Bookworm, no. 68
Bookworm, no. 68
David Venn on elections. Caroline Noël reviews Angel B.H.’s “All Hookers Go to Heaven.” Emily Mernin on Kevin Lambert’s “May Our Joy Endure.” Inside the November issue.
Ballot Boxing
What Ukrainian Elections Taught Me about Democracy
Jane Cooper
McGill-Queen’s University Press
216 pages, softcover and ebook
In many ways, What Ukrainian Elections Taught Me about Democracy mirrors the course of a political campaign: boring and then thrilling, slow and then fast, distant and then all encompassing. But it’s mostly disheartening. Over two decades, Jane Cooper observed a handful of elections in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Ukraine, where she witnessed or heard of deplorable acts of coercion. Her notes, initially taken for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, laid the groundwork for this passionate, riveting, and unnerving account of an egregious mayoral election in Kirovohrad, Ukraine.
The vote, in 2015, ended with the businessman and trailing candidate Andriy Raikovich filing frivolous complaints to cause doubt and delay his inevitable loss. At the same time, his party ousted half of the polling commission and replaced them with puppets who invalidated the ballots at two polls where the opposition was leading. Even though the media covered the corruption in detail, Raikovich won the next contest five years later—by a wide margin. It’s easier, Cooper found, for losers to position themselves as victims: “Of course, Ukrainian politicians aren’t the only politicians who find it very difficult to admit they have lost.”
Although she doesn’t state it directly, Cooper implies that this example echoes challenges in the United States. In 2021, Transparency International ranked Ukraine in the top third of countries for public sector corruption. In the years since, however, the country—amid the war with Russia—has morphed into a symbol of democracy. “Reality is always more complex than a numbered ranking system can capture,” she writes. On that same list, the U.S. sits at twenty-seventh.
—David Venn
Earthly Desires
All Hookers Go to Heaven
Angel B.H.
Invisible Publishing
368 pages, softcover and ebook
Angel B.H.’s All Hookers Go to Heaven details a young Maritime woman’s sexual and spiritual discovery. Spanning about a decade, this intimate debut novel explores the consequences of desire, “not just for money, but for all the things that money represented: success, validation, freedom.”
Born to devout Christian parents in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley, Magdalena once vowed to live a pure and holy life. But a homoerotic encounter at an evangelical summer camp leaves her “no longer willing to stifle my natural impulses nor my attraction to women.” She abandons the church and her hometown, giving up her “future in Heaven,” then moves to Montreal and gets hired to dance at a strip club, Supersexe. Influenced by the “Hustler’s Curse”—the “incorrigible thirst for cash” that motivates escorts—Mag takes up sex work in various countries, under a slew of aliases. Over time, she loses the boundaries that once kept her comfortably detached: “My work persona—confident, calculating, professional—was disintegrating.”
B.H. crafts a nuanced, affirming tale. As lewd as Mag’s exploits may appear on the surface, they reveal a much more compelling story about solidarity among her peers. A self-declared “anti-virgin,” she acknowledges how “intimacy, generosity, and friendship cast a light in the darkness, proving to me that not everything was cursed.” Indeed, All Hookers Go to Heaven furthers the shift away from classic tropes, which often frame sex workers as victims of circumstance.
—Caroline Noël
Protested Development
May Our Joy Endure
Kevin Lambert, translated by Donald Winkler
Biblioasis
224 pages, softcover and ebook
May Our Joy Endure marks a significant departure from the rural, working-class worlds of Kevin Lambert’s previous novels. (The author now goes by Kev Lambert.) The scathing class criticism that enthralled early readers remains, but this time it’s composed from within the glittering spaces inhabited by a powerful architect and internet persona, Céline Wachowski.
In Woolfian prose, the narrative moves between the perspectives of Céline, who’s planning a controversial development in Montreal, and her affluent social circle as they grapple with cancel culture, protests, and delusions of celebrity. Writing in the April issue of the Literary Review of Canada, Amanda Perry called the award-winning original, Que notre joie demeure, “stylistically adventurous.” That also rings true for the seamless translation by Donald Winkler, who renders Lambert’s shifting aesthetic modes and formal experimentation with verve.
—Emily Mernin
Inside the November Issue
“A lighthearted, slim book that is a pleasure to read.” Charlotte Gray on Judith Adamson’s Ghost Stories: On Writing Biography.
J.R. Patterson reviews Kimberley Moore and Janis Thiessen’s Mmm...Manitoba: The Stories behind the Foods We Eat and Jane Morrigan and Susan Ivany’s LaHave Bakery: The Building, the Baker, and the Recipes That Revitalized a Community.
“From a luxury vacation to a personal hell.” Emily Latimer reviews Sugaring Off, a novel by Fanny Britt and translated by Susan Ouriou.
And much more!