Museum of Love

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Museum of Love

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Overview

A dark, visionary novel.
This story traces the journey of a young French Canadian across the top of North America. It is a darkly magical world through which Jean-Michel travels, a blend of brutality and the supernatural, black humour and tenderness, with intrusions of the surreal.

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780879515836
Publisher:	The Overlook Press
Publication date:	02/28/1995
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Steve Weinerwas born in Wisconsin, studied writing at the University of California, and went on to study film animation. His first novel,The Museum of Love, was published in eight countries to wide acclaim and shortlisted for Canada's prestigious Giller Prize. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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Editorial Reviews

Jean-Michel Verhaeren, an adolescent in a depressed French-Canadian town on the shores of Lake Superior, is the protagonist of this bizarre but impressive first novel. Jean's father is an unemployed prison guard; his mother, a morphine addict who has divine visions, is a janitor at a nursing home; and his brother, Ignace, is well on his way to becoming a saint. The Verhaerens are truly a strange lot--and Jean is as strange as any of them. He's the leader of a gang of not-quite-hoodlums, an obsessive when it comes to the subject of death and a fellow whose sexual orientation, as a friend puts it, is to ``butter his bread on both sides.'' When Jean burns down a wing of his Catholic school, he's sent to the reformatory, where the British boys beat and abuse him. Weiner's prose is lucid and startling, and he avoids the fey, New Age tendencies of many practitioners of magic realism, instead forging an industrial, fire-and-brimstone variety whose surreal imagery is spare and shocking. But the novel is relentless in its bleakness, and the mix of disparate elements--spirits taking flight as birds, contrasted with the grim Acadian setting--proves not to be as felicitous as one would expect. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Adolescent Jean-Michel Verhaeren does not have what might be called a nurturing environment: he's dealing with a brutal prison guard for a father, a guilt-inducing mother and brother, the narrow-minded conformity of the Fifties, and the foul air and water of Toronto, with its bone-numbing winters. ``Our lives were blind, instinctive, Catholic. We were miners with no lanterns. We danced in our city of the dead and thanked le bon Dieu for our graves.'' He finds solace in fantasy, the small gang he leads, his sense of irony (admitting one member for telling fiction as though it were fiction), and the exploration of his emerging homosexuality. Thus begins his bizarre journey through alternating periods of insane confusion and pure clarity, as he travels first to reform school and then to the surreal Museums of Negritude, Religion, Love, and Death. This is a quirky first novel whose occasional failings are more than compensated for by Weiner's ability credibly to depict utterly bizarre thoughts, emotions, and situations. The Museum of Love is no place for the timid, but the bold will enjoy this exhibition hall of the imagination.-- Jim Dwyer, California State Univ. Lib., Chico

Library Journal

Ecstatic and grotesque...Weiner's technique echoes not only the delicate raw immediacy of the novels of Celine, Burroughs, and Genet but the cinematic disjunction of Croenenberg and Lynch. -- The New York Times Book Review

Tom Clark

A high-speed pageant of lust and loss, extraordinarily seductive and sublime. The Museum of Love is a dazzling calling card from an impressive talent. -- The New York Times Book Review

Michael Upchurch

The style is spare, poetic...an original and memorable reflection on our culture. -- The Globe and Mail

Marian Botsford Fraser

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