Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced,” wrote James Baldwin, an apt epigraph for No Safeguards, the new novel by H. Nigel Thomas. Cultural memory often involves a good deal of willed forgetting, an overlooking of painful parts of experience in favour of a dominant narrative.
Two new books – In Defiance and Generation Rising – are useful in situating the 2012 strike within an ongoing struggle against society’s marketization at the expense of its citizens, and set against the backdrop of Quebec’s unique sociopolitical history.
Couched in the English title of Madeleine Gagnon’s newly translated autobiography is a consciousness of the inability to accurately convey the facts of one’s life. Memoir refers not only to a Life, but more specifically to a Life in Writing: “fiction is everywhere when you tell your own story,” Gagnon writes. Autobiography emerges from the contradiction between a unified life and multiple selves.
Bock’s characters are immersed in trying to find their context in a Quebec that is experiencing the same struggle. These stories are rich in both the tacit and tangible manifestations of a people who at once belong and do not, are citizens and are not, are Canadians and are not.
More recently, reading essays and reviews on other books by Arcan, I have found it frustrating to discover that it seems impossible to write about her prose without first writing about her body.
Reading Mike Steeves’s Giving Up can be uncomfortable. It’s full of the psychic detritus that floats around our brains from moment to moment: self-doubt, fear, justifications for unhealthy behaviour, petty grudges we can’t let go of, obsessive attention to the slog that can plague the pursuit of our goals and dreams. Optimistic perspectives are disregarded and replaced with cynicism. And on top of this, the novel is a thorough dissection of an ongoing relationship.
The D&Q brand is the kind that earns your trust, and before you know it you can find yourself venturing into outré realms – Marc Bell’s intricate free-standing psychedelic tableaux, Anders Nilsen’s dream-logic minimalist epics – that you would previously have never considered.
The emotional core of A Secret Music is this passionate, enmeshed bond between mother and son, both of whom hope that his music will help keep her demons at bay. For Lawrence, his mother’s belief in, and single-minded focus on, his music is a burden-laden blessing.
Robyn Sarah’s poetry has always reckoned with the past, but her newest collection, My Shoes Are Killing Me, reflects from a particular juncture in life, one she defines succinctly as “the beginning of dwindle.” Sarah explores the time in middle life when what has happened takes on a larger presence than what remains to happen.
A small-town charm dominates much of the local fiction about our fair city, and Montrealer Elaine Kalman Naves’s first novel, The Book of Faith, keeps religiously to this invisible holy commandment.
The Last Bonobo is a brilliant book, exactly the kind of intellectually powerful, clear, and compassionate account that could – literally – help save the world.
