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Irish Writer Colm Tóibín With Eleanor Wachtel


The Blue Metropolis Literary Festival has grown tremendously in popularity since its inception in 1999. Not only have pre-festival ticket sales soared, but so has the festival’s ability to draw internationally acclaimed writers. On Thursday night, the Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix was presented to Colm Tóibín before a sold-out crowd at the Bibliothèque Nationale. The prize and $10,000 purse are awarded each year to a world-renowned author in recognition of a lifetime of literary achievement. The Irish writer is no stranger to literary awards, having won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Man Booker Prize, among many others.

Best-selling Canadian author and jury member Claire Rothman Holden told the audience how the jury had selected Tóibín over the other illustrious contenders, which included Barbara Kingsolver, Orhan Pamuk and Rohinton Mistry. It was in part the writer’s versatility. In addition to being a novelist and short story writer, he is an essayist, poet, literary critic, playwright and journalist. “It was also the ease with which he writes, and the fact that he has accomplished all of this before the age of 60,” said Rothman Holden.

After the formal award presentation, Tóibín was joined on stage by Eleanor Wachtel, the host of CBC Radio’s “Writers and Company.” It might be assumed that a man named one of Britain’s top 300 intellectuals would be a snob, but this was not the case. With a keen sense of humour, he spoke frankly with Wachtel about his recent work, Broadway play, religion and family.

Although the Enniscorthy native is best known for his novels The Master and Brooklyn, it was his most recent work, The Testament of Mary that seemed to most interest Wachtel. Tóibín chose to breathe new life into the tale of the mother of Christ, something he was surprised no one had tried before. Instead of the meek and mild version we’re all familiar with, Mother Mary is imbued with a fierce intelligence, in spite of being illiterate. In addition to being incurious about what her son is doing, she refers to the disciples as a group of misfits and leaves his crucifixion before he dies. The premier performance of the Broadway production of "The Testament of Mary" was performed last Monday night in New York, and as can be expected some religious groups were up in arms. Nevertheless, the author showed genuine enthusiasm for the standing ovation his play received, the instant reaction a novelist never sees from someone reading his book.

On the topic of religion, the audience learned that Tóibín had once entertained the thought of joining the priesthood. “My family thought it was funny,” said the writer. The second youngest of five children had even considered something grander. “If I’d joined the Church then I wanted to be a Bishop,” said Tóibín. He admitted, however, that in spite of being a sucker for stained glass and enjoying Bach’s religious music, he just couldn’t bring himself "to believe any of it.”

A recurring theme is Tóibín’s work is family. His university-educated father was a teacher, local journalist and historian. His death when the writer was only 12 was devastating. “It was one of the first things to surface in therapy,” said the author. “After a death, everyone acts as if nothing has happened, life goes on and the whole issue becomes unmentionable. It’s like having half your face bitten off, but still having to smile.” The author made a number of thought-provoking statements about the truth of our interior lives, our secret selves, and how these thoughts can sometimes only be validated through reading experiences similar to our own.

His wise words were more than worth the admission price. As I walked up the steps of the auditorium listening to other people’s excited chatter about what they had just heard, there was a rush to get out of the doors, but it wasn’t to go home. A larger than usual crowd was milling around the display tables with Tóibín’s books, smiling and looking exhilarated.

This has been cross-posted at Rover Arts.

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Bombay Wali and other stories

Bombay Wali and other stories
Veena Gokhale

A former Bombay journalist, Veena Gokhale has penned her first collection of 12 short stories set almost entirely in India. While her stories set in Bombay will impart a genuine taste and flavour of India familiar to Indophiles, there is a definite departure from traditional India in this collection, giving a sense that change is in the air. The author throws in a few surprises, such as a story set in Japan in the last third of the book, serving as a type of aesthetic contrast, in addition to a tale about a young Canadian woman who finds moving spiritual enlightenment in Kathmandu. For anyone who loves stories about the Indian subcontinent, this collection offers some gems that are both evocative and visually pleasing.

The title story, “Bombay Wali,” also the collection’s longest, brings together a number of young professional women eking out an existence in Bombay. Renuka’s dreams are shattered when she has her bag slashed and money stolen outside a bank. Too ashamed to tell her father, she entertains the idea of robbing a bank, a plan suggested by her friend Gulnar on a girls’ night out. In desperation, Renuka agrees to take part. For their disguise, six burqas are purchased, and then the plans abruptly change. This leads to a less than satisfying ending to an otherwise original and engrossing tale. “Bombay Wali” is a welcome shift from the traditional portrayal of Indian women.

Equally audacious is “the Room,” which opens with a young couple, Suj and Vikram, smoking an illicit substance. As their relationship becomes more intimate, Suj resists the pressure to take a key for a room from Vikram’s unsavoury friend so that the couple might be alone. Although Suj is portrayed as more sexually open than her friends, as the reader witnesses, the stakes are still high for even the most minor displays of public affection.

My favourite in the collection is “Zindagi Itefaq Hai” (Life is Chance). Vishwanath Iyer is an investigative journalist at The Disquieter, a small-time Bombay rag. As fate would have it, page two of his report, which contains a key quote, is blown out the window and into the alleyway. Unable to retrieve his page two, Vish rushes to the station where his source, a judge, is catching a train. Both humorous and realistic, this story is easy to visualize, “The station was a tide of bodies, a cacophony of sounds – human and mechanical, a solid flow of heat-resistant energy. Nevertheless, the announcer’s steady voice, talking alternatively in Marathi, Hindi and English, managed to prevail over the chaos.” In spite of its somewhat weak ending, “Zindagi Itefaq Hai” feels like the beginning of a very entertaining full-length novel.

Other noteworthy stories include “the Tea Drinker” about an adolescent boy who befriends a rich social outcast and “Freire Stopped in Bombay,” which details the ravages of hunger on a poor student who is too proud to borrow money. In addition, despite its pedestrian title, “Middle Age Jazz and Blues” is the most beautiful story in the collection. At a jazz concert, middle-aged single Feroza is struck by the vision of the love of her life, who died tragically.

As is usually the case, some stories are not as interesting as others. However, in spite of some vague references to “things” and “stuff,” a handful of heavy adverbs and some unconventional dialogue tags, Veena Gokhale shows genuine promise as a short story writer and future novelist. Let’s hope she chooses to write more about the Bombay newspaper world.


This has been cross-posted at Rover Arts.



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Drawn & Quarterly Presents Alison Bechdel

It was still light out on Friday night when I left wearing rubber boots to see Alison Bechdel at the Ukrainian Hall, an event sponsored by Drawn and Quarterly and the Institute For Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at McGill. As I trudged through the slush of the late spring snow and dodged spraying mud from passing cars on St-Denis, I wondered what Bechdel would talk about, even though I knew she really didn't have to do much to please the crowd. The syndicated cartoonist of the long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For and critically acclaimed graphic memoirist has legions of adoring fans. The evening's presenter even told the crowd that a video of Bechdel rescuing an earwig from the kitchen sink garnered more than 7,000 views.

In the end, however, it was not her talk that was the most interesting, but the Q&A at the end. Both of her groundbreaking graphic memoirs Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama were more widely read than I had ever imagined. It was also interesting to see her reaction to personal questions that appeared to hit a little too close to home.

No one can deny that authors speaking in public have some expectation of privacy, so why wouldn't Bechdel?

A proponent of "the personal is the political," Bechdel (pronounced Bekdel) writes and draws about very personal issues in great detail. In her first wildly successful graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, she chronicles her childhood and early adulthood in a rural Pennsylvania town and her complex relationship with her father, a funeral home director and high school English teacher. Her father is overbearing and at times violent, like many dads of that era, but he also lives a secret life. Just as the author is coming to terms with her own sexuality, she realizes that her father, too, is gay. It is around this time that there is a tragic accident and her father dies. However, the daughter sees it as a suicide.

Her second graphic memoir, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama, is equally as personal. Bechdel writes about her relationship with her very distant mother, who never fully gives her blessing to the memoir. It is also abundantly clear that Fun Home was not a family favourite. Are You My Mother? goes into detail about Bechdel's relationships and her psychotherapy with multiple references to Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich and Donald Winnicott.  The book does not offer the same closure as Fun Home, but then making sense of our relationships with our mothers is often a work-in-progress.

Although Bechdel admitted at the Q&A that she was not pleased with the end-result of Are You My Mother?, it was nevertheless a critical success.

The talk and slide show of Dykes to Watch Out For were in fact short. The Q&A started like most other with a few timid questions until a sexologist came to the microphone to ask the author about the openness of her therapists to Bechdel's sexual orientation. The author was frank about her positive experiences. At any other Q&A, this would have been a cringe moment, but this time it wasn't. In fact, I nearly made a move to the mic myself. I had my own question. I wanted to know how the little Pennsylvania town where she grew up reacted to Fun Home. But clearly, I was not alone, as many more people quickly joined the line to ask a question. A therapist said that she used Are You My Mother? with her patients as a means to teach the heavy-handed writing of Winnicott. There was also a question from a teacher who taught Fun Home to his highschool English class. Bechdel said that the book was used in college English classes and that she always found it strange that students talked about her father as an actual character.

Then the question everyone was expecting materialized: What did Bechdel's mother think of Are You My Mother? The author took a step back and put her hand over her mouth before answering. Her mother was not happy. "I had to take her to Las Vegas," she said.

Then it was announced that there was enough time for two more questions for the last two people in line. The following person asked a question about the Bechdel test for films and then asked why neither of her siblings appeared in Are You My Mother? Again the author's hand covered her mouth. "Ahh, that's a bit of a hornet's nest," she said. "I can't talk about that." Then she waved her hand in the air and called an end to the question period, leaving one last person in line.

Alison Bechdel has truly espoused "the personal is the political" and her books have helped and validated the experiences of many, but I still think that her honesty and openness may have come at a very high personal price.

This has been cross-posted at Rover Arts.

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Gay Dwarves of America by Anne Fleming

There are a lot of great writers in Canada, yet there seems to be little meritocracy. While some great writers are widely promoted, others rarely get the attention they deserve. This is the case of the inventive, unique and moving Gay Dwarves of America (GDA) by Anne Fleming.

True, it could be that GDA is a collection of short stories, not always the first thing people reach for when they read. Or, as the title suggests, some of the stories are unconventional, even outlandish, maybe not exactly what everyone might be in the mood for. Nevertheless, the reader will be generously rewarded with this refreshingly original collection of short stories. Fleming strikes that fine balance between humour and realism, reeling us in with a few laughs only to show us a more serious issue we might never have considered.

The nine-story collection contains a wide variety of tales, from the stellar and almost mainstream "Thorn-blossoms" about an eccentric hockey mom who must contend with her once ambitious journalist mother now stricken with Alzheimer's, to the experimental and self-explanatory, "Thirty-One One Word Stories."

In the middle of the spectrum, there are stories about a boy on a unicycle, a bearded parasitologist named Edna and a musical about a bunch of wannabe artists working in inventory at the back of an outdoor equipment store. This story includes a chorus of cashiers and of course (?), a love triangle with the cuckold in a coma.Yes, this is a laugh-out-loud book, but it also elicits a range of other emotions.

The title story, "Gay Dwarves of America," is about two college roommates who, on a whim, set up a chat room for gay men with dwarfism. However, when one of the roommates receives a serious email from a mother who suspects that her son, a little person, is gay, a distance develops between the two friends.

My favourite, "Puke Diary" is about the funny and harrowing events surrounding each family member's experience with vomiting. This even includes an entry on Sarah, the family cat. My least favourite was the "Backstock: the Musical." Although original, I found it long and had to restart it a few times.

GDA is not a quick read and is best enjoyed over an extended period of time, and preferably not on your commute to work. The conspicuous lime green jacket attracted quite a few smiles and inquisitive looks on the metro. Or was it my giggling?

Anne Fleming's stories have been widely published in literary journals, and she has been shortlisted for both the Governor General's Award for Fiction and the Danuta Gleed Award. That said, although GDA might not be considered mainstream fiction, I'm still surprised that it didn't generate more buzz. Fleming is an original talent that shouldn't be missed.

This review has been cross-posted at Rover Arts.


Other book reviews:
One Good Hustle by Billie Livingston
The World is Moving Around Me by Dany Laferrière
The Return by Dany Laferrière
The Goodtime Girl by Tess Fragoulis


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