Ibis3’s Comments (group member since Sep 06, 2010)

Ibis3’s comments from the CanLit Challenge group.

I re-read this in 2008, the 100th anniversary of the book and it had probably been about 12 years since I read it last. I was able to look at it with quite a different perspective. L.M. Montgomery
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I read this in a couple of days in late August while lounging at the pool. I did definitely have a different perspective this time ’round. I read Margaret Atwood’s analysis of the book in which she says that the true heroine of the book is Marilla, and this time I paid particular attention to Marilla’s development. I also tried to read it with a view to the Canadian literature which preceded it and was able to compare it to Little Women (very favourably—I didn’t care for the moralising of the latter book. Of course all of that extra background knowledge and focus did not detract a whit from the exuberance, joy, and pathos of Anne’s story.

If you’ve not read this book before, I urge you to pick it up. It’s such a delight.

It seems that I only "reviewed" the book halfway through. I guess I'm going to have to go back and check out the 2nd half at some point and post about it then, but in the meantime, here's the first:

I’m finding this book very engaging, especially since I’m now living just a short distance away from where Ms Moodie was living when she first arrived and where she settled in what was then bush country near the small settlement of Peterborough, Ontario. One thing that strikes me is the re-emphasis of the impression made in my readings of Traill and Jameson: how integrated with and integral to life in the non-urban areas of Upper Canada were the First Nations peoples. There’s a real sense that there were three founding “nations” of Canada: the aboriginal, the British (including the Scots and Irish of course), and the French.

Another thing that stands out is the difference between the two sisters. Catharine was excited, optimistic, and took a lot of joy in her circumstances, whereas Susanna dreads her future in Canada, finds displeasure in almost everything she encounters, and, though better than some whom she discusses, seems to look down on both the aboriginal people (frequently calling them ugly and unpleasant) and those Europeans of the lower classes. She also puts down the “Yankee settlers” as a whole. However, it is true that she seems to be (what might be considered) progressive in her attitudes toward blacks.

I did enjoy this book, especially its evocation of the prairies — and the small prairie town — during the Great Depression. In fact, the landscape is the only ‘character’ of the book that is unambiguous and stark in its reality. But even in that there is a possibility that the reader is being shown a facade (just like the “false-fronted towns” Mrs Bentley refers to); after all, the town is called Horizon — a place that can never be reached no matter how far one travels. There’s just so much to think about and discuss with this novel: how reliable is Mrs Bentley’s narration? is she or is Philip the main character? what is going on in the weeks that are omitted? There’s the role that art plays in the novel, the lost son, the replacement son in Steve, and the half-son Philip at the end of the book. There’s the theme of religion and lack of religious feeling. And a lot of hypocrisy on many levels to analyse. It’s a very short book and the whole thing takes place in only about a year, but there’s so much crammed in here. An excellent book by Sinclair Ross.

A friend on BookCrossing gave this review:

Got about 10 pages to go.

I want to recommend this relatively little-known gem, so I'll tell you something about it - albeit there is NO SPOILER; please read on.

If you were to read the back of this book, you'd think it was going to be dull, but it's captivating. It's a short book, very introspective, full of thought provoking similes and lovely imagery, so that you feel like you're there with the characters. The story is about the deep and killing strain in a relationship between a married couple who are at heart complete strangers to one another. In a sense, they live on opposite sides of a freezing cold island in the middle of an arctic sea. For a number of reasons they are emotionally crippled and pitted against one another. The marriage is quite plainly foundering badly on the rocks - in fact I'd call it a nightmare of mental abuse - but it is being held together by the wife purely by her need to keep up appearances and her determined hope for the future. Given the time of writing (1930s small prairie town), the wife's virtual entrapment is believable. The extreme distance between the couple despite their necessary closeness keeps building and building, until the reader is ready to scream!! I've no idea how this one can end.

Of particular interest is that the book is told from the POV of a woman but was written by a man. Recommended!!

I’m afraid I found these stories rather dull. Though they’re wonderfully written, I found myself slogging through them.

“The Four Seasons” – Story about a young servant girl and her English ex-pat employers and how the English community is faced with the war that they hadn’t foreseen.
“The Moslem Wife” – I did like parts of this story of the relationship of two married cousins (and liked it better after hearing Mavis Gallant talking about it).
“The Remission” – A very long story about an expatriate community on the French/Italian Rivera. It was okay but a little boring.
“The Latehomecomer” – I didn’t have any idea that German prisoners of war were basically made into ‘slave’ labourers in France for years.
“Baum, Gabriel, 1935-( )” – I didn’t mind this one, but I just found it went on for a very long time. I guess I’m just not that fascinated by Paris of the 50s and 60s
“From the Fifteenth District” – This I found to be the most intriguing of the stories so far. A tale of ghosts haunted by the living. The concept is a nice twist on what we would expect.
“Potter” – Another very long story which I found annoying because I really didn’t like either of the main characters.
“His Mother” – This is one of the ones I liked the best of the collection. On the shorter side and giving a real snapshot as a mother of an émigre in an Eastern European city. Reminded me a bit of De Niro's Game for some reason.
“Irina” – Another of the shorter stories. I liked the ending & I especially liked the description of women as parcels.

Overall, I really enjoyed some of Gallant’s language, especially her descriptive imagery, but since I found the characters and their situations kind of dull, I found it difficult to read. Perhaps these stories would have been better listened to than read—I find that with texts that have so little plot: I find it hard to concentrate on just the language and expression. I also found her characters and the stories blended into one another and were a bit ‘samey’.

The format of this book is very unusual—perhaps unique. In 1836, Jameson travelled to Toronto just before winter set in, and of course in the days before central heating, there wasn’t much to do in the long Canadian winter, but hunker down and read. The first part of her book is like, well, like a book blog, detailing her reading and her thoughts about Goethe (whom she had personally met). I enjoyed the intermittent descriptions of her life in Toronto (& would have loved for her to give us more), but I’m afraid I couldn’t fully appreciate her literary analysis because I haven’t read anything by any of the authors she mentioned.

After the long cabin fever, Jameson was ready to go out & explore, and the second half of the book is a travel memoir. Despite advice to stay in what passed for civilisation (she was deeply homesick for the cultured salons of Europe), she decided to embark by herself on a remarkable trip into what was then the deep interior of the country. First, she journeyed down through the settled areas along Lake Erie’s northern shore and then by bateau and canoe north, traversing Lake Huron to Michilimackinack and Manatoulin islands (where she attended the annual gathering of First Nations of the area), and then south through Georgian Bay and Lake Simcoe, and finally travelling overland down Yonge Street back to Toronto. She describes the people (settlers & First Nations) in great detail, tells anecdotes, relates First Nations folk tales, discusses the Chippewa (i.e. Ojibwa) language & customs, and depicts her experience of the landscape with a wonderfully observant eye.

I absolutely loved this book. What a treasure Anna Brownell Jameson has left us! As long as it was, I wished it would go on for another 300 pages.

I loved this book. It was relentless and heart-wrenching, but wow, does Timothy Findley ever have an imagination! This book definitely deserves a second read. I loved the character of Mottyl and I hated Noah, Yahweh and all their patriarchal ilk. This would be a great book for discussion in a book group and I really wished that it had won Canada Reads. I’m in awe of an author who can write this way. I think it was Steve MacLean on the Canada Reads panel who said that Lucy was a secret weapon that he was waiting to be used, but I guess history just hasn’t been like that…

My original blog post:

Again, I started this book with some misgivings. I’m one of those people who hate clowns and carnival sideshows and I was afraid that this book would be too much in a setting I couldn’t stand. Sigh. I ought to have known better by now & trusted Mr Davies not to disappoint. I loved this book too, and yes, I read it all in one sitting some months ago, and am only now getting around to blogging about it.

We’re presented with another framed story, first the old comfortable shoes of Dunstan Ramsay, then the autobiography of Magnus Eisengrim né Paul Dempster. We finally find out what happened to the third boy affected by that fateful stone in the snowball. Davies is such a great storyteller, you’re drawn in right away and he takes you on a trip through all the elements that made Dempster into Eisengrim but he doesn’t stop there. Like Nicholas Nickleby, World of Wonders is populated with a great cast of actors, and of course Liesl. Oh yeah, and what was it the Brazen Head said about the death of Boy Staunton? We find that out too…

This is my orginal blogpost:

I’m so far behind in journalling & blogging about my books! I posted this entry back in November and it’s now July. I enjoyed this book tremendously. It was rather like going back in time and travelling from Britain to the New World (and a place not very far from where I now live) with a woman just a few years younger than I.

She starts out by describing her passage out. Unlike the “lower class of Highlanders” travelling on a passenger ship, Catharine and her husband sail somewhat luxuriously by comparison on the brig Laurel. She talks extensively about her landing in Québec City, her observations about her journey to where she would eventually settle on the Otanabee River near Peterborough, Ontario.

That part really stuck out in my mind because as I was reading about her journey to Cobourg, I just happened to be on a train travelling from Ottawa to Oshawa. There were mechanical problems with the train and it kept having to stop so everything could be checked. What was to be a four-hour trip turned into a seven-hour one. People on the train were not very pleased, believe me. But here I was, reading about what such a journey was like in almost the same place (the train did eventually go through Cobourg) just 176 years before, in 1832. It took her several days to get from Montreal to Cobourg and she had to travel the final distance to Peterborough on foot in the dark.

I loved her extensive descriptions of the way of life when first settling the land—this is something I’m sure many of my own ancestors did—and of the aboriginal peoples she encountered and made friends with. Her drawings enriched and complemented her written narrative.

The only improvement would have been to read an annotated and (further) illustrated edition—one with the plants and flowers she describes especially.

The afterword by D. M. R. Bentley was superb, very memorable:

The prototypically Canadian vision that reaches forward in time and outwards in space from The Backwoods of Canada is highly ordered and organizing. Spatial rather than linear, it is as out of place among ‘interminable’ and ‘impenetrable’ forests as it is at home in the frame-houses and picturesque landscapes into which it wishes to transform those forests. It finds as continually worthy of praise lands that are in a ‘high state of cultivation’ as it finds by turns discomfiting and claustrophobic the ‘desolate wilderness of gloomy and unbroken forest-trees.’ Yet in a visual and physical equivalent of the social harmonies and hierarchies that are present in the backwoods, it seeks in the landscape a balance between the man-made and the unacculturated, between the completely artificial [...] and nature as completely other — as unknown and, therefore, unimaginably remote, like ‘the north-west passage.’

… The Backwoods of Canada is a book about willed connections and existential possibilities. It is also a book about individualism and community, hierarchy and harmony, prosperity and poverty, human beings and nature. That these issues are at least as important in Canada today as they were in the 1830s is hardly fortuitous: the foundations were being laid then, both socially and environmentally, for what is here and now. More than the ‘useful,’ ‘amusing.’ and morally instructive book that she intended to write, The Backwoods of Canada is a reflection of an emerging culture and a distant mirror of what that culture has become.

This is my blog post, written over half a year after reading it:

I originally zoomed through this novel, reading it in one sitting. I really loved it, but of course, didn’t journal it or blog about it right away. So now I’m trying to do that seven (!) months later. I was ever my intention to read the whole trilogy through again and maybe I’ll have to do that to give a halfway decent ‘review’. But I’ll try to recall my initial thoughts as I look back over the novel (it’s been so long I barely have any solid impressions about the plot). I remember that before I started, I was a little reluctant to read about someone’s psychoanalysis and moreover, was a little disappointed that the book was about David instead of Boy Staunton. But in the end I was far from disappointed! It was fascinating hearing about the Staunton family and some of the events of Fifth Business from David’s point of view. This is the kind of book that draws one in and doesn’t let go until the end, which is remarkable for a story without a lot of plot, but rather a lot of biography. Davies is a master at this technique (found in both of the other books of the trilogy, Fifth Business and World of Wonders). The warped childhood, the early love gone awry, further insights about Canadian identity (especially her colonial British identity) are all played out yet again with different tonal emphases. I especially loved the story of Maria Ann Dymock:

Now, the cream of the story is this. Maria Ann Dymock must have been a girl of some character, for she bore the child in the local workhouse and in due time marched off to church to have it christened. ‘What shall I name the child?’ said parson. ‘Albert Henry,’ said Maria Ann. So it was done. ‘And the father’s name?’ said parson; ‘shall I say Dymock?’ ‘No,’ said Maria Ann, ‘say Staunton, because it’s said by landlord the whole place could be his father, and I want him to carry his father’s name.’
[...] But my dear Davey, you’re missing the marvel of it; what a story! Think of Maria Ann’s resource and courage! Did she slink away and hide herself in London with her bastard child, gradually sinking to the basest forms of prostitution while little Albert Henry became a thief and a pimp? No! She was of the stuff of which the great New World has been forged! She stood up on her feet and demanded to be recognized as an individual, with inalienable rights! She braved the vicar, and George Applesquire, and all of public opinion. And then she went off to carve out a glorious life in what were then, my dear chap, still the colonies and not the great self-governing sisterhood of the Commonwealth! She was there when Canada became a Dominion! She may have been among the cheering crowds who hailed that moment in Montreal or Ottawa or wherever it was! You’re not grasping the thing at all.
[...] Just a very rough shot at something the College of Heralds would laugh at, but I couldn’t help myself. The description in our lingo would be ‘Gules within a bordure wavy or, the Angel of the Annunciation bearing in her dexter hand a sailing-ship of three masts and in her sinister hand an apple.’ In other words, there’s Mary the Angel with the ship she went to Canada on, and a good old Gloucester cider apple, on a red background with a wiggly golden border around the shield. Sorry about the wavy border; it means bastardy, but you don’t have to tell everybody. Then here’s the crest: ‘a fox statant guardant within his jaws a sugar cane, all proper.’ It’s the Staunton crest, but slightly changed for your purposes, and the sugar cane says where you got your lolly from, which good heraldry often does. The motto, you see, is De forte egressa est dulcedo—‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness’
—from the Book of Judges, and couldn’t be neater, really. And look here—you see I’ve given the fox a rather saucy privy member, just as a hint at your father’s prowess in that direction. How do you like it?

I also liked the epilogue bit, meaning the part at the end with Liesl and the cave.

April wrote: "I'm reading The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood."

This was book #21 http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/4.... I'd love for you to share your thoughts in the discussion thread.

Rachelle wrote: "I'm reading Bonheur d'occasion by Gabrielle Roy. So far really enjoying it. Has anybody else read this?"

I haven't yet, but it's on the list... I hope you'll come back and give us your thoughts on it when it comes up.

Anyone have plans for the long weekend?

I quite enjoyed it. Lots of Canadian navel-gazing. :)

I’m afraid I missed a lot of the topical references (especially in the entertainment area) and because it was written fairly contemporaneously to the setting (the bulk of the novel takes place in the centennial year of 1967, coincidentally also the year of the Six Days’ War, and the novel was published in 1971), Richler felt he didn’t really need to explain much. I think I may need to reread the parts about what actually took place when he came back from the funeral because I’m not sure if I got the whole story.

I really enjoyed the back-and-forth timeline of the novel.

On my original blog post, I've recorded my thoughts on the CBC adaptation too.

So, what do you think, Kirsten? Vancouver-Boston final?

I really loved this book, and I highly recommend it. From a coming-of-age, portrait of the artist as a young man in the first part of the book, we move to an older man's reflection upon the sincere friendship of three men gone awry in the last act. (view spoiler)[The breakup of the friendship of the three men over something so small and inconsequential was sad and unnecessarily unfortunate. Or, perhaps, according to Morley's analysis of their natures, unavoidable. (hide spoiler)]

A book of short vignettes that promises to tickle our funny bones. Should be able to read it over a weekend.

I'd already read the first, My Financial Career. The National Library used to have a hilarious clip of Johnathan Stark doing a reading/performance of it, but it's no longer available.

Kirsten wrote: "I figured you'd be pleased. What is your main team allegiance if you don't mind my asking?

On the bright side, all the teams I liked being out of the playoffs means I'll actually study for finals..."

I'm a Leafs fan. What can a person do? (I keep telling myself the eventual victory will be all the sweeter.) My western conference/2nd fave team is Vancouver, so that gives me some relief.

I've been meaning to add some Pierre Berton to the CanLit Challenge list. I'm having a little trouble deciding whether to read his opus in the order it was written, or to read it (roughly) in the order of historical events.

The first book he wrote (as far as the bibliographies I've checked out) was the children's classic The Secret World of Og. The first one in historical order would be (I think) The Invasion of Canada: 1812-1813, the first of two on the War of 1812. Anyway, I'd love some feedback about which direction I should take, so I'm going to put up a poll.

Whew.

No no no. This can't possibly happen again. The Canucks are too good to lose the series.