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.)
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
This bizarre first novel tells the story of Jean, an adolescent French Canadian who journeys from his home on the shores of Lake Superior across North America. Along the way, his drunken, sadistic prison-guard father is indicted for torturing a convict; his illiterate, epileptic, mystic Catholic mother has luminous visions and is committed; his brother, a would-be martyr, drowns; and Jean himself burns down his school and is sent to a reformatory but mostly shuttles back and forth between his surreal home and a bum's life on the road. Scenes of rotting corpses, women giving birth to hogs, and bulls sodomizing children sometimes stunningly evoke a dreamer's mutated perceptions. On his surreal journey, the cynically intelligent, hesitantly homosexual, spiritually orphaned Jean is lost, starving, drunk, unlost, dying, awakening, drugged, paralyzed, disowned, and ecstatic. Always he asks, "Why does life hurt?" This is strong stuff, not for the faint of heart or those who favor concrete naturalism. Yet it is shot through with moments of Hieronymus Bosch-like brilliance.
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
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
The style is spare, poetic...an original and memorable reflection on our culture.
-- The Globe and Mail
