Usiku

The path wound over the burnt earth, the black cotton soil, through random fields of yam and cassava, past mud huts sheltered by manyara hedges.

Suddenly Daudi stopped. "What's wrong?" asked the young woman beside him.

"There are two men ahead," he replied, stooping to the ground for a rock. Hussein followed suit, and together they advanced with their arms in the air. An immense granite boulder materialized out of the darkness.

"Usiku," cried Daudi. When there was no answer, he yelled the warning again, and this time a faint sound slithered down from the top of the boulder. Daudi and Hussein drew back their arms threateningly.

"Mchana," replied a grudging voice above their heads.

Daudi and Hussein dropped their rocks and guided her safely forward.

"I don't understand," she said. "What just happened?"

"Usiku means night," explained Daudi. "If you meet someone whom you suspect of wrong doing, you say that to him. If he means no harm, he will answer mchana, which means afternoon. If he means evil, he will say usiku, or nothing at all."

The young woman was incredulous. "But what's to prevent him from saying mchana and then knocking you over the head when you're not looking."

Daudi sounded puzzled. "I have never heard of such a thing happening."

At Swim-Two-Birds

Craziest novel I've ever read. First published in 1939, it's on Time Magazine's list of 100 greatest novels. My Penguin edition refers to it as an "experimental blend of satire, fantasy and farce."

On the back cover are blurbs from James Joyce and Dylan Thomas. The latter says, "This is just the book to give your sister if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl."

The central character, Dermot Trellis, is an Irish lout who spends most of his time in bed. He is writing a tale in which "there will be no hero, nothing but villains." Celebrating the "birth" of one of his characters, he informs the press that credit is due in part to another author, William Tracy, a writer of Westerns.

Soon several other Tracy-inspired characters appear, cowpunchers brandishing shooting-irons on the streets of Dublin. They fall in with some characters from Irish mythology, including Finn MacCool, mad King Sweeney, a type of devil called a Pooka, and a Good Fairy.

Events in Trellis's life are interspersed with extracts from the story he's writing. The extracts grow longer, and the characters become fractious after the author seduces one of them and brings into existence "offspring of the quasi-illusory type." Eventually they drug Trellis, beat the crap out of him, and take control of the novel.

The writing is humorous, erudite, and fey. The vocabulary is prodigious, and there are snippets of Latin, Greek, and Irish Gaelic. The narrative is destabilized by intentionally bad poetry and many authorial asides, including synopses for "the benefit of new readers."

As one character explains, "It's the sort of queer stuff they look for in a story nowadays."

Captain Francis Crozier

Last Man Standing?

In YK part of my job involved visits to a massive government warehouse that held everything from beer to kayaks. One day I stumbled across a forgotten flat of small blue volumes published by the GNWT.

Second-in-Command by May Fluhmann summarized in brief chapters the life of Francis Crozier, who was second-in-command on Franklin's last voyage. The book was a genuine work of scholarship, for Fluhmann had access to Crozier's correspondence from 1828 to 1845. But the volume had a slightly amateurish air, and I doubt it was ever widely available or attracted much notice.

Now there's been a resurgence of interest in Crozier. Dan Simmons made him the central figure in his novel, The Terror, which came out in 2007. And in the previous year Michael Smith published a more complete, more polished biography, which cites May Fluhmann as one of its sources.

Smith's book of necessity covers much familiar ground. For me, the most interesting part was Crozier's role in a four-year Antarctic expedition, of which he was second-in-command under his close friend James Clark Ross. According to Smith, both men were so unnerved by the voyage that afterward they were never quite the same. Ross began drinking heavily, and Crozier subsided into a depression from which he never recovered.

A second reason for Crozier's depression was his failure to win the hand of Sophy Cracroft. His "uncertain state of mind" caused him to "stand aside from the leadership battle" for what was to become Franklin's last expedition, even though he was the most experienced officer available and the logical choice for the position.

After Franklin was given the job, Crozier did a volte-face and agreed to act as second-in-command. Smith suggests that Crozier did so in the hope of gaining favour with Sophy, who was Franklin's niece and Lady Franklin's constant companion.

Soon Crozier began to rue his decision. Franklin had not been North in 17 years. Worse, Crozier had no hand in selecting the crews, a task that was given to Fitzjames, who was third-in-command but with no Arctic experience. Crozier turfed two of the men selected by Fitzjames as being "perfectly useless either at their trade or anything else."

Smith describes Crozier's last letter to Ross as "the dark, brooding missive of a troubled man harbouring major doubts about the dangerous undertaking which lay ahead." Many are the ironies, mysteries, and tantalizing possibilities surrounding that doomed voyage. According to Inuit oral history, Crozier was one of the last survivors. Indeed, it has even been suggested that he lived among the Inuit for many years afterward.

The two ships, Erebus and Terror, have never been found.

Nikolski

Beyond the uttering of superlatives, this is not an easy book to write about briefly. It’s a knotty postmodern tale in which a bookstore clerk in Montreal refers to his unborn self as “an imperceptible comma in an as yet unwritten novel.”

Later he acquires a “three-headed book” composed of fragments from three separate works that are as self-referential as the toy compass he wears around his neck. As he himself says, “I refrain from specifying that my compass did not point north but toward Nikolski—the story is already convoluted enough, thank you.”

Proof occurs on the last page when the reader cannot help but exclaim, “WHAT!” and immediately start flipping happily through the pages again. Happily, because the writing is playful and imaginative, full of marine imagery that is apt and entertaining: a high school career counselor named Mr. Barrier, a poissonnerie that sells sea horses in Cajun sauce, a cloud of phosphorescent plankton swirling around a street light.

In short, this is a nautical yarn set on dry land with three strange fish as protagonists. Noah, who never knew his father, was raised on the prairies by his aboriginal mother. They led a nomadic existence, living in a trailer with ancestral ghosts. Noah leaves for Montreal to study archeology, and falls under the influence of a prof who specializes in trash.

Joyce, who was abandoned by her mother, grew up in Tete-a-la-Baleine. She is a descendant of Acadian buccaneers and niece of Jonas Doucet, father of Noah and the aforementioned bookclerk. Joyce runs away to Montreal, takes up dumpster diving, and fulfills a childlhood dream of becoming a pirate.

Noah's and Joyce's stories are told in the third person and alternate throughout the book, while (in a brilliant conceit) the nameless bookclerk's story surfaces haphazardly and is told in the first person.

There are many more plot elements, most but not all neatly dovetailed together. The tantalizing loose ends simply add to the manifold pleasures of this book.

But enough already. (Though if you'd like to know more, I recommend this review.)

Nikolski was first published in Quebec in 2005 and won a slew of awards. In 2007 it was translated into English by Lazer Lederhendler. It’s a beautifully designed book, right down to the typographic fish used to indicate section breaks. The cover is gorgeous.

Another Whopper

Nikolski reminded me of another postmodern fish story that I read recently, Gould’s Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan. You can read my review here.

Doctor Sax

After finishing Ray Robertson's What Happened Later, I realized I had not read anything by Kerouac in far too long, and so picked up this book long mouldering on a shelf.

But at the back of my mind was a judgment rendered by a snooty prof in my grad school days. Would I find Kerouac a passing fancy, a faded juvenile attraction?

Not so! The book is a joyous paean to innocent youth, a mad inspired jazz solo of words. Listen:

Merrimac comes swooping down from a north of eternities, falls pissing over locks, cracks and froths on rocks, bloth, and rolls frawing to the kale, calmed in dewpile stone holes slaty sharp (we dove off, cut our feet, summer afternoon stinky hookies), rocks full of ugly old suckers not fit to eat, and crap from sewage, and dyes, and you swallowed mouthfuls of the chokeful water...

Doctor Sax is an imaginary figure from Kerouac's youth, modelled after The Shadow, clad in cape and slouch hat. He lurks only at the edges of the narrative until the final chapters, where he steps into the foreground to battle the Snake of the World.

It is only at this point that the book loses its way, turning into pure pulpish fantasy, no longer anchored in the real world of Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts.

Faust Part Three

From Ann Charters's biography I learned that Doctor Sax was Kerouac's favorite book. He wrote it in 1952, five years before On the Road was published. He was staying with William Burroughs in Mexico at the time, high on weed and writing in the bathroom. The book took him three weeks to complete.

Ah, the dilemma of Kerouac. How to reconcile the dashing figure of his autobiographical novels with the pathetic bloated drunk he became. How to admire the books and not be seduced by the lifestyle they celebrate. Reading Doctor Sax made me realize that this is what Robertson's book is about.

Faust Part Three is the subtitle of Doctor Sax and hints at the awful truth -- Kerouac sold his soul to the devil for literary immortality.

More Kerouac

Just last year was the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road and a new edition, subtitled The Original Scroll, was released. It restores the book to its original uncut version.

Another treasure is The Jack Kerouac Collection, three CDs of Kerouac reading his work, sometimes to the accompaniment of piano and sax. Kerouac's voice is perfectly matched to his material, and makes evident the jazzy scat rhythms of the prose. Gad, the man even sings!

What Happened Later

Kerouac's sequel to On the Road was going to be called What Happened Later. Author Ray Robertson has claimed that title for this dual-threaded story of Kerouac's last road trip and the coming-of-age of "Ray Robertson" in Chatham, Ontario.

Young "Ray" grows up worshipping a pair of handsome counter-culture heroes, Jack Kerouac and Jim Morrison of The Doors. They rebelled against the same stifling middle- and working-class existence that "Ray" finds himself shackled to.

Unfortunately "Ray" can't find a copy of On the Road anywhere. All he can do while planning his escape is listen to The Doors, and vicariously experience the lives of his two heroes through a pair of biographies, Jack's Book and No One Here Gets Out Alive.

Author Ray Robertson does a fine job portraying the family that "Ray" grows up in. Seen through the latter's eyes, they live a trite and dull existence. But through the reader's eyes, the family is a sweet idyll, especially when juxtaposed with what really happened later to Kerouac, who (like Morrison) turned into a bloated drunk.

While "Ray" seeks to escape his roots, Jack is trying to return to them, but the road trip to Riviere-du-Loup to investigate his Quebecois origins is a drunken disaster, nothing at all like the heroic journey related in On the Road. Yet part of What Happened Later's attraction is the homage Robertson pays to Kerouac:

Plus, riding shotgun across the country and back with brand new best pal Cassidy at the wheel gabbing his golden Okie patter from dusk to dawn and Jack realizing Oh my God, this is what literature is supposed to sound like -- one man simply telling another man the simple humiliations and agonies and always-too-late epiphanies that add up to his and everybody else's life -- and not a sack of tricky tropes to be toted out and professionally employed in order to expertly con the reader into imagining a pretty little Book Club approved daydream.

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King Leary

The title suggests tragedy, and indeed lives are ruined and the book ends in blood and death, but the allusion to King Lear is somewhat misleading, for the book was awarded the 1988 Leacock Medal for Humour.

The title is more firmly a reference to Francis Michael Clancy, to whom the book is dedicated, and whose life and nickname (King Clancy) provided a rough template for the character of Percy Leary, a slightly-built professional hockey player known for his speed and grit. Like Clancy, Leary played for Ottawa, was involved in a game during which he played all positions (including goal), and ended up in management with Toronto.

Yet according to the author, King Leary is not about hockey. It's "ultimately about winter, that thing that defines us most eloquently as Canadians." This sentiment is reflected in the epigraph from A Winter's Tale:

A sad tale's best for winter. I have one of sprites and goblins.

The book's humour comes from Leary himself, who has a distinctive grammatically-challenged way of expressing himself: "I amn't sure," he says, and "my peepers is shut." People are "mooks" and "goomers." Toronto's team is the "Maple Leaves."

One of the best things about the book are the magical hockey-playing monks -- the epigraph's "sprites and goblins." And there are plenty of great lines:

Mrs. Ames gives us a look that could crack nuts. His eyes looked like stones left over from digging a grave. I twist him around so good his socks end up on different feet. I was so full of ginger I could make a horse sneeze at thirty paces.

Tretiak: The Legend

I've wanted to read this book by Tretiak for a long time, and was particularly interested in getting a Soviet perspective on Canadian hockey. However, the English version of this book appeared in 1987 when the Soviet Union was still intact, so in many places the book reads like propaganda. Advice given by coaches is often trite or couched in language that reeks of ideology.

When the Soviet team fell behind in a game against the Canadiens, "the coaches suggested that our players skate faster and be more accurate with their passing."

In another game they said, "Lock up your opponents in their zone, force the goalie to make mistakes, fool the defensemen, and most importantly, show your character."

I assume the book was vetted by Soviet censors, making it impossible to know how accurately it reflects Tretiak's views. I have no doubt he is patriotic, so it is possible his words are genuine.

After retiring, he became a political worker with the Central Red Army Sports Club. And though he dismisses as "ridiculous" the suggestion that Soviet athletes were engaged in subversive indoctrination, he also says:

Athletes are, in fact, on the main line of the ideological fight of two social systems. Our athletes have to prove constantly that they are not only the strongest and most talented, but, more importantly, they must let the world know that behind them is the strength of Communist ideals, the all-triumphant truth of Soviet morality.

Hockey Thuggery

A number of Tretiak's complaints while playing in North America are similar to those made by Dryden, Esposito, and others while in Moscow during the 1972 Summit Series -- complaints about food, officiating, and accommodation. But Tretiak's harshest words are reserved for the "gladiator psychology" of NHLers.

The dirty tricks, punches, threats to the referees, and after-the-whistle hits were all tactics that the Canadians demonstrated without any trace of shame. They employ their tested weapon -- dishonest, dirty hockey. [They have] malicious, twisted faces, foaming at the mouth.

Tretiak overstates his case, but there is some truth in what he says. In The Game, Ken Dryden provides a careful analysis of the differences between the Russian and the Canadian styles. Because Russian hockey developed differently, it was able to avoid the limitations of the North American game, where (Dryden says) "violence had been allowed to make sense."

Compliments

Tretiak has many gracious things to say about us. He's particularly complimentary about Bobby Hull: "The legends about him are told for a reason. What a shot!"

Gerry Cheevers is "fearless, skillful and calm."

Bobby Clarke: "To look at him, you'd swear that Bobby was a wanted murderer, but once you got to know him, you realized what a very friendly and kind fellow he was."

Phil Esposito: "...his superb ability to control the puck, his powerful game in front of the net, and his astounding intuition were, as always, distinct Esposito trademarks."

He refers to the Montreal Forum as "a great hockey citadel" and suggests that Russians "could learn from the Canadiens everything that concerns respect for fans and players."

Trivia

Tretiak, like all the Russians, did an incredible amount of dryland training. This included having someone hit tennis balls at him with a racket. During games he watched the eyes of incoming players so intently that he was accused of hypnotizing them.

Before the first game of the Summit Series, Jacques Plante made a surprise visit to give him tips on how to play the Canadian forwards.

He was fascinated by Gerry Cheevers, who smoked a cigar before games, and had a clause in his contract permitting him to drink beer between periods.

He addresses Ken Dryden directly, responding to comments made in Dryden's first book, Face-Off at the Summit. "You're right, Ken. We all had the same feelings..."

The Stanley Cup: "a huge, paunchy, glittering trophy that looks like a Russian samovar."

Retirement

"Vladik" retired in 1984, stating that he never wanted to play in the NHL. "It wouldn't suit me, as an officer and Soviet citizen..." This may or may not be the truth.

The Wikipedia entry on him indicates he may have retired because he was not allowed to go to the NHL, and also because he no longer wanted to play for Tikhonov. It was Tikhonov who pulled Tretiak during an Olympic match against the Americans in Lake Placid (the "Miracle on Ice"), after Tretiak had let in a weak goal at the end of the first period.

In 1987 there was a reunion of the Summit Series players. Tretiak writes:

Now there was no trace of the old antagonism. We had become wise and kind. We looked at one another's aging faces and couldn't hold back the laughter, thinking about what bullies we had been in 1972.

Tretiak is one of the most admired and respected hockey players in the world. He was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1989.

The following year he became the goaltending coach for the Chicago Blackhawks. Among those he tutored are Ed Belfour, Martin Brodeur, and Dominic Hasek. Any goalie wearing number 20 does so as a tribute to Tretiak.

In 2006 he was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal by the Governor General.

He runs the Vladislav Tretiak Elite School of Goaltending in Toronto.

The translation is by Sam and Maria Budman.

The Game

You know what people say about goalies -- they're "different." Ken Dryden certainly is. Imagine the way his teammates saw him. Aloof and introspective, brainy (he's got a law degree!), unusually tall for a player in the 1970s (at 6'4" he was taller than just about everyone else in the league).

He's the only person to win the Conn Smythe trophy (as playoff MVP) before winning the Calder (rookie of the year). After playing two full seasons with the Canadiens, he rejected the contract he was offered and sat out a year. (Players just didn't do that then.) He abruptly retired after a short but brilliant career (seven and a half seasons), during which he backstopped the team to six championships.

He went on to become an Member of Parliament, and made a bid for the leadership of the Liberal party. Think of it, a goalie as PM!

Like its author, The Game is "different." One might have expected a book that recaps at least some of those Stanley Cup wins. But no, it's structured around a week near the end of his final season, when he's made his decision to retire, and takes us through several routine league games.

The book is a couch on which Dryden analyzes himself, his teammates, and the state of the game. He reflects on practices and warmups, pregame chatter ("Gotta play it, might as well win it") and dressing-room gibes ("Hey, you're the guy Plager scored on from the parking lot...").

He muses upon officiating ("like doing spot-checks on New Year's Eve"), and the "NHL theory of violence," and how Gretzky and the Soviets contributed to obstruction and the "dump-and-chase" style.

But he's best when fixing his gaze on those around him: the prankster Lapointe, Shutt "a perfect Shakespearian fool," Phil Esposito a "volume shooter," Don Cherry coaching the Bruins with "a tiny permanent grin on his face, like a ten-year-old kid holding a stink bomb behind his back."

And the brilliant but unlikeable Scotty Bowman whose playing career ended during a breakaway, his skull fractured by the stick of Jean-Guy Talbot, who was chasing him. How ironic that Bowman later coached Talbot, or that a typical pregame harangue by Bowman went like this:

...and that Woods, is there some reason we can't touch that guy? Is there? For crissake, I see Lupien pattin' him on the ass. And Mondou, sniffin' around, 'Hiya Woodsie. How are ya, Woodsie?' You're not playin' with him.

And Dryden's analysis of Larry Robinson:

More skillful with each year, doing more things, stretching himself wider, he has stretched himself thinner. Working hard, he is making more good plays; but, overextending himself, his stride now chopping, his invincibility in question, he is making more bad plays as well. The numbers are still hugely in his favour, but now it is a game of numbers, concrete and measurable, as for everyone else. By exchanging a game he dominated for a larger, more demanding one he cannot dominate, Robinson is no longer a presence.

The Game is earnest and rambling, often insightful, sometimes windy. It's been hailed as the best book about hockey ever written, and is lauded on the back cover by no less a personage than Mordecai Richler. It's one of only two hockey books listed in Sports Illustrated's Top 100 Books of All Time. (The other is Game Misconduct by Russ Conway, about Alan Eagleson.)

First published in 1993, it was reissued in 2003 as a "20th Anniversary Edition" with an additional chapter. The cover photo and most of the 16 pages of photos were taken by Denis Brodeur, father of another famous goalie. One of them shows Dryden sitting in the dressing room with a serene look on his face, cradling the Stanley Cup like a teddy bear.

Midnight Hockey

No one in Canada is better at the combined tasks of writing and hockey than Bill Gaston. Not Margaret Atwood or Michael Ondaatje. Certainly not David Adams Richards, whose memoir Hockey Dreams is subtitled Memories of a Man Who Couldn't Play.

Gaston on the other hand can play -- Junior hockey for the Vancouver Centennials, university hockey for the UBC Thunderbirds, and pro in Europe for a year. He's had his nose split open by Steve Shutt, and his bell rung by Denis Potvin.

He's also been short-listed for the Giller, the G-G, the Ethel Wilson Award; and he's won the Timothy Findley Award and the CBC/Canadian Literary Award.

In other words he's a ringer, a guy who can go top shelf with a puck or a well-crafted sentence.

The book's title refers to the late-night time slots that rec and oldtimer hockey games are given, the earlier times being reserved for kids. In hockey terms an "oldtimer" is someone who's reached the lofty age of 35.

Gaston has played a lot of rec and oldtimer hockey. Some of the teams he's played for are the Stinkhorns, the Old Goats, the Hurry-Kings. The names of these and other teams -- the Fogduckers, the Vasectomites, the Well Hungarians, the Flapping Dondalingers -- provide a clue to the nature of the book.

Humour is paramount. I laughed until tears ran down my face.

Sure, it's guy humour, but even my wife laughed when I read bits to her. But then she's a good sport. We spent our honeymoon in Florida, along with everyone else on my team. We were playing in a tournament.

Hockey has an almost mystical status in this land. The instinct to throw one's arms in the air after scoring a goal is something that Canadians are born with. But there's much more to hockey than scoring and winning. There's the camaraderie off the ice, the dressing room goofiness, the beer, the road trips, the nicknames, the goalies ("men from a distant galaxie").

For me, this was the perfect book to start off the 2nd Canadian Book Challenge -- and not just because it's such a darn good read. Once, as part of Canada Book Day, me and Bill took part in a progressive short story that travelled through each province and territory, with each writer tacking on a section. Sorta like the flip side of the Canadian Book Challenge.

Synchronicity or what?