Afterthoughts

I’ve been thinking about the discussion of Alison Pick’s Far To Go last night at the book club I frequent. I’m in the process of revising my interpretation of the principal narrator, Marta. Opinions about the book differed, but with reasons as all differences of opinion worth pursuing do. Some had high praise for the novel, especially its careful imagery and beautiful prose. I was in that camp, but I also had a few reservations. (None, however, that would prevent me heading out as soon as possible to read the author’s previous novel, The Sweet Edge, or whatever novel comes next for that matter.) I want to concentrate on just one of these because my afterthoughts have me rethinking what I said.

It struck me as odd, even jarring, that the Bauer family had a “governess” such as Marta. In the first half of the book this is the most typical term used to describe her role. Latterly, the narrator uses “nanny” frequently and then predominantly. What troubled me was that the Bauer family that employs Marta are supposed to be wealthy industrialists and socialites. They speak multiple languages. Their young son, Pepik, is 5 as the novel begins and turns 6 before he leaves on the Kindertransport. Marta is an uneducated, unworldly young woman, the child of farm labourers. Why would wealthy, worldly, sophisticated industrialists hire this woman as a “governess”?

Is Marta even literate? Yes, I think so. But it is clear that at 5 Pepik cannot read. And he still cannot read at 6. Just what kind of governess is Marta?

So that was bothering me, the decision to describe Marta as a governess. But now I think it might be more complicated.

Toward the end of the novel we learn that the story and its narrative frame are due to a female academic living in Montreal named Anneliese. This Anneliese is the daughter of Marta and her employer, Pavel. She is named after Pavel’s wife. (Pavel and his wife both die in the concentration camps.) Most important, however, is that this Anneliese is only 6 or 7 when her mother, the Marta of the story, dies. We learn that the entire book is supposed to be Anneliese’s imaginative exploration of her mother and father’s lives. This needs to be contrasted sharply with the letters and other documents that Anneliese has unearthed in archives from the time period.

What does this information tell us as readers? That’s what I’ve been thinking about. The purported “author” of the imaginative rendering is an “interested” party. She is the daughter of the main character and, so far as we know, has very little if any first-hand knowledge of her mother’s actions. Now I begin to think that maybe this narrator isn’t quite as trustworthy as she initially appears. Maybe she has coloured Marta’s tale, at least at first, to put her in as good of a light as possible. Hence the references to Marta as Pepik’s governess. Later in the tale it becomes less and less plausible to refer to Marta as a governess and so she takes on her more appropriate title as nanny to Pepik. A confusion which is taken further when Pepik, after a delirious transport to Scotland, associates the new English word “mother” for Marta when she is pointed at in a photo which he bears.

Now this, to my mind, makes the novel more interesting. Also more challenging than it first appears. It also washes away a number of other minor concerns I had. But is it the right reading? Is it even a better reading, at least better than I had before? Perhaps.

One thing is certain. I now look forward with special keenness to Alison Pick’s visit to Waterloo on 11 November. Maybe she will resolve some of these things I have been wondering about. Even better if she prompts new ones.

Reading again

One of my guilty pleasures is re-reading. There are tens of thousands of novels published worldwide each year of which there might be (I’m just guessing) maybe a thousand that, given sufficient time, I might find worth reading. On my current pace, I will be lucky to get through 60 novels this year. And those are not restricted solely to recent publications. So any way you slice it, there are going to be a rather large number of novels I do not read in my lifetime. Reading a novel a second or third or tenth time seems like an extravagance, a dereliction of duty somehow, almost selfish. Yet I do so enjoy returning to a novel that has given me pleasure in the past hoping, perhaps, to rekindle my admiration for the author, or revise it, as may be the case. And sometimes I thinking reading again is my favourite form of reading.

That may be one reason that I find talking to other readers about a recent read we’ve shared to be so much fun. It forces me to go back over the novel in my mind and attempt to articulate what I like or didn’t like about it, what I thought was clever or dull, where the author surprised me or disappointed me, how a phrase or image or paragraph leapt off the page for me. It isn’t re-reading itself, but it is part of that process. And the more input I get from others, especially careful and sensitive readers, the more likely I am to enjoy my experience of reading the novel again.

For the first time the book club I frequent has given me the perfect excuse for reading a novel again. A little more than a year ago, I read Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist, a book I thoroughly enjoyed. It reminded me what an exquisite craftsman Baker can be. A marvel. It triggered a bit of a Baker-fest in my reading schedule. So it was a great delight to discover The Anthologist on the list of books to be read in the book club this year. Now I have to re-read it. And I get the added bonus of anticipating a hearty discussion of same.

Will my fellow readers be as taken with Nicholson’s prose as I was? I have no idea. Will I be as admiring on a second read? I certainly hope so. In any case I expect to find a great deal more in the novel this time than I did the first time. Who knows, it may even prompt another plunge into Baker’s back catalogue. I can hardly wait.

Hard choices – book club or public reading?

It’s a scheduling nightmare! The book club that I frequent is meeting at the same time this week as a free public reading by three well-regarded authors. How to decide?

The book in question is Alison Pick’s Far to Go, which I have very much enjoyed reading despite the heart-wrenching subject matter. I am keen to hear what the other readers in the club think about this book, not least a certain “discerning and widely read guy”. No doubt lively repartee shall ensue (I hope). The public reading involves Sandra Birdsell, Annabel Lyon, and Alissa York. I could learn more than a thing or two about writing from any one of these authors.

If only there were two of me. Not much chance of that. But I do have a secret plan. My secret plan is that I will go the book club and my partner will go to the public reading. Almost the best of both worlds.

Almost…

Municipal elections

Tomorrow is polling day for our city and region. I am fairly certain that nearly everyone I intend to vote for (for city council, mayor, regional council, and regional chair) will not in fact get elected. I still intend to cast my ballot. I think that’s important.

It has been enlightening going through this election. After 3 years back in Canada, I sometimes forget that there are still many differences between here and the UK on which I have not yet had a chance to refresh myself. For example, municipal and regional politics here is not party political. In my ward, there are a large number of candidates for a single council seat. All I have to go on is what the candidates have said in their election materials or at the various of organised debates which have been well-reported in the local media.

There are also a couple of local plebiscites that will be on this ballot, both of which have been divisive in the campaign.

However, without party allegiances to fall back on I have found myself casting about in my own pool of thoughts, principles, and preferences.  That has been useful because it has given me a useful matrix against which to test the opinions of those who would seek my support. Some things stand out for me. It turns out I don’t really mind paying taxes, or even more taxes, so long as those funds are going to develop and enhance my community. So if your whole reason for being in politics is to ensure that I have an extra 50 cents in my pocket at the end of the year, you really need to look elsewhere. If the first thing you want to do once you get in office is to remove a piece of anodyne public site art, then look elsewhere. If you sign up to an aggressive campaign of fear-mongering pseudo-science, I’m sorry you’ll have to look elsewhere. If you confuse public health issues with personal rights issues, again elsewhere.

That’s just a sampling of what I’ve found in my personal selection criteria. It’s surprising that there is anyone at all I’m willing to vote for. But I found enough candidates to make the short walk over to the polling station worth the effort. Sure, none of the candidates that I’ll be voting for is likely to win. But they still need my vote. And I need it too.

Elections – they can be a useful tool for the personal as well as the political.

Blog use and first thoughts about Drupal

Still no tweets from me, but I do now have 3 followers. Soon. The anticipation must be killing them. Meanwhile I have been busy sharpening up my various foci of identity online. For example, this blog has returned to its predominant themes of openness, free and open source software, and reflections on such software and the communities that grow and sustain it. Gone is the fun widget from LibraryThing displaying books that I have recently added to my catalog there (if you are reading this via an rss feed you may never have seen that). I have moved that over to my other blog, Transformative Explications, which focusses on books and writing. There is a link here in my blogroll. My thinking is that it is better to give these two passions a separate and distinct location on the web without trying to disguise that they are both a growing part of me.

My other blog is located on a domain I set up back in 2007: www.randymetcalfe.com. I hadn’t done much with that domain or with the web hosting package that lies behind it, but I am now actively developing it.

You will notice, if you visit it, that the blog is a WordPress installation. WordPress is just one of an array of software packages available via the Fantastico De Luxe installer that comes with my web hosting package. Since my skills do not lie in system administration, this turns out to be a great way for me to experiment with and commit to using some FOSS. I’m happy with the WordPress install that I have but it doesn’t prevent me from also living in the cloud over here at Blogger. Of course my needs are simple; more complex requirements might have necessitated a clear choice.

The other FOSS that I have been exploring of late is Drupal, which is also available to me via Fantastico. After a couple of test installs at different domains, I have committed to exploring Drupal more fully. To that end I have been patiently documenting my learning curve (more on that later) as well as looking for opportunities to engage with the Drupal community.

Drupal is not as simple to use as WordPress, clearly, but its capabilities are vast (limitless?) and to take full advantage of it my learning curve will need to go on for some time. I’ve made some initial moves on participating in the Drupal community – joining email lists, sitting in on IRC, even attending my local Drupal user group meeting this past week. I was also lucky enough to go to one day of the nearby Toronto DrupalCamp, where I saw Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, give an inspiring talk. What have I learned so far, other than that I have a lot to learn? I’ve learned that the Drupal community is strong. It has a lot of small and mid-size web consultancy businesses actively participating within it. And there are a lot of people around with, it seems to me, a great deal of technical knowledge. Enough so that it will, I think, be a long time before I manage to find any way to contribute to this community other than by using the software and enthusing, where possible, about it.

If I have sharpened my use of my blogs in the past week, then I will have got somewhere. Still a lot more things to think about in this exploration of my PIO. But until then…