Kolbe Times is beginning a series entitled “Books That Changed My Life”, written by leaders and innovators in our faith community. This is the first article in that series.
From the earliest age I have always wanted to be a writer. I loved books, wrote books, studied books. Any kind of book. I was the type of kid who read the phone book if there wasn’t something else available, but my parents always made sure I had alternatives. Since my parents were not learned in the traditional sense, and had not come from bookish families, I was not fed on a regular diet of children’s classics. So I pretty much charted my own course, often dictated by articles about influential writers that I might find in the newspapers, and then later, at university, through the passions and prejudices of my favourite professors. I can pretty much map my reading trajectory according to the courses I took, from medieval to theatrical, Victorian to Canadian.
As a young wannabe writer in the ’80s my favourite authors were Heinrich Böll and William Faulkner, the latter of whom ruined my writing for a good 15 years as I tried to imitate his eccentric and epic style. It was not until much later that I began to return, as a writer, to what I see now as my Canadian roots, and to craft my stories through the drier, wiser tones of an Alice Munro or a Mavis Gallant, the humour of an Atwood and the poetics of an Ondaatje. I never scaled their heights, of course, but through them I learned how legitimate and exciting the Canadian view was as the subject of fiction. It may seem strange now, when a breadth of experience and subject matter is such a given, but there was a time when Canadian identity in fiction had to be argued for and championed, and where a writer like Morley Callaghan had to set his stories in Buffalo, rather than Toronto, just to get them published.
So when I was asked to write this initial column on the subject of favourite work I thought that this would be easy and my choice obvious. I considered the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, or the simple complexity of Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller. I still reel at the boldness of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom where the story is given a heart-wrenching twist through a detail buried in the genealogy at the book’s close. I re-read Shakespeare the way one might pray the rosary, looking for inspiration, solutions to characterizations, or for the comfort of perfection.
But in the end the work that shimmers behind, around and above all others, which I turn to in depth or as a magpie seeking meaningful moments, is the Bible. Its influence on literature is impossible to capture in words. It has given us the titles to more novels than any other single work — from The Sun Also Rises to East of Eden, Song of Solomon to Leaven of Malice; more aphorisms and sayings are drawn from its pages than from any other source — an eye for an eye, by the skin of your teeth, a labour of love — with Shakespeare a distant second. And the architecture of this great and holy work teaches all writers — young and old — how to tell a story, how to move an audience, and how to make truth the centre of every tale. I am not a theologian, and you would not detect a Biblical resonance in my novels, poetry books, plays or academic writings. But the influence is there: in the texture of the writing, in the works’ moral core, and hopefully, occasionally, in a moment of inspiration that is witness to something greater than the individual voice can ever hope to become.
