I’m sure Vincent Lam was the most astonished person in the room when his book was announced as the Giller winner last night at a gala in Toronto. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I have yet to review two of the finalists, Carol Windley’s Home Schooling, and the book with the biggest pre-award-announcement buzz, Rawi Hage’s novel about Lebanon during the years of civil war, De Niro’s Game. However, of the books I have read I would have picked The Immaculate Conception over Lam’s Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, but I did enjoy that one too. What I think I liked most about Dr. Lam’s win was the backstory. We’ve all heard over the past few weeks how Hage’s book was plucked from the almost certain death it faced in Anansi Press’s slush pile, and we’ve heard how Lam’s book was the only one of the finalists to have been published by a major house. Until now though, I hadn’t heard that Lam’s path to having his book published was even more an instance of spectacular good fortune than Hage’s.

It started with a chance meeting between a doctor on a cruise ship and literary icon Margaret Atwood. He told her he was an aspiring writer. She asked him if he wanted her to be nice or be honest. He said “honest” and she agreed to read the half-written manuscript of his first book. She e-mailed him back a few months later saying “Congratulations. You can write.” She helped him get a book deal and last night Vincent Lam won Canada’s most prestigious book award.

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.