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BOOKS
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The Diviners
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By Margaret Laurence, review by Bruce Meyer
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The Diviners
By Margaret Laurence, review by Bruce Meyer
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Margaret Laurence's The Diviners is an epic novel about the process of how we come to terms with our past. Using memory as its key motif, a river that flows in both directions, Laurence explores the question of how we understand not only personal identity but history as the sum of personal actions. She argues that within each of us is a vast warehouse of private and shared myths into which we can dip, if necessary, to find out who we are.
A great Canadian novel
In many ways, The Diviners is and will remain that great Canadian novel. Its epic scope, from the impassioned stories told by Christie Logan to the young Morag Gunn, to the panoramic presentation of Western Canadian and Metis history, suggests that all of us have in us the material for grandeur and pride. No matter where we come from, no matter what challenges we encounter, we are all capable of great things if only we are willing to examine the depths of our experience and our imaginations.
A celebration of personal identity
As a study in various forms of emergence -- the emergence of the individual, the emergence of place, nation, identity and self-worth -- The Diviners represents a watershed in Canadian literature where the voice of the stories we tell ourselves stopped looking outward and turned its vision inward in a grand act of self-examination. Laurence puts her readers in touch with the substance of memory, the characters, places and people, that make someone who he or she is, and in the process celebrates the essential nature of individualism.
For more reading:
http://www.info.library.yorku.ca/depts/asc/Bios/mlwho.htm
This site is from York University and features a good thumbnail biographical sketch of Laurence.
For those interested in visiting her home in Lakefield, Ontario, check out the following website:
http://www.mts.net/~mlhome/
Finally, this site from the CBC is a wonderful resource for those interested in Laurence's life, works and beliefs: http://archives.cbc.ca/IDD-1-74-161/people/margaret_laurence/
--Bruce Meyer
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