Hello Hemlock! discussion

Happy new year everyone! This month we will be reading Sinclair Ross' AS FOR ME AND MY HOUSE, a true #CanLit classic to kick off 2015! It should be relatively easy for people to get their hands on.

Quick show of hands: When a book looks slim I'm actually more intimidated. Anyone else agree, or am I totally crazy?

Jessica wrote: "Happy new year everyone! This month we will be reading Sinclair Ross' AS FOR ME AND MY HOUSE, a true #CanLit classic to kick off 2015! It should be relatively easy for people to get their hands on...."

Sinclair Ross is wonderful and this is one of my very favourite books. THRILLED to be reading it with everyone at Hello Hemlock! And Jess, Ross is one of those writers who can tell a nuanced and complex story without any of the filler. It's slim but dense. I can't wait to start talking about it!

Hey guys! Wow. This book is DENSE. I had no former knowledge of the book (apart from Jason and Emily's LOVE for it) and I am not that far in, by page count. But I am WAIST DEEP in emotion, friends. In just over 20 pages my heart has stopped several times, having been so arrested by the words on the page. Here is one of my favourite passages thus far, when Mrs. Bentley meets Mrs. Bird, the doctor's wife who also feels separated from the community in which they are both outsiders. She calls herself an Expatriate, though she is not British, and references a poem about England in the spring. Perhaps it's because I am a newcomer to a small town, but my stomach was filled with butterflies and my mouth forgot to breathe when I read this:

She sat for a moment, looking melancholy through her glasses, then rallied: "That's why I dropped in on you, my dear. I heard your piano up on Main Street--young, sparkling, jubilant---and I said, 'There, Josephine'---there's an expatriate too. You'll find the spring you're looking for--someone akin to you----'"

What's your favourite passage(s) so far?

Ally wrote: Ross is so good and manipulating the atmosphere and weather without making it feel contrived.

You are SO RIGHT, Ally! I love that about his writing, as a total newbie to his work. Canadians are endlessly enamoured with the weather of this big, bad countryside. Despite living in the freaking TUNDRA right now, each time I turn the page I am engulfed in the spring showers of the prairies. How? HOW, SINCLAIR?

Okay everyone! Can we start getting some favourite passages/quotes/lines? Feel free to post from any part of the book, as we should all be nearing the finish line :) Also feel free to reference the page numbers as best you can. We've all got different versions but it could be fun to try and spot other people's favourites in our own text!

"In the Car, Paul said thoughtfully that that was the worst penalty inflicted by education, the way it separates you from the people who are really close to you, among whom you would otherwise belong"

"It's a woman's way, I suppose, to keep on trying to subdue a man, to bind him to her, and it's a man's way to keep on just as determined to be free"

While I do not like this description of a woman, me being a woman, I found it very interesting that Ross would depict our narrator like that.

Carolina wrote:"It's a woman's way, I suppose, to keep on trying to subdue a man, to bind him to her, and it's a man's way to keep on just as determined to be free"

I appreciate what you said about disliking this description of a woman, Carolina. Do you think it's because Ross felt that way? Was our narrator at the mercy of her environment/era, when perhaps popular opinion felt women to be this way? Is that even a thing? ;)

Other's can comment too!

One of my favourites, underlined and dog-eared in my copy from my last reading, is on page 159 of the 2008 NCL edition:

"'Religion and art,' he says, 'are almost the same thing anyway. Just different ways of taking a man out of himself, bringing him to the emotional pitch that we call ecstasy or rapture. They're both a rejection of the material, common-sense world for one that's illusory, yet somehow more important. Now it's always when a man turns away from this common-sense world around him that he begins to create, when he looks into a void, and has to give it life and form.'"

Ally wrote: ""The wind and the sawing eaves and the rattle of windows made the house a cell. Sometimes it's as if we had taken shelter here, sometimes as if we were at the bottom of a deep moaning lake, We are ..."

Ally, that's so funny that you chose this passage, because I love it too. I really love the paragraph that precedes it though:

"The sand and dust drifts everywhere. It's in the food, the bedclothes, a film on the book you're reading before you can turn the page. In the morning it's half an inch deep on the window sills. Half an inch again by noon. Half an inch again by evening. It begins to make an important place for itself in the routine of the day. I watch the little drifts form. If at dusting time they're not quite high enough I'm disappointed, put off the dusting sometimes half an hour to let them grow. But if the wind has been high and they have outdrifted themselves, then I look at them incredulous, and feel a strange kind of satisfaction, as if such height were an achievement for which credit was coming to me."

Jessica wrote: "I appreciate what you said about disliking this description of a woman, Carolina. Do you think it's because Ross felt that way? Was our narrator at the mercy of her environment/era, when perhaps popular opinion felt women to be this way? Is that even a thing? ;) "

Our narrator was (in my opinion) the image of "her time" almost to the dot. Left her dreams of being a musician behind, bends to her husband's decisions even if she doesn't agree with them, and puts herself down quite often. The book was originally published in the early 1940s, so I would think that she is a product of the woman image back then and the construction of a character that is meant to be sorrowful and heart broken. I haven't read anything else from Ross so I can't be sure if that's the way he always depicted women, but this fragile type of female character was pretty common for a long time, particularly when the author was male.

Jason wrote: "Ally wrote: ""The wind and the sawing eaves and the rattle of windows made the house a cell. Sometimes it's as if we had taken shelter here, sometimes as if we were at the bottom of a deep moaning ..."

That's one of my favourites as well...you two have EXCELLENT taste :P

Here are a few more that I love: "We've all lived in a little town too long. The wilderness here makes us uneasy. I felt it the first night I walked alone on the river bank — a queer sense of something cold and fearful, something inanimate, yet aware of us. A Main Street is such a self-sufficient little pocket of existence, so smug, compact, that here we feel abashed somehow before the hills, their passiveness, the unheeding way they sleep. We climb them, but they withstand us, remain as serene and unrevealed as ever. The river slips past us, unperturbed by our coming and going, stealthily confident. We shrink from our insignificance. The stillness and solitude — we think a force or presence into it — even a hostile presence, deliberate, aligned against us — for we dare not admit an indifferent wilderness, where we may have no meaning at all."

"There was a hot dry wind that came in short, intermittent little puffs as if it were being blown out of a wheezy engine. All round the dust hung dark and heavy, the distance thickening it so that a mile or more away it made a blur of earth and sky; but overhead it was thin still, like a film of fog or smoke, and the light came through it filtered, mild and tawny…I turned once and looked back at Horizon, the huddled little clutter of houses and stores, the five grain elevators, aloof and imperturbable, like ancient obelisks, and behind the dust clouds, lapping at the sky.

It was like one of Philip’s drawings. There was the same tension, the same vivid immobility, and behind it all somewhere the same transience.”

SO GOOD. Ross's treatment of landscapes absolutely kills my little geocritical heart.

Emily wrote: "Jason wrote: "Ally wrote: ""The wind and the sawing eaves and the rattle of windows made the house a cell. Sometimes it's as if we had taken shelter here, sometimes as if we were at the bottom of a..."

I am so excited for you to get all geocritical with this novel, you have no idea.

One of my favourite passages: "We've all lived in a little town too long. The wilderness here makes us uneasy. I felt it the first night I walked alone along the river bank -- a queer sense of something cold and fearful, something inanimate, yet aware of us. A Main Street is such a self-sufficient little pocket of existence, so smug, compact, that here we feel abashed somehow before the hills, their passiveness, the unheeding way they sleep. We climb them, but they withstand us, remain as serene and unrevealed as ever. The river slips past, unperturbed by our coming and going, stealthily confident. We shrink from our insignificance. Their stillness and solitude -- we think a force or presence into it -- even a hostile presence, deliberate, aligned against us -- for we dare not admit an indifferent wilderness, where we may have no meaning at all" (NCL ed., p. 141).

I love Ross' writing style; it kind of reminds me of Michael Ondaatje's. This passage obviously clarifies the metaphor of the land as their relationship and makes me think of a hilarious 4-panel comic about Canlit wherein a couple compares their marriage to the cold, bleak winter (sorry, I couldn't find it! If anyone knows what I'm talking about and/or where to find it, please link it up yo). I like the way he avoids linking words and little transition words to convey the language of the time and also to leave the reader with a sense of disconnect. I think he definitely has a powerful and draining way of storytelling (could have something to do with the rambling run-ons...), as others noticed.

Whenever I started hating the characters, he would inevitably draw me back in with some little glimmer of hope, only to crush that hope moments later. By the end of the book I really disliked and pitied every single one of the characters and their "false fronts." But I loved the book and its underlying message of staying true to yourself.

Renée wrote: "One of my favourite passages: "We've all lived in a little town too long. The wilderness here makes us uneasy. I felt it the first night I walked alone along the river bank -- a queer sense of some..."

Hey Renée! You and Emily have similar (read: good!) taste in passages!

The comic you're talking about is by Kate Beaton and can be found here:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_eFzemeXkU_A...

Your connection to Ondaatje is interesting to me. I love Ondaatje, and I know you're a big fan of THE ENGLISH PATIENT. I haven't thought of comparing their styles. I'll have to revisit some Ondaatje and look for similarities in style. It would be an interesting comparison. I was thinking a LOT of Martha Ostenso's WILD GEESE this time I read it. Maybe it's the Judiths. There were things that Judith said, about saving money to leave Horizon for something bigger, that reminded me of the "new woman"... but then sometimes her behavior was NOT "new womany." Can I get some opinions up in here please? Renée? Emily, you've read Wild Geese!

Ren, I like what you said about the sense of disconnect you found in the novel; I briefly touch on that in my forthcoming Hello Hemlock video! What was the reading experience like for you?

And that beautiful "false front" metaphor. Sigh sigh sigh. What a novel.

I'm so glad you loved the book! Thanks so much for reading along and commenting! <3

Jason wrote: "Renée wrote: "One of my favourite passages: "We've all lived in a little town too long. The wilderness here makes us uneasy. I felt it the first night I walked alone along the river bank -- a queer..."

I definitely picked up on the WILD GEESE vibes too. Ross and Ostenso were both writing out of prairie realism, so it makes sense that these genre conventions (like their characterizations of women) bridge the two novels.

Their treatment of landscapes, too, is SO similar (I'm thinking here of the way the prairies are given a kind of antagonistic agency -- you see that ALL OVER the passages we've listed above, and its something that Ostenso draws out at length as well). #BeGeocritical

Just chiming in to send big love to errybody on this thread.

To those who haven't commented yet: BRING IT ON. Favourite quote or passage? Did you find our narrator an empowered voice, or a disenchanted subject of her time? Any other probing thoughts?

Yo pals, Jess' final video is UP, and that's a wrap on As For Me and My House! Feel free to stop back here and add comments if you think of anything new, but if not, let's move on to Shani Mootoo's MOVING FORWARD SIDEWAYS LIKE A CRAB!

See you there!