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.

While my attention was taken up with all of the literary award news earlier this month, Rachel Giese at the CBC was writing about a new book that’s making a bit of a splash on the CanLit scene this fall. The catch? This book isn’t the latest by Margaret Atwood (Moral Disorder) or Alice Munro (The View from Castle Rock), but a speculative fiction (let me say that again in case you missed it: speculative fiction) novel called Before I Wake by British Columbia author Robert J. Wiersema.

Giese touches upon two issues in her article: the first has to do with the way Wiersema had to construct a second career as a book reviewer in Quill & Quire and The Globe & Mail in order to get any of his novels looked at by publishers — as Tyee points out, not exactly “a credit to the Canadian book industry”; the second has to do with popular fiction in this country.

In short, there isn’t much of a place made for it. In the past few decades, we’ve managed to carve out a place for Canadian literary fiction, not only here but globally. But is there such a thing as CanLit generic fiction? Really, it’s still in it’s infancy. For the most part, most of those authors who are Canadian and writing sci-fi, fantasy, mystery or the like have to do their work in the States (just like big-budget movie directors).

“[Canada is] known around the world for our writers, rightly so. We have a literary culture that includes Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, you could go on and on. But as far as CanLit goes, that’s it. We have the upper crust, but there’s no filling,” Wiersema says. “Our genre writers and commercial writers generally publish out of the U.S.: Charles De Lint, Robert Charles Wilson, Tanya Huff, William Gibson, Nalo Hopkinson. We do publish certain commercial writers — like Giles Blunt at Random House, or Penguin with Jack Whyte and Guy Gavriel Kay. But all of those people are published within a certain literary structure, because there’s no existing commercial structure in this country.”

Maybe this is a promise that things are changing. Maybe Canada’s finally ready for some pop lit. Maybe there’s room for lots of contemporary genre fiction set in Victoria and promising new Canadian authors won’t be tempted to pull out their hair or collapse in despair.

Governor General’s Literary Award nominees were announced today, and again the big literary celebrities were passed over (though it should be noted that icons Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood asked to be left out of consideration).

English Fiction

• The Law of Dreams by Peter Behrens
• The Fearsome Particles by Trevor Cole
• Gargoyles by Bill Gaston
• De Niro’s Game by Rawi Hage
• The Dodecahedron or A Frame for Frames by Paul Glennon

English Poetry

• Airstream Land Yacht by Ken Babstock
• Home of Sudden Service by Elizabeth Bachinsky
• Inventory by Dionne Brand
• Stumbling in the Bloom by John Pass
• The Good Bacteria by Sharon Thesen

English Drama

• The Optimists by Morwyn Brebner
• Cast Iron by Lisa Codrington
• I Still Love You by Daniel MacIvor
• Adapt or Die: Plays New and Used by Jason Sherman
• In a World Created by a Drunken God by Drew Hayden Taylor

English Non-Fiction

• The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal by Afua Cooper
• The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism by Ross King
• Starlight Tour: The Last, Lonely Night of Neil Stonechild by Susanne Reber and Robert Renaud
• The Empire of Mind: Digital Piracy and the Anti-Capitalist Movement by Michael Strangelove
• The Half-Lives of Pat Lowther by Christine Wiesenthal

English Children’s Literature – Text

• Ingrid and the Wolf by André Alexis
• Pirate’s Passage by William Gilkerson
• Skinnybones and the Wrinkle Queen by Glen Huser
• Me and the Blondes by Teresa Toten
• Friendships by Budge Wilson

English Children’s Literature – Illustration

• Earth Magic illustrated by Eugenie Fernandes
• The Birdman illustrated by Annouchka Gravel Galouchko and Stéphan Daigle
• Casey at the Bat illustrated by Joe Morse
• Let’s Go for a Ride illustrated by Maxwell Newhouse
• Ancient Thunder illustrated by Leo Yerxa

Translation (French to English)

• The Bicycle Eater translated by Sheila Fischman
• Bonbons Assortis / Assorted Candies translated by Linda Gaboriau
• Vetiver translated by Hugh Hazelton
• The Immaculate Conception translated by Lazer Lederhendler
• A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism translated by Fred A. Reed

French Fiction

• Le sort de Fille by Michael Delisle
• Sauvages by Louis Hamelin
• La rivière du loup by Andrée Laberge
• Jeanne sur les routes by Jocelyne Saucier
• La Cité des Vents by Pierre Yergeau

French Poetry

• Origine des méridiens by Paul Bélanger
• L’artisan by Jacques Brault
• Les îles by Louise Cotnoir
• Ravir: les lieux by Hélène Dorion
• L’Étang noir by Benoit Jutras

French Drama

• Venise-en-Québec by Olivier Choinière
• Août : un repas à la campagne by Jean Marc Dalpé
• Désordre public by Évelyne de la Chenelière
• Blue Bayou, la maison de l’étalon by Reynald Robinson

French Non-Fiction

• Le rêve et la forêt : histoires de chamanes nabesna by Marie-Françoise Guédon
• Le temps aboli : l’Occident et ses grands récits by Thierry Hentsch
• Paroxysmes : la parole hyperbolique by Michaël La Chance
• Condamner à mort : les meurtres et la loi à l’écran by Catherine Mavrikakis
• À force de voir : histoire de regards by Pierre Ouellet

French Children’s Literature – Text

• Les saisons d’Henri by Édith Bourget
• Je suis fou de Vava by Dany Laferrière
• Cauchemar aveugle by Fernande D. Lamy
• Poupeska by Françoise Lepage
• Nuits rouges by Daniel Mativat

French Children’s Literature – Illustration

• Le trésor de Jacob illustrated by Lucie Papineau
• Le petit chien de laine illustrated by Marie Lafrance
• Les cendres de maman illustrated by Lino (Alain Lebrun)
• Je suis fou de Vava illustrated by Frédéric Normandin
• Le gros monstre qui aimait trop lire illustrated by Rogé (Roger Girard)

Translation (English to French)

• Parlez-vous boro : voyage aux pays des langues menacées translated by Dominique Fortier
• L’Arbre : une vie translated by Dominique Fortier
• L’homme qui voulait boire la mer translated by Daniel Poliquin (in collaboration with Pan Bouyoucas)
• L’Odyssée de Pénélope translated by Lori Saint-Martin and Paul Gagné
• Un jardin de papier translated by Sophie Voillot

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.

The three judges of this year’s Giller Prize–Michael Winter, Alice Munro, and Adrienne Clarkson–have selected a shortlist of relatively unknown authors. This isn’t always the case with literary awards (after all, the bigger your authors’ names, the bigger the audience draw, thus the more prestige your award accumulates). So why no literary celebrities (like David Adams Richards or Douglas Coupland, both on the long list) this time?

“When we were choosing the books, we had no sense of choosing a writer who had a reputation … we just chose books that we loved,” Michael Winter explained. How great is that? If three icons can just choose books that they loved, there’s a chance for any Canadian writer to be the next Giller winner.

Another thing to note: four of the five finalists were published by small presses like I Publish Press. Only one was published by one of the big houses (Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures was published by Doubleday Canada). So not only can any Canadian writer win, any small press can produce a bestselling Giller finalist.

As the CBC points out, “a Giller nomination is often a ticket to bestseller status for Canadian books, as the prize draws the attention of readers across the country.”
Businessman Jack Rabinovitch created the Giller Prize in 1994 to honour his wife, literary journalist Doris Giller, who died in 1993. It is considered one of the top literary awards in Canada. The winner will be announced at a black tie event in Toronto on November 7th.

The authors and their books:

• Rawi Hage for his novel De Niro’s Game
• Vincent Lam for his short story collection, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures
• Pascale Quiviger for her novel The Perfect Circle, translation by Sheila Fischman
• Gaétan Soucy for his novel The Immaculate Conception, translation by Lazer Lederhendler
• Carol Windley for her short story collection, Home Schooling

Stay tuned for future reviews.

Read on.