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?

The Dog of the South

When Ray Midge’s wife, Norma, runs off with her former husband, Guy Dupree, Ray sets out after them -- not so much to reclaim Norma but to get back his Ford Torino and his credit cards.

The chase, if it can be called that, is a rather desultory affair that leads eventually to Mexico and Belize.

Along the way Ray encounters Dr. Reo Symes, a rogue of the same ilk as Dupree, and a bail bondsman named Jack Wilkie. All are typical Portis characters, eccentric, self-absorbed, and ineffectual.

Ray is a sweet oddball, while Dupree and Symes are pathetic con men. Here’s Symes reflecting on an earlier incident in his medical career:

"A patient named J.D. Brimlett developed osteomyelitis,” said the doctor. “That was the claim anyway. I’m convinced he already had it. He had everything else. Emphysema, glaucoma, no adrenal function, you name it. Two little hard dark lungs like a pair of dessicated prunes. "He belonged in a carnival instead of an arthritis clinic. The world’s sickest living man. No blood pressure to speak of and you couldn’t find a vein to save your ass. Renal failure on top of everything else. The Mayo brothers couldn’t have pulled that chump through, but no, it was my zinc that killed him. A class B irritant poison, they said. "I should have screened him out. I should have closed my eyes and ears to his suffering and sent him on his way. I didn’t do it and I’ve been paying for that mistake ever since. There’s always a son of a bitch like Brimlett hanging around, doing anything to get attention, dying even and just ruining things for everybody else. Do you want it in a nutshell? I was weak. I was soft."

Symes has a broken-down schoolbus named "The Dog of the South," which makes a brief appearance early in the book. Using it as the novel's title suggests that other journeys in the book will end up in a similar state, for the characters themselves are leading broken-down lives.

Charles Portis is a former marine and newspaperman (New York Herald Tribune). He’s written five unusual comic novels: Norwood, True Grit, The Dog of the South, Masters of Atlantis, and Gringos. His gentle portrayal of eccentrics, typified by self-serving monologues and folksy expressions (“in a nutshell”), have made him something of a cult figure.

Unofficial Website

Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy

A self-described “quantum comedy,” this triptych of novels is spread across six parallel universes in a version of the USA called Unistat.

The writing is silly, sexy, and erudite. It uses a mosaic of events in place of a conventional plotline, and peels back layer after layer of reality and conspiracy. It's like an X-rated version of The X-Files scripted by Monty Python.

The trilogy's structure is as follows:

BOOK ONE – THE UNIVERSE NEXT DOOR
Part One – Purity of Essence
Part One – The Universe Next Door

BOOK ONE – THE TRICK TOP HAT
Part One – Stoic and Christian Ejaculations

BOOK ONE - THE HOMING PIGEONS
Part One – Who’s Zelenka?
Part One – Coming to a Head
Part One – Flossing

A large cast of recurring characters shows up in each part (universe) under a different guise. For example, Joe Malik becomes Josephine Malik, and Mountbatten Babbit is variously a scientific advisor to the President, a researcher at Orgasm Institute, and an admiral at Naval Intelligence.

Many of the names provide an indication of the author’s intent: Ms Karrige, Justin Case, Natalie Drest, Bertha Van Ation, Juan Tootreego, Frank Hemeroid, Clem Cotex, Furbish Lousewart, Marvin Gardens, the Mad Fishmonger, Benny “Eggs” Benedict…

A number of characters are motivated by a desire to know “what the hell is going on.” They lecture each other on quantum mechanics, politics, religion, philosophy, and economics. Some eventually come to the conclusion that they are simply characters in a novel.

Other common elements include a disembodied penis, L5 space cities, a computer called the Beast, and the town of Bad Ass, Texas.

The author, Robert Anton Wilson, was a former associate editor at Playboy. He is best known for co-authoring The Illuminatus! Trilogy with Robert Shea. The Schrodinger’s Cat trilogy is a kind of sequel, sharing a number of characters with the previous work.

The Golden Ass

This is a rambling collection of shaggy tales whose unifying thread is Lucius, a young man with a misplaced interest in magic. He seduces a maid named Photis and convinces her to steal a shape-changing ointment used by her mistress to transform herself into a bird.

When Photis brings the wrong stuff he makes an ass of himself, literally, and falls in with bandits, catamite priests, and various other captors. Twice he defends himself by defecating on his tormentors, and narrowly escapes castration, butchering, and a starring role in a sex show.

Occupying a central portion in the book is the tale of Cupid and Psyche. The latter has never seen her husband, who visits her only under cover of darkness. Convinced by her jealous sisters that he is a serpent who must be killed, she lights a lamp while he is asleep and discovers that he is a deity, a beautiful winged man. Cupid flees, and his mother, Venus, exacts retribution. Eventually Jupiter puts an end to the quarrel, and Cupid and Psyche are reunited.

Other tales of greed, cruelty, murder, cuckoldry, and divine meddling are recounted. In an ursine equivalent of the Trojan horse, a bandit named Thrasyleon allows himself to be sewn up in a bear hide to gain admittance to a rich man’s home. Thelyphron’s nose and ears are cut off by witches and replaced with wax replicas.

Miscellaneous Notes

Lucius is rescued by the divine intervention of the Egyptian goddess Isis, who at the time was not a mythological figure in the same sense that Cupid and Psyche are, but actively worshipped throughout the Greco-Roman world.

Romans often diluted their wine with hot water.

Sex is described in mock-heroic terms, either as a wrestling match or form of combat:

"Engage," she said, "and do so bravely. I shall not yield before you, nor turn my back on you. Direct your aim frontally, if you are a man, and at close quarters. Let your onslaught be fierce; kill before you die. Our battle this day allows no respite."

Despite such raunchiness (remarkably vital after 2000 years), I found the book rather shapeless and hard going in places. The combination of magic, gods, and alien culture makes it difficult to understand the author's intentions, and the literary nuances are lost on anyone without a sound knowledge of the classics.

Background

The Golden Ass (aka Metamorphoses, not to be confused with the Metamorphoses of Ovid) is the only Latin novel from the classical period to survive in its entirety. “Its later influence on the vernacular literatures of Europe has been immense,” writes P. G. Walsh, translator of the Oxford University Press edition. Boccaccio imported several of the tales into the Decameron, Bottom is transformed into an ass in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and a scene in which a drunken Lucius carves up three wineskins, mistaking them for ruffians, is replicated in Don Quixote.

The book’s author, Apuleius, was born in present-day Algeria during the 2nd century AD, educated in Carthage and Athens, and resided for a time in Rome. Though he lectured in Greek and Latin, Punic was most likely his native tongue. A Platonist and devotee of Isis, he was once indicted on a charge of magic (employing love-philtres to induce a rich woman into marriage).

The first English translation was by William Adlington in 1566 and is available here, at the Gutenberg Project. Many other translations are available, some fairly literal, others taking liberties to communicate the style and flow of the original.

An informative discussion of the book can be found here.

Hotel Honolulu

The narrator in Hotel Honolulu is a writer "with a hard-to-pronounce name." He grew up in Medford to become a "grumpy traveler in a book that had been a bestseller in the 1970s." He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. He arrived in Hawaii at age 49 having left "a house and a wife and a whole life in London."

Now he is the manager of a hotel, which becomes for him "a house of fiction," a collection of tales about himself, the owner, the staff, and the guests. Many of these stories are lurid – lots of sex and corpses. Some are told in a single chapter, others are more expansive. Unifying them are the evolving and somewhat parallel stories of the owner (he marries a whore) and the narrator (he marries a whore's daughter).

The owner is Buddy Hamstra, nicknamed Tuna, a wealthy foul-mouthed joker who won the hotel in a poker game. One of his favourite pranks is putting dogshit in hair dryers. He says to his latest wife, "I wouldn’t piss up your ass if your guts were on fire." Theroux tempers such crudeness (and there is plenty) with numerous literary references, in particular to Tolstoy ("Tolstoys 'R Us"), Henry James (he "would love Hawaii"), and Stephen King ("a modest talent").

In the end the narrator becomes a beekeeper. It's not too different from being a hotel manager: the staff do all the work.

Miscellaneous Notes

The hotel has 80 rooms, the book 80 chapters. The name of the hotel's bar is Paradise Lost. One of the hotel's signature dishes is Serious Flu Symptoms Chili.

Referring to some of the characters in the novel, the narrator says: "If they had read anything I had written, they would never tell me stories." Some of their names: Clamback, Fishlow, Godbolt, Lionberg, Malanut, Figland, and Kamakawiwo'ole, a 650-lb Hawaiian singer who needs a forklift to get around.

The narrator provides a blurb for a novel by Ruth Jhabvala, upon a request from Jackie Onassis (who, after the death of her second husband, worked as an editor for Viking and Doubleday). Does she represent a royal figure in this beehive of a novel? The Kennedy lineage figures elsewhere in the book.

Leon Edel is a Henry James scholar who grew up in Saskatchewan, attended McGill, and was living in Hawaii at the time of his death in 1997. Theroux makes him a character in the novel. Edel, says the narrator, is "the only person in Hawaii who knew me – and in the most profound and subtle way, through my books, the detailed autobiographical fantasies of my fiction."

Whereas Theroux's travel books are sometimes referred to as "travel novels," Honolulu Hotel, a work of fiction, is semi-autobiographical. Thus, much of his work is about himself. But then what writer's isn't? Theroux does so more provocatively than most.

Theroux is a beekeeper. The brand of honey he produces is called Oceania Ranch Pure Hawaiian Honey.

Excerpt

"Man, he got one big book, howlie bugga." "I never wen see no book." "In he office." "Bugga office?" "Yah. Howlie bugga office. Big book. Hybolical book." "Eh, no easy fo read, yah." "Too much easy for howlie." "Yah." "Yah. Bymbye, da howlie bugga be rascal." "Frikken big rascal."

The book is Anna Karenina. The "howlie bugga" is the narrator. Like Paul Theroux, he is a "frikken big rascal."

Honolulu Star-Bulletin Interview

Gould's Book of Fish

A Novel in 12 Fish

This is an outrageous fictional account of the life of convict artist William Buelow Gould, who in the early part of the 19th century was transported to Van Dieman’s Land (now Tasmania) for stealing a coat.

The Commandant of the penal colony is a felon himself, having appropriated the identity of a dead English lieutenant. He corresponds with the lieutenant’s sister, who later turns out to be a famous English opium-eater. He wears a gold mask to hide his chancre-ridden face, and diverts himself by riding a locomotive around a circular track and gazing at painted vistas provided by Gould.

The Surgeon, who has hopes of being admitted to the Royal Society, enlists Gould to paint fish, and sends barrels of pickled heads to an English phrenologist. When the Surgeon meets an untimely end, his bones get sent to England too, resulting in a comic scientific mixup.

Gould becomes obsessed with fish. He confuses the people around him with the fish he is painting. He lives in a saltwater cell. He turns into a fish. His book finds its way into the hands of a 20th century purveyor of fake antique furniture named Sid Hammet. Sid turns into a fish.

Each of the 12 chapters is named after a fish and accompanied by a beautiful reproduction from the real William Gould. In the hardcover version there are magnificently marbled endpapers, which resemble a tidepool, and ink colour varies by chapter, reflecting the handmade ink that Gould himself is using. The writing is ornate and grotesque:

As I bob about my cell now I think back on it, we were not surprised when we felt upon us as an implacable hatred the malignant stare of that unholy army of the persecuted—filthy little clawscrunts & half-starved wretches, their pus-filled eyes poking like buttercups out of scaled scabby faces, their misshapen backs hacked & harrowed out of any matural form by endless applications of the Lash; brawn-fallen, belly-pinched wrecks of men bent & broken long before their time, the one I thought the oldest only thirty-two years of age.

This is an entertaining, though at times mystifying, recursive fish story.

Marbled endpapers

Historical Note

Several times the novel mentions Colonel Arthur, the Governor of Van Dieman’s Land. He was recalled in 1836 and the following year installed as Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada. Arthur’s replacement was Sir John Franklin, who governed until 1843, when he was removed from power without warning. Stung by this disgrace, Franklin set out two years later on his final expedition from which no one survived.

The book concludes with a doctored biographical note on Gould. His real bio can be found here.

Cubaism

At Biran she knelt before the shrine where the great man had been educated, but not for the reason the soldier thought. She'd been feeling unwell since joining the convoy at Guardalavaca.  Perhaps it was the bilious colours of her hotel, a clunky Soviet-built affair in the Brutalist style. Or the memory of an American Airlines jet at Holguin, parked next to a sign that said, "Socialismo o muerte."  The soldier, standing in the shade of a tree with strangely geometrical five-sided fruit, shifted his rifle restlessly.  Would he shoot if she threw up?

"He had relatives here."
"Well, it's where he was born."
"No, not him.  He was a communist, you know."
"Of course, he was, but what kind? Analytic or synthetic?"
"You're thinking of someone else."
"Orphist, then. He was elected, right?"

"So we're off on an adventure," she said, climbing into the SUV.