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?

 

 

 

Template for a Conversation With a Single Friend (rondeau)

Template for a Conversation With a Single Friend

I'll call you back when Junior is in bed

(addressed to Isa/Janet/Winifred).

My hands are full of turkey parts and string;

I know you want to talk about the thing

that happened at the staff retreat with Ted.

 

I have to see the kids are bathed and fed.

Of course I'd rather talk to you instead.

I'm sure he doesn't view it as a fling--

I'll call you back.

 

I'm sure he only means to clear his head.

You can't expect a man to go to bed

with someone from the office and then ring.

You have a lot to give. Stop hollering,

stop saying that you wish that you were dead.

I'll call you back.

 

-Alexandra Oliver

 

I pulled this book off my shelf and was browsing through when I saw this witty rondeau. Having posted Leigh Hunt's half a rondeau, Jenny Kiss'd Me, not so long ago, when I saw this, I thought that's the ticket. Though the title poem is awfully good, too, and well, a whole bunch of the others as well. The book won the Pat Lowther award for best book by a female Canadian poet in 2014.

 

Who exactly is it that's hollering? I'm voting for Junior, with the narrator carrying on two conversations at once, but I suppose it could be Janet.

 

Alexandra Oliver is a contemporary Canadian poet.

 

And why did I have the book off the shelf? Consider this a teaser for a longer post on Ontario publisher Biblioasis... 

 

Sunday Salon

Last Week

There were a couple of books, of course: I finished Shirley Hazzard's The Transit of Venus. Post coming soon? We'll see. It is half-written.

Then a slim volume of poetry, The Discarded Life by Adam Kirsch, which came out last year:

Which may be why, in that first eastern winter,

When I looked up to see the silhouettes

Of stripped black branches spidering across

The deeper blackness of a frozen night,...

Our eastern-ish backyard earlier today.
More sunset than frozen night, though...

Kirsch was raised in L.A., but then moved to the east coast, where he writes for The New Yorker. The volume is more or less the story of his move. He writes blank verse well, and yes, that is a bit 'damning with faint praise' in case you were wondering.

Some plays of Plautus, which I'm still thinking about.

Then Try Not To Be Strange by Michael Hingston, a history of the kingdom of Redonda, also out last year, from small Canadian press Biblioasis. Redonda is an actual island in the Caribbean, but the kingdom is a literary in-joke.  M. P. Shiel (born on Montserrat in 1865) was its first king: his father took him to the uninhabited island as a boy and proclaimed him king as a birthday present. Shiel went on to be a popular writer in England; his best known work is the last man sci-fi novel The Purple Cloud. (Pretty good and available from Project Gutenberg.) The kingdom was handed on to the English poet John Gawsworth (friend of Lawrence Durrell and frenemy to Dylan Thomas) before spawning a bunch of claimants to the throne, one of whom was the late Javier Marías.

'Try not to be strange,' is what M. P. Shiel's father told his son as the young Shiel emigrated to the U.K. Not entirely sure the advice was heeded. Pretty entertaining. I preferred the journalistic parts of the book to Hingston's memoir, but your mileage may vary.

Which leads to:

On the Stack

Some of those are the same as last week, but then I added three Redonda-related books to the stack. Am I really going on a Redonda bender? Maybe! The new ones are:

Javier Marías' All Souls

Javier Marías' Between Eternities and other essays

Lawrence Durrell's Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

I also downloaded M. P. Shiel's Prince Zaleski from Project Gutenberg, which is supposed to be Shiel's answer to Sherlock Holmes, written after Holmes went over the Reichenbach Falls and everybody still thought the great detective was dead.

Linking up with Readerbuzz' Sunday Salon:

Sit down, stay a while. How was your week?

Randy Boyagoda's Original Prin

The Toronto Public Library offers the Appel Salon program where authors come to the main library to talk about their most recent book; Randy Boyagoda came this fall to talk about his Original Prin. I thought the book sounded interesting and I must not have been the only one because, though I put it on the hold list the next day, the library only now delivered to me.

Original Prin is the comic story of Princely St. John Umbiligoda, (yes, really) a Sri Lankan immigrant and now a professor at a small--and getting smaller--Toronto-area Catholic university. He's married to Molly and has four daughters; at the start of the novel he has just had surgery for prostate cancer. He's in his 40s.

Also that getting smaller university is about to disappear entirely. The university president has hired a consulting firm to try to save something of the university, and the primary consultant is Prin's ex-girlfriend from graduate school, Wende. Does Prin still have feelings for Wende? How does that comport with his Catholic beliefs? Could he even do anything about it anyway, after his surgery? Well, of such stuff are novels made on.

At the Appel Salon talk, Boyagoda said he'd come to his editor (John Metcalf at Biblioasis) with a 600-page page manuscript. Metcalf told him inside that there was a 200-page novel seeking to get out. (Inside every fat man...) Metcalf put him on a diet of short comic novels and told him to cut and Boyagoda did: this was 223 pages in my edition. At the talk Boyagoda particularly mentioned Evelyn Waugh, which alarmed me: I'm not very fond of the what they tell me are the funny novels of Waugh, like Scoop or Vile Bodies. But something else that was said suggested to me Morte d'Urban, which I very much do like. The story is the idea of a good person trying to do good in a fallen (and bureaucratic) world.

Well, it was neither Waugh nor Powers. Not nearly so unedifying as Waugh, and, for my money, funnier than Waugh, but not as funny and warming as Powers. The humour is more of the nature of Prin's silly name than the situational humour of Fr. Urban in Morte d'Urban. There's a lot of guilt-ridden agonizing on the part of Prin, which is funny, but I do feel like I've read that before, though not in a Sri Lankan immigrant. The best moment I thought came early when Prin is in confessional with Fr. Tom.

Anyway, good, if not everything I had hoped. It's apparently the first of a planned trilogy. I don't know if that explains it, but the ending was both over the top and a bit unsatisfying, and not in the, I, the author, don't mean to satisfy you way.

Another entry for the Canadian Book Challenge:

Jorge Carrión's Bookshops: A Reader's History

Jorge Carrión is, among other things, a travel writer, and this volume is, among other things, a volume of travel, travel to bookshops. He imagines a passport which has, instead of the stamps of countries, the stamps of bookshops he's visited and there are bookshops in Buenos Aires, in Istanbul, in London, in New York, in Sydney, in San Francisco, in Santiago. He himself lives in Barcelona and, of course, there are bookshops he's visited in Barcelona. He describes the layout, the shelves, the windows, the signs, and most importantly, the stock.

That, of course, is one of the great pleasures of this book for a book lover: the thought of all those bookshops one (I) could go to. The ones I have been to (say 57th Street Books in Chicago) I now want to revisit; the ones I haven't, well, I've made a list.

But there's also a melancholy tone to the book. Carrión emphasizes early on that book selling is a business even though we as book lovers don't always want to see it that way. I may have been known to hoard a book or two that only my heirs and assigns will ever be able to get rid of, but by definition that can't be true of a bookseller: if they don't sell books they don't last in the business for very long.

And plenty of bookstores fail anyway. Increasingly as his book goes along (and as his writing of it went along--he seems to have been working on this book over the course of ten years) the bookshops he once visited have closed. 

Bookstores also take on other functions. He introduced me to the Spanish neologism cafebrería, that combination of a coffee shop and bookstore, a word that could usefully be imported into English. Of course it's a business and one does what one has to. Are these lists of the world's most beautiful bookstores any longer about books? Or have they become tourist destinations? If selling is necessary then can we complain when booksellers do what it takes? Carrión does not take a stand, but only brings up the question.

Anyway, enjoyable, even if I just lost an hour Googling bookstores that no longer exist where I've spent my time and money...