A propos de l'auteur
Œuvres de John Gallant
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Nom canonique
- Gallant, John
- Date de naissance
- 1917
- Sexe
- male
- Nationalité
- Canada
- Relations
- Seth (son)
Membres
Critiques
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Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 1
- Membres
- 75
- Popularité
- #235,804
- Évaluation
- 4.2
- Critiques
- 5
- ISBN
- 1
Seth grew up hearing the stories which his father shared every time he had a chance. To the growing child, they sounded like adventures and every retelling added more details - as often happens with stories like that. As he was growing older, he started realizing that they are anything but - and that the humor in them is covering for desperation and hopelessness. So he decided to ask his father to start recording the stories and sending them over. Seeing them on paper, arriving sporadically, showed an even starker side of them - the humor which his father injected in the telling was all but gone - the only thing remaining was the reality of growing in poverty in a very rural part of the Prince Edward Island province - the village of New Acadia (later known as St. Charles) in the neighborhood of Rollo Bay in the 1920s and 1930s (but not on the coast itself).
John Gallant was born in 1917 in a family which would have been better off without children - the father was uneducated and frequently without a job, the mother was a housewife who seemed to care about her children but had way too many of them. There were some grandparents in the picture but they were not well-off either and the winters can be brutal in that part of the world. A lot of the early stories in this collection of autobiographical stories contain barely suppressed (and not always suppressed) loathing towards a father who had no job, no prospects, no dreams and yet wanted and had a big family.
I am not sure how much editing Seth did for this book - the stories do not sound like his usual style so I suspect we are actually hearing John's voice in a lot of it. The language and the stories are simple - the way a man who struggled to survive and never had a chance for real education talks and tells stories. But they also show where Seth got storytelling abilities (unless he helped more than it looks like he did).
Each of the stories in the book is very short, usually just a few pages but I dare you to try to read just a story at a time. There is some repetition and the story does not move entirely linearly (and some of the repetition comes from that) but reading it, it feels like the kind of stories family tell around the table or when the children come home. It was not an easy read in places, especially knowing that it happened (let's just say that the exploited children of the Dickens novels had it easy compared to some of what happened here). But it also showed me a part of Canada I am not very familiar with at a time when I am much more familiar with European and US history than Canadian (although admittedly, that may be true for most periods in history).
The short book (120 small pages with a lot of blank space) is the kind of memoirs I like reading - not those of the makers and the shakers of the world but the people who just lived in that area, in that time. These are also the kind of memoirs that rarely get published - this one would have never been published if Seth was not the artist that he is.
In addition to the cover and the editing, Seth also provided an introduction (in the form of a comic) and illustrations throughout the book (and I suspect he worked on the selection of the font and other visual elements).
Strongly recommended if you are interested in how some poor rural people lived during the Great Depression in Canada or if you like personal stories.… (plus d'informations)