Literary Review of Canada

Jason Anderson works as a journalist and film programmer in Toronto. Kelly Baron is pursuing her doctorate in English literature at the University of Toronto. Matthew J. Bellamy is a historian at Carleton University. Elaine Coburn directs the Centre for Feminist Research at York University. Brad Dunne is a freelance writer and editor in St. John’s. Dan Dunsky executive produced The Agenda with Steve Paikin from 2006 to 2015. Cheryl Forchuk is the Beryl and Richard Ivey Research Chair in Aging, Mental Health, Rehabilitation and Recovery at Western University. John Fraser is the founding president of the Institute for the Study of the Crown in Canada. Curtis Gillespie has won seven National Magazine Awards for his writing on politics, sport, culture, and science. J. L. Granatstein writes on Canadian political and military history. Charlotte Gray is an award-winning historian and…

ROBINSON CRUSOE CERTAINLY HAS A rough time of it, and that’s even after the seventeenth-century castaway has “found a large tortoise or turtle” while exploring the back side of the Island of Despair. But find one he does, and soon he is feasting on the “hundreds of them” that roam the opposite beach — their eggs and their flesh, “the most savoury and pleasant that I ever tasted in my life.” The Robinsons, a Swiss family who wash up on a different island in a different sea, also do okay by exploiting their chelonian neighbours for “many a sumptuous meal.” And in one memorable scene — my childhood favourite from the 1960 film adaptation of the 1812 Johann David Wyss novel—a propitious marine turtle serves as something of a tugboat, helping…

RE: New Urban Legends by John Delacourt (December) THANK YOU FOR THE MARVELLOUS REVIEW OF In the City of Pigs and After Realism. It is an honour to be read so carefully. I especially liked that John Delacourt started out with a reference to Balzac — a dimension of my work that I haven’t seen other readers comment on. There is one minor thing, though. The piece mentions that, like my character Alexander, I lived in Montreal for a period of time. Alas, I never had that privilege: I did my schooling in Winnipeg and Halifax. André Forget Kitchener, Ontario RE: Fits for a King by David Parkins (November) I THOUGHT IT WAS SHOCKING THAT YOU WOULD put a drawing of our King, in his underwear, on your cover. This is mean-spirited and offensive. It is so…

The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: Economic Efficiency, Social Justice, and Individual Liberty. —John Maynard Keynes THE CONUNDRUM ITSELF DOES NOT need decoding. We already know that Justin Trudeau has long been mired in an authenticity crisis — a crisis that boils down to a gap between image and reality. He became prime minister more than seven years ago, and the numbers tell us that, except for a brief spell around the 2015 election, a majority of voters believe he’s never been up to the job and think he’s still in it only because of weak opposition and a flawed first-past-the-post electoral system. The more pressing issue is what the past and present might tell us about where Trudeau and his party plan to go from here, and what…

Has Populism Won? The War on Liberal Democracy Daniel Drache and Marc D. Froese ECW Press 256 pages, softcover and ebook The Age of the Strongman: How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Democracy around the World Gideon Rachman Other Press 288 pages, hardcover, softcover, and ebook WITH APOLOGIES TO STEVEN Pinker, who (correctly) keeps telling us that this is the best time to be alive: it sure doesn’t seem like it sometimes, at least not when we scan the bleak social and political landscape of the past year. But hope we must. In that spirit, the recent mid-term elections in the United States may be a source of some optimism for the future. On November 8, 2022, the voters of the world’s most important liberal democracy took a good look at the pack of populists hand-picked by…

When I did an MRI scan like being in a space capsule, I asked the technologist— Will I come back to Earth? She replied, You’re already back on Earth. And my soul… can the MRI gadgetry tell about molecules gone awry? Camera shots taken at an angle, and the noise: oh, the noise, reminding me of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Movie imagery only, so I said to the technologist, Let me stand on my head— a yoga pose, if you please. Transcendental, you see— as the machine may have read my innermost soul it presumes to know, worlds being One. A discoverer of places, new planets all told in real time, inner space I behold like what never existed before. Tubes and wires sticking out, arteries, blood vessels, and mapping out a diagram only as I…