Cuts Like A Knife Album

In April 2008, Feist was awarded five Juno Awards, the Canadian equivalent of the Grammy, in the following categories: songwriter, artist, pop album, album and single of the year. Her music has been described as \"swoony indie lounge pop\" by Rolling Stone, and the New York Times referred to her as \"a restless polymath with a catalog of great songs and a voice like carved steam.\"

Cuts Like A Knife Album

The odd changes in tone here seem similarly designed to prevent us from finding out about her. Jemima's voice veers between jokey and serious, even when the subject matter demands consistency. ''I pierced my hand with a knife, the little wound in my palm like the mouth of a fish feeding on the surface of a pond, opening and closing, opening and closing, and as I fainted I thought, my hand is talking to me, it is trying to tell me something. Later I thought how embarrassing my wound was, being in a classical spot for a stigmatist, even though Jesus was no doubt nailed through the wrists and not the palms at all and he was only one of many crucified types, crucifixion being a very low form of capital punishment and regularly inflicted on pirates and slaves and agitators of any kind. Constantine the Great abolished crucifixion in the fourth century, and I like him for that, I do.''

The Jemima that gradually emerges from these pages is fragile and damaged. She is a woman for whom every departure is a betrayal: when her therapist goes on vacation she cuts herself; farewells from her mother are so painful she can't cope with them; and the climax of one story hinges on a parallel between Sir Perceval breaking up the Round Table and her brother missing the family Christmas dinner. You worry for her, and yet you can't help feeling there's a contradiction here. The bulk of the book is made up of the detailed recollection of Jemima's childhood. Yet the happyish childhood and the later troubles don't seem like two halves of the same life. There is a disjunction. One minute Jemima is eating hot dogs with her brother or worrying about being allowed to stay up late to watch a movie, the next she's cutting open her arms and lying to nurses about accidents with cheese graters. The portrait of the happy childhood is undermined by what we know of its sequel: it's like giving a restaurant a fabulous review and casually letting it drop that the kitchen is infested with rats. 041b061a72