Giller Prize – MostlyFiction Book Reviews We Love to Read! Sat, 28 Oct 2017 19:51:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.18 HELLGOING by Lynn Coady /2013/hellgoing-by-lynn-coady/ Tue, 24 Dec 2013 13:35:08 +0000 /?p=23549 Book Quote:

“It started before the dream. A woman walks into a bar.

Starts like a joke, you see.

A woman walks into a bar. It’s Toronto, she’s there on business. Bidness, she likes to call it, she says to her friends. Makes it sound raunchy, which it is not. It’s meetings, mostly with other women of her own age or else men about twenty years older. Sumptuous lunches in blandly posh restaurants. There is only one thing duller than upscale Toronto dining, and that’s upscale Toronto dining with women of Jane’s own age, class and education. They and Jane wear black, don’t go in for a lot of jewellery, are elegant, serious. The men are more interesting. The men were once Young Turks of publishing. They remember the seventies, when magazines were run by young men exactly like themselves — — smokers, drinkers — and these men have never found one another remotely dull — not in the least. “

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe (DEC 24, 2013)

Lynn Coady’s new story collection, Hellgoing, brings together nine self-contained stories that take a realistic and thought provoking look at a wide range of human relationships in today’s world. Reading them we are pushed or pulled into something like a voyeur role, observing in close-up fragments of ongoing or evolving relationships between an array of distinct characters, be they in couples, with family or friends, or crossing paths in professional or casual encounters. Some of the stories can take you on a bit of a rough ride; they rarely are smooth, easy or the content just pleasant. While they might leave us with a sense of unease they also stimulate us to consider more deeply the underlying questions and issues that the author raises. Are they a reflection of contemporary reality or, at minimum, of certain aspects of it? Very likely. Among the quotes on the book’s back cover, one (by the National Post) reads: “…There is a searing honesty here about humankind’s inability or unwillingness, to make an effort at connection, but the author’s own humanity rescues her vision from descending into despair or nihilism.” I couldn’t have stated my reaction any better. If you look for romantic love or happiness, you will not easily find it in any of these stories.

One story from the collection has remained etched in my mind more than any of the others, titled, “Mr. Hope.” It is written from the perspective of a young female teacher, who, upon returning to her first school, is reliving intense childhood memories, among them her first encounters with her teacher, Mr. Hope. Lynn Coady exquisitely captures the feelings of a young girl, her anxieties but also her independent spirit. Interweaving the vividly reimagined child’s perception with that of the hindsight of the adult looking back, the author tells a story that not only conveys narrative tension and inner drama, she convincingly brings out the girl’s emotional confusion and conflicts in a way that will, in some way or another, sound familiar to most readers.

Among the other stories, some characters stand out for me more than others, such as a nun in a hospital who applies her counselling to get an anorexic girl with a religious obsession to take “some food.” The title story tackles another important and well-known subject: deep and lasting family strains going back decades that the female protagonist cannot shake off. However, a “reunion” demands a different response so many years later. While all stories are written from the distance of a third person narrator, they do often cut through the surface of the characters’ “normalcy” and expose what lies underneath. Coady’s stories focus more on the women’s mental state of mind than that of their male counterparts. There is, for example, the young bride who has discovered that “twenty-something” sex is no longer adequate (or never was) and her new partner is a willing if somewhat reluctant participant in the new experiments. Coady pinpoints many of the ambitions and anxieties that younger women experience, whether in private or professional life. She is an astute observer of people and scenarios and her depiction of her central characters is not without a sense of humour or irony.

Canadian Lynn Coady, is with Hellgoing the recent winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize 2013 and a finalist for the Writers Trust Fiction Prize.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-0from 4 readers
PUBLISHER: House of Anansi Pr (July 31, 2013)
REVIEWER: Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Lynn Coady
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Another Giller Prize winner:

Bibliography:

]]> A STUDENT OF WEATHER by Elizabeth Hay /2011/a-student-of-weather-by-elizabeth-hay/ Fri, 16 Dec 2011 02:18:29 +0000 /?p=19604 Book Quote:

“He nudged his chair close and studied the warm little hand. He smelled of sweat, peppermint, tobacco, old coffee. Despite his accent he wasn’t hard to understand – he talked so slowly and so carefully. She would have a long life, he said. She would have one child… You have special talents, he told her. People don’t realize.” 

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  DEC 15, 2011)

… stated the “tiny old man,” one of the many transient visitors to the Hardy farm in the small village of Willow Bend while reading eight-year-old Norma Joyce’s palm.

Canadian author, Elizabeth Hay, centers her superb, enchanting and deeply moving novel around Norma Joyce and sister Lucinda, her senior by nine years. Set against the beautifully evoked natural environments of Saskatchewan and Ontario, and spanning over more than thirty years, the author explores in sometimes subtle, sometimes defter, ways the sisters’ dissimilar characters. One is an “ugly duckling,” the other a beauty; one is rebellious and lazy, the other kind, efficient and unassuming… In a way, their characters mirror what are also suggested to be traditional features of inhabitants living with and in these two contrasting landscapes: on the one hand the farmers in Saskatchewan, patient and often fatalistic in their exposure to the vagaries of the weather and the hopes and destructions that those can bring, on the other the Ontarians, assumed to have a much easier life and, to top it off: they grow apples… A rare delicacy for the farmers out west. Hay wonderfully integrates the theme of the apple – the symbol of seduction as well as health!

Hay’s novel is as much an engaging portrait of the quirky Norma Joyce as it is a delicately woven family drama, beginning in the harsh “dustbowl” years of the 1930s. Still, Hay gives us much more than that: her exquisite writing shines when she paints in richly modulated prose, rather than with the brush, a deeply felt love poem to nature: its constantly varying beauty in response to a weather that seem to toy with it as in a never-ending dance.

While Lucinda runs the household on the farm with efficiency and dedication under the admiring eye of their widowed father, Norma Joyce succeeds in daily disappearing acts to avoid taking her place as a dutiful daughter. Into their routine lives enters, one day, and seemingly from nowhere, Maurice Dove, attractive, knowledgeable and entertaining, a student of weather patterns, Prairie grasses and much more… Ontario meets Saskatchewan with unforeseeable consequences…

Norma Joyce has always been a child of nature through and through: “She had her own memory of grasses. Five years old and lying on her back in the long grass behind the barn, the June sun beating down from a cloudless sky until warmth of another kind pulsed through her in waves […] she remembers every name of every plant.” Now, at eight, she has found in Maurice the ideal teacher and she turns into the “perfect student.” Her small hand reaches out to claim him… He, while enchanted with Lucinda, had been “taken aback by [Norma Joyce’s] ugliness, a word he modified to homeliness the next morning […] then at breakfast he thought her merely strange, and now, interesting.”

Hay is too fine and imaginative a writer to let the story develop predictably. There will be many twists and turns with the family moving to Ottawa and Norma Joyce even further away to New York. At every turn, Hay builds an environment in which human beings interact with the natural surroundings they are placed into. Her description of the Ottawa neighbourhood is intimate and real; New York has its own attractions and disappointments. As Norma Joyce grows up, she feels forced into a difficult journey, that, she later realizes has been an essential phase for her to gain confidence in herself and to discover “her special talents” as the old man had predicted: “Her life would stop, then it would start again…”.

As a reader, I was totally engaged with Hay’s exploration of Norma Joyce’s maturing that teaches her, among many other lessons, to let go while allowing herself to also accept new experiences into her life. Her life-long connection to the prairies sustains her at a deep level, her community in Ottawa helps her to find new avenues to her inner soul. At a different level, Hay plays with references to Thomas Hardy, to established naturalists to underline the importance of landscape and our traditional connection to it. She evokes images that remind us of fairy tales, such as the drop of bright red blood on the white pillow or Norma’s ability to pre-sense events happening many miles away. For me they form part of a richly created background to what is a very authentic and meaningful account of one young woman’s road to herself, an extraordinary achievement for a first novel. A Student of Weather collected several awards and, deservedly, was a finalist for the prestigious Canadian Giller Prize in 2000.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 31 readers
PUBLISHER: Counterpoint (January 2, 2002)
REVIEWER: Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Elizabeth Hay
EXTRAS: Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Non-Fiction:

]]> LATE NIGHTS ON AIR by Elizabeth Hay /2010/late-nights-on-air-by-elizabeth-hay/ Wed, 22 Dec 2010 20:36:30 +0000 /?p=14356 Book Quote:

“Radio was like poetry, he told her. At its best, it could be, while television was like a blockbuster novel: one makes you think and feel, the other dulled your mind. “A radio program isn’t a show,’ he went on. ‘It’s not showbiz, it’s not an assault. It’s about one person learning something interesting and telling it to someone else.’ ”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (DEC 22, 2010)

If a heart is torn apart in the Canadian arctic and no one hears it, did it really happen? Elizabeth Hay would answer a resounding “yes.”

All of her characters – a diverse group of wounded lost souls who work together in a small Yellowknife radio station in the mid-1970s – are aching. Harry – the curmudgeonly acting manager with the cauliflower ear – has returned from a gig in television with his tail between his legs. Dido ran from the only man she ever loved – her own father-in-law — and quickly connects with the station “bad boy,” Eddy. Eleanor fled from the memories of a husband who could not consummate their reunion. And Gwen, the youngest, who arrives at Yellowknife “subtle in her camouflage” with a buff-grey shirt with a pale brown collar and no adornment, is looking to make a fresh start in an area in which fresh starts are legendary.

Within the course of this subtle and timeless novel, we get to meet these characters and more, as they reveal themselves like slowly blooming flowers. Events encroach on the town: a television station threatens to supplant the intimacy of the radio, a gas pipeline (based on the Mackenzie Valley pipeline project) is poised to disrupt the rhythm of the community and particularly its native people. The natural and charged quality of the narrative is slightly disrupted by these events and there’s a bare hint of the authorial voice.

But this author weaves her magic when she focuses on her characters, all of whom are connected to each other in intense and ultimately transformative ways. As summer turns to harsh winter, one of them muses, “Winter here does terrible things to people. You’ll find out.” And indeed, it does; people disappear or drift away or sometimes, forget to listen too closely. And what holds them together is the power of stories: Gwen’s creation of soundscapes and songs of longing during her late-night sound spot; others who present back stories that are so poignant and real you feel as if they’re coming from someone you know.

One of the strongest – and there are many – parts of this amazing book is when four of the characters embark on a journey into the rarely-travelled Arctic wilderness, where real-life Englishman John Hornby and a party of two starved to death in the Barrens in 1927. Each has his or her own compelling reason to go: “Ralph wanted to prove himself – prove that at sixty-one he was still youthful. And Eleanor had indicated that she and the Barrens might be a good spiritual fit. And Gwen had the young person’s all-consuming desire to see a place for the first time especially since it would complete a story that had captured her imagination as a child…” And Harry? “He was looking forward to a clean break from his old dissatisfactions, a summer that would help him forget his winter.”

The descriptions are exquisite: “They passed over the line into a world without walls, a land of rolling plains as exposed as the open sea. Their backs were sudden trees. Their hats were leaves the mosquitoes rested upon. Birds flew past their shoulders, like familiars. And at night, their quiet talk around the little bannock fire was similar to the voices of the trees that spooked the early Eskimos…”

Some characters will find redemption, others will face more questions. Some will make it, some will not. When Harry muses about the caribou, “He’d never known before that migration wasn’t one outbroken forward movement; it was sideways, backwards, forwards, a passage enlivened with indecision in the face of real and imagined danger,” he might have been speaking of himself and the others. The morning after I completed this book, I woke up yearning to reinhabit the world of these characters. No higher compliment can be paid.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 23 readers
PUBLISHER: Counterpoint; First Trade Paper Edition edition (May 1, 2009)
REVIEWER: Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Elizabeth Hay
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Non-Fiction:

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