- Hardcover: 414 pages
- Publisher: HarperCollins Canada; 1st ed edition (Aug 9 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0002005018
- ISBN-13: 978-0002005012
- Product Dimensions: 21.8 x 14.2 x 3.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 703 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #378,022 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Amazon.ca
A finely detailed depiction of the Depression era, Clara Callan is told entirely in the letters and journal entries of two adult sisters, Clara and Nora Callan, and their older lesbian friend, Evelyn. The novel, Wright's ninth, made a surprising sweep of Canada's major awards for best novel--the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Award--in 2001. Wright has the gift of making the reader care deeply about these characters and their worlds, which include small town Ontario, where Clara is a sensitive schoolteacher, and New York City, where the younger Nora has moved to become a radio soap opera star. Since both sisters are still "on the shelf," their roller-coaster love lives--Nora's in worldly Manhattan and Clara's in the more restrictive atmosphere of small-town spinsterhood--are a primary subject of their letters and Clara's journal.
This is a quiet book, studied and well researched, but thoroughly engaging and readable. Numerous references to period music, political events, and the looming war quite successfully place the reader at both the centre and the periphery of life in the 1930s. Side trips to Italy and to view the Dionne quintuplets feel entirely authentic. With deceptive simplicity, the author creates a world of clear images: "Nora came in from her shuffleboard game with a sweater tied across her shoulders, her hair damp from the rain." Most importantly, Wright has realized characters that come alive on the page--quite a feat considering the self-imposed limitations of this novel's form. --Mark Frutkin
From Publishers Weekly
Canadian author Wright (The Age of Longing) has published eight novels, but remains unknown to most readers in the States. His most recent offering, which won Canada's 2001 Governor General's Award and the Giller Prize, could change that. The story's conceit is simple enough: Clara Callan is a single "schoolteacher who likes to write poetry," left to fend for herself in the tiny town of Whitfield, Ontario, after her father dies and her sister, Nora, takes off for New York City. The novel is made up of a series of letters and journal entries written between 1934 and 1939. During that time, Nora becomes a radio soap opera star, while Clara loses her faith in God, is raped by a vagrant, has an abortion, engages in an affair with a married man named Frank and finally gives birth to a daughter. Nora and the lesbian writer of her soap opera, Evelyn Dowling, are Clara's main correspondents, but the news she relates in her letters (such as "grippe and calloused hands"-although she also shows concern for the world's more serious injustices) contrasts with the darker events recorded in her journal entries. Wright has accomplished an amazing feat by allowing his characters to emerge, fully formed and true, without authorial intrusion into their intimate psychological world, revitalizing the epistolary form in the process. This novel will remind some readers of the American poet Elizabeth Bishop, herself an avid correspondent, and of the way in which the elegant surfaces of her letters sometimes cracked open to reveal demons lurking below.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rediscover the 1930's and a great Canadian writer!,
By Blflowerbug (Quebec, Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Clara Callan (Hardcover)
I was extremely intrigued by the title when I first noticed this book on the shelves of my favorite bookstore. I immediately wanted to know who was Clara Callan. I was not disappointed in Richard B. Wright's latest novel. Written in diary and letter form this is the romantic and sometimes tragic story of two Canadian sisters, one, an ordinary school teacher, the other, an aspiring actress. The writer leads us into their thoughts and through their actions and the repercussions they face as he develops his characters through the 1930's, retelling a bit of our history. Highly recommended. You won't be disappointed. I look forward to his next book.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An unremarkable life?,
By
This review is from: Clara Callan (Paperback)
Clara Callan, the protagonist of Wright's novel, is a small town spinster in the 1930s. She lives a reasonably comfortable life thanks to the inheritance of her father's house and a job as a local schoolteacher. Through her diary entries and exchanges of letters, mainly with her more glamorous younger sister Nora, Clara reveals herself to the reader. Wright has created a believable character that "grows on you" as her personality emerges little by little. Life's difficulties during the Depression years, in particular for a single woman in rural Southern Ontario become apparent through the description of daily events. However, a very dramatic personal incident and its aftermath force Clara to confront her new circumstances in a very direct manner. While she was accustomed to express her daily experiences and reflections in poems, events interfere and poetry becomes impossible. She recognizes "how suddenly a life can become misshapen, divided brutally into before and after a dire event." Her beliefs are challenged and so is her self-contained whole-ness as a person. Clara's personal story is embedded in the realities of the mid-thirties where unemployment is rife and poverty spreading. Although at the periphery of the main thrust of the book, Wright alludes to the emerging pre-war anxieties. He touches on the contrasts between city and rural living, utilizing Clara's reluctance to accept such innovations as the telephone, as an example. Yet, the regular Saturday trips to Toronto, perceived by her as a necessary escape from the village, lead to a new, important phase in her personal development, giving her also a new taste of independence. She visits her sister in New York, although in rather difficult time in her life. Cleverly, Wright lets her visit pre-war Italy as a third party to her sister's vacation. It allows the author to add impressions of the growing political conflicts in Europe as a backdrop without losing the focus of the story. The counterweight to Clara is Nora, who could not bear small-town Ontario and leaves for New York to "make it in radio". She becomes successful as a radio voice in daytime "soaps" and her personal life seems to take on some aspects of a soap opera itself. Nora is privileged in finding a solid rock in a glamorous female friend, Evelyn, while her on and off affairs are far less successful. Clara, always concerned about her sister and her superficial lifestyle, attempts to remain the firm family base for her sister, but her own life story places her more and more on a shaky ground. She finds advice and empathy through her correspondence with Evelyn. Clara Callan is a very engaging story indeed. Wright successfully places himself into the mind of a woman: Clara's personality quietly and gently takes hold of the reader as one follows her in the exploration of the multifaceted realities of her time and place.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Marvelous!,
By
This review is from: Clara Callan (Hardcover)
It would be superflous to simply praise this book, after all it is one of the rare if not the only book to have won the two most prestigious CanLit awards, the Governer General's and the (Sociabank) Giller award. Clara Callan is an undulating work of literary excellence. This is a must read book.
The story is set before the second world war in a small town in Ontario, where Clara Callan, a solitary thirty something school teacher, ponders the meaning of life, love and happiness while floating in the banal everyday existence that a small town has to offer. But no life is ever ordinary and the journey Clara takes in the years leading to the second world war are filled with both happiness and sorrow but most of all discovery. No man is an island and certainly not Miss Callan whose correspondance with her sister Nora, a sprity creature who runs off New York to be a radio star, and the ever sharp witted Evelyn, alongside Clara's diary, forms the basis of the novel. The true charm of the novel is not its plot twists and deft storytelling but the humanity with which the characters are rendered for both their beauty and warts, and the recognition that even the most seemingly mundane and ordinary life is a tale worth telling.
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