Michael Crummey, Galore
Featured Book
One Hundred Years of Solitude transplanted to freezing Canada
Michael Crummey makes no bones that his surreal, folktale-like novel set in a dreamy Newfoundland is inspired by Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece, but that’s okay, because Galore stands up, even to the glare of Gaby’s best work. It starts with a bravura opening in which a man white as snow springs from the flesh of a giant whale that has washed ashore of the small Newfoundland community, Paradise Deep. The whale’s a good omen, because the starving town will eat for weeks, but this strange figure also sparks an almost intractable problem: a five-generation-long conflict between Paradise Deep’s two leading families. It doesn’t do the book justice to say that this epic family feud becomes a mythic retelling of the modernization of Newfoundland, because “the history of a little-known island just short of the Arctic Circle” sounds dull, and Galore is anything but. Like García Márquez, Crummey makes a small, out of the way place feel big and important, turning it into a truly inspiring location by taking us from one outstanding folktale-like story to the next. (It shows that the author based them on actual Newfoundland folktales that he researched extensively.) At length, Galore‘s reach and atmosphere makes it both a deep and a universal novel, one of the best from one of Canada’s best.
