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The End of Canada
| Article
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10706 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1993 |
2,302 Words |
| Author
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Mark Wegierski
Mark Wegierski is a Toronto-based historian and freelance
writer/researcher who specializes in issues of nationality and
ethnicity in modern society. His articles have been published
in the Review of Metaphysics (Catholic University of America,
Washington, D.C.), This World (Elizabethtown College,
Pennsylvania), and other periodicals. |
OH CANADA! OH QUEBEC!
Requiem for a Divided Country
Mordecai Richler
New York: Alfred a. Knopf, 1992
278 pp., $23.00
One of Canadian literature's biggest stars, Mordecai Richler, born in 1931, twice won the Governor-General's Award for Fiction, the country's highest literary award. Among his most famous works is The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, and his recently published Solomon Gursky Was Here, a loose retelling of the Bronfman/Seagram Distillers saga (bootleggers to billionaires), was a best seller. The closest American literary figure he can be compared to probably is Saul Bellow, who writes mostly about the East European-Jewish and Jewish American experience; and he is somewhat similar to Alan Dershowitz in his combativeness.
On Canada! Oh Quebec! Is an expansion of Richler's reporter at large article for the New Yorker, which appeared September 23, 1991. The book also includes a postscript consisting of pointed rebuttals to various reactions to that article, particularly among the Quebecois, the French-speaking majority of Quebec, whom it had criticized. Yet in a later BBC television documentary based on the book, Richler was able to adopt a gentler, more conciliatory tone.
The title suggests a drollness contrasting with the word requiem in the subtitle; the former quality emerges as the book's primary characteristic. It is in no way a dirgelike remembrance of things past, in the style of Canadian culture traditionalists like George Grant, who had lamented the defeat of English-Canadian identity at the hands of a universalistic, socially corrosive, American-centered "empire of technology"; nor does it have the pathos of a work such as novelist Hugh McLennan's Two Solitudes, which had approached Canada's French-English divide with greater emotional intensity and subtlety, centering on love relationships as the central metaphor. Rather, it consists of the highly charged ventilations of an often-cynical litterateur, who--despite his pretensions at being an enfant terrible--ultimately holds the currently correct positions.
The best type of reader for this book would be someone knowing a fair deal and feeling strongly about the political issues of today's Canada. The book is geared very much to Canada's Ottawa-and Toronto-centered managerial, media and therapeutic elites, as part of the ostensibly free-wheeling debate about the future of
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