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Overview
Along with Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley (b. 1930) is one of Canada's most popular and important writers. A consummate stylist and entertainer, he seems driven to return to a set of private obsessions that electrically connect with the most decisive events of the twentieth century. While some wish to claim him as an untiring advocate of free speech or as Canada's most ardent antiwar writer, others argue that his work is best defined by its reverence for animals and the sanctity of the natural world. In this comprehensive study of Findley's eight novels, novella, three story collections, three plays, and memoir, Diana Brydon argues that Findley's fiction engages with the legacy of modernism as both a social and artistic movement that reached an impasse in the holocaust, which for Findley encompasses the Nazi concentration camps and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For Findley, the holocaust becomes an organizing image for horror and a call to remembrance, for the demarcating lines of memory and forgetting. Such horrific events recall and resituate the repressed histories of violence on which the new world of the Americas was built by European immigrants often fleeing violence yet trailing it in their wake. Brydon's clearly written yet sophisticated study draws on a range of approaches, from the historical to the postcolonial, in assessing Timothy Findley's accomplishment.Synopsis
Along with Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley (b. 1930) is one of Canada's most popular and important writers. A consummate stylist and entertainer, he seems driven to return to a set of private obsessions that electrically connect with the most decisive events of the twentieth century. While some wish to claim him as an untiring advocate of free speech or as Canada's most ardent antiwar writer, others argue that his work is best defined by its reverence for animals and the sanctity of the natural world. In this comprehensive study of Findley's eight novels, novella, three story collections, three plays, and memoir, Diana Brydon argues that Findley's fiction engages with the legacy of modernism as both a social and artistic movement that reached an impasse in the holocaust, which for Findley encompasses the Nazi concentration camps and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For Findley, the holocaust becomes an organizing image for horror and a call to remembrance, for the demarcating lines of memory and forgetting. Such horrific events recall and resituate the repressed histories of violence on which the new world of the Americas was built by European immigrants often fleeing violence yet trailing it in their wake. Brydon's clearly written yet sophisticated study draws on a range of approaches, from the historical to the postcolonial, in assessing Timothy Findley's accomplishment.
Booknews
Focuses on the popular contemporary Canadian writer's eight novels but also accounts for his novella, short stories, plays, and memoir. Argues that his fiction engages with the legacy of modernism as both a social and artistic movement that reached an impasse in the holocaust, which for him encompasses both the Nazi concentration camps and the atomic bombing of Japan. Includes an annotated bibliography. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.