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Five Legs: A Novel
First published by Anansi in 1969, Five Legs was a breakthrough for Canadian experimental fiction, selling 1,000 copies in its first week. Five Legs is the subversive tale of two guilt-ridden young men, Lucan Crackell and Felix Oswald—one a professor, the other his student—caught in the grip of the North American Protestant ethic, with its emotional web-spinning and sexual torments. Gibson captures both their mortifications and their spirited resistance to all things WASP, themselves included, in stream-of-consciousness prose that is at once fluid, disjointed, and hilarious. This is essential reading for any Canlit junkie, and quite a trip.
- GenresCanadaFictionLiterature
268 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1969
8 people are currently reading
238 people want to read
About the author
Graeme Gibson
18 books35 followersGraeme Gibson CM was a Canadian novelist and conservationist and the longtime partner of author Margaret Atwood. He was a Member of the Order of Canada (1992) and one of the organizers of the Writer's Union of Canada. He was also a founder of the Writers' Trust of Canada. Gibson was best known for his 1973 book Eleven Canadian Novelists, a non-fiction work.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
July 18, 2013
A stunning cacophony for two voices
A series of windows cut directly through landscape and conversation
An unending nightmare fugue-of-conciousness
A microscopic observation of the excruciating moments that make up the everyday
A great tragicomic anxiety dream where ever past present future moment of your life is happening at this very moment and will never never stop happening just like that again and again and again
Five Legs is a little deceptive, a mirage construction of placid mundane gestures teetering on the edge of the great irrational disaster of post-war middle-class mediocrity and despair. On the surface: Lucan, a 30-something English professor, having failed to write anything of consequence of his own, hopes only to make department head and fill the child-shaped gap in his marriage. But is floundering a little, drinking a bit too much, perhaps desperately uncertain? And now one of his M.A. students has gone and died, he'll have to represent the university at a funeral he has no desire to attend, among people he cannot relate to of the generations before and after his own. One representative of the younger, Felix, has parallel anxieties, perhaps, but also perhaps more time ahead to set them right, if he can make it through this day and begin to formulate a path.
All of which sounds true and tragic and terribly tedious. If it were taken in the ordinary realist manner at least.
But Gibson, writing in the late 60s, builds these basic facts into a dense and writhing fever of image and insight. Stream-of-consciousness was very much in the voice of the times, but rarely (if ever) have I seen it applied in such fine interweaving of threads for such sustained stretches of writing. Entire 40-page sections of dense-packed type seem to have been conceived of as indivisible chunks covering 20 years and several cities, maybe several realities. Again, much of the surface action is ordinary enough, but the most ordinary moment, here, is shot through with hidden turmoil and dischord, memory and fantasy piercing each present moment to the quick, scenes collapsing through one another in the seamless disorientation of hard mental glissement. Were this to be filmed, it would take a very assured surrealism and elaborately linked sets to convey. As it is, the confusion of thoughts and images boiling across the page almost hides the flickering and intractable unreality permeating this: only a careful dissection of the shifting perspectives and dislocations can reveal the full strange power at work to bind the whole together. Others often do this sort of thing in short bursts but Gibson's voice is sustainedly distinct and surprisingly assured for a debut. And unlike with better known modernists, I was quite unprepared for the complexity and stylistic daring here. I've surely missed much that a slower and more committed read would reveal.
Which is why a long-buried book like this needs more readers, more minds at work on it, more and closer readings encouraging even closer readings from others. Because this one seems well worth it. Darkly comic, desperate, and feverish behind the even facades of mediocre lives.
...
Earlier account of how exactly I found this one:
There's a bookstore near my new apartment called Here's a Bookstore. It's in Midwood/Sheepshead Bay/Gravesend/South-Brooklyn-???? so no one's ever heard of it unless it's getting named the best every now and then. The stacks here, mostly running books-behind-books three rows deep, are wonderfully esoteric. Tons of weird first editions from the 70s and such, comprehensive collections of authors I've never heard of, and generally old editions are much cheaper than newer.
Browsing one day, I found an old Margret Atwood Canadian lit-crit book from the 70s called Survival. I leafed through, browsed her theories on Canadian writing being the literature of victims and survival, noted a "Gibson", wondered if William Gibson was around in the 70s, realized it was actually a previously-unheard-of Graeme Gibson, apparently a keystone novelist of Atwood's arguments. Moving on down the shelves, suddenly there was Graeme Gibson's debut, Five Legs. Of which the first line was an elegant garble of impressions of someone waking up very hung over, in a flurry of half-glimpsed personal and professional concerns. How could I resist?
A series of windows cut directly through landscape and conversation
An unending nightmare fugue-of-conciousness
A microscopic observation of the excruciating moments that make up the everyday
A great tragicomic anxiety dream where ever past present future moment of your life is happening at this very moment and will never never stop happening just like that again and again and again
Five Legs is a little deceptive, a mirage construction of placid mundane gestures teetering on the edge of the great irrational disaster of post-war middle-class mediocrity and despair. On the surface: Lucan, a 30-something English professor, having failed to write anything of consequence of his own, hopes only to make department head and fill the child-shaped gap in his marriage. But is floundering a little, drinking a bit too much, perhaps desperately uncertain? And now one of his M.A. students has gone and died, he'll have to represent the university at a funeral he has no desire to attend, among people he cannot relate to of the generations before and after his own. One representative of the younger, Felix, has parallel anxieties, perhaps, but also perhaps more time ahead to set them right, if he can make it through this day and begin to formulate a path.
All of which sounds true and tragic and terribly tedious. If it were taken in the ordinary realist manner at least.
But Gibson, writing in the late 60s, builds these basic facts into a dense and writhing fever of image and insight. Stream-of-consciousness was very much in the voice of the times, but rarely (if ever) have I seen it applied in such fine interweaving of threads for such sustained stretches of writing. Entire 40-page sections of dense-packed type seem to have been conceived of as indivisible chunks covering 20 years and several cities, maybe several realities. Again, much of the surface action is ordinary enough, but the most ordinary moment, here, is shot through with hidden turmoil and dischord, memory and fantasy piercing each present moment to the quick, scenes collapsing through one another in the seamless disorientation of hard mental glissement. Were this to be filmed, it would take a very assured surrealism and elaborately linked sets to convey. As it is, the confusion of thoughts and images boiling across the page almost hides the flickering and intractable unreality permeating this: only a careful dissection of the shifting perspectives and dislocations can reveal the full strange power at work to bind the whole together. Others often do this sort of thing in short bursts but Gibson's voice is sustainedly distinct and surprisingly assured for a debut. And unlike with better known modernists, I was quite unprepared for the complexity and stylistic daring here. I've surely missed much that a slower and more committed read would reveal.
Which is why a long-buried book like this needs more readers, more minds at work on it, more and closer readings encouraging even closer readings from others. Because this one seems well worth it. Darkly comic, desperate, and feverish behind the even facades of mediocre lives.
...
Earlier account of how exactly I found this one:
There's a bookstore near my new apartment called Here's a Bookstore. It's in Midwood/Sheepshead Bay/Gravesend/South-Brooklyn-???? so no one's ever heard of it unless it's getting named the best every now and then. The stacks here, mostly running books-behind-books three rows deep, are wonderfully esoteric. Tons of weird first editions from the 70s and such, comprehensive collections of authors I've never heard of, and generally old editions are much cheaper than newer.
Browsing one day, I found an old Margret Atwood Canadian lit-crit book from the 70s called Survival. I leafed through, browsed her theories on Canadian writing being the literature of victims and survival, noted a "Gibson", wondered if William Gibson was around in the 70s, realized it was actually a previously-unheard-of Graeme Gibson, apparently a keystone novelist of Atwood's arguments. Moving on down the shelves, suddenly there was Graeme Gibson's debut, Five Legs. Of which the first line was an elegant garble of impressions of someone waking up very hung over, in a flurry of half-glimpsed personal and professional concerns. How could I resist?
dropped
April 2, 2024A classic of Canadian modernism, I found this novel’s staccato stream-of-thought sentences, the leaping from vague scenes and interactions to obscure thoughts, mutterings, or flashbacks, to have an intriguing pulse to them at first. As I approached the ninetieth page, the style had exhausted itself, and as the novel has nothing else to offer apart from a sustained stylistic assault (whose attempts at Beckettian black humour fall flat), this reader chose to place the handsome volume to one side with a respectful nod for my Canadian brethren.
August 6, 2017
Still don't get why anyone would possibly feel compelled to compare him with Pynchon.
September 29, 2022
At times I was captivated by the sheer strength of the decapitated dialogue, filling in words that were invisible in print but clear as a bell in sound. Yes, I was often lost. Yes, I am often lost staring at my phone. I think a background sound track would help me when chaos reigns.
December 16, 2019
Stream of consciousness from the perspective of two men attending a funeral for a young man they both knew from their university. It was extremely hard for me to decipher what was happening. This book seems to be a Can-Lit darling, although for the most part I failed to find much in the way of reviews or criticism to help me figure it out. Only Margaret Atwood understands this one.
August 15, 2020
I'm sure this is a good book for someone, but, after 178 pages I, personally, didn't have a clue what I was reading. I couldn't finish it due to being totally lost. My guess is this book is far to smart for me.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews