All posts by Alyssia

About Alyssia

Alyssia is an Adult Services Librarian at the Vaughan Public Libraries. Nothing makes her happier than a great book and a great cup of coffee. She loves fiction in all formats - books, movies, television, you name it - and is always on the lookout for awesome new music.  |  Meet the team

The Sleeping Car Porter: Canada’s Hidden Black History

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February is Black History Month! To celebrate, VPL has put together programming for all ages, including Black History: The Music and the Message for kids, and an adult book club where we’ll discuss The Skin We’re In by Desmond Cole. For more programming options, check out our What’s On Magazine.

Suzette Mayr’s The Sleeping Car Porter uncovers a portion of Canadian history lost to time—more specifically, Black Canadian history, lost to time due to institutional neglect. The 2022 Giller Prize winning novel follows a young Black man in the 1920s named Baxter, who has come over from the Caribbean for a job as a train porter in order to save up money for dental school. The novel’s timeline is a single cross-country train journey, from Montreal all the way to Banff, during which Baxter’s lack of sleep results in a blurry delirium made worse by the constant demands of his customers.  

I’ll admit I knew nothing about sleeping car porter history prior to reading this novel, but there were enough intentionally placed, specific references to suspect that there was likely a well of history behind Baxter’s story. Why, for example, did (white) customers keep calling him George? What was this Brotherhood they keep mentioning? Turning the last page over to Mayr’s extensive bibliography was the final clue that this novel is very, very heavily based on real Canadian history. So like any good nerd, I went on a bit of a deep dive and checked out They Call Me George: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada by Cecil Foster and My Name’s Not George: The Story of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in Canada by Stanley G. Grizzle, two titles from Mayr’s research that are available at VPL. They Call Me George is a particularly useful companion read to The Sleeping Car Porter, as it often answers the questions brought up in the novel. What I learned took me by surprise: Black porters were not only part of the Canadian cultural consciousness of the early to mid-20th century, they were also instrumental in instigating a Black middle class, and even helped cement—not by accident, but by will—our identity as a multicultural nation, on which we now pride ourselves.  

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From Book to Screen: Adaptations for the New Year

The new year may have just started, and we might still be in a post-holiday fog, but TV and movie adaptations don’t sleep! Particularly not when they’re set to debut on streaming services, which can be accessed from the comfort of our own homes (and don’t have to compete with the snow and slush to get people to a theatre). The early months of 2023 already promise an intriguing roster of new adaptations (not to mention new seasons of returning faves like You and Shadow and Bone). Below I’ve picked out five adaptations I’ve got my eye on with release dates set between January and March. Grab a copy of the books at your local branch before they hit the big or small screen!

January 4: The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante 

The latest Italian-language adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s work is set to air today on Netflix. Say what you will about Netflix’s (baffling, unsustainable) business model, one thing they’re good for: investing in and promoting international talent. Treading familiar territory for those who have read and/or watched Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (aka the Neapolitan series), The Lying Life of Adults explores the class divide in Naples, only this time it’s the 1990s (the trailer features the songs “Celebrity Skin” by Hole—an iconic 90s riot grrrl banger—and “E Mo E Mo” by Peppino Di Capri, the requisite 80s Italo-Disco song for any Italian media). When young Giovanna’s father remarks that she is starting to resemble her estranged aunt Vittoria, she decides to set out and find her lost family member. Her journey takes her from her middle-class, bourgeois hilltop neighbourhood to the more vulgar quarters down in the city’s depths. Along the way questions of truth and the nature of storytelling arise: who is lying, what counts as a lie, and why?  

Available in print and on Overdrive and Hoopla.  

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Babel: An Arcane History

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Babel (full subtitle: Or, the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translator’s Revolution) by R.F. Kuang is a big, bold, incredible conundrum of a novel. Anything clocking in at over 500 pages is already going to be asking a lot from its readers. And that title? Music to my history nerd ears (eyes?), but what a mouthful! From the jump, Kuang is telegraphing what you’re about to sink into, and that is a dense, at times challenging, historical epic. Babel follows Robin Swift as he’s taken from his home in Canton to be raised in England, priming him for a lucrative career in Oxford’s translation department. But things aren’t all what they seem, and Robin quickly gets caught up in an underground, anticolonial movement called the Hermes Society.  

This book is marketed as a fantasy, but it’s light on the magic. In this version of Industrial Revolution era Britain, the gilded Oxford University has a Royal Institute of Translation (I googled: not a real thing) based out of a tower aptly named Babel. This institute works by translating and inscribing words into enchanted silver bars, which function like a source of energy for their owners. So, countries that can afford more silver bars gain more power. Kuang doesn’t imagine much of an alternate history here; Britain is the dominant force in the silver trade and thus has the strongest colonial power—just like real life. Truthfully, not much is different than actual British trade history. I know some readers were frustrated by that, but it doesn’t bother me. Just approach the novel like historical fiction with some slight fantasy elements, and that should mitigate any disappointment. 

Rather than the more typical elements of fantasy fiction, the magic in this world is the act of translation itself. This might be where reader reactions diverge. Kuang, a scholar through and through (she currently has two Masters, one each from Oxford and Cambridge, and a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literature from Yale) is not shy about loading the text with thorough explorations of linguistics and the history of language. Your mileage may vary on how interesting this is; as someone who minored in linguistics, I am always happy to see the word “Proto-Indo-European” appear in the wild. Give me all the etymologies! 

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