Cool Water, Dianne Warren

Marlys Farn-Guillette, The Fence Is Down

(December 25) Got this when I heard it won a 2010 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction. Can see why it won something -- it's very serious (reminds me of Ann Patchett) -- everything happens in one day and everything that happens echoes an event that occurred in the area 100 years ago (to the day) -- so the Saskatchewan landscape never changes and is the ultimate victor over puny human happenings à la Ozymandias -- and so on and so forth.

But a book like this -- you can never stop being aware that you are reading a book that has been carefully crafted to evoke all this symbolism -- it never lifts you out of yourself and out of the feeling that you are reading a carefully crafted book and into the realm of vicariously lived excitement, and that's what I really want from a book.

However, I was surprised and enchanted to learn that there's a desert in Saskatchewan. Everyone in the book acknowledges or comments fleetingly on the fact that no one knows there is a desert in Saskatchewan, and they are right. Which is kind of cool.