Unless, by Carol Shields
I met my goal of 12 reviews for this site in 12 months. Go me. and I finally got a book from the 21st Century.
Unless, by Carol Shields
It happens that I am going through a period of great unhappiness and loss just now. All my life, I've heard people speak of finding themselves in acute pain, bankrupt in spirit and body, but I've never understood what they meant. To lose. To have lost. I believed these visitations of darkness lasted only a few minutes or hours and that these saddened people, in between bouts, were occupied, as we all were, with the useful monotony of happiness. But happiness is not what I thought. Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it's smashed you have to move into a different sort of life.
First-person novels in which the narrator is a writer with similar general characteristics to the author of the book always flummox me a little. I keep wondering how much of it is autobiographical. It's like listening to a band sing a song about themselves singing.
Carol Shields is a Canadian writer with multiple awards. The heroine of Unless is also Canadian, maybe a little younger, with at least one award. Nothing happens to "Reta" in the book that could not conceivably have happened to Carol Shields. The two focal points of the book are Reta's constant looking back to her coming of age in the Sixties and comparing her ideals and moral compass then with how her life is now; and her concern about her oldest daughter, who, after doing very well in college, suddenly dropped out without a degree and took up sitting on street corners with a sign that says "Goodness".
The chapters are brief and disjointed. To emphasize their disjointedness, the chapter titles consist of conjunctions, prepositions and interjections; however those little connective words do add meaning to the chapters if you notice and emphasize those words when they appear in that chapter (Think of the famous Spartan reply to the Persians' ultimatum: "IF").
Gender issues make a big part of Reta's moral compass. She wonders if her daughter left school because of the school's failure to include enough female authors in the curriculum, and she begins to write to critics, professors and other literary critics (the letters are printed in full as their own chapters) to scold them for noninclusiveness in their work. She encounters an editor who wants to rewrite her new book into a completely different work "to make it more relevant". Sometimes, I couldn't tell if Reta's flashbacks were meant to highlight her previous ideals as being something silly that young people do, or if they were meant to highlight what's wrong with her present life in that she strayed from her true path. Possibly she's trying to make up her mind which it is.
Unless, by Carol Shields
It happens that I am going through a period of great unhappiness and loss just now. All my life, I've heard people speak of finding themselves in acute pain, bankrupt in spirit and body, but I've never understood what they meant. To lose. To have lost. I believed these visitations of darkness lasted only a few minutes or hours and that these saddened people, in between bouts, were occupied, as we all were, with the useful monotony of happiness. But happiness is not what I thought. Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it's smashed you have to move into a different sort of life.
First-person novels in which the narrator is a writer with similar general characteristics to the author of the book always flummox me a little. I keep wondering how much of it is autobiographical. It's like listening to a band sing a song about themselves singing.
Carol Shields is a Canadian writer with multiple awards. The heroine of Unless is also Canadian, maybe a little younger, with at least one award. Nothing happens to "Reta" in the book that could not conceivably have happened to Carol Shields. The two focal points of the book are Reta's constant looking back to her coming of age in the Sixties and comparing her ideals and moral compass then with how her life is now; and her concern about her oldest daughter, who, after doing very well in college, suddenly dropped out without a degree and took up sitting on street corners with a sign that says "Goodness".
The chapters are brief and disjointed. To emphasize their disjointedness, the chapter titles consist of conjunctions, prepositions and interjections; however those little connective words do add meaning to the chapters if you notice and emphasize those words when they appear in that chapter (Think of the famous Spartan reply to the Persians' ultimatum: "IF").
Gender issues make a big part of Reta's moral compass. She wonders if her daughter left school because of the school's failure to include enough female authors in the curriculum, and she begins to write to critics, professors and other literary critics (the letters are printed in full as their own chapters) to scold them for noninclusiveness in their work. She encounters an editor who wants to rewrite her new book into a completely different work "to make it more relevant". Sometimes, I couldn't tell if Reta's flashbacks were meant to highlight her previous ideals as being something silly that young people do, or if they were meant to highlight what's wrong with her present life in that she strayed from her true path. Possibly she's trying to make up her mind which it is.