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Chargement... Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul (2011)par David Adams Richards
   Aucun Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre.  TheBookJunky | Apr 22, 2016 |    ) Romonko | Jul 5, 2015 | Hector Penniac dies on his first day of work, and it isn't clear whether it is an accident or a murder. The community comes to believe Roger Savage, a while man whose property extends onto the reserve, is guilty of killing Hector. But is this true? The author does an outstanding job of showing how perception can become reality; and of showing how people shape truth and perception to their own ends. The story is partly a mystery story, and partly an expose of political intrigue in band governance. Superbly well told, with every character deeply developed -- and often conflicted. Highly recommended! (  ) LynnB | Nov 18, 2013 | Highly recommended. [book won in publisher contest, from booklounge.ca] (  ) BCbookjunky | Mar 31, 2013 | Amos Paul, the 75-year-old chief, fears that Savage is being scapegoated by being seen as the incarnation of centuries of wrongs committed by whites. The chief, the voice of reason, strives for truth and peace, but many of the younger people view Amos' conciliatory approach as obsolete and favour a more confrontational style which demands immediate retribution. They attempt to remove Savage from his home; the crisis gathers force, and tragedy ensues. Twenty years later, the chief's grandson, Markus Paul, who is an RCMP officer, sets out to unravel the mystery of Hector's death and to answer some questions surrounding subsequent events on the reserve. On the one hand, therefore, the book can be read as a mystery, but it is much, much more than that. The author scours the community and examines the motives of everyone affected by Hector's death. No one escapes unscathed. Corruption and weakness are exposed everywhere. Markus observes, "Yes . . . we all have one [cheatin' heart]" (267). One theme is people's "willingness to forego a certain integrity in order to belong to a group" (49). Chief Amos, the moral centre of the novel, explains people's behaviour with an analogy: "'There is always a big hidden giant in the room, and this giant attaches itself to people in a crowd, and moves them in one direction or another. Those who do not join this giant are outcast, and sometimes will get stepped on by great big feet. Those who join the giant have the benefit of puffing themselves up and acting like one, and sometimes do the stepping - until their friends leave and then they just get smaller and smaller. And sometimes after it is all over, they simply disappear'" (105). These words prove to be prophetic: many people, including the journalist Max Doran who covers the crisis, fall prey to this giant. The author examines the lingering consequences of Canada's mistreatment of aboriginal people, and there is do doubt of his sympathy for First Nations people. However, he bravely suggests, as Rayyan Al-Shawaf summarized in The Globe and Mail, that "Legitimate historical grievances cannot justify the pernicious notion of inherited guilt. . . . attempting to redress sins of the past sometimes leads to victimizing innocent descendants of the sinners." This is a book that all Canadians, both indigenous and non-indigenous, should read. Schatje | Jul 22, 2011 |
 Murder, betrayal, lies, hypocrisy, racism, sin, suffering and redemption. No, it’s not a plot synopsis from The Days of Our Lives; it’s just another day in New Brunswick’s Miramichi Valley, that hardscrabble world of loggers and fishermen, Indians and whites, saints and sinners that people the novels of David Adams Richards.....Richards is one of Canada’s most important English-language writers...For some, though, he displays a too unremittingly pessimistic view of the world. It’s true that the author’s fictive worlds are generally fraught with gloom but in this novel, at least, there is some redemption in the end.  In a stark, stunning and profound new novel, New Brunswick’s David Adams Richards (Mercy Among the Children, Nights Below Station Street) exposes Canada’s rawest nerve. Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul scrutinizes the lingering consequences of the country’s brutal treatment of aboriginal peoples. For a white man, Richards has chosen the most controversial tack imaginable: He delves deep into political machinations on a First Nations reserve during one long, hot summer of crisis. The novel embraces themes close to Richards’ heart, specifically the difficulty of transcending class and dysfunctional family history for his poor and rural protagonists. Here he extends his idea of family history to embrace the past of an entire people; two peoples, actually, white and indigenous.  , it should be noted that Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul is also relentlessly grim. This, of course, has been just as much of a hallmark of Richards' 37-year, 15-novel career as his habit of setting all his tales in the same Miramichi region. In this novel, the biggest acts of integrity and courage often pass unnoticed and are not rewarded. Much of the heroism is undocumented, even futile. The final scene may be one of the most devastating denouements in recent memory. As with most of Richards’s novels (Giller Prize co-winner Mercy Among the Children is a notable exception), Incidents is related by an omniscient narrator. From inhabiting the mind of a character to offering a panoptic viewer’s observations on that character’s predicament there lies a difficult segue, one which Richards does not always manage smoothly. But the characters themselves, who could have been frozen into moral archetypes – as has happened in previous Richards novels – attain a welcome level of complexity. Prix et récompenses
Highly charged and profoundly important, Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul is a new masterpiece from one of Canada's greatest writers. On a bright morning in June 1985, a young Micmac man starts his first day of work--but by noon he is dead, killed mysteriously in the fourth hold of the cargo ship Lutheran. Hector Penniac had been planning to go to university, perhaps to study medicine. Roger Savage, a loner who has had to make his own way since his youth, comes under suspicion of killing Hector over a union card and a morning's work. Even if he can't quite put it into words, Roger immediately sees the ways in which Hector's death will be viewed as symbolic, as more than an isolated tragedy--and that he is caught in a chain of events that will become more explosive with each passing day. The aging chief of Hector's band, Amos Paul, tries to reduce the tensions raised by the investigation into Hector's death and its connection to a host of other simmering issues, from territorial lines to fishing rights. His approach leads him into conflict with Isaac Snow, a younger and more dynamic man, whom many in the band would prefer to lead them--especially when the case attracts press attention in the form of an ambitious journalist named Max Doran, the first of many outsiders to bring his own agenda and motives onto the Micmac reserve. Joel Ginnish, Isaac's volatile and sometimes violent friend, decides to bring justice to Roger Savage when the authorities refuse to, blockading the reserve in order to do so. And though perhaps no one really means for it to happen, soon a single incident grows ineluctably into a crisis that engulfs a whole society, a whole province and in some ways a whole country. Twenty years later, RCMP officer Markus Paul--Chief Amos Paul's grandson, who was 15 years old when Hector was killed--tries to piece together the clues surrounding Hector Penniac's death. The decades have passed, and much about the case has been twisted beyond recognition by the many ways that different people have sought to exploit it. But, haunted by the past, Markus still struggles towards a truth that will snap "those chains that had once seemed impossible to break."This is a novel that begins with an instant from today's headlines, and digs down into the marrow to explore the oldest themes we know: murder and betrayal, race and history, the brutal and chaotic forces that guide the groups we are drawn into. Nothing is one-sided in David Adams Richards' world--even the most scheming characters have moments of grace, while the most benevolent are shown to have selfish motives or the need to show off their goodness. All are depicted with an almost Biblical gravity, framed by an understated genius of storytelling that makes this novel at once both an utterly gripping mystery, and a vitally important document of Canada's broken past and divided present. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
Discussion en coursAucunCouvertures populaires
 Google Books — Chargement...GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne: (4.42)
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Highly recommended.
[book won in publisher contest, from booklounge.ca] (