Come, Thou Tortoise (2009)

Jessica Grant

Knopf Canada

- Available in softcover March 9th!

- A Globe and Mail Best Book of 2009!

- Shortlisted from the 2009 Winterset Award and Amazon.ca’s First Novel Award!

- Currently in The National Post’s Canada Also Reads Competition!

 Pardon all the adjectives, but this books really is a fresh, innovative, unprecedented, unforgettable gem. Pardon the cliché but I mean it: There is nothing quite like this. The story, the tone, the characters,  the diction, the delivery: all Jessica Grant’s. But I’ll concede, since people demand comparisons, as impossible as they are in this case: Come, Thou Tortoise is everything great about a Miriam Toews novel meeting everything great about the fresh, ultra-modern diction of Burning Rock fiction. Grant’s crisp, accurate descriptions dance the story so vividly off the pages. “Her skin felt like an old elbow,” “Her brown hair makes a beaver’s tail down her back.” The story’s heroine, Audrey Flowers, sees and describes the world in a consistently fresh, unique way: “the wind was flappy,” or “Downtown is a bit smooshed. It takes Verlaine five tries to park the Lada,” or “Why did she name her horse [Rambo] after that sweaty, bullety Sylvester Stallone?”

“Bullety”; no one has ever used that adjective before, that apt neologism. And” flappy wind,” a virtually perfect-but-unused adjective for wind, so revealing of her character.  It is no wonder Michael Winter, a CanLit icon known for his attention to detail,  endorsed this novel with a plea, “Please —I beg you dear reader — read Jessica Grant. “

Nutshell summary: Audrey Flowers’ father is knocked into a coma just before Christmas (by a Christmas tree hanging out the back of someone’s truck) and she has to return to Newfoundland, leaving her pet tortoise behind with her friend, Chuck, a dejected player of small-not-big roles in Shakespeare plays. (The tortoise narrates every so many chapters, relaying his chaotic history of ownership and the demise of Audrey’s relationship with her deserting, rock-climbing ex.) Back at home, Audrey, obsessed with the game of Clue, and possibly suffering from a low IQ, ends up slowly piecing together a family mystery and the truth behind her ever-lasting pet mouse, all the while recapping her entire childhood with her unconventional, endearing family. The ending is one of those endings where it is past midnight, and you just want to sleep, but you can’t lay the book down.

As mentioned in her acknowledgements, it is a very “punny” novel.  There is a great sense of humour in the narration, in terms of obsessive references to the game of Clue, two  consistent catch phrases, an offbeat plot and its off-kilter delivery, and a plethora of puns . Random examples:  The narrator purposefully left the L out of her father’s obit, so it read Water Flowers, not Walter Flowers. Her father used to refer to the family unit as “The Bouquet,” (because their last name was Flowers). In the opening chapter, in one of the funniest scenes I’ve ever read, Audrey, in an act of delusional heroics,  gets herself into a predicament in which an air marshal is asking for his gun back through the bathroom door (and his last name just so happens to be Marshall). Even before that, we get the lines, “Winnifred is old, she might be three hundred. She came with the apartment. The previous tenant, a rock climber named Cliff …” (A rock climber named Cliff. And Cliff, by the way, referred to the ceiling as an overhang, because the walls and ceilings of his apartment were equipped with climbing holds, for when he wasn’t busy rappelling from the fire escape). Grant’s outwardly off-kilter novel works because it is balanced with a sadness not milked into melodrama like most writers would do. The offbeat nature of the book, and constant puns and wittiness aren’t exhausted or cheesy; instead they perfectly fuel what makes this novel an utterly unique gem. This is a book you will never forget. It helps that she portrays the wacky Flowers family in a believable and endearing manner. (Her live-in uncle Thoby has one arm longer than the other, for some reason, so he is obviously the one to change light bulbs or scrape ice from windshields.)

Also, it is okay that eight or nine of these chapters are narrated by Audrey’s pet tortoise, because Winnifred is one of the best characters of the year, and hilarious, and might do for the tortoise pet trade what Sideways did for wine? A quote to summarize all my raving, “Audrey’s brilliant. She’s hilarious. I could read about her all day. Same goes for the tortoise.” – The Globe & Mail.

Check out her renowned collection of short fiction as well: Making Light of Tragedy

Yes, I am being purposefully witty: February’s book of the month is February, but also because the softcover version just hit stores.

As I read February, I was overwhelmed with the sensation that I was, for the first time, reading the work of a fully evolved writer. In terms of bare-bones writing, in terms of sentence-level writing, and how well an author crafts a sentence to capture a moment in words: There is no one else in the country who can touch Lisa Moore’s elegant rendering of language. Lisa made her mark with Open, and Alligator got all the attention it deserved. But with February, she’s peaked. She’s distinticve, and what she does with language is nothing less than dazzling, and then there is her uncanny ability to inhabit every pore and sinew of her endearingly human characters, and project their stories up off the pages in the most meaningful ways, with her tender, visceral diction. What she does with language is pure art. Pure innovation. With all the right words and nuances, moments and memories are fleshed out and almost x-rayed, until the reader is made to experience her protagonist’s very core and consciousness. Through her rendering of the main character, Helen O’mara, I have felt the irrevocable and deflating loss of a spouse. Lucid is the word I am after, her scenes dance right off the pages and all over your heart. Especially when you have the chance to hear her read her own work. 

If my words aren’t enough, the backcover is graced by the following endorsement from the legendary Richard Ford:  ”Lisa Moore is an astonishing writer. She brings to her pages what we are always seeking in fiction and only find the best of it: a magnetizing gift for revealing how the earth feels, looks, tastes, smells, and an unswerving instinct for what’s important in life.” 

February is the story of Helen O’mara, a woman widowed and left to raise her children alone after she losses her beloved Cal the night of the Ocean Ranger disaster, Valentine’s Day, 1982. In no way does Moore exploit, sentimentalize, or overuse that real-life tragedy. Instead, with a truly shocking and core-penetrating skill, she shows us the effect of that loss on Helen. How and why, years later, her mind still trickles back to that ill-fated February. Structurally, February unfolds in a non-chronological order. Helen’s memories, her daily routines of present day life, her watching her grandchildren or helping her son cope with the reality of an estranged, impregnated fling are all happening at once. Moore’s non-linear narrative structure not only makes the book a more engaging read, it also captures how life really works, the reverberations of our past echoing in the present, often at random. Her memories come at random to pierce through the mundane chores of every day life. This is an important work, and perhaps the apex of CanLit, if not simply a shining example of what is meant by creative writing: sentences that evoke emotions in their reader; words strung together with an artful, calculated precision so that a reader feels what they’re reading.

 February earned its way onto numerous “best of 2009″ lists, most notably the  Quill & Quire’s and Globe and Mail’s.

Scrabble Lessons is deeply affecting and gorgeously written. As a writer, reading her is like holding on to fire works. It’s a thrill to be so fondly jealous you never wrote these stories yourself. No detail is left blandly described, and it is all so fresh and vivid. Example: “The tears started, big fat drops cutting inside her cheekbones and taking the easier nose-side route,” and you know what she means. You know she sat back in her chair and saw all her scenes and never missed a thing in describing them; it’s like she’s writing from the inside out. Where most writers might say Gary was confused, or Gary was disoriented, she’d say “Gary felt like he’d stepped inside some weird foreign film, like he should be looking around for subtitles to make sense of it all.” Even each gesture is given a unique visual. For example: “She shook her head like there were flies buzzing around it” or “She held her fingers ruler straight.”

Take the opening story, “Scrabble Lessons.” The detail is there, she talks about the clinking sound of the tiles as she hears her mother and grandmother playing scrabble in another room, and describes everything in a way you see; she really puts you there with lines like: “Rob was two-handing his beer glass like it might get away from him.” And there is some sort of harsh, intentionally paradoxical contrast in many of the lines in this story: a lot of the most vivid violent sentences are played off so casually. Example: “Just about the time the steering wheel was punching through Dad’s chest, Mom was joining VELO to CITY, her V boldly claming the red square of a triple word score.” You get a juxtaposition of the violent, unfathomable death of her father laid over the mundane, everyday routines of her life, except this day, her father dies in a car accident and with these sentences stacked the way they are, you really get a sense of the narrator’s shock via Vryenhoek’s command of language and lingual wizardry. When her mother shares her scrabble wisdom, or lessons, is it not a metaphor for life, done in a subtle way for the deeper reader? A clever parallel between the game of scrabble and the game of life; the approaches to each.

I could make some half-apt and flattering comparisons, so that anyone reading this might get a feel for this book. I could say, “Scrabble Lessons is Lisa Moore’s short fiction meets Kathleen Winter’s,” but there’s something here that’s all Leslie Vryenhoek’s, and that’s what excited me the most. A new voice, and I love it. This is a perfect collection of short stories: punchy, top-notch creative writing that makes you feel something. Jammed in around all these skilfully constructed sentences is raw emotion you feel, seeping out through the words. These are stories you feel as a reader and admire as writer.

Easily One of the most well-conceived, well-presented, and exciting books out of Atlantic Canada this fall?

St. John’s based editor and author, Mike Heffernan, has put together “an anthology of dark Atlantic Canadian fiction … full of viceral imagery … for anyone who likes their literature written with a ragged quill pen, a messy inkpot, and a sinister edge, Hard Ol’ Spot brings us the dark beauty of Atlantic Canadian fiction.”

* Features story-specific artwork by the super-talented Darren Whelan

A Foreword by Kathleen Winter.

And Stories from:

Michael Crummey, Sara Tilley, Michelle Butler Hallett, Ramona Dearing, Gerard Collins, Jo-Anne Soper-Cook, and more …

“This is a book where a hard place breeds violence, reckless escape and, perhaps cruelest of all: hope.”

Listen to CBC’s Angela Antle interview Mike and Darren here:

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Never More There
Stephen Rowe
Nightwood Editions
Poetry

How do we reconcile story with fact? What must one lose for the other to exist? In this debut collection, Rowe explores the nature of mythology and how it morphs in time to retain cultural and personal significance. Folk tales, supernatural creatures, family histories and personal elegies come together to expose the cohabitation of the dead and the living; the relationship between cold absence and stark presence.

“One of a new generation of Newfoundland poets who are inspired by the riches of their culture, Stephen Rowe casts a meditative eye on the world about him.”
- Mary Dalton, award-winning author of Merrybegot and Red Ledger

“Again and again while reading Never More There I was struck by arresting lines and images, by Stephen Rowe’s rigorous attention to the natural world and the world of words. Eloquent and passionate, Rowe is poet of real promise.”
- Michael Crummey, award-winning author of Galore and Hard Light

Never More There was shortlisted for the 2009 Fresh Fish Award

Atlantic Canada’s 100 Greatest Books
Trevor J. Adams & Stephen Patrick Clare
Nimbus Publishing

In Atlantic Canada’s 100 Greatest Books, Trevor J. Adams and Stephen Patrick Clare review the top one hundred Atlantic Canadian books—both fiction and nonfiction—ever published, as chosen by a panel of local readers and literary luminaries. In their own knowledgeable reviews, Adams and Clare offer insights into these titles’ continuing influence and celebrate their contributions to the Atlantic Canadian literary landscape. Illustrated in full colour with book covers and photos of the authors, and accompanied by personal selections from celebrities in the literary community and beyond, Atlantic Canada’s 100 Greatest Books is a requisite companion for fans of Canadian literature.