Roberts’s readings are both original and politically engaged. She deftly combats charges that Rohinton Mistry’s refusal to represent his “host” country in spite of the accolades it’s bestowed upon him—to “pay up”— makes him a bad guest. Drawing parallels between Mistry’s representations of political disenfranchisement in India and his public excoriation of cuts to social-welfare programs under Mike Harris’s “Common Sense Revolution,” Roberts makes the case for the political efficacy of a cosmopolitan citizenship that stands in two places at once.

Digressions like Roberts’ discussion of the idiosyncrasies of Canadian film distribution in her chapter on Carol Shields are less carefully considered. And provocative as the book is in tracing the delicate steps of writers such as Michael Ondaatje, granted honorary citizenship for works that needle the nation now hailing him as its own, its shifts from literary analysis to reception history can be jarring. Still, this is an important study—a smart look at border-crossing books about border crossing that is attentive, as Roberts says about Yann Martel, to the “radically simultaneous” potential of Canadian identities.

“I know what I wanted to tell you,” she said both times, “so-and-so died.”

The first unfortunate object of forgotten conversation was a dear old great aunt in Vancouver I hadn’t seen in a decade. The second was my childhood family doctor, whose last prescription for me was filled at least 20 years ago. My mother is the meticulous and dedicated reporter of demise in our family. She spreads the detailed news of death and disease, and these are usually the lead stories in any call from her. In this, she shares a curious simpatico with a writer of whom both she and I are fond, Michael Ondaatje.

Is there another writer anywhere who makes sickening violence and death into beauty with such regularity and skill? I hear someone shouting—perhaps wailing—Atwood!, and indeed, Peggy and Mike can be justly seen as the twin pillars of Canadian moroseness. Why bring a character’s life to a satisfying conclusion amid doting pets and darling grandchildren when you can murder, beat, maim, dismember, explode or burn them beyond recognition? But while Atwood hurts her characters as object lessons in the indifference of the universe, Ondaatje’s cruelty has the air of fetish about it. It is violence for art’s sake. His is a stunningly beautiful landscape of suffering.

In Divisadero, the reigning Governor General’s Award champion, Ondaatje cripples one character with childhood polio, has a horse kick the stuffing out of the same girl and her sister, induces a father to attack and nearly murder his daughter’s lover, and has that same daughter stab and almost dispatch the attacking father.

Later in the book, the almost-murdered lover is beaten into amnesia by some gambling colleagues and must undergo a second round of recovery and recall. As well, a literary flashback takes us through the life of a French poet who is blinded in one eye when glass shards pierce his cornea, and who later witnesses his one true love die of diphtheria. In an Ondaatje novel, not even a poet is allowed a life of quiet. Then again, this is the same writer who flung a nun from the Bloor Street viaduct, blew up a nurse with a roadside bomb and forced a lovestruck archeologist through the agonies of body-wide third-degree burns.

When we were younger, my writer friends and I made a game of Ondaatje sightings around town. Someone had spotted him in a liquor store, buying a wine that screamed of excellent taste. Another had a long, uncomfortable conversation with him at a book launch. Yet another is proud to report he used the urinal beside Ondaatje’s not once but twice in his travels. In each instance, the tellers of the tale escaped literary harm despite their proximity to this genius of personal disaster. So far, Ondaatje has not clubbed a character with a wine bottle, talked one to death or had him painfully assaulted during urination.

I note a brand-new Coach House title, Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig, brings potential bio-terrorism to the Toronto subway. Helwig’s characters drop to the tiled platforms in delightfully Ondaatjean style. Of course, Ondaatje began his career as a Coach House author. Is Canada’s hippest small press the source of all this pain and morbidity?

In my student days I edited and handmade a literary magazine called ink, and we printed the covers and trimmed the final books at Coach House. I did the trimming myself on their diabolical-looking industrial book cutter, an awesome machine that can straighten the edges of 20 magazines or more with one precise machine-driven cut. I never passed my fingers beneath the blade without visualizing the horrible damage it could visit upon me.

Once, deep in concentrated trimming, I was interrupted by someone standing beside me. A voice asked me to trim a pile of Brick magazine covers. As I handed back the trimmed pile, Michael Ondaatje gave me, and the deadly cutting edge, a grateful smile. I realize now I’m lucky to have escaped with my life.

In her new book, Imagining Toronto, York University geography professor Amy Lavender Harris creates a literary map of that identity building. What she finds is a literary scene that is reflecting the city’s shifting geography, moving into inner suburbs like Scarborough and North York, and well into deep suburbia: Pickering, Vaughan, Ajax.

Harris began writing her book two years ago after scouring the city for books for a Toronto literature course. She soon found herself delving into the city’s literary history, as framed by the narratives of iconic neighborhoods like the Annex, Parkdale and Cabbagetown. Now she has oriented the city’s public spaces in its literature, tracing Toronto’s identity to the streetcar lines and architectural icons that recur in its literature.

It’s those architectural icons that often define the Toronto identity, for better or worse. “The CN Tower comes to mind because it’s the most iconic, as well as in some ways, hated, symbol of Toronto,” she says—but that was until Michael Lee-Chin’s crystalline addition to the Royal Ontario Museum was unveiled, Harris notes.

Harris says there is plenty of literary history to left to map. “If you could say everything there was that could be said about Toronto, then it would be a pretty boring place.”

The Al Purdy A-Frame Anthology is a fundraiser to restore the Ontario home where he nurtured aspiring young poets and made a mean wild-grape wine.

The ramshackle A-frame house Al Purdy built still stands by the lake in Ameliasburgh, Ontario. A place “so far from anywhere,” he wrote, “even homing pigeons lost their way.”

Inside, it’s nearly as it was when he died 10 years ago. His drawers and cupboards still hold the flotsam and jetsam of a well lived life.

Outside, wild grass has reclaimed a shed that was once a guest house for young poets like Michael Ondaatje. Purdy’s writing room, another shed, sinks slowly into the muddy earth. The main house is badly in need of a new foundation.

That’s where the Al Purdy A-frame Trust comes in. A collection of poets, authors and CanLit lovers want to raise the money to buy the land, save the house, and start writer-in-residence program in the A-frame.

“Nurturing young writers was a second vocation for Al,” said Jean Baird, the project’s head. “And he was blunt!”

Canada hasn’t done a great job of preserving its physical literary history, Baird says. The childhood home of author Joy Kogawa is preseved in British Colombia, but 60 years passed between it being her family home and becoming a historic site. Purdy’s house is still owned by his wife Eurithie, and remains largely untouched since his death.

The book The Al Purdy A-Frame Anthology is an amazing piece of Canadian literary history, and a fundraiser for the project.

The anthology has the same cobbled-together yet built-to-last feeling as the A-frame itself. It’s a summer scrapbook of essays, poems and pictures by authors including Denis Lee, F. R. Scott, and Margaret Atwood. Purdy’s own essays and poems flesh out the famous cottage that was once CanLit’s own homemade-wine fueled summer camp and setting for many of his poems.

The A-frame was the go-to spot for aspiring Canadian poets and acclaimed wordsmiths alike for 40 years. Many of the aspiring poets, like Ondaatje, later became the acclaimed in part due to their visits to the A-frame to hone their skills.

Many of the book’s contributors, including Eurithie, credit the house as the catalyst that transformed Purdy’s writing from his awkward early attempts to the beautiful and often brash verses he wrote in his middle years about the land and our history.

So we built a house, my wife and I

Our house at a backwater puddle of a lake

near Ameliasburgh, Ont. spending

our last hard-earned buck to buy second-hand lumber.

-Al Purdy, from “In Search of Owen Roblin”

Baird says it’ll cost about $900,000 to buy the house, upgrade it to current safety codes, and establish the writer-in-residence endowment. So far, most of the money the trust has received has been in $10 and $20 increments from poetry-loving Canadians. The push is on now to get several large donors to really get things rolling.

For more information about the project, or to make a donation, visit Harbourfront Publishing’s website.