Reputations and egos are glossed not paintings. 1-9: “Oh, no, no, no thought Clara Morrow as she walked towards the closed doors.” This is how Louise Penny begins A Trick of the Light.Ĭlara is about to walk through the door of the ultra-chic, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal for her vernissage, a private party where artists celebrate with friends, clients, patrons and even critics before their exhibitions open to the public. Someday my son will read the Gamache Series and understand even better. And my son said “Daddy, we can use this to make another world.” To my ears it sounded like something that Clara’s character would say, and like Clara would have, we have kept the paintbrush from the paint set-a lovely gift given by a remarkable woman, who knows so very much about the nature of true friendship. That Christmas Louise sent a paint-by-numbers kit. But like that junior officer of the Sûreté, now felt I was part of something special. This time we had a lengthy telephone call-we did have lots of plans to help promote Louise and I can talk about my son for a long, long time. She asked about all the children, about the dads and most importantly about the children whose dads could not attend-how did the those kids feel? It was a Gamache-like exhibition of thoughtful perception. When we spoke again, the first thing she asked about wasn’t our plans to promote her, but my son and our Tea. I spoke briefly with Louise but confessed that I could not talk for long as I was about to go to a Father’s Day Tea at my son’s preschool. We at Raincoast had just signed on to help with book promotion in Canada, it was the middle of June and A Trick of the Light was publishing in August. It was like this for me when I met Louise Penny, the Chief Inspector of our publishing adventures together in Canada. When he gets back to his village, although several of his friends have died – one presumably in the war itself – the others have survived, and he soon goes back to sitting and gossiping with them outside of the pub where they used to chatter together.We all love those scenes where Gamache meets a new officer of the Sûreté and instead of overawing them he shows kindness and curiosity. Rip Van Winkle manages to sleep right through it, which is quite a feat when you think about what a noise there must have been. One interpretation is that Irving, through this light-hearted tale, is actually trying to downplay the American Revolution. Why did Irving recycle this old plot device for his story about the American Revolution? And how should we interpret the story? Like Irving’s story, it features a man from a simple village who discovers some strange men drinking in the woods like Irving’s story, the hero falls asleep after partaking of their drink, and, like Irving’s story, he wakes up to find twenty years have passed. The Christian myth of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, who fell asleep for two centuries to escape persecution, is another important precursor to ‘Rip Van Winkle’.īut the clearest influence was Johann Karl Christoph Nachtigal’s German folktale ‘Peter Klaus’. Indeed, it was an ancient idea: the Greek historian Diogenes Laërtius, writing some 1,500 years before Irving, tells a similar story concerning Epimenides of Knossos, who fell asleep in a cave for fifty-seven years. Nor was the central idea of the story – a man falling asleep for many years and waking up to find the word around him substantially changed – entirely new.
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