From Amazon
Completed just before Matt Cohen's death from cancer in December 1999,
Typing is a stunning recreation of one writer's literary life. It's more than a memoir, though certainly Cohen takes readers through his life, from his birth in Kingston, Ontario, in 1942 to his decision, just five months before his death, to put his literary life in perspective. The 26 keys refer to Cohen's 26 books: collections of short stories, novels, works in translation, and children's books. One thing that Cohen makes clear is how hard it is to be a writer, especially, he suggests, if you're also a Jew, an outsider in Canada and desperate to find a way to connect with your country's literary landscape. Yet even as Cohen writes about his struggles with what he saw as an English-language literature dominated by its predominantly Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, small-town perspective and his comfort, by comparison, with the European literary landscape, some of his best fiction, including
Elizabeth and After and the Salem Quartet novels, is deeply rooted in the very landscape where he felt most out of place. Cohen writes eloquently about his literary journey and about some of the men and women who played important roles in his own literary life, including George Grant and Margaret Laurence.
Typing adds a personal touch to a remarkable literary legacy.
--Jeffrey Canton
Review
“
Typing: A Life in 26 Keys is important not only for what it reveals about one of the country’s most respected writers, but for the light it sheds on the years during which Canadian culture came of age. [it is]…a deeply affecting work, an eloquent conclusion to a life devoted to writing.” –
The Kitchener-Waterloo Record“However we view it,
Typing is the most penetrating exploration of the dark side of creative genius I’ve read since Lawrence Durrell’s
The Black Book....” –
The Globe and Mail
"Matt was a consummate writer. I don't know of anyone who lived a commitment to the process of writing more thoroughly and with more intensity than he did." —Margaret Atwood
"I believe that when the dust has settled, long after we've joined him, readers in many countries will be finding their way into the funny, poignant, bittersweet pleasures of Matt Cohen's imagination. This is a body of work whose stature will grow with time." —Dennis Lee
