Moving to Canada

    by Jenny Hubbard  Rowan Public Library

The election is over—hooray!—so for some of you, it’s time to learn about a little about the literature available to you in your new adopted homeland of Canada. 

The heavy hitters there write fiction.  Alice Munro, arguably the most masterful short-story writer alive or dead, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013. (Unlike Bob Dylan, she earned it.)  The only Canadian-born-and-bred author to win it, Munro grew up in rural Ontario, where most of her stories are set.  Razor-sharp, vivid, and often astonishing, these stories concern themselves not with what happens but the way it happens, and why.   What takes some novelists hundreds of pages to say, Munro can crystallize in twenty.  Her story “The Found Boat,” which I read thirty years ago, haunts me to this day.

Equally haunting is Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a dynamite dystopian novel.  Although it first appeared in 1985, it has garnered recent attention because with The Donald holding the reins, the vision Atwood lays out seems entirely plausible   A prolific writer, Atwood has won every award, it seems, but the Nobel.  Her latest endeavor, Hag-Seed, published last month, is a retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with Prospero as an artistic director of an Ontario theatre director.  (Check out the New York Times review by fellow Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel, whose own scarily realistic dystopian novel, Station Eleven, imagines a world devastated by a pandemic.) 

But of course one of the reasons you are moving north is to seek sources of hope and light, not doom and despair. Perhaps no Canadian author is more beloved and optimistic than Lucy Maud Montgomery, whose Anne of Green Gables, published in 1908, is one of the great classics in children’s literature and one of my personal favorites.  The sunny and irrepressible Anne Shirley brings nearly 150,000 tourists annually to Prince Edward Island, where most of the Anne books are set.  I have, in fact, been there, and it truly is idyllic, so if you haven’t yet chosen your new home and you’re fond of lobster, church suppers, and starry night skies, you might want to investigate the smallest of Canada’s provinces.

Although I’ve know Anne Shirley since I was ten, I’ve only recently met Chief Inspector Armand Gamache.  His creator Louise Penny (who scores extra points from me because she’s a dog rescuer) has written a dozen best-selling mysteries featuring Gamache, head of homicide, who resides in the village of Three Pines, Quebec.  Though it looks peaceful, Three Pines roils below the surface with dark and deadly secrets. If you start with the first one, Still Life, you can track Gamache’s small victories and inner struggles through A Great Reckoning, Penny’s latest.  Her books, smart and satisfying, are also nice way to bone up on your French, which you’ll be needing if you choose to set up shop in Montreal. 

So many male Canadian writers, too, are worthy of your attention:  Robertson Davies, Yann Martel, Douglas Coupland, Michael Ondaatje.  Thank you, Canada, for not building a wall to keep your southerly neighbors out.