Things fall apart.
I'm facing something of a logistical nightmare in reading the 2nd printing of the mass market paperback version of Vardis Fisher's Pemmican, whose print date was October 1957.
At least in part because it's so bleedin' old, the glue has pretty much disintegrated: as I turn each page, it falls out, obliging me to read it on either a flat surface, such as a table, or at least a semi-flat surface, such as my crossed leg; I can't hold it normally, elevated to near eye-height.
Also, the pages are so aged (and I'm sure that the paper wasn't any great shakes to begin with) that, when I highlight a word or passage, the highlighter mostly bleeds through to the other side, rather defeating the purpose of me highlighting in the first place: looking back (and that normally simple act is a delicate operation here) for a reference, I'm hard-pressed to tell exactly what I highlighted.
And I'm obliged to fasten the book with a couple of rubber bands when I close it.
Managed to snag another mass market paperback copy yesterday from the first second-hand book shop that I went to -- this one a copy of the 3rd printing, from roughly a year later -- for a buck less than I paid for the "Mission Impossible" edition. ("This message will self-destruct after you've read it.") Haven't switched to reading that copy yet, primarily because if that one also falls apart, I'll probably cry. This time of year is problematic enough without that added stressor.
How is the book otherwise, you ask?
I'm kinda on the fence about how I feel about Pemmican thus far: Fisher's writing is defiantly, unrepentantly un-PC (and I can understand why one of the blurbs likens Pemmican to Robert Ruark's Something of Value, his reportedly racist, misogynist, gore-and-sex-drenched novel about the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya), but the style is often rather clumsy, despite the frequent vigor of the prose. Pemmican is about the so-called "Pemmican War" (1815-21) between the Hudson's Bay Company of London and the North West Company of Montreal over the "beaver lands" near and west of what is today Winnipeg, Manitoba. The war ended with the forced merger of the two companies in 1821; HBC absorbed NWC (whose employees were derisively called "pedlars" by the Company men, for all that the "pedlars" explored and mapped the western half of modern-day Canada before the sluggish, hide-bound Company men did).
The subject matter is interesting to me; depressing too, given the mass slaughter of critters and the degradation, exploitation and murder of the Amerindians (or First Nations, as the Canadians call them these days). OTOH, at least in Fisher's account, the Amerindians were often as mean, vicious, greedy, merciless, cruel, wanton, misogynistic, drunken and murderous as any of the whites they encountered.
It's interesting to contrast Pemmican with another novel that I read this year about the subject, one of the nominees for the 2000 Giller Prize (which had yet to be sponsored by Scotia Bank), Fred Stenson's The Trade. It's not a strictly fair comparison, given that The Trade's scope is a good sixty or seventy years broader than Pemmican's; but, thus far, I'd have to say that I have to give the nod for overall quality and evenhandedness to Stinson's novel over Fisher's.
Will keep reading Pemmican, if I can.
At least in part because it's so bleedin' old, the glue has pretty much disintegrated: as I turn each page, it falls out, obliging me to read it on either a flat surface, such as a table, or at least a semi-flat surface, such as my crossed leg; I can't hold it normally, elevated to near eye-height.
Also, the pages are so aged (and I'm sure that the paper wasn't any great shakes to begin with) that, when I highlight a word or passage, the highlighter mostly bleeds through to the other side, rather defeating the purpose of me highlighting in the first place: looking back (and that normally simple act is a delicate operation here) for a reference, I'm hard-pressed to tell exactly what I highlighted.
And I'm obliged to fasten the book with a couple of rubber bands when I close it.
Managed to snag another mass market paperback copy yesterday from the first second-hand book shop that I went to -- this one a copy of the 3rd printing, from roughly a year later -- for a buck less than I paid for the "Mission Impossible" edition. ("This message will self-destruct after you've read it.") Haven't switched to reading that copy yet, primarily because if that one also falls apart, I'll probably cry. This time of year is problematic enough without that added stressor.
How is the book otherwise, you ask?
I'm kinda on the fence about how I feel about Pemmican thus far: Fisher's writing is defiantly, unrepentantly un-PC (and I can understand why one of the blurbs likens Pemmican to Robert Ruark's Something of Value, his reportedly racist, misogynist, gore-and-sex-drenched novel about the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya), but the style is often rather clumsy, despite the frequent vigor of the prose. Pemmican is about the so-called "Pemmican War" (1815-21) between the Hudson's Bay Company of London and the North West Company of Montreal over the "beaver lands" near and west of what is today Winnipeg, Manitoba. The war ended with the forced merger of the two companies in 1821; HBC absorbed NWC (whose employees were derisively called "pedlars" by the Company men, for all that the "pedlars" explored and mapped the western half of modern-day Canada before the sluggish, hide-bound Company men did).
The subject matter is interesting to me; depressing too, given the mass slaughter of critters and the degradation, exploitation and murder of the Amerindians (or First Nations, as the Canadians call them these days). OTOH, at least in Fisher's account, the Amerindians were often as mean, vicious, greedy, merciless, cruel, wanton, misogynistic, drunken and murderous as any of the whites they encountered.
It's interesting to contrast Pemmican with another novel that I read this year about the subject, one of the nominees for the 2000 Giller Prize (which had yet to be sponsored by Scotia Bank), Fred Stenson's The Trade. It's not a strictly fair comparison, given that The Trade's scope is a good sixty or seventy years broader than Pemmican's; but, thus far, I'd have to say that I have to give the nod for overall quality and evenhandedness to Stinson's novel over Fisher's.
Will keep reading Pemmican, if I can.