Coincidences

I had been thinking yesterday that I wouldn’t write about DQ any more this week and that I would write about other reading I’ve been doing. But then, a strange coincidence…

My dad was an avid reader. I don’t know that much about the books he read. From the brief glimpses I got of them (they were usually library books), they seemed to be mostly political/spy thrillers. Years ago, I know he really liked John Le Carre so I assume these books he read more recently were similar. He also read other stuff. I occasionally gave him books. A couple of years ago, I remember giving him an Alistair McLeod book which he really liked – I think it had the word “Mischief” in the title. I remember that my dad asked me once if I had any poetry anthologies I could give him. Of course, I had quite a few as (see Wednesday November 30, 2005, “Claustrophobia”) publishers send them to me and I passed several anthologies over to him. We didn’t talk much about poetry but I know he particularly liked Tennyson and Browning. He also liked the Romantics – especially Keats and Shelley. I don’t know if he knew or liked any contemporary poetry.

But on to the coincidence…

Mostly my dad read newspapers and magazines. As I said recently (see Tuesday December 20, 2005, “Obituary”), I started reading the Death notices because of my mom. I got my more general interest in newspapers and magazines from my dad. I would often bring my dad newspapers and I also picked up his habit of reading the local paper whenever I went. In the summer when we are camping, I read the London Free Press and then I use it to start the campfire…

A couple of Christmases ago, I stuffed a copy of The Walrus into my dad’s stocking. He read it from cover to cover and since then has bought it sporadically off the newsstand. The Walrus appealed to him with its mix of Canadian politics and culture and its attention to design. When he finished reading an issue, he would usually pass it on to me commenting on and recommending various articles. And, yesterday, one of these issues (the May 2005 issue) of The Walrus reappeared. It was sitting on my living room couch, so I picked it up and browsed the cover. I hadn’t read this one, though I had seen it before. And, I was amazed to see that at the very bottom of the banner, there was a heading entitled “Docs and Don Quixote”. The title summarized the two review essays near the back of the magazine. I quickly skimmed both essays – I didn’t have my glasses and the room was quite dark. The first essay was called “The Life Quixotic” by Charles Foran. In it he “reviews” four books and he reveals (news to me) that “this year marks the 400th anniversary of the first installment of Don Quixote”!! In the essay, he mostly writes about the power of the novel to enchant and to send the reader on an imaginary quest. He focuses, coincidently, on the very part of DQ that I have just been reading – that intersection between Part I and Part II when so much is revealed about the construction of the text and the novel becomes much more than “just a story”. Foran uses this point to launch into a discussion of the endless potential of the novel form by asking rhetorically if “there [is] anything the novel form designed by Cervantes, can’t do”. He then posits that what we need to remember vis a vis DQ is that the novel form “can’t do reality. It can’t never not be a book”. This then allows Foran to move into a critique of the realist novel (in particular, what he calls “psychological realism”) and to celebrate the novel’s “true” definition: “always fictions, always invitations to set out on an imaginative quest”. He ends the review essay by suggesting that Jann Martel’s Life of Pi may also be one of the quixotic breed of novels – a “must read”.

Another coincidence: About a month ago, I started to write something about Life of Pi, about how I started to read it, recommended it to a friend and then regretted recommending it…but more of that later…