Book 41, Alias Grace (1996) – Margaret Atwood
“In 1843, a 16-year-old Canadian housemaid named Grace Marks was tried for the murder of her employer and his mistress. The sensationalistic trial made headlines throughout the world, and the jury delivered a guilty verdict. Yet opinion remained fiercely divided about Marks–was she a spurned woman who had taken out her rage on two innocent victims, or was she an unwilling victim herself, caught up in a crime she was too young to understand? Such doubts persuaded the judges to commute her sentence to life imprisonment, and Marks spent the next 30 years in an assortment of jails and asylums, where she was often exhibited as a star attraction. In Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood reconstructs Marks’s story in fictional form. Her portraits of 19th-century prison and asylum life are chilling in their detail. The author also introduces Dr. Simon Jordan, who listens to the prisoner’s tale with a mixture of sympathy and disbelief. In his effort to uncover the truth, Jordan uses the tools of the then rudimentary science of psychology. But the last word belongs to the book’s narrator–Grace herself.”

Other useful links:
the Wikipedia entry for Alias Grace

My thoughts:
This was a very good book, possibly my favourite of Atwood’s so far. So many layers of meaning and a wonderfully unreliable narrator. She had me guessing the entire time: manipulative? a psychopath who merely reflects back what her interlocutors expect? a victim of early abuse and tragedy who’s put out of her mind when faced with trauma and never really regains herself? or a placid philosopher who takes things as they come and reports things as they happened? And what of Dr. Jordan? and Jeremiah? and Jamie Walsh? People appear and disappear and are never surely who they seem to be. Loved it!

Book 40, Wild Animals I Have Known (1896) – Ernest Thompson Seton
“An immediate success upon its first publication in 1898, Wild Animals I Have Known gave the animal story new credibility and power as a literary genre and remains Seton’s best-loved work.”

Other useful links:
the Wikipedia entry for Ernest Thompson Seton

My thoughts:
I’m still working on this, but it’s really tough going for me. I’m not so bad with the stories in which the animals suffer or meet a bad end due to “natural” causes (though I’m still sad), but I really have a problem with human cruelty and disrespect for other animals. Under other circumstances, I’d likely have stopped reading during the story of Lobo and abandoned the book, but since it’s a CanLit Challenge book I decided I had to finish it.

There were a couple of stories I liked a lot (my favourite was about Silverspot the crow), but most were very difficult for me to get through. I can’t stand deliberate ruthlessness in the treatment of animals, and there were plenty of cruel, relentless humans in the pages of this book. I suppose Seton himself felt as though presenting the stories this way, with a proper respect for the animals’ point of view, could change peoples’ attitudes toward our furry and feathered relations (in this respect it reminded me much of Black Beauty), but in me he’s preaching to the choir.

Book 39, In the Village of Viger (1896) – Duncan Campbell Scott
“The ten stories in In the Village of Viger portray the life of a rural village as it faces the darkness of its own future. An established milliner, Madame Laroque, is upset by the advent of a younger, more popular rival. An innkeeper’s obsession with the Franco-Prussian War drives his descent into madness. A gardener longs to return to the village in France where his mother was born. At once comical, farcical, and tragic, this superb collection, first published in 1896, anticipates later collections of linked short stories including Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? and Margaret Laurence’s A Bird in the House.”

Other useful links:
the Wikipedia entry for Duncan Campbell Scott

My thoughts:
Not what I was expecting at all. Some of the stories contained some humour, some were rather sad, a few were actually spooky(!)–kind of in Turn of the Screw territory. My favourite was the last story “Coquelicot”, which wasn’t in the original collection. Tracy Ware’s afterword put things in perspective.

So I guess I’d better get the blog up to date in case there’s a story in the offing, eh?

I’ve been continuing with my CanLit Challenge despite my lack of recent blog posting (the reasons it stalled for a bit were unrelated to the Challenge). Last year, I set up a Goodreads group so that others could join in, and we’re hovering at about 75 members. I’m currently reading Book #49, Literary Lapses by Stephen Leacock. Stay tuned and I’ll post all the books in between #38 and #48.