Description
Book SynopsisThe brilliant debut novel by Helen Weinzweig, one of the first feminist writers in Canada and the award-winning author of Basic Black With Pearls.
In Helen Weinzweig's brilliant debut novel, a wedding reception becomes a gothic dream. The bride is not all she seems and there is something ambiguous about the groom and just about everyone else at the surreal and strangely moving wedding.
Like a piece of music, Passing Ceremony is composed of brief, suggestive fragments that grow into a tightly integrated whole. There are bits of real and imagined conversation; polite dialogues that slide into mad comic banality; and scenes that could be quiet nightmares out of Borges. A satire and a rueful meditation on the ways people hurt one another, Weinzweig gives us a world suspended in time, an uneasy territory of the soul, which we all inhabit.
This edition features a new introduction by Jim Polk.
Trade ReviewA remarkable piece of writing. * Toronto Star *
Polished, forceful, and poetic. * Ottawa Citizen *
Handled with skill. * Chatelaine *
A brilliant first work of fiction. * Edmonton Journal *
[Passing Ceremony] crackles with the energy of chance. Its form seems built from mysterious, unconscious forces . . . As a whole, the powerful novel resembles a shattered reflection in a mirror, each page a different-sized shard of a splintered psyche . . . There’s a reason people are returning to [Helen Weinzweig’s] work now. Her art was committed to unshackling us from the illusion of any form of certainty — to keeping the unknown, unknown. * Literary Review of Canada *
