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Executive’s early plight in Sri Lanka influential

Every family’s legacy can be mixed, whether due to strained relationships, major or minor disagreements, external factors or some combination of issues. In his memoir Prisoner #1056: How I Survived War and Found Peace, Roy Ratnavel relates how his background as a Tamil man from Sri Lanka, and particularly his relationship with his father, influenced his later life and his determination to succeed in his new life.

Ratnavel grew up in Sri Lanka during a period of intense persecution of the Tamil people in that country. He became a political prisoner at the age of 17 before immigrating to Canada, where he worked at a variety of jobs before becoming an executive at CI International, Canada’s largest asset management company. Currently, he lives with his wife and son in Toronto. Prisoner #1056 is his first book.

In Prisoner #1056, Ratnavel tells the story of his early years in Sri Lanka where, as a teenager, he was rounded up together with other Tamils, taken to prison and tortured before being released three months later through the intervention of a family friend. The author’s father insisted on getting his son to Canada to give him a better life and the chance to flourish.

Only a short section of the book deals with the author’s imprisonment, but it establishes Ratnavel’s sense of obligation to work hard and thus justify his father’s decision. When he learned his father was shot and killed only days after Ratnavel’s departure, it gave the author an added incentive to do well in his new country.

Professor, student come to terms with love and loss in Kang’s new novel

Han Kang’s latest novel Greek Lessons is far more than a simple retelling of the age-old student-falls-in-love-with-their-professor trope. Instead, what she crafts is an intimate look into the lives of two people trying to find solace in the study of language as they navigate a world that is slowly slipping from their grip.

Set in Seoul (the city Kang calls home), a woman finds herself dealing with an egregious amount of loss. Her mother has recently passed, her ex-husband has gained full custody over her young son and she has lost her ability to speak. Having lost her speech once before as a teenager, and finding it returned to her by learning a new language, she attempts the same by joining a class on ancient Greek.

Her professor takes notice of her silence and solemn demeanour, reminded of a previous lover who was deaf. When his attempts to communicate with her through sign language fail, he seems to give up, though curiosity remains on either side: “There are times when they look at each other without speaking. Waiting for the lessons to begin… Little by little, his face became familiar to her,” Kang writes.

We learn that he too is experiencing a loss. That loss is of a strong cultural identity — his childhood having been split between South Korea and Germany — and the rapidly impending loss of his sight.

St. Boniface-born Greenpeace co-founder fondly remembered in essay collection

Robert (“Bob”) Hunter is an undeservedly unheralded figure in Manitoba.

Ontario has twice honoured the pioneering environmental activist and co-founder of Greenpeace in its landscapes.

It created the 400-acre Bob Hunter Memorial Park in the greater Toronto area. And Toronto city council later named a 17-hectare municipal park near Scarborough Bob Hunter Greenspace.

But the native son of St. Boniface, who got his start as a reporter for the Winnipeg Tribune, has nada here to recognize him.

Courtroom thriller a mysterious masterclass

Seattle lawyer Keera Duggan reckons her zillionaire hunky client isn’t guilty, maybe, as she doggedly preps for her first murder trial... but he still gives her a case of the serious creeps.

Even if client Vince didn’t murder his wife Anne, it doesn’t mean he’s not guilty of a lot of other nasty stuff, she figures, knowing all too well her job is to see Vince gets the very best protection of his legal right to presumption of innocence and the absolute best defence she can muster.

The police are certain they have Vince slam-dunked for life without parole. His wife, confined to a wheelchair, sat in her kitchen with her back turned as someone blew off the back of her head. Vince came home and reported finding her dead — so why did he wait so long between being spotted by his surveillance cameras and dialling 911?

Vince doesn’t know Anne had two earlier visitors who will testify they left her alive: a lawyer who confirmed for Anne that their prenup gives her every penny if Vince cheats, and then a woman whom Anne accused of cheating with Vince. Anne had photos. Lots of photos. Oh dear.

Métis women’s struggles span generations

Beautifully crafted and deeply moving, Manitoba-born, Newfoundland and Labrador-based Métis author Michelle Porter’s debut novel is a testament to the strength of Métis women.

Porter may be known best for her poetry, including her 2019 collection, Inquiries.

However, her background includes journalism, two works of non-fiction about her family history (including last year’s Scratching River) and teaching creative writing and Métis literature at Memorial University.

Porter’s range of experience shows in A Grandmother Begins the Story, a story about five generations of Métis women trying to understand their identities, overcome personal struggles and better connect with each other.

Pandemic pursuit of wonder delights

Subtitles do a lot of heavy lifting for authors of non-fiction. Though they dutifully wait their turn, making their appearance in self-effacingly small fonts, subtitles share what the would-be reader needs to know. Revealing the focus of a book, a task enigmatic primary titles decline to do, the subtitle’s no-nonsense attitude is softened only by its inclination toward alliteration.

At least this seems to be the case for books by British author Katherine May. The title of May’s new book, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age, follows a pattern established by her first book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. In the case of both books, May lives up to the promise of her subtitles, offering readers not only honest explorations of the challenges of contemporary life but also reassurance about our ability to endure and even thrive.

Wintering, a New York Times bestseller, explored May’s family’s experience of a series of hardships, including medical and mental health challenges. Fortuitously published in early 2020, it appealed to readers who found themselves grappling with the unanticipated disruptions and losses of pandemic life. Enchantment takes on both the darkest phases of the pandemic and the confusing and stressful aftermath of Britain’s lockdown. Very much of the moment, May’s portrait of daily life in an “Anxious Age” articulates the not-uncommon experience of constant worry.

A skilled author of reflective personal essays, May writes compellingly about her loss of both focus and motivation and the drain of too much time spent reading troubling news.

Beauty, joy found in encounters with nature

As even the longest life is short compared with that of the great, wheeling universe, Jean-François Beauchemin “strives to… balance this brevity… by way of joy… or otherwise the seeking of beauty.” In this, his 24th book (translated into English by David Warriner and illustrated by Annie Konst), the prize-winning Québécois novelist and poet offers readers 66 observations — each no more than four pages, and most half that — he calls “a bestiary of memory.”

For Beauchemin, joy and beauty are most reliably found in encounters with animals both wild and domestic, and with the natural world, and this slim volume is primarily dedicated to accounts of these meetings, interactions that animate Beauchemin’s life and, indeed, his death, or at least his anticipation of it.

For example, writing about a fallen oak and an owl who might be the tree’s soul, he muses, “I wondered… if all the beating of wings, the nocturnal calls, and the sudden flights I perceive so clearly in me might be the expression of a similar presence… of a peaceful soul appraising its chances of survival for the day I absent myself from my body once and for all.”

Reminiscent of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, Beauchemin’s style is beguiling, as are many of his notions, and readers are certain to find joy and beauty within these pages, as well as invitations to ponder meaning.

Hanks’ colossal cast of characters provides inside look at movie magic

Chances are you’ve heard of Tom Hanks — movie actor, director, producer, global icon and collector of vintage typewriters. As it turns out, you can now add novelist to that list — actually, surprisingly good novelist.

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, Hanks’ second book (after his short-story collection, 2017’s Uncommon Type), is not without flaws, including a too-long title which, in a way, points to its excess — though the book holds many surprises.

There have been recent novels that weave together a myriad of characters over different time periods, such as Jennifer Egan’s excellent The Candy House, from last year. Hanks amps up the concept by dipping into the mindset of dozens of players. To say it’s an ensemble cast doesn’t do it justice.

Egan’s book followed minor characters and expanded their story by showing their lives and motivations. Hanks does a similar thing, but goes a bit too far. Upon meeting a new character, you start to worry if the next chapter will follow them back to conception, which in fact happens more than once.

Economic whistleblower zeroes in on China

This is the third edition of confessions written by American economist John Perkins, which began in 2004 with the publication of Confessions of an Economic Hitman and was revised in 2016 as The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. It’s now clear to about two million readers in dozens of languages that when it comes to demystifying money and politics, nobody does it better. What Albert Einstein is to physics, what Lennon and McCartney are to music and what Steven Spielberg is to movies, John Perkins is to the mysteries of economics, the master of exposing the dark side of development.

Perkins was a wholesome New England kid who was raised and educated to believe that as an American, his first duty was to be “the Good Guy.” He believed that; he was a star in the Peace Corps in the late 1960s, then landed a plum job as a “strategic consultant” for a leading engineering development firm.

There he was shocked to learn that his real job was to colonize developing countries whose resources — oil, minerals, perhaps — were needed by American corporations. He was trained to visit and convince these countries to accept huge development loans they probably could not repay, and ultimately demand cheap access to their actual resources and political support instead of payment. In the meantime, jobs and profits from these projects went to Americans, and poverty levels remained the same in countries targeted for “development.”

Perkins was not alone — there were many such men and women in the 1970s known privately in the trade as EHM, or economic hit men. Behind them were another level of persuaders known as “the jackals,” hired assets mandated to use bribery, blackmail or even assassination to inspire co-operation and get results. Perkins failed to persuade at least two South American leaders — Omar Torrijos of Panama and Jaime Roldós Aguilera of Ecuador — to play the debt game, both of whom died in private plane crashes within weeks of each other.

Winslow’s gangsters back for more mayhem in scorching sequel

Danny Ryan never wanted to be a godfather — decent blue-collar guy, loving husband and father, loyal to his friends… such a lovely man, except when he’s killing people.

Kind of like Michael Corleone, without the couth.

When our tale begins — or more accurately, resumes, this being the second book of American author Don Winslow’s latest trilogy — some exceptionally bad people are making Danny watch as they prepare to burn some other people alive, after which it will be Danny’s turn.

It’ll be almost 350 pages before we find out what (shudder) happens, but don’t forget that Winslow has promised us it’s a trilogy, and he’s made a big career writing about people who know what’ll happen to them if they lie to their customers.

Trio of Belgian women thrill in wartime fiction

American author Pam Jenoff has a reputation for writing books with unexpected plot twists. Her latest and ninth book, Code Name Sapphire, is no exception. At the end, many will be left saying “I didn’t see that coming.” Jenoff has taken many events and characters from real life during the Second World War, shuffled the deck and rearranged events and characters to create a compelling story centred around the interactions of three women in occupied Belgium and the tough choices they each face.

Hannah is a political cartoonist with the Resistance in Berlin in 1942. She narrowly escapes a Gestapo raid that ends with the death of her fiancé Isaac. Eventually, she makes her way to Hamburg, where she hides for several months before booking passage on a ship carrying refugees to Cuba.

After the ship is turned away, they try for America but “the price for saving a ship full of Jews was too much for even the president of the United States to bear.” (Sound familiar?) Hannah stays with the ship as it returns to Belgium. Occupied by the Nazis, the country is hardly safer than Germany, but Hannah hopes her cousin Lily, who lives in Brussels, will take her in.

Lily had left the family home in Antwerp and moved to Brussels nine years earlier to marry Nik, more than a decade her senior, the doctor who has treated her dying mother. Lily, whose family was in the diamond trade in Antwerp, is a proper society lady in Brussels, naive about the Nazi occupation since being Jewish in predominantly Catholic but tolerant Belgium had never been an issue. Now it was a liability, and one that made their futures uncertain.

Narrator’s quest for purpose, identity at core of deft debut

Some new writing is so refreshing and articulate, the reader will follow the author anywhere. Toronto’s Marta Balcewicz offers a first novel that fits that description; it is unusual but completely plausible and real.

Big Shadow is narrated by the main character, 17-year-old Judy, who has just finished high school and, as the novel begins, is trying to take seriously the work she has been assigned by her cousin Christopher and his pal Alex, both also 17. They are studying the clouds, trying to interpret what the clouds’ shapes mean, especially to the people watching them. But sooner or later, they will have to decide what they are going to do in the fall — attend university?

Balcewicz restricts the novel to a minimum of people living in or near a small city in 1998. Judy’s life seems simple, uncluttered by commitments. She had a boyfriend for a really short time and he has left town. She lives with her mother, who works at a library and has little social life — “she’d degenerated unnaturally quickly.”

One rainy summer day, Judy is on the protected steps of a university building when a man hurriedly joins her to get out of a sudden downpour. He speaks to her, and she encourages him. He’s tall and middle-aged. After a brief exchange, he seems to think she is bright. She tells him, “‘I’m going to start classes here in the fall.’”

Canada’s role in U.S. Civil War, Lincoln’s death examined in engaging account

Democracy is not worrying the walls are thin.

Which is just as well, since what Julian Sher is letting us know is as hair-raising as discovering the Mona Lisa was paint-by-numbers.

Sher’s words — well said and documented — do us a refreshing favour by explaining that Canada didn’t just support the Underground Railroad that funnelled southern slaves into this country.

We also gave birth to something highly controversial and less noble in the American Civil War — an underground highway of mayhem and mischief operated in Canada by Confederate spies and agents for export to their enemy, the North.

Provincial grievances, Indigenous rights loom large in fragile national unity

Donald J. Savoie suggests Canada’s national anthem should be B.J. Thomas’s Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song. His latest polemic argues Canada is unique among nations in that every province, region and identifiable group loudly claims victimhood in one way or another yet, at the same time (with one glaring exception), Canada has resolved or mitigated their grievances to the point where it is internationally recognized as one of the best countries in the world.

Savoie, who holds the Canada Research Chair at the University of Moncton, is the author of several award-winning books about the failures of Canadian governance and what should be done about it.

Savoie blames this all-encompassing victimhood on Ontario and Quebec manipulating the creation of the Canadian federation to suit their own interests. In 1867, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia agreed to unite as one federal state. Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland remained aloof. The inhabitants of the vast expanse of the Northwestern Territory and Rupert’s Land (“owned” by the Hudson’s Bay Company) were not consulted. Apart from the Red River Valley, it was populated almost exclusively by Indigenous nations.

Decades of failed attempts to create viable governments for Ontario and Quebec, the threat of American military expansion and the British government’s fear of being drawn into an economically disastrous war pushed John A. Macdonald and George-Étienne Cartier into seeking an arrangement that would provide a form of independence and allow for westward expansion.

New in paper

Either/Or: A Novel

By Elif Batuman (Penguin, $25)

Picking up where Batuman’s The Idiot left off, protagonist Selin sets out on an international journey while trying to navigate life at an Ivy League school.

Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters

On the Night Table

TJ Klune

Author, In the Lives of Puppets

Horror is my great love — I love horror novels, love the genre. I’ve been reading it since I was a kid. So I’m always interested in finding new horror authors that are coming out to put their spin on the story. I just finished reading a book called The Spite House by Johnny Compton. It’s his debut novel and it’s a short read, but it is fantastic. It is a great haunted house novel about a Black family that moves into a white neighbourhood... and it is extraordinary. It is so, so good. I enjoyed every second of it.

Bovey’s survey of Western Canadian art a clear and passionate account

Surveys of Canadian art have tended to focus on central Canada, with the western provinces often getting only a cursory look. In this comprehensive new book, Patricia Bovey, an art historian, academic, gallery director and just-retired Manitoba senator, addresses this marginalization, not just by focusing on visual art in the West, but also by challenging the conventional structures and approaches that have historically divided art into the centre and the margins.

In their place, Bovey offers a complex flow of intertwining narratives that trace the development of visual art in the four western provinces. She begins with a brief chronological overview, mentioning pre-contact foundations, going on to early “itinerant” immigrant artists and exploring the gradual 20th-century expansion of professional art scenes in the main western cities.

Bovey is not hung up on timelines, however, which can be overly determined and which often slot art into narrow categories and discard what doesn’t quite fit.

She uses other approaches to organize her material, starting with a section that concentrates on medium and technique, grounding her discussion in the materiality of art and the development of visual languages. She cites such examples as Ann Kipling’s delicate drawings, Reta Cowley’s luminous watercolours, prints by artists working through Winnipeg’s Grand Western Canadian Screen Shop and the innovative sculptures of Brian Jungen, created with ordinary consumer goods.

Treatise on class struggle mines policy, backstory

On Class is about, just as its title says, class in Canadian society: what it is, who talks about it (or not) and how.

It’s a nifty, provocative little book.

On Class is the seventh short-book title in Canadian publisher Biblioasis’s Field Notes non-fiction series that focuses on economic, public-policy and cultural issues. Biblioasis touts its series titles as the literary descendants of 18th-century political pamphlets.

Deborah Dundas is the Toronto Star’s books editor. Broadly speaking, her book is about debunking the American Dream — and its Canuck cousin — that holds that through smarts and hard work anyone can rise from poverty to, if not wealth, at least middle-class comfort.

Family’s grieving of 9/11 death offers valuable lessons

On Grief: Love, Loss, Memory is not a self-help book. Nor is it a challenge to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s notion of the five stages of grief, at least not directly. It’s the extraordinary account of the grief suffered by the family of Robert George (Bobby) McIlvaine, who died at age 26 in the 9/11 attacks in New York City in 2001.

Jennifer Senior was fortunate to have a connection to the family; her brother (unnamed) was Bobby’s roommate in 2001, and she knew the family. She used this connection to interrogate Bobby’s mother, father, brother and fiancée to write this essay for the Atlantic magazine. Originally titled Twenty Years Gone, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2022.

Even luckier for Senior is the fact that each member of the McIlvaine family mourned in dramatically different ways. This is no surprise. As Senior notes: “Every mourner has a different story to tell.”

And not just the McIlvaines. Mourning is “idiosyncratic, anarchic, polychrome.” The McIlvaines just happen to be particularly vivid examples.

Rethinking value of work key to combatting exhaustion

There exists a taken-for-grantedness with work.

For most of us, we get up on prescribed days of the week and march off to a second home, where we engage in tasks and thinking in exchange for money. Some of us who are lucky enough, including this reviewer, are even excited each morning to work. Some see work as a calling — a place where we find meaning, community and purpose.

But for Atlantic writer Derek Thompson, our obsession with meaning-making through work is not only a recent phenomenon, but also one that could very well be problematic. In On Work: Money, Meaning, Identity, a short collection of long-form essays and part of Atlantic Editions, Thompson makes the case for what he labels “workism:” a new religion based on the idea that people “ask their jobs to provide community, transcendence, meaning, self-actualization, existential therapy — all the things we have historically sought from organized religion.”

Our species is highly creative and capable of great feats. But in the 21st-century North America, this has translated into longer hours worked with many “feeling overextended, exhausted, and empty.” These are the lessons, however, that we have taught ourselves in our society — that hard work and devotion to it are the bedrocks for fulfilment. Crawling to your home on a Friday night at the end of the week when you haven’t spent time with your family, your partners, or neighbours is the norm.