When Fenelon Falls is a tragic-comic story set in 1969 in Ontario’s cottage country, featuring a young girl, Jordan, who is adopted and disabled–a protagonist based on Palmer herself. I interviewed Palmer about her activism, her feminism, and her writing, and the resulting piece “Bastards and Bullies” is up at the new issue of Herizons magazine. Here’s an excerpt.

DP: Since I was a teenager, I longed to see someone like me in a book and never did. I wrote to hear a voice I’d never heard, either in Canadian literature or later in broader feminist fiction or academia: the modern doppelganger of Canada’s girl orphan icon, Anne of Green Gables. I wanted to write a novel about a red-haired adoptee who knows it’s more than hair making her angry, who does far more about it than break a slate over Gilbert Blythe’s head. When Fenelon Falls is about things that fall–Jordan, a girl with a limp, Yogi, an entrapped bear, and all of the bystanders who should have stood up and done something about the falling they enabled and witnessed.

[...]

Alice Munroe said some years ago that she said she no longer liked the term “autobiographical fiction” because it had the cast of being a smaller, somehow less authentic, kind of writing done by women [...] to my mind, Canadian women writers are still more often asked about and somehow tacitly dismissed as writing “just autobiography,” which carries the suggestion that autobiographical content is some kind of safe blueprint, or crutch. “Just” implies that fiction with less autobiographical content is somehow, A: the domain of real writers, namely men and B: real fiction, a more pure or literary art form. Obviously, many novels draw on autobiography, but nobody ever suggested that Faulkner or Dickens wrote “just autobiography.” While the settings are all real, When Fenelon Falls has far too much fiction in it to ever be considered “just” a memoir—its plot and commentary is larger than one life and certainly far larger than mine.

My novel is informed by years of working in my union and school board against other oppressions, against racism, bullying, sexual harassment and homophobia. My analysis and practice was always as two things: as an adult adoptee who almost passed as “normal” and as a disabled woman with a disability that almost let me pass in the walking world. Jordan makes many analogies between sexism, racism and what she calls “bastardism.” She sees bastardism as systemic, as built right into everything – language, children’s stories, television and books, and she knows her brother doesn’t see it because he’s a boy, because he’s privileged, “to the bloodline born.” He never has to think about how painful it is to hear what you are, a bastard, being used as a daily swear word [...]

If you’d like to read more, please pick up a copy of Herizons (the piece isn’t online). And here’s an excerpt from my review of the novel, also in Herizons.

It’s the summer of 1969, and fourteen year old Jordan May March is figuring out her tenuous place in her family, in society, and in the world. Jordan is adopted and disabled, and is thus considered fair game for her family’s cruelty, especially from the cousins who gather each summer at the family cottage in Fenelon Falls. Jordan’s fierce intelligence, while enabling small acts of revenge, is also her downfall, for she senses the true animosity that lies beneath the teasing, and is unable to fool herself into thinking that it’ll get better. [...]
When Fenelon Falls is saturated with rich detail about Ontario in the fifties and sixties, from the clothes to the music to casual bigotry that was simply how things were back then, and the narrative vividly illustrates what a complex, problematic, fractured, fertile era it was. If you know someone who insists that Canadian society was easier to navigate before the advent of, y’know, multiculturalism and all that new-fangled stuff, give him this book—and then watch him squirm.

It’s a funny, wrenching book, and I recommend do hope you’ll pick it up.

The Penelopiad is a re-telling of Homer’s Odyssey, which, as most of the Western world knows, describes the twenty-year-long adventure of King Odysseus–ten years in the Trojan War and the next ten attempting to return to his kingdom of Ithaca. Odysseus spent most of his travels battling monsters and having sex (first with the goddess Circe, and then, when living with the nymph Calypso for seven years), while back in Ithaca, his wife Penelope wept and prayed and waited.

(From the performance: Odysseus on his travels. Photo Credit: Robert Popkin.)

But eager suitors laid siege to Penelope’s wealth, clamoring that she marry again. Penelope put them off by claiming she needed to weave a shroud for her (not-yet dead) father-in-law; every night, Penelope unraveled her day’s weaving with the help of her twelve maids, who also undertook, at her request, to divert the attention of the odious suitors with food, foot spas, sex and anything else they might demand.

(Penelope and her maids. Photo Credit: Robert Popkin)

Finally, Odysseus returned to Ithaca and killed the pesky suitors, and Penelope, united with her husband, was forever held up as edifying example of womanhood for her patience and fidelity; all was well in Ithaca. Oh, and Odysseus had Penelope’s twelve maids hanged–they’d been sleeping with the suitors, and he couldn’t have that kind of slutty behavior in his kingdom, you know. It was a mass honor killing, mostly on whim.

The Penelopiad,  published in 2005,  is part of the Canongate’s Myths series, which feature re-imaginings of myths by contemporary authors (the most recent is A.S.Byatt’s Ragnarok). Atwood, in essence, gives us the Odyssey from the view of those left behind when the heroes are off chasing glory.  The protagonist Penelope, now dead and wandering around the Asphodel Meadows, tells us about her marriage at fifteen, the birth of her son, and her wait for Odysseus. As she ponders the nature of lust, gender roles in marriage and parenting, and the mythologization of womanhood in the service of men, she warns, “Don’t follow my example.”

(Penelope, played by Megan Follows. Photo Credit: Robert Popkin)

Also wandering amongst the dead are the twelve maids, and their chorus undoes Penelope’s attempts at self-justification or self-pity.

“we are the maids/the ones you killed/the ones you failed
we danced in air/our bare feet twitched/it was not fair
with every goddess, queen, and bitch/from here to there/you scratched your itch
we did much less/than what you did/you judged us bad [...]“

The Penelopiad is written in a chatty, thoughtful tone, completely shorn of the rhetorical flourishes that typically accompany myth, and is peppered with audacious epigrams–for instance, the darker grottoes in the Asphodel Meadows are populated by “minor rascals” such as “a pickpocket, a stockbroker, a small-time pimp.” The book has Atwood’s trademark combination of profundity and sly wit, and gallops along at a fine pace, though I did feel that the chapter entitled “The Trial  of Odysseus, as Videotaped by the Maids” said a lot of things that were known already. And an exposition about the significance the number of maids was rather tedious; called “An Anthropology Lecture”, it would no doubt goose-pimple a student of the classics, but as a non-student, it left me unmoved, as lectures tend to do.

So I was very happy to see director Kelly Thornton following William Goldman’s precept, and giving us a Penelopiad devoid of lectures or trials. And it was very good indeed, conveying all the power and wit of Atwood’s vision in a production bursting with flair and energy. Nightwood Theatre is a Toronto-based feminist group, and this play featured an all-woman cast who were required to sing and jump and dance and simulate sex and shed any notions of the body as anything but performance instrument, which they did with utter conviction. The music by Suba Sankaran (whom I know from Autorickshaw, and btw, for those who follow Carnatic music, her dad is Trichy Sankaran), was moving and amusing by turns. Penelope was played by Megan Follows, famous for her Anne of Green Gables, and, in a nice little casting coincidence,  Penelope’s maid Eurycleia was played by Patricia Hamilton, who is Rachel Lynde in Road to Avonlea. I was most beguiled by Kelli Fox, who played Odysseus with a  one-sided, glinting smile that perfectly conveyed his belief in his own (admittedly considerable) cleverness, and in the next breath, played a submissive-shouldered maid. How? How?

With minimal props and no special effects apart from fake smoke, the Penelopiad had the audience for 140 minutes, and we emerged shaken and stirred, outraged on behalf of the characters and yet amused by it all. I was left, at the end, with a huge appreciation for the cleverness of the whole thing–for the original material as well as the sensibility of the adaptation, for the splendid orchestration of the production’s many component parts, and for the ingenuity of the staging. The show runs till Jan. 29th, and tickets are available here. Go on, Torontonians, thrill yourselves.

Flavia de Luce is eleven years old, and she’s precocious like water is wet. Flavia is Mistress of the Periodic Table, with a special interest in poisons–enough that I’d back her over Vizzini and The Man in Black.  More surprising, perhaps, is her remarkable unsentimentality; in the first three pages,  we find her conducting an irreversible experiment involving acid and her sister’s pearls–which belonged to their dead mother.  And upon discovering a dying man in the cucumber patch, Flavia is frankly delighted, remarking, “This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.”

If you find preternaturally wise and knowledgeable children irritating rather than endearing, you’ll have to skip this book. The plot is oiled by overheard conversations and improbable coincidences, and Flavia too-conveniently possesses a Spidey-sense of hearing (“…the kind… Father once told me, that allows its owner to hear spider webs clanging like horseshoes against the walls.”) The identity of perpetrator was obvious even to this blogger of little brain, and the post-war British setting is wildly Anglophilic–all stepping stones over meandering rivers and endless mentions of tea; in sum, the book’s appeal hinges entirely upon the protagonist. Now, I have a weakness for precociousness and unsentimentality (when not exhibited by my own child) and so I enjoyed Flavia very much. I also have a weakness for vulnerable protagonists who outwit Authority, and of course, children are the most vulnerable amongst us; I find it utterly satisfying that a young girl should reason out a crime that’s baffled grown-ups.

The plot is wildly farcical, beginning with the discovery of a dead jack snipe with a stamp in its beak delivered as a warning to Colonel de Luce.  (Why not just send a letter marked “private”?) Shortly after, Flavia overhears a conversation between her father and a “caddish”, “oily” voice who calls him Jacko, and reminds him of the suicide of their schoolmaster Mr. Twining many years ago.  All too soon, the possessor of the unfortunate voice is dead, and Flavia’s father is arrested for murder.

Flavia heads to the library (it’s 1950, y’know?) to look up Mr. Twining’s death, and gasp! he turns out to be the librarian’s mother’s brother. And the librarian remembers that one of the boys involved was called … Jacko. So Flavia sets off on her trusty bicycle (named Gladys) to unravel Mr. Twining’s death, to clear her father’s name and find the real murderer, and oh, yes, help out King George along the way.

I liked this book, I did, but somewhere along, found myself wondering why I wasn’t charmed by it when it so obviously set out to charm. And I think my answer lies in my question. I felt that Bradley tries too hard–the characterization lacks finesse, hammering its points home. Here’s a fairly representative paragraph:

” ‘Good morning, Flavia,’ Pemberton said with a  grin. ‘Did you sleep well?’

Did I sleep well? What kind of question was that? Here I was on the terrace, sleep in my eyes, my hair a den of nesting rats and nose running like a trout stream Besides, wasn’t a question about the quality of one’s sleep reserved for those who had spent the night under the same roof? I wasn’t sure; I’d have to look it up in Beeton’s Complete Etiquette for Ladies. Feely had given me a copy for my last birthday, but it was still propping up the short leg of my bed.”

It’s fun, but a little bit of this goes a long way, and Bradley is relentless–everything Flavia says and thinks is laden with significance, and she sometimes verges on caricature, coming across at times as inhuman rather than merely freakish, lacking emotional resonance. I also think the author focuses a bit too much on establishing the setting–the police inspector reminds Flavia of “Douglas Bader, the Spitfire ace, whose photos I had seen in the back issues of The War Illustrated that lay in white drifts in the drawing room.” The doctor is “the spitting image of John Bull”. Flavia is most appealing  when Bradley’s not reminding us she’s clever or British; when she’s kidnapped, for instance, there’s a most enjoyable rumination on her situation.

“Being kidnapped is never quite the way you imagine it will be. In the first place, I had not bitten and scratched my abductor. Nor had I screamed: I had gone quietly along like a lamb to the September slaughter.

The only excuse I can think of is that all my powers were being diverted to feed my racing mind, and that nothing was left over to drive my muscles. When something like this actually happens to you, the kind of rubbish that comes leaping immediately into your head can be astonishing.”

Hopefully, now that he’s established setting and character so firmly in the first installment, Bradley has fine-tuned his prose for the subsequent books. I have the rest of the series on hold at the library, and I’m looking forward to dipping into them–at judicious intervals.

Also, a minor point. Flavia’s mother Harriet is 15 years old in 1930, and her first daughter Ophelia is born in 1933, and Flavia in 1939. But Harriet reads L.M.Montgomery’s Jane of Lantern Hill as a schoolgirl, which is impossible, as Jane was published in 1937. So the years don’t add up. Or am I  missing something terribly obvious?

***

I began the day with The Power of a Plate of Rice.

On my way to work I saw  Fauna

and walked by Six Metres of Pavement

to avoid The Traitor and the Tunnel

but I made sure to stop at The Red Road.

In the office, my boss said “In the Sea there are Crocodiles“

and sent me to research The Grand Plan to Fix Everything.

At lunch with Kabir the Weaver-Poet

I noticed Cinderella Ate my Daughter

under Dear Baobab

then went back to my desk Outrage[d].

Later, on the journey home, I bought Skim

because I have the Heart of a Samurai,

then settling down for the evening, I picked up More than Love Letters

and studied The Story about Ping

before saying Goodnight Moon, Dune, and Bush.

***

Do join, and don’t forget to comment on Cornflower Books when you post your day!

Here you go, Ryan.  More than Love Letters (2005) by Rosy Thornton.

Twenty-four year old Margaret Hayton is a school teacher in Ipswich, and she’s an edgy (and infinitely more likeable)  Pollyanna for our age. Margaret directs her energy towards issues ranging from global warming to the placement of garbage bins on her street, and frequently writes her local MP Richard Slater to voice her concerns. Slater assumes that she’s a stereotypical old biddy (though Margaret’s letter protesting VAT on sanitary protection might have tipped him off differently), and dodges her requests until Margaret threatens to send her collection of his form replies to the Prime Minister, following which he agrees to meet her.

ZAP! Margaret’s  enthusiasm (and, um, her good looks) shock Slater out of his spin-centered existence into championing one of her causes–obtaining asylum for an Albanian refugee, Nasreen, who was forced to flee her home because of her inter-faith love affair.  Slater’s ideals, long gone to seed, sprout in Margaret’s sunny company, and the two gradually fall in love.

(Manly men: don’t be put off by the butterflies and hearts and love letters. Thornton, who teaches law at Cambridge, takes for her subject nothing less than immigration laws and domestic violence.  She  has much to say (all disturbing) about the marketing of her book,  whose original title, by the way, was Asylum. This cover is about as accurate having a David Lodge novel feature a gun and beer barrel propped up against a giant obelisk. Get out the, um, brown paper if you must.)

I’ve rarely read a novel where the personal combines quite so seamlessly with the overtly political.  Thornton’s delicacy of touch is especially impressive considering that More than Love Letters is an epistolary novel. We’ve all read books where it’s painfully obvious whom the heroine is addressing when writing to her  BFF “I was brushing my long chestnut-brown hair when my brother Jack phoned me from our father’s real-estate office.” MTLL never has you wondering why the characters seem compelled to quote Wikipedia entries at each other; the writing informs without ever veering into dreaded info-dump territory. We learn that Nasreen was forced to leave Albania as her brothers threaten her life for daring to love a man from a different faith, but Britain doesn’t recognize her as a legitimate candidate for asylum, and she’ll be deported unless Margaret and Richard manage to change the law. It’s only a day or two  after finishing the book that you realize that asylum laws in Britain circa 2005 have seeped into your mind despite yourself.

Perhaps what I relished most about MTLL was the humor and positivity steaming off each page.  Thornton’s fictional landscape has more than its fair share of grimness–there’s suicide and domestic violence, and the wicked often go unpunished–but after reading this book, you feel that it’s not a bad old world after all, and Thornton proves conclusively, you doomsters, that happy endings and intelligent writing aren’t incompatible.  Her characters are mostly pleasant and obliging, shouldering their burdens without whining, and they do the best they can (which is often pretty stupendous).  Thornton’s wit is pointed and yet very good-natured indeed–here’s Margaret’s Gran on her first brush with chick-lit.

“…I’m not sure they are my kind of thing. One has a picture of just the bottom half of a girl on the front cover, doing the hoovering in a miniskirt and stiletto heels, and she appears to have a half-empty wine bottle in one hand. I quite enjoyed the one she [Gran's helper] brought me last week, but I find it such a distraction to be told in every chapter what shade of lipstick the heroine is wearing and the name of the shop where she bought her blouse.”

So, Gran is a kindly soul, who is obligated to her helper for supplying her with reading material as she has mobility issues, and who doesn’t like to criticize, but  her remarks are no less devastating for their gentleness.  Thornton is very very good as straining her opinions through the particularities of each character. And what characters they are–I took each one into my heart, and I dare you to find a more likeable heroine than Margaret in contemporary fiction.

And finally: I so love literary Britain–I grew up on Enid Blyton and her  kin, and it’s instant magic when a book refers to Mrs Danvers, Pooh Sticks,  Nevil Shute, and Mallory Towers. And when Rosy Thornton had Richard Slater quote John Thornton on Margaret Hay to Margaret Hayton’s dad, well, it was all very meta (or do I mean pomo?),  and *just* the kind of thing I chuckle over as I’m getting ready to sleep.

So as you can see, MTLL hit every sweet spot on my reading desiderata, and as god is my witness,  my first Rosy Thornton novel will not be my last. I hit my credit card for The Tapestry of Love earlier this week; you can borrow it from me if it’s not in the library, Ryan.

(Pic from the Toronto Star)

After the reading, she took questions from the audience, and here are a few things she said.

1. Recalling the texts she read at high school, she mentioned Tess of the d’urbervilles with a shudder. Mill on the Floss earned its fair share of ire as well.

2. When she began writing in the 1960s, five  Canadian books were published every year. Publication was conditional upon approval from partner publishers in the US/UK, and books were sometimes rejected for being “too Canadian”.

3. Like many authors, she self-published her work before finding a “legit” publisher. She views the current trends in self-publishing positively–she was enthusiastic about Lulu, blogging, e-books, Amazon etc., which all of which she likened to the string connecting two tin cans (the writer and the reader).

4. She said the conditions that have engendered the Occupy Wall Street movement are akin to the situation leading to the French Revolution–an undue concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few elites who manipulate laws to protect them.  Also noteworthy: 72 % of the OWS protestors are, in fact, employed (they protest after work hours).

5. She talked about social media with a sort of fond incredulity that had the audience cracking up. Apparently, she  found the cover image for her latest book via a ‘Twitter’ ‘follower’, who ‘tweeted’ “We think Margaret Atwood will like these pictures. ” And she clicked on the attached ‘URL’ and found a photoshopped picture she liked. (All quotes correspond to her air-quotes during the talk.)

She added that “digital manipulation meant something else entirely back in 1955.”

In sum: if there’s an event within a 1000-mile radius that features Margaret Atwood, you should go. Move mountains if you must.

***

Updated to add that The Penelopiad by Atwood has been adapted into a show by Nightwood Theatre, Toronto.  Do check out their site for more details (including tickets and dates).

Would you like to attend a reading in Toronto featuring three celebrated authors? And even if you’re not in the Toronto area, could you please take a minute to read this post to see how you can further literacy programs in South Asia?

World Literacy Canada is a Toronto-based NGO supporting women and children’s literacy through non-formal education programs in South Asia (their Indian operations are based in Varanasi).  Their initiatives include adult literacy programs, community libraries, skills training (such as tailoring), and much more. Please do click through to their site. And here’s a video.

***

In the 1990s World Literacy Canada’s fundraising efforts were concerned with “linking a love of literature to the cause of literacy”, and the Kama Reading Series was born.  The first Kama series featured writers such as Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood; 2012 marks the twentieth anniversary of this  event.

In association with World Literacy Canada, I’m giving away a ticket (worth $60) for a Kama Reading to be held at The Park Hyatt Toronto on January 25, 2012. The reading features Marina Nemat (Prisoner of Tehran), Ava Homa (Echoes from the Other Land), and James Loney (Captivity). 

“Marina Nemat was born in 1965 in Tehran, Iran. After the Islamic Revolution of 1979, she was arrested at the age of sixteen and spent more than two years in Evin, a political prison in Tehran, where she was tortured and came very close to execution. She came to Canada in 1991 and has called it home ever since. Her memoir of her life in Iran,  Prisoner of Tehran, was published in Canada by Penguin Canada in April 2007, has been published in 28 other countries, and has been an international bestseller. MacLean’s Magazine has called it “…one of the finest (memoirs) ever written by a Canadian.” Prisoner of Tehran has been short listed for many literary awards, including the Young Minds Award in the UK and the Borders Original Voices Award in the US.”

“Ava Homa is the author of Echoes from the Other Land  which was nominated for the the world’s largest short story award: 2011 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Echoes from the Other Land was also placed 6th in the top ten winners of the CBC Reader’s Choice Contest for Giller Prize. Ava is a Kurdish-Canadian writer-in-exile, with two Masters’ degrees one in English and Creative Writing, another in English Language and Literature. Echoes from the Other Land has a running theme of resistance by modern Iranian women under an oppressive regime.”

“James Loney  is a Canadian peace activist who has worked for several years with Christian Peacemaker Teams in Iraq and Palestine. On November 26, 2005, he was kidnapped in Baghdad along with three others: Harmeet Singh Sooden (Canadian) and Norman Kember (British), both members of the delegation he was leading; and Tom Fox (American), a full-time member of CPT who had been working in Iraq since September 2004. The widely publicized hostage crisis (see 2005-2006 Christian Peacemaker hostage crisis) ended on March 23, 2006 when Loney, Kember and Sooden were rescued in a clandestine military operation led by British Special Forces.  Tom Fox was killed on March 9, two weeks before the release of other men. Captivity is the story of what Jim described upon his return to Toronto and reunion with his partner Dan Hunt as ‘a terrifying, profound, transformative and excruciatingly boring experience’.”

Here’s the full line-up for the series, which also features one of my favorite authors ever–Rohinton Mistry!  I may do giveaways for other readings too–please come back and check this blog if you are interested.

It’s a truly wonderful line-up of authors, isn’t it? And there are cocktails…

***

HOW TO ENTER:

Please leave a comment letting me know you’d like to win a ticket, along with your email address.  That’s it!

But seeing as it’s a charitable cause, could you please spread the word about this event and this organization? For instance, you might:

1. Like World Literacy Canada on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/worldlit  (you’ll find Kama in the events section), and follow them on Twitter @worldlit.

2. Share news about the Kama Reading Series on social media venues (please use #WLCKama) or on your blog.

3. Blog about this giveaway, post it on social media venues of your choice, and let friends and family in the Toronto area know about the event.

4. And you could donate directly to World Literacy Canada here: https://www.dollarsatwork.org/Donation.aspx  90 cents of every dollar directly funds the programs, and all donations are tax-deductible.

Small print:

1.  This giveaway closes on Dec 31, 2011

2. One winner will be picked by random number generator. If you have left a comment but are not in the Toronto area, or do not wish to enter the draw for any other reason,  please mention this in your comment.

3. World Literacy will mail the winner’s ticket to a Canadian mailing address, or will hand it over at the venue, depending on the winner’s preference.

4. I have no professional or personal involvement with World Literacy, and am running this giveaway in order to promote a cause I support.  For all legalese, please contact World Literacy Canada.

Thank you for reading, and thank you for helping!

1. The book I’m currently reading:

The Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor.  “Spontaneous forests, polygamy, strange insects, Nigerian 419 scammers, really really fast cars, a different kind of Sahara Desert, male beauty contests, the apocalypse, life, death, sword fights, fat chiefs, assassins, this novel is kind of nuts!”says the author.

So…when I find an author I like, I tend to obsess over her backlist.

2. The last book I finished:

Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor.   “Sunny lives in Nigeria, but she was born in New York City. She looks West African, but is so sensitive to the sun that she can’t play soccer during the day. She doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere.
Then she learns why.
Her classmate Orlu and his friend Chichi reveal that they have magical abilities- and so does she. Sunny is a “free agent,” overflowing with latent power. And she has a lot of catching up to do.”

3. The next book I want to read:

Who Fears Death by … you know the drill.  This book just won the 2011 World Fantasy Award, and it’s waiting for me at the library. Unlike Okorafor’s previous novels, this one is adult, not YA.

4. The last book I bought:

Ling and Ting: Not Exactly the Same by Grace Lin, for my son.  It’s a picture book featuring identical twins who have very different personalities. One is fidgety, the other calm,  one eats with chopsticks while the other prefers a fork, and so on. It’s very cute!

5. The last book I was given:

A review copy of Marina Endicott’s  The Little Shadows. “The Little Shadows revolves around three sisters in the world of vaudeville before and during the First World War. We follow the lives of all three in turn: Aurora, the eldest and most beautiful, who is sixteen when the book opens; thoughtful Clover, a year younger; and the youngest sister, joyous headstrong sprite Bella, who is thirteen. The girls, overseen by their fond but barely coping Mama, are forced to make their living as a singing act after the untimely death of their father. They begin with little besides youth and hope, but Marina Endicott’s genius is to show how the three girls slowly and steadily evolve into true artists even as they navigate their way to adulthood among a cast of extraordinary characters – some of them charming charlatans, some of them unpredictable eccentrics, and some of them just ordinary-seeming humans with magical gifts.”

Meme Maker: Simon at Stuck in a Book. Join in, why don’t you?

The book was written in 1933,  and has its fair share of issues–the illustrations, for instance, show a Chinese boy who’s the same color as Ping. And, the spanking.  “But why did the boatman spank the last duck?” asked my four-year-old, very disturbed, and I didn’t have a good answer, for even if every single duck was on time, one would always get spanked. I think one of the hardest things to explain to young children is that sometimes, shit happens. At this age, we parents are constantly trying to establish causality and consequences, as in: “If you keep banging that glass door, it’ll break, and if does, I’ll give you a time-out for bajillion years.” Getting my son to understand that things happen without a reason (and that people are sometimes nasty just for the heck of it) has been challenging, but necessary–he’s increasingly coming up against a real world that isn’t always nice, the cosmic spank that can’t be dodged.

But children are freakishly changeable. My son maintains a reading log for school, and he’s supposed to pick his favorite out of every 10 books read and draw a picture. Of course he picked Ping. Why? “Because I like the duck getting spanked,” he said, and laughed madly.

And what about the review (1999) that started it all?  Ping is apparently a Unix networking utility (whatever that is), and the reviewer very cleverly analyzes the book in terms of the latter. As in “The book describes networking in terms even a child could understand, choosing to anthropomorphize the underlying packet structure. The ping packet is described as a duck, who, with other packets (more ducks), spends a certain period of time on the host machine (the wise-eyed boat). At the same time each day (I suspect this is scheduled under cron), the little packets (ducks) exit the host (boat) by way of a bridge (a bridge). From the bridge, the packets travel onto the internet (here embodied by the Yangtze River).”

[...]

Who Should Buy This Book

If you need a good, high-level overview of the ping utility, this is the book. I can’t recommend it for most managers, as the technical aspects may be too overwhelming and the basic concepts too daunting.

Read the rest of the review on the Ping program creator’s page at http://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/ping.html (you have to scroll down).  Sadly, Mike Muuss,  the man who created Ping, died in a car crash in 2000.  Really bad shit happens.

“After completing my MBA, I worked for a while in large corporations (last with Citigroup), till I started believing I was entitled to do what I really wanted. I wanted to read and to write, and not just on stolen hours on weekends. So I got myself a Masters degree in the arts, and then I started sending out my work.

Clark Blaise says about Indian immigrants to [North] America that material success “has been the easy part. After all, they were programmed to study hard, invest wisely, and live frugally. But that other Constitutional promise, ‘happiness,’ has been elusive.” I’m a product of the Indian upper-middle class that Blaise so astutely portrays, and in some ways, I had to give myself permission to be happy and to believe that things would work out. And you know what? They did. Sure, it’s been a bumpy road–I initially received nothing but rejection from every Canadian publication I approached. (Fortunately my work got picked up in the US, otherwise I might have returned to banking.) I now work as a freelance writer and spend much of my time reading and writing.”

If you feel so inclined, you can read the whole thing here.

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This weekend, I attended a round table conversation at IFOA on the topic “The Individual in Society”, featuring authors Bharati Mukherjee,  Lauren B. Davis, and Johan Harstad. In essence, the three authors discussed why they (and their characters) chose not to conform, their respective motivations and reasoning, and the consequences of questioning the values of the societies they belonged to. I was (predictably) most interested in hearing Mukherjee–I’ve been reading her since high school, and “The Management of Grief” still tears me up.

I was particularly intrigued by Mukherjee’s response to Harstad mentioning that self-effacement was part of his manifesto of living. Harstad said (I’m paraphrasing liberally here) that he always endeavored to cause the least amount of fuss, to minimize his societal footprint, if you will. For instance, he said that when his flight landed, he always remained seated till the passenger in the aisle seat was ready to disembark. Mukherjee replied that it took a certain confidence to behave in such a manner, and that sometimes, in some societies, the only way to succeed was to claw and grasp at the most fleeting opportunites. Here’s the thing: Harstad is from Norway, while Mukherjee’s protagonist is a girl from small-town India. Pushing and shoving are perhaps both inevitable and necessary in a society featuring scarce resources, one that imposes draconian consequences for bucking tradition. I think a small-town girl would be mincemeat if she chose to be self-effacing rather than brash-bordering-on-selfish.

The tricky part, I suppose,  is recognizing when to abandon that sort of mindset. I think some are so conditioned to having to fight for the least glint of opportunity that twenty years after, they’re still jumping the queue at the $9.99 India Palace lunch buffet despite earning six-figure incomes.

Anyway. After the talk, I briefly met with Mukherjee and asked her to sign my book, and I didn’t have to spell my name out for her. And of course I gushed like an idiot; poise: when will you make my aquaintance?

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Some of you may have noticed a pleasing symmetry in the above post: Clark Blaise and Bharati Mukherjee are husband and wife. Furthermore, I’ll be hearing Blaise read this Thursday at the Rogers Writer’s Trust  Fiction Prize event.