Ann Charney's first book, Dobryd (Permanent Press, 1996) is an autobiographical fiction about a Jewish girl who, by the time she was five years old, had spent half her life hidden away in a barn loft. That’s the beginning of an account of her childhood in a Polish town during World War II.
Rousseau’s Garden (Véhicule Press, 2001), follows Claire, a Montreal photographer, to Paris with her husband, who is an art historian. There she seeks an understanding of her mother and of the panic attacks she herself has been suffering from.
Distantly Related to Freud (Cormorant Books, 2008) is set in Montreal and Long Island, NY in the 1950s. Ellen and her mother have moved into a large house with a group of refugees from Central Europe, whose erratic behaviour and dark view of human nature captivate the young girl’s imagination.
And now, in Life Class (Cormorant, 2013), Charney focuses on Nerina, a young woman from Sarajevo, in the former Yugoslavia, who lost her parents during the Bosnian war and is now a refugee in Venice. An older woman, Helena, a survivor of World War II, takes Nerina under her wing in a series of events that see her move from Venice to Smith Falls and New York City and then to Montreal.
One of the great things, with a writer who has written several books, is that you can get a sense of the kinds of characters and issues that are of abiding interest to her. Ann Charney’s work is not limited by place or nationality, it has a considerable interest in girls and women in their relationships with their mothers, their friends, and their work, and it is always focused in some way of the process of creation – of writing, of photography, of the visual arts. This is a thoughtful body of work, reflective and wise and increasingly fun and funny as book follows book.
Watch this space for a transcript of the interview, which I will post as soon as I can transcribe it.
© Linda Leith, 2014
Salon .ll. and LLP publisher Linda Leith is the author, most recently, of Writing in the Time of Nationalism, which has just appeared in a French translation by Alain Roy, Écrire au temps du nationalisme (Leméac 2014).
When French author Annie Ernaux was ten years old, she overheard her mother conversing with a customer outside the family-run small grocery. The mother confided that there was a daughter before Annie, a six-year old girl who contracted diphtheria and who “died like a little saint.” L’Autre fille (The Other Daughter) is Annie Ernaux’s letter to the departed.
Annie Ernaux [Photo: Catherine Hélie, Gallimard]
“There's a lot more to come,” says Lady G, “a lot more good things to come. Just like anything else, you can have good and bad. The bad is going to get lost somewhere. The good is going to prevail. Because good is always over evil. It's just one of those things. Every day you have a new artist from the reggae or the dance hall fraternity. It can never stop. Music will surely live on.”
The Nobel prize-winning St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott died on March 17, 2017, at the age of 87. Ingrid Bejerman remembers her first meeting with him in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2000, and her last at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival in 2006.
Dennis Johnson of Melville House Books, who sees himself as an outsider, is critical of the mainstream of American publishing. I've heard him talk about publishing a couple of times, now, both times thanks to the Literary Press Group of Canada, of which LLP is a member. He's one of the more original voices in contemporary publishing.
