Tag: canada

This book has a fun premise, asking what would happen if you suddenly got access to all your colleagues mails and slacks. WHAT POWER!

This basic idea could have gone in a lot of different directions. I thought it might be an unhinged story about revenge, which probably says a lot about me. But actually it was much sweeter. It was about a girl who is self-absorbed, and getting a chance to see how other people really feel helps her focus outside herself for the first time in many years.

It’s interesting because her self-absorption is sort of sympathetic, in that what she is really absorbed in is guilt about the death of a friend. But even so, what you get is that self absorption is self absorption, and whatever its cause, it makes you unhappy.

I had always felt mildly guilty about never reading Munro, being a Nobel laureate and all, but she is a short story writer and that is just not my medium. She died recently and I finally decided to give her a go, choosing this book which is apparently her ‘only novel.’ In fact it is loosely connected short stories. Whatever. Really she is a wonderful writer.

Try this, from page 1, about a frog hunt:

“Old frogs knew enough to stay out of our way, but we did not want them; it was the slim young green ones, the juicy adolescents, that we were after, cool and slimy; we squished them tenderly in our hands, then plopped them in a honey pail and put the lid on.”

Or her description of soldier’s khaki uniforms “which had an aura of anonymous brutality, like the smell of burning,” or this, a description of her mother:

“My mother had not let anything go. Inside that self we knew, which might at time appear blurred a bit, or sidetracked, she kept her younger selves strenuous and hopeful; scenes from the past were liable to pop up any time, like lantern slides, against the cluttered fabric of the present.”

A wonderful, depressingly and forbiddingly wonderful, writer.

This is a comic novel about a short marriage and a long painful divorce. The writer has previously written for TV shows (Schitt’s Creek) and magazines. You can kind of tell: this novel is absolutely packed with jokes and cleverness. It’s like reading an entire novel of one liners. I can only imagine the immense effort this must have taken. Here for example is her taking up buying self help books:

I would open one and put a flower on top of it, then take a picture and imagine changing everything about my personality and core friendship group to allow myself to post that image online.

Or at one of many efforts to have hobbies or interests – at a gaming arcade:

. . . I watched a group of twentysomething girls cheering while one of their friends whacked a pinball machine. They were having a level of fun I’d never seen outside of a commercial for a chain restaurant.

I have read three novels recently about women and breakups and I am delighted once again to have not grown up in the developed world. I’m not saying I feel amazing about my body, but I just can’t get over how much women from developed countries seem to worry about how they look. Truly I wonder if it is patriarchy at work – how much mental real estate is being used on Spanx rather than on seizing the means of production.