When young Vittorio Innocente’s mother, Cristina, is bitten by a snake during an encounter with a blue-eyed stranger in the family barn, the superstitions and prejudices rampant in their small Italian town immediately roil to the surface. But the worst is yet to come for the independent-minded Cristina. Eight months pregnant and unable to abide her treatment in the village any longer, Cristina books a passage to Canada for herself and Vittorio, although it will not be to join her irascible husband Mario, who sailed there when Vittorio was an infant. A national bestseller for seventy-five weeks, Lives of the Saints won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the Bressani Prize. It is the first novel in the Vittorio Innocente Trilogy, which includes In a Glass House and Where She Has Gone. Nino Ricci web site.
Category: Canadian Literature
Mercy Among the Children
Winner of the 2000 Giller Prize, David Adams Richards weaves an intense story of love and honesty, an exploration of how humanity faces inhumanity, how lies and disappointments cannot and will never destroy truth and human greatness. At the age of twelve, Sydney Henderson pushes his friend Connie Devlin from the church roof. Looking down on Connie’s motionless body, Sydney believes he is dead. Let Connie live and I will ever harm another soul, Sydney vows to God. At that moment, Connie stands up, wipes his bloody nose and with a laugh walks away. In the years that follow, the self-educated, brilliant and now almost pathologically gently Sydney holds true to his promise.
The English Patient
Haunting and harrowing, as beautiful as it is disturbing, The English Patient tells the story of the entanglement of four damaged lives in an Italian monastery as World War II ends. The exhausted nurse, Hana; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burn victim who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning. In lyrical prose informed by a poetic consciousness, Michael Ondaatje weaves these characters together, pulls them tight, then unravels the threads with unsettling acumen.
Too Much Happiness
Alice Munro has an uncanny ability to draw you into her stories and you are completely engaged – time stops. Her collections of short stories are very personal, written as though she were talking to you across the kitchen table. Don’t underestimate their power, as they speak to issues that concern us all and most importantly – human connection in all its complexity and aberration.
In her book, Too Much Happiness, her final story, “Too Much Happiness” is historical fiction, taken from Sophia Kovalevsky’s diaries, letters and writings, an extraordinary woman who was both an author and mathematician in 1890s Russia. On math, Sophia is quoted, “Many persons who have not studied mathematics confuse it with arithmetic and consider it a dry and arid science. Actually, however, this science requires great fantasy.” Alice Munro was intrigued by her and wrote a story about Sophia’s amazing life and accomplishments and how she endured the political and cultural pressures of her time.
Alice Munro‘s other books:
Dance of the Happy Shades; Lives of Girls and Women; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; Runaway; The View from Castle Rock; Too Much Happiness
The Diviners
Margaret Laurence (1926-1987), writer, was born Jean Margaret Wemyss in the prairie town of Neepawa, Manitoba, which inspired her fictional “Manawaka”. Her parents, of Scottish and Irish descent, died when she was young and she was brought up by an aunt who had become her stepmother. From 1944 to 1947, Margaret Wemyss attended United College, Winnipeg, with a scholarship and graduated with a B.A. honours in English. She worked as a reporter for the Winnipeg Citizen upon graduation and married Jack Laurence, a civil-engineering graduate of the University of Manitoba, the same year. In 1949, they moved to England and one year later, they left for Africa and remained there for seven years, first in the British Protectorate of Somaliland (now Somalia) (1950-2), then in Ghana just before its independence (1953-7). (from York University archives)
The Diviners is a novel about Morag Gunn, a novel that I read for the first time in my first year at Carleton University. It was intense and intriguing, a young girl growing up without her parents, trusted to an eccentric aunt and uncle, in abject poverty. She navigates her way into adulthood and retells the story of her life from an adulthood that included a daughter very much like herself. You won’t be disappointed in this story. This novel won her the Governor General’s award for Fiction in 1974. She wrote a couple of other books set in Manawaka: A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers and Stone Angel.
McMaster University professor James King wrote a biography on the life of Margaret Laurence that is intimate and revealing, a must for devoted Laurence fans.
Digitizeme 