O Canada

What to do on a holiday weekend in the U.S. if you don't care about football?

My answer is to look through my bookshelves to see what I've acquired and not gotten around to reading. Friday I discovered The Free World by David Bezmozgis and dug right in.

Published in 2011, this book fits into the genre of origin stories for Soviet emigres ... how my family and I ended up in the Free World and what it meant for us.

If you haven't heard of Bezmozgis, you should have. First of all, he was one of The New Yorker's 20 under 40 in 2010. (Not sure how that feels to him 6 years later...) Secondly, what a great name -- the "is" at the end tells you he is originally from Latvia (not everyone knows that suffix game you can play with Soviet emigre surnames) but the "bez mozg" part is particularly fun for anyone who has studied Russian. "Bez" means "without" and "mozg" is brains. Another strike against him, perhaps, that his name translates to "brainless guy from Latvia." But not one you'll forget now that you've read it.

However, the main reason you may not know Bezmozgis is that even though he writes in English, he's from Canada.

Admit it. Other than Alice Munro and maybe Margaret Atwood, you weren't really sure there are writers in Canada, were you? 

I frequently recall a Russian writer I knew who got into trouble with the censorship in the late Soviet era. Since his day job was as a scholar of French literature at the Gorky Institute of World Literatures, he used to complain that the Soviet government, in its gentler hypostasis, had not exiled him to Siberia, but merely to Canadian literature.

His tone of voice implied that Canadian exile was somehow worse than the GUlag. He was wrong, even in the late 1980s, but it was a funny line anyway.

The Free World is totally worth reading -- interesting from all kinds of perspectives, even structural. But the best scene in the Bezmozgis novel also helps explain why U.S. citizens today are wishing they could find their way north. (See Philip Galanes from this past weekend -- brilliant as always.) When one character asks another why they should consider emigrating to Canada, having fled Soviet Riga and landed in the no-man's-land of Rome temporarily, they have the following exchange:

"It's more European than America, and more American than Europe."

"What does that mean?"

"It means that a person can eat and dress like a human being, watch hockey, and accomplish all this without victimizing Negroes and Latin American peasants."

Substitute "watch the OSU-Michigan football game" and you'd have many takers from my liberal part of Ohio.

There is something ugly about mainstream America. And though I haven't ever lived in Canada, I'm getting ready to sing a new national anthem, along with David Bezmozgis. Or I would if I could figure out a way to move across the border.

According to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development,
Canada comes in third as one of the top countries to live in among all the countries in the world.