Fragment follows fragment like thoughts in a mind suspended between waking and sleeping, and again and again the book returns to the life of actor and Olympian Johnny Weissmuller. And yet this novel, the first part of a trilogy, isn’t a difficult read. The prose is translucent, flowing, beautifully translated from its original French by Dimitri Nasrallah.
[dropcap]W[/dropcap]e all have family mythologies. Those stories told and retold of previous generations: a grandmother who survived perils to immigrate to North America, or the tale of how our parents found each other. These stories colour how we see ourselves and the world around us. They’re often born out of struggle, or loss, and we defend their veracity as we would our very honour, no matter how distorted they may become with the retelling. In the novel Brothers, David Clerson harnesses the power of these stories and amplifies it with the force of fable to create a tale of violence, loss, revenge, and ultimately rebirth.
Will McClelland’s self-published debut novel The Minted is set in a surreal futuristic Canada, where animals talk and the country is under the control of a shadowy villain named Argent. The story takes place during “The Great Burning” of the early 2030s, when an uprising of wild animals, led by an immortal moose, briefly cripples the infrastructure of the nation’s cities and towns.
In a world devoid of affection, the word “gentleness” reverberates like a blow to the head when it materializes suddenly in the final pages of Karoline Georges’s novel Under the Stone – newly translated into English by Jacob Homel.
Everything in Italy is “old and broken,” says Suzanna’s niece, encapsulating a motif in Keith Henderson’s latest novel. Suzanna can relate. It seems everything about her life in Montreal is crumbling, too. When her ex-husband threatens to curtail support payments, the newly divorced forty-two-year-old must scramble to find a job – no small task since she long ago abandoned her studies for motherhood and hasn’t worked outside the home since.
While Testament may find readers everywhere, it will be of particular interest here in Anglophone Montreal, where word of Vickie Gendreau’s extraordinary life and death may have already been heard. Midway through 2012, at the age of twenty-three, Gendreau was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour. Less than a year later, she had succumbed to it, but not before writing two books that would make her the darling, the shooting star, the fennec fox of Quebec literature.
The story that unfolds is a quick and enjoyable read. Seven Days Dead features an engaging cast of characters upon a captivatingly written landscape. To ride alongside Cinq-Mars in the proverbial passenger seat as he thinks through various scenarios and learns about the lives of the townspeople makes for a satisfying and entertaining rainy day read.
The Keys of My Prison is the latest Canadian noir thriller to be resurrected by the Ricochet Books imprint of Montreal’s Véhicule Press. Established in 2010 and curated by Brian Busby, the Ricochet series has brought such long-lost titles as Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street and Blondes Are My Trouble back into the public consciousness.
In this ambitious book, Marcelino Truong tells his family’s story, intertwined with a history of the onset of the Vietnam War and contemptary reflections about that time. Truong offers a rare perspective for Western readers – that of a Vietnamese French person who experienced the conflict first hand. Originally written in French, the book has been translated to English by David Homel.
Ben Katchor’s Cheap Novelties is considered to have been one of the first modern graphic novels. First published in the late 1980s as a series of strips in the alternative weekly New York Press and then as a RAW one-shot in 1991, the comic has finally received the full Drawn & Quarterly treatment on the occasion of its twenty-fifth anniversary.
Shanghai Grand takes Grescoe and his readers far from Montreal – not only to a distant land but also to a very different time. Its story unrolls in the streets, nightclubs, luxury hotels, and shikumen lane courtyards of Jazz Age Shanghai.
Considering the complexities and difficulties surrounding questions of Indigeneity and non-Indigeneity in Canada, few would have the expertise and courage required to write “A Guide to First Nations, Métis & Inuit Issues.” But this is exactly what Métis author and educator Chelsea Vowel has done.
