William Dalrymple, author of THE LAST MUGHAL, speaks at the ROM on March 26th
Launches campaign to restore 15th century Tibetan painting
The Friends of South Asia (FSA) at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) celebrates the re-opening of the Sir Christopher Ondaatje South Asian Gallery with its first event of the season: Who was the Last Mughal? Lecture & Book Signing with William Dalrymple. The reading takes place on Wednesday, March 26, 2008 at 6:30 pm in the Signy & Cléophée Eaton Theatre at the ROM, followed by a book-signing. Copies of THE LAST MUGHAL will be on sale: this is the launch of the paperback edition in Canada.
Celebrated historian and author William Dalrymple will speak about his latest book, THE LAST MUGHAL: The Eclipse of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857. This is the tragic story of the poet-Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar II, who found himself swept up by the largest anti-colonial uprising in the nineteenth century, the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The result was the catastrophic end to the dynasty that built the Taj Mahal, horrific casualties, and an ascendant British Raj. Within five years, the last Mughal was dead, buried in an unmarked grave far from his beloved Delhi.
“Dalrymple presents a brilliant, evocative exploration of a doomed world and its final emperor, Bahadur Shah II ... That the rebels fatefully raised the flag of jihad and dubbed themselves ‘mujahedin’ only adds to the mutiny’s contemporary relevance “ (Sunday Times).
William Dalrymple is the author of five books of history and travel, including Delhi: City of Djinns and White Mughals. He has recently written about the Pakistani political scene for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Hindu, The Guardian, and The Toronto Star. This event launches FSA’s fundraising campaign to restore a rare and extremely fragile Tibetan Buddhist painting from the 15th century. This conservation project will allow the thangka to go on display for the first time in the Museum’s history.
Tickets are now on sale: $35 Public; $30 ROM members; $25 ROM/FSA members. Register online at http://www.rom.on.ca/programs, click ROMLife lectures, Keyword Mughal or call 416.586.5797.
This event is generously supported by the Ancient Echoes * Modern Voices: South Asia Programs Fund.
FSA is a membership group which supports a deeper understanding and appreciation of the diverse and rich history of South Asian arts at the ROM through the Sir Christopher Ondaatje South Asian Gallery, special events and programs.
For more information, visit http://www.rom.on.ca/friends, e-mail , or call 416.586.5700.
LOVE & BLOOD: At The World Cup With The Footballers, Fans, and Freaks is the new book by Jamie Trecker, senior soccer writer for Fox Sports.
In 2006 Jamie, based in Chicago, Illinois, travelled with fans, footballers, journalists for the world’s biggest spectacle: The FIFA World Cup. With the kind of tragedy that can only be found in soccer and Shakespeare, LOVE & BLOOD is an irreverent and intensely readable account of the finals in Germany, examining the passion, politics, controversies and economics of the beautiful game. And drinking a lot of beer…
Jamie and I caught up on email earlier this week and talked about the World Cup, Toronto FC and the future of Major League Soccer (MLS)...
Dan W: What surprised you most at the 2006 World Cup?
Jamie Trecker: The overall quality of play in the first phase of the Cup was poor and the hard corporate sell that surrounded the Cup was at an all-time high . Both were a bit off-putting and detracted from what is the greatest spectacle in all sport. The former showed just how overworked the players really are in today’s hyper-competitive global soccer market and the latter showed why the global soccer is so hyper-competitive.
DW: Who was your player of the tournament?
JT: Fabio Cannavaro of Italy. Zinedine Zidane was a close second.
DW: At the 2002 World Cup, the US reached the quarterfinals. Why did a seemingly better-prepared US team under-perform in 4 years later?
JT: Well, they weren’t better prepared - as it happened, they were pretty poorly prepared. The difference is that the USA was sold as “being better” and that just wasn’t true. In 2002 the USA benefited from being a) an under-rated “unknown” and b) playing on neutral ground. They were well-known by the time 2006 rolled around and the USA have historically struggled on European soil. Fact is, getting that single point against the champs was a major achievement, but because of all the overblown hype, it felt to many fans like a failure. But the team is not able to handle true tactical football, and that’s a failure of development and the American training system.
DW: Can you see the day that a North American team will win the World Cup?
JT: Yes, but it may not be in my lifetime. Certainly both the USA and Mexico have the population bases and interest to produce top-level athletes, but whether either of them can is an open question. I think Canada, with the emphasis on hockey and its smaller population, is far less likely to be competitive outside of the CONCACAF region.
DW: Soccer is a popular sport for young kids in North America, but this hasn’t apparently translated into a successful adult game in the US or Canada. Why do you think this is?
JT: I think soccer is successful in both countries, actually; it’s just not a “major” sport. North America is such an inflated market because of the huge revenues from baseball, basketball, NASCAR and the NFL, so it’s easy to overlook the fact that getting 15-20,000 a night is pretty good for any sport.
Why is it not a major sport? For the same reasons boxing, horse racing and tennis aren’t—you didn’t have a league for a number of years and that took it out of the public eye. Boxing and racing were the two big sports at the turn of the 20th century, but they faded—the same thing might well happen to any one of the top sports today.
One thing that has contributed to it is that soccer has been thought of more as a pastime for kids than an actual “sport.” That’s slow to change.
DW: England recently played Russia on a controversial artificial turf instead of grass. The surface has been approved by FIFA and many MLS teams (including Toronto FC) use it, despite widespread disapproval within the game and fears over injuries. Should FieldTurf be used for soccer matches?
JT: I don’t like it, personally. Having said that, there is a need for some surface for very cold and very arid climates. FieldTurf seems to be the best of a bad bunch right now, and soccer players are going to have to get used to it.
DW: What is holding the MLS back from reaching mainstream success?
JT: Bluntly, the quality of play. Americans demand the best in sport, and it’s pretty obvious that just about anyone that cares to can see top-quality soccer—for free or the cost of a cable connection—virtually every day of the week thanks to networks like Fox, TSN, ESPN, Rogers et al.
MLS has done a good job building up its infrastructure, but a poor job actually building up the player base. Salaries are paltry, rosters are thin, and good young players from Latin, South and Central America are not being tempted to come and play here as a result. It’s very disappointing.
DW: Has the arrival of David Beckham at the LA Galaxy been a good thing for the MLS?
JT: It was illuminating, but no, I think it proved to be a public relations disaster. MLS rushed him out too early, on an injured ankle, and the folks in LA were woefully unprepared to deal with the pressure and attention they got as a result. It’s interesting that as soon as the hub-bub died down in LA that the Galaxy started to win again, isn’t it?
DW: How would you evaluate Toronto FC‘s first season in the MLS?
JT: I think it went as well as one can expect, honestly. Anyone who has followed MLS knows that it’s very difficult to assemble a team via a dispersal draft, and it became very clear that many of the Canadian internationals were not ready for this level of play. But TFC’s fans have stuck with the team, and the stadium has the best atmosphere in the entire league by my reckoning so I think that they’ve laid down a real solid base for next season.
DW: Would the MLS benefit from more Canadian teams?
JT: Absolutely. I’d love to see a team in Montreal, myself and I think Vancouver could be a good addition. Canada has been a great host for pro soccer at every level, and I can’t see why that wouldn’t continue.
DW: Thanks Jamie! I can almost forgive you for being a gooner....
Jamie’s book LOVE & BLOOD is published by Harcourt, and available in bookstores now. You can read Jamie’s latest thoughts on the soccer online at jamietrecker.com
The Maple Leafs might be having a tough time right now, but if you live in Toronto then you can win even if our team can’t! Five copies of MAPLE LEAFS TOP 100 by Mike Leonetti are up for grabs over at insidetoronto.com! You have until November 4th, 2007 to enter!
To find out more about the contest, click here.
OK, so the Toronto Maple Leafs may have got spanked last night by the Carolina Hurricanes, but even the most depressed Leafs fans should find something to cheer about in Mike Leonetti’s new book MAPLE LEAFS TOP 100: Toronto’s Greatest Players of All Time.
A beautiful hardcover book full of colour photographs, MAPLE LEAFS TOP 100 explores the team’s rich history and profiles Toronto’s greatest players from 1927 to 2007, ranking them from one to 100.
One of the contributors to MAPLE LEAFS TOP 100, Doug Farraway (AKA “The Deacon"), has posted a great article about his involvement in the book on his Fan 590 blog:
A year ago I was asked along with 13 other gentlemen to choose a top 1 hundred Maple Leafs of all time… I handed my list in almost ten months ago, and now the results are in bookstores everywhere.
It’s entitled “Maple Leafs, top 100, Toronto’s greatest players of all time”. The photos are terrific and the essays by John Iaboni are bang on. In other words if you’re a Leaf fan it’s a must to possess, and even if you’re just a hockey fan it’s a great book to own considering it’s a basic history of the best known franchise in this country.
I guess only the question is, will you agree with the selection panel? Who would be in your Leafs Top 100?
Rutu Modan has been interviewed by the BBC about her acclaimed graphic novel EXIT WOUNDS:
We have also just found out that Rutu will be appearing at this year’s International Festival of Authors in Toronto with fellow Drawn & Quarterly artists James Sturm, author of the forthcoming JAMES STURM’S AMERICA (which includes the out-of-print story THE GOLEM’S MIGHTY SWING) and Adrian Tomine, whose first full-length graphic novel SHORTCOMINGS is out this fall (woop!).
(Fans of Adrian Tomine on the west coast, might also like to know that he will be appearing at Sophia Books in Vancouver on Tuesday, November 13th! More details soon...)
Here’s your chance to see some of our great authors at events around the country.
This is the list of who’s going to be where. (Sorted by location and date.)
(UPDATE: Author events have been added to this list since it was originally posted. New additions are marked below.)
BRITISH COLUMBIA
Word On The Street Vancouver
Sunday, September 30, 2007
http://www.thewordonthestreet.ca/
John Lekich
Chris Mizzoni
Pascal Blanchet
Bruce Grierson
Vancouver International Writers Festival
October 16-21, 2007
http://www.writersfest.bc.ca/
Justin Cartwright
John Burns
Edeet Ravel
Faïza Guène
ONTARIO
Eden Mills Writers Festival
September 7-9, 2007
http://www.edenmillswritersfestival.ca/
Edeet Ravel
International Festival of Authors, Toronto
October 17-27, 2007
http://www.readings.org/
David Leavitt
Emma Donoghue
Justin Cartwright
Will Self
Rutu Modan New Addition!
James Sturm New Addition!
Adrian Tomine New Addition!
I had the pleasure of meeting Clare Clark, author of THE NATURE OF MONSTERS, in Toronto a couple of weeks ago when she was in town for a reading at The Booked! Festival and so I was very happy to see that her devilishly good new novel garnered a great review in The New York Times this weekend:
In “The Nature of Monsters,” Clark again shows an impressive ability to combine historical accuracy with vivid language and a strong plot, confirming her claim to a place in historical city-lit by returning to London for a tale of mystery, skulduggery and (in what seems set to become a hallmark of her work) intensely described physical sensation… As a storyteller, Clark is endowed with verve and intelligence, but her larger gift, dazzlingly in evidence throughout both her fine novels, lies in the originality of her imagination. She gives us a world that feels alive and intense, magnificently raw.
Furthermore, James Macgowan profiled Clare Clark for the Ottawa Citizen on Sunday:
Clark, who just turned 40, studied history at Cambridge, and must have taken her studying seriously, for she doesn’t just describe life in 1719 London, she reconstructs it, smelly detail by smelly detail, until the dirt, the odour, and the brutish streets lift themselves off the page and practically squat down next to you.
And Joseph at The Book Design Review Blog has posted about the terrific cover design for the book!
Here’s a quick summary, of recent reviews and interviews:
Newspapers
The Guardian (United Kingdom)
St. Petersburg Times (Florida)
The Winnipeg Free Press
Online
Curled Up With a Good Book interview and review
The Jane Day Reader (this review also ran in The Winnipeg Free Press review)
Ariel Gordon, Winnipeg-based writer and editor, has posted a very thoughtful review of Clare Clark’s THE NATURE OF MONSTERS on her blog The Jane Day Reader:
LEAF through the first dozen pages of Londoner Clare Clark’s richly disturbing second novel, and the following conclusions are inevitable.
First, that the former historian has a dark but orderly brain.
Second, that she is utterly unafraid.
The review originally appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press on Sunday.
Click here for the full review
PS - Clare is reading at the Booked! Festival in Toronto on Sunday June 10th at 12pm in the Speigeltent located at Harbourfront with Gil Adamson, author of THE OUTLANDER (Anansi Press). It would be great to see you there! : )
Harcourt have posted an interesting interview with Clare Clark, historian and author of the wonderfully visceral London novels THE GREAT STINK and the forthcoming THE NATURE OF MONSTERS, on their website:
my aim has never been to specifically expose London’s underbelly; although, I suppose that in The Great Stink there is a great deal of it. Instead, what has always interested me as a historian and novelist is the daily minutiae of lives lived in places that are familiar to us but in a style and context that it is difficult for us to understand. The dirt and the smell of historical London were habitual inconveniences that its occupants took for granted; tolerance of squalor was ingrained which explains why, in the main, life was raucous and violent by our standards. If we are to get under the skin of a period, it is my view that we need to appreciate the context. If we, as modern human beings, find it difficult to behave well, how much more difficult was it for someone in the eighteenth century for whom life was cheap and filth a daily hazard? Against so dark and brutal a background any kind of goodness and kindness seems to me to shine with startling brightness.
THE NATURE OF MONSTERS is available May 19th and Clare will be attending the BOOKED! festival in Toronto on June 10th.
Click here for the full Clare Clark interview
Click here for THE NATURE OF MONSTERS mini-site
Click here for So Misguided’s review of THE GREAT STINK and THE NATURE OF MONSTERS
UPDATE: Click here for a neat BBC Radio 4 interview with Clare! (AUDIO)
Browsing a fine local independent bookstore on Monday I was very pleased to see a big stack of the very cool Mingering Mike: The Amazing Career of An Imaginary Soul Superstar by Dori Hadar near the register.
By a strange coincidence, alignment of the stars, quirk of nature and/or fate if you will, the always interesting Bookburger (Feeding Hungry Readers!) posted a review of Mingering Mike on the very same day. Spooky.
Jim Bartley, The Globe and Mail’s First Fiction Reviewer, discusses his debut novel Drina Bridge in the latest edition of The Danforth Review:
I read a lot, and I went back twice to former Yugoslavia and put a few thousand kilometres on rental cars driving to the various places and landscapes that appear in the book—Sarajevo, Belgrade, rural Bosnia and Serbia, gorgeous medieval monasteries in Serbia, ancient mosques. I met a lot of generous and accommodating people—Serb, Muslim, Croat and also Yugoslavs who don’t sport an ethnic identity—who were often a bit bewildered that this Canadian guy was writing a novel about their history and culture.
Published by Raincoast in 2006, Drina Bridge follows the story of Chris, a Torontonian traveling in Yugoslavia as civil war tears the country apart. Hoping to unearth the secrets of his dead lover’s past, Chris’ narrative becomes intertwined with the memoir of a hospitalized and embittered writer Slobodan Kusic. The result is a dark and courageous story of loss and reconciliation.
To mark Saturday’s protests against the four year war in Iraq, Toronto news blog BlogTO has reviewed Marisa Handler’s timely memoir of political activism Loyal to the Sky:
This book could be read and enjoyed for its interesting environs, its likeable writer, the political insight it offers or its striking and elegant prose.
I enjoyed it for the all of these but primarily for the questions Handler is brave enough to ask. While her answers to humanity’s problems are not entirely satisfactory, it is hard to blame her for falling short. In the full course of human history, far too many people have claimed to have solved these conundrums, while no one actually has.But Handler has the courage to look within and without, attempting to find a resolution and admitting what she does not know. The best passages are when she gropes for and is eluded by answers. For example, she writes of a New York protest:
“I watch my friends walking and chanting. They are good people, so good that they care about men and women and children they do not know and will never know. They are the conscience of this nation; they will not let these delegates forget what this administration is perpetrating. But this, what we are doing right now - is it helping? Or is it pushing us further apart? We didn’t come here to convince the delegates to change their minds, or to win their esteem. But I can see what they are thinking. Faced with hatred, they hate us right back. That’s what we’ve all learned to do. What would we risk if we tried something different?”
UPDATE!
If you would like to hear Marisa Handler talk about activism and her book Loyal to the Sky, two new podcast interviews with her are available from the Intrepid Liberal Journal and from Uprising Radio.
Toronto alternative magazine Eye Weekly has a look at Toronto’s thriving independent bookstores and talks to Marc Glassman the owner of Pages Books & Magazines on Queen Street West:
In what should be a low-stakes industry, Pages thrives on something other than profit margins. “When I started Pages I didn’t think anything more than it would be really nice to open a bookstore that could be community-based, make a bit of money, employ me and a couple of friends and represent alternative voices,” Glassman says.
As Pages’ neighbourhood at Queen and John changed over 25 years, the store’s approach to the books they stock has remained, but its audience now extends throughout the city. Glassman cites having the luck of wider interest in the store’s specialties - the small press and cultural theory - growing along with it.
Smart readers of the hip Toronto website BlogTO will have the opportunity to win Empire of the Soul: Some Journeys in India, by Paul William Roberts, tomorrow. Funny, insightful, and occasionally surreal, Empire of the Soul is a remarkable portrait of India’s political, cultural and spiritual life. First published in 1994, this updated edition has a new introduction from the author.
Paul William Roberts, who lives in Toronto, writes for Harper’s, The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, the Times Literary Supplement, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Jordan Times and the Globe and Mail. His book The War Against Truth: An Intimate Account of the Invasion of Iraq, published by Raincoast, won the 2005 PEN Canada/Paul Kidd Courage Award and was a finalist for the 2004 Charles Taylor Non-Fiction Prize.
The book will be given away as part of BlogTO‘s weekly “Humpday Giveaway” cheering up Toronto’s unfortunate literary types suffering midweek existential crises.
Praise for Empire of the Soul:
“Uniquely engaging, often profound, and beautifully written, it presents a powerful and hauntingly vital portrait of an ancient civilization in the grips of a modern economic miracle.”
-- New York Times
“Unusual… wondrous… splendidly evocative… lush.”
-- Globe and Mail
“Reminiscent of Bruce Chatwin, this soul-searching literary travelogue turns a keen and uncompromising eye toward India.”
-- Publishers Weekly
“One of the most remarkable travel books ever written. It’s brilliant, funny, moving and often profound… Empire of the Soul is the most living book about India I have ever read.”
-- Colin Wilson
In Remainder, the extraordinary debut novel by author Tom McCarthy, the nameless victim of an unexplained accident uses compensation money to painstakingly reconstruct and re-enact his memories of a London apartment building. A darkly comic and unpredictable exploration of memory and identity, it was originally published by underground French publisher Metronome Press, and is now available to a wider readership courtesy of Alma Books.
Tom McCarthy’s non-fiction book Tintin and the Secret of Literature is published by Granta Books (also available from Raincoast), and Remainder will be published in North America by Vintage in 2007. Tom is also the General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a semi-fictitious avant-garde network. He was born in 1969, and lives in London, England.
Raincoast Blog: Remainder has several incidental moments that appear significant but are ultimately unexplained. Do you know exactly what happens?
Tom McCarthy: If you mean do I know what exactly the ‘accident’ consisted of, no. It’s not Memento: it’s not important what the accident is, simply that it happened, that we’re in its aftermath. If you want to be literal about it, some bits of a satellite or plane falling on the hero’s head wouldn’t be a bad guess; if you want to be allegorical, you might think more along the lines that the ‘accident’ is history, time, being thrown into the world in the first place. All the other loose ends have their place and function at one level or another - short councillors, extra cups of coffee, even cordite…
RB: Is ambiguity a virtue?
TM: For sure. If you were simply communicating a message you were certain about it wouldn’t be any good as literature.
RB: So did you work out the precise details of the characters and plot first or did you just see where the initial idea would take you?
TM: The whole thing came in a flash, in half-an-hour of mad scribbling at a party after I’d seen a crack in the bathroom wall and had a moment of deja-vu, just like the hero. The rest was carpentry. Of course, details and whole sub-sequences came while I was developing and executing it, but essentially it was pretty much all there in the crack-moment.
RB: Is the apartment building in Remainder based on a real location?
TM: I went walking around Brixton (in South London) looking for a building corresponding to the one I had as a picture in my mind, just like the hero does. I found one that wasn’t exactly the same, but close enough to provide a base to work from, just like he does. It even had little roof-access cabins which I realised could be used for putting out the cats his vision requires to be slinking around (and which plummet to their deaths one after the other). The real building’s not called ‘Madlyn Mansions’ either: that’s a nod to Proust’s madeleine moment - and, of course, to madness.
RB: Do you think there is a unique London sensibility about the book? Will a North American audience read it differently to a British audience?
TM: It’s very integrated into the landscape of London, but I think that’s more incidental than fundamental. It’s by no means certain that the forthcoming movie will be set in London. Any big city that has dilapidated areas undergoing gentrification, coffee-shop chains and social hierarchies that break down along racial lines (and which big Western city doesn’t have all these?) could host its action. The only place it couldn’t be is LA, because then all its unreality and re-enactment scenes would play out as an allegory about the movies, which they’re not.
RB: I read in your fantastic Ready Steady Book interview with Mark Thwaite that you researched trauma and post-traumatic stress disorders for Remainder. Did you find that research interesting?
TM: It was absolutely fascinating. You wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy, but PTSD is an extremely creative condition. It instils a propensity for repetition alongside a need to disguise the scene being repeated, i.e. to generate other scenes and contexts for the primal event to morph through. It also leaves you with a sense that everything is somehow artificial, secondary, fake. Andy Warhol said that from the moment he was shot for the rest of his life onwards he felt he was just watching TV. The only ‘real’ thing for PTSD sufferers is the traumatic moment itself, which remains outside of proper memory, hence outside of all narrative, all representation. Again, that’s why the ‘accident’ must remain unnamed.
Part Two of this interview will appear tomorrow.
Tom McCarthy will be appearing at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto on October 27th and 28th, 2006.
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Check out our NEWEST Podcast for Clancy with the Puck, a hilarious tale of hockey hubris.