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Jean Marc Ah-Sen sat down with Giller Prize winner André Alexis to talk about the current state of Canadian literature.Handout

Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author André Alexis has explored the hinterlands of human desire across several acclaimed books. In April, 2022, he released Winter, or a Town Near Palgrave, an ode to the miracle of artistic inspiration. Depicting the hibernation practices of a secretive townspeople, Alexis reckoned with the Italian writer Tommaso Landolfi’s influence on his work.

I met with Alexis in a Sherwood Park café to discuss this latest release, the end of his five-novel Quincunx Cycle, and how his generation of writers squares up to the titans of Canadian publishing.

Now that the grand experiment of the Quincunx is complete, can you tell if it accomplished what you set out to do?

It’s not over because I’m going to rewrite all five novels. It’s not a major rewrite, but I’m going to make sure that there are no editorial flaws. Some incidents happen at the wrong time that need to be made internally consistent. The important thing for me about the Quincunx is not that there is a narrative unity; you don’t start out at one end and go to the other just to discover some narrative truth. It’s a matter of patternings; psychological patterns, geometric ones – each novel is five chapters, the denouement comes in Chapter 4, Chapter 5 is a settling of accounts.

It’s like being in a garden; right now, you can see all the plots, but I’ll just get rid of a few of the weeds. It will come out again as a single volume edition called A Quincunx with Coach House Books. The novels will be in the order they were released, but if you enter them at various points, people can see different things. I love the idea that my order is only one of many.

Winter has a fabulistic quality that made me think of Kafka’s The Hunger Artist. What inspired this story?

The central image [of people hibernating in body bags] comes from a Tommaso Landolfi story. He is a writer I admire; unclassifiable and very strange. It’s not an homage in the sense that I’m trying to imitate him. As an immigrant, you domesticate things that you find strange in a new society within yourself. I’m a house for culture; I’m aware of all the little rooms and closets and spaces within myself. Winter happens to be the Tommaso Landolfi aspect of myself, and it answers the question of why something you read has stayed with you. It’s connected to this idea of maternity, these elements that you take care of culturally. There is a custodial element to the work we do, which I’m more aware of as I get older – of keeping the flame alive, though there is also the possibility of something rotting inside you.

You’ve been considered an independent stalwart for years now, but you have published with bigger houses before. What does it mean for independent writers who move on to larger publishing opportunities?

Although I recognize there’s a difference between Book*hug, Coach House or McClelland & Stewart, these were a set of personal relationships I had with [editors] Jay Millar, Alana Wilcox and Jared Bland. If those people happened to be at different houses, I would have been just as happy to be at those other places. It’s important to make a distinction between brand names when we talk about the big houses or the indie thing and the people working there. You can be screwed by indie publishers just as easily as by big publishers, so let’s have no illusions about that.

Are we producing better fiction than 70 years ago?

That generation would probably be Alice Munro, Norman Levine, Mordecai Richler, Margaret Laurence, Atwood? My contemporaries would be Christian Bök, Nino Ricci, Steve Heighton, Miriam Toews, Sheila Heti, Alex MacLeod. Are “we” better than those writers? I’m not going to say that. I would say they don’t punch “us” in the head and we don’t punch “them” in the head either. It’s a wrestle to a draw. I think we’re at least as good as they are.

I feel very close to Munro, Levine and Laurence, but I feel just as close to Italo Calvino, Witold Gombrowicz, Leonardo Sciascia and Harry Mathews. The problem with the idea of the giants on whose shoulders you’re standing is that people automatically assume they come from where you do, which isn’t necessarily the case. It’s the mystery of culture to an extent.

I think cultural sympathies [from 70 years ago] are tricky. It’s not up to me to say that someone doesn’t have the right to go to that spot. I know there are interesting arguments about and against cultural appropriation, but here I’m talking about something more ineffable. Why is this sensibility drawn to that sensibility? There is some inner thing in Eric Clapton, who has become a bit of a dick, that responds to Robert Johnson that isn’t ingenuine. I think about Muddy Waters loving George Jones or how Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa reminds me of some of the ghost stories I heard as a child in Trinidad.

There’s not just one kind of cultural appropriation. There is a rigid, unyielding version that is anti-art because it forces people to stay within narrow lanes (you cannot explore outside of yourself); but there are versions of cultural appropriation that are about being sensitive to the material that you are taking on. Before I might have thought that I could talk about Indigenous spirituality; that’s no longer true because I’m aware of the problems associated with that, which is good. It can be stimulating and considerate, but ultimately, each of us has to make a decision about how deeply we take something in. I think it’s unfair to point to cultural appropriation and assume we know which version we’re talking about.

How has your writing changed over time? Is your self-conception as a writer tied to ideas you want to engage in, or are your considerations mainly stylistic ones?

Style is a judgment from outside, something that the reader sees. For me, it does not exist as a guiding principle. I have an ear, I have an instinct; I’m chasing after a version of balance, cleanliness, of clarity, and that chase is what people probably think of as my style. I don’t see it as a monolithic thing that I want to maintain; it’s possible for me to imagine evolving into a different way of writing. The difference between myself as a writer when I started out and the writer that I am now is self-awareness. I know a lot more about the art I’ve been practising for 40 years – I’d have to be stupid not to.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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