Cut & Paste: The Books

Click here for an explanation of The Great Varsity Cut and Paste

Our section process was very scientific. We went to the UC and Trin book sales and bought a whole lot of books having to do with Toronto, then we whittled down the list to those we though would splice together well. Here’s what we’re looking forward to having fun with. All blurbs from the back cover copy.

Dionne Brand, What We All Long For (Random House, 2005) Award-winning writer Dionne Brand powerfully delves into uncharted aspects of urban life, the bittersweetness of youth and the secrets families try to hide. Tuyen, an aspiring artist whose family arrived from Vietnam in the 1970s, rejects her immigrant family’s hard-won suburban Toronto comforts. Instead, she lives in a rundown apartment on College Street that she shares with her friends—each of whom is grappling with familial complexities and heartache. Tuyen’s parents are still haunted by the loss of their son Quy, who disappeared in the chaos of fleeing Vietnam. Now, unbeknownst to his long-lost family, Quy has become a criminal in the Thai underworld—and he’s coming to Toronto. Amid the dynamic rhythms of the city, the tension surrounding Quy’s arrival mounts, and leads to a violent, unexpected encounter that will alter forever the lives of Tuyen and her friends.

Morley Callaghan, More Joy in Heaven (NCL, 1970) In this novel, which many people consider to be his best, Morley Callaghan displays his usual insight into human relationships and weaknesses, and questions the conventional morality of the Canadian community. More Joy in Heaven is the story of Kip Caley, an ex-criminal, intent on becoming a useful and honourable human being. His struggle with himself and with a society which will not let him regain his human dignity is presented with great perception and sympathy.

Howard Akler, The City Man (Coach House Books, 2005) It’s 1934, and Toronto is stalled in the Great Depression. Pickpocket Mona Kantor is scraping by on small change, while Eli Morenz, city reporter for the Daily Star, struggles to wring news stories out of the subdued metropolis. When a chance photo drives Eli into the Jewish underworld Mona inhabits, he finds he’s stumbled into the story of his life.

Told in prose as deft as a thief’s fingers, The City Man is a darkly funny romance about a perilous lust, a desperate time and the fine art of the gift.

Donald Jones, Fifty Tales of Toronto (UTP, 1992) Over two decades Donald Jones delighted readers of his column in the Star with fascinating tales of the city’s history. Here are 50 of his favourites, gathered together for the first time. In these pages you will meet some of the intriguing people of Toronto’s past—remarkable citizens and celebrated visitors. Among them:

• the pilot who loaded Canada’s first airmail flight with smuggled whisky
• the world’s first woman war correspondent
• the man who helped Sigmund Freud escape from the Gestapo
• the black doctor who became a hero in the U.S. Civil War
• the divine Sarah Bernhardts’ ‘scandalous’ performance
• the future bishop who was a literary forger
• the secret reason for the visit of Charles Dickens
• the nursing student who changed her name to Elizabeth Arden and made a fortune
• the 5000 heroes of the First World War who lie buried in Prospect Cemetery

Katrina Onstad, How Happy to Be (McClelland & Stewart, 2006) Katrina Onstad, one of Canada’s most popular you cultural journalists, makes her fiction debut with all the style, incisiveness, and intelligent wit for which she is known. Onstad’s first novel, How Happy to Be, is an engaging, shrewdly observed story about a woman searching for something real in the celebrity-driven, auto-referential world we live in, and figuring out for herself that elusive ideal of happiness.

Maxime, an entertainment writer at a neo-con newspaper, struggles with the emptiness of her job, haunted by the memories of her unconventional childhood on a West Coast island commune. Max’s early rebellious obsession with TV and movie stars has, now that she is thirty-four, turned into a life stuck deep in the machinery of celebrity worship where pop culture is her only acid test. She seeks refuge in parties and ritual substance abuse and half-hearted attempts to get herself fired. But the past comic and poignant, keeps intruding on her downward spiral: memories of her mother’s brutal death and her hippie father’s crippling breakdown; the reappearance of an aging vegan idealist who briefly played her stepmom; tender realizations about the artists she was supposed to marry; and the exotic sincerity of a long-lost boyfriend who re-enters her world. When these reappearances and recollections collide with Max’s more recent indiscretions, she realizes that any chance at happiness depends on uncovering, at last, her one true story.

Set during both the madness of a winter film festival in Toronto and in the hemp-flare-filled seventies on an island off Vancouver’s coast, How Happy to Be brilliantly captures our modern social mallaise and launches a masterful new talent for fiction with vibrancy and a satirical edge.

Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye (McClelland & Stewart, 1988) CAT’S EYE is Margaret Atwood's first novel since her international award-winning best-seller, The Handmaid’s Tale, in which she created a futuristic totalitarian society. In CAT’S EYE, Atwood moves away from this overtly political territory to a landscape which is more personal, but no less disturbing.

Painter Elaine Risley, pushing fifty, returns from Vancouver to Toronto for a retrospective of her work, which has been much celebrated by the women’s movement and much attacked from other quarters.

Toronto is the city she fled many years earlier, hoping to leave behind the tyrannical and obsessive memories of her early life there—from her post-World-War-II schooldays and fifties adolescence, through the avant-garde art scene of the sixties, to the advent of feminism in the early seventies.

Now, as she wanders the streets of the city, which are no longer puritanical and dowdy but resplendent with eighties glitz, Elaine confronts the submerged layers of her past—her unconventional family, her eccentric and brilliant brother, the self-righteous and dangerous Mrs. Smeath, and the two men Elaine later came to love in diverse and sometimes disastrous ways. But it is the enigmatic Cordelia, once her tormentor, then her best friend, whose elusive yet powerful presence in her life Elaine finally came to understand.

The realm of childhood and growing up, with its secrecies, cruelties, betrayals, and terrors, has never been so luminously evoked. Through the quirky, idiosyncratic voice of Elaine Risley, Atwood has given fascinating dimensions to the ambiguous roots of women’s relationships, both with one another and with the world.

By turns disquieting, hilarious, compassionate, haunting and mordant, CAT’S EYE is vintage Atwood, and her most deeply felt work of fiction to date.

Michael Redhill, Consolation (Anchor, 2007) Moving between the stories of one man’s lost legacy and of the man who discovered it, Consolation is a haunting novel about the traces of history in our lives, and how time alters even the things we hold most certain. This superlative book moves seamlessly between Toronto’s past and present, evoking the mysteries of love and memory, and what suffering the absence of the beloved truly means.

Barbara Amiel and Lorraine Monk, Celebrate Our City (M&S, 1983) This book is a Celebration! Torontonians were invited to produce their own book for the city’s 150th anniversary. They responded en masse—some 20,000 entries—with photographs and short literary pieces from which 300 were selected.

The result, as Barbara Amiel says in her introduction, is “a collection of special moments…that make up the multi-hued, extraordinary mosaic of a city that once knew itself as ‘Hogtown’ but now reaches to the skies.”

And as Lorraine Monk describes it, “Celebrate Our City is the voice of the people. The photographs ring with excitement and sparkle with reality.”

This, then, is Toronto as it looks and feels on its 150th birthday. With an historical introduction by Mike Filey and a page of useful contemporary facts about Toronto, Celebrate Our City is a book by Torontonians for the people of Toronto and for its many visitors.

James W. Nichol, Midnight Cab (Random House, 2002) Hailing from a small Northern Ontario town, Walker Devereaux, age nineteen, is in Toronto to discover the truth behind the harrowing circumstances of his early life. At age three, he was found abandoned on a country road, terrified and clinging to a wire fence.

Walker finds a job driving a cab and becomes romantically involved with the night dispatcher, Krista, who helps him track down the horrific secret behind his parents’ identities. But in doing so, they come within the deadly grasp of Bobby, a young man who has matured from early cruelty to murderous pleasure.

Maggie Helwig, Girls Fall Down (Coach House, 2008) A girl faints in the Toronto subway. Her friends are taken to the hospital with unexplained rashes; they complain about a funny smell in the subway. Swarms of police arrive, and then the bazmat team. Panic ripples through the city, and words like poisoning and terrorism become airborne. Soon, people are collapsing all over the city in subways and streetcars and malls.

Alex was witness to this first episode. He’s a photographer: of injuries and deaths, for his job at the hospital, and of life, in his evening explorations of the city. Alex’s sight is failing, and as he rushes to capture his vision of Toronto on film, he encourages an old girlfriend—the one who shattered his heart in the eighties, while she was fighting for abortion rights and social justice and he was battling his body’s chemical demons. But now Susie-Paul is in the midst of her own crisis: her schizophrenic brother is missing, and the streets of Toronto are more hostile than ever.

Maggie Helwig, author of the critically lauded Between Mountains, has fashioned a novel not of bold actions but of small gestures, showing how easy and gentle is the slide into paranoia, and how enormous and terrifying is the slide into love.

Toronto Stories: Streets of Attitude (Yonge & Bloor, 1990) “I imagine myself standing at the main entrances and exits of Toronto: Yonge Street, the 401, the QEW, Union Station, the Dundas bus terminal, Pearson Airport. And to every man and woman who passes by, to every person entering the city with a hopeful heart or fleeing it with a curse, I hand a copy of this book. What effect will it have on them? Will it make some about to leave suddenly decide to stay? And will it make others just arriving turn around and go back again?”—From the Introduction

Catherine Bush, Minus Time (HarperCollins, 1994) Helen’s mother is an astronaut trying to set an endurance record by circling the earth in a space station. Her father, a disaster-relief specialist, travels the world saving people from catastrophe. What kin d of family is possible when your parents are in constant motion and there’s so much space separating you from them? With risks of disaster all around, how do you dream a future for yourself?

With surreal lyricism and edgy, deadpan wit, Minus Time traces a young womans’ desire to make a place for herself in a world of media madness and toxic scares, where the simple act of breathing is fraught with danger. Brilliantly observed and deeply moving, Catherine Bush’s debut novel offers a striking snapshot of life on the cusp of a millennium, a tale told in a voice sparked with irony and awe.