Chapters Indigo top reviewer Toni Osborne was recently tapped to do a review of Dan McNeil’s novel, The Judas Apocalypse. She gave it 5 out of 5 maple leaves and her early comments were very positive:

“Your novel is fantastic I loved it…Congratulations.”
“Excellent debut novel. It is suspenseful and a page turner.”

Read the whole review…

This book has all the elements of a standard chick-lit novel: a young twenty-something Montreal woman on vacation in Tuscany, an older (maybe thirty-something?) attractive Italian man with a now-empty childhood home that’s just asking to be renovated and decorated, his mother who spends her time in the kitchen making culinary expressions of joy and familial ties, a village of quirky characters to be won over, and a couple of dogs ready to be fallen in love with.

Yet, The Perfect Circle is far from what you would expect given that list of ingredients. Instead, we’re thrown into a world of overwhelming, depressing, obsessive love that leaves Marianne isolated and lost rather than fulfilled and energized.

The power of this book is Pascale Quiviger’s lyrical writing style that comes across through Sheila Fischman’s masterful translation. In fact, there were times when it reminded me of another Fischman translation of a Quebec classic, Next Episode by Hubert Aquin. Her descriptions and commentary are insightful and demand contemplation: “Recollection is something like that scaffolding, memory is like the restored fresco: it’s the new skin applied to the past in order to bear its disappearance which is always, in the end, our own. [...] Eternity is the fact that once a fresco has been sunk into the wall and once the wall has eroded to the ground, it is still intact and close to me, despite my ignorance of them, despite my absence.”

“Marco’s country belongs to a handful of citizens, but it’s also the country of everyone,” Quiviger writes–and accurately too–I felt just that way when I stepped off the plane the first time I travelled to Rome. But Marianne finds she can’t abide there waiting in a kind of limbo for Marco to pay her sporadic attention.

This book was well-written, though rather heavy. I love Italy and I love love, so I think I might have preferred A Perfect Circle to have been written as that light, uplifting chick-lit book, with Marco and Marianne dividing their time between Quebec and Tuscany, with Marco’s village and family coming to adopt the Canadese traveller as one of their own…you know the story.

Vincent Lam’s Giller Prize-nominated work, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, is billed as a short story collection, but in many ways it is more like a novel. Its cast of characters make their way from story to story and the stories themselves are strung together by narrative threads created by a linear timeline and a tendency for the setting to be drawn toward a single nexus in Toronto.

In the opening chapter, “How to Get Into Medical School, Part I” we meet Fitzgerald and Ming, two pre-med students at the University of Ottawa. Ming’s approach to her studies and her emotional life is disciplined, structured, and compartmentalised. Fitz’s, on the other hand, is haphazard, intuitive, and (as we later discover), sometimes self-destructive. The two are in love, but decide to place restrictions on their relationship, due largely to Ming’s concerns about intimacy and fear of her family’s reaction to her being with someone who isn’t Chinese.

Fitz stays behind in Ottawa to improve his grades for a second attempt to get in while Ming goes on to the University of Toronto’s medical school in the second chapter, “Take All of Murphy,” which Andrew Piper of The Globe and Mail described as “perhaps the collection’s best story.” It is here that we meet the rest of the book’s recurring characters, Ming’s anatomy class lab partners: Chen and Sri. Ming and Sri are diametrically opposed when it comes to dealing with the body they are dissecting. Ming treats it as a cadaver, the object of scientific study, and the means to a good grade. Sri is just as interested in him as a man, a veteran, a person with a name (in the absence of his real one, Sri names him Murphy) and a life story. Chen is left to try and negotiate a truce between the two inclinations.

With each subsequent chapter, we see further and get to know these four characters in more depth. We also get glimpses into the lives of the people with whom they or their patients interact (the family of Dr. Chen in “A Long Migration,” a psychotic patient in “Winston,” a prostitute and a paramedic in “Afterwards,” a pregnant woman in “An Insistent Tide”) . We also have a detailed account of what life was like in the hospitals of Toronto during the 2003 SARS crisis in “Contact Tracing.”

Lam’s writing is straight-forward and uncompromising, as one might expect of a writer who spends his off-hours working in a Toronto ER. There are occasional hints of brilliance in a turn of phrase, apt metaphor or narrative layering. His characters, even minor ones, are generally complex and life-like, though he keeps his female characters at more of a distance (none of their stories are told in the first-person for example).

I look forward to reading more of Lam’s books (when he writes them of course), especially if we get to see more of the characters we’ve come to know in Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures.

The Immaculate Conception refers to the doctrine that the Virgin Mary was conceived without Original Sin, her purity preserved through the power of divine grace. In Gaétan Soucy’s novel (a translation by Lazer Lederhendler of L’Immaculée conception (1994)), Purity is an elusive state and Grace a slippery object.

Many reviewers have likened the atmosphere of this book to a Grimm fairy tale, with its shadowy characters and shifting sense of reality. There is definitely a folk-tale-like aspect to Soucy’s Montreal parish of the Nativité: there are mysterious events, phantasmic beings, and evil monsters in human form. We are confronted over and over again with pairings and dualities: two nasty brothers, a set of twins (good and evil), two enigmatic little girls (one in the past and one in the present), two fathers for the protaganist (both of whom are partially paralyzed at some point), two relics saved from two different fires–all coalescing around the stories of two struggling, broken people, Remould Tremblay and Clémentine Clément.

Remould, once a brilliant, inquisitive, philosopher of a child, through horrific trauma now reduced to a shell of a man looking after his bitter, paranoid, Smallweed-like stepfather (the ironically named Séraphon), searches through the ashes of a devastating fire to retrieve an icon of redemption. He is also pressed into taking care of his employer’s young neice, a mute child that at times seems transcendentally innocent, at other times supremely malevolent. His encounters with a sinister fire captain and three troubled youths of the neighbourhood link his tale with that of schoolteacher Clémentine.
Clémentine–literally ‘mericiful mercy’–widowed a week before her wedding, delivered of a still-born boy not soon after, wants the best for her students but treats them with a strong dose of sterness verging on cruelty. She is smitten with the school principal, Brother Gandon, and dreams of moving to Paris and becoming a renowned poet. She harbours a great deal of suspicion, but it is consummately misplaced.

These two characters navigate their way through the fire-touched landscape of their village-like neighbourhood and through the still-smouldering embers and ashes of their memories, trying to capture for themselves some of that elusive, fairy-tale Purity. It’s left for the reader to decide whether they succeed or not.