Toronto Star calls Malarky fascinating, absolutely beautiful
Insightful review and perspective on Malarky from Georgie Binks in today’s Toronto Star. Great to have this reflection on the book as it speaks to the inner monologues of everyday folk. This piece about Malarky also deals with the book that was written, rather than speculating on or demanding the one that wasn’t, which is ditto cheering.
Some clips from the review:
“Malarky is a fascinating voyage into the mind of a woman embattled but surviving during and after the deaths of her husband and son, the latter being the true tragedy from which she must recover. The central character of the book, Philomena a.k.a. “Our Woman,” is kind enough to share the running commentary of her life in an Irish patter that could easily mirror the thoughts of many women at mid-life, if in fact, mid-life these days is when the kids have left and the husband has died or departed.
Schofield admits, “I wrote that book unapologetically for and about women. I find the ordinary working class woman fascinating. I like to write about ordinary people who usually don’t get written about.”
“…”What I love about Malarky is the absolutely beautiful, almost lyrical, but very simple turns of phrase Schofield employs. Little truths like her observations that youth is not wasted on the young but that age is wasted on the old or that widows — first considered a novelty — soon become the remnants of the person who is gone.”
Click here to read the entire Toronto Star review of Anakana Schofield’s novel Malarky
Malarky invited to Wordstock Portland Book Festival
I was delighted to hear the news I have been invited to Wordstock the Portland Book Festival in the Fall. I am excited to visit Portland as I’ve never been.
Thank you indeed to Wordstock for the invitation.
In the Bog 2012
A great day’s work today in the bog helping my mother bring in the turf or at least some steps in the process to bring up the turf.
We stacked turf and made reckles the four of us and joked and had a bit of craic.
The rain stayed off til we’d done what we could manage. It’s backbreaking but peaceful work. I love the small purple flowers in the heather with their tiny bells hanging off them and the details in the sods.
Nephin mountain borders that bog, like I said it’s ever so peaceful out there. No nicer place to work, no matter how hard it can be physically it’s somehow twice as rewarding. We may return again in the morning and carry on if the weather holds, but I suspect it won’t.
Baile Atha Claith
I am having a splendid time navigating the weather in Dublin — patchy drizzles, intermittent downpours, essentially constant rain until this morning, when hark ye Sun! I hardly knew how to behave until by 8pm wandering past the GAA ground in Cabra big, fat raindrops recommenced and pounded my cardigan.
You cannot but admire the consistency.
Minutes ago there was a bout of howling wind. Actual howling wind. I am humbled by its appearance in July.
The weather is the top topic here and you can be assured of a discussion about it with anyone whose breathing. Hark it howls again. I am weathery made up. Yesterday though I was weathery dismal. The company exceeds all of the above. Warm beyond warm and so familiar.
Hot Spot!
The wave of heat has been with us for two days and we are delighted with it. Welcome heat. Welcome wave. It’s a particularly good combination because at night the temperate falls and it’s not unbearable.
Or it may be the case that we are simply defrosting from the past six months of chilly puddling and therefore cannot gain any actual sense of the temperature because we’ve been so frozen. Who would actually know at this point what’s unbearably hot as we’ve become fluent in unbearably overcast.
Yesterday (Sunday) it was scorching at 4pm. I gave thanks and scorched along with it.
My only concern now is that of thunderstorms and what they lead to — the dreadful forest fires.
Sources tell me there was an hour long discussion on BC Almanac on the weather today. I am ashamed to say I missed it. Such is the nature of my present life my weather forecasting or weather watching has been derailed.
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Malarky selected for Amazon Best Books of 2012 So Far list in 2 categories
This week or Friday gone, Amazon.ca announced it’s Best Books of the Year So Far list and Malarky was selected in 2 categories! Given there are only 10 spots in each category that was a coup.
It was happy days to be listed alongside Tamara Faith Berger’s novel Maidenhead (also in 2 categories) as our books speak to something in between them. Perhaps the assumptions made about women’s sexuality. I read with Tamara in March at VPL (along with Ben Wood whose novel is also listed) and enjoyed her company and our discussions greatly.
This week I have read some of the most unambitious meanderings in a long time on literature, I’ll save you from them. Except to say language is certainly the way to go! And I commit to going even further with language! We need to move beyond middle brow expectations of story and prescription in the novel. What century is this again?! Form needs to reflect the undulations of the ordinary, daily life, the mind, the moment, this moment not stand back from it safely framing and merely dabbing calculated light on the traffic and trees around it and getting the reader up the hill to the next set of traffic lights. Enough of the linear, enough of the expected. Ideas and interrogation please. A literary work needs to be considered within its context not co-opted sideways to that which is not its concern and that which is already to be found plentifully in the myriad of mystery novels and middle brow fiction.
I could have engaged more with the various debates, but was very caught up thinking about Robert Walser’s use of tone in The Assistant and have been so struck by the image of his own death in the field finish. I reread Coetzee’s essay on Walser and was particularly galvanized by this paragraph:
Also, Little Star Journal have blogged some considerings on Christopher Middleton’s Thirty Poems of Robert Walser. Read it here
Finally the other thing that’s consumed me this week are thoughts of creating small living spaces within small living spaces. I came across a wonderful structure in a coffee shop Moii on Cambie near Broadway. Go and visit it. It’s a tiny tiny room within the coffee shop that an artist/media artist with an interest in industrial design built for her final project at Emily Carr. I want to learn to build walls and try to up my output from the Japanese hand saw with the green handle. I am convinced that being short will help realize this small space creation because the walls do not need to be so high to house me.
Fennel-ville
I had good fortune yesterday. I went in search of plants on a whim and the place I went to was giving them away for free as they were on the turn, or certainly headed that way. They were also a motley crowd. Very odd plants that I will have to google or just wait to see if they survive.
I took my clogs to my sad plot at the community garden and heaved a few of my rambling strawberry plants, attacked the invasive buttercups and basically lashed the new friends into the ground. On account of being the single person in Canada who cannot grow fennel, I took as many fennel starts as I could fit into my tray.
If after this effort no fennel survives I will take to the podium as the lone person who cannot grow fennel. Heck I see people everyone trying not to grow fennel, growing it.
Why you may ask would you want to so desperately grow fennel? Because I have two hefty pudding sized guinea pigs who would eat an acre of it. I think fennel is catnip to a guinea pig. They nearly do a dance when I feed them it.
Guinea pigs if you’re wondering are a great source of consolation. Need some consoling? Adopt a guinea pig or two. Or learn the cello. Or knit.
San Francisco Chronicle publishes excellent, insightful review praising Malarky
A piece of criticism is required to be an engaging piece of writing in its own right. Increasingly reviews are devoid of ideas and the frames of reference have become painfully narrow, such engagement is only to be found in the longer form essay or critique.
The San Francisco Chronicle published a review in their Sunday edition (July 3, 2012) that not only strongly praises Malarky but more importantly considers it and considers it coherently. And even more significantly the review, even within the confines of today’s newspaper word counts, manages to contain ideas.
“Malarky” is very much a book about sexuality and sexual frustration, but it is more fundamentally about the blinkers life puts on a person. Smart and absurdly proactive as Our Woman can be, she remains unable to see certain parts of herself or push through the illusions that her marriage has taught her. Schofield brings in a clearly political element when these illusions pertain to her soldier son, yet, throughout, “Malarky” makes a more subtle critique: failing to see past the margins of one’s understandings invites a failure of the imagination that hurts those you love, or attempt to.
Potent and fresh as this is, “Malarky” becomes truly compelling when Our Woman embodies an existential strangeness. In certain moments, we are not so far from Beckett’s Molloy – Our Woman comes close to enlivening not only the political and the personal but also the human.
Click here to read Scott Esposito’s San Francisco Chronicle review.
Raining curtains
There was a major rain event at around 2am when the sensible people were asleep. It lasted several hours and I have titled it the curtain rain event. It was literally raining curtains out there. Thick and heavy curtain sized sheets of it pouring down from the sky. It was so loud I opened the window! I had to. I actually had to contemplate it.
The rain always wakes me up if it is of such a powerful consistency. I was reading the Blueberry Farmers are concerned the weather is going to do in the blueberry crop. The weather has become such a local talking point which naturally enough pleases me since I wish we’d contemplate it whether it’s good, bad or indifferent.
The rumour is that it’s going to brighten up tomorrow, but currently it’s resumed the rain sonata out there.