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.

Reproduction, the Giller Prize winner from last year, was discussed in one of my book clubs on December 30^th. A group of women between the ages of 60 and 80, most and perhaps all of us had played a role in making Christmas for our extended families. Besides the effort of Christmas, which seems to become my focus for at least a month every year, I always feel exhausted by the diminishing light of November and December. I think it was partially a reflection of the time of year that at the discussion on the 30^th no one liked the book very much. Some read the first forty pages and couldn’t go on. I also was thoroughly put off by the first forty pages, finding the characters extremely unappealing. I did get half way through the book before the meeting, but only because I wanted to have something to say. At that point my only positive comment was that I loved the scenes featuring snarky, insecure, self-obsessed teenagers. Several women who actually finished the novel said they felt it was a book for younger people, a book they would recommend to someone interested, in terms of both subject matter and style, in what is happening in Canadian fiction nowadays..

Because I had bought my own copy and because the book had won the Giller, I took it on the Mediterranean cruise. I have written before about how I must have a good supply of reading material at all times, so I can hardly believe how few books I took with me on this trip while also leaving my tablet at home. The ship had a meagre collection in what was called the library and card playing room. This area was almost completely taken over by card players on the days we were at sea, the days when I would have most liked to sit there and read. Adding to the paucity of the collection from my point of view was that the books were in six languages (and given the number of Chinese tourists on board, I predict there will soon be a seventh). I can read some French and Spanish but did not feel like tackling Danielle Steel or John Grisham in either of these languages while on vacation.

This left me with the books I had brought with me, which had seemed like more when I was packing. I read the one P. G. Wodehouse book I brought along and left it behind in the ostensible library, vowing never to give that author any more time—elaborate English country house humour is simply not my thing. Then I read the second half of Reproduction, and because it was almost a month since I had read the first half and I didn’t have much else to do, I read that part for the second time. I was considerably more impressed than I had been between Christmas and New Year.

The novel follows what can loosely be described as a family group over almost four decades.

Felicia, a girl from an unrecognized island (“I am from nowhere,” she says), is still in school when she meets Edgar Gross, a man more than twice her age. Their mothers are patients in a palliative care unit when much of the hospital is under water. Felicia’s mother does die shortly. Edgar’s “mutter” may be a concentration camp survivor; she remains an inscrutable character who speaks only German. Mutter survives and is for a time cared for by Felicia in Edgar’s house. Edgar is a slimy character who has prostitutes on call to care for his mother..

Edgar seduces Felicia, who becomes pregnant and has a son named Armistice. Felicia’s story is on one level tragic, but on another humorous, as in this, one of my favourite passages:

The sex talk that Felicia received had two problems. First, it occurred after she had had

sex. Second, it was delivered by the man with whom she had just had sex, had been having sex for six weeks. In its entirety, it went like this:

I don’t want to get pregnant.

Then don’t.

Felicia thinks Edgar told her he had a vasectomy; in fact, he was musing about having a vasectomy.

Thus begins an on and off—mostly off—relationship spanning more than three decades. When Army is a teenager, he and Felicia rent part of a house from a Portuguese Canadian landlord named Oliver, the divorced father of a son and daughter he has custody of for some of the year. Oliver and Felicia and their three children and eventually one grandchild become increasingly connected over time. Army has inherited some some of the business acumen of his father’s family, and as a teenager runs various rackets—hair cuts, gym memberships, peeks at his porn stash—out of the rented garage. Edgar takes little interest in his offspring until he is charged with sexual harassment by some female employees and tries to upgrade his image by acting like a caring father. At the end of the novel, Army is in his mid-thirties, driving a BMW, still never really having got a grip on his own life, still living with and off his mother and never having had a significant relationship with any other woman. He has not left home to make his fortune and come home to take care of Felicia. He has never left, and she is still taking care of him.

Felicia is somewhat reminiscent of Hortense in Andrea Levy’s Small Island and of the mother in David Chariandy’s Brother (two other books I enjoyed in the past year). They are all brown women in racist societies where white people have the power. Hortense and Felicia struggle to have their certificates from their home countries recognized and to acquire new, valid ones. Felicia does her best for her only child, but is always away, either working to support them or working to acquire another diploma that will enable her to support them better. Felicia and Hortense are also alike in their religious fervour and in their habit of dressing up as ladies. The mother in David Chariandy’s novel is always exhausted from working several jobs, and like Felicia is not at home enough to enforce the rules she wants her children to live by.

Reproduction starts out fairly conventional in form, and becomes more fragmented. There are later passages which have commentary within the text, sort of like the running annotations in some versions of the Bible, but rather than being on the left margin, the commentary is embedded in the text. By this stage I was so involved with the characters that the unconventional form did not put me off. Besides engaging characters who at first don’t seem appealing, the novel has humour and pathos and also social criticism. While telling the story of an unconventional family, bound together by lust, economics, familiarity, rage, inertia, and love, Williams writes about racism, colonialism, and male chauvinism. He also pokes fun at wannabe rock stars and the makers of arty films.

Asylum: A Survivor’s Flight from Nazi-Occupied Vienna Through Wartime France by Moriz Scheyer (2016) is another book I read on the ship. I found this memoir on the discount pile at the local Chapters for $4 (and with my Plum Rewards card discount of 10% and 5% GST, paid a mere $3.78 for the book). The author, who died in 1949 and was already in poor health as his ordeal began, wrote the book during and right after the War. It has the feel of walking over hot coals in bare feet, certainly not of emotion recollected in tranquility. Scheyer’s stepson destroyed the original manuscript because he felt the tone was too anti-German (it is hard to see how one could be Jewish and not be anti-German when describing the horrific events of 1933-1945 in Europe). The memoir was finally published after Scheyer’s step-grandson found a carbon copy among family papers.

Scheyer was an influential journalist in Vienna in the 20s and 30s, a reviewer of books, theatre, and music. He did not identify as Jewish but as Austrian, and beyond that as European. After the Nazis occupied Austria, he was removed from his job, and as their lives became more and more restricted, he, his wife and their faithful, non-Jewish servant set off for France—a country he had always loved and idealized. With the German invasion, they were not safe there either. After many terrible trials and betrayals the trio found sanctuary in a home for the disabled, the mentally ill, and epileptics that was run by nuns. The mother superior was sure she was doing God’s work in harbouring all these societal rejects who were, in the view of the Nazis, less than human. The author, his wife and servant found a safe haven among other rejects, the same kind of people that find a home in l’Arche.

A book I read on the Mexico trip provides an interesting contrast to Scheyer’s memoir. I Am Fifteen and I Don’t Want to Die by Christine Arnothy tells a similar story, but from the point of few of a spoiled Hungarian Jewish teenager, who also escaped to France. In spite of the narcissistic, often petulant tone the story kept me reading. Although written when the author was an adult, the book left me feeling that the narcissistic, needy teenager became a narcissistic, needy adult. Scheyer’s maturity provided a refreshing change.

In Mexico City, I bought a copy of The Great Gatsby, a book I had not read since a course on twentieth century American literature that I took in 1968. My friend who came on the Mexican trip is a great admirer of this book, which I found certainly worthy of rereading, and applicable to our times in its theme of the pernicious shallowness of the American dream. This friend who came to Mexico and another of her friends travelled to San Francisco in February—when such travel was still possible—specifically to take in a dramatic reading of this novel.

After Scheyer’s book, I turned to what I think of as pandemic reading.

I rarely buy anything from Amazon, as they are essentially a monopoly and are known for their unfair labour practises. I did buy Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Island by Patrick Radden Keefe with an Amazon gift certificate I received for Christmas. This is the harrowing tale of the murder of a widowed mother of ten children for her supposedly being an informer for the British at the time of the Troubles. We are taken inside the hearts and minds of the IRA supporters who thought this was a just punishment for such a crime, as well as shown the effect on the shattered, scattered children.

Say Nothing led to Milkman by Anna Burns, winner of the Booker Prize in 2018. The novel is an avalanche of language set in a place that seems to be Northern Ireland but could as well be Bosnia or Lebanon or Rwanda. Only the dog has a name. Everyone else is defined by their political leanings, or supposed political leanings, by their family and its real or imagined leanings, and by their place in the family. The narrator, a young woman who reads while walking and only books from the nineteenth century or earlier (because she can’t stand the twentieth century) comes to realize that her eccentricity is beyond the pale. The tone is panicky, the atmosphere is suffocating. Some of my book club friends could not bear to read the book at this time. To me the happy ending seems contrived and not a logical outcome of the narrative, as though the author felt pressured to wrap things up neatly.

Another pandemic read, a bestseller I didn’t entirely enjoy, was Born a Crime by Trevor Noah. He is the son of a black mother and white father, born when sex between the races was literally a crime in South Africa. This book was recommended to me by my younger son, who is a fan of late night American talk show satire. The memoir begins with a real bang, as Trevor’s mother tells him to jump out of a moving car and then jumps out herself with his baby brother, when she realizes the men who have given them a ride have criminal intent. It ends with the mother, a passionately devout Christian, being shot in the head by her ex-husband and being able to walk out of the hospital under her own steam four days later. In between these two dramatic incidents the narrative is pretty ho-hum, some sections having the feel of a writer getting in his daily word count.

Liberty Street by Regina writer Dianne Warren provided a complete change of pace.

It tells the story of Frances Moon, the difficult daughter of a British couple who move to Canada for a fresh start, to get away from something in the Old Country, something that is never defined. The husband and father has dreams of the wild west, but quickly gives up his cowboy hat for a cap and his dream of fighting or at least encountering Indians for running a dairy farm. Frances’s mother is so determined her daughter will have a better life, that she continuously harps on her dream of university, to the extent that she turns the girl off the idea of education. Frances has one date in high school, always feels like an outsider (although from the narrator we see that she is not as much of an outsider as she feels), and makes a disastrous twelve-day marriage to a man her father’s age. At least the older man is not a silly high school boy, and she feels that she is teaching her mother a lesson. Then Frances does go to university—it’s a way of getting away from gossip—where she gets a degree in chemistry that leads to her long-time job at a water treatment plant. She puts the farm and a stillborn baby behind her to such an extent that she never tells her partner of two decades about the baby or about the fact that she has been married and has never got divorced.

Frances returns to the town of Elliott, to clean out the house her parents rented out, a house that was built for her father’s brother but which he did not live to occupy, and also to confront her past. She comes to recognize the part she played in the problems she had with her mother. It is a great strength of the novel that neither mother nor daughter is presented as a villain. A problem child has a problem mother—their personalities simply grate on each other. Frances does grow in understanding and achieves a degree of maturity, but does not become a different person. In this sense, the novel is like real life.

Cool Water is the title of a previous book by Dianne Warren that won the Governor General’s Award. I enjoyed Liberty Street even more, finding its understated charms to be a drink of cool water in these harrowing times.

Even before I was isolating at home, I had begun going through all my books, deciding which ones to read, which ones to re-read, which ones to give away, and which ones to keep. Most of the books I have written about here are keepers.