Steve Zipp

I bought this book in Yellowknife. Unlike most of the other reviewers, I have been there many times.

This book is almost a collection of inter-related short stories, tied together by geography and the mythology of the north more than by the characters. But the characters are marvelous -- quirky and almost unreal, they find themselves in comic-tragic situations partly of their own making and partly the result of world events too big for them to understand.

Once I realized that this wasn't a conventional novel with a beginning-middle-end plot, I just lost myself in the characters and situations and thoroughly enjoyed the ride. Reading the book was a lot like being in Yellowknife and talking to people there -- everyone has a story. Those who weren't born there usually arrived to escape and stayed because they were captured by the people and geography.

Steve Zipp understands all that.… (més)

Fiction or non-fiction? Genre?
fiction; Canadian?

What led you to pick up this book?
This is cool. I am in the Canadian book challenge, and Steve offered to send his book to anyone in the challenge who wanted it. I'm sure I would never have found this book otherwise. Additionally, it is a book for the place entry of the What's in a Name challenge

Summarize the plot, but don't give away the ending!
I'm not exactly sure! The book is more a collection of anecdotes following an eclectic group of people who live in Yellowknife. There is a cruise missile and diamond mining and fishing that seem to be unifying elements, but no linear plot I could explain.

What did you like most about the book?
- I really liked the characters, and the obtuse view of them and their peripheral connections to each other.
- I liked the writing as well, and found it easy to follow even when the traditional plot idea wasn't there. There were unifying elements and connections between characters to discover.
- I also liked the setting, and this book was mostly about the north, vast and strange.
- I liked the humorous situations and found myself smirking at numerous lines throughout the book

Have you read any other books by this author? What did you think of those books? nope, first time.

What did you think of the main character?
I think the main character was Yellowknife, but Danny and Freddy, and Nora and Hugo were my other favorite characters.

Any other particularly interesting characters?
Too many to mention. It felt like a book that could have been written as a collection of short stories, each more defined and traditional. But every character was a character. I think I'd be afraid to head to Yellowknife. Even if this was just an exaggerated sampling, the place and people sound a little different.

Share a quote from the book:
"Nothing about the guy made any sense. In fact, now that Danny thought about it, the same could be said for just about everyone else he'd met since entering the Territory."

This from a guy that hitch hiked into the Territory with no plan or supplies and lives in a dump, and subsists on stolen dog food and then decides to be a detective? Ha

Share a favorite scene from the book.
I liked the scene with Danny house sitting, and investigating the Pitbull in the spare room, hoping it wasn't dead.

What about the ending?
I liked the ending with Pfang and the Y2K bit, connecting the beginning of Nunavut and the end of the 20th century.
The final scenes with the dogs and the animals of the north was a little weird. But I suppose the animals were there first, and will hopefully be there in the end.

Any final thoughts?
I really liked the first third, got a little lost in the middle third, and then it picked up again for the ending. There were so many characters it was hard to know what the main story was, or who the main characters were. Once I realized there weren't any, then I just let go and enjoyed whatever part of the story was being told and many of my questions were answered by the end, like how the cruise missile ended up in the north.

Thanks to Steve for sending me the book and showing me a part of Canada I have never seen.… (més)

Canada’s Northwest Territory has always seemed a little unreal to me and, consequently, my imagination allowed me to create my own version of a larger-than-life world there, one populated by some of the hardiest people on the face of the Earth who found their way that far north for lots of bizarre and personal reasons. You know what I mean – a world something like the stereotypical version of what life was like in the American West in the 1870’s when residents were either gunslingers or people who were afraid of gunslingers, with not much in between.

Then along comes a novel like Steve Zipp’s Yellowknife and I start to wonder if what I figured was a farfetched distortion of what life up that way was like might only be off by a matter of degree. Zipp’s fictional Yellowknife is filled with the kind of people I imagined would be there, people who have been drawn to the remoteness of the Canadian North for reasons of their own and who relish living in an environment that scares most of the rest of us to death.

Some come to Zipp’s Yellowknife looking for the easy money they imagine to be there. Others come because they are fed up with people and big city life and imagine that immersing themselves in Mother Nature will ease their spirit. A few come because they need to get lost for a time or because they want to reinvent themselves among people who don’t much care about where they started from. Some, of course, have lived there for generations and can only chuckle and shake their heads at what they observe.

Yellowknife, much like the early novels of John Irving, is not the kind of book that a reviewer can ruin for its readers by revealing a key spoiler or two. There is just too much going on, too many stories being told as the characters come and go, interacting with each other and recombining in ways that are sometimes simultaneously surreal and brutally realistic. Zipp’s characters embody the deepest secrets, dreams, fears and plain old weirdness that the rest of us manage to keep hidden from everyone but possibly ourselves.

There’s a dog-food-loving, self-made private detective who calls himself Dan Diamond and who learned everything he knows about sleuthing from watching bad television. There’s the guy with a secret entrance cut into one of the walls of his home that opens directly into a mine tunnel from which he seems to illegally gather enough gold to support himself and his wife. There’s a government environmentalist so infatuated by mosquitoes that he allows them to feast on him during his field research and who discovers a snow white species of mosquito no one but him has ever seen. There’s the government-employed computer geek who can’t be fired because he’s so good at hacking into the system and erasing all records of his dismissal, and who just might have saved the world with the Y2K-solution virus he unleashed in late 1999. And that’s just the short list.

My favorite sections of the book, though, involve places as much as characters. Zipp’s description of the colony of misfits who live on the grounds of the town dump and mine it for the treasures they need to survive in the town’s warmer months is great fun. And the winter festival during which so many of the townspeople hope to turn a profit by selling something to their fellow citizens is a reminder that, despite it’s location, life in Yellowknife may not, deep down, be all that different from life in any small town. But best of all is when Zipp places his characters deep in the Artic wilderness and, ready or not, they are on their own and it is literally sink or swim.

Yellowknife is one heck of a ride and I disembarked still not quite sure what was exaggerated truth and what was pure fantasy. But maybe that’s the point. For readers like me, who have never seen the Northwest Territory, the mystery surrounding it remains intact, and that’s what just might get me up there one of these days.

Rated at: 4.0… (més)