Monday, June 18, 2012

My Five-Star Bookshelf, Part Six

Timothy Findley, Famous Last Words

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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