The scorching temperatures in Lytton this last week, and the horrible loss of the entire town to fire could have happened long ago. From March of 1869 through November of 1870, Father Pandosy mentioned while packing over the Dewdney Trail from Hope, not a drop of rain or snow fell from the sky and all the rivers ran dry. He was talking about the Okanagan, a bit east of Lytton, but if it happened there, Lytton was probably in a crisis as well. Here’s Lytton in 1867. Not a Canadian town yet.
A lot of local trees went into those buildings, for sure, but likely not the ones on the banks below town or on the steep slopes leading down to the river in the distant. The slope in the foreground, for sure. Note that the flat in the centre of the image, on the bank of the Fraser River…
None of them light summer reading. All of them essential for our time.
Kim Echlin’s SPEAK, SILENCE is essential reading. Long ago, I coined an neologism, SIOLENCE to express exactly what this book delivers, in its title and its text. SPEAK, SILENCE should be hollered to the mountain tops. Written in Kim Echlin’s lucent prose, SPEAK, SILENCE rings as clear as a bell, tolling for thee. Mothers and daughters, intergenerational trauma expressed with eloquent clarity and compassion. Listen to these women and you too will be inscribed by their stories. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5…
Gary Barwin’s Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy is a master work, hovering between tragedy and the humour (puns galore!) Barwin brings to all his work… very like Indigenous writing in that good regard! The novel reads like Salmon Rushdie at his best in its exuberant inclusivity… but the writing is so much tauter than Rushdie’s rush, and it never totters. Nor does it falter in its quixotic but sure dash toward safety, somewhere, surely! My only quibble is the title, Nothing the Same, which does not invite the reader in. But begin at high noon, as Motl might suggest, and you will be still reading long into the night, impelled by plot and even more by language to conclude. A picaresque triumph. https://www.goodreads.com/book/photo/…
Delighted in the new Rachel Cusk, Second Place. Truly remarkable perceptions, by far her best work…. no longer that detached null-at-centre narrator of the trilogy. I think Cusk has learned from Joan Didion’s concision in remarking on the peripheral that has not yet been articulated! Fascinating re art, and the background Laurentian story: compare Second Place with Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Lorenzo in Taos. Dodge ‘s book has a new half-life, a palimpsest… a second Second Place, with a wet Norfolk marsh replacing dry New Mexico. Compare too Cusk’s 2016 essay: “Like gravity, truth can only be resisted for so long: it waits, greyly, for the fantasy to wear off.” https://granta.com/coventry/
Penn Kemp 