White nights.
The other reason I'm singing Edmonton's praises is because, miracle upon miracles, I finally finished another book while I was there.
FINISHed a book and got a chunk completed on the manuscript that I swore up and down I would work on to make my traveling road show a multi-tasking one.
The book I ended up reading was Dave Eggers How We Are Hungry.
The whole story around this book is actually pretty serendipitous. I was lying on my couch one afternoon when my friend Sasha Van Bon Bon called and asked if I was interested in coming to the library and making a little cash. Of course, I was. The only proviso was that I had to bring a book to swap and be there in 10 minutes. This is how I ended up in the Toronto Reference Library's second annual book swap, as a celebrity guest replacing Buck 65. How glamourous can a girl's life get? I swapped an extra copy of my friend Willow Dawson's books Lila and Ecco's Do-It-Yourself Comics Club (which, if you cannot get for free, you should really buy) for Eggers.
It turns out that the book I swapped for was one I had, and had started and not finished a while ago. I realized this when I read this passage:
GOD: I own you like I own the caves.
THE OCEAN: Not a chance. No comparison.
GOD: I made you. I could tame you.
THE OCEAN: At one time, maybe. But not now.
GOD: I will come for you, freeze you, break you.
THE OCEAN: I will spread myself like wings. I am a billion tiny feathers. You have no idea what's happened to me.
("The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water")
I kind of intensely love when Eggers does this, these odd surreal yet ordinary type twists. It gives his work that vibe of a story told by some kind of careless genius. Pretty much everything I've ever read by Eggers has felt like it rests in some grey area between overly meticulous and almost lazy. Like the titles to many of the short stories, which are long, in a way that's either unedited or purposefully overly detailed.
Example: "What It Means When a Crowd in a Faraway Nation Takes a Soldier Representing Your Own Nation, Shoots Him, Drags Him from His Vehicle and Then Mutilates Him in the Dust"
This under/over thinking is what separates this book from something like Douglas Coupland's Life After God, a collection of similarily Polaroid-y, slice of life, short stories, which swing toward cereal-box brevity.
What connects the two, I think, and also what I kind of love about Eggers is how his work seems to play with everyday tragedy, both our expectation of where we'll find tragedy and twist and the unexpected places this sort of stuff ends up turning up in life.
In one story, he opens with "There is almost no sadness in this story." Like, so stop waiting for it. ("The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water").
In another tragedy IS there, around the corner, kind of where you would expect it although still out of direct view ("Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly").
My favourite book is the somewhat laboured but also beautiful "Notes for a Story of a Man Who Will Not Die Alone."
Awesome book.
(And now, ladies and gentleman and neither, we are back on track.)
m