About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Mark Anthony Jarman
Rave The Toronto Star (CAN) \"\'Burn Man on a Texas Porch,\' from Jarman’s outstanding 2000 collection 19 Knives, is a canny choice to open the current volume; it is not only one of the finest Canadian short stories ever written, exemplifying what the short form is capable of on a stylistic, technical level, it represents in microcosm the elements that persist throughout Jarman’s very particular oeuvre. These include a rough-hewn male protagonist nevertheless possessed of an almost romantic sensibility; a fragmented structure; and compressed, allusive language that lands just this side of poetry ... The 21 stories in Burn Man, selected by the author himself, are not ordered chronologically but rather the way a musician might sequence tracks on an album, paying careful attention to modulations in tempo and rhythm and how individual pieces play against one another. This offers readers who might have encountered these stories previously in the context of individual collections a new experience ... The mordant humour in situations such as these helps leaven what might otherwise be a series of brutal, downbeat stories. Though Jarman is rarely without hope, even if that hope is tinged with a recognition of existential pain.\
Patrick DeWitt
Mixed Toronto Star (CAN) The aching heart of The Librarianist is a piercing seriocomic character study of isolation and abandonment. Would that deWitt had left his more flamboyant tendencies in the drawer for this one.
Claire Dederer
Rave Toronto Star (CAN) Carefully argued, densely nuanced essays examining her own conflicted emotional and intellectual responses to consuming art created by people she knows have harmed others ... Her final assessment may be contingent but, given the slipperiness of the human condition, it could hardly have been otherwise.
Stephen Marche
Mixed The Toronto Star (CAN) While Marche is adept at uncovering the fault lines that exist in the U.S. polity and extrapolating their significance for the stability of American democracy, his imagined narratives of possible inciting incidents for a widespread civil conflict are less convincing, especially after two years of an ongoing global pandemic ... The decision to structure his book around imagined events such as a presidential assassination or a catastrophic flood loses some of its force in the context of COVID-19, actual wildfires in California and lethal tornadoes in Kentucky, and a geopolitical reality that has effectively rendered dystopian fiction indistinguishable from kitchen sink realism. He frames the possibility of an assault on the U.S. Capitol in conditional terms — the country \'would not respond rationally\' — ignoring what we know about the actual fallout from Jan. 6, 2021. (Marche does mention the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, but briefly and without much elaboration) ... To a certain extent, Marche falls victim to the forces that anyone trying to write a book-length study of our current moment must confront: the plain fact that history is galloping too quickly to even attempt a long view. By the time a book is printed, the situation on the ground will have changed beyond all recognition. If a futurist is someone who makes guesses for a living, it is not necessary to engage in supposition about where America may be headed. We’ve already seen it in action, and it ain’t pretty.
Sarah Hall
Mixed The Toronto Star (CAN) There’s a lot going on here and it’s hard not to suppose that Hall has overextended herself ... Any one of these plot streams would have made for a powerful short story and the novel is a reminder that it is the short form in which Hall really excels ... Writing about the physical and psychological effects of pandemic lockdowns in such close proximity to the actual experience of the past two years may prove a bit too close for the kind of distance such a meditation seems to demand ... The novel’s final page includes an explicit connection between Edith and her art, but the survival that opened the book is undercut by the realization that it is contingent — her resilience will inevitably run out. It’s a sobering notion that the novel is not quite substantial enough to fully inhabit.
Helen Oyeyemi
Positive Toronto Star (CAN) Much of the success of Oyeyemi’s narrative will hinge upon a reader’s willingness to buy into the oddity and bizarre scenarios the author infuses into the fibre of her story — everything from a woman who hides emeralds in her mouth and chokes on them in her sleep to a couple of blank white paintings that divulge figures to their viewers in a kind of trompe l’oeil ... At its core, Peaces asks what happens when we are unable to recognize the most significant figures in our lives. Does that make us insane, or just human? ... Little is explicitly stated in Peaces; Oyeyemi has no interest in making things easy for us.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Positive Toronto Star Nguyen’s erudite narrator...is a vehicle for the author’s deep knowledge of philosophical and social history ... the narration forms a useful corrective for pervasive Western narratives of Southeast Asian experience, though this sometimes occurs at the expense of the narrative’s forward momentum. The danger with novels of ideas is that the ideas threaten to suffocate the novel; in the case of The Committed, the more didactic elements take attention away from the other half of the book, which reads like a high-octane thriller. Here, the cultural critique is equally piquant...but it is more seamlessly integrated into the narrative ... a novel that is bifurcated at its core.
Anakana Schofield
Rave Quill & Quire (CAN) As with Joyce and Faulkner, Schofield is primarily concerned with weaving her tapestry via innovative approaches to narration and structure. If Martin John fractured its narrative by breaking down scenes and incidents into discrete chunks of elliptical prose, Bina pushes this technique even farther, with successive short passages that read like point-form notes or jottings ... Schofield’s anger is precisely calibrated and she strikes her targets mercilessly ... The humour in Bina is acerbic, though it drops off in the final third, as anger gives way to melancholy and mourning at the loss of a friend. There is irony here, too, in the complicated moral calculus involved in Bina’s calling and the fact that she has been brought up on charges for the one incident in which she insists she did not have a direct hand. This is typical of the author, whose subtlety is surpassing ... Schofield locates herself in the vanguard of a group of strong women writers – Rachel Cusk, Eimear McBride, Valeria Luiselli, Anna Burns – who are radically revising the novel’s potential and pushing it forward as a form. She calls this book \'a novel in warnings,\' as if putting the reader on notice as to its singularity and calibrated strangeness. Her work is challenging and perturbing, sure. It is also, pace Marie Kondo, a source of much joy.
S. D. Chrostowska
Positive Quill and Quire (CAN) The Eyelid is a highly allusive work, namechecking everyone from Paul Éluard and Victor Hugo to Saint-Pol-Roux, a French Symbolist whose notion of \'idéorealism\' involved the use of art as a locus to overlay reality and the world of ideas. Chrostowska is not above being playful ... If the pervasive literary allusions provide one unifying force throughout the novel, another is the use of irony ... a densely philosophical novel that addresses a number of undeniably pressing concerns for early 21st-century society: the pressures of conformity, the demands for increased productivity in a connected and information-saturated world, and the withering of the imagination as a creative force ... the book sometimes plays its hand a bit too forcefully, with swaths of polemic shoehorned into the text in place of narrative ... This slim novel contains an outsized ambition and an authorial agenda that are all too rare in today’s literary culture. That it doesn’t always succeed in its execution is perhaps forgivable; it reminds us of the subversive nature of the individual mind and its power to dream itself into a better existence.
Clarice Lispector, Trans. by Katrina Dodson
Positive The Globe and Mail Lispector\'s writing – dense, often engaging in aspects of surrealism or disjunction, and steeped in a tradition of Jewish mysticism – is not easy, or particularly comfortable ... These stories indicate that Lispector could be straightforward enough when she wanted to be. Perhaps more typical, however, are stories such as The Egg and the Chicken, which features a cascading series of free-associative images flowing out of the quotidian moment of noticing an egg on a kitchen table ... Also typical here is a focus on the domestic, though this is seen through a lens that aggressively defamiliarizes everyday objects and experiences.
Margaret Atwood
Mixed Quill & Quire ...a propulsive narrative that owes more than a little to the drive and momentum found in the wildly popular television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. If the earlier book was a dystopian allegory, The Testaments more closely resembles a thriller, complete with multiple plot twists, double- and triple-crosses, and a daring escape from captivity by car and boat. The languorous pace of The Handmaid’s Tale is jettisoned in favor of a narrative that races from one event to the next, driving the reader forward by the sheer force of the storytelling. What gets lost in this transaction is the careful attention to metaphor that infused the first book: there is nothing in The Testaments to compare, for example, to the extended symbolism of eyes and seeing that ran throughout the earlier novel ... What Atwood has produced, then, is a work that is sure to change nobody’s mind: it will delight her fans and annoy her detractors.
Harriet Alida Lye
Mixed The Quill & Quire ...propulsive, occasionally frustrating ... Much of the way this [narrative] plays out feels overdetermined, in no small measure because of the heavy-handed symbolism inherent in the farm’s colony of bees ... There’s a lot going on here, and Lye keeps the narrative moving at a brisk clip with short, dialogue-heavy chapters that rarely run more than two or three pages ... Lye evokes gothic tropes and a rippling aura of foreboding that recall Shirley Jackson and Daphne du Maurier by way of the tortured Catholicism of Flannery O’Connor ... the ending, when it arrives, impresses as being unexpected and ambiguous.