I know I’m going to sound like an old man, but what a bunch of claptrap. There’s nothing I can add to what’s been said below except my almost complete dissatisfaction and boredom with the movie. Tiresome.

I first heard about this book in an English class in high school, but even though I got a copy of it we never covered it, so I didn’t bother picking it up. I wonder what I would have thought about it if I had. Sharon Pollock is a really interesting Canadian playwright; she writes about events in Canadian history that are often skipped over or left unsaid, but she doesn’t write theatre that really really compels me. That being said, I found Walsh both moving and difficult. It’s a story about the North West Mounted Police Chief in Western Canada in the late 1800s who Sitting Bull came to when he and the rest of the Sioux in the United States fled north to avoid being wiped out by the Americans after Little Bighorn. It’s difficult because it plays with your morality, your sense of right and wrong, and whether justice even exists. It’s moving because it’s human. Walsh is every one of us. Every one.

I forgot this wasn’t out in paperback yet. An expensive choice for a book club, let me tell you.

The director is actually Zacharias Kunuk, and I found this movie hard to get into, harder than The Journals of Knud Rasmussen anyway. Probably just because I’m a southerner. All I can remember about this movie is this image of him running naked across the snow… or ice?

Wait…damn, this is a book, isn’t it?

This is an abominable adaptation of a breathtaking book. For a novel written through the language of love, and sex, and sensuality, and most of all through food, the movie is insultingly prosaic, as bland as dried-out white rice, and as devoid of any emotionality as… well, as Stephen Harper. I don’t know if it’s possible to translate magic realism onto film, but if there’s a way, this certainly isn’t it.

I haven’t read this yet, but the picture is totally wrong.

Bizarrely, this book kept reminding me of Milan Kundera, who I was reading at the time by pure coincidence, and myself. Now, when I say it reminded me of myself, what I really mean is that as I was reading this book, it seemed to me that I knew what was going to happen next, even if I had no idea, because it seemed like something I could have been feverishly dreaming. The preoccupations with family, with the soul, with alchemy, with the unending cycles of human nature and of blood…

It’s like a hot, sticky room you think you can get out of, but everytime you open the door, you find yourself walking into the same place you just left. See if you can find out what the prophecy is for yourself. And see if the naming, the Aurelianos, the Arcadios, begins to make sense to you. It is a mad, wondrous strange, beautiful novel.

This story is too drawn into itself. I couldn’t even finish it; after a hundred and fifty pages, nothing happened. Dionne Brand is first and foremost a poet I guess, and it really comes across in her meditations on these characters’ lives. Starts off electric but quickly slows down. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you reallllly love stories about Torontonians.

After I read this book, I resolved never ever to read anything by Alice Sebold again.

This is a really terribly written novel. The concept is interesting, the main character is almost someone I could identify with, but the way it’s written is like cotton candy; it’s fluff, there’s no substance to the story and it seems sweet at the time but leaves a really awful aftertaste. There are very few books I have felt like I wasted my time reading, and some of my friends highly recommended I read The Lovely Bones, but it comes across something like a Readers Digest story expanded for YA publication; this would be fine, of course, if it didn’t try to pawn itself off as mature literature.

Really, read something by Yeats instead.

This book is like fragments, sketches, outlines of a love that runs rivulets and deep canyons through a red, red, life.

I fell in love with Herakles. I had my heart torn out with Geryon. Who wouldn’t? Who wouldn’t want to see that volcano with him, who wouldn’t go to Buenos Aires to wrap yourself in echoes of that love, try to pick up scraps like torn fabric and sew it back together, and dive, and dive, and share the secret no one ever tells?