The BURIED Book Club discussion

Helen Weinzweig - (Canada, 1915–2010) only wrote 2 novels and one short story collection. Her novel Basic Black with Pearls won the Toronto Book Award in 1981. It only has 45 ratings, and all her other books combined give her 1 more rating for a total of 46 ratings.

Basic Black with Pearls will be released by NYRB in April of 2018! So hopefully soon it won't be AS buried as it is now. Here's some info about that book:

A brilliant, lost feminist classic that is equal parts domestic drama and international intrigue.

Shirley Kaszenbowski, nee Silverberg, is a middle-aged, middle-class woman in a Holt Renfrew tweed coat, a basic black dress, and a strand of real pearls. She may seem ordinary enough, pricing silk scarves at Eaton's or idling in hotel coffee shops, but in fact she is searching for her lover. He is an elusive figure, a man connected with "The Agency," a powerful technocrat who may or may not have suggested a rendezvous based on a secret code in the National Geographic. Her search takes her to the world of her past as a Jewish immigrant in the Spadina-Dundas area of Toronto. She finds the bakeries and rooming houses of her youth still haunted by survivors of postwar Europe and by her own memories of guilt and loss, while the consolations of art, opera, and pornography offer only echoes of her own illusions and desires. Her strange, wryly funny odyssey ends in a dramatic confrontation scene with her husband and "the other woman," as she trades in her basic black for another chance.

In Basic Black with Pearls, Weinzweig displays her gift for creating sympathetic characters in a slightly surreal, but always recognizable world.

And here's more info about her other book Passing Ceremony:

In this brilliant debut novel by Helen Weinzweig, the award-winning author of Basic Black With Pearls, a wedding reception becomes a gothic dream in which the bride, groom, family, and guests struggle with private obsessions, guilty fantasies of sex and power, and the constant failure of love. The bride is not all she seems and there is something ambiguous about the groom ― and about everyone else at the surreal and strangely moving wedding.

Like a piece of music, Passing Ceremony is composed of brief, suggestive fragments that grow into a tightly integrated whole. There are bits of real and imagined conversation; polite dialogues that slide into mad comic banality; and scenes that could be quiet nightmares out of Borges.

A satire and a rueful mediation on the ways people hurt one another, Weinzweig gives us a world suspended in time, an uneasy territory of the soul, which we all inhabit.

I can't find much info on Weinzweig online, but here's a PDF paper on her: http://journals.msvu.ca/index.php/atl...

Excerpts from that paper:

Helen Weinzweig's interests and career as a fiction writer recall those of George Eliot. The works of both describe contemporary women's struggles as wives, mothers, and daughters, and adapt existing narrative conventions to suit their subjects. Further, Eliot published her first novel, Adam Bede, in 1859, when she was 40, and Weinzweig began writing a century later, at the age of 45. Despite a delayed beginning, the first works of both writers reveal their originality as well as their artistic maturity. There the similarities end, however, for unlike Eliot, who enjoyed critical recognition during her lifetime, Weinzweig is one of Canada's marginalized writers of fiction.

To date, Helen Weinzweig has published two novels and a collection of short stories. Her marginalization is not so much the result of a relatively small oeuvre but is due largely to the surreal, often bleak vision that informs her writing, a combination that has challenged critics and alienated some readers. The briefest look at Weinzweig's work explains why this is so. Her work betrays an interest in modern painting, music, and, in particular, the French nouveau roman. Like the French novelists whom she admires — Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute foremost among them --Weinzweig eschews traditional elements such as plot, characterization, and setting as sources of context in her own fiction. Instead, she creates highly visual and fragmented worlds akin to abstract paintings that require the active participation of the reader in assembling the various parts of her literary canvases and interpreting their significance.

Nice work!

Thanks! I'm really excited to read her. The college library has her short story collection. I might read that first, since everything else is as yet unavailable to me without shelling out the bucks. I'll let you know what I think of her stories.

She sounds fantastic. Nice find, Jimmy!

Also, Passing Ceremony was an Anansi book, I see. I wonder if it was part of the Spiderline avant-garde series along with Graeme Gibson, Russell Marois, Marion Engle and so many other strange semi-lost gems of Canadian post/modernism. They were certainly putting out really interesting and daring work during those years, so it speaks well of this regardless.