Given his pacifist perspective, you might expect Noah Richler’s new book about Canadian military involvement in Afghanistan to be a rant. Or one of those “important” books that attract high-powered reviewers, so you can get by with reading reviews. Not so. What We Talk About When We Talk About War is an eloquent meditation on the nature of modern warfare, and one of the best books I’ve read about Canada in years – not the surprisingly colourful, forgotten history of, but a biting analysis of who we are in the twenty-first century, and why. Spinning off from the Raymond Carver story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, … About War makes an elegant bridge from Richler’s justly acclaimed Literary Atlas of Canada (2006), which was based on his coast-to-coast road trip encounter with contemporary novels and novelists, in search of our national soul.

This time Richler promises “a consideration of the phrases and forms of story that Canada has used in order to talk itself into, through and out of the war in Afghanistan.” Culling through mounds of old newspapers, he gleefully cuts and pastes together an astonishing account of how the Harper government, spurred by the crisis of 9/11 and backed by a handful of sympathetic intellectuals and journalists, undertook a massive “recalibration of Canadian ideas about the importance of the military and its role in foreign policy” which allowed for a huge increase in military spending, the publically-stated purpose being to support American military goals. Astonishing not because he uncovered new facts (he didn’t), but because the synthesis and analysis of known facts is so deliciously provoking. Because it raises news and comment to a higher level, that of psychological, emotional, philosophical meaning.

In the space of five years, Canada’s international image was radically changed, with profound domestic implications. One small example, the Macdonald-Cartier Freeway became the Highway of Heroes, a gesture fraught with symbolism. The effort entailed a concerted reformulation of the Canadian personality, reviving old myths, putting others to bed. Richler argues the makeover didn’t stick in part because the chosen battleground for testing this new image was an unwinnable war. Forced to retreat, Harper and the military were forced to revive the lost legacy of peacekeeping; renaming what the military was doing over there made slipping away publically defensible.

This book with a long title has a narrow issue focus – there is no discussion of the extent to which military expenditure was inspired by domestic, vote-getting motivations, providing the government with opportunities to spend millions of dollars in parts of the country where Conservative support needed shoring up; no reference to Harper’s wider learning curve in the realm of foreign policy, for example, his public appreciation for the Dali Lama and disdain for China’s internal politics, followed by a parallel reversal over the same time period, as he woke up to the reality of the international economy. We’re left with the impression that, in spite of his best efforts, Harper has been drawn back into the deep middle road (or rut) of Canadian values where peacekeeping is the thing to do. This makes for a neat story arc, but it feels premature; surely Harper’s attention has just gone elsewhere. The changes he wrought – or tapped into – will not soon disappear.

Arguably more interesting is the ‘big idea’ Richler develops using war (like novels in his last book) as material. Built slowly and carefully to a crescendo, his idea both nails and transcends its subject masterfully, and it is a literary one: that war and war mongering call for an epic form of thinking, whereas peace and peace-keeping require a taste for the novel. Epic literature is heroic, favouring the stark contrast of light and darkness, friends and enemies, winners and losers; the novel seeks to understand, illuminate complexity and reconcile or at least bring about a truce in the natural clash of opposites. These two forms of thinking obey quite different laws and uphold different values.

Dipping into the Iliad, he frames the central paradox of pacifism in mythological terms: as Achilles’ mother told him, a young guy has two choices: live a long, unremarkable life of peace, or a short military one promising everlasting glory. War is hell, a terrible waste of life and money. But it is also exciting, rousing, energizing, especially in a time of uncertainty, which is to say pretty well all of the time.  Since the first recorded skirmish, war has offered generations of youths without prospects a quick route to self-definition and a glamorous routine. War has also presented generations of writers with a subject worthy of their deepest outrage, finest style. An ancient irony, tackling an ideology he passionately opposes has brought out Noah Richler’s inner warrior, inspired his best writing yet.

So we are living in epic times. By identifying a sea change in the Canadian political psyche, Noah Richler identifies the spirit of our times, opens an important discussion. His big idea explains, for example, why the bottom has dropped out of literary fiction, why all people seem interested in reading in droves is crime fiction, Swedish polars and, well, books like What We Talk About When We Talk About War. Books that are the intellectual equivalent of a good night’s sleep, that leave you feeling smarter, ready to cope with the grind of national news, and actually interested in Canada and the culture wars that lie ahead.

Don’t leave this one to the critics. Buy the book, sink back, get mad and enjoy.

Noah Richler will appear at Paragraphe Books and Breakfast this Sunday, May 13, with Kim Thuy, Taras Grescoe and Jeff Rubin, 10 am at Le Centre Sheraton, 1201 Boul. René-Lévesque West. Tickets are $32 plus tax. Call 514-845-5811.

Check out Noah Richler’s columns for The Rover, The Writing Life, here.

http://youtu.be/5yUi_pMGI6k

Is a likeable main character essential to a successful novel? Is it okay if the author is ten or eleven times smarter than the guy he’s writing about? These questions hovered in the air as I read You comma Idiot.

Upon reflection, I’d say no to the first question, yes to the second. In fact, the combo is probably essential. If a protagonist lacks charm and intelligence, then it behoves the author to fill in the gaps, which Doug Harris does abundantly in his novel about an Anglo slacker’s coming of age. A good part of the enjoyment of reading Harris’ acclaimed first novel comes from watching the interplay between a tattered character on the page and his clever master, the author. You don’t have to like Lee Goodstone to be drawn into his story. An appreciation for dramatic construction, witty dialogue and thematic audacity will suffice.

Now out in French as T’es con, point (Stanké, beautifully translated by Éric Fontaine), You Comma Idiot, has garnered a slew of excellent reviews since it was published in 2010. Rover’s critic Adam Kelly was among the dissenters, which Goose Lane Editions has bravely quoted in the paperback edition, just released. The uncommon gesture of reprinting a bad review speaks to a gust of unflinching defiance behind the entire project.

Harris, you see, gives voice to a casualty of empowered womanhood, and minority (or possibly a majority) that hasn’t so far garnered much of a support group. His protagonist Lee Goodstone is the kind of guy you might not want to know, but probably do. He’s a Beta male who stacks up poorly against Apha, but in the course of forty chapters, manages to claw sideways into a new beginning where a thin slice of his dream and reality might be about to meet.

A self-proclaimed non-handsome loser, a drug dealer, loner and sexual fantasist, Lee is full of admiration for Johnny, a guy endowed with what it takes to melt women at first sight. Even Lee likes looking at Johnny, and feels good in the cloud of confidence he exudes. For most of the book, Lee is caught up in a murky power game played by Johnny’s sometime girlfriend, the beauteous Honey. Written in the rarely-used used second person tense (You’re the kinda guy who… etc.), the tone is comic, yet this little-used finger-pointing tense serves as a reminder that Lee is not only an unreliable narrator, he’s a student driver in his own life, and the author has one foot on the hand brake, should things get too far out of control. As reader, we are both trapped inside Lee’s vision of the world, and watching Harris get it all down with delicious verve and wit.

The main actors in the story are women, and they don’t treat Lee any better than he treats himself. Women are the forces of reason, makers of rules and agents of survival around whom men are called upon to dance. And they do. In the end, I found this a brave book. A hyper-lucid guy plays against the odds, bats out of his league and survives to tell the tale, just.

It’s too early yet to tell what the plethora of good novels being written about this city in our time will add up to, but Doug Harris’s contribution to the growing literature of the battered Anglo is definitely a milestone. Put him on the shelf with John Brooke’s Last Days of Montreal (Signature Editions 2003) and Louis Rastelli’s A Fine Ending (Insomniac Press, 2007). All three books are set in declining neighbourhoods, Harris in NDG, Brooke in Rosemont and under the Jacques Cartier Bridge during the 1995 referendum, and Rastelli on the plateau, circa the ice storm of ’98. Brooke is concerned with fitting in, Rastelli with getting by. All three novels present detailed, nuanced descriptions of contemporary urban Montreal, a city in which the weight of decline is ever-present, yet significantly, where who’ve lived there forever talk of leaving.

What lies in store for novelist Harris, a successful producer of TV commercials with fingers in several pies? He has the makings of a first-rate social satirist, and he knows a lot about this town. Let’s hope his next novel points the searchlight on people of his own height and weight.

You Comma Idiot is in bookstores as a paperback, as e-book on Amazon, and at Goose Lane.

T’es con, point translated by Éric Fontaine, Stanké.

A Fine Ending is published by Insomniac Press .

Last Days of Montreal is available from Signature Editions.

A literary long weekend with ninety-one events means there will be many possible festivals, depending on your choices. My best experiences at the 14^th edition of Blue Metropolis happened along side-roads.

Joyce Carol Oates packed the Grande Bibliothèque on Saturday night where she was interviewed by CBC’s Eleanor Wachtel and received this year’s Grand Prix. I held out for the future broadcast.

Instead, a day earlier, I caught up with Globe and Mail deputy Books editor Jack Kirchoff (a former Montrealer) who led a pleasant chat with Oates in an intimate space. Without actually asking how she managed to write 129 books, Kirchoff got the answer. He posed his questions and just let her go. Massively charming, the woman is a fountain of words. They bubble up, spill out, slip through long lean fingers that keep fluttering while she talks, all of it totally interesting: her love of teaching, her ten years in Canada, acerbic comments on the US political scene, reflections from a deep well by an irrepressible storyteller.

For volubility, only Nicole Lundrigan could match her. Born and raised in Newfoundland, a beauty and mother of three, Lundrigan has just published her fourth novel, which she wrote sitting on her bedroom floor with children playing at her side. Or so she said. I found the image breathtaking and not entirely convincing.

Appearing on a panel called Becoming a Writer, she said she was raised in a story-telling culture but is actually not much of an anecdote spinner, except in her head. Curiously, everything she said by way of biography or comment on craft was delivered in perfect story form. I went off with a copy of her new novel, Glass Boys, and a few hours later have already dipped into it long enough to savour the gorgeous prose.

Montreal novelist Ann Charney and translator Sheila Fischman had some fascinating horror stories on the subject of translation (most of them to do with the arrogance of les Français de France. Fischman recalled John Irving telling her his French translator substituted cricket for baseball because he didn’t understand the American game.) But Charney leavened her critique by declaring, “translation can give life to a book. Sometimes it’s a transfusion.” The Quebec French translation of her novel Distantly Related to Freud has been noticed as strikingly erotic by francophone critics, a discovery she attributes to the translation, although a stylish, juicy cover and the new title, La petite cousine de Freud, may have helped.

Music writer Lucinda Catchlove had a lot to say about why and how Montreal became a brooder house for new music in the 1980s and 1990s. While her panel-mate Alan Lord said the current music scene is drowning in over-production (too many artists), Catchlove went out on a bit of a limb and predicted we are on the verge of interesting times again. Watch out for the complete conversation about “The Montreal X Factor” on CBC’s Cinq à six Saturday programme later this summer. (Get on Rover’s newsletter mailing list and we’ll send you a memo.)

I’d heard it before but still enjoy listening to Trevor Ferguson tell the story of how he re-invented himself using the name John Farrow to publish thrillers, a strategy that successfully rescued his stalled career as a literary novelist. JF is currently making the rounds with an 844-page tome called River City. A combination historical adventure and 1950s crime story, it reads as if both writers took turns on the keyboard. Playing himself at Blue Met, Ferguson had much of interest to say as part of a panel on Montreal Noir crime writing. The man knows his Montreal history and has given it much thought.

At the same event, actor Marcel Jeannin did an excellent job at reading excerpts from some long-forgotten pulp novels, including an out-of-print hack job by Brian Moore. He almost convinced me it was worthwhile paying attention to pulp fiction. Almost. On second thought, I’m really only convinced we should pay attention to actor Marcel Jeannin, and save reading energy for good writing.

The mood at this 14^th edition was as cool and classy as the (relatively) new president William St-Hilaire. With her second season, St-Hilaire is beginning to put her stamp on the institution, though I had the feeling she isn’t quite there yet. Held at the boutique Opus Hotel, corner of St. Laurent and Sherbrooke, this year’s festival was smaller (20,000 in attendance) than past editions, but came off as rich and friendly. The hotel’s public spaces acted as an inviting hub to a gathering that spilled into several nearby venues.

In the end, all roads in a festival like this are side-roads. Writing and reading being solitary acts, a cosy room and the right people are all it takes to generate intensity and resonance. On those terms, the festival I composed from a generous programme was a huge success.

Stay tuned for the video of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents Louise Penny”, Rover’s event at this year’s Blue Met featuring Gordon Masten, Ellen David and Donovan King. Written and directed by Marianne Ackerman. Video by Leila Marshy.

Forty-five days. That’s how long Rover’s first-ever IndieGoGo fundraising campaign will be calling on readers and friends for contributions. Not just begging, either. We’ve got some pretty juicy prizes and rewards for those who give. Theatre and movie tickets, books, magazines and more – some of Montreal’s leading art and culture makers have donated to the pile of rewards to be handed out over the next six weeks.

The buzzword is “crowd funding.” IndieGoGo is a highly successful international site founded in San Francisco. In four years it has helped some 45,000 individual artists and groups meet their target by small and medium-sized donations for a lot of people.

Our campaign started April 16 and will wind up May 31. Click on our site at  IndieGoGo and find out how you can help Rover reach our goal of paying writers and editors in the very near future. Our goal is $3,000. Thanks to Barbara Ford for jumping off the dock first, within hours of our launch.

Stay tuned for more news on the progress of our campaign. The project is headed up by our new marketing co-ordinator Danielle St. Amour.

You can help in more ways than giving money. Read all about it on our IndieGoGo campaign page.

Donovan King cuts an imposing figure as he parades the streets of Old Montreal on summer nights. Six feet tall and dressed in a top hat and long black overcoat, his booming baritone inflected by a mock-Transylvanian accent.

He mesmerizes tourists with tales of murder, riots and ghosts from the seamy side of Montreal history: Bloated bodies found floating in the sewer. Angry mobs burning buildings. Plague victims buried alive.

Yet there are those who say Professor Beeblebock—a character King created for the tour group Les Fantômes Montréal Ghosts—is tame stuff compared to …

Subscribe to Montreal’s Maisonneuve Magazine and read the complete profile in Issue 43, Maisy’s 10^th Anniversary. On newsstands now!

Why write for Rover? Certainly not for the money (so far there is none), although money often follows, along with advancement on the Montreal arts scene. Proof? Check out the new spring issue of mRb, in bookstores, cafés and theatre lobbies now.

The only publication devoted exclusively to the analysis and promotion of literature published and often written in Québec, the mRb is currently edited by Mélanie Grondin, who has been with Rover since the launch in 2008, and who is now our (prolific) French-language theatre critic and an editor. After attending a Rover writers’ workshop, Mel started writing for Rover, pitching reviews to the Montreal Review of Books. In 2010, she became associate editor of the magazine and is now editor.

In the same lively issue, Leila Marshy, currently Rover’s most active day-to-day editor and the person in charge of video, reviews Sara Ferdman Tauben’s book Traces of the Past, Montreal’s Early Synagogues. Rover reviewer B.Markus offers a roundup of new books for young readers. Lori Callaghan, who joined us in year one, wrote a feature on graphic novelist Anders Nilsen. The cover story on Sina Queyras is by me.

My greatest pleasures as founder and publisher of Rover is seeing young writers come along, struggle with peer editing and emerge as really, really good writers. Seeing their names in a variety of publications, I am encouraged to push the endeavour further along the road to becoming a sustainable magazine that can offer key people and writers paid employment.

MONTREAL

The starter pistol has been fired on CBC’s second annual Bookie Awards, a people’s choice competition where readers vote for their favourite books online. The last time I checked (two minutes ago), Johanna Skibsrud’s short story collection This Will Be Difficult to Explain was second in her category. Louise Penny’s A Trick of the Light had a ways to go, but given her phenomenal fan base, she’ll no doubt soon pull ahead. 

A Montrealer and alumnae of the Summer Literary Seminars, Skibsrud has written for Rover. Her greater claim to fame rests with winning the Giller Award for her first novel, The Sentimentalists. I haven’t read her short fiction yet but voted for her on the basis of having read her excellent novel.

Ensconced in the Eastern Townships, Louise Penny is working hard on her acclaimed series of Gamache murder mystery series. A Trick of the Light is a gorgeously clever book, and often very funny. Her picture of the cut-throat world of visual art almost outshines the hunt for a murderer. Featured in full-page ads in The New Yorker, Penny’s latest book is an international sensation. It doesn’t get much better.

The finalists – five books in ten categories – were chosen by the producers at CBC Books, the Canada Reads competition and Writers & Company, with consideration given to readers’ online recommendations. There are two international categories (fiction and non-fiction); the others are Canadian titles. And a few reviewed on Rover: Half-Blood Blues, Something Fierce, This Will Be Difficult To Explain.

You can vote once a day for an author in each category until the contest closes at the end of March. At the same time, you can also see each author’s ratings. Brutal, but fun!

No doubt about it, writing and art in general is increasingly becoming a blood sport – unashamedly competitive, a winner-takes-all game. In this context, the CBC’s competition is particularly welcome. Writers with the most friends and best publicity machine will do best. Still, it’s a nice change from the pervasive and often mysterious influence of a few widely-publicized juried competitions. And, an excellent promotional vehicle for books at a time when the “industry” (as insiders like to call it) is undergoing one life-and-death crisis after another.

Bookstores too. The Globe and Mail reported this week that Nicholas Hoare will close his bookstores in Westmount and Ottawa. A terrible loss for Montrealers, and a mystery too. With the closing of the Double Hook in recent years, Nicholas Hoare had Greene Avenue all to himself. What happened?

Literature needs great bookstores, just as it needs courageous publishers, intelligent critics and attentive readers. Great art has never been a popularity contest. Still isn’t today. The best literature is and always has been about a book and a writer’s ability to grasp the essence of the times. Great books aren’t just part of the zeitgeist. They are a large part of what creates zeitgeist.

Fifty years ago Canadian creativity needed the kick-start of public funding. Governments stepped up to the challenge and look how far we’ve come. These days the problems of culture are far more diffuse but no less urgent. At very least, the survival of art in a globalized marketplace juggernaut needs everybody who cares to pay attention.

Vote today for your friends and favourites today. In this case, who votes is far more important than who wins.

The polls close at 11:59 p.m. ET on Saturday, March 31. The winners will be revealed on Thursday, April 5. Go to: /www.cbc.ca/books/2012/03/the-second-annual-cbc-bookie-awards.html

As Shakespeare demonstrated, historical fiction is always about the present. For a prime example of the genre’s paradox, look no further than Downton Abbey. Set in a Yorkshire castle before, during and after the First World War, this gorgeous upstairs-downstairs saga is really about social change, especially the fragility of the 1%.

At every juicy turn, we’re reminded of how unfair it is that some people get to live in a bubble of luxury while many more do all of the work. Perfidy and human weakness contribute the best plot jolts, but the real motors of this brilliant series are feminism, socialism, middle-classism – unstoppable forces that doom Abbey life from the first image of an old dog’s bum ambling toward home.

The brainchild of actor and writer Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park), this lavishly-produced Masterpiece TV series is picking up fans in the millions. The second season just wound up on PBS; the DVD is now available at Bôite Noir, but don’t hold your breath. Only three copies were ordered and reservations aren’t possible. It’s available for purchase on-line, which is how our household was able to cope with the frightful gap between one Sunday night and the next.

For those who haven’t yet caught the Downton bug, think Jane Austen meets Coronation Street. At the top of the ladder are the Earl of Grantham, Robert Crowley (Hugh Bonneville) and his American-born wife, Cora (Elizabeth McGovern). Maggie Smith plays the dowager, Crowley’s mother, and is never given a single line that isn’t wickedly funny. The Earl has devoted his life to keeping the post-card pretty estate humming, even marrying an American for her money, though the match turned out to be a good one. Forget the aristocratic dress and manners; Cory and Robert could be any modern couple trying to launch three high-maintenance daughters into life. Their best scenes happen at bedtime, after they’ve escaped the high-wire act of perpetual dinner parties, and can sigh over the day’s events.

The kink in their existence is a lingering heritage decision made by the Earl’s late father: the fortune Cora brought into the marriage is now common property. It must be passed to a male heir, but the Crowleys have only girls. Enter cousin Matthew Crawley, a handsome young solicitor, who is invited to relocate from Manchester and be groomed for the position. Even Granny thinks it would be great if one of the daughters fell in love with him (apparently he’s distant enough to permit such an alliance) and two of them do. But the course of true love runs amuck long enough to keep that story line going for two seasons, possibly more.

Meanwhile, a legion of servants presents personal stories defying easy summary. Suffice to say the tales are rich and riveting to follow, which is what a great series TV has to be. This is one of the best.

The British press has been full of comment about how unreal the whole set-up is: historically, servants would be filthy, ill-mannered creatures and their masters much less kind. But reality TV this isn’t. It’s great drama, fine comedy, brimming with brilliant writing and acting that creates a world and leaves viewers yearning for the next chapter. We root for the good and seethe at the villains, although Fellowes does an excellent job at making sure every character has at least a psychological basis for acting badly.

As with virtually all mainstream entertainment, we can be reasonably confident things will end more or less well for the characters we care about. But Fellowes makes it clear from the start that a way of life is crumbling. Individuals from all levels of society may survive and prosper, or not, but the class system will not hold. At least not this particular configuration.

And yet, as Janet Bagnel’s recent column in the Gazette pointed out, on paper at least, a small number of very wealthy families still have a firm hold on rural Britain. Seventy per cent of UK territory is owned by a faction of one per cent of the population. The Downton Abbeys of our time may be forced to take in lodgers. But otherwise, it’s business as usual. Old Money keeps its head down.

Season three is about to start filming, with Shirley MacLean playing Cora’s mother, over on a visit for New York. If you haven’t already, best to catch up on Downton Abbey now, before over-hype completely destroys the joy of discovery.

Season One of Downton Abbey is available for rent at most video/DVD outlets, including Videotron. Boite Noir has Season Two. Both are available for purchase on Amazon.

The age of national culture is over. Forget about tired nation-states, their ineffective governments and surly citizens. Great art is to be found in cities with strong flavours. At the top of my list is Chicago, just over an hour from Toronto by air, where a vibrant theatre scene is offering the best play I’ve seen in years.

The Chicago Shakespeare Theatre is located on Navy Pier, a Disneyesque promontory sticking out into Lake Michigan. Drawing eight million visitors a year to a children’s museum, a glittering midway, several bars and a slew of boat cruises, Navy Pier is the last place you’d expect to find a jewel of a classical theatre, but the six-storey playhouse with two performance spaces is world unto itself. The 500-seat main space is an ingenious blend of London’s Globe, with several stories of seats built in a steep U around the performance space, and a combination proscenium and thrust stage reminiscent of Canada’s Stratford Festival thearre. Theses are references only; the CST playhouse is an original. A surprisingly intimate space, even cosy, it is surrounded on three sides with glass reception areas offering a spectacular view of the waterfront.

During a brief visit to Chicago in early January, I saw Timothy Findlay’s play Elisabeth Rex, starring two Canadian Stratford stalwarts, Diane D’Aquila and Stephen Sutcliffe, directed by the CST’s founder and artistic director, Barbara Gaines. A magnificent play written by a great, late Canadian, it was staged with feeling and finesse, a breathtaking mixture of pathos and comedy. After opening in late November to rave reviews, it was selling out in the last weeks, meaning a Broadway transfer could well be the next stop. Such moves are common on the Chicago theatre scene, which boasts an excellent transfer record.

Set during the end of Elizabeth I’s reign, the play imagines the Queen descending into a draughty barn where Shakespeare and a few of his leading actors are spending the night. Elizabeth has condemned her former lover, the Early of Essex, to death for fomenting an uprising, and turns to the theatre crowd for distraction. Ned Lowenscraft, a gay actor who has spent a lifetime playing women’s roles, is days away from succumbing to venereal disease. Their night is a long argument about the true nature of womanhood and manliness, the issue resolved after an emotionally wrenching battle of wits. Between them, Shakespeare, in skullcap and bathrobe, is reading Plutarch and taking notes for his next play, Anthony and Cleopatra, which he is basing on the Queen’s tormented love life. Rich, imaginative and intense, the play is a masterpiece, and very well served by the theatre’s formidable production.

The Chicago Shakespeare Company is celebrating its quarter century anniversary this year, and much ground covered since Gaines launched the venture upstairs at the Red Lion Pub 25 years ago. I had a chat with creative producer Rick Boynton, one of four who make up the artistic staff of the company. A former actor and casting agent, Boynton acts as liaison between the artists and an accounting department with an annual budget of $13 million, half of which comes from box office. He also nurtures new projects, such as the Sondheim musical Follies, launched last fall to great acclaim.

How does a company with Shakespeare in the name dare programme a true blue American musical? “Our mandate is to do Shakespeare, his contemporaries and other plays inspired by his brilliance,” Boynton explained. The definition clearly works. Currently he’s developing a hip-hop adaptation called Othello the Remix for the Globe-to-Globe festival coming up in London, the only North American theatre invited to present work at an event featuring dozens of foreign-language productions of the bard’s plays.

Later this season, the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre is presenting a 3-actor rift on The Tempest, using masks along with 651 pounds of driftwood, 38 feet of chain, a gramophone and an ax, followed by A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Timon of Athens.

Getting to Chicago is painless and, if you plan ahead, relatively cheap thanks to Porter Airlines which flies directly from Toronto’s City Airport (located on the island, a hop from downtown.)

New York it isn’t. I won’t say its better, as such claims are meaningless. But Chicago is definitely the American city I will turn to first for a fresh-water breath of creative air. Don’t get me started on the food, music and architecture. See for yourself, asap.

www.chicagoshakes.com

Marianne Ackerman is the publisher of The Rover.

There’s a great line in a George Walker play about growing older. A character, somebody’s crusty mother, remarks that as we age, we either get more like ourselves, or less. “I’m going for the more,” she snaps. Me too. Is there really any other choice?

Take for example, my tendency to live in the future, create a plan and head for it doggedly, paying only scant attention to the blur of time passing. For years, I’ve tried to change and failed, consoling myself that at least the flaw promotes productivity.

Recently, though, I’ve begun to see living for the future as a sophisticated form of procrastination. The present becomes a litany of small duties, leaving larger goals sitting on a far-off horizon. And so I resolve to …

But surely making New Years resolutions is a form of living in the future.

Last night my daughter told me she likes to spend New Year’s Eve (her favourite holiday) looking back on the past year, an act of consolidation. We’re spending the night together here in Vancouver, where she lives, so I’ll be perusing my agenda for evidence of where 2011 went.

Meanwhile, let me tell you about our plans for next Christmas. If all goes well, the theme will be Russian, the location, Berlin. My husband’s daughter Rhiannon has just accepted a position in Potsdam, on the outskirts of the German capital; her brother Rhys will be moving to London; Fiona (my daughter) and her husband are planning to spend a year in Berlin, living near her father. The Russian theme was proposed by Rhys, reached us by Skype from Johannesburg this year.

Theme Christmas started last year when all three of Gwyn’s children joined us for the holiday in Montreal: a vegan, vegetarian, a gluten-allergic vegetarian, a guy who doesn’t like fish, and me – the cook – who will eat and apparently cook anything. Other years I’ve offered a traditional meal with an elaborate chestnut loaf (glamourized turkey stuffing) for the vegetarians. Instead, Rhys declared we should wipe away the past and embrace somebody else’s tradition. The Greeks won out, and so we had three different kinds of Moussaka, surrounded by various Hellenic delicacies available right in Mile End.

Imposing a new layer of drama to Christmas is one way of papering over the cracks in a tradition that – as Rover writers have so ably described over the past week – is in serious need of makeover in our secular, multi-ethnic, consumption-obsessed culture and complicated blended families.

Still, certain old chestnuts remain, and I cherish them. For example: the Christmas fight. The moment when my husband blows up at me and declares a line has been crossed. It simmers during a meal, and erupts after we go to bed, when he announces he is sleeping on the couch. I follow him and the blanket into the living room, accuse him of wrecking Christmas, and drag him back to bed for a vigorous, whispered argument which ends in mutual derision and giggles.

Our most memorable Yuletide fight dates from 2004, La Roque Alric, France. It was New Years Eve. Gwyn, his daughter and I were sitting around the fire drinking wine, the two of them speaking Welsh (I haven’t managed to learn). When I slipped away to the bathroom and drew a hot bath, he was furious. The upshot was his proposal of marriage, followed by a champagne breakfast.

This year’s argument was over a (perhaps too lengthy) account at dinner of my travels in Poland, and how my “friendship” with a certain esteemed Polish theatre critic had inspired me to write plays about Quebec history. I told this story because we had a young woman of Polish origin present, and I wanted to draw her into the feast of anecdotes.

Later, I was criticized for having withheld important information during an otherwise quite happy courtship and marriage. “I’m sorry,” I pleaded. “I didn’t know literary influences were part of full disclosure.” The argument pretty well collapsed when I told him I’ve also won the Nobel Prize, but chose to keep it to myself, out of respect for the male ego.

Seriously, though, whether we realise it or not, we are all as 21^st Centurians, doomed to re-invent Christmas. That’s how the season survives. Wild, whacky, personality-driven family gatherings are essential fodder for novels, mid-life crises and other pivotal human events. They are all better in the telling than reality.

I was shocked and thrilled this year when Rhiannon (on Skype from London) told her father (in Welsh) that last year’s Greek Christmas was the best yet. I thought it had been a fantastical shambles, what with her protracted career crisis and a blow-up over her brother’s choice of a double-breasted suit jacket for a James Bond-themed birthday dinner at which the birthday boy chose to wear pyjamas and the menu was eggs benny. But that’s another story.

Well. Enough looking back on 2011.  Apparently the 12-course traditional Russian menu is completely vegetarian.

Marianne Ackerman intends to focus on creating revenue streams for Rover and completing two books in 2012. All donations to Rover sincerely appreciated. See www.roverarts.com.

If Vincent Van Gogh were alive and creating dance theatre in Montreal, he might well make work like Dave St. Pierre’s. Both artists display sure flashes of genius embedded in frantic energy, as well as a voracious will focused unflinchingly on the creation of terrible beauty.

Van Gogh painted virtually all of his masterpieces in a little more than two years, before a combination of wretched health and despair did him in. St. Pierre has been steamrolling European stages and packing Quebec theatres for seven, fighting physical ailments as serious as the painter’s. Fortunately, he lives in a time when medicine can work miracles. Diagnosed at 17 with cystic fibrosis, an incurable, degenerative lung disease, St. Pierre has worked against the clock for more than half his life, finally undergoing lung transplants two years ago.

During the brief rehearsal for Le cycle de la boucherie, currently playing at Théâtre La Chapelle, he was back in hospital again with an intestinal infection, directing actors with the help of video recordings. Hemorrhoids and shingles made his presence at rehearsals excruciating, but none of this backstage turmoil showed on the night I caught the performance.

As audience chatter settled into silence, St. Pierre was planted firmly in the centre of the packed audience. He began by holding auditions for nine actors seated on folding chairs arranged along the back wall of the stage, calling each forward, asking banal questions about their backgrounds. The painfully funny session seemed aimed at destroying their confidence and reducing expectations. Finally, having chosen his line-up, he orders them to strip naked.

Knowing it was all part of a rehearsed piece hardly dampened the frisson of shared embarrassment. Not only does St. Pierre break down the proverbial fourth wall separating audience from performance, he draws us into the action, needles us into taking the actors’ sides, sharing their discomfort. Of course, the cast follows his dictates and demands with superhuman ease. But so clever is the transition between rehearsal banality and polished performance that the imaginative leaps are easy to take.

St. Pierre struts around the stage, working cues from his laptop planted on a table to the side of the stage, reading from notes scribbled on his clipboard. A tiny, compact guy in black sneakers, non-descript pants, and a white shirt fastened with a bow tie, he exudes a kind of Chaplinesque charm, barking directions and opinions directly at actors or at the audience, with the house lights sometimes raised to full glare.

The heart of the piece consists of two scenes reworked from previous shows: one involving a mock tragedy set in a clownish McDo ad, the other a searing erotic pas de deux that turns bloody before it becomes tender.

A stunningly theatrical finale welds it all together. Le cycle de la boucherie has both the loose feeling of a work-in-progress and the dense aroma of something that has been simmering for ages.

At one level, it’s theatre about theatre, a dubious idea, but it does work. Following the journey is a riotous experience. Many moments veer off into cringe-territory, only to swing back and settle into awesome symmetry.

When St. Pierre’s troupe played Sadler’s Wells Dance Theatre in London this past summer, several British critics were horrified to be assaulted, pestered and driven to distraction by nude actors “waving their willies” in the faces of people sitting close to the stage. (The Telegraph gave it a zero star rating.) Others were blown away by innovation and sheer imaginative power.

Apart from a few bottles of ketchup splashed over the naked chest of a dancer playing Ronald McDonald’s death scene, there is nothing palpably disgusting or particularly offensive about this work; a binging scene with apples and fat girls is shockingly beautiful. Wild mood swings between hilarity, harangue and tenderness abound. Ultimately, this is a work of profound generosity, compassion and audacity.

At 37, St. Pierre has already joined a pantheon of boundary-breaking Québécois talents emerging from unassuming backgrounds to conquer world stages. In the past few years, he has won major prizes and accolades in Europe, a route paved by Marie Chouinard, Robert Lepage and Wajdi Mouawad, to name only a few.

Experiencing his work is exhilarating, breathtaking. And yet for anyone struggling to keep believing in theatre, it’s also disconcerting. Dave St. Pierre is, to be sure, inimitable. He raises the bar. His existence is bad news for timidity in our midst.

Le cycle de la boucherie continues at Théâtre La Chapelle through December 17. Additional performances have been added. Box office: 514-843-7738. For more information and to see video excerpts, go to www.lachapelle.org.

The Van Horne Terminal Iron Works is a graceful brick block dividing northern Mile End from the railroad tracks. It started out as the name of sculptor Glen LeMesurier’s storefront studio at 135 Van Horne, but has since become synonymous with the whole fabulous building, just east of avenue du Parc.

A creative home to a large number of very good Montreal artists, not to mention the best antique cum bric-a-brac store I’ve ever visited, it’s also the location of the second annual Rover Art Fair, taking place December 1-4. Fourteen artists are offering close to 100 works to the shopping public, a wide range of painting, art photography, sculpture, drawing, collage and marionettes. Proceeds split between the artists and Rover.

Why an art fair as fundraiser? The jaded might say it’s hard enough to run an online arts magazine like Rover without jumping into the murderous world of selling fine art with the hope of paying our bills.

Makes perfect sense to me. Rover should have two or three such events per year, curating and bringing to the public gems from the vast quantity of unsold artistic creation in this glorious city.

You’ve heard it said before: Montreal has more artists per square foot than any other city in Canada, and yet the local market for all this talent is woefully underdeveloped. The same 500 people are solicited over and over again, while a huge number of cultured, affluent people know only the names of those who’ve made it somewhere else. And yet, they (you, we) do love to dine out on the truism that Montreal is a hotbed of creativity.

Well, time to get specific. Meet an artist. Listen to his/her story. Look at the work. And if it hits you as a memorable must-have, take it home.

Check out the catalogue of work available at www.roverarts.com/artfair2011.

The opening night party is FRIDAY Dec 2nd, 6-10 p.m.: a catered reception created by the talented Rouge Lefebvre, Glen LeMesurier’s new flame.

Read the story of their romance at:  Love and art anchor the heart.

As artist studios go, Michael Harrington’s is vintage man-cave. An arch between two yet-to-be-gentrified houses on an unfashionable Ottawa street leads into a weedy courtyard. At the back, a cinderblock building on its last legs. The windowless two-room suite on the second floor is crammed with guitars on stands, various packing crates, iffy furnishings, paint-splatted pallets and other accoutrements of the working artist. What can’t be found in this studio is much art.

On the day I visited, he’d just received news that of ten new works he’d recently shipped off to Montreal’s Galerie de Bellefeuille, all but three had been sold, and the exhibition doesn’t formally open for three weeks. He was sweating over how to fill the order again.

In his mid-40s, Michael Harrington is in the enviable position of knowing that everything he paints will find a buyer, sooner rather than later. Part of what makes him good and popular is the absolute convergence of who he is and what he paints.

Tall, solidly-built with silver hair and broad shoulders, he’s wearing black rimmed glasses and a tweedy hat which he never takes off, but keeps readjusting throughout our conversation, running his fingers through his hair as though it’s falling out of place, which it isn’t. Guessing his line of work, you might say PR or advertising or sales, which in a sense it was until he turned to art full-time 12 years ago.

What he paints is mainly men, cars and flowers, an ever-shifting combination of the three in moonlit fields, fluorescent-lit parking lots, gaudy hotel rooms and lobbies. His colours are vibrant – red, yellow, a lot of black, leavened by a masterful use of light. The worlds he captures are edgy, mysterious; full of pathos, menace, sometimes humour.

Each painting could be a moment from a play in progress. You don’t know what came before, and wonder what will happen next. Although based in realism, an otherworldly atmosphere predominates. Full of grownup toys, interesting hats and costumes, they are manly pictures, risking the ridiculous, achingly beautiful and executed with immense conviction.

As it turns out, Harrington is articulate about the origins of this splendidly wrought vision of mankind. Born into a large, Irish-origin family, he spent five years of his childhood living in a hotel in Williamsburg, Ontario (pop. 547), which his father bought in hopes of breaking away from a 9-to-5 job. The town had once boasted an internationally-famous foot doctor, hence the existence of the hotel, but by the time the Harringtons came on the scene, he was gone. They had a two-channel TV and little outside entertainment apart from occasional paying guests. His father often took the boys to movies. He recalls seeing Five Easy Pieces when he was in grade six, a vivid introduction to the world he would someday paint.

In the mid-’80s, he did a stint at the Ontario College of Art, planning to become an editorial illustrator, and was published in GQ magazine at 26. Then the recession hit and his career collapsed, so he went to work for his father’s personnel agency.

“I met a lot of men older than me, out of work, a bit desperate,” he recalls. “My job was putting people together, figuring out what each side wanted. I’m all for feminism, it had to happen. But a certain kind of man easily becomes invisible. Take a guy who’s sold truck tires all his life and at 45 or 50 is out of work. Not everybody’s a winner, but that doesn’t mean they’re losers. They’re just getting by.”

After starting to paint seriously, he eased out of his day job gradually, which may be why the world of needy people seeking connection remained so strong. Gradually, he dropped female figures from his pictures, since their presence tended to focus discussion on gender issues, and that isn’t what he’s about.

His favourite author is Flannery O’Connor.

He regularly visits his father in Florida, a recurring landscape in his work.

“I heard somebody on the CBC the other day say that everything we do is about procreation,” he tells me, as we sit in the dark looking at images of old works on his computer screen. His paintings capture the anxiety behind that potential fact. They do it with humanity and brio.

Catch Michael Harrington’s next exhibition at Galerie de Bellefeuille (1367 Greene Ave.), beginning Nov. 26

His work can also be found at Katherine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects in Toronto and the Ellen Miller Gallery in Boston

For most of the 20th Century, authors were blissfully removed from the means of production. A vast enterprise of publishing and media undertook (and profited from) disseminating writing. Now all that’s collapsing. Expozine helps fill in the cracks in the architecture.

Founded by novelist, publisher (the pioneering zine Fish Piss figuring prominently), musician and Distroboto inventor Louis Rastelli, Expozine Montreal has grown into one of North America’s largest small press fairs. The tenth edition is happening this weekend, Nov. 25- 27.

This is artistic entrepreneurship of a high order. Hundreds of writers have gotten their start this way. The burgeoning genre of graphic novels was greatly nurtured by just such events. The romantic tradition of the gentleman/woman author who only emerges, like the proverbial groundhog, to catch a glimpse of its shadow at the book launch, is fast becoming a thing of the past. These days, a book launch is hardly more significant than the author’s birthday party – a gathering of friends, a private event.

Not so Expozine. Some 270 creators of publications ranging from books to zines and graphic novels (in English and French) will congregate in the cavernous basement of l’Église Saint-Enfant-Jésus (5037 St-Dominique St.), while thousands of shoppers will nudge their way through the packed event. Somewhere between a bazaar and a huge block party, Expozine attracts exhibitors from across Canada, the U.S. and Europe. It’s an important showcase for small publishers and self-published authors.

The tenth anniversary kicks off Friday night at a launch party hosted at the Drawn and Quarterly bookstore (211 Bernard St.), starting at 7 pm. The fair itself (which is free) is open from noon until 6 pm Saturday and Sunday. There’s a party Saturday night at Casa del Popolo (4873 St-Laurent Blvd.).

Expozine at l’Église Saint-Enfant-Jésus (5037 St-Dominique St.), Nov. 25- 27

For more information, check out the Expozine website at http://www.expozine.ca/en/

Like peering through the windows of a stylish bar on a Saturday night, Safari 1 invites viewers to become voyeurs. A seven-minute video co-directed by filmmaker Denys Arcand and visual artist Adad Hannah follows the dream-like actions of eight bar habitués, projected on six TV-sized screens suspended from the ceiling. In the centre, the bar itself – a flower-shaped, faux leopard skin sofa – remains empty.

Veteran filmmaker Arcand (The Decline of the American Empire, Jesus of Montreal) and 40-year-old video artist/photographer Hannah, whose growing slate of international clients includes Elton John, are among 20 Quebec artists from a wide variety of disciplines, including graphic art, performance and circus arts. Called Big Bang – to evoke the beginning of creation theory – the large-scale free exhibition at the Musée des beaux arts has Montreal’s arts media reaching for new superlatives.

Collaborations produced some of the most successful works, including 2000 and One Realities, a haunting score composed by Pierre Lapointe, played in a chapel-like room created by architect Jean Verville from 2,000 white plastic lawn chairs, stacked in columns. The centerpiece is a podium holding an elegant, leaf-green seat from French designer Patrick Joudin’s limited edition series, meant to evoke the solitary experience of a concert performer.

Museum director Nathalie Bondit says the project was designed to “revitalize the museum’s collection” by putting living artists to work. Some top names were given carte blanche, with one stipulation: that they select as their inspiration one of two items from the museum’s vast collection, most of it locked away in storerooms.

Choreographer Marie Chouinard’s meditative creation centres around a tiny Japanese incense box, set in the middle of a square of white sofa benches, with large photos of her dancers hung on four walls. The museum-goer’s comfort also inspired Collectif Rita. The design duo who used the colours and shapes of Lawren Harris’ oil-on-canvas masterpiece Morning, Lake Superior to create a bank of comfortable benches facing the painting.

Hannah and Arcand say the chance to meld their two very different styles was one they’d been trying to arrange for sometime. The process, Arcand says, was “refreshing.”

“Let’s say we both had to put a little water in our wine,” he quipped during the recent opening. The budget did not allow hiring professional actors, so they cast members of the museum’s administration staff, dressing them up in stylish ’80s stepping-out garb. Arcand abandoned his linear storyline for a series of tableaux vivants depicting themes of sex, drugs, AIDS and solitude.

The resulting short film, Safari 1, alternates between Hannah’s trademark static shots, focusing on performer/models who pose self-consciously, and action sequences including copulation, the sudden departure of a pensive woman, and a gay couple collapsing into a Pieta-like death scene.

Hannah, who often shoots with a handheld camera and no crew, says working with Arcand was a valuable learning experience. “For Denis, there’s always the ‘best shot,’ ” he says. “He knows how to bring out great performances. There was a lot of back-and-forth – let’s say productive friction.”

Big Bang continues at the Musée des beaux arts de Montréal (1380 Sherbrooke W.) until Jan. 22
Admission is free

What would possess an acclaimed art photographer to shoot his 80-year-old mother in the nude? Well, she wanted him to do it. Hounded him.

That’s the kind of woman Margaret Lunt is, an iconoclast and something of a show-off, as Don Winkler’s latest art documentary, Margaret & Evergon, so ably captures. After spending most of her life in Niagara Falls, Ontario, keeping up a small bungalow on a mainly quiet street, Mrs. Lunt accepted her 62-year-old son’s offer to come live with him in Montreal – the first time she and Evergon (Albert Lunt’s professional name) had co-habited in ages.

“Living with your muse de-muses her,” he admits, with a wry smile. “It was easier to be amused or even bemused when she was a few hours away.”

Nevertheless, the invitation – and obeying her request to pose – resulted in what critics refer to as series of “powerful” black and white photographs confronting the ample body of a weathered woman pushing against a wooden pillar, sprawled on a Recamier or seated facing the camera, draped in spotted skin several sizes too big. Breasts like beloved old handbags, cellulite clinging to gnarled thighs resembling collapsed bread dough – the portraits are unsparing, devoid of vanity. Perseverance personified. A lifetime of letting go. What’s left of Margaret Lunt after her clothes come off is a rare variety of confidence: she feels better than she looks, and is completely comfortable with the truth.

Winkler’s documentary starts out slowly, with an atmosphere that sets us up for a yawn-provoking home movie. We see son, mother and friends at her birthday party. The queen bee is taking full advantage, accepting her role as the ageless person, sexually neutral, a celebrity by association. No effort is taken to explain how famous her son is, or why. You have to know that Evergon has an international reputation (with over 1000 exhibitions) as a pioneer in new photographic techniques and subject matter, personal sexuality being a consistent motif in his work.

This film is mainly about Margaret. Only when the story moves forward into tales of Albert and his brother Ronnie’s youth is the true measure of this amazing woman revealed. The physical and mental abuse she suffered as part of a rigid patriarchal society. How readily she threw off her own deepest cultural conditioning when she discovered both sons were gay.

This is where Margaret & Evergon becomes great: in the quiet revelation of her efforts to let Ronnie and Albert be exactly who they are, and during a time and place where this was a revolutionary act. Sewing dresses for them, bailing teenage drag queens out of jail, opposing her homophobic husband – she spared no effort to let them live the life they craved.

As it turns out, taking her clothes off was an attention-getting device. Margaret Lunt has been naked since the day her father went after her child self with a two-by-four. Don Winkler’s remarkable film captures a lifetime of heroic shedding of skin. Evergon’s cryptic comments about mother as muse say everything. A many-sided gem of a film, not to be missed.

Margaret & Evergon will be shown in Montreal at the Image+Nation film festival on Saturday, Nov 5, 6 pm. Sève Cinema, 1400 de Maisonneuve West. Margaret Lunt, Evergon and Don Winkler will be present.

An exhibition of Evergon’s photographs is currently at Galerie Trois Points, 372 St. Catherine St. W, #520 through Nov 5.

Toronto International Art Fair: Donald Winkler, Margaret Lunt, and Evergon will at the Galérie Trois Points kiosque, # 903. Oct 29 and 30.   2:30 – 5 pm. There will be a discussion on Friday at 3:30. The film will be shown Saturday at 3 pm, discussion to follow. http://www.tiafair.com/

Full details: www.donaldwinkler.com

If an author’s life bears any relation to her writing, then even more so her death. In the case of Nelly Arcan, it is impossible to read this outstanding Quebecoise novelist’s final work without being aware at every turn that she took her own life days after completing the manuscript.

A powerful argument for suicide as a human right, Exit is also strangely life-affirming. Ordinarily, these contradictory positions could suffice as the motor of a plot. Arcan’s protagonist is the irascible, narcissistic Antoinette Beauchamp, who seeks strength and reason to live from within the depths of her own twisted psychology. Knowing that the young woman who wrote this outrageously beautiful, thoroughly original novel did not is, well, heartbreaking.

Cruel, even. So Exit and the late Nelly Arcan’s life are a package.

Reams of modern criticism hereby die too: there is no way this novel can be read or discussed without reference to the author’s private answer to “the one truly philosophical question,” as described by Camus. In literature, there is redemption. In life, not. But if literary achievement can stand in as an acceptable substitute for body and soul, Arcan will live for a very long time by virtue of four extraordinary novels: Putin (2001), Folle (2004), À ciel ouverte (2007) and now Paradis, clef en main (a stronger title in French).

A child born of artificial insemination, now in her early 30s, Antoinette Beauchamp has been paralyzed following a botched suicide attempt. Confined to a hospital bed, she is cared for by her fashionista mom who visits every day bringing jugs of vodka and orange juice so her daughter can sink into oblivion at will. Meanwhile, she tells her story (which we are reading) for posterity, every gesture followed by a surveillance camera her mother has set up in the hospital room.

While mother loves daughter resolutely, Antoinette loathes the woman who forced her into being and dreams of crushing her. Suicide is something of a family tradition. The narrator’s grandfather took his life in a conventional way for a psychologically coherent cause: grief.  Her uncle Léon did it for more complex, possibly temperamental reasons, a sense that life was a prison sentence, and enlisted the services of a professional agency called “Paradis clef en main.” Sensing a kindred spirit in the child Antoinette, he left her enough money to take the same road out should her desire for escape someday overcome the will to carry on.

Paradis clef en main is a bizarre enterprise run by a mysterious leader who employs a huge staff to put clients through a series of hoops designed to test their resolve to die. This is where the novel finds its energy, as the hapless Antoinette is forced to cope with quest-like tribulations in her pursuit of death. The resolution comes via highly cinematic scenes, worthy of Atom Egoyan, or John Greyson’s film treatment of Michel-Marc Bouchard’s play Les feuleuettes, where fantasy and reality collide.

In the end, though, I only thought of Nelly Arcan. How could she have had this book inside her, let it out, and still leave us?

Great beauty can be found in very dark places.

Marianne Ackerman’s latest novel is Piers’ Desire, published by McArthur & Co.

Peter Behrens is back in town this weekend to meet fans and read from his new novel, The O’Briens, at the Westmount Public Library.

Born and educated in Montreal (LCC, McGill and Concordia universities), Behrens received high praise and a Governor General’s Award for his 2006 novel, The Law of Dreams, about a young man’s torturous journey from famine-wracked Ireland to Montreal and beyond. He’s back this season with The O’Briens, a sequel of sorts, though a very different and considerably more ambitious novel.

Set in California, Western Canada and (mostly) Montreal, it follows Joe O’Brien, great grandson of Fergus from The Law of Dreams, who, as a willful teenager, leads his siblings out of dire circumstances in Pontiac County, Que. After making a fortune building railroads, he settles his brood in Westmount, where they cope with two world wars and the psychological scars.

The fictional family bears a strong resemblance to Behrens’s own. The names have not been changed; the cover is a family photo, a beach scene featuring the author’s lovely dark-haired mother and her sisters. The protagonist is based on his grandfather, a man he remembers as a powerful if troubled patriarch.

So what happens when a writer weaves blood secrets into fiction? In the late 19th century, Thomas Mann pestered family and friends for their recipes, sayings, banking details in order to write his masterful family saga The Buddenbrooks, published when he was only 25. Residents of the north German town of Lübeck were scandalized to see themselves, warts and all, in print, but the literary success set Mann on his way to the Nobel Prize. Having read both The Buddenbrooks and The O’Briens this summer, I can affirm they are definitely in the same league – great, juicy tales that will make you take a second look at annoying relatives. They are, after all, part of the big picture, otherwise known as history and destiny.

Behrens is 56. The relatives he writes about are dead, although he has 17 cousins living in Montreal who do remember their common elders. The delay was accidental, he says. A Hollywood screenplay writer for many years, he worked on The O’Briens off and on for ages, setting it aside to write The Law of Dreams as a way of investigating his characters’ origins. The O’Briens is chiefly concerned with how characters move, think and feel. History is context, as is social circumstance.

The book is, however, an important corrective to our collective consciousness. Until now, Irish Montreal has usually been depicted in literature as a working-class community, with the Scottish closely associated with wealth. Behrens’s Irish world is one of debutantes, mansions and status anxiety.

“Our little corner of the city was peculiar in that we were much closer to French Quebec than any other group,” he says. “My mother attended a convent school where she learned French and made lifelong friends with francophone girls. I can’t claim she was bilingual. She would open a conversation in French but her friends always spoke to her in English. That’s just the way it was in those days.” Religion was the meeting ground, intermarriage and integration, common. Says Behrens, “I’ve never met a Quebecer who didn’t have at least one Irish ancestor.”

A rebel from an early age, he shocked his parents by taking off for Alberta to work on a cattle ranch. Tall, slim, with fine grey hair, he still has something of the cowhand’s gait, his spoken English bearing traces of displacement. Studying French in high school convinced him he had no aptitude for languages, but working in Alberta with a unilingual cowboy from the Beauce proved otherwise. Living in California, he hired a tutor and caught up on the grammar. As a result, he’s delighted to speak French with a mystifying range of accent.

These days, the author, his wife and young son spend winter in small-town Texas and summers in Maine, where he enjoyed many sailing seasons as a youth. He was back in Montreal for the Irish Studies conference held at Concordia, then headed out a cross-country promotional tour.

A truly wonderful writer who will no doubt be dominating the literary award nomination lists this fall, Peter Behrens will be at the Westmount Public Library, on Saturday, Sept. 24 from 3 p.m. Signed copies of The O’Briens will be available. Refreshments will be served.

First published in The Gazette, July 22. Read Marianne Ackerman’s column Micro Montreal on page two of The Gazette, every fourth Friday.

We’ve said it before and let’s say it again: Montreal is the capital of creative ideas. Latest proof: success of this year’s Infringement Festival in Buffalo, USA. A spin-off of our own great event!

This, from the Buffalo News, July 29:

In 2004, when a small group of countercultural malcontents banded together in Montreal to launch the world’s first Infringement Festival, they were making a bold statement against the status quo.

The more visionary among them might have suspected that their radically democratic, all-inclusive experiment – launched in response to the more staid Montreal Fringe Festival and dubbed “a critical response to the oppressive neoliberal worldview” – might find acolytes outside of Quebec.

But certainly no one predicted that the city of Buffalo, where an impressive fleet of cultural enterprises large and small has long been flying beneath the national radar, would develop that seed into the largest of five Infringement fests in North America.

And this year, Buffalo’s seventh version of the mammoth affair, which got started on Thursday night, is one for the ages. By the estimation of the event’s increasingly harried team of organizers, this year’s Infringement Fest will feature 1,200 separate performances in 52 venues across 11 days. These include 190 musical acts, 24 film and video productions, 20 dance troupes or individual dancers, 35 separate theater productions and 27 poetry and spoken word events.

The fest has come a stunning distance since 2005, when the Montreal group Car Stories, with the help of early Infringement proponent and Subversive Theatre founder Kurt Schneiderman, launched Buffalo’s first modest version of the event.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to overstate the significance of Infringement in revealing the true depth and variety of Buffalo’s many artistic communities and enterprises – and thereby feeding those communities with the concentrated esteem of their city.

In the recent debates over cultural funding in Erie County, we’ve heard the name of perhaps some two dozen arts organizations large or established enough to rise to the attention of the Western New York populace. But there are many orders of magnitude, organizations, artists and mini-collaborations in the region’s sprawling creative underground which – by virtue of their small size, occasionally unorthodox subject matter or refusal to play by the rules of traditional art-commerce – have remained largely unsung outside of small circles of followers.

These groups and individuals are on full and glorious display during the Infringement Festival, which is what lends the festival its unique and indispensable power as a city-defining, culture-shifting venture. They have names like Moss of Ancients, Crabmeat Thompson, the Boom Boom Betties, the Zombettes and Spider Goat. Their disciplines range from straight-up rock ‘n’ roll to rap-punk fusion, traditional graphite-on-paper sketching to interactive hula-hoop instruction.

That head-spinning range, along with the serious dedication of the festival’s creators and organizers, unveils a thriving artistic underground that cities twice Buffalo’s size would be hard pressed to reckon with.

This year, the fest’s constantly rotating and expanding team of organizers includes, but is not nearly limited to: music booker Curt Rotterdam; all-around Infringement PR guru and Filigrees Gallery & Boutique owner Melissa Campbell; dance coordinator Leslie Fineberg; web dude Dave Pape; theater coordinator John Shotwell; visual art coordinator Cat McCarthy; film and media coordinator and musician/poet Geoffrey Peters; and legions of others.

Discussions of the quality of work in the festival are another matter entirely – but suffice it to say that the experimental, hit-and-miss nature of Infringement is part of what lends it its power.

And all of that is what makes the Infringement Fest not only the largest, longest and coolest arts festival in our expansive region, but one of the most important cultural developments the city has seen in the past decade.

For more about the line-up, go to Buffalo News.

Read Jason McLean’s account of his journey to Buffalo here.

Shortly after I voted, the doorbell rang. It was a gentleman about my age, dressed in a suit and tie, bearing NDP pamphlets.  We fell into conversation, in French, naturally.

Only when I started saying how great it would be, as an Anglophone Quebecer, to have a vote that counts, did he switch into English – his first language too.

“Take this for what it’s worth,” he said, lowering his voice. “But it’s looking like Madame Laverdière might win. She wasn’t expecting to have to move to Ottawa.”

Aye, there’s the rub for Montrealers who dabble in federal politics. Hélène Laverdière did indeed topple Bloc Québecois leader Gilles Duceppe in Laurier-Sainte-Maire, and now she has to leave town. Yikes!

Much has already been said and written about the source of Jack Layton’s sudden popularity in Quebec. How he’s from Hudson, speaks French and of course has handed around broad hints about a possible resurgence of interest in constitutional reform. (As if.)

He’s a great guy, no doubt about it. But I have a strong feeling Stephen Harper had more to do with the NDP wave in Quebec than the affable leftish leader, or his policies.

Francophone Quebecers are extremely canny voters who can sniff out self-interest quicker than people in any other part of Canada. Harper’s tough love approach signalled an end to the gravy train politics that has benefited this province so handily for decades. A Liberal leader would have tossed a hockey arena at Quebec City, no problem. But Harper’s had his fingers burned here a few times. He made it clear he won’t risk a dime in hopes of winning seats.

That was bad news for francophone voters, who are used to being courted in style. Thoughts of a majority leader’s steely-eyed gaze shifting right past Bloc members in the House of Commons was enough to make them realise they’d better give up on the unsubtle us-first Bloc appeal. Better find a new big love, fast.

I feel for Mme Laverdière, and for the NDP, a party that will be changed over the next few years beyond anyone’s imagination.

But I’m very happy Quebec is back in the news, above the fold. If there’s one thing this province cannot abide, it’s the loss of limelight. Thomas (Outremont) Mulcair as finance critic? Works for me, and for our indépendentiste neighbours.