Reading List: Canadian Literature

So you're interested in Canadian lit. Fantastic! There are few better things to be interested in than the wide, diverse, innovative, prosaic, haunting world of homegrown Canadian authors, doing what they do best: telling stories that branch from Canada to the rest of the world. Here's a short list of recommendations to get you started. All of these books are available at the Hart House Library, just an arm's reach away.

The Sentimentalists -- Johanna Skibsrud

What it's about: The winner of the 2010 Giller Prize, Canada's top literary award. This is a short novel about a woman who learns more about the life and history of her Vietnam veteran father. 

Read this if you like: Poetic, atmospheric stories about fathers, daughters, and lived experiences. 

Find it at Hart House: CF SKI

Scott Pilgrim -- Brian Lee O'Malley 

What it's about: A six-part series. Scott Pilgrim has a pretty great life with a cute girlfriend until the devastating, mysterious Ramona Flowers blows through, and to woo her, he has to defeat her seven evil ex-boyfriends.

Read this if you like: Quirky, geeky graphic novels set in Toronto, and if you were a fan of the movie.

Find it at Hart House: GRA OMA

Design in Canada: Fifty Years from Tea Kettles to Task Chairs -- Rachel Gotlieb and Cora Golden

What it's about: A beautiful, visual non-fiction title about the history of design in Canada, spanning all areas of contemporary product design. Lots of full-page pictures.

Read this if you like: Looking at amazing pictures, Canadian history and art, and of course, design.

Find it at Hart House: CAN GOL 

Come, Thou Tortoise -- Jessica Grant

What it's about: A girl named Audrey and her opinionated tortoise find themselves embroiled in a mystery when Audrey's father has an accident.

Read this if you like: Funny, witty, off-beat fiction with plenty of intelligence that will, nonetheless, make you laugh and cry.

Find it at Hart House: CF GRA 

Kiss of the Fur Queen -- Tomson Highway

What it's about: The story of two Cree brothers and their childhood at residential school, growing up against forces that try to destroy their culture and their identity.

Read this if you like: Powerful, painful, necessary novels about the very real history of First Nations peoples in Canada.

Find it at Hart House: CF HIG

Lullabies for Little Criminals -- Heather O'Neill 

What it's about: Baby is a young girl who lives with her deadbat dad on the streets of Canada, growing up with poverty and trying to deal with it by smashing the walls into adulthood.

Read this if you like: Magnetic coming of age stories that deal with the experiences of impoverished children in urban areas, and stories about that fuzzy boundary between being a child and being an adult.

Find it at Hart House: CF ONE

A Complicated Kindness -- Miriam Toews

What it's about: Nomi Nickel's mother and sister have disappeared from the small Manitoban Mennonite town they live in, and as Nomi deals with issues of abandonment, she comes to understand her own place in her world, or lack thereof. 

Read this if you like: Tender, fiercely sad stories about missing families, and stories about growing up in religious communities. 

Find it at Hart House: CF TOE

- N.S

Featured Book: The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht

Publisher: Random House
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 352 pages
Published: March 2011

The Tiger's Wife is a striped book -- appropriate enough, given its title. Its stripes are the stories contained therein, layered on top of each other, orange over black, black over orange. Set in an unnamed Balkan country during an unnamed war (which resembles the Yugoslav Wars of 1991-1995), there are really three narratives, a trifecta that does, for the most part, come together to form a whole. The first narrative is that of Natalia, a young doctor from a family of doctors, traveling to deliver vaccines to an orphrnate near a village that does not welcome her. The second narrative is that of her recently deceased grandfather, and his encounters with a man who could not die. The third narrative is another piece of her grandfather's history, about how, when hew as a boy growing up in the village of Galina, a tiger escaped from a zoo and terrorized the townsfolk.

I've read an interview with Obreht (who, by the way, is only 26) where she remarked that the novel is a story about doctors and death. I see what she means. Death and war bracket the novel -- large parts of the story are told during war or in the aftermath of war. And yes, all of the narratives are, in a sense, about dying, and about bodies, and about how people process death. The doctor part is interesting too, because all the doctor characters strive against death, fighting it with all the weapons in their arsenal, and yet they know death better than anyone. It can come at the end of a soldier's rifle or the swipe of a tiger's claw.

I have heard complaints that the novel is too opaque and that moving between the three stories never gives the reader a sense of the whole. In some parts, I think, this is true. The ending for me was not as smoothly transitional as the beginning, and I think that in the telling of history, of people's stories, we could have stood to hear more from Natalia. So much of the book is focused on her grandfather's history, that I think she has more to tell us, as a girl who has grown up during war.

These are small complaints, however. The Tiger's Wife is an enigmatic, elegant novel by a ferociously talented young writer. I look forward to whatever Obreht writes next.

- N.S