British novelist Evelyn Waugh was what one might call a traditional Catholic and Catholicism is central to his 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. Waugh was outright despondent following the liturgical transformations of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and felt as though he was losing the church and faith that he embraced after his…
Author: Christopher Adam
Standing on the threshold of a new year, I am bidding farewell to 2018 with a selection of photographs I took both at home and abroad. This year I traveled to Saskatchewan, Ohio, Kentucky, Hungary and Portugal. Let’s begin with photos from my trip at the end of May to Saskatchewan, where I was fortunate to visit the historic, late…
Adam is an extremely articulate author, who is flawless with grammar and very easy to read; I absorbed the whole of this trio of tales in one sitting. Set in both rural and urban Canada, the stories are short and relatable slice-of-life snippets, character-based, without any real sense of drama; the basis of the book seems to be a metaphorical…
The rich internal monologues and heavily accented dialogues, giving away the socio-cultural background of these Brooklyn residents, are what make Hubert Selby Jr.’s 1978 novel Requiem for a Dream such compelling reading. The fact that all of this dialogue is fully embedded in paragraphs, one sliding into the other, and that it lacks quotation marks (as well as apostrophes), can make…
The Picture of Dorian Gray was Oscar Wilde’s seminal work. And it was also the story which, in the eyes of his scandalized detractors, helped confirm the belief that older gentlemen of influence and financial means, particularly the nobility, often corrupted younger men of lower social standing by making them the targets of their “unnatural” and self-indulgent sexual vices and…
Evelyn Waugh was a master of the English language and of dry, witty writing. He certainly proved as much in his 1948 novel The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy. The novel, based in part on Waugh’s observations during a visit to Hollywood, explores the stuffy pretensions of the British expatriate community in Los Angeles and the cultural divide between Britons and Americans.…
Who hasn’t come into contact with Mormon missionaries–the mostly very young, mild-mannered and smiling men dressed conservatively in a suit and tie, who we are to address as elder? Over the years I have read enough about the ascetic and grueling lives of Mormon missionaries to feel quite strongly that they deserve politeness and compassion from the people they approach…
Author Gene LaLonde is a survivalist from upstate New York and it would appear as though Dave and Becky, the two main characters in his book, A Question of Survival, are very much based on himself and his wife. (The latter is acknowledged and thanked for having proofread this self-published novel.) Set in rural Vermont, LaLonde tells the story of…
It seemed fitting to launch my book in Ottawa and, more specifically, in the city’s east-end, given that the three stories in I Have Demons are so closely intertwined with the social and geographic landscape of the Canadian capital. The book launch took place on Saturday, November 24, 2018 at the Rideau-Vanier Community Centre and included a book signing, a reading,…
A jaded young priest of a dwindling parish faces a man with a terrible secret. A lonely pensioner spends a Thanksgiving she’ll never forget at a local diner, served by an acerbic waitress who has finally found her ticket out of there. A recent university graduate from small-town Ontario leaves home with nothing to his name but the hope of…