For CanLit aficionados, 2013 has been an embarrassment of riches. Major new works from Margaret Atwood, Joseph Boyden, Colin McAdam, Wayne Johnston, Douglas Coupland, Lynn Coady, Lisa Moore, Michael Winter, and Eleanor Catton abutted strong new titles from the likes of Craig Davidson, Elizabeth Ruth, Nicole Lundrigan, Shaena Lambert, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Michael Crummey, Sara Peters, Kelli Deeth, Andrew F. Sullivan, and Douglas Glover. A reader could suffer whiplash bouncing from one book to the next.
Alice Munro won the Nobel and Lynn Coady took the Giller, signalling (hopefully) a renewed interest in the Canadian short story. Elsewhere, maximalism was back in a big way (see what I did there?). In addition to Catton’s 850-page sophomore novel, The Luminaries (the longest novel ever to nab the coveted Man Booker Prize), there were hefty entries from Kenneth Bonert (whose debut, The Lion Seeker, was one of the most overlooked novels of the year, its GG nomination notwithstanding) and Norm Sibum (whose decidedly ambitious monolith, The Traymore Rooms, was iconoclastic and absorbing, if not altogether successful).
Narrowing down my favourites to a clutch of five was extraordinarily difficult, and the books on this list could easily have been substituted for any number of those alluded to above. Once again, I haven’t read everything published this year, so this is not a list of best books, but a highly personal selection of five titles that made an impact on me as a reader over the past 12 months.
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- Cynthia Flood's fourth collection is a marvel of style and technique; it also features a vast range of subjects and approaches to augment its formal virtuosity. From the petty bickering of West Coast radicals in Dirty Work to the rebellious denizens of an old-folks' home in Care to the clouded leopard marauding through the backstreets of Vancouver in The Hunter, Flood crafts characters and situations that are at once iconoclastic and vividly alive. Her concentrated and elliptical writing strips away anything extraneous, resulting in brief, sharp tales that are as densely packed as poetry, yet as subtly constructed as an impressionist painting. <br /> <br /> Don't let its small size fool you: <i>Red Girl Rat Boy</i> is an impressively imposing collection.
- <A HREF="http://www.quillandquire.com/reviews/review.cfm?review_id=8169">Red Girl Rat Boy by Cynthia Flood (Biblioasis)</A>
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- One of the most intellectually bracing, technically fascinating Canadian-authored novels of the year was actually published in the U.S. by the indie press Dalkey Archive. <br /> <br /> York University professor S.D. Chrostowska's fiction debut is frankly unclassifiable: an epistolary novel practically devoid of plot, without recognizable characters, and written in a highly abstruse style, the book is definitely not for everyone. For those who are game, however, Chrostowska's one-sided correspondence, from a character identified only as Fern Wren and addressed to an anonymous artist, is a frequently profound, occasionally frustrating meditation on the nature of identity, and the convoluted, often contradictory relationship between writer and reader. <br /> <br /> With nods to Derrida, Barthes, and the nouveau roman philosophy of Alain Robbe-Grillet, <i>Permission</i> was one of the most European English-language CanLit novels of the year.
- Permission by S.D. Chrostowska (Dalkey Archive)
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- We wanted to speed up history, says one of the terrorist operatives in Louis Hamelin's brazenly audacious fictional recapitulation of the October Crisis that paralyzed Quebec in 1970. And history will be our judge. <br /> <br /> Hamelin knows as well as anyone that history is written by the winners, and in his sprawling 600-page novel he offers an alternative history, provocative in its implications and frightening in its plausibility. Racing furiously back and forth through time and geography, and marshalling an enormous cast of characters that incorporates intellectuals and the mob, cops and agents provocateurs, Hamelin has crafted a politically engaged plot that moves at the speed of a Hollywood thriller. It takes a while to get going, but once it does, there is no stopping it until the final, shattering pages.
- October 1970 by Louis Hamelin; Wayne Grady, trans. (House of Anansi Press)
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- Surprisingly (or perhaps not, given the general lack of diverse, non-European voices across vast swathes of the CanLit landscape), there has not been an anthology of black Canadian poetry since 1979. <i>Great Black North</i> incorporates both traditional, print-oriented poets (what the anthology's editors refer to as page poets) and a group arising out of the spoken word and dub poetry traditions (referred to in the book as stage poets). Representatives of the first group include such canonical writers as Lorna Goodison, George Elliott Clarke, and Olive Senior, while the second group features such vibrant new voices as Jemeni and Lillian Allen, whose assertion in Black Voices Can't Hide “ The what shall be what the poet sees / Voice threading stance and eyes and light / pulled through the cracks in things that let the light in “ could easily stand as a manifesto for this important book.
- <A HREF="http://www.quillandquire.com/reviews/review.cfm?review_id=7967">The Great Black North: Contemporary African Canadian Poetry, by Valerie-Mason-John and Kevan Anthony Cameron, eds. (Frontenac House Poetry)</A>
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- The full title as it appears on the cover is <i>Chris Eaton, a Biography: A Novel by Chris Eaton</i>, which might scare off readers who dislike this kind of postmodern playfulness. That would be a shame, however, because Eaton, the driving force behind the indie band Rock Plaza Central, has created one of the most fascinating generic hybrids of the year. Combining aspects of his own biography with elements apparently picked up by Googling individuals who share his name, Eaton has written an extended meditation on identity that crosses boundaries of gender, nationality, and experience. <br /> <br /> Taking a cue from Laurence Sterne's classic 18th-century novel <i>Tristram Shandy</i>, Eaton's narrative begins before its protagonist is even born, then branches off into several intertwined potential histories. We create our own identities, Eaton writes. By telling stories. This novel is a bravura illustration of precisely that.
- Chris Eaton, a Biography by Chris Eaton (BookThug)
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