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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... McMinnville Public Library | Wright, R. | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Winner in 2001 of Canada's two most prestigious literary awards -- the Governor General's Award and the Giller Prize -- Richard B. Wright's celebrated novel Clara Callan is the powerful, moving story of two sisters and their life-changing experiences on the eve of World War II.
It is the year 1934, and in a small town in Canada, Clara Callan reluctantly takes leave of her sister, Nora, who is bound for the show business world of New York. It's a time when people escape from reality through radio and the movies, when the Dionne Quints make headlines, when the growing threat of fascism in Europe is a constant worry, and the two sisters -- vastly different in personality yet inextricably linked by a shared past -- try to find their place within the complex web of social expectations for young women in the 1930s.
While Nora embarks on a glamorous career as a radio soap opera star, Clara, a strong and independent-minded woman, struggles to observe the traditional boundaries of a small and tight-knit community without relinquishing her dreams of love, freedom, and adventure. But Nora's letters eventually begin to reveal that her life in the big city is a little less exotic than it may seem: though her career is flourishing, her free spirit is curbed by a string of fairly conventional and unsuccessful personal relationships. Meanwhile, the tranquil solitude of Clara's life is shattered by a series of unforeseeable events, turns of fate that require all of Clara's courage and strength, and that will put the seemingly unbreakable bond between the sisters to the test.
Ultimately, both discover not only the joys of love and possibility, but also the darker side of life -- violence, deception, and loss -- lurking just beneath the surface of everyday experience.
Clara Callan is a mesmerizing tribute to friendship and sisterhood, romance and redemption, written with such insight and passion that the characters' stories will remain with you long after you have read the last page.
Author Notes
Richard B. Wright was born in Midland, Canada on March 4, 1937. After graduating from Ryerson University in 1959, he worked as a copywriter for newspapers and radio shows and later accepted an editor post at Macmillan Canada. His first book, Andrew Tolliver, was a children's book. His first novel, The Weekend Man, was published in 1970. He wrote more than 15 books during his lifetime including Nightfall, The Age of Longing, and In the Middle of a Life. Clara Callan won the 2001 Giller Prize, the 2001 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction, and the 2002 Trillium Book Award. His memoir, A Life with Words, was published in 2015. He became a member of the Order of Canada in 2007. He also taught English at Ridley College. He died after sustaining a fall on February 7, 2017 at the age of 79.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Oct. 1) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
The separate histories of two sisters are traced with understated compassion in this superb novel, the ninth from the Ontario author (Farthing's Fortunes, 1976, etc.) and winner of Canada's Giller Prize and Governor General's Award. A haunting epigraph from Rilke that asserts the dignity and value of unremarkable lives precedes the text, which is composed mostly of dairy entries penned by the eponymous Clara, an unmarried schoolteacher who remains in her rural hometown of Whitley (near Toronto), and the letters Clara exchanges with her "glamorous" sister Nora, who escapes Whitfield for New York City and a career starring in a popular radio soap opera, and also with cynical Evelyn Dowling, the irrepressibly mannish writer of Nora's show, The House on Chestnut Street. Hardly ever raising his voice, Wright assembles a vivid picture of pre-WWII Canada (the story's major events occur during the years 1934-38), when the Western world thrills to he phenomenon of the Dionne quintuplets and nervously observes the rise of fascism in far-off Europe. It's as if the "progress" of the century ironically mocks that of Clara, who makes hesitant forays away from her stifling matrix-daring a brief trip abroad with the now-sophisticated Nora, enduring a frustrating not-quite-love affair with her "man" in Toronto, self-absorbed Frank Quinlan (a devastating characterization of the kind of superficially appealing male whom every woman eventually realizes she never really wanted), and consequentially encountering a menacing drifter that fulfills with a vengeance Clara's fantasies of "adventure." A terse afterword reveals the later fates of both sisters, incidentally explaining how their story came to be written. Though nobody seems to have noticed, Clara Callan is almost certainly modeled on Arnold Bennett's classic 1908 novel, The Old Wives' Tale-and is not much, if at all, inferior to that masterpiece. A wrenching chronicle of time passing and opportunity lost.