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Loading... No Great Mischief (1999)by Alistair MacLeod
   » 9 more Books Read in 2016 (1,726) Canada (29) No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) TMLL | Aug 1, 2022 |  ) maryzee | May 11, 2022 | A 50-something dentist goes to visit his alcoholic brother in an insalubrious Toronto boarding house. In succeeding chapters, he recalls incidents in their shared life. Moving back and forth through time...a conversation here, an event there....going back even further to the family mythology of their first Scottish forebears to migrate to Canada...this is the most tremendously moving novel. The thing that stood out for me was how the writing is SO superb that he can wring your heart, even for characters who have barely appeared. Brother Colin is hardly mentioned until...an event occurs....yet that doesnt stop the reader being completely caught up in the trauma. Subsequent references to him just add to it. Although a family memoir, Macleod is also aware of the experience of immigrants...from the Mexican fruit-pickers to the Vietnamese facing US aggression and the Masai...encountered on an African holiday...being pushed out. He links these to his own family, fleeing the problems in Scotland for more difficulties in the harsh new life. The first Highland soldiers, serving under a sceptical General Wolfe, were seen as without value, it being, in his view, "no great mischief if they fall". And as the Gaelic-speaking clan in Canada come to face death, jail, violence,antipathy, maybe they feel the modern world views them similarly. One of best books I've ever read. Got it from library but will order my own copy to keep..Superb writing. ( ) starbox | Jun 8, 2021 | Alexander MacDonald is a twin with his sister who are the youngest of a family that undergoes a terrible tragedy. Raised by his grandparents, he tells the story of his family with frequent flashbacks from his current life as a well-to-do dentist. It is a story about family and tradition. There's a quote repeated throughout the book: 'All of us are better when we're loved.' No matter their difficulties, these people stuck together through good times and bad. Mr. MacLeod's writing is lovely. He has a style of writing much like a tone poem. Each paragraph is a new painting set before the reader to savor and absorb. I'm usually a fast reader, but I found myself taking my time through this story, sometimes only reading a page and putting the book aside, the better to reflect. One of the classics of Canadian literature, No Great Mischief is a book to be cherished and reread. ( ) N.W.Moors | Oct 23, 2018 | ) Rdra1962 | Aug 1, 2018 |
"Remarkable. ...[MacLeod's] writing, graceful and elegiac, has the resonance of Steinbeck." "With...No Great Mischief...American readers...have before them...a new land that their imaginations can seize like a manifest destiny." "A gorgeously worded...novel by an acknowledged master of the short story." He does not take readers to as many different places and psyches as his country's very best writer, Alice Munro, but he indelibly renders a Cape Breton we are never likely to visit -- a terrain where the ''dog days'' are the coldest, not the muggiest, and where the ocean wind has forced enough sand into the trees that ''when the saw passed through them in the early darkness of the fall and winter evenings, streaks of blue and orange flame shot from them.'' AwardsNotable Lists
In 1779, driven out of his home, Calum MacDonald sets sail from the Scottish Highlands with his extensive family. After a long, terrible journey he settles his family in 'the land of trees', and eventually they become a separate Nova Scotian clan- red-haired and black-eyed, with its own identity, its own history.It is the 1980s by the time our narrator, Alexander MacDonald, tells the story of his family, a thrilling and passionate story that intersects with history- with Culloden, where the clans died, and with the 1759 battle at Quebec that was won when General Wolfe sent in the fierce Highlanders because it was 'no great mischief if they fall'. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.06)
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