Galore
by Michael Crummey
Other Press
352 pp/$15.95
The scope, tenor, and influence of Michael Crummey’s Galore are all suggested by its two opening epigrams. First, we have Gabriel Garcia Marquez – The invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love, says the Colombian giant in Memories of My Melancholy Whores. At least Crummey makes his inspiration transparent. In this, the Canadian author’s third and most ambitious novel, a clear debt is owed to Marquez, particularly One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Crummey’s setting is north – Newfoundland. His first two novels are also set here, but with Galore Crummey fashions the fictional fishing communities of Paradise Deep and The Gut from the coastal province. The novel begins when a dead whale beaches on the shore. What the residents find upon cutting the great creature open has impacts immediate and distant, incidental and (possibly) imagined. An albino man, naked, mute, stinking of fish, and – surprisingly – alive is excavated and dubbed Judah. Which brings us to the novel’s second epigram; I will bring my people again from the depths of the sea, says God, in an excerpt from Psalms. Perhaps Crummey is alluding to the Bible as first in the tradition of magical realism, developed thousands of years later by Marquez. Perhaps he is simply trying to foreground the religious themes of the work, like when Judah blots 7:5 onto a page with ink and sand (Let the enemy persecute my soul, and take it, etc). But the question curious readers will have is whether or not Crummey does anything new and exciting with the magical-realism genre, and some may persecute his soul for aping such a stable of twentieth century fiction.
The Late American Novel
It’s Sunday morning. A dog wakes me up. I hear it barking under the window, I open the window and yell at it. The lady who owns the dog is gardening. She shouts at me to quit yelling at her dog. I shout at her, so knock off the noise!, and slam down the window.
The Smiling People
