QUILLBLOG

The Guardian to CanLit: “Don’t be so modest!”

The Guardian‘s book blog currently features a kind of “you go girl” shout-out to Canadian Literature from Jean Hannah Edelstein, a former New Yorker, now Londoner, who discovered the heady joys of CanLit while spending some time in Montreal.

At less than 200 years old, Canada is an infant in national terms: like the bullied younger sibling of a high-achieving elder one, it is often dismissed as a bit innocent, naive and unformed. Robertson Davies, one of Canada’s foremost writers, described it as “a country you worry about” and the prime minister Stephen Harper recently established a cabinet portfolio for “Canadian Identity”, perhaps in an attempt to help the nation define itself on the international landscape as something other than a left-wing, polite America awash in maple syrup.

But though I can’t help but bristle when I come across people being dismissive of Canadian writing – I was disheartened when I worked in publishing to find that “Canadian” is an adjective often used to justify not publishing a book in the UK – I can’t really blame those who overlook CanLit. I was once equally uninformed. Although I grew up a mere 200 miles from the border, which is inches in North American terms, I am sorry to say that I spent very little time even thinking about Canada, much less reading about it, while I lived in the States.

But then I went to study in Montreal, where I was swiftly – within hours – disabused of the south-of-the-border assumption that everyone in Canada is a bit sorry they’re not American. And once I began to tackle my required reading, I realised that my Canadian colleagues were unequivocally correct in their rejection of Americanness: although the world seems to regard Canada as the U.S.’s slightly slow cousin, Canadians are quietly and deservedly smug about their rich and distinctive culture, which includes a distinguished literary canon.

It is perhaps inevitable that this kind of thing will mostly serve to make most readerly/writerly Canadians bristle, too – did they really need to illustrate it with a shot of a prairie, and did she really need to bring up maple syrup? Edelstein’s intentions seem pure enough, but all the same there is  a tone of “don’t be mean to the wimpy kid” about the piece. About Michael Redhill’s Giller-longlisted novel Consolation, Edelstein writes: “Toronto is a perfectly good place to set a novel.” Hey, thanks – so is London!

Still, just to show that we don’t take it seriously, Quillblog has endeavoured to return the favour by writing our own defence of BritLit:

At over a 1,000 years old, Britain is a bit of an old fogey in national terms: like the cranky and forgetful grampa who can’t stop telling you what he did in the war and how much better things were back then, it is often dismissed as hopelessly decadent, tired, and culturally sclerotic. George Bernard Shaw, one of Britain’s foremost writers, said this about his people: “We don’t bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don’t dress well and we’ve no manners.” Britain has long laboured to define itself on the international landscape as something other than a literal-minded and unromantic France awash in sausages and warm beer.

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