Wildlife by Richard Ford


My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a classic coming of age story, a young man on the cusp of maturity who learns that life is fundamentally uncertain and unpredictable when his father decides to leave home to join the teams of men (and some women) heading off to fight forest fires in the mountains surrounding their town. Ford masterfully conveys Joe Brinson's feeling of being caught somewhere between knowing and not knowing what will happen next as he is thrust into the middle of the fire that is the dissolution of his parents' fragile marriage. This is a novel that derives its power from simple unadorned language and an unstinting attention to detail. The story behaves like the fire it describes, with white hot embers of emotion seething beneath the surface, threatening to flare up and destroy at any moment. And like a fire, once on the surface, it's difficult to control.


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A little love for Halbman from my Alma Mater

Sometimes home is not what we think it is, Rotchin tells us, and memory can become a way forward rather than an anchor to the past. These themes will resonate even for those who have never set foot in Montreal. Read more.

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


There were times reading this novel when I was reminded of the musician who has great chops but doesn't know when to stop; he plays five notes when two tastefully executed would've sufficed. I guess it should be expected from this early novel in what was to become a long, illustrious and prodigious career. Rare is the talent that charges out of the gate fully mature, and Updike was no exception. I never did develop any sympathy for Harry - which is a major problem for a novel's readability - nor did I ever arrive at any genuine understanding as to why he walks out on his pregnant wife and young son in the first place. And perhaps that's Updike's main point: Harry's ambivalence leads to moral obtuseness. In the context of its publication at the end of the 50s ie. the United State's post-war economic boom and middle America reveling in an Ozzie and Harriet Protestant suburban fantasy, I can see how a character like Rabbit, the ambivalent rebel, might seem outrageous. Unquestionably, the tragic price paid for Harry's ambivalence is heart-wrenching. But nowadays, when thirty is the new twenty, youth are in no hurry to grow up and leave home, and ambivalence is the order of the day, Harry's 'rebellion' strikes me as rather quaint. I'll still read the next book in the series to see if both Updike the writer and Harry mature. 



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Halbman in Toronto

If you happen to be in Toronto next week, I'll be appearing at the Jewish Book Festival to read from Halbman, a program the organizers are calling "New Takes on Jewish Montreal."

Wednesday, June 6th - 5:30 PM ($5 at the door)

The Bram and Bluma Appel Salon

at the Toronto Reference Library

789 Yonge Street (at Bloor), Toronto

New Takes on Jewish Montreal

Authors Sara Ferdman Tauben, Seymour Mayne and B. Glen Rotchin will each discuss Jewish life in Montreal, its history and its people.

Sara Ferdman Tauben is the author of Traces of the Past: Montreal’s Early Synagogues. She will discuss the architecture and social history of the rise and fall of Jewish communal life in Montreal’s old centre.

Seymour Mayne’s latest book, The Old Blue Couch and Other Stories, gives rise to hilarious predicaments that are endearing and deliciously comic.

B. Glen Rotchin, author of Halbman Steals Home, enters the same Yiddish Montreal we have come to love through the words of Mordecai Richler and pulls it off with humour and warmth.

Sponsored by Ronald P. Frye & Company and Co-sponsored by the Vered Jewish Canadian Studies Program, University of Ottawa.

More details here.

 

The Letters of A.M. Klein and what they say about writing today

I also wonder, with the diminishments of email, where do we write this type of one-to-one writing now? Where the image of one single person is kept in mind while typing? It’s hard to figure. You might keep a journal, and even expect it to be read by one or two people posthumously, but this is not the same as writing to one person. You might unload in consecutive, endless tweets and blogs and confessional columns (hello!), but this is writing to a solid mass of “everybody,” and this, too, is very different. We don’t do the audience of one so much anymore — the audience of one is a lost audience. Read More

Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A wonderful story told with wit, sensitivity, economy and insight. Dunstan Ramsay, war hero, loner, dreamer, bystander, is a character that will stay with me for a long time. Are we truly center stage in the performance of our own lives? Or are we characters, part real and part myth, in the life stories told to others? What matters more, hard fact or meaning? The world is magic; what we see and what we choose to believe. By the end I was torn about Dunny. He spent his life trying to justify his choices living according to traditional moral standards, and he pays a heavy price, wifeless and childless, and with his personal integrity only partially intact. He never truly stands in the spotlight, except in the reader's imagination.

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Halbman on CKUT radio

In case you're still undecided about purchasing Halbman Steals Home, hopefully this interview with Jeffrey Mackie on CKUT radio will tip the scale.