Reif Larsen’s The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet is a novel that’s easy to talk about but difficult to write about. It’s a natural distinction for a book that’s so beautifully designed and obsessively layed out—what can one say with mere words, after all, when the subject of one’s words is a text that incorporates as marginalia scientific diagrams, heartbreaking sketches, sweeping illustration, and nuanced cartography. I’ll just say that Larsen’s debut is everything one could hope for from such an expansively composed volume: it is by turns beautiful, moving, witty, informative, mysterious, and devastating. I spoke with Reif Larsen a few weeks ago, just before he launched the book in Toronto.
When T.S. lists the clubs he’s joined, he includes the Official Dolly Party Fan Club. It occurred to me that though we know a whole lot about what T.S. reads, sees, thinks, and feels, we don’t really get any information on what he’d listen to. What would be on T.S. Spivet’s playlist?
It’s funny that you ask this, because there’s this blog called Largehearted Boy, and they asked me to do a playlist, though it wasn’t necessarily what T.S. would listen to. Because I thought about this and realized that the Coppertop Ranch is kind a music-less place, aside from kind of the crackle of the Westerns on television. (more…)
Last week, I posted the first half of my conversation with New Yorker staff writer David Grann, whose new book The Lost City of Z, about the explorer Percy Fawcett and his mysterious disappearance in the Amazon in 1925, is currently sitting comfortably at number thirteen on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list. Some brief thoughts on the book were offered before the transcript began; many others have offered more in-depth praise. Part two of our long conversation follows below, with topics including Sherlock Holmes, Theosophy, and some of Fawcett’s more extreme beliefs.
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It’s also a book, of course, about your own obsession. I wonder what you think you have in common with someone else you’ve written about, another historian who was particularly interested in a cache of secret papers, the Sherlock Holmes expert Richard Lancelyn Green?
Oh, probably a lot. I mean, a lot. The thing I remember most about the Lancelyn Green piece, who was this great Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes scholar, was his room towards the end of his life, which was so filled with pictures of Conan Doyle and papers and artifacts that everywhere you kind of turned he was haunted by this subject matter he was investigating. And in the course of writing this book, which took me several years of research—I have a little room, a little office, it’s extremely small, and I had, you know, maps up on the wall where Fawcett went and pictures and pop culture imagery and thousands and thousands of pages of copies of Victorian letters and diaries. I mean, you could barely get into my office. And I often felt extremely overwhelmed in the pursuit of this subject. It’s interesting—I wrote the Lancelyn Green piece before the book, and it actually led to the book when I discovered while researching that Fawcett had helped inspire Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World. Green was driven…mad may be too strong a word, but nearly insane by his obsession with Conan Doyle and his desire to write the definitive biography, he’d spent his whole life on it. And I wanted very much to write the definitive biography on Fawcett—there’d never really been one—but it was utterly elusive. Even if you try to fill in every little bit, there will always be other little bits you don’t know. So of all the people you asked me, in terms of my own life and quest, I feel the most similarity with him. (more…)
There’s a moment relatively early on in David Grann’s spectacular new book, The Lost City of Z, where the author is imagining his subject, Percy Fawcett, during Fawcett’s early years in Ceylon. Fawcett, who would go on to become the world’s most famous explorer and the inspiration for countless fanatical quests to resolve the mystery of his fate, was at the time encamped in a military fort. Grann, recounting a strained moment between Fawcett and his eventual wife Nina, tells us that “For years, they had no more contact. Fawcett remained at the fort, where, high on the cliffs, he could see a pillar dedicated to a Dutch maiden who, in 1687, had leaped to her death after her fiancé deserted her. Nina, meanwhile, returned to Great Britain.”
I offer this as a simple example of what makes this book so exceptional. In Grann’s meticulous endnotes there is no account of his having recovered this information from Fawcett’s papers, which means that instead it was gleaned by his doing what truly great biographers do: imagine their subjects fully, so fully as to meaningfully reconstruct their behaviour within a verifiable environment. Grann the researcher uncovered this pillar, and he can be certain that Fawcett would have seen it; knowing Fawcett’s obsessive streak, he can be relatively certain that his explorer would be aware of the local history. Even if Fawcett didn’t know the pillar’s history, Grann does, and the latter’s research, in this moment and countless others throughout the book, opens history to these small moments of insight, of knowing, and—as in his subtle juxtaposition here of the very practical Nina with her more melodramatic husband—quiet, wise wit.
David Grann is a staff writer at the New Yorker, where he contributes some of the most intriguing, bizarre, and gripping stories the magazine runs—investigating the mysterious death of the world’s leading Sherlock Holmes expert; reporting on Frédéric Bourdin, a French con-artist whose impersonations of children were so successful, he was taken in by a Texas family as their long-missing teenage son; considering Mark Halperin, one of the most influential—and sometimes controversial—players in American political media. We met a few weeks ago, on a cold Toronto Monday morning. (more…)
(Detail of photograph by Larry Towell, appearing in our April issue.)
When we asked Mark Kingwell to write an essay about leadership related to Obama, we weren’t entirely sure what we’d get, but none of us expected the brave, challenging, and completely original piece of writing that resulted. It’s not that we didn’t expect Mark’s writing to be those things—it characteristically is—but that we didn’t expect it to be so in the form in which it exists, an unusual, second-person monologue that allows him, as he tells me below, to be both about Obama not about Obama. I asked Mark a few questions about the new essay, the new president, and the idea of self-awareness.
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I imagine that in writing the piece, you had to do a lot of anticipating, imagining how Obama would conceive of certain things, react to certain phenomena. Now that we’ve been able to observe him in action for a few months, have you rethought your understanding of him?
I wanted the essay to be both about Obama and not about him—readers may notice that his name appears nowhere in the piece, even its headline. In that sense, the cover sell is a bit misleading, though I’m always happy to be on a magazine cover! My idea was to use the change of administration, and the election-victory and inauguration speeches as opportunities for reflection about the very idea of democratic politics. The second-person conceit is a way of doing this, imagining an interior dialogue that might be the counterpoint to all the official rhetoric being uttered by the official man in his official voice. So: back and forth thoughts, doubts, little surges of optimism, and so on. I did of course draw on some real Obama material, his stated views on taxation for example, even while putting other material—stuff from Ian McEwan, David Foster Wallace—into this ‘you’ person’s head. (more…)
Of all the non-fiction titles I’ve read this year, few have surprised and delighted me more than Maclean’s editor-in-chief and publisher Ken Whyte’s new account of the rise of William Randolph Hearst, The Uncrowned King. While the book focuses on the struggle for marketplace dominance between Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, it is, at heart, a history of America at the dawn of the twentieth century, densely packed with research, anecdote, and analysis. (It also offers a fantastic epigraph, worth repeating, from the inimitable Randall Jarrell: “The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.”)
I spoke with Whyte last week, amidst a grim season for the print media in general, but before this week’s even grimmer news of the bankruptcy of the Tribune group and the New York Times’ new mortgage. As Whyte explains below, his critical reconsideration of Hearst’s early New York success has convinced him that a serious reimagining of what newspapers do is necessary should they hope to survive in the twenty-first century.
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You note that you first read about Hearst while preparing for the launch of the National Post, but that you didn’t see enough there to convince you that the stereotypes about him were inaccurate. What about your experience in newspapers made want to return to study him five years later?
When I returned to it, I still hadn’t changed my mind about Hearst. I’d always had suspicions that something wasn’t right in the way the story was told, because I didn’t believe that Hearst could go from such a low circulation to a high circulation in such a competitive market unless there was something interesting, compelling about his newspaper. So I suspected that people who had written about this episode were missing some of the qualities or appeal of it, otherwise he couldn’t have had that kind of success. (more…)
Taras Grescoe’s excellent book Bottomfeeder is now out in paperback, and recently won the prestigious Writers Trust Award for best non-fiction book of the year. I reviewed Taras’s book in our June issue. He was kind enough to answer my questions about fish, food writing, and fans.
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The book’s main argument—that we should stop eating large, predatory fish and instead consume the more sustainable bottomfeeders—requires an adjustment in our attitudes toward dinner. In researching and adopting the ideas in the book, what has been the single biggest adjustment you’ve made?
I’ve completely adjusted my eating habits when it comes to seafood.
Before I started researching and writing Bottomfeeder, I figured that getting my protein in the form of seafood, from the oceans, was smarter than getting it in the form of chicken, poultry, or beef, from industrial abbatoirs and factory farms. It was a fairly straightforward decision, one I made in the early 90s: fish was clearly more sustainable, and healthier, than meat. At the time, it seemed to me the oceans were inexhaustible as a food source. (more…)
As yesterday’s informal National Post poll showed, Joseph Boyden is the smart-money choice to win this year’s Giller Prize tonight. (Update: Huzzah! I was right.) And for good reason — his new novel, Through Black Spruce, is a methodical study of our relation to the land and each other, marked by Boyden’s characteristically beautiful prose and true, vivid characters. I spoke with Joseph a few weeks ago in Toronto.
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I read in the interview you did with your wife, Amanda, for the CBC, that you handed her a hundred pages of an early version of the novel that just wasn’t working. How did this story originally come to you? And what did you change from those early attempts to make it successful?
The story originally—I knew before I finished Three Day Road that I wanted to write at least one other book, and very possibly two, try and create a trilogy of the family. Each novel could be read on its own, but they don’t have to be read in any particular order, although reading them from first to third might make the most sense. I wanted to stretch myself as a writer and go back to the contemporary—my first story collection was contemporary short stories—and I wanted to explore that world again because I think there’s so much going on, it’s really kind of exciting. And then this whole idea, kind of from a Leonard Cohen song, “Suzanne takes you down” was fascinating to me, and the original title was She Takes You Down, referring to Suzanne, traveling down South and that. But the original title had too many negative connotations that I didn’t want to imply. (more…)
To celebrate the publication of Josh Glenn and Mark Kingwell’s excellent small book, The Idler’s Glossary, I asked Mark to offer glosses on a few of his favourite entries. His response is below. I urge everyone to buy this book; there’ll be nothing more curious and delightful published this fall. (Nor many as beautiful—Seth’s design work is lovely.)
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Hi Jared,
Here is a small sampling of the richness packed into our little book, The Idler’s Glossary. As I say in my introduction, the glossary is the idlest of all textual forms: no narrative, no explicit argument, no structure save the alphabet. And always that insistent, kooky circular imperative to see another word, or compare an entry elsewhere. Thus, the perfect vehicle for insights about idling!
In fact there are mini-narratives and brilliant little arguments scattered liberally through the entries. Like McLuhan’s probes or Nietzsche’s aphorisms, these are little mind-bombs that go off almost randomly, as the reader dips here and there into the book. (more…)
Giller prize winner David Bergen’s new book, The Retreat, is among this fall’s very best novels. Instead of commenting on this myself, I’ll refer you to Danielle Groen’s review of the book from our October/November issue; she says most of what I have to say, and better than I could.
I spoke with David Bergen a few weeks ago in Toronto. He’ll return to town next week as a part of the International Festival of Authors, for a reading on October 31st and a roundtable hosted by The Walrus‘s own Jeremy Keehn on November 1st. Click those links to buy tickets, or enter a contest to win some courtesy of IFOA and The Walrus here.
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I know that your last novel sat with you for quite a while before it came to shape. How did this one arrive?
I suppose it came more quickly. With The Time in Between I had written a non-fiction piece previous to the novel, and I used the non-fiction work to create the novel, because the non-fiction stuff just was not working. I discovered I’m not a non-fiction writer, not in the way I want to be—not like a Bruce Chatwin. If only I could write like that, which really isn’t non-fiction I suppose, he bends the truth very much. But you can bend the truth more with fiction, so I decided to write the novel. Because I see my job—I see it as a job, and I see it as work, it’s not something where I wait for inspiration—so in this instance, The Retreat came to me as an image of a family driving across the country, arriving in Kenora, going to this commune. I began the story with the second section, called “The Retreat,” and the first section, “The Island,” came later, when I found Raymond. And when I say ‘found’ Raymond, I think it’s important to say that some of these characters, like Nelson and like Raymond, they were found, or sort of walked into the door, and I said, “Oh wow, here’s Raymond, here’s Raymond delivering fish and chickens to the Retreat.” And of course the unconscious is at work when that happens, and you have to allow it to open up, to be found. So that’s how the novel began. (more…)
There was a time, years ago, when I was working towards a thesis on the little-known but truly brilliant Canadian poet George Johnston. One of the obstacles to doing work on Johnston was that his books were out of print except for the collected poems, which contained some revisions and prevented one from considering the individual editions as artifacts of a given moment. So I’d like to second my friend and colleague Sean Rogers’s excellent essay on university book sales, which were a great boon during those years (and many other years, with less specific purpose). Johnston, you see, was an academic— among other things, he taught literature and Norse myth at Ottawa’s Carleton university—and so much of his books’ meager sales were to fellows in the trade. Exactly, in other words, the sort of volumes that turn up at University book sales, where much of the stock is donated by those affiliated in some way with the academic community.
I must have bought and given away at least four or five copies of Johnston’s first book, a magnificent collection called The Cruising Auk, which Oxford UP released in 1959. (The picture above, actually, was not from a university sale, but rather from a copy of 1966’s Home Free, gift given to me years ago by the very same Sean Rogers, included here because Johnston was also one of the century’s great handwriters.) (more…)
This week marks the beginning of the 29th annual International Festival of Authors in Toronto, and it’s a particularly impressive lineup: 135 writers from fifteen different countries, events spanning ten days and virtually all genres, top-notch Canadian scribes and international heavyweights alike. Given the barrage of literary talent, I thought it would be helpful to make some recommendations. The following are my personal picks for must-see events at this year’s festival. The list is by no means exhaustive, nor meant to imply that anything not chosen isn’t worthwhile—just the lay of the land as I see it, and what I’m personally planning on attending.
For more on the IFOA, be sure to check out our featured page here, where you’ll find Walrus articles by and related to this year’s participants. And don’t miss Andrew Westoll’s official IFOA blog.
Thursday, October 23, 8pm, Fleck Dance Theatre
Reading: Nadeem Aslam, Hermenegilde Chiasson, Joe Dunthorne, and David Adams Richards
I cannot imagine two books more diametrically opposed than Nadeem Aslam’s brooding, poetic take on present-day Afghanistan and Joe Dunthorne’s rollicking, hilarious account of a late-nineties boyhood in Wales. To borrow an obsession from Dunthorne’s novel, will the Fleck Dance Theatre stage be able to handle such cognitive dissonance? (more…)
This week, Lee Henderson‘s first novel, The Man Game, was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust fiction prize, and deservedly so. It is a sprawling, brilliant, playful, heartbreaking, and eminently wise book that considers its world with unusual bravery and purpose. It’s easily one of the very best books I’ve read this year. I caught up with Lee Henderson last month, while he was in Toronto for the launch.
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This is your first novel, but unlike many first books it’s not obviously autobiographical. How did your ideas come together?
I think it still is autobiographical, but more symbolic autobiography. I’ve always been doing drawings, and I always thought it was somehow irreverent to draw naked men, and I’d be in writing classes and you’re supposed to write critiques on people’s stories or poems, and I’d just be drawing little naked men for them. It seemed counterintuitive at the time, so I’m always looking for how to draw stories out of very small obsessions like that. I knew that if it was going to take nine years, at least I’d be entertained while I worked on it. (more…)
The Walrus HOOPP Pension Debate
Be It Resolved That Canadians Are Incapable
of Saving for Their Retirement Needs Alone
12 pm, Wednesday, May 30 at
Hart House Debate Room, Toronto
The Walrus Glenbow Debate
Calgary’s Cowboy Culture:
Living Legacy or Just History?
6:30 pm, Thursday, June 7 at
Epcor Centre: Max Bell Theatre, Calgary
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