Jennifer Duncan
In Frontier Spirit: The Brave Women of the Klondike by Jennifer Duncan, we meet women who escaped the prison of propriety and domesticity by joining the Gold Rush to the Yukon. Some travelled on their own; others followed their husbands; one carried on up the trail after her husband chickened out. This book is a collection of short accounts, so reading it is a bit like watching hockey highlights: the women seem to live their lives at a frenetic pace, travelling back and forth from north to south many times and rebuilding (more than once) after their fortunes are wiped out by fire. I have few quibbles with this good book. To a modern woman like me, the energy and determination of these women is both inspiring and exhausting.
Reviewed by Patty Osborne in Geist No. 55
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Kenneth White
Karen Connelly’s travel memoir One Room in a Castle opens with an apt epigraph from Kenneth White: "The world is open before you. All you need to do—and want to do—is walk through it." Across the Territories, White’s most recent book of travels, describes eleven excursions that range through territories "from Orkney to Rangiroa." These personal travel essays are not travelogue: they do not suggest an itinerary, nor do they recommend restaurants or hotels. White is a thoughtful, observant wanderer, more "beat" than Baedeker; Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North is the model that comes first to mind. White prefers to travel solo, but he always brings along a host of literary travel companions—philosophers, mystics and vagabond poets from earlier times—as mentors and guides. In Denmark he notes that "it was because of Saxo Grammaticus that I decided to go to Helsingør"; in Morocco he sits at a café in Oujda "reading a French translation of Averroës’ Decisive Treatise (Fasl al-Magal)"; in Andalusia he imagines a statue of the eleventh-century Hebrew poet and Arab philosopher Salomon Ibn Gabirol hopping down from its pedestal to accompany him on his wanderings. There is what you might call an eastern aesthetic to White’s writing style: images and episodes dabbed onto the page with a paintbrush charged with colour and broader cosmic connections allusively suggested rather than baldly stated. Sometimes he can lead the reader into rather esoteric areas, but I like his attitude, and I recommend this book.
Reviewed by Michael Hayward in Geist No. 58
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Bob Gaulke
Bob Gaulke's description of his travels in Salvador (a region of Brazil), in The Nervous Tourist, evokes the age of imperialism. His background-and education afford him the opportunity to make a decent living teaching English, but he is very much an outsider, trying to negotiate his enthusiasm and wariness of culture, politics and local customs. It is the allure of Brazilian music that tempts Gaulke overseas, but he is not a post-colonial tourist. He involves himself with the residents of Brazil through friendship, English classes and interviews with young people about their relationship with America. There are some classic repressed-Westerner-abroad moments, such as when Gaulke learns to love the sunga (a tiny local swimsuit), to navigate the magic realism of the bus system and to party Salvador-style during Carnaval. This is a modest chapbook, but it contains insightful, engaging and funny writing about the eye-opening experience of travel.
Reviewed by Kris Rothstein in Geist No. 53
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Douglas Coupland
When Douglas Coupland said that he did not make public appearances in his hometown because he didn’t want to be "recognized," I stopped reading his books. A few years later a colleague of mine from the BBC interviewed him at his home and reported that he was welcoming and polite, so I was willing to consider changing my opinion. The Coupland who appeared in Souvenir of Canada at the 2005 Vancouver International Film Festival (produced by Robert Cohen et al.) was thoughtful and affable, eager to share his odd collection of Canadian detritus and his ideas on national identity. Coupland created an art piece called "Canada House" in a soon-to-be-demolished post-war home, and his installation captures signs and objects that cannot be understood without knowing the secret Canadian handshake. Some items, like the official mascot ookpik and the invented Canadian greeting chimo, are so secret that I had never heard of them. Coupland meditates on Terry Fox, instructional films on how to build an igloo, Canada’s favourite rock formation (the Canadian Shield), hockey and the Trans-Canada Highway in this film, a nostalgic piece of Canadian auto/biography.
Reviewed by Kris Rothstein in Geist No. 48
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Roo Borson
Last summer I hiked up to a fire lookout in Alberta to visit a friend who lives there for part of each year, and tucked in my sturdy pack was Roo Borson's Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida, which I was taking to my friend as a talisman from the place beyond her secluded wood. I had gone some distance along the very gruelling trek, which crosses and follows the North Saskatchewan River through Alberta’s Siffleur Wilderness, before it occurred to me that I was taking a book called Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida on a short journey upriver toward Cline Lookout. When I arrived at the lookout, my friend presented me with a plate of ginger cookies and a cold beer, and I presented her with a bag of salt-and-pepper potato chips and Roo Borson’s book. I had spent the better part of the previous two weeks with this book, and its unlikely weaving together of poetry and prose made me feel instantly at home in its pages. This is writing that does not insist. It is a simple opening to a world of wisteria and persimmons and dragonflies and railway bridges, and I wanted to belong to that world, and it let me. As it turned out, my friend already had this book in her lookout collection, and so the following day I took it on a short journey downriver toward the Siffleur Falls parking lot, where together we returned to life in the place beyond.
Reviewed by Jill Boettger in Geist No. 55
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W. G. Sebald
When W. G. Sebald died in an automobile accident in December 2001, just four of his books were available in English translation. Those four books had earned him considerable praise (Michael Ondaatje called him "the most interesting and ambitious writer working in Britain today") and critical attention (Austerlitz won a National Book Critics Circle Award). Four more books by Sebald have been published since his death, and with the latest, Campo Santo, translated by Anthea Bell, there are signs that the well of previously unpublished (or untranslated) material is finally beginning to run dry. Campo santo—"sacred ground" in Italian—refers to a Corsican cemetery that Sebald visited in 1996, and the piece that was inspired by that visit is a wonderfully discursive exploration of many of Sebald’s favourite themes: the way the dead linger among the living and the way history lies everywhere upon the present landscape like a series of veils. This and three other fragments that focus on the island of Corsica and form the heart of this book are its most successful parts; I wish that Sebald had lived to complete the book as the novel he’d planned. The rest of Campo Santo consists of literary essays on writers that Sebald felt a kinship with: Bruce Chatwin, Vladimir Nabokov, Günter Grass and others, and as a result the book feels more like a collection of excavated bits than a cohesive whole. Fragmentary or not, though, Campo Santo will please those who want just one more taste of Sebald. To experience him at his best, start with one of his earlier novels—especially The Rings of Saturn.
Reviewed by Michael Hayward in Geist No. 57
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Vincenzo Pietropaolo
In Making Home in Havana, Vincenzo Pietropaolo, a photographer, and Cecelia Lawless, a professor of romance studies, explore the notion of "home" in two Havana neighbourhoods. Havana is the site of anachronism for the rest of the Americas: when we look at Havana in photographs and movies, we feel the power of memory in the unrepaired facades of another age, the decaying old Fords and Chevrolets, and a dystopian glimpse of the future seems to beckon and to offer a warning at the same time. These sensations are not available to the citizens of Havana, who make their lives in real time: they cannot live in the scenery of the past that we see them inhabiting. Life in Havana is hard, and the people in these photographs, whose words comprise most of the text, are straightforward in their talk: "Human dignity, one has to take care of it," says one of them. "Every society has its problems. We have ours, let us live them. Freedom. I have nothing to do with the state. I work. Look at the bicycle I use for work. Now wait a minute. I am not complaining. The tire is bald, it has no rubber left, and I don't have the money to buy a new one, but I forge ahead with no complaints. That's what I've got. I don't have any choice." This is a book for browsing and it is best read in several directions. The words in the text (quoted from interviews) are never attributed, so the reader is never certain who is speaking: I found this to be disconcerting. Nevertheless this is a compelling work on more than one level. We want to know these people from within their lives; at the same time we cannot help admiring the peeling surfaces of their homes and streets; we feel ourselves tempted in unsavoury ways: we have to question ourselves. This is strong material, but the book lacks a firm sense of purpose: we never learn what motivates the photographer and the author, who are North Americans (one Canadian, one American), to go into the homes of these people—whose struggle, in the words of Lawless, is a "daily quest for dignity and grace"—in order to ask questions.
Reviewed by Stephen Osborne in Geist No. 48
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