The Museum of Love

by Steve Weiner

This story traces the journey of a young French Canadian across North America. It is a darkly magical world through which Jean-Michel travels, a blend of brutality and the supernatural, black humour and tenderness, with intrusions of the surreal.

Genres: Fiction, Queer, Novels, Canada

Hardcover

First published April 1, 1993

About the author

Born in Wisconsin, now based in Vancouver, Steve Weiner studied writing and film animation in California. He is a contributor to The Clear Cut Future , a Clear Cut Press anthology. Weiner's first novel The Museum of Love was nominated for the Giller Prize.

"Mr. Weiner's fictional world has an affinity with the work of the writers Ben Okri and J. G. Ballard, the photographer Joel-Peter Witkin and the film makers Guy Maddin and Todd Haynes. But he is, one suspects, less a disciple of these latter-day Surrealists than a kindred spirit. Employing a dream logic that taps directly into the unconscious, he pushes narrative to the outer limits of what it can do."
(Michael Upchurch, New York Times)

Reviews

[Eddie Watkins]

Somehow I found my way to this book through the Quay Brothers, whose work is featured on the cover, which is appropriate as both the Quays' work and this book are animated by an elegant morbidity. But while the Quays rarely (never?) explicitly address sex or sexuality, The Museum of Love seems (and I mean seems, as it's very difficult to synopsize this book or even say exactly what it's about) to be primarily about a boy's/young man's initiation into various forms of gay love. Or at least it seems to've been inspired by this initiation; it's also about the decay of a family and a small nowhere Canadian town, and the main character's specific and general alienation from Catholicism and school and family and standard mores of behavior. This initiation and decay spawns numerous hallucinations and dreams and fantasies (many quite violent) which are virtually impossible to unravel from the straight narration, which is only appropriate, as hallucinations dreams and fantasies are always warping and twisting and influencing our perceptions of "straight" reality; only in this book it's as if all is turned inside out - hallucinations and dreams unfolding outward like a starfish's stomach (viscera externalized) to digest the waking world (with a tender violence worthy of Genet), but instead of making yet more starfish shit of it Weiner has made something monstrously lovely.

[Chris]

Weiner has written a violent, sordid, mystical book in a tone that is difficult to maintain for more than a few pages. Like Hemon in Nowhere Man, he failed -- but it doesnt matter. Just like the apostrophe on my keyboard doesnt work, but it doesnt matter. Its worth a read anyhow, because the fragments of plot create a more intricate vehicle than something more coherent might.

The metempsychotic mix, the first-person hallucinations that were not Jean, the narrator we return to, are tiring and perhaps pointless. Coincidentally, Hemon abandons his first narrator in the same way, and fails in the same way. But while Weiner hews to his surrealism, Hemon drifts towards the banal world we know, so that by the second half of Nowhere, hes closer to Updike than Bruno Schulz.

[B.]

Only other person I have ever found to write the way this book is written is Michael Ondaatje, very high compliment. I would consider this a writing of true hallucination.

[Ivan Izo]

If you don't mind a novel with no plot, you might like this. The narrator is many things in many places, sometimes different things in different parts of the world in the same paragraph. There is plenty of imagery. Lots of sex, mostly gay, none erotic since it's also mostly violent. There's tons of violence here if you like reading about murders, suicides, accidental deaths, and fatal diseases. This is a lot like a book I read by either Burroughs or Ginsberg or a legless dwarf I found barb-wired to a jet engine in the sub-basement of a slaughterhouse who vomited the entire time I was raping him. That last line is much like this novel. If you'd want to read 200 pages of that, this one's for you.

I don't mind a weird disturbing book like this now and then but, unlike one review I read, I don't think it would be difficult to write. There's no plot to develop. No character development either since the protagonist continues to be 12 years old throughout the book. So much of it is imaginary that I don't feel like I got insights into any culture.

So, do I recommend reading it? It is a fast interesting read with elements of reality. If a copy of another book by Steve Weiner showed up in a bookstore somewhere, I'd read it.

[Dennis Bolen]

The author of Museum of Love, lives in Vancouver. I guess that and the fact it was also released by Penguin of Canada qualifies it to be shortlisted for a CDN literary prize. Anyway, whatever its nationality this book had for me a deadly pallor upon it by page 100. Unfortunately, the book drones on for more than twice that length.

In what seems to try to be a remembrance of a repulsive childhood in a dimly-drawn segment of the recent past, we are regaled by uninteresting characters who narrate in monotone. We are flitted from passage to unrelated passage with no regard for narrative momentum or lack thereof. All the features of effective reader-estrangement are here: Tossed-off lyricality, narrative fits-and-starts, disjointed vignettes, and a certain inappropriate grottiness. Passages like:

I fainted in the shower... Suddenly Colonel Canale was looking down with a green glass eye.
`You must have put your head directly under the cold water,’ he said. `There’s a hole in your skull. That’s where the nerves are. The cold water hit the nerves and you passed out.’
`I never touched the water, sir. I was choking on mucus in the corner.’

Yuk. And the grotesquery goes to prove nothing other than the fact the protagonist narrator does not belong in private school.

Incidentally, up to page 109, where I stopped counting, there were no fewer than 34 `suddenly’s, sometimes two in a paragraph. Other annoyances: little separation from dream-to-reality, and an obnoxious tendency to have so many unimportant characters, so many haphazard first names popping up once or twice then forgotten, that all effectiveness was more than lost. I hate to have to mention stuff that should be dealt with in first-year writing seminars, but, jeez... Sloppy.

But don’t take my word for it, read all the testimonials on the dust jacket. There’s one effusively blurb from Canada Council Director Roch Carrier, who opines: `Some will say: it’s a new On the Road. Some will say: it’s The Painted Bird in a quiet country.’ I don’t know where Mr. Carrier gets his perspective, but if we’re talking straight content here, I’d call it more like: Hiking Trails of Despair in Northern Ontario, or something like that.

So never mind my natterings about Mr. Weiner's root-canal of a tome, with this kind of endorsement, it might well win some big trophy down the road even if nobody reads it, which I don’t think too many people will...

[Peter Landau]

The great Canadian novel was written by an American.

[Susan]

This is one of the best books I've read in a long time. Being half French-Canadian this book spoke loudly to me. The hero, an anti-hero actually if you follow the Canadian mainstream thought of the French as being invalid, witnesses the loss of the likeable identity of the original settlers of North America and takes on idenities of others considered less-likeable from the historical timeset the book covers. In every identity he tries to find an identity and acceptance and travels from his birthplace in a French community near the Ontario-Manitoba border, down through the French and Metis settlements of Minnesota, and down the Mississippi to New Orleans, with a stop in Chicago. The story is about the loss of respect for the French on the North American continent and the people affected by this outlook. It is a powerful book written in staccato verse in the same way that all violence is delivered.

[Shannon]

EDIT: Well, dammit. I got swept up in school/other books and I never finished this. It's been long enough now that I feel I'd have to re-read it entirely now. I was more than halfway, too. I suck.

I still haven't finished this, because it's become horrendously depressing and grotesque. If you like death, rape, animal abuse, rape, disfigurement, some more rape, and just generally reading about humans being completely brutal to each other.. you'll probably love this book. It's actually beautifully, fantastically, ugly. I had to stop reading because I realized my face was in a permanent grimace. This is NOT a light read. And it's written very, very strangely. I pray to Jesus that none of this was autobiographical.

[Sarah]

i'm only about a third of the way through it, but so far this book is brutal and unpleasant. my obsessive tendencies are forcing me to continue to read it. if i were a stronger person i'd put it down and start something different.

***

i managed to push through it, but this book did not redeem itself. the positive thing that i can say about steve weiner is that he can definitely evoke strong feelings with his writing. but the imagery was just too disturbing for this to be an enjoyable read.