A mathematical equation proving whether a book is pornography might be based on the difference in the rate at which one reads the passages between saucy bits and the saucy bits themselves. Is it, in other words, literature when we find ourselves speculating about the pizza guy’s life before he made that fateful delivery? Was the job a consequence of failing to finish his degree or did he recognize his true calling and succumb to the lure of the open, pepperoni-infused road? Read more…
CNQ
THE IMPOSTER BRIDE
by Nancy Richler
The extended Polish/Russian Jewish family that is the focus of Nancy Richler’s Montreal-based post-World War II saga includes not one but two female members abandoned by a parent. One of them is Elka Krakauer, whose father didn’t bother waiting until she was born before walking out on Elka’s imperious mother, Ida Pearl. To her daughter, Ida offers the lie that her father left to fight with “revolutionaries” back in Europe. Read more…
THE CAT’S TABLE
by Michael Ondaatje
A vaguely autobiographical bildungsroman set at sea in the early 1950s, The Cat’s Table takes place aboard the Oronsay, the ocean liner that will take 11-year-old Michael from Colombo, Ceylon to England, where he will be reunited with the mother he hasn’t seen in years. Cruise ships offer us a simulacrum of the world and society, and Michael’s awakening from innocence is duly compressed, time-lapse style, into the 21 days of the voyage that will take him, epically, over two seas, an ocean and through the Suez Canal. The Oronsay may be chickenfeed compared to today’s grotesque, floating theme parks, but to young Mynah—as he becomes known—whose only “ship” up until this point has been dugout canoe and whose longest trip was an egg-sandwich-fortified car ride between cities, it is nothing short of palatial. What the Oronsay lacks in buffet tables, conga lines and glitz it more than makes up for in intrigue, characters and old-world patina. Read more…
THE FREE WORLD
by David Bezmozgis
Exile comes to mind when we think of the Jewish diaspora, yet it’s limbo that better describes the state The Free World’s Krasnansky family finds itself in as its members await (in the country of Dante’s birth, no less) clearance to emigrate to America over a six-month period in Rome in 1978. Read more…
Gwethalyn Graham’s EARTH AND HIGH HEAVEN
Time has not been particularly kind to the Canadian social-realist fiction that emerged post-war during the late 1940s and early 50s. Eclipsed by the stars of subsequent decades—the Gallants, Munroes, Richlers, Atwoods: you know them—the novels of this time have largely come to be seen as stepping stones to the literary riches yet to come. Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes earns most of its keep these days as a hoary catchphrase in politics and the media, perhaps because the racket caused by the novel’s self-conscious mythmaking and ethnographic didacticism make actually reading it hard going. Morley Callaghan, likewise, still gets lip service as a Canadian Writer of Importance, but few people seem to be able to stomach his individual novels anymore. Read more…
THE DEATH OF DONNA WHALEN
by Michael Winter
In 1993, a working class single mother from St. John’s named Brenda Young was stabbed to death 31 times in her living room as her two young children slept close by. Young’s boyfriend, Randy Druken, was charged with murder and convicted two years later on the strength of testimony from an informant who claimed Druken had confessed to him in prison. Druken served six years until DNA analysis of previously unexamined evidence—a cigarette butt that literally fell on the floor during the trial—exonerated him of the crime. When the test results fingered Druken’s own brother Paul as the true murderer, the latter committed suicide. In 2006, Druken was awarded $2 million for his wrongful conviction. The case, which came on the heels of two other discredited murder convictions in Newfoundland, caused a sensation and was part of the impetus behind the three-year Lamer Inquiry into repeated failures of the province’s justice system. Read more…