Canada Reads 2020: From the Ashes

In mid-July, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation held its annual Canada Reads competition. The stand-up comedian Ali Hassan hosted the show again, and five jurors were assembled to judge the candidates for this year. Each of them championed a book of their choice.

"From the Ashes is a remarkable memoir about hope and resilience, and a revelatory look into the life of a Métis-Cree man who refused to give up," runs the introduction of Jesse Thistle's publisher, Simon & Schuster.

Simon & Schuster (Canada)

In 2019, the memoir first came out and it became a bestseller. Jesse Thistle was born in the prairie province of Saskatchewan, where his Cree maternal grandparents lived. His parents split when he and his two elder brothers were small, and their father took them into his care. Plagued with drug abuse, he left them on their own for days on end, found food in garbage cans and through shoplifting; their experience then was Dickensian; and I was baffled that this was possible in 1970s Canada.

Then their father never returned. Their white grandparents rescued them from foster care, where they had been maltreated. After that they raised the grandchildren to the east in suburban Ontario.

The grandparents loved them. But they were set in their ways and raising three hungry, traumatized children challenged them. Their grandfather — an elevator engineer — was raised in a tough school. He handed out bruising beatings.

The 'cultural mosaic' Canada didn't exist in the boys' schools; the schoolyard appeared to be divided along ethnic battle lines. Thistle felt uncomfortable accepting a First Nations heritage he barely knew, when it was despised by his classmates. And the brutal social dynamic seemed to turn him off his school work.

Aside from keeping in touch with his parents, his cultural heritage could have been a steadying influence, I think adult Thistle is hypothesizing. I think (or hope) that the child welfare system might agree with this more now than in the 1970s.

I found the childhood scenes, although my siblings and I saw no abuse whatsoever, very relatable. [Edit: Although this is more my narcissism than because the experiences were alike.] The precarious feeling of being raised by just one parent for a while — if nothing else — and of children being left to improvise themselves while that parent was busy doing something else (in my father's case, it was just computer programming!), was familiar. In my father's case I also think there was an air of misery, and self-discontent when he felt that he wasn't managing to do everything quite as well as he intended.

When he was still a teenager, I think, Jesse's grandparents found him with a bag of cocaine. Especially because the drug abuse and imprisonment of Jesse's father had hurt them so that they weren't willing to take any more, he was kicked out of the house. He became homeless.

Sunday Theology: A Jewish Prayer in Isaac Bashevis Singer's Poland

Before I cut short the reading in German translation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's novel The Magician of Lublin, I copied a quotation into my notes:

"Was sind wir, was unser Leben, was unsere Gnade? Was unsere Frömmigkeit, was unsere Hilfe, was unsere Kraft, was unsere Stärke? … Alle Helden sind wie nichts vor dir, die berühmten Männer, als ob sie nie gewesen, die Weisen wie ohne Erkenntnis, die Einsichtigen wie ohne Verstand, denn die Menge ihrer Werke ist eitel, und die Tage ihres Lebens sind nichtig vor dir."

These words are spoken in a place of worship by an Orthodox Jewish man who is praying by himself. The character of the Magician (who is wrestling, like the author himself, with contradictory forces of secularism and faith) overhears him on one of his journeys from Lublin.

To translate roughly: What are we, what is our life, what is our mercy? What our piety, what our assistance, what our power, what our might? ... All heroes are as nothing before you, the famous men are as if they never existed, the wise are without knowledge, the perceptive without reason, for the mass of their works is in vain, and the days of their lives are nothing before you.

Whether it is an excerpt from a known religious text, as I assume, or Singer's own composition, I was struck by it.

From a literary perspective, its words are weighty. Atmospherically I feel pathos in it — a sadness about not living up to an individual ideal — rather than a brutal denial of humanity at large, although this is debatable.

What I like in a subjective, non-literary way is the sense of proportion of a human's role in the history of the world, and in the width and breadth of the present time. It appears healthy to follow a religion or philosophy that is not meant to coddle and feed ego, but rather to help us look beyond ego.

I also like the idea of a God who is forceful enough to influence our lives through the quieter inner paths of conscience and the path of outer events without clear cause and effect, not a thin-skinned, fragile narcissist who relies on human propaganda, vigilanteism and perpetual obeisance to achieve the good. (Whatever that good may be.)

On the other hand, I may have quoted before the thought that God is infinitely small as well as infinitely great. We do not need to worship a Nietzschean superman.

*

On second thought, writing about a Jewish prayer on Sunday may be clumsy. So apologies for that, as well as for the perhaps frivolous habit of picking and choosing from religions what interests me and what doesn't, and offering an uneducated opinion without taking into account what the reactions may be.

Source: Der Zauberer von Lublin, by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Translation by Susanna Rademacher. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2017.

Around the World in 32 Countries: Argentina and Jorge Luis Borges

Niedertracht und Ewigkeit: Erzählungen und Essays
Jorge Luis Borges
Transl. Karl August Horst and Gisbert Haefs
Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1991

"Cuesta del Obispo, Provincia de Salta (Argentina)."
Attributed to eMaringolo, 2012
via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-2.0 License

***

Argentina in a Nutshell:

Surface area: 2,780,400 km2 (smaller than Brazil, larger than Mexico)

Main country immigrated from historically: “62.5% of the population has full or partial Italian ancestry” Now the country is only 2.4% Amerindian.

Recognized regional languages:

• Guaraní in Corrientes
• Quechua in Santiago del Estero
• Qom, Mocoví, and Wichí in Chaco
• Welsh in Chubut

(Yes, that Welsh)

Independence from Spain: declared 1816

Driving side: Right

Notable geography: "Aconcagua is the highest mountain outside of Asia, at 6,960.8 metres (22,837 ft), and the highest point in the Southern Hemisphere."

Sources: Argentina , List of countries and dependencies by area [Wikipedia]

***

Finding Argentine authors was difficult, but perhaps I didn't go about it the right way.

I was thrilled to learn [via Goodreads] that the classic film Blow-Up, by Michael Antonioni, is based on a short story by the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. Also, because I was interested in Patagonia, my mother found the Chilean writer Francisco Coloane's book Tierra del Fuego in our bookshelves, for me to read as a supplement.

Technically there are many biographies and memoirs one could read. The Pope is Argentine. Ernesto (Che) Guevara was from Argentina and wrote his Motorcycle Diaries about travel in the country. And there are plenty of biographies of Eva Perón, wife of the 1970s president Juan Perón and symbolic heroine of the nation who inspired a film where Madonna acted the title role.

Photograph of the first meeting between the Argentine writers
Borges and Ernesto Sabato.
Published in the Revista Gente, nº 499, Feb. 13, 1975
via Wikimedia Commons, public domain in Argentina

However, our home library doesn't have many books by Argentine authors. The exception is the literary giant and polymath Jorge Luis Borges. He also happens to be a favourite author of a colleague.

We have a German translation of a collection of short stories and essays, and notes by the author, that were published from the early 1930s through to the 1960s: Niedertracht und Ewigkeit: Erzählungen und Essays 1935-1936.

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The Universal History of Infamy — the Niedertracht part of the book, originally published as the Historia universal de la infamia in Spanish — is a series of short stories about villains who really lived, in fictionalized form.

The villains: A Chinese pirate who led a fleet of over 20,000 people and rivalled the fleet of Portugal in the early 19th century, John Murell (Lazarus Morell) who pretended that he wanted to free slaves in the southern United States and instead ensured that they were recaptured and murdered, a gang lord in New York, and Billy the Kid, amongst others. Their tales are all gripping, the details that Borges may have added in from other sources were colourful and helped set the scene as thoroughly as any set designer could in a well-financed Hollywood film. The book made me so curious that I looked up all of the real-life stories after reading his fictional versions.

I think that Borges might have considered, but didn't say, if dramatic villainy like this, perpetrated by frowning people who wield firearms and murder people with great publicity, does more harm than everyday villainy. Likely I should read Hannah Arendt's thoughts on the banality of evil before I write more. But maybe more people are killed by criminal negligence, the guns manufacturing and marketing industry, fake medicines, overwork, etc., than by the kind of first- and second-degree murderers who end up in prison.

Incidentally, I wish that the vocabulary Borges had used for African-American characters were less dehumanizing. 'Negro' and 'mulatto' were considered polite enough terms in the 1930s, I think, but when he talks of 'heaps of negroes' in stories where he no longer seems to be satirizing racist attitudes, it feels as if he genuinely did subconsciously consider Black people to be an incoherent and mindless mass.

Anyway, Borges faithfully lists his sources: Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain, The Gangs of New York by Herbert Asbury, etc.

August 2020 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next

2020 in books: a literary calendar

Guardian, January 4, 2020

The Death of Vivek Oji is a novel (to be published August 4th) set in Nigeria, written by Akwaeke Emezi.

via Penguin Random House

Because there is no extract on Ama**n yet, I don't yet know if I want to read it. Plot and setting are one thing, writing style another, so first chapters are important to me. But at any rate, according to Emezi's publisher, this is the plot:

One afternoon, in a town in southeastern Nigeria, a mother opens her front door to discover her son’s body, wrapped in colorful fabric, at her feet. What follows is the tumultuous, heart-wrenching story of one family’s struggle to understand a child whose spirit is both gentle and mysterious.

But because an excerpt of Emezi's earlier work Pet looks interesting too, I might read that already. It's a young adult novel that, within the fantasy genre, appears to be a (not overly subtle) pastiche of American social politics.

***

Recently the 25th anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica took place. As a child of the 80s, I dimly remember the Balkan Wars, with the snipers who made cities uninhabitable to civilians, the soldiers who fought against each other from the Croatian and Serbian sides, the Bosnians and others who were massacred, the streams of refugees, and then a few years later the Kosovo War.

via Amazon.com

In To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace, by Kapka Kassabova, summarized in the words of her publisher Granta Books:

Setting out to resolve her own ancestral legacy of the Lakes, Kassabova’s journey unfolds to a deeper enquiry into how geography and politics imprint themselves upon families and nations, and confronts her with questions about human suffering and the capacity for change.

I feel bad for mentioning a small literary quibble. But I will say that in the first chapter, her good intentions appear to outdo her writing style. For example, there are mixed metaphors:

Some places are inscribed in our DNA yet take a long time to reveal their contours, just as some journeys are etched into the landscape of our lives yet take a lifetime to complete.

It sounds mysterious and vague and deep, but does it make sense? wouldn't other metaphors work better?

Anyway, she has a prime quotation from Henry David Thoreau at the beginning: "A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye, looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature." Fantastic.

***

In the meantime, I am also reading other books:

First Nations/Indigenous literature (Canada):

Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson

Him Standing by Richard Wagamese

African-American history:

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

Around the World in 32 Countries:

Niedertracht und Ewigkeit: Erzählungen und Essays by Jorge Luis Borges [Argentina]

Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes [Spain]

Gute Nachrichten auf Papierfliegern by Juan Marsé [Spain]

Platero and I by Juan Ramón Jiménez [Spain]

Hundert Jahre Einsamkeit by Gabriel García Marquez [Colombia]

Apartheid: A Collection of Writings on South African Racism by South Africans, Alex La Guma ed. [South Africa]

To-Be-Read: 'Book Haul' from a Berlin bookstore a few weeks ago:

Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

On the Come Up by Angie Thomas

Humankind by Rutger Bergman

Extra:

The Story of a Non-Marrying Man and Other Stories by Doris Lessing

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“New Releases for August 2020” [Goodreads]

The Death of Vivek Oji [Penguin Random House]

"Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2020 Book Preview" [The Millions] (July 15, 2020)

To the Lake [Granta]