Books read after Calgary writing conference
Writers are also readers. As always after a conference, I returned with a list of books to read. Following a fun interview by Vancouver writer Danny Ramadan of fellow-Canadian writer Eliza Reid, I added two more to my already long list. Between reading other books, I’ve just finished both.
Eliza Reid is a Canadian who now lives in Iceland with the husband she met in England and their four children. Co-founder of the Iceland Writers’ Retreat, she’s the author of Death on the Island, a closed-room style mystery set in a tiny community in Iceland.
Protagonist Jane, wife of the Canadian Ambassador to Iceland and the amateur sleuth. After visiting a fish-processing facility that employs many of the locals, she reflects on the downside of company towns. The “power, granted through economics rather than democracy, often gave the factories a disproportionate influence over a village, as if Amazon or Meta had based their global HQ in a remote northern harbour town.”
A long time ago, I lived in Kitimat, a company town in northern BC. Back then it was dominated by Alcan (aluminum) and Eurocan (pulp and paper). More recently, LNG Canada and Fluor employed armies of people from across the country and beyond to build the first liquid natural gas processing plant, now complete.
As for the murder mystery, I’m still brooding about the final plot twist at the end.
Danny Ramadan’s memoir, Crooked Teeth, is an entirely different kind of work. I listened to it on audio, read by the author. This memoir of an LGBTQ+ Syrian refugee was a moving and often poetic description of of one man’s attempts to navigate life as an author, journalist and fixer in Damascus, Beirut, and Cairo.
Aspects of his personal story he chooses to reveal reflect his troubled birth family. His mother’s suffered from mental health issues and his father was rarely home. On top of that, the home the family had occupied for generations in old Damascus was expropriated and bulldozed for the building of a bridge.
The reader glimpses the social and personal pressures imposed by the regime through its effects on his parents and sisters as well as on himself. Being gay was illegal, which forced people of diverse sexualities underground. Exposed, they’d be social pariahs as well as lawbreakers.
During his chequered history, Danny reported on The Arab Spring demonstrations in Cairo’s Tarhrir Square and was jailed for a time in Syria. After treating him with physical and mental brutality in prison, his captors tried to blackmail him into spying for the regime.
Ramadan entered Canada as a refugee, sponsored by Rainbow Refugee, a society he has continued to support.
I found the book a pleasure to read as well as an education for someone like me—fortunate enough to have been born in a safer time and place. The full symbolic resonance of crooked teeth, a phrase repeated throughout the book, is fully revealed only at the end of the story.
Danny Ramadan has also written novels, children’s stories, and a charming series of kids’ cookery books featuring young Salma the Syrian chef.