Frances Greenslade's Blog

I'm re-reading A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. This time of year, I start thinking about "beach reading," by which I mean something juicy, totally engrossing and narrative-driven. Reading to get sun-burned by (because I stay too long, not wanting to put the book down). A Fine Balance isn't a beach read. It's like several novels in one and each story winds out in an inevitable flattening of the dreams of the characters. It is as sad it sounds. Sadder, because some of the things that can happen in India in 1975, especially in a Bombay slum, are so uniquely, strangely, heart-breakingly tragic that they're not even on my radar of potential tragedy. In my darkest 4 a.m. moments, I never wake and feel a wave anxiety about treasured pet monkeys. (if you've read the book, you'll probably remember this horrendous scene)
But Mistry is a genius because along with the sadness, there's the balance that the title refers to. And the book manages to be more beautiful than depressing.
I've also been watching a film called Raga about Ravi Shankar in the 1960s and 70s. He brought Indian music to North America and Europe, and Beatle George Harrison became his student and later used the sitar in some of his songs. Ravi Shankar says that in every raga, there is sadness, and he's always looking for the way to express it. Beauty, but also sadness. That's the fine balance, I think. As a writer, I'm always thinking about how to express it.

I first read this book a long time ago; I can tell by my name written on the inside cover in rounder, more careful handwriting than I have now. And I found a folded note inside that reads: Damon, Just gone for a walk. Help yourself to a cupcake. Slap some icing on it (them) L. And a phone number in different ink (not my writing; I never crossed my sevens). The note, written by my long-time friend Laurie who lives in Winnipeg and is still with her partner, Damon, suggests that either I lent this book to her, or I borrowed it from her, kept it and eventually wrote my name in it, thinking it was mine. Then again, I rarely write my name in my books unless I'm lending them.

The book smells like an attic and someone has written in it, in ink GUN=SELFHOOD, POWER. That was neither me nor Laurie. I must have bought the book secondhand. Whoever did it also underlined "Burrard Inlet," "Stanley Park," "Lion's Gate Bridge," "golf course," "New Westminster" and "outraged endurance," but then the underlinings peter out and past chapter nine, it's clean. It's as if the book was mined for uppercase meaning then abandoned once it'd given up its goods. That's probably unfair; it's not like I've never approached a book in such a businesslike way. Just not this book.

I remembered little of this book except that I liked it and that it traveled into the firs and pines of the BC deepwoods and that it made the familiar a little exotic and I liked that. Re-reading it tonight, I was delighted to find that when Maggie leaves the home she had loved but now hated, she stops at Hope and reflects on the two roads forking into the interior of BC and she chooses the Hope-Princeton. I always choose the Hope-Princeton too, though it's a home I love that I'm heading to. And she stops by the river, which she calls the Similkameen. And the Similkameen does run along that road, but first you pass through the wilder transition from the coastal rainforest -- the huge cedars and salmonberry undergrowth -- where the road runs along the Skagit River. That's the river I always stop beside (at least when the road in is passable, which is from about May to October).

I was re-reading Swamp Angel because my novel Shelter has been shortlisted for the BC Book Ethel Wilson Prize and when I heard, it reminded me of the book and of the writers like Wilson and Margaret Laurence and Gabrielle Roy and Adele Wiseman and Margaret Atwood, who I read when I was in my early twenties, those iconic McClelland and Stewart New Canadian Library books. I envied Margaret Laurence her cigarettes and coffee at her desk overlooking the Otonabee River and I wanted to do that. I don't have the river or the cigarettes but I spend my days writing at my desk looking out on the hills around Penticton and I feel a kinship to those writers who wrote things like "'I shall be all right. Just set me down near the river.'" (Ethel Wilson, Swamp Angel, 1954)

I'm posting the blog from my website here because it's something I've been thinking about a lot lately as unread novels pile up under my (now full) bookshelf.

I've started writing a new novel and I've been noticing how eclectic my reading habits get when I'm writing fiction. I have six partially read books on the floor by my desk, several more upstairs by my bed, and a few in the living room. When I was writing Shelter, I read books about survival, about building homes in the wilderness, about sailing adventures (or canoeing or kayaking). I read all my son's Gary Paulsen books; Hatchet is the first one -- what a great book. I read and re-read The Curve of Time by M. Wylie Blanchet, an account of a woman's voyage up and down the coast of British Columbia on a 25-foot boat with her five children. And I read and re-read Driftwood Valley, one of my favourite non-fiction books. Rita mentions in Shelter that it influenced her. It was written in 1946 by Theodora C. Stanwell-Fletcher about building a cabin in the woods in Northern British Columbia.

I also burned through books of mythology, fairytales, memoirs by people who had lived in the Chilcotin, and naturalist guides to edible plants. What I didn't read very much of, at least when I was writing first drafts, was fiction. I can't seem to read much fiction when I'm writing fiction. I do dip into various novels. Anything by Virginia Woolf was a favourite when I was writing Shelter. I'd open Mrs. Dalloway or The Waves at random, read a few pages, then put it away. It was kind of like knocking back a shot of espresso. I'd feel energized, a little feverish to try and go as deep as she could. I chose her partly because my writing is so different from hers. If Hemingway's writing was like an iceberg, only 1/8 revealed on the surface, with the other 7/8 hidden below, Woolf is down there swimming around under the ice in that shimmering world.

When I'm writing fiction, it's hard to read fiction because it takes me into someone else's world and I want to be in the world of my novel. I know I also walk around with a slightly vacant look on my face. I'm not a good conversationalist. I heard Neil Young say once that writing was the one thing he did where he didn't feel like he should be doing something else. Or to quote the Littlest Hobo, "there's a voice that keeps calling me..."

I just finished re-reading the Mahabharata -- not the whole thing, which is over 100,000 verses long, and eight times longer than the Iliad and the Odyssey put together. (I should put it on a course syllabus!)I read the shortened prose version by R. K Narayan that was published in 1978. What an amazing story it is, with echoes in so much other literature, including Homer and Shakespeare. Hard to give the plot of a 100,000-verse epic in a nutshell, but here's my attempt:

A blind king struggles to please both his own one hundred sons, the Kauravas, and his five nephews, the Pandava brothers. Duryodhana, his son, is consumed with jealousy over his cousins' good fortune and won't rest until they are destroyed. Yudhistira, the eldest Pandava brother struggles with his desire to escape conflict against his duty to perform the tasks of a warrior.

One of the most interesting characters in the epic is Draupadi, the woman who ends up the wife of all five Pandava brothers because of a slip of the tongue from their mother. When she is dragged from her palace bedroom, humiliated, paraded in front of crowds wearing only a thin sari and called a whore, she begs for one of her warrior husbands to come to her aid. But they all fail her. She says, "I do not understand why they all stand there transfixed, speechless and like imbeciles." The god Krishna hears her, though, and performs a miracle so that no matter how much the men unravel her sari, heaping a pile of cloth on the floor, her original sari stays on her body to protect her dignity.

I like the story because of its complex portrayal of human dilemmas. I feel Draupadi's rage at her husbands' powerlessness, but also understand their desire to avoid the conflict that they know will end in the destruction of their family members.

It boggles the mind to read and be moved by a text that was composed in about 400 BCE, but that was probably being recited orally hundreds of years earlier.

One year ago today, my phone rang at 7 a.m. It was my agent. "Are you up?" she asked. "Yes," I said. (I wasn't). It was 10 a.m. in Toronto and I knew she'd waited until the first respectable moment to call and so it must be important. "Have you checked your email yet?" she said. "No." "Go and check your email. I had a crazy email at 5 a.m. You need to print it out and frame it." The email was from the executive publisher of Random House, Canada. She said she'd been up all night reading the manuscript of my novel, Shelter. She had to go to the Giller Awards that evening and was worried about the black circles she'd have under her eyes from reading all night. A few minutes later, she sent another email about her affection for the two sisters, Maggie and Jenny. Her enthusiasm for the novel was every writer's dream. The next few days were a glorious blur of competing bids from other publishers, but nothing could match the sweetness of that image I had of Louise Dennys propped up on her pillows, sending middle-of-the-night emails on her Blackberry about Shelter.

I'm reading Patrick Lane's There is a Season about a year in his garden spent recovering from a life of alcoholism and drug abuse. It's fascinating and heartbreaking. What might be most disturbing is his description of his first drink when he was about twelve and his parents were out for a New Years Eve party. He mixes up some leftover alcohol he finds in the house and passes out on the kitchen floor. But he likes the feeling.

Lane has endured a harrowing emotional life, but he tells the story so matter-of-factly and with such beauty, even the awful parts. It reminds me of David Adams Richards on CBC radio one night, talking about a line from Dostoevsky: Beauty will save the world.

It's Lane's ability to see the beauty in the small world of his garden and even in the love that his father tried to show him so horribly and imperfectly that saves Lane.

Tragedy has beauty in it and that has to be one of the reasons that artists keep trying to portray it, not to be bleak, but to continue to have hope.

I'm reading Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks. He describes a phenomenon called musical hallucinations. These aren't just the annoying bits of songs you get caught in your head (which are called brainworms.) During a musical hallucination, the music is so vividly heard, you think you've left a radio on, or your neighbour is blasting the stereo. When he described it, I realized I've had this experience.

The most striking instance was after a four-day Medicine Wheel ceremony, an intense and beautiful few days and nights of singing and campfires, moonlight and blazing sunshine that culminated in, among other, better things, a raging migraine headache for me. The headache had dissipated when I headed home, alone, in my 1965 Valiant, a rattly but trusty old car. The trip was about an hour and I was tired. As I came to the crossroads about fifteen minutes from home, I heard the Eagle song we'd sung each night around the campfire rising in the car. The radio didn't work in the Valiant, so I knew it wasn't real, but it was so clear and insistent, I stopped the car and shook my head. It cleared momentarily, but as soon as I started to drive, it started up again. For weeks afterwards, whenever I drove the Valiant, the song would start up again.

I also used to hear Neil Young songs in that car on long roadtrips. The Valiant had good taste in music.

Zsuzsi Gartner's collection of short stories, Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, was recently long-listed for the Giller Prize. Full disclosure: Zsuzsi is a friend of mine. Her book is urban and frantic, not what I usually read. But I expect to see this book on the shortlist, too. Better Living is the kind of book writers want to read, because you can almost feel her fierce wrestling with the language. "Once, We were Swedes" is my favourite story in the collection. If you teach in the post-secondary system, you have to read this story. Sitting next to me as I read, my husband asked me what I was snickering about. The characters make their own language out of Ikea product names. "Sultan Blonda" means "noble man" or "to shut your eyes." "Besta" means "blockhead." You won't find a cliche in this collection. There is a character who says "Your voice is damaged swimwear." (then later,"Your voice is fresh cement.")

I remember seeing Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca on various bookshelves when I was a teenager. I don't think I ever read it, or if did, I didn't appreciate the sensitivity of her characterization of the narrator, a young woman plagued by self-doubt after she marries the wealthy Maxim, master of Manderley, a "gray stone manse on the windswept Cornish coast." This is the kind of novel you think it's going to be after you read the first line: "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." Shivers. Hard to tear myself away to attend to normal daily tasks like getting dressed.

I'm reading Manil Suri's The Age of Shiva. I've been reading literature about India and by Indian authors for quite a few years, and now, in preparation for my trip to India this coming winter, I'm reading everything Indian I can find.
I like Manil Suri's writing. It has a plain-spoken quality that I admire and the characters generally feel authentic. When I started the novel, it felt so much like I was reading a woman's voice that I kept checking the author photo to remind myself that he's male. But it's a disturbing book in many ways and, as I was reading, I sometimes felt reluctant to re-open it and get back to it.
Meera, the protagonist, is not a very likeable woman. She's alternately obstinate to the point of being self-destructive and then weak-willed to the point of being self-destructive. I found it difficult to reconcile these characteristics. Meera begins as a strong-willed young woman bent on self-preservation at all costs, but then makes such bizarrely bad choices that I felt real annoyance and impatience. I felt a bit like I was being manipulated by the author and it kept occurring. Just when it seems like something might actually go right for this woman, she sabotages herself again. Sure, people do this in real life, but somehow I wasn't quite convinced about Meera's motivation. I couldn't get my head around her wildly inconsistent personality. Still, I kept reading, which is a testament to the good writing.
The only thing I found distracting about the writing (and I never want to be distracted by the writing, even if it's beautiful) was the author's choice of second person voice for the second half of the book. It goes on far too long and there doesn't feel like there's a reason for it.
I'm not yet finished the book. As a mother of a son, it's seriously creeping me out. But I will read his first book, The Death of Vishnu, after this.