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Imagine a book that mingles the cultural landscapes of Jack Hodgins and Ethel Wilson with the impressionistic fragments of Virginia Woolf, can curse along with Irvine Welsh, and is clearly as comfortable with carnality as any medical journal and you have a rough approximation of Cynthia Flood's refreshingly daring and difficult debut novel,
Making a Stone of the Heart. Flood works backwards through the 20th century, beginning with the death of her central character, the near-nonagenarian Dora Dow. At Dora's autopsy, a pathologist discovers a lithopedion (an unborn fetus, conceived outside of the womb, that has calcified, literally becoming a stone child) that Dora has been carrying for decades. Lithopedions are an obsession of Owen Jones, Dora's sometime lover, who is dying in a local seniors home. They were also the lifelong interest of Dr. Jonathan Smyth, a Vancouver GP whose life has a way of colliding with Dora's at its greatest (and lowest) moments.
Flood gradually traces the lives of these characters to their sources in a boldly disjunctive and digressive way, managing to get much of Vancouver's 20th century, from Expo back to the First World War, between the pages of her book. Making a Stone of the Heart is by no means a pleasant read--it is filled with family squabbles, dire poverty, frank depictions of sexism and racism, and, of course, an exploration of the stranger side of gynecological medicine. Flood hasn't quite mastered the art of giving a fragmented novel the entrancing pace of a good linear narrative, but this is an ambitious and original book, the debut of an assured and accomplished novelist. --Jack Illingworth
Product Description
When curmudgeonly Owen Jones died in a Bella Coola nursing home, no one who knew the elderly man could imagine the extraordinary story of his life. Spooling backwards through time against the backdrop of Vancouver's raw, exuberant growth over the last hundred years, Making a Stone of the Heart tells Owen's story and those of his lover, Dora Dow, and of Dr. Jonathan Smyth. The lives of the three have been irrevocably tied together by their knowledge of two terrible secrets — secrets that spun each of their lives off on unforeseen trajectories. What are the secrets of the heart that each carries within? What mysteries lie in their pasts? As their lives unwind back to the beginning, the answers are expertly revealed.
