Still Alice

 by Lisa Genova

Simon & Schuster

  ~ Review in Halifax Herald, September 2009

Getting a book published is not easy.  It can be downright discouraging for authors to get their work into print.  And so it was for Lisa Genova.  After finishing Still Alice, she realized it could take years to find a publisher.  But she believed in her story and so did the National Alzheimer’s Association, so initially Genova published it herself.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Alice Howland is an educated, energetic woman at the peak of her career as a professor of psychology at Harvard University.  Her children are grown and on the road to their chosen careers.  Grandchildren are on the way, her marriage is solid and life is good - until she begins to forget things.  She gets lost on her regular running route.  She sits waiting with her students for the lecture to begin, the one she should be teaching.  Finally, her anxiety sends her to a specialist who gives her the devastating diagnosis - early onset Alzheimer’s.  She is 50 years old.

Still Alice is written from inside Alice’s mind.  She is aware of her deterioration and “pictured her Alzheimer’s as a demon in her head, tearing a reckless and illogical path of destruction …”  

Genova’s background in neuroscience gives authority to her writing.  She weaves a wealth of information into her story with clarity and simplicity.  Remarkably, she never loses sight of the fact that Still Alice is a novel, something which entertains by its very nature.  She keeps the fine balance, drawing her readers in.  We root and cheer for Alice.

As her identity slips away, Alice fights back but she understands the inevitable outcome. “She thought about the books she’d always wanted to read … the ones she figured she’d have time for later.”  Time is not on Alice’s side.

Alice’s family struggle to accept her diagnosis.  They are conflicted, each one of them viewing the illness and the future through very different lenses.  But as their understanding of Alzheimer’s progresses, they finally begin to make the adaptations and compromises necessary to keep Alice in their lives.

To Genova’s credit, this is not a depressing story of a life spiraling into despair and blankness.

Still Alice is about ever changing identity, and the willingness of families to adapt and change for those they love.

Lisa Genova holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience and is an online columnist for the National Alzheimer’s Association.  This is her first novel.

Singing for Mrs Pettigrew, Stories and Essays from a Writing Life

by Michael Morpurgo

Candlewick Press

  ~ Review in Halifax Herald, October 2009

Michael Morpurgo is also a teller of stories and it’s easy to see why he held the post of Children’s Laureate in Britain from 2003 to 2005.  The stories in Singing for Mrs Pettigrew speak directly to his chosen audience - children. He revels in the chance “to rediscover and indulge in that delightful and necessary conspiracy in which I suspend all the trials and tribulations I have come to know and share with them for a while the wondrous worlds of . . . Winnie-the-Pooh and Peter Rabbit.”  But whether it be stories for the young and the young at heart or stories of travel and musings, his understanding of the world and of people delightfully entertains.

Singing for Mrs Pettigrew is a collection of stories and essays, interspersed together to make a book of thoughtful book for both children and adults. His essays are sometimes travelogues as he wanders the English countryside, sometimes informative as he tells of Farms for City Children, a hugely successful venture which has given sixty thousand children a farm experience “harvesting, mucking out, feeding sheep and pigs and calves”, and sometimes instructional as he talks about his life as a writer.

Pen and ink sketches by Peter Bailey scatter through the pages, illuminating stories and essays alike.  I looked for a favourite, but found many.  My One and Only Great Escape tells of a young Morpurgo, at boarding school and desperately homesick, making a break for it.  The illustration alone is worth several pages! There is Yannick, a small boy sent to France for the summer holidays, who learns how to make crème brûlé for Picasso.  And there are whales and ghosts, unicorns and giants.

Morpurgo does not shirk from difficult subjects. The Giant’s Necklace is the story of Cherry, a young girl who becomes cut off by the tide while collecting shells.  Her struggle to climb above the rising sea and her encounter with the ghosts of miners long gone gently lead the reader toward an inevitable conclusion.  Masterfully done!

Singing for Mrs Pettigrew is a curl up and read aloud book, or a quiet, easy read-in-a-corner book for all ages. And it loudly speaks to the writers in us all. “Don’t pretend,” writes Morpurgo. “Tell your tale.  Speak with your own voice. We are what we write, I think, even more than we are what we read.”

Michael Morpurgo was the Children’s Laureate of Britain from 2003 to 2005 and has written more than 100 books.  He lives in Devon, England.

Too Much Happiness

by Alice Munro

McClelland & Stewart

  ~ Review in Halifax Herald, October 2009

The London Review of Books is not given to hyperbole, so when their September issue made reference to Alice Munro as “possibly the world’s greatest living writer of short stories”, (London Review of Books, September 2009) one must believe there is a basis of fact.

Munro’s latest collection of short stories, Too Much Happiness, is part of that fact. Her fourteen other books would be the rest. Certainly, the judges of The Man Booker International Prize thought so.

The stories in Too Much Happiness are as good as anything Munro has written.  Perhaps better!  But judge for yourself - read her book.  Even if short stories aren’t your thing, read the book. Perhaps your taste will change.  Perhaps not, but read it anyway. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Take your time. Breathe between the stories.  Savour the words, because Munro doesn’t waste them. Sit quietly with the endings for a few minutes.  There’s no special order to the stories so pick a title that appeals and start reading. You won’t be sorry!

It is clear Munro likes her characters.  They have a humanness, which, in spite of their sometimes dire circumstances, asks for and often gets compassion which perhaps would not otherwise be granted.  When a man murders his children (Dimension), we ache for their mother, despair for her grief and yet, through a chance highway accident, begin to understand why she is unable to break free, continuing to visit him in prison.

In Fiction, Joyce is drawn to a young woman at a party. She is an author, her first book just published, and for Joyce she resurrects the past, a time of betrayals, passions and manipulation. And even as Joyce seeks her out in a bookshop, Munro can’t resist a dig at the lowly status short stories continue to endure. The book was “a collection of short stories, not a novel.  This in itself is a disappointment.  It seems to diminish the book’s authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside.” 

We are way ahead of Nita in Free Radicals, whispering “NO” in horror as she carelessly lets a stranger into her house.  We see what depression masks from her.  Danger!  Read the book!

The title story quite fittingly ends the collection.  Sophia Kovalevsky was real, a brilliant mathematician in 19^th century Russia and Munro moves into different territory with this fictionalized account of a life.  Sophia is driven by her extraordinary talent to break out of the rigidity of Russian society, but she is tiresomely ordinary in affairs of the heart.  She wins awards, dazzles the intelligentsia with her talent and promise, but can’t find a job. The universities of Europe are not yet ready for a woman professor.

“They had given her the Borden Prize, they had kissed her hand and presented her with speeches and flowers in the most elegant lavishly lit rooms.  But they had closed their doors when it came to giving her a job.  They would no more think of that than of employing a learned chimpanzee.”          

This is Munro at her shining best. A Must Read!

Alice Munro was awarded the 2009 Man Booker International Prize, given every two years to a living author for a body of work that has contributed to an achievement in fiction on the world stage. Too Much Happiness is her 15^th book.  

Say What? The Weird and Mysterious Journey of the English Language

by Gena K. Gorell

Tundra Books

  ~ Review in Halifax Herald, November 2009

The English language is ever changing.  It spite of those who would prefer that it remain constant and definable, it evolves and shifts, adapting to the current needs of a culture or a community. Most languages are influenced by others, and English itself is no exception, heavily influenced by Greek, Latin, French, Arabic and a myriad of other languages.

Say What? is packed with interesting facts.  Did you know that more than seventy per cent of English words were born someplace other than England?”   Or that, after the famous Battle of Hastings in 1066, French became the language of government in England?  Foreign words, such as suffah (sofa), sukka (sugar), and ghul (ghoul), have found their way into our everyday speech, and anyone who has studied Latin knows that the meaning of words can often be ‘worried’ from their Latin derivative.

Gena Gorrell has given us a short history book that is interesting, the kind we all could have used when propping our heads up in history class.  Written in language that is clear and concise, Say What? is a wealth of information, presented in chapters that read more like magazine articles than a dry history book.  In spite of a little boundary blurring around Australia and New Zealand colloquialisms, Say What is a concise, well organized introduction to the history and evolution of the English language. 

Gena Gorrell is an editor and an award winning author of non-fiction for young people.  She lives in Toronto.

Vanishing and other stories

by Deborah Willis
Penguin Canada
  ~ Review in Halifax Herald, November 2009

The stories in this debut collection are about love.  Not just romantic love, but the deep caring between friends, brothers and sisters, parents and children.  They are about our inability to do much more than stand by helplessly as we are buffeted and cracked open by its force.

In the title story, Vanishing, Tabitha’s playwright father stacks his unpublished manuscripts neatly, climbs down from his attic study, walks out the door and never comes home. Tabitha “imagines that her father stepped onto a bus, then onto a boat and soon they’ll receive a postcard from India.”  She never stops waiting.

Three friends live together in This Other Us, believing they were happy, until one of them leaves.  “I had prepared myself for something bad to happen, because I’m the kind of person who thinks ahead” says Elise.  She and Lawrence turn to each other for comfort

How does a child survive the loss of a parent, or begin to understand the complexities of adulthood which seem out of control? A mother drives fast as she “blasted down wide roads, past subdivisions” with her retired boxer lover.  A med student daughter stops eating, looking “like a pile of bent hangars” under a blanket.  Willis’s characters react as we react. She paints them with care, they are real. They gamble, use sex or dope, pick up younger lovers.  Willis gives them permission to find their way, however contorted.

Remember, Relive gives us Cassy as her almost brother-in-law seduces her on his wedding day.  She is thirteen.  Her mother slowly drifts toward dementia; her father is 10 years dead.  “Memories of him are like the photographs: grainy, flat, not really alive to you ever.”

Vanishing is a thoughtful, entertaining debut collection.  And now she has written her first book, one hopes that another is not too far away.

Deborah Willis grew up in Calgary.  Her fiction has been published in Canadian literary magazines, and in the UK’s Bridport Prize Anthology.  She lives in Victoria, BC.

Galore

by Michael Crummey
DoubleDay Canada
  ~ Review in Halifax Herald, November 2009


With a new twist on the story of Jonah and the whale, Michael Crummey embarks on an extravagant history of the fictitious community of Paradise Deep, Newfoundland.  Two families are feuding, fractious differences which have lasted many generations and involve careful maneuvering and politicking.  Galore follows the intrinsically linked lives of the inhabitants of Paradise Deep, moving effortlessly back and forth through time, an epic tale that is at times magical , and sometimes unimaginably hard.

When Judah arrives unceremoniously in Paradise Deep, literally spewed from the belly of a beached whale, the community gathers to watch and wonder, never for a moment believing such a person could survive.  But he does, and the people of Paradise Deep open their arms, if not their hearts, to the pale, mute stranger.  His arrival alters the community of Paradise Deep forever.

 While Galore is an epic story of love and family, it also places the ever struggling Newfoundland fishery in an historical context which traces the rise to power of the FPU, the fisherman’s union which faced fierce opposition by the Catholic Church. When fish prices “collapsed with the glut of high-grade fish dumped on the European market,” the ramifications are harsh and immediate.  “The same fool’s-gold story played out across the country, the same crushing disappointment.... it was a bleak lesson, to be blessed with plenty only to learn that abundance could be a tool of destitution, and all through that fall people abandoned the shore.”

Crummey conjures a vision of Newfoundland that is ancient and steeped in traditions, visions of mummers, and ghosts that will not be denied. Galore moves effortlessly back and forth through generations.  There are many players, all central to the story and seldom does one take centre stage for long. This ability to tell a story through history and through the community itself is no small feat. That Crummey allows the story to unfold organicallywithin this ever changing context is in itself remarkable. That he is able to “navigate the complications of one generation and the next” and hook his readers from the opening pages is the mark of a truly talented writer.  Crummey’s new book shines.

Michael Crummey is the author of three books of poetry, a collection of short stories and three novels.  He lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

The Pages

by Murray Bail
Published by Harvill Secker
  ~ Review in Halifax Herald, February 2009

It has been ten years since Eucalyptus, and once again Murray Bail brings us a novel of harsh, beautiful landscapes and the dry wit that is distinctively Australian. Wesley Antill is a self appointed philosopher, and is unable to pursue his calling on the vast sheep station in New South Wales where he lives with his brother and sister. He moves to London and then Germany, pursuing what he believes should be the life of the philosopher. Germany, he writes in his journal, has given the world ‘five of the giants of western philosophy. It must be something in the water.’

After many years, he returns home and sets up an office in an abandoned wool shed where ‘lines of silver light from the loose-fitting sheets of corrugated iron and the various nail holes ... intersected the brown stillness’. But he dies before his work is produced and his siblings look for an assessment of their brother’s output. There is excitement in the Philosophy Department at Sydney University and they send Erica to try and make sense of it all. She too sets herself up in the wool shed. ‘The air was thick with the smell of wool, so thick it surrounded and began caressing her. Erica felt if she stayed here for any length of time her skin would improve.’

The Pages follows Erica’s slowly unfolding friendship with Wesley’s sister, and an almost imperceptible romance with his brother. Their quiet life in an unforgiving landscape is juxtaposed with Wesley’s diaries of his life in Europe as he struggles to find the place to write. ‘Begin with nothing. Begin again. Not to think, but allow thinking to arrive. Drought-thoughts.’ And Bail keeps us waiting right to the end, the Antill writings forever a carrot dangling on the next page, which we keep compulsively turning.

Murray Bail was born in Adelaide. He is the author of several books, including Eucalyptus, which won the 1999 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

Hannah’s Dream

by Diane Hammond
HarperCollins
  ~ Review in Halifax Herald, February 2009

In a small private zoo on the grounds of Havenside near Puget Sound, lives an elephant. Hannah is small, blinded in one eye as a baby and rescued from Burma by Max Biedleman. Max was a visionary, a woman whose dignity, compassion and foresight holds the zoo together long after her death. Before she dies, she appoints Hannah’s keeper, Samson Brown, to be the elephant’s legal guardian. And Sam loves ‘exactly two things in his life: his wife and his elephant.’ For 41 years, Sam and Hannah spend their days together, walking, watching TV and growing old. The problem is that Sam is growing old faster than Hannah.

Hammond has created some quirky and endearing characters in Hannah’s Dream. There is Truman, single parent and zoo accountant, who buys a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig as company for his son, with interesting results.  Neva Wilson, a young elephant keeper hired to replace Sam when he retires, teaches Hannah how to paint. Corinne, Sam’s wife, spends many evenings watching movies in the elephant enclosure and believes Hannah to be the reincarnation of her dead baby girl. And Harriet Saul, the Zoo’s Director,  is just a nasty piece of work.  Together, this unlikely group staggers toward understanding what needs to happen to ensure Hannah’s healthy and happy future.

Hammond has created a love story with Hannah at the centre, who loves unreservedly and who is loved passionately in return. Hannah’s Dream is a heartwarming story with an intelligent, quiet message that is hard to ignore.

This is Diane Hammond’s third novel. She worked in public relations for many years, and was the media spokesperson for Keiko, the killer whale who starred in Free Willy. She lives in Oregon.

Yesterday’s Weather

by Anne Enright
McClelland & Stewart
  ~ Review in Halifax Herald, January 2009

There’s something thrilling about this new collection of short stories from Anne Enright. The characters in them speak straight to the heart, as if sharing a cup of tea across the kitchen table. These are ordinary, hard working Irish people whose complicated lives are never straightforward.  Sometimes they stand at a point in time, not so much regretting the past as wondering how the future looks from here.

Several of Enright’s stories tell of madness, of a slow spiral down. In Pale Hands I Loved, Beside the Shalimar, Fintan is slowly losing touch with reality.  [His friend] leaves the house they share to marry into a comfortable life, and returns to meet Fintan in the afternoons.  “He is madder now than he ever was. I think he is quite mad.  He is barely there.  Behind my back I hear the sound of threads snapping.”

Serena, anorexic and troubled, takes off and is gone for ninety-one days.  Her family “lived them one by one.  We lived those days one at a time.  We went through each hour of them and we didn’t skip a single minute.” - Little Sister.

And through the collection, Enright’s characters deal with the complicated exasperation of marriage. Until The Girl Died is the opening story (and the last story written). An unnamed wife’s husband has an affair with a younger woman.  She’s used to it, they’ll get over it, nothing will change.  Until the girl dies, and her husband sits crying on the sofa.

Anne Enright is a master of the short story genre.  The shape of her words and sentences create a cadence that is a pleasure to read and her ability to convey so much with a word or a very Irish turn of phrase appears effortless.  It the mark of a writer at the top of her craft.

Anne Enright has written numerous works of fiction and non-fiction. In 2007, she won the Man Booker Prize for The Gathering.  She lives in Dublin, Ireland.

The Frozen Thames

by Helen Humphreys
Published by McClelland & Stewart
      ~ Review in Halifax Herald, January 2009

There are forty vignettes in this new edition of The Frozen Thames, each telling of a moment in time when the river formed an ice mass which allowed passage. Forty moments because “in it’s long history, the river Thames has frozen solid forty times.”

The stories reach back into history, to times when the ice became a carriageway for Henry VIII (1536), an archery range for Queen Elizabeth I (1565), an escape route for Queen Mathilda under siege at Oxford Castle (1142), and the final path for the beheaded tyrant king, Charles 1 (1649).  And often, the frozen river became a site for Frost Fairs.

Kings and queens walk through these pages, but it is working voices whose keen observations narrate the stories that merge fiction with history.  We see the river and feel the ice breath of winter through the eyes of Londoners going about their business.  Their voices draw us in. Queen Elizabeth’s chambermaid shares her joy of solitude.   “The ice is quiet and demands the same ... I feel ... like myself, and I do not know what to call this if not happiness.”   And the gravity of the moment is not lost on a man assisting at the execution of Charles I.  “ ...to kill one’s king is a solemn business.”  We nod, agreeing.  We are there.

Humphreys has presented us with a history so readable it is hard to put down.  It is almost a bonus that the silken pages of this small book are littered with maps, portraits and artworks, each chosen to complement the story it accompanies.  It is a beautiful book.

“This book is intended as a long meditation on the nature of ice . . .” says Humphreys in her author’s note, “[which] we are in danger of losing from our world.”  [If this happens] “we would also lose the idea of ice from our consciousness.”  A timely and perhaps prophetic statement.

Author's website: http://www.hhumphreys.com/