Books On Beechwood

This is a dark, moody book about the relationship between a man and wife. What makes it interesting is the brilliant descriptions of the parts of the world they inhabit.

Anne Michaels describes the rescuing of the temples at Abu Simbel from the rising waters of the Aswan High Dam on the Nile. It remains a horrifying experience for the thousands of people of Nubia who lost their homes.

In the same way, Michaels brings back the relocation beside our own St. Lawrence Seaway. The novel’s couple, Jean and Avery Escher, are involved in both these undertakings – he as an engineer, she as an avid botanist.

Their own story reflects the intense trials of the work they’re doing which in turn affects their personal lives. Michaels stresses the feeling and need for home. Her book shows what can be saved from the violence of life. Their marriage, though precarious, turns out to be one of these things.

Anne Michaels is a Canadian writer, who lives in Toronto. Her earlier novel, “Fugitive Pieces”, has won literary prizes around the world, and also been made into an acclaimed feature film.

Review by Anne McDougall

John Updike is saying goodbye in this, his most recent collection of short stories. The famous author died in January, 2009, so this is in fact his valedictory book.

It does have a flavour of looking back: to beloved homes in his native Pennsylvania, and later New England suburbia, to exotic locales in trips to Morocco, Florida, Spain, Italy and India. He remembers high-school reunions, the mysteries of growing up and falling in love, and an old man’s bedtime routine and the happiness it brings him.

A critic on “The Guardian Weekly” calls Updike the greatest virtuoso stylist since Nabokov. He criticizes this book for leaving in sections where Updike repeats himself, but concludes that his American cast of characters is as witty as they have always been. More importantly, Updike’s creations live and authorial love is what sustains them. That love shows no signs of weakening in this book.

John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania,in l932. He is the author of more than sixty books and has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, among many other honors. “My Father’s Tears” is a moving tribute to this fine writer.

Review by Anne McDougall

“Border Songs” not only comes out at a timely moment in Canada-U.S.border talks, it is also a powerful novel about the people living on both sides of this border on the Pacific coast.

Jim Lynch is the author of “The Highest Tide”, a wonderful story about the sea and a group of people living beside it. He has got the same touch in this new book. His hero, Brandon Vanderkool, is a tall (6′ 8″) American,rugged, but also dyslexic – with a special feeling for the earth and sea and all birds living within earshot. He leaves his father’s dairy farm for a job with Border Patrol. To everyone’s amazement he catches one smuggler after another. This is at a time when the U.S. has tightened security, and the Americans and Canadians who once laughed and waved at each other across “the ditch” (as they called the invisible border ) now become suspicious of every move. People who used to garden, now grow cannabis.
Everyone smuggles.

Brandon’s story is of the best of human nature winning out against our inhuman technocratic world. Lynch both laughs at, and deplores this world. His book is full of real characters, quite rough at times, who win through to a convincing ending. Well worth reading.

Review by Anne McDougall

This is a fine novel by a prize-winning professor of English in Pennsylvania. But I think you really have to have a love of birds to do it full justice.

Hinnefeld is interested in the relationships between mother, father and daughter and explores their love of ornithology, wild life, music, poetry as well as their love for each other. The conflicts seem to come when one of the arts, or science, gets in the way of expressing their emotions on a personal basis.

The heroine is called Scarlet (after the bird the scarlet tanager) and the book follows her search to understand her highly emotional,artisic mother. The natural world, with wonderful and constant stories of birds who enter the picture, is beautifully described. One reviewer calls Hinnefeld “a wise story-teller” – which makes this a charming book to read this summer.

Review by Anne McDougall

This is the story of two lonely young people in Ireland, one of them married, who fall in love for a summer that was always doomed to come to an end.

William Trevor takes you close into the lives of Ellie and Florian. This is small-town, rural Ireland where everyone knows what is happening in the big house, as well as the smaller ones. All the characters come alive as they watch this gentle love affair.

Ellie’s husband had lost his own wife and baby in a horrific accident on the farm he ran. Ellie was an orphan,chosen by the nuns to look after and eventually marry this older farmer. Florian is the only child of two watercolourists. He grew up in a big house and was lost when his parents died, leaving him without any apparent ambition or training. He met Ellie in a nearby town, where he was practising photography. He was also planning to sell the house, and live abroad, possibly as a writer.

There is something inevitable about their love and at the same time touchingly sad. Trevor is deft in his sketches of all the lives involved. He also paints a beautiful picture of the lakes, flowers and birds that enhance the green countryside. The Irish voices ring out musically and a whole new world comes to life – totally entrancing, in 200 short pages.

Trevor lives in County Cork. He has written many novels, and short stories, and won many prizes. His last book “The Story of Lucy Gault” was shortlisted for both the Man Brooker and the Whitbread Fiction Prize.

Review by Anne McDougall

Donna Leon is a generous writer. Anyone who has read any of her seventeen mystery novels to date will know that she gives not one story but three.

There is the central plot of crime and intrigue that holds the novel together. But always running alongside this is the enchanting story of the leading detective’s family life. And behind these themes is the ever-haunting presence of the city of Venice itself. Leon has lived there for over 25 years and writes about the beauty, the danger and corruption lurking in the exquisite palazzos, the sense of style, love of food and overall Venetian glamour that really takes you down the canals in the gondolas with her leading characters.

“About Face” has its own story of murder, which comes very close to the family of Guido Brunetti, the detective in charge. It is at a dinner party at the house of his father-in-law, Count Falier, that he meets a woman who turns out to be involved in his investigation into a suspicious death.

The violence is dangerous but does not overcloud an excellent detective story. Donna Leon has done it again; it’s a fine read.

Review by Anne McDougall

Mavis Gallant is our best-known expatriate writer. She has won all the top prizes Canada has to offer, including Companion to the Order of Canada, and is also recognized internationally as a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

She was born in Montreal in l922, and became a leading journalist in that city. Divorced, she left in l950 to live in Paris and write short stories. Her first pieces were accepted by The New Yorker, and she has been writing them ever since – enough, Robertson Davies once surmised, to add up to twenty novels.

She herself has travelled a lot between Quebec, New England, France and Germany and writes sensitively about all these cultures, giving vivid pictures of the spots she features. Often the characters seem a bit lonely for whatever they crave for home. There is a bitter after-taste in stories like “The Rejection” and “Sunday Afternoon”. But always a rollicking movement of life pressing on and what Alberto Manguel calls in his introduction, “the sense of things”.

With the world getting smaller every day, and globalisation all around us, Mavis Gallant feels ahead of her time in what her probing, compassionate stories are trying to tell us.

Review by Anne McDougall