A Giller long-listed book and a recent Canada Reads contender: Muna is a widowed single mother who escapes to Montreal in 1986 from Beirut. What follows is a one-year struggle to find work as an immigrant, to help her son Omar adjust to a radically new environment, to survive her first winter, and to overcome marginalization and prejudice. A compelling story.
Category: Quebec
When We Lost Our Heads – Heather O’Neill
Simply put, this is a wonderful book about compelling and complex women in Montreal at the end of the 19th century. Men in the story are mostly inconsequential, despite some appallingly boorish behaviour. Marie and Sadie are best friends as children, but theirs is a classic love-hate relationship (“Every decent friendship comes with a drop of hatred. But that hatred is like honey in the tea. It makes it addictive”). Marie is spoiled and entitled; Sadie is subversive and dangerous. Ms. O’Neill‘s writing is enchanting with exquisite similes describing disparate worlds: life in a brothel, exploitive factory work (the Squalid Mile). Female relationships are infinitely complex with righteous anger, pettiness and jealousy, and a self-absorbed woman who has no empathy toward other women. Powerful feminist themes abound: the invisibility of marriage, sexual awareness leading to female empowerment. And finally, anticipate a late plot twist and an extraordinary ending. This is O’Neill at her best, a Montreal noir story.
The Forgotten Daughter – Joanna Goodman
Ms. Goodman wrote the excellent The Home For Unwanted Girls about the Duplessis Orphans, created when Quebec re-classified orphans as being mentally deficient in order to transfer their care to mental hospitals. Her new book continues Elodie’s story to achieve justice and an official apology. The time is the early 90s with the backdrop of separation and the 1995 referendum, with two fascinating characters, James and Vero, on opposite sides of the separation debate. Anger is a powerful force in people’s actions. And the difficulty of acting on principles is a dominant theme. Highly recommended.
Surfacing – Margaret Atwood
An early Atwood treasure from the 1970s with beautiful descriptive writing – this description off a restaurant meal is on page 1: “two restaurants which served identical grey hamburger steaks plastered with mud gravy and canned peas, watery and pallid as fish eyes, and french fries heavy with lard”. Is your mouth watering? The narrator is an un-named young woman who travels to a remote lake in Northern Quebec with three friends, to seek her missing father. There is an eerily effective transition to sinister happenings, but the true gem of the writing is the unfiltered dialog in the narrator’s head: this story is both spooky and brilliant, a must read.
Dual Citizens – Alix Ohlin
Regular readers of this book blog know that I have a specific affection for introspective relationship books. This book by Ms. Ohlin is a perfect read, in my opinion. The story enters on two sisters, Lark and Robin, from their early childhood in Montreal and their complicated relationship with their mother Marianne, to adulthood in New York and the Laurentians. Lark is the main character, someone who hopes that silence will produce invisibility. The story contains vivid descriptions of art, music and film, motherhood and even wolves. The writing is divine; highly recommended.
A Deadly Divide – Ausma Zehana Khan
Inspector Esa Khattak and Sgt. Rachel Getty of the Canadian Community Policing (Ethnic Division) investigate a mass killing at a Quebec mosque. In addition to providing a really excellent murder mystery plot, this story is obviously topical in Canada but also topical world-wide given the New Zealand mosque attack. The issue of radicalization to white supremacy causes is treated intelligently. Khattak and Getty make a formidable team, much like Elizabeth George’s Lynley and Havers. A thoroughly enjoyable read.
The Home for Unwanted Girls – Joanne Goodman
One of the things we learned from Heather O’Neill’s very fine The Lonely Hearts Hotel was that Quebec orphanages were tough places. Goodman’s novel reinforces that reality, beginning in 1950. Even worse, the Duplessis Quebec government transferred illegitimate orphans to mental institutions in order to obtain more federal money for institutions. So this is an angst-filled story over 20 years, the mother who was forced to give up her illegitimate daughter and the daughter’s experience in horrible institutions, so be warned.
Songs For The Cold Of Heart – Eric Dupont
This Giller short-listed book by a Quebec author is hard to describe. It is epic story-telling told with great detail, so there is much content about many many topics. Sometimes I wished that some of the content had been edited out as this is a very long book. Part of the book takes place in Quebec and it is very French-Canadian, with complex family dynamics, wicked nuns, etc. The last half takes place in Berlin and Rome, albeit with characters that are linked by family to the first part of the book. The Lamontagne family is always surprising; the writing is imaginative and often dark.
Barkskins – Annie Proulx
This is a sweeping Michener-like novel that spans over 300 years, with two family trees at the back of the book to keep track of multiple characters. The novel begins with two men from France who go to New France (Quebec) in 1693 to make a new life in the new world. Their lives diverge remarkably. Charles Duquet/Duke is driven by greed and opportunity to establish a huge and prosperous timber empire; Rene Set marries an indigenous woman so his story takes a very different path. Exploitation of forests is a major theme, not just in North America; the story also extends to China and New Zealand (the giant kauri trees). The book has a satisfying ecological message at the end – overall, a very good read.
What David Read 