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| My Heart is Broken Mavis Gallant Don Mills, ON: PaperJacks, 1974 |
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11 June 2018
07 June 2018
The Amazon Customer Review 2018 Ontario Election Edition: Interesting and Easy to Read
Election Day in Ontario. If the pollsters are correct, Doug Ford is set to become the province's twenty-sixth premier. That's him smiling on the cover of Ford Nation, the book he wrote with his brother Rob.
Ford Nation ranks as one of the most remarkable achievements in Canadian publishing. Doug announced that he was writing the book at a 13 September 2016 news conference. Two months later, there is was, finished and in stores.
Again, a remarkable acheivement... made more so by the fact that co-author Rob had died nine months earlier.
At that news conference, held in his mom's garden with Rob's widow Renata by his side, Doug described the work in progress as "the most exciting book that this country has ever seen when it comes to politics."
Does the finished product live up to Doug's claim? I haven't read Ford Nation myself, and so rely upon Amazon customer reviews:
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04 June 2018
The Dustiest Bookcase: C is for Child
Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).
They're in storage as we build our new home.
Patience, please.
The Village of Souls
Philip Child
Toronto: Ryerson, 1948
294 pages
I've long championed Child, praising God's Sparrows and Mr. Ames Against Time here and elsewhere. The Village of Souls was his debut novel. It was first published in 1933 by Thornton Butterworth of London, England, a full fifteen years before there was a Canadian edition. Ryerson went some way in making up for the delay. This may be the publisher's most beautiful book.
Roloff Beny, a man I'd known only as a photographer, provides the cover and the illustrations that open each chapter.
Child wrote just five novels. I haven't read this one for the simple reason that it's set in seventeenth-century New France. As mentioned a couple of weeks back, I'm not drawn to historical fiction. Should I be giving The Village of Souls a chance? According to Ryerson, I'm missing out on a novel that "will live as a Canadian classic."
The Ryerson edition of The Village of Souls was published seventy years ago. The novel hasn't seen print since.
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28 May 2018
A Publisher's Worst Book?
A sunny weekend in St Marys was made brighter still when I finally finished Arctic Rendez-vous, the sixth novel by part-time pilot and sometime novelist Keith Edgar.
Now all I have to do is write a review of the damn thing.
I would've given up on Arctic Rendez-vous had not been the errors – the many errors – that plagued the book. Something of a surprise, they kept me going because I'd long considered the novel's publisher, Collins White Circle, to be the most competent producer of Canadian post-war paperbacks. I've read White Circle editions of Ralph Connor, Hugh Garner, Stephen Leacock, and David Montrose, but never encountered anything nearly inept.
Ignoring typos – "riffe" for "rifle" is one example – let's look at the title: Arctic Rendez-vous. The title page and back cover have it as "Arctic Rendezvous."
This, I'm willing to overlook – hell, no less a publisher than Penguin got the title wrong with no less an author than Brian Moore – but then comes the back cover copy:
"Here is the story of a man and a woman, savage and elemental, matching their hatred and a strange attraction in a race for a guilty secret and sunken fortune..."
In fact, the fortune is not sunken, though there are several pages in which Taffy believes that might be the case. The "ghost-ship Baychimo" doesn't feature in the novel. Taffy and Marta are racing to reach the Unaikto, a fictional ship that was abandoned after becoming icebound.
This is not to say that there was no Baychimo. It was abandoned in 1931, the very same year as the fictional Unaikto. A ghost-ship, it was last seen in 1969.
That's Marta being groped on the cover.
Her hair should be black.
Her breasts should be conical.
More anon.
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