SWANN

by Carol Shields ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1989

A brilliant literary mystery, by Canadian Shields, in which all traces of a dead poet's work gradually disappear: a delightful sendup of the scholarly sideshow that surrounds a work of art. Mary Swann, a kind of rural Canadian Emily Dickinson, submitted a paper bag full of poems to a small publisher before her husband hacked her to pieces. Rather quickly, a number of scholars devote themselves to her little-known life and her slender volume of poems. The novel tells about four such people before bringing them together at a Swann Symposium (with the account of the latter written as a screenplay): Sarah Maloney, a feminist scholar whose dissertation became a best-seller, is full of literary gossip and feminist jargon; Morton Jimroy, Swann's biographer, corresponds with Sarah and fantasizes about her; Rose Hindmarch, a small-town librarian, exaggerates her brief acquaintance with Swann for a measure of fame: and Frederic Cruzzi, editor of that same small town's paper, published the first edition of Swann's book. While none of these people really knows much about the poet, their thoughts and milieu--rendered in Shields' deft brush-strokes--reveal much about themselves and their intertwined lives. The documentary screenplay that tells the story of the symposium itself is lovely: it's at once a broad social satire of the academic world and a wonderfully inventive mystery--page by page, every trace of Mary Swann disappears, including all copies of her poems, and the disappearance is universal. By book's end, her work exists only in the fragmented memories of the Swarm scholars--who finally stop haggling and attempt, probably futilely, to reconstruct the poems. Along with Shields' collection of stories, Various Miracles (p. 84), this novel is the triumphant introduction of a mature artist to American readers.

Pub Date: July 1, 1989

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1989

Categories: FICTION