Childhood - Hardcover

Alexis, Andre

3.29

390 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747536325 ISBN 13: 9780747536321

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 1998

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Now in paperback, the winner of the Chapters/Best First Novel in Canada Award and the corecipient (with Alice Munro) of Canada's prestigious Trillium Award.

Set in the 1950s and '60s, this picaresque novel chronicles the childhood-or perhaps the loss of childhood-of Thomas MacMillan, a Canadian with ties to Trinidad, who pieces together, from memory and from related stories, the early years of his life. Raised in a small town near the U.S. border of Canada, Thomas is abandoned by his mother to the care of an eccentric grandmother. When he reaches the age of ten, his mother, Katarina, reclaims him and takes him to Ottawa, where they live in the Victorian home of Mr. Henry Wing, a magus-like figure whose love of science and the imagination becomes an important legacy for Thomas. But is he Thomas's father? This brilliantly crafted debut novel is a story about love, memory, and the potency of the past.

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Review:

Thomas MacMillan is 40, an orphan, an heir, a laboratory technician, an autodidact of esoteric intellectual appetites, as he writes this interrogation of the past disguised as a letter to his absent lover. Like Andre Alexis, both Thomas's restlessly sexual mother, Katarina, and his courtly mentor, Henry Wing, were born in Trinidad and resettled in Canada. Their unconventional lifelong relationship is both the deepest mystery and the central fact of Thomas's life, the creature in the center of his heart and the heart of this fictional memoir, the beast he walks around and around, prods with questions and tries to fix with lists of explanations and attributes. From his quasi-scientific attempts to understand the past, the nature of love in general and theirs in particular, Alexis derives some entertaining narrative quirks, including Thomas's notes, graphs, and footnotes in the text, letting paragraphs elide into nothingness as questions of motivation remain unresolved. After Thomas's grandmother dies, an event it takes him the better part of a day to discern, his footloose mother appears to claim her son, accompanied by a lover who abandons both on the road to Montreal. Mother and son seek refuge in the Ottawa home of the deliciously eccentric Henry Wing, a stock trader with a home laboratory and a gigantic library, who may or may not be Thomas's biological father. By the end of this gently funny and genuinely original little novel, we come to understand that what first seems linear and picaresque is actually a perfect circle, as Katarina goes home to die in her mother's bed and Thomas comes to inhabit Henry's wayward style of scholarship and his patient, distant style of loving. A debut this sly and satisfying promises fine things to come. --Joyce Thompson

About the Author:

Andr� Alexis was born in Trinidad in 1957 and grew up in Canada. Despair was published in Canada in 1994 and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize. Alexis lives in Toronto.

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