the_siobhan | 2021 books: 1-3 (Reply)

I haven't stopped tracking what I read, I just hadn't gotten around to posting about it. (I'm waiting for an excel file to either finish calculating or just give up and crash already, so I have some time right now.)

Little Sister by Barbara Gowdy

I love Gowdy so I grabbed this one out of the Little Library when I spotted it.

I have come to the conclusion that Canadian writers can only write about death. Maybe it's the cold. Maybe it's all the people that had to be murdered to make the country a possibility in the first place. Who knows? But I never again will know an author is Canadian and not start immediately hunting for the corpse in the narrative.

In this case it's a sister. Main character Rose runs a rep cinema in Toronto along with her mother, who has just started developing dementia and is suddenly talking again about Rose's younger sister who died in childhood. Meanwhile Rose has developed hallucinations whenever there is a thunderstorm - hallucinations that drop her into the body of another woman, a stranger who also reminds her of her dead sister.

I'm not sure what to think of this story. Writing is excellent. The premise is weird, but she makes it work. On the other hand the obsession that Rose develops with the private life of the other woman is more than a little bit over the top, and it made me really uncomfortable.

Six Metres of Pavement by Farzana Doctor

I actually purchased a hard copy of this book. Doctor is (was?) a neighbour and for a while she was organizing reading nights at a local coffee shop. I never managed to make it to a reading night, but the coffee shop had copies of her book so one day I was passing by and I picked one up.

There are three stories that wrap around each other in this book - Ismail killed his daughter in a horrible accident 20 years ago, Celia just lost her husband and everything she owned due to gambling addiction that she hadn't known her husband had, and Fatima is a queer activist who has been thrown onto the street by her conservative family. The story is about found family and the slow careful construction of new connections after old ones have been lost.

I think one of the things that I love about Doctor's writing is how clearly she depicts how grief makes you stuck. Ismail and Celia are both pinned in amber by their loss, unable to change or move forward. Growth and movement only come when they are ready to reach out and make contact with other people.

I'm putting this into the library because I want to share it, but I'm definitely going to be picking up more of her writing because I really really liked this book.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

The conceit of this book is that a woman in her 80s is writing her life story. In the meantime another story, the blind assassin of the title is a science fiction story being told by a man to his lover, who might be the author or might be the sister. There are a lot of dead people in this one, not all that surprising given the age of the protagonist, but the relationship with the sister is the main catalyst for the big event.

I often find Atwood's heroines are bloodless, and this one drove me spare with her passivity. She takes her revenge in the end but it feels like the story might have been a less dismal one if she had found her spine before everybody she loved was fucking dead.

"Why bother about the end of the world? It's the end of the world every day, for someone. Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown."