It takes a long time to read The Obituary, the eighth book from acclaimed writer Gail Scott, considering it’s a mere stripling of 162 pages. It’s a question of density, partly, but also of shifting gears – you might need to enter this book slowly, as you would a cold lake.
Do not create anything,” famously wrote Bob Dylan in his poem “Advice for Geraldine on her Miscellaneous Birthday”: “it will be misinterpreted. / it will not change. / it will follow you the rest of your life.”
Go into any bar of a certain type and you’re almost sure to see a guy like Spat Ryan. He’ll look like he’s been there for a while, sitting alone, but not so alone that he’s not compelled to voice his comments about all and sundry: the music, the weather, politics, women.
As Canadians, we pride ourselves on our national image as protectors of multiculturalism; H. Nigel Thomas’s new short story collection Lives: Whole and Otherwise offers a bleaker picture of our supposedly progressive nation. Thomas presents poignant, blunt, and hauntingly heartbreaking accounts of members of the Caribbean community in Montreal, many of whom struggle with the physically and emotionally frigid conditions of their new home.
The characters in Teri Vlassopoulos’s debut short story collection, Bats or Swallows, are trying to make sense of themselves and the world. Many are in that purgatory between adolescence and adulthood, when the security of childhood erodes and the ugly complexities of the self and human experience are revealed.
When you pick up a book whose cover motif is interlocking coffins and find that it is set in Croatia, you can bet there’ll be more than three deaths inside. True to the title, though, the three stories are about the poisoning of a golden and cherished child, a father’s blood-frothing deathbed address, and a mother who spent a decade dying.
Subtle Bodies is a fascinating little book, a “fictional biography” that takes as its inspiration the life of René Crevel – French writer, idealist, communist, and occasional medium.
The mid-twentieth-century German writer Walter Benjamin said: “All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one: they are, in other words, special cases.” As we lurch into the twenty-first century, one thing that surely connects us to the most change-defined century in human history is invention through the blending of distinctions. Hybridization is not just for rose bushes anymore.
One of the delights of reading fiction is that it lets you travel at practically no cost to places you would otherwise never see. Of Water and Rock, Thomas Armstrong’s debut novel, takes readers to modern-day Barbados, but not the Barbados of glossy travel brochures featuring beaches and resort hotels. This is behind-the-scenes Barbados, in the private homes and lives of the locals.
Every so often, a book comes along that shakes up the way we look at Montreal. Mauricio Segura’s first novel, Black Alley is such a book. Other authors have come at Montreal from a dreamier angle, adding new layers to the city’s mythology, but Segura does the opposite. What makes this book so affecting is that it feels so painfully real.
"You can’t be deep without a surface,” proclaims a cheeky lover in Jonathan Lethem’s You Don’t Love Me Yet, and surface, or in this case, style, is the first thing to jump out at the reader in Nadine Bismuth’s newly translated collection of short stories, Are You Married to a Psychopath? (Just look at the striking title.)
I Am a Japanese Writer is Haitian-born author Dany Laferrière’s thirteenth novel, newly translated from the original French. Douglas & McIntyre is publishing the book this fall alongside a reissue of the author’s first novel, 1985’s How To Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired. As part of a campaign to introduce the prolific francophone author to English-Canadian audiences, these two novels separated by twenty-three years share the distinction of being among the most provocatively titled in his catalogue.
