Dionne Brand's Toronto

[vaneramos]

Townhouses on Northumberland Street, Toronto, April 4

I finished reading What We All Long For, a novel by Dionne Brand, while visiting my parents Easter weekend. When I met Brand she suggested that the city of Toronto is the narrator of the story. The point of view often withdraws to a place both impersonal and intimate, a voice relating family histories of each of the young characters, details they themselves could barely understand. Some landscapes are familiar: Kensington Market, Bloor Street West, St. Jamestown. The book also inspires me to visit neighbhourhoods I haven't seen.

Coming home last week I resumed Tom Spanbauer's The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon. I've been chipping away at it a few pages at a time for the past several months, mostly over breakfast. Thursday night I took it to read in bed. Unfortunately I reached an important crisis in the story, and incident so gruesome it actually made me nauseated. It was bad timing.

I need something lighter these days. So I've set Spanbauer aside for now, and resumed East, Shoots and Leaves, a humorous nonfiction book about punctuation by Lynne Truss, which I received for Christmas.

I'm still drifting like the wind through Brand's Toronto landscapes. I'll drive home tomorrow.