Cloud
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“Why, when we take such care to disguise our true selves from others, would we expect them to be an open book to us?”
Harry Steen, a businessman travelling in Mexico, ducks into an old bookstore to escape a frightening deluge. Inside, he makes a serendipitous discovery: a mid-nineteenth-century account of a sinister storm cloud that plagued an isolated Scottish village and caused many gruesome and unexplainable deaths. Harry knows the village well; he travelled there as a young man to take up a teaching post following the death of his parents. It was there that he met the woman whose love and betrayal have haunted him every day since. Presented with this astonishing record, Harry resolves to seek out the ghosts of his past and return to the very place where he encountered the fathomless depths of his own heart.
With Cloud, critically acclaimed Canadian author Eric McCormack has written a masterpiece of literary Gothicism, a gripping, darkly imagined story about the nature of love in a world where menace hovers at every turn.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This, McCormack's fifth novel, is his first in 12 years, is worth the wait. The story is told by Harry Steen, a Scottish-Canadian businessman, who retrospectively narrates the events of his life. He recounts his impoverished childhood in a Scottish tenement called the Tollgate, where violence is commonplace and the ground is littered with unexploded bombs left over from the war. While still a young man, Harry leaves the Tollgate to take up a teaching post in Duncairn. It is there that he endures a heartbreak so devastating that he abandons his teaching post and sets off on a series of peripatetic journeys to Africa, Venezuela, and eventually Canada. The novel abounds with colorful grotesques Harry's miner father, who delights in cracking bleak jokes; Charles Dupont, a French-Canadian doctor who has mended his own broken heart by escaping to tribal Africa. McCormack imbues the novel with a great deal of intertextuality books within books, abundant epigraphs, and even at one point an amusing nod towards his own bibliography. But the novel's true greatness comes its portrait of Harry, the lovesick traveller and memory artist. Hopefully, we won't have to wait another 12 years for the next McCormack offering.
