Literary Review of Canada March 2022

SILVINA OCAMPO’S DEBUT SHORT STORY collection, Viaje olvidado (Forgotten Journey), came out in 1937. Her publisher was the book-making arm of Sur, the influential literary magazine — the same magazine that went on to trash the book when it hit the shelves. The reviewer commented on the “irritating mistakes” that filled Ocampo’s colloquial Argentine prose and described the imagery as “attacked by torticollis.” The reviewer was the editor of Sur, so she had some discretion when it came to saying what she wanted to say. The reviewer also happened to be Ocampo’s eldest sister, Victoria. I think of that piece in Sur whenever a potential writer for this magazine flags a potential conflict of interest, mentioning, for example, that he once had dinner, years ago, with the author of a book…

RE: Muslims and the Media by Haroon Siddiqui (January/February) HAROON SIDDIQUI PROVIDES US WITH A DETAILED analysis of a narcissistic injury that dates back over 700 years, to the fall of the last Crusader Kingdom, in 1291. When Saladin finally conquered Jerusalem in 1187, he offered generous terms of surrender to the Crusaders. Jews were allowed to resettle the city at once. This was the opposite of what Godfrey de Bouillon did when he captured the city in 1099: he didn’t think twice about massacring 3,000 Muslims and Jews. Yet there is barely any mention of Islamic mercy in the West. The humiliation of having once held, and then lost, the holy sites of Jerusalem is too overpowering. But Saladin was not unique. Even in modern times, Muslims have risked their lives to protect…

The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future Stephen Marche Avid Reader Press 256 pages, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook MAYBE DIGGING INTO STEPHEN Marche’s new book, The Next Civil War, while in West Virginia — where Donald J. Trump won nearly 70 percent of the vote more than a year ago—wasn’t wise. Maybe reading Marche’s book in a state where forty-nine of the fifty-five counties were in one of the two highest categories of COVID infection and where the governor, diagnosed a few days later with an inconvenient case of the virus, had lifted the indoor mask mandate six months earlier showed bad judgment on my part. Maybe spending a good deal of the week of the first anniversary of the U.S. Capitol insurrection poring over an argument setting out how the world’s…

In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony Darren Byler Columbia Global Reports 160 pages, softcover, ebook, and audiobook Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City Darren Byler Duke University Press 296 pages, hardcover and softcover WHEN CANADA’S HOUSE OF COMMONS DENOUNCED the Chinese Communist regime as guilty of genocide, in February 2021, it became the first legislature anywhere to do so. But others are paying close attention to China and its ruling party. Indeed, as the world’s finest athletes gather in Beijing for the 2022 Winter Olympics, many countries are on a journey of discovery—about that party’s actions and the great moral and political challenges they present. One Canadian scholar, Darren Byler, is helping to guide that journey, with two recent titles that make an outstanding contribution to both public awareness and critical scholarship. The books…

A foot of snow has fallen overnight.I strap on snowshoes and begin to pad uphillto take a sunrise walk. Some earlier pilgrimhas come this way and in their poking stepsI neatly tamp a frozen channel and smooththe path for other travellers when they come. I plod in cold and steady thought untilI reach a shocking slash right through my course.A deer’s plunging heart-shaped hooves have wreckedmy tidy, narrow route, torpedoed my lineinto a frothy, wayward “X.” Spun round,unmoored like when the saint’s living lectern, a spellbound stag, bolted in fear, all studyscattered, the Good Book bouncing in its rack.Still, saint, stag and Book were soon restored.But there’s no salvage here. The snow tellsof feet sinking, paths crossed, heart churned,and all devotion to order overturned. Nancy Holmes lives in Kelowna, British Columbia. This poem…

Cuba: An American History Ada Ferrer Scribner 576 pages, hardcover, softcover, ebook, and audiobook AN EPIC HISTORY DESERVES DRAMATIC chronicling, and Cuba is a country with such a history. Given its outsize impact on the world, the island nation is often understood as a small place with a large foreign policy. With Cuba: An American History, the scholar Ada Ferrer tells the latest five centuries of its sweeping story in a beautiful book. The clever title signals her framework: no nation is ever truly an island, and this one has always been intimately connected to its neighbour to the north—and vice versa. If, like the many Canadians who would typically descend upon Cuba at this time of year, one harbours an image of the country’s past that begins and ends with the 1959 revolution, it might…