Thursday, February 17, 2005

• Currently Watching Sharpe's Rifles By Sean Bean, Assumpta Serna see related

  Confession: I've been watching "Sharpe's Rifles" with Sean Bean and I keep rewinding the tape to this scene:

  Theresa: If you were French I would take a knife and you would tell me all I wanted to know.

  Sharpe: But we're allies.

  Theresa: Allies.  Do Allies keep secrets from one another?

  Sharpe: Lovers keep secrets from each other, yet they still make love.

  I would sell my grandmother down the river to have Sean Bean look at me like that.

  I'm well into A Good House by Bonnie Burnard. It's been a bit of a disappointment. Burnard maintains a distance between herself and her characters. We never really know what they're thinking and can only make surmises about their characters from their actions. Also, this book tells the story of a single family in small-town Ontario, starting in 1942 and ending in 1997. The expanding cast of characters is hard to keep track of, and the more characters there are, the less we know about them, since Burnard treats them all with equal weight. It's not that the characters are one-dimensional or cartoonish, such as you could expect from a book of lesser quality, but I couldn't bring myself to really care very much about any of them.  The book is also about that particular part of Ontario, its customs and how the people treat eachother.

  On the plus side, this book did teach me that regional similarities can override national ones. The book is set near Lake Huron. I grew up on the Great Lakes too, (Lakes Erie & Ontario) but on the American side. The characters' speech patterns are similar to the ones I grew up with, despite the fact that we are of different nationalities. Burnard used the word "guys" a lot. It really struck me. Where I live now, no one uses the word "guy" to describe a young man. And yet if I had read this book before I left Buffalo, I wouldn't have even noticed her use of this word. It's not just her use of the word guy.  There are certain passages that sound exactly the way I talk, and I don't get that feeling from other books that I read, despite all of them being written in English, my native language.

  Some of the scenes she describes: eating dinner on the porch of a cottage while the sun sets over the lake, hanging out on the balcony of an old dance hall that's on the beach, with the lake, invisible in the darkness, lapping the shore, or battening down for a big storm that's coming off the lake--these are all scenes I lived myself a hundred times. It helps that I've driven through that section of Ontario many times when we lived in Michigan but had family in Buffalo.

  A Good House won a major literary award in Canada, and while it's certainly well written and I enjoyed the trip down memory lane, it's unlikely that I will seek out more books by this author.

  In other news:  ever diligent in my quest to have a house that smells at all times as Fresh as a Morning Breeze, I washed my couch's slipcover and washed out the inside of the kitchen garbage pail.  This means that tommorrow one of my kids will definitely spill a blueberry smoothie into the couch cushions.  Even now, my 12 year old is balancing a plate loaded with half-eaten salad, kalamata olives, chicken and ranch dressing on the arm of it.

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