On my desk, Menahem Mendel by Sholem Aleichem is still waiting to be finished, alongside Vol. I of Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom (let's see if he mentions Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who has just died), Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue, Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley, 4321 by Paul Auster, Beatrix Potter's tales, and Assia Djebar's Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement. For Christmas I've also received Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Notes on Grief. Besides, an English-language translation of Delphine Minoui's memoir I'm Writing You from Tehran looks tempting.
2021 in Review
In 2021 I kept a spreadsheet where I tracked part of my reading. I finished over 68 ebooks or paper books and 13 audiobooks. There were signs that I need to diversify my reading: for example, 56% of the books were from the United States.
Reading Journey Around the World
If I finally manage to write up the South Korean books read in 2021, as well as reading Ukrainian books, the next countries would be Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Italy, the UK, and France.
What I've Just Read
I listened to the last of the audiobook of Cherie Dimaline's Empire of Wild yesterday.
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| Cover of Empire of Wild via Penguin Random House Canada |
Although its writing style leans toward too many similes, and a few patches of bald prose or scenes (like the sleazy affair of a corporate man of affairs with a young church acolyte) remind me of mass market thrillers, I found it incredibly absorbing.
The protagonist is Joan. She is a Métis woman — sometimes mistaken for a 'spicy Latina' in roadside bars — who has finally found an equally somewhat bohemian but loving partner in another Métis person, Victor. The two of them had met in a drinking establishment, decided to join forces and travel through the United States in a camper van, and finally settled down again and married in Canada.
In their rural Ontario community — the one Joan grew up in, with her construction worker mother Florence, grandmother Mère, her grandmother's friends, and her brothers — men and women work in house construction or mines, for example. Men and women also hunt for their food, like deer or rabbits or elk, alongside grocery store fare. Still, there are social conventions against killing more than one can eat. Also, one can't say that any of the characters in the book glorify guns, and there's no trace of Duck Dynasty.
After the pair argue, Victor disappears.
Joan does everything she can to find her husband. She finds irritation and solace in her family, who do not entirely support her quest and have their own battles to fight. Older than her years in spirit, unwise at times but self-aware, warm and reliable in her imperfect way, she felt very real, as if her voice were speaking from the page. [Edit: Some of the credit for this is surely also due to Michelle St. John's narration of the audiobook!]
The leading thread of Joan's longing for her husband, weakened by insecurities and lent interest and realism by the fact that neither of them were perfect, part of a bond whose precise nature is hard to pinpoint in moments of doubt, was in my view well spun. At times this plot aspect has a timeless quality, as old as Penelope waiting for Odysseus — with a positive modern difference: Joan is actively working for the good of her husband instead of waiting for him to reappear on his own.
It is also this plot and characterization thread, though, that makes me a more partial reviewer, prone to over-interpreting — it reminded me of the platonic yearning for family and friends in the era of social distancing. Sometimes descriptions of grief take on a very self-conscious, cult-like quality, but I liked Empire of Wild all the more because it steered clear of that tendency.
Cherie Dimaline's book has one foot in secular reality: the financial needs of Métis communities in Ontario vs. the destruction of ancestral lands and culture through pipelines (e.g. Keystone Pipeline) and mining, along with financial exploitation, casual misogyny, and the ways in which people both embrace and need more than the places they come from. Its other foot is set in the world of Métis legend: the werewolf-like figure of the Rogarou and the spirit world that avenges the misdeeds of the community. Of course, the lines blur.
As oil pipelines and other dilemmas still exist for many First Nations (and other) communities in Canada, as well as the mingled legacy of Christianity on First Nations cultures, Empire of Wild has lost nothing of its contemporary power and relevance.
Altogether, although listening to audiobooks I'm less likely to pick up on problems in the literary style, I'd say that Empire of Wild is one of the best books set in Canada that I've read. Like Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach, Jesse Thistle's From the Ashes, Joshua Whitehead's Jonny Appleseed, and maybe even the works by Guy Vanderhaeghe and Margaret Laurence that I found singularly tasteless, grim and unedifying as a high schooler, it has made me even more aware of never really having understood the cultures and living reality of most of the rest of the country I used to live in. Attending a German-Canadian church in a middle-class suburban community in Victoria in the 1990s and early 2000s, with heavily Americanized influences through school and television, is apparently not all that representative.
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| Pine Island, Georgian Bay (ca. 1915) by Tom Thomson via Wikimedia Commons |
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"Cherie Dimaline: ‘My community is where my stories come from and it’s also where my responsibilities lie’" [Globe and Mail] (June 30, 2017)
Empire of Wild [Penguin Random House Canada]
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Cookbooks
Aside from still needing to make more recipes in Yasmin Khan's Ripe Figs (but the tahini swirl buns were excellent), Kirsten Buck's Buck Naked Kitchen, and Sarah Kieffer's 100 Cookies, I now also have a German language translation of Meera Sodha's East, bought as a Christmas present for the family.
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Resolutions
To forage in Dussmann Kulturkaufhaus again. Also, to read books in Italian. To read more internationally, and cook many healthy recipes and a few naughty ones ... The list goes on.
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