Coach House Books, 2007
Read by T.K. Murphy
Dumuzi is trying to have sex with Anna. Runner Cogshill is trying to have sex with Dumuzi. Runner likes Anna. Runner would like to be Anna. But Runner is not Anna. You could even say that Runner is the in-Anna. (Dumuzi is in Anna too, but just once. Talking about it makes him kind of anxious.)
The Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club, to which Runner belongs and into which she inducts (with varying degrees of success) both Anna and Dumuzi – that book club caused this reader some concern. Because they act out their books. Art, life, life, art, words, words, words, words. At first it seems the book might go that way: theory mocked up to move like people, and people like puppets with a script one step too glib, trendy, poppy, slippery, fast. Clever but sexed-up. Energy-intensive, less-than-nourishing, easily consumed, heavily eroticized textual theory. A low-cal, DeLillo-esque Name of the Rose.
This reader, however, was glad to be wrong. This book is actually about something very simple. It’s about a book that helps Runner to help her little brother Neil. Runner and Neil are both sad because Runner’s twin sister Ruby is dead, and together they study The Epic of Gilgamesh, so that they might learn how to overcome death without dying too. With some input from the Baghdad Blogger, Neil figures it out (though it’s too late for Runner, who, like the Sumerian goddess Inanna, follows her sister to the underworld.) So even though this is a book about a book club, and even though the narrators mention Margaret Atwood, Irving Layton, Anne Carson and Michael Ondaatje in the first twenty-two pages alone, The Girls Who Saw Everything isn’t really about books. Instead it’s more about archetypes, and the durability of myths, and their changeability too: how myths respond to the demands of contemporary experimental storytelling. The Girls Who Saw Everything turns out to be a poignant, highly effective and personable dramaticization of its source texts.
