When I heard on the radio last month that Thomas Raddall had died, I was shocked and embarrassed instead of saddened because ever since discovering his books ten years ago I had thought of him as a real old-timer who must already have died. I came upon his books (His Majesty’s Yankees in particular, and then Roger Sudden, and then the rest) by accident, in a used bookstore, and when I began to read them knew for certain that all my teachers had betrayed me.
The talk show on the radio was full of praise for Suzanne North’s first mystery novel (Healthy, Wealthy and Dead, from NeWest) so I paid a visit to the local mystery bookshop to buy a copy and the clerk was excited about it too. “It’s about time Canada had a writer who can write cozies,” he said.
Newfoundland will be five hundred years old in 1997 (a hell of an age for any part of North America), and Breakwater Books of St. John’s is marking the event with the Newfoundland Poetry Series, a collection of handsome slim volumes, of which they plan to have twenty-five in print by the end of the cinquecentennial.
One of the April New Yorkers contains a wonderful piece by Robert McCrum on Graham Greene’s library, an archive to be coveted not for its size (a mere 3000 volumes) or its variety (from Planet of the Apes to Sanctum Jesu Christi Evangelium, a gift from Pope Paul VI), but for the thousands of notes Greene scribbled in margins, on flyleaves and end-papers (I think it was Joseph Conrad who said no writing is ever finished, just abandoned at some point): plot summaries, notes for novels in progress, word counts, snippets of dialogue. In The Waterfall by Margaret Drabble, he writes, “Flying to Helsinki 17.8.69—Coming into a new capital at night still has its spell”; while visiting Fidel Castro he writes, “A man who is discovering things for the first time …
Lost Moose is already famous for the Lost Whole Moose Catalogue, a beautifully designed monster book that has everything in it you need to know to actually survive in the Yukon, and even more if you want to survive somewhere else while thinking about the Yukon.
American novelist David Leavitt had a legal and literary sensation on his hands when his novel While England Sleeps was published last winter. Apparently Leavitt borrowed heavily from the memoirs of Stephen Spender, the aging English poet, in writing up the story of a love affair between an upper-middle-class writer and a subway worker in pre-war London.
Lifter (by Crawford Kilian, Beach Holme) is a book about a boy who learns how to fly when he is in a state that is not quite awake, but not quite asleep. It is a really neat story in the way the author describes what it would be like to fly and you also get to see how hard it is to keep a secret like that.
In a recent Vancouver Sun, Don McGillivray had a note on what Americans think Canuck means to Canadians. He quotes the 1992 American Heritage Dictionary, which defines Canuck as: “offensive slang used as a disparaging term for a Canadian, especially a French Canadian”; the 1985 Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage: “a Canadian-American, especially one of French-Canadian ancestry, an oddity”; and the Columbia Guide to Standard American English: “some people consider it an ethnic slur.”
