Search results for ""Author David Helwig""

A retired academic is called to a remote university to speak as the replacement for an old friend recently deceased in unusual circumstances. The Stand-In is a transcript of these lectures, revealing a sophisticated tale of art, fame, and adultery that unfolds through rambling anecdotes and flashes of scholarly grandstanding. Fiercely funny and bitterly ironic, The Stand-In has been called the best academic doppelgänger story since Nabokov's Pale Fire. David Helwig is a prolific author, an Officer of the Order of Canada, and former poet laureate of Prince Edward Island.

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"Birdsong, wind: here by the ocean every noise was surrounded by silence that reached all the way to the stars. Monica studied the white shingled building above the slope of green lawn, deep bays rising two storeys on each side of the front door and the windowed porch. You felt the big rambling construction must have a memory, old thoughts. Listen, I am the voice of what once was. I am as real as the beating of your hungry heart. A flash of sun blinded her, a pirouette of the dazzling god." So begins David Helwig's Saltsea. A lovely, meditative novel, a story about memory, and about how what once was continues to affect what is and what will be. It is the story of a place, of the family that used to own it, and the people who have been its caretakers. Saltsea, a hotel on the shores of Prince Edward Island, where people come for a brief time, their lives intersecting in intimate and unforeseen ways. The characters of Saltsea are finely drawn, with humour, love and compassion. Sadness and even tragedy are a constant here, but Helwig handles it all humanely, without sentimentality, and with the control of a writer at the height of his powers. Saltsea, befitting a novel so concern with memory, is not something you will soon forget.

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In The Time of Her Life, David Helwig draws us into the world of a woman of character. Indeed how Helwig tells the tale is as absorbing as the tale itself as we follow Jean from small-town Ontario to a privileged life as la contesse de Serviède in wartime France to genteel poverty in Montreal, adapting her actions and values to survive in the world around her. At fifteen, Jean is ready to slip into the secret life of adults; already she enjoys the attention of a cross-border whiskey smuggler. When he is shot by other smugglers, she rows out to him. Close to shore, she admits to herself that he is dead. Setting the course of her life, she sidesteps explanation by rolling the body overboard and sneaking home. Soon, she accepts a movie cameraman's impulsive proposition and heads for New York disguised as a boy. Being beautiful, being looked at becomes Jean's métier. In New York, working as nude model, she learns the value of her youth and beauty and what sex can buy her if she uses it judiciously. In Hollywood, silent-film stardom is soon hers. Asked to make a movie in France, she says Yes, as always. She says Yes again to a much-older count, has a son, and lives as a Paris aristocrat until her life is devastated by World War II. Her husband dead and her apartment commandeered, she huddles at the family's country home with her child until the war is over. Trading on her title, Jean opens a gallery, and, in the postwar confusion about ownership, she carefully sells a parcel of Picassos left with her by a missing Russian Jewish designer. But peace is transitory. She loses her son to the war in Indochina, her lover to family duties, her womb to a hysterectomy. Stricken with restlessness, she sells the gallery, moves to Montreal, and starts a new career in films and commercials. In old age, she measures out her last days in her Montreal apartment, her resilience undimmed by history and human folly. In The Time of Her Life David Helwig has created a highly entertaining and provocative work. This is an inspired exploration of time and memory skillfully crafted by a veteran Canadian writer.

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A snug country house, a snowy landscape in a place that could be Prince Edward Island, a small-town lawyer bumbling through an emotional crisis -- Close to the Fire is a winter's tale that warms the heart while gently chilling the blood. Many years ago, the lawyer (then a student) persuaded the woman who is now his wife to desert Orland, her older husband, and run away with him. Now Orland arrives on their doorstep to die. The lawyer recalls the moral force her exerted to make Marijke change loyalties instead of simply enjoying a little adultery. Does sheltering a dying man atone for stealing his wife? The lawyer doesn't know and isn't sure he cares until a dramatic fire and Orland's death rearrange the domestic hearth.

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