…and Found

*** Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (Harper, 516 p., 2006)   No one of Jewish descent growing up in America just after World War II could be entirely unaffected by the Holocaust. In my family, Uncle Walter and Aunt Holla were presented to us (I’m tempted to say, “exhibited” to us) in the early 1950s as our “survivor” relatives. They had managed “to make it out just in time,” I was repeatedly told, in what became the recitation of a family legend, a story... 
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Can You Read This? Don’t You Wish You Couldn’t?

*** Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason (New York: Pantheon, 356 p., 2008)   A couple of decades ago, back in the 1980s, a friend of mine in Vancouver displayed a jokey bi-lingual poster on his front door that said in big letters: “Fin de lire” (“The end of reading”). At the bottom of the poster, in small print, its punchline asked, “Can you read this? Don’t you wish you couldn’t?” I.e., wouldn’t you like to be as dopey as everybody else? Susan Jacoby’s The Age... 
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In Search of Lost Poets

Roberto Bolano, The Savage Detectives (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 577 p., 2007, translated by Natasha Wimmer) I first encountered, if that’s the right word, the Chilean-born writer Roberto Bolano (pronounced Bo-lahn-yo) as a real-life “character” in Javier Cercas’s novel, Soldiers of Salamis (2001; English translation, 2003). Cercas presents Bolano as a “softly-spoken, curly-haired, scruffy, unshaven Chilean” who offers his Spanish literary colleague some indispensable advice about writing. It... 
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Post-Communist Story

Bruce Benderson, The Romanian: Story of an Obsession (Tarcher/Penguin, 401 pages, 2006) If you’re not particularly interested in middle-aged, pill-popping, alcoholic New York writers who specialize in tales of demimonde sleaze and who fall in love with hustlers in post-communist eastern Europe, then it’s unlikely that you’ll be immediately attracted to Bruce Benderson’s erotic memoir, The Romanian: Story of an Obsession, published a couple of years ago. Actually, that’s not categorically true,... 
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No Saviours Needed, Just Some “Good News”

***   Leave aside the factoid that the cover of this week’s Der Spiegel, Germany’s leading newsweekly, features an inspirational photo of U.S. Senator Barack Obama and the headline: “The Messiah Factor.” Fact is, the reason that progressives in Canada, Europe and sizeable chunks of the rest of the world care about the outcome of the still-months-away American presidential election of November 2008 is not because they’re looking for saviours. Rather, they’re simply looking for (to stick... 
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Dark Places

*** John Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (Bond St. Books / Doubleday Canada, 378 p., $35.95, 2007) Michael Gorra, ed., The Portable Conrad (Penguin, 702 p., $21.50, 2007) I I didn't really appreciate Joseph Conrad's famous Heart of Darkness--so famous that its title has become a cliché for anyone travelling to a seemingly remote patch of the planet–the first time around, when it was a staple on college reading lists. As V.S. Naipaul says (in a 1974 essay, "Conrad's... 
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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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Good News: The End is Nigh

*** I watched the CNN/YouTube Democratic Party presidential candidates debate the other week, and then I followed some of the post-debate coverage of the event, and I even tried to read a Rex Murphy column about it in the Toronto Globe and Mail. Having invoked the Canadian national icon, O' Murphy of Newfoundland, complete with his winning authentic accent, I have to admit, as a big fat aside, that I've never been able to read a Rex Murphy column or listen to a Rex Murphy TV commentary all the... 
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