Yet Another Year End Books List

There are few more hackneyed ideas than the year-end list. The "best" are the worst: The Best Books. The Best Films. The Best Live Theatre. The Best Political Scandal - Canada wins hands down for the dead heat between the Senate expenses dustup and the Rob Ford Follies. So how about a slightly less threadbare list of the books I have enjoyed reading the most this year, even if all of them have flaws small or large but none that are inexcusable.

In no particular order, they are Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edyugan. It won the Giller Prize in 2011 and was nominated for the Man Booker Prize that year, too. It's a tour de force. The writer has given us a story that is deeply felt and a Black/Baltimore/German-inflected language that dips and soars like the best jazz. Occasionally, even with the best musicians, a note comes out flat - in this case when dialogue switches codes from swerving improvisation to the strictly formal. And making the female jazz singer a native of Montreal seems like a bit of unnecessary CanCon. Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentialism and Human Emotions is also on my list. The first part of the book comes from Being and Nothingness, and the rest was written independent of that. It's a defence of his philosophy against criticism, particularly that of Catholics and communists. It's as compelling today as it must have been in the 1950s, and both parts are written in admirably translated English.

Paris also features in the next two books on the list. They are Published in Paris, by Hugh Ford, and Death in the City of Light, by David King. The former is an excellent compendium of who was who among the writers and publishers of the Lost Generation, and the section on Edward Titus (husband of Helena Rubenstein and beneficiary of his wife's uncomprehending largesse) and his Black Manikin Press and "librarie" and bookstore At the Sign of the Black Manikin is very good. The latter is a tale of gore, madness, greed, anti-Semitism, indifference and official incompetence. Like so much about occupied France in WWII, it was a case of "sauve qui peut" - every man for himself. Dr. Marcel Petiot was a serial killer who disposed of his victims - many of them Jewish and desperate to flee the Nazis - with stupefying abandon. Not a book for the faint-hearted.

The other favourites on my list are Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran, by Gohar Homayounpour and The Mind in Conflict, by the great Freudian analyst Charles Brenner. After a long time away Dr. Homayounpour, a clinical psychologist who did her undergrad at Queen's University in Kingston, decided to return to Iran to practice there. Well, it's clear she's conflicted about her move and her conflict is reflected in the book. I expected far more about her analysands - patients to you and me - and can only remember one, a cultured, self-important woman. What I got was plenty about the psychologist herself, and I couldn't help but think from what she wrote and how she wrote it that Dr. Homayounpor could use some more time on an analyst's couch. Last but certainly not least is The Mind in Conflict. It's not a book for the lay reader - I think - but for those who ply the psychology trade in private practice or in universities. I highlighted passage after passage. There's plenty in there that I understand, but some I don't and don't think I ever will.  

TPL: Very Good, Very Bad

Lost in the uproar over the slashing of TTC bus service is yet another attack on Toronto's libraries. According to a small item in today's Toronto Star, a firm of consultants has, after a cursory look at municipal finances, said that some branches should go dark. (Going dark is a theatre expression and what are libraries if not theatres of the mind?) I'm utterly appalled, not just because my own branch, Davenport on Shaw Street, is threatened but because closing libraries is among the worst things that can happen to a civic culture. It seems Rob Ford really does want back the bad old days of Hogtown.

The news of the potential closures comes on the heels of some sterling work from the Davenport branch. In the last 10 days it has delivered And the Show Went On - Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris by Alan Riding, and Four Lives in Paris and Published in Paris, both by Hugh Ford. So well done Davenport Branch. I appreciate your contribution even if the mayor, his toadies on council and the latest batch of no doubt highly paid consultants don't.

Oh, and if you're a francophone or francophile (or even if you're neither) check out Le Salon du livre de Toronto Nov. 30 to Dec. 3 at the Reference Library while you can. Who knows when Ford & Co. will want to close it down.

AGO 's Masereel Exhibition Disappointing

The guide at the AGO last Wednesday night was pleasant and chatty, but a bit confused and I didn't understand why. I'd gone to the House that Gehry (re)Built to see the Frans Masereel exhibit. It had been held over, she told me, for a week past its announced closing and she couldn't quite see why. Well, I thought dismissively, she doesn't get it. Lost Generation Paris still continues to excite and mystify us - as it should - almost 80 years after even the hardiest of the Prohibition-escaping, trust fund-spending tourists had caught the last steamer back to New York. (I know Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, Natalie Barney and others remained en place, but they weren't playing at art.) Well, I was a little unfair to my guide. She did get it. The Masereel exhibit was a letdown. It was small, with about 15 works (I neglected to count them) all set off in a side room so obscure the first guide I asked for directions hadn't a clue where it was.

Then there were the works themselves, a mixture of water colours and woodcuts Masereel (Belgian 1889-1972) produced over a long career. I'd gone to the AGO in anticipation of some excitement, some devilry, some new way into a decade that has been pored over - and pawed over. After all, Masereel was in Paris in the 1920s: "...We lived in an atmosphere of euphoria, youth and enthusiasm that can hardly be imagined today" is how the famed German-French art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler described it. Well, none of that euphoria, youth and enthusiasm was evident in the works I was most interested in, those from 1920s Paris. They weren't dull, exactly, but stolid, plodding and one - City Lights 14 July, 1925 - was utterly joyless, no small feat if you've ever been to Paris on Bastille Day. City Lights, incidentally, viewed from 10 feet away reminded me for all the world of some painting by Bernard Buffet (gawd.) Another work - The Followers 1926 - was foreboding: Two men, one with porcine features, the other whose face appeared to be carved in wood, follow closely behind two women, in a dark, shuttered street. Their wives? A pair of prostitutes? The reason for such close proximity? I don't know. I wondered about that going home.

The two works that did engage me, no, neither was Ascension 1968, a banal woodcut reflecting the riots of May 1968 in Paris but saying nothing about their causes or effects, were Swannee River 1926 and Having Tea 1925. The former is the curiously static depiction of a Left Bank jazz club featuring black musicians, although an element of excitement does creep in at last! at last! since the head of the Lost Generation's iconic Bad Girl, Kiki de Montparnasse (lover and model for many an artist including Man Ray), is tucked away in the bottom right hand corner. The latter, again curiously static for such a fluid age, shows a young-ish bourgeois couple at rest if not at peace. His fingers are steepled, but on his lap rather than held upright, a sign of lost authority? High over his right shoulder the sun shines weakly. Could the couple be Harry and Caresse Crosby? These gadabout, mad about Lost Generation swells founded and ran Black Sun Press on Harry's family's banking fortune largely to publish Harry's unremarkable poetry and that of others far more talented and better remembered. I'll get over my disappointment, but my visit was a salutary reminder that art is neither an exercise in voyeurism nor a précis of the past. Oh, and Harry Crosby shot his girlfriend in New York in 1929 and then killed himself.