Reviews

The Parabolist

Stephen Osborne
Tags

In the well-written and funny book The Parabolist by Nicholas Ruddock (Double­day), a poet from Mexico takes over a poetry class for medical students in Toronto and precipitates a crazy string of events that includes a couple of murders (one of which may have been the result of reading a poem), a rape and a suicide attempt.

Nonetheless, this book will make you laugh—at the surprising idea that poetry can be the catalyst for violent and life-changing events, and at the dark humour of the medical students, who, when they’re not attending poetry class, are bending over their assigned cadavers and, week after week, cutting them up.

There’s also a guy who is driven to keep updating his book on French idioms even as the publisher is producing the galleys (language changes so quickly these days), an ill-fated midnight canoe ride (complete with a loon sighting) in which a young man encounters the wrong woman, and a lot of running around the streets of Toronto. Rud­dock is also a doctor, but don’t be put off: it just means that his descriptions of eviscerated body parts are deliciously graphic.

This is a great novel that just happens to be Canadian.

(Read here for an excerpt of The Para­bolist)

No items found.

Stephen Osborne

Stephen Osborne is a co-founder and contributing publisher of Geist. He is the award-winning writer of Ice & Fire: Dispatches from the New World and dozens of shorter works, many of which can be read at geist.com.


SUGGESTIONS FOR YOU

Reviews
Kendra Heinz

Big Dread at West Ed

Review of "Big Mall: Shopping for Meaning" by Kate Black.

Essays
Anik See

The Crush and the Rush and the Roar

And a sort of current ran through you when you saw it, a visceral, uncontrollable response. A physical resistance to the silence

Reviews
Anson Ching

Fables Galore

Review of "Galore" by Michael Crummey.