularly moving scene, Jo Hammett writes about visiting her father at his San Francisco Post Street apartment, where he wrote The Maltese Falcon; she remembers the elevator, with its folding brass grille, closing. For anyone who has read the novel, this memory is clearly reminiscent of the final scene, where the femme fatale is led out in handcuffs, yet Jo Hammett focuses instead on how trapped her father must have felt in that elevator - stomach constricted, air sucked out of his lungs. He suffered from claustrophobia all his life. Not a tough guy like Sam Spade, the Hammett she brings to life is full of vulnerability and depth. Exactly the characteristics I want to bring out in my dad.

Photo from: here

Book #30: The Travelling Life

2010-10-27T18:41:00.000-07:00

"But the truth is also that there is an answering impulse of subservience in him, part of him wants to give in, I see shadows thrown up in grappling contortions on the roof of the cave." -Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room

I was planning on giving this book to a friend for her birthday, but now, a third of the way in, I don't know, I just might have to get her something else. Even if In a Strange Room weren't a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, I still wouldn't have been able to put it down. What is it about this dark narrative that immediately drew me in? The first novella "The Follower" is deceptively simple: a young white South African man named Damon treks through the mountains of Lesotho under the spell of a mysterious German man named Reiner, a philosopher of sorts. Although Damon claims not be in love with Reiner - preferring to think of their relationship as a "dark passion," an accidental interlude - it soon becomes clear that he's deeply, obsessively in love with this man and his every attempt to maintain emotional distance is bound for failure.

So intense are his feelings that he's devised a strange technique for telling his story. The story is for the most part told in the third person, but every so often it slips into the first person, as in the passage above. While this technique at first throws the reader off - for a moment, I thought there were three characters, a menage-a-trois - it's well worth the experiment. For the technique pays off by opening up meanings and raising questions about what happens to you when you travel and fall in love. The minimalist prose conveys perfectly the way that life and your identity get pared down to the bare essentials and the feeling of weightlessness can be very liberating at first; it's as if you have the freedom to create yourself anew, be anyone, try anything. In this sense, it's as if Damon, the narrator-traveller, is watching himself in a film. (I remember that feeling from my year in Berlin. Back in grad school, I suddenly sold all my possessions, except my laptop and two suitcases full of books, and moved to Berlin, not knowing anyone, having chosen the place more or less randomly because I'd fallen out of love and I'd overheard some artists talking about how it was easy and cheap for foreigners to rent short-term housing there. And all the while, I didn't feel like me, I felt deliciously free of me, like a girl in a film).

This sense of distance, it seems to me, is what Galgut is trying to convey in writing most of the work in the third person. And yet the "I" surfaces at key moments of passion, memory, betrayal - exposing how the work isn't entirely fiction, it hovers on the cusp of memoir.

Photo from: here

Book #29: The Art of Impotence

2010-10-20T08:57:00.000-07:00

“Oh Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”
“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” -Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

Time to buckle down. My heart still aflutter from the good news of last week, it was time to make headway on finishing chapter seven of my literary memoir. This chapter focuses on The Sun Also Rises, which was an important novel for me and my dad to read together. There's something strangely alluring about Jake Barnes' impotence, and I found myself remembering and reflecting on a conversation we had on this topic.

"You really feel Jake's suffering," Daddy said. "But he never seems wimpy or unmanly. I like the guy."

Injured in the First World War, Jake has lost his balls, so to speak, but that doesn’t stop women from falling in love with him. I smiled. Daddy was becoming more observant about the text, ever since he took up reading as his new retirement hobby and asked me - his languishing English professor daughter - to put together a reading list.

I had to admit that I liked Jake, too. What is it about Jake Barnes that makes him so likable even though the guy’s a prick? He’s mean to friends who annoy him for being suck-ups, like Robert Cohn, but he’s loyal to a fault to other friends, like Brett Ashley, who walks all over him. Throughout it all, Jake affects an air of solitary cool; he seems the perfect lone ranger. At night, however, his true feelings come out.

After an evening of heavy drinking with his friends at all the hotspots in Paris, he comes home to an empty flat, piss drunk and alone. The waves of loneliness wash over him and the reality of his impotence comes crashing down. Although he tries to find the humour in it, the joke only goes so far and he breaks down in tears. Brett drops by early in the morning and through the haze of sleep, he mistakes her as a prostitute. So it’s fair to say that he doesn’t trust her, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s hopelessly in love with her. Brett’s demand for intimacy is tantalizing torture.

“What do you think of Jake and Brett’s relationship?” I asked Daddy.

“It’s painful to watch them together,” he said. “Yet they’re clearly so much in love.”

I could remember people saying the same thing about me and Josh, my old boyfriend from undergrad days. All our breakups and tearful reconciliations left our friends and families perplexed.

As I thought back, it occurred to me that perhaps this is the beautiful thing about Jake's impotence. It allows us as readers to relive that turbulent, thrilling, adolescent feeling of being in love with someone with whom you just can't get it together. The dynamics of desire and despair take on a life of their own. Haven't we all been in that excruciating position before?

Photo from: here

At Last ... My Book Has a Home!

2010-10-12T19:41:00.000-07:00

I probably mentioned some time ago that I've been working on a book. It's called The Reading List and it's a memoir about my miserable career as an English professor and search for a new career, which pushed me to the brink of a breakdown three summers ago, and all the while I was seeking distraction from my career blues by looking for love in all the wrong places, drowning in the Grey Goose. My father, grappling with his own demons, decided to take up reading as his new hobby and who better to recommend a reading list than his erudite daughter? Except I wasn't feeling very erudite at the time.

Still, we bond over literature in other - unexpected - ways and this opens a whole new dimension to our relationship.... (More on this later).

Anyway, a few months ago, I sent my book proposal around to a few publishers and then waited.... and waited.... and faced some perfectly diplomatic rejection emails, which pointed out its merits and drawbacks, but no matter how many times I read them amounted to the same thing. I pretended that I was fine with it - really, I was, I wasn't grinding my teeth at night more than usual, despite my throbbing jaw - and I could accept that my memoir (half written) might never see the light of day. At the urging of a friend, I began work on another project, an historical novel, and half convinced myself that I'm a novelist at heart, not a memoirist after all.

All this changed the other night, when I was at a friend's birthday party (my agent actually) and he introduced me to a lovely young woman, Sandra, who turned out to be a publisher. She runs a small press that focuses on next generation multicultural literature.

"She wants to publish your book," my agent whispered to me.

I blinked and the room began to spin gently, even though I hadn't had a drop of wine (I was on cold medication, feeling very uncool to be at a party not drinking), but yes, my cheeks were getting hot, as if I might have quaffed an entire bottle.

"I've read your manuscript and I love it," Sandra said, smiling warmly. "Let's do it! Let's publish your book."

Sandra and I stood by the wall chatting in our high heels for the next four-and-a-half hours and we exchanged many giddy emails last week and this morning we signed a contract. She and her father, who founded the press, shook my hand and hugged me and the room was filled with good karma, if I may say so myself, and I'm not the kind of person who usually says things like "karma."

Ever since I was six years old, you see, I've wanted to be a writer. Much more than I ever wanted to be a professor. That first godawful career was just a detour (which, ironically, has given me something to write about).

So now the clock is ticking. I have until April to complete the second half of the book.

Photo from: here

Book #28: Like Jewels and Stones

2010-10-07T13:18:00.000-07:00

“The words, hard and bright, are like jewels within her. But they’re also like stones.” -Dawn Promislow, Jewels and Other Stories

I met Dawn Promislow about a year ago in a program called Diaspora Dialogues. It fosters the creation of diasporic literature by pairing established writers with emerging writers of various multicultural backgrounds. Dawn and I were both “emerging writers” and we gravitated to each other at a poetry reading. We started chatting about this and that – our favourite writers’ use of dialect, the colonial tragedies of places we know (I used to live in Trinidad and Dawn grew up in South Africa), among other lighter topics of conversation, like “following” Virginia Woolf in our heads…..

Last week, I was delighted to attend the book launch at Type Books for Dawn’s first book, Jewels and Other Stories. It’s a beautiful weaving together of such a variety of stories, all set in South Africa: a doctor takes an unexpected risk to draw his black servant’s son into the family; a young white girl tries to give her nanny the contents of her piggy bank, not realizing the wedge she’ll drive into the family; a receptionist and drug dealer’s love affair gone awry yields a strange kind of insight about love and chance. These are just a few of the vivid characters you meet in the fourteen stories, which flew by so quickly, too quickly. Now I feel I must go back and read them again.

The resistance movement gathering momentum in the 70s forms the backdrop of many of the stories, although the stories always remain focused on the characters themselves – ordinary people’s desires, fears, hopes. I felt they were all people whom I already knew in some way from my own life, and “Isn’t that the way we would react?” I kept thinking to myself, if we were caught up in violent upheaval and change.

I was struck by what Dawn said by way of introducing her book at the book launch; she said that some years ago she had wanted to write about South Africa, but felt ambivalent and paralyzed because so much had already been written. So she said that she decided simply to “create voices” and see where they would take her, and at the end, she’d found no answers. No answers at all. I thought about what she’d said and it dawned on me that this is the very thing about literature: it doesn’t need to deliver grand answers, it doesn’t need to judge. Indeed, my favourite stories have a kind of openness that teases the mind by providing a slice of life that, the more you think about it, contains a world that glimmers beyond the present. Gestures to more to come.

Btw, since completing Jewels, Dawn has a written a very beautiful, evocative story published in the online journal MTLS. You can read her story here.

Photo from: here

Book #27: Better Than Therapy

2010-09-29T10:11:00.000-07:00

“The butcher had come out and smacked his hands together and rubbed them back and forth, and he’d laid a steak on the stainless steel cutting board and turned on the saw, and he’d cubed it for her. Little stiff cubes with frost fibres in the purplish flesh, and this, Helen realizes now, is herself, her own heart, sliding back and forth under the blade.” -Lisa Moore, February

Life is a veil of tears for Helen O’Mara, when she loses her husband in the sinking of the oil rig Ocean Ranger during a storm off the coast of Newfoundland. Lisa Moore’s latest novel February gives a masterly glimpse of her struggle to hold together some semblance of normal life – taking care of her four kids, cooking fish sticks, trying to make ends meet by taking a crappy job as a cocktail waitress (and being mistaken as a prostitute on her walk home at four in the morning). These ordinary yet absurd moments underscore for Helen that her life will never be the same. For much of the novel, she is emotionally paralyzed just letting this fact sink in.

The tragedy of her husband’s death and its endless ripple effects replay in her mind with an immediacy that doesn’t allow her to assign the disaster to the past. Surely, this is why Moore chooses to narrate many of these memories in the present tense; they are all too vivid at the forefront of Helen’s mind to be told as flashbacks. The most mundane activities, like going to the butcher, risk overwhelming her, flooding her with raw emotion. Yet these moments are strangely beautiful because we see Helen standing outside herself and slowly, painstakingly, finding the resources to heal herself and move on.

Isn’t this the great thing about literature? The novels that I love reading over and over again – Toni Morrison’s Sula, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth – have this deeply therapeutic effect. Although I could never have admitted this in my former life as a lit prof (my colleagues in the English department would have scoffed), the truth is that I’ve never been drawn to literature because I wanted to learn more about a certain period of history, philosophy or theory of any kind. Literature offers a much more primitive kind of experience that consoles and helps me relive the moments when I was so depressed my whole body felt laden with weights.

I remember all too clearly, for instance, my ballet teacher putting her hands on my eleven-year-old hips. Monique her name was. She pushed and prodded my hips into an awkward position and I toppled over, but not before she had felt the imbalance, my imbalance. She told my mother that my spine curves like an S and my mother took me to see the doctor and he referred me to an orthopedic surgeon and thus began a surreal phase of passing from x-ray machines to a fiberglass brace to operating table…. I think I just sort of curled into myself and hid in a closet in my head for those three years…. I recall the struggle to get up and get dressed in the morning, the numb, disjointed feeling as if my body were a marionette puppet, hands and feet hanging limp in midair.

It must have been during this time that I developed a penchant for sadness and sad literature. To identify through reading with another’s grief and triumph over that grief can be a very consoling, beautiful thing. February brought all those extreme emotions back and I fell in love with the journey all over again.

Photo from: here

Book #26: Outlaw Women

2010-09-22T11:30:00.000-07:00

"My children were of me alone, of the wild blood boiling along the earth, of me and all that lived; of none and of all. Then I found I had Jewel." -William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

I've been sleepless thinking about who my grandmother really was. You see, I've been toying with writing a section of my novel in her voice. Over the weekend, I had brunch with my dad and we listened to a tape recording of her talking about her childhood, the war, falling in love in an internment camp.... My dad made the tape during a trip to Cape Cod a few years ago, shortly before her Parkinson's got bad. The tape intrigues yet frustrates me, because all the while I feel that my grandmother is trying to say what's expected of her. She's trying to preserve for posterity an image of herself as the good daughter, the self-suffering wife, the devoted mother.

I long to gain access to the other side of her identity - the secrets and unspoken truths she harboured all her life. The moments when she surprised herself by acting out of character. What she would say, if she could speak from beyond the grave.

This is the kernel imbedded in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, which I was reading over the weekend for the first time (even ex English profs haven't read everything by Faulkner). It's the story of Addie Bundren on her deathbed and into the afterlife, told from the perspectives of fifteen different narrators, including her four legitimate children and one love child, Jewel. Before dying, she expresses her wish to be buried in her hometown, Jefferson, Mississippi, and the novel chronicles her family's efforts to honour that wish, dragging her homemade casket by horse and carriage across the brutal landscape. While all the narrators have their own unique ways of seeing Addie, the section where she reflects upon her life from beyond the grave makes all the other sections pale. What we get is Addie's scathing denunciation of her marriage (which seems hardly more than a random occurence) and her ambivalent meditation on motherhood. Motherhood seems to draw out her sadistic streak, and although she is possessive of her children, she is no less repulsed by them, a steady flow of babies who arrive without rhyme or reason. Ironically, Jewel is closest to her heart, perhaps because he is the only one born of desire. All these taboos are laid bare - with poignancy and beauty - in Addie's monologue.

I'm reminded of something Toni Morrison once said in an interview: "Outlaw women who don't follow the rules are always interesting to me, because they push themselves, and us, to the edge. The women who step outside the borders, or who think other thoughts, define the limits of civilization, but also challenge it." (No coincidence that Morrison wrote her master's thesis on Faulkner).

Listening to the tape of my grandmother, I find myself listening not so much to what she's saying as much as to her stammers, repetitions and evasions and I wonder what repressed "outlaw" possibilities they mask over.

Photo from: here

Book #25: That Accident Which Pricks Me....

2010-09-13T19:21:00.000-07:00

"This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole - and also a cast of the dice. A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)." -Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Since my father retired, he has been digging into family history. The other day while I was at work, he sent me the above photo, which he found upon googling "Minidoka" - the camp where my grandmother was interned during the Second World War. "I think your grandmother is in this photo," his email read. "Third girl from the right, in profile. Zoom in."

And there she is.

A whoosh of gratitude came over me - had the camera caught her a moment before or after, her face might have been obscured, like the girl on the far right. Quelle chance! Then weird thoughts started rushing through my mind. I found myself looking at the styling of her hair and wondering how, while living in an internment camp, she could manage to keep it freshly curled and glossy (while I, from the comfort of home, can barely make the effort to blow dry). But imprisoned and made to rake mud, my grandmother would not let herself go and, though I knew that should make me happy, it made me feel sad. Her dress remains smartly pressed, despite everything. And while the other girls are working, she appears to me to be only pretending to work - something about the whimsical tilt of her head. She's caught in a moment of fantasy or denial, her mind a thousand miles away.

The frailties and defenses of her personality seem to be encapsulated in that image.... For the grandmother I knew some fifty years later was a complex, cryptic woman. She was often cool and remote in person, but had a penchant for florid language (I recall receiving a postcard that said "the stars are like chrysanthemums" and thinking, Huh?). She shied away from talking about the past, even when my father would press her, until the very final days of her life when she began to give in. She was a woman who seemed ill prepared to be a mother or grandmother, preferring to play the role of a younger aunt, dressing half her age.

It was as if she always wanted to remain a girl - as if some beautiful moment in her adolescence had been stolen away.

Looking at this photo makes me think of Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, which I read years ago (back in my geeky, academic days). At the time, I thought I understood what Barthes meant in coining the terms punctum and studium to describe two different and opposed kinds of experience upon looking at photographs. By studium, he means the cultural and political dimensions of a photograph, all the ways in which it can be rationally discussed and made comprehensible to an audience. By sharp contrast, punctum refers to a viewer's private experience of a photo - a purely subjective response. To experience punctum is to feel idiosyncratic details jump out and grab you with such emotional force that you feel pierced, wounded.

At the time of reading Camera Lucida, I had been deeply moved by certain photos which I'd viewed in various museums, galleries and books. But I cannot say that I'd felt pierced. Until now.

Photo from: here

Book #24: Impounded Images

2010-09-07T09:07:00.000-07:00

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had archive fever. I’ve been reading a pile of history books on the Japanese Internment. I’m looking to gain insight into what my grandparents experienced as internees as part of my attempt to write an historical novel, centred on a secret romance in one of the camps. The idea is loosely based on snippets of stories and half-disclosures that my grandmother let slip over the years, giving me certain ideas (fantasies, really) about how she met my grandfather. The beginning of their strange, turbulent marriage.

But the problem with reading history books, I’ve come to realize, is that “facts” only get you so far as a writer. They’re full of quotations by politicians and statistical data, whereas I’m interested in accessing the taste (or lack of taste) of the camp food, the sounds and smells of the barracks, the feel of the floorboards against our heroine’s bare feet as she sneaks out at night.

So I decided to read something different. Or not read at all. The other day, I came across a collection of photographs by Dorothea Lange, who is best known for her portraits of U.S. migrant farmworkers and sharecroppers during the Depression. What is not so well known about Lange’s career is that she was commissioned by the U.S. government to document the Japanese Internment. She toured many camps in California and took a slew of stunning photographs: bewildered, beautiful girls clinging to the slip of shade outside a mess hall; the Inyo Mountains rising pale and ghostly behind the camp at Manzanar, barely visible through the dust haze; and internees gardening with the materials at hand – to describe just a few of Lange’s moving images.

More than simply documenting the group’s degraded condition, Lange’s photos distill a timeless, universal sadness to their plight. There appears something almost mythic about their suffering. Since these images were seen as so obviously sympathetic to the internees’ perspective, they were impounded by the U.S. government and not published until recently.

These photos are a wonderful source of inspiration. Looking at them, I’m able to imagine how the dust would feel sticking to my skin and mixing with my sweat and from there … the thoughts of my heroine start to come alive in my head. I can feel her yearning for some escape and becoming susceptible to the advances of a certain stranger who pushed his way into her life.

Photo from: here

Book #23: Decaying Family Ties

2010-08-31T10:22:00.000-07:00

“Kiyo and I were too young to run around, but often we would eat in gangs with other kids, while the grownups sat at another table. I confess I enjoyed this part of it at the time.” -Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, Farewell to Manzanar

It’s a story that’s both familiar and strange to me. It might have been my mother’s story if she’d been born ten years earlier or my grandmother’s story if she hadn’t been embarrassed to tell all.

Farewell to Manzanar is Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s fascinating memoir about coming of age in an internment camp during the Second World War. The camp, situated in Manzanar, California, housed over 110,000 Japanese Americans in 36 blocks of hastily constructed barracks on 540 acres of sultry desert land. Jeanne goes overnight from being a carefree seven-year-old to an internee. Her father, a fisherman, is seized one day by the FBI under suspicion that his radio is being used to transmit information to Japan. By the time her father is released, her mother and the rest of the family have been forcibly relocated to cramped, dirty quarters at Manzanar, where the communal toilets are not even partitioned and the food is so terrible that most everyone falls ill.

I wonder to what extent my own family members suffered such indignities upon being interned at camps in Minadoka, Idaho, and Sandon and Kaslo, BC.

But what I find most interesting and unsettling about the tale is the erosion of communal family life. We hear of children and teenagers left to their own devices, allowed to eat in the mess hall with their friends everyday - running from one mess hall to the next in search of more palatable food - and all the while their parents are either absent (interned elsewhere) or languishing in depression and alcoholism. Gangs form, governed by violence and their own secret hierarchies. And covert romances, too (one might speculate). Although the author only touches on these aspects (as a child, she was too young to be sucked into the group dynamics that led to the infamous Manzanar Riot), she is clear about the fallout – the loss of parental authority. It was in this kind of no man’s land that my own grandparents fell in love against their elders’ wishes and ran away after the war.

Photo from: here

Book #22: Racy Regionalism

2010-08-23T19:31:00.000-07:00

"The xylophone player! The xylophone player to marry her! Yonder he is!" -Eudora Welty, "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies"

Not so long ago, I spent four years of my life writing a dissertation whose key insight can be summed up by these two sentences: "It is by nature itself that fiction is all bound up in the local. The internal reason for that is surely that feelings are bound up in place." The citation is from Eudora Welty's 1956 essay, "Place in Fiction," which I stumbled across online. A pang of sadness came over me - this essay would have been a goldmine back in the days when I was "dissertating"! At the time, I had become obsessed with regional literature and was trying to show how all modernist art is in fact regionalist in its basis. But now I saw that I could have saved myself three hundred pages. Welty said it perfectly in two lines.

(And yes, there was a touch of nostalgia for my old academic self: cuticle chewing, sleep deprived, masochistic, high on literary theory....)

Indulging in a blue, second-guessing-the-past moment (the crappy weather wasn't helping my mood), I dug up from a storage box Welty's first collection, A Curtain of Green and Other Stories. I'd read a few of the stories back in grad school, but hardly remembered a thing about them. Now, as I began reading the first story, "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies," I found myself thinking about the way Welty uses dialect and delightful references to local institutions - like "Ellisville Institute for the Feeble Minded of Mississippi" - to create her signature sense of "place." But it takes more than just that.

Her real speciality, it dawned on me, is sexual deviance. A group of gossipy southern ladies are bound together around the scandal of the idiot girl's sexual initiation. On the verge of being institutionalized, Lily Daw announces that she is going to marry a xylophone player, who has charmed and possibly seduced or molested her, throwing all the ladies into a tizzy. Their shock and prurient curiosity charge the story with feelings that are tied to the specific locale.

This is the kind of racy regionalism that fascinates me.

As I kept reading, I began thinking about my own grandmother, Kayaco, and how much she reminds me of a character from a Welty story. By contrast to my other grandmother (about whom I was blogging in my last entry), Kayaco is a no-nonsense kind of woman, named after Kayaks River in BC, where her father first lived upon immigrating from Japan. She is a woman who knows her roots and what she stands for. But to return to my point, she has a keen eye for sexual impropriety and seems to take a good deal of pleasure in rooting it out. I remember when I was ten, she told me that her mother-in-law had long had designs on my grandfather. Incest, you say? Not quite. You see, her mother-in-law was actually my grandfather's stepmother, but for decades, she had lived in their house. The family dynamics were fraught, to say the least.

Hmmm.... I got out my notebook and began taking notes.

Photo from: here

Book #21: History or Love Story?

2010-08-18T17:26:00.000-07:00

“This is a story of how I fell in love with a woman who read me a specific story from Herodotus. I heard the words she spoke across the fire, never looking up, even when she teased her husband.” -Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

Last night, I was thinking about the historical novel and how its claim to being “historical” is a bit of a sham. A love story, tragically thwarted. This is what most historical novels boil down to. Or at least the ones I adore.

I was thinking about this as I was rereading The English Patient, which is no doubt at the top of my list, along with a few others like Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! History looms large in these novels – war history, to be precise. You learn a lot about bomb disposal during the Second World War by reading Ondaatje, just as you can pick up some interesting facts about southern Confederate history through Faulkner. But what ignites these novels on an emotional level is the love plot, wrapped around the secret of one lover’s mysterious identity. The English patient is burned beyond recognition. Charles Bon’s sophisticated, urbane appearance masks over a past that turns out to be far more southern and primal.

These lovers are lost souls caught in the revolving blades of historical change. While it would be nice to think that love provides salvation, just the opposite is true. Their passion for certain women turns into full-blown obsession, which in the end proves destructive and violent. Yet, as the reader, I always feel some inexplicable hope, some utopian horizon just around the corner….

I was mulling this over while thinking about my grandfather’s life. Kaz. He died in the 1960s, following a mental breakdown, long before I was born. I don’t know why, but for some reason I’ve got it in my head that his unraveling began during the Second World War, when the Japanese-Canadians were interned. I never met Kaz. But I can picture him in the midst of the dusty barracks, falling in love with my grandmother in those cramped quarters, the fury in his hot-tempered brain finding its only outlet in her seduction. Her violent seduction? Kaz, from all accounts, was a man who took what he wanted.

The way that Kaz met my grandmother, Masako, was strange to say the least. Unlike most Japanese immigrants, Kaz wasn't forced into internment, because his father (my great grandfather) was a well known doctor who was put in charge of providing medical services at the camps. Yet, ironically, for reasons that remain fuzzy, Kaz chose captivity. He was free - on a road trip touring the West Coast -when he met Masako. She was a beauty queen who’d won a competition for Japanese-American girls, so perhaps Kaz saw her at a pageant, as she was walking on stage and slowly turning in her rented kimono. In any case, she must have made quite the impression. He became obsessed with her and after the war’s outbreak, followed her to the internment camp.

I will never know my grandfather, yet a vestige of him grows in my imagination every time I read….

Photo from: here

Redesigning My Blog (& Life?)

2010-08-12T06:22:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I was strolling with my boyfriend through Grange Park, beside the Art Gallery of Ontario, enjoying the warm, leafy afternoon. While he was taking photos, I was sitting on the steps of the Grange reading the novel that's always in my purse (that day, it happened to be The English Patient. More on this soon). On a whim, Chris took a picture of me. Later that evening, he pointed out that it might make an interesting banner for my blog, which I'd been wanting to redesign. I wanted to give my blog a more personalized look, but I'm not sure what my "personality" is at the moment.... Recently, I've been feeling less like a coherent "self" and more like a collage made from those ripped up magazine photos (wasn't it fun to make collages back in kindergarten?) Whenever I get this feeling, it's a sure sign that another transition period is around the corner....

In any case, it was lovely to have the photo before me. I had a moment of pure recognition.

Chris was very sweet in taking the time to photoshop it and even change the background -unfortunately, cherry blossoms do not in reality grow in Grange Park! But the cherry blossoms seemed appropriate since they remind me of Japan and my long-lost Japanese heritage. Ten or twelve years ago, I spent a summer in Osaka and I remember arriving during cherry blossom season. The petals were falling all over the place, like streamers after a birthday party. I was both excited and terrified to be in the country my ancestors had left over a hundred years ago. Yet as the weeks wore on, I became increasingly melancholy. It depressed me that I don't speak Japanese, while everyone there assumed I was a native. Rather than confronting the cleft in my identity, I retreated into a shell. I sat in noodle shops and cried all the time and rainy season went on forever.

Now, once again, I find the Japanese side of myself beckoning to me, mysterious murmurs. But no longer do I want to visit Japan so much as I want to recreate the imaginary landscape of my ancestors.......

Photo from: here

Book #20: True Gumption

2010-08-09T08:35:00.000-07:00

"We walk a few steps further down the path, and there, almost hidden from sight off the path, is a small grey hut with a broken porch camouflaged by shrubbery and trees. The colour of the house is that of sand and earth." -Joy Kogawa, Obasan

Obasan isn't an easy novel for me to read. Usually upon reading an historical novel, I feel a kind of fascination - the luxury of reflecting upon events from afar. But in reading Obasan, no such distance is possible. The events are all too intimate and painful.

Yesterday evening I saw my grandmother at my mother's birthday dinner. My grandmother is a half-deaf, gnomish woman with a habit of blurting things out at the most inopportune moments. Right as we're about to serve dessert, she doesn't hesitate to butt into the conversation: "At the prison camp, there was this guard named Aidan who called us all lazy...."

What prison camp, Granny? When I was a child, I had no idea what she was talking about. As I got older, I realized that her life, typical of Japanese-Canadians of that generation, had been full of hardship and dispossession, the very story told by Joy Kogawa in Obasan. Published in 1981, her novel broke new ground by telling a story long repressed in Canadian history - the story of the Japanese-Canadian Internment. Like the narrator, my grandmother would often reminisce about the big white house on Gravely Street in Vancouver where she grew up and had tea parties in the garden by the rabbit hutch out back. Later, she ran her father's two restaurants on Hastings and Powell Street. But following the outbreak of World War Two, the government took it all away and put the Japanese-Canadians in internment camps. "They assumed we were traitors," my grandmother says, her eyes flashing, as if she still can't get over her astonishment.

Never could she forget the shock of arriving at the camp, located in the desolate interior of British Columbia, in a ghost town named Sandon. All the internees were crammed into log cabins, two families expected to inhabit each shack, and all the women had to cook at a communal kitchen. My grandmother makes a hula hoop with her arms to show me the size of the vat in which she made stew for all the people who came to depend on her cooking - extended family, friends of her in-laws, hangers-on. Constant labour, fatigue, the endless grey sky and the extremities of hot and cold - these memories and sensations come alive in her voice. And even though it hurts, I can't help but want to know more.

Photo from: here

Book #19: Memories of War

2010-08-03T07:38:00.000-07:00

"In recalling your past there is precious little knowledge, which remains our most difficult quarry. In memory there are simply shapes that appear before the eyes of who you are now, and who you might've been, the shapes as incomplete and changeable as the times." -Dennis Bock, The Ash Garden

What would be the most extreme, life changing experience you could have? Losing half your face to disfigurement from the atomic bomb surely ranks at the top of the list. In The Ash Garden, Dennis Bock explores this predicament from the perspective of a Japanese woman named Emiko. An innocent child when defaced during the war, she is now a celebrated filmmaker who looks back on her life using her scars as a kind of lens for trauma and memory.

But the fascination and beauty of this novel is that Bock never lets it descend into an all too easy tale of victimization. For as much as Emiko has been hurt by history, we discover that her trauma bears a striking - ironic - resemblance to that of the man responsible. Anton Boll, the inventor of the atomic bomb, provides the other half of the novel, told from his peculiarly guilt-ridden perspective. I say "peculiarly" because guilt for him is no simple matter of confessing to a horrific act. When he and Emiko are brought face to face, she asks, "Do you believe you need absolution?" All he can reply is, "That is what my wife believes."

As I've gotten older, I've come to realize that the Second World War is no less muddled for my own family. "They rounded us up," my grandmother would blurt out at Christmas dinner, "and put us in Hastings Park, where the horses were usually stored." She made no bones about the fact that we - and all Japanese-Canadians living in BC - had been imprisoned and dispossessed. She would tell her story to anyone who would listen. Shopkeepers, strangers on the bus.

I love my grandmother and identify with her rage and sorrow, but in recent years I've discovered that there is another more complex side to our family history. I don't understand this aspect and so it haunts my mind. It turns out that my father's side of the family was never interned because it seems that my great-grandfather agreed - in exchange for their freedom - to be the camp doctor. He uprooted himself and his family from Vancouver and moved to Kaslo, a ghost town in the interior of BC, where he provided medical services to the internees, who must have both revered and resented him. He was free, where they had lost everything. I don't know whether a sense of guilt got under his skin, but I've heard from certain relatives that he was regarded with jealousy and gratitude in equal measure.

Perhaps this is why decades after the war had ended, he returned to Kaslo as an old man. Disoriented and probably in the early stages of Alzheimer's, he crashed his car and was found wandering on the side of the road. It seems that he had dreams of returning to Kaslo and starting his medical practice anew. I picture him mumbling about wanting to making amends for something he'd never managed to accomplish. But shortly after he died of a heart attack.

Photo from: here

Book #18: The Elusive Life of Inspiration

2010-07-27T12:42:00.000-07:00

“Just across from us, overhanging us, indeed, stood the mesa, a pile of purple rock, all broken out with red sumach and yellow aspens up in the high services of the cliffs…. It was the sort of place a man would like to stay forever.” -Willa Cather, The Professor’s House

I first read The Professor’s House in a seminar on American Modernism, halfway through my master’s. The professor appeared barely older than me – way too young to be a professor. Still, there was something wearied about the first grey wisp in her tendrils and the way she trudged into class, as though the epiphanies of modernism had long grown boring. She didn’t want to be there, and I couldn’t understand why.

But five years later, it was me up in front of the auditorium of students – now they expected me to be waxing lyrical and conjuring pearls of wisdom from the text. Pearls? I was more concerned with controlling the sweat drops on my nose. Dwarfed by their fresh-faced smiles and shining eyes.

It’s a strange thing being a professor. Everyone looks to you for inspiration, but what are you supposed to do when your mood plummets and you want to shut out the world?

This is why I’ve come to love The Professor’s House. It’s the story of a professor who has a mental breakdown. After decades of toil in the badly ventilated “office” of his attic, Professor St. Peter falls out of love with the life of the mind. Suddenly, he wants to break out of his head – he wants to do something real instead. His life of contemplation and critical navel gazing pales in comparison to the lives of the primitive men he studies (his discipline is Spanish colonial history). Sound depressing? Not entirely. For St. Peter has an active imagination. In the midst of his despair, he finds himself fantasizing about what it would be like to be one of his students, a young man by the name of Outland. Outland used to live on a mesa - a life as authentic as his name. As St. Peter gets to know him, Outland becomes his alter ego, casting light on the man St. Peter could have been.

(Since I have been warned by a certain follower not to give away too much – lest my entries turn into SPOILERS – I’ll leave off here. Suffice it to say that The Professor’s House is the perfect bed companion for anyone who has gotten used to going to bed alone, pondering how to go on when life seems to have lost all inspiration….)

There is a way to jumpstart your creativity. It begins with making up stories about other selves, fantasizing your alter ego....

Photo from: here

Conjuring Books....

2010-07-22T13:58:00.001-07:00

"She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain." -Louisa May Alcott, Work: A Story of Experience

When I started this blog a couple months ago, I was a complete ingenue to the blogosphere. (Still am. A friend told me that most bloggers don't use words like ingenue. Alas, will I ever learn?) You see, for the past ten years I was a geeky grad student and then an English prof, and a lot of stuff happened during that time - Facebook, wikipedia and Survivor happened - and throughout it all I had my head buried in the dusty pages of a rare books library.

When I decided to cash in my chips on that socks-and-Birkenstock profession and rejoin the land of the living, I had some catching up to do. All these acronyms, like LOL, WTH or WTFH, left me feeling like an oblivious wallflower. But now, thanks to the friend who convinced me to start this blog (the therapeutic effects of blogging and sharing my experiences, he said, might be beneficial to my wellbeing) and the support of you kind-hearted readers, I feel as if I've at least got a toe in the twenty-first century.

The other day, a certain Bushpig left a comment that alerted me to a glaring oversight. He (I'm assuming Bushpig is a he) wanted to know where my actual reading list can be found. Considering that I've named my blog "The Reading List," it's a fair question. Thanks for pulling my head out of the dusty tomes, Bushpig.

Initially, when I was toying with the idea of blogging about the books that have uplifted and inspired me at crisis points in my life (moments when my career and love life were going so badly I was getting damned close to the edge of the rooftop), I envisioned "The Reading List" as an ever evolving, notebook-like compilation of scribblings about diverse books. The reading list would be more of an overarching concept than an actual list. Now that I think about it, however, Bushpig is right. A blog called "The Reading List" should include an actual list. So as of this afternoon, I've created on the right hand side a list of all the books I have discussed so far, and gone back to old posts and added the corresponding book numbers to their titles.

And if other readers have suggestions, please, pretty please, let me know - we Luddites need all the help we can get.

Photo from: here

Am I Addicted to Tragedy?

2010-07-17T13:28:00.001-07:00

"And besides, what was there to go home to? Nothing but the silence of her cheerless room - that silence of the night which may be more racking to tired nerves than the most discordant noises: that, and the bottle of chloral on her bed." -Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

The other day I got into a discussion with a new friend on Goodreads (this great site where readers from all walks of life talk about the books they can't put down. Also an excellent place for moral support and pure distraction). Anyway, this friend, this e-friend, this woman I'll never meet but instinctively like, broached an interesting discussion about Thomas Hardy, noting his tendency to favour tragic endings and heroines who remain trapped in their own circumstances. She was somewhat critical of Hardy for condemning poor Tess to sexual violation, backbreaking labour, lost love, and a fate too horrible to fathom. I saw what she was saying... and yet, what could I say? "The most memorable heroines for me," I confessed, "tend to be women like Lily Bart, Tess and Isabel Archer.... Am I addicted to tragedy?"

Recently, I'd re-read the ending of The House of Mirth, and found myself enjoying a good cry, lingering on the pages where poor Lily ends up addicted to this drug called chloral. It's her only escape from the drudgery of her job at the hat shop and the bleakness of the tenement house - a far cry from the ornate ballrooms and late nights dancing that consumed her youth. At the same time, I was finishing Shanghai Girls (I always like to have more than one book on the go), and this story is no more uplifting. Forced to flee their beloved homeland in Shanghai during the Second World War, Pearl and May survive rape, imprisonment and interrogation, before immigrating to America and eking a living in L.A. One thing after another goes wrong. Pearl's miscarriage. Persecution at the hands of U.S. immigration authorities. Tragedy compounds tragedy.

I wonder what draws me to literature that celebrates life as a constant drumbeat of sorrow. Ever since I was a kid, I was aware that something powerful - drug-like, almost - beckoned to me from within the pages of a good depressing book and a box of kleenex. Whenever something went wrong in my life - a friend made fun of me at school, or I didn't get invited to someone's party - there was something very comforting about losing myself in three hundred pages of someone else's turmoil. As I got older and acquired real problems - health problems, career blues, a slew of crappy relationships - I came to depend on tragic literature as my shelter from the world, my sacrosanct retreat from My Own Problems.

It was interesting that some readers wrote on Goodreads that they liked reading about characters pushed to deeper insights at their breaking points. Even though it's too late for them to save themselves, the reader is rewarded with an epiphany. I agree, but I also think there's something more primal at play. Back in grad school, I recall reading the anthropologist Mary Douglas. She writes about how in primitive society, people use ritual and art as a means of representing - and thereby holding at bay - the things that they most fear about themselves. In other words, there's something reassuring about exploring and making concrete the potential crises lurking at the back of your mind.

Lily, Tess, Pearl, Isabel.... If these tragic women embody elements of myself, perhaps getting it out in the open, through literature, holds the key to moving on....

Photo from: here

Book #17: Wayson Choy's Phantom Homeland

2010-07-13T03:14:00.001-07:00

"I close my eyes: older, long-ago faces, a few of them barely smiling, push into my consciousness. I hear voices, a variety of Chinatown dialects, their sing-song phrases warning me: 'You never forget you Chinese!'" -Wayson Choy, Paper Shadows

Wayson Choy's memoir Paper Shadows opens with the startling discovery that he was adopted. The woman whom he buried eighteen years earlier turns out not to be his mother - sparking a series of vivid flashbacks. Sometimes idyllic, other times frightening, his childhood growing up in Vancouver's Chinatown appears a mishmash of half-remembered fragments: a violent father, who was away for long stretches building the Canadian Pacific Railway; a vivacious mother, who liked to play mah jong until the wee hours, despite her husband's dark moods; and bachelor uncles and aunties who claimed to be family, for lack of any real blood ties in Canada. As the secrets of this community come to life in Choy's memory, the past appears ever more mysterious, estranged. Despite the warnings of the Chinatown elders, what it means to be "Chinese" seems to be slipping away, even as they speak.

Mother, motherland. Both are elusive. The woman he thought was his mother appears in his memory as a ghost - "a length of warm shadow stretched out along the far edge of the bed." She was his last tie to his ancestral homeland, but even that tie turned out to be based on a concealment, a lie.

Although I'm not adopted, Choy's feelings of loss and disorientation are familiar. There must have been a moment when I came to view my Asian heritage with this mix of fascination and fear. Growing up in Toronto as a fourth-generation Japanese-Canadian, my connection to Japan never seemed to go much further than dinners at sushi bars - where California roll was always my favourite - and the annual Japanese New Years celebration when we would all crowd around the Formica table in my grandmother's tiny kitchen, the oily stink of tempura and daikon radish filling the air.

And yet, my grandmother insisted that I was Japanese. We all were, in her mind.

The idea of our Japanese homeland was replete with meaning for her. I could sense it in her excitement, as she talked about growing up in Vancouver's Japantown, where she had run her father's restaurant and grocery store, before the place was razed during the Second World War. As she reminisced, her black curls quivered over her pointy ears, the skin smeared with indelible streaks of dye. She longed for the rugged beaches of the Queen Charlotte Islands, where she had been born, shortly after her father immigrated to Canada working as an "explorer" for the Japanese government. Supposedly, the government wanted information about the ways and lives of the Haida Indians.

Years later, I thought back to her stories and wondered whether they were entirely true, but at some level it didn't matter, for her words had caught hold in my imagination. Her memories were charged with the sadness and magic of a place that no longer existed.

Photo from: here

Book #16: Transient Family in Lorrie Moore

2010-07-09T07:54:00.000-07:00

"For stray minutes we seemed like a family, laughing and chewing. I felt included. We were all in this together. But family life sometimes had a vortex, like weather." - Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

When I read The Guardian review of Lorrie Moore's latest novel A Gate at the Stairs last year, I was still raw from throwing in the towel on my career as an English professor. After two years of teaching undergrads in small-town Nova Scotia, I found myself having a breakdown. So what Moore says in her Guardian interview hit a nerve. She talks openly about the transience of university towns like Madison, where she runs the University of Wisconsin's creative writing program, and reflects on still feeling like an outsider after being there for decades. Equally telling are Moore's doubts about whether creative writing should be taught in an institutional setting; she suggests that universities breed "niceness" in students and this is not a good trait in writers.

A Gate at the Stairs deals with this whirlwind of uncertainty and loss in post-9/11 America. The novel focuses on the relationship between Tassie Keltjin, a university student in the fictive Midwestern town of Troy (read: Madison), and Sarah Brink, an aging restauranteur who belatedly wants kids (despite the fact that she has reached the end of her rope with her womanizing husband). When Sarah offers Tassie a job as the part-time nanny for their soon-to-be-adopted, biracial baby, Tassie jumps at the chance. Sarah represents the allure of cosmopolitan sophistication. And in Sarah's eyes, Tassie's farm girl background gives her an air of homegrown authenticity. The two women improvise a household that actually works, in a strange way. For a while at least, until reality sets in.

In Moore's world, there are no simple, happy endings.

Sarah and Tassie's feelings of homelessness and desperate searching for some substitute home and family come through vividly, filling my eyes with tears. I can relate all too well to Sarah's plight as "one of those out-of-staters who'd moved here a while back but only had a pieced-together knowledge of the town." Many evenings I'd spent sitting at the bar of the one good restaurant in my little town, as students and locals walked past the window and stared in. There I was, alone with my martini. My awareness of being an anomaly, as the sole Asian person in town - save a few international exchange students and the couple running the Chinese restaurant - made me feel horribly isolated. As a fourth-generation Japanese-Canadian, born and raised in Toronto, I don't speak any language other than English. So when shopkeepers greeted me with "Konnichiwa," and other words borrowed from samurai movies, I was left stammering. They knew more about being Japanese than I did.

During office hours, I found myself staring at the wholesome, freckled faces of students who would come see me the day before the exam. While I droned on in a zombie-like voice about modernist aesthetics, all I could think was, I wish I could stop being a professor so we could really talk and get to know each other.

But they were stressed, eager to get their mid-terms over, so they could head home for the holidays. I, on the other hand, was looking forward to a turkey sub for Thanksgiving.

Photo from: here

Book #15: Selves Like Costumes in Stieg Larsson

2010-07-06T06:15:00.000-07:00

"In the bathroom mirror she looked at herself for a long time, examining her angular, assymetrical face, her new breasts. And the tattoo on her back - it was beautiful, a curving dragon in red, green and black." - Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire

No one disputes that this novel is a page turner. The plot is propelled forward by a vigilante rescue of a woman about to be killed by her husband, a crime syndicate importing Eastern European prostitutes, and the murder of the husband-and-wife team investigating the johns and thugs - all this before I've even reached the novel's midpoint. It didn't take long for my heart to start pumping like a piston. I was expecting this adrenaline high based on the reviews I'd read.

But what caught me off guard is the idiosyncratic, original characterization.

These characters have a complexity that gets under my skin. Our heroine, Lisbeth Salander - hacker extraordinaire, world traveller, bisexual Don Juan - is particularly fascinating because she is comprised of multiple contradictory "selves" that she dons with the insouciance of costumes. Indeed, her identity seems to be a mystery even to herself. Looking in the mirror and admiring her newly implanted breasts (bought with the fortune she acquired in a recent heist), she seems to regard her own features as no more real or natural than the artful tattoo on her back. There's something marvellous about how she's able to reinvent herself from moment to moment, conjuring an identity that suits any situation. A hitman attacks her? Her keys turn into brass knuckles. She needs to furnish her new apartment under an alias? She throws on a blond wig, grabs a Norwegian passport and heads to IKEA.

Ironically, her theatrics and adaptation skills stem from how she overcame the sadistic sexual abuse inflicted on her during childhood. While the details of Salander's past remain obscure, we know from the opening scene (presumably a flashback) that she "lay on her back fastened by leather straps to a narrow bed with a steel frame" for more than 43 days, awaiting her captor's daily assault. Trapped in this horrific state, her calmness and clarity of mind are all the more striking. Although she is afraid, she isn't debilitated by fear, for with every passing second, she is channelling her fear into a plan for settling the score: "She had discovered that the most effective method of keeping fear at bay was to fantasize about something that gave her a feeling of strength. She closed her eyes and conjured up the smell of gasoline." The girl who plays with fire is born.

The abuse that could have easily paralyzed her for life has instead become a source of power and focus. I think this is why I find myself sympathizing and identifying with and above all liking this oddball heroine. Although an extreme case, she appeals to that universal desire in all of us to overcome our childhood traumas and humiliations, of whatever magnitude, and move on. Rather than letting her past control her, she has taken control of her past and transformed it into a new, creative identity.

(By the way, a few days ago I added a page called "What's Your List?" at the top of the blog. This is where you can post a list of your favourite books.)

Photo from: here

Book #14: Chance Encounters through Munro

2010-07-02T08:43:00.000-07:00

There is a certain kind of woman whom Alice Munro often writes about, and for better or for worse I identify with her. Sophia Kovalevsky, the heroine of "Too Much Happiness" (the final story in Munro's latest collection by the same title) exemplifies what I'm saying. Sophia is a mathematics professor in late nineteenth-century Stockholm, "an utter novelty, a delightful freak, the woman of mathematical gifts and female timidity." So does Juliet, the Classics grad student at the centre of "Chance," in Munro's earlier collection Runaway. This type of woman, who fascinates Munro, is someone who could be attractive to men and lead a normal married life, if it weren't for one little problem: she possesses a strange, burning passion for some esoteric field of study.

I remember having this moment of recognition four years ago, in the library of the college in small town Nova Scotia, where I had ended up as Visiting Assistant Professor of English Literature (the "Visiting" was an important part of my title, just so I wouldn't forget not to become too comfortable beyond my two-year contract). Au contraire.

It was a Friday night, and I was supposed to be working on my Faulkner article (for I was intent on publishing my way to greener pastures), but instead I found myself sitting in the lounge area, where Runaway had been discarded on the table. Randomly opening the book, I found myself reading "Chance" and immediately I recognized myself in Juliet. Her social awkwardness - hyper sensitivity to when men are flirting with her - leads her to blow off a homely stranger who later kills himself. And then, when she does meet a man who interests her, Eric, her attempts at flirtation go no farther than repartee about Greek tragedy.

Yet at her core, she craves a normal life - the life of a happily married woman.

Or does she?

When Eric asks her why she majored in ancient Greek and Latin, she says lightly, "Oh, just to be different, I guess," but deep down, it's more than that. She considers these languages her "bright treasure." But the closer she gets to Eric and the ordinary happinesses and burdens of domestic life - motherhood, housework - the more her treasure risks slipping away. Juliet reflects:

"Kallipareos. Of the lovely cheeks. Now she has it. The Homeric word is sparkling on her hook. And beyond that she is suddenly aware of all her Greek vocabulary, of everything which seems to have been put in a closet for nearly six months. Because she was not teaching Greek, she put it away."

Tears stung my eyes. Here I was sitting in a deserted library, while all my students were at Piper's Pub getting hammered, and all I could think was: what will become of me?

I had done everything to hold onto my bright treasure - all those brilliant, long dead authors. I had broken up with lovers at a moment's notice to throw my books in a suitcase and jump on a plane. I had moved to a town where walking to the supermarket meant getting covered in slush as I trudged three miles along the highway (I still have not learned how to drive).

Yet flickering in my chest was a rivalrous doubt. Yearning for the life of just an ordinary, happy woman.

Photo from: here

Book #13: Dreaming of Asia....

2010-06-29T05:41:00.001-07:00

My boyfriend, Chris, is presently away in Hong Kong tending to his family affairs. He has been away for the past two months leaving me all by my lonesome to read and blog about that turbulent time in my life two years ago, when I was lovelorn, in the midst of a breakdown and desperately searching for a new career. Missing Chris (and perhaps feeling a bit left out of his adventures in China), I started reading Linda See's Shanghai Girls. My pulse quickened. Five pages in and I was hooked.

This tale of an upper crust family in 1930s Shanghai - where the daughters wear "complementary cheongsans to show harmony and style" - has an exotic appeal, no doubt. But what really draws me in is the fact that, despite the far-flung setting, I can identify with the thoughts, feelings and deepest aspirations of the heroine, Pearl. She is an independent, yet secretly insecure woman, who has always been a little too tall and clever to be considered beautiful in conventional terms. Especially compared to her cute-as-a-button, flirtatious sister, May.

Pearl doesn't understand men at all. The man whom she has secretly been in love with for years - an artist who paints her and her sister for calendars and soap ads - doesn't seem to care when she arrives on his doorstep in tears. Her father has sold her and May in arranged marriages to Chinese-American men in order to cover his gambling debts. Contrary to her expectation that this man will save her, his Bohemian airs melt away, and he reminds her of her obligation to filial piety. Devastated, Pearl and May attempt to resist the arranged marriages on their own, but then their father disappears, the Japanese attack the city and the girls suddenly find themselves refugees on the run, vulnerable to attack and rape. As their situation gets increasingly dire, it becomes clear that their best hope for survival is to get to America to their would-be husbands. Pearl reflects:

"Many people wish to go to America. Some will do anything to get there, but going to America was never my dream. For me, it's just a necessity, another move after so many mistakes, tragedies, deaths, and one foolish decision after another. All May and I have left is each other. After everything we've been through, our tie is so strong that not even a sharp knife could sever it. All we can do now is continue down the road we're on, wherever it takes us."

These passages capture the essence of how it feels as Pearl's girlish longings and desire to find love curl inward and die stillborn. Now, she's in survival mode and finding the man of her dreams seems as frivolous and unreal as a soap opera. I have never experienced losing everything in war and being uprooted (as my grandmothers have). Shanghai Girls gives me a glimpse of how it might feel by magnifying 100 times the experiences that are vividly real to many readers - deception and desertion by an old lover, drifting through life with no place to go, feeling like an outcast who just can't go on.

But Pearl does go on. Her strength and resourcefulness in the face of adversity are inspirational.

Photo from: here

Book #12: My Grandmother, the Femme Fatale

2010-06-24T16:42:00.000-07:00

My father and I were reading books together as part of our effort to remain on speaking terms, despite the fact that we were both having breakdowns (his because my grandmother was dying, mine due to my shrinking career prospects). Daddy was so edgy that I was reminded of Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. We would get around to reading the novel, but first why not start with the film?

Humphrey Bogart plays Sam Spade to a T - very cool and wolfish. Again, I was reminded of my old man.

In the darkness of the basement, reality faded away and the exaggerated world of the film took over. The story is deceptively simple. A beautiful blond who goes by the name Miss Wunderly arrives on Spade's doorstep, claiming that her sister has absconded with a thug named Floyd Thursby. When Spade's partner tails Thursby, both men end up dead. It turns out that Miss Wunderly's real name is Brigid O'Shaughnessy - or so she claims. At first, it isn't clear what she wants from Spade, beyond a little assurance that he can shield her from police interrogation. But as she paces around her hotel room in a slinky striped robe - wringing her hands, her face vacant as a porcelain bowl - he's on to her duplicitousness and feminine wiles. The shadows of the Venetian blinds play over her body and you just know she can't be trusted. It's as though she's dead inside, imprisoned within her own dark, desperate mood.

There was something uncomfortably familiar about her premeditated gestures and cries. And then it hit me - she reminded me of my grandmother. My grandmother, the femme fatale.

My earliest memories of Granny are of the period when her beauty was beginning to fade, but even so, she remained a lovely woman - an ex-beauty queen - and everyone assumed she looked much too young to be anyone other than my mother. This was awkward for me, but she loved it, giggling histrionically and leaning forward on the edge of her chair.

"My father was the one who enrolled me in beauty pageants," she once told me. "He taught me to walk lightly on stage. Women in Japan walk lightly like they're floating on air." She reminisced about how the year she was seventeen, her parents had sent her back to Toyama in hopes that the matchmaker would find a rich husband. Three men had proposed.

But if this was so, why had she returned to Canada shortly before the war? Her cryptic relationship to Japan veiled her in mystery and unknown origins, both drawing me in and keeping me at bay.

And now she was dying. Her skin still appeared smooth as she lay in bed, but her arms were twitching like she was possessed, and her leg would be amputated any day.

Photo from: here

Book #11: Fathers and (Wine) Lovers

2010-06-21T06:06:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening, as I was waiting for Daddy to come over for Fathers Day dinner, I was lying on the sofa reading a lush, full-bodied, all-round delicious book. It's delicious not only if you want to immerse yourself in the world of wine, but also if you're looking to dissect the cryptic, turbulent nature of father-daughter relationships (which I certainly did, especially on this auspicious day). The book is called Corked, by Kathryn Borel. It's a memoir about this young woman's trip through the wine regions of France with her dad - wine aficionado extraordinaire. An eccentric Frenchman whose emotions run the gamut from Tourette's-like outbursts to lyrical reflections, his mind teems with weird, unexpected facts about wine, like the fact that Languedoc is a "big up-and-comer" despite its longstanding reputation for spewing "wine for stoneworkers, who'd sit there breathing in dust and crap all day."

While this memoir yields scads of insight about the history and romance of wine, this isn't its true kernel. At the core of the story is the author's fraught quest to become closer to her dad and the other men in her life, too. (Not to get overly Freudian ... but I couldn't help but think of the adage that a father is a girl's first love object and as such, he sets the tone for subsequent lovers). All too aware of her complex dynamic with dad, Borel also puts under the microscope her conflicted feelings for Matthew, her most recent romance gone awry. Despite everything, she still feels that he is the only one really gets her:

"I described to him my allergy to the present. Matthew nodded patiently when I stomped around, detailing how I could not exist within or enjoy the present (even though he was in mine), and how it had pressurizing and irritating effects on the contents of my skull (which, at the time, included him). He abided this allergy, which was at once an itch and a fear, an itch that could be scratched only by getting on with it, moving onto the next thing, satisfying the curiosity that there is something beyond this place, this annoying purgatory that is holding up my trajectory to the other place - the other place, of course, being much better and more stimulating than this infernal place."

As I was reading, I found myself identifying with Borel's sense of being forever caught in a waiting zone, hovering on the fanciful brink of tomorrow, my life will begin. The small university town where I used to teach American Literature - Antigonish, or "Antigonowhere," as we outsiders liked to call it - left me awash in that horrible, anxious feeling so vividly, so unforgettably. Following my bad breakup with the town planner (more about this later) I was caught in a paralyzing cycle of reminiscing about my first love, Josh. If I were Clarissa Dalloway, then he was my Peter Walsh. The acrobatic sentences of Mrs. Dalloway ran through my head, as I power-walked past the dingy storefronts on Main Street, the wind burning my cheeks.

I'd missed my one chance at happiness. I wanted to press the fast forward button on my life.

Photo from: here

Book #10: The Missing Leg in Anthony De Sa

2010-06-17T18:10:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I find myself thinking about my grandfather's old girlfriends. Is that weird? But everything about his life is weird. He died of some mysterious, unspecified illness before I was born, and my father only ever refers to him by his first name, "Kaz." Where other girls had grandpas who'd been struck down by cancer, all I had was this faded, black-and-white image: a man with a vivacious smile and a debonair wave to his hair. The photo must have been taken in Japantown, before the war.

According to my great aunt, Kaz was quite the "bad boy" - drinking, womanizing, leading a louche existence when he was barely out of high school. Apparently, there was a jazz singer named Lily, whom he fell in love with. My great aunt giggles as she remembers this, but something nervous and almost hysterical undercuts her show of boisterousness. I want to know more, but her lips tighten, and she says mockingly, "Look at Leslie, so bemused, taking it all in."

Perhaps these childhood memories have something to do with why I'm tantalized by Anthony De Sa's Barnacle Love. This collection of linked short stories tells the tale of the Rebelo family, beginning with Manuel, a young fisherman, fleeing the insular confines of his Portuguese hometown. He washes up nearly drowned on the shores of Newfoundland, ready to make a new life, but where does he fit in? What does it mean to follow his dreams? Caught between tradition and the surging pulse in his blood, he falls under the spell of a fisherman's daughter, who, despite being a cripple, is strength and sexuality incarnate:

"Her hands blur as they weave the leather straps and secure the metal brace to her thigh - the moulded cup meets the hardened flesh where her leg should be. He's not sure how he feels about it - she is not whole. But when she brushes by him he is caught in her smell of cotton sheets and the peppered sweetness of cinnamon. There is intrigue in her difference - something fragile that needs his tending. Manuel wants to hold her, touch her."

With her missing leg and her slight figure - so slight that she appears almost an apparition when he first sees her - she represents mystery and the beauty of something lost. Her atrophied flesh and severed bone embody something unknowable about her past, in the same way that Manuel's own ties to Portugal are being torn away.

I find myself wondering about my grandfather's past and what it must have been like growing up in the shadow of Japan. He bristled under his father's expectation that he carry on the family tradition by becoming a doctor. I remember my great aunt alluding to his thwarted musical talents. She said that his personality dissolved after the war.

I want to ask my dad what happened, but something stops me. He already looks edgy, lying on the couch, flipping the channels, and I haven't said a word.

So instead I simply ask him if he would like to read Barnacle Love.

Photo from: here

Theory Hungry

2010-06-13T19:07:00.000-07:00

This morning, reading The New Yorker, I came across Jeffrey Eugenides “Extreme Solitude.” A wave of nostalgia hit my chest. The story is set at Brown, my alma mater, and written from the perspective of a hyper-self-conscious Semiotics student, Madeleine, who hangs out at all my old haunts (the Ratty, the Blue Room, Level B in Rockefeller Library where “the stacks exuded a vivifying smell of mold”). Perhaps “nostalgia” is the wrong word, for I don’t deny feeling a good deal of ambivalence, too. But the story actually made me miss academic life. That fragile, convoluted, cut-off-from-reality life that pushed me to the brink of despair.

No doubt, my short-lived career as an English prof was a debacle (if my therapy bills are any gage). Still, grad school was fun. Undergrad even more so. There’s something delicious about spending one’s days lounging around seminar tables discussing concepts like “subalterity,” “coevalness” and “queer theory.” Sitting at a sidewalk café with Althusser propped on a bookstand, Moleskin notebook open. Not a bad day’s work.

But ultimately – as Eugenides brilliantly illuminates – too much thinking and theorizing is a killjoy, especially when it comes to love. Madeleine is having a tryst with a classmate, Leonard, debating whether it’s mere sexual attraction or something more. When she reads Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, she’s struck by how the text casts light on her own predicament:

“The necessity for this book is to be found in the following consideration: that the lover’s discourse is today of an extreme solitude.”

“Waiting

attente / waiting

Tumult of anxiety provoked by waiting for the loved being, subject to trivial delays (rendezvous, letters, telephone calls, returns). . . .

Waiting is an enchantment: I have received orders not to move.”

The more Madeleine reflects on it, the more she understands “that extreme solitude didn’t only describe the way she was feeling about Leonard. It explained how she’d always felt when she was in love. It explained what love was like and, just maybe, what was wrong with it.”

It’s the anticipation of love and rapture that becomes alluring in itself. Put simply, Madeleine only wants him if she can’t have him. Some barrier to fulfillment is necessary – such is the perverse structure of desire. She would rather be burying herself in a book, thinking about him, longing for him, luxuriating in pure solitude, than getting it on.

I recall having a conversation with my therapist about my own need for distance. It was curious, to say the least, why I always gravitated, for the longest time, to lovers who lived in different cities, boyfriends on the other side of the continent. Rather than face-to-face contact and flesh-and-blood intimacy, I craved love letters, witty emails, kinky text messages…. spelling out a kind of scenario that followed the formula of: if you were with me now, I would do X…. It was sexier in my mind.

Photo from: here