Books

Writing non-fiction’s a bitch – a truth not universally acknowledged.

– Will Aitken in This Writing Death

Theatre

Chekhov for Beginners



by Natalie G.

Comment

Don't know where you were sitting, but there were lots of laughs.

– comment by Suzy Charto

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Marianne Ackerman

ART

Urban Tales with Edge

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Gordon Young, Galerie de Bellefeuille

by Marianne Ackerman
14.12.2010

Seen through Gordon Young’s eyes, city life is molten, mysterious. The mad dash of commuting and hanging out in cafés is distilled into edgy images of waiting, smoking, checking messages. Young’s quirky compositions in oil suggest he has taken scissors to perfectly ordinary shots of people doing banal things. The effect is anything but ordinary, [...]

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CRITICAL I

Imagining Montreal

Montreal Books, Bain St-Michel

by Marianne Ackerman
18.11.2010

Asked to name the iconic taste of anglo Montreal, most people tend to fall back on high-carb cliché’s like smoked meat and bagels. But look further, into the city as served up by 21th century fiction and you’ll find quite another range of images.

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CRITICAL I

Giller Gong Show

Giller Prize

by Marianne Ackerman
12.11.2010

Opening night reception of Don Quixote at the Centaur, a tiny ubiquitous woman accosts me with the dread question: “Did you catch the Giller Awards on TV?” Think about it Donna: how likely is it that I—one of the many unnamed losers—would spend that evening in virtual Toronto?

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ART

Cheeky Girls on the Verge

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Angela Grossmann, Galerie d’este

by Marianne Ackerman
10.11.2010

The impulse is familiar to me. A woman of a certain age, hit by a powerful interest in young girls. While men in their fifties may dream (and scheme) about sleeping with them, for a woman – at least one with a creative medium at her disposal – the urge is requited by watching and [...]

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NOTEBOOK

A Terrible Beauty

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La carte et le territoire, by Michel Houellebecq, Flammarion, 428 pages. $32.

by Marianne Ackerman
25.10.2010

A new Michel Houellebecq novel is an event in Paris, where some 700 titles will appear this fall, only a few garnering critical attention. No living writer polarizes the heady French literary scene quite like the chain-smoking, 55-year old agronomical engineer-turned-novelist, poet and filmmaker. Some are outraged by his blunt lunge at touchy themes; others [...]

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CRITICAL I

Freedom

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Freedom, by Johnathan Franzen, HarperCollins Canada

by Marianne Ackerman
10.10.2010

Midway through Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Freedom, I was seized by certainty that the whole enterprise was a joke. A clever if wildly undisciplined writer puts one over on Oprah.

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NOTEBOOK

Summer Duties & Bookish Intentions

by Marianne Ackerman
08.09.2010

Summer over, and I’ve opened not one of the books I so brazenly vowed (in public!) to read. Up to my ears in fixing up the farm house in which my five siblings and I were raised, none of the titles I packed seemed to make sense. They might have been written in Greek.

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