Candace Fertile<\/p>\n
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The Rude Story of English<\/i>
\nby Tom Howell,
\nToronto: ON: MClelland &Stewart
\n320 pp. $22.95<\/p>\n
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That Tom Howell loves language and wordplay is obvious for his romp through the history of English in The Rude Story of English<\/i>, a light-hearted imagining of the language\u2019s past (and possible future). Howell hasn\u2019t met a pun he doesn\u2019t like, and he has no fear of the roughest edges of the language, so the book is a zany amalgam of history and fiction written in a chatty, familiar voice.<\/p>\n
Howell worked on the Canadian Oxford Dictionary<\/i> and the Canadian Oxford Thesaurus<\/i>, among other language related tasks before embarking on this book, and his knowledge shows as much as his sense of humour. He argues that the story of English lacks a hero, so with the help of history and J.R.R. Tolkien, he creates one named Hengest, who moves through time appearing and disappearing along with his twin brother, Horsey, and sister-daughter, Horsehair.<\/p>\n
The book has four parts: \u201cThe Hero,\u201d in which Hengest is developed; \u201cRise of the Poets,\u201d in which early poetry is explored (including a chapter called \u201cMore Cock Jokes, 885 AD\u201d); The \u201cTongue That Ate Itself,\u201d in which English becomes recognizable, in part through the development of \u201cguidebooks\u201d for pilgrims and the church\u2019s marketing strategies; and \u201cCompany,\u201d in which English spreads around the world as England becomes the major colonising force.<\/p>\n
The book is a collection of anecdotes, poems, lists, illustrations by Gabe Foreman, and no-holds barred attitude which often dwells on the sexual. Howell uses plenty of parenthetical asides in his whimsical gallop through English, and honestly, I had a hard time figuring out what the hell was going on.<\/p>\n
Ultimately I had an even harder time trying to figure out who the audience is. You need a strong background in English language, literature, and history to get many of the jokes (except for the penis ones as they tend to be universal). And even then it\u2019s confusing because of the blend of fact and fiction. But Howell has a fast and twitchy mind and loads of information, both of the distant past and of current popular culture. And his dedication to creating a hero and developing the rude aspect of the story is appealing even if the story is necessarily fragmented and the language is brash.<\/p>\n
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Bombay Wali and other stories<\/i>
\nby Veena Gokhale,
\nGuernica Editions,
\n218 pp. $20<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The dozen stories in Bombay Wali and other stories<\/i> by Veena Gokhale are all marked by a gentle tone, no matter the content. Gokhale, a journalist in Bombay (Mumbai) in the 80s and current Montreal resident covers a wide swath of geography in this debut collection.<\/p>\n
Unsurprisingly, the most arresting stories are those set in Bombay in the 1980s, and of these, the most powerful feature female characters. The title story deals with three young women, friends from college, who are trying to find their life paths. Gulnar, Tanya, and Renuka are wonderful friends who support each other while trying to figure their goals and how to reach them. Gulnar and Renuka are away from their homes and chronically broke although Renuka has a boyfriend who foots her entertainment costs. Both Gulnar and Renuka are writers, and Tanya lives at home and is obsessed by the Tarot. Their powers of imagination lead them to contemplate robbing a bank to solve some financial problems.<\/p>\n
Gokhale\u2019s world is a realistic one, and lack of money affects more than the characters of the title story. In \u201cFriere Stopped in Bombay\u201d Dilip is a young student in Bombay, also away from his home and suffering from extreme poverty. He has a scholarship, but the money doesn\u2019t come on time, and in this story, Gokhale touches on the plight of the Dalit caste. Unfairness abounds, and the outcome is sad.<\/p>\n
Other stories have characters of material wealth, but emotional poverty as in \u201cSmoke and Mirrors,\u201d in which Kavita, a self-absorbed businesswoman imagines killing her best (and perhaps only) friend, a woman she has betrayed. These stories show the importance of having enough money to live on, while placing love and friendship at the top of what matters in life. In that regard, it doesn\u2019t matter where people live: their needs are similar.<\/p>\n
In \u201cSnapshot,\u201d for example, an elderly Japanese woman suffers from physical ailments, but the more significant issue is her loneliness. Sukiyo lives with her daughter on the outskirts of Tokyo, but her daughter\u2019s commute is two hours, and Sukiyo\u2019s great-grandchildren live in Thailand. How she tried to ease her pain is curious and understandable and suggests major shifts in contemporary lifestyles. In \u201cKathmandu,\u201d a young Canadian woman is left in a small hotel by her boyfriend because he wants to go white water rafting, and she is sick. Money is not a problem; her father is funding her trip. But being abandoned hurts her, and she is encouraged by an older woman at the hotel to go and do what she wants to do.<\/p>\n
Given Gokhale\u2019s background as a journalist, the prose is direct, and writing is seen as valuable and powerful. Guernica Editions publishes \u201cfine Canadian literature with a special understanding of different cultures,\u201d and Veena Gokhale\u2019s collection joins the ranks of other books put out by this publisher that demonstrate the human similarities in the cultural differences.<\/p>\n
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When This World Comes to an End<\/i>
\nby Kate Cayley
\nLondon, ON: Brick Books, 2013
\n88 pp. $20<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
When This World Comes to an End<\/i>, the first poetry collection <\/i>by Toronto writer Kate Cayley, uses multiple approaches to present intriguing scenarios. Cayley\u2019s poetry in firmly rooted in the world of creativity, and pictures are an integral part.<\/p>\n
The collection has three parts with varying organizing principles. In Book of Days, Cayley includes a dozen poems focussing on such divergent figures as Zola, a servant of Leonardo; Judas; and Persephone. Cayley imagines what it would be like to test Leonardo\u2019s wings\u2014and fall to the earth: \u201cThen I fell. Clutching at time, I went down. \/ A crunch of bones, \/ stone. Earth had the last word.\u201d Judas is enjoying life \u201cin a deck chair, watching the water, \/ his face lined and friendly.\u201d And Persephone eats pomegranate seeds \u201cwith a swift tongue.\u201d In short poems, Cayley can create a whole world of queries. One of the most imaginative scenarios is in \u201cNick Drake and Emily Dickinson Meet in the Afterlife.\u201d While Dickinson and Drake seem antithetical, Cayley seamlessly draws them together, two writers who achieved fame after their deaths.<\/p>\n
The second part, Curio: Twelve Photographs, deals directly with words growing out of images. The cover image of a white horse leaping into water from a platform leads to two poems: \u201cThe White Horse Divers, Lake Ontario, 1908\u201d and \u201cWhite Horse Diver #2\u201d and both poems reflect on how the horses may feel in their role as entertainers. The first poem is exquisite, linking the jumps of the horses with human existence: \u201cBe the horse. Be patient and simple, blind \/ to anything beyond this moment, step out \/ on trembling legs toward the lake, knowing that \/ there is something behind this, something \/ that sustains, propels, repeats.\u201d In the second poem, a sonnet, Cayley pushes further contemplating the \u201cmodest sadness\u201d of the horse at being supplanted by vehicles, a \u201cdream suppressed\u201d of \u201cnights of hooves and sky.\u201d What knits these poems together is their denseness, their stellar concreteness.<\/p>\n
The third part, Signs and Wonders,\u201d is more varied in topic and style. Five of the selections are prose poems, and of those, \u201cThe Girl on the Road\u201d is the most successful, I think, as it\u2019s one long sentence with no interior punctuation. The headlong rush through the poem to its sad conclusion works because of the format. Nothing stops until everything does except for the wind. And as I tend to be drawn to self-referential poetry, my favourite in this part is \u201cLove Poem from the Dictionary,\u201d in which Cayley riffs on the words \u201cNight,\u201d \u201cAbsence,\u201d \u201cClothes,\u201d \u201cSkin,\u201d \u201cTime,\u201d and \u201cAbsolve,\u201d drawing them altogether as the poem progresses.<\/p>\n
The language in this collection is clear and direct. The beauty of the poems comes from Cayley\u2019s ability to take ordinary objects or experiences and twist our view of them in precise words or to take extraordinary experiences and bring them down to earth\u2014Zola jumping in his wings, horses jumping into water.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Genre-Queer, Fiction and Poetry Review Candace Fertile The Rude Story of English by Tom Howell, Toronto: ON: MClelland &Stewart 320 pp. $22.95 That Tom Howell loves language and wordplay is obvious for his romp through the history of English in The Rude Story of English, a light-hearted imagining […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1923,"parent":93,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1496","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1496"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1979,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1496\/revisions\/1979"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/93"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}