Synopses & Reviews
A stirring meditation on the elusiveness of the past and humanity's yearning for emotional closure.
Childhood is Andre Alexis's picaresque and stunning debut novel. It features Thomas Macmillan, a Canadian with ties to Trinidad, who pieces together--from memory and from related stories--the early years of his life.
Raised in Petrolia, a small town in southern Ontario near the U.S. border, Thomas is abandoned by his mother to the care of an eccentric grandmother. When he reaches the age of nine, his mother Katarina and a Mr. Mataf take him on a pilgrimage to Ottawa, where they live in the Victorian home of Mr. Henry Wing, a magus-like figure, whose love of science and the imagination becomes an important legacy for Thomas.
Set in the 1950s and early 1960s, Childhood is daring, intelligent, profoundly moving, laced with humor, and tinged with longing. It signals the emergence of a supremely talented writer and storyteller, whose gifts for drawing memorable characters and for infusing place with a sense of wonder and immediacy are equal to the bold ambition of his novel's title.
Synopsis
In a land of sand, dry rocks, and dead things rides the timeless American hero: a forlorn horseman, "leathery and sunburnt and old as the hills. Yet just a kid. Won't ever be anything else." He drifts into a desert ghost town (or, in a sense, it drifts up to him), where, under an obscure obligation, he must serve as both lawman and outlaw, a performance both outrageously comic and profoundly disturbing, reminiscent of Samuel Beckett's clowns and of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote. All the elements of the Western epic are present--heroes and villains, whores and virgins, gunfights, saloon brawls, high-stakes gambling, bank and train robberies, runaway stage coaches, white stallions and black mares, cattle stampedes, prospectors and bounty hunters, jailbreaks, duels, scalp-hunts and hangings--but all radically transformed by Robert Coover's comic energy. Much as Cervantes's spellbound knight brought an end to the era of the medieval European romance, so does Robert Coover's Ghost Town hero bring down the curtain on this century of the American cowboy.
About the Author
Andre Alexis was born in Trinidad in 1957 and grew up in Canada. His collection of short stories, Despair, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize. He has also written for radio, theater, and the newspapers the Toronto Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star. Alexis lives in Toronto.
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