In Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana and John Crowley's Love and Sleep,part of his Aegypt sequence, characters born with cauls are summoned in the middle of the night to walk among the dead. Kay calls these individuals Night Walkers. Their story stretches back to real-world superstitions about children born with a membrane around their heads. This …
Continue reading Ember Nights in Guy Gavriel Kay and John Crowley
Unreliable narrators have a way of turning up in the most recent short stories I have drafted, so, in the interest of attaching this idea to historical fantasy, here is my blog post of this week: In my Honours thesis, I drew attention to the conflict posed by fusing the historical novel with the fantasy …
Continue reading Unreliable Narrators and Historical Fantasy
Rawi Hage's unnamed protagonist—an unreliable narrator—fantasizes almost as much as he steals. A poor, starving Middle-Eastern immigrant walking the Montreal winter streets, he sees himself as a cockroach: the lowest of the low, but also crafty and able to survive. His awkwardness around women causes him to undergo what he perceives as a metamorphosis into …
I counted it a significant turn of good fortune that I had just finished reading Rawi Hage's novel Cockroach when it almost won this year's Canada Reads competition (Joseph Boyden's The Orenda took first prize). It took me 5 years to get around to reading it. Nonetheless, this author—whose book I am reviewing Friday—has had …
You may know Guy Gavriel Kay as a historical fantasy novelist, author of River of Stars, a book that continues to be nominated for various awards. But did you know that he is also a poet? Beyond this Dark House is that obscure volume of poetry you might have remembered seeing just before the title …
Today is a special day in the life of a blogger: the day his baby turns one. Although I once had another blog that I updated infrequently, this has been my first serious attempt to blog. Was this year a success? In celebration of this great anniversary, let my reminisce a retrospective over the marking …
Is it even possible to canonize all the things I have learned in my three and a half years studying literature at Canada's best university to 10 items? I believe my critics will be able to deconstruct the bejesus out of this list. They'd probably base their argument on how I privilege my subjectivity over …
Continue reading Top 10 Things I Learned While Studying English Literature at McGill University
Every once in a while, two events in your life happen simultaneously and in their juxtaposition, a humorous situation appears in your imagination. I had just finished reading Guy Gavriel Kay's The Fionavar Tapestry and started a job as a salesman. Anyone familiar with the myth of King Arthur, especially as retold by Kay, and …
"Tigana, let my memory of you be like a blade in my soul." -Guy Gavriel Kay, Tigana . Alessan's mantra for his beleaguered nation, erased from history by the tyrant sorcerer Brandin of Ygrath, forms a central node in the theme of exile and memory in Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana. A novel set in the …
Continue reading Machiavelli and the Problem of Memory in Tigana
When Guy Gavriel Kay wrote his byzantine historical fantasy Sailing to Sarantium, he was stealing a title from a famous poem by William Butler Yeats: “Sailing to Byzantium.” After reading the novel last June, I took a close look at Yeats' poem to search for the items that might be said to have inspired Kay's …
Continue reading How did Yeats inspire Sailing to Sarantium?
Matthew Rettino 