Sunday, February 04, 2007

As For Me and My House


I finished reading Sinclair Ross' As For Me and My House last night. The plot is about as flat as its Saskatchewan setting, but there's something about the way Ross crafts his writing that kept me reading. It's rather bleak and depressing, which is probably another reason I liked it.

I don't want to say too much and spoil the plot, but I will say that it's an epistolary novel--sort of. It takes the form of a preacher's wife's diary, for precisely one year, I think during the early years of the Depression. As with most things epistolary, there's as much in what's not being said as in what's being said and truth becomes a rather subjective, er, subject.

Also, it's one of the few Canadian novels I've read that delves deeply--if at all--into art and the artistic temperament.