By Sunday, on March 17th, 2010 “In Lullabies, I wanted to capture what I remembered of the drunken babbling of unfortunate twelve-year-olds: their illusions, their ludicrously bad choices, their lack of morality and utter disbelief in cause and effect” – Heather O’Neill on Lullabies for Little Criminals.
I had to begin with this quote because it’s such a succinct indication of how real O’Neill keeps her depiction of childhood. In fact, she’s been criticized by some readers (hopefully just the sheltered ones who still believe in the tooth-fairy) for keepin’ it too real – a concept that I find ridiculous since much of the inspiration for the characters and situations came from O’Neill’s memories of her own upbringing. Don’t get me wrong, I do sympathize with the need to quantify childhood with images of happy kids jumping-rope, but doesn’t it seem like blatant self-trickery to pretend that being a kid is always all sunshine and rainbows?
The fairytale land of childhood looks much different and not so squeaky-clean when it includes having a heroin-addicted father and being completely poverty-stricken, as it does for Baby, the protagonist and narrator in Lullabies. Growing up in Montreal’s red-light district, motherless, with no solid role models, and a father who’s in and out of rehab, Baby [...]
By Sarah, on January 15th, 2010 Reading The Carnivore was an interesting experience for me, because I’ve never been so engrossed in a story centered on characters I couldn’t stand. Both of the protagonists teetered on the border of unbearable, and perhaps it was because I anxiously wanted to see what abyss they’d sink into next, but I just couldn’t get enough. Like the undertow of the flooding rivers the pages describe, each time I turned a page I was sucked further in.
This is the story of a failed marriage, a husband and wife narrating alternating chapters of reflection on their troubled past. It is a story of a shared memory lacking the capacity to heal, existing only as the point of regeneration for a lifelong downward spiral. This fictional trip through the past takes place on the backdrop of the very real Hurricane Hazel, one of the deadliest storms to ever hit southern Ontario. The metaphor of the storm tracks perfectly the course of Ray and Mary’s union; like the citizens of Toronto preparing for the floods, they didn’t know exactly what to expect, were hit with innumerable horrors but somehow managed to survive and, when it passed, felt nothing but relief.
Interestingly, Hurricane Hazel had [...]
By cgevans, on October 28th, 2009 A review of “Except My Love For You,” a novel by John Hodgert
“Except My Love For You” by John Hodgert tells the story of a 45 year-old man named Gordon from Winnipeg, Manitoba. The novel begins with Gordon’s dramatic decision at the peak of his career to set aside his business and his marriage to explore the simplest way a man of his age can live ‘comfortably’ in the city. Guided by an underlying poetic structure and full of flashbacks and unexpected twists and turns, Gordon’s journey through this changing time in his life with nothing but a few possessions and a handful of friends to call his own is a difficult yet beautiful one.
While the appeal of “Except My Love For You” for the baby-boomer generation is clear, what is surprising is the way in which all readers are moved to journey alongside Hodgert’s protagonist and easily swept up in the questions his life poses of ours. Questions like: what do we idealize in life and should we idealize these things? What would it feel like to simplify our day-to-day and what would be the consequences of this change? Where will our choices lead down the road? How are [...]
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