Featuring: Haruki Murakami, Arthur Conan Doyle, Junot Diaz, Stephen King, and John Reibetanz.

1. Running Man In their summer fiction issue a few weeks ago, the New Yorker published an essay by Haruki Murakami about his simultaneous birth as a novelist and long-distance runner. Like most Murakami, it was really good, but sort of hard to say why. It’s actually an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which Bond Street will publish at the end of this month. What to say that doesn’t break the review embargo? I’ll note that if you enjoyed the essay, you’ll enjoy the book, and you’ll finish it with the same sense of perplexed pleasure with which you ended the excerpt. Murakami’s work is, stylistically at least, deceptively simple, and I always leave his novels a little uncertain of what’s transpired, but very sure that I’ve enjoyed its transpiring. Since the book is non-fiction, what happens within it is a bit clearer than in, say, South of the Border, West of the Sun (seriously—was she like a ghost or something?), but the prose still has its mysteries. For instance, how did it manage to entrance me enough to finish a book about long-distance running, a subject in which I have no interest? The title, of course, is borrowed from Raymond Carver, and Tess Gallagher is thanked within for permission. Not thanked, however, is Horace Silver, though he should be—Murakami’s cover borrows and adapts the running man from Silver’s semi-excellent 1972 Blue Note LP In Pursuit of the 27th Man (part of which is pictured above). (more…)

Surely Biblioasis, the small independent press run out of Emeryville, Ontario, is among the bravest entities in Canadian literature. This spring, after all, their list contained not one but two books of critical essays. One would be risk enough. Two is sort of admirably crazy. Fortunately for them, though, both books are very good, and I say that not just because both authors are contributors to The Walrus. Charles Foran’s Join the Revolution, Comrade and Stephen Henighan’s A Report on the Afterlife of Culture are excellent in part because their publisher has encouraged their scope to extend beyond the traditional confines of Canadian essay collections. Foran and Henighan are decidedly internationalist in their orientation, and what results are wide-ranging surveys of everything from, in Henighan’s book, Roberto Bolano to Haruki Murakami to Wole Soyinka, and, in Foran’s, from finding memories of Vietnam movies in Hue to searching for quality in Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons. (I’ll put a preemptive plug here for Biblioasis’s new edition of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s collected poems, which I’ve not yet bought, but sort of has to be good, no?) (more…)

Last weekend, as I was shuffling around BookExpo Canada, searching for catalogs and in need of fresh air, I came across the booth of Ten Speed Press, who really are a top-notch operation. I was drawn by what appeared to be a finished copy of Grant Achatz’s new Alinea cookbook. It turned out to be a dummy copy, though one that in its size and beautiful dust jacketry gave an idea of how impressive this book will be. The Ten Speed rep had a black and white galley of the book, though, and I can report that the recipes are aesthetically stunning and practically impossible for the average home chef. (Apparently by buying the book you’ll have access to a website that will let you learn from Grant & Co., which sounds to me like another way to feel inadequate. To learn more about Achatz, you should read D.T. Max’s very good New Yorker profile from a few weeks ago.) (more…)

In what is surely one of the worst ideas in recent cinematic history, Warner Brothers has asked Guy Ritchie to direct a new Sherlock Holmes movie. Making it even worse? The script is to be based on a comic book, and both of these iterations are to focus, Variety tells us, on our hero’s physical side in an attempt “reinvent Holmes and sidekick Dr. John H. Watson.” According to information shared by Lionel Wigram, the film’s producer, the new Holmes will “be more adventuresome and take advantage of his skills as a boxer and swordsman.” The Guardian headline really says it all: “Guy Ritchie takes on ‘all-action’ Sherlock Holmes.” I like to think that those scare quotes are some British copy editor’s way of saying, “Hey, listen everybody: how dumb is this?!”

In effect, greenlighting this project is like saying that it would be really cool to make a movie about Hulk Hogan’s recent dalliance with modal logic. It’s not inconceivable that the Hulkamaniac is into the whole possible worlds thing, but it certainly isn’t his day job. The fact that Holmes is physically agile and has a history of boxing makes him a rounder character, but it doesn’t define that roundness; while I would find Hogan more interesting if he had some serious thoughts about David Lewis, I would never expect—nor would I want—it to be more essential to his character than, say, the time he body-slammed Andre the Giant while defending the world title at Wrestlemania III.

The last time I wrote about Holmes, my focus was on the brilliant new Penguin series of paperbacks. While thinking about the man in preparation for writing that, it occurred to me that the notion of order is central to the Holmes world. I didn’t mention it in the post, because it seemed sort of self-evident; the books and stories are based on the possibilities of reasoning, which is an inherently structural act. While Holmes may have distracting tendencies—his occasionally debilitating drug addiction, say—the idea of order is at the centre of his capabilities.

Which is why this news is particularly terrible. Setting aside the fact that the direction of the film stands in distinct opposition to any reasonable interpretation of what is essential to the character (and ignoring the fact that it’s a crass attempt to make a biceps-and-zingers superhero out of a character who is already a superhero, though of a different kind), the idea of Guy Ritchie helming this picture is ridiculous. Ritchie’s style—frantic, frenetic, jittery, annoying—is the antithesis of the masterly calm that defines Holmes’s personal world, and the precision with which Conan Doyle relates the events that happen within it.

But I suppose it’s all tied up in that word ‘reinvention’ To truly reinvent the character, it seems, they’ll need to change not only his fundamental nature, but the way he relates to what is fundamental to his world. So perhaps Guy Ritchie and his MTV editing team are exactly the right choice. Because if you’re going to kill an idol, you might as well make doubly sure he’s dead.

Lincoln Hall’s new book, Dead Lucky: Life After Death on Mount Everest, is pretty much what it sounds like: an account of how Hall, who had nearly reached the summit of Everest in 1984, suffered a cerebral edema and was left high on the mountain during his second attempt in May 2006. Presumed dead after hours of immobility and non-responsiveness, he was found alive the next morning having miraculously survived the night with no shelter, oxygen, water, or warmth. As far as things to have done go, that’s pretty impressive.

Almost as impressive is the book itself. Hall, an Australian magazine editor by trade who has been climbing for decades, recounts his story in elegant prose and with a generosity of spirit that comes not only from his very nature, but also his dedication to Tibetan Buddhism, a spiritual orientation that infuses the narrative with calmness, kindness, and a thoughtful precision. The end result is a sort of existential account of a near tragedy, vastly more meditative than the typical climbing yarn, and ultimately more rewarding.

I met with Lincoln Hall earlier this week.

Jared Bland: Toward the end of the book, you ask yourself how it is that you could still be alive, but realize that you don’t think you’ll know until you’ve recovered properly and had time to explore it. It’s been just over two years since these events. Do you have a better idea of what happened? (more…)

I’ve been meaning for some time to write some posts about short stories. Not so much the idea of the short story, but reviews of individual stories themselves, considered as stand-alone works of art instead of as a part of a collection or larger body of work. With tomorrow’s tonight’s launch of Pasha Malla’s first collection, The Withdrawal Method, now seemed like the right time to start. I didn’t know which story to choose, so I emailed Malla, and he suggested “Big City Girls,” which is the piece that he says has been most on his mind since completing the book.

“Big City Girls” is the story of Alex, age seven, who stays home from school on a snow day with his fifth-grader sister and a few of her friends. They’re bored kids, and without much to do after building a snow fort, they retire to the living room to play Clue and have a conversation that eventually turns to sex. Or at least sex in the unknowing way that kids of that age talk about it—“Maybe Miss Scarlet and Professor Plum were having fun with the candlestick, said Shayna…In the Secret Passageway! screamed Heather”—which is to say with imprecision and anxiety. (more…)

Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford’s new book, Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China, is one of the best cookbooks I’ve ever read. Duguid and Alford have compiled twenty-five years of personal history, observation, photographs, travel narratives, and recipes into a collection that illustrates just how rich and varied non-Han Chinese culture is today, and just how endangered. In a year when China is in the news more than ever, the book serves as a reminder that the country is more than its capital city. I spoke with Jeffrey and Naomi a few weeks ago at the Random House Canada offices.

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Your own personal history is woven throughout this book and one gets the sense that these areas have been important to you for a long time. So why this book now? Why wasn’t it, say, your second book? What has changed politically, or in your own experiences, that made you want to write this book now?

Naomi: Well the ones out earlier, we put bits of those things in them—in our first book, Flatbreads and Flavors, we managed to squeeze Tibet in there, there was a lot of Xinjiang in there, and we started the book with flatbreads from Kashgar. But even now on our sixth book, we think this is lucky to be able to write about somewhere that is relatively so far out. So to have a contract even after a track record of six…that’s got to be our answer, partly. This has always been an interest of ours.

Jeffrey: in fact, a long time ago, Naomi wanted to do a book on Tibet. And I kept saying no way in the world…

N:…will anybody ever publish it. Stones and Silk, I thought. That would be a title.

J: Our editor was working on our second book with us, the one on rice, and she said, “you know, I’m okay to have my feet in the mud…”

N: “…in the rice paddies…”

J: “But please not over my knees.” (more…)

Much like Damien Hirst, Bigfoot considers his work “No dark, just misunderstood and ahead of time”

(Much like Damien Hirst, Bigfoot considers his work “No dark, just misunderstood and ahead of time.”)

This month marks the release of the third book in a series of collaborative memoirs by Bigfoot and Walrus contributing illustrator Graham Roumieu. Bigfoot: I Not Dead is a tender yet violent addition to Bigfoot’s ongoing self-exploration project, sure to please both fans of his previous work and those who aren’t yet familiar with him but enjoy furry creatures, mutilation, poetry, existential anxiety, and/or hard-learned life lessons.

Readers in Toronto should be sure to attend the book’s launch, which takes place Thursday night at the Gladstone Hotel as part of Pages Books’ “This Is Not a Reading Series.” Michael Winter, Nathan Whitlock, Douglas Bell, The Walrus’s own Jeremy Keehn, and others will speak about what Bigfoot means to them. Second floor, 7.30pm, free.

I reached Bigfoot last week at his home in the woods.

How has your life changed since your first book came out?

Bigfoot hang dirty laundry on line for all to see. Some things just needed be aired out on wind of disclosure. Others so heavy shit-encrusted that they fall off of line into mud and now scrutiny birds pick bits of corn out of it and neighbor steal and put on Ebay. Not totally regret writing books but wish sometime to go back to old technique of whisper secrets into hollow stump. (more…)

“To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.”
–Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”

It is somewhat of a consensus around the Walrus office, or at least whichever part of that office Paul Isaacs and I happen to be in at a given time, that Sherlock Holmes is tops. This is one of those hyperbolic statements that sounds playful and ridiculous, but which is not. I believe some call this Birony.

The truth is that Sherlock Holmes is just about the best company a person could have. (He’s also a great instructor in the art of reasoning; were we all to study at his feet, the world would be a better, and slightly cooler, place.) But Holmes has had the misfortune of what we might call the public domain treatment. This phenomenon happens when a book is no one’s property and thus anyone can release it in basically any form at any time. This leads to two things: 1) a wider, often less-expensive dissemination of the texts, which in the case of Holmes is excellent, for people tend to enjoy the stories, but which in the case of Hard Times is certainly pernicious and potentially disastrous to the book’s public conception (average twenty-first century reader: not so much with the activist Dickens); and 2) a proliferation of ugly design (see: everything by Dover Thrift Editions) which is often so prevalent as to render the book forever hideous in the reading public’s mind. (I should note that it’s great that Dover makes very affordable books, and I don’t criticize their enterprise there. I’m not even asking them to make the books beautiful. Just less ugly.) (more…)

This past November, when he won the National Book Award for his novel Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson couldn’t make it to the ceremony because he was in Iraq reporting a piece for Portfolio. At the time it seemed like strange news. But one can only imagine that, after spending years chained to a monstrous novel, the man felt like a vacation.

As Gregory Cowles recounted the other day on Paper Cuts, the New York Times books blog, Johnson made his absence up to New York with a recent reading and Q&A at the New School. I have to assume that anyone who’s ever read an interview with Johnson would show up mostly for the reading, as he’s notoriously taciturn during question periods. (A favourite of mine from the a National Book Award-sponsored interview last fall: Bret Anthony Johnston: Were there moments in your writing process where you worried the book wouldn’t work? If so, how did you press on? Denis Johnson: Well, I’ve never thought about this before, but now that you ask, it occurs to me I don’t have much interest whether any of my books work or not.) (more…)

Exclusive Edward Burtynsky photos

(Backstage at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, photograph by Edward Burtynsky.)

In the sixth grade, I played Lysander in the Iles Elementary School’s presentation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was as professional a production as you’d imagine it to be. The fairies danced to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”; Hermia, Helena, Demetrius, and I wore pyjamas (it was nighttime, you see, and we were very sleepy); and Christie Walden’s memorable Titania looked like a twelve-year-old cross between the Bride of Frankenstein and Diana Ross on the cover of Why Do Fools Fall in Love?

I wasn’t cut out to be an actor, and it was my second and final appearance on stage. (The year before, I’d played a senile mountie in a show about an old folks’ home. My job was to intermittently wander across the stage singing, “I love the North.” Video survives.) In fact, I’ve grown to vaguely dislike the theatre. I prefer my artifice in the form of anapests and enjambments, and I do not like being seated in a crowded room. In high school, I tried to avoid the theatre kids, and was largely successful. I went to one play in university, and only because a friend was playing Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, a role that I knew (from reading, not seeing) that I liked. While she was good, I enjoyed the version in my head better. (more…)

It’s sort of a shame that Torsten Krol is best known for the question of whether or not he’s real. He lives in Australia, and, as the first page of Callisto reminds you, nothing else is known about him. This, of course, has led to speculation about his identity, with rumours swirling that he may actually be some other, more famous writer using a pseudonym. All of which is pretty un-germane, actually, and distracts from the reception of his new book, which is worth reading for reasons entirely unrelated to the identity of its author. So good thing we got that mystery out of the way, no?

Callisto is the story of Odell Deefus, a lumbering hunk of corn-fed Wyoming, a man with limited mental capacities and who is so convinced Condoleezza Rice’s merits as the woman of his dreams that he carries a picture of her in his pocket. It’s also the story of US paranoia, a cartoonish, kitchen-sink satire that embroils its hero in unending manifestations of an American anxiety about terrorism in particular and Islamic fundamentalism in general. Since one of the book’s pleasures is in discovering its curveball plot points and increasingly preposterous developments, I don’t want to ruin it by getting into a detailed plot summary here. (I’d avoid reading reviews, which will doubtless be forthcoming in Canada, for this reason; more than most books, their summaries will ruin this one.)

The novel succeeds on the basis of Odell’s narration, which is charmingly simple and entirely engrossing. It only fails, in fact, when it tries to be too simple by introducing malapropisms that are jarring given the subtlety with which his mental limitations are explored elsewhere. Imagine the Forrest Gump of Winston Groom’s novel wandering not through a greatest historical hits of the second half of the twentieth century but a small Kansas town where he mows lawns, drinks a lot of Captain Morgan, and notes to everyone who will listen that he has read The Yearling sixteen times. (As someone who is interested in both alcohol and the assigning of definite articles to nouns that don’t require them, Odell’s predilection for “the Captain” really resonated with me.)

By offering Odell as a sort of conduit between us and society’s reactions to the idea of terrorism, Krol succeeds in making us think not only about that society, but about how we think about it. And since Odell intends to enlist in the Army and remains a relatively unquestioning believer in his country’s trajectory, we end up thinking not just about how we think about that society, but about how we think about those who support that society’s more militaristic endeavors. In other words, Odell’s mental limitations mean that we can’t automatically rely on the narrator’s understanding of his world as we might in another novel, and what results is a sort of meta contemplation of the paranoid state and those who support it. It would be too simplistic to say that Krol indicts this mindset by aligning it with a narrator who is borderline retarded. Lots of the smarter people in this book believe in the ultimate benevolence of the police state Callisto’s America has become, too. But in giving us Odell Deefus, Krol complicates things with simplicity, and in an age where black and white can easily become too sharpened, a little complexity is not a bad thing.

In our April issue we published a poem called “Two Cowboys” by Elise Partridge, a poet from Vancouver. I was the first person at the magazine to read the poem, and I immediately fell in love with its clarity, subtle complexity, and power. Last month, “Two Cowboys” reappeared as one of the poems in Partridge’s excellent new collection, Chameleon Hours, published by the House of Anansi.

On the occasion of her new book, I asked Elise a few questions about her work and new poems.

What attracts you to the lyric mode?

I think it’s the mode that best suits my gifts and inclinations; in any case, it was the one I was most drawn to attempt, and pursue. That said, in the future I’d like to incorporate more dramatic elements into some of my poems, for example perhaps try to write monologues for different voices. I also regularly get inspiration from short stories and would like to write more poems that include narration, however compressed. (more…)

This week finds me in the middle of both a production cycle and a terrible cold, so I do not have the time or capacity to write the essay I’d intended to write about Samantha Power’s excellent new book, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World. I had planned, you see, to point out how it’s a very good guide to understanding some of the thought behind Barack Obama’s remarkable foreign-policy philosophy, of which Power was an influential architect, and I was going to discuss Spencer Ackerman’s fine piece on that philosophy. I was going to note how unfortunate it is that the book’s release has been overshadowed by the fallout from Power calling Hillary Clinton a monster, which isn’t to say that it’s okay to call people monsters, but that one should at least wait until one’s book tour is over before doing it. If, that is, you want to talk about your book on that tour rather than your public political statements. (more…)

Michael Pollan’s new book, In Defense of Food, has an air of summation about it, drawing on years of research to make an argument that is both profoundly radical and embarrassingly simple. In Pollan’s estimation, many of the epidemics facing our corner of Western society have little to do with, say, the ratio of saturated to unsaturated fat in our diet. Instead, the problem is the nature of our diet as a whole, and the fact that we eat way too much of it: too much red meat, too many refined carbohydrates and sugars (usually including an array of chemical enhancements) and too little of everything else.

Partly to blame for this is the rise of nutritionism, a particular branch of food science that has spent decades casting about in an attempt to blame some evil or other for the reality that many of us are overweight. Pollan’s book is as much a defense of food as it is an indictment of the mindset that has seen us reduce food from being nutritious to being comprised of particular nutrients. This tendency, Pollan argues, lies behind our societal fetishization of the latest black-balled ingredient, a focus that allows us to ignore actual nutrition, which would just tell us to eat more vegetables and fruit, and less food overall.

In Defense of Food is a small book in size, but its scope is massive: a comprehensive study of the ways in which, over the last fifty years or so, scientists and journalists have manipulated what and how we eat. Pollan also looks forward in its call to common sense. “Eat food,” Pollan advises. “Not too much. Mostly plants.” Simple advice, and geared less to a diet fad than a new lifestyle. The book’s overwhelming success indicates its message is being well received. And let’s hope so, for as Pollan suggested in our interview, as more and more of us “vote with our forks,” casting the ballot will become easier, and more delicious.

I spoke with Michael Pollan last week, by phone from his office in Berkeley, California. (more…)