Canadian literature can be foreign even to Canadians, I suppose.

I am looking forward to some good books I bought today. I purchased and downloaded the MP3 version of Michael Crummey's Hard Light. Last summer I stumbled across it in paperback and it was a good companion for me during long summer evenings. It is something else again read out loud, from what I've heard so far. Some of the vocabulary and place names are a little beyond me, like "quintal" or "Makkovik", I couldn't have said them right before but now I know how they should sound. Better, though, is hearing the expression and the inflections of the readers. It's like a good performance, an interpretation of the work that sheds a new light on its frame.

My serendipitous bargain of the day was finding Frederick Philip Grove's Fruits of the Earth on the used-bookstore clearance rack, for fifty cents, including tax. I read it in the sole Canadian Lit class I took, and loved it, delighting in the precise descriptions and distances, the treatment of the land as a foundation for human construction. Our professor was a visiting sessional from Toronto, and I remember explaining the measurements to him, how long a rod is, and so forth. I was very enthusiastic about prairie literature.

We read a short story where a woman who is housebound in a blizzard breathes on the windowpane to see outside. The professor asked us what this detail meant. "It's cold outside," he expected. What he got?

"I think this maybe symbolizes her futility and her self-destructive impulses, because you don't breathe on a window if you want to see out for very long. It just frosts over even thicker, because of the moisture. You have to use your thumb, press it to the glass to make a little hole, and then use your fingers to widen it. Otherwise the hole's no good. So this little action of hers against the dark and the cold, it's not even making any difference, eh, it's just frosting her in even more."

The professor blinked several times and paused before thanking me for my contribution. Then he asked someone else what they thought the passage meant. "It's cold outside," the student said. "Right."

After that I went back to my math classes.