A year later, and still getting reviewed!

The world of publishing is obviously far different than that of the movies, where reviews are up the first week or so, and that's likely it. But not for books; over a year after being published, Shelf Monkey is still getting reviewed, and it goes without saying, reviewed well. Like I'd promote a bad review.

This week, it's the independent (and fantastic) magazine Broken Pencil. I love the independents, they can get away with so much more...colourful language. I think every book review ought to be laden with obscenities.

From the review by Richard Rosenbaum in issue #39:

The dialogue is thoroughly witty, Thomas' desires and frustrations feel genuine, the style is quite original, and if you've got any sort of literary tastes or preferences at all, the discussions between the characters over which books are treasures and which ones are trash will have you laughing out loud in recognition. Let's put it this way: if you hate the [obscenity deleted for our more sensitive readers] Da Vinci Code, this book is totally for you!

Thanks, Richard! You and your review rock in every conceivable way!

At a Loss For Words by Diane Schoemperlen - review

At a Loss for Words
by Diane Schoemperlen

It may be trite to remark that romance, and all its iterations, is among the most employed themes in all of literature. Recent years’ examples have run the gamut in terms of quality, from the sublime intelligence of Stephen Marche’s Raymond and Hannah to the simpering idiocy of Paulo Coelho’s Eleven Minutes.

Diane Schoemperlen is no stranger to the passions and perils of the heart. The Canadian author has past mined this vein with great success with her novel In the Language of Love and her Governor General’s Award –winning short story collection Forms of Devotion.

Schoemperlen has proven herself both an excellent stylist and an expert navigator of human foibles. Unfortunately, her latest novel, At a Loss for Words, is supremely disappointing.

The unnamed narrator of Loss suffers from insomnia, has recently undergone a severe break-up, and is “a writer who cannot write.” Stumped for words and ideas, she turns to writers’ self-help books for inspiration, all of which spit out hackneyed advice along the lines of “Write on colored paper” and “Write about a time you were misunderstood.”

As she writes through her block, she begins to reveal facets of the relationship that has left her shattered. Walking through the steps of the romance from giddy first meeting to tear-soaked denouement, Schoemperlen shows an expert sense of pacing, portioning out the slow reveal with the sometimes-bizarre recommendations of the self-help books.

A reunion with a departed lover of thirty years previous, this new/old love at first leaves her in a state of unadorned bliss. “When you’re in love, every little thing furnished further evidence of the fact that the two of you are indeed fated to live together happily ever after.”

The lovers are immediately in a sugary worship of each other that leaves everything they utter or write dripping with syrup, capping each sentence with an exclamation point of idolization. “Look what love does to language,” Schoemperlen writes. “Either it sends you into breathless, shameless, hyperbolic logorrhea…or it leaves you wordless altogether.”

While it may have been Schoemperlen’s point to juxtapose this excessively purple prose with the reality of the ultimate betrayal, the dialogue is at first amusing, then irritating, and eventually exhausting. The narrator’s near-constant self-involvement may be realistic in terms of her pain, but as a narrative device it only serves to make her exceptionally unlikable, and distances the reader from any possible empathy with her plight.

As a result, At a Loss for Words, slight as it is, becomes a chore to finish. The final pages, complete with ‘you go, girl!’ conclusion, are tiresome and repetitive. A concluding twist near the end comes too late, as the reader is dulled into apathy.

There is personal truth and ache in what Schoemperlen writes about, and it leaks into the story in unexpected ways. “Sometimes I wish I could just put you back in the box where I used to keep you,” the narrator comments. “I guess I’m going to cut off your legs to fit you back in there.” Such barbs have the sting of authenticity, but they are too few and too far between to make any impact.

In Forms of Devotion, there is a wonderful story entitled “How to Write a Serious Novel About Love.” It is wise, witty, weird, and true, a spectacularly funny examination of the form while being itself a touching love story. It says more in fifteen pages than the whole of At a Loss for Words, and resonates far, far longer.

[Originally published in The Winnipeg Free Press, February 10, 2008]

9 months later, and the reviews keep coming in

Jeff Vandermeer, author extraordinaire, has provided a list of his favourite novels of 2007 to Locus Online, a respected science-fiction/fantasy publication.

And guess who's on the list?

Among many, many other notable titles (he acknowledges that it was a very good year for reading), Jeff cites Shelf Monkey under his 'First Novels' choices, noting :

Corey Redekop provided this year's gonzo fun with his Shelf Monkey, an utterly enjoyable novel about radical bookworms.

I love it.

Thanks, Jeff, and I'll be starting The City of Saints and Madmen any day now.

Book Review - The Toothpick by Henry Petroski

The Toothpick: Technology and Culture
by Henry Petroski
Alfred A. Knopf, 443 pages, $35.95

“The close study of anything as both an object and as an idea is potentially intellectually rewarding and revealing about the technology and culture in which it is embedded.” So says Henry Petroski, and he knows whereof he speaks.

Petroski, a professor of history at Duke University and the Aleksander S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering, has made quite a side career for himself as a popularizer of what many would regard as ‘the mundane.’ In previous books outlining the history of the pencil, the bookshelf, and multiple other devices that most people never give a second thought to, Petroski has sought to reveal the “hidden and frequently overlooked relationships among the people and things of the world.”

Thus, for his fourteenth book, Petroski undertakes a meticulously researched assessment of one of the simplest manufactured artifacts in existence. The Toothpick: Technology and Culture places the examined object within the context of the evolution of civilization, with always-intriguing results.

The toothpick, as a device, has existed in one form or another since mankind’s first meal. A simple apparatus has long been sought as a tasteful alternative to our body’s natural pick; “whenever we proceed to drag the tongue across and thrust it between our teeth at a repast’s tenacious residue, we reveal our mission by the bulge moving around our lips and cheeks like a mole beneath the lawn.”

As Petroski notes, there is no one single starting point for such a tool. Examining the fossil record of our ancestors, grooves in skeletal teeth reveal that twigs, rocks, and grass are the historical antecedents to the now-ubiquitous smooth wooden utensil we are familiar with.

The modern pick, in its mass-produced form, is typically attributed to Charles Forster, an American businessman “who recognized the potential for ultimately large profits in small, trivial things such as toothpicks sold by and for the millions.” As Petroski digs deeper, we see that by following the progression of the toothpick, with its cultural nuances and technological advancements, we are following the development of civilization.

All this would be for naught if Petroski treated his subject with the dry reverence of a scholarly treatise. Luckily, like contemporaries such as Mark Kurlansky (Cod) and Simon Winchester (The Professor and the Madman), Petroski has the narrative skills to match his mania for research. While Petroski does not brandish the storytelling prowess of his peers, his passion and fascination more than make up for a unexceptional and slightly unwieldy framework.

Adding spice is the bizarre arcana that crops up surrounding “the oldest habit,” ranging from George Washington’s rules of civility, “the one hundredth maxim of which cautioned against using a knife or fork to remove stuck food,” to the ancient Chinese and Romans, who carried toothpicks as a vital part of their daily jewelry.

The famed Bowie knife is sometimes known, depending on the area, as the Arkansas, Louisiana, or Texas Toothpick. Poetry has been written as to its uses and flaws, and the number of people who have perished from toothpick-related mishaps (including, possibly, U.S. President Warren G. Harding) is surprisingly high.

“People are by nature adaptive, creative, and inventive, capable of taking anything far beyond its stated and intended purpose…Given a lever, they will move the earth. Given a toothpick, they will turn it into a universal tool.” Henry Petroski believes this, and The Toothpick is proof positive that not only can the toothpick be a tool with many uses, it can also be the source of a marvelous book.

Originally published in the Winnipeg Free Press, December 30, 2007.

The Culprits by Robert Hough - review

The Culprits
By Robert Hough
Random House of Canada, 320 pages, $35.00


First, a quick note; this may be the greatest description of the Canadian peoples ever put to paper. “The people work too hard, and are boring because of it. They live in nice homes, and watch hockey on television…The people do not like opera or ballet, and they have no famous writers. They are polite to one another, without ever being friendly. They keep their problems to themselves, and don’t know how to laugh properly.” Perfect.

I think Robert Hough must delight in confounding expectations.

His first novel, The Final Confession of Mabel Stark, with its quaint cover evoking a bygone era of big-game danger and circus escapades, looked to be a rousing send-up of adventure novels. Quite a surprise, then, to discover Hough leavening the ribaldry with deft psychological depth and witty meta-fiction asides.

Six years later, he does it again. First, the title: The Culprits. It puts one in mind of a crime thriller, along the lines of The Usual Suspects or Reservoir Dogs. Then there’s a cover image, a silhouette of a rabbit, blindfolded, with a target painted on it. I am immediately reminded of the bizarre Canadian movie Phil the Alien, wherein a secret operative with a shadowy U.S. agency is trained to ignore all emotions by killing puppies with a cheese grater. It’s funnier than it sounds.

What a non-surprise to discover that the culprits of the title are not villains bent on monetary gains, but something far more intangible. “How about fantasy? How about desire? How about the need to keep the mind nimble and the soul a little more lifelike, despite all the drudgery that is thrown by life at us?” The culprits, in Hough’s universe, are the emotions that fight to take chances, to seek joy, to be happy; these culprits keep us interested in living.

The next surprise comes through the plot, which sets itself up in a few broad strokes to be a comical satire of lovelorn individuals trapped in marriages of convenience. Again, however, Hough refuses to deliver the expected. Damn him. Damn him, I say, and damn his inestimable talent.

Hank Wallins is a lonely man. A night-time computer operator with an insurance company, he has no friends, no prospects, and a maddening case of tinnitus. As he notices one night, “[he] had fourteen cigarettes left, and enough change for five cups of coffee from the Quality Assurance vending machines. Other than that, there was nothing, not a thing, in the joke that was his life.”

A fortuitous push into the oncoming path of a subway train puts him into hospital, and into contact with a man who has recently benefited from the offerings of the website From Russia with Love. It is an online love market for lonely North American men and desperate Russian women, and Hank is a prime candidate for its services. As is Anna, a Russian woman badly treated by her lover, and in desperate need of a change. Hoping for anything, she begins a correspondence with Hank, who sees in her the image of his long-lost love.

This is the stuff of classic comedy, of Neil Simon witticisms and Hollywood fluff a la Green Card. And there is fine humour in Hough’s smooth delivery of Hank’s transparently bad idea, of his desperation in finding companionship through Internet scams. Anna’s obvious dislike of Hank, her disappointment in his ordinariness, is matched by her feelings toward Toronto; “There was something about the city’s orderliness that exacerbated her turmoil. There was something about its cool functionality that made her lose her composure. Even the air felt thin, the soul squeezed out of it.”

Yet after this initial set-up, Hough brings in a third character; Ruslan, a Dagestani living in Russia, the former lover of Anna who finds himself kidnapped in Putin’s Russia. Suddenly, all expectations go out the window, and Hough expertly manoeuvres through a plot that combines the mundane goings-on of Canada with terrorists, disgruntled Russian citizenry, and horrific brutality. All of this from the omnipresent POV of a narrator whose identity shall remain secret, but whose outlook on life is arguably amongst the most touching and unique in 21st century Canadian literature.

There is much more to Hough’s story, as he effectively contrasts the disparate personalities who propel the plot forward. But for all its modern pyrotechnics, there is something undeniably sweet and old-fashioned at the core of The Culprits, a yearning for more than life gives. As Hank pines, Anna whines, and Ruslan slowly erodes, Hough reveals a compassion for the simple needs of his characters, whether they be in straits commonplace or dire. “Humans, they cope,” the narrator advises, and it is this theme that brings about the major events of The Culprits. Whether it might be ill-advised acts of love or acts of terrorism, the humans, they do indeed cope. It’s all we can expect to do, Hough appears to say, and it is a testament to his storytelling verve that such a sentiment does not bog the story down in depression. Rather, like Hank falling to the tracks below, it hovers. It stays aloft, and floats, and astonishes. The Culprits is one of the best novels of 2007.

Houdini's Shadow by Leo Brent Robillard - Review

Houdini’s Shadow
By Leo Brent Robillard
Turnstone Press, 177 pages, $19.95

In his review of the under-rated modern noir Johnny Handsome, esteemed film critic Roger Ebert opined that stereotypes are not always a bad thing. Sometimes, he believed, a story is better when it acknowledges its roots.

I felt the same way after reading Leo Brent Robillard’s uneven yet entertaining novel Houdini’s Shadow; here is a novel of dark, pulpy, noirish themes, yet it would be a better story if it acknowledged itself as such.

Despite an opening chapter detailing one of Houdini’s famous escapes, Houdini’s Shadow does not concern itself with the magician. Rather, Robillard follows the path of Jake, a young boy who witnesses Houdini’s cheating of death, and becomes enamoured with the prospect of becoming an escapist. With a boxer father on the take, however, it isn’t long before Jake’s life departs from the glorious illusions of youth, and enters the gritty reality of a life of crime on the streets of Montreal.

Soon, after an aborted life as a professional thief, Jake takes up as a driver for Israel, a local mobster who isn’t as big as he’d like. Israel has taken up with a fetching young lass named Louise who, in classic femme fatale fashion, takes up with Jake on the side, says her name is really Lulu, and begins playing all the angles to suit her own mysterious needs. “[H]e understands in some oblique way that she is like a mirror. Only, rather than a likeness, she reflects a yearning. She is what you want her to be, and is therefore perfect.” If that isn’t a dangerous woman straight out of Chandler and Hammett, it ought to be.

Robillard displays a fine knack for crafting evocative moments that effortlessly capture the essence of mystery. At one point, Jake observes a man and woman sitting at the other end of a train car, when the train enters a tunnel; “when the light crashes through the windows on the other side of the tunnel, they are where he left them. Only something is different. A smudge of blush, perhaps. A loose lock of hair. And suddenly he understands something important about the dark.” Passages such as this tinge the plot with hints of indigo sadness, pushing the noir to its limits.

The problem with Houdini’s Shadow (other than a third act that unwisely abandons its third-person singular narration) is its unwillingness to fully embrace its pulp origins. Robillard rarely pushes hard enough, trying to find the artistic slant to his slim plot rather than delve into the darkness that his tale truly requires. It’s too much surface, all gloss and polish, when what is needed is a healthy dose of grit. Robillard needs to commit to the stereotypes of the genre; the somewhat-dim hero, the deadly dame, the aggrieved gangster. These are the tools of the trade, and while Robillard understands their uses, he is unable to build more than a façade that looks good, but has little depth.

For Houdini’s Shadow is fully in the vein of the recent Hard Case Crime publications, and would make a good fit with the classic reissues of Donald E. Westlake and Ed McBain. Robillard has the moves and the technique, but he needs more seasoning to fully bring Jake’s sordid world to life. Houdini’s Shadow is an enjoyable story, but it’s a b-movie among b-movies.

The Commons by Matthew Hughes - review

The Commons
By Matthew Hughes
Robert J. Sawyer Books, 317 pages, $26.95

It’s not often that one can use the phrases “rich study of archetypal characters throughout human history” and “boisterous sci-fantasy action yarn” to describe the same story. In the worlds of Mathew Hughes, however, it would appear that going as far astray from the normal as possible is the norm, so to speak.

Hughes is one of a number of should-be-better-known science-fiction authors being pushed forward by Canadian sci-fi icon Robert J. Sawyer. Through his imprint, deserving authors such as Nick DiChario and Terrence Green are gaining a wider audience for their visions of the fantastic.

Lucky Matthew Hughes. While he has published several novels to acclaim—many concerning his terrifically warped Archonate universe—The Commons may mark his introduction to a far more expansive readership; deservingly so, as an imagination as tremendously unbridled as Hughes should be experienced by as many as possible.

Using the Archonate themes of earlier novels Fools Errant and Black Brillion, The Commons is an exploration of Hughes self-styled “noösphere,” a spectacularly dense world underneath the world, “the distillation of all human experience, everything that had ever been important to humankind, individually or collectively, since the dawntime.” A universe that exists within the minds of humanity, the noösphere can only be visited by those specifically trained by the Institute of Historical Inquiry, an organization founded “scores, some said hundreds, of thousands of years ago, to explore and map the human collective unconscious.”

In this world of the Commons reside “the eternal archetypes of the species: the Fool and the Hero, the Mother and Father, the Wise Man and the Helpful Beast…[h]ere, too, were all the elemental Events, Situations, and Landscapes of the human story.” In other words, the noösphere is a world where all our myths and legends live on, cycling through their stories in perpetuity, never altering, and always dangerous to those “noönauts” brave enough to map its countries. Only by chanting a variety of “thrans” can the noönaut avoid being detected and absorbed into the psychological landscape.

Onto this crowded palette is thrust Guth Bandar, a trainee with the Institute who finds himself increasingly (and unwillingly) forced into interactions with humanity’s historical archetypes and event patterns. Soon, he comes to believe that the collective unconscious has achieved consciousness, and may be trying to use Bandar to some purpose he cannot comprehend.

As with most speculative fiction, the fun is in the details: how this new universe functions, what its rules are, etc. For most, this requires an exacting certitude in presentation, to ensure no anomalies are present. Hughes sidesteps this potential dilemma by creating a universe with no rules at all; the world of the noösphere is in the unconscious imagination, and therefore has no limits, and therefore can do whatever it pleases. This can lead to some bizarre and hysterical archetypal mashups, as when Bandar (no spoilers here, just hints) finds himself physically transformed in a subplot to a famous Greek myth, escapes, and becomes trapped in a children’s fairy tale. All of this is relayed in scientific/psychological jargon such as “The forest, when he entered it, was of the Sincere/Approximate classification…its iconic characteristics told Bandar that he was almost certainly in a Class Four Situation…the Situation’s cycle would involve only indispensable interactions between the idiomatic inhabitants.” Hughes never reveals his hand, letting the reader have the joy of slowly realizing the common archetypes in play. The only obvious parallel is Jasper Fforde’s Tuesday Next novels, wherein the heroine walks through a world populated by characters and themes from great literature. Where Fforde uses Austen and Dickens as templates, however, Hughes mines the psychological texts of Jung and the myth explorations of Joseph Campbell.

While Hughes imagination is exemplary, the novel falters in its overall execution. Originally a series of short stories Hughes wrote for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Hughes has performed a “fixup,” a reorganization of the stories as an overall novel, with inconsistencies smoothed out and overall theme emphasized. Sawyer, in his introduction, takes pains to establish this technique as a classic manoeuvre in literature, reminding us that Frank Herbert’s Dune and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy began life in the same format. All this is well and good, but The Commons is too obviously a series of stories, and never fully congeals as a novel in its entirety; it is too episodic, too repetitive, and its lack of overall linear flow damages the novel. Bandar is a charming enough protagonist, but he is too much the cipher, and other characters never have enough opportunity to become more than pieces on a chessboard.

It’s a quibble, nevertheless, because The Commons is so rich and rewarding an experience that its shortcomings can easily be forgiven. With its unique employment of archetypes and psychological depth, The Commons is a great introduction to Hughes, and leaves the reader yearning to discover his other works, which may be the greatest compliment one could give.

Shelf Monkey - now taking over Florida (yes, Florida)

The talented, sweet, and oh-so-swell sci-fi author Jeff Vandermeer (located in Florida, in case the title of this post confused you) has a sideline as a reviewer for the Amazon.com Bookstore Blog. Why is this interesting? Because he has included Shelf Monkey as one of his "Books you might have missed."

Sez Jeff:

Sometimes biting, sometimes just silly in the best possible way, the novel celebrates books even as it has its demented way with them.

Read the rest of brief but thoughtful review here.

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 Full LRC review

The full article on Shelf Monkey is now up, and can be read by clicking on the very large image to the right of these words I'm currently typing.

Literary Review of Canada...you know, my sales may have not allowed me to retire just yet, but getting in the LRC, that is just too cool.

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.

Shelf Monkey - Literary Review of Canada review

What can I say? The reviews keep coming in, and continue to amaze me.

The most recent is from Graham Harley, "a bibliophagic director and actor who played Cyril in the acclaimed television series Slings & Arrows." Mr Hurley has provided the most literate review of Shelf Monkey thus far, revealing undercurrents and themes that even I didn't know were there, and pointedly revealing certain flaws with the structure that I certainly knew were there, but hoped others wouldn't. Unfortunately, I cannot link to the article in its entirety (you can read the first paragraph here), but here's a quick blurb of the highlights:

"The four central characters in Corey Redekop's invigorating first novel are bibliognostic bibliophiles, bibliomaniacal and bibliophagic, who work for a bibliopole and indulge in biblioclasm . . . It is a world in which books are people and more insidiously, as we are to discover, people can be treated as books . . . Shelf Monkey may be [Corey Redekop's] first novel, but it is decidedly more than almost."

There's a few inside notes there, and only reading the review in it's entirety can all be explained. So what are you waiting for? Go buy it!

*Incidentally, there is a spelling mistake in the review, that Mr Harley himself wrote to explain. I won't mention it here, but if you've read the book, you'll get it immediately. Thanks, Graham, for the explanation (and the review, of course).

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..

What's Shelf Monkey really like?

My apologies for not updating this blog as often as I should (let's face it, I'm simply not interesting enough to fill a daily blog). I'll try to be more proactive (big news coming soon on this front), but for right now, I thought I'd do a quick read-through of all my reviews, and present a list of all the novels and authors that Shelf Monkey has been compared to:

Fahrenheit 451 (well, duh!)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Carrie
Lord of the Flies
The Monkey Wrench Gang
Revenge of the Nerds
Douglas Adams
Max Barry
Chuck Palahniuk
Dave Eggers
Rex Murphy (seriously!)

Pretty good company, all that.

Shelf Monkey - Toronto Star review

The terrific author Michel Basilières (Black Bird) has penned a fairly great* review of Shelf Monkey in the August 5 edition of The Toronto Star.

"Corey Redekop's first novel, Shelf Monkey, takes aim at the entire world of books and readers, and manages to hit quite a few targets...

"As a former shelf monkey myself, in exactly the kind of "hypermegabookstore" that Redekop sets his story, I can confirm that his protagonists are embarrassingly real, if exaggerated for the sake of his madcap story. In my experience, book clerks are every bit as overly well read as Redekop's characters, but only sometimes – well, maybe half the time – are they as socially misfit. This is the realm of the book nerd. These people laugh at jokes about ISBN numbers and adopt pseudonyms taken from their favourite novels...

"The book is faintly reminiscent of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest via Fahrenheit 451, but that's only picking out a couple of Redekop's many deliberate borrowings. This he does quite well. If you, too, have read far too many novels or spent any time as a shelf monkey, or like your fiction light and fast, you'll probably enjoy this one, as I did."

Read the rest of the review here.

*I say "fairly great" because of a few too many spoilers for my liking, and one misspelling of my name.

Shelf Monkey - intercontinental blog review

Fellow Shelf Monkey and Paris resident Amy Ross (I'm now officially taking over Europe!) has posted a lovely review on her blog une nouvelle vie de boheme:

"Redekop has moments of real wit and he isn’t afraid to push his plot to entertainingly ludicrous extremes. If, ultimately, he winds up glossing over some finer philosophical points about censorship, elitism, taste, and judgement, he at least reminds us of the pleasure, joy, and even lunacy a true love of books can inspire."

Read the rest of the review here.

Shelf Monkey - Rabble.ca review

The cool website Rabble.ca has posted a glowing review by Melanie Redman:

"Redekop’s work could be read as a light satire or a savage condemnation of intellectual snobbery, but in either view the work explores the complexity of any group of people attempting to set the standards by which we understand and engage literature...The next time you’re sitting on an airplane haughtily surveying the titles propped before your fellow travellers, remember that, soothing as it may be to the little snob that lives in most of us, intellectual snobbery is not a monkey you want on your shelf."

Read the rest here.

Arrogant? Moi? [updated]

Well, the first ever amazon.ca review is up and, well, it's...I'll let busymom speak for herself:

"I read this book because of all the good reviews in magazines ect (plus I figured the author's arrogant attitude had to come from somewhere)but I had a really hard time getting past the first two chapters. Was a waste of my time."

*sob

Well, good reviews, she got that right. And Amazon seems to be upholding its high standard of reviews by people who admit to not reading the book, but whatever. What strikes me as odd is that I get the sense that this person knows me.

Huh.

I'll never say that a bad review doesn't hurt; I mean, the Globe and Mail review was by no means a rave, but at least some points were made. But "author's arrogant attitude," now, that hurts. But that's what the veil of anonymity allows.

Well, can't please 'em all. Hope she paid cash.

UPDATE: The review has been taken down. Strange, but gratifying. And a new 5-star review has taken its place. So, take that, anonymous reviewer!

The Reviews Keep Coming In!

Well, the sales may not be causing James Patterson any sleepless nights, but the reviews are as stellar as ever!

"[H]owlingly funny debut novel...if you love books and really need a good laugh in your life, track it down, read it, and then shelve it next to some really serious books which will then automatically lighten up."
Andrew Armitage, Owen Sound Sun Times.

"With what can only be described as something different—and I do mean different—comes Corey Redekop, and his debut novel Shelf Monkey. Redekop’s manic work examines the fine line that separates bibliophiles (lovers of books) from bibliomaniacs (people afflicted with a legitimate psychological disorder that creates an obsession with the obtaining and possession of books). Sure, it sounds goofy—but for those of you with a hate-on for manner in which modern book sales are driven more by media circus than by authentically good work by talented writers, Redekop has answered your prayers."
Kelly Rowntree, Planet S.

"Shelf Monkey" is by turns hilarious and disturbing. It may generate a few uncomfortable squirms as well as giggles from readers who might have a few snobbish literary tendencies of their own. Still, it's a fun sort of squirmishness, and the nihilistic cheer that permeates throughout this book is going to make it a big hit among fans of Chuck Palahniuk. I really enjoyed "Shelf Monkey" and I think that this will be the start of a very promising career for Redekop, especially if the real-life shelf monkeys of our world embrace this book like I think that they will."
Matt Staggs, SkullRing.org.