the englishman's boy is part western, and part early hollywood tale, exploring how we interpret civilization and savagery in our personal thoughts and action, and how that is reflected in the rest of society. it does so by recounting two stories: one of the titular character, drifting through the...
I have so much to say about this book but I don't know how much I'll be able to articulate clearly, because I'm in a weird emotional spot due to the book and other things happening...This is the first Vanderhaeghe I've read, and I have to read more, because he is absolutely brilliant (I seriously...
“21 May 1993 To Dad —with much loveon your birthday from Lizzie ttOXO”Inscribed with blue ink on flyleaf of Guy Vanderhaeghe’s book of short stories, “Things as They Are?”I bought it at the TC book sale, 18 years later, for just $2. It pains me, well perhaps pain is a bit strong. I feel per...
Ed is punchy, unemployed, and on the wrong side of thirty. After his exasperated wife, Victoria, leaves him, Ed finds consolation where he has always found it, in his own rich and eccentric imagination. Pursued by the demons of his own obsession, Ed embarks on a quixotic quest to find Victoria. A...
I finished this several days ago and I’m still trying to decide if everything fit together. The story is largely set in Saskatchewan in 1959, with flashbacks to Vera’s childhood and life after she left home at the age of seventeen. Now in her mid- to late-30s she has a 12-year-old son, Daniel, wh...
I was going to give this four stars, but fuck it. I enjoyed this a lot more than I thought I was going to. In high school, I read Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy. I hated that book with a fucking passion - pedestrian writing, pedestrian plotting, pedestrian everything. (Even now, many yea...
The three had agreed to meet at six o’clock for supper at the Oxbow, but when the hands of the wall clock pointed to six-fifteen, McMullen said, “Enough is enough. Time, tide, and Joe McMullen wait for no man. I’m ordering.”It’s now nearly seven-fifteen and McMullen is looking forward to a night ...
Joseph’s passion for horses was not of the same character as the old man’s had been; Joseph’s was searching, secretive, concerned with lore, confined to books. It was not love. When his wife asked him what he was doing, staying up so late night after night, he said he was working on an article. J...
His housekeeper, the widowed Mrs. Hax, paused in the doorway and then walked heavily to the bedside window, where she abruptly freed the blind and sent it up, whirring and clattering.She studied the sky. Far away, to the east, and high above the bursting green of the elms that lined the street, g...
My father, John Dowd, was working on a crew that constructed bridges all over the province – rinky-dink affairs thrown across muddy creeks, piddling streams, and trivial rivers. His job kept him away from home for two-week stretches, so he wasn’t there to apply the brakes the day Mother got it in...