Author: Hilary

Madeleine Thien’s new book tells the story of two musical families in revolutionary China and how they survived. It stretches from Shanghai in the 40’s to Mao’s Cultural Revolution and then from 1980’s Beijing and the Tienanmen protests up to today where the heroine of the story lives in Vancouver.

This woman is grieving her father’s death by suicide in China. We learn of three particular musicians who were brutalized by the government and told their art was a shameful indulgence. Shostakovitch’s music comes into the story and the trouble it ran into in Communist Russia where it was condemned as dangerously bourgeois.

Madeleine Thien is the daughter of Malaysian-Chinese immigrants to Canada. She spent some years in Vancouver and now lives in Montreal. Her previous works, Simple Recipes, Certainty, and Dogs at the Perimeter, have won prizes in North America and Berlin, and have been translated into twenty-five languages. She gives a very up-close picture of living in China where sensitive artistic emotions are blocked by the relentless tide of the Cultural Revolution.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

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This is the latest in Donna Leon’s beloved mystery series set in Venice. The American has spent thirty years in Venice and her fans will recognize not only her sharp portrait of Commissario Guido Brunetti and his family, but the haunting beauty of Leon’s chosen city and the up-close lives of people she has come to know.

The case Brunetti is asked to solve is a touching one. A young girl, unable to swim, fell into a canal late at night. She was drowning when a nearby man, an alcoholic, pulled her out and saved her. By that time she had suffered  brain damage which left her unable to develop and grow up. The man said he saw someone throw her into the water, but the next day he couldn’t remember anything about it.

Brunetti stuck to the case and it has a surprising ending. This is Donna Leon’s thirtieth book. She now divides her time between Venice and Switzerland. It is hard to believe we won’t hear from Commissario Brunetti again.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

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James Bartleman has already written seven books on his extraordinary life as a part-Indian child from Muskoka who grew up to hold Foreign Service posts in some dozen countries, and also serve as Lieut-Governor for the Province of Ontario.

This book has further highlights from this amazing life and gives us all hope in the days of trying to reconcile injustices done to Indigenous people. Bartleman’s mother belonged to the Chippewas of Rama First Nations. His father was white, a steelworker from Welland, Ontario. When James was six, in 1940, the family of four spent the summers in a tent near the village dump in the small Muskoka village of Port Carling. James loved the outdoors life and still dreams of it, in spite of some prejudice against the Indigenous families.

He got his big break when he was sixteen and just finished grade twelve. A businessman for whom he’d done odd jobs, asked if he could help him pay to get his senior matric and go on to university. Bartleman graduated from the University of Western Ontario in 1963. The rest of this book tells how he joined the Foreign Service, was ambassador to two hot spots, Cuba and Israel. He served as ambassador to the North Atlantic Council of NATO, and was high commissioner to South Africa, Australia, and ambassador to the European Union. In 2002, Prime Minister Jean Chretien appointed him Ontario’s Lieut-Governor. In his later years he writes he has been giving  back to society by establishing libraries in Indigenous-run schools, a book club for 5,000 Indigenous children, creative writing awards and summer reading camps for marginalized Indigenous children in Northern Ontario. This is indeed a book of hope.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

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This is a short but amazing book by a ninety-nine year old English writer who shares some of her most intimate experiences.

This is Diana Athill’s sixth book of memoirs. She spent her life in London in writing and editing. She helped Andre Deutsch start his own publishing company and worked there for four decades. She never married, but at the age of forty-three got pregnant. In this book she describes the experience of losing her baby and in fact almost losing her life. “Alive, alive oh” is how she feels about surviving. In this book she looks back at some of the things that have stayed at the top of her memories.

There is a lot of beauty in the book. Athill grew up in comfortable circumstances and there are lovely descriptions of her grandparents’ house and garden which was actually a large park. She writes with humour and honesty about the First and Second World Wars, as well as her trips to Europe as a young woman. She is often frank, as well as wise and funny. It is an unusual memoir, to say the least.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

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