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Cape Breton is the Thought-Control Centre of Canada
Sophisticated, playful, and extremely funny, this collection begins the career of one of Canada's best humorists and storytellers. Featuring the adventures of Patchouli the Passionate, Sweet William, Paleologue, Passquick, Purlieu, Jasper, and Angus, with guest cameos by G.K. Chesterton and painter Raphael Santi, these odd Acadian episodes have delighted for decades.
192 pages, Paperback
First published October 15, 2006
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About the author
Ray Smith
171 books3 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
Ray Smith (the novelist) was born in Cape Breton in 1941.
For more than three decades, Ray Smith has occupied a distinctive position on the margins of the Canadian literary scene. His work is characterized by an interest in experimentation, but there is no discernible pattern of development. Each of his books is markedly different from the others, and none fits comfortably into the standard academic overviews of Canadian literature.
His first book, Cape Breton Is the Thought Control Centre of Canada (short fiction), is one of the earliest Canadian examples of experimental writing in the international tradition. (Of American writers, perhaps Donald Barthelme provides the closest analogue.) The relentless, witty interrogation of short story form underscores a parallel skepticism about received truths in other areas of life.
Smith's first novel, Lord Nelson Tavern, focuses on a group of about ten characters, most of whom have known each other from their student days. The first of its seven sections depicts that period of their lives as being relatively ordinary, but as their life stories unfold, their individual narratives become increasingly bizarre and exotic. One, for example, becomes a famous poet who marries an Oscar-winning actress. Another—the least likely—becomes a major player in a world-class drug smuggling operation; eventually he is murdered in accordance with Hollywood convention. A third becomes an internationally acclaimed artist, a fourth a producer of pornographic films, and so on.
Smith does not attempt to make such lives seem believable. Instead his interest is in exploring the voices of his characters, both spoken and written. Much of the book is in dialogue, and there are many unusually long speeches; two of the sections are transcriptions of diaries. Though many of the episodes involve comic exaggeration, the novel does address serious thematic issues, especially the nature of love and art, and the factors that promote and destroy them. Taken as a whole (and despite the sometimes frivolous and cynical rhetoric), Lord Nelson Tavern professes an almost Romantic faith in the validity of romantic love and the power of art to redeem human experience.
Read more: Ray Smith Biography http://biography.jrank.org/pages/4747...
Ray Smith (the novelist) was born in Cape Breton in 1941.
For more than three decades, Ray Smith has occupied a distinctive position on the margins of the Canadian literary scene. His work is characterized by an interest in experimentation, but there is no discernible pattern of development. Each of his books is markedly different from the others, and none fits comfortably into the standard academic overviews of Canadian literature.
His first book, Cape Breton Is the Thought Control Centre of Canada (short fiction), is one of the earliest Canadian examples of experimental writing in the international tradition. (Of American writers, perhaps Donald Barthelme provides the closest analogue.) The relentless, witty interrogation of short story form underscores a parallel skepticism about received truths in other areas of life.
Smith's first novel, Lord Nelson Tavern, focuses on a group of about ten characters, most of whom have known each other from their student days. The first of its seven sections depicts that period of their lives as being relatively ordinary, but as their life stories unfold, their individual narratives become increasingly bizarre and exotic. One, for example, becomes a famous poet who marries an Oscar-winning actress. Another—the least likely—becomes a major player in a world-class drug smuggling operation; eventually he is murdered in accordance with Hollywood convention. A third becomes an internationally acclaimed artist, a fourth a producer of pornographic films, and so on.
Smith does not attempt to make such lives seem believable. Instead his interest is in exploring the voices of his characters, both spoken and written. Much of the book is in dialogue, and there are many unusually long speeches; two of the sections are transcriptions of diaries. Though many of the episodes involve comic exaggeration, the novel does address serious thematic issues, especially the nature of love and art, and the factors that promote and destroy them. Taken as a whole (and despite the sometimes frivolous and cynical rhetoric), Lord Nelson Tavern professes an almost Romantic faith in the validity of romantic love and the power of art to redeem human experience.
Read more: Ray Smith Biography http://biography.jrank.org/pages/4747...
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April 22, 2025
Featured in the influential showcase Ground Works: Avant-Garde for Thee, Smith’s first collection is a sledgehammer blow to the conventions of Canadian fiction, pulling the nascent nation into the knotty, peculiar world of postmodern jiggery-pokery. The opening essay ‘The Age of Innocence’ is something of a manifesto of Smith’s approach and performs a jocular in-depth sweep of the inception of the stories frolicking forth. The title piece is a mosaic of flip self-aware fictions, bringing to mind the late Marvin Cohen in his ponderous pomp. Exuberant wordplay is deployed in brief in the Wuthering Heights send-up ‘Passion’ and the silly ‘A Cynical Tale’. Smith is at his strongest in longer pieces like ‘The Galoshes’, a surreal account of a sexually tortured student under the sway of a charismatic elder that maintains an irresistible comic rhythm for the duration. An essential carnival of the creatively unhinged.
Displaying 1 of 1 review