Two things.

Firstly, I've given up on War and Peace.

It breaks my heart, believe it or not. But I got wrapped up in other books, and other parts of life (the joy of the season is that I can be working in my yard!). What I read I loved. And I want to read it again - or the parts that I have read so far. I really enjoyed it, just could not be dedicated to it and other books. It is far too complex.

Secondly, I've finished Everything is Illuminated.

Last night as I was nearing the end, I heard a voice in my head. Don't move on, it said. Read this book again. Right now. Figure out something else.

I did not listen. I've moved onto a new book. But I'll be damned if I am not distracted by thoughts of Everything is Illuminated.

What a fantastic novel. I'm going to be mulling over it for a long time. I do think, though, that it has altered my understanding of what is included in a quality novel. It puts other books that I have read this year into perspective, and makes me want to reread some of them - just to see if they are actually as good as I remember.

This novel makes me think that they are not. They are not half as tightly constructed. Or half as creative. Or half as fascinating to read - with so many voices, and so many lovely characters, and so much philosophy. Everywhere. Philosophy. Absolutely brilliant, and totally moving.

Important Books

I'm still one hundred pages away from finishing this book, Everything is Illuminated. I have been reading it very slowly. 10 days and I've not quite finished 200 pages. This is an unprecedented slowness for me. Particularly for fiction.

As stated, I have been reading it slowly. But this is both a product of circumstance and non-circumstance. Firstly, I've been working a lot in the yard over the past week, so most of my free time has been consumed by something other than reading. Secondly though, this book is not a fast read.

It is a challenging read, that is for sure. Two narrators, three or four audiences that the narrators address in three or four different styles. Each very, very distinctive.

The other reason that this book is inherently a slow read is because it is filled with philosophy. Brimming with it. The fact that so much is contained to the less-than-300 page novel is very impressive. But it is more than that.

This book is painful to read. In a good way. Today, I was eating a quick supper on the run, and, as I do my best not to waste time doing nothing, I was reading while I was eating in my solitary state. I read something and it broke my heart. Completely. I was half-way through a paragraph and I put the book down. And I was disturbed.

It cannot be read fast.

I can sense that, somehow unlike most of the books that I have read this year (all of which I have enjoyed to varying degrees), this book is an important one for me. It is bothering me, and making me uncomfortable, and making me laugh. It takes what it is doing so seriously that it includes humour - something I have for so long avoided in literature - and the humour is also heartbreaking.

This man, Jonathan Safran Foer, is a very, very talented writer.

Regarding Zeitoun. I finished it. I have been thinking about it - thinking of what to share with you. I'm torn about Dave Eggers, and about the book. Just as I was with What is the What?. But I'll let you know what I think about it... eventually.

Bright lights.

Everything is Illuminated.

By Jonathan Safran Foer. A brand new reading experience for me. I've managed to read only a hundred pages this week. Only a hundred pages in 7 days.

I've reread a lot of things. Entire chapters have befuddled my mind. I can't tell yet if the fairy tale that is being constructed by one of the narrators (as of now I think there are two) is going to lead into the second story just yet. But I've still almost 200 pages to find out.

And, though it is a challenging read (and I mean that wholeheartedly - I've not seen the English language treated in this manner since reading Burgess' Clockwork Orange), it is a thoroughly enjoyable read. The characters are likeable. Beyond likeable. And their language, once you get into the swing of it, is endearing.

Here is a hint of one of the writing styles (this author must be a somehow genius, or something like that):

From space, astronauts can see people making love as a tiny speck of light. Not light, exactly, but a glow that could be mistaken for light - a coital radiance that takes generations to pour like honey through the darkness to the astronaut's eyes.

In about one and a half centuries - after the lovers who made the glow will have long since been laid permanently on their backs - metropolises will be seen from space. They will glow all year. Smaller cities will also be seen, but with great difficulty. Shtetls will be virtually impossible to spot. Individual couples, invisible.

The glow is born from the sum of thousands of loves: newlyweds and teenagers who spark like lighters out of butane, pairs of men who burn fast and bright, pairs of women who illuminate for hours with soft multiple glows, orgies like rock and flint toys sold at festivals, couples trying unsuccessfully to have children who burn their frustrated image on the continent like the bloom a bright light leave son the eye after you turn away from it.

Some nights, some places are a little brighter. It's difficult to stare at New York City on Valentine's Day, or Dublin on St. Patrick's. The old walled city of Jerusalem lights up like a candle on each of Chanukah's eight nights. Trachimday is the only time all year when the tiny village of Trachimbrod can be seen from space, when enough copulative voltage is generated to sex the Polish-Ukrainian skies electric. We're here, the glow of 1804 will say in one and a half centuries. We're here, and we're alive.

I've read this passage several times. Imagined it. And moved on several times more.

This author must be a genius, or something like it.

Real-life Science Fiction

Dave Eggers is a special kind of author, who can turn a novel into a cry of the human heart for justice. Or vice versa.

I'm reading Zeitoun, a novel released last year. An absolutely fantastic read, a true treatise on a broken America. He has managed to turn the real, the actual events of the recent past, into an apocalyptic story - rivalling the predictions of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 in its regime and The Road in its universe. How though, does Eggers manage to fill the novel with hope?

Zeitoun's office was unharmed, but it was no more than twenty feet from the fire. They tested the winds. It was a still night, with heavy humidity. There was no predicting where the fire would go, but it was certain that nothing could stop its course. There was a fire station four blocks away, but it was empty and flooded; there were no firefighters in sight. And with the phones down, with 911 inoperative, there was virtually no way to alert anyone. They could only watch.

Zeitoun and Todd sat in their boat, the heat of the fire pulsing at them. The smell was musky, acrid, and the flames swallowed the homes with remarkable speed. One was an old Victorian Zeitoun had always admired, and a few doors down was a house he had considered buying when it had been on the market a few years earlier. Both homes were devoured in a minute. The pieces disappeared into the dark water, leaving nothing.

The wind was picking up, blowing away from Zeitoun's office. If there had been any gust in the other direction, his building would have succumbed, too. He thanked God for this small mercy.

As they watched, they glimpsed a few other watchers, faces orange and silent. Other than the crackle of the fire and the occasional collapsing wall or floor, the night was quiet. There were no sirens, no authorities of any kind. Just a block of homes burning and sinking into the obsidian sea that had swallowed the city.

It is like reading science fiction.

Flowers for a Guinea Pig, again.

Strikingly original.

I've never read anything quite like it. Science Fiction that is totally believable, completely engrossing. Set in a world that I understand and can somehow relate to - a world that, unfortunately, seems just as real now as it would have 50 years ago when the novel was first published.

What works most for Flowers for Algernon, though, is that you really get into the protagonist's head. His name is Charlie. He was born a little slow - learning disabilities transferring to social disabilities. And in his older age he is used in an experiment to make him truly brilliant - one of the smartest men on the planet. And the world is not ready for him - he is too brilliant for them. Neither is he ready for the world - it is too unfamiliar to him.

The novel is written as a collection of progress reports that Charlie is expected to complete as documentation for his experiment. This approach really allows you to fall for Charlie; you care about his development, and the discoveries that he makes about how people have treated him throughout his life, and you sympathize with his frustrations as a genius. He never feels as though anybody is treating him as a human, but merely as an experiment - a guinea pig.

Indeed, his only real friendship is with a fellow Guinea Pig - a rat named Algernon. Algernon was treated with the same experiment as Charlie, and initially Algernon's intelligence is well beyond that of Charlie. It is quite interesting to see this connection to the other guinea pig - his only compatriot in the test tube.

What really works for Daniel Keyes in this book is the character. You care for Charlie more than you have cared for most other characters you have read about. Part of this is the personal nature of the writing structure - we are reading his most intimate, and sometimes inappropriate, feelings and ideas. And you watch him blossom into a dark and depressed flower incapable of trusting anybody that surrounds him, except for Algernon.

This book did two things for me that are quite rare. The first was that it made me angry. About a quarter of the way through the novel, Charlie begins to remember his past, and moments when his coworkers and his family treated him poorly. You hear these stories, and you are angry. Anger - a feeling I have not felt since reading Dave Eggers' What is the What.

The second was that it got me excited to read about Charlie. There was a point, about three quarters of the way through the novel, when I was driving home and I was thinking about Charlie. I was worried about him. I wanted him to be ok - I didn't want to witness his demise. What was happening was heartbreaking - what was bound to happen was heartbreaking.

A note about the writing style. This novel was originally written as a short story, and then expanded to include more characters and a prolonged story. You rarely get the sense that this transformation was a challenge for Keyes. The writing is mostly seamless, mostly believable. But it is a testament to the transformation that the English language was going through in the 1950s and 60s - this book does not feel contemporary even if the world that it produces can be mistaken as such.

June 24 - Today I went on a strange kind of anti-intellectual binge. If I had dared to, I would have gotten drunk, but after the experience with Fay, I knew it would be dangerous. So, instead, I went to Times Square, from movie house to movie house, immersing myself in westerns and horror movies - the way I used to. Each time, sitting through the picture, I would find myself whipped with guilt. I'd walk out in the middle of the picture and wander into another one. I told myself I was looking for something in the make-believe screen world that was missing from my new life.

Then, in a sudden intuition, right outside the Keno Amusement Center, I knew it wasn't the movies I wanted, but the audiences. I wanted to be with the people around me in he darkness.

The language is not flowery, it is not poetic. It is not stream of consciousness, or even a false steam of consciousness. It feels completely planned out - it is planned out and edited. Not a bad thing, but something I noticed. And it suits the character of the narrator and of the novel - it is both personal and impersonal. The language that a high academic may use to talk about themselves, no?

I made the comment in my last post that this would be a more valuable novel than Tortilla Flats in high school curriculum. I stand by that. Even without having read Tortilla Flats. It is a novel that I recommend to everybody. Captivating, though not perfect. Original, though not contemporary. A nice diversion, and a valid awareness-raising novel.

Flowers for a Guinea Pig

So I finished Atwood earlier this week in search of something different.

I thought that would be a challenge. I have a lot of books, but I perceive many of them to be relatively similar. I started reading covers to decide what to read - my thought process (abridged):

"They loafed and drank and loved and stole, and lived the brave life with innocence and outrageous disregard for scruples.." (Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck)... sounds familiar, like a novel you read in a high school english course (which is probably where I got this edition years ago). Maybe some other time.

"...traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper..." (The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje)... maybe not just yet. I loved what I last read of yours (which is supposedly your worst novel)... but something about that feels like I already know where it is going.

"...Like so many others, Lev is on his way... changing British Society at this very moment.... a singular man with a vivid outsider's vision... In his innocence, his courage and his ingenuity, he is perhaps Rose Tremain's contemporary version of Candide." (The Road Home by Rose Tremain) I love comparisons with iconic literary characters that I am not familiar with... but everything else seems so familiar. Listless. Plotless almost. Familiar.

"The true story of one family, caught between America's two biggest policy disasters; the war on terror and the response to Hurricane Katrina." (Zeitoun by Dave Eggers) Well reviewed. I like what I have read of the authors (even want to revisit it). Still though, it seems almost too topical. And we all know that topical literature is only really important when it is no longer topical... maybe not. I just might read this one...

And then I reached to the top of an old shelf, to books whose papers have not been ruffled in years. Hello recommendations and borrowings from grandmother - it has been so long since we have spoken. And that is how I discovered Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.

"This fascinating tale of a daring human experiment has been described as 'a love triangle between two people,' 'a suspenseful, gripping story,' and 'a brilliant fantasy.' It is all these things. It is one of the most strikingly original and engrossing novels of our time!"

It was written in the 1950s. I didn't know what to expect. The cover told me nothing. I had heard nothing of it other than that it should be read. So I opened up my 45 year old edition and started reading the aged text on the yellow paper.

"progris riport 1 martch 3

Dr Strauss says I should rite down what I think and remembir and evrey thing that happins to me from now on. I dont no why but he sais its importint so they will see if they can use me. I hope they use me becaus Miss Kinnian says mabye they can make me smart."

I was intrigued. And read further. And further. I wasn't hooked by the writing, but I was intrigued by the story. And I figured out very quickly why it is that I had heard nothing about this novel's story - the plot reveals itself early on. Mostly. And it is difficult to explain part of it without giving the majority of the book away.

And I don't want to give anything away.

I just finished the novel though, and I am thoroughly impressed. One of the best works I've read? Not at all. But still a fantastic novel. That perhaps, just perhaps, deserves to be in high school curriculum far more than something like Tortilla Flats.

More on it next time. I want to go read some more War and Peace, and I need to get ready for my next book (oh, where to go?).

A mostly disappointment

When I last wrote about Surfacing, it did not appear that I was the biggest fan of what Margaret Atwood accomplished with it. I was at page 70 at that point - the novel was still figuring itself out. It didn't seem to have anything stick long enough to matter. That changed soon after page 70; around page 80. Page 80 was when I started caring about the protagonist and narrator, a powerful female character with an incredible intelligence but a penchant for paranoia.

I also wrote last that this novel seemed to have captured 1970s Canadiana in a single, self-contained story. I still stand by that, and perhaps would say that this is its greatest detriment, but it serves as much as a historical document as it does a literary one. And, admittedly, as a Canadian nationalist, I quite enjoyed the symbolism that it used to raise concerns of national identity.

Surfacing is about a group of friends who leave the urban safety of Toronto to the just-over-the-Quebec-border of wilderness, lakes, and silence in search of the protagonist's missing father. It starts with a world of logic, and quickly descends into a natural mystery, viewing the natural world with reverence and fear just as it has always been viewed and always deserved to be viewed. The protagonist's three friends, Anna, David, and Joe, are all urban-dwellers. They are lost in the wilderness without a guide, but they take each temporary success at conquering the wilderness as a sign of their true Canadianism.

And that, I think, is the central theme of this novel - Canadianism. And a very 1970s concept of Canada; the one proliferated in magazines like Canadian Geographic and not Chatelaine. It is about the encroaching power boats of the Americans, their baseball, their killing of the environment for personal gain. It is not a pretty picture, and ultimately you realize, with the protagonist, that the Canada we all imagine existing - the wilderness, trees, rocks, the shield, the lakes, the mystery of the ancient and the unfamiliar - is all to be drowned in the rising tide of American culture. And that we have to accept that, and give in.

Depressing, is it not?

The cast of characters are ultimately more enjoyable to watch than the protagonist. They are classic archetypes thrown out of their element - the anti-feminist but progressive nationalist of David, the loving and desperate Joe (and it is amazing to watch the protagonist move away from this archetype in her flashbacks to her current inhuman person), and the materialist Anna using anything she can to maintain a sense of power and control over her husband, David. Other characters that pop in are minor but support the themes of feminism or Canadianism, or environmentalism. All of which Atwood presents as essentially Canadian, but essentially struggling in a modern world.

Unfortunately, you can't find yourself caring for the narrator enough to love the story. All the elements are here - her flashbacks to her husband and child, her brother and mother and father and growing up in the wilderness and then the playground once she moved to the city with her mother and the realization that it is the city that is dangerous rather than the wilderness - the technique is quite impeccable. But you still don't care about her at all. So, when she descends into madness at the end, and the language becomes inconsistent and delirious and beleaguered, you don't care - you are confused, but you also know what is happening though you don't know why it is happening. Atwood trying to show the mystery of the wilderness and how it affects humanity, and the loss of logic as a valuable thing that no longer makes sense.

I also mentioned mentioned that this novel had an identity crisis - at first I thought this was thematic, though it is clear now that this was a means by which Atwood was portraying the depression of the protagonist. Everything connects and triggers memories and ideas, provides a reason for hate and a reason for love that is not good enough to still feel disdain and refuse to trust the people around her. I now would argue that the identity crisis that this novel faces is in the genre it is a part of; this is a psychological thriller that has been written in the drama genre. As a result, it is missing out on the suspense that could've developed and totally wrapped the reader into the story.

So then, why would I finish it? Well, first of all, I never doubt Atwood - and as you can see above, there is a great deal in this novel that is worth discussing, even if it is not the most enjoyable reading. This is the impressive genius of Atwood, visible even at this early stage of her career. The other reason is the writing - I absolutely loved this early-Atwood writing. It was experimental, almost stream of consciousness, but calculated for a careful character creation.

"You're screwing around with me," he said, till not looking at me. "All I want is a straight answer."

"About what?" I said. Near the docker there were some water skippers, surface tension holding them up; the fragile shadows of the dents where their feet touched fell on the sand underwater, moving when they moved. His vulnerability embarrassed me, he could still feel, I should have been more careful with him.

"Do you love me, that's all," he said. "That's the only thing that matters."

It was the language again. I couldn't use it because it wasn't mine. He must have known what he meant but it was an imprecise word; the Eskmoes had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them, there ought to be as many for love.

"I want to," I said. "I do in a way." I hunted through my brain for any emotion that would coincide with what I'd said. I did want to, but it was like thinking God should exist and not being able to believe.

She writes well, doesn't she.

Now, do I recommend this book? Yes, and no. I think that Atwood accomplished many impressive things with this book - her use of images and language and sentence structure, her way of creating themes and developing them with violence that disgusts and transforms some and amuses others. You acknowledge good people in this book, and you hate others - you get a good snapshot of Canadian identity in the 1970s, and you recognize parts of it in our identity now.

I will say that, having finished this book last night, I felt exhausted. I needed something different. Something without a depressed protagonist or something like that. Where is the happiness in Canadian fiction? We are all lonely, sad, depressed authors. Now it is my task to find something that inspires me rather than saddens me.

Don't allow yourself to be disappointed just yet...

Last night I could not fall asleep. How frustrating when that happens. I got home from a music rehearsal and had a quick snack of some toast, and then tried to sleep. And tried to sleep. I read a bit. Tried to sleep. Read a bit more. Tried to sleep again.

I failed in the trying to sleep, but definitely succeeded in the reading.

Thank goodness

Now for a little note on Surfacing, Margaret Atwood's second novel which is currently casting a shadow over my nightstand (actually, I took it to work today to read during my breaks, and so I suppose it is casting a shadow in my daypack at this very moment). For some reason it was grabbed yesterday instead of Hisham Matar's In The Country of Men.

And I am thinking that was a mistake.

My mother and my brother both swear against Margaret Atwood. My experience with Alias Grace, one of my favourite novels, turned me into a fan. 70 pages into this short novel I am not sure I really know where it is going - I'm not sure it knows where it is going. I don't know what it is about, or what it isn't about. Every paragraph has an identity crisis.

This novel has certainly captured in the universe of 1970s Canadiana. Not a bad thing, but maybe, just maybe, not a good thing either. I'll finish it, out of necessity - but I may come away with a bit of a sour taste, wondering how it is that Atwood managed to go from this piece of schlock to the glorious literary adventure I experienced in Alias Grace.

Regarding last night - because I am consciously trying to slow down my reading of these novels, I used War and Peace to keep me entertained in my restlessness. Damn, this is a great book.

A New Reading Strategy - Part 2

I think I may have a handle on this new reading strategy. Hopefully it will slow down my consumption of literature and allow things to settle a bit more in my psyche. Affect me more deeply - just as Annabel did in its 6-day long lifespan.

I have not allowed myself to pick out my next book since completing Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy. It has been four days now, and I have focused my reading on Tolstoy's War and Peace. And the barbs have sunk in. I am enamoured by the writing and the characterization. Truly, this is a piece of impressive creativity.

I have already laughed in this book. I was out in public at the time, and I laughed at a book - and I am sure that I got the awkward and confused glances that I often send in the direction of people who do the same around me. But I couldn't help it. Tolstoy captures that frivolity of Russian socialites that seems to fit so well into my understanding of their aristocracy from this period. And yet each and every single one of them (and there are lots of them) has a purpose that they intend of following through - be it the acquisition of money from a dying man, or the movement of a son from the fighting line as they start training for a war with Napoleon. It is really impressive to see all of these stories weaved together.

Enthralling.

I can't decide what the read next. As I mentioned last week, I have purchased more books (but no more book shelf space) to read recently, as though I hadn't already collected an amount above and beyond what I can hope to accomplish this year. I'm thinking though that Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men may win out. Or Atwood's Surfacing. I'll be making a decision today so that I can start slowly delving into a universe parallel to that of Tolstoy's.

A Dark and Divided World

So I have finished Cormac McCarthy's novel Outer Dark. In the final day of its reading, Sunday, I unintentionally read 170 pages - I had intended on letting it last for another couple days. But the story picked up, and the suspense of the novel kept me turning pages, and the flow of the language made me completely unaware of how far I had gotten into the book.

This is the third of McCarthy's commentaries on human nature that I have read, and it may actually be the most dark. Not quite as depressing as The Road, and not quite as violent as No Country for Old Men, but I think it is far more mysterious. It starts with a brother and sister, who have a child together. The child, on the eve of its birth, is put outside by the brother out of shame for what he has done with his sister. Once there, the child is collected by a tinker (or tradesman), and taken to a nursing mother so that it may survive.

Once discovering this, the mother sets out to find the child. The brother of the mother and father of the child sets out the find her. As their adventure takes them through a long-lost world of American Appalachian wilderness, deliriously careening down mysterious roads, sleeping in forests, and relying on the kindness of strangers for water and food and work and accommodation, they leave behind them a wake of destruction. Lives are destroyed or lost, and there is fear in the air.

Nobody trusts anybody in this story, and yet everybody is friendly enough to ensure that others survive. Until the one group of people who isn't arrives at your doorstep and ensures that you don't.

This novel is filled with tense moments, written in action-focused prose acted by characters that seem simple but are undeniably complex. They are products of a time completely unfamiliar to our own, and yet in whom you recognize aspects of yourself. I was amazed, and frightened, at how frequently I would read dialogue between strangers and think that I have had those conversations before - and enjoyed them about as much as the characters appeared to be.

I don't know if I agree with McCarthy's stark and concerning portrayal of the world, but I have to admit that I come from a part of the world where I have not been affected by enough of the violence and hate that animates his universes to be able to relate. I am certain that there are places and people that can far better. I hear about it in the news - I know it exists. And, part of the intention of those novels I have read (particularly Outer Dark and No Country For Old Men) is the outline the randomness of violence, and how it can affect those who suspect it just as rapidly as it can alter the lives of those who don't.

The way that McCarthy writes about violence is shocking. It isn't graphic. He invites mystery into his novels and tells your imagination to fill in the blank. I last wrote about this novel marking the massive difference between his voice and that of Kathleen Winter, and I believe this to be the primary result: Winter paints the picture for you to see, McCarthy provides the underlying sketch and then asks your imagination to add the colour. Going from a rather poetic voice to this one requires an effort of mind at first.

I would recommend this novel, if you are a fan of suspense. It is a period piece, and it is alarming, and it tells something about human relationship (I would love to consider the relationship between Culla and Rinthy Holme, the mother and father of the lost child), and tells something of human suffering in an imperfect world, and tells something of human attraction to committing acts of violence. It asks the question of innocence, and points out that nobody is - and yet, it seems that it also notes that nobody is deserving of violence. This is a story about suffering, not redemption or justice; of mystery made from the natural and myth from the normal.

I exalt Mr. McCarthy to the halls of my most preferred authors, and look forward to reading more of his writing so that he may be confirmed in this place once more and once more and once more.

Annabel and Labrador Hunters

I've been trying to write about this book for days now. It isn't coming easy.

Sometimes you read a book and it just gets you and you wonder, 'where did that author come from?' I want to say that this happened with Annabel. And when you look at where this author came from, in this case a former writer for children's television show Sesame Street, you hope that some of her moral magic managed to slip into her previous work so that children have in some way been touched by her humanity.

I did not fall in love with book at the beginning. It was interesting and fast-paced, but then it slowed down, and I didn't find myself interested in the characters just yet. I could see some elements being tossed in that were interesting, like Wayne's interest in geometry and symmetry, and I knew that they would come back to play later in the novel in some way (and are used quite satisfactorily), and I enjoyed it but didn't fall in love.

Until Wayne got to Grade 7. If you can read this book till the point of Grade 7, I will be amazed if you can successfully wrench it from your hands before you have finished it.

I can only possibly recommend this book, though it comes with reservations. Sometimes the author appears to be lost in the wilderness of her words. Sentences say something, say many things, but not what you think they are suppose to say, and you don't know if they are saying what the author wanted them to say either. There are ocasional moments where you read a sentence and you don't know why it was included. But you've read it, and enjoyed it.

And there are moments when the characters don't quite do it. They seem two-dimensional, but also classical archetypes. I loved them, particularly Treadway and Jacinta, and Thomasina. But they didn't quite do it all the time. And in those moments when they did, they made the book seem unbalanced - like in the last quarter of the book, when characters other than Wayne seem to become more prominent than they ever deserved. It isn't really to the book's detriment though, because you don't become annoyed by it. Enamoured would be a far better term.

And then there is the ending. Particularly the epilogue. The ending is far more enjoyable then you want. There are roses in it, somehow. And you are not sure where they came from. But from a book that is so repeatedly, gently blasting its reader into knowing how horrible Wayne's life is - his loneliness, and sadness, and lack of intimacy, and confusion about himself - you come to the sudden happy ending and you give a sigh of relief.

So, somehow all of these weaknesses feed into the novel. You read then and you are puzzled by them, but you enjoy them, and are thankful for them somehow. You have been wooed, either by a fantastic debut novel or by a very clever author who knows how to woo an audience. I hope it is the former.

This novel tells an important story, representative of so many lives in Canada and around the world. The sorrows that Wayne experiences, and the panic and pain of his family, is all very real. And in its poetic portrayal, Kathleen Winter has managed to grasp some hint of that pain in this novel. I am curious though, if many of us will recognize how this story is representative of all of our lives - as it is a story about a gender minority, it runs the risk of becoming representative of a life shared by 'them' rather than one experienced by everyone.

And I think that the life that Wayne tells is actually a life shared by everybody in some way.

Wayne had been watching people. He watched men and women who passed him on their way to get pea soup at Shelley's at lunchtime ro croissants at the new bakery across from the Bank of Montreal. The street smelled of cigarettes, perfume, and coffee, and Wayne saw that the faces, bodies, clothes, and shoes of the men and women who passed him had been divided and thinned. The male or female in them had been both diluted and exaggerated. They were one, extremely so, or they were the other. The women trailed tapered gloves behind them and walked in ludicrous heels, while the men, with their fuzzy sideburns and brown briefcases, looked boring as little beagles out for the same rabbit. You define a tree and you do not see what it is; it becomes its name. It is the same with woman and man. Everywhere Wayne looked there was one or the other, male or female, abandoned by the other. The loneliness of this cracked the street in half. Could the two halves of the street bear to see Wayne walk the fissure and not name him a beast?

Kathleen Winter gets something in this novel, something truly profound in content and presentation. It comes with the highest, though occasionally puzzled, recommendation. Read this book and allow it to affect your understanding of society, others, yourself, and the way that people are as a part of who they were.