Monday, May 17, 2021

The Innocent Traveller (1949)



Years ago, in an effort to broaden the conversation on Canadian fiction (and sell a few books in the process), McClelland & Stewart created the New Canadian Library. Among the titles in this library of reprints is Ethel Wilson's The Innocent Traveller (1949), first published by Macmillan. 

As with all NCL titles, The Innocent Traveller carries a short afterword by a writer and/or scholar who has an interest in, or relationship with, the text. The writer tasked with the "Afterword" for Traveller is the late P.K. Page. Here she is near the end of her afterword:

"But what of the book itself, what of its shape? For it has a shape, this collection of stories (or is it a novel, after all?). So delighted are we by its style, by its characters who have become our friends, that we have altogether forgotten shape. We have been carried along -- like Topaz herself -- absorbed, unthinking, until towards the end, the book gathers itself together, and we see its circularity and lift that is, in fact, a spiral."

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