Ayn Rand and Ralph Nader?

Posted by Josee Corrigan

I was driving back from what was possibly my last camping trip of the year - wah! - and listening to one of my fave radio jockeys on CBC, Jian Ghomeshi. He was in discussion with Ralph Nader about Nader's new book entitled Only The Super Rich Can Save Us! While Ghomeshi teased him about the title, Nader elaborated on topic of his book - that the wealthiest 1% have the power to change the world and are beginning to care. Of course the four-time US presidential candidate's new book has a special focus on our American neighbours to the south, regardless Nader's theory about wealth and responsibility is worthy and timely during an era in which the rich have been demonized for their lack of altruism (see Michael Moore's new film Capitalism: A Love Story) .
Interestingly, Ayn Rand and her famous novel, The Fountainhead, emerged throughout the conversation, at which point I really perked up my ears. Synchronistically, over the past few weeks I've picked up a biography of Ayn Rand by Anne C. Heller called Ayn Rand and The World She Made. Rand was a fascinating writer and theorist who expounded the themes of narcissism, capitalism, and individualism through the characters in her novels. According to both Heller's biography and Ralph Nader, her book The Fountainhead is one of the top five books read in America and has had a profound influence on the cultural development of the United States since its publication. With this in mind, it's interesting to examine Nader's arguement that it is the richest 1% who should and are, in some cases, promoting altruistic cultural action in this tragic age of disintigrating American values. Hmmmmn. So, what do we all think about that?

For more interesting facts and info about Ayn Rand look to the Ayn Rand Institute at www.aynrand.org
To listen to Jian's interview from this morning go to www.cbc.ca/q

On another note entirely, Jennie lent me an excellent book from the coming-of-age genre. The novel is called The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. The anti-hero, Charlie, describes his life in the form of letters written to "Dear Friend," from the perspective of a highschool student/teenager. I love him! Although perceived by the 'cool' crowd as a loser/freak/weirdo, he is sensitive (cries a lot), smart, and perceptive. The novel details his life including descriptions of his group of similarly mifit, but also wonderful friends; a boy-crazy sister; a college-attending jock brother; a wacky, embarrassing, exended family; a set of unbelievably chill parents; and one thank-god-for-him english teacher. I really enjoyed the books that this kid reads and reviews as his teacher assigns them for extracurricular - Ayn Rand's Fountainhead being one of them. This book is worth reading, especially for those who are currently experiencing the joys and pitfalls of highschool.

OUT STEALING HORSES by Per Petterson

Posted by Jennie

Last year my favourite literary fiction was Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson. It takes place in Norway and gives us a man's life, how everything changed when he was fifteen and out stealing horses, and how that change echoes in his old age. It's a simple story, quiet and intense at once.

--Review by Ken Worpole on 31/05/2006

This fine novel, translated by Anne Born, was the surprise winner of the 2006 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and it really is a book to cherish and remember.

Out Stealing Horses eschews the knowing realism of much contemporary fiction in favour of the episodic ebb and flow of the "unending conversation" in the mind of the narrator, as he looks back upon a series of traumatic war-time incidents in the past, and in the face of approaching old age. The narrator, Trond, has returned, following the death of his second wife, to a remote settlement in Norway where he and his family spent their childhood holidays under German occupation. Not only do old faces re-appear, but he has to try to finally understand the familial and political betrayals of that bitter period of resistance and collaboration, and the breaking of families.

The detail of the daily round of wood-chopping, shopping, cooking, dog-walking and immersion in the life of the forest of an ageing widower is beautifully achieved. There is also the occasional drink with a neighbour, and a nightly reading of Dickens, the novelist whose work shaped the imagination of the young Norwegian who, like David Copperfield, desperately hoped to become the hero of his own life. That question overshadows the whole novel: did he achieve this heroic role?

Tragedy and epiphany recur in equal parts, though the deep forest interiors seem to absorb all of human hope and suffering. In his childhood Trond remembers the milkmaids singing the cows home every evening just as vividly as the presence of the Germans and the secretive night-time manoeuvres of local partisans. However, there was one terrible incident involving the accidental shooting of a child by its twin brother, that provides the fulcrum of the novel, and seems to instigate a pattern of family ruptures that marks the lives of nearly all of the male characters we meet. The narrator, like his father before him, and his best friend, at some point in his life walks out on his family, never to return or even maintain contact. Going missing seems to be the price men under stress have to pay in these taciturn, unforgiving times and places.

There is salvation in this world through physical labour. The scenes of harvesting and tree-felling (and the subsequent rolling of the trees into the river to be manoeuvred downstream to the sawmills) are imbued with a Tolstoyan love and deep nostalgia. If these days are happily foreshortened by the blue hour of dusk "when everything draws closer", so too are the final days and months of the narrator as he slowly untangles the mysteries of childhood; the threads of fragmented family and village relationships are gathered in again, and finally understood.

Don't be put off by the title and its unfortunate echoes of Cormac McCarthy's overly poeticised All the Pretty Horses, nor the jacket photograph of the author in full horse-whispering mode. Inside is the real thing, a novel artfully conveying a profound sense of time passing, the consolations of landscape, and a prose style and folded-in geology that makes every sentence do the work of ten.

THE LAST SAMURAI by Helen DeWitt

Posted by Jennie

One of my favourite books is back in the store. The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt. It has a most clever method for learning a new language. It has single mother angst and single child quest. I loved it so did all my friends, well, the ones that read it. It's not the movie script, but it is all about it. It's very original and very good! And it seems to be going out of print...


Helen DeWitt's extraordinary debut, The Last Samurai, centers on the relationship between Sibylla, a single mother of precocious and rigorous intelligence, and her son, who, owing to his mother's singular attitude to education, develops into a prodigy of learning. Ludo reads Homer in the original Greek at 4 before moving on to Hebrew, Japanese, Old Norse, and Inuit; studying advanced mathematical techniques (Fourier analysis and Laplace transformations); and, as the title hints, endlessly watching and analyzing Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece, The Seven Samurai. But the one question that eludes an answer is that of the name of his father: Sibylla believes the film obliquely provides the male role models that Ludo's genetic father cannot, and refuses to be drawn on the question of paternal identity. The child thinks differently, however, and eventually sets out on a search, one that leads him beyond the certainties of acquired knowledge into the complex and messy world of adults.

The novel draws on themes topical and perennial--the hothousing of children, the familiar literary trope of the quest for the (absent) father--and as such, divides itself into two halves: the first describes Ludo's education, the second follows him in his search for his father and father figures. The first stresses a sacred, Apollonian pursuit of logic, precise (if wayward) erudition, and the erratic and endlessly fascinating architecture of languages, while the second moves this knowledge into the world of emotion, human ambitions, and their attendant frustrations and failures.

The Last Samurai is about the pleasure of ideas, the rich varieties of human thought, the possibilities that life offers us, and, ultimately, the balance between the structures we make of the world and the chaos that it proffers in return. Stylistically, the novel mirrors this ambivalence: DeWitt's remarkable prose follows the shifts and breaks of human consciousness and memory, capturing the intrusions of unspoken thought that punctuate conversation while providing tantalizing disquisitions on, for example, Japanese grammar or the physics of aerodynamics. It is remarkable, profound, and often very funny. Arigato DeWitt-sensei.

Review by Burhan Tufail at goodreads.com

GRACELING by Kristin Cashore

In a world where people born with an exceptional skill, known as a Grace, are feared and exploited, Katsa carries the burden of a skill even she despises: the Grace of killing.

She lives under the command of her Uncle Randa, King of the Middluns, and is expected to carry out his dirty work, punishing and torturing anyone who displeases him. Breaking arms and cutting off fingers are her stock-in-trade. Finding life under his rule increasingly unbearable Katsa forms an underground Council, whose purpose is to combat the destructive behavior of the seven kings - after all, the Middluns is only one of the seven kingdoms, and each of them is ruled its own king with his own personal agenda for power.

When the Council hears that the King of Liend's father has been kidnapped Katsa investigates . . . and stumbles across a mystery. Who would want to kidnap him, and why? And who was the extraordinary Graced fighter who challenged her fighting skills, for the first time, as she and the Council rushed the old man to saftey?

Something dark and deadly is rising in the north and creeping across the continent, and behind it all lurks the shadowy figure of a one eyed king . . .

Reprinted from Orion Publishing Group

“Cashore's prose is smooth and unobtrusive. But for all its lightness of tone, Graceling is not a simple novel. indeed it deals with some very difficult subject matter. Its inevitable love story is sweetly unconventional and unabashedly feminist. Katsa herself is a rich character. The growth of her trust and self-esteem is the understated heart of the novel. This is always Katsa's story and enjoyable fast paced it is too. An immensely fun, good-hearted read”

SFX

“A WOW of a book! I HAD to know how it ended”

TAMORA PIERCE

more on ITALIAN SHOES by Henning Mankell

Jennie's favourite book of the year.

Frederick Welin was once a surgeon until an act of medical negligence brought him into disrepute. It was not so much what happened as the fact that he attempted to avoid the responsibility which brought the disgrace and he retreated to live on a skerry in the Stockholm archipelago, cut off from all but a very few people. Twelve years into his self-imposed exile, Welin, now in his mid sixties, wakes one morning to see an old woman with a Zimmer frame struggling across the frozen sea to his cottage. It was Harriet, a woman whom he had loved and then abandoned without warning some forty years before.

You'll struggle to warm to Welin, who's moved through life without accumulating much in the way of companions and his most meaningful relationships are with the postman and the coastguard. He's a snooper and it's whilst he's going through Harriet's handbag that he discovers she's in the later phases of a terminal illness. She's sought him out because she wants to hold him to a promise he once made to take her to a remote lake in northern Sweden. It's an eventful journey which forces Welin to think about the way his life has gone – but ill as she is, Harriet has a shock in store for him.

As do most people outside Sweden, I came to Mankell via his Wallander police procedurals and it was only when I was deprived of those that I moved on to Depths and was won over by the anti-hero, Lars Tobiasson-Svartman, and Mankell's ability to evoke the fog- and ice-bound islands of the archipelago. I was slightly disappointed by Kennedy's Brain which was written from burning anger and lacked the clinical precision of Depths, but it's with Italian Shoes that I feel Mankell has come into his own.

We have another anti-hero in Welin and whilst the book has the familiar themes of estrangement and isolation, the overt violence of Depths has gone, to be replaced by redemption and a glimmer of hope. It's another journey into the heart of a man and an examination of aging and death – those which come suddenly and without warning and those which are long-heralded and perhaps greeted with relief. The book lacks a towering female character such as Sara Fredrika in Depths, but Harriet and the other women who come into Welin's life are vital – despite the fact that one is terminally ill – and contribute greatly to the uplifting feeling that the book gave me. I finished the book with a feeling of hope that there was a better future ahead – which is rather unusual With Mankell's books.

Italian Shoes may well lack the technical brilliance of Depths but for me it's the best of Mankell's work. Difficult themes – aging and death – are dealt with sensitively and back lit by the bleak settings of the Stockholm archipelago and northern Sweden. The writing is elegant and Laurie Thompson's translation as brilliant as ever. Add to this a thought-provoking and intriguing story and it really is difficult to ask for more.

review by Sue Magee of The Bookbag

SOMETIMES I THINK, SOMETIMES I AM by Sara Fanelli

Reviewed in Books For Keeps No. 169 (March 2008) by Joanna Carey (JC)

Sara Fanelli, an Italian now living in London, has influences that range from artists of the Russian avant garde and the Dadaists, to the African American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. Her distinctive work has a very personal visionary quality, that makes it virtually inimitable. Well known for Dear Diary, Mythological Monsters – and her brilliant Pinocchio, her latest book (not aimed at children, but widely accessible) has the intimate, slightly chaotic feel of a scrap-book, and is packed with drawings, etchings and collages, all inspired by literary quotations – hence its title Sometimes I Think, Sometimes I Am (Paul Valery).

This enchanting book ushers you into the labyrinthine world of Fanelli’s imagination, a place inhabited by birds, angels, sprites, devils and tight-lipped onion-headed marionettes with pointy noses and clackety little boots. Like eccentric street performers, they act out the wit and wisdom of the sayings of assorted luminaries like Robert Louis Stevenson, Napoleon and St Augustine, Nabokov, Virgil et al. The drawings are playful, anarchic, romantic and mysteriously disturbing by turns.

Fanelli has a graphic language all her own, wanton loopy scribbles appear to denote energy, lust and confusion, while elsewhere, arrows move purposefully across the pages like guided missiles, or in clusters, as in the Bayeux tapestry. Who knows what it all means – we all see things differently. Saul Steinberg is one of Fanelli’s heroes and in one of the quotes she illustrates (a drawing of an onion-headed sphinx with an enigmatic smile) Steinberg says "The beauty of the sphinx is that you yourself must do the interpreting… interpretation probably does not give us the truth, but the act of interpretation saves us."

$40.95

Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography

Posted by Noam Ash

One of my all-time favourites. Chester Brown has an extraordinary gift for using spare, simple illustrations to convey a depth of human emotion and complexity. He portrays individuals not caricatures, and offers unique insights into the minds of historical figures on both sides of the Red River Rebellion. Highly entertaining, this is a must read for anyone interested in Canada's campaign of Western Expansion during the early years of confederation.


Drawn & Quarterly

Chester Brown reinvents the comic book medium to create the critically acclaimed historical biography Louis Riel, winning the Harvey Awards for best writing and best graphic novel for his compelling, meticulous, and dispassionate retelling of the charismatic, and perhaps insane, nineteenth-century Metis leader. Brown coolly documents with dramatic subtlety the violent rebellion on the Canadian prairie led by Riel, who some regard a martyr who died in the name freedom, while others consider him a treacherous murderer.

"It has the thoroughness of a history book yet reads with the personalized vision of a novel."--Time Magazine

"If you love to read a gripping story, if you are awed by the talent of an artist, then look no further: Chester Brown's Louis Riel is comix history in the making, and with it, history never looked so good."--The Globe and Mail Book Review

"The starkly told story of a crucial figure in Canada's history--yet one whom most Americans have probably never heard of. It's a credit to Brown's plainspoken artistry and flair for narrative that it's a page-turner till the end."--The Boston Phoenix

"This is an ingenious comic and a major achievement." --Publishers Weekly Starred Review