When fifteen-year-old Del Parsons' parents rob a North Dakota bank, his normal life is altered forever, and a threshold is crossed that can never be uncrossed. His parents' imprisonment threatens a turbulent and uncertain future for Del and his twin sister, Berner. Fierce with resentment, Berner flees their Montana home for California. But Del is not completely abandoned. A family friend spirits him across the Canadian border toward safety and a better life. There, afloat on the Saskatchewan prairie, Del finds only cold refuge from Arthur Remlinger, an enigmatic and alluring American fugitive with a dark and violent past.
Undone by the calamity of his parents' robbery, Del struggles to remake himself. But his search for grace only moves him nearer to a harrowing and murderous collision with the forces of darkness that shadow us all.
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.
Canada is a coming of age book with 15 year old Del Parsons as the narrator, an unusually introspective, reflective, and insightful adolescent. I liked Del and was rooting for him and his twin sister, Berner, as they were forced to cope with and manage circumstances that most adolescents, I hope, don't have to deal with.
Del's parents rob a bank in North Dakota, get arrested, and Del gets spirited away to Canada by an acquaintance of Del's mother to avoid being taken by Child Protective authorities . Del is apprenticed to Arthur Remlinger, a hotel owner in Saskatchewan, who also is an American ex-patriot.
The creative tension in the book is developed from Del's trying to make sense of his experiences never quite knowing what god awful thing might happen to him next. The kid is resilient, observant, and purposeful in dealing the circumstances which life places in his path.
I liked this book a lot and a great deal of my interest was in caring about what becomes of Del and his sister, Berner, who ran away to California instead of going to Canada with Del according to her mother's plan.
Literature should teach us about life and how do manage the moral dilemmas that we are often faced with. The dysfunction in Del's family and the world he encounters is in some ways nonsensical, "crazy", which so much of human life entails. The dysfunction is banal, unnecessary, and involves self-inflicted suffering which could have been avoided had one chosen a different path, but "chosen" doesn't quite seem the right word because it seems that some situations that we create and get involved in are, in some ways, our destinies, and were "accidents waiting to happen".
This novel has a spiritual quality in that it asks a basic and sub conscious question which is "What is the meaning of life?" The underlying question this novel deals with is "Given the absurd things that happen in Del's life what will be it's meaning? Del lives the question and it is an honor and privilege for the reader to witness this and be invited to live the question with him.
I recommend this novel.
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