Bookworm, no. 124
Tom Hawthorn reviews Brendan Kelly’s “Habs Nation.” Selena Mercuri on Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi’s “The Book of Interruptions.” A cover artist Q&A. Remembering David M. Malone.
Rinkside Politics
Habs Nation: A People’s History of the Montreal Canadiens
Brendan Kelly
Baraka Books
240 pages, softcover and ebook
Sports fandom is a secular religion with rituals, sacraments, and relics. The fiery Maurice “Rocket” Richard, the dignified Jean Béliveau, and the flashy Guy Lafleur formed a holy trinity for devotees of the Montreal Canadiens. Wearing the Sainte-Flanelle jersey, these stars bookended an era of miracles and wonders. Between 1955 and 1980, Les Glorieux won fifteen Stanley Cup championships. That quarter century also marked a tumultuous time in Quebec’s history: the Rocket Richard Riot, the death of Maurice Duplessis, the Quiet Revolution, Expo 67, the October Crisis, the Olympics, the election of the Parti Québécois, and the first failed independence referendum. In Habs Nation, the author and Gazette columnist Brendan Kelly considers how the Canadiens “reflect our society” and contends that they “should be considered a cultural institution rather than a sports team like any other.”
In the years since its storied run, the franchise has only hoisted the Stanley Cup twice, an ongoing cause of anguish for many. Kelly argues that the team performs better with more francophone players on the roster. He provides some evidence, but it’s wrong to think this historic success is solely owed to skaters from Quebec. Alongside Rocket on the “Punch Line” skated Elmer Lach, a Prairie boy, and Toe Blake, from Ontario mining country; Béliveau was class, and Vancouver’s John Ferguson was muscle; Lafleur scored goals, while Ken Dryden from suburban Toronto stopped them. Kelly is offside, too, in blaming the franchise’s championship drought on insufficient regard for the organization’s linguistic and nationalistic roots. The team no longer wins simply because the business of hockey has profoundly changed with expansion and international growth.
The Québécois connection to hockey is a beautiful thing, but the sport exists outside the Bell Centre and the professional game. The Habs were founded as a money-making enterprise in 1909 and remain so today. Expecting a corporation on a global stage to reflect Quebec’s cultural, linguistic, and political aspirations is to live in a state of perpetual grievance and frustration.
—Tom Hawthorn
Stop Right There
The Book of Interruptions
Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi
Wolsak and Wynn
110 pages, softcover
The Book of Interruptions resists continuity. Across seven sections, the poet Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi fragments speech, syntax, and identity, until meaning itself becomes an act of endurance. The first poem, “Before We Begin…,” starts mid-motion: “the poet’s hand softens the glare of the sun / a city breathing / in the wake of prophets / prisoners of wars / who never learned the lingua franca.” The lines are an amalgamation of origin story and exhaustion. The sacred and the urban, like the mythic and the modern, occupy the same page without reconciliation.
The Iranian Canadian poet and translator writes about Persian Islamic mysticism, French psychoanalysis, queer theory, and Marxist critique, without prioritizing any single one. The result is a voice that speaks from the margins: “I’m housed / within my own disgust / I allocate new centres / to proposed utopias.” (Revulsion, hunger, and pleasure are conditions of thought rather than feelings to transcend.) The section “Purgatorial Imagery” contains scenes of war, domestic life, and hallucination, which suggest that history never ends. Instead, it recasts its characters: “the newspapers know my predisposition / but they sell me my fix anyway / if not THE consumer then… / an alternate consumer / of hyphenated products.”
Throughout, Mohammadi exposes the artifice of coherence: “I have no history / my own voice whets the mirror / a political abstraction / my temperament / is a violence / to many generations to come.” Ultimately, what emerges is poetry that begins and breaks, self-dissects, and starts again, offering up language attuned to the ruptures we inhabit, those that insist on remaining open.
—Selena Mercuri
Cover Artist Q&A: Dave Murray
How did you come up with the concept?
I wanted to capture a memory or a feeling of winter. I find peace in those crisp, quiet moments when boots crunch through fresh snow or when a biting wind is tempered by the soft, pink light of dusk and snowflakes catch the fading sun as they drift along.
How has your style changed?
I consider how I draw to be a language I’m constantly learning. There’s been a natural evolution, and I feel like I’ve reached a comfortable fluency yet still seek challenges. I used to be more rigid, but now my images can be more abstract. I’m also trying new mediums, such as large-scale paintings. I think about sculpture a lot.
Is doing a cover for the front and back a challenge or an adventure?
A bit of both—but definitely enjoyable. The composition shift from portrait to landscape allowed me to let the wind blow across the full width and expand the light. It was fun to think about how elements peek over the spine. Hopefully, readers find for themselves a bit of the memory and feeling that I hold so close.
In Memoriam: David M. Malone
Last week, David M. Malone, a former Canadian diplomat and rector of the United Nations University, in Tokyo, died at seventy-one. Malone wrote or edited numerous books and contributed to our pages on multiple occasions. Whether from New Delhi or Victoria, he was an esteemed champion of the Literary Review of Canada, among many other causes. He will be missed.
Inside the December Issue
“I found the early chapters to be a candid, often darkly droll account of Kathy Page’s physical struggle with her symptoms, her intellectual effort to understand the physiological impact of her diagnosis, and the emotional stress of facing a brutally curtailed lifespan. I empathized with her exasperation at the endless clichés surrounding talk of disease, particularly the illness-as-journey trope.” Charlotte Gray on Kathy Page’s In This Faulty Machine: A Memoir of Loss and Transformation.
Brad Dunne reviews Greg Mercer’s The Lobster Trap: The Global Fight for a Seafood on the Brink.
“There is a sense in which the book is a mystery without a crime.” André Forget reads Marc Bendavid’s debut novel, The Sapling.
And much more!