0 Histories of Food and Eating

              

In his excellent In Defence of Food, Michael Pollan steers the reader away from the highly processed stuff that dominates grocery store shelves and toward "real" food with this bit of advice: "Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food." He suggests that you imagine your great grandmother at your side as you make your way through the store, and look at each item through her eyes as you pick it up and scan its ingredient list.

Because my actual great grandmothers are less vivid in my mind than their fictional contemporaries, I found myself adapting Pollan's exercise to consider the meals of some of my favourite late 19th/early 20th century characters as possible dietary touchstones. Think, for example, of the meal that Anne Shirley plans for Mrs. Morgan's visit in L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Avonlea (set in the early 1880s):

"I'll have a light soup to begin with ... you know I can make a lovely cream-of-onion soup ... and then a couple of roast fowls. I'll have the two white roosters." [...] "Then I'll have peas and beans and creamed potatoes and a lettuce salad, for vegetables," resumed Anne, "and for dessert, lemon pie with whipped cream, and coffee and cheese and lady fingers."

Or the box of groceries that Betsy and Joe receive as a mysterious housewarming gift in Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy’s Wedding (set in 1914):

     Betsy was sitting on the kitchen floor beside a huge box overflowing with groceries. A smiling delivery boy was just closing the door.
     "Who sent them?"
     "He wouldn't say. But they're for us."
     Joe dropped down beside her. He lifted out a dozen eggs, a half dozen tomatoes, a cucumber, some onions—two bottles of milk, a pound of butter, bacon, a slab of strong cheese—a loaf of bread, a coffee cake, doughnuts.
     "Pretty good," he said, devouring one.
     Betsy was pulling out coffee, cocoa and tea, vinegar and oil, salt and pepper, oatmeal, tapioca, molasses, raisins.
     "And coconut!" she cried. "I can make you a coconut cake as soon as I learn how!"
     Next came flour and sugar, baking powder, soda and vanilla. Beside a box of graham crackers stood a jar of jelly and one of pickles. Potatoes and apples spilled from their sacks.

Or, the evening snack that provokes a disquisition on the history of popcorn from a young Almanzo Wilder in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Farmer Boy (set in the late 1860s):

     Almanzo sat on a footstool by the stove, an apple in his hand, a bowl of popcorn by his side, and his mug of cider on the hearth by his feet. He bit the juicy apple, then he ate some popcorn, then he took a drink of cider. He thought about popcorn.

I would be happy to reconfigure my diet along any of these lines.

Alas the pleasure of this exercise can slide too easily into romanticism about the pure and nutritious food people ate in the good, old days. Note that Pollan advises avoiding anything that your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food; he doesn't advocate adopting her diet, being well aware that many of our great grandmothers had very poor diets indeed whether out of choice or necessity. As an antidote to that romanticism and as a means of figuring out how we got to where we are now as far as food production and distribution and the dietary habits that flow from them are concerned, I've been dipping into a pair of social histories by Harvey Levenstein: Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (covering 1880-1930) and Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (spanning 1930 to the present).

I can't give a full account of either yet, but I'm far enough along in Revolution at the Table to tell you that it makes for fascinating reading. Levenstein's premise is that the years between 1880 and 1930 marked a dramatic transformation in how and what Americans ate. In the opening chapter he paints a vivid picture of "The American Table in 1880" and throughout the rest of the book tracks the shift that occurred thereafter and the multitude of forces that prompted it: for example, technological advances that changed the processes of food production and distribution as well as the way people prepared it in their homes, a new ethos of advertising that saw enormous sums of money employed to develop mass markets for new food products to supplant existing staples, and reform campaigns rooted in a burgeoning nutritional science which were designed to persuade people to eat not what they liked but what was good for them.

A particular strength of the book is the attention that Levenstein pays to regional differences and to class. He makes very clear that what Americans ate in 1880 and how the shifts that occurred thereafter affected them had much to do with where they lived, how much money they had in their food budgets, how much time they had to devote to preparing food, and whether or not they had the help of servants in doing so, as well as to dietary preferences shaped by tradition and culture. By way of illustration, here he is summing up a chapter on "the New England Kitchen experiment," a reform effort that sought to improve the diets of the working classes in Boston, New York, and other cities in the northeast U.S.:

It is tempting to regard the founders of the Kitchen as they saw themselves: people of learning and vision frustrated by the ignorance and prejudices of the class they most wanted to help. After all, within decades, much of their message on nutrition had become part of the conventional wisdom. Yet to concentrate solely on the wisdom of their message would be to ignore their manifest failings. Like many reformers of their time, they went about their mission among the working class with the smug assurance that with "science" on their side, they were touting a way of life far superior to that worked out by millions of people in their daily struggle to survive. Once rejected, rather than re-examining their message and its audience, they dismissed the working-class as ignoramuses whose only hope lay in their propensity to imitate their betters.

Note the quotation marks around "science." Here's why:

The great irony of this attempt to bring the benefits of science to the eating habits of the lower-class was that many of the things the reformers advocated were, by the light of today’s nutritionists, both dangerous and unhealthy. As we have seen, one of the banes of the workingman's diet was the dearth of fresh vegetables and fruits. Yet because they preached in the era before the discovery of vitamins, the New Nutritionists denigrated most fruits and vegetables, which emerged from the labs as mostly water and carbohydrates. Atwater urged Americans to eat more white flour and fewer potatoes because the former was a much cheaper source of carbohydrates. The bran of the wheat and the vitamin-packed skins of the potatoes were to be discarded as "refuse." The tomato was dismissed as useful only in small quantities as a flavoring agent with no food value of its own. If one insisted on eating green vegetables, they were to be well boiled, to make them more digestible and lessen the waste of energy necessary to digest them. Only condensed milk, laced with sugar but deprived of Vitamins C and D, was used in the Kitchen. In short, if America turned en masse to follow their advice, rickets, beri-beri, scurvy, and other vitamin-deficiency diseases may have reached epidemic proportions.

There are a lot of strands to the story that Levenstein is telling in this book which can make for a somewhat disjointed reading experience. I think that's inevitable though as a more focussed narrative would require too much narrowing or distortion. In fact, the structure of the book makes it perfect for dipping into and out of as I like to do with this sort of richly detailed non-fiction. I expect I will be sharing more titbits here as I continue to work my way through it and move on to Levenstein's follow-up, The Paradox of Plenty.


Next Friday: Marion Nestle's What to Eat.

Detail: Histories of Food and Eating

0 Alicia Giménez-Bartlett’s Inspector Petra Delicado Series

What a happy discovery Alicia Giménez-Bartlett's Inspector Petra Delicado series has proven to be.

I usually like to begin a series at the beginning and, although the translations of the Petra Delicado novels have been published out of order (as is so often and so annoyingly the case with European crime fiction), the first three books are all now available in English. But Prime Time Suspect, the third in the series, was the first to turn up on the library hold shelf, so I dived in there.

I confess that it took me a bit of time to fully enter into the book. I was distracted by a slightly off-kilter quality to the dialogue which I initially assumed to be a flaw in the translation. But I soon realized that the source of the dissonance wasn't the dialogue but rather the character of Petra Delicado. She never responds in quite the way one would expect, whether to a new development in the investigation, an emotional scene with her visiting sister, or a bit of banter with her (also rather eccentric) partner Sergeant Fermín Garzón. Her methods, her politics, and her philosophy of life are sufficiently unconventional that I found myself reading avidly as much to see what she would do and say next as to get to the bottom of the plot. Mind you, the suspense of the plot propelled me along nicely as well with plenty of twists and turns that had me guessing right to the end. And the glimpses of Spain, a country of which I know little, were a bonus as well. The series is set primarily in Barcelona, but the investigation at the heart of Prime Time Suspect had Inspector Delicado and Sergeant Garzón travelling back and forth between Barcelona and Madrid a number of times, and reflecting on the distinct character of each city in very interesting and illuminating fashion.

By the time I finished Prime Time Suspect, the copy of Death Rites that I'd ordered had arrived. So now I'm well into it, and relishing the opportunity to learn some of the back story: how Delicado developed into the woman and the police officer that she has become, and how her partnership with Sergeant Garzón developed.

That leaves me with just one more to acquire: Dog Day. But a quick google search reveals that at least seven novels in the series have been published in Spanish, and I dearly hope that more of them are due to be translated into English, as I'm keen to continue following the adventures of Inspector Delicado and Sergeant Garzón.

(Thanks to Danielle whose mention of Alicia Giménez-Bartlett prompted me to seek out these books—and I see that she too has enjoyed her first encounter with Petra Delicado.)

Detail: Alicia Giménez-Bartlett’s Inspector Petra Delicado Series

0 Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life is part memoir, part treatise/meditation on sustainable agriculture and ethical eating. In it, she recounts a year-long experiment in which she and her family opted out of the industrial food chain, eating only what they could grow or raise themselves on their Virginia farm, or purchase from their neighbours, save for a very few fair trade indulgences (coffee, hot chocolate and spices such as cinnamon and turmeric) shipped from afar. Kingsolver explains the endeavour and something of the motivation behind it thus:

This is the story of a year in which we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew. We tried to wring most of the petroleum out of our food chain, even if it meant giving up some things. Our highest shopping goal was to get our food from so close to home, we'd know the person who grew it. Often that turned out to be us, as we learned to produce more of what we needed, starting with dirt, seeds, and enough knowledge to muddle through. Or starting with baby animals and enough sense to refrain from naming them.

The experiment was very much a family affair and so too is the book. It contains sidebars by Kingsolver’s husband, biologist Steven L. Hopp, on relevant aspects of environmental science, the food industry and legal regulation thereof, and local food activism, and occasional short essays by daughter Camille offering up a teenage perspective on the experience as well as seasonal menus and recipes. But the primary voice is Kingsolver's and a very engaging voice it is. I've read a few books in this vein that suffer from an excess of earnestness and a dearth of writing skill. Kingsolver, by contrast, has produced a smart, funny, thought-provoking, and highly evocative book.

A good bit of it is devoted to a day-to-day, season-by-season, nuts and bolts description of the small-scale farming that brought food to their table. In the introduction, Kingsolver is quick to say of this aspect of the book that it is not intended as a "how-to," and making a case for the relevance of it to urbanites like me who lack the resources or the inclination to contemplate growing our own dinners:

...think of the agricultural parts of the story as a music-appreciation course for food—acquainting yourself with the composers and conductors can improve the quality of your experience. [...] Knowing how foods grow is to know how and when to look for them; such expertise is useful for certain kinds of people, namely, the ones who eat, no matter where they live or grocery shop.

But it turns out that I didn't need to be convinced on utilitarian grounds. The agricultural parts of the story proved to be my favourite parts. They're beautifully written and were frequently something of a revelation to me. Early on, when I found myself reading a lengthy bit about asparagus (pages 26-29 of the hardcover edition) aloud to Eric, it was clear that I was hooked. I've been enjoying asparagus for years but I had not previously so much as pictured how it looks in the ground. Ditto for peanuts. I was so taken with Kingsolver's description of cheese making that I'm contemplating learning how to do it myself despite being borderline lactose intolerant and not even slightly domestic. And who would have thought that there could be such suspense in a tale of turkey mating? The book was truly a pleasure from beginning to end. I highly recommend it.


Soup of the Day: Today's soup was a delicious Lentil and Carrot, made from a recipe in Cooking With Foods That Fight Cancer. It's the third soup recipe from this book that I've tried that has produced stellar results (the other winners are Cuban Black Bean, and Mediterranean Bean) and the Shepherd's Pie proved excellent also. This book is a companion to another that explains the cancer-fighting properties of the various foods that figure in the recipes, Foods That Fight Cancer. I haven't yet read the nutritional science behind it all, so for now I'm recommending the recipes simply on the basis of deliciousness with the healthiness factor in the background as a potential added bonus.

Next Friday: A post on Harvey Levenstein's Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet, a most interesting social history of eating in the U.S. that spans the apparently pivotal years of 1880-1930.

Detail: Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

0 An Unconventional Memoir of a Life in CanLit

Dr. Delicious: Memoirs of a Life in CanLit is, as its subtitle indicates, a memoir of Robert Lecker’s life as a professor, critic, and publisher of Canadian literature. But who is this Dr. Delicious character? In the introduction, Lecker explains that after a student told him that his surname means “delicious” in German he began to reconceive himself:

The idea of being Dr. Delicious instead of plain old Professor Lecker made me think about the kind of writing I would have done if I was really the tasty version of myself. Professor Lecker would be reluctant to tell stories about his own life. He would resist the temptation to make his life in Canadian literature personal. He would not gossip. He would write scholarly articles and books that no one would read. But Dr. Delicious would lead a completely different life. He would delight in his classroom experiences. He would take liberties with his life story. He would talk about the ups and downs of being a Canadian publisher. He would bring in music, painting, hypochondria, malt whisky, deranged students, government grants, questionable authors, bank debt, termite infestations, a teaching stint in Brazil, lawsuits, the pleasures of hot sauce. He would write about his passions, his failures, how the whole business of CanLit drove him crazy, lost him sleep, drove him on.

I can appreciate how the idea of Dr. Delicious helped Lecker to abandon academic convention in embarking on this book, but in the early going I found the Dr. Delicious persona off-putting. To me it smacked a bit of an aging professor trying too hard to be cool. (No doubt my sensitivity to this stems from my own fears of venturing into that territory as a professor just past forty and no longer as conversant with my students’ pop culture references as I once was.) It was only when Lecker shucked off the Dr. Delicious veneer to describe the unabashed passion for the study of literature that he developed in graduate school that I was hooked by the narrative. The jaded academic is a familiar figure in the public imagination, and Lecker does go on to catalogue many of the frustrations of academic life with great insight and humour. But the passionate scholar is all too rarely represented, and it was a great pleasure to encounter one here.

Ultimately it is not a sharply drawn Jeckyll & Hyde conflict between what Lecker refers to as his “multiple book personalities” that makes this book so interesting, but rather their mostly peaceful co-existence. That Lecker is deeply suspicious of the CanLit canon in his critical work, yet contributes to its formation in what he chooses to teach in his professorial guise and what he chooses to publish as co-founder and long-time partner of Canadian small press ECW. That he is a champion of Canadian fiction and poetry, yet opts to devote a substantial amount of time and energy to the publication of dubious non-fiction titles (a low-carb cookbook, a glossy biography of Jennifer Lopez, WrestleCrap: The Very Worst of Pro Wrestling) to keep his press afloat. These are, of course, the realities not just of Lecker’s professional life but of academic life and small press publishing more broadly. And thus Dr. Delicious is a very satisfying read for anyone who is interested in the pleasures and frustrations of academic life, of small press publishing, or in the formation of and challenges to the CanLit canon. It was a bulls-eye on all three counts for me. Indeed, I was sufficiently intrigued by the snippets about the CanLit canon to buy a copy of Lecker’s previous book which is wholly devoted to the subject, Making it Real: The Canonization of English-Canadian Literature.

So, although I was not so keen on Dr. Delicious the persona, I highly recommend Dr. Delicious the book.

Detail: An Unconventional Memoir of a Life in CanLit

0 Space and Place in James Joyce's "Araby"

James Joyce’s “Araby” is a marvellously evocative short story. It is a very interior sort of story; the action, such as it is, occurs almost exclusively inside the narrator’s head. Of course this is not uncommon in coming-of-age stories as they generally track changes that occur within the protagonist. But this quality is heightened in “Araby” as the changes that the narrator undergoes are provoked by the quiet dissolution of a fantasy rather than by any dramatic external catalyst.

The interiority of the story is underscored for me by the way that Joyce uses space and place within it to highlight contrasts and mark transitions. The houses of North Richmond Street are associated with stuffy, respectable adulthood while the street itself is the terrain of childhood. The houses, in contrast to a vacant one at the end, are described thus in the opening paragraph: “The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.” But the street itself can be a more raucous place:

When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street.

The back lane is more adventurous territory still, not theirs but navigable nonetheless:

The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses, where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness.

Back on the front street, the narrator and his playmates still opt for the shadows beyond the light thrown by the kitchen windows. They duck out of view when the narrator’s uncle comes past on his way home, or when his friend Managan’s sister calls him in for his tea.

But when the narrator becomes smitten with Managan’s sister, despite never having so much as exchanged a word with her, he confines himself more often to his house. He lies on the floor of the front parlour where he can watch through the window for her to appear on her front doorstep. He ventures into the back drawing room where the previous tenant, an old priest, had died, to vent his desire in privacy. Finally, after Managan’s sister speaks to him at last, and he begins to anticipate a real connection between them, he goes to the top of the house, distancing himself further from the “child’s play” he now disdains:

I mounted the staircase and gained the upper part of the house. The high, cold, empty, gloomy rooms liberated me and I went from room to room singing. From the front window I saw my companions playing below in the street. Their cries reached me weakened and indistinct and, leaning my forehead against the cool glass, I looked over at the dark house where she lived. I may have stood there for an hour, seeing nothing but the brown-clad figure cast by my imagination, touched discretely by the lamplight at the curved neck, at the hand upon the railings and at the border below the dress.”

The connection that the narrator anticipates has to do with a planned visit to Araby, “a splendid bazaar.” When Managan’s sister spoke to him finally, it was to ask if he was going to Araby. She can’t go herself as she is to attend a convent retreat that weekend, and he tells her that if he goes he will bring her something back.

Araby is associated with neither childhood nor respectable adulthood; it’s another space entirely. The very name “cast[s] an Eastern enchantment over” the narrator. He nearly doesn’t make it there when his uncle forgets to return home in time to give him money to go. But finally, after an anxious train journey, the narrator arrives at the bazaar at ten minutes to ten on Saturday night.

I found myself in a big hall girded at half its height by a gallery. Nearly all the stalls were closed and the greater part of the hall was in darkness. I recognized a silence like that which pervades a church after a service.

He listens to the stallholders counting money and gossiping to one another. Even those few stalls that are still open are clearly not keen for his business so late at night.

What better place than an exotically named bazaar a train journey from home to represent a fantasy just out of reach? And what better place than that bazaar at closing, its gaudy facade let down, its aisles empty of revellers, to bring home the recognition that the fantasy is out of reach and remains just that, a fantasy?

The story ultimately is masterful in taking not just the narrator but also the reader from the space of childhood (the bracing chill of the dark street ringing with boys’ shouts) to the awkward in-between (confining oneself to private corners of the house then railing against that confinement) to young adulthood (and the sharp moments of disillusionment it inevitably brings).

“Araby” is the third of fifteen stories contained in James Joyce’s collection The Dubliners. But it’s such a perfect coming-of-age story that I’m thinking of the collection now as book-ended with “Araby” at the beginning and “The Dead,” a masterpiece of a story about, among other things, aging and death, at the end, and I’m very keen to read the collection from start to finish to see what I make of it as a whole.

Drop by A Curious Singularity to read what other bloggers have written about James Joyce's "Araby."

Detail: Space and Place in James Joyce's "Araby"

0 Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander Mysteries

     

In my latest foray into crime fiction in translation, I finally made the acquaintance of Inspector Kurt Wallander. My dad has been recommending Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander books to me for years, but it was only last week that I began with an audio version of the first instalment in the series, Faceless Killers (first published in Swedish in 1991 and in English translation in 1997). I’m generally not keen on audio books as I tend to drift when I’m listening rather than reading. But I’ve found that a suspenseful mystery can hold my attention and render my commute bearable. Faceless Killers did better than that, keeping me riveted through a variety of weather-related subway delays that stretched my commute to nearly three hours one afternoon. I was so thoroughly hooked that the minute I reached the end, I picked up the second in the series, The Dogs of Riga, this time in book form, and made short work of it as well. And, having listened to the first book, I had the benefit of having the proper pronunciations in my head so that I didn’t stumble over the Swedish names when reading for myself.

So what’s so good about this series? It begins with the central character, Inspector Kurt Wallander. In many respects, he is an embodiment of the conventions of contemporary crime fiction. Wallander is a disaffected, angst-ridden police officer. He drinks too much (mostly whisky), is passionate about music (opera), and his personal life is in shambles (his wife has just left him and he is estranged from his teenage daughter). He frequently winds up battered and bruised from the physical risks that he takes in the course of his investigations. And yet he subverts a myriad of conventions as well. He falls in love at the drop of a hat, but he’s not the least bit suave with women and his feelings are rarely reciprocated. He may drink copious quantities of whisky of an evening, but he’s apt to order a glass of milk with lunch. His stomach knots under stress and he finds himself searching for a toilet at inopportune moments. He worries about his weight. He telephones his elderly father nightly, concerned about his drift into senility. He gets on rather well with his boss. He doesn’t fight doggedly over his turf when he comes into contact with other branches of the police service but rather hopes they might take a difficult and disturbing case off his hands. He makes a lot of mistakes, and many months may pass before he manages to resolve a case. He does his job well and has a strong sense of duty, but he is constantly tempted to quit the police service for an easier life. All of which is to say that though he has many of the requisite characteristics of a crime fiction hero, he remains gloriously human.

Mankell’s Wallander books also appeal to this literary tourist for their vivid evocation of Sweden. After only two books, I already have a strong sense of the landscape and the progress of the seasons in the southern province of Sweden in which the series is set. And I have learned something about Swedish society, politics, and history as well. I recognize, of course, that fiction isn’t the best source of information about such things. But I relish a novel that sparks my interest in a new subject sufficiently to send me off in search of non-fiction about it, and these books have done that for me. Faceless Killers opens with the brutal murder of an elderly Swedish couple. The woman survives for nearly a day but wakes only long enough to speak the word “foreigner” before she dies. After a leak to the media, simmering tensions around Sweden’s immigration policy ignite resulting in further crimes and many complications for Wallander and his team in their quest to solve the case. This scenario offers not just a suspenseful mystery but also a glimpse into an aspect of Swedish society that runs counter to the general perception of the country as a bastion of tolerance. The Dogs of Riga opens with the bodies of two men who have been tortured and executed washing up on the Swedish coast in an unmarked life raft. The victims are traced to the Baltic state of Latvia, then in the midst of violent political turmoil stemming from the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The rather apolitical Wallander must travel to Latvia and learn something of its history and politics in order to solve the case. Again I found myself riveted by the plot (formulated by Mankell before the outcome of the Latvian quest for independence was determined), and also moved to learn more about the recent history of the Baltic states than I had gleaned from following the news at the time that the events to which the book alludes were unfolding.

Utterly satisfying books both, and I am very much looking forward to reading my way through the rest of Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series.

Detail: Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander Mysteries

0 The Calling by Inger Ash Wolfe

All of the pre-publication buzz about The Calling, a crime novel by Inger Ash Wolfe, has focused on the identity of the author. When advance publicity revealed Wolfe to be the pseudonym of a well-known North American writer of literary fiction, the guessing games began at once. Speculators constructed a pool of likely prospects drawn from writers who share an agent with Wolfe, have the requisite knowledge of the part of Ontario in which the novel is set, and have been long enough between books to have completed a new one. I confess to some curiosity about this. But now that The Calling has hit store shelves, I’m content to turn my attention to the more important question of whether it’s a good book.

It has a couple of significant flaws. First, despite the occurrence of a murder within the first ten pages, The Calling gets off to a slow start. As is too often the case with a book that is to be the first in a series, there’s an awful lot of back-story shoehorned in in unwieldy chunks in the early chapters. Second, there’s just too much plot for one novel. More than once, upon encountering yet another twist in the plot, I found myself eyeing up the pages still to be read and asking in a peevish “are we there yet” sort of tone what could be left to uncover.

But there is much that warrants praise as well. The cast of characters is a fascinating lot, each of them very interesting in his or her own right, and so too are the dynamics of the relationships between them. At the centre is Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef, acting chief of the Port Dundas police detachment, sixty-one-years old, recently divorced, and fighting a reliance on the painkillers with which she soothes her bad back and the carefully concealed bottle of whisky with which she washes them down. Serving alongside her is Detective Sargeant Raymond Greene who, despite an outlook much more conventional than Hazel’s, appears content to answer to a female boss. And then there are the recent additions to Hazel’s team: Detective Constable James Wingate, a young, technologically-savvy officer, newly arrived from Toronto, and Detective Sargeant Adjutor Sevigny, a French-Canadian officer of intimidating size on loan from the Sudbury police, both of them with personal secrets that they must strive to keep concealed. This diverse group is thrown together to pursue, with little experience and few resources, a serial killer who is dispatching terminally ill individuals, one after another, in gruesome fashion.

A second strength of the novel is the sense of place evoked within it. In highlighting this facet of the book, I’m not referring simply to the vivid depiction of the landscape of the bit of Ontario where the fictional town of Port Dundas is located, but also to its relationship to the rest of Ontario and to the rest of the country. The novel brings to life the contrasts between rural and urban policing, and, as the scope of the case broadens with the identification of more victims, the tensions not just between rural and urban Ontario, but also between Ontario and other parts of Canada.

Finally, there’s the plot. I noted that there are a few more twists and turns to it than fit comfortably in a single novel but, nevertheless, it was altogether riveting for long stretches, and ultimately it wound its way to a very satisfying conclusion.

The Calling is not a great crime novel, but it’s a good one. And I very much hope that it is the beginning of a series because I suspect that, with the initial hiccups of establishing a series out of the way, the second book will be even better. I could very happily spend several more books in the company of Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef.

Detail: The Calling by Inger Ash Wolfe

0 The Stone Angel Then and Now

I was fifteen when I first read Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel and it made an enormous impression on me. I welcomed the opportunity to reread it when it was voted this month’s selection by the Slaves of Golconda, but I was a bit nervous as well. What if it fell flat for me so many years later? I need not have worried. The novel has retained all of its power for me, and this time around I had the added pleasure of being better equipped to understand the source of that power.

What I recall most vividly about my teenage response to the book was that, after reading it, I never looked at my grandma quite the same way again. My grandma was in her late seventies then and was nothing like Hagar Shipley, the ninetysomething narrator of The Stone Angel. My grandma survived into her nineties as well and must have had a ribbon of steel at the core of her. But she chose the path of least resistance always whereas Hagar runs headlong at every obstacle no matter how fruitless her opposition may seem in any given circumstance. Nevertheless, witnessing Hagar showing the face of a rather meek and sentimental old lady to the world on the bus home from the doctor’s office, yet knowing the passion and anger and regret that roil within her all the while, I couldn’t help but realize that a great deal more than I could know must also be going on beneath my grandma’s cheerful old lady facade and, indeed, in the hearts and minds of random old ladies that I encountered on buses.

I also clearly remember from my teenage reading of The Stone Angel how strongly I identified with Hagar throughout. The conventional wisdom of those who market books to teenagers seems to be that to get kids reading you have to give them characters that they can “relate to” which much of the time translates into giving them characters of roughly their age who are grappling with what are thought to be universal teenage problems. Perhaps then my firm identification with Hagar was surprising. But, then again, perhaps not. After all, that sense of being at the mercy of others, of being perfectly capable of making decisions for yourself but being prevented from doing so, is something shared by the young and the old. Although the primary source of frustration for the young teenager is being thwarted while on the very cusp of independence, whereas for the very elderly it must run much deeper, having once had that independence and now being deprived of it with no prospect of ever regaining it. I think that Laurence plays on this identification directly, albeit briefly and subtly, in the relationship that develops between Hagar and the girl in the next hospital bed near the end of the novel.

That was The Stone Angel then. What about now? What did I see in the book as an adult reader that may have escaped me as a teenager? I think that this time around it was much more apparent to me how skilfully Laurence structured the novel and depicted Hagar’s character such that the reader is drawn fully into her head yet can simultaneously see her from the outside. She’s such a strong character and the reader can’t help but stand with her and rail against the indignities she suffers by virtue of her failing body, and also the wrongs that have been done to her by unsympathetic characters throughout her life. But at the same time, the reader can’t help but recognize how impossible she is, how difficult she must be to care for, and also to recoil at the wrongs that she has perpetrated against others throughout her life. Hagar is a thoroughly unsympathetic character herself who nevertheless generates much sympathy. This double vision is made possible and made incredibly vivid, I think, by virtue of the fact that Hagar shares it. And ultimately that’s the chief tragedy of the book. She has gained enough self-knowledge over the course of her life to be able now, at least periodically, to see herself as others see her, but she can’t go that step further to change how she behaves, even toward those that she loves most deeply.

The other facet of the novel that I was very much struck by this time around was the earthiness of it, both in the depiction of Hagar’s physical decline and in its evocation of sex. Sex and sexual desire are described euphemistically, as one would expect given Hagar’s vintage and character, but never coyly. The enduring sexual desire that she felt for her husband that she was never able to communicate even to him seems to me another of the great tragedies of her life. This aspect of the novel may have been somewhat controversial when it was first published in 1964. I’m not sure about the history of this novel in particular, but I know that several of Laurence’s novels were banned on the basis of sexual content and that this caused her much anger and pain.

This has been a rather rambling post, but rereading The Stone Angel sent my thoughts spinning in a number of directions. I relished the experience and I’m keen now to reread the rest of Laurence’s Manawaka novels. For those of you new to Laurence’s work, she set several novels in and around the fictional town of Manawaka, Manitoba, Hagar’s hometown. But each focuses on different characters from different segments of the town’s population and they range across different time periods, so you may catch glimpses of characters from one novel in another, but only peripherally. For example, the Tonnerre family with whom Hagar’s son John gets up to no good is mentioned only in passing in The Stone Angel but plays a central role in The Diviners. I would recommend any of Laurence’s novels, but the ones that stand out for me particularly are The Diviners, which I consider her masterpiece, and A Bird in the House, which is an early exemplar of the linked short story collection.

To read what other bloggers have to say about The Stone Angel, head over to the Slaves of Golconda, and to participate in a discussion of the novel, drop by the Metaxu Cafe forum dedicated to that purpose.

Detail: The Stone Angel Then and Now

0 Armchair Traveler Challenge Report

I finished my sixth book for the Armchair Traveler Challenge just under the wire on December 30th. The journey was not an unalloyed pleasure, but it was certainly an interesting one. Here are my snapshots:

1. Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1878 France): I confess that my contemporary sensibilities got in the way of my enjoyment of this one at the beginning. I couldn’t help but be horrified at the treatment of poor Modestine the donkey. I had to keep reminding myself that in that time and place it was Stevenson’s affection for the donkey that would have caused people to look askance, not his employment of a switch to urge her on. Ultimately, once we all settled into the journey, Travels with a Donkey proved to be the sort of travel writing that I like best—a new landscape illuminated by a writer who brings to the task a keenly observant eye, a sense of humour, and a good bit of humility. By humility, I mean that he never forgets that he’s a stranger in a strange land and, as a consequence, more often than not, the joke’s on him. I keep returning to one chapter in particular, “A Night Among the Pines,” which is absolutely breathtaking.

2. Jeremy Mercer, Time was Soft There (Paris): In this memoir, Mercer tells the tale of a year in which he fled dire personal and professional troubles in Canada and found refuge at fabled Paris bookstore Shakespeare & Co. I’ve been to that bookstore; indeed, working back through the dates, I think I visited it while Mercer was living there. But I was much more familiar with the history of the store from which it borrowed its name, the Shakespeare & Co. of Sylvia Beach and the lost generation, than with that of the current incarnation. Mercer’s book offers an extraordinary glimpse behind the scenes at the store and into the life eccentric owner George Whitman. This book works beautifully as memoir (Mercer’s own story), biography (Whitman’s story), and as social history (the story of Shakespeare & Co. and the community that built up within and around it).

3. James Baldwin, Another Country (1950s New York): This was my first foray into Baldwin’s longer fiction and I can’t say that I enjoyed it. The primary feeling that it provoked in me was exhaustion at the surfeit of words. Baldwin has a way of layering on sensory detail that is a very effective means of conveying heightened experience. For example, I’m not sure I’ve come across any other writer who can bring jazz alive on the page as effectively as Baldwin does. But I don’t think that you can keep your readers at that point of sensory overload for 400 pages straight, and that was how I experienced Another Country. And perversely the effect, once it works its way into everything, is not a visceral one, because every gesture, every encounter, in this novel is freighted with symbolic significance. I never had a sense of the characters interacting with one another as individual characters; every one of them seemed to stand for something or someone else. I guess that’s part of the point, that their world was so thoroughly determined by racism, sexism, and homophobia that they couldn’t interact as individuals. But, to my mind, compelling them to carry around the weight of their author’s intentions along with everything else made it all add up to less than it could have done. As for New York, certainly I saw bits of it in this novel that I’d never seen before, but only brief glimpses. The characters just never got out of their own heads long enough to take a proper look around. I suspect that I should stick to Baldwin’s non-fiction, which I admire enormously, though if there’s another Baldwin novel that you think I ought to try, I’m prepared to be convinced otherwise.

4. Terry Teachout, City Limits: Memories of a Small-Town Boy (Sikeston, Missouri): In this memoir, Teachout brings to life his hometown in the 1950s and 60s in loving detail. In so doing, he manages to honour the specificity of that town but at the same time to tell a tale to which I'm sure many readers from very different places will be able to relate, that of loving but needing to leave (in his case, ultimately decamping for New York) the places that formed us in order to become fully ourselves.



5. Mary Morris, The River Queen (the Mississippi river, from Wisconsin to Missouri): When Morris sets off down the Mississippi in a less than luxurious houseboat with river pilot Jerry and mechanic Tom (both strangers to her before they embark), she’s grieving the death of her 102 year-old father with whom she had a very complicated relationship, and coming to terms with her 18-year-old daughter’s recent departure for college. To begin with, I found Morris altogether too inward-looking. It’s unreasonable, I know, to fault a memoir for being self-absorbed, but the Mississippi is new territory for me and I wanted a good look at it. Of course Morris did intersperse her personal musings with descriptions of the terrain that they were traversing, but it seemed almost perfunctory. How could the river span so much ground and yet seem so unchanging in her initial accounts of it, I wondered. But before long the river woke her up and she began to weave her inward and outward journeys together nicely. Jerry and Tom emerged as the characters that they clearly are and so too did the Mississippi. The emotional heart of the book and the strongest part of it comes very near the end when Morris goes looking for her father’s boyhood home in the Mark Twain theme-park that Hannibal, Missouri has become. By then, I didn’t want to leave the river any more than Morris did.

6. Virginia Woolf, The London Scene: Six Essays on London Life (London): This is a gorgeous little book, but the content proved a disappointment. It was written as a series of bi-monthly columns for the British edition of Good Housekeeping in 1931 and, perhaps constrained by the intended audience, Woolf is not at her essayistic best here. There are memorable turns of phrase but these essays rarely rise above clever description; they simply don’t have the wit and whimsy, in short the magic, of the best of Woolf's essays. The one exception in this book is the essay titled “Great Men’s Houses.” On its own, it’s not worth the price of the book, but it's certainly well worth seeking out and reading.

Thanks to Lesley for hosting this highly enjoyable challenge!

Detail: Armchair Traveler Challenge Report