The Man Who Forgot How to Read by Howard Engel - review

The Man Who Forgot How to Read
by Howard Engel
HarperCollins, 176 pages, $24.95

“Like astigmatism on a drunken weekend.” “[A] film in which the soundtrack no longer matched the lip movements of the characters.” “Like being told that the right leg had to be amputated but that I could keep the shoe and sock.”

There are countless medical conditions that may befall a person, but it is unlikely there has been a more ironic misfortune than that which afflicts Canadian author Howard Engel.

Engel, creator of the successful Benny Cooperman mystery series, woke one day to discover that the front page of The Globe and Mail looked to written in a foreign language, “Cyrillic one moment and Korean the next…what looked like an a one moment looked like an e the next and a w after that.”

Engel had suffered a type of stroke called alexia sine agraphia, or “word-blindness,” a rare condition in which the afflicted can still write, but can no longer read. Recognizing the overwhelming irony of the condition as it applied to his livelihood, Engel writes, “I felt like a plumber told to stay clear of drains and lead pipes, or a banker told to avoid dealings with money.”

The Man Who Forgot How to Read – the title is a direct nod to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a work by famed neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks – is Engel’s memoir of rehabilitation, a work notable for its complete absence of self-pity. Certainly, no one could ever blame Engel for spiraling into depression, but his refusal to give up what he loves is inspiring.

It is not the likelihood of never writing again which fuels Engel’s initial despair, but the possibility that he will never again enjoy the simple pleasure of reading a book. “Reading was hard-wired into me,” he pines, devastated that the main pleasure of his life has been cruelly snatched away. “I could no more stop reading than I could stop my heart.”

As he comes to grips with his new situation, attending therapy sessions to help him adapt to a world where apples and grapefruits appear strangely similar, Engel begins to try and write again, facing each letter as a hieroglyph to be memorized. This is far harder than he anticipated, vividly describing it as “trying to move a ton of raw liver uphill by hand.”

Like the Cooperman mysteries (that last of which, Memory Book, was written after his stroke), Engel writes with a disarming simplicity of voice that may keep his mysteries humming, but unfortunately robs the story at hand of any tension.

In his guise as mystery writer, Engel excels at keeping the reader guessing as to the outcome. Here, the ending is never in doubt, and while this should not dissuade a person from reading Engel’s remarkable story, the lightness of his voice never fully captures the anguish he says he feels.

As Dr. Sacks himself says in the afterword, Engel’s story “is not only as fascinating as one of his won detective novels but a testament to the resilience and creative adaptation of one man and his brain.” Engel’s spirit in the face of his affliction is indeed stunning, but his hand is far surer in the realm of fiction than memoir.

Originally published (heavily expurgated version) in The Winnipeg Free Press, September 23, 2007.

The Solitude of Emperors by David Davidar - review

The Solitude of Emperors
by David Davidar
McClelland & Stewart, 288 pages, $32.99


“It was in December 1992 that Bombay lost its way.”

In 1992, Hindu nationalists destroyed a mosque in the town of Ahodhya, India. Muslim retaliation was to be expected, and the resulting sectarian violence led to one of the bloodiest and most shameful incidents in India’s long history.

David Davidar, president of Penguin Canada and author of The Solitude of Emperors, presents the riots with unflinching directness. As his protagonist Vijay watches people being torn apart in the street, “internal organs visible as if in a urology lab demonstration,” the nature of mob violence attains a gruesome intimacy.

It is not violence, however, that drives Davidar’s plot, but the lust for power in those who would feign religious righteousness as a masquerade for their dreams of glory. And in a world that sees the increasing reliance on fundamentalist dogma rather than logic to guide those in power, the themes of The Solitude of Emperors are all too familiar.

Vijay is an aspiring journalist with the Bombay-based newspaper The Indian Secularist. After a close brush with death during the riots, he is sent to the tea town of Meham to relax, but discovers instead that the religious tensions of the big cities are slowly making inroads into rural India as well.

While Solitude is ostensibly Vijay’s story, Davidar interweaves his tale with the words of an unpublished treatise on past leaders of India, written by Vijay’s mentor Mr Sorabjee. In this fashion, Davidar manages the not-inconsiderable feat of seamlessly couching a diatribe on India’s “compact with the Gods” within a personal drama of sizeable power.

Attempting to encapsulate the timeless lessons of Ashoka, Akbar, and Gandhi, while tying them to the state of the country in the 1990s, Mr Sorabjee hopes that his text will serve as a call to arms for young Indians. While admitting that poverty and poor educational resources are rampant throughout the nation, “our surfeit of Gods, one for every three or four of us, more than makes up for any lack of doctors, policemen, school teachers, nuclear scientists, and judges.”

Sadly, while India may very well be the most religiously diverse country on Earth, Mr Sorabjee worries its reputation as a nation of tolerance is rapidly being eroded by “small-minded men who will use [religion] to advance their own petty ends.” Vijay’s adventures do nothing to dispel this belief, and as the plot steadily advances toward an almost-foregone conclusion, the hideous inevitability of conflict creates almost unbearable tension.

While there is undeniable bleakness in Davidar’s words, it would be a disfavor to label The Solitude of Emperors as disheartening. As Mr Sorabjee ends his essay with words of hope, asking the young to “fight in whatever way you can to restore sanity and decency to our nation,” so too does Davidar, arguing that the solutions to such religious dilemmas are far more complicated than the overt easiness of blind fundamentalism would have us believe.

Starting a war is a straightforward affair; ending a war requires compassion, thought, and reason. The Solitude of Emperors never offers any answer but this one certainty, and in reminding us of it, Davidar may be gearing us up for what lies ahead.

Originally published in The Winnipeg Free Press, September 9, 2007.

Shining at the Bottom of the Sea - book review

Shining at the Bottom of the Sea
by Stephen Marche
Viking Canada, 256 pages, $32.00

Every author, in some respect, creates unique worlds in their novels. Whether it be a wholly fictitious planet, a slanted version of our own reality, or merely the kindly neighbours next door, the sphere of existence on display within the pages only subsists as an artificial construct, subject to the whims of its creator.

It’s a fair bet, however, that not many authors have gone to the lengths Stephen Marche has in idiosyncratic world-building.

The Canadian author’s second novel, Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, documents the Island of Sanjania, “an invisible dot in the middle of the North Atlantic.” Sanjanians, in the words of one of its leading writers, “are perhaps the most literary people on earth…bookstalls are as common as fruit stands…on Sanjair flights the stewards push small carts of books down the aisle after the beverages and pretzels.”

Yet rather than simply set a story in this fictional country, Marche sets himself the challenge of anthologizing the many varied works of fiction in Sanjania’s history, exploring the country’s past through its pamphlets, short stories, and novels. Marche, in his role as editor, is perplexed that Sanjanian writing is essentially ignored in the world, especially as authors such as George Orwell praise Sanjanian pamphlets as “[reminding] me of a childhood I never had.”

In lesser hands, such a notion could easily lead to cheekiness, a nudge-nudge ‘aren’t I clever’ showiness that showcases the author’s vanity in his own talents rather than serve the central conceit of such an endeavour. Even the slightest wink at the absurdity of the scenario could destroy its fragile nature.

Luckily, as fans of his first novel Raymond and Hannah are aware, Marche is a spectacularly precise writer, with nary a word wasted or phrase unexamined. His meticulousness of language and rhythm carry his voices easily throughout the stories, from the distinct local patois of the early pamphleteers, through to the later “clean school” of writing ostensibly introduced by Blessed Shirley.

Indeed, such is Marche’s accomplishment that it becomes well nigh impossible to critique Shining at the Bottom of the Sea as anything less than a factual anthology. From Cato Dekkerman’s charming “A Wedding in Restitution” to Caesar Hill’s wonderful “Flotsam and Jetsam,” it becomes an exercise in futility to distinguish Marche the Canadian author from Marche the fictional compiler of material.

Marche’s disparities of tone and style, his inclusion of footnotes and author biographies, his traversing of the Sanjanian cultural landscape though fictional heroes such as fallen woman Pigeon Blackhat and aged crimesolver Professor Saintfrancis; all combine into such a complete literary deconstruction of a land and its people that a reader not in on the joke would be forgiven for looking into making travel arrangements to Sanjania.

In a sense, by skirting the usual narrative trappings of the novel, Marche, in revealing “a secret compartment of the sea,” has summarily reinvented them. Impossible to categorize, impressive in execution, always enthralling, Shining at the Bottom of Sea is a joy, and a celebration of all that is possible in literature.

Originally published in The Winnipeg Free Press, August 26, 2007.

The Architects Are Here - book review

The Architects Are Here
by Michael Winter
Viking Canada, 384 pages, $34.00

Many authors are praised for having a ‘distinctive’ voice, but what, exactly, does the phrase actually mean? If it means a voice that is singular, unique, and immediately identifiable, then most authors, no matter the level of talent, are hardly ‘distinctive;’ a reader, without foreknowledge, would be hard-pressed to offer more than an educated guess as to the author of any one particular book.

There are exceptions, of course; no one would mistake a Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. novel for the work of anyone other than the maestro. And while Michael Winter may be a comparable neophyte, with the publication of his latest novel The Architects Are Here, he is well on his way to having one of the most distinctive voices in Canadian literature.

Winter, along with contemporaries Wayne Johnston and Kenneth J. Harvey, is among the new wave of Atlantic Province authors who fuse modern-day sensibilities with profound respect for the heritage of their forebears. The result, especially in the cases of the above three, is works of supreme originality and shattering insight, all the while leavened with doses of bracing Canadian wit.

The Architects Are Here is a similar animal, at once familiar and innovative, a dissection of lives born in-between the Newfoundland of old and the new. It is a portrayal of lives in flux during “the last days before people began sending a hologram of themselves to conferences, before we strapped on sensory devices and experienced other places without leaving our bedrooms, before the West sent robots to war instead of real American soldiers.”

The narrator Gabe, a novelist, writer for The Auto Trader, and previous Winter subject in This All Happened, has fallen in love with Nell Tarkington, a woman with strange ties to people in his past. Nell once had an affair with his best friend David’s father, and when she disappears after an argument, Gabe and David travel a meandering path from Toronto back to Newfoundland for answers to numerous questions.

The plot itself is the most familiar aspect of Winter’s tale, mixing elements of E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News with the basic elements of a Hollywood road movie (think Sideways by way of Goin’ Down the Road in reverse). The glory of Winter is his writing style, a sharp-edged yet brittle prose that cannot be adequately summarized in a few quick quotations.

Like a poem, Winter’s words must wash over the reader in its entirety, letting his asides and quick-cut thought edits bounce around in the readers’ mind, quietly revealing character through humour warm yet grim. Sentences such as, “Arthur was complicating grief-retirement with turning middle-aged and the resentment a man has of ploughing his carnal will into one woman for twenty years,” are wonderful in and of themselves, but it is Winter’s absolute command of voice which proves that his sublime previous novel The Big Why (a contender for the great 21st century Canadian novel) was no fluke.

Already in his short professional life, Winter has burst through the pack through his startling personal mix of lyrical cadence, imagination, and warmth. The Architects Are Here is proof positive that Michael Winter is something special.

Originally published in expurgated form in The Winnipeg Free Press, September 2, 2007..