Mirrors and Mirages offers a refreshing glimpse into the inner lives of a cohort not yet well represented in Canadian fiction. In fact, believers of any faith are thin on the ground in CanLit, and the effort these characters make to balance their individual beliefs and the demands of their families and the culture around them is central to the story Monia Mazigh wishes to tell.
April, it seems, is not the cruellest month. That would be November. That is, if we’re to believe James Benson Nablo’s protagonist in his novel The Long November. The latest book to be published under Véhicule Press’s Ricochet imprint, The Long November is a noir, gritty, raw novel, but it’s not a mystery or a potboiler. It’s an anti-war novel, a rags-to-riches novel, a love story, and a coming-of-age story in oh so many ways. In short, it’s nothing you would expect.
“It’s easy to romanticize the sea,” writes Louise Carson in Mermaid Road. While the evocative seafoam colour of this hand-bound chapbook does well to immerse the reader in a romanticized feeling of the sea, the story emphasizes the practical considerations a mermaid and her family must make when getting by in the twentieth century.
To enter the world of Jacob Wren’s novel Polyamorous Love Song is to enter a bizarre yet compelling dreamscape, a parallel universe where everyone is an artist (regardless of whether they produce physical artwork or not) and where revolutionaries don mascot uniforms and risk death for their cause, the politics of which are left ambiguous.
Where do we draw the line between storytelling and lies? Can a good story veil (or protect) reality while revealing a larger truth? And what is the responsibility of the storyteller to his audience? In his second novel, The Goat in the Tree, Lorne Elliott – comedian, award-winning playwright, musician, and Hudson resident – playfully poses these questions, wrapping them in a tale about a storyteller whose talent for fabrication is his ticket to ride. To sweeten the plot, Elliott adds parables and fables as guideposts to the characters we meet along the way.
Kidd has been a fixture in the Montreal artistic landscape since the 1990s, launched to spoken word stardom (such as it is) by such works as her much-acclaimed show and poetry collection Sea Peach, which toured internationally. Hyena Subpoena shows off the best of her signature poetic traits – a gift for philosophical whimsy (described by some critics as “Dr Seuss for adults”), frankly dazzling technical virtuosity in the realm of subtle rhyme and complex meter, crisp vocal performance, and a slightly bizarre yet strikingly resonant fixation with animal metaphors.
In My October, Hannah is struck by “the voices” in Roy’s classic, finding them all “so closely observed that it was easy to forget they were fictional.” The same could be said of Rothman’s well-orchestrated choir of characters, thanks to which My October rings true.
Fortier’s writing is very far from “pure ravings.” It is lucid, rich in detail, and showcases her deep and broad interest in the history of science, which sets her novels apart from much of fiction.
The Danish-Canadian writer’s hefty new novel, The Lost Sisterhood, skilfully weaves a mesmerizing tale of two women – one modern and one mythological (or maybe not) – replete with intrigue, twists, and turnarounds.
It began in 1931 in Manchuria. The Fascists won that time. Then it got going again in Abyssinia, and the Fascists won again.” In the spring of 1937, as Canada’s Mackenzie King government joined in keeping Republican Spain under effective embargo during the civil war against General Franco and his coup, the Canadian doctor Norman Bethune made the point as clearly as he could: “the world war has started. In fact, it’s in its third stage – Manchuria, Ethiopia and now Spain.”
In the life of Pierre Jeanniot there are plenty of lessons in how to make something of oneself: how to think clearly, work hard, succeed. Jeanniot came from circumstances that were not desperate per se, but not all that promising, either. Yet as a young technician in Montreal, he invented the “black box” flight recorder and, as president of Air Canada, he instituted computer reservation systems and no-smoking flights. The latter initiative was so successful it’s hard to imagine now that people ever smoked on planes.
