That Just Happened!

Wright, Richard B.  Clara Callan. HarperPerenniel Modern Classics (2001).

 It is the late 1930s and two sisters, Clara and Nora Callan, face the future with both hope and uncertainty.  Clara, a thirtyish schoolteacher from small-town Ontario, longs for love and adventure.  Nora, her flighty and very pretty younger sister, escapes to the excitement of New York, where she becomes a monor celbrity.  At a time when war clouds are gathering, the sisters struggle within the web of social expectation for young women…

From the Jacket

Fantastic.  It has been a while since I have been so contented while reading a book.  The storyline is interesting, the prose: lyrical, the pace: great.  All in all, a novel very deserving of the Governor General Award for Literary Fiction. 

The novel is actually a collection of letters and journal entries written between Clara, her sister Nora, and Nora’s friend Evelyn.  At first I was a little skeptical of reading a book that was just letters, but I soon realized that the letters were so interesting and well written you hardly noticed it at all.  There was never any confusion about who was writing the letter (most of it is written by Clara’s hand).

I have talked about perspective before on this blog.  Usually you can tell if the author is male or female and their characters take on that tone.  This was written from the female perspective so well that it wasn’t until the end of the novel I remembered it was written by a man.  The sentiments and feelings are so clearly female.  Also, it’s also hard to believe a man would write all those letters (even if he is the author!).

Themes in this book are relationships, love, sexuality, politics and culture.

I would say this is was definitely worthy of

Engel, Marian.  Bear.  McLelland and Stewart. (1976)

After five years buried like a mole amid the decaying maps and manuscripts of an historical institute, Lou is given a welcome field assignment: to catalogue a nineteenth-century library, improbably located in an octagonal house on a remote island in northern Ontario. Eager to reconstruct the estate’s curious history, she is unprepared for her discovery that the island has one other inhabitant: a bear.

Lou’s imagination is soon overtaken by the estate’s historical occupants, whose fascination with bear lore becomes her own. Irresistibly, Lou is led along a path of emotional and sexual self-discovery, as she explores the limits of her own animal nature through her bizarre and healing relationship with the bear.

A daring and compelling novel, Marian Engel’s Bear won the Governor General’s Award for 1976

From the Publisher

 I was with the Publishers until the second paragraph.  I wouldn’t necessarily say that they accurately capture what the book is about.  In one word, it is about: Bestiality.  Yeah.  Lou’s relationship with the bear is a sexual one.  I understand that the author was probably going more for exploring Lou’s sexual awakening and her mental fragility as a single woman.  Perhaps, given the time, I will even stretch to say that the author was commenting on the sexual awakening happening in society.  The Seventies was definitely a time of excess, but this kind of free love may be more appropriate to pair with the mind-bending psychotics of the Sixties.   So really…I got nothing.  Reading this book was disturbing and, I felt, shocking for the sake of being shocking. 

I did a bit of research on this book and the author.  Although it is stated by many that Engel was a prolific writer, I cannot find a single thing beyond the plot summary.  What does it all mean?  What does her relationship symbolize?  Why did I read a book about a woman doing “it” with a bear?  *sigh*  The answers are not to be found.

Themes are self-discovery, relationships, sexuality.

Ondaatje, Michael.  Divisadero.  Vintage Canada (2008). Originally published in 2007.

In the 1970s in northern California, near Gold Rush country, a father and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work their farm with the help of Coop, an enigmatic young man who makes his home with them. Theirs is a makeshift family, until it is riven by an incident of violence — of both hand and heart — that sets fire to the rest of their lives.

Divisaderotakes us from the city of San Francisco to the raucous backrooms of Nevada’s casinos, and eventually to the landscape of south central France. It is here, outside a small rural village, that Anna becomes immersed in the life and the world of a writer from an earlier time — Lucien Segura. His compelling story, which has its beginnings at the turn of the century, circles around “the raw truth” of Anna’s own life, the one she’s left behind but can never truly leave. And as the narrative moves back and forth in time and place, we discover each of the characters managing to find some foothold in a present rough-hewn from the past.

Breathtakingly evoked and with unforgettable characters, Divisadero is a multi-layered novel about passion, loss, and the unshakable past, about the often discordant demands of family, love, and memory. It is Michael Ondaatje’s most intimate and beautiful novel to date.

From RandomHouse.ca

I expected big things after having read Anil’s Ghost, but I felt that this novel just fell short of my expectations.  The book was split into three parts and it switches between Anna, Claire and Coop’s lives at first.  Anna is in France researching an author, Coop is getting involved in and then leaving the gambling scene, Claire is trying to reconcile the past with the present.  The first to parts of the book follow these three characters and explores how their lives have been affected by a traumatic incident in their past.  All of a sudden the third part of the book shifts and is about the author that Anna is researching.  It felt like a completely different book.

At the end, the original characters are not really revisited and the author’s end is inferred. I was disappointed that we didn’t get back into Anna, Claire and Coop’s lives as I found that was slightly more interesting.  I kept trying to look for parallels between the author’s story and the three character’s lives to try to determine why his story was the third part of the book, but I didn’t get it.   I feel like I was missing something that would make me go “Aha! Now it makes sense!”  Perhaps I was, or perhaps it just isn’t there.

I read this for my personal Governor General Award Winner for Fiction Challenge.  Because I found the first two parts interesting, and I am not sure I fully understood the book, I am giving this book…