Bookworm, no. 71
Caroline Noël reviews Fawn Parker’s “Hi, It’s Me.” Zachary Thompson on “A National Awakening,” edited by Joyce Wayne. The best in Canadian studies. Inside the December issue.
Like Mother, Like Daughter
Hi, It’s Me
Fawn Parker
McClelland & Stewart
352 pages, softcover, ebook, and audiobook
With Hi, It’s Me, Fawn Parker chronicles the mournful, disorienting day her mother died. Chapters punctuate each hour, as the novel—a fictionalization of true events—reveals how suffering distorts reality.
In the spring of 2019, Fawn drives from Toronto to the remote farmhouse where her mother, Elaine, lived until her death by medically assisted suicide. Two hours before the twenty-nine-year-old writer arrives, “it had already happened.” Alone in her mother’s room, she reflects on their strained relationship: “I couldn’t tell her I loved her. I couldn’t even tell her at the end, during the last phone call.” Elaine also left her daughter a voicemail prior to her final moments, but Fawn, overwhelmed by her mother’s voice, deletes the message. Instead, she turns to Elaine’s journals for one last conversation.
Parker deftly exposes the extent to which people ignore reality in favour of a fabricated world. Fawn considers her relationship with her mother to have been so strong that it superseded the need for conversation. But Elaine’s journals reveal that she felt her daughter was mean and distant. In Parker’s disconnected world, avoidance only offers momentary respite.
—Caroline Noël
Round Robin
A National Awakening: Robin Mathews & the Struggle for Canadian Identity
Edited by Joyce Wayne
Mosaic Press
112 pages, softcover and ebook
Canadian nationalism guided the pursuits of the activist, writer, and professor Robin Mathews, who died last year at ninety-two. That he, a self-avowed socialist, would support the concept seems almost contradictory in 2024, but his ideas were rooted in protecting the country from the imperialist overreach that plagues the global South. With A National Awakening, ten scholars—many of whom worked closely with Mathews—focus on his Ottawa years, from 1968 to 1984, and contextualize his work in the twenty-first century.
Alvin Finkel, a professor emeritus at Athabasca University details Mathews’s activism in protecting Canadian trade unions, whose members he felt proved crucial to “combatting both imperialism and the capitalist structures that made it possible.” Elsewhere, the professor emeritus Daniel Drache, of York University, discusses Mathews’s The Struggle for Canadian Universities, from 1969, which criticized trade policies that favoured hiring American and British professors. Drache argues that the book helped foster homegrown scholars and diversify academic courses: “Mathews’ big idea was that Canadian hiring practices are critical components for building a vibrant, university system.” Later, Susan Crean, a former chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada, asserts that Mathews pioneered the concept of Canadian content. She recalls how he met with Art Gallery of Ontario representatives in Toronto in the early ’70s and criticized the institution for promoting American artists ahead of domestic ones.
A National Awakening celebrates Mathews’s interpretation of nationalism while explaining why it grew outdated. Although his campaigns “paid little attention to the maligned, exploited, and murdered Indigenous people within their midst,” his fight for a country’s individuality in the face of towering international influences should still resonate with today’s progressives.
—Zachary Thompson
Awards Season: Best Book in Canadian Studies
Last month, the Réseau d’études canadiennes (Canadian Studies Network) named Anne Trépanier’s De l’hydre au castor (From the Hydra to the beaver) the 2024 Best Book in Canadian Studies. In our November issue, Graham Fraser wrote that Trépanier’s history of Canadian newspapers between 1844 and 1867 uncovers “a wide range of fears and concerns surrounding Confederation.”
Inside the December Issue
“The book is the first full-length treatment of Norquay’s life and political career, which turns out to have been a great deal more interesting than one might have expected.” Daniel Woolf on Gerald Friesen’s The Honourable John Norquay: Indigenous Premier, Canadian Statesman.
Marisa Grizenko reviews Bad Land, a novel by Corinna Chong.
“The revelations are precisely calibrated but always organic.” Katherine Ashenburg on Not Even the Sound of a River, a novel by Hélène Dorion, translated by Jonathan Kaplansky.
And much more!
Somebody Call a Doctor
Last week, our very own editor-at-large, Alexander Sallas, successfully defended his dissertation at Western University, in London, Ontario. He is now a bona fide expert in coffee, horror movies, and deus ex machina. Congratulations, Dr. Sallas!