Blaise on a Plane

This morning the inimitable Margaret Atwood did a guest blog for The Huffington Post, where she commented on her favourite places to read. Now the where is pretty cool: on a plane, sans email, sans phone (or in days gone by, sans electricity--seems there's a relationship between kerosene & concentration? Gas lamps and social obliviousness? #heygradstudents! #futureMAthesis!). Still, it's the what of it that's got me hooked. Yes that's right: "What I last read on a plane," she declares, "was The Meagre Tarmac, a group of stories by Clark Blaise, of which I am writing a review." If that didn't light up the Bibliomanse for the past hour! Not everyone would read a book so-titled in the air--sounds like tempting fate to me. Thanks to MA & a happy Thursday to everyone!

The Meagre Tarmac on the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize

All of us here at Biblioasis are proud to announce that Clark Blaise was named among the five finalists for the Rogers Writers' Trust Prize For Fiction this morning for his wonderful collection The Meagre Tarmac. Finding ourselves in Toronto following Ray Robertson's glorious Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live launch, we headed to the Rogers' announcement at Ben McNally's and we nearly jumped for joy when the first words by the announcer turned out to be "exploring the places where tradition, innovation, culture and power meet with explosive force...." At that moment, no words could have sounded more beautiful.

Heartfelt thanks to the jurors for this: Rabindranath Maharaj, Emma Donoghue and Margaret Sweatman, and warm congratulations to the rest of the authors and their publishers:

Michael Christie. The Beggar's Garden (Harper Collins)
Patrick deWitt. The Sister's Brothers. (Anansi)
Esi Eduygan. Half-Blood Blues (Thomas Allen)
Dan Vyleta. The Quiet Twin. (Harper Collins)

for more information on the Award and the shortlist, please go here.

To see my shaky iPhone video of the first 16 seconds of the announcement, please click below. (I had to put my phone to clap, which ended that.)

Michael Bryson Reviews The Meagre Tarmac

Over at his blog Michael Bryson has offered up a rave review of Clark Blaise's The Meagre Tarmac, nominated Tuesday for a Giller Award. Here's how it starts:

Masterpiece. That's a big word. In 20 years of writing book reviews I don't think I've ever used it, but I'm throwing the dart at Clark Blaise's new short story collection, The Meagre Tarmac(Biblioasis, 2011).



Primarily a short story writer, Blaise has often explored the period of this upbringing and his multiple identities and senses of self. He has also been an administrator of writing programs and a notable essayist and non-fiction author. He is currently the President of the Society for the Study of the Short Story.

...

The eleven short stories in The Meagre Tarmac continue Blaise's interest in the social construction of identity. This time, however, his characters are not exploring the two solitudes of North America's English/French divide. The characters in this book are nearly all Indo-American. The two solitudes on display here are the East and West. Also, cultural tradition versus liberal capitalism.

Post-Obama, are we post-racial? Blaise's book argues emphatically, no. But it's a no that is dense with complication.

In an earlier age, this book would be a lightening rod for an "appropriation of voice" debate. How can this white dude write from within the perspective of the Indo-American population? And he does it over and over, in precise detail, and so well!

Clearly, the author has experience of Indo-American culture through his in-laws, but (more importantly) he has brought to it a lifetime of experience, a lifetime of thinking through precise cultural differences, a lifetime of mastering the short story.

And it is a mastery, here, that ought to be celebrated. And read. And studied.

We, of course, couldn't agree more. For the whole review, well worth reading, please go here. (And sorry about the mustard colour highlighting: can't seem to steal from Bryson's blog without it. )

A Georgia Straight Profile & Review of Clark Blaise's The Meagre Tarmac

Charles Demers gives us one of the best combined profiles/reviews yet:

In the ’70s and ’80s, when readers were first getting to know the essays, memoirs, and, perhaps most importantly, the short fiction of Clark Blaise, the author’s idiosyncratic biography dovetailed with many of the political preoccupations of the time. Half Québécois, half Anglo-Canadian, and raised mostly in the United States, Blaise wrote stories offering insights for a North America fixated on economic continentalization and the future of Quebec. But from almost the very beginning, along with the cultures of his birth and upbringing, there was also the vivid presence of the culture he married into: India and its diaspora. Since 1963, Blaise has been married to Indo-American author Bharati Mukherjee, with whom he has two grown children.

“India was, initially at least, the great ‘other’ in my life,” Blaise told theGeorgia Straight by telephone from New York. “India is decidedly not anything that was part of my upbringing, or part of my experience, or part of my preparation. I really fell into it the way one should fall into it, you know—through love.”

Over the years, in the course of visits to the country, time spent living there, and immersion in family life, the “other” became an integral part of Blaise’s already hybridized identity.

“Indian standards of artistry, and Indian standards of humanity, and Indian standards of love, and of family, devotion, commitment, stand for me as the standard for how one should behave,” he explained.

In his wonderful new collection of interconnected short stories, The Meagre Tarmac(Biblioasis), Blaise introduces a rich cast of characters divided spiritually, physically, and economically between India and North America.

“I really didn’t feel I had to mould them much at all. They seemed to be precast, as actors waiting for their cue. They were just sort of standing around the wings.…It was almost a matter of just naming them, and then seeing who came out,” Blaise said with a laugh.

For the rest, please go here.

Clark Blaise & Bharati Mukherjee Launch in Toronto on Monday, June 6th

I'll be taking the Porter into Toronto tomorrow for one of the key Biblioasis launches of the year: Clark Blaise's launch of The Meagre Tarmac at the Dora Keogh at 141 Danforth Ave in Toronto at 7 pm. So any Toronto-area Biblioasis-o-philes: please, please, please come. You won't be disappointed.

The event will also serve as the launch for Bharati Mukherjee's latest novel Miss New India.

Books will be sold by Ben McNally.

See you there!

Phil Marchand Reviews The Meagre Tarmac

Just in from BEA in New York, an exciting if absolutely exhausting stretch away from the office, of which more anon. But I wanted to draw your attention to today's Post Review of Clark Blaise's The Meagre Tarmac (of which more anon.) Phil Marchand starts:

The Meagre Tarmac, a collection of short fiction by Clark Blaise, is a naked instance of appropriation of voice — a literary felony justified in this case by the results. If you’re going to appropriate someone’s voice, you better know how you want that voice to sound, and Blaise has spent his life and his career tuning his ear to foreign rhythms. Born in North Dakota of a French Canadian father and English Canadian mother, he grew up in various locales, mostly in the United States, and then spent 12 years teaching in Montreal with his wife, the Calcutta-born novelist Bharati Mukherjee. After a brief stint in Toronto, he and Mukherjee moved back to the U.S., where they have remained since. In 1989, he became director of the International Writing School at the University of Iowa.

Enriched by experience, knowledge of variegated literatures and personal contacts, Blaise’s fiction spans the globe, exploring themes of diaspora, rootlessness and cultural identity. Two great historic cultural shifts in particular drive his work, the migration of French Canadians on this continent, and the struggle between tradition and modernity in contemporary India. The latter is the basis of The Meagre Tarmac, a sorrowful chorus of voices, men and women trying to bridge distances between India and the U.S.

To read the whole review, please go here.

Waiting for Romesh

So you haven't yet picked up Clark Blaise's brilliant The Meagre Tarmac? Well, Douglas Glover's Numero Cinq is going to let you test-drive one of the stories, one of my favourites in the collection, Waiting for Romesh. Douglas introduces the story this way:

Meet Cyrus Chutt Chutneywala of Baroda, Gujarat, waiting for a friend in the the Factory Tavern on Andy Warhol Square in Pittsburgh. His friend, Romesh, calls the bar to let Chutt know he’ll be late and the waitress inadvertently hits the speaker phone and public address switch and lets the entire clientele know she has a hard time getting past that name, Chutneywala. Thus begins Clark Blaise’s comic story “Waiting For Romesh” from his brand new collection The Meagre Tarmac, just out from Biblioasis.

Clark is an old friend (dating back to the early 1980s and dg’s Iowa Writers Workshop experience) who once made the mistake of inviting dg to stay the night. Clark and his wife, Bharati Mukherjee, were sharing an appointment at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs and living in palatial splendour in a huge house on Circular Street with an octagonal carriage house and mistress apartment in back. DG somehow managed to stretch that night into three months (this was in the days of dg’s impoverished apprenticeship, um, actually, he is still an impoverished apprentice), the walking definition of a Horrific Guest. Clark moved away, dg stayed in the house til it was sold. He wrote his story “Dog Attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon” in the little glassed in conservatory.

Clark Blaise is brilliant story writer and memoirist, intelligent, cosmopolitan, a master of point of view. He has lived multiple lives and written about all of them, from his impoverished childhood in Florida, Pittsburgh and Winnipeg to his extended sojourns in India and his long and eminent teaching career. He is the author of 20 books of fiction and nonfiction. He has taught writing and literature at Emory, Skidmore, Columbia, NYU, Sir George Williams, UC-Berkeley, SUNY-Stony Brook, and the David Thompson University Centre. He has received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2003), and in 2010 was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. Nowadays, he divides his time between New York and San Francisco, where he lives with his wife, Bharati Mukherjee.

To read 'Romesh', please go here.

The Winnipeg Free Press Reviews The Meagre Tarmac

Saturday witnessed the second rave review for Clark Blaise's The Meagre Tarmac in three days, with Dave Williamson writing, in part:

CLARK Blaise, born in the United States but acclaimed years ago as a CanLit star, has produced a collection of new short stories, his first in almost 20 years.

A master of showing how clashing cultures affect his characters, Blaise offers 11 engrossing tales that involve people from India finding success but not necessarily happiness in America

...

As Blaise explained in his Selected Essays (2009), his itinerant Canadian father moved the family all over the eastern U.S., causing Blaise to feel like a "resident alien." Blaise's keen awareness of cultural differences (city to city, Canada to U.S., Quebec to the American Midwest) was further honed by his marriage to the India-born writer Bharati Mukherjee.

Back in 1977, Blaise and Mukherjee published Days and Nights in Calcutta, a two-part book in which he and then she gave an account of their one year living in her homeland. Now, all these years later, Blaise's insight into life in India has matured to the extent that he can feel comfortable writing from the Indian immigrant's point of view, despite the fact that he has spent most of his recent life in America.

The Meagre Tarmac (the title refers to the humble airports from which most of Blaise's protagonists emigrate) shows a veteran storyteller at the peak of his powers.

For the entire review please go here.

The Montreal Gazette REVIEWS Clark Blaise's The Meagre Tarmac

The first of what I hope will be many reviews of Clark Blaise's new short story collection The Meagre Tarmac appeared today in The Montreal Gazette. I'll have a lot more to say about this collection later -- hopefully later this week -- but for now I'll leave you in Ian McGillis's capable hands:

The Meagre Tarmac

By Clark Blaise

Biblioasis, 165 pages, $19.95

``Sociological anomalies.'' The term appears on the first page of Clark Blaise's new book, used by a Russian-American graduate student to describe a generation of South Asian immigrants in North America, a group marked by its disproportionately high rate of professional success as much as its disinclination to identify itself as a community.

Double-edged as they are, the words would serve well as an alternate title for this unified - if not strictly linked, certainly loosely interwoven - collection of stories. Blaise finds a multitude of ways to show the human implications behind a dry academic designation, and the toll that never quite belonging can take.

Blaise was born in North Dakota to French-Canadian and Anglo-Canadian parents, and has lived and worked in both the United States and Canada. That neither country claims him as its own may partly account for why he's not as widely read as the standard of his work clearly merits: anthologists and canon- compilers never seem quite sure where to slot him.

But it may be that very not-quite-here, not-quite-there perspective that gives Blaise's writing its distinguishing observer's clarity. Pittsburgh Stories and Montreal Stories are indispensable collections set in cities of which Blaise has extensive first-hand knowledge; in The Meagre Tarmac, he takes his flair for character and social chronicle a step farther, in the process achieving a rare feat of cross-cultural empathy.

One of the first things you notice about Blaise's Indo-Americans is that, by any conventional material marker, they are doing very well. The closest thing to a failure among his protagonists is Vivek Waldekar, subject of that earnest graduate student's research, and even he is solidly middle class, with a daughter who's set to become the youngest student ever to attend Stanford. But all is far from well in Vivek's world. His family is in revolt: his wife openly contemptuous, his academically gifted daughter shockingly precocious in other ways too, Vivek himself ridden with guilt over a long-ago sexual dalliance and the memory of the sacrifices his father made for him. Here is one culture transplant that hasn't taken hold.

Most of the subsequent stories feature people whose road has been smoother than Vivek's, the drama in their lives arising less from any sense of looming disaster than from more subtle forms of culture clash and self-definition adjustment. A Hollywood star, a Goan literary editor, an eligibly single banker who seeks an Indian bride despite all his notions of having transcended tradition, an IT magnate thinking of taking his American-gained wealth back to India's needy - these are super-achievers, highly educated, able and willing to articulate all the nuances of the delicate identity dance in which they're engaged, but prone to occasional trip-ups nonetheless. Reassuringly, they're also able to laugh at themselves and how they're seen, as when one man archly remarks, ``It is my experience in the West that Indian men, afraid to press their opinions or exert their presence, are often perceived as soulful.''

Blaise's writing has always been marked by its sharply detailed focus on how place shapes people and vice versa, a strength on especially trenchant display in The Quality of Life. The aforementioned actor recalls his schooling as a child in 1960s Montreal, where ``The purpose of French instruction in the Protestant schools appeared to be inoculation against the local usage.'' Later he reports his parents' comments on their subsequent Canadian experience: ``Toronto was nice, they said, but rather anti-Indian in a crude, working-class, British sort of way - although the absence of French was compensation.'' (Blaise lived in Montreal for several years in the 1960s and '70s, teaching creative writing at Sir George Williams, and later, Concordia University.) Canadian race attitudes as seen through the eyes of Indian immigrants who in turn are seen through the eyes of an American writer with French-Canadian roots and an Indian writer wife (Bharati Mukherjee) - this is a rich stew, and these stories are full of such multi-layered moments.

The Meagre Tarmac might have been rounded out with one or two stories of the less accomplished: hopeful scholarship stars who couldn't cope, dropped out, ended up stranded in dead-end jobs bearing the brunt of their minority status in ways their successful compatriots haven't had to. Such things do happen. But Blaise gets his chosen subjects so right that it's far better to applaud what's there than to regret what isn't. Add the non-showy way he ties things together - scenarios presented from dual points of view, figures disappearing only to pop up, years older, in other stories, characters bumping against each others' lives in surprising ways - and what Blaise has created is a collection greater than the sum of its formidable parts.

Story Hour: Clark Blaise & Bharati Mukherjee

In my internet travels this afternoon I came across this video of Clark Blaise and Bharati Mukherjee reading at Berkeley. Biblioasis-o-philes will be seeing a lot of this pair this year, as both are publishing new works of fiction this May. We'll be launching Clark's new short story collection The Meagre Tarmac at the end of April at Blue Met in Montreal; Bharati's New Miss India, from which she reads here, will be out a few weeks later.