Ibis3’s Comments (group member since Sep 06, 2010)

Ibis3’s comments from the CanLit Challenge group.

Thanks for joining my CanLit Challenge group. I know we'll have some great discussions about Canadian books and authors & lots of other stuff besides. Feel free to introduce yourselves in this thread & let us know what you think about CanLit (favourite books & authors for example). This folder is open to all and any discussions about Canadian stuff, including books not on the official Challenge list. If you have recommendations to share or wish to solicit suggestions for further reading, this is the place to do it.

Ta,
Ibis

Paul Durand, a well-off farmer living in the fictional seigneurie of Alonville on the bank of the St. Lawrence, has two sons, each by a different wife (he is made a widower twice). They go off to school in Montreal where one flourishes and the other wishes to be back working outside on the farm. Sibling rivalry and a bad marriage play out against the backdrop of village and urban societies.

From the introduction:
"Obviously this novel demonstrated new interests on the part of the author. It appeared in a period of innovation. Novelists in Britain, America, and Europe were experimenting with problem novels. Mrs. Gaskell's sombre novels were supplanting Dickens' more humourous accounts of family and class relations--but even Dickens had turned from his early Pickwick style to the darker tones of Hard Times--a novel about industrial strikes, drunkenness, and family breakdown. In the 1860s Turgenev and Flaubert, Meredith and Melville were opening new avenues in their fiction. Mrs. Leprohon's 1868 story reflects the changing concerns of contemporary novelists."Armand Durand, or, A promise fulfilled