{"id":49,"date":"2013-08-13T23:37:19","date_gmt":"2013-08-13T23:37:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/douglasglover.net\/?page_id=49"},"modified":"2013-08-14T18:11:54","modified_gmt":"2013-08-14T18:11:54","slug":"the-life-and-times-of-captain-n","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/douglasglover.net\/?page_id=49","title":{"rendered":"The Life and Times of Captain N."},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"Douglas<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cPassionately intricate . . . . Brilliantly re-invents the history of a new nation\u2019s inner life: what was forged, what was lost, and what might yet be regained.\u201d \u2014 Chicago<\/i> Tribune<\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cThe narrative is by turns funny, erotic, appalling, and haunting. . . This vividly imagined novel portrays the American Revolution unforgettably as regional nightmare rather than national epic. Highly recommended.\u201d \u2014 Library Journal<\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cIts language is so sharp, so evocative, that the reader sees well beyond the tissue of words into a forbidding life called the past . . . It is brutal and violent, and all the light to be found in it comes from the author\u2019s poetic grace.\u201d \u2014 The New Yorker<\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cDarkly humorous, simultaneously restless and relentless in its patterning of voices and imagery, this is a close study of individuals trapped by a world in flux: a chaotic view of a new world order from the standpoint of the losers.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews<\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cA venture into a haunting era . . . Glover has written a wonderful portrait of a young mind [Oskar] made for history\u2019s certainties and shattered by its brutal ambiguities.\u201d \u2014 The <\/i>Los Angeles<\/i> Times<\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cIt is this command [of language] \u2014 evidenced also in the sardonic humour that informs the narrative \u2014 that marks Glover as one of the most important Canadian writers of his generation.\u201d \u2014 Philip Marchand, The <\/i>Toronto<\/i> Star<\/i> (17 April 1993)<\/p>\n

\u201cEnough scatological realism and explosive violence to rip the lid off any notions about the quaintness of frontier life . . . a forcefully imaginative work.\u201d \u2014 Maclean\u2019s<\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cDark, funny, exuberantly violent . . . It\u2019s a tale that will smack readers up-side the head like a warrior\u2019s club and leave old preconceptions about historical fiction in a muddied, bloodied heap . . . A work of art.\u201d \u2014 Quill & Quire<\/i><\/p>\n

\"cover<\/a>\u201cA poetic horror . . . a hellish world of shifting realities where the only constant is pain . . . It delineates in a welter of words, often poetic but always brutal, the horrors that human beings inflict on one another and themselves.\u201d \u2014 The <\/i>Calgary<\/i> Herald<\/i><\/p>\n

A world shot through with violent mysticism . . . No fresh-faced idealism here, no platitudes, no tired old saws about liberty or death, but a stinking, festering free-fall into a war that in its own way was just as horrific and mindless as anything happening today in Bosnia.\u201d \u2014 The <\/i>Hamilton<\/i> Spectator<\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cA whirlwind worth riding . . . A splendid, harrowing whirlwind of a tale, a book that somehow manages to be horrifying and hilariously grotesque and sumptuous, carnal and pensive \u2014 all without ever ceasing to be a great, full-bodied story. The writing is as sharp as nails. The words seem hammered to the page . . . A pell-mell narrative inquiry into the nature of meaning, the decline of faith, and the ascendance of reason. This is a profoundly thoughtful book . . . At once crazy, funny, and wise, this is a book to make you dizzy with horror \u2014 and delight.\u201d\u2014 Oakland Ross, The Globe and Mail<\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cGlover tells wonderful, complex stories, and like many post-modern novels, his book continues to expand, resisting closure and completion. For as Oskar muses, one \u2018could write a whole book and there would be nothing in it but questions.\u2019\u201d \u2014 Andy James, Kingston<\/i> Whig-Standard Companion<\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cGlover, with his own potent eye and ear, enables the reader to see and hear and smell and touch the way it was to be alive at our beginning two centuries ago . . . What will keep readers turning the pages is Glover\u2019s mastery of language, the way he has managed not only to furnish his book with pioneer d\u00e9cor, but to infuse it with the lusts and terrors and dreams that filled the North American white mind two centuries ago.\u201d \u2014 George Galt, Books in <\/i>Canada<\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cAn exhilarating challenge to my essential linear sensibilities . . . a very accomplished book . . . I suspect that posterity is going to select The Life and Times of Captain N<\/i>. as one of the seminal novels of our time, given that Douglas Glover has achieved a stunning synthesis of historical evocation and literary invention.\u201d \u2014 Paul Steuwe, Books in Canada<\/i><\/p>\n

\"cover<\/a>\u201cWithout compromising the visceral immediacy of the narrative, Glover skilfully sustains motifs . . . that help elevate his spare prose toward poetry . . . an intense, satisfying book.\u201d \u2014 The <\/i>Vancouver<\/i> Sun<\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cAn unconventional version of historical voice . . . an astonishing jabber that absorbs you with its intelligence . . . Occasionally scabrous, terrifically funny, intermittently appalling, sometimes frightening. A thoroughly convincing world of its own making, it also leaves you persuaded that here, truly, is how the past was. It\u2019ll give you a pleasurable headache of recognition and wonderment.\u201d \u2014 Stephen Smith, The Financial Post<\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cImmediately compelling . . . Visceral imagery that\u2019s still cool enough to curdle the blood….\u00a0 Glover\u2019s hallucinatory world exists as it does in the mind\u2019s eye with nary a detail out of context . . . It\u2019s hard to slot this story of early America in the historical novel category. Leave it somewhere in dreamtime, because the best tales transcend their time and place to speak to readers in any age.\u201d \u2014 The <\/i>Edmonton<\/i> Journal<\/i> (Roger Levesque, 16 May 1993)<\/p>\n

\u201cDreamlike . . . confounds as it allures. Glover\u2019s novel hovers between utopian vision and nightmare. His mastery of form and language transforms this historical fiction into a post-modern novel, which manifests the shining face of literary brilliance while it exposes the dark shadow of European presence in North America, and the even darker shadows within us all. . . . Glover\u2019s novel is an event in Canadian publishing, a work of grace and substance.\u201d \u2014 Patricia Whitney, The Ottawa Citizen<\/i>; The <\/i>Medicine Hat<\/i> News<\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cFascinating and powerful . . . [a] brilliant tour de force.\u201d \u2014 The Kitchener-Waterloo Record<\/i><\/p>\n

\u201c[The Life and Times of Captain N.<\/i>] is the kind of novel that transcends its own characters and plot, that rises above the historical events on which it is based. It doesn\u2019t so much describe or explain or detail as provide a glimpse into the mystery that surrounds all human life.\u201d \u2014 The <\/i>Halifax<\/i> Daily News<\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cAn outstanding work of art by a brilliant writer . . . an unforgettable picture of the human side of the conflict.\u201d \u2014 The Port Hope Evening Guide<\/i><\/p>\n

\"Douglas<\/a>\u201cWith The Life and Times of Captain N.<\/i>, [Glover] has crossed the threshold of the linguistic magicians . . . [he] surprises us by making his mysterious characters knowable, at no sacrifice to their appeal as exotics. His book is a none-too-thinly veiled commentary on the Loyalist origins of the English Canadian middle class.\u201d \u2014 Douglas Fetherling, The Danforth Report<\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cThis utterly extraordinary work even mocks the forward-backward quality of history itself . . . an exquisitely written novel, and unforgettable.\u201d \u2014 Allan Gould, The Western Star <\/i>(Cornerbrook NF); The <\/i>Lethbridge<\/i> Herald<\/i>; The <\/i>Belleville<\/i> Intelligencer<\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is most striking about this novel is its originality. The strangely erotic and violent passages force the reader to rethink how this country was settled.\u201d \u2014 The Simcoe Reformer<\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the kind of novel that transcends its own characters and plot, that rises above the historical events on which it is based and reaches an enviable universality. It . . . provides a glimpse into the basic mystery that surrounds all human life, the dumb, wordless fear that grips us all. And, in so doing, it manages to turn upside-down our familiar and comfortable notions of war, of family, of progress, and of the people who first inhabited the so-called New World.\u201d \u2014 Event<\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cGlover is unquestionably one of Canada\u2019s finest: an unusually erudite writer whose psychic filtering system seems to have malfunctioned, leaving him with the wide-open perceptions of a seer or madman.” \u2014 <\/i>Ann Diamond, Matrix<\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cBrilliantly captures the chaos of the period . . . Glover\u2019s energetic and strikingly visual prose does harrowing justice to the pervasive but wholly nongratuitous scenes of remorseless violence and torture. What prevents the reader from being smothered by the book\u2019s essential nihilism is the formidable intelligence that underlies every page.\u201d \u2014 Canadian Book Review Annual<\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cA strange and savage history. Dream-like, disturbing, exquisitely written.\u201d \u2014 David Macfarlane<\/p>\n

\u201cA strange and savage fictional account . . . mysterious, mystical and thoroughly original.\u201d \u2014 Owen Sound<\/i> Sun-Times<\/i><\/p>\n

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Order The Life and Times of Captain N<\/em><\/h3>\n