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From Amazon
Although best known for The Stone Diaries, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Governor General's Award, Carol Shields has anointed Swann as her favourite offspring. Swann, a literary mystery that won the Arthur Ellis Award for best Canadian mystery, is among Shields's most eccentric works. It revolves around the papers of a fictional Canadian poet named Mary Swann, the stifled, uneducated, and almost friendless wife of a violent, poverty-stricken farmer. Just before her murder at the hands of her husband, Swann had delivered a paper bag containing her scraps of poetry to Frederic Cruzzi, the editor of a Kingston small press. Swann's book is initially forgotten, until Sarah Maloney, a young American feminist academic, discovers it. The novel itself begins after Swann has gained a small but growing reputation as a sort of northern Emily Dickinson, as her various readers prepare for an academic symposium in her honour. The bulk of Swann is divided into four sections, one devoted to each of the novel's main characters, all of whom are guilty of distorting or even destroying Swann's work and character to suit their own purposes. Along with Sarah and Frederic, the reader meets Morton Jimroy, Swann's rather pathetic and repellent biographer, and Rose Hindmarch, the middle-aged spinster who was Swann's only lasting human contact outside of her marriage. Swann is, in a sense, a writer's revenge novel, gently satirizing everyone who lives through the literary establishment, from academics to publishers, rare book collectors, and even common readers. Nevertheless, this compulsively readable book should delight anyone with a weak spot for fine literary mischief. --Jack Illingworth
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