A short story from Arvida, finalist for the 2016 Best Translated Book Award.
The winner of the 2016 Best Translated Book Award is set to be announced on May 4, and Quebec’s very own Arvida is very much in the running. Peter McCambridge sat down with P.T. Smith, one of the fiction jury’s nine members, to discuss Arvida’s chances.
“These are stories of stories: what they do, what life becomes through them, and why they should be passed on.”
“The thirteen stories move across time, some set contemporarily, others in the past or the future. The movement is not linear; with the start of each, the moment in history needs to be located anew. However, the place is ever the same. These are stories of Quebec, both in their location and their hearts.”
George Ellenbogen’s A Stone in My Shoe: In Search of Neighbourhood is his story of Jewish culture within Montreal. Cities don’t live just in facts, anecdotes, and people, but in myths, in the rumours passed around neighbourhoods by enthusiastic children, or adults amusing themselves by telling tales.
“The violent power of language and the way Aquin uses that to create his prose style is what most directly unites Next Episode and The Invention of Death. Unique may be an overused word, one which often comes with an unnecessary modifier, but Aquin is just that: unique, utterly mad, yet coherent. Aquin’s prose is a form of logorrhea that finds sense and beauty again and again.”