Reviews

White Lung

HAL NIEDZVIECKI

White Lung (Anvil Press) by Grant Buday. This is the comic novel that should have been given to delegates at the WTO in Seattle. The story concerns long-time bakery workers and the plant closure that will soon put them out of a job. Buday registers the shuttered, limited failures and hopes held by his tormented cast of not-quite-caricatures, including the simpering Epp, the drunken Klaus (who sleeps in the basement to avoid his own ambitions), the sexually repressed Stahl, and the reluctant family man Singh. What starts off as an account of pay cuts forced on an ineffectual union ends up as a wide-ranging rumination on what happens when a life and a job suddenly separate. Where were the technocrats plotting the rise of the global economy when Buday's motley crew of drunken workers baked their last loaf?

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HAL NIEDZVIECKI

Hal Niedzviecki is a writer, cultural commentator and editor. He is also the founder and fiction editor of Broken Pencil magazine. He lives in Toronto.


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