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.
How many people once played in a band, tried their hand at writing songs, and eventually let the whole music thing fall by the wayside – but have a nagging feeling that someday they’d like to take it up again? No doubt the number is too high to count, but Montreal writer Eric Siblin decided to take up a personal music revival in earnest, and to write about the experience. Studio Grace is an intimate, at times exhaustive account of Siblin’s journey in writing and recording an album.
We’re not likely to get a more thorough biography of Calixa Lavallée than Anthems and Minstrel Shows, Brian Christopher Thompson’s huge and meticulous account of the life and times of the composer of “O Canada.” It’s exhaustively researched, even if sometimes the bigger picture is lost in the denseness of facts.
While short story collections tend to feature a relatively even style and emotional palette, Daydreams of Angels offers readers a wide spectrum of both. In these twenty stories sparkling with wit and fantasy, O’Neill gives us a variety of genres, including heartfelt coming-of-age stories, miniature historical fictions, allegories, tall tales, and even literary cover versions. And while these stories largely stray from the gritty realism of her novels, they nonetheless retain the powerful emotional resonance of those works.
