One book that I would like to have seen get more attention is Alphabet by Kathy Page, from the small Canadian press Biblioasis. It’s a sort of Clockwork Orange update: A man convicted of murdering his girlfriend volunteers for a special program designed to reprogram criminals by making them face their crimes head-on, but he’s not prepared for the humiliation involved.
This is my favorite book of the year. Kathy Page puts you inside the head of Simon. He’s in jail and doesn’t understand his rage. He’s murdered his girlfriend. He learns the alphabet and begins writing anonymous letters to women. He pretends to be someone else — someone who loves art — until someone figures him out and asks him for the truth, and it all unravels. This book is about identity, the prison system, and how to love yourself when you’ve been beaten down.- And last but not least, if you still have a moment to spare, I swear you'll not regret dropping in at The Rumpus for Leland Cheuk's fantastic and appreciative dual review of Alphabet and Paradise and Elsewhere. Here's a taste:
Studies have shown that reading literary fiction increases a reader’s ability to empathize. In her first books to be published in the U.S., Giller Prize-nominated British author Kathy Page puts that theory to a rigorous test. Would you like to spend 300 pages in the mind of a murderer? How about fourteen stories replete with the vengeful whispers from those vanquished by the injustices of globalization? In both the novel Alphabet and the story collection Paradise and Elsewhere, Page demonstrates that she is a master provocateur, unafraid to ask unpleasant questions about contemporary society...
The Canadian author Kathy Page has been compared by critics to Angela Carter, and it’s easy to understand why ... as with Carter, Page enlists the tone of myth and fable to tell nuanced feminist stories, to undermine mythic structures by grounding them in the body. But whereas Carter is using fairy tales to talk about the cruelty and power of fairy tales, for Page the mythic idiom is a means, is incidental ... Whereas Carter rejects the comforts of myth, treats it as patriarchal structure to be opened wetly by the recursive blade of fairy tale, for Page the fantastic, the mythic, is a means to tell the story of connection and transcendence, of escape. In service of that story she ropes into these odd tales discussion of tourism, of loneliness, of possibility, of tea. Carter beats on iron that we might hear the din; Page, in this remarkable collection, would rather watch the sparks.
Well, who doesn’t like to kiss? I’ll admit it cheers me to see other people kissing, too. At high school we called mono the kissing disease, but when I wrote this story I was thinking more of HIV/AIDS. That pandemic surfaced during my twenties. Everyone lost someone. There was a before, and an ongoing after. It was terrible time, but there were eventually some positive consequences: increased honesty and more open public discourse about sex, for example. It was that aspect, the silver lining, that I had in mind.The story begins with Gary arguing with the radio. My roots are in England, and for decades BBC Radio 4 was the background to my life. No ads, little music, just wonderful voices. Between the drama, poetry and news, panels of experts and pundits would discuss in intricate (sometimes exhaustive) detail the controversies of the day. My family and I frequently joined in and I still sometimes listen online. Gary’s position as the story opens is so vehement that it implies his eventual willingness to enjoy what he thought repugnant. That’s the seed from which the story grew.Men and masculinity interest me a great deal, as does the way in which, generally speaking, we deal with otherness by separation, as if it was contagious — which brings me right back to disease. Bodies — our relationship with them, the ways in which they may betray or overtake us or be dramatically transformed — are a preoccupation of mine. One of the protagonists in my novel Alphabet is in transition between genders; The Find centres on a woman’s struggles with the onset of Huntington’s disease, and there lies yet another of my many preoccupations: identity. How much can we change and still remain who we are? At what point do we become someone else?
Enjoying "Paradise & Elsewhere" by @kathypagebc, from @biblioasis: tight, strange, nifty stories (+ not unrelated to #gender issues).
— Margaret E. Atwood (@MargaretAtwood) June 4, 2014
"I've come from the sea," I told him, "I left my coat on the rock." My voice emerged rough-edged, sore. He raised the binoculars again. "I think I see something dark in the water. We'll take the boat and look." So we pushed out. He took the oars and I the glasses, and I quickly learned how to use them to bring the distance close. At times I too thought I could see a dark thing floating just below the surface of the water, but once we drew close I understood that it was nothing but a reflection of the rock, and despite him saying that whatever I had left there would likely wash up on the shore, I knew that I must act as if my old skin was gone, and that I now must live on land." - from "Low Tide"
Doretta Lau is a journalist who covers arts and culture for Artforum International, South China Morning Post, The Wall Street Journal Asia, and LEAP. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Day One, Event, Grain Magazine, Prairie Fire, PRISM International, Ricepaper, sub-TERRAIN, and Zen Monster. In 2013, she was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust of Canada / McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. She splits her time between Vancouver and Hong Kong, where she is at work on a novel and a screenplay.
Kathy Page is the author of seven novels, including Alphabet, a Governor General's Award finalist in 2005, and The Story of My Face, longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2002, as well as many short stories, previously collected in As In Music. She recently co-edited In the Flesh, a collection of personal essays about the human body, and has written for television and radio. Born in the UK, Kathy has lived on Salt Spring Island since 2001.
Eva Stachniak was born in Wrocław, Poland. Her debut novel, Necessary Lies, won the Books in Canada First Novel Award in 2000. Her first novel based on the life of Catherine the Great, The Winter Palace, has been a bestseller in Canada, Poland and Germany. Stachniak lives in Toronto, where she is at work on her next novel.