Wigford Rememberies
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Wigford is a small town in rural Southwestern Ontario, home to a cast of recurring characters: Buzz, a drunk-driving father of two; his wife, who should have married Bert Walmsley instead; Happy Henry, a devout, socially inept apostle who loves to play the organ; Elmer, a stroke survivor.
Wigford Rememberies tells this community's stories through an impressionistic series of vignettes. The language is inventive, innovative and exciting, and whether describing mucking out the pig barn—“there in the dust and the sweet smells of grain and straw and the heavy brown odour of shit so strong it makes you sneeze"—or helping a drunk articulate how to manipulate God's forgiveness—“‘if I gave my heart to Jesus—right there on my deathbed the minute before I died—he'd forgive everything an I'd go up into Heaven and be saved just as much as the other guy who never did nothin' wrong at all with no difference?'"—Harness wields words with an eye for detail, musicality and style.
Visceral, reflective and lyrical, Wigford Rememberies is a poetic evocation of mood and epiphanic realizations, and will resonate with anyone who has ever confronted suffering, love or the unknowable.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This moving debut novel from Harness (The Art of Charlie Chaplin) reads more like a collection of connected short stories, centering around the fictional town of Wigford, Ontario. The stories of its inhabitants and their confusions, heartbreaks, and everyday frustrations are told with unshrinking honesty and real compassion. Buzz, the heavy-drinking father of two, is trying to reason out God's forgiveness with simple Happy Henry, an itinerant proselytizer; Buzz's wife, Mona, knows she would have been happier marrying another. David Crowe is the odd-looking, anemic boy whom nobody likes, and Joseph Hardwick is a general favorite with a cruel streak. Each chapter is by turns realistic and poetic. In "Come All Ye Young Lovers," the characters gather for an anniversary party. Children and dogs run through the hubbub, the women gossip in the sitting room, and the men in the kitchen posture over their beer. Each conversation is rich in its undercurrents, the things not said, and yet these feel like something overheard. "Nightsong" is a lyrical chapter, reminiscent of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, swooping down from the wider view of Wigford to the particular details of its inhabitants' dreams, secret hopes, and disappointments. These characters and their stories will linger with readers.
