A Canadian Hat Trick: Obasan, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, and Green Grass, Running Water

I find myself again wanting to review books in order to take my mind off other things. So today, I’ll talk about the Canadian books I’ve been reading! I finished three in November, which brings my total for the Canadian Challenge up to ten (I need to read and review thirteen in order to finish it; an accomplishment Kelly has already finished!). I’m reviewing them in the order that I read them, which also is the ascending order of how much I enjoyed them. :)

Obasan by Joy Kogawa
When I was making up my challenge list, Obasan immediately intrigued me, because it was about the WWII interment of Japanese Canadians. I didn’t realise the Canadian government had done the same thing as the American one, so I was curious to learn more. Having read this novel, I’m now in the market for some nonfiction about the topic, because if Kogawa’s narrator can be trusted the Canadian government was worse than the American one. But to the novel…from what I gather, this is autobiographical fiction. Obasan is now a grown woman teaching school, and the main story is told in flashbacks to her memories as a child and her life pre-WWII followed by internment and displacement. I liked how Kagawa mixes in Japanese words and concepts to the text; it felt both Japanese and Canadian in sensibility, and that’s a fine line to walk. That being said, I had a problem with Obasan herself; she’s incredibly timid and confused, and since the story is all told in her voice it was quite muddled. I understand that it’s a stylistic device, but it made me dread picking up the book to read another fifty pages. I loved the characters, especially Obasan’s female relatives-her aunts, her mother, her grandmother; they’re all drawn quite well, and I cared for them. And the story itself was compelling, though sad of course. I don’t know…it’s like everything in the book was wonderful except for Obasan and her voice, but since she’s the main aspect of the book that made a big difference. I kept willing myself to consider why Kagawa chose to make Obasan’s voice that way, and on an intellectual level I see how it shows that Obasan’s life was pulled out from under her as a child and she never recovered. I can admire that. But on a gut reading level, it made the book feel more like a chore, like something I’d read for high school and analyse. There was a spark missing.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley
This one is all over the book blogosphere, but in case you missed it, Bradley is a septogenerian who just published this mystery book (the first in a projected series) set in 1950 England and narrated by a precocious eleven-year-old. I really enjoyed Flavia’s voice; it rather reminded me of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Flavia’s family is hilarious; along with her two older sisters Ophelia (obsessed with the mirror) and Daphne (obsessed with books) she lives in a kind of run-down, intellectually eccentric aristocratic family that is so British and have some of the funniest one-liners. My favourite:

I knew that Feely and Daffy would never condescend to respond to a bell (“So utterly Pavlovian,” Feely said)…

Flavia herself is obsessed with chemistry (which reminds me of Oliver Sacks’ memoir Uncle Tungsten, and which I therefore loved), and with an aloof father and deceased mother, pretty much does whatever she pleases (it’s summer, so there’s no school). So the the book’s style and characters were sparkling and charming and all those other -ing adjectives, perfect to curl up with on a cold night with a mug of tea. That being said, the mystery itself was rather thin. There was only one real suspect, who was obvious from her/his first appearance, and many of Flavia’s ‘conclusions’ were unveiled with a bit more drama than they warranted. Still, that’s a small quibble (I know it doesn’t seem that way in a mystery novel, but really the plot’s just a vehicle to get to know the characters), and when the next Flavia book comes out I’ll definitely be reading it.

Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King
Hang on, I need to get something out of my system:

OMG, this book was SOOO good! And it just kept getting better! And I loved it so, so much! And it was so readable! But incredibly intelligent at the same time! Where has King been all my life?!

Whew-ok, now I might be able to talk about the book more coherently. Seriously: you should go read this. I promise you it won’t take that long; it’s both a quick read and a thought-provoking one. How often do you find those two characteristics in the same novel? Along with lots of fun characters and a plot that moves along quite nicely? That’s what I thought. I know that the actual page count for the book looks high, but so many pages are only half-filled with text, or even less, and the chapters are so short and snappy, you’ll be shocked at how fast you’re reading. It’s going to be difficult to summarise this book, though, because it deals with so much stuff. Basically: there’s a handful or so of Canadian Indians, all from the same reservation who grew up with each other and are in their late 30s, early 40s. And they’re all going about their lives, either in Toronto or still on the reservation; not completely satisfied but not horribly depressed either. Just normal. And you get more back story on each of them as the book progresses, but meanwhile they’re all being drawn back towards the reservation, where it’s almost time for the Sun Dance. Interwoven with all of their stories, there’s also one about a doctor who is looking for four old Indians who just escaped from his institution. And those four old Indians have a bit of a story too…it seems that they’ve been old and in that institutionfor at least one hundred years, and occasionally they escape which happens to coincide with various natural disasters…and they have the oddest names: Lone Ranger, Ishmael, Robinson Crusoe, and Hawkeye…and no one’s really positive about their gender. And then, there’s stories about the origins of the four old Indians, which are told by ‘I’ to Coyote, and which are wonderfully mythic and intersect with some classic Western stories, from the Garden of Eden to Moby Dick and beyond. And all of these characters come together in the end, and it all makes sense.

But why did I love this? Because I love myths, and King has done a wonderful job of weaving together Native American myths and Western European ones and making something fresh and new. Because I love trickster gods, and Coyote is just what I would expect. Because of writing like this:

“Oh, oh,” says Coyote. “Changing Woman is stuck on the island all by herself. Is that the end of the story?”
“Silly Coyote,” I says, “This story is just beginning.”

Because King weaves together mythic truths, and a profound look at the underpinnings of Western European thought, with characters whose individual fates I care about, from whether or not one will be able to have the child she craves to whether one will be able to keep the house his mother built by hand. I loved it, because it was perfect, because it echoed two of my very favourite authors ever, Neil Gaiman and Salman Rushdie, but at the same time the writing style was nothing like theirs. I highly recommend this book to everyone. Seriously.