Early in Leila Marshy’s novel The Philistine, the protagonist, Nadia, abruptly declines to board a return flight from Egypt to Canada and arranges instead for an open-ended ticket allowing her to stay indefinitely. What looks at first glance like a refusal to go home becomes far more ambiguous because of how the novel unsettles the categories of home and away, travelling and arriving, belonging and exile.
In Blue Lake, history and tragedy threaten to repeat themselves in each generation, with each character “doubled and shadowed by past, present and future.” In this community, it’s considered perfectly reasonable to camouflage your cabin with paintings of trees or to cultivate a garden of poisonous plants, fertilized with the ashes of family and friends.
What do we do in a crime novel where there is no hard-boiled detective working the case? No tenacious cop playing cat-and-mouse with the killer, no small-town spinster shrewdly putting together clues? What do we do when we walk into the story after the thrill of the chase?
In this intricately layered book, a cross-genre narrative encompassing memoir, biography, goodbye letter, and poetic socio-historic treatise stretching from Vancouver to Montreal, Erín Moure reminds us that memory transcends mortality, that in our rawest grief, love and reflection can offer the greatest shelters. The disclaimer upfront avows that “memory is a work of the imagination.”
Will Aitken does something remarkable in his new book: he brings together a keen critical eye and an open heart, and – in doing so – creates a unique hybrid of critical essay and memoir. And though Aitken begins with strong material – a classic play in a new translation by a major poet, staged by a renowned actor and director – it’s what he does with the material that is most striking.
Bologna’s success is just one of several interesting stories in Judith Dellheim and Jason Prince’s engaging, if at times frustrating, Free Public Transit: And Why We Don’t Pay to Ride Elevators. The chapters, written by academics, journalists, and activists, delve into the “political side” of the question of how best to address the mobility needs of a city.
As editor Andy Brown sets out in the foreword of this collection of essays and interviews, BDQ refers to Quebec comics or bande dessinée québécoise, just as manga refers to comics from Japan. The collection is divided into four time periods, with the longest section devoted to “The Nineties,” evidently an ebullient period for sequential art, particularly in Montreal.
The heartfelt and melancholic story in Red Winter covers just a few days of a passionate love affair during a frigid winter in a small Swedish steel-mill town in the 1970s. But it is broader in its emotional scope: it delivers a lovely snapshot of the lives of ordinary people, including their stifled desires, isolation, loss of prospects, and political hopes.
This past fall I was invited to read at Salon du livre des Premières Nations in Wendake First Nation. At first, I was hesitant to go. Not because I wasn’t honoured by the invitation, but because I wondered if I was Indigenous enough. At moments, I questioned whether I was even poet enough.
