Leah Bailly

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Hope: A Tragedy Shalom Auslander Salvage the Bones Kill Your Friends John Niven Joan Didion Blue Nights Jesmyn Ward

May 15

May Showers = Read Your Face Off

May has been grim in Scotland: sideways rain, inside-out-umbrellas, hours in the library hiding from the drizzle outside. It has given me the opportunity to read, and read, and read. Of the dozens of books I gobbled up this past month, there were some winners. In order of very best to kind of great:

HOPE: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander is my kind of hysterical. For one, it is totally cringe-worthy: a paranoid Jewish father who finds Anne Frank, alive and geriatric, squatting in his attic. Auslander’s protagonist is riddled with Holocaust guilt; he simply never suffered enough, despite his mother’s PTSD from a war that ended before she was born. This novel is bitingly funny, crisply rendered, and impossible. Loved it.

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward is a rich, sensual, serious novel about a small Mississippi family facing Hurricane Katrina. Like most National Book Award winners, this is a coming-of-age story; the 15-year-old protagonist is poor, pregnant, and desperate for the smallest sign of tenderness. That said, the girl-narrator is strange and bright, and brings Greek myth and a fierce setting into her narrative without a trace of self-pity. Gorgeous stuff.

Blue Nights by Joan Didion (pictured above) was not an easy read. This is a memoir about grief, whereby Didion, now nearing the end of her writing career, meditates on motherhood, mourning a dead daughter, and her own fragility. Harrowing accounts of waking up on the floor bleeding out of her head and watching her daughter die in four different ICU facilities are stitched together to fashion a kind of dreamy meditation. This book is slender and cryptic, but a testament to a Joan Didion’s prowess as memoirist numero uno.

Kill Your Friends by John Niven is a hideous, heartless, fucking hilarious look the UK music scene the minute before it died. It is 1997, The Spice Girls are destroying the charts, and this novel’s protagonist is a coke-head, demi-psycho star-searcher looking for the next big hit. It is cruel to say that I laughed out loud when he murdered his competition, that this book made every Scottish hangover I had pale, and there were moments I felt physically ill from this character’s debauchery. I can’t help it. This ruled.

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Player One Douglas Coupland Fictive Rest

Apr 24

I believe I suffer from what Douglas Coupland calls Fictive Rest:

The common inability of many people to be able to sleep until they have read even the tiniest amount of fiction. Although the element of routine is important at sleep time, reading fiction in bed allows another person’s inner voice to hijack one’s own, thus relaxing and lubricating the brain for sleep cycles. One booby trap, though: Don’t finish your book before you fall asleep. Doing so miraculously keeps your brain whizzing for hours.

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Various Positions Martha Schabas

Apr 01

Various Positions, by Martha Schabas

There is this book about ballet that is half Black Swan and half Sweet Valley High. It was on a few of Canada’s very best book lists of 2011, and though people are saying it is a courageous debut, I couldn’t help but thing it was a fairly standardized YA plot. Things get crazy, then they get crazier, then they make sense. The typical secondary characters (sexualized male teacher, absentee father, over-emotional mother) don’t seem to develop, they just surprise us by being normal. And the protagonist, caught in that ‘learning that the world is dripping with sex’ period in her life, doesn’t appeal to teenagers or adults— she’s too compulsive for kids, too unpredictably uptight and then loose for adults, and too simple-minded about sex in general. Is this book courageous because a teenager buys a thong? Or looks at porn? Or takes dirty photos?? That said, despite her annoying habits, watching this character’s life fall apart was a strange kind of addictive. I couldn’t put it down.

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Sara Levine Treasure Island!!!

Mar 18

Sara Levine definitely, without a doubt, comes from Generation X. Her characters have that slacker wit. They hold degrees in literature and work as clerks at the Pet Library. Bored twenty-somethings don’t aspire for management positions; instead they opt for loafing around, obscure art and horn-blowing. Her character is likeable and loathesome at the same time! How did she do it?

Douglas Coupland would love this, I think. He likes a bit of verbal flair. He enjoys an unreliable narrator (see The Gum Thief.) And he likes things that are compact and small: Sara Levine admits she likes philosophies that fit in a paragraph, and novels that last as long as a nosebleed. This one was a little bit like a dark, nasty, hysterical nosebleed. Read me!!!

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1Q84 Murakami

Mar 12

I finally have my life back. After a painful month of violent dreams and passive protagonists and a frustratingly too-convenient plot, I am finished with Murakami’s 1Q84. Yes, I admit, I’ve been distracted. My world couldn’t be further from his semi-fantastical Tokyo of thirty years ago. Instead, I’m in Edinburgh— city of winding lanes and gilded ceilings and triangle sandwiches. Exploring this city has been unusual and exciting; Murakami’s novel, on the other hand, was not.

Yes, there was token suspense. Yes, the world was sinister, full of malignant, cultish forces that conspired against our two protagonists, Tengo and Aomame. But these protagonists rarely DID anything back. Instead, the star-crossed lovers depended on secondary characters to get them involved in the plot in the first place, then take care of the bad guys, and finally meet. Left to themselves, they stayed indoors FOR HALF THE BOOK!! That means 400 pages of waiting, hiding, waiting. We learned about how to stretch. We learned about how to add sake to a stir fry. Infuriating! And what wasn’t organized for these too was conveniently set up by the plot gods. He happened to be at the right playground. She happened to be looking out the window. Etc.

I appreciate the hype, and I inwardly grin when a novelist gets pop-star status. I loved Murakami’s Norweigan Wood and his lesser known After Dark. For a creepy, surreal look into Murakami’s mind, this slim novel takes you there effortlessly. That said, don’t bother with this massive tome. It might disappoint you in the end.

* ♥ 1

Miranda July Peter Orner Nick Flynn Pers Petterson

Feb 13

The Year So Far: Reading to Stay Sane

I just moved to Scotland, exactly one week ago. For the last month, I was in a kind of jittery work-errands-winter haze. I needed something to stem my moving-across-the world anxiety, to stay sober and save money, to prepare for a big writing period (that’s what I’m doing here) and generally ignore my perpetually twilit Canadian scene. So… here are the two novels and two memoirs that got me all the way to the UK:

It Chooses You (a memoir) by Miranda July

I had my hands this book for two days, and in that time, I slurped it up. It was about the thousands of ways you can ignore the writing you are supposed to be working on, and instead find a true, sparkling, heartfelt project in your favourite distraction. Miranda July interviews unknowns who are hawking things in the Los Angeles Penny Saver. They are also people who do not use computers. Other themes include marriage, strangers, and death. Love. This.

Love and Shame and Love (a novel) by Peter Orner

Peter Orner wrote one of my favourite novels ever, The Second Coming of Mivala Shikongo (the NYT calls that one haunting) and this one was quirky, cute, gorgeously written and fucking depressing. Here is a family of men whom women hate— for no reason! They all seem funny and smart and rich, and still their wives and girlfriends just ditch them and cheat on them and dream of bludgeoning them with kitchen utensils. Poor patriarchal Jewish family from Chicago! Why can’t my cute single friends scoop you up?

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (memoir) by Nick Flynn

This is going to be a movie this year about a stoner who’s dad is homeless. When I was reading, it felt very 2005, when memoirs were really Eggers-hot, and when you could divide a book into little poetic chapters and a big fancy publisher still thought it made for a real book. Shallow, I thought. Sentimental. However, since then, when I see a homeless dude, I suddenly know things: about sleeping on a steaming vent, or spraying down an old ladies for head-lice, or how easily a drunk bleeds out. I guess this book stayed with me. Brutal cover, killer title.

Out Stealing Horses (a novel) by Per Petterson

When my partner was in Europe without me and I was feeling REALLY sorry for myself, I turned to this stoic Norwegian novel to make me feel useful. I wasn’t lonely! I just needed a stern list of tasks, a pot of coffee to brew and a fire in the pot-belly and some lumber to chop down. This old guy in his old cabin is nostalgic in the sad way, but after he chopped things down, we both felt a lot better. There are some mega-dark and sad bits, but that can’t be unlike a winter in Scotland or Canada… can it?

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Jan 13

Two bits of great news this 2012!

I just won the Vancouver International Writers Festival Contest! Whoo! My short story, Spiritus Mundi, will be published in subTERRAIN soon.

To make it sweeter, I just won an Alberta Foundation for the Arts grant for my short story collection, The Vegaboy Chronicles. One of my fave stories in this collection is Stampede Queen, published in PANK last year. More of these to come!

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Jan 05

What kind of novel would you write if you were the cocktails editor at the New York Times? Probably something scathingly funny about a drunk poet who’s stuck in O’Hare while his daughter whom he’s never met gets married across the country. This scornful little book is totally impudent and rude. The whole thing is a letter to an airline he loathes. But his life! His poetry! Jonathan Miles’ Dear American Airlines is the perfect balance of despair and hilarity.

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Dec 15

I did not anticipate that Aristotle would be a sympathetic character. I did not think I would enjoy a historical fiction set when Alexander the Great is a child. I did not think this writer from Vancouver would handle Ancient Greece in such startling, human detail. But she does, I did, he is! Lyon’s The Golden Mean is honest. Aristotle tells little Alexander to fuck himself. Slaves are bought and then returned. And Aristotle—as he defines tragedy, as he conducts his first human dissections, as he discovers the female orgasm—is marred by depression. He weeps for no reason! And Alexander is actually affected by the grizzly war he is forced to captain at age 16. He has symptoms of post-tramatic stress! Annabel Lyon challenges the notion of perfection here; there is no Golden Mean. As if to prove it, she takes a great risk by telling this story from Aristotle’s crisp-thinking, emotionally cloudy point of view, and it pays off. These characters felt real in the hands of such a competent scholar/writer.

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Dec 11

How lovely can a little novel be? A novel can be lucid and daring. It can take one little accident and shatter it into a dozen pieces and look at each of those pieces as if it is a small prize. The characters could be people you see around you every day: the teenage lifeguard, the life insurance guy, the dry cleaner. And still they have big hurts— their mistakes can make a kind of poem. We Agreed to Meet Just Here would never be published by a big American house… But it is reassuring that Blackwood won a Whiting Award for this debut novel, because his prose is precious, and careful, and risky all at once. People go missing, and then reappear. It is nice to hear about it in a quiet book like this one.

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Dec 07

Blech. Who don’t we love? Writers with the clever concepts who end up with sappy, crappy teen novels dressed up as super-fly cutting edge fiction. This book promised to be great— a dystopia that features “The Cure” for aging, whereby our social tendencies sour, marriages fall apart, Russia explodes under a tyrannical despot and America turns into a post-carbon nuclear mess. Could make for some real conflict. But no, this Maxim, NBC, Deadspin writer just goes for titties and shotgun scenes time and time again. Don’t waste your time with this one.

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Nov 29

This beautiful collection of short fiction is available from Caketrain Books. They are special in that everything they publish is precious. This particular gem just won a Whiting Award. They also have a chapbook called Tongue Party. They represent everything I love about everything.

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Esi Edugyan Half-Blood Blues

Oct 09

It is nominated for the Booker, the Giller, the Rogers Trust. It combines Nazis and jazz and violence and many lonely hours, starving in a squat in Paris. And it is beautiful: Half-Blood Blues is pitch-perfect. It is the voice that does it. Written in a 1930s dialect that never strays off-tempo, this novel is the closest thing to real jazz since Coming Through Slaughter.

Esi Edugyan, a self proclaimed “little kid from Calgary – this girl from the colonies” has been called a prodigy by the Booker Prize jurors. And I see it. With her mournful protagonist Sid, she has crafted a flesh and bones bass player from Baltimore, stranded in Berlin as the Nazis rise to power. He rolls with Chip (an American drummer), Paul (a Jewish piano player) and a kid-genius trumpet player, Hieronymus Falk.

Hiero is the one with the problems. An Afro-German who is stateless in Germany and an enemy in France, in the first scenes Hiero is arrested. After that, the novel tries to set events straight, and, like real life, it leaves much to be imagined. Instead we are left with the real fear: what it would be like to have our friends disappeared, what the train station felt like on the day people fled Paris. The most gruesome, gorgeous scene of all— when Hiero and Sid visit a zoo in Hamburg. The exhibit is an African family living in their hut, a high pointed fence around them, caged like wild cats.

Hot off the presses, nominated for everything— reviewers are hard on this book, mostly because they want answers, and answers don’t come easily here.Half-Blood Blues won’t march towards an inevitable climax. Like jazz, this novel seems to duck behind corners, switch directions. Yet somehow the story, in all its depravity, still manages to swing.

* ♥ 2

Skippy Dies Looking Down the Barrel of De-Dreamification Paul Murray

Sep 27

Today, we love Paul Murray’s “Skippy Dies”, even though it is a sprawling 650 pages, and it is about loneliness (about how the universe is actually made of loneliness), and it even though one character’s only talent is lighting his farts on fire…

The story is set at Seabrook College, a posh boarding school for particularly lucky Dublin boys. In this novel, the teenagers are real. Carl spiked the punch with Mom’s sleeping pills. Barry keeps selling Ritalin to the girls at St. Brigid’s. The girls text on bedazzled phones, give blowjobs, obsess over pop-star Bethany. The boys try to impress them by throwing flaming paper planes down on Asian clerks from the roof of donut shop.

Meanwhile, all of Murray’s adult characters are losers who eventually shuffled back to their alma matter once their other chances have burned out. At Seabrook, generations of sob stories seem to gather in the staff room, guys like Howard the Coward, Lurch the math teacher and Pere Vert, the creepy Father who teaches French. It’s depressing and perfect. Murray calls the whole process of turning old and lame “looking down the barrel of de-dreamification”:

Here’s a taste:

“You know, you spend your childhood watching TV, assuming that at some point in the future everything you see there will one day happen to you: that you too will win a Formula One race, hop a train, foil a group of terrorists, tell someone ‘Give me the gun’, etc. Then you start secondary school, and suddenly everyone’s asking you about your career plans and your long-term goals, and by goals they don’t mean the kind you are planning to score in the FA Cup. Gradually the awful truth draws on you: that Santa Claus was just the tip of the ice burg – that your future will not be the rollercoaster ride you’d imagined, that the world occupied by your parents, the world of washing the dishes, going to the dentist, weekend trips to the DIY superstore to buy floor tiles, is actually largely what people mean whey they speak of ‘life’. Now, with every day that passes, another seems to close, the one marked PROFESSIONAL STUNTMAN or FIGHT EVIL ROBOT, until as the weeks go by and the doors – GET BITTEN BY SNAKE, SAVE THE WORLD FROM ASTEROID, DISMANTLE BOMB WITH SECONDS TO SPARE – keep closing, you begin to hear the sound as a good thing, and start closing some yourself, even ones that didn’t necessarily need to be closed…”

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Hunter S. Thompson Happy Birthday Jack Nicholson Breakfast

Sep 23

Today we love Hunter S Thompson, not for his riotous Fear and Loathing, not for gonzo, not for his crystalline vision of Vegas that to date, no one has managed to reproduce. No… In this tiny little book Happy Birthday, Jack Nicholson, Thompson actually speaks frankly about death, about ugliness, and about beauty. Here, he discusses breakfast:

“I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas, or at home—and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed—breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crêpes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned-beef hash with diced chilies, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of key lime pie, two margaritas and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert…Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours, and at least one source of good music…all of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.”