I had initially checked this book out of my local library, picked it up and put it right back down. Privileged white dude living a charmed existence. No thank you. But I must have kept mixing this book up with something else, and I ended up buying the ebook.

The world needs less privileged white dudes, the literary world could probably due to leave them out for a generation or two as well. Anyhow, I don’t mean that so much on a purely political level, I genuinely just cringe when I encounter them. There are plenty of other folks happy enough to make small talk with them, I suppose, I would just rather make small talk with someone else at a party.

Having said that, I am glad I read this book. But I did stay up late to finish it so that it didn’t eat into more than one day of my life.

I get that the writer was deliberately playing with the privileged white dude and in fact, he wins in the end due to the fact that he’s lost some of the trappings of the privileged white dude, but, still. Like I said, for me, there are more interesting folk at the party.

I will say, I was mightily impressed by the structure of this book, and French is obviously a writer whose technical tools are prodigious. There is a sense that the novel is divided into blocks, this is what is happening now, here is a wrench the irrevocably changes things, so that this is what is happening now. Perfect timing, executed decisively, intelligently, and with sophistication and it made putting the book down that much harder.

Alice Munro. Yeah, so I had come across a story of hers here and there. Terrific. As good as they come. What is it with me and short stories? I love them. Appreciate them. Put off reading them.

So now I’m finally sitting down to The Moons of Jupiter, in its entirety and starting with “The Chaddeleys and The Flemings: 1. Connections”, and right away the narrator’s aunts are hogging up the couch, boisterous and bouncing and generally making it difficult to read, which I really want to do, having fallen in love with the writing right from this paragraph:

“Their bosoms were heavy and intimidating— a single, armored bundle—and their stomachs and behinds full and corseted as those of any married woman. In those days it seemed to be the thing for women’s bodies to swell and ripen to a good size twenty, if they were getting anything out of life at all; then, according to class and aspirations, they would either sag and loosen, go wobbly as custard under pale print dresses and damp aprons, or be girded into shapes whose firm curves and proud slopes had nothing to do with sex, everything to do with rights and power.”

The Aunts here are fiercely alive, and remind me of some women I’ve met, but never on the pages of a book. My Aunt Donna, recently passed, who happily bullied my mother to get over her fear of driving on the 401, travelling without my father, to Vegas, to see Elvis, of course, to demand her weekly night out with the girls, to bingo, even if it meant delivering my sister and I in the cubby of the back of Donna’s Corvette to my father, working late. (Donna: “Get in kids”. Me, in my head: “But there are no seats…”)

My Aunt Val. Built as described above, with enormous breasts and incredibly wide thighs, guaranteed to spend the entire family picnic weekend in a strapless bathing suit, forcing even the most reticent of us into the games she seemed to have spent the rest of the year developing. Egg tosses, donut-on-a-string eating contests (no mini-donuts here, full-sized and jelly-filled), water balloon under-the-chin partnered extravagances. Everyone had to play – she dominated us like a the ring leader in a three ring circus. The kids, the adults, the rotating cast of romantic partners that might last a year, three or ten, and then rotate back out again. “Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner” was her victory song.

My paternal grandmother and her friend “from the old days” Mabel, turning over a plate on my mother’s dining room table to read the maker’s name, pretending to slip the silverware into her purse, reminiscing about stealing the light bulbs from the hallways of the apartment building she and my grandmother had been living in when they met. Generally eliciting shocked laughter from my sister and I, normally accustomed to adults behaving in more dignified ways.

Yeah, so anyway. By the end of the first half of the story we realize Munro has used these delicious, vital women to draw for us the silhouette of our narrator, but then in just a few brutal, heavy strokes, illuminates the narrator’s situation, her husband and other weaknesses.

This story is outrageously fun. Sad, in that sour way of regretting your own stupid wrongdoing when it’s already too late. Completely powerful. Absolutely fucking perfect.

If you are currently reading anything other that Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners right now, I urge you to put down that book down. If you haven’t read The Diviners since highschool, since university, since the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, really, I urge you.

I found myself holding my breath for long passages. Has any writer ever created as fully rendered a narrator as Morag Gunn? When distracted from my reading – which was almost never – it was inevitably to wonder if Morag Gunn is Margaret Laurence. Could any writer create so real a person on paper as Morag Gunn? Surely not. Maybe?

The rest of the characters are also very fully realized, but only exactly in the ways that Morag Gunn experiences them. Laurence is like a surgeon in the precision of the story she presents.

The Diviners is filled with an obsession with mythology vs fact. The early pages of the story deal primarily with Morag analyzing her memories, carefully trying to separate fact from fiction, from that which can be known to be neither.

I found the plight of young Pique to be particularly tender and heartbreaking. If she is burdened by the same mythological origins of Morag, she is carries an infinitely more heavy load in the scattered mythology of her Metis father. Here, no book pulled down from Christie’s shelf will supply her a clue, no visit to a distant county. Instead she takes her father’s songs, travels across the country, finds, perhaps, a home that can supply her more answers in an uncle’s hectic and remote sanctuary for metis kids in the foster system. Her creation must come if not from scratch, from her own research.

That’s all I can write at the moment. I’m still living with Morag and Pique, Christie and Jules in my head, and I’m going to enjoy that while it lasts.

I grew up in the same neighbourhood as Chariandy, in fact, his family lived in the townhouse next door to my grandparents for many years. I remember his parents quite well, especially his mother, who everyone, my mother included, called “Mrs. Chariandy”, at all times, none of this Anne or Marnie or Arlene business of the rest of the moms in the neighbourhood.

I read Soucouyant, Chariandy’s first novel, just a year or so ago, and I liked it a great deal. Brother feels almost like it could have been the early part of that novel. The set up is the same, the non-existent father, the absent, but omnipresent brother and the richest character in both books, the mother.

I find the narrator in both books a bit frustrating. He seems powerless, witnessing the activities going on about him, not impacting much with his own actions. Both books have a mysterious female character that turns up slightly inexplicably to become the narrator’s sexual partner.

Chariandy’s work for me is at its best when he writes of the mother and her culture, especially whenever conjuring her past, or witnessing the evidence of her seemingly former, almost snuffed-out spirit, as both mothers are experiencing a dementia of one sort or another. This is what I loved best about Soucouyant, and it’s here in Brother, too. An understanding of, and great ability to express, the flavour of the culture his family comes from, without needing to rely on (or possessing, for that matter) a lot of direct experience of it. He’s able to capture so beautifully, what all children of immigrants must feel, an utterly true sense of a culture they’ve never actually lived in. It feels so authentic, and so bittersweet.

I wouldn’t normally have bothered to mention my first-hand knowledge of Chariandy, we didn’t know each other very well, but he’s writing about a neighbourhood I knew also, although perhaps at a time a little earlier than when this story was set. I suspect part of where he’s writing about is the area where he lived, but the ghetto aspect is coming from further west, where I had friends and spent time.

My memories of that place weren’t simply of newcomers who weren’t entirely welcomed into the greater society – although that was there – hardworking, poor, and dealing with injustice. There were a host of other problems that make up the bulk of what I remember most clearly. Alcoholic and drug-using parents. Kids as young as 12 locked out of the house overnight in cold weather when mom was “entertaining”. Drunk children under 12 in the parks and fields. Abuse, physical, and also sexual, that the girls I know didn’t talk about initially, but which became obvious when you started spending time in their homes. Parents who traded a kid’s drumkit for drugs. Violence wasn’t necessarily something that these young people chose, from what I saw. It was a protection from things that it was possible to agree might be worse.

Anyway, that’s it. I was a white kid living in a nice house and I got to return there at night, but I learned things about injustice and hard choices in some of these neighbourhoods, the townhouses on Manse Road, the buildings on Ling, Orton Park, that have never left me, and if I was prompted to write about them that’s what I would need to tell.

Nevertheless, I love seeing a place I know so well brought alive by another’s thoughtful eyes.

Buy Brother, by David Chariandy, here.

Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights is a meandering yet focussed rumination on the nature of travel – the story meanders but the intention remains unwavering. There was something of the structure of the book that made me felt that if novels are normally written on the vertical, this book worked on a horizontal plane.

Flights appears to be about travel, but the theme that that is visited again and again seems to me to be more about home. People travel away from home, and others return. And some are homeless, either figuratively or literally.

The book has a narrator who pops in now and again like a familiar face with first person commentary, and then seems to disappear for stretches of time. The ending of certain storylines and starting of new ones, some familiar, made for a jarring read, but in a powerfully enjoyable way.

Tokarczuk’s writing is beautiful. Near the end of the book she describes a character’s fatal stroke as a flood of the blood that is destroying his memories, his personality, his life. It’s a powerful, breathtaking metaphor that she carries for a couple of long paragraphs:

But the crimson inner ocean of the professor’s head rose from the swells of blood-bearing rivers and gradually flooded realm after realm – first the plains of Europe, where he’d been born and raised. Cities disappeared underwater, and the bridges and dams built so methodically by generations of his ancestors. The ocean reached the threshold of their reed-roofed home and boldly stepped inside. It unfurled a red carpet over those stone floors, the floorboards of the kitchen, scrubbed each Saturday, finally putting out the fire in the fireplace, attaining the cupboards and tables. Then it poured into the railway stations and the airports that had sent the professor off into the world. The towns he’d traveled to drowned in it, and in them the streets where ha had stayed awhile in rented rooms, the cheap hotels he’d lived in, the restaurants where he’d dined. The shimmering red surface of the water now reached the lowest shelves of his favourite libraries, the books’ pages bulging, including those in which his name was on the title page. Its red tongue licked the letters, and the black print melted clean away. The floors were soaked in red, the stairs he’d walked up and down to collect his children’s school certificates, the walkway he’d gone down during the ceremony to receive his professorship. Red stains were already collecting on the sheets where he and Karen had first fallen and undone the drawstrings of the older, clumsy bodies. The viscous liquid permanently glued together the compartments of his wallet where he kept his credit cards and plane tickets and photos of his grandkids. The stream flooded train stations, tracks, airports, and runways—never would another airplane take off from them, never would another train depart for any destination.

The sea was rising relentlessly, the waters swept up words, idea, and memories; the streetlights went out under them, lamp bulbs bursting; cables shorted, the whole network of connections transformed into dead spiderweb, a lame and useless game of telephone. Screens were extinguished. And finally that slow, infinite ocean began to come up to the hospital, and Athens itself stood in blood—the temples, the sacred roads and groves, the agora empty at this hour, the bright statue of the goddess and her little olive tree.

This is the literal flood that fells the professor’s brain and ultimately causes his death. I love the images it creates.

I read this book in just a few days, and I don’t really feel I did it justice; in hindsight, if I had understood the way the book is broken down, I might have put more effort into reading it in discrete chunks of one solid long episode or a number of small ones. Next time! And though more books go on the “to-reread” pile than I ever actually reread, I’ll put a star next to this one hoping it gets closer to the top.

I posted this review on GoodReads. View all my reviews

Buy Flights here.