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TOist Review of Books: What We All Long For
Traditionally Canadian literature has been divided into two very logical halves, English and French. But within English Canadian Literature there really should be another division, one that reflects this city’s overwhelming dominance in English Canadian letters. The bulk of the country’s publishers are here. The country’s influential critics, journalists and chattering classes live, write and pontificate in the cafes and bars of the Annex, the Beaches and Queen St. West. This dominance translates into a vitality in our literary scene. Every year dozens of novels are published by Toronto-based writers about the city, more than enough to demand that those who look at the state of Canadian literature look at the Toronto-novel as a subject worth studying.
Dionne Brand’s new novel What We All Long For is a recent example of the Toronto-novel. Brand’s novel of four young Torontonians draws as much of its strength because Brand captures the energy of urban Toronto: the day-to-day cultural mash-up of Kensington Market, the rain-soaked celebrations of the world cup in Korea Town, the streetcar, the subway.
Pair this urban energy with Brand’s lyrical yet muscular prose and you get some truly sublime moments like this description which closes the book’s first chapter and captures the thousand of intersecting stories the city can barely contain. “Lives in the city are doubled, tripled, conjugated – women and men all trying to handle their own chain of events, trying to keep the story straight in their own heads. At times they catch themselves in sensational lies, embellishing or avoiding a nasty secret here and there, juggling the lines of causality, and before you know it, it’s impossible to tell one thread from another.”
In this novel, Brand captures the multi-ethnicity of Toronto, one of this city’s defining qualities and something reflected to a lesser extent in other Canadian cities. The book’s title, its story of young Canadians blindly feeling their way through life, of a city that seemingly mutates and changes before the eyes of those who live there, all of this resonates for almost any Torontonian.
To Brand’s credit the strength of her storytelling and the ferocity of her style should allow those not in Toronto to feel these same resonances . They might not get that spine-tingling familiarity when Brand describes Carla, the bike messenger streaking across the Bloor Viaduct or Tuyen, the artist, working in her second floor College St. apartment, but Brand’s story of loss, love and clinging on to whatever you can find is no less affecting.
The TOist review of books reviews relatively recent books by Torontonian writers and appears on the last Friday of each month.