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Canada Paperback – January 22, 2013
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"First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then the murders, which happened later.”
So begins Canada, the unforgettable story of a boy attempting to find grace, written by the only writer in history to win both the Pulitzer Prize and Pen/Faulkner Award for a single novel.
This is the story of Dell Parsons, whose parents rob a bank and fracture his life into a before and an after, crossing the threshold that cannot be uncrossed. After his parents’ arrest and imprisonment, Del and Berner, his twin sister, face a blank future of foster care and social services visits. Berner, willful and burning with anger, runs away – orphaning Del completely.
In the midst of his abandonment, a family friend intervenes, spiriting Del across the Montana/Saskatchewan border. There, in a dilapidated town floating in the sea of the Canadian prairie, he’s taken in by Arthur Remlinger – an enigmatic, charismatic man whose own past exists on the other side of a similarly uncrossable border.
Undone by the calamity of his parents’ robbery, Del struggles under the vastness of the prairie sky and the stark, unforgiving landscape to realign his sense of self and his perception of the parents he thought he knew, even as he moves on an inexorable collision course with the slow-simmering violence trembling just beneath Arthur Remlinger’s cool reserve.
A resonant and luminous masterwork of haunting and spectacular vision, CANADA is an elemental novel of boundaries traversed, innocence lost, and of the mysterious and powerful bonds of family. Told in spare, elegant prose but rich with emotional clarity, lyrical precision, and an acute sense of the grandeur of living, it is a masterpiece from one of the greatest American writers alive.
- Print length432 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherEcco
- Publication dateJanuary 22, 2013
- Dimensions5.31 x 0.97 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100061692034
- ISBN-13978-0061692031
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“This is a brilliant and engrossing portrait of a fragile American family and the fragile consciousness of a teenage boy. It is also fascinating in the way it reveals the plot in the opening page and then winds backwards, offering a more and more intimate version of the story.” — Colm Toibin
“Pure vocal grace, quiet humor, precise and calm observation.” — The New Yorker
“[Canada]confirms his position as one of the finest stylists and most humane storytellers in America… his most elegiac and profound book…” — Washington Post
“Robust and powerful… Ford is able to tap into something momentous and elemental about the profound moral chaos behind the actions of seemingly responsible people… Ford has dramatized the frightening discovery of the world’s anarchic heart.” — Wall Street Journal
“A triumph of voice.... The writing... is spare, but heartbreaking.” — USA Today
“Richard Ford returns with one of his most powerful novels yet…Ford has never written better…Canada is Richard Ford’s best book since Independence Day, and despite its robbery and killings it too depends on its voice, a voice oddly calm and marked by the spare grandeur of its landscape.” — Daily Beast
“Awe-inspiring… The laconic, grief-stricken voice of Dell, looking back on his past, trying to make some kind sense of what happened when his family imploded, keeps you turning pages, as do the quiet, thought-provoking revelations that Ford drops in throughout.” — O, the Oprah Magazine
“Told in Ford’s exquisitely detailed, unhurried prose…Ford is interested here in the ways snap decisions can bend life in unexpected directions... Canada’s characters grapple with this... and the answers they come up with define the rest of their lives, along with this quietly thoughtful book.” — Entertainment Weekly
“Masterly… in Ford’s American tragedy, filled with lost innocence and inevitable violence―a rusting carnival, a rabbit caught in a coyote’s jaws―geography feels a lot like fate.” — Vogue
“One of the most memorably heartbreaking novels of the year.” — Christian Science Monitor
“[Ford’s] newest novel Canada, shows an artist in full command of his craft―sparsely elegant and bracingly direct, with a refreshing lack of irony or tricks.” — Men’s Journal
“Marvelous…Canada is a masterpiece of a story with rich language and dialogue filled with suspense, bleakness, human frailties and flaws, and a little bit of hope seen through the eyes of an adolescent boy whose emotions seem often aligned with the desolate landscape of its setting.” — The Oregonian (Portland)
“A must-read. . . . Canada reminds us why Ford is considered one of this country’s most distinguished writers.” — St. Paul Pioneer Press
“[A] deeply felt and magnificently imagined work…With Canada, Ford has given us his deepest exploration yet of weakness and betrayal set amid a boy’s coming of age. It is a memorable novel, suffused with love, sorrow and regret.” — Austin American-Statesman
“[A] novel about big truths told by a writer with clear vision…solid, satisfying craftsmanship. This is a Richard Ford novel in the tradition of his earlier work. It also is a coming-of-age story, and a story about the discovery of identity.” — Washington Independent Review of Books
From the Back Cover
When fifteen-year-old Del Parsons' parents rob a North Dakota bank, his normal life is altered forever, and a threshold is crossed that can never be uncrossed. His parents' imprisonment threatens a turbulent and uncertain future for Del and his twin sister, Berner. Fierce with resentment, Berner flees their Montana home for California. But Del is not completely abandoned. A family friend spirits him across the Canadian border toward safety and a better life. There, afloat on the Saskatchewan prairie, Del finds only cold refuge from Arthur Remlinger, an enigmatic and alluring American fugitive with a dark and violent past.
Undone by the calamity of his parents' robbery, Del struggles to remake himself. But his search for grace only moves him nearer to a harrowing and murderous collision with the forces of darkness that shadow us all.
A true masterwork of haunting and spectacular vision from one of our greatest writers, Canada is a profound novel of boundaries traversed, innocence lost and reconciled, and the mysterious and consoling bonds of family. Told in spare, elegant prose, both resonant and luminous, it is destined to become a classic.
About the Author
Richard Ford is the author of The Sportswriter; Independence Day, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award; The Lay of the Land; and the New York Times bestseller Canada. His short story collections include the bestseller Let Me Be Frank With You, Sorry for Your Trouble, Rock Springs and A Multitude of Sins, which contain many widely anthologized stories. He lives in New Orleans with his wife Kristina Ford.
Product details
- Publisher : Ecco; Reprint edition (January 22, 2013)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 432 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0061692034
- ISBN-13 : 978-0061692031
- Item Weight : 14.7 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.31 x 0.97 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #425,269 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,848 in Small Town & Rural Fiction (Books)
- #7,206 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
- #22,611 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Richard Ford (born February 16, 1944) is an American novelist and short story writer. His best-known works are the novel The Sportswriter and its sequels, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land and Let Me Be Frank with You as well as the short story collection Rock Springs, which contains several widely anthologized stories.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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Dell's father, Bev Parsons, is retired from the air force after having been caught in an illegal smuggling racket. Bev tries his hand at selling cars, then real estate, but in an attempt to make better money he revives his smuggling operation, this time linking a group of Cree Indians with a buyer on the Great Western Railway. Dell's mother, Neeva, is a teacher whose Polish immigrant parents disowned her after she got pregnant and married Bev. She regrets the marriage and longs for a more cultured existence than the one she experiences in Great Falls. Dell's twin sister is also keen to get away and links up with a tearaway boy named Rudy, hoping he will be her passport to freedom. Dell himself is focused on his interests of chess and beekeeping, and looking forward to senior high school.
Bev's smuggling operation goes awry so he decides to rob a bank in order to get the money that he owes to the Indians. Neeva, against her better judgement, decides to go along with him. The pair are no Bonnie and Clyde, and a local newspaper describes the ensuing heist as a comedy of errors. Bev and Neeva end up behind bars, Berner heads off into the night and Dell is left alone and bewildered. The family is no more.
Mildred, a friend of Dell's mother, collects Dell and drives him over the border into Canada so that he can stay with Mildred's brother Arthur and begin a new life. In fact Dell spends most time with an odd and menacing character named Charley. Dell works as a cleaner in the hotel owned by Arthur and very slowly is taken into Arthur's orbit. Dell later learns hunting and butchering with Charley, and is also befriended by Florence, a local artist and Arthur's girlfriend. Arthur has a dark past and ran away from a career at Harvard to escape the police. He settled in Fort Royal in Canada, but after Dell has been living here for a while, two men from Arthur's past come from Chicago to seek him out. Arthur ends up murdering the two men and runs off. It is Florence who then rescues Dell and sends him to her brother in Winnipeg where Dell finally returns to school and builds his future life.
Dell never saw his parents again after the day they went to jail, and his mother committed suicide there. Dell later married, though he and his wife had no children, and generally he has led a happy life in Canada. In the end he visits his dying sister back in the United States. She has been a heavy drinker and has a cancer that is rapidly killing her, though after a series of failed relationships she is finally living with a man who is good to her.
Despite the bleakness of his youth, and the tumultuous events that saw him uprooted and set adrift in Canada, Dell has remained forward looking and determined. His view of life - though he does not articulate it in this way - is a mixture of the Buddhist ideal of living focused in the present and the existentialist idea that life has no intrinsic meaning and that it is our role as individuals to give it significance. To survive and be content, Dell says, you need to tolerate loss, avoid cynicism and keep a sense of proportion in your life. Sometimes it can be hard to see the good, but it is always there if we are willing to look with unclouded eyes.
Dell experiences some harrowing things for a young teenage boy, but he never surrenders to despair. When the bigger picture is grim, he focuses on the detail of the world around him and maintains a curiosity about life and the way nature works. It might be wrong to call his approach optimism, but in the end that is what it looks like.
Richard Ford's prose is clear and finely etched. Both Great Falls and Fort Royal, small towns with little going on, come alive in Dell's story. The wide open spaces of these lands contrast with the densely cluttered thoughts and fears that run through Dell's mind. Dell is saved by the kindness of strangers - Mildred, then Florence - but his ability to make an ultimately happy life for himself is down to his capacity to build on the cards he is dealt. His sister Berner doesn't fare so well, in many ways embodying the weaknesses of her mother, though she is cheerful as death looms.
This is a long and detailed novel. The key events - the bank robbery and the murders - are spelled out by Dell in the opening pages, so there are no big surprises on that score. Instead, the novel is a study of how a young boy comes of age under dire conditions, and how good can win out over evil and tragedy if we approach life in a particular way.
Dell is reconstructing events from a long time ago, both explaining how they seemed to him at the time and how he understands them in retrospect as a mature man. It's a difficult technique but Richard Ford manages it very well and the voice throughout is authentic and convincing. Ford captures the period (the early 1960s) well and the behaviour of the female characters in particular evinces the division between the older generation still adhering to pre-war values and the sixties generation seeking a new way to be. Oddly, Dell fits into neither side of this divide, instead charting a course through life that is at once idiosyncratic and instructive.
"Canada" is broken up into three sections and in my view the first section stands head and shoulders above the other two. In fact, Ford should have title this book "Montana" because it is the true virtuoso performance of this three act set. Dell narrates the book from a vantage point some 40 years later --- although we don't know where he has landed in his life until the last section --- and creates such a dramatic and suspenseful buildup to the fateful robbery in section 1. The rich texture of the Parsons family, Bev Parsons, former Air Force bomber, and wife Neeva, along with twin sister Berner, builds such tension despite the hints Dell drops during his recollection.
Dell is brought to Saskatchewan by his mother's friend, Mildred, to be taken care of by her brother Arthur. Dell finds himself on the outskirts of Fort Royal, away from Arthur's direct supervision, in a ramshackle outpost with loner Charley Quarters. Dell struggles to come to grips with the sudden dislocation from everything he knew and finds little guidance or normalcy north of the border. While the writing was just as captivating in this section, I struggled with the turn of events that led to the murders Ford alludes to in the first sentences. Ford did such a masterful job creating enough context to build the readers interest and at least passing understanding of what led to their decision to rob a bank that his lack of doing so with the events in section two let me down.
Ford ultimately brings things back to a tight conclusion as Dell and Berner reacquaint themselves, but the frustration I had with the conclusion of section 2 is enough to keep me from giving this fine novel 5 stars.
Top reviews from other countries
This novel is quite different. Here he weaves a story that focuses on a fifteen year old boy named Dell who is sensitive and socially isolated. His parents have protected him from dubious outside forces.
Then when his parents, in financial straits, decide to rob a bank in small-town USA, Dell and his twin sister become orphans. The sister takes off on her own and Dell is shipped off to a small town in Saskatchewan, under the “care” of a brother of a friend of his mother’s. He has never met the man, or anyone else in Saskatchewan. It is a truly challenging situation for a teenaged boy, particularly one who has had little to no experiences in life.
Dell is left pretty much on his own, and has to work at various jobs in this small town. He longs to go to school, but that is not an option.
Without spoiling the climax of the story, I will state that Dell gets involved, through no fault of his own, in a dangerous and indeed deadly situation.
The entire story takes place over several months. The characterization is very good, and, interestingly, there is no humor whatsoever that I could detect.
I highly recommend this unusual book in Richard Ford’s oeuvre.