An Idea About My Dead Uncle (1)

by K.R. Wilson

A young, mixed-race composer, raised without meaningful connections to his Chinese heritage and struggling with identity issues, travels to China in search of his long-missing uncle, an uncle who vanished in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square. An Idea About My Dead Uncle--winner of the inaugural Guernica Prize for the best unpublished novel manuscript--is about the identities we choose and the ones that are imposed on us. It is about being on the outside looking in. It is about dealing with pain through the artistic process. It is about delusion and healing. It is about the power of narrative. According to Gabriella Goliger, winner of the 2011 City of Ottawa Literary Award for Fiction for her novel Girl Unwrapped and a juror for the Guernica Literary Prize: A witty, sharp-edged, finely-crafted story about a young man struggling with identity issues, which causes relationship disasters and a quest for his long lost uncle in China. The introspective but straightforward narrative eventually plunges into the surreal, mirroring the madness that can result from an uncompromising search for self.

203 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2019

Reviews

[Ian Shaw]

This is a quintessentially Canadian book. Set in Calgary in a world fringed by the exotic but unlike Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal so far from Canada's famed connections to the rest of the world, a young man of mixed race stumbles metaphorically forward to understanding something, anything beyond his mundane reality. Perhaps, this is the book's charm, its redemption. Not a book for everyone, but I certainly enjoyed reading it.

[Hollay Ghadery]

The book is very much like I'd imagine the music of the protagonist, Jason: soft, reflective, and even a little muddled in parts. The story of a man who takes a journey under the pretense of looking for his uncle, but is really looking for himself. Unlike many other books that might give you a pat ending, this one doesn't. I loved it.

[Bandit]

This was the winner of the best unpublished manuscript prize by Guernica. I’m not even familiar with that specific accolade, but it nevertheless does set one’s expectations up. And yet…in the end the book didn’t really end up doing it (you know, that it one expects from a really good read) for me. There was much about it to appreciate, the competent writing, the multiracial aspect, the rediscovery of one’s ethnicity, the quest to locate a family member, but nothing about the book stood out in any way. The first person narration was a fairly subdued affair of…well, of a not so subdued affair mostly, and then due to this indiscretion the protagonist ends up dumped by his girlfriend and alone and spiraling into a sort of depression that ends up with a quest to find a lookalike uncle who went to China some two decades ago during some very heavy political turbulence and disappeared. So the protagonist, Canadian Chinese heavy on Canadian, arms himself with some sociohistorical and language lessons and goes to China to play detective. The entire thing is set during the Y2K lunacy to (presumably) amp up the drama and uncertainty. The novel read easily enough and was admirably succinct, but the narrator never really becomes engaging or compelling enough to care about and the last (hallucinatory, quite literally) act was didn’t really work for me. So essentially it was a well intentioned nicely written story that didn’t really wow to begin with and disappointed at the end. Maybe I’m too tough on it. It’s possible. It wasn’t terrible in any way, it just kinda was. It went by quickly enough, but outside of some interesting Chinese cultural and historical facts and observations, it didn’t offer much in return for the time. Thoroughly underwhelming read. User mileage may vary. Thanks Netgalley.

[Johnny Armstrong]

If I go to my imaginary dictionary to find an example of a fascinating work of literary art, on the page staring back would be K.R. Wilson’s An Idea About My Dead Uncle. A work of artistry in writing, from beginning to end, page to page, its amazing symphony of plot, of ideas and of words astounded me. K.R. Wilson’s “ Dead Uncle” won the Guernica Prize for Literary Fiction. It’s easy to see why. If you want to read a beautifully written novel, this is the one to go for.

Johnny Armstrong

[Ian]

K.R. Wilson’s Guernica Prize-winning novel, An Idea About My Dead Uncle, tells an absorbing, unsentimental tale of a young man of Chinese origin, raised in Canada as a North American, searching for answers about his ethnic heritage. Set at the turn of the millennium, Jason Lavoie’s journey begins in Calgary. A mystery of long-standing that has consumed the family concerns his uncle LiHuang—known as Uncle Larry—who left Canada in the mid-1970s for China, sent a few letters home to his mother, but for 25 years has been incommunicado. As a child, according to Jason’s mother, Jason had a “special connection” with Uncle Larry, and Jason’s recollections are fond. When we meet him, Jason’s living an unsettled, marginally satisfying life. His vocation is composing music, but to pay the bills he has a job as a barista. Jason also lives at odds with his ethnicity, bristling whenever an interlocutor, casual or not, assumes his cultural influences are Chinese. A positive for Jason is his relationship with Louisa, who acknowledges his flaws but accepts him as he is. However, this falls apart when he meets Judy, a professor of Asian Studies. Louisa discovers the affair and leaves him, but Judy breaks off with him as well, leaving Jason emotionally untethered but with his curiosity about what happened to Uncle Larry undiminished. Having reached a crossroads and seeing no other way forward, Jason travels to China to learn what he can about his uncle’s fate. From here, Wilson’s narrative follows Jason as he acts, wisely or not, upon clues gleaned from his uncle’s letters in the hope of tracing Larry’s movements and discovering what might have happened all those years ago. K.R. Wilson writes sharp, straightforward, uncluttered prose that carries the reader along on waves of dramatic urgency. The scenes set in China are especially effective because of the earnest yet haphazard nature of Jason’s quest and the obstacles fate seems to place in his way. The novel ends in a surreal, shape-shifting dreamscape as Jason’s resolve abandons him and his psyche shatters under the pressures he has placed on himself. An Idea About My Dead Uncle is a poignant debut novel that explores issues of ethnic identity with a clear, unforgiving eye. Even though his actions are not always admirable and sometimes self-destructive, his vulnerability makes Jason Lavoie an appealing narrator, and we set aside our misgivings and stick with him until the end.

[Sarah Dressler]

This novel is set in Canada, which I was excited to read. Add to that, the fact it is about a Canadian Chinese young man in search of his uncle in China, I thought for sure this would be a read I would enjoy.

The story line, and the characters did however fall short of my enjoyment.

After preparing some lessons, and dumping his girlfriend, he sets off to China in search of this look-alike uncle that disappeared some 20 years ago.

Add to that the idea that the novel is set during the Y2K time period, it just didn't seem to connect and settle well with me. The references which should have added a little drama to the story line were just sprinkled through, and I struggled to connect with him as a character, and his search for the long-lost uncle.

If you enjoy novels that search for missing relatives, involve Y2K, then you may enjoy this novel more than I did.

Thanks to Netgalley for providing the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

[Marion Lougheed]

This book had a lot of promise, but I felt like it didn't really go anywhere. The first part of the book didn't seem to have a lot to do with the second part of the book (which was more interesting, except it drifts off into the surreal and nothing gets resolved). I can see how other people would really enjoy it though. Wilson's writing is good and there are a lot of interesting moments throughout.

[James Fisher]

It's difficult to say what I didn't like about the book. It was disjointed, and the first half of the book seemed unnecessary (other than the part about the missing Uncle) once Jason set out to find his Uncle in China. I liked reading it, but in the end, was left dissatisfied.

[Christine Hood]

This book is such an interesting and different story. It is also very well written with lots of funny moments but also with lots of depth. It's a little hard to get into at first, but give it a chance and you'll see why it is a Guernica Prize Winner.

[Amanda Hale]

K.R. Wilson's book won the Guernica Editions' first novel contest. It is a compelling story about Jason Lavoie, a young composer struggling to write an opera about his mysteriously disappeared uncle who went to China. Jason is part Chinese, a cultural strain which is more or less ignored by his family. He is a lost character, flailing around through various sexual relationships, struggling with a musical career which is going nowhere, until he ventures to China himself, supposedly to search for his uncle who seems to be a symbol of Jason's own identity. Was the uncle his real father? And is his own name meant to evoke the Classical Jason's Quest for the Golden Fleece? My only criticism is that the journey could have started sooner. Anyone who has traveled in their youth can relate intensely to Jason's quest, which becomes passionate and bewildering. Like Everyman, he meets symbolic characters along the way - one in particular who poses riddles in the form of new age spiritual advice. Jason's descent into an Edward Burtinsky-type Manufactured Landscape is excruciating - a couple of italicized sections are tantalizing - are they subtle clues to his uncle's fate? I found the conclusion to be devastating because I had become so invested in Jason. This novel evoked in me a similar feeling to that created by Madeleine Thien's Do Not Say We Have Nothing. I am very interested to see what K.R. Wilson comes up with next.

[Heather Babcock]

Beautifully written and told with poetic insight, An Idea About My Dead Uncle is about memory, family history and our lonesome quest to make sense of it all. I loved this book.

[Line Dufour]

A talented, insightful and subtle writer. looking forward to reading more of his work.

[Hadi Atallah]

The heavy rhythm and melody of what seemed to me as a maybe book at first slowly moved me to complete it. What I had read, and I know, might be a reflection of a story that had accidentally drifted in or a complete illusion. In our world of uncertain light, there are more illusions than realities. This is why my eyes were on this book and could not wait to arrive at the very ending – Hadi Atallah, author of "Rosemary Bluebell."