Dusty CanLit Spring Reviews

Here comes summer. School is out. Oh, happy day.

So, here we are with the spring blog reviews of old CanLit. As expected, most came from Canadian bloggers, but the Brits are well represented. Americans, où es-tu?

Looking over the list, I'm left wondering whether we are on the cusp of a Ross Macdonald revival. The winter harvest included Blue City, The Goodbye Look, and Sleeping Beauty. Spring brought reviews of The Ivory Grin, The Underground Man, and The Goodbye Look.

Please do let me me know if I've missed anything or onyone.

The Mountain and the Valley - Ernest Buckler

The Ivory Grin - John Ross Macdonald [Kenneth Millar]

Le grand Khan - Jean Basile

Les voyages d’Irkoutsk - Jean Basile

Lan ga ge - Michel Garneau

Langage 1 - Michel Garneau

Langage 2 - Michel Garneau

Langage 3 - Michel Garneau

Langage 4 - Michel Garneau

Langage 5 - Michel Garneau

Moments - Michel Garneau

La plus belle île - Michel Garneau

Les petits chevals amoureux - Michel Garneau

Élégie au génocide des nasopodes - Michel Garneau 

Eukuan nin matshimanitu Innu-iskueu - An Antane Kapesh

La rivière sans repos - Gabrielle Roy

Bear - Marian Engel

The Goodbye Look - Ross Macdonald [Kennneth Millar]

'Fang Law' - Harold F. Cruickshank

The Equations of Love - Ethel Wilson

The Underground Man - Ross Macdonald [Kenneth Millar]

I read and reviewed seven old CanLit titles this past season: 

The Stone House Mystery - Joyce Boyle

The Eyes of the Gypsy - John Murray Gibbon

Sword of Desire - Robert W. Tracy [Alvin Schwartz]

If You Want to See Your Wife Again... - John Craig

The Street Called Straight - Basil King

Looking Forward - Hugh Pedney

The Homesteaders - Robert J.S. Stead

Of these, Rev King's The Street Called Straight was the best, though Montrealers and readers of science fiction may find Looking Forward to be of more interest. The Homesteaders is recommended for readers in Manitoba and Alberta,

I'm beginning to think that 2025 will be another year in which male authors dominate my reading.

Let's see what the summer brings! Enjoy the sun!

Related post:

Dusty CanLit Winter Reviews

Limited Time, Limited Editions (1/6)

Hetty Dorval

Ethel Wilson

Vancouver: The Alcuin Society, 1967

Typographer: Charles Morris/ Illustrator: Gus Rueter

"This is number 230 of an edition limited to 375 copies which was produced especially for members of the Alcuin Society."

Anyone looking for evidence of the neglect shown Ethel Wilson, British Columbia's greatest novelist, might want to consider the prices being asked for this unusual edition. An elegant production, with a five-page author's introduction that appears nowhere else, it can be bought online for as little as US$25. Twenty years ago, during those heady days of bookseller catalogues, I paid C$75 for this copy. At the time, I thought it was a fantastic bargain.

And it was.

The Mysterious Question Mystery

The Canadian Century: English Canadian Writing Since Confederation

A. J. M. Smith, editor

Toronto: Gage, 1973

The Canadian Century is the tardy companion to The Colonial Century, a textbook that began life in 1965 as The Book of Canadian Prose: Volume 1. Worth the wait? I think so. Smith wastes more than a few of the 652 pages on things like Hugh Garner's 'One- Two- Three Little Indians', but this is more than offset by the inspired, accomplished and all too often overlooked. The reader is presented with writing by Edward Blake, Wilfrid Laurier, Northrop Frye, Leonard Cohen and Alice Munro. Louis Riel's eloquent, if confused, final statement in The Queen v Louis Riel is included; as is John Glassco's comic memoir 'A Season in Limbo', otherwise only available in an old number of The Tamarack Review. Preceding all is a piece titled 'The Mysterious Question', which Smith chose to include in his Preface.

'Perhaps I take a risk of including here a remarkable short story', the anthologist writes

Perhaps.

The short work of fiction, first published in a 1951 issue of Northern Review, is a hoax. Attributed to 'John Goodwin of West Vancouver, B.C.', age 12, it was actually the work of editor John Sutherland (plagiarized from a story by Washington Irving). The prank fooled a great many people, including Ethel Wilson, who had been so impressed by the story that, thirteen years later, she wondered about its author in her essay 'Series of Combination of Events and Where Is John Goodwin?'

Smith knew the true identity of the author; in 1969, he and Glassco had exchanged correspondence about Sutherland's prank. Yet, the anthologist appears to have had no qualms in furthering the ruse... for a while. The Canadian Century was reprinted at some point. Hard to tell when. The title and copyright pages are identical, the design is unchanged, yet 'The Mysterious Question' has disappeared.

Object: Well, it's a textbook: bland layout and paper of a shade that induces symptoms not dissimilar to snowblindness. Simultaneous cloth and paper editions.

Access: Not as common as one might expect. A handful of copies are currently listed, the most expensive coming in at US$15. Seems everyone thinks that they're offering the first printing. Maybe they are. The second printing is scarce — in his A. J. M. Smith, An Annotated Bibliography (Montreal: Véhicule, 1981) Michael Darling writes that he'd been unable to locate a copy.