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362 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 simple observations, and especially in photographs of amazing dresses and shirts embroidered with significant designs. The whole idea of dressing while telling a story is most interesting, as is the notion of the protective power of embroidered designs. The value of womanhood, as described by many of the tales, is seen in the quality of a woman=s handiwork. The stories themselves, which compose the centre of the book, are very strange to a Western reader. When all of them are read in a lump, in fact, they have a very dark effect. Most of them are about people >marrying= animals, which means mating with them, having animal children, metamorphosing into objects or animals and back again. The main concern of the tales seems to be finding a mate, and what really comes through is the isolation of individual households. There are many stories of girls and women living alone, and of sons and daughters having to travel very far just to find someone to mate with. The stories are told in a deadpan way which can be quite humorous if read properly, and the tales would probably differ slightly depending on who is telling them. These versions are very much the result of one telling at one time, and when the teller is tired, as is the case with one of the stories, one can feel the tiredness in the telling. Van Deusen includes illustrations, maps, photographs, and a bibliography for further reading on shamanism, which is a good thing. This book is less about shamanism than it is about storytelling, despite the title, and this might seem misleading. But after reading the book, it seems right not to say too much about the shamans, their rituals, and their lives. That would appear invasive, and much of what the shamans do is considered mysterious and secret, and should not be talked of. However, the bibliography gives readers a chance to pursue the subject further. This is a rich and fascinating book, both informative and strange, and highly recommended. (KRISTJANA GUNNARS) Alberto Manguel. Reading Pictures: A History of Love and Hate Knopf Canada 2000. xii, 338. $37.95 This is an entertaining and deliberately disorganized book, similar to Manguel=s History of Reading. It ranges widely (despite the author=s protestation that the book >seems to me made up essentially of missing pages=), from Philoxenus of Eretria, who painted a mural of Alexander the Great, to Marianna Gartner, a contemporary Canadian painter. A reader will encounter Manguel=s typical mélange of references B mainly in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish B to authors as diverse as Meister Eckhart and Thomas Laqueur, Vincenzo Cartari and Marina Warner. The book moves briskly through twelve meditations, each on a separate work of art. humanities 363 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Paintings are puzzling, and books like this can sometimes mimic their strangeness by weaving from one topic, one insight, one aside, to another, with a rhymeless lack of reason that seems to fit the subject. The visual is various, so the argument might go, and therefore writing should be unfettered. I was amused and entertained at various places through the book on account of the turns Manguel allows himself to make. My reservations come from the same source. Manguel says at the outset that he has no theory of interpretation to offer; he names Michael Baxandall and E.H. Gombrich as people who have such theories. Yet his twelve chapters do have themes B >The Image as Reflection,= >The Image as Violence,= and so forth B and the book itself is about emotions; its subtitle is >A History of Love and Hate.= All essay writing is to some extent indebted to Montaigne, who made wandering a theme and a virtue. But isn=t Montaigne=s achievement different in kind, and not just in quality, from Manguel=s partly organized book, which ends B disingenuously and too easily B with the admission that what he has written is >made of haphazard notes and indecisions=? I want to distinguish this complaint...

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