Book Review: Garbo Laughs - Elizabeth Hay

This is a novel about movie love. Set in Ottawa in the 1990s, it is the quixotic tale of tall, thin Harriet Browning, inflamed by the movies she was deprived of as a child. Bent on seeing everything she has missed, she rapidly becomes so saturated with old movies, seen repeatedly and swallowed whole, that she no longer fits into this world. Equally addicted are her three companions-of-the-screen: a boy who loves Frank Sinatra, a girl with Bette Davis eyes, and an earthy sidekick named after Dinah Shore. Breaking in upon this quiet backwater, in time with the devastating ice storm of 1998, come two refugees from Hollywood, the jaded widow of a famous screenwriter and her movie-expert stepson. They are Harsh Reality. With them come blackouts, arguments, accidents, illness, and sudden death. But what chance does real life stand when we can watch movies instead? What hope does real love have when movie love, in all its brief intensity, is an easy option? In this brilliant and poignant comedy of secondhand desire, movies and movie lovers come first.


About the Author
Elizabeth Hay is the author of two highly acclaimed, bestselling novels. Her first novel, A Student of Weather (2000), won the CAA MOSAID Technologies Inc. Award for Fiction and the TORGI Award, and was a finalist for The Giller Prize, the Ottawa Book Award, and the Pearson Canada Reader’s Choice Award at The Word on the Street. Her most recent novel, Garbo Laughs (2003), won the Ottawa Book Award and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award. She is also the author of Crossing the Snow Line (stories, 1989); The Only Snow in Havana (non-fiction, 1992); Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York (non-fiction, 1993), and Small Change (stories, 1997), which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Award, and the Rogers Communications Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Her stories have been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories, The Journey Prize Anthology, and The Oxford Book of Stories by Canadian Women, edited by Rosemary Sullivan. She has won a National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Fiction and a Western Magazine Award for Fiction. In 2002, she received the prestigious Marian Engel Award.Elizabeth Hay lives in Ottawa.


This was chosen as my book club selection for the month of February. It is an author that is getting a lot of publicity right now since she was a finalist for the Giller Prize. Can I just say; book club is freaking awesome! It’s a great bunch of ladies that all have very strong personalities and loads of experience in all kinds of things. We are a new club but I can tell it is going to be great! Ahem. At our last meeting, we decided to pick our books for the following 2 months so that those less fortunate (like me! J/K!!) could get the books from the library. Both books had a very long queue but for some reason this one came through quickly. I have once again put aside Claire and Jamie to read this new novel.

I am really enjoying this book right now. I am only halfway through but want to remember what I am thinking and feeling. It is the first time in a long time (possibly ever) that a book has actually touched me. It is scary in the sense that I know these characters (or rather people just like them) and I can so relate totally, on a level that is just… wow. A few other things that I found really interesting is that it was set here in Ottawa, so the landmarks visited by the characters in the book are very familiar to me, at one point part of my daily life. I am sure that is one of the main reasons that I can relate so well to the story.

It also talks a lot about the Ice Storm of 1988, which is something that I remember all too well. It was my 19^th birthday and I had gone out to dinner with friends in the west end. That place with the car that is halfway in the wall.. anyways, I was taking the bus home, the 95 to my Ottawa friends! And it was the middle of this ice storm. I had to walk a few blocks home and the world was covered in shiny, clear ice. It was actually really beautiful. It was very late, 11:30pm ish (I know right! Those were the days!) and the sky was that dark blue that it gets when it snows, and the streetlights bathed everything in a golden shiny glow. I was looking at the trees above me and the ice had become so heavy that they had bent and leaned over the road. At one point I heard a very large crack and from that point I became terrified whenever I came near an ice encrusted tree. I was so afraid that a branch was going to snap off, due to the sheer weight of all that ice. It is something that I don’t think I will ever forget and this book has brought it all back to the surface. It’s nice to know that those memories are still in there!

The story itself is a little slow and I really don’t get all the actor references (which really, is a large part of the book) but it is very well written and definitely evokes emotion. We’ll see how I feel once I finish it!

Now that I am done this book, I must say that I am a little dissapointed with the ending. I hate when authors just seem to wrap everything up very quickly and end the story. I was a little surprised at some of the events but I won't mention what they are, for those of you that haven't read the book. All in all it was an ok read. I would try this author again but am not in any hurry to get another one of her books.