The Unexpected Twists and Turns: Rover

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Summer Reads: One Good Hustle by Billie Livingston

One Good Hustle
Billie Livingston
Random House Canada

Award-winning author Billie Livingston has once again used her crisp clean prose to deliver another compelling story about an at-risk teen coming to terms with the severe limitations of her once-idolized grifter parents. As in the author’s first novel Going Down Swinging and her collection of short stories, Greedy Little Eyes, there are no silk blouses or cashmere sweaters in One Good Hustle. Livingston spins a humorous gritty tale set in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby in the mid-80s that is both gripping and realistic.

Sixteen-year-old Samantha Bell (Sammie) leads a precarious life through no fault of her own. The daughter of two small-time hustlers, Sammie leaves home after a number of her mother’s alcohol and drug-induced episodes and ramblings about suicide. The victim of a hustle gone wrong, mother Marlene spirals out of control until Sammie finally seeks refuge at the home of high school friend Jill, whose working-class parents are caring and stable, something that Sammie finds both foreign and comforting. Sammie’s relationship with her own con artist father is equally as troubled, particularly when she is forced to see that he put her in harm’s way for the sake of a heist. Confronting her long-cherished beliefs about her parents, Sammie experiences intense feelings of disappointment, shame, betrayal and hope, a highly vulnerable situation rendered beautifully by Livingston in this coming-of-age novel.

The author has delivered a well-rounded character in Sammie. Still a street-smart teen able to see a potential hustle, which she uses to finance her driver’s ed classes, Sammie nevertheless remains drug and alcohol-free as a means to maintain what little control she has over her own life. She is also determined to finish high school, no small feat given her limited stability and guidance. Sammie’s life is anything but carefree, which Livingston expertly illustrates through the use of her friend Jill as a foil. Average teen Jill goes to bush parties and naively dives into a doomed romance, whereas Sammie finds the prospect of a relationship a highly stressful undertaking, a luxury she simply cannot afford.

Sammie keeps love-interest Drew at arm’s length for fear that his wealthy Christian family will discover the truth about her past. But Sammie has a lot of tracks to cover, which causes further turmoil. When Drew moves too close, Sammie physically strikes out, and this minor incident is what makes One Good Hustle so resoundingly real. As a young woman with few socially acceptable means for venting anger and frustration, Sammie suffers in silence, internalizing her feelings. Her lashing out in the face of mounting stress makes her character all the more credible and gives the reader a well-deserved break from the passive heroine so widely flogged in mainstream media.

Last year, in an interview with Billie Livingston on her YA novella taken from One Good Hustle, I asked her about the origins of Sammie’s character. She told me that in addition to drawing on family members and girls she had gone to school with, Livingston had grown up with many small-time hustler families like the Bells. It is perhaps the author’s first-hand knowledge of this milieu that makes this novel ring so true.

One Good Hustle will remind many of us not only of those dark days when we feared becoming our parents but also of just how trying those teen years can be. Many young readers will find validation for their own experiences in the book, particularly those who are marginalized and who rarely find anything resembling their own reality on the pages of a novel. Livingston has once again given us a stellar book about people we see every day on the street but rarely ever meet.

This review has been cross-posted at Rover Arts Uncovered.

Other posts on Billie Livingston
Interview with Author Billie Livingston
Review: Going Down Swinging by Billie Livingston
Review: Greedy Little Eyes by Billie Livingston

Other possible books for the beach
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
Ru by Kim Thuy
Fifty Shades of Grey
The Blue Dragon by Robert Lepage and Marie Michaud
The Return by Dany Laferrière
Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter
Interview with Carmen Aguirre, Chilean Resistance Fighter
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
The Antagonist by Lynn Coady
Irma Voth by Miriam Toews
Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien
Incendiary by Chris Cleave
Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell
The Girl Without Anyone by Kelli Deeth

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Summer Reads: Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

I was recently asked by Rover Arts to write about a classic summer read. The one that immediately came to mind was Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, a graphic novel, my first. After years of disdain for a genre I deemed little more than kid stuff, I relented and quickly discovered how wrong I was...

If you love adventure and have a feisty left-leaning inner core you will love Persepolis.

Here's what I wrote for Rover:

The Complete Persepolis
Marjane Satrapi
Pantheon

Forget all your preconceived notions of Iran, and dive into Persepolis, a gripping graphic memoir of the author’s childhood and adolescence growing up in a middle class family during the Islamic Revolution. The feisty young Marjane not only believes that one day she will become a prophet, but also pretends that she is Che Guevara marching around with her friends. While her left-wing intellectual parents are in the streets of Tehran protesting the Shah, Marjane demands that her father get rid of his Cadillac and that the maid be allowed to eat at the family dinner table.

The Islamic Revolution, however, takes its toll on the Satrapis. Imprisoned family members return to tell tales of torture and murder, while Marjane is forced to attend an Islamic school and don the chador, something that she and her mother protest vehemently until they are attacked in the streets by fundamentalists. The parents fear for their daughter’s safety because of her increasingly vocal opposition to authority, and at 14, Marjane is sent away to school in Austria where she languishes.

Persepolis is my all-time favourite graphic novel, and the one I most often recommend. Not only does it give the reader a detailed portrait of a country sadly known more for its religious fanatics and autocrats than its rich history, but it also lets us see the everyday life of an average person, a girl no less, during the tumultuous times of the Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War. Persepolis piqued my curiosity about Iran and led me to Christiane Bird’s Iranian travelogue Neither East Nor West and Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, two other books I recommend about a country I dream one day of visiting.

Other related reviews

Fifty Shades of Grey, an update
Joyce Carol Oates on her Life and US Politics
Fifty Shades of Grey
The Blue Dragon by Robert Lepage and Marie Michaud
The Return by Dany Laferrière
Meet Revolutionary Mother
Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter
Interview with Carmen Aguirre, Chilean Resistance Fighter
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
The Antagonist by Lynn Coady
Irma Voth by Miriam Toews
Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien
Going Down Swinging by Billie Livingston
Incendiary by Chris Cleave
Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell
The Girl Without Anyone by Kelli Deeth

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Relax, Regroup, Refocus

If you're trying to move away from social media, switch off your smart phone or disengage from the current political situation in Montreal, then you might want to head down to the Conservatoire de musique et d’art dramatique de Montréal for the last day of the first annual Yoga Festival Montreal. There are numerous sessions to work on your breathing, unblock your chakras and reach new depths of consciousness. This is a great way to relax and regroup, but more importantly the perfect means for silencing the background noise in our lives.

Yoga Festival Montreal, brainchild of the Yoga Community of Montreal (YOCOMO), is a grassroots initiative aimed at recognizing the breadth of yoga practice and skill. The purpose of the Festival is to empower individuals and connect the city's vast range of traditions and practices, and celebrate its vibrant diversity. More than 30 different sessions have been scheduled in the spacious conservatory studios, and the cheerful volunteers will direct you to your session of choice.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to attend a session on ayurvedic yoga with Bita Bitajian, who trains at the Ayurvedic Institute with Dr. Vasant Lad in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Ayurveda is the traditional Indian system of health that recommends a daily regimen of yoga to offset imbalances, while respecting our life stages and the changing seasons.

In the last session of the day, I heard the wise words of Dr. Madan Bali, the founder-director of the Montreal-based Yoga Bliss. An inspirational example of a healthy lifestyle, 88-year-old Dr. Bali has been credited with introducing yoga to schools, hospitals, community centres and corporations, as well as developing yoga as a complementary form for treating psychosomatic disorders.

If your yoga experience involved small dark studios with wooden floors groaning under your every move, I recommend you stop by the conservatoire today to luxuriate in the large luminous studios. In fact, I don't think that YOCOMO could have found a more inspiring venue.

You still have a chance to catch some enlightening sessions today. You might want to dissolve the negativity in your life by meditating on the image of light with Juniper Glass, learn about the dynamic sacred art of Nritya, the yoga of dance, with Amrita Choudury or engage in a discussion on the interplay of sex and yoga (Brahmacharya) with Lauren Rudick.

Namaste!

This was cross-posted at Rover Arts under Festival City.

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Review of Ru by Kim Thuy

By Kim Thuy

Translated by Sheila Fischman

Random House

This review has been cross-posted at Rover: Montreal Arts Uncovered.

Recipient of several literary prizes, including the Governor General’s Award for Literature, Ru is the autobiography of Kim Thuy. Under the name of Nguyen An Tinh, the author recounts her story: from her childhood in a palatial Saigon home, which her family is later forced to share with the invading Communist forces, to the squalor of the Malaysian refugee camp where she and her family fled before coming to Canada by boat. Starting out in Granby, Quebec, in the late 1970s, her parents work in menial jobs so that their children may one day live their “American” dream. As an adult, the protagonist returns to her native Vietnam where she is told that she is too fat to be Vietnamese and is mistaken for an escort and a Japanese tourist.

In Vietnamese, Ru means lullaby, while in French, it signifies a flow of money, blood or tears, three recurring themes in this book. The narrative is a series of vignettes, usually no longer than a page, taking the reader back and forth in time and space. One vignette segues into the next with a single thematic thread. In one instance, the author describes her silence growing up in the shadow of her cousin Sao Mai, who is the same age and gender. In the next, she is attending a Canadian military cadet school so that she can learn English for free. She spends her summer receiving incomprehensible orders from over-exuberant teens who know nothing of the horrors of war. At the end of the summer in her first English words to her superior officer, our protagonist bids him adieu: “Bye. Asshole.”

As all writers know, appealing to the five senses is key to bringing the reader into the story. In Ru, Thuy not only relies on vibrant colours and rich sensual detail to layer her narrative, but she also introduces the refreshingly original, such as the texture of a comma, the sharp smell of sun-baked hair or the sound of crumpled dollar bills as they hit the feet of naked young women. And it is perhaps the rich detail of Ru that will make it so compelling for the North American reader, as it fills in the many cultural blanks we have of a country and a people about whom we have heard so much but know so little.

For many of us, our ideas of Vietnam stem from the black and white war footage of the nightly US news in the early 1970s, only to be followed by a series of Hollywood movies taken from the perspective of US soldiers. There were North and South Vietnamese: the enemies and the victims, some of whom later became boatpeople. But for those of us who had Vietnamese classmates, we were never to ask them any questions about their past for fear we would unearth some horrific memory.

Although the story is at times harrowing, it also takes humorous turns. In addition to shedding some light on the presence of the “hairy hands,” as the US GIs were known, the book also gives further details on the invading North Vietnamese soldiers who were often illiterate country bumpkins. The young operatives occupying the family’s Saigon home once rifled through the mother’s undergarment drawer only to discover her bras. Convinced they had found coffee filters, they immediately wanted to know why there were always two together. They deduced that one never drinks coffee alone. In another instance, the Communist soldiers occupying their home demanded that the family return their fish to them. The soldiers had apparently stored their dinner in the large white bowl in the shared washroom, unaware of the porcelain fixture’s purpose. The family had unwittingly flushed the fish away.

With its innovative, yet simple narrative structure, Ru is a rich, sensual, poetic and enlightening read. My only criticism was its length. As I turned the last page, I frowned. At 139 pages, it was far too short. I wanted more.

Other reviews:

Fifty Shades of Grey

The Return by Dany Laferrière
Meet Revolutionary Mother
Review: Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter
Interview with Carmen Aguirre, Chilean Resistance Fighter
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
The Antagonist by Lynn Coady
Irma Voth by Miriam Toews
Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien
Going Down Swinging by Billie Livingston
Incendiary by Chris Cleave
Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell
The Girl Without Anyone by Kelli Deeth

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Review: The Return by Dany Laferrière

The Return
Dany Laferrière
Translation: David Homel
D&M Publishers

Just a brief note about this book: Laferrière is a great writer, and I had no idea how big he was until I had to review one of his books for Rover, where this is also cross-posted. Although I have seen the author on TV here in Quebec a number of times, I`d never read any of his books. In the end, I read The Return three times and still felt like I was seeing some universal truth for the first time. This read is well worth your book-buying buck.

Winner of the 2009 Prix Médicis, Dany Laferrière’s eleventh novel is about his return to his native Haiti after living 33 years in exile. Half prose, half poetry, The Return is a finely crafted autobiographical account of the author’s voyage back to his place of birth. But his homecoming is bittersweet, as he bears the news of his father’s passing.

Windsor Laferrière, the former Assistant Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and the former Mayor of Port-au-Prince was driven out of Haiti by ruler Papa Doc, François Duvalier, and later settled in Brooklyn. His father had left when Dany was four or five years old, and before that, he had spent much of his time in hiding. As a result, although the son loved his father, he never really knew him. A generation after his father`s exile, the son too flees Haiti after a close friend and journalist is murdered. The stifling loneliness of exile took its toll on the mind of the elder Laferrière, but for the son it was the exile in time that was more pitiless. He missed his childhood more than his country. Going back to the Haiti of his youth and visiting his family is just one part of the Return. The final leg involves going back to Baradères, the village of his father`s birth.

Although returning from exile is difficult for many North Americans to grasp, Laferrière continually draws his readers into his story through common experience, which starts on the second line of the very first page, “The inevitable phone call that every middle-aged man one day will receive. My father has died.” As many can attest, the death of a parent is one of life’s milestones and a harsh reminder of our own mortality, but it is also a time of tremendous personal growth. In the author`s case, he is able to discover much about his father, and by extension himself, through the anecdotes of his father`s friends in Brooklyn, Port-au-Prince and later in the countryside on his way to Baradères.

The Return is replete with thought-provoking observations about the human condition, from the dynamics and cyclical nature of power in Haiti to the preoccupation with hunger and finding one’s next meal. Laferrière’s writing is poetic, profound and beautiful, and this was only the translation. Is it possible that the original was even more moving? The author eloquently reminisces about his country of birth only to discover that although he speaks Creole, he is no longer considered Haitian by the people he meets.

About life and death, the city and country, north and south, The Return is also a rumination about identity, time and space. A single reading of this novel will yield its beauty and thoughtfulness, but to fully appreciate it warrants a second reading. For anyone who has lost a parent, this is a must-read.

Other book reviews:

Meet Revolutionary Mother
Review: Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter
Interview with Carmen Aguirre, Chilean Resistance Fighter
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
The Antagonist by Lynn Coady
Irma Voth by Miriam Toews
Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien
Going Down Swinging by Billie Livingston
Incendiary by Chris Cleave
Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell
The Girl Without Anyone by Kelli Deeth

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Occupy the Holidays

Accumulation of Useless Crap

Occupy Christmas: International Day of Action has been a welcome initiative for many of us. The holiday season is a hectic, stressful time for working families who end up spending well beyond their means on gifts, meals and entertainment. This spending spree now extends beyond the holiday season and into the New Year, as lining up outside big box stores for big ticket items has become a popular new tradition in the past decade. The real winners in all this are the corporations, credit card companies and banks, otherwise known as the 1%.

Most of us are painfully aware of this fact and have already adopted the holiday measures the Occupy Movement has advocated:

Supporting the local economy by making purchases from local merchants. This even involves filling our gas tanks at locally-owned gas stations. Buying gifts from local artisans and produce from farmers' markets.

Leaving our credit cards at home because banks make their money from interest and late payments.

Using strictly cash and withdrawing only the amount of money we need. Remember that ATM or debit cards charge merchants 2% to 5%.

If North Americans adopted these few measures, we might actually succeed in cutting into the profits and power of the 1%, but unfortunately the Occupy Movement does not have the means to get this message out. Media in the US is concentrated in the hands of a wealthy few who also own many of the corporations that profit from holiday spending and year-round consumerism. Concentration of media ownership is also the case here in Quebec, where Québecor is king, taking in $4 billion in revenues last year. This corporation alone prints 37 dailies, 7 free commuter papers, 200 community weeklies and its media holdings include the TVA 24-hour news network and the canoe.ca news portal. Together, Québecor media reaches 90% of French-speaking households in this province.It`s no coincidence that Occupy Montreal camped outside the front door of the corporate headquarters.

The likelihood of Canada's media titans Québecor, Shaw, Rogers and Bell carrying the Occupy Movement's media message of buying locally and using strictly cash year-round are pretty slim. That's why the Occupy Movement should be advocating the following fourth and fifth measures:

Read, support and make donations to independent media and share the information via Twitter, Facebook and other social media.

Continue to expand your social media contacts and use targeted hashtags to help get important information out.

For instance you might want to tweet something along these lines:
Kai Nagata writes 3-part series for indy Tyee on Quebecor's hold on Quebec
http://bit.ly/o64hTa #occupy #indymedia

If you don`t have time to comb through left-leaning media, Toronto Star writer and social media maven Antonia Zerbisias or Montrealer Neath Turcot are people worth friending on Facebook.

Here`s a list of indy media outlets. If I`ve forgot one please leave a comment below with the name or link.

Indy Media

Canada
Adbusters: Where the Occupy Movement started.
Rabble
Tyee

US
Truth Dig (My favourite!)
Truthout
Common Dreams
Democracy Now!
Alternet
The Nation
ZNet

General news with a different frame but not independent: Al Jazeera and the Guardian (Great Occupy Wall Street coverage to date.)

A portion of this has been cross-posted at Rover Arts.

Related posts:
Occupons Montréal in Photos
Peaceful Tactic: Keep Wall Street Busy
Interview with Carmen Aguirre, Chilean Resistance Fighter

The Unexpected Twists and Turns

Summer Reads: One Good Hustle by Billie Livingston