Literature

The Wars is my second Timothy Findley novel, the other being Famous Last Words. That they both wound up being war novels is a coincidence. I did try The Piano Man’s Daughter when I was younger, which was recommended to me by someone after I’d told them how much I loved The Stone Diaries, but I put it down before finishing the first chapter out of utter fucking boredom, and I never went back to it. Famous Last Words was better, and fortunately so was The Wars. The framing device of an unnamed historian or researcher with no clear identity of their own examining the life of Robert Ross is a bit strange; it doesn’t cohere in any meaningful way, but it does make the primary narrative extremely unreliable. Ross also feels under-developed. We know he’s sensitive, unsure of his sexuality, dislikes violence but is comforted by the authority his… Continue Reading →

For those who aren’t familiar, there’s no delicate way to say it: Bear is that infamous Canadian novel about the woman who has sex with a bear. An actual bear. There is a rather famous, very lurid cover that makes the rounds on social media every so often, but unfortunately I was not lucky enough to find one of those. My copy (pictured here) is a first edition, and rather appropriately comes in a plain brown wrapper. Having not read any of Marian Engel’s other work I was completely in the dark. On the one hand, the premise almost cries out for something gonzo; on the other hand, it is not the done thing to give the Governor General’s Award to works of gonzo literature. Sadly, Bear was not gonzo, but happily, it turned out to be quite elegant. Of all the things it could have been, that was the… Continue Reading →

I imagine that the vast majority of Canadian readers of my generation know Margaret Laurence through her novel The Stone Angel, a wonderful but not very kid-friendly book that has been a staple of Canadian high school curricula for at least two generations. If that was your first encounter with Laurence you can be forgiven for not going any deeper into her oeuvre; I loved The Stone Angel, but that was more despite the way it was taught to me in high school rather than because of it, and I can see why many readers would be inclined to steer clear of her other work. Margaret Laurence’s books are, on the surface at least, less exciting than those of Canada’s other great Margaret, Margaret Atwood. Who would want to read about village life in pre-war Manitoba when there are fast-paced stories about dissatisfied urban intellectuals to devour, and who cares… Continue Reading →

Alice Munro has a way of deflating things usually thought majestic, and granting majesty to things normally thought small and plain. I tweeted that earlier this month, and the passage that got me thinking about it was the opening of a section called “Changes and Ceremonies” in which Del and her friend Naomi become wrapped up the mythology of both sex and art, entering puberty and acting in the school play. It is an amazing thing: Boys’ hate was dangerous, it was keen and bright, a miraculous birthright, like Arthur’s sword snatched out of the stone, in the Grade Seven Reader. Girls’ hate, in comparison, seemed muddled and tearful, sourly defensive. Boys would bear down on you on their bicycles and cleave the air where you had been, magnificently, with no remorse, as if they wished there were knives on their wheels. And they would say anything. They would say… Continue Reading →

I will confess to not really understanding why this novel was such a sensation. I imagine that it has something to do with the cultural context; aside from The Tin Flute I don’t really know much about Quebec literature from before 1959. I know that (European) French films of that period were moving away from a particular kind of pastoral romance and were either ignoring the genre entirely or subverting its tropes and ideals, and I wonder if Blais was trying something similar with Mad Shadows. With Louise’s vanity, Patrice’s beauty and utter stupidity, and Isabelle-Marie’s intense cruelty and anger, she’s certainly taken a sledgehammer to the pastoral novel, but then Gabrielle Roy did a complete end run around it almost fifteen years earlier. I won’t say that I thought it was bad, but I also can’t say that I liked it very much. There weren’t any issues with translatorese,… Continue Reading →