Identity Crisis the Triumph of the Self, and the End of Politics

Chris Alexander: Canada’s failure in Afghanistan PAGE 3 $6.50 Vol. 26, No. 8 October 2018 CHRISTOPHER DUMMITT Identity Crisis The triumph of the self, and the end of politics ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: NANCY MACDONALD ‘The most terrible jaws afloat’ NORA PARR The literary Middle East JOSÉ TEODORO Un-memorializing Leonard Cohen PublicationsOctober Mail Agreement 2018 #40032362. Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to LRC, Circulation Dept. PO Box 8, Station K,reviewcanada.ca Toronto, ON M4P 2G1 A New from University of Toronto Press Robert A. Davidson takes readers on a trip through art, film, and photography to explore an urban space that is at once familiar and enigmatic: the hotel. As shared sites for both tourists and asylum seekers alike, hotels are touchstones of our multinational landscape. Drawing on examples from Edward Hopper to Alfred Hitchcock, The Hotel: Occupied Space chronicles how the hotel has entrenched itself into our symbolic and physical landscape throughout history. “In the current climate in which “Using a wide variety of representations, “Well written, accessible, and engaging, discussions of toxic masculinity from literature, to autobiography, to lm April in Paris brings together interesting have become more frequent and and non- ction critiques, this book tells and surprising threads in order to urgent, Brad Congdon’s book is the story of the adman, and addresses illuminate modernist culture and its relevant and timely.” the ambivalence that practitioners and in uence on the rest of the twentieth critics have about capitalism.” century.” –Maggie McKinley Harper College –Kathy M. Newman –Ihor Junyk Carnegie Mellon University Trent University utorontopress.com B reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Literary Review of Canada 340 King Street East, 2nd Floor Toronto ON M5A 1K8 email: [email protected] reviewcanada.ca Charitable number: 848431490RR0001 To donate, visit reviewcanada.ca/support Vol. 26, No. 8 • October 2018 EDITOR IN CHIEF Sarmishta Subramanian [email protected] ART DIRECTOR Rachel Tennenhouse 3 Indefensible 17 A More Sentimental Man ASSISTANT EDITOR The truth of Canada’s failure in Afghanistan Michael Ondaatje’s late style Bardia Sinaee The Politics of War by Jean-Christophe Boucher Warlight by Michael Ondaatje ASSOCIATE EDITOR and Kim Richard Nossal Moez Surani Beth Haddon Chris Alexander POETRY EDITOR 19 A Novel Bursts to Life Moira MacDougall The quiet brilliance of Helen Humphreys 7 On Looking, and Love COPY EDITOR Did captivity save the killer whale? Machine Without Horses by Helen Humphreys Patricia Treble Orca by Jason M. Colby Donna Bailey Nurse CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Nancy Macdonald Mohamed Huque, Andy Lamey, Molly 21 ‘We Don’t Need Art That Often’ Peacock, Robin Roger, Judy Stoffman 8 Evening in the West of Ireland Memorializing the artist who resists enshrinement PROOFREADERS A poem The Flame by Leonard Cohen Cristina Austin, Suzanne Mantha, Peter Stuart-Sheppard José Teodoro Sondra McGregor, Heather Schultz, Tyler Willis 9 A Boy Meets the World 24 ‘The Sly and Cunning Masquerade’ ADVERTISING/SALES Art from human bondage A brief history of literary fakes Michael Wile Washington Black by Esi Edugyan Literary Impostors by Rosmarin Heidenreich [email protected] Patrick Lohier Dennis Duffy BUSINESS MANAGER Paul McCuaig 11 Looking Out for Number One 26 ‘A Siege of Reading’ BOARD OF DIRECTORS The unmentionable void in city planning Is politics diminishing a burgeoning Tom Kierans, O.C., Don McCutchan, Trina McQueen, O.C., Jaime Watt No Place To Go by Lezlie Lowe literature of the Middle East? CORPORATE SECRETARY Brian Bethune Pay No Heed to the Rockets by Marcello Vali Bennett Di Cintio and The Other Middle East 12 moody blues ADVISORY COUNCIL by Franck Salameh Michael Adams, Alan Broadbent, A poem Nora Parr C.M., Chris Ellis, Carol Hansell, Donald Crystal Hurdle Macdonald, P.C., C.C., Don Rickerd, 29 Letters C.M., Rana Sarkar, Mark Sarner, 13 We Are All Outsiders Now Margaret Moore, George Anderson, Bernard Schiff The triumph of individual autonomy George Elliott Clarke, Nyla Matuk, POETRY SUBMISSIONS For guidelines, please see reviewcanada.ca. Identity by Francis Fukuyama, The Once and Bernie Koenig Future Liberal by Mark Lilla, and The Lies LRC design concept by Jackie Young/INK That Bind by Kwame Anthony Appiah 32 The Foreign-Baby Baby Problem Founded in 1991 by P.A. Dutil The LRC is published 10 times a year by the Literary Christopher Dummitt A lesson on citizenship from contemporary Review of Canada Charitable Organization. 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Based in Matane, Quebec, Sébastien Thibault creates illustration duced without the written permission of the publisher. that provides sharp political commentary on topics that are relevant today. He uses graphic shapes, ISSN 1188-7494 The Literary Review of Canada is indexed in simplified form, and intense colour to create symbolic images for publications like the New York Times, the Canadian Literary Periodicals Index and the Canadian Index and is distributed by Disticor and L’actualité, and the Guardian. Magazines Canada. From time to time, the LRC may allow carefully selected organizations to send mail to subscribers, offering products or services that may be of interest. If you do not wish to receive such correspondence, please contact our Subscriber Service department at [email protected], or call 416-932-5081, or mail P.O. Box 8, Station K, Toronto ON M4P 2G1. IN memOrIam We acknowledge the financial Funding Acknowledgements We acknowledge the assistance Priscilla Uppal support of the Government of the OMDC Magazine Fund, 1974-2018 of Canada through the an initiative of Ontario Media Canada Periodical Fund of Development Corporation. the Department of Canadian The LRC mourns the loss Heritage. of a valued contributor, who will be missed. an Ontario government agency un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario October 2018 reviewcanada.ca 1 MEMENTO MORI Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis by Robert Bringhurst & Jan Zwicky “Truth-filled meditations about grace in the face of mortality.” @Margaret Atwood “The project of Learning to Die is simple, but harrowing. Bringhurst and Zwicky ponder an all-but-unthinkable question: how should we live in the end times? They don’t discount our attempts to stave off environmental catastrophe . But what makes Learning to Die indispensable goes even deeper: the example it sets of unblinking moral courage. It opens a space for human beings to reckon with ultimate things.” —Dennis Lee, poet and editor Participation made possible through Creative Saskatchewan’s Market and Export Development Grant Program. 2 LRC AD Learning to Die U of R Press.indd 1 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review2018-09-17 of Canada 10:59 AM Indefensible The truth of Canada’s failure in Afghanistan CHRIS ALEXANDER The Politics of War: Canada’s Afghanistan Mission, 2001-14 Jean-Christophe Boucher and Kim Richard Nossal UBC Press 300 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780774836272 ver fifteen years working in Afghanistan or tracking all aspects of the O conflict from outside, I’ve only once dared hope that peace was in prospect. It was May 2, 2011. Just after 1 a.m., Pakistan time, U.S. Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in a walled compound in Abbottabad, a kilometre from the Pakistan Military Academy. Surely all remaining illusions about Pakistan’s role in this war were now shattered, I thought: the whole world would confront The forty-year war: Soviet troops in Afghanistan, 1986. Pakistan’s “miltablishment”—the military and PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEXANDR GRASCHENKOV, RIA NOVOSTI ARCHIVE, VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS intelligence agencies that had nurtured al-Qaeda and the Taliban, fielded their fighting forces, and in Afghanistan continues; “strategic cynicism,” fed a quest for “strategic depth” in Central Asia, provid- lied for them all along. by weakness of the will, prevails in every Western ing the spur for an extended, forty-year proxy war. How wrong I was. The Barack Obama admin- capital. About ten thousand people died in this The United States seeks to preserve the institutions istration kept its head buried deep in Syria’s sand. violence in Afghanistan last year. Today this bitter that replaced the Taliban after 2001 as well as a stra- The flash of brilliance at Abbottabad faded back reality haunts Afghans alongside an even more tegic partnership with nuclear-capable Pakistan— into cowardly drift. Within a few years, and after sombre anniversary: the Saur revolution of 1978 goals that are increasingly irreconcilable. a few rounds of bilateral recrimination, Asif Ali that saw Afghan president Mohammed Daoud All these imperatives—Kremlin and Pakistani Zardari and Nawaz Sharif, then Pakistan’s president Khan and his family murdered and replaced with paranoia amid contradictory U.S. strategic object- and prime minister respectively, had visited the Moscow’s hand-picked successors. Two more vio- ives—remain alive and well today, constituting a U.S. to meet Obama. Zardari attended a NATO sum- lent putsches in 1979 meant that, in less than two recipe for perpetual war. Afghanistan is locked in mit in Chicago, and Pakistan completed a purchase calendar years, three presidents and a U.S.

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