The Last Hurrah

As some of you may remember, for the most part I can’t stand a lot of Canadian literature (explanations here).  That being said, there are three authors who are amazing and deserve any accolades they receive – Russell Smith, Camilla Gibb and Ann-Marie MacDonald.

I read MacDonald’s Fall On Your Knees over the course of two days during the summer of 2000, right after I had moved to Kingston.  It was the first time I had ever lived completely on my own, and the sheer sense of freedom and quiet isolation was intoxicating.  I had absolutely nothing to do and no one to answer to, and I laid on my couch for those two days with that book, getting up only to eat, go to the washroom, and sleep. 

It’s a bit strange now; since I read it so quickly (and because it was over seven years ago), most of the details have completely faded from my mind.  All I remember was the feeling I got (and retain to this day) that it was one of the most amazing things I had ever read; and, because of the timing, it has a special place in my impressions of that time of learning to be on my own. 

Well, I’m about to make another journey similar to my Kingston one, and so what better book to read as a last Canadian hurrah than her latest (and from what I understand final) novel The Way the Crow Flies.  After only a couple of pages I felt that unique rush that only comes from reading a master craftsperson, a writer so skilled that seemingly every sentence presents an intricacy of language that most writers don’t begin to even approach.  It’s a huge novel, rooted partly in auto-biography and partly in Canadiana, but done in a way completely removed from her Can-Lit forebearers — as in, more rooted in detail and less in abstraction, more honest and brutal as opposed to cloying. 

And, in one of those wonderful mathematical moments of perfect coincidence and mirroring, here are the latest words I’ve read (pg. 41 of the paperback):

If you move around all your life, you can’t find where you come from on a map.  All those places where you lived are just that: places.  You don’t come from any of them; you come from a series of events.

Time for my next place and the latest in my series of events.