Arvida
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the 2015 Giller Prize
Finalist for the 2016 Best Translated Book Award
One of Quill & Quire’s Books of the Year, 2015
A twenty-five-thousand-copy bestseller in Quebec, Arvida, with its stories of innocent young girls and wild beasts, attempted murder and ritual mutilation, haunted houses and road trips heading nowhere, is unforgettable. Like a Proust-obsessed Cormac McCarthy, Samuel Archibald's portrait of his hometown, a model town design by American industrialist Arthur Vining Davis, does for Quebec's North what William Faulkner did for the South, and heralds an important new voice in world literature.
Samuel Archibald teaches contemporary popular culture at the University of Quebec in Montreal, where he lectures on genre fiction, horror movies, and video games, among other subjects.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
First published in French in 2011, Archibald's (Le sel de la terre) collection of 14 stories mostly paints a loose portrait of the author's hometown of Arvida, Quebec, accented by gothic, sometimes surreal individuals and events. "In the Midst of Spiders" follows a corporate executioner (whose job is telling people they are losing their's) who knows his own turn on the chopping block will come. In the visually evocative "Jigai," two women in Hokkaido embark on body scarring and dismemberment, for pleasure and for power. "The Last-Born" follows Raisin, a blunt, unintelligent man, one of the town's "last-borns," who doesn't know how to live his own life or interact competently with others. The strongest story, "House Bound," is a haunted house narrative about the horrors of existing within a broken family. Like the other strong stories in the collection, it focuses on the nature of things nature itself, and human nature and the systems constructed by and around it. Though Archibald's writing is clean and his imagery strong, the two trilogies that intersect with the other stories "Blood Sisters" and "Arvida" are more focused on crafting a tone representative of a place and time, and they are not inhabited by fully fleshed-out characters, which detracts from the impact of the other narratives.
