Okay.

These are the big guns.

Seven hundred and fifty-one pages of Frank O’Connor.

And loving every minute of it.

So I love Frank O’Connor. He wrote my favourite short story that I read in my teens (My Oedipus Complex) and my favourite short story I read in my twenties (Guests of the Nation) (fun and embarrassing meghan-fact: I did not realize it was the same Frank O’Connor who wrote both these stories until I was, maybe, 26). On more than one occasion, I’ve lamented that they don’t teach Frank O’Connor much in school (maybe they do in Ireland, but not here in Canada). Instead, I had five years of our short-story English component being The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber and All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury (they couldn’t even find the same two Canadian short stories for us to read from grades seven through eleven).

So I love Frank O’Connor. I know that the previous paragraph also started that sentence, but I do. He has stories that don’t have a plot and they work. He has stories that are heavy with back story that’s never revealed and they work. He has stories with the artifice of a narrator telling a story about someone telling a story and they work. He has a story about a lion tamer, in Ireland, in this collection and it works. You can read Frank O’Connor and see that you can strip so much away and still have something amazing. You can also read Frank O’Connor and see a story that, if I were to write it, would collapse under all the strain, the history, the religion, the family, the expectations, but his stories don’t. They soar. They are funny, in a desperate, despairing way. They are sad in a way that makes one smile. I think it bears repeating: so I love Frank O’Connor. I mean, how can you not love someone who:

was always a great believer in buttered toast.

This sounds harsh, but I think it’s true: If you are a short fiction writer and you knowingly haven’t read Frank O’Connor, then there may be something wrong with you.

Still, loving Frank O’Connor is not without its difficulties. He’s a product of a time and locale. He uses the word Jew as a pejorative and Oriental as a description. Both those, at least in this collection, aren’t frequent. What is frequent is that women are generally secondary, and there are times when the comments on or depictions of women just skirt the line of misogyny. I’d like to think O’Connor is just being accurate regarding the treatment of women in such a staunch Catholic setting, but reading O’Connor, I’ve never really been able to shake the feeling that he can’t imagine how frustrating it would have been for so many of these women, treated like second-class citizens and expected to be baby machines, like his imagination just cannot imagine something like that.

As for this collection, it’s a bit baffling if one is looking for background. I have another collection of Frank O’Connor stories (Vintage’s Stories by Frank O’Connor) where Frank O’Connor himself tells you why he chose the stories he did. But in this collection, there is no introduction or essay at the end saying why these stories were picked. It’s called Collected Works, but not every Frank O’Connor story is there, and the publisher is actually pedaling three other Frank O’Connor collections as well. Is there overlap between these collections? Are there links between them? In the collection I read, characters tend to reappear, certain priests, certain families; are all occurrences of, say Father Ring, in the collection I just read, or does he appear in other collections as well? Other than reading the other collections, I have no idea. I find it odd (I’d like to say disrespectful, this is Frank O’Connor we’re talking about here! Does the publisher not know that I love him?) that they couldn’t find anyone willing to write an intro to Frank O’Connor, to say why these stories were chosen, and maybe why others were left out. That’s pretty much the only negative I have to say about this collection, and, of course, it has nothing to do with Frank O’Connor himself.

Again, I love Frank O’Connor. I read him and I feel closer to some of my family, who were a big Irish Catholic brood. Most immigrated to Canada generations ago, but there are still echoes of their behaviour in these stories. And maybe that’s why I love Frank O’Connor when on paper (ha! writing pun!) one wouldn’t think so; I’ve complained about male-view stories enough that perhaps my love of Frank O’Connor seems a bit mystifying. But you can’t deny good writing. You can’t deny that Frank O’Connor loves all his characters, even the despicable ones like Jeremiah Donovan. Each character is like a universe to him-(or her, rarely)-self. Just like people. Just like life.

Collected Stories by Frank O’Connor went on sale August 12, 2014, but the I think it may be a reissue of a collection from 1981, and the stories within have publication dates spanning from 1931 to 1965.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I also apologize to Tesfa and Geoff who are going to have to listen to me saying begor and wisha for the next few weeks until I get it out of my system.

Do you really think it is impossible for a woman and a writer to lead a normal life as a woman?

I live in a small town that I moved to two years ago. I’m not the friendliest person and I work at home, by myself. Some mornings, some afternoons, I fall into the trap of thinking that no one experienced this, that all my struggling with family and motherhood and solitude and attempts at writing are somehow new and unique. It can be a bit of a kick in the gut to have it pointed out the exact opposite: other women have thought about what I think about now. Other women have written their thoughts down on it. I’m hardly alone; I just have to reach out.

So we have Mrs Stevens Hears The Mermaids Singing. During an interview, an author reflects on her books, her life, her loves (male and female), the Muse (female). She reflects on the difference between solitude (a good thing) and loneliness (a bad one). She befriends a college student smarting from his first gay encounter. It takes place over two days. In one sense, even written in 1965, stands up today. Dateless: authors still write, struggle to find the Muse, get married, break-up, and women still try to have-it-all. In another sense, it’s a book about feminism without the benefit of second-wave feminism, and there’s a datedness in the assumptions of what roles women can play. There’s a datedness in Mrs Stevens’ recollections of her gadabout twenties and thirties, floating around Europe, one would assume wearing trousers and having gin fizzes and charleston dancing. It takes more imagination to relate to that.

The introduction, written by Carolyn G. Heilbrun (who the Internet tells me is an American Feminist Academic), mentions that the writing does not match the depth of the ideas. Maybe I wouldn’t have noticed it if it hadn’t been said, but then, once read, that was all I could notice. The novel’s beginning is a cliché: Mrs Stevens waking up and thinking about what she’s going to do that day. Metaphors are obvious. The whole book is plagued with measles or chickenpox or something that makes there be “…”‘s on each page (oh, how I despise ellipses unless they are being used as in a mathematical statement, i.e. $$x_1, x_2, \ldots, x_n$$). People talk in a way that never feels natural to me, but I wasn’t alive in the 1960s and maybe that was how upper-class-type people spoke. The dialogue reminded me of watching The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie when I was only six or seven, where, at least to a six year old; there’s that sort of affectation to the speech that distances the viewer/reader. You have to look past that, the introduction suggests. Look past that and see what’s underneath.

And so, what did this book tell me? Can I write while female and still have a normal female life? Mrs Stevens didn’t, but tells one of her interviewers she can try. She can hope. Maybe I can too, provided I “[fight] my war to get to [my] desk before [my] little bundle of energy has been dissipated.”

(This review brought to you while Geoff entertains Tesfa in the basement with Dragon Quest VIII on the PS2, so maybe it’s less impossible to combine all this than it may seem.)

This reissue of Mrs Stevens Hears The Mermaids Singing by May Sarton went on sale July 22nd, 2014, but the book was originally published in 1965.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

What’s the difference between a book being classified as literary and a book classified as genre? What makes me consider Never Let Me Go, for example, literary while I place A Calculated Life firmly in the sci-fi/dystopia genre pile? Of course, a slight variation of this question is central to both novels: what makes one human versus some sort of copy? What is real versus what is cloned (although A Calculated Life is quite clear that Jayna is not a clone, she is a simulant)?

So why is this a genre book, other than the publisher telling me it is? There are ellipses everywhere. There is over-explaining of day-to-day minutiae that hardly needs to be explained, i.e. take this musing on dreams:

…a dream that served, as ever to purge, shuffle, and juxtapose the day’s events, before spewing crazed stories that, surely, she could never have imagined in waking hours.

Yes, you mean like a dream, that thing that happens to the majority of the population when they are asleep? Explanation not necessary. And the simulants, when they are speaking to each other, talk like stilted robots, which are kind of what they are, but I don’t want to read stilted robot talk. There is only one instance where I am interested in stilted robot talk and that involves Flight of the Conchords, not as dialogue in a book.

But then, there are also all the little touches that make me feel happy. Jayna works in a building named after Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (when Tesfa inevitably has to do that grade school project on a scientist, I’ve told her she has the choice of Ada Lovelace or Grace Hopper). Jayna has an analytic brain, great at math (well, statistics, but we’ll pretend math), and is often mystified by people around her, feeling left out and alone – just like me! And the book has an idea for the greatest children’s invention ever: a marker that changes colour when shaken.

But (another but) the book doesn’t have enough emotion in it. I read it and kept thinking how much more heartrending the clones struggle in Never Let Me Go was compared with the simulants’ struggle here. But that’s the struggle, almost the purpose of Charnock’s book (both books actually): how to make humans care about almost or quasi humans? Interestingly, the bionics (humans with some sort of robotic or computer implant; it isn’t explained in detail) seem more distanced from the simulants than the organics (unmodified humans that aren’t simulants). Charnock tries to explain this by invoking class and the juxtaposition of the airy suburban life of the bionics versus the hard-scraggle tower-block life of the organics, but then it’s dropped without any in depth examination. That’s another mark against A Calculated Life: Jayna examines. Most of the book is observation, and when she does act, especially near the end, it doesn’t work out necessarily the way she wants – although, having written that, now I’m thinking that maybe it’s a sort of parallel to 1984 when Winston is finally reprogrammed. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it.

I don’t read much sci-fi, so it’s nice when I read one that annoys me here and there rather than making me want to find the author and strangle him (I’ll use him here because the majority of sci-fi authors I feel like strangling are men). There will likely be sequels to this book. This book was a quick read, and I’m guessing the sequels will be as well. There’s about a 45% chance I’ll read the sequels, or at least, synopses of them to see what happens next. But I just can’t help feeling how much stronger this book was if it was a first-person narrative, like the Sonmi chapters in Cloud Atlas. That reminds me that once I tried to write a story from the point-of-view of a clone/replicant/something like that. Maybe I should dig that story up and have a go at it so I get an idea of hard it is really is to do what Charnock tried to do here.

A Calculated Life by Anne Charnock went on sale September 24th, 2013.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.