Hollywood North paints a dark portrait of Trenton, Ontario. This institutional port town is a gateway to the Trent-Severn Waterway and Prince Edward County, and it has a storied history as an epicentre for tragedy. Author Michael Libling pushes his hometown’s reputation to the extreme, and he would have us believe it to be the township of Quinte’s own Bermuda Triangle, with a forever-burning creosote plant, tragic fires, unexplained plane crashes, wartime losses, train derailments, drownings (so many drownings!), and various traffic accidents.
The cover of Aphelia features an out-of-focus photograph of a young woman. In the gauzy light, few of her features are visible beyond an outline of shoulder-length hair, dark eyes, and a smudge where her mouth should be. This haunting image neatly symbolizes the novel’s central character, whose name we never learn.
We’ve all had the experience where our mind arbitrarily takes a snapshot, a freeze-frame that reverberates with the particulars that shaped our state of being at that moment in our lives. These flashes capture a near-simultaneous amalgamation of thought, emotion, and vivid sensory experience, a kind of neural artifact of an ever-changing self. But what if it were possible to compile the experiential snapshots of an array of different people in a single book? This is the ambitious challenge that Simon Brousseau has set for himself in his experimental novel Synapses.
People have been writing novels about infidelity for about as long as people have been writing novels. Indeed, within the literary canon – think Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, or The Great Gatsby – adultery is about as common a subject as an absent father or an unplanned pregnancy. Incidentally, 26 Knots, the debut novel from Montreal- based pediatrician Bindu Suresh, has all three of these things. It wasn’t until after I’d finished reading, however, that I noticed just how much Suresh had packed into such a slight volume.
Shortly into their marriage, the narrator of Maude Veilleux’s autofictional novel Prague and her husband decide to experiment with an open relationship: “We told ourselves we should enjoy our bodies now while we were young. And what were a few lovers in a lifetime spent together?” As part of the experiment, she begins to write a book about an open marriage. Yet, as one relationship escalates in intensity, the novel quickly takes on a mind of its own.
A book about friendship, polyamory, queerness, and unconventional families, Run J Run has all the makings of an exciting novel. But, bogged down by racial and mental health tropes, the book leaves an unsettling feeling.
Christian Guay-Poliquin’s second novel The Weight of Snow, winner of the Governor General’s Award as well as three Quebec literary prizes after it was published in French in 2016, has just appeared in English, translated by David Homel. Part dystopian survival tale, part existentialist character study, it’s a compelling read with a minimalist style that masks some heavy-duty themes.
Fog has some ingredients – a finely detailed setting, a strained friendship between two young men – that point to the novel’s potential as a suspenseful work about the lost men of a neighbourhood.
Gégoire Courtois’s novel The Laws of the Skies conducts a visceral experiment with both narrative and human nature. It removes all prospect of hope from the outset, then creates a spectacle of waiting for forewarned deaths to occur, rather than generating suspense about whether or not they will.
In classical mythology, Persephone is forcefully separated from her mother and taken to the underworld. She is eventually able to return, but the reunion is incomplete: Persephone must forever spend a portion of time hidden away, moving through a cycle of appearance and disappearance tied to the seasons. Through both indirect and direct reference, this myth infuses Ariela Freedman’s novel A Joy to Be Hidden, where secrets, loss, and separated family members interweave through multiple plot lines.
atherine Lalonde’s The Faerie Devouring likewise centres on an intimate familial relationship: the sprite, a young girl, is raised by her staunch grandmother among a gaggle of other children in rural Quebec. In contrast with the precise, crystalline images and mood of The Embalmer, Lalonde’s language is organic, pulsing, and repetitive in the way of fairy tales. The Faerie Devouring is a loose, impressionistic text that captures the fraught, shifting relationship between the sprite and her Gramma. Lalonde’s characters are physical before anything else, moving constantly but barely speaking.
Expect neither Skil saws nor crowbars in Montreal writer and translator David Homel’s eighth novel: the “teardown” he explores with perspicacity is the mindset of a narrator who, like the older homes in his childhood neighbourhood, remains structurally sound but feels unjustly rendered worthless in a volatile, financialized new world order.
