Monsters as People

Nearly a week has passed, everything slow and languid, like all things in a heavy Canadian winter, including reading. As only a Canadian ought to in winter, I have just finished reading the Governor General's Award and Scotiabank Giller Prize nominated novel The Immaculate Conception by Gaétan Soucy, translated into English by Lazer Lederhendler. To everything there is a season, and especially when it comes to reading Canadian Literature, that spirit of pathetic fallacy borne in the Canadian-born reader seems to have an affinity for winter, inwardly. Reading Todd Swift's dark and stormy description of Soucy's novel from his article "Monsters as People" in the January/February 2007 issue of Books in Canada: The Canadian Review of Books opened a window to the possibility of Great Can Lit for me:

Nothing had prepared me for the novel The Immaculate Conception by French Quebec author, Gaétan Soucy--nothing, that is, other than the works of de Sade, Poe, Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Kafka, and a host of other writers; tormented by the nearly impossible promises of God (or Good), they make elaborate work of the Devil (or Evil), and in the process, bring into the world the very suffering they would quarrel with.