"Who is Robertson Davies? It's a fair question." This is how Val Ross opens her review in The Globe & Mail on September 28, 1991. "After all, she continues, "Davies begins most of his novels with a question or a mystery, including the latest,
In Iris Murdoch’s Henry and Cato (1976), Henry Marshalson inherits the family estate when his brother Sandy dies. Henry returns to the home where his mother Gerda still lives, with her kinda-sycophantic admirer, Lucius. Cato lives nearby. So does Colette. Stephanie does not, but, because of her pre-existing
This year I added another writer to my MRE list. In truth, he was one of the writers whose stories provoked that kind of MustReadEverything commitment early on, but I didn’t have a word for it yet. Authors who told the kind of stories that I wanted on my
In which there is talk of the slim stories which have travelled with me within the city. While bulkier volumes stayed home. Like Robertson Davies' Murther and Walking Spirits (1991). And Nazanine Hozar's Aria (2019). These are awkward travelling companions: thick and heavy But some of the skinnies in
This is one of those strange Paris-soaked stories that I imagine Mavis Gallant writing on an afternoon in a café when she has had too many cups of espresso. When she is in that creative mode where every gesture seen, every syllable overheard, every small intimacy observed between strangers
