REVIEW: YESTERDAY, TODAY, AND TOMORROW

 

Sophia Loren: glamorous, seductive, exotic. However, as Signora Loren reveals in her new memoir Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, beyond her great beauty rests self-awareness and down-to-earth simplicity. Readers expecting a glossy, ghost-written movie-star “autobiography” will be shocked at how “normal” Loren truly is. Inspired by a box of treasured trinkets and notes discovered over Christmas, Loren writes from her heart in this captivating yet honest memoir. From her children’s drawings to notes from cinema’s greatest stars and directors, it is clear that Loren’s life has been guided by truth, hard work, and valuing the few truly good people in one’s life that make it all worthwhile.

Loren’s life began in difficult circumstances: her mother had unrequited dreams of movie-stardom and conducted an affair with a man who would never marry her. Loren’s childhood was also marred by the colossal Second World War. Often not having enough to eat, this destitute childhood became formative for Loren, who would revisit the experience for films such as Two Women and A Special Day. Against odds, Loren grew up from a tiny “stuzzicadenti” (toothpick) to a curvaceous, beautiful teenager. Through pageants, Sophia gained notoriety and began participating as an extra in Italian film although at first her unusual features and height confused directors. Through years of hard work, dedication, and versatility, Loren became Italy’s reigning sex symbol. Yet her difficult upbringing gave her the sensitivity and depth to go beyond the bubbly, captivating persona. Loren became an international acting legend due to stunning dramatic incarnations, such as that her Oscar-winning performance of a haunting and astonishingly mature middle-aged mother in Two Women despite being only in her twenties. Among my personal favourites as a classical baritone are Loren’s operatic encounters, personifying Donizetti’s La Favorita and the great Renata Tebaldi in Aida on film.

Loren’s memoir traces her life mostly chronologically through personal memories and recollections. Each chapter is inspired by an object or piece of writing from her collection, leading her into the memories, relationships, and people of her life. Despite being only a teenager when she met him, Loren fell in love with film producer Carlo Ponti, who shared a life together until Ponti’s death. Even through the string of handsome leading men that Loren collaborated with, such as Cary Grant, who very nearly stole her heart, Loren’s heart lay grounded in her moral compass, developed through her tough upbringing. Loren so desperately wanted the normalcy she missed as a child, but her love with Ponti was dogged by legal difficulties, such as Ponti being accused of bigamy and Loren voluntarily going to jail for 17 days. Loren’s desire for children was also plagued with miscarriage. However, through hormone replacement therapy and years of legal struggling, Loren finally achieved a family life that she craved for her whole life. Professionally, Loren’s great memories revolve around her close Italian filmmakers and co-stars, such as director Vittorio De Sica and actor MarcelloMastroianni, frequent co-stars that accentuated her Neapolitan spirit in memorable films such as The Gold of Naples and Marriage Italian Style, which captured her effortless elegance and Italian charm. Loren candidly describes the truly human moments that defined her, beyond her impressive filmography of over 100 movies. She suffered a horrific break-in at a hotel that made her realize that the only precious jewels she would from then on would be her “son’s embrace”. She witnessed her parents and dear husband’s deaths and suffered postpartum depression and anxiety-induced psychosomatic issues while filming.

However, despite her many struggles and successes, Loren’s charm and zest for life are captured beautifully in Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. From beating Richard Burton at Scrabble and meeting a delightful aging Charlie Chaplin to watching her grandchildren excitedly hear her in Cars 2, Sophia’s life, like her career, is full of juxtapositions of great luxury and charming simplicity. Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow is a book about memory, youth, aging, and staying present. As the book closes, we learn to see Signora Sofia Loren as all that she is: a meatball-making Italian Nonna, an autograph-signing Oscar and Grammy winner, and an octogenarian whose past laurels only signify the inner beauty residing within. Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow is a unique, entertaining, and moving memoir that can only offer a tiny sliver of insight into the complex, alluring, and eternally enigmatic Sophia Loren. Brava!

Mike Fan is a Chinese-Canadian classical baritone. Mike plays five instruments and speaks three languages (with a few in progress). He holds degrees in piano performance and biomedical science, but it was obvious from an early age that music would win out. On the literary side, Mike wrote 365 sonnets in his teens and writes for his poetry blog someturbidnight.blogspot.ca. Follow @MikeZFan for Mike's adventures, musical and otherwise.

REVIEW: I WANT A POEM

In response to an online discussion around what poetry really is, Valerie Senyk began to reflect on what she wanted, or needed, poetry to be. Upon learning that this was the premise of i want a poem, I began thinking about my own relationship to poetry. This re-thinking is exactly what Senyk’s poems will evoke in readers. Her privileging of desire newly positions poetry in a way that helps us ask different questions of our art.
 
Drawing on poets like Rainer Maria Rilke to help frame self-reflection, Senyk’s response is laid out in this collection of poems that feel at once immediate and purposeful. In “memory poem,” she asks of a poem to help her remember. In “changing poem,” she wants a poem to radically change her life. I can’t help but think that articulating her reciprocal relationship with poetry is (importantly) radical.
   
What is interesting about Senyk’s work is that though some of it can be read literally, as a response to the guiding question of the book, many of the poems play with sound and image in unexpected and delightful ways. Each poem successfully complicates our understanding of poetry by making room for more ways to engage with and be affected by poems.
 
It is not often we approach poetry reflexively with the intention of centrally situating our desires within it, to call upon the ways our poetry is informed by those desires. What Senyk does by exploring her desire here is enter into a dialogue with form, and yet her poems speak to poetry as lived. She notes that her sons’ lives are poetry. Refreshingly, she asks of poems to bite, to blind, to purr, to sing, to expose.   

Senyk brings to mind Audre Lorde’s assertion that all poetry is revelatory. We get the feeling that she is figuring it out, tackling the intersections of art and desire in real time, while her poems suggest there are infinite answers. With each passing poem, our reading becomes alive with the emergent quality of Senyk’s writing. We are in a joint process of discovery. By asking what she may want or need from poetry, Senyk moves in a direction that is necessary for us as readers and writers if we are to reconcile feeling and thought in art. i want a poem explores desire as it represents it. It never stops questioning even as it answers. 

Fiorella Morzi is a writer, reader, and feminist from Toronto. Find her on Twitter here: @ellafior

REVIEW: THE GALLERY OF LOST SPECIES

 

This is the kind of novel I like to refer to as a “rainy day book.” You don’t necessarily have to read it on a rainy day, and the term isn’t restricted to just books – poems and songs will do to. What I means is, The Gallery Of Lost Species is the type of book one reads during those times that sadness seems preferable to entertainment, when you feel a yearning more for bittersweet melancholy rather than satisfaction. 

Nina Burkhout's novel is the kind of book that ages you, that stays with you, that makes you think. On the surface, it’s about a girl trying to deal with life’s challenges and the fact that her family is slowly falling apart. But beneath that, it has many, many layers of interconnectedness that makes it special. Berkhout loops together themes of memory, vicarious living, age, loss, art, and countless other tiny little things that stitched together turn into a definition of life.

Everything in this book is a reflection of something else, all of which connects in myriad ways. The unicorn that Edith sees as a child turns into a symbol of hope and of loss all at once, by being reflected through the lenses of art, cryptozoology, and memory. I really do like the use of cryptozoology in this book – rather than take it from a scientific standpoint, Berkhout takes it from an emotional one, and it’s so much more effective that way. A forgotten bird transforms from mere curiosity into a sense that something wonderful has been irretrievably lost, and that creates a source of sorrow that is so much more impactful than a mere classification.

Like I said, this isn’t a book to read when you’re feeling sunny and warm. It’s for those cold, lonely days when the words written in a good book can make you feel all sorts of things, and can impact, and maybe even teach you, something about life and the way it happens all around us.
 

Robert Green is a confirmed bibliophile and aspiring writer whose love of sci-fi has caused him to own many more books than he has physical room for. He is also the owner and creator of the up-and-coming company Verity Books, which can be seen at various cons throughout the year. Any questions or comments can be sent to veritybooksanddvds@gmail.com or facebook.com/veritybooksanddvds.

REVIEW: THE BURIED GIANT

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro is one of my favourite things: a true fairy tale. Neither a too-precious tale for children nor a too-heroic piece of genre fantasy, but a story of the kind that J.R.R. Tolkien describes as being characterized by “a quality of strangeness and wonder,” a story of the kind that Tolkien himself accomplished only rarely, in “Leaf by Niggle” or “Smith of Wooten Major”, a story in the tradition of George MacDonald's Lilith or Howard Pyle's The Garden Behind the Moon or C.S. Lewis' Til We Have Faces.

Like these others, Ishiguro's novel operates on a symbolic level that should be described as mythical or mythopoetic rather than simply metaphorical or allegorical. It follows a small group of characters -- an old couple who cannot quite recall their past, a young boy bitten by a strange beast, a warrior with a hidden purpose, an old knight who is the last of Arthur's roundtable -- as they seek the source of a strange forgetfulness that has fallen over the land. Their story explores questions of memory and forgetfulness, especially as they relate to love and death, war and justice, presenting these familiar human questions in a way made new and strange and thereby compelling.

Though the earlier chapters contain some elements that feel out of place, the novel as a whole is also strong stylistically, as Ishiguro's books generally are. A sense of dreaminess, of forgetfulness, seems almost palpably to hang over the prose at times, immersing the reader in the very questions of memory that lie at the heart of the novel but making these questions strange enough that we must reconsider them, must search them out again, as if we are only catching glimpses of them beyond the horizon or seeing them in a dream from which we have just awakened.

I often feel with G. K. Chesterton that “the things I believe most now are the things called fairy tales,” and in this sense Ishiguro's The Buried Giant is a story that can be believed, a story that speaks profoundly to our human experience by returning to us its essential strangeness and wonder.

Jeremy Luke Hill teaches literature, makes jams and preserves, reads continental philosophy, uses open source software, bakes bread, watches documentary film, plays old-man basketball, and writes poetry, among other things. He is the founder of Vocamus Press, an organization that supports reading, writing, and publishing in Guelph. He has a book of poetry, short prose, and photography called Island Pieces. You can read his blog at at http://jeremylukehill.wordpress.com/, and you can reach him at jeremylukehill@gmail.com.

REVIEW: CLOUD

Eric McCormack is a writer of exceptional range and talent. You approach his writing innocently enough, getting absorbed in an intriguing story, until you come to an edge in the story. Peel back the edge to reveal another layer, and another, until you finally come to realize that it's layers all the way down.

Cloud is Eric McCormack's most recent novel, and his first book in a decade. Despite the gap, it has been well worth the wait. The book begins with its protagonist, Harry Steene, finding an improbable book about an improbable event in an improbably named bookstore, while attending an unmemorable conference in Mexico. The discovery of the book, and its link to a remote town in Scotland in which Steene lived briefly but loved memorably, is the impetus for a much broader search for understanding and quest for meaning.

What follows is a book that is as broadly sweeping as it is acutely personal. The story roams around the globe, from the slums of Glasgow to the mines of South America to the remote islands of the Pacific, with frequent stops in McCormack's beloved and only vaguely fictional Camberloo. While the book covers a vast geography, though, it rarely strays from the essential questions of purpose, identity, love and relationships.

McCormack's protagonist is intriguing, in that we come to know him more through how he is seen and reacted to by others. His identity is defined—and shaped—by those he meets and their view of his talents, abilities, loyalties, ethics and romantic potential. He is less an actor than he is acted upon, although this makes him no less intriguing as we witness the opportunities that are presented and the choices that are thrust upon him by others. Every situation that we see him in, every person he meets and every interaction he has provides a little reflection of the man we are following. Bit by bit we piece the fragments together until larger features emerge, even while the whole picture remains maddeningly elusive.

I thoroughly enjoyed Cloud from the outset. It is first and foremost a well-crafted story, one that weaves multiple threads of plot and character development into a rich tapestry. McCormack's characters are well developed, intriguing and wonderfully nuanced. If that were all, it would be a good book, and still well worth reading. What I delighted in, however, was the shear complexity, intricacy and texture with which McCormack has sculpted his book. Recurring concepts, motifs and images intertwine in a tale of stunning complexity. As the book unfolds, events, characters, ideas and concepts both build on and reinforce what has come previously.

I found Cloud to be a delight from the outset, and was altogether saddened when it ended. McCormack is a delightful author. His attention to plot, gift for the absurd and delight in the macabre remind me of Neil Gaiman. The depth and complexity of his characters and exploration of the depths of human nature recalls the delightful storytelling of Gabriel García Márquez. And his ability to challenge convention, contemplate the fantastical and question meaning bring to mind the works of José Saramago. Of course, you could also just really enjoy the book as the work of Eric McCormack. And hope we don't have to wait ten years for the next one.

Mark Mullaly is an avid reader, sometimes writer, enthusiastic motorcyclist and lover of wine (and endeavours to engage in only one of these pursuits at any given time).

REVIEW: VILLAGE OF SECRETS

Growing up in post-war Britain near a city where smoke still hung in the air from industrial waste still smouldering from war-time bombing, I had a deep, personal and abiding interest in the Second World War. As I grew old enough to view the terrible news footage of liberating Nazi camps and able to read Primo Levi, Anne Frank and other astounding authors about the holocaust, I became fascinated at the motivations of the oppressors and petrified at the magnitude of their terrible deeds. As a teen I was fortunate to see Edgar Reitz’s 32 episode series Heimat and I began to glimpse some of the nuances that might illuminate how a community might be more than merely monsters.

Caroline Moorehead’s finely drawn book Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazi’s in Vichy France is a portrait of a community that opened its doors, both institutional and private, to harbour thousands of Jews and other persecuted people during the war. This noble history has become mired in controversy and hagiography since and Moorehead is painstaking in her research to avoid over-blowing the extraordinary story.

Le Chambon-sur-Lievre emerged from its existence as a pre-war holiday resort, remote and lacking in transport, where city folks and orphans could visit for the healthy air and peaceful countryside. What made the community doubly unique was its concentration of devout Christians, many of whom held to archaic non conformist traditions. Hugenots and Darbyists stayed close to home and had strong traditions of not talking, or gossiping. They also demonstrated a commitment to non-violence and protection of the innocent and with the urging of several charismatic and practical leaders they took in increasing streams of displaced people, as well as guiding some to Switzerland and freedom.

Descriptions of the appalling conditions in French holding camps, the arbitrariness of who was shipped off to the camps or who was interrogated and returned to the community, defy logic. Of course there is no logic, only disbelief and admiration for a community that did not lapse into apathy or denial so common elsewhere. The many photographs in the text help to demonstrate how, despite privations, some did enjoy some insulation from the atrocities. What is also clear however is the impossibility of undoing what had been experienced and the distrust deeply sown into the collective psyche. Moorehead does not pretend the miracle is anything more than a gift of chance, she does acknowledge even in paradise betrayals and sacrifices were experienced.

Moorehead’s extensive research painstakingly peels back the layers of memory to reveal the unique alignments that created this chance haven. Le Chambon stands as a proof that monster regimes can be defied and that it takes a village to counter an unthinkable threat. As a book that illuminates a little explored element of the war, this is a highly recommended read. It will certainly convince you that even miracles are underscored by ambiguous fact but that heroic achievements deserve to have a light shone upon them - all the more when a whole community is characterized by the response. 

- Rosslyn Bentley 

REVIEW: GUELPH VERSIFIERS OF THE 19TH CENTURY

Every city has a story, but what does Guelph have tucked away in its unassuming corners? David J. Knight's fascinating anthology Guelph Versifiers of the 19th Century scratches the surface of the delicious secrets of our city. How better to learn about the origins of our city than from some of the first people who lived and breathed in Guelph?

The anthology examines poets from all walks of life spanning the change-filled 19th century. The variety is amusing and astounding. The collection spans poetry from Guelph founder John Galt to anonymous amateur poets to neglected gems of the ever-popular John McCrae. All of the poetry is rare and has perhaps not been read since they were first published in early Guelph newspapers and journals. Odes to sewing machines, bitter tirades lamenting the politics of early Guelph, and emotive monologues demonstrate that there is certainly more to Guelph than meets the eye. It is a surreal and eye-opening experience to read charmingly archaic poetry by long-forgotten Guelphites who once walked the same steps as we do every day. It’s a strange and pleasant surprise to see the Speed River and Wyndham Street in the eyes of a different century and mindset!

There are poems for every taste and each reader will find their own pearls in the mix. Some of my personal favourites include Henrietta "Hetty" Hazelwood and her vivid and emotionally charged imagery, Charles C. Foster's nostalgic "The City of Guelph", and Thomas Laidlaw's succinct Dickinsonian tidbits. Of special note is the delusional yet amusing James Gay, Canada's self-titled Poet Laureate, whose poetry is definitely worth reading for its "quality". David J. Knight’s charming introductions to each poet and succinct footnotes shed tasteful led on the fascinating lives of these Guelph poets. It truly makes me wonder why more city histories are not explored through anthologies of their poetry. A sequel to Guelph Versifiers is certainly in order!

Mike Fan is a Chinese-Canadian classical baritone. Mike plays five instruments and speaks three languages (with a few in progress). He holds degrees in piano performance and biomedical science, but it was obvious from an early age that music would win out. On the literary side, Mike wrote 365 sonnets in his teens and writes for his poetry blog someturbidnight.blogspot.ca. Follow @MikeZFan for Mike's adventures, musical and otherwise.