By Anne Sebba, 2016

After my post of November 2020, it seemed to me the rewards of writing about books were not commensurate with the effort, and I felt I was finished with blogging. Just getting through the day in fairly good cheer has used up a lot of my energy throughout the pandemic, as it has for many others.

In spite of not having great energy for the last two years, I always have a couple of books on the go. Subscriptions to The London Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and The Literary Review ofCanada seriously cut into my time for reading anything else. These journals do give me something in the mail box and make me feel somewhat connected to the world beyond my home and my neighbourhood, and they are much more than just fill-in reading. Some of the articles are works of art in themselves, for example, Patricia Lockwood’s review in 6 January 2022 LRB of The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

Whether reading book reviews or browsing in book stores, I am always on the hunt for new books. A couple of months ago, I found Les Parisiennes in the sale section at the Chapters on Calgary Trail, and I felt compelled to share my excitement. The book deals with an under reported and misrepresented subject–the role of women in war. Too often they are presented as quietly keeping the home fires burning, when in fact they usually do much more when confronted with violent conflict they have probably not chosen and have little control over.

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Seized by a desire to go somewhere and not at all sure it wouldn’t have been better to stay home, in late June and early July my husband and I made a road trip to Winnipeg. There were only four cases of Covid-19 in Manitoba at that time, so the locals were probably in more danger from us than we were from them. We encountered no expressed hostility to our Alberta license plates, and the weather and the visiting were great. Now Manitoba has the highest infection rate per capita in Canada, and the province is in lockdown..

At that time we did not envision the pandemic lasting into next year. Now the limitations have gone on so long that normal life seems farther and farther away. Always given to introspection, I find myself tending more and more in that direction. Like many I wonder what will survive and what should survive of the old world.

The pandemic has made me aware of how much energy I usually expend rushing to get to things—mostly social engagements—and how stressful that rushing is. I ‘ve also been wondering why as a retired person I need to rush at all. Now that I barely have anywhere to get to, I am free of the stress of hurrying; I now experience the different stress of loneliness. From August until this week, when new restrictions were put in place, I was able to enjoy the company of my three grandchildren.

While I am fortunate compared with those alone in isolation, I still long for more variety in the company I keep and more variety in the places where I keep it. And I desperately miss live music and singing in a choir. Recently I attended my first Covid-19 funeral, where there was no hand shaking, no hugging, no singing, and no sharing of food. Everyone was masked and socially distanced, and yet it was comforting just to be in a church in the presence of other people. This was the funeral of my grandchildren’s step-great-grandmother, and I waved at them from three rows of pews away.

One side effect of isolation has been than I mostly feel calmer than usual, and get through most days in pretty good cheer. However, it doesn’t take much to shift my mood downward.. A sunless sky, a strong wind, a whole day of rain, the death of someone I barely knew, attending to the political shenanigans south of the undefended border—even one of these could cancel out my good mood in current times. Two or more together can ruin my day.

My mood is now steadily elevated by the fact that Joe Biden is president elect of the US, and even more so by the election of a woman—and a woman of colour—as vice-president.

In normal times a good part of my day is given over to socializing and running errands. Now the errands are mostly only for essentials and I am socializing much less and then at a distance. In these abnormal times I have more time to read and write than usual, yet my concentration and focus are poorer than usual. Also, my eyes simply wear out before I have filled up the day. I have probably read about a hundred books since my last post, yet have found it difficult to focus my thoughts on any of them—or even to keep track of all the titles.

At least I have had sufficient focus to have published a poem called “Intelligent Orange Woman Seeks Lovely Man” in an anthology called Glow from Truth Serum Press in Australia.

Like many I am wondering how I will make it through a pandemic winter when even a mostly beautiful pandemic summer was a challenge. I have had to find other pleasures besides writing, reading and visiting during this time. Gardening was a great joy and comfort from May through October, and on October 12^th the zinnias and rose mallow I planted from seed were still going strong, although it seemed wrong for flowers to be blooming at the fifty-third parallel in mid-October. With a supposedly 600-year-old starter passed on to me by my oldest friend, I have learned to make excellent whole wheat sourdough bread. I have also been making good use of the Netflix subscription I share with my younger son.

I often feel left out when other people talk about movies and TV shows, as I rarely watch anything in normal times. In spite of my love of animals I seldom watch cute animal videos, and find watching anything else on my small laptop screen almost unbearable. To me watching is incredibly slow compared with reading, so I must work out on the elliptical trainer in front of the TV, or do some knitting or hand sewing, neither of which I excel at but both of which soothe me. Even when I have something else to occupy me physically, I often just feel irritated by watching.

Because I am a fan of both Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, I watched all six seasons of Grace and Frankie, a show I enjoyed even though it doesn’t always make good use of the talents of these two wonderful actresses. Then I watched After Life with Ricky Gervais, Broadchurch, and Unorthodox. I enjoyed these three but wanted them to be longer, and still needed something to occupy my hands or my feet and arms.

On the recommendation of a Chinese Canadian friend the same age as my older son I viewed all sixteen luxuriously long episodes of Crash Landing on You (CLOY), a romantic drama about a South Korean heiress, a savvy businesswoman in her own right, who ends up in North Korea after a paragliding accident during a terrible storm. She and the handsome captain she literally lands on, the soldier in charge of guarding the border, gradually fall in love. The picture of life in North Korea, in reality a police state, is no doubt romanticized, but as the story develops, the villagers, especially the village women and the men under the captain’s command, are humanized. There are many improbable plot twists and turns that in the context of the characters and the story make perfect sense. In episode fifteen the lovers are separated at the border. Never much given to weeping, I cried my eyes out over their separation. It was cathartic to shed copious tears–something I needed to do in these trying times, when I often feel simply numb. Here is a picture of the lovers as they are falling in love, and he is doing his best to get her back to South Korea.

When I finished this series I tried Itaewon Class, another South Korean drama, but couldn’t get into it because the only character I found appealing (the father of the main character) was killed off early on. On the recommendation of a friend my own age, who had enjoyed CLOY after I told her about it, I next turned to It’s Okay to Not Be Okay, a South Korean drama about mental illness and trauma. Much of it is set in the OK Psychiatric Hospital and there is lots of humour in addition to the serious subject matter—and a compelling love story. At the beginning, supernatural elements are strong; as the series moves along, it becomes more realistic.

What is so remarkable about these Korean dramas is that I find them totally engrossing—I can just watch with my hands in my lap. Maybe it’s the unfamiliarity of the characters and the settings. Maybe it’s the way that physical attraction is handled. The characters remain fully clothed, even when in bed. I love this chasteness, and the scenes where lovers simply gaze at each other. And I love the flashbacks even though flashbacks usually get on my nerves. In a long on-line article I can no longer track down, another addicted female viewer commented that because 70 percent of the writers of Korean dramas are women, men are often seen through a female gaze—something that doesn’t happen much in Hollywood.

With little evidence, I previously had a low opinion of South Koreans, thinking them robotic unfeeling workaholics. Korean dramas have so changed my perspective that I now hope to travel to Korea when that’s possible. I am two thirds of the way through my second viewing of Crash Landing on You, and am finding it even more engaging than the first time, such that I feel no need for knitting or sewing. This may be because of the unfamiliarity of the settings and the characters; it may be because I am just generally slowed down compared with my normal life. On second viewing, I am also struck by how little I remember of something I have already viewed once compared with a book I have read once. Many of the scenes in the show seem absolutely fresh to me.

In the midst of all this viewing I have also been frantically reading. Generally I am good at keeping track of what I read, but it feels like most of the books I have read this year are loose pages blowing around in the pandemic whirlwind. In this time of protracted isolation, which in theory should be the ideal environment for finishing projects, I am finding it more and more difficult to finish anything. This seems to be just one more way the pandemic is detracting from my quality of life. It takes a lot of energy just to get through the day.

So I will conclude this post with remarks about only four books that I will always remember.

At the end of April, I speed read my way through Anna of All theRussias: A Life of Anna Akhmatova, a 2005 biography by British poet, novelist, and memoirist Elaine Feinstein (who died last year). Both the person and the poetry came alive for me. Anna Akhmatova had a public life as tumultuous as the outward life of the great American poet Emily Dickinson was uneventful. Born in 1889 to a noble family mired in genteel poverty, a family straight out of a Chekhov play, she lived through the 1905 revolution, the Bolshevik October revolution, the civil war, the famines, the terror, World War II, the banishment or execution of many of her generation, and the incarcerations of her only child. Because she continually ran afoul of the authorities, for much of her life her poetry was not published, although millions of Soviet citizens could quote big chunks by heart. She becomes a sort of Soviet Everywoman in her poems about waiting in line for news of her son with packages she hopes will be delivered. This biography received rather tepid reviews. I think it needs a reader as immersed in Akhmatova’s time and place as I am. One of the most thrilling aspects for me was the discovery that Akhmatova was a friend and muse of Modigliani, who was in love with her (although she did not reciprocate), whom she met in Paris about 1909. Imagine the conversations they had as they talked about their personal lives and the literary and artistic happenings in Italy and Russia!

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a 2018 novel by Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk chosen by one of my book clubs. On the most basic level it is a murder mystery. I read it twice because it puzzled me on first encounter. The setting is rural Poland near the Czech border, and the first person narrator is a retired civil engineer, formerly a builder of dams and bridges, now eager to know people’s exact dates and times of birth so she can cast their horoscopes. Another element of the occult or supernatural is provided by the appearances of the ghosts of her mother and grandmother in the boiler room. She keeps a sharp eye on all the comings and goings around her, ostensibly because she watches several unoccupied houses for money over the bleak winter. One of the things she observes most carefully is the abuse of animals. Indeed, the book has a great deal to say about the human relationship with non-human animals. It also has a lot to say about attitudes towards older women. Like many men approximately her age, the male authority figures she encounters see themselves as virile and in the prime of life, and women around their age or even somewhat younger as sexless crones soft in the head and certainly not worthy of positive attention. These attitudes allow the narrator to hide in plain sight, to observe things very closely and then to act on those observations.

My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises by Fredrik Backman (translated from Swedish, 2015) is also about a feisty old lady, but from the point of view of her seven-year-old (almost eight) granddaughter Elsa. Right after the novel was given to me by a dear friend, who put it on top of a box of books I had lent to her at the beginning of the pandemic, my stepdaughter-in-law and I chose it for the book club of two she and I have started having by phone. Elsa is being bullied at school, her mother is expecting a baby with her new partner, and Granny is dying of cancer, yet in the end this is a feel-good book with a happy ending. In general I don’t trust feel-good books but this one works for me. Elsa and Granny are both compelling characters, there is lots of humour, and a dog plays a central role in the story. While Elsa is having a hard time, a whole community of adults is quietly looking out for her.

Clara’s War: One Girl’s Story of Survival by Clara Kramer with Stephen Glantz (2009) is the most gripping of the many Holocaust memoirs I have read. To save one Jew in Nazi-occupied Europe was an extraordinary feat, fraught with terror and immense practical difficulties. This story is based on an old woman’s memories and the diary she kept as a teenager in the cellar of a house in eastern Poland (now western Ukraine) as one of 18 Jews rescued by an ethnic German who was a drunk, an adulterer and a vociferous anti-Semite. The venture succeeded because the house had a flush toilet that made it possible to dispose of the waste of so many human beings, and because of the sheer nerve and bravado of Valentine Beck—and also because of incredible luck. As to why Beck did what he did, as far as I can tell the fundamental motive was his inability to bow to authority. The original impetus was the close friendship between Beck’s wife and one of the women in the cellar. The wife leaves for three days after she discovers the friend and Beck are having an affair, an affair that all the others in the cellar are painfully aware of, but does not betray anyone.

I first read this book around 2010 when I borrowed it from Saskatoon Public Library. In 2014 I bought my own copy at the Strand Bookstore in New York City after phoning from Edmonton and speaking to an actual human being. I have never felt so cosmopolitan as when I walked into the store to pick up my hold, which was handed to me by a young hipster in wire-framed glasses, a black T-shirt and black jeans. Recently I have read that like many other bookstores, the Strand has experienced a huge loss of business during the pandemic (and also that its employees—hipsters and others—are not well treated by the female owner). I am doing my best to keep Audreys, Edmonton’s independent bookstore in business, and have just placed my Christmas order.

I hope this pandemic will end before I do, and I will get to feel as cosmopolitan again as I did walking into the Strand. In the meantime, I have Korean dramas.

I am sitting down to this blog after more than fourteen months of other things. This has been a year of dog walking, gardening, writing poetry, singing in a choir, two book clubs, and visiting with family and friends. Although those still in the labour force may think of retirement as an endless vacation, I have taken four actual vacations—a trip to Mexico for the Day of the Dead, a Mediterranean cruise, and visits to Winnipeg and Halifax. Each of my vacations involved air travel, about which I feel a bit guilty but which I rationalize because I barely left home between 1975 and 2000.

Everywhere I go I visit bookstores and libraries. In Halifax I was blown away by the spectacular downtown library that is full of light and space, and also of books and other media. In Mexico City the entrance to the main public library was a huge altar to Our Lady of Guadalupe, who was honoured by flickering candles and masses of marigolds and other strange magenta coloured flowered succulents I could not find out the name of. Although the light was dim and there were electrical cords taped to the floor, I saw no one trip or fall in the semi-darkness.

There is always a lot of unnecessary suffering in the world, brought home now more than usual for Canadians by the senseless murder of 22 people near Halifax, the beautiful city I visited last summer. To make these killings even harder for the bereaved, we are now in the midst of a pandemic that has upended normal life, severely restricting travel to other countries and even our movements at home. I am fortunate to have no worries about finances or food supply and to be isolating with two of my favourite humans and my dog in a house large enough for each of us to have enough personal space. Nevertheless, I am missing loved ones I cannot reach out and touch and speak with in person.

Other than the pandemic, the killings in Nova Scotia, the plight of refugees around the world, and the political shenanigans south of the border, the most upsetting thing for me in the past year was discovering that Jean Vanier, one of the few people I came close to idolizing, was probably guilty of sexually abusing a number of women over whom he had authority. I thought he was a holy man, and find the knowledge that he was an abuser hard to reconcile with all the good things he did and said. Even though we are all human and prone to sin, mistakes, and error, there is a hierarchy of such things, and sexual abuse is pretty close to the top. Other people have written that l’Arche was and is much more than Vanier, and I hope and pray their work continues.

So much has happened in the past fourteen months that in spite of a very good memory, I can’t remember everything I have read in that time. In the following paragraphs I will touch on the highlights.

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I began blogging about books with high hopes. Over time I have realized how much work it is to read a book, and then write something at least halfway intelligent about it. I am grateful to everyone who has read what I’ve written and possibly offered comments, but this has not turned out to be as much of a conversation as I had hoped. The format doesn’t lend itself to easy back and forth.

In early July last year, while driving home from Saskatoon with my travel and writing buddy (she was at the wheel), I was inspired by a book of poems by her friend Dave Margoshes. ACalendar of Reckoning, that she had just had autographed. (When she told the story of my poetic conversion to Dave, he said, `Not at all surprising. Art begets art.`–or words to that effect.)

Thus I began writing poems myself. This was a bold act for a woman who studied Keats and Donne and other greats of poetry in her youth. For a long time my study of literature inhibited my attempts to write. With age I see that my efforts at writing are worthwhile because they reflect my personality, the era I live in, and my life experiences. I also have the advantage of having read widely and intensively for more than six decades.

My first poem, about two girls I saw at a bus stop while depositing a bag of dog poop in the garbage receptacle, is called “Two Whitest Girls in the World.” I have refined it to the point where I am ready to share it.

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By Marian Keyes, 2017

I remember my forties as my most difficult decade. It was made difficult by my younger son’s collision with the education system, my feelings that I should have done something more or at least different with my life, and the fluctuating hormones of the perimenopause. These combined stressors contributed to a deep depression and thoughts of suicide.

Because I remember that terrible decade very clearly, it was easy for me to empathize with Amy O’Connell, the 44-year-old protagonist of this 570-page novel.

It is a rollicking good read, very different from most of the books I read and write about. The dialogue crackles with life, and there are many bits that are very funny. Few short books manage to be this funny; this long book had me chuckling and smiling throughout (I seldom guffaw—often I don’t get the joke or I get the wrong joke).

I bought my copy at the Value Village on Whyte Avenue on a day when all books were 50 percent off. It came to me seriously bent out of shape, as though it had been held in one hand by a reader who was holding a baby or stirring a pot with the other. Arthritis in both thumbs prevents me from reading in this way, but the shape it came in was a good indicator of how engrossing a book it would be.

Amy has a demanding job in public relations. While trying to find a celebrity willing to be a spokesperson for adult diapers, she is also working to rehabilitate the reputations of a serious male journalist who has been caught shagging the nanny and a noted actress who has been arrested for buying prescription drugs from undercover police. One of five adult children in a lively Irish family that meets every Friday for a takeaway meal at their elderly parents’ home, she feels stressed out by work, by a perennial shortage of money, by the mothering of three daughters on the cusp of adulthood, by her father’s dementia and her mother’s need for more caregiving support, by the emotional withdrawal of her husband. Amy is on the verge of being an alcoholic, sometimes over the verge, and addicted to on-line shopping for new and vintage clothing and accessories. Like many women, she is racked by insecurities about her appearance in general and her weight in particular and the creeping sense that she is past her prime (although it is clear from the way others react to her that she is extremely attractive).

An engaging but self-deluded omniscient narrator, Amy is gobsmacked when her devoted husband Hugh, having come into some money from the estate of his father, announces he is taking a break. This is to be not a separation, not a divorce, just a break from their life together, a six-month back-packing trip through Southeast Asia. If sex with other women happens, it happens –just as he recognizes Amy may be having sex with other men while he is away– but he promises he will be coming back to her and the girls, and that he will not be posting pictures of other women on his Facebook page.

When Hugh makes his shocking announcement, Amy is sure that Hugh, until now a caring husband and a doting father to the three girls (only one of whom is biologically his), needs a break because he is still mourning the deaths of his father and a childhood friend. The unfolding narrative reveals that Amy is not quite so innocent in Hugh’s need for a break as she initially wants to believe. Seeing a posting about him on another woman’s Facebook page leads Amy to pictures of him on a beach in Thailand with this woman in his arms, and convinces Amy that Hugh is not coming back.

Marian Keyes has published numerous novels and also several volumes of non-fiction. An active campaigner on the yes side during the recent abortion referendum in Ireland, she very much wanted children of her own. When she and her husband could not conceive, they chose not to go the adoption or IVF route. Keyes absolutely supports the right of women to be mothers when and how they choose.

A good part of The Break concerns the abortion of one of Amy’s teenage daughters, a fraught experience which requires a trip to England. The abortion pills Amy orders on-line are impounded by customs, and the mere ordering of the pills could have led to a fourteen-year jail sentence. In spite of—some might say because of—the abortion theme, The Break is a testament to the comfort, value and durability of family.

McNally Robinson Books in both Saskatoon and Winnipeg classify Marian Keyes’s writing as fiction, and the work of Edna O’Brien, another Irish woman writer, who in her eighties is still writing great books, as literature. I understand the difference. Some but not all fiction is literature, and it doesn’t have to be both to be enjoyable.

I was extremely happy to find Down by the River, a 1997 novel by O’Brien, in the neatly organized literature section at the back of the otherwise messy and overfull Red River Book Store in the Exchange District on a recent visit to Winnipeg. I paid only $4 for a hardcover in mint condition.

The book opens with a scene of bucolic nature. The lush perfection is destroyed by a terrible story of father-daughter incest. This is the most heinous of crimes, as it violates the father’s obligation to nurture and protect the child, and is an evil expression of his physical, economic, and emotional power

The beauty of the writing and the setting in nature contrast with and emphasize the horror of the story. The girl, who is living alone with her father after the death of her mother, becomes pregnant and almost gets to England for an abortion, but then is apprehended and returned to her father (who is still her legal guardian). When investigation determines the pregnancy is the result of incest, the case goes to the high court.

Published in 1997, Down by the River draws on real-life situations and characters. There is no supportive community gathered around the lonely girl, as there is in The Break. I found the O’Brien book so horrifying that I was not able to do more than skim its pages, and don’t know if I can bear to keep it on my book shelf. Yesterday I read of a similar case in Indonesia, where a 15-year-old girl who was pregnant after being raped by her brother, was put in jail for having an abortion.

There are times when literature is too much, and fiction is as much as the buffeted reader can handle. There are times when the news is too much, and one must turn away from being any more informed. Like many others, I have been incredulous at much of the recent news–about the only good stories have concerned the rescue of the boys from the cave in Thailand, and the Edmonton teenager born in a refugee camp in Ghana who is amazingly gifted at soccer.

Currently I am nearing the end of Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds by Lyndall Gordon, the choice of one of my book clubs, and a book I found in Winnipeg at Neighbourhood Bookstore and Café for $8.50. It has been soothing to go back more than a century and become absorbed in the life of a family that was in many ways highly dysfunctional, but a family that produced and as best it could nurtured a genius. For me this book has been the best kind of escapism.

By Jenny Erpenbeck, 2017

A translation from the German, this is the story of a man named Richard, a professor emeritus of classical Greek literature. Until his retirement and the death of his wife a few years earlier, he lived what he thought was a good life in the former East Germany. Access to his Stasi file shows him he was thought to be too fond of women other than his wife to have been a reliable informer. We see his limitations and his loneliness in his grocery lists for ham, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, tinned soup, and bread. As in the rest of his life, there is little colour and little variety in these lists.

After Richard has packed up his office and said a final farewell to his colleagues, who seem much less interested in his departure than they were in his arrival as a younger man, he struggles to find new meaning and new focus. Quite by chance he happens upon a group of refugees from Africa who have occupied a square in Berlin to draw attention to their plight. Slowly he is drawn into their concerns and in the process finds new purpose in life.

As a student of the Odyssey and other classical works, Richard sees in these men echoes of earlier wanderings and dislocations. He imagines the men he comes to know best as characters from Greek literature—a beautiful boy is Apollo, the large angry man is the Thunderbolt Hurler. At the same time these characters seem fully realized human beings. The men are all trapped between the tragic, painful past—the murder by fire of a beloved father, the drowning deaths of their children, the beatings they experienced as slaves—and a future they want to have but which is not taking shape for them.

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Edited by Richard J. Hebda, Sheila Greer and Alexander P. Mackie, 2017.

In 1999 hunters looking for sheep found human remains on a glacier in British Columbia, in a region so remote and with such extremes of weather that it is accessible at best for two or three weeks a year. The bones and soft tissues were so well preserved by the cold and ice that a great deal of information would be gleaned from them.

The elders of the Champagne Aishihek First Nations (CAFN), on whose land the remains were found, felt responsible for the respectful treatment of what was left of a human body. Anthropologists and other researchers on the project realized that only minor adjustments were necessary to make their practises conform with Indigenous customs, and that these changes did not compromise scientific rigour. Generally parallel ways of knowing—scientific and traditional—were made for a time to intersect and to work together.

After some debate, scientists were allowed to take the remains to the Royal British Columbia Museum for analysis. This showed that the remains were between 150 and 300 years old and those of a man 17-19 years of age. His age was estimated from his not quite fully adult skull. The diet revealed in his bones showed that he had come from the coast. His incipient tuberculosis was evidence of contact with Europeans. Death was probably the result of exposure rather than violence. He may have laid down to rest in the cold and never got up again.

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In library and information science, bibliotherapy is the matching of reader and text to provide comfort, insight, or catharsis. It is about reading as a means to healing of the soul and the psyche. In the past month I have been especially in need of the comfort and insight provided by reading and perhaps especially of reading as a better or at least different reality than the real world.

On October 1st I embarked on a three-day trip to Saskatoon with a friend, a last quick visit before winter. In the four years I lived in this small city, I was frequently dissatisfied and longed to be back in Edmonton. Now that I have been back in my home town for five years, I enjoy the best that Saskatoon has to offer.

When I worked in libraries I bought few books. At 69 I shop for books with the same zeal I used to devote to shoes and clothes. I figure I now have enough of both of those things to last for the rest of my life, and I now feel the same urgency about finding just the right book and never being without a book I absolutely must read right now as I used to feel about dressing up.

As a person who loves books, I go to Saskatoon to enjoy its two wonderful bookstores. McNally Robinson is better than any bookstore in Edmonton. Like all large bookstores it now sells jewellery and purses and expensive clothes of the type indulgent grandmothers less thrifty and practical than myself buy for their adored grandchildren. And it has a mid-priced and usually very good restaurant where I feel comfortable lingering for hours of conversation with Saskatoon friends.

Along with these add-ons, McNally Robinson still has books as its main focus. While you will be lucky to find even one book by a writers such as Edna O’Brien and Jane Gardam in an Edmonton bookstore, possibly multiple copies of the same current title if you find anything, at McNally Robinson I have been thrilled to find seven or eight different titles by such midlist authors.

Saskatoon also has an outstanding second-hand book store in Westgate Books, the best second-hand bookstore I have been in other than the Strand in New York City. Not only does Westgate Books have an extensive and well-organized stock out front, the owner also has detailed knowledge of what is in the back.

Out front the books are organized not just by broad categories such as history. The history of Asia is broken down by country, and there is a separate section on the Holocaust. There are fiction sections of British women and British male writers and American male and female writers, and extensive and precisely organized Canadiana. I bought two of my most treasured books, Siege by Anna Reid, and Night of Stone by Catherine Merridale, on earlier visits to Westgate Books.

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By Susan Faludi, 2016

As a human being I believe in every person’s right to choose whatever identity feels most comfortable, as long as it is not hateful to anyone else. As a daughter I would have been utterly confused and traumatized by having either my mother or my father choose to transition to the opposite gender. Although I don’t think of their marriage as particularly happy, I am grateful that my mother never chose to become a man and my father never chose to become a woman.

Susan Faludi lived through the dislocating experience of her father’s transition to womanhood. This beautifully written memoir of that family history caught my eye on the bargain table at my neighbourhood Chapters for a couple of reasons. I am fascinated by the history of Eastern and Central Europe and even more so by stories about parents and children. This book about Faludi’s relationship with her Hungarian father, who returned to live in Hungary after the fall of the Iron Curtain, appeals on both these levels.

Susan Faludi tells the story of her father’s life and her fraught relationship with him. Her parent’s troubled marriage ended with such violence on his part towards her mother that Susan has not seen him for more than 20 years when she goes to Hungary to visit.

For the first seven decades of his life the man who has become a woman was Istvan (which I believe in Hungarian is pronounced Isht-van), Pista to his nearest and dearest. Istvan changed into Steven and then Steve when he moved to the United States in the 1950s. In this new country, he was an insecure caricature of an American husband and father, although a highly unusual one in his construction of marionettes, his enthusiasm for recordings of opera and requiem masses, and his fascination with The Ugly Duckling. He made the best he could of things in the States after finding out that his one true love—his reason for moving there—had just become engaged to an American.

When Susan reconnects with her father, Steve has become Stefi after a sex-change operation in Thailand and wants to relate to Susan girl to girl. This is, however, a book not just about name or sex changes but also about larger issues of shifting identities. It is about what is fake and what is real and how we try to know the difference.

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