A Biblioasis Bender

 

Biblioasis is a small Canadian publisher and bookshop based in Windsor, Ontario. One of their successes--so much so she's moved on to Knopf in the meantime--is Anakana Schofield, who came to Toronto's main library for an event on Thursday. I was thinking about reading/rereading some of hers, and that got me to look at the Biblioasis website. Why look at all those books I hadn't otherwise noticed!

Anakana Schofield/Martin John

I had passed on this one when it first came out in 2015. Martin John is a OCD serial sexual abuser, living in London, England. Now such a novel can either be good or bad, right? If it's bad why are you reading it? But if it's good, you've just spent 300 pages (in this case) inside the head of a seriously unpleasant person. I did think this was quite good, but it's written in a close third person, and there's no escape. The back cover says it's 'darkly comic,' and so it is, but maybe not funny enough? (Though how could such a thing be all that funny.) Certainly sometimes novels like this work, are even important--Notes from the Underground, Lolita--but in any case you have to be in a mood to read them. 

Anakana Schofield/Malarky

Malarky has got some darkness, too, but more plain humour. Philomena, Phil, often just known as 'Our Woman', is living on a not very successful cattle farm in Ireland. She learns two things: her husband is having an affair with a woman she labels Red the Twit, and her youngest and only son, Jimmy, is gay. She doesn't use the words, but there's a sexual revolution going on, and maybe she should take part, too! She seduces a traveling salesman her own age and then a lonely security guard, handsome and younger, who has emigrated from Syria. But can a middle-aged Irish woman from a small town really join the sexual revolution? Maybe not.

The novel occurs in a couple of time streams, and Schofield writes in a softened Irish dialect:

    "Get out and about a bit, my husband urged me, go in to town, have a look at the shops. I lived alone then with my husband. If you're wondering I have three children, though now I have only two and no husband neither...

    It was the second time my husband instructed me on that day. The shops, to the male, ever the solution to the glowering female, but in this instance they were no use whatsoever for unbinding me from misery."

The language is fun. The time shifts make it a little tricky--Schofield is often labelled an experimental novelist--but this wasn't especially difficult, and the shifts are well-signaled.

What I hadn't realized until this reading is that Martin John and Bina (the main character of her third novel) both appear in this volume, making the three a sort of loose trilogy.

Her new novel--I'm currently number 38 on the hold list--her fourth, Library of Brothel, sounds interesting. Since they bought 45 copies, I might even see it pretty soon. At the Appel Salon event, she was fun: lively and thoughtful both, and while she lives in Canada now, I wonder how long it's been, because she still has a strong Irish accent, which is just one of the best ways to hear English spoken.

Ivana Sajko/Love Novel

Ivana Sajko/Every Time We Say Goodbye

 

Two novellas by a contemporary Croatian writer. Love Novel is about a married couple in an unnamed EU country; it's 'love in late capitalism' according to the back of the book. She's an underemployed actress; he wants to write. They're not poor by African standards, but they're poor by modern European standards. Will their marriage survive?

 

I thought this was strong, and I might say something more after I've read Every Time We Say Goodbye.

 

Ray Robertson/Estates Large and Small

 

Ray Robertson is a Canadian writer. I've read a couple of his novels before, but his more recent work seems to be non-fiction on popular music (a long time interest of his) and aging (and aren't we all more interested in that as time goes by...) None of which I've read. This novel from 2022 had slipped past my notice.

 

Phil (could there be a Biblioasis pattern here?) runs a small used-book store. Business has been getting worse, and during the pandemic, he decides a bricks-and-mortar store no longer makes sense. He hires a service to setup his eStore; Cameron, a young woman confined to a wheelchair after an car accident, organizes the website; he hires his nephew to enter in the books. There was a wife, but she's long gone. He smokes dope and listens to Grateful Dead board tapes.

 

Phil is still buying books from estates (large and small). Mostly they're husbands who collected, and widows who decide to sell, but at one home with a good collection of interesting and saleable books, Phil tells the woman something conventional, I'm sorry for your loss, but it turns out she's the one dying, stage four lung cancer, and it's time for death-cleaning. But wouldn't you want your books, at least until... They work something out.

 

At first I thought this novel was just a little too low-key and short on event, but I came around. (You see the possibility of the Cameron-nephew romance, right?)  It's certainly not a thriller, but I now think it may be the best of Robertson's novels. (At least of the ones I've read.)

 

Alice Chadwick/Dark Like Under

 

This was the real discovery for me. I hadn't heard about it at all. It's a day in the life of an English public school (that's private for North Americans) in the 1980s. The school is in some unnamed small town--one of its students is from a farming family. The students are told to look down upon students from the other (public if you're a North American) school, but our story's school is hardly Eton or Rugby. Two main things happen at the start of that day, just after midnight.

 

Robin is seen leaving a party with Jonah, Tin's (Thomasin's) boyfriend.  Tin is good-looking, somewhat damaged--her mother committed suicide when she was a kid--and trouble. Robin worships Tin, and Tin doesn't actually treat Jonah very well, but Tin still wants him.

 

But also that night, popular teacher Mr. Ardennes died. He was the leader of the school faculty's liberal faction; the principal Gomme won't stand for any infractions at all, such as being in the hall without a hall pass, or refusing to wear the school blazer on a hot day. We gradually learn that Mr. Ardennes committed suicide and that Robin and Jonah were the last ones to see him alive.

 

This was Alice Chadwick's debut novel and it came out last year. It's possible the novel had too many characters for 330 pages, but I thought it was a pretty remarkable debut, and a very good read.

 

Biblioasis isn't just novels, though!

 

They have a nice line in contemporary formal poetry, something I like, and I just pulled all those off the shelf for their photo op, after posting a poem of Alexandra Oliver's earlier this week. Pino Colluccio has also been on the site once, though not from this book.

 

Do you read books just because of the press? Do you have particular publishers you like?