Under the Ribs of Death

This is sometimes charmingly heartfelt--the young Hungarian immigrant boy's yearning to be an Anglo Fauntleroy in a big house surrounded by beauty; the rendition of his fresh-off-the-boat sad Pierrot or "thin gypsy thief" of an uncle--but too often it seems like Marlyn, whose day job was tech writer for the Canadian federal government, felt the need to take his own rich experiences and remembered feelings and render them sensationalistic, even garish. He's simultaneously too close to the material and too eager to please, and while where it works it works well, not only for the poignant soft-focus stuff like above but also for queasy moments like the scraping-bottom scene with the rat (I've had a mental breakdown of a kind in a house show more riddled with rats, and the rats helped it along, let me tell you); but in other places, like all the parts where he gets weird about how ugly and "gristly" skinny women are and how only a fat thigh can support a fat heart, or the heavy-handed not-so-high-concept ending, he's obviously got his protagonist, who goes by "Sandor Hunyadi" and "Alex Humphrey" and "Alex Hunter" and compulsively writes and rips up his name(s) throughout as he tries to break through the titular ribs of his "hunky"/"humpy" Hungarian identity (oh, awful title too), also mixed up a bit too much with he John Marlyn himself, who was born a Hungarian under a presumbly Hungarian name and also went by Vincent Reid (when he wrote science fiction). So this is psychologically interesting and shows some craft but is a kind of unpleasant reading experience, where you feel like if you react wrong John Marlyn is gonna start hitting himself in the head with his shoe and going "Stupid, stupid!" show less

This is an important novel about the experience of growing up as a Hungarian immigrant in early/mid 20th century Winnipeg. It's a bit dated (the ending struck me as sentimental), but it deals with issues that remain relevant today, like integration and assimilation.

new Canadian library 41. really STUPID maybe funny but I never laughed.