One of my favourite Canadian writers. A character imagined
by an important Modernist poet. Combine the two and you have a fascinating and
beautiful literary thriller about World War Two, the British Crown, and
fascism. This is how history might have been, and the idea is chilling.
I read this novel between my third and fourth years of
university. At that point, I was just beginning my serious study of Modernist
poetry and knew little of Ezra Pound. Earlier that year I had read Not Wanted
on the Voyage, after another student gave a presentation on it in one of our
seminars. (That subsequently became one of my mother's favourite books.) Suddenly I was on a Timothy Findley roll, reading everything of Findley's
I could get my hands on. Famous Last Words stands out for me, though, for its powerful
images and curious imagining.
Some of Findley's work is overblown. Some of his novels are profoundly
bleak. I didn't really care for The Wars, and there is one novel of Findley's that I still haven't read. (And I should acknowledge really enjoying his short fiction and his memoirs.) But this novel (along with The Piano-Man's Daughter, which should also
be on this list) worked perfectly for me.
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