Steven Langdon's Blog: The Write Stuff - Posts Tagged "zoe-whittal"
Best Giller Prize Book 2016?
Six books make up the Giller short list for 2016, and together they demonstrate the strength and breadth of Canadian fiction. There is grand variety, from historical fiction to interlaced short vignettes to tragicomedy to grim contemporary drama -- with settings from China to Ireland to Spain to downtown Toronto. Yet sharp-edged vivid writing marks them all; they were a great joy to read.
One book, "The Party Wall" by Catherine Leroux, is translated from French and has been published by Biblioasis, the excellent small publisher from my old home territory of Windsor -- one of a set of Quebecois books tackled in recent years to make contemporary French writing from that province accessible to English readers. The French title, "Mur Mitoyen" (Adjoining Wall,) conveys the book's theme better -- tracing the blood ties that connect many people powerfully in their lives (twins, sisters, children to their parents, etc.) You may be confused as you try to sort out the disparate characters in the interlaced short stories and vignettes, but you will end up as I did admiring the complexity of the people probed, the intricacy of the stories told and the clarity of the writing.
Mona Awad's "13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl" is also a novel structured through separate vignettes, though the main character, Elizabeth, a woman fighting against her sense she is too fat, is a constant in all of them. This is an outrageously funny book in places (commenting on "Misery Saga" -- Mississauga -- for instance, and describing a hilarious vegetarian meal she cooks for her husband) but it is also biting in its social criticism of the emphasis on women's body size concerns in North America. It is a book with its share of tragedy -- the failure of her marriage once she sheds many pounds, and the death of her father. Awad combines all this with verve and skill -- and no recourse to the maudlin.
"Yiddish for Pirates" by Gary Barwin has its share of tragicomedy, too. Its narrator is a 500 year-old African parrot, who keeps telling Yiddish jokes -- while his mainly Jewish pirate crew scuttles about the Caribbean after escaping from the Spanish inquisition, with the help of Christopher Columbus. Yet the book is devastating in its description of European pogroms against Jews and the viciousness of Spanish colonization of New World Indian communities. I must admit that the book lagged for me as yet more pirate attacks took place, with yet more people gutted and stabbed. But there is no question that the novel is highly imaginative and full of literary references (to Shakespeare's "The Tempest," for example.) Plus the parrot has great chutzpah!
The three remaining novels are the best of the six -- Madeleine Thien's "Do Not Say We Have Nothing," Zoe Whittal's "The Best Kind of People" and "The Wonder" by Emma Donoghue.
Thien's book is set mostly in China and traces the interconnected lives of several families through the social extremism of the Cultural Revolution and then the hope and subsequent suppression of the Tiananmen Square uprising. Her characters are beautifully traced and their grim struggles to maintain artistic integrity and personal loyalties effectively realized. Her skills have already been recognized by her receiving the Governor-General's prize for English literature this year.
Whittal's book is about the father in a well-respected New England family being accused of sexual assault of teenagers -- and how this reshapes fundamentally the lives of his wife and his children. George is in jail for months waiting trial while the consequences damage his wife Joan's sense of self-confidence, his son's relationship with his male partner and his daughter's ties to her friends and career hopes. As the oh-so-contemporary criminal process plays out, Whittal is able to probe the way questions demand to be answered and the past needs to be reassessed.
Donoghue's book is also ultimately about abuse of the young, but in a much different time and place (Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century.) A young girl seems to be surviving without food, as she expresses her deep religious beliefs. A miracle, the local community starts to think, making contributions on her behalf to the Catholic church and its charities. But is this possible? An English nurse, fresh from working with Florence Nightingale in the Crimea, is brought in to be a dispassionate observer. But as this book rises gradually in a crescendo of passion and conflict, Lib cannot remain an outsider.
So which of these three excellent novels should get the 2016 Giller? Whittal has written a book that echoes the central concerns of contemporary North America with sexual assault and the way too many men seem to get away with their abuses; her deep and thoughtful examination of the many dimensions involved will be a persuasive reason for awarding her this year's prize. Her book moves with a drive and energy that sometimes seems missing in Thien's novel. I'll be happy if "The Best Kind of People" wins.
But for myself I think "The Wonder" is the best of all six -- not by a large margin, but in slight though compelling terms. Donoghue for me has taken a completely foreign environment dominated by religion, superstition and poverty, and gradually step by step brought it vividly alive. She has also captured the dimensions of child abuse in all their complexity with much more sensitivity and passion than I discern in Whittal's novel. She has written a thrilling and thoughtful book that surprises the reader -- even more so than in "Room," her fine book about the woman and her child captured by a sexual predator. So that's where I would cast my vote for 2016.
One book, "The Party Wall" by Catherine Leroux, is translated from French and has been published by Biblioasis, the excellent small publisher from my old home territory of Windsor -- one of a set of Quebecois books tackled in recent years to make contemporary French writing from that province accessible to English readers. The French title, "Mur Mitoyen" (Adjoining Wall,) conveys the book's theme better -- tracing the blood ties that connect many people powerfully in their lives (twins, sisters, children to their parents, etc.) You may be confused as you try to sort out the disparate characters in the interlaced short stories and vignettes, but you will end up as I did admiring the complexity of the people probed, the intricacy of the stories told and the clarity of the writing.
Mona Awad's "13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl" is also a novel structured through separate vignettes, though the main character, Elizabeth, a woman fighting against her sense she is too fat, is a constant in all of them. This is an outrageously funny book in places (commenting on "Misery Saga" -- Mississauga -- for instance, and describing a hilarious vegetarian meal she cooks for her husband) but it is also biting in its social criticism of the emphasis on women's body size concerns in North America. It is a book with its share of tragedy -- the failure of her marriage once she sheds many pounds, and the death of her father. Awad combines all this with verve and skill -- and no recourse to the maudlin.
"Yiddish for Pirates" by Gary Barwin has its share of tragicomedy, too. Its narrator is a 500 year-old African parrot, who keeps telling Yiddish jokes -- while his mainly Jewish pirate crew scuttles about the Caribbean after escaping from the Spanish inquisition, with the help of Christopher Columbus. Yet the book is devastating in its description of European pogroms against Jews and the viciousness of Spanish colonization of New World Indian communities. I must admit that the book lagged for me as yet more pirate attacks took place, with yet more people gutted and stabbed. But there is no question that the novel is highly imaginative and full of literary references (to Shakespeare's "The Tempest," for example.) Plus the parrot has great chutzpah!
The three remaining novels are the best of the six -- Madeleine Thien's "Do Not Say We Have Nothing," Zoe Whittal's "The Best Kind of People" and "The Wonder" by Emma Donoghue.
Thien's book is set mostly in China and traces the interconnected lives of several families through the social extremism of the Cultural Revolution and then the hope and subsequent suppression of the Tiananmen Square uprising. Her characters are beautifully traced and their grim struggles to maintain artistic integrity and personal loyalties effectively realized. Her skills have already been recognized by her receiving the Governor-General's prize for English literature this year.
Whittal's book is about the father in a well-respected New England family being accused of sexual assault of teenagers -- and how this reshapes fundamentally the lives of his wife and his children. George is in jail for months waiting trial while the consequences damage his wife Joan's sense of self-confidence, his son's relationship with his male partner and his daughter's ties to her friends and career hopes. As the oh-so-contemporary criminal process plays out, Whittal is able to probe the way questions demand to be answered and the past needs to be reassessed.
Donoghue's book is also ultimately about abuse of the young, but in a much different time and place (Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century.) A young girl seems to be surviving without food, as she expresses her deep religious beliefs. A miracle, the local community starts to think, making contributions on her behalf to the Catholic church and its charities. But is this possible? An English nurse, fresh from working with Florence Nightingale in the Crimea, is brought in to be a dispassionate observer. But as this book rises gradually in a crescendo of passion and conflict, Lib cannot remain an outsider.
So which of these three excellent novels should get the 2016 Giller? Whittal has written a book that echoes the central concerns of contemporary North America with sexual assault and the way too many men seem to get away with their abuses; her deep and thoughtful examination of the many dimensions involved will be a persuasive reason for awarding her this year's prize. Her book moves with a drive and energy that sometimes seems missing in Thien's novel. I'll be happy if "The Best Kind of People" wins.
But for myself I think "The Wonder" is the best of all six -- not by a large margin, but in slight though compelling terms. Donoghue for me has taken a completely foreign environment dominated by religion, superstition and poverty, and gradually step by step brought it vividly alive. She has also captured the dimensions of child abuse in all their complexity with much more sensitivity and passion than I discern in Whittal's novel. She has written a thrilling and thoughtful book that surprises the reader -- even more so than in "Room," her fine book about the woman and her child captured by a sexual predator. So that's where I would cast my vote for 2016.
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