Against the dead illusion, decayed reality and vile bodies there is always the countermovement of imagination, pushing back against an unreal reality. There is Bowie’s scintillating, permissive intelligence that speaks to us in our aloneness and reaches out to touch our aliveness. All we have to do is listen and give him our hands. As he says in “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide”: You’re not alone. You’re wonderful.
Marian Engel's 1976 novel Bear, which tells the story of a relationship between a woman and her ursine lover, has been called one of the most controversial books in the history of Canadian literature.
But experts say the Governor General Award-winning book is also one of the most daring and relevant examples in the Canadian canon, deftly mixing comedic scenes with important themes such as colonialism and our relationship to the wilderness. One expert says it also touches on the issue of Western appropriation of Indigenous stories.
I started writing Call Me by Your Name as a diversion. I had absolutely no idea it was going to be a story, much less a novel. One April morning I was dreaming about being in an imaginary Italian villa overlooking the sea. It was a real-estate fantasy: a swimming pool, a tennis court, wonderful family and friends, plus the attendant personnel: a cook, a gardener and a driver. I had even picked the house from a painting by Claude Monet.
Some years ago, researchers in Ushuaia, the southernmost city of Argentina, observed some unexpected winter visitors. Martillo Island, a speck of land in the Beagle Channel, regularly attracts tourist boats owing to its photogenic colonies of magellanic and gentoo penguins. Visit today, however, and you may just be lucky enough to spot an outsider: a king penguin, staring out across the channel from the island’s pebble beach, head and shoulders taller than the gentoos and about twice the size of the magellanics.
She told me about the sticky “syrup kisses” she always got from the neighborhood kids after they had their pancakes, how she would wear that maple-syrup scent all day long as she worked, how she watched the children she knew as babies grow old enough to come in to the enjoy the diner on their own.
“I’d just like to have the chance to say goodbye,” she told me, in tears.
What author Nuala O’Connor attempts in her novel “Nora” may be considered sacrilege by some. What she achieves is serene.