"I n 2008, at the age of fifty-one, André Alexis published his second novel. He had come rather late to the game, putting out his first collection of short stories at thirty-seven and his debut novel a few years later. But his work was well received, and that first novel, Childhood, garnered him a brace of major literary prizes. Four hundred and eighty pages long and a decade in the making, Asylum was a suitably ambitious follow-up."
"Exploring the intersecting lives of a cast of characters in Ottawa during the early Brian Mulroney administration, the action is driven by a bureaucratic hero peddling a scheme to build a vast prison complex, something "great and deep and noble" that would rehabilitate degenerates through its stunning beauty. Part social novel, part allegory, part parable, it was a big, serious book."
André Alexis published a second novel, Asylum, a 480-page work that took a decade to complete and combined social novel, allegory and parable. Asylum centered on a bureaucratic protagonist promoting a grand prison project touted as a rehabilitative monument, but the novel met a chilly reception. The rejection prompted a personal and creative turning point that led Alexis to London, where he wandered Camberwell while listening obsessively to Beethoven's Sixth. His attention shifted to the flat land of Southwestern Ontario and to a new idea: a young priest arriving in Barrow whose faith is tested by miracles. Alexis described the writing of that new project as a deeply immersive, dreamlike experience.
Read at The Walrus
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]