Book 40, Wild Animals I Have Known (1896) – Ernest Thompson Seton
“An immediate success upon its first publication in 1898, Wild Animals I Have Known gave the animal story new credibility and power as a literary genre and remains Seton’s best-loved work.”

Other useful links:
the Wikipedia entry for Ernest Thompson Seton

My thoughts:
I’m still working on this, but it’s really tough going for me. I’m not so bad with the stories in which the animals suffer or meet a bad end due to “natural” causes (though I’m still sad), but I really have a problem with human cruelty and disrespect for other animals. Under other circumstances, I’d likely have stopped reading during the story of Lobo and abandoned the book, but since it’s a CanLit Challenge book I decided I had to finish it.

There were a couple of stories I liked a lot (my favourite was about Silverspot the crow), but most were very difficult for me to get through. I can’t stand deliberate ruthlessness in the treatment of animals, and there were plenty of cruel, relentless humans in the pages of this book. I suppose Seton himself felt as though presenting the stories this way, with a proper respect for the animals’ point of view, could change peoples’ attitudes toward our furry and feathered relations (in this respect it reminded me much of Black Beauty), but in me he’s preaching to the choir.

Book 39, In the Village of Viger (1896) – Duncan Campbell Scott
“The ten stories in In the Village of Viger portray the life of a rural village as it faces the darkness of its own future. An established milliner, Madame Laroque, is upset by the advent of a younger, more popular rival. An innkeeper’s obsession with the Franco-Prussian War drives his descent into madness. A gardener longs to return to the village in France where his mother was born. At once comical, farcical, and tragic, this superb collection, first published in 1896, anticipates later collections of linked short stories including Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? and Margaret Laurence’s A Bird in the House.”

Other useful links:
the Wikipedia entry for Duncan Campbell Scott

My thoughts:
Not what I was expecting at all. Some of the stories contained some humour, some were rather sad, a few were actually spooky(!)–kind of in Turn of the Screw territory. My favourite was the last story “Coquelicot”, which wasn’t in the original collection. Tracy Ware’s afterword put things in perspective.

Book 38, Tempest-Tost (1951) – Robertson Davies
This is the first novel of Robertson Davies, set in the fictional city of Salterton (a stand-in for Kingston, Ontario). In this comedy of manners, various characters come together to put on a Little Theatre production of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest but some have ulterior motives and other agendas on their minds.

Other useful links:
the Wikipedia entry for Robertson Davies

My thoughts:
Reviewing this book on its own merits is a bit difficult. Throughout the entire reading experience, I couldn’t help but evaluate it with Davies’ later works in mind, as the precursor of the Deptford and Cornish trilogies (I have yet to read either of the Toronto trilogy books). That’s always a danger when you get familiar with an author and their “mature”* work and then go back to read the early stuff.

Looking at it in isolation, I would say it was an enjoyable read with quirky characters and some description of Canadian life in a small Ontario city. There were a few rather humourous episodes and Davies’ wit was to the fore a number of times. This was not a book of either major tragedy or drama (the worst thing that happens, happens to a horse, though there was a point where the novel could have turned very grim indeed), just a glimpse into a community over the course of a couple of months.

Looking at it as the prelude to the rest of Davies’ novels, one can certainly pick out similarities to and differences from the latter. For example, it had the exposition of characters that is so intrinsic to Fifth Business and World of Wonders, but not to the same degree. It had a short description of Hector’s background and childhood that was reminiscent of the more thorough treatment given to Francis Cornish in What’s Bred in the Bone. From the prominent place of allusion in the Robertson Davies novels I’ve read (e.g. Paracelsus in Rebel Angels and Arthurian myth in The Lyre of Orpheus), I was expecting a similar exploration of The Tempest, but didn’t get it. The play itself hardly figured at all.

*It seems a bit odd to characterise anything produced by Davies as anything other than mature–was he ever a young man??

Book 37, Armand Durand (1868) – Rosanna Leprohon
Paul Durand, a well-off farmer living in the fictional seigneurie of Alonville on the bank of the St. Lawrence, has two sons, each by a different wife (he is made a widower twice). They go off to school in Montreal where one flourishes and the other wishes to be back working outside on the farm. Sibling rivalry and a bad marriage play out against the backdrop of village and urban societies.

From the introduction:
“Obviously this novel demonstrated new interests on the part of the author. It appeared in a period of innovation. Novelists in Britain, America, and Europe were experimenting with problem novels. Mrs. Gaskell’s sombre novels were supplanting Dickens’ more humourous accounts of family and class relations–but even Dickens had turned from his early Pickwick style to the darker tones of Hard Times–a novel about industrial strikes, drunkenness, and family breakdown. In the 1860s Turgenev and Flaubert, Meredith and Melville were opening new avenues in their fiction. Mrs. Leprohon’s 1868 story reflects the changing concerns of contemporary novelists.”

Other useful links:
the Wikipedia entry for Rosanna Leprohon

My thoughts:
Armand Durand was quite distinct from Antoinette de Mirecourt. Where the latter novel had a rather tight plot contained within a relatively short period of time and with no extraneous subplots, this one is meandering, biographical, and takes place over the course of two generations. As well, Antoinette was more in the style of the previous century whereas Armand Durand has a stronger sense of realism. I quite liked this novel with all of its character studies set against the backdrop of Quebec society. Armand is likable, Delima is annoying, but not as annoying as Mrs. Martel. Armand’s marrying the wrong girl followed by the right girl after the first girl made him a widower reminded me a bit of David Copperfield, though Armand never loved his first wife and the reasons why Delima was unsuitable were far different. The only difficulty I had with the characters was with Paul fils. It seems so odd for him to suddenly turn so jealous of Armand so as to manipulate his dying father to cut Armand out of the will and to try to fix it so that their father would die without seeing Armand again. It’s such a cruel thing to do and there was no real reason for it (I mean it’s not like Paul senior favoured Armand and neglected his other son). Though interesting, the little subplot about Genevieve and de Chevandier was a little strange. It was like a setup for a further story that was later dropped. I couldn’t help but think that may have been due to the original serialisation—in fact this could be a cause of much of the unevenness of the novel.