It’s been a wonderful long weekend of reading Robertson Davies! Thanks to all who joined in this event; here are the posts I gathered: Calmgrove on Tempest-Tost: “This then could be how the novel works: a light entertainment, yes; perhaps a work to share with bookish friends, certainly; but also possibly a work laden with […]
As an extra bonus at the close of this year’s Robertson Davies Reading Weekend, I received a very nice email from a Davies fan who was unable to post a review on his own blog because he doesn’t have one. I offered to put it up as a guest post, and he kindly agreed. So […]
Robertson Davies, The Cunning Man (1994) For this year’s Robertson Davies Reading Weekend, I wanted to revisit Davies’s last novel — which, of course, he could not have known to be the last; he had begun to draft a new novel at the time of his death, so it seems he intended to at least […]
“One of the things that puzzles me is that so few people want to look at life as a totality and to recognize that death is no more extraordinary than birth. When they say it’s the end of everything they don’t seem to recognize that we came from somewhere and it would be very, very […]
As summer begins, here is just a heads up that after last year’s Robertson Davies Reading Week event, there was enough interest in doing it again that I’ve decided to host a three-day “birthday weekend” for the Canadian author, August 28 to 30. This will be a very free-form event; simply read whatever you like […]
It’s hard to believe, but our week has already come to an end. It’s been fantastic to see some other readers giving attention to the marvelous books of Robertson Davies. Many thanks to my fabulous guest bloggers: Calmgrove on The Deptford Trilogy Lizzie Ross on For Your Eye Alone Consumed by Ink on High Spirits […]
Today, head over to Buried in Print for a consideration of Robertson Davies’s second-to-last finished novel, Murther and Walking Spirits — one that draws on his own family history in a remarkable way. It’s not a spoiler to tell you that the main character dies (this happens in the first sentence) but beyond that we’re […]
Today, a venture into a sort of side-line of Robertson Davies’s narrative genius, the ghost stories told by him each Christmas while Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto. Naomi of Consumed by Ink tells us what makes these seemingly transient trifles still worth a look today — even though regrettably we cannot […]
As we continue to this week’s appreciation of the work of Robertson Davies, we turn to a literary form that is severely endangered in the age of e-mail and texting: the art of letter writing. Davies was a prolific and highly versatile correspondent, and recipients of his missives often treasured them for years. A selection […]
Readers of Robertson Davies’s fiction — to which we were given a brilliant introduction yesterday in Chris’s review of The Deptford Trilogy — may become curious about the motivation and inspiration behind his multifaceted talent. Fortunately, there is a good deal of material to feed this curiosity, as Davies wrote and spoke extensively about various […]