Dionne Brand reading at home.Dave Chan/The Globe and Mail
At the window during the day and at the lamp at night or early morning, reading is quieting. A busy kind of quiet, or rather a rich quiet. But there are rules. Namely, while writing poetry, read philosophy or natural history; while writing fiction, read poetry; after, but not before or during writing poetry, read fiction. These rules of reading keep the compartments of poetry and prose fiction pristine. It is really the poetry that demands this regimen; it is fragile and all means have to be employed to protect it from excess.
I just finished writing a book of poetry, so I've been catching up on fiction in the past several weeks. It was difficult because all I found myself doing was scrutinizing sentences for waste. So Colm Toibin, Junot Diaz, Michael Thomas and Colson Whitehead all came in for severe criticism unrelated to their narrative talent or success. But by the time I got to Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, the ascetic tendencies of poetry had abated slightly. Her collection, There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby, was gorgeous. Perhaps because these were short stories, droll, clever and wickedly funny. I was reminded that the sentence is not a terrible thing and one need not always be at work inciting tension between line and syntax.
So on to Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill, a novel, perfectly pitched, about the breakdown of a marriage post-9/11, but most entertainingly about cricket playing in New York. Amin Malouf's The First Century After Beatrice followed, a work about a near future year when no girls are being born in the world. I've also recently read Bernard Schlink's novel H omecoming and his short stories, Flights of Love. At core, what's being worked out is how the children of the perpetrators of the Holocaust come to grips with that legacy.Marilynne Robinson's Home didn't capture me as much as her first, Housekeeping. The desolate, barren, midwest America is present again, but I think not as effective. Attica Locke's Black Water Rising, and Walter Mosley's The Long Fall, both detective fiction … now I was really adrift of poetry and in the form most compelled by narrative plot. To recover, I'm in the middle of Violence, by Slavoj Zizek.
Dionne is a Toronto poet, novelist and critic.