Nocturne: On the Life and Death of My Brother - Helen Humphreys ✔✔✔

Humphreys is a favorite Canadian author of mine - I loved The Lost Garden especially.  This was a very different book, since it is a letter to her brother Martin, a well-known Canadian pianist, RCM examiner, composer who was diagnosed with terminal cancer in the summer of 2009 and who died in December of the same year at the age of 45.

There are some wonderful quotes I could copy here , on the themes of grief, dying, sibling love, but most especially about music.  Interestingly enough, one of Martin's favorite pieces was Debussy's Clair de Lune, which is also my "signature piece", and she even quotes the Paul Verlaine poem which was the basis for all of Suite Bergamasque.  But anyway, here are a few...

"Grief enjoys shorthand, that's what I'm thinking today.  Narrative is too fluid.  Grief is all chop, all rhythm and breaks, broken.  It is the lurch of the heart, not the steady beating of it."

"Maybe music is better company than writing because it makes a sound, takes up human space, a dimension in the world.  It releases emotion, whereas writing pins emotion down.  And all writing is necessarily elegaic."

"You must have felt both liberated and oppressed by the fact that the music lived through you, that you were responsible for making it happen, that without your body to animate it there was only silence"

The Orenda by Joseph Boyden ✔✔✔✔✔

I could give this book more checkmarks, I would - it's a wonderful book! The third by Boyden, and although I thoroughly enjoyed them all, this was very special.

The Orenda is the story of the Huron Indians, the Jesuit priests who came to convert them in the early seventeenth century, and the Iroquois Indians, who were bitter enemies of both the Hurons and the Jesuits.  Bird is a Huron elder whose wife and family were killed by the Iroqouis many years earlier, and is the central Huron character in the story.  He captures and kills an Iroquois family, but saves their young daughter, and adopts her as his own, naming her Snow Falls.  And finally there is Christophe, the Jesuit priest referred to by the Hurons as Crow, because he wears a flapping black robe.  He has come to the Hurons, escorted by Bird when this killing takes place, and is later joined by other Jesuits.  Christophe's character is based on Jean de Brebeuf, the Jesuit martyr.


This isn't an easy book to read, because it is very brutal, both in the violence throughout, but also in the weather conditions, the illnesses, lack of proper food.  However, Boyden paints a clear picture of a way of life we can only wonder at, and describes many native rituals, including torture, in such a way that you could never say the violence was gratuitous.  And I couldn't put it down, and found myself thinking about it when I wasn't reading it. The rituals ands religious symbols of the Jesuits were a complete mystery to the natives, and to have these described from the native's vantage point  is masterful.

It's been nominated for the Giller, which Boyden won for Through Black Spruce a few years ago, so it'll be interesting to see if he's able to repeat.  And - as usual after I read a good historical novel like this one - I spent another half hour or so looking up information about the various tribes and the role of the Jesuits in these communities.

This may be a good book to recommend for Book Club another year.

Stranglehold by Robert Rotenberg ✔✔✔✔✔

This is the fourth crime novel written by Rotenberg, a criminal lawyer himself from Toronto.  I have read them all, and this one is my favorite so far.  Nearly all of the characters are familiar, because they appear in the three previous novels, although the stories are not sequential.

Detective Ari Greene is accused of murder in this particular one, and the victim is another well-known character from the previous novels.

Fast-paced, many references to familiar spots in Toronto ( this one centers on a motel on Kingston Road, a very familiar street for us when travelling to David's place), and informative glimpses into the police department and courtroom drama, these are very exciting reads from beginning to end.

I can't say enough about the quality of these novels.  I read this  one in three days - couldn't put it down!