"First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later."
When fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons' parents rob a bank, his sense of normal life is forever altered. In an instant, this private cataclysm drives his life into before and after, a threshold that can never be uncrossed.
His parents' arrest and imprisonment mean a threatening and uncertain future for Dell and his twin sister, Berner. Willful and burning with resentment, Berner flees their home in Montana, abandoning her brother and her life. But Dell is not completely alone. A family friend intervenes, spiriting him across the Canadian border, in hopes of delivering him to a better life. There, afloat on the prairie of Saskatchewan, Dell is taken in by Arthur Remlinger, an enigmatic and charismatic American whose cool reserve masks a dark and violent nature.
Undone by the calamity of his parents' robbery and arrest, Dell struggles under the vast prairie sky to remake himself and define the adults he thought he knew. But his search for grace and peace only moves him nearer to a harrowing and murderous collision with Remlinger, an elemental force of darkness.
A true masterwork of haunting and spectacular vision from one of our greatest writers, Canada is a profound novel of boundaries traversed, innocence lost and reconciled, and the mysterious and consoling bonds of family. Told in spare, elegant prose, both resonant and luminous, it is destined to become a classic.
My thought
This is my first Richard Ford novel and I quite enjoyed his writing. Very evocative of place and the voice of the fifteen year old boy rang true. It's written in the voice of a man who's parents robbed a bank but more, how his life developed
I found the prose to be very good and it has something interesting to say, but I was a bit unhappy with the way the story was told.
The first half describes the life of Dell Parsons, a bookish young loner of a teen, who lives a reasonably normal life in Great Falls, Mont. with his parents and sister in the 1960s – until his middle-class parents are arrested for a bank heist. The second half of the novel follows him to Saskatchewan as a strange twist of fate blows the untethered boy north.The strength of this book isn't the plot, although excitement and suspense eventually find its way to the page in Part II, it is the writing. A fight through the first part pays off in the end.
Melancholy that is how I felt after reading Canada. This is not a fly by night, grabs you by the seat of your pants or light beach read. This is a profound, deeply intense, serious and deep book. Be prepared to think. At times I shut the book and thought about what I had read.
A must read and must own for you are sure to get new meaning each time you read it.
Quotes
“What I know is, you have a better chance in life ---of surviving it---if you tolerate loss well; manage not to be a cynic through it all; to subordinate, as Ruskin implied, to keep proportion, to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good, even if admittedly good is often not simple to find.”
"...try to include in my thinking as much as I possibly could, and not let my mind focus in an unhealthy way on only one thing, and to always know something I could relinquish. My parents for their part had by turns counseled me in favor of acceptance...I would try to mediate among the good counsels I'd been given: generosity, longevity, acceptance, relinquishment, letting the world come to me - and, with these things, to make a life."
“"Life's passed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part."”
Florence La Blanc
