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03/31/2006
Governor General's Literary Awards - here I come!
I've decided (likely in a fit of insanity) that I'm going to read, or at least attempt to read, all the books that have won Governor General's Literary Awards in English fiction. They've been awarded continually since 1936, so I have a lot of catching up to do, but I'll give it a shot. The thing is, I'm trying to figure out why these books win the awards they do. Is it because they are actually really that good, or because there's a tight clique of stuffy literary friends that arbitrarily assign these awards to big-name Canadian authors? I'm also wondering, how much in common does Canadian literature have? Is it really all about the universal Canadian theme of "victimization"?
Now for those of you that are puzzled, yes, I'm an engineer, not an English major. And thank goodness for that. I can say, "yep, I liked the book", and leave it at that, and nobody can dock marks. I don't need to worry about who is having Oedipus complexes or god only knows what else. However, sometimes, it's fun to just muse about this sort of stuff. In high school, my grade 11 English teacher told me he thought I'd be getting my PhD in English Literature one day. It really was hard not to laugh my butt off, because it was pretty much the last thing I could imagine myself doing. Growing up, I was HUGE into creative writing. I loved it to pieces, and since English class, early on, involved a lot of creative writing, I loved English class. Then, somewhere around grade 10, English class went from do-your-own-writing to study-someone-else's-to-death, and English class went from my favourite to basically my least favourite. I think high school killed my appreciation for literature for a long time.
So, I've decided to try to revive it. Back in the fall, there was a book sale at UVic, and I picked up a dusty old book from around the turn of the century (1900-ish, that is) called Literary Taste - How to Form It by Arnold Bennett. I thought, now THERE'S a book I can relate to. Reading it, despite the title, age, and subject matter, was actually quite a hoot. It's written in stuffy Victorian language (I can almost feel the corset strings digging into my ribs!) but it's actually almost amusing to read. One funny aspect is how it mentions people would rather read contemporary stuff than classics, and the list of "contemporary" works is basically a list of what we would also consider classics!
Anyway, with the help of this book and some determination, I'd like to get through the GG awards for fiction list. I actually already have a bit of a head start. Quite a few years ago, around the time it came out, I read the 1994 winner A Discovery of Strangers by Rudy Wiebe, which was indeed an awesome book. Then a couple of years ago I tried to read Elle by Douglas Glover, the 2003 winner. That was a whole other can of worms. The writing was indeed superb, for the most part. It was about a French woman in the late 1500s who got kicked off her ship onto a remote island somewhere off the coast of Labrador. So far so good, and the characters were well-rendered, as was the landscape and so on. But Glover has a very annoying habit of interspersing the beautiful, rich writing with very crude, badmouthed interjections which I can only envision as a sporadic unleashing of a nasty fetish for anything that happens between the legs - sex, pee, poo (and these are all the nice translations of the words he uses). It's almost like listening to a beautiful symphony, but with a 13-year-old pubescent boy screaming toilet talk into a microphone at one-minute intervals during the symphony. I read somewhere (which I can't seem to find now) that this shock factor was intended to shock, to make it more interesting I guess, but for me it was such a turn-off that it turned a book that could have been an all-time favourite into something I just couldn't bear to read beyond page 70 or so. I guess the good news is that with all the potty-mouthed talk in there, it's not likely to be foisted on unsuspecting high school students anytime soon.
The 1968 winner, Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro, is a collection of short stories that I ended up studying as an independent study in grade 12. I remember disliking this also. I think the problem in this case was that I felt trapped in sepia-coloured 1960's images of rural Ontario where the fact that nothing ever happened was an event in itself, or that a dandelion sprouting through a crack in the sidewalk was worthy of three pages of text. I have my theories about what makes Can.Lit. what it is, but I'll leave that for another post as it's kind of a humour piece. :-)
The 1971 winner was St. Urbain's Horseman by Mordecai Richler, which I am not looking forward to reading. I've only read one of Richler's books so far - Son of a Smaller Hero - but that was already enough for me. It's the book that sticks out in my mind as THE most boring book I ever read in my whole entire high school English career. (Well, The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway was right up there but at least it was a whole lot shorter than Son of a Smaller Hero.) Son of a Smaller Hero gave new meaning to deathly boring - most of the time I felt it sucked so much energy out of me that I was on the verge of cardiac arrest. Almost like the electrons orbiting my atoms were deciding they can't be bothered to orbit any longer. I could skip twenty pages and still be in the same scene as before. Yes, it was that bad. So as you can imagine, I'm not a big fan of Richler. Let's just hope that either St. Urbain's Horseman was more interesting, or that I've matured with time and somehow what used to be boring isn't so bad anymore. Unfortunately, I think my attention span is even shorter now than it was in high school, so who knows what will happen.
Let the experiment begin! Right after I finish the Wave energy paper, that is. (Yes, Andrew and Peter, it's nearly done and I'm working on it today!!)
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