Baltimore's Mansion: A Memoir - Softcover

Johnston, Wayne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0676972977 ISBN 13: 9780676972979

Publisher: Vintage Canada, 2000

Synopsis

Baltimore's Mansion introduces us to the Johnstons of Ferryland, a Catholic colony founded by Lord Baltimore in the 1620s on the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland, and centres on three generations of fathers and sons. Filled with heart-stopping description and a cast of stubborn, acerbic, yet utterly irresistible family members, it is an evocation of a time and a place reminiscent of Wayne Johnston's best fiction.

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Review:

In this forceful, complex memoir, Wayne Johnston returns to the setting of his 1999 novel, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. Johnston doesn't just come from Newfoundland, remotest of Canada's provinces; he comes from the Avalon Peninsula, the most isolated portion of Newfoundland (and confused in young Wayne's boyish imaginings with the mythical Avalon, where King Arthur sailed to be healed of mortal wounds). It's an apt metaphor for a land that "was the edge of the known world, and looked it." Avalon's natives fiercely resented the 1948 referendum that joined Newfoundland to the Canadian Confederation--especially Johnston's father, the memoir's central character, who keens for lost independence in a manner highly reminiscent of Stephen Dedalus's father in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Indeed, parallels with Ireland are evident throughout, not just because the Johnstons are descended from Irish immigrants but because the Newfoundlanders exhibit a similar passionate insularity and zest for feuding among themselves. Johnston's muscular, plainspoken prose bears little resemblance to that of James Joyce, but his themes of exile and loss, loyalty and betrayal, and an ancient culture's ambivalent relationship with modernity resonate with the great writer's most urgent concerns. --Wendy Smith

From the Back Cover:

"Incredibly moving, deeply personal and often hilarious." -The Toronto Star

"A prodigiously talented author--. Baltimore's Mansion ought to win a wide readership, especially among those of us grasping after the meaning of our own fathers' lives." -The Globe and Mail

"Much more than a memoir--Johnston has used all the fictive techniques he has mastered as a mature literary artist to shape the materials of real life into a work of astonishing beauty and power." -National Post

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Canada
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0676972977
• ISBN 13: 9780676972979
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288