Sinclair Ross

As For Me and My House is the only book on my Canada 150 list that I hadn’t heard of prior to making the list.[ref]It was a wise suggestion from my girlfriend, just one among a string of wise suggestions.[/ref] Sinclair Ross, as a name, was familiar to me, but beyond the “Canadian author” tag, I had nothing to attach to it. Having now read the book, it’s unclear to me how I escaped high school without having read it. It is exactly the sort of archetypal repressive prairie novel you’d expect to see assigned in Canadian schools—I would say it’s the very model for such books, if Martha Ostenso’s excellent Wild Geese didn’t predate it by a good sixteen years. The story of the country parson and his wife[ref]Philip Bentley and his wife, who despite being the narrator, is never named.[/ref] being slowly ground down by the weight of… Continue Reading →