Wigford Rememberies

- Authors
- Harness, Kyp
- Publisher
- Nightwood Editions
- Tags
- novel , fiction
- Date
- 2016-05-07T00:00:00+00:00
- Size
- 1.45 MB
- Lang
- en
"a great writer" -Daniel Lanois
"one of the finest songwriters on the planet... his lyrics [are] every bit as powerful as the best Dylan, Cohen and Lennon combined." -Ron Sexsmith
"a national treasure" -Michael Barclay, *Exclaim*
"he's a stone genius" -CBC
"Kyp Harness scrapes at the backdrop of reality to reveal the tired, the broken, the lost and desolate, imbuing their agony with a fine and desperate dignity and allowing the reader to be swept along as well."
-Mike Blouin, award-winning author of *Chase and Haven*
"Kyp Harness' prose has a unique flow: word and action, thought and thing are all contiguous and combined in lovely braided sentences. There's some Joyce splashed around Wigford, a satisfying read. This is a fantastic book, please just read it." -Tony Burgess, author of Idaho Winter, finalist for the Trillium Award and author of *Pontypool Changes Everything*
Wigford is a small town in rural Southwestern Ontario, home to a cast of recurring characters: Buzz, a drunk-driving father of two; his wife, who should have married Bert Walmsley instead; Happy Henry, a devout, socially inept apostle who loves to play the organ; Elmer, a stroke survivor.
*Wigford Rememberies* tells this community's stories through an impressionistic series of vignettes. The language is inventive, innovative and exciting, and whether describing mucking out the pig barn--"there in the dust and the sweet smells of grain and straw and the heavy brown odour of shit so strong it makes you sneeze"--or helping a drunk articulate how to manipulate God's forgiveness--"'if I gave my heart to Jesus--right there on my deathbed the minute before I died--he'd forgive everything an I'd go up into Heaven and be saved just as much as the other guy who never did nothin' wrong at all with no difference?'"--Harness wields words with an eye for detail, musicality and style.
Visceral, reflective and lyrical, *Wigford Rememberies* is a poetic evocation of mood and epiphanic realizations, and will resonate with anyone who has ever confronted suffering, love or the unknowable.