Prof. Granatstein has performed an enormous public service to his countrymen by writing this book. Too bad most Canadians will never read it. Instead, I imagine that the majority of readers will be U.S. expats trying to understand the insecurity, paranoia and passive self-righteousness of some of the Canadian public and most of the Canadian media and political elite when it comes to matters concerning the U.S.

Granatstein provides a thorough history of anti-Americanism, which is rooted in the expulsion of British loyalists from the U.S. colonies during the Revolutionary War to the inhospitable reaches of Upper Canada (now Ontario). Events such as the U.S. "invasion" of Canada during its War of 1812 with British aggressors have entered Canadian mythology as naked American aggression toward peaceful Canucks. This aggression and disrespect for the sovereignty of other nations, of course, is a fundamental tenet of U.S. policy in the eyes of many Canadians. ! In reality, of course, the U.S. enetered Canada during that war to extinguish British forces, harbored by Canadian colonists, that were making periodic destructive forays into New York and Vermont.

Granatstein also lucidly explains the great 20th-century British "betrayal" of Canada during WW-I when the bankrupt Brits were forced to turn to the U.S. for men, materiel and money in order to defeat the Germans. This essentially pushed Canada into the arms of the U.S. as America became the defacto world power in the wake of the war. This "betrayal" underpins most modern Canadian antipathy of America. It is interesting that it appears an article of faith among modern Canadians that the U.S. revolution against Britain was fundamentally illegitimate and the root of much evil in world today.

This list goes on and on, and Granatstein is steely in his objectivity. After listening to the shrill knee-jerk denunciations of the U.S. that are staples of daily Ca! nadian media and political discourse, one can turn to this ! book to understand their genesis. It is especially sad in these days of continuing friction between central and western English-speaking Canada and its Francophone and maritime provinces that Canadians conveniently seek an external locus of control on which to blame their problems.

This is a fine and wonderful country; if only its citizens would exorcise their insecurities and move forward. Reading this book with an open mind and unflinching introspection would be a productive move in that direction. It takes much more effort and honesty for one to read this book and reappraise Canadian bigotry toward America than it does to turn on Jerry Springer and indulge in sweeping, facile generalizations about U.S. society.

"YGH" should be required reading at the CBC, Globe and Mail, and in parliament.

I try to cut authors some slack wherever possible, so I'm giving A SON OF THE CIRCUS four stars rather than three, but it's really more like three and a half. John Irving seems irresistably drawn to transsexuals, yet his portrayals of them continue to be some of the silliest and least convincing I've read. I'm not looking for political correctness, but I do appreciate characters I can believe in. Fortunately, A SON OF THE CIRCUS does have some. The protagonist, Dr. Daruwalla, is well-drawn and likeable. His informally-adopted movie star "son," John D. (a.k.a. Inspector Dhar), is intriguing. Nancy, a displaced American married to a Bombay policeman, is heartbreaking.

Among other things, this is a book about twins, and Irving uses "twinning" in interesting ways throughout the story: several characters are referred to by more than one name; the real crippled boy Ganesh is mirrored by a similar character in Dr. Daruwalla's screenplay. Dr. Daruwalla himself lives not one but two double lives -- as a respectable orthopedic surgeon and a writer of trashy cop movies; as an immigrant in Toronto and a not-quite-Indian in Bombay.

This novel disturbed me and I have found myself thinking about it quite a bit in the few days since I finished it. If you're the sort of reader who believes these are good things, you may well enjoy it too.

This is a wonderful novel--engrossing, well-crafted, moving, humorous, and profound. Even after 630+ pages, I was sorry to come to the end of the book. To this I must add: based on some other reviews I have read, a prerequisite for reading *A Son of the Circus* evidently is development of an attention span longer than that typical of today's channel-surfing, sound-byte-seeking generation.

The plot is Byzantine and carefully-woven, but ultimately predictable in some ways. The story and its ending are not particular strengths of the novel, but are mainly vehicles for Irving's skillful neo-Dickensian depiction of contemporary India--more specifically, some of its colorfully bizarre social settings and the diverse personalities that animate these unusual environments.

Oh, the characters! I will miss them so! The endlessly fascinating personages who appear, disappear, and reappear throughout this lengthy narrative provide the very heart of Irving's masterpiece. There are so many! Particularly unforgettable are the actor John D., whose alter ego is his forever-sneering on-screen persona, Inspector Dhar; John D.'s garrulous and impulsive Jesuit missionary twin (long-lost, of course!); the crippled elephant boy, with his dreams of skywalking on the circus high wire; the staid and forever disapproving steward at the exclusive Duckworth social club, at which much of the principal action in the novel occurs; the twisted and tortured transsexual, Rahoul; and finally, at the center of this circus there is the essential straight man, Dr. Farruk Daruwalla, a childrens' orthopedic surgeon (and screenwriter) who splits his time between his native India and his adoptive home in Toronto, where he feel "always an immigrant." Complementing these unforgettable characters is a lengthy cast of dwarfs, transsexuals, prostitutes, drug dealers, drunks, drifters, and other assorted misfits and freaks. As always, Irving shows his affinity for the strange and tortured underside of human existence.

At one level, the novel is simply another of Irving's jaundiced romps through the absurd, the socially marginal, and the unspeakable, and the author's typically ironic dry wit can lull the reader into thinking this is all just a lengthy exercise in twisted humor and world-weary cynicism. But there is so much more! In the end, Irving has succeeded in creating a profound, complex, poignant, and moving portrait not only of the rich and glorious chaos that is contemporary India, but of humanity as a whole.

I read this book when it first came out, and was buying a copy for a friend when I noticed how mixed Amazon's reader ratings were. I was shocked, as I truly believe this to be Irving's finest book yet. Everything that is intriguing, outrageous and wonderful about Irving's intense writing style and ultra-creative story-telling abilities is epitomized in Son of the Circus. It is not necessarily an easy read, as Irving presents a LOT of information for the reader to digest (there are dozens of quirky characters and several subplots). With that in mind, if you feel up to the task, it is more than well worth the effort.

While reading this book, I was constantly aware of the author's genius. His ability to conceive and weave together intricate plots and carefully constructed characters into a cohesive, wildly entertaining story is mind-blowing. Irving's previous books (Owen Meaney, The Cider House Rules, Garp, Hotel New Hampshire, etc.) and the subsequent Widow For One Year are all excellent reads, but all much tamer and far less intricate than the grand spectacle of Son of the Circus. It is truly an amazing feat of fiction - a wonderful book with as many twists, surprises, and glimpses of the bizarre as one could ever hope for. Irving's beautiful writing, outstanding background research, and vivid imagination make for a truly original story that haunted me for months after reading it. Several years after reading it, I still harbor strong memories of Son of the Circus(and I have read dozens of books in the interim).

This is a book to be read carefully - it makes an excellent vacation read, when the proper amount of time and attention can be paid. If some of the other reviewers of Son of the Circus were disappointed with it, I suggest that they return to it and read every word with care - perhaps then they will understand John Irving's gift and what an intelligent and interesting book Son of the Circus is. Don't miss it - books like this don't come along very often!

This is the second novel by Atwood that I've read, along with a few short stories, and I'm not sure I have the intestinal fortitude to read another. Her grim themes pop up again here like mushrooms after a spring rain. Like "The Handmaid's Tale", this novel is suffused with anger and darkness, although the locale this time is a sunny tropical island. Rennie, the main character, is a thoroughly unlikable woman: bitter, angry, cynical, a bit of a coward. Very human, in other words. The story flips back and forth between what is happening on the island and her life back in a sterile and constricted Canada. Through the painful events in the book, it seems that blame for all the violence and agony in the world is laid at the feet of men: men as users and abusers, corrupted by power, not to be trusted, but also loved and desired despite all that (and does that make us women "weak" and somehow partners in our own subjugation?) I found all the ambivalence very wearing. But life is full of ambivalence. Those looking for a light relaxing read that leaves no aftertaste would be advised to choose something else.

I've read most of Margaret Atwood's books. This, by far, is one of my favorites. This author has a way of pulling you into the stories and feeling the feelings of the characters. There is also a lot meaning behind her words.

This was truly a fast read. I really liked the character, Rennie, although at one point in the book I was ready to clobber Paul for her.

If you like Margaret Atwood, don't miss reading this one!

Although I have not read many Atwood novels, when I pick up one of her books I expect to be provoked intellectually and emotionally. Bodily Harm kept me reading well into the night, and I was amazed at Atwood's ability to write so evocatively. I noticed early on that while I did not like Rennie, the main character, I did empathize with her. Before breast cancer hits her, Rennie is the 'every woman' and not in a positive sense. Breast cancer and the ensuing chaos in her life leads her to question her purpose as a survivor. The theme of finding a purpose in the midst of tragedy is used often in popular fiction, and Atwood does a good job with it. The synopsis of this book sounds trite, but in actually, the book is very dense and stimulating. It is replete with symbolism and meaning, and I will be reading Bodily Harm again.

This book was recommended to me by my manager because I am a quiet person, and very choosy about the people I associate with. While I am a bit shy, it doesn't interfere with my personal or professional life as much as this book implicated that it should.

This book covered mostly pathologically shy people, and painfully shy people. The end of the first half of the book pointed out that shy people have greater tendencies to become murderers, rapist, see prostitutes, etc. It freaked me out so badly that I put the book down.

I picked it up, read through the second half, and surprise, surprise, it was a bunch of self-exploratory psychobabble exercises. While this might have been fine for someone who has not thought about who they are, where they came from, and what they're doing now, I found the exercises useless, as I know very well who I am.

I knew beforehand the particular reasons that I don't like to be around people, so this book wasn't much help. It was interesting to read the interviews with nearly terminally shy people, but other than that... there was almost no reason for me to read this book. It brought me little enjoyment, and even less revelation.

I'm sure there are people who haven't looked at their lives, and their surroundings, and their thoughts about themselves and others. Perhaps to them, this may be a wake-up call.

The book is *outdated*. It was written in 1979. Some of its theories really freaked me out. I thought there was some thing seriously wrong with me. And it's not that informative. The impression I got from the writer is shyness is not normal and it's some kind of a character defect that needs to be treated. I read a part about shy people tend to become perverts, rapists or killers. That's not true.

If you want a great book about shyness, then you should buy "Shyness: A bold new approach" By Bernardo J. Carducci, Ph.D. His book is recent and the information provided is totally up todate. He doesn't think shyness is a character defect that needs to be treated, etc.

Being a true-blue shy person, I've ordered every book on shyness I could find. This author seems to be the only one who really knows what he's talking about. The reason I give it 4 stars instead of 5 is that it's outdated. The only thing that has changed since I bought this book 10 years ago is it's cover.

Probably the only journalist ever to have interviewed Saddam Hussein while stoned on ecstasy--Roberts, that is, not Hussein!--Roberts paints a chilling portrait of an Iraq thirty or so years into the Hussein regime. The book is very funny in parts, but there's terror behind the canvas that Roberts covers with his amusing anecdotes. I found some of the treatment spotty and some jibes needlessly cruel, but on the whole, an entertaining account.

Earnest idealists and humorless conservatives will never get it. The book is screemingly funny, obviously written by a keen student of the tragiocomic human condition. Roberts does a fine job clubbing us over the head with the absurd realities of third world existance (and making us enjoy it), while never letting us forget the underlying human tragedy. Nothing's sacred here, not history, not his host's English skills, not the press corps, not 300 pound gay secret policeman, not George Bush, and certainly not Saddam Hussein. I particularly enjoyed Roberts' hilarious commentary on Saddam Hussein's official biography, his tripped out interview with the demonic dictator poster boy himself, and the bit where he dared the leader of Islamic Jihad to show him exactly, exactly mind you, where it says in the Koran that Israel must be destroyed. I also loved the eerily plausible conspiracy theory where George Bush orchestrated the invasion of Kuwait. On another level I cannot forget the harrowing descriptions of a clandestine trip into the heart of Bagdad in the midst of the Gulf War bombing. The book had me laughing and at the same time educated me a bit about the history of the region. I liked it immensly, but then I'm more cynical then your average third world dictator.

This is one of the best books I have ever read; it made me laugh out loud, it made me cry, and it gave me a far better understanding of the real situation still faced by Iraq. Dr Roberts is like a cross between PJ O'Rourke, John Bierman and Martin Amis, mixing bizarre first-person narrative with historical perspective in a way I found both highly entertaining and richly informative. By providing the background to the ongoing war against Iraq, Roberts forces us to see a bigger picture -- and it is not a pretty one. The reader's sympathies are ultimately with the poor Iraq people who have suffered so terribly at our hands and for no reason other than the crimes of a leader they loathe more -- it seems -- than we do. The vivid accounts of Gulf War action and the dreadful aftermath of the UN embargo rank among the greastest pieces of prose I can think of. I have since read some of this writer's other books and they are all just as good. I am surprised he is not better known.

I love the "Best American Short Stories" annual collections - if nothing else they let you catch up on all those issues of The New Yorker, Harpers, Atlantic, etc. you didn't buy! The quality of any given year, though, depends both on how good the material was and who the editor is - this year it's E.L. Doctorow and he does a great job (in terms of quality, sequencing, variety of styles - even the short introduction is a nice read). If there's a flaw it's an overreliance on well-established authors (Amy Bloom, Walter Mosley, Jhumpa Lahiri, even Raymond Carver(!)) - I don't know if all these are really up to snuff, but the overall quality is right up there and you can't beat the price. Reader Alert: In my humble opinion, the two best stories appears towards the end: ZZ Packer's "Brownies" - a parable about race and growing-up that's a bit reminicent of, dare I say, Ralph Ellison. And Ha Jin's "The Bridegroom" - a thought provocing morality play about politics of all types. Not to be missed!

A bonus in the authors' notes appendix lets the authors comment on their stories or writing in general.

I disagree with many of the reviewers. This is an above average volume. With the exception of a couple of stories, I found the rest all highly readable and some of them truly outstanding. Ron Carlson, Allan Gurganus and Annie Prolux's pieces are gems. Carlson's The Ordinary Son reads like Salinger's the Glass Family, a surreal journey the keeps you turning pages. I was disappointed when it ended. He's At The Office is one of the best short stories I have read in a long time, absolutely engrossing from the begining to end and tragic without the slightest hint of sentimentality. Hard to do. Prolux piece is from her latest collection which has some great stories in it, but this one is a killer. The rest all fall slightly below these in my opinion but they are all good reads without a great deal of blather. Worth the price of admission.

Doctorow has excellent taste in short fiction. With only a few exceptions (Junot Diaz and Marilyn Krysl), the stories in this collection are excellent. Amy Bloom's story, "The Story", which i think is a great title, is an interesting story about writing, about the characters in the story, and it is a story about itself.Michael Byers has a great story about obsession and attraction rather than love (though he does go on a page or two too long). Ron Carlson has a wonderful story about about happiness and the ways you can get there. It is one of the best of these stories. There is a story from Raymond Carver, and it is as good as anything he has written. Kiana Davenport's story deals with abuse and family. Everett's "The Fix" is the best story in this anthology, which it's allusion to Christ, in a sort of Kafka-like way. Gautreaux's story about atonement is a winner as always. I remember reading Gurganus' story, "He's at the Office" when it was first published in the new yorker, and i remember thinking at the time that it had to be one of the better stories i'd read that year, so it was a pleasure to see doctorow select it. Aleksandar Hemon and Jhumpa Lahiri both have well told stories about being a foreigner in this country, though one has an uplifting feel and the other is more bleak, but both are a pleasure to read. Annie Proulx's "People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water" is a story you should read. but don't let the title fool you, it doesn't fit the story. Sherwood's story about loss is weak and a better selection could have been made, but it wasn't dull like the two mentioned earlier. i could go on about the stories i haven't mentioned, but there is a space constraint. i've only read best american short stories 2000 and 2001, so i can't say if these selected are better or worse than what is normally picked, but i can say that there are 18 stories here that are fine examples of what a short story should be.

Anne Carson recently won a MacArthur, the "genius" grant, and deserved every penny of it, in my opinion. Yes, this book is crammed with historical allusions and persona poems in one form or another. No, it is not emotionally involving. And yes, occasionally she skates the fine line between postmodern cleverness and gimmicks, with all of the "tv scripts" and so forth. Nevertheless, the quality of writing and intellect at work here is absolutely stunning--and makes Anne Carson one of the most exciting, adventurous, and brilliant lyrical poets I've been reading. Unlike the "glass" essay in "Glass, Irony, & God," you will not get anything remotely resembling an intimate first person narrative here. If that's the kind of poetry you're looking for, this is definitely not the book for you. On the other hand, if you're looking for expanded possibilities in lyrical writing--the lyric operating in an intellectual/philosophical arena--or you enjoy experimental lyrical poets--then this book is well worth the money. It's a sheer tour-de-force in intellectual imagination and breathtaking lyrical lines that spin intelligently, if not emotionally, as some of the reviewers here have cited as a criticism.

Susan Sontag, one of the foremost thinkers and writers of today, says of Anne Carson: "[Anne Carson] is one of the few writers in English that I would read anything she wrote." Such regard for Carson is justified. One of the premiere poets today re-inventing and rediscovering language to meet our present demands of articulation, in the true post-modernist fashion, Carson has come up recently with a collection called, Men in the Off Hours, finalist to the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Men in the Off Hours contains poems and prose pieces that lay the groundwork for various intersections of opposites: past and the present, the classic and the modern, cinema and print, narrative and verse. Here we can find the paintings of Edward Hopper turned into poems as footnoted by St. Augustine's words in the Confession, Thucydides and Virginia Woolf conversing about war, and a host of other characters summoned in the forefront of contemporary image-making: Sappho, Artaud, Tolstoy, Lazarus, Antigone, Akhmatova. They can be found in the chain of poems titled "TV Men" which re-images and re-imagines the lives of these personages, how they correspond to the contemporary definitions of the gaze, as shaped and articulated by woman-as-director, woman-as-creator.
One of the best poems in the collection is "Essay on What I Think about Most" where Carson exalts the element of mistake, both in art and in our lives. It then makes a literary exegesis of a fragment poem written by Alkman, a 7th century B.C. Spartan poet, of how it masterfully harnesses the conceit of the mistake, and is interspersed with quotes by Aristotle. The persona declares: "The fact of the matter for humans is imperfection."
"Irony is not Enough: Essay on my Life as Catherine Deneuve," on the other hand, is composed of a series of prose poems that narrativizes the days of Catherine Deneuve. Here Carson imagines herself as Deneuve, somewhere in a room in an academy in France, lecturing about Socrates and Sappho, catching all the knowing gazes by one of her female students, as the snow outside her window drives through everything like rain. The prose poems are short and episodic, almost breathless, representing the smallness of Daneuve's life, and the frailty of relationships, against a backdrop of a long, bitter winter.
Carson is at best intellectual and scholarly in this collection. Her far-reaching vocabulary touches various human endeavors like myth, archaeology, science, history. Because of this pre-occupation with facts and quotes, Carson has debunked the lyric, freeing words from imposed musicality that poetry is almost always made to assume. Her poems are minefields, nuclear antechambers, blackholes. They are reckless, energetic, centrifugal. This attitude of Carson problematizes the poem as insular and solitary, breaking up its gates to the gift of intertext, where meaning yields to multiplicity.
Told in such exquisite and piercing language, her long essay (complete with an annotated bibliography), "Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity," meanwhile interprets classical configurations of the woman body's and its supposed vulnerability for defilement. She calls forth thinkers from various epochs who have shaped and structured the constructs with which we define one another as members of the human tribe. She then launches into an analysis of the motivation behind ancient weddings and a fragment poem by Sappho, things that speak well of the kind of boundaries we have put up as a defense from one another, as how Carson puts it: "As members of human society, perhaps the most difficult task we face daily is that of touching one another-whether the touch is physical, moral, emotional or imaginary. Contact is crisis."
Men in the Off Hours culminates with an essay Carson has written for her newly departed mother titled, "Appendix to Ordinary Time." Carson proves that she is indeed a "poet of the heartbreak," as she remembers the simple gestures of her mother when she was still here, articulating the loneliness attendant to the experience of grief, and how she found solace and comfort from the diary entries of Virginia Woolf during her last days. She grieves: "Did she think of me-somewhere in some city, in lamplight, bending over books, or rising to put on my coat and go out? Did I pause, switch off the desklamp and stand, gazing out at the dusk, think I might call her. Not calling. Calling. Too late now..."
Carson is one of the first writers to conquer the frontiers of the 21st century poetry, the first to be able to storm through the paltry and outdated definitions of language and language-making. Here is a poet who is courageous, intelligent, and fierce but at the same time tender and forgiving toward the kind of passages we undertake, solitary or communal. She always reminds us that the love for imperfection is valid and that we are irredeemable from transience, but guides us though the maze of fear evoked by these truths, if only to discover the joy and surprise that come from being here, the ordinary time we seek to mark.
Carson's opus can well be summarized in the epitaph she used for her mother:
such
abandon
ment
such
rapture

Susan Sontag, one of the foremost thinkers and writers of today, says of Anne Carson: "[Anne Carson] is one of the few writers in English that I would read anything she wrote." Such regard for Carson is justified. One of the premiere poets today re-inventing and rediscovering language to meet our present demands of articulation, in the true post-modernist fashion, Carson has come up recently with a collection called, Men in the Off Hours, finalist to the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Men in the Off Hours contains poems and prose pieces that lay the groundwork for various intersections of opposites: past and the present, the classic and the modern, cinema and print, narrative and verse. Here we can find the paintings of Edward Hopper turned into poems as footnoted by St. Augustine's words in the Confession, Thucydides and Virginia Woolf conversing about war, and a host of other characters summoned in the forefront of contemporary image-making: Sappho, Artaud, Tolstoy, Lazarus, Antigone, Akhmatova. They can be found in the chain of poems titled "TV Men" which re-images and re-imagines the lives of these personages, how they correspond to the contemporary definitions of the gaze, as shaped and articulated by woman-as-director, woman-as-creator.
One of the best poems in the collection is "Essay on What I Think about Most" where Carson exalts the element of mistake, both in art and in our lives. It then makes a literary exegesis of a fragment poem written by Alkman, a 7th century B.C. Spartan poet, of how it masterfully harnesses the conceit of the mistake, and is interspersed with quotes by Aristotle. The persona declares: "The fact of the matter for humans is imperfection."
"Irony is not Enough: Essay on my Life as Catherine Deneuve," on the other hand, is composed of a series of prose poems that narrativizes the days of Catherine Deneuve. Here Carson imagines herself as Deneuve, somewhere in a room in an academy in France, lecturing about Socrates and Sappho, catching all the knowing gazes by one of her female students, as the snow outside her window drives through everything like rain. The prose poems are short and episodic, almost breathless, representing the smallness of Daneuve's life, and the frailty of relationships, against a backdrop of a long, bitter winter.
Carson is at best intellectual and scholarly in this collection. Her far-reaching vocabulary touches various human endeavors like myth, archaeology, science, history. Because of this pre-occupation with facts and quotes, Carson has debunked the lyric, freeing words from imposed musicality that poetry is almost always made to assume. Her poems are minefields, nuclear antechambers, blackholes. They are reckless, energetic, centrifugal. This attitude of Carson problematizes the poem as insular and solitary, breaking up its gates to the gift of intertext, where meaning yields to multiplicity.
Told in such exquisite and piercing language, her long essay (complete with an annotated bibliography), "Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity," meanwhile interprets classical configurations of the woman body's and its supposed vulnerability for defilement. She calls forth thinkers from various epochs who have shaped and structured the constructs with which we define one another as members of the human tribe. She then launches into an analysis of the motivation behind ancient weddings and a fragment poem by Sappho, things that speak well of the kind of boundaries we have put up as a defense from one another, as how Carson puts it: "As members of human society, perhaps the most difficult task we face daily is that of touching one another-whether the touch is physical, moral, emotional or imaginary. Contact is crisis."
Men in the Off Hours culminates with an essay Carson has written for her newly departed mother titled, "Appendix to Ordinary Time." Carson proves that she is indeed a "poet of the heartbreak," as she remembers the simple gestures of her mother when she was still here, articulating the loneliness attendant to the experience of grief, and how she found solace and comfort from the diary entries of Virginia Woolf during her last days. She grieves: "Did she think of me-somewhere in some city, in lamplight, bending over books, or rising to put on my coat and go out? Did I pause, switch off the desklamp and stand, gazing out at the dusk, think I might call her. Not calling. Calling. Too late now..."
Carson is one of the first writers to conquer the frontiers of the 21st century poetry, the first to be able to storm through the paltry and outdated definitions of language and language-making. Here is a poet who is courageous, intelligent, and fierce but at the same time tender and forgiving toward the kind of passages we undertake, solitary or communal. She always reminds us that the love for imperfection is valid and that we are irredeemable from transience, but guides us though the maze of fear evoked by these truths, if only to discover the joy and surprise that come from being here, the ordinary time we seek to mark.
Carson's opus can well be summarized in the epitaph she used for her mother:
such
abandon
ment
such
rapture

For me the essence of this novel is the journey undertaken by a young woman as she returns to her inner self. Coming home to the island wilderness of her youth in Quebec in search of her missing father, the young artist is accompanied by her lover and a vacuous married couple. All are her recent acquaintances in a life where she has buried many painful experiences subconsiously. Her true self begins to emerge as the remembered becomes familiar and compelling. She finds herself on a solitary journey and the people with her are an impediment to her awakening. She disappears from sight when they leave the island, confidant that she carries a pure new life from her companion-lover, Joe. Now, she is finished with him. Layer by layer, she begins to cleanse her psyche, finally uncovering the woman essential to the nurturing of her unborn child. There are multi-levels of awareness in this novel: progress, pollution, man's encroachment upon nature. Margaret Atwood offers much food for thought. But this book may not be for everyone. It doesn't seem at first as sophisticated as Atwood's later works. Personally, I find myself returning again and again to SURFACING, as if each time I am able to wear the skin of the young woman's discovery, surfacing myself.

"Surfacing" is the second Atwood book I've experienced, and to be honest, I found her narrative style in this one more accessible than in "The Handmaid's Tale". The first 165 pages evoke a cynicism rooted deep in the apathy of 1970's North American culture, especially from a Canadian perspective. While Americans may find the references to the "flag-waving Yankees" the narrator loathes so much a bit distasteful in the light of recent events, the book must be taken as a narrative of one woman's personal struggle. While many of the narrator's opinions may find readers slightly offended, they provide a vehicle for her own personal frustration. The last few chapters seem a bit far-fetched compared to the others, but then again, I don't recommend reading the entire book in one sitting for that very reason. Though turned off by some elements of "weirdness" (the very same reason I didn't get into "The Handmaid's Tale"), I found "Surfacing" to be one of the most psychologically-challenging novels I've read, and perhaps the discomfort I felt while finishing the last page is post-magical-realism at its finest-- "There's no way this could happen...I think. Well...maybe?"

Try it out for yourself, but please don't judge its value on a few anti-American references. Remember, she's Canadian, and the book was written in the 70's.

This is another one of Atwood's early novels, but is almost the flipside of The Edible Woman. That book showcased her oft neglected sense of humor and used some none too subtle metaphors to drive the point home. Here we have a very somber work that has so many layers of symbolism that English teachers the world over must be drooling over the thought of putting it into their classrooms. In a nutshell, a nameless protagonist takes three friends (a married couple and her boyfriend) out into the Canadian woods to find out where her father and along the way we get heaps of character exploration, to which plot almost seems secondary. Not that this is a bad thing, at her best Atwood dissects people like nobody's business and her character studies reveal simple characters for the complicated people they are layer by layer. Except that doesn't much happen here. Like the later Life Before Man, there are four people here who interact in various ways. Also like Life Before Man, all of these people are either so self absorbed or just plain unlikeable that it's hard to care. Unlike Life Before Man, the book is narrated totally in first person, which means you don't get as much of that car accident feeling from watching all the characters circle each other, which wound up being the most fascinating part of that book. Here it's all filtered through the narrator, which is good and bad. We don't get really great insights into the other characters this way, the one guy is always annoying and a total jerk, he reminds me of On the Road's Dean Moriarty with all the redeeming qualities taken out. The other guy isn't as annoying but then he rarely talks either, so I guess it's a tossup. That leaves the heavy character lifting to the two women, one of which is rather submissive and not too exciting. The other is the narrator herself, who speaks in Atwood's typically brilliant prose, with all its gift for detail and metaphor. The only problem . . . she's not too interesting either since she's cold and distant to everyone in the story and nearly impenetrable to the reader. Atwood, to her credit, does try to find a new spin on "woman repressed by society trying to break free" which leads to a very, very strange section of the book that probably means all kinds of things I'm not smart enough to understand. But in the end, the narrator was so distant that I really couldn't care all that much. Still, Atwood gets points for trying really hard, and I could read her prose all day, she does make beautiful sentences seem quite effortless. My version has a neater cover, with someone in a canoe dissolving, which I think sums up the book very well. All in all, a worthy read and worth your time, but it's not her best. That, alas, was still to come.

I just used this book here in Costa Rica and found that some of the info. wasn't correct. As the Residents Asociation states the cost of living is much higher than as described in this book.

My wife and I found this guide covers the important topics for newcomers making the move. The chapters on starting a small business and stories about foreigners living there were helpful to us.

Great Book! The self-guided tour chapter was very helpful. I thought the book in general had very useful information. I also liked the chapters "Starting Small Business". What we liked most was that it was a straight forward reference book without the "fluff" found in some of the other books.

I read "The Stone Angel" back in high school as required reading for my senior year English class, so naturally I despised it. A Canadian novel about old age had nothing to do with me, a teenager in Tampa Bay; so apart from helping me earn an "A," I had no particularly good feelings toward the book. However, after revisiting it later as a student at the University of Florida, I had a change of opinion.

Margaret Laurence's independent voice and candid description of the physical and psychological battle of growing old deserve special attention. In Hagar Shipley, she has created a character worthy of contempt, pity, and eventually admiration. Though I wish she had done more with the book's other characters, Laurence's mastery of the protagonist and her ability to mold the reader's reactions to her stand out nonetheless. Before you reach ninety yourself, I recommend that you read this novel.

As for many of these people that read The Stone Angel, I was not forced to read it.
I choose to read it for my grade eleven Independent Study.
I have read this book twice now and I have found it more enjoyable the second time.

If anybody has ever read any of Margaret Laurence's books they will know she likes to use the main character as her narrator.
This narrator goes back in the past so you can get an idea of their life.
If Margaret Laurence did not reflect on Hagar Shipley's past there would not be a story.

I quite enjoyed Hagar's stories of her life and I especially enjoyed her elderness because it contrasted her womenhood.

As you can probably tell by some of the other reviews, this book will NOT be for everyone. If you're looking for a quick escape, lots of action or a strong romance, this is not the book you want. However, if you enjoy books that aren't your usual fare and are strong on psychological tension, this is an excellent choice. I absolutely loved this story of an elderly woman, a rather judgmental, cantankerous person. I like novels that show how a person grows and changes and I find slow change to be most believable and true to life, as it is in this book. Many readers may have found Hagar Shipley's life to be rather mundane, even dull. But I didn't - her marriage to a man she eventually saw as inferior and coarse, her relationship with her children, her desire to make a proper home and better herself - were all quite realistic to me. As she becomes increasingly frail and dependent on her son and daughter-in-law, she also comes to see her life in a different way. I won't reveal more but I do urge you to read this one and stick with it. Odds are, you'll want to read more by the gifted author, Margaret Laurence.