Showing posts with label Fischman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fischman. Show all posts

12 December 2016

The Year's Best Books in Review – A.D. 2016; Featuring Three Titles Deserving Resurrection



Still more than two weeks left in the year, but not too early for this list. Given my schedule these days, I know the book I'm reading right now will be the last finished before the ball drops in Times Square. I also know that it won't make the grade.

What's the book? I'll let that remain a mystery, though the sharp-eyed will spot it amongst other 2016 reads pictured above.

This year, I reviewed twenty-seven books – here and in the pages of Canadian Notes & Queries. That's just three more than in 2015, and yet I had a much harder time deciding on the three most deserving of a return to print. These are they:

The Midnight Queen
May Agnes Fleming

Who'd have thought this 19th-century novel of the Plague Year, would be such good fun. It's a fast-paced, crazy ride featuring a masked medium, a killer dwarf, long-lost siblings, and highwaymen and whores playing at being aristocrats. It's also quite well written.

There Are Victories
Charles Yale Harrison

An ambitious, daring novel by the man who gave us Generals Die in Bed. Set in Montreal and New York, this isn't a war novel, though it does deal with its devastating effects. Flawed, but brilliant, the novel's scarcity adds to the need for reissue.

For My Country [Pour la patrie: roman du XXe siecle]
Jules-Paul Tardivel

In this 1895 novel, Satan looks to secure his hold on the Dominion of Canada, only to be thwarted by divine intervention and something resembling a fax machine. The original French remains in print, but not this 1975 translation by Sheila Fischman.


Regular readers know that nearly every Margaret Millar I read is recommended for republication. This year, I read only one of the Grand Master's novels: Do Evil in Return. It would've made the list had it not been announced for republication as part of Syndicate Books' Complete Margaret Millar. Look for it in March.


Three books reviewed here this year are currently in print:

The Man from Glengarry
Ralph Connor [pseud. Charles W. Gordon]
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2009
Olive Pratt Raynor [pseud. Grant Allen]
Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2003
The Cashier [Alexandre Chenevert]
Gabrielle Roy [trans. Harry Binsse]
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2010
I helped usher two titles back into print this year, both as part of Véhicule's Ricochet Books series:

Gambling With Fire
David Montrose
[Charles Ross Graham]

The fourth and final David Montrose novel. Here private investigator Russell Teed, hero of the first three, is replaced by the displaced Franz Loebek, a once wealthy Austrian aristocrat caught up in Montreal's illegal gambling racket.
The Keys of My Prison
Frances Shelley Wees

In the 2015 edition of the Year's Best Books in Review I made reference to a book I was hoping to revive. "If successful, it'll be back in print by this time next year," I wrote. The Keys of My Prison is that book. A novel of domestic suspense set in Toronto, it should appeal to fans of Margaret Millar...


And on that note, as might be expected, praise this year goes to New York's Syndicate Books for The Complete Margaret Millar. The Master at Her Zenith  and Legendary Novels of Suspense, the first two volumes in the seven-volume set are now housed in the bookcase. The next, The Tom Aragon Novels, is scheduled for release on the tenth of January.


Great way to start the new year.

Related posts:

17 February 2016

The Strange Satanic Canada of a Future Past



For My Country [Pour la patrie: roman du XXe siecle]
Jules-Paul Tardivel [Sheila Fischman, trans]
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975
250 pages

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:
The Dusty Bookcase:
A Journey Through Canada's
Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing
Available at the very best bookstores and through


Related posts:

31 August 2015

Langevin's Masterpiece; McClelland's Disappointment



Orphan Street [Une Chaîne dans le parc]
André Langevin [trans., Alan Brown]
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1976
287 pages

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:
The Dusty Bookcase:
A Journey Through Canada's
Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing
Available at the very best bookstores and through


Related posts:

21 June 2010

Lost in Translation



The Scarecrows of Saint-Emmanuel [L'épouvantail]
André Major [Sheila Fischman, trans.]
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1977

In the latter half of the 'seventies McClelland and Stewart published translations of novels by Marie-Claire Blais, Hubert Aquin, André Langevin, Diane Giguère, Monique Bosco, Jean-Yves Soucy, Naïm Kattan, Jacques Ferron and Gabrielle Roy. Different times, especially for the house that refers to itself as "The Canadian Publisher" (in italics, always italics). The Roys aside, all were issued in hardcover and enjoyed a lone printing; there were no paperback editions. I can't say I've read all of these, but of those I have The Scarecrows of Saint-Emmanuel is the one I'd most like to see returned to print.


Originally published in 1974 as L'épouvantail, the novel begins with our hero, Momo Boulanger, waking up after a severe beating. There will be more to come. Momo is a man very much out of his depth, trying to make sense of the past. Fresh out of jail, he's come to Montreal to confront a red-haired beauty named Gigi. She's working as a hooker out of some seedy place called the Paradise, but short years before, in little St-Emmanuel, she'd been his girl. "If you were any kind of man you'd get me out of this hole", she'd told him. And so, desperate for cash, Momo had robbed a hardware store. Her father turned him in.

Gigi's whine is a cliché, and the plot resembles a pulp novel, but what sets this work apart from the cheap, yellowing paperbacks is Major's use of language. Anyone seeking evidence of Sheila Fischman's formidable talent as a translator need look no farther than this book.

Here's the beginning of chapter three:
He had stopped looking over the tops of the houses that formed an endless wall on either side of the street; there was nothing more to see up there now that night had fallen like a canopy, closing him completely inside a kind of deserted labyrinth where no one would turn around as he went by, astonished or smiling at his black eye and swollen lips; he walked slowly, dragging his feet, a stiffness of muscles of his calves, and for a moment nothing could stop him, not even the uselessness of his wandering, even though it seemed absurd to be walking like that, just for the sake of walking, as though the fabulous sum of his steps would finally lead him somewhere, or at the very least make him discover some goal to be reached, while the one really important thing to do was drink some hot coffee and take some time to rest up and get warm.
One sentence, it flies in the face of formula. Major's paragraphs often go on for pages, moving dreamlike between past and present, St-Emmanuel and Montreal. One dark scene follows another; even those depicting Momo and Gigi at the beginning of their relationship disturb. The Scarecrows of Saint-Emmanuel is not a pleasant read, nor is it an easy read, and yet once started it is difficult to put down. It's the finest novel I've read this year.


Object and Access: A slim hardcover, there are plenty of Very Good copies to be had at under C$8. Pay no attention to the Ontario bookseller charging C$10 for a "Fair" library discard. The Scarecrows of Saint-Emmanuel is rare sight in our public libraries, though it is found in most universities. A bit more scarce in the original French, despite having been reissued by Stanké in 1980.