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IN THE MARGINS

column for Sat, June 4 K-W Record Books page

by Chuck Erion (co-owner of Words Worth Books in Waterloo)

Tinkering into fall?

When this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction was announced in April, few in the publishing industry had heard of the author, Paul Harding, or his publisher, Bellevue Literary Press. Tinkers  is only the second book by a small press has one America’s top award (The Confederacy of Dunces did it in 1981 for Louisiana State University Press and is still selling.)  Tinkers is the story of a clock repairman looking back over his life as he lies dieing with his family around him. His memories are interspersed with the story of his father, an itinerant salesman (the horse-and-wagon tinker of the title) in Maine whose epilepsy drove their family apart. While that somber plot summary may be off-putting; read this book for its poetry:

“I decided to try to find my father in the woods. When I walked through the woods, I wore my father’s old boots. They were too large, so I had to put one three pairs of socks to make them snug. I carried my lunch in his old wicker creel, slung over my shoulder. I wore his wide-brimmed hat. When I walked through the Gaspar’s corn patch, I imagined breaking an ear from its stalk, peeling its husk, and finding my father’s teeth lining the cob.”

Of its many accolades, let me choose a favourite author of mine, Marilynne Robinson:  “Tinkers is truly remarkable…It confers on the reader the best privilege fiction can afford, the illusion of ghostly proximity to author human souls.”

This summer brings sees the paperback release of several hardcover bestsellers. Barbara Kingsolver’s Lacuna just won Britain’s Orange Prize and will be available July 10^th ($19.99). Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood and Audrey (Time Traveler’s Wife) Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry ($22)are also out on that date. Linden MacIntyre’s Giller Award-winning The Bishop’s Man is out on August 10 ($22).

Looking ahead to this fall, there is an abundance of Canadian authors returning to the book tour circuit with their new novels. Jane Urquhart’s Sanctuary Line will be out in August. Richard Wright’s Mr. Shakespeare’s Bastard, set in Elizabethan England, launches in September. Jack Whyte, Sandra Birdsell, David Adams Richards and David Bergen are also returning with new novels. Ami McKay (The Birth House) returns with The Virgin Cure (Oct.), BC bookseller and author Robert Wiersema, follows Before I Wake with Bedtime Story (Oct.), and Kitchener-born Alison Pick, follows The Sweet Edge with Far to Go (Aug.). On the mystery front, veterans Giles Blunt and Peter Robinson will be back in Aug. and Sept. respectively.

Watch for (further) memoirs from David Suzuki (The Legacy, Sept.), Farley Mowat (Eastern Passage, Oct.) and Margaret Trudeau (Changing My Mind, Oct.). Charles Foran had had access to the family archives while writing Mordecai: The Life and Times (Oct.) about Mordecai Richler. Romeo Dallaire examines the global problem of child soldiers in They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children (Oct.). Charlotte Gray heads to the Klondike gold rush with Gold Diggers (Sept.). The Canadian War Museum historian, Tim Cook, follows his two-volume WW1 history with The Madman and the Butcher, about the libel case between Sam Hughes and General Arthur Currie (Sept.). Also in the military vein, Sunray (Oct.) examines the life of Nichola Goddard, the first female Canadian soldier to die in combat.

In the arts, the almost-octogenarian Robert Bateman reveals 100 new paintings in Bateman: New Works (Sept.). WLU communications professor, Darren Wershler, examines the experimental documentary film-maker in Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (Aug.) Ross King traces the early days of the Group of Seven in Defiant Spirits (Sept.)

All told, it looks like a rich book harvest this fall.