Cures for Hunger
A Memoir
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3.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Almost unbelievable. You'll swear it's fiction.
"You haven't read a story like this one, even if your father was the kind of magnificent scoundrel you only find in Russian novels. Béchard is the rare writer who knows the secret to telling the true story." — Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings
Growing up in rural British Columbia, Deni Béchard worships his father, believing that he can do no wrong. Although his charismatic father is prone to racing trains and brawling, Deni has no idea how unusual his family is.
But when Deni discovers his father's true identity (and his other life as a bank robber), his imagination is set on fire. Before long, he begins to see himself as a character in one of his father's stories. He can't escape the sense that his father's life holds the key to understanding his own passions, aversions, and motivations.
Eventually Deni finds himself ensnared in the controlling impulses of his mysterious father and increasingly obsessed by his father's own muted recollections: the impoverished childhood in the Gaspé he'd fled long ago, the hunger for excitement and a better life, and a trail of crimes leading from Québec to the American west.
At once an extraordinary family story and an unconventional portrait of the artist as a young man, Cures for Hunger is a singular, deeply affecting memoir by an acclaimed writer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the opening pages of B chard's memoir, we learn that his duplicitous, bank-robbing father, Andr to whom the bulk of the book is devoted committed suicide "in a house empty but for a single chair on the outskirts of Vancouver." Begun just three months after his father's death, B chard's story is the result of "seventeen years of rewriting," and the process shows in the prose, which vacillates between that of a pretentious, if talented, young writer, and an adult whose understanding of his troubled youth has been refined by years of reflection and searching. Nevertheless, B chard powerfully evokes the ever-present tension between the author and his parents ("Our family always seemed on the verge of disaster, and then the danger passed, and very little changed."), as well as his own struggle to emulate and escape his father. At once a quest to uncover the details of Andr 's life including his real name (Edwin), the town in Quebec from whence he came and the family he left there, and a criminal record that led one of Andr 's sisters to remark, " Il ne faisait rien moiti .' He didn't do anything halfway." B chard's story is also one of personal discovery, and a teasing out of the function of memory: what it keeps, what it loses, and what it saves.
