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Tag: CanLit

Four More Novels by David Bergen: Out of Mind

Posted on October 1, 2021October 16, 2022 by David Barker

More than 10 years after the publication of The Matter with Morris (2010), David Bergen has revisited the characters from that slender novel to create a slender companion, Out of Mind. Taken together, the two novels offers us a single substantial portrait of middle-class life in the early 21st century.

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Four More Novels by David Bergen: Stranger

Posted on September 27, 2021October 16, 2022 by David Barker

In a time when the Black Lives Matter movement and anger around Residential Schools have thrust issues of identity and histories of colonial oppression into the foreground of public conversation, the question arises as to the function of the arts in this regard. Are the arts yet another forum for public conversation? If so, who gets to speak? And what are the rules?

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Four More Novels by David Bergen: See The Child

Posted on September 23, 2021October 16, 2022 by David Barker

See The Child falls squarely within the commercial realist fold, and David Bergen is one of its great stylists.

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Four more novels by David Bergen: Leaving Tomorrow

Posted on September 18, 2021October 16, 2022 by David Barker

Leaving Tomorrow, David Bergen (Toronto: HarperCollins), 2014. I am a proposer of projects aimed at answering arcane questions but, because of their arcaneness (arcanicity?) and because they would require more time of me than I have lifetimes to give, most of my projects go unprojected. One such project is to conduct a novel census. Create…

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Book Review: Big Reader: essays, by Susan Olding

Posted on June 17, 2021October 16, 2022 by David Barker

A writer’s experience shapes her work; it cannot be otherwise. But inevitably that experience happens in the context of personal relationships. In terms of privacy, what does a writer owe to the other people in those relationships. If a right to privacy were absolute, no one could ever write anything.

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Four Novels by David Bergen: The Case of Lena S

Posted on April 22, 2021October 16, 2022 by David Barker

Bergen is willing to investigate the quiet moments that stitch together experience while eschewing the tendency to give greater weight to the momentous events.

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Four Novels by David Bergen: The Matter with Morris

Posted on April 21, 2021October 16, 2022 by David Barker

One could easily imagine the principal character here, Morris Schutt, meeting Barney Panovsky in a hotel bar and, together, the two of them putting a serious dent in a bottle of McCallan.

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Four Novels by David Bergen: The Age of Hope

Posted on April 20, 2021October 16, 2022 by David Barker

In a way, Bergen is the perfect author to read during a pandemic lockdown. History may record the Covid-19 global pandemic as a dramatic crisis worthy of its own straight-to-Netflix movie. But sitting here in the midst of it, I experience it not so much as a crisis as I do a chronic state to be endured.

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Four Novels by David Bergen: The Time In Between

Posted on April 19, 2021October 16, 2022 by David Barker

For me, what drives the comparison [to Denis Johnson] more deeply is the style of the writing. Both writers deploy a crisp detached prose that is perfectly suited to evince an emotionally lost protagonist looking from the outside in.

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The Blue Clerk, by Dionne Brand

Posted on December 16, 2020October 16, 2022 by David Barker

Another way of thinking about the narrative is to treat it as a neurological drama: the author (recto) and the blue clerk (verso) are metaphorical ways of reflecting the bicameral structure of the human brain.

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2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize Nominees

Posted on November 16, 2020October 16, 2022 by David Barker

Polar Vortex, Shani Mootoo (Toronto: Book*hug, 2020) Polar Vortex opens with a dream. Priya, a lesbian of Indian descent, immigrant from Trinidad, now settled with her white spouse, Alex, in white bread Prince Edward County, awakes from the riotous colours of an Indian wedding ritual which culminates in sex with a man, not with any…

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The Innocents, by Michael Crummey

Posted on May 13, 2020October 16, 2022 by David Barker

Through The Innocents, Michael Crummey creates a microcosm in which the triangle of isolation, innocence and ignorance can be spun out as an allegory which speaks to us precisely in the here and now. He wrote it before Covid-19 so he could not have anticipated its salience to our current situation.

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Little Dogs, by Michael Crummey

Posted on May 12, 2020October 16, 2022 by David Barker

In these times (not of Covid-19 but of a rising secularism), poetry is the last toehold of spiritual writing. Not that there’s anything explicitly spiritual in Crummey’s writing. But it’s spiritual insofar as it concerns dreams, memory, fathers, the dead, and frail loves.

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Moon of the Crusted Snow, by Waubgeshig Rice

Posted on April 22, 2020October 16, 2022 by David Barker

Moon of the Crusted Snow, by Waubgeshig Rice (ECW press) came to my attention with the life-imitates-art story on the CBC of a Quebec couple who drove to Whitehorse then flew from there to Old Crow, the Yukon’s northernmost community.

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The Waterproof Bible, by Andrew Kaufman

Posted on December 17, 2019October 16, 2022 by David Barker

I bought a copy of The Waterproof Bible this summer in a Haliburton book store called Master’s Book Store. Naive person that I am, it never crossed my mind that the Master refers to Jesus and the book store is a Christian book store.

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