The Three-Day Novel, which turns nineteen on Labour Day [1996], remains one of Canada’s few contributions to the world of literary form. (Milton Acorn’s jack-pine sonnet is the only other one I can think of at the moment.) Writing a novel in three days is as difficult as you want to make it, we are told by agents of Anvil Press, who sponsor the contest and claim as their model Voltaire’s Candide, which they say was written over a weekend in the eighteenth century, and “pretty well anything by Jack Kerouac,” who, they say further, typed his stuff nonstop on 200-foot telex rolls (which is “why they’re all the same length”).
The crisis unfolds in the Arctic Ocean where Queequeg meets his end on a iceberg, Ahab meets his flippery adversary face to face, and Ishmael alone lives to tell the tale. You have to be completely drunk to watch this (Orca is the title; it’s in the video store) all the way through.
The Canadian version of Waiting for Godot takes place on Christmas Eve in a tavern somewhere in north Ontario, in a movie called Solitaire. In this one the two guys are played by the barkeep and the patrons, who indulge themselves in not enough drink and far too much dialogue of sophomoric dimensions.
Richard Gwyn tries to get away with two puns in the title of his book Nationalism Without Walls: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian (McClelland & Stewart), trading off on both André Malraux’s cultural manifesto of the 1960s Museum Without Walls, and Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Since my review of Yann Martel’s novel Self (Knopf) in Geist No. 21, I have retrieved it from my bedside table and read it to the end. It’s an attractive hardcover with a creamy yellow sleeve and the story, which stumped me at first, enthralled me when I continued where I left off.
Speaking of jarring but effective writing, Bud Osborn’s Lonesome Monsters (Anvil) successfully dramatizes the harsher side of urban life. This book, though it doesn’t break new ground in form or content, depicts the Main-and-Hastingses of North America in unpretentious and straightforward poems.
Re-entering the fray is a true original, Sheri-D Wilson, “action poet extraordinaire,” whose work lurks on a jazzy playground of sex, glamour and intrigue—the frenzied visions of a James Bond girl. Her latest poetry collection cheekily entitled Girl’s Guide to Giving Head (Arsenal Pulp), furthers her subtle and not-so-subtle forays into the sensual wilderness, in which, among other things, she recalls the day she married Elvis and what happened after her Dorothy Parker weekend.
It has been said that Canadian poets are a staid, funereal bunch, but there are a lot of exciting new writers who are reinventing the form, such as those in Breathing Fire (Harbour), an anthology of young poets. Re-entering the fray is a true original, Sheri-D Wilson, “action poet extraordinaire,” whose work lurks on a jazzy playground of sex, glamour and intrigue—the frenzied visions of a James Bond girl.
In Ian McKay’s book about Nova Scotia, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (McGill-Queen’s), post-modern theory collides head-on with Canadian social history, leaving sacred cows splattered all over the page. McKay argues that the image of Nova Scotia as a picture-postcard setting inhabited by rustic fisherfolk mending their nets is a fiction invented by the tourist industry and its close partner, the folklore industry.
Gregory Scofield’s new book of poems is Native Canadiana (Polestar) and it’s very good. So is Lola Lemire Tostevin’s latest collection, Cartouches (Talonbooks), which came out last year and which we’ve been meaning to mention here ever since, along with Enchantment & Other Demons (Oolichan), a new collection by Ron Smith.
