Childhood

Description

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.

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Thomas MacMillan is 40, an orphan, an heir, a laboratory technician, an autodidact of esoteric intellectual appetites, as he writes this interrogation of the past disguised as a letter to his absent lover. Like Andre Alexis, both Thomas's restlessly sexual mother, Katarina, and his courtly mentor, Henry Wing, were born in Trinidad and resettled in Canada. Their unconventional lifelong relationship is both the deepest mystery and the central fact of Thomas's life, the creature in the center of his heart and the heart of this fictional memoir, the beast he walks around and around, prods with questions and tries to fix with lists of explanations and attributes. From his quasi-scientific attempts to understand the past, the nature of love in general and theirs in particular, Alexis derives some entertaining narrative quirks, including Thomas's notes, graphs, and footnotes in the text, letting paragraphs elide into nothingness as questions of motivation remain unresolved. After Thomas's grandmother dies, an event it takes him the better part of a day to discern, his footloose mother appears to claim her son, accompanied by a lover who abandons both on the road to Montreal. Mother and son seek refuge in the Ottawa home of the deliciously eccentric Henry Wing, a stock trader with a home laboratory and a gigantic library, who may or may not be Thomas's biological father. By the end of this gently funny and genuinely original little novel, we come to understand that what first seems linear and picaresque is actually a perfect circle, as Katarina goes home to die in her mother's bed and Thomas comes to inhabit Henry's wayward style of scholarship and his patient, distant style of loving. A debut this sly and satisfying promises fine things to come. --Joyce Thompson

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Ingrid and the Wolf

Product Details

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• ISBN13: 9780887766916

Description

Like all of us, Ingrid wants to belong, especially to a family. Now, she does have parents whom she loves very much, but she has a sense that there is more to her past than she’s been told. When the opportunity presents itself for her to visit Hungary, Ingrid takes it despite her parents’ objections.

What she finds in the old country is enchanting, gorgeous, and terrifying. Her legacy is nothing like she expected. It is a creature that is, by turns, loving and vicious. It is a wolf.

Ingrid realizes that she is the caretaker of her unusual inheritance, like it or not.

Award-winning author André Alexis delivers his storytelling skills to a new generation of readers in this, his first children’s book.

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Beauty and Sadness

Description

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God's Eugenicist: Alexis Carrel And the Sociobiology of Decline (Monographs in French Studies)

Description

The temptations of a new genetically informed eugenics and of a revived faith-based, world-wide political stance, this study of the interaction of science, religion, politics and the culture of celebrity in twentieth-century Europe and America offers a fascinating and important contribution to the history of this movement. The author looks at the career of French-born physician and Nobel Prize winner, Alexis Carrel (1873-1944), as a way of understanding the popularization of eugenics through religious faith, scientific expertise, cultural despair and right-wing politics in the 1930s and 1940s. Carrel was among the most prestigious experimental surgeons of his time who also held deeply illiberal views. In "Man, the Unknown" (1935), he endorsed fascism and called for the elimination of the "unfit." The book became a huge international success, largely thanks to its promotion by Readers' Digest as well as by the author's friendship with Charles Lindbergh. In 1941, he went into the service of the French pro-German regime of Vichy, which appointed him to head an institution of eugenics research. His influence was remarkable, affecting radical Islamic groups as well Le Pen's Front National that celebrated him as the "founder of ecology." It includes a foreword by Herman Lebovics.

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Asylum

Description

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Despair: And Other Stories

Description

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The themes of André Alexis's first story collection--belonging, displacement, alienation, and desire--may strike some readers as overly familiar. And most of the action in Despair takes place in downtown Ottawa, not exactly a city that makes the heart beat faster. Yet the author's achievement here is anything but mundane. Recounting his stories in precise, unadorned language, Alexis produces quiet dramas of nightmarish threat, in which reality itself constantly threatens to degenerate into (as "Kuala Lumpur" would have it) "something ecstatic and unhealthy."

Almost all the characters in Despair are isolated by circumstances beyond their making--or simply by their own imaginings. And Alexis manages to combine the cultural traditions of Trinidad and Canada to eerie, searing effect. In "The Night Piece," for example, a young guest at a wedding is haunted by a tale of the Soucouyant, a folkloric vampire who kills his victims by slowly biting their backs and the soft flesh behind their knees. "Despair: Five Stories of Ottawa" opens with the last words of a 50-year-old parakeet: "Jesus, Maria, my corns are killing me." But this avian fare-thee-well sets in motion a truly unsettling series of events, including the ascension of the peripheral (but symbolically weighty) Mr. Paz:

Mr. Paz lay on the green grass with his arms out, like a man crucified. Soon Mr. Paz's body rose from the lawn; his body rose. It ascended. It floated above the houses in Merivale. It sailed over the thousands of freshly tarred roofs. It passed by tall buildings and from the ground it appeared to be a cross or a starfish, and then a speck in the sunlight.

Elsewhere, plants grow out of the mouths of the poor, disembodied heads cackle and jeer. Alexis's brand of homegrown surrealism seldom seems contrived to shock us. Instead, he explores the interplay between the real and the not real, sketching out a fictional universe in which existence itself becomes a "confusion, a welter, a tangle, a tumult." --Ruth Petrie

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