Edmonton Journal from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada • 52

SUfy DAY READER Books E14 EDMONTON JOURNAL SUNDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2000 BEST-SELLERS The charts NATIONAL TOP 1 0 The following list of hardcover titles is compiled by The National Post from sales data of more than 160 independent bookstores. 1 1 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. J1 The book everyone is reading 3 WEEKS ON THE LIST The Dog Rules (Damn Near Everything!) by William J. Thomas Key Porter 189 $21.95 Wainfleet, Ont. humour columnist William J. Thomas takes on canines in this stocking-stuffer that has maintained a healthy sit-stay on best-seller lists.

These are more than a basic Ten Commandments. In fact, as rules go, these complement any situation: the bedroom, dining room, yard, airplane, you name it. EDMONTON TOP 10 The following best-seller list has been compiled by Greenwoods' Bookshoppe, Orlando Books, Volume II, Audreys Books and Smithbooks Edmonton Centre, and shows hardcover and paperback titles. Bracketed figures on the Edmonton and national lists show a book's position from the previous week. Alberta authors are marked with an asterisk ().

FICTION 1 (2) Vinyl Cafe Unplugged Stuart McLean 2. (3) The Amber Spyglass Philip Pullman 3. (1) The Blind Assassin Margaret Atwood 4. (8) Mercy Among the Children David Adams Richards 5. -) Uther Jack Whyte 6.

(4) Winter's Heart Robert Jordan 7. (-) Completed Field Notes: Long Poems Robert Kroetsch 8. (-) Where You Belong Barbara Taylor Bradford 9. (-) Corona Radiata Alice Major 1 0. (-) False Memory Dean R.

Koontz NON-FICTION 1 (2) Gateway City Alex Mair 2. (-) Talking Dirty With the Queen of Clean Linda C. Cobb 3. (10) The Big 5-0 Lynn Johnston 4. (3) Girdles and Other Harnesses I Have Known Joyce Harries 5.

(1) Canada: A People's History, Volume I Don Gilmor and Pierre Turgeon 6. (-) McCarthy's Bar Pete McCarthy 7. (-) 'Tis: A Memoir Frank McCourt 8. (-) Chicken Soup for the Preteen Soul Jack Canfield et al. 9.

(-) Cutting Corporate Welfare Ralph Nader 10. (-) The Rights Revolution Michael Ignatieff FICTION (1) The Blind Assassin Margaret Atwood (3) Vinyl Cafe Unplugged Stuart McLean (2) Winter's Heart Robert Jordan (5) Anil's Ghost Michael Ondaatje (4) Uther Jack Whyte (7) Mercy Among the Children David Adams Richards (6) Prodigal Summer Barbara Kingsolver (8) The Shape of Snakes Minette Walters (9) No Great Mischief Alistair MacLeod (-) The Prometheus Deception Robert Ludlum NON-FICTION (8) Thinking Like a Mountain Robert Bateman (1) Canada: A People's History, Volume I Don Gilmor and Pierre Turgeon (5) Sandra Schmirler: The Queen of Curling Perry Lefko (9) The Dog Rules (Damn Near Everything) William J. Thomas (6) Trans Canada Trail: The 16,000 Kilometre Dream Gerry L'Orange (3) The Beatles Anthology The Beatles (2) River in a Dry Land: A Prairie Passage Trevor Herriot (-) The Life, Times Passing of Pierre Elliott Trudeau The National Post et al. (-) Haley's Cleaning Hints Graham and Rosemary Haley (7) Tropic of Hockey: My Search for the Game in Unlikely Places Dave Bidini 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. Here, for instance, are Rules 5 and 6 for yard behaviour: "When a car pulls into the driveway, the dog must sit to the side and wait until the car is stopped and the engine has been turned off. "Only then can he race to the nearest open door, jump into the front seat and grin back at you through the windshield." AUTHOR PROFILE Capturing the essence Giinter Grass stirs passions again I NOVEL Controversy lost in translation GILBERT A.

BOUCHARD Special to The Journal EDMONTON Too Far Afield by Giinter Grass Translated by Krishna Winston Harcourt Review by STEPHEN HENIGHAN wilder English-speaking readers because classical German literature is not read in English. Lacing together Fonty and the Immortal enables Grass to draw intricate parallels between Germany's recent reunification and the first attempt at forging a single German state in the late 19th century. As Fonty plods through a changing Berlin, the reader is tugged, often in mid-paragraph or even mid-sentence, backinto the Germany of Theodour Fontane. Through this interpenetration of past and present, Grass develops dozens of tiny, sardonic links between contemporary Germany and the Germany ofKaiserWilhelm that eventually lunged Sipping his draft Guinness in the mock-Celtic splendourof Oliver's DruidPub, the seemingfyun-flappable Jack Whyte recounts how he sent an office full of Viking editors into cardiac arrest in thefallofl999. "I threw out 500 manuscript pages just short of deadline," explains the Kelowna, B.C.-based au- thor of the turmoil he unleashed during the creative process that lead to Uther (Viking, 824 most recent retelling of the earlyyears of the Arthurian legend.

Whytewasn'thappywiththepointofviewofhis historical novel-in-progress. He had written five instalments of the internationally best-selling Dream of Eagles, his epic pre-Arthurian cycle that ends with a young Arthur pulling the familiar sword out of the stone. Rather than continue with Part Six, Whyte instead decided to write a standalone work that would follow Arthur's father, the troubled Uther Pendragon, cousin to the Romanized sorcerer Merryn of Camulod (the Camelot in Whyte's telling) and the warlordking of wild, dark Cambria. His quandary was that he felt that his Uther story too closely re-told the tale he'd already written in The Eagles' Brood (1996). This creative impasse ended when he read Orson Scott Card's Ender's Shadow the "parallel novel" to the classic Ender's Game and realized that that was the tack he needed to take.

TT 1 1 When this novel was published in Germany in 1995, reaction was vitriolic Germany's foremost literary critic took the unusual step of appearing on television to warn that Giinter Grass had written a bad novel that no one should read. The newspapers unleashed a maelstrom of denunciation. Grass's crime? His sour view of German reunification. By referring to West Germany's absorption of East Germany as Anschluss the word usually reserved for Adolf Hitler's annexation of Austria Grass had besmirched the German nation's most coveted achievement When I mentioned the Anschluss controversy to an eastern European friend who was visiting me at the time, he raged against Grass for half an hour, then burst into tears. Five years later, as Too Far Afield is published in English, it is difficult to re-create the mood in which this novel rubbed so many raw nerves.

In the interim, Grass won the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature, prompting the German media to stage a cautious rapprochement with the country's most notorious, difficult writer. Germans, meanwhile, have grown less defensive and more ironic about reunification. Derisive references to reunification as Anschluss crop up in daily conversation. Grass, now in his 70s, has been a leftward-tilting thorn in the side of western German political orthodoxyfor decades. Having grown up before the Second World War as part of the German-speaking minority in eastern Europe the people Hitler claimed he was "bringing back into the Reich" by invading his neighbours Grass arrived in West Berlin as an outsider with a unique 1 nence, uieueu- sion to scrap what i he'd already writ ten to that point Whyte knew he had to get to the heart of his own "parallel novel" and find the authentic centre of into the First World War.

Fonty's secret service shadow is referred to alternately as Hoftaller and Tallhover. TaUhover is the tide of a spy novel by the East German writer Hans Joachim Shdlich. Grass, who smuggled Shdlich's first manuscript out of East Berlin in the 1970s, here appropriates Shdlich's character for his own novel. WuttkeFonty and HoftallerTallhover are employed by the Handover Trust, a former archive that is now a privatization ministry. Deviously though Grass deploys them, his Fontane allusions become a padding that distances the visceral realities of a society undergoing dramatic change.

The reader receives glimpses of German reunification: souvenir-hunters chip at the Wall, bargain-seekers flood East Berlin furniture stores, street corner moneychangers ply their trade. There is the ritual first meal at a McDonald's restaurant, the influx ofWestern television, a glance at the emoronmentally ravaged East German countryside and meetings with East-em fishing folk fearful of the Western developers determined to convert their seaside village into a pricey tourist resort Yet in a novel that manages to be both elaborately abstract and grindingjy particularwithout ever becoming fully evocative, these scenes are not developed. Grass makes only cursory gestures toward exploiting the satirical potential of his protagonists' privatization work. He gives fuller play to allegorical set-pieces such as the marriage between a reticent East German spinster and a grasping West German developer that serves as a symbol of reunification. (The marriage ends in divorce.) The arrival of Fonty's illegitimate French granddaughter, nowagraduate student researching the work of the Immortal, breathes some human life into the book.

In the closing 50 pages, Fonty and Hoftaller break free of their postmodern armour to emerge as sad old men for whom the reader feels compassion. But the best of this novel its provocative-ness, its ingenious use of literary allusion, its rumbling humour and mainly unrecoverable punning has become muted in translation. Stephen Henighan has studied German in both western and eastern Germany; his latest book of fiction is North of Tourism Montreal Gazette Uther's tale. And so, the prolific author "reconstruct- Jack Whyte ed" 1,500 pages of daringly different text in the ensuing seven months. "My natural voice is the first-person narrative, this book is in the third-person what I call the a tale with the capital Giinter Grass: a unique approach to Germany's war guilt man community groups.

His specialty is the work of Theodour Fontane, Germany's most important 19th-century novelist. Wuttke's knowledge of Fontane's life and work is so detailed that friends call him "Fonty." This, for the English-speaking reader, is where the problems begin. The words, "Theodour Fontane," do not appear in the novel. While Wuttke is referred to as Fonty, Fontane is called "the Immortal." Each page contains some sort of allusion to Fontane's life or work: the reader who is unaware of Fontane will be plunged into a welter of untraceable references. Krishna Winston's translation is so painstaking that it is surprising she did not include a preface explaining Fontane's importance to German culture.

(The novd'stideisaquotefromFontane that would be instandy recognizable to most literate Germans.) Fontane's great adultery novel, Effi Briest, can stand comparison with Flaubert's Madame Bovary, but where Julian Barnes can confidently tide a novel Flaubert's Parrot, a work of fiction that places Fontane at its core is likely to be- approach to German war guilt His masterpiece, The Tin Drum, fusing vivid descriptions of a minority reality with grotesque exaggeration, brutal wordplay and narrative innovation, became a beacon for younger writers attempting to breathe novelistic life into marginalized cultural backgrounds. In fact, one of Grass's most ardent disciples is Salman Rushdie. Grass's later novels about his East Prussian upbringing (Gar and Mouse and Dog Years) also enjoyed substantial success. In recent decades, Grass's work has become increasingly cerebraL Too Far Afield, an extremely clever but ultimately rather ponderous book, prolongs this tendency. Opening in 1989, as the Berlin Wall crumbles, and closing in 1991 with the reunification of Germany, TooFar Afield follows the adventures of an aging East German intellectual and his ex-secret service "shadow." In good postmodern style, the two protagonists are both invented characters and self-conscious echoes of earlier literature.

Theo Wuttke has survived the years of communist rule as a lecturer on cultural topics to East Ger- that doesn always go into all the details. Uther was to become a far more personal, intimate work than what preceded, veering deep into the psychological. "Uther's the hero of the book for sure, but he has problems," says the Scottish-born actorsinger-turned-novelist who toiled for over 14 years on the story cycle before publishing the first volume in 1992. Uther, after all, is the "dark side of Merlin," and while likable, is a hero who morphs into a villain by dint of association. "I concentrated on his family relationships and built a character who like many of us has been sabotaged by his upbring-', ing before realizing that he has been." Granted, the detail-loving Whyte admits thathe'd already undertaken more than enough historical research from his previous cycle of books set in the decades following the Roman abandonment ofBritaininthe4thcentury totideliimoverfor this stand-alone novel This is not to give the im-l pression that Whyte is a total slave to research and authenticity.

He's enough of a poet to keep his eye on the prize: the deeply resonating core of no-'. bility at the heart of the Arthurian legend. This chivalrous nobility has not only fascinated gener-. ations of English language devotees to the dream of Camelot, it continues to attract fresh waves of i i i .1 i Boundaries of gender, race and class I NOVEL Mishmash of characters simply confusing After the War by Mice Adams Knopf 306 $18 Review by CANDACE FERTILE pnenomenauy raiinrui rans to tnese aeepry craned books even at the dawn of the 21 st century. For example, despite the bastardized Americanisms and the Hollywood gloss, Whyte's favourite musical is a big fan of Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay's 1960 Camelot being mounted at the Citadel Theatre in March 200L "It captures the essence of the legend evoking a time when people looked up to their leaders and trusted their governments, and when leaders embodied a noblesse Of course, given Dur current pack of "cynical, self-serving" federal leaders and the "grotesque" American election, Whyte jokes that the musical might be as close to Camelot-style leadership as we're apt to get.

Whyte will continue telling the story of Arthur beyond his crowning in not one but two separate story cycles that will extend well into the Middle Ages. "People didn't want to end it where it was left off at the end of the cycle they didn't want to leave the characters behind and they wanted to know what happened to my Arthur." Editor'i Bote: .4 review of Vther rill appear in next week's Book section; ack hrte I We lite her, she would probably lie naked. All exposed saves Melanctha from her despair in the most simple and believable of ways: the girl rescues a dog nearly drowned in a river. The puppy raised his head and gave one light lick to her chin. An investigation, possibly what was this new strong dry source of warmth? but Melanctha took it for love." If the other relationships in the novel were as directly developed as that between Melanctha and the puppy River, the novel would be very strong.

Too much of the novel is spent on the tediously self-absorbed Cynthia, and the political, racial and religious issues are superficially tackled Adams seems to be trying to pack everything in, and the kibsyncratic bifurcation of the novel testifies to an unpolished product After the War is not how I intend to remember Al-fce Adams. I will go back to her collections of stories, Beautiful Girls, To See You Again, After You've Gone, and the splendid The Last Lovefy City. None of her novels achieves the grace of her short stories, and this last novel is sadly one of the weakest Candace Fertile is a regular contributor to Books confusing. It jumps rather frantically from character to character, from Cynthia and her affair with Derek McFall, the celebrated war correspondent; to her daughter Abigail and her affair with Joseph Marcus, whose parents are Communist activists; to neighbour Russ Byrd who dies standing next to a "Negro soldier" immediately suspected of foul play, to Deirdre Byrd, Russ's longtime lover and current wife, who ends up with Derek. And so on.

The bones of a good novel are present but there isn't enough flesh. Events happen too quickly and without the rtilection Adams's characters are known for. Perhaps the most successful presentation is that of Melanctha Byrd, Russ's college-age daughter. She is a self-conscious, full-breasted young woman caught in the confusion of the changes swirling around her. WTien an old man drops dead (too similar to her father's death, which is yet to occur) brushing her breasts on his way down, Melanctha is terrified, and she heads home to stay.

She ponders, "She likes the word 'suicidaL' What she does not lite is the idea of herself as a body, limp and dead. Exposed to anyone who wanted to see her. In the morgue or the funeral parlour, wherever they took Posthumously published novels give readers yet one more chance to savour a beloved writer's work, but they also present the problem of conceivable exploitation. After the War by Alice Adams, who died in 1999, is such a case. In an earlier novel, A Southern Exposure, Adams introduced us to Harry and Cynthia Baird, a Connecticut couple who move to Pinehill, N.C, in 1939.

After die War takes us back to the Bairds and other familiar characters, examining their lives at the end of the war. Both novels explore the boundaries of gender, race, and class among other defining human issues, but the earlier novel is much more seamless in its presentation. 4ter the War has die air of a novel published before its time. Too much is packed in without enough context; if the sequel is read on its own, it is likely to be quite.