Year End Blurb

11 books for 2013.  Not even half the amount I read the previous year.  2011 remains my best year.  Autumn 2012 was when I become a parent.  Notice zero books read in October, November and December.  I blame new parenthood.

11. Are You My Mother?

By Alison Bechdel

This is the sequel and companion piece to Fun Home, which I was quite impressed by.  Are You My Mother? explores the author’s difficult relationship with her mother, who was no less interesting than her father.  Although her mother was not burdened with the ‘dark secret’ of closeted homosexuality, she was burdened with depression and maternal ambivalence.

Fun Home was more like a graphic memoir while AYMM was more like a therapy memoir, probably because Bechdel’s mother read many books about psychoanalysis and underwent years of therapy.  As a result, AYMM lacked the narrative cohesion and tighter structure of Fun Home, often meandering into self-indulgent tangents and psycho-babble.   

One example was how young Alison and her brothers used to compete for goodnight cuddles and kisses from their mom, and that all abruptly stopped one night when she was seven years old with only a “you’re too old” as an explanation. There is one sentence that simply said there was not enough of her mother to go around.  As a reader, I felt I had to infer what that might have meant to Bechdel as a child and how that shaped her personality as a grown up.  Also she doesn’t even explore what that could have meant for her brothers.  In fact, there were times I forgot she even had brothers, so I’m left with a very narcissistic point of view.

I get the feeling that a child’s memories of a distant parent can be incomplete; usually all that is left are unresolved feelings of hurt and loss.  I think this is why Bechdel replaced these gaps with digressions from Woolf or psychoanalytic quotes, which I suppose was better than supplementing missing memories with false ones. 

Our friend was certainly not impressed with AYMM when he passed on his copy to Olman and I and told us we can keep it.  Even Olman neglected to review it in his blog.

Yet despite all the flaws, I still got a lot out of this book.  I'm very interested in maternal ambivalence and how it manifests in a woman’s relationship with her children, especially during the post-WW2 era when many women questioned their traditional roles and purpose in society. Even today, exploring the negative side of motherhood is still considered an uncomfortable subject, even though it is no longer a social taboo.  I admire Bechdel’s courage in sharing her intimate reflections on her upbringing, and for putting her memories, thoughts, feelings and obsessions on paper in such a uniquely beautiful way.

10. The Historian

By Elizabeth Kostova 

My god was this book ever a chore to read.  I think every reader has been burdened with a book that requires conscious plodding.  Trying to get through a few pages while in between more engaging books.  

My mistake was that I kept expecting it would get more interesting, or that the pace would pick up...  If I had known that The Historian would be such an arduous slog from start to end, I would have stopped sooner.  Much, much sooner.

Although the author is American (née Johnson, Kostova is her married name), the writing really seemed like it was translated awkwardly from another language to English.  It was also rather dull and long-winded; burdened with overly expository passages written in epistolary form as the novel is comprised of letters from a historian to his daughter. 

To this day (seven years later), I have no recollection of what I had read.  Something about a never-ending search for Dracula, which seemed to just drag on and on in more ways than one.  

Having read some Goodreads reviews, I was certainly not the only survivor reader with such feelings.  It’s disappointing really, as The Historian was heavily promoted and reviewed -  I remember being intrigued by its seemingly unique hybridization of genres: gothic, adventure, detective, travelogue, postmodern historical, epistolary epic and historical thriller.  I can tell you now that even though The Historian had all these elements, it was far from thrilling or adventurous.  There might have been some sparse action scattered here and there amongst the long-winded prose, and it was certainly epic in its tedium.  When it comes down to it, I don’t think I have ever come across a book that held so much promise yet delivered so much nothing. 

Thank the Devil I only spent a couple of bucks on this tome (another Chainon find), but I cannot get back the lost hours I spent on something on words that are now like tears in rain.

9. The Sisters Brothers

By Patrick DeWitt

I think this was one of those rare times where I actually purchased a trade paperback brand new, jumping on the bandwagon with this much hyped novel.  I remember how the CBC and The Globe & Mail heaped praise on this book as the author is Canadian.  

Even Olman remembered the hype when he came across a a free copy several years later and decided to give it a go.  Thank goodness for that as I can just link to his review of it here (yay to retroactive reviews).

I’m trying to remember if I had ever read a real Western.  I don’t think I have, so this is the only book that comes close, though I'm not sure whether it counts as one.  Like how Speculative Fiction is high literature for the Sci-Fi genre, The Sisters Brothers is like Spec Fic for Westerns.   

I really quite enjoyed this book.  It had everything it was supposed to have in an award-winning 'literary western' of this calibre.  The brothers made a flawed yet charismatic pair tossing witty exchanges at each other, the plot had some bad guys, the story was engaging with the right amount of humour, action, and romance all delivered via high quality writing. 

… and this was the beginning of our new brotherhood, with Charlie never again to be the one so far ahead, and me following clumsily behind, which is not to say the roles were reversed, but destroyed. Afterward, and even today, we are careful in our relationship, as though fearful of upsetting each other. In terms of our previous manner of correspondence I cannot say why it vanished suddenly then, snuffed as it was like a candle. Of course the moment it passed I became fond of it in a sorrowful kind of way, at least in theory or maudlin memory. But the question has entered my mind so many times: Whatever became of my bold brother? I can never say, only that he was gone and has yet to return.

--

I brought this book with me during our vacation in Vancouver, where we visited friends in Lasqueti Island.  Not surprisingly, they had read this too.