The Power to Bend Spoons: Interviews with Canadian Novelists ed. by Beverley Daurio (review)

humanities 491 and ... as the antithesis of economic values (all of which makes their public-sector support portrayable as economic and moral dependency), is an image that has persisted throughout the recent period in which the arts in Canada and Australia have been required to model themselves as cultural industries.' Obstacles to women's participation in cultural decisionmaking remain in place despite content and employment equity rules. Given this scenario, the volume concludes that `a whole world-view needs to be re-visioned.' (DIANA BRYDON) Beverley Daurio, editor. The Power to Bend Spoons: Interviews with Canadian Novelists Mercury 1998. 232. $19.95 Where do collections of interviews fit between the words that writers write? Who reads and uses interviews? Critics? Booksellers? The curious, the sycophantic? Do readers go to interviews assuming that the words from writers' mouths will unlock a magic door to their fictions? Or are they intent on some secret detail that will enhance the pleasures of reading? (Clint Burnham's interview with Steve McCaffery raises the issue of the `dubious value to be gained in going to the author for all the answers to her texts.') These questions are probably best negotiated by each example of the genre. Some interview collections are bouquets of conversation, some vague snippets in search of authenticity, some intent on the personal disclosures that make writers objects and icons. This one combines all possibilities. Interviewing is an art that demands a steady eye, a quick riposte, and thorough preparation. Interviewer and interviewee can be complicitous, coy, snide, or evasive with one another. (The interview with Mordecai Richler is marked by the interviewer's nervousness, perhaps even fear, of her subject.) It takes a particular rapport to succeed in illuminating for the curious reader something beyond the predictable. And the print interview, lacking the modulation of either voice or body, is doubly difficult, anticipating as it does a leap across the gap between person and text with only a frail pole-vault of words. Beverley Daurio is one of the most astute interviewers in Canada; as editor of this volume, she brings experience and elegance to the task. Of the thirteen interviewers posing questions, Daurio is the most skilful, eliciting complex and interesting answers from her quarry without succumbing to generalities or slavishness. But of course the interviews' limitations are connected to those who answer the questions. Some writers burgeon with dogma and didacticism, some are pompously earnest, some guarded, some determined to exhibit intellectual pyrotechnics. This cocktail is difficult to predict, and the result is, perhaps inevitably, a 492 letters in canada 1999 mixture of interesting and tedious dialogues. Every volume of this type is necessarily arbitrary B it would be impossible to coalesce an inclusive collection. The range of writers represented here is good, slightly more Ontario-focused than it might be, but overall a combination of newer voices and stalwart presences in Canadian literature. The collection is grounded by Richler's grumbling taciturnity, Margaret Atwood's irrepressible mischief, Timothy Findley's transcendence, Joy Kogawa's projective solemnity, and Michael Ondaatje's offhand self-effacement. The characters that they bring to interviews are recognizable, familiar. The best aspects of this volume are its surprises, new articulations of old questions. Dionne Brand discusses the randomness of racism, Douglas Glover demonstrates a speedy, self-critical sharpness, Thomas King admits to hating the prairie even though he knows it roots his humour. Nicole Brossard muses about Le Sens apparent, `I wanted to fall in love and so I had to write a book.' McCaffery riffs into a wonderful disquisition on the letter as an emblem of logophilia. And Kogawa, in context of her discussion of minority writers and anger, makes the fascinating declaration that `it is much harder ... to practice the imagination of privilege than the imagination of marginalization.' The compelling interviews here are those that contain stories, miniature narratives rather than definitive statements of political affiliation and retribution . Oddly, many avoid telling stories, as if being fiction writers means that they must hug their narratives close to their chests. But the worst aspect of a bad interview is when either one of the two in the binary is determined to pronounce on larger...