For certified Canadians, the correct pronunciation of Geist is as follows: GE as in Jeeze, I as in incovenient, S as in stop (now banned in favour of Arret), T as in termite or terminal illness.
How Do I Know I’m Canadian? 1. When I go to a party with people from another country, no one expects me to be interesting. 2. I know all the words to my national anthem, except the French ones, and the tune is not that hard.
Last month we had a visit from Elizabeth Anderson, who hails from Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she is a graduate student at the state university. Her field of study is Canada, and she also writes about Canada for Utne Reader. We wanted immediately to know what there is about Canada that might constitute an object of study.
There was a gap in History where there should have been a great man. The important events had moved into place, their gears locked, everything was ready but he didn’t show up.
We always need more books like Stupid Crimes, by Dennis Bolen (Anvil). Crime novels set in Canadian milieux have the immediate and salubrious effect of elevating places we know into places we like to see imagined.
Must the deconstructionists have every last word?—not any more: Signs of the Times by David Lehman (Poseidon) is out in paperback and worth even penny. Here at last, a work that makes sense of the gobbledygook (by identifying it as gobbledygook), the solipsism and the tautology that constitute Literary Theory in its current trendy form.
Visions of Jude, by Daniel Poliquin (Douglas & McIntyre) has great promise: what more could we ask for but a serious novel about an Arctic explorer? The story of Jude the explorer (somewhat reminiscent of V. Steffanson, although Jude doesn’t order a half-pound of butter whenever he eats in a restaurant—too bad) is told through the eyes of the women who love or once loved him.
Marc Diamond’s new novel, Property (Coach House), belongs to the tour-de force class, and will appeal most to those who appreciate ts-d-f: the whole thing is three paragraphs long: a real typesetter’s nightmare. The first paragraph occupies 123 pages; the second, one line; and the third, 30 pages.
Hugh Brody has been getting a tough time from reviewers for Means of Escape, his first book of fiction (Douglas & McIntyre), offered anomalously as “a set of stories” which he introduces with the desideratum that we read them in the order in which he sets them out—surely an outrageous intervention: who, after all, reads a book of stories in the order of their presentation? An orchestrated reading is what novels provide—with a “set” of stories, linking meditations might provide that orchestration, if they were provided.
