Yes, We Have No Canon Today

*** I’ve been puzzling over a strange literary problem for some time now. It has to do with the notion of the “best Canadian books” of the last half-century or so. Here’s how it came about. My publisher, Rolf Maurer of New Star Books in Vancouver, asked me to write an introduction to a new printing he was doing–a sort of slightly belated Silver Anniversary edition–of western Canadian writer George Bowering’s 1980 novel, Burning Water. I was perfectly happy to do... 
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A Road Runs Through It

  *** At the very end of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, his mid-twentieth century chronicle-novel-memoir of the Beat Generation, there's a phrase that has stuck in my mind. It occurs in the book's long concluding lyrical riff about the flow of daily life, the melancholy of time and memory, and the geographic immensity of the American continent in which our minute trails of wandering are scratched. It goes: "…and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides... 
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Forever

  *** The Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz once wrote, "In our deepest convictions, reaching into the very depths of our being, we deserve to live forever. We experience our transitoriness and mortality as an act of violence perpetrated against us." As soon as I read those sentences (they're in the Polish poet's late book, Milosz's ABC's), I took them to heart. Immortality is a concept that makes increasing sense to me (although I'm not expecting any personal... 
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Some Enchanted Evening… in Aleppo?

*** John Borneman, Syrian Episodes: Sons, Fathers and an Anthropologist in Aleppo (Princeton, 231 p., 2007) Princeton anthropologist John Borneman says at the outset of his account of a several month sojourn in Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city, “I suppose I went to Syria for enchantment, reenchantment or some kind of magic unavailable to me in America.” He cheerfully confesses to following in the footsteps of such “Orientalists” as Flaubert, Burton, von Humboldt and T.E. Lawrence. After... 
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Reading, Writing, Shelving

. Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night (Knopf Canada, 2006) John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel (St. Martin’s, 2006) Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer (HarperCollins, 2006) Here are three recent books about the literary basics: writing, reading, and shelving. But before saying a word about them, let me dispense with the verdict: John Sutherland’s How to Read a Novel and Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer are mildly entertaining, more or less harmless bits of fluff, ideal for winter... 
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The Gods That Failed

1. I’m hardly the first one to have spotted the new intellectual mini-trend advocating atheism. It’s inspired a profusion of books, reviews, newspaper columns, blog comments, and websites discussing and debating the rejection of theism. More important, increasing numbers of scientists, philosophers, and other intellectuals, perhaps disturbed by the consequences of Christian and Islamic fundamentalist religious beliefs in the turbulent first decade of the new millennium (the “noughty 2000s,”... 
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Forgotten Scenes

It’s funny the way books fall into our hands. I was lazily reading an issue of the Times Literary Supplement one afternoon last summer when I ran into a longish article about a mid-20th century British novelist I’d never heard of named William Cooper. The thing that slowed me enough to read the opening paragraphs of D.J. Taylor’s biographical “reappraisal” of Cooper (”Behind the Scenes,” TLS, June 9, 2006) was an arresting photograph of the long-neglected, nearly-forgotten... 
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Apples and Oranges

Is it possible to compare literary apples and oranges? That is, can we meaningfully measure a novel against a work of non-fiction, a volume of poetry, a screenplay? I think so. Recently, at the readers’ group that I’m a member of, we were talking about John Banville’s The Sea (Knopf, 2005), winner of last year’s Booker Prize, which we had just read. We gave it mixed reviews, which means that we didn’t much like it, despite the book’s prestigious honours, the undeniable pleasures of Banville’s... 
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Bad Ideas

Heather Pringle, The Master Plan: Himmler’s Scholars and the Holocaust (London: Fourth Estate, 463 p., $28, 2006) Vancouver writer Heather Pringle’s interesting new book, The Master Plan, tells the story of a very bad idea whose time had come. The bad idea was that there is a superior race of people, the blond-haired, blue-eyed, tall and muscular Aryans, whose alleged descendants are destined to rule the world. The time for bad ideas that had come was 1933-45, the era of Nazi Germany. The man who most... 
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Edmund White’s Own Story

I One of the more useful ways to think about gay writing and its most important writer, Edmund White, is to first locate them in relation to the trajectory of contemporary gay political and literary history. It’s more than a quarter-century since gay writing emerged from the rights’ movement that noisily burst onto the North American scene with the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York (an event at which Ed White, then 29, was present). As White wrote to friends during the semi-accidental birth of... 
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