Can words on the page be truly scary? While some choose to read the classics like Lovecraft, and others enjoy the pulp of Clive Barker, there is only one King.
It is hard to argue the impact that Stephen King has had on the horror genre. For the past forty years, King has contributed dozens of works to the realm of horror, including such influential classics as Carrie, Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Misery, and It. If you haven’t read King, you’ve heard of him, and even if he isn’t your cup of tea, you still have to respect his talent.
“Stephen King has done a tour of just about every horror concept that you can imagine. He might be kind of a dirty word in the world of ‘literature,’” says Jessica Marcotte, a graduate student at Concordia. “But when you write as much as he does, you’re bound to write something good – he’s a master of the short story and novella. Different Seasons is one of the best collections of novellas I’ve ever read.”
What Marcotte points out is arguably King’s greatest strength. His sheer prolific nature has forced him to be recognized. While much of King’s work is still outside the realm of academia, he has become such a presence in the world of fiction that it is impossible not to encounter his work, whether it be in their original literary form or in the film adaptations.
Many authors are lucky if they can have one book or series become a successful film. King has enjoyed so many quality adaptations of his work that even his short novellas like The Mist and Secret Window have become major Hollywood films. Currently, King’s Dark Tower series is undergoing the film treatment, which has the possibility to set him alongside the likes of J.K. Rowling and J.R.R. Tolkien.
While King’s reputation is unquestionable, how did one author from Maine become an international name in horror? The answer is that his novels and consequently his movies employ three techniques of horror that never fail to frighten; the gross-out; severed body parts, mysterious green goo dripping on someone’s arm, the horror; huge spiders, zombies, something grabbing you in the dark, and atmospheric terror; “when you come home and notice everything you own has been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there…” BOO! you jump a foot in the air.
“At the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world,” says Saleem Sinai in the 1981 novel Midnight’s Children written by acclaimed author Salman Rushdie.
These words are just a sampling of the prose and story that enchanted millions when the book was first released. The book has since been adapted into film by Oscar-nominated director Deepa Mehta and is set to be released in theaters Nov 2.
Midnight’s Children is an allegorical recounting of the historical events of India’s independence and its partition into two religious states: the Dominion of Pakistan and the Republic of India. It is told by Saleem, who was born exactly at the stroke of midnight on the day of India’s independence and is therefore exactly as old as the Republic.
In this fictionalized and fantastical rendering of India’s history, Saleem represents the entirety of India. His telepathic conference with the other children born at midnight the day of India’s independence reflects the political and personal conflicts that consumed citizens of India at the time. Saleem attempts to imbue his personal narrative with all the themes and stories of his country eventually overwhelms him and he disintegrates, much like the united country of India disintegrated during the partition.
According to Dr. Jill Didur, the chair of the department of English at Concordia, Saleem’s telepathy is meant to play on the Western idea of Indian mysticism.
“Saleem’s telepathic powers have been seen by critics as a gesture by Rushdie to appropriate Orientalist assumptions about Indian culture and satirize them through exaggeration [while] signaling them as a creative choice rather than simply reproducing a stereotype about India.”
The novel was extremely popular during its initial release in 1981 garnering itself the Booker Prize, the English Speaking Union Literary Award and the James Tait Prize. Furthermore it was also awarded the Best Of The Booker in 2008 when the Booker committee was celebrating the 40th anniversary of the award.
Midnight’s Children is considered groundbreaking in its use of an imagined form of Indian English —a mix of accented English and Hindu, its employment of magic realism to relate historical events and its postmodern literary style. The novel integrates the past and the present and spans a great number of years, beginning in 1915. It will be interesting to see whether the master craftsmanship of Rushdie’s writing can be effectively translated into the medium of film.
Are you the intellectual or the creative person? Do your school projects involve symbolism, color schemes and artistic vision? Or are you burying yourself in endless piles of academic research, books and drafts of papers not yet published?
Traditionally, you can only define yourself as one or the other, but what would happen if we decided to do both? Better yet, what would happen if we decided to do both at the same time? Discover Law Through Art, a publication that launches at the Montreal Contemporary Art Museum next week, discusses our capacity to use art for interpretation and learning purposes, is, in light of this, a book of the utmost appeal.
San Persand, the book’s author, has a complex profile. A McGill alumnus from the faculty of law, he’s a successful lawyer, an artist and now an author. His coffee table book displays many of his original works of art and attempts to explain the basis of the legal world through the medium of art.
“I’ve always been interested in merging ideas, even when I was studying biology. Throughout my studies, I’ve always been an artist. I was constantly drawing in my notes; you’d find unintelligible scribbles in all of my notes,” said Persand.
The idea for his book stems from dinner parties with friends where he would discuss his view of the artistic world and its link to the legal domain. At his friends’ insistence he finally decided to write a book on the topic, exhibiting some of his artwork while also educating people who had no knowledge of the legal world.
“When I decided, at the time, the coffee table book seemed like a compromise between the artist and the intellectual, a promise about being able to appeal to both. When you think about art books, you think of these larger books with rich, colorful images in them.”
Although it may have been easier to articulate some of his points more extensively through a written work of nonfiction, Persand felt that the concept of intertwining the two worlds of art and law is reinforced by his chosen means of presentation.
The book is formatted so that every page or two is dedicated to displaying a particular painting that then ties into the explanation of a legal concept. For example, one of the paintings depicts a mask divided into two halves, which Persand uses to explain the difference between civic and common law. The book encourages readers to learn extensively about the legal world in a very particular way; playing on symbolism, analogy and comparison. It encourages the left and right hemispheres of the brain to interact and allow people to learn in a totally new way. This touches on the realm of neuroaesthetics, a field which deals with the project of studying art using the methods of neuroscience.
“We need both sides of the brain to think creatively just like we need both feet to walk. It’s important to remember that the brain functions as an entity,” said David Pariser, the chair of the art education faculty at Concordia. “I think everyone has the capacity to be creative. Some people will make great creative discoveries; those are people like Ghandi, Darwin, Einstein, Virginia Woolf and Georgia O’Keefe. But the bottom line is that we all creatively solve problems every day. It’s innate in us,” he said. There is no distinction between artists and intellectuals, said Pariser. Intelligence is manifest in the arts just as in science, politics or religion.
Ultimately, we should consider Persand’s book to be a message to generations of people who are still in the process of finding themselves. Maybe it’s not that we are either intellectuals or artists at heart. Maybe it’s about throwing us off our game and changing the way we see the world.
The Twelve by Justin Cronin, part two of the The Passage Trilogy.
The Twelve by Justin Cronin, part two of the The Passage trilogy.
Justin Cronin doesn’t particularly fit the bill of your average blockbuster writer.
When he submitted The Passage, the first installment of his Passage trilogy, for publication, he was keen to submit his manuscript under a pseudonym, not anticipating its overwhelming success.
The two novels that Cronin had published previously had been well received but were part of a more minimalistic fictional genre. He was therefore not entirely sure what to anticipate in terms of reception for this novel, in light of how different it was from the rest of his work.
Having been published at the same time as the reputable Guillermo Del Torro’s The Strain and the 50th anniversary edition of McCarthy’s The Road, Cronin’s book started a trend, or rather renewed it. The appeal was there and Cronin’s post-apocalyptic, horror-like novel took the New York Times bestseller list by storm, maintaining its popularity for the better part of three months after its publication. In fact, Cronin was apparently offered millions in exchange for the movie rights to the trilogy, which got scooped up by the Ridley Scott Production team.
The Passage deals with the premise of a military experiment gone wrong. Having discovered a miraculously rejuvenating virus in the rainforest of Bolivia, the United States government covertly funds Project Noah in an attempt to isolate the benefits of the virus and overcome its lethal side effects. The government uses twelve death row inmates with no remaining ties to the world, whose disappearance would go unnoticed. Predictably, the virus is not as easy to modify as anticipated and turns the inmates into mutants with vampire-like characteristics.
Eventually, the inevitable happens and the twelve test subjects who were being held at the military base escape into the real world. Thus, the beginning of the apocalyptic pandemic leads us into the second part of the novel, where those who survived have regrouped together hundreds of years later to live in a community of barricades and constant protection.
Readers will most probably find that, even after having garnered every detail of the voluminous read that was The Passage, the beginning of The Twelve is slightly disorienting. Rather than focusing on the main characters of his previous novels, Cronin starts out by shifting his narrative time period, concentrating instead on a group of survivors in the wake of the more direct aftermath of the pandemic. This makes it hard to grasp, at the very beginning, who the recurring characters will be throughout the book. That being said, Cronin does an excellent job at expanding the precarious universe he had created in his first book, which, needless to say for avid trilogy readers, is a daunting task.
For what it’s worth, The Twelve does this trilogy justice; riveting and suspenseful, Cronin manages to keep us interested in the fairly mundane story of the survivors of this surreal apocalyptic plot. The quality that readers will probably most appreciate in this novel is that it gives us a lot of answers as an audience. Sub-plots that we just assumed would go unanswered in The Passage are revisited with interest and curiosity. Here, Cronin has grasped a universal truth: readers will always want to know as much as humanly possible about a universe that fascinates them. It’s part of the greater picture of a literary legacy.
Having strayed away from the minimalistic and traditional fiction style of his previous novels, Cronin has been labeled as a “sell-out” by more than one literary critic. Because his trilogy novels relate much better to trending literary genres, he’s considered to have taken the easy way out. Ultimately, what these same critics fail to notice is that Cronin didn’t just find his place in the world of science fiction, he helped redefine it.
Bear with me: having lived the revolution that Harry Potter caused in children’s literature first-hand and having, like so many others, fallen hopelessly in love with her characters, I too have expectations for Rowling.
However, the hype that has surrounded her most recent publication, an adult fiction novel entitled The Casual Vacancy, is proof of how much weight lies on this author’s shoulders.
Clearly, should she want to write about anything other than Hogwarts, broomsticks and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, the literary world will undoubtedly go wild, with critics bracing themselves in anticipation.
So, understandably, it’s with a bit of reserve and much trepidation that I, like millions of others across the world, picked up a copy of The Casual Vacancy at my local bookstore on Sept. 27.
Three days later, my previously pristine copy of Rowling’s book was torn, crumpled and decorated by coffee stains, having been lugged around virtually everywhere with me for 72 hours; coffee shops, metro rides and dinners included.
The book was extremely good, in the dark, sarcastic, incredibly realistic way that books can be good in our decade. Rowling had me engrossed in a story that I would never have believed to be that captivating. Let’s be honest – the idea of a book revolving around the sudden death of a council member in a tiny, unknown village in England isn’t exactly everyone’s dream premise. But the citizens of Pagford, the tiny village in question, are fascinating as we glimpse their everyday lives unraveling in the throes of tragedy.
The novel starts out with councilman Barry Fairbrother passing away suddenly on the eve of his wedding anniversary. Initially shocked with grief, the citizens of Pagford quickly move on to replacing him on council and a controversial election ensues. On the other side, the previous ally of the deceased finds herself more alienated than ever. And so, as we flip the pages, tensions and secrets arise, in a way that readers will find covertly echoes a combination of Desperate Housewives and Shameless.
Rowling does a marvelous job of showing us, yet again, that she has a profound understanding of human existence. Humor is doused with crudeness, and the combination is a satire of our time that leaves us wanting more. I found myself blitzing through chapters, anticipating the slew of revelations to come, the same way I had dashed through the last Harry Potter book, wanting to know if Voldemort had prevailed. It’s suspense, but not in the classic sense; there’s simply a more refined sense of excitement to be had.
Having skimmed the media on the topic, it goes without saying that I’ve read my share of reviews on The Casual Vacancy. Needless to say, not many of them are flattering. Negative reviews mainly criticize the book’s overall grittiness and the fact it reveals a relatively ugly side of social reality. Obviously, for anyone having read the Harry Potter series, this is an unexpected (and maybe even unpleasant) wake-up call. The charm that surrounded Hogwarts and its inhabitants, easy-going, comical characters that we would have loved to meet, was addictively pleasant. You’ve been warned: there will be drugs, depression and all-out despair. Does that make the book any less of a page-turner? Not really.
“‘All you hear here are tales of lust, hate and despair,’ she continued. Every word she spoke was said slowly, weighted by her heart and soul. ‘You know what they say? Shit flows downhill and well, there’s the hill up there.’ She pointed at the antenna at the top of Mount Royal.”
Ian Truman, a graduate of Concordia’s creative writing program, released his second novel, Tales of Lust, Hate and Despair, this past summer, about a man from Montreal named Samuel Lee who is serving a life sentence in prison.
The story is a long letter to his 18-year-old daughter, Melody, detailing how he became a murderer back in 1996.
Samuel relates how he first went to prison for two years for beating up a police officer who was attacking a friend of his. His stint in prison means leaving his pregnant girlfriend Alice behind, who — having no money — finds an infamous coke dealer to support her and her daughter.
Samuel learns all of this after leaving prison, and decides that he must do everything in his power to be with his daughter. With the help of his only loyal friend, Mikey, he comes up with a plan to get his daughter and girlfriend back.
This violent story shows us a side of Montreal few have seen before; one that is filled with poverty, drugs, and street gangs. The descriptive tale paints a new picture in our minds of places we thought we knew, places like Hochelaga-Maisonneuve and St-Michel, and even the downtown Concordia University campus.
This story of friendship, love and, most of all, revenge proves captivating.
The book is written in the first person point of view, and reminiscent of the style of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye with more swearing and much, much more blood. It takes a few pages to get used to the style, but once you do, it becomes almost impossible to stop reading. Samuel’s voice is raw, angry and emotional. It feels like he’s speaking directly to the reader rather than his daughter, using flashbacks to explain how he got to be where he is today. He also sometimes imagines what life would be like if he had a house, a wife and children; a life far away from his current life of crime.
The story did have a few typos and grammar issues, as well as some awkward sentence structure at times. A quick edit would definitely make this novel a much smoother read.
Overall, this action-packed and heartbreaking novel was a page-turner. Although we know that Samuel will become a murderer from the start, the story keeps us on our toes the entire time wondering who he will kill, how he will do it, and why. This story is definitely unique and while not for the faint of heart, this noir-style tale definitely deserves a read.
Tales of Lust, Hate and Despair is available on Amazon for $2.99 in electronic format.
Mister Roger and Me by Marie-Renée Lavoie is not one of those action-based novels where every chapter ends with a bang.
Those craving high stakes and breathtaking battles between good and evil will not be sated. Instead, this novel, translated from the French by Wayne Grady, explores life through the eyes of a child and tells of the unlikely friendship that develops between this child and an elderly man.
With humour and sensitivity, the author explores the complexities of growing up in an ‘80s working-class atmosphere. Hélène, who goes by the name Joe, is not your average eight year-old but a “little boy manqué” who claims to be ten and wishes she were a boy.
Dazzled by her favourite television heroine, Lady Oscar, (a show she promptly watches from 4:00 to 4:24) Hélène dreams of nothing but adventure.
“Twenty-three kilos, holding back a mind that was always trying to run off to faraway, pitiless realms,” Hélène says,
With her keen insights, Hélène is an endearing character constantly seeking out ways to help her family with their financial and moral crises. Young yet mature; she works as a paper-girl, a waitress at the Bingo Hall and has responsibilities as both an older sister and a student.
It is no wonder that a friendship forms between this shrewd character and her next-door neighbour Roger. Roger is an old drunken man who grunts, burps and shouts loud enough for all to hear that he just wants to die. But together these characters discover that you don’t need to be a hero to be heroic.
The novel successfully unfolds each character’s personality, revealing a realistic and relatable person. Their qualities, faults and quirks on the page make it impossible for the reader not to smile.
Wayne Grady’s translation does not conform the story to the English language but rather embraces the French dialect and rhythm. It maintains the cultural flair in an original way, where both languages are not in competition with each other but enhance one another. The way this story is written presents a welcome reprieve for those wanting more than a traditional English novel. The unique sentence structure preserves its French origins while still allowing for clarity and fluidity in the storytelling.
Mister Roger and Me is Marie-Renée Lavoie’s first novel. It won the Quebec’s Prix Archambault as well as the Radio-Canada’s Battle of the Books competition in its original French version. With the release of the English version, it will be interesting to see the audience’s reaction to this translation.
“Once again, a fever is infecting the minds of many Westerners. We must not allow history to repeat itself,” writes Doug Saunders in his latest book The Myth of the Muslim Tide: Do Immigrants Threaten the West?, which aims to show that the western population’s fear of Muslim immigrants, is nothing but a huge misunderstanding.
“In examining our own recent history along with the fast shifting cultural realities of these new immigrants, I hope we can begin to see this human tide not as a seismic and ruinous tsunami but as a regular, rhythmic movement on our shores, once we’ve seen before.”
The “Muslim Tide” is based on the idea that Muslims are migrating to Western countries in large amounts and that they are having children very quickly, implying that they may one day take over. According to Saunders, some people are of the impression that Muslim immigrants are disloyal to their ‘host’ countries and that they plan on taking over Western politics.
With the use of intriguing anecdotes, informative statistics, references to similar situations from the past, and riveting quotes, Saunders tries to teach us what people are really thinking. He strives for the true explanation of all the rumors circulating about Muslims, and explains that these worrisome feelings towards specific religious groups have occurred before.
Using statistics, Saunders is able to prove wrong some predominant stereotypes about Muslim immigrants. He shows that it is not true that Muslims are procreating more than the Western population, and that the rate of Muslim immigration is not increasing exponentially, as people seem to believe. Saunders shows that many of these immigrants are in fact loyal to their ‘host’ countries, and that they do not want to live apart from others. Finally, he attempts to disprove the idea that Muslims are more likely to take part in acts of terrorism.
Although enlightening, reading the ‘facts’ section of the book was quite tedious. Saunders illustrates his points using many different sources and statistics, which is useful in providing evidence for his arguments, however it made that part of the book a little harder to swallow.
Overall, this short yet fascinating book has the potential to really teach us a lot, not only about the myth of Muslim migration, but also about human nature. Sanders’ work meticulously inspects the social and political aspects of the immigration process for Muslims to the countries of the West and helps us comprehend how this situation could have happened in the first place. It is a great read for all those searching to understand the world a little better.
The Myth of the Muslim Tide: Do Immigrants Threaten the West? retails for $24.95 and is available at Chapters, Indigo and online at Amazon.ca.
A good piece of literature should always leave one feeling that each page was worth the time it took to turn it.
Unless it’s truly horrid writing (or has been penned by anyone with a reality television show), most books will accomplish that. But a great book will see the main character reaching their arm out of the pages to grab yours and let you feel everything they’re feeling.
That’s the case with former Concordia graduate Rawi Hage’s latest novel, Carnival.
The son of a trapeze artist and flying carpet pilot, Fly is a taxi driver who likes to wander but doesn’t like customers who smell. Or puke in his car. We meet him just as the carnival arrives in town, attracting hordes of tourists and bringing with it a sense of the strange and mysterious.
Fly identifies with a group of drivers that are called, well, “flies” because they like to drive around to pick up customers, unlike the drivers he calls “spiders” because they simply sit at a hangout called Café Bolero all day and wait for customers to come to them.
It’d be easy to peg Fly with the timid loner archetype – after all, his mother is dead, his father is gone and the bearded lady who raised him is also dead. But that’s not the character Hage presents. Fly interacts with many people throughout the book, has friends and, for lack of a better word, is a total badass. He beats up steroid-heads, works for a dealer, goes to an S&M dungeon and says gems such as, “I could substitute their cocaine lines with fishing ropes that sailed up their nostrils and down their brains.”
That’s not to say he doesn’t have his hang-ups. Interspersed among the novel are lengthy passages describing what he fantasizes about when he masturbates, which he does lying on his father’s old flying carpet, in the middle of his book-filled apartment. While they show his creativity (he often imagines himself fighting wars and rescuing maidens), they hint at a desire to escape from his life, or to have done something else with it. “It is always a pleasure to meet dirty novelists,” he tells a customer. “I once contemplated becoming one myself…but instead I stopped trying and picked up another creative habit that has kept my fingers busy ever since.”
The story is told through little vignettes with titles such as, “Dogs” and “Guns.” Fittingly enough, the passages evoke the feeling of being at a carnival – catching glimpses of strange faces and acts in quick succession and becoming entranced in the atmosphere. Coupled with the lack of quotation marks, it’s an interesting format that, as one works though the five acts that make up the story, makes sure the reader is paying absolute attention.
It’s easy to see why Carnival made Hage one of the finalists for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Although Fly doesn’t belong with the spiders who work around him, the strands of the story weave tightly around the reader, leaving one tangled in a web of enchantment.
Simon Walls just added a rather important feather to his cap. Musician, check. Traveler, check. Teenage mentor, check. Walked across Canada, check. And now he’s an author; a raw, honest and introspective writer.
This week, he launched his newest baby Troubadour des Temps Modernes – or modern day troubadour – published by Montreal-based Éditions Dumont.
The book recounts the incredible ups and downs Walls experienced during his nearly 705,684 km, 9 month journey. If you think bears, wolves and cold weather were his biggest enemies; think again. The storm was, in fact, on the inside.
Simon Walls is, in actuality, Simon Gervais. He’s a 26 year-old from Napierville and he likes to walk. After having tackled the Compostelle path in Spain (a 1050 km-long trek that follows the tracks of 12th century pilgrims) Gervais decided he needed a bigger challenge. Canada is bigger, he figured. The wheels started spinning and an ambitious project surfaced; to write an album, a book and shoot video footage over the course of a trip across Canada. The result: his touching album, Klein Blue and now – Troubadour des Temps Modernes. Throughout the book, Gervais digs further and further into his own mind and heart to learn some pretty important lessons. His descriptions are simple, beautifully illustrated and marvellously evocative. You know that hollow feeling you get when you’ve been on the road for quite a while and you start missing your family? Take that feeling and imagine it on foot, walking long and flat prairie miles with hardly anyone around to talk to.
Over the course of his book launch, he stood candidly on stage and told the audience about some of the rawest moments of his trip.
“There was a point when I got to Antigonish, Nova Scotia where I thought I just couldn’t do it anymore,” he tells us. “I called a few people back home to get their advice – some of those people are actually here tonight. And then I found some strength, I locked myself in a room with a TV for three days and then I hit the road again.” That moment, he says, is what prompted this song – and he launches into a generous version of his track, “Smell of Blue.” Steady at his side for months now has been Jean-Yves André, who harnesses Gervais’ enthusiasm on the Peruvian cajỏn with his reliable beats and steady back vocals.
He also spoke of the incredible generosity and eccentricity of the people he met on the road. He read a passage that describes his deepening gratitude in the face of even the smallest act of kindness – a sandwich, a chat, a place to crash for the night (one much cozier and warmer than his tiny tent.) His book betrays his great admiration for the stories he heard along the way and many of those stories are featured in Troubadour, in which he paints such simple portraits that you can’t help but be soaked in. And once you know the backstory behind his song “Dear Traveller,” you’re unlikely to ever hear it the same way again.
You might think accomplishing such a big project would mean it’s finally time for a rest, but not with Gervais. He is currently working on a video piece about his journey and looking to tour with his book. And, of course, it’s probably a safe bet to say he’s cooking up another expedition or journey already.
Troubadour des Temps Modernes, $24.95, is available from Chapters Indigo and other book retailers.
Available for $14.95 online at kasinihouseartshop.com/magazine
Available for $14.95 online at kasinihouseartshop.com
It’s the crack of noon, so roll yourself out of bed, brew a cup of extra strong tea and settle in with the philosophically melancholy characters featured in Guillaume Morissette’s debut collection of stories and poems, I Am My Own Betrayal.
Comprised of five short stories and ten poems, the Concordia student’s first collection is beautifully written but thematically stale. The main characters featured in each piece, are all obsessed with themselves, they wax poetically and philosophically on the staleness that is their day to day, moaning about their relationships or lack thereof.
Although anyone who’s ever suffered from perpetual or occasional depression will be able to relate to these sentiments, the novelty of Morissette’s crafted observational insight into melancholy and anxiety wears thin with repetition.
The writing is of high literary quality. Morissette is a master of the clever metaphor and visual metonymy, offering a unique take on the everyday. He astutely comments on everything from beer cans to the bustling metropolis of Montreal with candor and wit.
“We bought beer earlier and the beer we bought seems to have awarded itself a blue ribbon, for prettiest beer maybe,” writes Morissette.
In Vaster emptiness achieved, a story about a friendship carried out mainly through email, it is punctuated by one liners, reminiscent of facebook status updates. The narrator and his friend Anika, write to each other in beautifully insightful, melodious style, which is fun to read, but makes you wonder whether there are real people who talk this way, or if Morissette has taken literary license in appropriating dialogue to fit his style of writing.
It is Morissette’s style of writing that makes the collection worth reading. He crafts wonderfully vivid and interesting descriptions, such as how the world looks when you’re tipsy from drinking too large a pitcher of beer.
“The room is slowly starting to go diagonal, zig-zags. it comes at you, leaves and then comes at you again, like a game of ball-in-a-cup in which the ball is the room.” This excerpt comes from the story Banhood, which again plays with the theme of a young person feeling inadequate and generally despondent.
Concordia student and author Guillaume Morissette,
Morissette’s poems also play with this theme: in the poem I hate myself, he writes “a purpose is a person but backwards; if there’s a place where I belong I have already ruined it.”
The only poem where the narrator gives a concrete reason for being depressed is Poems are for no one, very long poems are for themselves, where the narrator is lamenting over a failed relationship. Morissette brings freshness to the classic poetry theme by appropriating the narrator’s feelings of longing to the bed.
my bed is a mess, it misses you. it’s been
having nightmares about being suffocated to
death with a red pillow. to calm the bed down
I have read the bed a bedtime story of printed-out
e-zine articles on ways to overcome a heartbreak.
I Am My Own Betrayal, is a collection that clearly demonstrates Morissette’s literary talent, but could use a little thematic variation and maybe a few more rays of sunshine.
Gorilla Beach by Nicole ‘Snooki’ Polizzi (Gallery Books) - $28.99 at Amazon.ca
How do you judge a book? We’re told not to judge a book by its cover, but what about judging a book by its author?
When I heard that Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi of Jersey Shore fame had written a fiction novel, I was skeptical to say the least. I then learned that Gorilla Beach, was not her first but her second novel and third book overall. Her first novel, A Shore Thing, which I’d assumed, based on the photo of herself on the cover, was an autobiography, is a novel about two guidette cousins living it up in Seaside Heights. The two guidettes, Giovanna “Gia” Spumanti and Isabelle “Bella” Rizzoli, are idealized versions of Snooki and cast-mate Jenni ‘JWOWW’ Farley.
Gorilla Beach begins with the girls returning after a winter in Brooklyn, to vacation in Seaside Heights and attend the wedding of their friend Maria. Things, however, are not as they left them the previous summer. Maria has undergone a complete makeover and now associates with fur wearing mafiosas, who throw her a bachelorette party in a tacky cowboy themed club owned by Fredo, the son of one of the mafiosas. The girls aren’t impressed, especially when they find Fredo with his pants down in the ladies room and the lights off so he doesn’t have to look at his own poo.
Things go from slightly crummy to crummier when they discover their summer digs are less than stellar. When Gia gets into a fight at Maria’s wedding she and Bella are forced to leave Seaside. Lucky for them Fredo is there to save the day. He whisks them off to Atlantic City in his Cadillac and sets them up in the premier suite.
Things just keep on getting better and better as the girls dine in luxury, admire the beach’s “gorillas” (aka guys with a lot of muscles and tans) and fall in love. Unfortunately, their happiness doesn’t last and a bit of actual drama is introduced when the sleazy, toupee wearing casino owner suspects they’re cheating at roulette and sets his spies on them. Things get really hairy for the girls when their winnings are stolen and the casino kicks them out, taking Fredo’s cadillac in compensation for the damage they caused when they drunkenly kidnap the owner’s crocodiles and set them loose in the spa. How will the girls get themselves out of this pickle? With pluck and candor of course. Or so we’re supposed to believe.
Gia and Bella aren’t exactly the deepest characters in the world. Unfortunately, vital information is given to the reader without much literary style, plunked down in places where it’s convenient or is needed to give credit to the plot. Not that the plot is very credible, it seems to rely on a lot of coincidences and lucky breaks and no effort on the part of its characters. No matter what, they’re always able to maintain the lifestyle and looks they’ve become accustomed to and someone (usually a man) is always there to get them out of a jam.
Bella is supposed to be the smart one and Gia the ditzy one and yet Bella never once does anything with her intellect to help them out and then it’s Gia who comes up with a scheme for revenge on the casino owner and grifter who stole their winnings. Gia is clearly the character Snooki imagines herself to be, so it’s no coincidence that Gia is loved by everyone, is an endearing ditz and super generous. To be fair, Snooki is generous when it comes to giving JWOWW’s character equal polish; Bella is smart, tall, athletic, sexy and suffers from caregiver syndrome (i.e. she loves to care for people too much).
However, you can’t fault the novel for being what it is, it’s a light read, sometimes funny and definitely appealing to fans of Jersey Shore and readers who like their books fluffy pink. Not everyone is a reader of deep, introspective fiction and there is nothing wrong with liking your books on the lighter side. Snooki wrote this book for those people. The book is not pretending to be anything other than what it is.
That being said, even light, ‘beach reads’ need to be held to the same professional standard as every other publication. The editing of this book was horrendous. Snooki credits Lauren McKenna as her editor, but it doesn’t seem like there was any editing done at all. The novel is riddled with typos, spelling errors and grammar mistakes. As a student of English it was a real shame to see something go to print in such terrible condition. When you’re expected to pay nearly thirty dollars for a book it should be perfect.
All things considered, Gorilla Beach, was not as bad as I expected it to be, based on my opinion of its author. There were some creative metaphors, funny quips and I have to admit it was a fairly entertaining read. So if you’re going to the beach this summer or want to pretend that you are, Gorilla Beach might just be worth taking along.
