As you may have heard, the annual Scotiabank Giller Prize was handed out last night. Q&Q will have a full report on the evening on our News page, but for now, here’s some shots of the gala.

Above: Authors Linda Spalding and Michael Ondaatje.

More below the fold… (more…)

According to just-released statistics from BookNet Canada, the shortlist announcement for the Scotiabank Giller Prize sparked a sales spike that averaged a 388% increase in weekly sales for the listed titles.

In the week ending October 14, 2007, A Secret Between Us by Daniel Poliquin saw the highest percent increase at 1200%, followed by Effigy by Alyssa York with 564%. Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje and The Assassin’s Song by M.J. Vassanji, already selling at a robust rate before the shortlist announcement, increased by 83% and 70% respectively, while Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air has seen a 22% bump in sales.

Quillblog doesn’t want to dampen the celebrations – any sales spike is a good sales spike – but interpreting this information requires a bit more analysis.

Although BookNet does not release sales figures, the percentages should be understood in light of the fact that pre-announcement sales for some of the books were quite small. Daniel Poliquin’s jump from a week of single digit sales to one in the low triple digits, explains the huge percentage increase for his book. York’s 564% increase similarly comes from a jump from low double digit to high double digit sales. Books from Hay, Vassanji, and Ondaatje all got smaller bumps from low triple-digits to mid triple-digits.

The percentage figures also don’t take into account the varying lengths of time each book has been on sale. Ondaatje’s Divisadero, for example, had much higher weekly sales right after it was released in the spring than it does now.

What was it that Mark Twain said about statistics?

Call your bookie, dryclean your tux or dress, and prepare your conspiracy theories: the Giller longlist has been unveiled.

The 14 15 titles on the list, which will be whittled down to five on Oct. 9, are below. Just like last year, the list is a mix of the usual suspects and surprising newcomers, big presses and small. N.B.: the last three Q&Q cover stars – Michael Winter, Elizabeth Hay, and D.R. MacDonald – made the list.

Here’s the complete list, with links to Q&Q reviews and author profiles.

• Soucouyant by David Chariandy (Arsenal Pulp Press)
• Zero Gravity by Sharon English (The Porcupine’s Quill)
• Helpless by Barbara Gowdy (HarperCollins Canada)
• Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay (McClelland & Stewart)
• The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill (HarperCollins Canada)
• Stormy Weather by Paulette Jiles (HarperCollins Canada)
• Lauchlin of the Bad Heart by D.R. MacDonald (HarperCollins Canada)
• The Reckoning of Boston Jim by Claire Mulligan (Brindle & Glass Publishing)
• Conceit by Mary Novik (Doubleday Canada)
• Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje (McClelland & Stewart)
• A Secret Between Us by Daniel Poliquin, translated by Donald Winkler (Douglas & McIntyre)
• The Assassin’s Song by M.G. Vassanji (Doubleday Canada)
• The Architects Are Here by Michael Winter (Penguin Canada)
• October by Richard B. Wright (HarperCollins Canada)
• Effigy by Alissa York (Random House Canada)

Watch Q&Q Omni for a full story later today.

When the Man Booker longlist was announced last August, pundits were somewhat surprised that many of the year’s biggest authors – Sebastian Faulks, J.M. Coetzee, Michael Ondaatje – were left off. After yesterday’s shortlist announcement, however, they’re positively hornswoggled. The most disturbing element of the list, according to The Telegraph, is that all but one of the authors – Ian McEwan – are practically unheard of, and that a full four of them have sold less than a thousand copies of their books.

While McEwan’s novella, On Chesil Beach, has been a runaway commercial success, selling more than 100,000 copies, one of his rivals for the prize, Animal’s People, loosely based on the Bhopal chemical plant explosion, by the Indian author Indra Sinha, had sold just 231 copies in [the U.K.] by mid-August, 10 days after its sales were supposedly given a major boost by being longlisted.

Nicola Barker’s Darkmans had sold only 499 copies. Anne Enright’s The Gathering had fared a little better with sales of 834 sales, Mister Pip had sales of 880 and of McEwan’s rivals, only Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist broke the four-figure barrier, with 1,519 readers buying it.

Michael Ondaatje will be the featured author on the BBC World Book Club’s fifth anniversary show on Sept. 28, speaking about his novel The English Patient. Host Harriet Gilbert will interview Ondaatje at Canada House in London, posing questions from listeners. In the past, the club has also featured Canadian novels Life of Pi by Yann Martel and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.

No word on whether on Ondaatje will be rereading his novel in preparation for the event. He once told an audience at a PEN Canada event that he doesn’t reread his own work and joked that if he did read The English Patient again he would probably be surprised there was no bathtub scene.

Thanks to John W. MacDonald’s blog for the tip.

In The New Yorker, Louis Menand takes a look at Ondaatje’s Divisadero, which leads him to investigate – and question, at least in part – Ondaatje’s approach to writing fiction.

There is a method of story writing that involves stripping the tale of every extraneous detail plus one, so that the nonextraneous bit becomes, in the reader’s imagination, the piece that might explain everything. It’s a formula for ambiguity. Kipling was expert at this; so was Hemingway. But ambiguity is virtually integral to literary expression—ambiguity, uncertainty, indeterminacy are ways that fictional texts mean what they mean. Ondaatje is doing something else. He is trying to change the medium.

[…]

The sacrifice of plot is tolerable, and, despite the willful digressions, traces of plot and even suspense are usually there in Ondaatje’s fiction. What is damaging is the sacrifice of character. His characters are ciphers. We have no affective connection with them. Their stories are too spare, and most of them are impossibly wan figures who seem to be floating outside of time—even in The English Patient, which treats the Second World War simply as the occasion for bringing exotic people together in threatening circumstances. The threat is there only to charge the atmosphere. But the strongest, the most entertaining part of The English Patient is, in fact, the conventional love story of Katharine and Almásy, just as the strongest part of Anil’s Ghost is the conventional mystery story of Anil and the twice-buried corpse.

(Read Q&Q’s review of Divisadero here.)

This week’s Friday … um, image … comes courtesy of photographer John W. MacDonald, who attended Michael Ondaatje’s recent appearance at the Ottawa International Writers Festival, only to be told that photos were strictly verboten during the event. So MacDonald sketched the author instead. Read MacDonald’s account of the evening here. He plans to auction off the sketch to the highest bidder.

Have you recently attended a book reading, library event, or author appearance? Have some interesting book-related pictures you want to share? If you’ve got photos of the Canadian book scene, we’d love to see them. Send them to us or sign up through Flickr and submit your images.

Michael Ondaatje’s new novel, Divisadero, is in stores this week. The Q&Q review of the book, written by our new feature columnist James Grainger, will be posted on the reviews section of our website tomorrow; watch our splash page for the link.

The Independent posted an excerpt of an article originally published in the UK-based Mslexia magazine, in which Danuta Kean discusses the process of bringing great books to the big screen.

The article references recent films such as Notes on a Scandal, based on Zoë Heller’s 2003 novel of the same name, and the fifth Harry Potter film, which is due out this July, and explains the box office expectations of adapted works.

According to Nick Marston, the managing director of Curtis Brown’s media division, there are two types of film: bullseye films, which rely on word-of-mouth and have to hit their upmarket audiences spot on if they are to be hits, and shotgun films: mass appeal movies which can hit far more targets.

“Blockbuster films thrive off mass appeal,” he says. “If you have a literary novel, translating it into an adult movie is harder because it appeals to a smaller audience.” Films like Notes on a Scandal break out of the art house circuit because they have hit the bullseye, getting everything right from fine acting to a great script, critical approval and audience-enticing awards.

Kean also discusses the author’s lowly position in the filming process. One writer, Celia Brayfield, who sold film rights to her novel Heartswap, was told she could attend the movie’s premiere but only at her own expense. And that’s only if the film actually gets made at all. “Less than two per cent of optioned films make it to the screen, and those that do usually have long gestation processes….” (Brayfield’s Heartswap got dropped after the buyers, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, divorced.)

Kean includes a list of the best and worst adaptations. The English Patient is number five on the best list with high praise for its screenwriter. “Anthony Minghella turned Michael Ondaatje’s Booker winner upside down to form a romantic epic that improved on the original.”

By way of an introduction to a fairly gushing Washington Post review [registration required] of David Adams Richards’ most recent novel, The Friends of Meager Fortune, reviewer Ron Charles asks a question that many Canadian authors, editors, and agents have likely been asking themselves for a long time now:

Why do Canadian writers get so little respect south of the border? Unless they’re caught writing “color” as “colour” or “center” as “centre,” you’d think they could waltz into the unsuspecting arms of American book buyers. But the tendency to dismiss them is so strong that not long ago an American publisher told me she was stripping all mention of a novelist’s Canadian identity from her publicity material in hopes of increasing the writer’s chances.

Yes, of course, there are exceptions: Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro can always get in. But most Americans probably think Michael Ondaatje is British (try selling “The Canadian Patient”); although Douglas Coupland lives in Vancouver, he says he’s often introduced at book events as German. Meanwhile, Canadian treasures such as Guy Vanderhaeghe, Frances Itani and Alistair MacLeod garner so little attention here that they’d be lucky to get arrested. And the most shameful American blind spot of all may be for David Adams Richards, who keeps piling up awards in Toronto but can’t find a stable publisher in New York.

Fair enough, though we’re sure there are many, many American writers who pile up the awards but can’t get a New York editor on the phone, either.

(And now we can’t get the image of Guy Vanderhaeghe, Frances Itani, and Alistair MacLeod together in a holding cell somewhere over the border….)

Read Q&Q’s review of The Friends of Meager Fortune here.

In a double review of Ross Lecker’s Dr. Delicious: Memoirs of a Life in CanLit and David Helwig’s The Names of Things, Good Reports’ Alex Good takes a hard look at the era that both memoirs look to as CanLit’s Golden Age. This is the period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s when such institutions as Coach House Press, House of Anansi, The Porcupine’s Quill, and (perhaps most importantly) the Canada Council’s block grant program were created, and when books such as Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies, Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, and Mordecai Richler’s St. Urbain’s Horseman, among many others, were published.

After comparing and contrasting the two writers’ disparate approaches to their own personal histories and that of CanLit, Good offers up his take on that decade and its continued influence on Canadian literature and publishing: “Like it or not, there is a canon, and the new writing has to position itself in relation to it, if only to be recognized by lazy critics. I think that’s regrettable. I think the official canon of the Golden Generation was overrated. I also think it’s a shame that so much media oxygen is spent keeping the reputations of writers like Atwood and Ondaatje preserved long after they’ve done work of any interest. And what’s even worse is how we so often look to contemporary writers to be imitators rather than challengers.”

Good ends with a sentiment very dear to our hearts: “Literary debates are always being encouraged, not because of any particular delight in the struggle but because in the end it’s what makes literature stronger.”

Related links:
Read Alex Good on two CanLit memoirs

Vanity Fair’s promised survey of the Toronto literary scene has materialized on the magazine’s website. VF writer Anderson Tepper hit the International Festival of Authors at Toronto’s Harbourfront in October, inspired by an earlier visit to McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Manhattan location. In his online piece, Tepper talks to such writers as Dionne Brand and David Bezmozgis, and he sings Toronto’s praises himself: “Toronto: a mini–New York; an anti–New York; a younger, more global, more tolerant New York. I didn’t want to leave this city—with its neighborhoods shoulder to shoulder, its puddled streets reflecting a maze of steel and shimmering words, and where its literary godfather, Michael Ondaatje, seemed about to materialize just around every corner.”

Related links:
Click here for the Vanity Fair article
Click here for an October 2005 Q&Q Omni article about Tepper’s visit

How reliable are literary awards as an index of quality? Not very, suggests one Toronto blogger, who argues that Kazuo Ishiguro was robbed in the recent Man Booker race (his Never Let Me Go lost out to John Banville’s The Sea. The same blogger is currently “slogging through” another Booker winner, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. “All in all,” writes the blogger, “I find that the recommendations from friends, booksellers (just tell them other stuff you like — they can do more than ring up your purchase, you know), and reliable reviewers [are] far more likely to satisfy.”

Related links:
Click here for the BlogTO entry on literary awards

Globe and Mail books editor Martin Levin weighs in on the controversy about the Washington Post review of John Irving’s new novel. (To recap: reviewer Marianne Wiggins savaged the book in the Post, but the paper repudiated the review after Irving pointed out that Wiggins is the ex-wife of a close friend of his, Salman Rushdie).

The issue, then, is one of reviewer bias, and Levin concludes that in the small CanLit scene, finding a completely disinterested reviewer is unlikely. “For that reason, we will sometimes allow acquaintances to review one another’s work, but ask that the review itself disclose any relationship.”

A case in point that some readers may remember would be David Young’s review of Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost, back in 2000. Young’s review begins thusly: “A necessary caveat: Michael Ondaatje is an old and very dear friend of mine and I am a great admirer of his writing.” This is irrelevant, Young goes on to say, because the book is so very wonderful.

Offhand, we can’t think of a Globe review in which the writer confessed a bias and then went on to attack the book, but for anyone who wishes to jog our memory, please do so.

Related links:
Click here for Martin Levin’s Globe and Mail column
Click here for an earlier Slate piece about the Wiggins/Irving case

A commentary by Adam Langer in The Book Standard maps out the seven deadly sins of book reviewing, with help from Michael Ondaatje, Diana Abu-Jaber, and several other peeved authors. Included in the list of “sins” is the risky gambit of challenging veracity, the fallacy of associating protagonist with author, and the sadly misdirected compliment, which praises the author while missing the point of the book. Also maligned is the just-plain-mean review. As Langer writes: “Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient and Anil’s Ghost, says that the worst review he ever received was for a stage adaptation of his book The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. ‘They stop bad meat at the border,’ the critic wrote. ‘Why not this?’”

Related links:
Click here for the full article from The Book Standard

The Toronto Star checks in on McNally Robinson New York, and finds that manager Sarah McNally is displaying such books as Annabel Lyon’s The Best Thing for You and Richard B. Wright’s Clara Callan, and even has Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje lined up for an appearance. (They’ll be promoting the Persea Books anthology Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets.) “I was inspired by what my mother did,” McNally tells the Star’s Judy Stoffman. “She has done so much for prairie literature (by selling the local authors). She’s a powerful woman, the most organized person I know.”

Related links:
Click here for the Toronto Star story on McNally Robinson New York

A collection of photographs shot in 1970, most of them undeveloped until now, will begin showing at the Dessinée Art Gallery in Toronto this Saturday. The photos, by amateur photographer Sheldon Grimson, capture 15 of Canada’s most promising young writers, including Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, before they became household names. Grimson shot about a thousand frames, only 13 of which were used in an Oxford University Press anthology of up and coming Canadian writers. The rest of the negatives stayed in boxes in Grimson’s basement for 32 years. The gallery is at 2470 Yonge Street.

Related links:
Toronto Star article