National Post from Toronto, Ontario, Canada • 28

ARTS Bit NATIONAL POST, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2000 Canada's newest literary prize is for independent presses FIRST RELIT AWARDS IN 2001 suDDOrt." Harvev savs award-winnine au- A new literary award for smaller, independent books in Canada was announced yesterday as a sort of anti-Giller Prize. The Relit Awards, short for Regarding Literature, are open to tliors such as Marearet Atwood started Dub- money." The ReLits were founded by Harvey and his wife, Janet (who will design the award along with Harvey's father, Josiah) as a coun- lishing with smaller presses. "Most big writ Harvey. The winner will be announced in either late May or June, 2001, at an event that has yet to be organized. "This award is about innovation, we are trying to do things differently," Harvey says.

Small presses must submit four copies of each book being nominated before Jan. 15. The work entered must be written by a Canadian author living in Canada. Books published during 2000 will be considered for the 2001 Relit Awards. Books can be sent to: The Relit Awards, Burnt Head, Cupids, NF, AOA 2B0.

More details on how to submit nominations, as well as rules and regulations for the prize, can be found at www.ReIitAwards.com. Brenda Bourn, National Post books published by independent literary presses in Canada, and wiD feature three categories: best novel, best collection of short fiction and best volume of poetry. Winners each receive a cheque for $1 and a "specially-designed handmade award," says Kenneth J. Harvey, a Newfoundland-based author Skin Hound, The Woman in the Closet) and one of the founders of the Relit Awards. "The award is about ideas and not ers did; the small presses deserve glory." Sponsors will be asked to help fund and sponsor the awards, Harvey says.

Judges for the Relit Awards will be Canadian writers who volunteer their time to help pick the winners. Their names will not be released until after the winner is announced. The Relit shortlist will be announced in May during a bonfire party on a beach in St. John's, Nfld. "Black tie shoes optional," says termeasure to the big-money prizes such as Canada's Giller Awards, with a purse of $25,000, or the Governor-General's literary awards, worth $15,000.

Harvey says the books nominated for the larger prizes are usually of the same sensibility. "That is not the way it should be. I'm not criticizing these books, or the jurors, but where are the innovative books, the cutting-edge books, where are the small presses? They need It is an amazing year In Carlos Fuentes's latest novel, characters define themselves amidst Mexico's turmoil Above all, a storyteller erred miserably: Anne Enright's What Are You Lawrence Norfolk's In the Shape of a Boar and Zadie Smith's White Teeth were but three exceptional novels by up-and-coming writers that were hugely superior to at least four of the books on this year's list. To that, add Tibor Fischer's Don't Read This Book If You're Stupid and Michael Ondaatje's remarkable Anil's Ghost, and you have some idea of the massive failing of I I jJ- Iff lir-' ft I nf this year Booker jury. What a foul-up! But why do we persist in expecting better of a country where, as Carl Honore pointed out yesterday, prior to their selection the total sales of three of the shortlisted novels Azzopardi's, Collins's and Kneale's was a mere 533 copies? Collins's Canadian publisher, MacArthur with only a third of the anglophone population, sold 10 times as many of The Keepers of Truth over here.

The English are esteemed, but they are overestimated readers. And what would this matter? Except that we still have such a habit of Anglophilia in this country. The truth is this: The Booker is not the "most coveted" prize in the English-speaking literary world anymore, it's a very ordinary one. Certainly it's a prize that needs some sorting. So be pleased, but do not think this is any watershed moment for Canadian fiction.

We had that some time ago, and we don't need the Booker to know it. And IH say it again: It is an amazing year for Canadian fiction though now we can say not just here, but also abroad. Atwood has won the Booker, and a couple of days ago, Michael Ondaatje won France's Prix de Medici for.4ra7's Ghost. Here in Canada, the Giller jury was positively spoiled for good Canadian books. So, congratulations to Atwood, and to McClelland Stewart and to the rest of us, an aside.

This year, it's true, everybody's a winner and it is incumbent upon the Governor-General's jury not to pull a Rabinovitch next week i.e., to see how much your sponsor will fork out when jurors are not quite up to the job and to make a choice in the year's last outstanding literary contest To that end, another wager (and, note, it has less to do with literature than it has to do with sport): It's going to be David Adams Richards. Outright. Finally, the real news is at home. National Post RICHLER Continued from Page Bl will be a retort. This year's shortlist was shocking in its mediocrity: Brian O' Doherty's ilie Deposition of Father Mc-(Sieevy, a novel no one can find in bookstores, was nearly universal-ty Jianned by those who did score copy; Michael Collins's The Keepers of the Truth is a pale imitation of any number of gritty, Midwestern American novels yith an apocalyptic vision of American decline that would only ring true in envious Britain jand TYezza Azzopardi's The Hiding Place is the sort of novel that would have been a fifth or sixth Selection in vintage Booker years.

The problem was that this year, there were no first-rung selections. The writers Alain de Bot-toh, Iain Rankin and Pam Grier, who constituted the BBC's television panel on the Booker night, unanimously agreed that of this year's books, only Kazuo Ishig-uro's When We Were Orphans ranked among the year's best. Even this novel was flawed, leading many to expect that Matthew Kneale's pleasingly received English Passengers might win. Few outside the London bookies astute about horses maybe, books I don't think so really expected the Canadian to take the prize. Even Atwood, quite genuinely, Claimed she was surprised.

Of Atwood's The Blind Assassin dtf Botton complained that she Hatd sacrificed readers' pleasure for her own sense of how important her themes were. After 150 pages, he vowed he would never rad another Atwood book. Rankin said the novel was impossibly dull and, at times, almost a p1 linishment. Grier suggested that the great flaw of The Blind Assassin was that all of the science fiction, the headlines and the news clippings in it merely illustrated arid did not illuminate the novel's labyrinthine and intertwining plots. The novel was "a complicated book, but not complex." own review in this paper Vras more favourable, but concurred with a lot of this: For all its inevitable reward, The Blind Assassin was a difficult, frustrating book which rested a good deal upon the reputation of the author, and the knowledge that her readers would finish it.

It maybe that it benefited disproportionately from the Booker jurors' habit of a second read-through. It is far from her best work, and does not approach the extraordinary quality of, say, J.M.Coetzee's Disgrace, which was last year's winner. This is why pundits and bookies started a fortnight ago talking about Atwood as a likely winner for the irrelevant fact that the author had already been nominated three times. The Booker, they said, was going to be a kind of lifetime achievement award." In this soppish thought is further proof that the Booker, in the last five years or so, has lost its way. Nevertheless, what was most startling about this year's shortlist and what, in part, made Atwood's winning possible was its omissions.

For even if the aim of the jurors was to inject new blood, or defer to some such platitude, they OSCAR MORENO AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE Carlos Fuentes: "I'm more Mexican than most Mexicans. By Donna Bailey Nurse Carlos Fuentes, Mexico's leading novelist, was in Toronto recently to read from his latest novel, The Years With Laura Diaz. Once onstage, he acknowledged the audience with a series of small, stately bows. His hair, which was fine and silver not grey or white shimmered beneath the lights. After locating his chosen passage, Fuentes plunged into the novel with a startling flourish.

With one hand he held the book in place. The other arm he used to conduct the action with grand, sweeping gestures. His voice surged forward at a breathless pace, occasionally bursting into Spanish, and barely pausing between the vast, image-filled clauses that comprise his complex literary syntax: "There was Rivera (seated by the dining-car window, telling fabulous lies about his physical origin sometimes he was the son of a nun and a lovesick frog, sometimes the son of a captain in the conservative army and the insane Empress Carlota evoking his legendary Paris life together with Picasso, Modigliani, and the Russian Ilya Ehrenburg, who wrote a novel about Diego's life in Paris, Adventures of the Mexican Julio Jurenito, detailing the Aztec culinary taste for human flesh, Tlaxcaltecan preferably the traitors deserved to be fried in lard lies all the time, sketching on huge sheets of paper spread out on the dining-car table the gigantic detailed plan of the Detroit mural, the hymn to modern industry)." As in The Death ofArtemio Cruz (1962), Fuentes's early popular novel, The Years With Laura Diaz explores the protagonist's efforts to carve out a personal and political identity amidst the tumult of revolutionary and post-revolutionary Mexico. Fuentes read from a passage set in 1932 in which Laura Diaz accompanies artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera to Detroit, where Henry Ford has commissioned Rivera to paint a mural for the Detroit Institute of Fine Arts. The mural symbolizes one of the novel's greatest ironies: that Mexican revolutionaries and American capitalists shared a faith in industrialization.

"What I'm saying is that Rivera, the communist, comes to Detroit under contract from Ford the capitalist. What do they have in common? The belief in industrialization. That this is the solution to the world. Communists and capitalists both believe in progress and industry and that it will take us forward and make us all happy. But history has proven that that kind of industrialization is outdated Heavy industry is out.

Heavy industry is out. Today basically tihe world moves on services. On information. On the quality and not the quantity of production. So it's another world." In his work, Fuentes, Latin America's leading defender abroad and one of America's harshest critics, suggests Mexicans look inward to forge a strong identity.

He encourages them to embrace their unique political and multicultural heritage, particularly their Indian heritage, instead of emulating the values of the United States. This is exactly what Fuentes himself has done. He was born in Panama City in 1928 to Rafael Fuentes Boettiger, a diplomat, and his wife, Berta Marias. At the age of six, Fuentes moved to Washington, where his father was counsellor to the Mexican embassy. There, he attended school, traded bubble-gum cards, read comics, just like any other American boy.

He was very popular, until 1938, when Mexican president Lazaro Cardenas decided to nationalize Mexico's oil reserves. The move inspired a wave of anti-Mexican sentiment. Fuentes's friends would have nothing to do with him. In 1941, the family returned to Latin America, living in Argentina, in Chile, and then, in 1944, when Fuentes was 16, they went home to Mexico. At the time, Fuentes felt like something of a stranger in his own land.

Mario Valdes, a professor of comparative literature at the University of Toronto, and a friend of Fuentes's, describes these years as essential to the formation of the author's vision: "Fuentes comes home after spending crucial years in the U.S. He is searching for an identity and he has the magnificent good fortune of falling in with a scholar." That scholar was Alfonso Reyes, essayist, critic, historian, story writer and expert in Mexican Indian culture. Fuentes and others have declared Reyes the best the American publicist. "Mr. Fuentes will see you in Toronto," said a voice online from London.

And then, in Toronto, "Mr. Fuentes will not be able to meet with you this morning." Mr. Fuentes maybe a marvelous interview, but he does not look forward to them, especially in the mornings, which is when he wakes up eager to put his racing thoughts down on paper. Who can blame him? In the more than 40 years since the publication of his first critically acclaimed novel, Where the Air Is Clear (1958), he has surely given hundreds. Fuentes belongs to that boom of Latin American writers, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortazar, that in the 1960s brought international recogni- 'COMMUNISTS AND CAPITALISTS BOTH BELIEVE IN PROGRESS AND INDUSTRV PETER REDMAN NATIONAL POST David Adams Richards Fuentes explains.

"The other side of the coin. She is simply a woman with contradictions, assertive, who lives with her virtues and her vice, with her defects and her good things." The book begins with the happy childhood of Laura Diaz, who is raised in the circle of a loving extended family of German extraction. She endures the early loss of her older half-brother, Santiago, a revolutionary, and later, an unsatisfactory marriage to Juan Francisco, a jaded communist organizer. The couple have two sons, but Laura is not fulfilled. The quest for her own identity leads her into the arms of various interesting men and into the elite company of renowned artist Frida Kahlo.

Fuentes based much of the novel on his German ancestors and the family members he grew up with. There is the great-grandmother Cosima, who on arrival in Mexico had four fingers chopped off by a bandit. She promptly fell in love with her assailant. Some of the novel's most memorable scenes involve Laura's three spinster aunts, who are straight out of Faulkner. The Years With Laura Diaz confronts spurious accusations that Fuentes is somehow not as Mexican as he should be: That he was not born in Mexico, did not grow up there, and now spends most of his time in London or in the United States.

During the '60s, Washington labelled Fuentes persona non grata for his support of Castro. But since that time critics claim he has become far too cozy with the American intelligentsia. Fuentes dismisses these charges with a laugh, though he not completely unperturbed: "To accuse a diplomat's son of growing up abroad is really frankly ridiculous. Throughout my childhood I always spent my summers with my grandmothers in Mexico. I had to be close to my family despite being outside my family.

I never lost the Spanish language No. I'm more Mexican than most Mexicans." National Post 1 will jump f.f-t BOOKER Continued from Page Bl prose writer in the Spanish language in the 20th century: "Reyes's books on Spanish literature, his books on Mexican literature, his rendition of Homer in Spanish, it brought a whole culture to life and made it immediate to us And he did it with grace and humour. He was not a pedantic man. He was a generous man. He was a funny man." Adds professor Valdes: "It is Reyes that makes it clear to Fuentes that he must be as informed as possible if he wants to be a writer It is Reyes who poured into Fuentes an appreciation for his Latin American culture." I spoke with Fuentes the afternoon of his appearance in Toronto.

He was the perfect interview: charming, generous, erudite. I was immediately persuaded to forget that I had spent the better part of a month chasing him half way around the globe. "Mr. Fuentes is in Mexico," said the secretary at Brown's University in Rhode Island. "Mr.

Fuentes will speak to you from I jmdon," said tion to Spanish literature in the New World. Where the Air Is Clear (La region mas transparante) boasts a crowded, cinematic, non-linear plot, and explores the failure of the Mexican Revolution. A more conventional novel, The Good Conscience, followed in 1959. Fuentes has published in excess of 20 books fiction, short stories and essays. Educated as a lawyer, he also served as Mexican ambassador to France from 1975-1977.

But he is a storyteller first. His two most popular books are The Old Gringo (1985), made into a movie starring Jane Fonda and Jimmy Smits, and The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), the deathbed story of a corrupt landowner searching his memories for a sense of identity. Some critics have described Fuentes's latest heroine, Laura Diaz, as a female Artemio Cruz. She is certainly his most important female character to date: "Let's just say that Laura Diaz is the adverse of Arterryo Cruz," significant statement at this point in her career and so well-deserved for The BlindAssassin" The Booker traditionally provides a huge boost to British sales: Roddy Doyle sold 27,000 copies of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha the day after the novel won the 1993 Booker. According to figures from Quill and Quire, the magazine of the publishing industry in Canada, sales of The Blind Assassin in Britain are currently just over 6,000 copies.

"Any kind of a prestigious prize draws attention to the value and importance of literary accomplishment. It focuses on reading, it focuses on books, and so I guess it's true it brings people into the stores," said Seligman. At Greenwoods', an independent bookstore in Edmonton, owner Gail Greenwood said the prize will definitely bring more buyers through the doors. "It gets people interested in books again." National Post, with files from Reut-s, The Canadian Press Sales of The Hiding Place by Trez-tA Azzopardi took off after she was shortlisted for the prize, said Cadence. Other novels on this year's shortlist included Michael Collins's Keepers of Truth, Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans, Matthew Kneale's English Passengers and ftian ODoherty's The Deposition bf Father McGreevy.

Staff at Chapters head office in Toronto erupted in shouts of "Yahoo" at the news of Atwood's win. 'At' McClelland Stewart, staff kft their desks to celebrate with Champagne. "It's just incredibly exciting," said Ellen Seligman, publisher fiction) at McClelland Stewart. "She's been shortlisted three times and we fed that it's such a.