For a supposedly well-read bunch, most of us rarely have time to get to all our course material, let alone crack open a new novel. Why not make it your mid-winter resolution to curl up with a good book? Our reviewers take a look at some of the best recent Can Lit reads.

Mysterious ways

Have you ever enjoyed the secret thrill that comes from reading someone else’s private thoughts? Or from overhearing an intimate conversation between strangers? It seems undeniable that in some way, we all love to satisfy our curiosity about other people and their lives. The Mysteries, the debut novel by 28-year-old Toronto writer (and Rhodes Scholar) Robert McGill, provides exactly this kind of guilty pleasure.

The story is set in small-town Ontario, where the unexplained disappearance of a local woman has left everyone suspicious. The narrative moves back and forth in time, and is told from the perspectives of 12 very different characters. McGill’s unique approach to the mystery of what happened to Alice Pederson gives the novel an added dimension of complexity. The reader is given voyeuristic license-in effect, granted access to the town’s confidential files containing the personal details of each character’s history.

McGill allows us to explore the community of Mooney’s Dump from the points of view of its strange and quirky inhabitants, whose lives and secrets are connected in bizarre and sometimes shocking ways. Remarkably, the events being described become even more intriguing when revealed through the eyes of dubious characters such as a little Croatian girl, a tiger, and a psychotic recluse who collects his neighbour’s garbage.

McGill’s style is refreshingly modern, rich in physical detail and emotional depth. Relationships between people in this novel don’t appear to be constructed, and the town of Mooney’s Dump itself could be likened to almost any tight-knit community in Ontario. Some of McGill’s characters are less influential than others, but they are all developed with equal care, and each person’s story is important to the mystery as a whole.

While the novel examines various interactions very closely, there is never a moment when it becomes predictable. There is always a question left unanswered, a piece of the story missing. This is what makes McGill’s first book such an extraordinary achievement: it fills you in as you go along, but also keeps you guessing to the very end.

Overall, the fluidity of the narrative makes you feel like you are part of the investigation process. Reading The Mysteries is more like an actual experience than a fictional escape-when you pick it up, you might feel like a tourist in an unfamiliar town, but when you put it down, you will feel like you know the place inside out. An incredible first effort by McGill-let’s hope the author has more dirty laundry to air in the future.
-LAUREN GILLETT

Engrossing epic

At first glance, it would be easy to confuse Hunger’s Brides, the first novel from Calgarian Paul Anderson, with a Norton Shakespeare anthology-it clocks in at nearly 1400 (!) oversized pages and is not exactly the kind of book you want to be reading on your morning commute. Surprisingly, though, it is equally successful as a work of fiction as it is a doorstop.

Subtitled “a novel of the baroque,” Anderson tells several stories within the novel’s many pages. The primary character is the non-fictitious Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a Mexican nun and poet who lived in the 1600s. Almost completely self-taught, she wrote prolifically until she signed a statement of contrition in her own blood. Anderson presents Juana’s life as it is constructed by Beulah Limosneros, an ex-graduate student obsessed with determining what could have made such an impassioned, irreverent writer succumb to the pressures of the Church.

Beulah is also the ex-lover of Donald Gregory-a professor of English at the University of Calgary before scandal (involving Beulah and a violent winter night) rocked the city and caused him to resign. He is the novel’s editor, stitching together episodes from his life with entries from Beulah’s diary and her fictionalized accounts of Juana’s life, as well as poems by Juana herself.

With so many disparate voices competing for the reader’s attention, it might sound like there’s just too much going on in Hunger’s Brides to make it worth reading. But the stories are completely captivating, and though the piecemeal way in which they’re stitched together is somewhat jarring at first, each voice is so distinctive that it soon becomes easy to follow.

Most impressive is Anderson’s ability to sustain the lure of the various plots over such an extended volume-nothing included in the work is unnecessary or superfluous. The multitude of voices is captured so believably that it’s easy to forget Hunger’s Brides is ultimately fictional (the use of extensive footnotes, ostensibly written by Gregory, that refer to people and works that actually do exist only adds to such confusion).

Complex and layered, Hunger’s Brides is a compelling read. It not only serves as an introduction to the inspiring history of Sor Juana, but asks probing questions about the nature of hunger and passion and the intricacies of madness. All this, and it’s beautifully written. Even if Anderson takes another 12 years to write his next novel, it’s likely to be well worth the wait.
-CASSANDRA DRUDI

The lore of love

In January, Canadians deserve to hibernate: eat mixed nuts, snuggle in a feather nest, neglect the outside world. Such self-imprisonment presents only one problem: boredom. As treatment, I propose Susan Swan’s latest novel, What Casanova Told Me. It has all the necessary elements of a hibernation read: exotic settings, intrigue, and sex. And yes, so may your standard Harlequin, but you’ll avoid all the shame because you’ll be learning trivia about the Napoleonic wars, Minoan religion, and modern archival practices.

The novel follows the journeys of two young women separated by centuries, yet connected through blood and similar circumstances. Luce Adams, a Torontonian archivist, is traveling with Lee, the female lover of her late mother, to deliver family papers to a library in Venice and to attend her mother’s memorial in Greece. As she travels, Luce immerses herself in the diary of her ancestor, Asked For Adams. The diary documents the friendship Asked For develops with the legendary lover Casanova, as she accompanies her father on his trade mission to Venice.

At times, the parallels between these interwoven journeys are similar to the point of distraction; we can’t help but sense Swan’s authorial hand tying up all the loose ends. Indeed, the reek of artifice plagues the novel. Irrelevant historical details make characters into hollow vehicles for Swan’s extensive research. In one diary entry, Asked For describes how the labels ‘BM’ and ‘BW’ designate the sections for Black Men and Black Women at her local church. This is an interesting fact, but it seems unlikely that a privileged white American woman in the 1790s would include it in her diary. A contemporary analogy would be writing a diary entry about the gendered signs on bathroom doors­-people rarely record what they consider to be normal.

Where Swan thrives is in her keen understanding for the various ways that love manifests itself. This is the quality that will be most familiar to fans of Swan’s The Wives of Bath. Here again, Swan portrays the most unconventional love with unsentimental honesty. The hesitant yet concerned love that Lee develops for Luce is portrayed with admirable restraint. The sexual exploits of the aging Casanova could have become farcical, but in Swan’s hands remain tantalizing and dignified (even when they involve sea kelp).

In Casanova, Swan smartly plays to her strengths. Equal parts love story, travelogue, and historical fiction, it all adds up to one stirring saga indeed.
-LIZZIE MCNEELY