Review: Survival by Margaret Atwood

Writing in the 1970s, Atwood surveys Canadian literature and identifies a few of its central themes and tendencies. In doing so, she helped bring self-consciousness to the literature of this frigid, confused, often-violent child of Britain, nudging it toward a distinct national identity.

Atwood identifies “survival” as the idea coursing through Canadian literature (in contrast to the US’s “frontier” and England’s “island”): survival against Mother-Nature-the-Monster (having discovered that Canada’s natural bounty was nothing like the idyll pictured from the shores of England), survival against the dominance of its southern neighbour, survival of the francophones in a sea of anglophones.

Survival is precarious in these works. Most of its characters succumb to some travesty or other. Atwood attributes this pessimism to a victimization complex, which she breaks down into four stages: denial of victimhood, resignation to the inescapability of victimhood, belief in the possibility of overcoming victimhood, and some fourth stage of transcendence (more of a theoretical possibility than something typically achieved, in reality or in literature). Most Canadian literature lingers in the second phase.

The book is well-structured; each chapter investigates a particular facet (nature, animals, settlers and immigrants, family, women, francophones, artists, death, failure), critiquing poems and novels that touch on these topics or motifs. Each chapter comes with a shortlist of 3-4 key works and a longlist of perhaps a dozen referenced works. Atwood’s writing is colourful, wry, and incisive, and her tour through CanLit is well-paced and enjoyable.

Having surveyed the previous century or so of writing, the work is now over half a century old. It was highly influential in shaping Canadian literary criticism, and thus the Canadian publishing industry broadly. It is therefore undoubtedly dated. I thought this was particularly true of the chapter on artists: with the advent of CanCon laws and funding for the arts (not to mention self-consciousness as a nation or the ease of distributing media across the globe), the lack of audience is no longer so existential for Canadian artists. Canada has also changed. Now several generations later, our identities as and associations with settlers and immigrants have shifted. Indigenous literature was absent from Atwood's investigation due to its near-total exclusion from the publishing industry. A modern revision would presumably investigate ideas of indigeneity and settler-colonialism founded on Indigenous literature that has since made it to print.

Still, I found it very easy to see themes of survival and the ways it ripples through other topics in many of the Canadian works I have read lately. Ducks is all about survival in the bleak capitalism and soul-crushing misogyny of the oil sands, first as a bare survival but then transitioning to an insistence on thriving and overcoming victimhood. Station Eleven is a post-apocalyptic narrative; survival means navigating a sparse and hostile world to find meaning in life. Study for Obedience picks up on many of the family themes Atwood discusses, with the brother taking the position of domineering patriarch. To this protagonist, survival means finding a way to coexist as a Jewish woman and an immigrant with the backwards villagers.

This is, obviously, a book about Canadian Literature from front-to-back. But I think it holds interest outside that narrow scope too. By honing in on this niche, Atwood demonstrates the value — or even the necessity — of literary critique and literature for developing a cohesive community identity. This work therefore may be of interest for someone hoping to develop other national or political identities. Second, although dated, Atwood hits upon some very persistent aspects of the Canadian identity. Those interested in learning who Canada really is, or taking a good look at themselves in the mirror, may also wish to pick it up.

Review: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

“Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be.” 

In this work, Joan Didion recounts her grieving process in the year following her husband’s sudden death from a heart attack. Reflecting on those first few months, she realizes that many of her decisions and ways of thinking were not based on reality, like sleeping alone in her apartment that first night “so that he could come back”, or arguing against a tracheostomy for her critically ill daughter, so that “she could be fine in the morning, ready to eat, talk, go home.” These moments give the book its title: A Year of Magical Thinking.

Grief does not always take the same path. Magical thinking is not a part of every journey. Many of the particulars of Didion’s experiences — the casualness with which she considers buying a house in Hawaii or flying to Paris or eating out every night — will not reflect most people’s realities. But most paths cross some of the same trail markers. Didion shares the cycles her mind looped through in that first year of her grief: rumination over the last few months with her husband, fixation over the last moments of his life and trying to piece together what happened and what he experienced, the haze of the first few weeks or months spliced with a few laser sharp memories. 

Didion weaves her own recollections with quotes and passages from others struggling with grief, emphasizing how common an experience it is, for all it is devastating. Like me, she is the type of person to relentlessly research a topic, and so she also bolsters her narrative with things she gleaned from medical and psychological journals. While virtually everyone will experience loss at some point in their lives, it is nevertheless an intense and often lonely emotion to go through. These writing choices help place her very personal account in the broader context of human experience.

Grief confronts Didion with aspects of herself she had not previously considered, such as her need to always be right (“For once in your life just let it go.”), or her positive thinking (“I realized that my impression of myself had been of someone who could look for, and find, the upside in any situation.”). In mourning her husband, she also mourns her own former self: “When we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer.” The version of herself her husband saw is forever gone.

Didion’s account is also a tribute to her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, and to their relationship. As it should be—what is so painful about grief is the end of a specific relationship, the loss of that shared experience. Exploring that emotion requires exploring what he meant to her. Both worked from home, and Didion speculates that it was because they were “unusually dependent on one another” that her grief was “pathological.” Prolonged grief disorder, as it is now known, was added to the DSM two decades after this book was written.

Didion struggles to let go of her husband: to acknowledge “that our life together will decreasingly be the center of my every day”, feels like “so distinct a betrayal.” Avoiding that acknowledgement becomes a way of keeping him alive. Her grief comes and goes in waves, once catching her by surprise in the middle of a story. She calls on his voice inside her head to make the deadline (“You’re a professional. Finish the piece.”). Eventually, she does make it through to the other side.

For those looking for advice on how to move on from loss, Didion offers no clear answers. Such ready-made solutions may help little anyways: knowing that one needs to let go “does not make it any easier to let go.” She describes grief as “passive”; in contrast, “mourning, the act of dealing with grief, [requires] attention.” The writing of this book was undoubtedly part of this mourning process: the active examination of her emotions and thought patterns and her search for their meaning must have helped her process them and recognize herself in her new identity as a widow. Writing is so much a part of how Didion relates with the world that this approach must have seemed natural. Other writers have sought this method too — I was reminded of Ti Amo, a similarly intensely personal reflection on grieving a husband based on the author’s own experience. Non-writers will have to find their own path. But if this book fails as an instruction manual, it does perhaps provide solace that this particular pain is shared, an opportunity to see the self in another person.

And for non-grievers? Didion warns us that conceptually being aware of grief and its inevitability does little to prepare you for it. This book is therefore no vaccine. Still, it remains compelling as a study of how a person examines their own emotions and finds rational explanations for seemingly irrational thoughts — magical thinking.

Review: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

In this memoir, novelist and marathon runner Haruki Murakami reflects on his relationship with running. As a runner myself, I enjoyed recognizing common ground in our experiences: an approachable form of exercise initially picked up to support a long, healthy life became a source of enjoyable routine and self-improvement. We have both also found in running a way to practice coming to terms with disappointment, failure, and personal limits. 

There are also substantial differences: Murakami is much more focused on competitive running (marathons, triathlons, and one ultramarathon), while I enjoy running more as a way of exploring and relating to my urban environment, and I have never run an official race nor much farther than a half-marathon. Of our differences, the reflections I found most compelling were those on how aging shapes his relationship with running. I am a decade or so younger than he was when he wrote this book, and so these passages present a peek into my future. For now, I will continue with my 35 kilometers per week while I can.

Overall, however, I was disappointed in the book. A good memoir either offers the reader a rare glimpse into an unknown world, or finds a way to make the author’s particular experience general. Jesse Thistle’s memoir is an example of the first, showing the reader how Canada’s social system traps homeless people in a cycle of poverty, crime and addiction, and how hard it is to emerge from it. Examples of the second approach include The Message, Born to Run, and to a lesser extent, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. These works interleave personal reflection with science, history, and sociology to connect their own experiences with the broader human experience. 

In contrast, Murakami’s narrative is very internal — many passages read like stream-of-consciousness — and I found the result a bit overly self-indulgent. Although I haven’t read Murakami’s novels, this memoir made me less interested in doing so. I find he essentializes “talent” too much (“what’s the most important quality a novelist has to have[?]. It’s pretty obvious: talent.”), views education too hierarchically (“the pupil has no idea what the real point of this sort of practice is.”), and writes strangely about women he sees (the "aggressive challenge” “emanating” from the “small, slim” girls with “blond hair in a ponytail” that “run like the wind.”). I found the prose to be unremarkable, although it is possible the fault lies with the translator. However, I am suspicious of a writer that claims “the fear I feel when I weave in and out of traffic on my sports bike with its skinny tires and my bike shoes strapped tight in the straps is something you can’t understand unless you’ve gone through it.” Isn’t the task of a novelist to make us deeply emotionally understand an experience we have not gone through? 

Altogether, this is a memoir better suited to the Murakami fan than to the casual runner.

Review: Biology as Ideology by Richard Lewontin

Lewontin has a few ideas he wants everyone — scientists and those outside the profession alike — to incorporate into their worldview. First, that genes do not dictate our social behaviour (i.e., against sociobiology); instead, the gene-organism-environment relationship is dialectical, with each influencing and defining the others. Second, science is a political activity: our worldview influences our experimental designs and our interpretation of the world around us.

This is the third work I have read by Lewontin, and all of them make this same case, relying on similar examples and arguments. The Dialectical Biologist is the oldest, and is a collection of several essays and chapters. The rhetoric is a little rougher around the edges, and it is at times more focused on the particular target at hand than on a general framework for understanding science. And yet, because this iteration is also written with passion and urgency, it is the one I would recommend for the scientist eager for a polemic. The Triple Helix is the most detailed and carefully constructed from a scientific perspective; the author tours us through the scientific literature to understand the relationship between the three strands of the helix: gene, organism, environment. This is the one I would recommend for scientists in general, though the political threads are more muted. 

Biology as Ideology is a Massey Lecture, intentionally written for a broad audience, and it fulfills that purpose wonderfully; I would recommend it for a general audience. The ideas are polished and woven together elegantly yet conversationally. The examples are well-chosen to be illustrative and approachable. If I have a critique, it is that the author leaves unsaid what should be done now that the reader (or listener) has this newfound appreciation for dialectical biology and the political ideology of science. The worldview Lewontin introduces us to is not (only) about more accurately describing the world, but about changing it, yet that is left as an exercise for the reader.

Review: Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein

“You should listen to me,” is the implicit argument being made by a narrator to the reader, especially a narrator who speaks as intimately and as conscious of the reader as the one in Study for Obedience. “Why?” is the natural question for the reader to ask back, and this question drew me through the first couple chapters. The narrator’s story-telling — a mix of far too much detail mixed with vague handwaving or elided rationale — quickly clued me in to her unreliability, but what story was she trying to tell me, and what really happened?

For a little while, I thought the narrator was like Amy, from Gone Girl, making herself out to be the perfect victim, while secretly carrying out a nefarious plot. The narrator is so meek, so self-deprecating, so unworthy of interest that I thought for sure it was a cover. But this aspect of her nature seems indeed to be true. The narrator is a victim of abuse, raised to serve her older siblings. She may also have been sexually assaulted (in a characteristic linguistic loophole, she tells us that there had been “no assault that had been reported, investigated, and brought to trial”). Now middle-aged, she leaves her life in the city to be a house-keeper for her brother in a tiny, traditional, rural village. She finds ways to make her devotion to her brother a matter of exercising her own agency. It’s a character and setting alien to me: very conservative, hierarchical, punishing, sexist, and so internalized that the character sees virtue in the ways she subsumes herself to these values.

The narrator is Jewish, although that word and its cognates never appear. Her identity can be pieced together from the stereotypes others apply to her and from the shape of the vague history she tells of her ancestors (“an obscure though reviled people who had been dogged across borders and put into pits.”), who fled the land in which she now lives during the Holocaust. She shares the grinding loneliness and fear of moving through the world as a Jewish woman. The villagers treat her as an outsider, no matter how much she tries to integrate. They accuse her of witchcraft, responsible for the many strange events that occurred after her arrival.

But the reader has to wonder about the actual cause of all these events. The narrator emphasizes to us the improbability of so many rare events coinciding:

Accepting that my arrival had coincided with the madness and necessary extermination of the cows, the demise of the ewe and her nearly born lamb, the dog’s phantom pregnancy, the containment of domestic fowl, a potato blight which I have so far neglected to mention – acknowledging that all these events had occurred in quick succession more or less upon my arrival in the place, and admitting that not one of these things had happened singly in recent memory, that the town and surrounding areas had actually lived through a blessed and prosperous fifty years, and that these unfortunate events had still less ever, in recorded history, happened simultaneously – granting all this, yes, still, it was difficult for me to accept the bad feeling of the townspeople.

There is also the unignorable fact that the narrator — for motives she does not reveal to us — wove together “herbs and grasses I knew so well by sight though not by name” into “shapes of some significance to me”, and then dropped them off in the middle of the night to select locations in the village, murmuring “quiet words of devotion” and then nervously waited for the effects to take place. The narrator’s value system is far from sympathetic. She works without scruples for a corporate law firm set on ruining the environment and the lives of those who try to protect it. She sides with her brother against the employees who accuse him of sexual harassment. Are her beliefs just the result of her childhood conditioning, unquestioning service to those higher up the hierarchy? Or is she a bad person?

 At this point, we should consider the epigraph the author chose for the novel: “I can turn the tables and do as I want. I can make women stronger. I can make them obedient and murderous at the same time.” Now the reader is placed in a predicament: is the narrator innocent of all the strange occurrences, merely a worn-down victim of abuse, obedient to a fault, mistreated by her antisemitic neighbours? If so, how do we explain these strange events and the narrator’s woven dolls? Or, is the narrator murderous? Did she cause (some portion of) these events? If so, the reader must accept the existence of magic, and is placed in uncomfortable company with the narrator’s antisemitic neighbours. (And if we choose this answer, the meek, unworthy neighbour recalls Gone Girl’s murderous heroine after all.)

The book ends with a surreal confrontation — for some reason, the townsfolk are all wearing matching white tracksuits when they summon her about the woven dolls — and although it is unclear what exactly transpired, the narrator demands her right to live, as a survivor of horrific violence against her people as well as someone now personally implicated. She receives it. The novel ends with her caring for her sorrysack brother in their home: “I am living, I claim my right to live.”

This novel wasn’t for me. I want to grasp events in all their spatiotemporal particularity; the narrator sands down all the details of history and geography until the village could be anywhere in Eastern Europe, and until its history of Jewish oppression becomes myth-like. I turn to novels to understand the human experience, but despite hearing this narrator’s entire story, I still have no idea who she is; there is no cathartic moment where truths and lies are revealed. The author invites us to contemplate these ambiguities, but rather than finding the result to be profound, I thought it made the treatment of these serious topics superficial, empty.

Review: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven has a fun premise but a messy execution. A deadly pandemic hits Toronto and wipes out 99% of humanity. The narrative unfolds across multiple timelines in the decades before and after a fictional SARS-like virus emerges, all revolving around the lives of film star Arthur Leander and his connections. Twenty years after the pandemic, civilization has collapsed, and mankind lives on in small clusters of families scattered about the land. There is no electricity and people live by hunting in the forests and scavenging relics of the past.

The novel contrasts characters who drift through their lives with those who purposefully construct meaning. Arthur’s best friend, Clark, who had originally wished to become an actor, works as a coach for business executives. For his work, he interviews a woman about one such executive, and she gives a diagnosis of the ills of the modern era:

“[Adulthood]’s full of ghosts. … I’m talking about these people who’ve ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They’ve done what’s expected of them. They want to do something different but it’s impossible now, there’s a mortgage, kids, whatever, they’re trapped. Dan’s like that. … But I don’t think he even realizes it. You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.”

This quote captures the main themes explored as we get to know our broad cast of characters. Arthur is one of these “sleepwalkers”: he escapes his birthplace of the tiny island off the coast of British Columbia for the big, anonymous city of Toronto, but leaves university to become an actor. His career progresses in a blur of parties and fortune. He falls into a relationship with Miranda: she needed a refuge from her abusive relationship, he liked that she was from his place of birth and unconnected to Hollywood. He just as quickly falls into an affair with the woman who becomes his second wife, and then soon after, begins a relationship with his third wife. Other characters at varying times also avoid confronting the real world in front of them, or the unhappiness within themselves. Frank, the brother of the paparazzo who tried to save Arthur’s life, spends the first days of the pandemic writing public relations fluff for a wealthy philanthropist, allowing him to put off thinking about the world changing and what his place in it will be. 

Miranda, on the other hand, is far more conscious of her goals and decision-making. Following her divorce, she pursues a career in shipping because the office environment is a calm and serene contrast to her cramped and chaotic student apartment she had shared with her abusive boyfriend. She creates an extensive graphical sci-fi novel for nobody — or rather, for her own personal satisfaction, not money or fame. Her comics share their title with this novel, and survive long past her own death. The paparazzo, Jeevan, treats his job with mercenary-like detachment, but plans to become a paramedic: he wanted to be the type of guy people turn to in a crisis. Although his plans derail in the wake of the outbreak, he finds purpose in settling down and starting a family, and rebuilding society.

The climax fits into this theme disjointedly: twenty years post-apocalypse, a prophet has arisen and is violently bringing “salvation” to the world. Over the course of the novel, the Prophet captures and kills several characters we become familiar with, before ultimately being assassinated by a member of his own movement who we barely know. Although the Prophet is the main antagonist in the post-pandemic scenes, his character is underdeveloped. His belief that everything happens for a reason leads him to conclude that the pandemic was divine intervention. This teleological definition of purpose is different from the purposiveness explored through the other characters. Religion and radical movements are of course sources of meaning and purpose in life, but this angle was explored simplistically. I wondered if the author had plotted out one storyline, and then not course-corrected this plotline when her character exploration took her into different thematic territory. 

Indeed, I wondered why the author centered the story around a pandemic at all. The major themes were most compellingly developed in the prepandemic timelines, while the apocalypse felt like an unnecessary narrative frame. The sleepwalker theme as well as the author’s other comments about interpersonal connection (e.g., Arthur’s relationship with his friend, V—“I used her as a repository for my thoughts. I think I stopped thinking of her as a human being reading a letter”) and of being known or observed (small island life, urban anonymity, paparazzi spying) were interesting, and explored well. The post-apocalyptic world, on the other hand, is surprisingly boring. The author has clearly thought deeply about her world — there is extensive detailing of logistics — but never did I feel curious to learn more.

Perhaps it is because it is a rather sterile world. The characters necessarily focus on survival and logistics rather than lofty questions about the meaning of life. But even in stressful and existential situations, humans connect and bond with each other. This connection is mostly absent from the author’s post-pandemic plotlines. People’s emotions are instead explored through their connections with objects — old comics and magazines, items scavenged from the beforetimes, a snowglobe carried about — lending these passages a nostalgic and detached tone, and one that often shifts into a critique of consumerism.

I think the author’s underestimation of the emotional needs of humans even in desperate situations also limits her handling of the Prophet. His rise is portrayed as incomprehensible and he and his followers are one-dimensionally zealous. Naturally, writing in the early 2010s, the author would have had no knowledge of the reactionary and fascistic movements that gained steam after the 2020 pandemic outbreak. But much older works have better captured similar vitriolic and religious reactions to plagues, as well as the more positive emotional responses that arise in their wake.

The novel tells the stories of creatives: actors, writers, photographers, musicians. The last few days of civilization are told by television news and newspaper columns. There is something missing entirely: politics. No government body guides behavior or organizes responses. The characters do not remark on this absence — except for noting the failure of the national guard to save them. Nor do we see nascent political bodies form in the ashes of civilization. Excluding the authoritarian orders of the Prophet (and perhaps the Conductor’s benignly dictatorial control over the travelling orchestra), everything appears to be managed through easy, unanimous, anarchistic consensus. Perhaps the author believes that with self-actualization taking a back seat to basic survival, political disagreement vanishes. The right-wing attacks on science and the state in response to COVID stay-at-home orders shred that belief. Indeed, reading the novel with all the hindsight of the 2020s, it is surprising that the Prophet does not appear to be capitalizing off the fears and anxieties of his followers. Politics is how humans collectively determine purposeful activity (or, as it were, “sleepwalk” into climate change or through pandemics). Collective negotiation of purpose is far more challenging than individual determination of purpose, and so its absence is notable. 

The novel is now an HBO TV show. The author often composes her scenes as if they were television shots. While this style is not particularly literary, I imagine it made for a more straight-forward adaptation. The unevenness and holes in the themes that plague the novel may also translate better to a series of cohesive television episodes.

Review: From The Ashes by Jesse Thistle

This memoir is narrative more than it is introspective. Having read it, I now know the darkest events that marked Jesse Thistle’s life, but I still don’t really know who Jesse Thistle is. What was it that went through his head or tore apart his heart when he went from kicking one addiction to immediately starting another? What was it that kept him going through each tragedy, rather than succumbing to the horrors of homelessness and addiction like so many others? What was it that finally gave him the strength to go clean, that last time?

I think the memoir wasn’t written to answer these questions, but to teach the reader the answer to a different question: why is it that homeless people can’t just get back on their feet? Thistle shows us — often in gory detail — how illiteracy, the pressures of starvation, medical problems, workplace exploitation, court fees and police records, ragged wardrobes, and broken social networks all work together to make that feat near impossible, even outside of drug dependency. But there is a missing piece to his answer, the human emotions of it that are shared with even comfortably-housed readers: relationships with father figures that corrode under mutual toxic masculinity, separation from social communities, addiction, reconciliation. How do you process these experiences? How do they feel? Solving the problem of homelessness is not just a matter of charity, of getting people off the streets, but of recognition of humanity. Weaving in not just the main narrative beats of his life path but also the parts of his experience that are surprisingly universal would have made for a more powerful, unforgettable book.

To ask someone to share the deepest parts of their heart is a lot. I am often a little awestruck when I find an author who can do so — recent partially-autobiographical reads Ti Amo and This Accident of Being Lost come to mind. I can understand why an advocate for the Metis people and for homeless people, who is probably asked often to share his experiences for the advancement of the cause, might try to keep a little bit of himself to himself.

Structurally, the memoir is a series of poems and short stories that rarely span more than one chapter. Thistle crafts them well: they are well-paced, filled with striking imagery, and encapsulate particular challenges or issues tidily. But it leads to an overall disjointed narrative. A teacher shows him kindness, then is never heard of again. His mother welcomes him to her home, but he rebuffs her, and the topic is not raised again. The world is similarly disjointed. There are brief allusions to the lack of treaty rights for the Metis, the declining social safety net, the lack of workplace protections for day labourers. If we want to house everyone in Canada, we need to recognize how each of these are related.