Category: Reviews

This Alice Munro short story collection is a gift at any time. Family Furnishings contains twenty-four of Munro’s short stories, gathered from the last two decades, and is a companion volume to Selected Stories (l968-l994). It has some famous stories, such as The Bear came over the Mountain, whose last sentence is worth the whole book, and which was made into the major feature film Away from Her.

Munro often writes about the people she knew in her Southwestern Ontario hometown, but her books cover the fullness of human experience and so we travel with her over the whole world. One of these stories, Too Much Happiness, gives the life of the noted nineteenth-century mathematician, Sophia Kovalevsky, where romantic love enters the picture in an unexpected way to show just who is in control.

Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 20l3. She had been one of Canada’s favorite writers for decades before this, winning many awards including two Giller Prizes, three Governor General Awards, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker International Prize. Her collections have been published around the world in many languages.   Canada can certainly be proud of her latest achievement. But mostly we have always loved her writing for the way she shows our own country. This collection is one of the best.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

This is a writer, writing a novel about another writer’s life. In Arctic Summer Damon Galgut tells the story of E.M. Forster, how he became interested in India and how his beloved book A Passage to India gradually took shape.

Galgut describes Forster’s own personal life, an only child who lost his father when he was just two years old, lived closely with his mother until he went to Cambridge, later tutored a young Indian who was going up to Oxford, and finally made the trip to India to see his young friend.  Forster, or Morgan as he is called here, slowly came to recognize his homosexuality and the difficulty he had in making close relationships. While he constantly sought affection, desire or lust interfered and he was left unfulfilled. The British reticence among his mother’s friends didn’t help although there are interesting sections on some famous authors he got to know, e.g. Virginia and Leonard Woolf and D.H. Lawrence.

Forster made a second, longer trip to India and there are lovely sections describing life in that country. He did find happiness, although the mystery of India remained with him. Slowly but surely the script of A Passage to India developed and became a book.

Galgut has won international prizes for his books, In a Strange Room and The Good Doctor. He lives in Capetown, South Africa, a city populated by people of all different races and creeds, which is apparent in a book like this one.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

 

If you’re already a fan of Alexander McCall Smith’s novels, you’ll realize it’s hard to find new ways to praise this “prolific, popular and wonderfully peculiar writer”.  But you’ll be pleased by the newest addition to perhaps his most popular series,  The No. l Ladies Detective Agency.

Entitled The Handsome Man’s De Luxe Cafe, this novel takes us to Botswana where McCall Smith was once a professor of law at the University. He also grew up in the country now known as Zimbabwe. Although he has been living for many years in Edinburgh, he has never forgotten his love for the people of Africa, for their culture and their kindness.

Precious Ramotse runs the No. l Ladies Detective Agency. She is married to the owner of the Garage, a business right next door to their home. She also has an assistant who has been promoted from secretary and is now planning on opening her own de luxe cafe. This group is brought a professional problem to solve, i.e. a woman who has lost her memory and cannot sort out her life. Precious shows her gentle wisdom and shrewd kindness and the story is captivating from every angle.

Review by Anne McDougall

In the rapidly changing world we now live in, M.G. Vassanji’s whole life is an example of these changes.  He happens to be a writing genius and so we can share in his  amazing experiences in more than one “home”.  In his newest book, he concentrates on a part of the city of Dar es Salaam where he grew up as a boy and revisits because he still loves the area.

Vassanji’s people came from Gujarat, India.  Two generations before he was born, they crossed the Indian Ocean to settle in East Africa.  He was born in Kenya but grew up in Tanzania.   He gives an affectionate description of the Indian section of Dar es Salaam called Kariakoo which was full of Indian traders setting up business with  their African neighbours.    These Africans had a close family life, full of music and community celebrations.   Vassanji’s own life took him abroad to study in the United States and eventually settle in Toronto where he know him from his prize-winning stories and novels.

This book gives a good description of some of the highlights of Dar es Salaam’s history, i.e. some of the story of Stanley and Livingstone;  the troubling years of German missionaries in German East Africa;  the revolutions of l964 when Kenya and Tanzania, as well as the island of Zanzibar gained independence from Great Britain only to suffer later from socialist austerity.  But Vassanji remembers another whole aspect of Africa and is saddened when he reads only bad news from that continent.   His memories are of a joyful land and this book goes a long way to show that.

Review by Anne McDougall

It must be the result of Alice Munro’s winning the Nobel prize for her life’s work in writing short stories. Both the legendary British writer, Jane Gardam, and now our own Margaret Atwood, have new collections of short stories out this year.

In Stone Mattress, a collection of nine short stories, Atwood is as original as ever. In spite of decades of prize-winning novels, short fiction, poetry, non-fiction and books for children, in this new book she comes up with highly inventive, often shocking, short stories in her own original style.

The Washington Post calls her “an utterly thrilling storyteller.”  There is quirky humour, but also a certain grimness which colours many in this collection. Atwood lives with the writer Graeme Gibson in Toronto. But her imagination takes her far and wide in stories that leave you gasping. But not forgetting.

Review by Anne McDougall

A.J. Fikry runs a bookstore on Alice Island (a fictional island near Rhode Island, U.S.). In this novel, he has just lost his young wife in a car accident, his sales are down, and someone has stolen a rare collection of poems. Even his favorite books can no longer cheer him and alcohol is slowly taking over. Into this depression arrives a baby girl, twenty-five months old, left with a note by her mother, who can no longer take care of her.

Gabrielle Zevin is a Los Angeles writer who has written seven novels, some for young adults, which have been translated into twenty languages. She has a sensitive approach to the isolation we can get into when literary concerns become our only life.

In this book she succeeds in bringing love back to A.J. and to his whole circle. This includes his sister-in-law, the sales rep who becomes his next wife, even the friendly police officer who’s always kept an eye on him. It’s a good story and well-written.

Review by Anne McDougall

Kim Thuy told us the story of her own life in her first novel Ru. We learned of the Vietnam boat people up close and the horrors they left behind as well as the kindness they received in Canada. She has now lived here longer and worked as a seamstress, interpreter, lawyer and restaurant owner in Montreal. The last profession results in vivid descriptions of Vietnam dishes which Man, a chef in Montreal, serves her clientele.

Her second novel follows the story of Man, whose name means “perfect fulfillment”, but she lives a dull, respectable life with her husband and children. This changes when on a trip to Paris she encounters yet another chef and this time falls madly in love.

The book is full of memories of the old world left behind, as well as discoveries of new life.  Kim Thuy ties food and love together in a graceful way. She creates dishes that are much more than sustenance for the body, that evoke memory and emotion, time and place. She is devoting all her time to writing these days. This is an excellent translation by the award-winning translator Sheila Fischman.

Review by Anne McDougall

It was 1921. Franklin D. Roosevelt was rich, privileged, had already served in executive positions with the Navy, the Boy Scouts, and was well-known as a leading Democrat and descendant of Theodore Roosevelt, a popular President of years past. And then polio struck. He was 39 years old and completely paralyzed from the waist down.

This book by James Tobin gives the up-close story of how this remarkable man fought back and never gave up on his aim to be President of the United States. He did the exercises and eventually found that warm water and sunshine doubled his chances of healing. He bought the resort of Warm Springs, Georgia and helped it become a leading centre for disabled patients. As he began to get some feeling in his legs, he used braces, canes and crutches. He was insistent on keeping his disability as inconspicuous as possible – not from a feeling of pride but because he didn’t want the pity towards “being a cripple.” He was a tall, handsome man with a big head, strong voice, and he laughed a lot, which made people forget his injuries.

As the years went by Roosevelt became more and more prominent in Democratic politics and was chosen to be Governor of New York. By 1933 he was President –  and the rest is history: the Hundred Days in which Roosevelt fought the causes and effects of the Great Depression; the New Deal. There are many books written about Roosevelt. This one concentrates on the years he fought his own private battle and the effect it might have had on his handling of later political problems. Many thought it made a huge difference to the man himself, making him more conscious of other people, of weak people, of human frailty. His wife, Eleanor, thought it gave him strength and courage he had not had before.

James Tobin has won prizes for two earlier books: Ernie Pyle’s War and To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight. This one is an elegant and moving book, gripping from the start with a fine eye for the telling detail.

Review by Anne McDougall

Alexander McCall Smith’s Sunshine on Scotland Street has come out in Vintage Canada paperback edition, and once again the Scottish author is fun to read.

McCall Smith is a retired professor of medical law from the University of Edinburgh. He is also an endless watcher of the people around him, as well as those he makes up. They are a motley crew – often droll, mischievous but believable, and in the end appealing.

As well as the 44 Scotland Street Series, McCall Smith has written The Isabel Dalhousie Novels, The Corduroy Mansions Series, The Portuguese Irregular Verbs Series, The No. l Ladies Detective Agency Series and several books for Young Readers. This one makes you feel you are living in Edinburgh, with its old stone houses, elegant Princes Street, view of the castle and beckoning pubs. In spite of its reputation for rain, McCall Smith shows a very sunny side of the city he loves as well as the affection between the various families and inmates of 44 Scotland Street. It’s a very upbeat book.

Review by Anne McDougall

This is a touching story of two young people raised on opposite sides of the Second World War, who eventually meet and fall in love.

As the war rages, the author Anthony Doerr introduces us to the blind daughter of an employee of the Museum of Natural History in Paris, who escapes the Nazi invasion with her father to live in the walled citadel of Saint-Malo. He also brings in the German orphan, Werner, living in an orphanage with his sister in a mining town, when he is chosen by the Nazis to join the academy of Hitler Youth.

The war widens and a series of coincidences brings these two characters together. Doerr writes intimately about the beauties of nature, the love and loyalty of human beings, as they shine through the horrors of war.

He is the author of a number of story collections and novels, many of which have won prizes in the U.S. and overseas. He lives in Boise, Idaho with his wife and two sons.

Review by Anne McDougall