Author: George Bowering. Published by New Star Books, Vancouver, 1977, 1st Edition. (This is the reissued 2017 New Star Edition) Printed in Canada. Very Good Condition SOFTCOVER Book, with a piece of 2 inch clear tape across bottom of the spine, and a close-by back cover scratch. Clean inside, tight spine. Size: 8.5 x 5.5 inch, 192 pages.
Forty years ago, George Bowering saw a country still struggling to find itself in its books, and decided to write A SHORT SAD BOOK about it. Did he know he was writing if not The Great Canadian Novel something like it? Originally published in 1977, A SHORT SAD BOOK has plenty of what you'd expect any Great Canadian Novel to have plenty of: geography, love, loons crying in the wilderness, lots of beavers.
"A SHORT SAD BOOK is a delightful picaresque romp that borrows freely in matters of style from the early 20th- century American experimentalist Gertrude Stein: the spirit of Canadian literature is chased up, down and across the country, sought in vain, with both the author and his readers learning much about what it means to be Canadian in the process...This book fairly brims over with invention, from its distinctive spelling and punctuation to its hunger to define, almost by lack of definition, this nation...The casual style, jokes and the book's compact length all conspire to seduce the reader into an impression of levity. Underneath such apparent levity, however, lie many themes as important to Canada today as they were 40 years ago."- Reviewed by James W. Woods, Vancouver Sun.
