...The cakes are sweet, but sweeter is the feeling That one is mixing with the literati; It warms the old, and melts the most congealing. Really, it is a most delightful party. (F.R. Scott’s “The Canadian Authors Meet”, 1935) The Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Awards, The Great Literary Dinner Party, the International Festival of Authors... The literary world has been in a whirl these last few weeks—celebrating, paying tribute, decking itself out grandly. Jack Rabinovitch, who established the Giller Prize in 1994 to honour his late wife, literary journalist Doris Giller, definitely knows how to throw a party—with all the glitz, glamour, media frenzy, tippling, shoulder-rubbing, and gossip a gala calls for. This year’s winner: Bonnie Burnard, for her first novel, A Good House—a tale of the day-to-day lives of three generations of a functional family. Ms. Burnard explained, while dysfunctional families are more melodramatic, it is the functional families that she finds far more interesting. Though she is a highly regarded short-story writer, Ms. Burnard’s win did catch more than a few people off guard who were hedging their bets with Timothy Findley’s Pilgrim (a sentimental favourite, reviewed here), Anne Hébert’s Am I Disturbing You? or Nancy Huston’s Mark of An Angel (the Ladies’ Room’s choice). My pick of the pack was Pilgrim, with Mark of An Angel a not too distant second. Yes, the former has been criticized for its “tired recycling” of images, utterances, themes—but then how much more postmodern can a writer get? Many of this century’s great writers (Kafka, Genet, Pirandello, to name but three) have regularly revisited the same psychological, spiritual or intellectual landscape—to exquisite effect. The angel books are marked by complex, accomplished, and eminently captivating narratives that blend personal and collective histories across nations, and that touch the vibrating core where desire, betrayal, madness, obsession, revenge, and love meet in the creation and destruction of the work of art—and the human heart. For those who couldn’t be there, the Giller Gala was televized on Bravo!, the station, ironically enough, whose inimitable executive producer, Moses Znaimer, is the very man who has pronounced the “triumph of the image over the written word”—or at least, who has gone a long way towards inciting a revolution. No wonder the “televisionary” stylizes himself—in image, in poster form—as Lenin or Mao Zedong. Joke? Provocation? Something more sinister? A discussion for a future issue. Our associate editor, Marek Kusiba, attended Znaimer’s recent colloquium, TVTV: The TV Revolution, a “debate”. Dressed in black and white and standing behind a podium, this modern-day Moses read his commentary to his “ten commandments”. But then this is a text written for use by television, not the printed word, was Znaimer’s response when our colleague drew his attention to his dependence on letters. A hand-selected group of media and communications experts, meanwhile, sat at the table, debating but barely interrogating. For the devotee of the book, the most disturbing of these commandments are numbers one (cited above) and seven: “Print created illiteracy. TV is democratic. Everybody gets it.” Well, okay, without print, there would have been nothing to be literate or illiterate about. But why blame the 600-year-old Johann Gutenberg—who, incidentally, was voted Man of the Millennium—for today’s social lapses? But then, television really “doesn’t give a shit about poetry”, as British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion so eloquently declared during his scintillating on-stage dialogue with Barry Callaghan at this year’s International Festival of Authors. Motion’s mandate is to change all that, to transform the way poetry enters public life—even impossible-to-access TV. Motion, surprisingly for a colonizing Englishman, also raised and took on the spectre of national identity: Englishness, as opposed to Britishness, “depends on inputs from all around the world; at its best, it’s been open-minded.” Several interviewees on the other side of the colonial fence did as well. Alistair MacLeod, in conversation with Peter Gzowski, talked about Gaelic as “the language that was beaten out of us [Cape Breton children] by the teachers”. English, after all, was to be the language of progress in Canada. In contrast to the Native community, which has been dealing with the painful aftermath of the residential school system, is the lack of anger among the very pragmatic Gaelic speakers, who knew they would have to learn English to participate in modern world. But perhaps they got their own back when they taught Gaelic to East European immigrant miners who thought they were learning English. Still, the language of one’s youth is the language of the heart—as attested to by MacLeod’s grandparents, who, in their eighties, have returned to their paradisiacal tongue. And then there was Assia Djebar. The Algerian writer, surrounded by her Arab mother tongue and the ancient language of Berber, writes in the language of the colonizers, the language that came with the soldiers, “the language of blood and corpses”: French. She too had no choice; the schools were French. Yet, she rang a cautionary note: to write about the self in the language of the other can lead to a deformation—if a critical distance isn’t maintained. No comment on the deformation to her elegant French caused by the quality of the English translation. (Poetic aside: During the dialogues with Motion and Ivan Klima, a bird, caught inside the Lakeside Terrace, alighted upon the stage and addressed the audience, eliciting from Motion: “A bird! All the birds in England are dead—except the magpies.”) Vital support of our writers continues with the inauguration of a new award this year, the Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize. This year’s winner, announced at The Writers’ Trust of Canada’s 14th Annual Great Literary Dinner Party, was François Ricard for his biography of Gabrielle Roy. Incidentally, translator Patricia Claxton, who shared the prize, also took home the Governor General’s Award for Translation. The Marian Engel Award in honour of a female Canadian writer in mid-career was also presented to the unbelievably prolific and versatile Janice Kulyk-Keefer, whom we profiled one year ago. In this first issue of the year and century, we introduce a special regular feature: conversations with prominent Canadians. The intent is to significantly broaden the scope of topics dealt with in our pages by engaging the most respected and forward-thinking Canadians in a dialogue about their life’s work and their contribution to their field. Here, Charles Reeve speaks with Vancouver artist and photographer, Jeff Wall. As part of our Great Authors series, I had the pleasure to interview Julia Kristeva—one of the most influential French intellectuals of our time. Her work in psychoanalysis, literary theory, and feminism has cross-fertilized a diversity of disciplines. Ms. Kristeva, who has held a visiting professorship at the University of Toronto since 1992, was in town to give the packed to overflowing Alexander Lectures on Hannah Arendt. And Krzysztof Czyzewski interviews Norman Manea, a Romanian writer living in New York, about surviving the concentration camp, about living in a repressive totalitarian regime, and about the exilic condition. Also included are reviews of books by two writers who would have had their centennial birthdays this year—Jorge Luis Borges and Ernest Hemingway—as well as works by David Layton, David Solway, William Watson, David Spalding, Tomas Venclova, A.M. Klein....