Haruki Murakami
Translated by Jay Rubin
Knopf ($21)

by Emily Johnston

For Americans, the first sentence of Haruki Murakami's recent book of short stories, after the quake, plumbs a sudden and surprising well of feeling: "Five straight days she spent in front of the television, staring at crumbled banks and hospitals, whole blocks of stores in flames, severed rail lines and expressways." The six stories in the book take place in the months immediately following the 1995 Kobe earthquake and previous to the poison gas attacks on the Tokyo subway. As the characters hover between natural disaster and terroristic threats, their usual fragility and isolation take on a new poignancy, and with skill and grace Murakami explores what effect such a profoundly disturbing event has on people who are already adrift.

Each character, of course, is affected differently, and many stumble into a state of emotional crisis without even understanding why they feel so vulnerable. In "ufo in kushiro", the story opens as Komura's wife, after five days of watching coverage of the earthquake's horror, leaves him. She explains, "The problem is that you never give me anything. Or, to put it more precisely, you have nothing inside you that you can give me...living with you is like living with a chunk of air." Like many of Murakami's characters, Komura is almost perfectly passive, distant from both the world and his own emotions. Sent on a mysterious mission to distant, cold Hokkaido, he meets a woman who asks him if what his wife said was true. He replies, "'I'm not sure...I may have nothing inside me, but what would something be?'" Moments later, she provokes in him a moment of violent rage, pure feeling—and in doing so shows him that there is indeed something inside him.

Other characters' lives, having less connection, require a catharsis based in fantasy. Katagiri, the protagonist of "super-frog saves tokyo," catalogues his barren life to the giant frog that surprises him in his apartment, asking for his help in saving Tokyo from a rage-filled giant worm: "I'm an absolutely ordinary guy. Less than ordinary. I'm going bald, I'm getting a potbelly, I turned forty last month...Why should a person like me have to be the one to save Tokyo?" Frog seems to speak for the author, and not just ironically, when he replies, "Because, Mr. Katagiri, Tokyo can only be saved by a person like you. And it's for people like you that I am trying to save Tokyo." It is the lost who need saving, and Murakami reminds us of this comically and without sentimentality.

The Kobe disaster wakes these dazed characters, but not immediately. On the plane to Hokkaido, Komura reads coverage of the quake and thinks of his wife, "Why had she followed the TV earthquake reports with such intensity, from morning to night, without eating or sleeping? What could she have seen in them?" She has seen, of course, that everything can disappear in an instant, and she has begun to understand what this means to her life. Her leaving forces the same primal awareness on Komura.

Murakami's characters seldom act until they have been forced to this edge. This isn't because they're complacent—they're either thoroughly unhappy or quietly, uncomplainingly, but nevertheless dramatically unfulfilled. But they are inured to this, and feel utterly unable to change anything. When the quake comes, though, the emotional ground beneath them opens up too, and this changes them profoundly. They feel a powerful drive for connection, as in one character's realization that "right now I have to stay here and keep watch over this woman and this girl...even if the sky should fall or the earth crack open with a roar." Because they know now that it can.

Murakami has always been a keen and sensitive chronicler of the isolation that modern life can bring. The great surprise for his characters in these rich stories is that they are a part of the world, alive and vulnerable—and that they want to be.

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Natasza Goerke
Translated by W. Martine
Twisted Spoon Press ($14.00)

by Laird Hunt

Halfway through Polish writer Natasza Goerke's new collection of stories, farewells to plasma, a toenail blithely asserts that "monstrosity is an important issue." Immersed in Goerke's wonderfully disconcerting world of marriageable she-bears, writers who choke to death on egg yolks, and a charming couple called the Zeroes, the reader doesn't miss a beat and wants to hear more. The toenail, shut up inside a locket, obliges. It holds forth on plagues, it blushes, it scratches its head. Yet it is a completely plausible element in Goerke's through-the-cracked-looking-glass sensibility, an instance of 3-D synecdoche that blares absence and bespeaks troubled love: key themes in Goerke's universe. As she ends the story "Zoom":

So what to do with them all? If what keeps them apart is what joins them together, they still won't be able to get close to each other.

But they won't be able to get away from each other either.

Love and absence are at the heart of farewells to plasma, but they are not alone: Goerke's palette is too broad, her energies too various, for the collection to be so easily pigeon-holed. Goerke writes with verve on all shape and variety of topics. Her characters are travelers, fortune tellers, masochists, talking shadows. They are concerned with the difficulties of reality, of communication, of self-assertion. The fictional matrices they are conjured in tend to be short, oddly and cleverly crafted, both pragmatic and dreamy, and crackling with energy. The result is an absurdist-inflected brand of magical realism, akin in its fusion of homegrown and international (often Western, often American) culture and concerns to that set out in the shorter works of Haruki Murakami.

Part of the credit for the effectiveness of farewells to plasma, which presents a representative selection from three of Goerke's earlier collections, must go to its translator, W. Martin. He has turned the original Polish into pitch-perfect English, giving us a loose-limbed prose fully capable of handling Goerke's typically complex, off-kilter blend of emotion, action and imagery, as in the opening of one of the longer stories in the collection, "dog":

Clouds were blocking the sun, and Denisa, who was strolling along with all the grace of an open wound, picked up a stick off the ground and threw it as far as her strength would allow.

Goerke, who was born and raised in Poland and currently resides in Germany, is widely considered in Europe to be one of the most exciting young writers working today. If enough people this side of the Atlantic get their hands on farewells to plasma, that sentiment will soon find itself shared.

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David Park
Bloomsbury ($24.95)

by Peter Ritter

“The snow was general all over Ireland,” Joyce wrote in “The Dead.” And so it is in David Park's The Big Snow, a work, which, though set in Ulster in 1963, shares more than atmospheric conditions with Joyce's celebrated novella. Here is the mood of muffled and inchoate longing; the stinging exposure of lives stunted by provincialism; and the evocation of a pre-modern Irish landscape, which, with its “dark central plain and treeless hills,” seems to be dissolving even as it unfolds.

In form, The Big Snow is less a traditional novel than a series of vignettes connected by gossamer filaments of theme and tone. The snow, symbolic of stasis in "The Dead," here becomes a catalytic force akin to the apocryphal Santa Ana winds of Southern California, loosening inhibitions and blurring social strictures. In "Against the Cold," for instance, a comically prudish middle-aged school master finds unlikely refuge from the blizzard in the house of a female colleague. As the night wears on and the snow piles up outside, the two begin an achingly tentative courtship. "Special circumstances," the teacher reasons to himself as they finally embrace: "the unexpected welcoming flicker of lights in distant windows, the promise of rest and shelter."

Elsewhere, the snow becomes a symbol of suffocating isolation: A man whose wife has died during the storm longs to confess an ancient infidelity; an old maid, half-crazed with loneliness, scours the snow-bound city for a perfect wedding dress. In "Snow Trails," a vignette with shades of Joyce's "Araby," a shopkeeper's son finds himself irresistibly drawn to a sophisticated married woman who flits briefly through his rural village. He, like Joyce's narrator, sees in her the possibility of escape from the banality of his lot. When an accident of the weather strands him in the woman's manor house, he finds himself eavesdropping on her lovemaking, listening to "her voice fluttering like the silken wings of a moth and coming closer all the time to the core of the flame." The story's climax—pun intended—recalls Leopold Bloom's infamous seaside interlude in Ulysses.

The final story in The Big Snow, a sinuous police-procedural set in Belfast, seems at first to strike a discordant note with these finely modulated tone poems. In it, a young, idealistic constable named Swift—an homage, certainly, to another great Irish wit—is drawn into a murder investigation after discovering an anonymous woman's body. As Swift lurches through the back alleys and sectarian haunts of Belfast, the ubiquitous snow casts its spell: "All around him the city was transformed into something only partly recognizable. Familiar landscapes were smoothed and rendered indistinguishable and everywhere a great weight of white pressed down on the buildings, and the snow had a shiny brilliance to it that the grime of the city had been unable to consume."

If this closing novella seems at odds with the muted emotion of the book's earlier stories, it does share with the rest of The Big Snow an acute sensitivity to human fragility. In this, the timbre of Park's work most closely resembles the elegiac swoon which concludes "The Dead"—an image of snow "falling through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end."

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Maxine Chernoff
Coffee House Press ($16.95)

by Chris Semansky

A master of indirection and irony, attitude and empathy, poet and fiction writer Maxine Chernoff charts the inscrutable and the mundane in Some of Her Friends That Year: New and Selected Stories. Thick with allusions to popular culture, these stories attempt to illustrate what happens when characters, mostly women, love too much.

The title story—one of fifteen new pieces added to selections from her two previous collections, Bop and Signs of Devotion—describes the unnamed main character by chronicling what happens to her friends over the course of one year in a list of thirteen short, numbered sections: one writes a bestseller, another has her first baby at forty-nine, another one's cancer returns, and so on—the stuff of life. As in many of the stories in the collection, meaning doesn't develop so much as accrue, the sheer weight of events greasing the way for the main character's epiphany. In the last section, the narrator provides it, summing up this character's attitude towards others: "she knew how everyone felt, that their lives were somehow hers... that she wasn't happy as long as someone else was suffering."

There's plenty of suffering in these stories, from jilted wives to disillusioned Russian immigrants to emotionally exhausted middle-aged couples seeking to renew their love. Many of the stories point toward a moral. In "Jealousy," for example, a couple whose marriage becomes strained after they put their money in stocks meets a quadriplegic whose aide has abandoned her. Cuddling that night with her husband, the wife muses, "Maybe helplessness is all we need for a life we can bear. Maybe all we have to do is ask to share it." As much about redemption as suffering, Chernoff's stories sometimes skirt perilously close to preachiness, her martyr-like narrators hammering home the same point again and again about the redemptive capacity of love. The short sketch "Nobel Prize for Shoes" charts the emotional life of a woman who contemplates the idea of happiness while enduring her husband's philandering ways and petty demands. "Her dreams are always about responsibilities to others," readers are told, a description that applies to many of the female narrators here.

The well-pocked road of middle age forms the backdrop for almost every story: disappointment and betrayal, the daily compromises of marriage, diminishing expectations, and always relentless nostalgia weaving its way through all interactions. In "Jeopardy," 40-year-old Maggie calls her octogenarian mother to ask if she remembers playing with Saul Bellow when she was a child, having just learned Bellow grew up on the same street as her family. The mother doesn't, but concocts a story about comforting the young Bellow after his mother had died. Full of wit and warmth, the exchange between mother and daughter illustrates how memory and desire help shape the complexities of trans-generational love, and of storytelling itself.

One startling offering, "We Kill What We Love," presents a familiar story in a new vein. Like television's popular cop drama, Law and Order, Chernoff takes a story from the headlines and adapts it to her needs. In a series of short, compressed sections that resemble a journalist's notes and include titles such as "Definitions" and "Actions," Chernoff analyzes the relationship between O. J. Simpson and Nicole Brown Simpson from its inception to its tragic end. In story after story, Chernoff ferrets meaning from popular culture, showing how individuals are stamped with history, destroyed and saved by love.

Although many of her themes and "plots"—some of her stories are little more than character sketches—are conventional, Chernoff lards her writing with details of twentieth-century American life, especially television shows and celebrities. References to John Belushi, David Letterman, Jeopardy, Saturday Night Live, and Harry Reasoner are so numerous as to constitute another character, a presence reminding readers not only of the fictive nature of her own stories, but of the fictive nature of the world from which they derive. Regardless of the familiarity of many of the situations and themes, Chernoff's details and her unerring sense of the (mis)directions of the human heart make hers a compelling voice.

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Osamu Tezuka
Dark Horse Comics ($9.95 each)

by Tosh Berman

On a trip in Osaka, Japan in 1989, I made a point of visiting the Tezuka Museum to see original artwork by Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy. Not being able to read Japanese, I became seduced by Tezuka's drawings of a robot boy flying through a 21st-century city that resembles Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Now reading through the series of volumes in translation, I am even more struck by the beauty of Tezuka's bittersweet vision of the future, as well as its horror.

Osamu Tezuka was born in Osaka in 1928. He was raised in Takarazuka, which is also famous for its all-female theatrical troop, and graduated from the Medical Department of Osaka University, but gave up medicine to draw manga, or cartoons. Tezuka is perhaps the first great artist who created manga that could be enjoyed by adults as well as children. Eventually, he started a company that produced the first cartoon TV show in Japan, which was of course Astro Boy.

Tezuka spent his childhood watching films, drawing, and most tellingly, observing insects. He developed a respect for the inner-world of the little creepy-crawlies, and was alarmed when certain insects started to disappear as cities began to dominate the countryside. Since then ecology has been a major theme in his work, second only to the relationship between human beings and robots. Tezuka makes intense observations on the nature of humans and their need to make machines that resemble, if not exactly, themselves.

Astro Boy made his appearance in a Japanese magazine in 1951, six years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed. In the story, a scientist named Dr. Tenma creates the robot in the likeness of his son Tobio, recently killed in a car accident. In the Doctor's words, "It'll be a Robot unlike any other in the world. It'll be modern science's supreme work of art!" adding touches such as "pleasure circuits to create a happy expression" on Astro Boy's face. Thus is born Tetsuwan Atom—literally "Mighty Atom," though it was translated into English as "Astro Boy," a more mellifluous but ultimately poor choice because the character has nothing to do with outer space.

After a while Dr. Tenma forgets that his replacement son is a robot, except when he notices that the robot is not growing like a little boy. Realizing that this "Tobio" will never grow up, the hateful and disappointed Doctor gives up Astro Boy to a robot circus. Luckily, Professor Ochanomizu sees Tenma's creation at the circus and realizes that this is no ordinary robot. Ochanomizu drags our hero out of robot hell, and through his kindness he teaches the robot boy to fly, speak sixty languages, and best yet, how to sense whether people are good or bad (welcome additions to his 100,000-horse power strength and the machine guns attached to his rear end). He no longer exists as Tobio the robot slave but as Astro Boy, everybody's friend.

Underpinning the Astro Boy stories is the "robot law," which states that the two main rules are "robots exists to make people happy" and "robots shall not injure or kill humans." In the first story in Volume One, Tezuka—who puts himself in the stories to make rather interesting commentary—puts forward the ideas that if we "substitute the word 'science' for 'robot' in the first article of the robot law, I wonder if our science-based civilization has really made people any happier..."

Most of the stories in the series deal with the conflicts between humans and robots. Tezuka's utilization of the concept of robots serves to expose the narcissistic trait in humans: Robots are machines, but somehow we have decided to build these machines after our likeness. Throughout robot literature, artists and authors have made robots to resemble human beings, and what is worse, to possess human qualities. In his work, Tezuka even invented robot "parents" and a little sister so that Astro Boy wouldn't be lonely. But underlying this status-quo family plan is the question: Why must we create machines that look and act human?

Set in 2003, Tezuka's Astro Boy stories are eerily prescient in theme if not in fact. Just as citizens of his fictional future came to the conclusion that life doesn't start only by the sexual act, but can also be created in the laboratory, we must deal with the same realization via cloning. At the heart of the dilemma is the impulse to love what we create, even though a robot made in our image and invested with our passions may really be desired for the purpose of doing all our human dirty work.

With one leg in the human camp and the other in the robot community, Astro Boy is the symbol for a tension that is relevant today. Generally his loyalty is with the robots—how can he not help but not "feel" something for his fellow robots—but the irony is that humans built these feelings within Astro Boy. It is almost heartbreaking to meditate on certain images in Tezuka's manga, such as the round eyes of Astro Boy, looking out onto the world with such sad and useless hope. Similarly the fight scenes in Astro Boy are more sad than angry or heroic or cathartic; the characters already feel regret for destruction and loss of life before entering the battle.

Tezuka's complex vision of 2003 shows us what humanity we humans have lost in the name of progress. His Astro Boy is thus best read as a parable about regaining this humanity, or at the very least, not blowing the second chances that fortune might bring our way.

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N. E. H. Hull & Peter Charles Hoffer
University Press of Kansas ($15.95)

by Felicia Parsons

Is a fetus a baby soul? Who gets to decide the course of a pregnancy? These are the questions people ask when discussing—or, more likely, doing battle over—abortion. What is the validity of substantive due process? Is the right to privacy a fiction fabricated out of the general language of the fourteenth amendment? These questions—not even understood, much less pondered by scores of pregnant women, right-to-life demonstrators, and religious leaders—are the questions upon which law is decided.

Roe v. Wade is one of the very few court cases people know by name. It is also one volume in a series entitled Landmark Law Cases & American Societies, which examines cultural issues through important legal decisions. The series editors, N.E.H. Hull and Peter Charles Hoffer, are also the authors of this volume. Each has several books, including examinations of female felons and the Salem witch trials, to their credit.

The authors admit that a scholarly approach to the topic of abortion is particularly difficult given that the subject is so emotionally charged as well as historically unresolved. Not that Hull and Hoffer don't try. Their efforts to remain objective while examining an issue they describe as "invariably moralistic and partisan" are generally well rewarded.

This book has the very specific goal of attending to only one aspect of the abortion issue, namely, the law as it has been addressed through the judicial branch of the federal government. The United States Supreme Court is as much affected by personalities, cultural habits, religious beliefs, social evolution—essentially the whole of existence—as any group of human beings. For writers attempting to trace a very specific path through that uncommonly complicated maze, there is always the danger of becoming either hopelessly abstracted and reductionist, or, contrarily, being unable to steer clear of lengthy detours. Hull and Hoffer manage to keep their bearings. Those less disciplined among us would certainly flounder.

Consequently, a reader looking for a primer on abortion might be frustrated by the very lack of engagement with broader personal and social issues that this topic requires. Likewise, someone hoping for an impassioned partisan manifesto will also be unrewarded. The book effectively sticks to its specific course, all without being overly legalistic. Legal terms and concepts are at very the core of the book, but they are generally explained sufficiently as to allow understanding without overburdening the reader with a college course in constitutional law.

This is not a textbook. In fact, the editorial decision not to include footnotes was, at times, frustrating. The authors intended that the book be "appealing for students and general readers." In an effort to find a happy balance, the tone occasionally wobbles between academic and popular. The prose can be dense and occasionally clumsy: "But the disparity between the importance that women assigned to the abortion issue and its relative unimportance within the late-nineteenth-century legal paradigm required that women find some collateral line of attack to open the door to the discussion of abortion, long before they could press for reform of the law." Nevertheless, it is usually more enlivened than one would expect from a dry treatise on this or any subject. Certainly the academic authority of the authors and their understanding of the legal principals about which they write is never in question.

The book is arranged chronologically, tracing the legal history of abortion in the western world from 1800 to the present day. The authors argue that early abortion law was intended to protect women from botched abortions, not fetuses from being aborted. They trace the expansion of abortion law from that which protects the mother, to that which protects the fetus even at the expense of the mother. While doing so, they illustrate the ties between abortion law and forces as diverse as the status of women, racism, class privilege, the paternalistic nature of the medical profession, and the interests of the church in controlling reproduction—an interest which now seems so entrenched but which, the authors argue, only became active relatively recently.

Of course, there can be no conclusion to this topic. The authors choose, in the last chapter, to turn their ears to the human, rather than the judicial, voice. One is struck—and possibly a bit relieved—to see that they, too, are not without feelings on this most provocative and disturbing subject, but even here those feelings give way to the desire to understand. Certainly this is a suitable model for all of us.

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Edited by Tonya Foster and Kristin Prevallet
Teachers & Writers Collaborative ($19.95)

by Thomas Bell

When I wanted another mind I chose a visual one. Then I moved out into spatial, gestural, and visceral minds. Once started I found out these directions were rooted in experimental approaches to poetry that began roughly 100 years ago, and beyond that back to Plato and Horace and, ultimately, to the impulse to poetry itself.

Our Cartesian world has been slow to realize again that poetry can be more than the intellectual, more than the verbal. It took the Burroughs phenomenon to bring visual, verbal, and visual-verbal (the "third mind") to general cultural awareness. Even this was resisted in some quarters: although Grove Press, which had gained a reputation for radical innovation, planned to issue Burroughs's and Gysin's Third Mind in 1970, it was not published until 1978 (by Viking).

It soon became apparent that working in the gestural mode ignited the inward prodigy of the visceral. This ignition could then express "the guts" through many modes, depending on one's inclinations and talents. What is to be said can reach expression experientially as well as experimentally, with and through the verbal, in contributor Marjorie Welish's sense of through: "A poem through abstract painting can be both expressive of the concrete register of painting and true to the medium of words, if some verbal analogue to the visual can establish itself on its own terms."

This is in contrast to the usual conception of the interaction of the verbal and visual in art and poetry—that one serves as a touchstone for the other. Many of the pieces in Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art do take this view, and examine this interaction's relevance for a number of student populations in a variety of settings—making it a useful anthology for writing teachers. However this conception falls short of addressing the 'through' which is important for practitioners and for viewers/readers who seek some of the wealth contemporary art and poetry can offer.

If we look at this closely, it becomes apparent that this gesture toward realization is more a human and artistic characteristic than a property of only one single mode of mind. As Holly Masturzo writes while considering "Gestural Abstraction and the Art of Cy Twombly," "The movement of the artist's hand over and against the canvas mimics the way the body moves through the world." It seems to me that the verbal mode need not be excluded from such abstraction, as can be seen in the work of certain visual and concrete poets, such as Michael Basinski, Philadelpho Menezes, and mIEKAL aND.

When it comes to realization, poet Lee Upton makes some intriguing comments in her discussion of the time her "resistant" students may have invested in developing their handwriting. She comments: "by using handwriting as a prompt, that is, by using the visual that has grown 'unseen' in its very familiarity, students are urged to look at visual presentations dynamically and in unaccustomed ways." This is a way of using experience, of resisting the resistance or the contour of absence. And one can presumably resist one's own resistance and move forward to realization.

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Richard Watson
David R. Godine ($35)

by Brian Charles Clark

René Descartes' life and times have been gone over with a fine tooth comb. Within a few decades of his death, in 1650, the first biography appeared: La Vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes (1691). A steady stream of biographies have appeared since then—though none, as Richard Watson points out in his amusing, contentious, and contemplative new biography, have offered much in the way of new information. Rather, biographers have tended to tender theories about how or why Descartes did thus or such, and especially as to why Descartes was (or still is) a Great Man.

Watson takes a different tack: he writes as a skeptic, placing the Great Man theories in doubt. As well they should be, of course: Descartes did contribute to the formation of modern science and analytical philosophy, but got things off on the wrong foot with his silly notion of a mind and a body the twain of which shall never meet.

Descartes' great contribution was instead the very skeptical method that Watson now turns on his previous biographers, especially those of the "Saint Descartes Protection Society," as he calls many of them with tongue in cheek. Remarkably, there are still those who would claim that, for instance, Descartes died a good Catholic, or that he never stole an idea from a friend, or that the three famous dreams that led to the invention of his analytical geometry really did all happen the way his hagiographers say it did.

Descartes, Watson persuasively argues, was a Catholic in name only. If you had Descartes' ideas and were writing the things he did at the time he did, you'd wear that badge too. Galileo was being censored and held under house arrest by the Church during Descartes' lifetime; Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy in 1600; and Sir Walter Raleigh had his head chopped off for atheism. Good reason to walk the walk and talk the talk, at least when the powers that be were paying attention. This is precisely why, Watson argues, that Descartes lived most of his life in relatively liberal Holland, avoiding the contretemps of the Counter-reformation in his native France.

As for "borrowing" ideas, Descartes seems to have cribbed most of his first treatise (on music and musical tunings) from his mentor Isaac Beeckman. At least, explains Watson, that accounts for the row between the two men that lasted for years. And the famous dreams in which he "saw" the outline of analytical geometry? It reeks of myth-making to Watson, but as he fairly acknowledges people do, and not infrequently, solve major problems in their dreams.

One strength of Watson's biography is his willingness to doubt. Again, this is the gift of Descartes, and we can only wish that such doubt be cast upon his dualism. The other main strength of this book, and what makes it a reader's pleasure, is Watson's travelogue. Over the course of many years and sabbaticals, Watson and his wife literally followed in Descartes' footsteps, visiting the many small towns in Holland where Descartes once lived. This makes for a peculiar and fascinating sort of biography: of Descartes, about whom everything is already known that can be, but also of Watson, the philosopher on the trail of the father of modern philosophy.

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Katherine Monk
forward by Atom Egoyan
Raincoast Books ($18.95)

by Brian K. Bergen-Aurand

After only a few titles and a handful of directors, such as David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, Michael Snow, and Norman Jewison, many filmgoers' cachés concerning Canadian cinema run dry. Thankfully, Katherine Monk's book can alleviate that arid condition. Composed of thematically driven chapters, biographical profiles and filmographies, studies of various Canadian film movements, and reviews of 100 Canadian films, Weird Sex and Snowshoes has the power to increase, exponentially, a reader's knowledge of the subject. The first such excursion into Canadian cinema since Martin Knelman's 1977 This is Where We Came In, Monk's study updates Knelman's popular approach and provides an array of facts and factoids concerning the English and French Canadian filmmaking traditions. Running over much of the same ground as Christopher E. Gittings's Canadian National Cinema (Routledge, 2002), but in a less academic manner, Weird Sex is an interesting primer and valuable catalog for beginning a journey into this cinema today.

Monk, originally from Montreal, is now a Vancouver-based arts journalist who has had brief experiences in low-budget filmmaking. She wrote Weird Sex to inform people about Canadian film and encourage them to engage with it—not to provide an exhaustive survey of all its history and complexity. In that light, the book takes sweeping looks at this national cinema and the "identity crisis" of Canada in order to show viewers how to watch the films, respect them, and eventually love them. Written for the "masses," its hope is to capture the essence of the experience of Canadian cinema by communicating a large amount of critical and cultural study to a popular audience.

Weird Sex is difficult to read straight through, though, due to the sweeping generalizations and cloudy descriptions that surface in the thematically driven chapters. Even after repeated reading, a good deal of this book remains unclear. For example, when summarizing the essential difference between Canadian and Hollywood cinema, Monk writes about the birth of the Canadian Film Board and how its formation under the Scottish documentarist John Grierson's leadership has left a permanent mark on Canadian filmmaking.

In this Scotsman's mind, film was not—in any way, shape or form—supposed to be a vehicle for mindless entertainment aimed at making oodles of box-office cash or building a completely bogus national identity. Therein lies the seminal difference between Canadian and American film: Canada's tradition grew out of an institution and a socialist-minded idea of showing Canadians honest reflections of themselves. The American, or Hollywood, film tradition began as a collective dream in the minds of several Jewish immigrants who were possessed by a desire to create pure fantasy and to reinvent the American Dream as an accessible, if entirely ethereal, ideal.

The binary between United States (Hollywood) and Canadian filmmaking is clear, and Monk holds to this opposition through most of the remainder of the book. What are not so clear, however, are the details of statements such as this one. Has Canadian cinema never been driven by profit? Has Hollywood only ever been? What is the relation between "institutional" and "collective" filmmaking when the word "collective" carries such positive significance in so many other (national) film histories? What is Monk implying by the phrase "Jewish immigrants," and how is their immigration different from that of Grierson? Many such unclear passages remain unresolved throughout the body of this text.

In the end, this book is most valuable in small doses, for its brief discussions of particular films, movements, and filmmakers from different Canadian filmmaking traditions. The reviews at the end serve as nice introductions to 100 Canadian films and provide a solid list for those who might want to learn more about this national cinema from the films themselves.

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