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Martyn Bryant

BOOKS

Dining Out

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The Cat’s Table, by Michael Ondaatje, McClelland & Stewart

by Martyn Bryant
06.05.2012

Michael Ondaatje’s latest novel, The Cat’s Table, floats in a sea of magic, curiosity and the fantasy of youth. Ondaatje animates life aboard the Oronsay, a six-hundred berth passenger ship en route from Sri Lanka to England in the 1950s. The twenty-one day journey is seen through the eyes of an eleven year-old boy nicknamed Mynah. [...]

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BLUE MET

Revolution Central

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Ahdaf Soueif at the Blue Met: review and podcast

by Martyn Bryant
22.04.2012

15-20 years ago, Egyptian journalist and novelist Ahdaf Soueif collected a third of an advance on a book that she didn’t write. She was asked to write about Cairo, the place of her birth and where she grew up and studied, but couldn’t bring herself to write an elegy for a city she saw as having long ago passed its prime.

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BLUE MET

Face to Face

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Esi Edugyan at the Blue Met: review and podcast

by Martyn Bryant
21.04.2012

In the introductory lines of Half-Blood Blues (reviewed by The Rover last year) Sid gives us a sense of Chip, “He got this booming voice, and when he talked it overwhelmed the air, shoved it aside like oil in a cup of water.”

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BOOKS

Virgin Territory

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The Virgin Cure, by Ami Mckay, Knopf Canada

by Martyn Bryant
02.04.2012

Ami Mckay took on the imaginative opportunity to recreate the world of her great-great-Grandmother in her latest novel The Virgin Cure. It’s New York City in the early 1870s and she works as a visiting doctor for the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children. Through her visits she meets the novel’s protagonist, whom she seeks to help, the lead narrator Moth.

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BOOKS

Gorilla in our Midst

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Silver, by Pablo Urbanyi, McNally Robinson

by Martyn Bryant
03.03.2012

“I had vague memories, from the days when I used to read National Geographic in an effort to find out who I was.” So narrates Silver, the highly intelligent gorilla from Africa with white fur-covered arms that “speckled with gleams of silver,” in the parody novel of the same name by Pablo Urbanyi.

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BOOKS

Saying I Do

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Interview with Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Marriage Plot (Knopf Canada)

by Martyn Bryant
19.02.2012

Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, opens his latest novel The Marriage Plot with an epigraph by François de La Rochefoucauld: “People would never fall in love if they hadn’t heard love talked about.”

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OCCUPY CHRISTMAS

The Wild Hunt

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Stalking the origins of Christmas

by Martyn Bryant
22.12.2011

In life we have to live with contradictions. F. Scott Fitzgerald said in The Crack Up that, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Christmas raises the most fundamental and visceral contradictions in me; it’s wonderfully loving and hedonistic but also nauseatingly cheap and shallow.

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BOOKS

The Bigness of Things

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This Will Be Difficult to Explain, by Joanna Skibsrud, McNally Robinson

by Martyn Bryant
04.12.2011

“Somewhere, that is, between the verifiable and measurable tick and the ensuing, and otherwise unremarkable, tock…” Johanna Skibsrud moulds time and space to investigate the contents of what is shared and isn’t shared between friends, close relations and strangers.

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BOOKS

Never Never Land

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Niko, by Dimitri Nasrallah, Véhicule Press

by Martyn Bryant
20.11.2011

Dimitri Nasrallah’s first novel is centered on the playful and exuberant Niko, opening with his early childhood in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war. Surrounded by a near constant backdrop of machine gun fire and exploding bombs, his proud and loving parents protect his innocence by, for example, asking him to hide from ‘ghosts’ (not militia) when the fighting gets close to their home.

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BOOKS

Interview: Johanna Skibsrud

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Interview with Johanna Skibsrud, author of This Will Be Difficult to Explain & The Sentimentalists.

by Martyn Bryant
30.10.2011

Johanna Skibsrud, winner of the 2010 Giller Prize for her debut novel, The Sentimentalists, returns with a collection of short stories This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories. She appears at Paragraph’s Books & Breakfast, Sunday 30th Oct to launch the book. I recently caught up with her in Montreal.

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BOOKS

Getting Here is Half the Fun

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Culture and Difference: Essays on Canadian Society, Ed.by Howard A Dougherty and Marino Tuzi, Guernica Editions

by Martyn Bryant
09.10.2011

“Who belongs in Canada?” “Are some Canadians more Canadian than others?” “Who is not an immigrant?” These are some of fundamental questions posed, researched and discussed in the book Culture and Difference, Essays on Canadian Society.

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ART

Art & Science: At The Crossroads

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Pioneering neurosurgeon Dr. Ivar Mendez brings his creativity to the Musée des maîtres et artisans du Québec.

by Martyn Bryant
27.09.2011

If I said to you, “I’m going to drill a hole in your skull, weave a small pacemaker-like device through the meat of your brain to reach its core, and then pulse electricity from it, all while you were awake,” you’d probably back away slowly and call to have me locked-up. A little too much [...]

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BOOKS

Magic India

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Tiger Hills, by Sarita Mandanna, Penguin

by Martyn Bryant
13.06.2011

“Jaggery-sweetened milk payasam clotted thick with raisins, orange jaangirs dripping syrup, coconut barfis” and other exotic food concoctions leave the reader salivating in Tiger Hills, the debut novel by Sarita Mandanna.

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FESTIVAL CITY

Summing up the Subcontinent

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BLOGGING THE BLUE MET

by Martyn Bryant
02.05.2011

The wave of empires, religions, languages and cuisine that makes India such a rich, exotic and fascinating country also results in divides and migrations, such as the 1947 Pakistan-India partition and the disputed Kashmir border. Kasmiri poet and playwright Aziz Hajini, and poet Koyamparambath Satchidanandan from Kerala, described the long time over which they needed to absorb and reflect on 2002 state-sponsored genocide by Hindu Extremists on Muslims in Gujarat before they could write about it. They produced some extremely distressing poem

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FILM

Right AND Honest Answers

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Professor Norman Cornett, NFB Documentary

by Martyn Bryant
11.03.2011

Dr. Norman Cornett’s creation of a “theatre of learning” as a Religious Studies Professor at McGill University and his subsequent dismissal in 2007 (to this day he has never received a letter from McGill outlining the reasons for this) is the subject of a 2009 National Film Board documentary by the distinguished and inspirational filmmaker [...]

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