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The Lava in My Bones
A frustrated geologist studying global warming becomes obsessed with eating rocks after embarking on his first same-sex relationship in Europe. Back home, his young sister is a high-school girl who suddenly starts to ooze honey through her pores, an affliction that attracts hordes of bees as well as her male classmates but ultimately turns her into a social pariah. Meanwhile, their obsessive Pentecostal mother repeatedly calls on the Holy Spirit to rid her family of demons. The siblings are reunited on a ship bound for Europe where they hope to start a new life, but are unaware that their disguised mother is also on board and plotting to win back their souls, with the help of the Virgin Mary.
Told in a lush baroque prose, this intense, extravagant magic-realist novel combines elements of fairy tales, horror movies, and romances to create a comic, hallucinatory celebration of excess and sensuality.
Barry Webster's first book, The Sound of All Flesh, won the ReLit Award for story collections.
Told in a lush baroque prose, this intense, extravagant magic-realist novel combines elements of fairy tales, horror movies, and romances to create a comic, hallucinatory celebration of excess and sensuality.
Barry Webster's first book, The Sound of All Flesh, won the ReLit Award for story collections.
375 pages, Paperback
First published September 11, 2012
6 people are currently reading
466 people want to read
About the author
Barry Webster
2 books11 followersBarry Webster is a classically trained pianist and writer of both fiction and non-fiction.
His latest novel, The Lava in My Bones, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the Ferro-Grumley Award, and the Dayne Ogilvie Prize.
His first book of stories, The Sound of All Flesh, won the ReLit Award for the best collection of Canadian short fiction published in 2005. His magic-realist fiction has also been shortlisted for the National Magazine Award and the Hugh MacLennan Award. He has written for a wide variety of publications including The Washington Post, The Toronto Star, Event, Fiddlehead, and The Globe and Mail.
Fluent in English, French and some German, he has translated some of his work into French. Webster has performed at numerous literary series including the Takt Galerie Series in Berlin, the National Gallery in Ottawa, the Saints and Sinners Festival in New Orleans, Vancouver's Raw Exchange, as well as on CBC-Radio.
As a musician, he has two A.R.C.T.'s in piano performance from the Royal Conservatory of Music. He lived for extended periods of time in Barcelona, London, Banff, and Berlin, where he was staying the night the Wall fell. Originally from Toronto Barry Webster now resides in East Montreal.
His latest novel, The Lava in My Bones, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the Ferro-Grumley Award, and the Dayne Ogilvie Prize.
His first book of stories, The Sound of All Flesh, won the ReLit Award for the best collection of Canadian short fiction published in 2005. His magic-realist fiction has also been shortlisted for the National Magazine Award and the Hugh MacLennan Award. He has written for a wide variety of publications including The Washington Post, The Toronto Star, Event, Fiddlehead, and The Globe and Mail.
Fluent in English, French and some German, he has translated some of his work into French. Webster has performed at numerous literary series including the Takt Galerie Series in Berlin, the National Gallery in Ottawa, the Saints and Sinners Festival in New Orleans, Vancouver's Raw Exchange, as well as on CBC-Radio.
As a musician, he has two A.R.C.T.'s in piano performance from the Royal Conservatory of Music. He lived for extended periods of time in Barcelona, London, Banff, and Berlin, where he was staying the night the Wall fell. Originally from Toronto Barry Webster now resides in East Montreal.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
October 29, 2012
When Sam woke the next morning, he lurched upright in bed. Why had a man’s body brought him pleasure? Was he himself a man? Two men together was pointless—they can’t produce babies. What’s happened to logic? Does science have anything to do with this? With a flash of panic, Sam thought: the world is still dying and I’m doing nothing about it.
That week Sam ate rocks every day; he couldn’t resist their beckoning curvaceousness, their ribald density and earthy flavour. They swelled his libido, and Franz ate rocks with him. He became accustomed to Franz’s maleness, the deep voice vibrating the chest cavity, the hardness of his eyebrow-ridge, wiry hair curling in unexpected places, and the raw apple scent of his groin.
***
Luscious and positively dripping with style (and honey), Barry Webster’s The Lava in My Bones is a frank, often poetic exploration of sexuality, maturity, family, and abandonment. Divided into six parts, the novel shifts between differing perspectives, writing styles, and overarching metaphors to deliver a sweeping tale that exists somewhere in the cross section between magical realism and the science of the natural world.
Sam, the primary protagonist, is a geologist on academic assignment in Zurich. A perfunctory creature by nature, Sam, though a scientist, is driven by an imagination that colours his world in such convincing ways he is sometimes unable to discern the difference between what’s real and what isn’t. He frequently loses himself to doubt and ever-deepening questions as to the nature and purpose of his being—as an individual, and more specifically, as a sexual creature who, until his time in Zurich and a chance encounter with an artist named Franz, believed himself to be heterosexual.
Meanwhile back home in Labrador, where Sam grew up, his sister Sue is dealing with troubles of her own. Since Sam abandoned her to suffer their parents alone several years prior to the start of the novel, Sue has begun sweating honey. It is literally bursting from her, seeping out from her pores, her follicles, indeed from every possible bodily exit from which a liquid can escape. As her involuntary sugary expulsion increases, Sue is treated as a pariah in their town—as a deviant of a sort not spoken of in conservative company.
Binding Sam and Sue’s fates are: Franz, Sam’s lover from Zurich who at first lusts for Sam and turns him onto the sensual pleasure of devouring rocks, then turns on him, betrays him, and ushers him away, back to Canada where he is deemed insane (rock eating just isn’t understood in some places) and confined to a mental institution; their mother, a religious, sexually reticent zealot who deems her children to be in need of salvation by way of flinging consecrated urine at them as if it were holy water; and their father, a quiet non-entity who, it is implied, once upon a time exploited his daughter’s expanding honey-based sexuality in nefarious fish-catching ways, and is in the present context of the story has abandoned his entire family in search of his true love—a mermaid that may or may not exist.
The narrative arc to Webster’s work is one of self-acceptance, and of confronting one’s demons, be they internally or externally represented—the latter being Sam and Sue’s mother, and the book’s primary antagonist. The different styles play well to this effect, elegantly portraying the differences between Sam and Sue as emotional (with Sam being the more esoteric and uncertain, and Sue, who is several years his junior, becoming the voice of strength and sexual assuredness he might never be), and the differences between the siblings and their mother as primarily ideological.
Both Sam and Sue are tasked with embracing specifically what it is that separates them from the relative norm of their rather enclosed communities. Sam’s segments, being the more idiosyncratic of the two siblings and prone to flights of imaginative fancy, are delivered in sharpened exchanges that highlight the surreality of his situation and the earth-based predilections he experiences during his affair with Franz. In contrast with that and the segment of text at the beginning of this review, Sue’s segment is more outwardly sensual and linguistically explicit:
Suddenly, honey gushed from my skin. It shot in waves from the pores in my scalp, filled my eyebrows, and flowed so thickly across my open eyes that the edges of Jimmy’s body wavered as if seen through the window of a car in a car wash. The honey had been damned up for so long that it now poured forth in quantities I’d never experienced. It streamed from the crease below my jaw, cascaded in sheets over my breasts, hung in rippling curtains from my forearms, and was like a waterfall tumbling from my vagina. The parched ground below became a foam-dappled honey quicksand that splattered onto my ankles and calves and stuck to the soles and sides of my feet.
The two siblings—the stone-swallowing hardness of masculinity and the soft, flowing femininity of a person more sugar and sweetness than blood—are contrasted as inversions of age and confidence and strength, with the younger guiding the hand of the older, sometimes overtly, to a better understanding of self.
Franz, meanwhile, is contrasted with their mother: he, the lover who opens Sam’s mind to possibilities not previously entertained; she, the paragon of righteousness, and arbiter of what’s deemed acceptable—of the norm and all who are represented therein.
Franz is complicit in Sam’s undoing, both offering to expand his mind, but also pushing him away when the affair between the two men breaks past the tidy little temporary affair Franz had hoped it would be and grows and festers as something bigger. This, of course, is commitment, and through commitment, Franz’s own fears and self-doubts are revealed—doubts which lead him on a journey of his own, to discover the “diamond” within, and to cast off the veneer of self he assumed, naively, to be accurate. However, through his explorations and the adoption of a female alter-ego named Veronika, he begins to see the world through suddenly opened eyes—forcibly opened, to the point where he, again, naively, assumes a degree of understanding, this time towards the struggles faced by woman in his environment. It’s a disingenuous change, one evident of a man so eager to feel like he belongs, either to a sub-culture or to an individual, that he forces the illusion of understanding without first doing the work required to attain it with any degree of integrity.
If Franz is the novel’s implied uncertainty and overwhelming desire to discover some sense of belonging, Sam and Sue’s mother is the heaving slab on concrete unwilling to move or be shaken from its old world ideals. Ever the pious, no matter how outmoded her views may appear to be, their mother is presented as the novel’s wall-breaking, overtly authoritarian familial disaster. Webster gives mother dear an omniscient narrator’s voice to add further fuel to the implication that, despite having a manufactured bird’s eye view of her children’s perceived sexual indiscretions and devilish wrongdoings, she knows nothing of them as emotional, caring creatures, categorically refusing to see them as individuals but only as flawed offspring in need of saving. Her growth, if one can call it that, is in her willingness to lie and manipulate and assault others—all in conflict with her piety—in order to do what she’s decided is right and proper for her children. The end she hopes and prays for is justified, no matter the cost. The literal monster that Sam has become in the novel’s second to last segment is the manifestation of the doubt and self-degradation she has instilled in him from his earliest days, and is in the end her undoing as well.
There’s much more to be said for the quality of Webster’s psychosexual fairy tale, much of it praise-worthy. The Lava in My Bones is an excellent companion to piece to another Arsenal Pulp novel, Amber Dawn’s Sub Rosa. Though the narratives differ greatly, the themes explored via magical realism feel compliant with one another. The imagery presented in this novel, coupled with Webster’s perfunctory, delicate, and strangely lyrical language, is like none other I’ve read this year. Sam and Sue’s contrasted journeys of sexual discovery and emotional maturity are often joyous affairs, well realized and carefully constructed.
That week Sam ate rocks every day; he couldn’t resist their beckoning curvaceousness, their ribald density and earthy flavour. They swelled his libido, and Franz ate rocks with him. He became accustomed to Franz’s maleness, the deep voice vibrating the chest cavity, the hardness of his eyebrow-ridge, wiry hair curling in unexpected places, and the raw apple scent of his groin.
***
Luscious and positively dripping with style (and honey), Barry Webster’s The Lava in My Bones is a frank, often poetic exploration of sexuality, maturity, family, and abandonment. Divided into six parts, the novel shifts between differing perspectives, writing styles, and overarching metaphors to deliver a sweeping tale that exists somewhere in the cross section between magical realism and the science of the natural world.
Sam, the primary protagonist, is a geologist on academic assignment in Zurich. A perfunctory creature by nature, Sam, though a scientist, is driven by an imagination that colours his world in such convincing ways he is sometimes unable to discern the difference between what’s real and what isn’t. He frequently loses himself to doubt and ever-deepening questions as to the nature and purpose of his being—as an individual, and more specifically, as a sexual creature who, until his time in Zurich and a chance encounter with an artist named Franz, believed himself to be heterosexual.
Meanwhile back home in Labrador, where Sam grew up, his sister Sue is dealing with troubles of her own. Since Sam abandoned her to suffer their parents alone several years prior to the start of the novel, Sue has begun sweating honey. It is literally bursting from her, seeping out from her pores, her follicles, indeed from every possible bodily exit from which a liquid can escape. As her involuntary sugary expulsion increases, Sue is treated as a pariah in their town—as a deviant of a sort not spoken of in conservative company.
Binding Sam and Sue’s fates are: Franz, Sam’s lover from Zurich who at first lusts for Sam and turns him onto the sensual pleasure of devouring rocks, then turns on him, betrays him, and ushers him away, back to Canada where he is deemed insane (rock eating just isn’t understood in some places) and confined to a mental institution; their mother, a religious, sexually reticent zealot who deems her children to be in need of salvation by way of flinging consecrated urine at them as if it were holy water; and their father, a quiet non-entity who, it is implied, once upon a time exploited his daughter’s expanding honey-based sexuality in nefarious fish-catching ways, and is in the present context of the story has abandoned his entire family in search of his true love—a mermaid that may or may not exist.
The narrative arc to Webster’s work is one of self-acceptance, and of confronting one’s demons, be they internally or externally represented—the latter being Sam and Sue’s mother, and the book’s primary antagonist. The different styles play well to this effect, elegantly portraying the differences between Sam and Sue as emotional (with Sam being the more esoteric and uncertain, and Sue, who is several years his junior, becoming the voice of strength and sexual assuredness he might never be), and the differences between the siblings and their mother as primarily ideological.
Both Sam and Sue are tasked with embracing specifically what it is that separates them from the relative norm of their rather enclosed communities. Sam’s segments, being the more idiosyncratic of the two siblings and prone to flights of imaginative fancy, are delivered in sharpened exchanges that highlight the surreality of his situation and the earth-based predilections he experiences during his affair with Franz. In contrast with that and the segment of text at the beginning of this review, Sue’s segment is more outwardly sensual and linguistically explicit:
Suddenly, honey gushed from my skin. It shot in waves from the pores in my scalp, filled my eyebrows, and flowed so thickly across my open eyes that the edges of Jimmy’s body wavered as if seen through the window of a car in a car wash. The honey had been damned up for so long that it now poured forth in quantities I’d never experienced. It streamed from the crease below my jaw, cascaded in sheets over my breasts, hung in rippling curtains from my forearms, and was like a waterfall tumbling from my vagina. The parched ground below became a foam-dappled honey quicksand that splattered onto my ankles and calves and stuck to the soles and sides of my feet.
The two siblings—the stone-swallowing hardness of masculinity and the soft, flowing femininity of a person more sugar and sweetness than blood—are contrasted as inversions of age and confidence and strength, with the younger guiding the hand of the older, sometimes overtly, to a better understanding of self.
Franz, meanwhile, is contrasted with their mother: he, the lover who opens Sam’s mind to possibilities not previously entertained; she, the paragon of righteousness, and arbiter of what’s deemed acceptable—of the norm and all who are represented therein.
Franz is complicit in Sam’s undoing, both offering to expand his mind, but also pushing him away when the affair between the two men breaks past the tidy little temporary affair Franz had hoped it would be and grows and festers as something bigger. This, of course, is commitment, and through commitment, Franz’s own fears and self-doubts are revealed—doubts which lead him on a journey of his own, to discover the “diamond” within, and to cast off the veneer of self he assumed, naively, to be accurate. However, through his explorations and the adoption of a female alter-ego named Veronika, he begins to see the world through suddenly opened eyes—forcibly opened, to the point where he, again, naively, assumes a degree of understanding, this time towards the struggles faced by woman in his environment. It’s a disingenuous change, one evident of a man so eager to feel like he belongs, either to a sub-culture or to an individual, that he forces the illusion of understanding without first doing the work required to attain it with any degree of integrity.
If Franz is the novel’s implied uncertainty and overwhelming desire to discover some sense of belonging, Sam and Sue’s mother is the heaving slab on concrete unwilling to move or be shaken from its old world ideals. Ever the pious, no matter how outmoded her views may appear to be, their mother is presented as the novel’s wall-breaking, overtly authoritarian familial disaster. Webster gives mother dear an omniscient narrator’s voice to add further fuel to the implication that, despite having a manufactured bird’s eye view of her children’s perceived sexual indiscretions and devilish wrongdoings, she knows nothing of them as emotional, caring creatures, categorically refusing to see them as individuals but only as flawed offspring in need of saving. Her growth, if one can call it that, is in her willingness to lie and manipulate and assault others—all in conflict with her piety—in order to do what she’s decided is right and proper for her children. The end she hopes and prays for is justified, no matter the cost. The literal monster that Sam has become in the novel’s second to last segment is the manifestation of the doubt and self-degradation she has instilled in him from his earliest days, and is in the end her undoing as well.
There’s much more to be said for the quality of Webster’s psychosexual fairy tale, much of it praise-worthy. The Lava in My Bones is an excellent companion to piece to another Arsenal Pulp novel, Amber Dawn’s Sub Rosa. Though the narratives differ greatly, the themes explored via magical realism feel compliant with one another. The imagery presented in this novel, coupled with Webster’s perfunctory, delicate, and strangely lyrical language, is like none other I’ve read this year. Sam and Sue’s contrasted journeys of sexual discovery and emotional maturity are often joyous affairs, well realized and carefully constructed.
Read
July 14, 2025I usually am a big fan of weird books, but this one might just have been a little (or a lot) too weird for me? I was so distracted by the rock-eating and honey-sweating and jizz forests and pee-throwing that I might have missed what the point of it all was.
April 16, 2024
All our old methods! Sam regards them as rusted machines in a historical museum. How afraid we are of the gaps between words, the space separating the dot of the "i" from the stem, multiplication tables complete but for one missing number. Sam is the fraction whose top half won't dance with its lower. He's the digit whose square root is reducible to nothing. He is two lines that never intersect, the fulcrum two degrees short of north and one degree east of west. he is the phrase with no subjects, two objects, and five verbs that don't accord but is a sentence nonetheless. Doctors murmur, "Such a shame, a brilliant, educated man."
Posthuman queer narrative joyously cartwheeling into complete and total anarchy erasing borders between living and nonliving, animals and humans, sexualities, and genders. In its borderline delirious quality it reminds me of John Elizabeth Stintzi's My Volcano. Becoming-geological of queerness? Yes!
Posthuman queer narrative joyously cartwheeling into complete and total anarchy erasing borders between living and nonliving, animals and humans, sexualities, and genders. In its borderline delirious quality it reminds me of John Elizabeth Stintzi's My Volcano. Becoming-geological of queerness? Yes!
February 18, 2015
What an extraordinary novel, a great shaggy dog (or, in this case, shaggy rock) story that mixes satire, melodrama and magic realism into an intoxicating brew. Bodily and geological fluids – semen and lava – drench these pages, which begin with the book-in-a-book called ‘Fairy Tales of Flesh’. The Mr. Potato Head people are able to swop body parts and organs, and are always experimenting with more and more outrageous configurations.
None so outrageous perhaps as Sam Masonty’s infatuation with Franz Niederberger, the former a blue-blooded male (or so he thought). The two meet at a geology conference in Zurich (Sam is a geologist) and soon embark on a torrid affair, the very intensity of which ultimately drives them apart.
Sam returns to his home town but ends up in a mental hospital (where he helps the two doctors treating him complete their mystical transformation into a Sonny and Cher lookalike – don’t ask; this is one of many such manic but utterly delightful and whimsical escapades in this wonderful book).
The viewpoint character switches to Sam’s sister Sue for one section, and her own battle with her out-of-control body (she perspires honey). Sam eventually escapes from the loony bin, hitches up with Sue, and they stow away on a ship bound for Zurich and a presumably ecstatic reunion with Franz.
However, en route they have to deal with their religion-crazed mother and Sam’s long-gestating change into a man-beast (with a super-long penis). Sue has an epiphany with bees and Sam eventually arrives at Franz’s doorstep ... only to discover the most logical and incredible transformation of them all.
No simple plot description can do this gonzo novel any justice. You just have to read it and, er, go with the flow. What I loved is how Barry Webster transcends gay conventions, and how gender becomes a cause célèbre in these pages. None so than with that ending, which cockily thumbs its snoot at a legion of single-gender gay literature and activism. Let Sam himself explain (note that this is not the ending):
... he was gripped by a fear of death, all the more ridiculous because he’s just about to see Franz and fulfil his most profound desire, a desire that is itself ridiculous because Franz is ridiculous, and their relationship is ridiculous. All at once the ridiculousness of everything – his impending death, Franz, ships exploding, girls sweating honey, supernatural urine, the Dairy Queen, men loving mermaids, summertime snowstorms, skies full of bees, Pentecostals at sea bottoms, giant spinning wheels, steel dresses, earthquakes on the far side of the world, and this Earth spinning so blindly on an axis without oil – assaults him, and the wonderful illogicalness of Life stares him in the face like God.
None so outrageous perhaps as Sam Masonty’s infatuation with Franz Niederberger, the former a blue-blooded male (or so he thought). The two meet at a geology conference in Zurich (Sam is a geologist) and soon embark on a torrid affair, the very intensity of which ultimately drives them apart.
Sam returns to his home town but ends up in a mental hospital (where he helps the two doctors treating him complete their mystical transformation into a Sonny and Cher lookalike – don’t ask; this is one of many such manic but utterly delightful and whimsical escapades in this wonderful book).
The viewpoint character switches to Sam’s sister Sue for one section, and her own battle with her out-of-control body (she perspires honey). Sam eventually escapes from the loony bin, hitches up with Sue, and they stow away on a ship bound for Zurich and a presumably ecstatic reunion with Franz.
However, en route they have to deal with their religion-crazed mother and Sam’s long-gestating change into a man-beast (with a super-long penis). Sue has an epiphany with bees and Sam eventually arrives at Franz’s doorstep ... only to discover the most logical and incredible transformation of them all.
No simple plot description can do this gonzo novel any justice. You just have to read it and, er, go with the flow. What I loved is how Barry Webster transcends gay conventions, and how gender becomes a cause célèbre in these pages. None so than with that ending, which cockily thumbs its snoot at a legion of single-gender gay literature and activism. Let Sam himself explain (note that this is not the ending):
... he was gripped by a fear of death, all the more ridiculous because he’s just about to see Franz and fulfil his most profound desire, a desire that is itself ridiculous because Franz is ridiculous, and their relationship is ridiculous. All at once the ridiculousness of everything – his impending death, Franz, ships exploding, girls sweating honey, supernatural urine, the Dairy Queen, men loving mermaids, summertime snowstorms, skies full of bees, Pentecostals at sea bottoms, giant spinning wheels, steel dresses, earthquakes on the far side of the world, and this Earth spinning so blindly on an axis without oil – assaults him, and the wonderful illogicalness of Life stares him in the face like God.
December 6, 2017
There is a particular logic that runs through the zany parabolic of LimB that drives the narrative and holds the story from flying apart. In fact, fot me, the greatest surprise in this book of surrealistic phenomenon is that it ends so neatly, as close to happy ever after as reality could be.
And I really loved it that the wacked out, all suffering martyr mother got here own chapter.
And I really loved it that the wacked out, all suffering martyr mother got here own chapter.
December 2, 2012
The Lava in My Bones is surely one of the most rollicking and exuberant novels to come along in many years. This deeply complex novel follows the adventures of a professional geologist named Sam. Sam was born and raised in Cartwright, Labrador, which he left at the first opportunity in order to free himself of the influence of his religious fanatic mother. Sam has never considered himself homosexual, and yet on a visit to Switzerland for a conference shocks himself by falling in love with man named Franz. Their vigorously physical relationship proves overwhelming for both of them, and Sam returns home to Canada, where he suffers a breakdown and is institutionalized. Meanwhile, Sam’s sister, Sue, still living in Cartwright, begins sweating honey and is followed by swarms of bees. Bullied because of her affliction and sick of her mother’s unforgiving and proscriptive brand of religion, she longs for Sam to come and take her away. Her wish comes to pass when Sam, determined to return to Switzerland and Franz, escapes from the mental institution and makes his way from Ontario to Labrador, where he will catch a boat and cross the Atlantic with his sister. Sam undergoes a shocking transformation during his journey, and his and Sue’s plans are derailed when their mother discovers their scheme and stows away on the boat. Franz meanwhile has undergone a transformation of his own, which Sam discovers when they are finally reunited. In The Lava in My Bones Barry Webster imagines a world which shares little more than its geography with the one in which we live. This is a world in which absolutely anything can happen. One character’s thoughts influence another’s actions thousands of miles away. Changes to the structure of the earth’s core are manifest in the creatures living on its surface. The human body is a pliable instrument, which knows things and reacts to them in ways the body’s owner cannot foresee or control. For a book in which outrageous events occur on almost every page and sometimes seem to happen at random, it adheres to a strict inner logic: all aspects of human and natural existence and experience are interconnected. We are part of the earth, and the earth is part of us. Webster’s novel is also a celebration of being alive and sensually aware. Love takes many forms in this book and I would wager that the phrase “erect penis” does not appear with equal frequency in any other work of fiction. The Lava in My Bones is a wild and enjoyable ride but be forewarned that it should be approached on its own terms because there are no antecedents in Canadian literature. Expect the unexpected.
October 20, 2016
When you think of Magical Realism, Canada is not the first country to come to mind. Nonetheless, The Lava in My Bones takes place in Labrador, which is home to an interesting family headed by a religiously devout and intensely god-fearing mother. She is bent on saving her family after acquiring the urine of the Virgin Mary. Her husband is a fisherman who is hopelessly in love with a mermaid, her high school-aged daughter begins to seep honey through her skin, and her older geologist son begins to eat rocks after having his first same sex relationship. All kinds of poetic antics ensue, all of which involve nature and climate change. Delightfully unbelievable and ostentatiously improbable, its surreal and grandiose plot twists work to support novel's main point: challenging beliefs in regards to gender, love, sexuality and what is considered "natural."
Review published on Denver Public Library website
Review published on Denver Public Library website
March 26, 2013
Maybe 4.5 stars, since I found the experience a little uneven, and it's a book you experience more so than read. It's an extravagant book, the imagination unfettered, a book that I wish more books, especially with Canada as a theme (or at least as a character), were like. Or more Canlit books. Definitely more Canlit books. Loved that the author did just enough research to let things go wild. Recommended for adventurous readers & keepers of wild gardens.
July 2, 2019
What the hell. No really, what the hell? This is a ridiculous book. It started out interesting, and got real disgusting real fast. This would have been a 1-star review (I truly resent having to read about giant-donged rat men and jizz forests) if it weren't for the hilarious rant-robin that it inspired at our book club meeting. That ending though...
January 9, 2013
This book has a throbbing intensity and is so wonderfully wild and imaginative. The part told by the mother made me laugh out loud many times (which I rarely do while reading) and the surprise ending is really a surprise.
October 18, 2014
Wow. What a great book. The magical realism was over the top, the sex was wonderfully sexy and totally unexpected. The prose though is what made the book. It is simply beautiful writing and the story is never one that I could imagine on my own.
January 10, 2020
I really enjoyed this odd little book.
October 2, 2019
I'm not sure how this ended up on my reading list, but I guess I liked it? It feels a little forced and awkward to me. It seems like the author was making a conscious decision to turn the tropes of CanLit on their ears. The landscape is a character, yes, but a violently obvious one. There's magical realism, yes, but it's a sledgehammer, not a mist. There's sensuality, yes, but it's vulgar and often grotesque. There's strained family dynamics, yes, but there's little redemption or reconciliation. There's personal growth and transformation, yes, but it's ridiculously over-the-top and comes to a head when, towards the end (don't worry this isn't a spoiler) the book literally says "[redacted] says the most insightful thing [redacted] ever heard or will hear. 'Everybody is us.... We are not boring; everyone is fascinating. ... Everyone has had the same experiences. They’ve gone from being one person to another, had their moments of exaltation and terror, their journeys ..., and it all happened when they weren’t paying attention; they were asleep or looking at dry cleaning bills .... No one is dull inside, and it’s never the end.... There’s no final stage! Other adventures will follow, and we’ll keep changing.'" I mean, if that's not CanLit in a nutshell, I don't know what is, but one of the key features of CanLit is that it's usually subtle rather than blunt and explicit.
So, like, I enjoyed this, mostly (although I almost gave up in the first section, but it gets better), but it was inelegant and kind of unpleasant.
So, like, I enjoyed this, mostly (although I almost gave up in the first section, but it gets better), but it was inelegant and kind of unpleasant.
December 9, 2014
Review published in Book Slut: http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/2012_...
Canadian author Barry Webster's whimsical, perversely playful fiction has garnered numerous accolades; indeed, his 2005 collection, The Sound of All Flesh, took home the ReLit Award for best Canadian short story collection. With The Lava in My Bones, Webster brings his talents in the shorter medium to bear on the medium of the novel. As a debut novel, The Lava in My Bones is witty and mature, and painstakingly intertextual, in its nearly seamless segues from teen angst to social commentary, from the use (and, most times, the overuse) of magical realism to a universal tale of the search for love and self-acceptance. However, where The Sound of All Flesh succeeded in its brevity and the far wider scope for which a story collection allows, The Lava in My Bones reads too redundantly like a short story stretched far beyond its logical narrative constraints, a series of vignettes tied together loosely by the themes of family, social ostracism, and the motherly ties that bind -- not to mention the oedipal ties that strangle when they can no longer mold according to social and cultural expectations.
The Lava in My Bones begins with Sam Masonty -- a geological expert on climate change "who'd gotten a BA, MSc, and PhD in eight years" -- barred from reentering Zurich and imprisoned in his native Ontario, where he commences not only his first relationship with another man, Franz, but his curious habit of eating rocks ("If you love something, you put it in your mouth"). Sam vacillates back and forth between recalling Canada's vast natural expansiveness to his lover who knows only the monotonous tedium of life in his own country, "Switzerland, the most land-locked country in the world." Webster's skill here is in presenting a relationship between two men that plays into self-parodies of queer life while also eschewing them: although Sam and Franz enact a doomed love affair, one that comments on queer subculture insofar as it emphasizes taut bodies and designer clothing, the body is less the focus than are the ways in which desire can be viewed as something intimate and yet something dangerous.
Webster foregrounds this theme of desire in a prologue that situates Sam's inchoate queer identity in terms of the grandiose and fantastic world of fairy tales; in these tales, Sam encounters "lovers who bit off each other's organs and when they opened their mouths, birds flew out," all the while recognizing that "these tales were telling the very story of his life." The magical realism found in these tales makes its way into the main narrative: during the height of Sam and Franz's relationship, snow falls in Zurich despite the fact that it is summer; Sam's academic work on climate change ("Rocks bear the imprint of the weight of our bodies... rocks record the details of someone's life") becomes personal when Franz first swallows a rock and then tempts his lover to appease his own wish to be closer to the core of the earth; and Sam's malevolent, religious mother appears at the foot of the bed he shares with Franz, casting judgment and externalizing Sam's own conflict about his sexual identity.
These fantastical elements carry over into the subsequent vignettes, episodes that are sieved through Sam's main narrative as we return to him for grounding. (It is no wonder that as each thread in The Lava in My Bones is titled after the four elements, Sam's element is that of the earth.) As Webster extends his terrain to introduce the reader to Sam's family, the reliance on magical realism becomes more of a crutch than a quirky trope that would allow the novel to flow more smoothly and inventively. We are introduced to Sam's sister, Sue, who begins to ooze honey from her pores; Sam's maritime father who is obsessed with mermaids; and Sam's hyper-religious mother who enlists the help of the Virgin Mary to save the souls of her far-from-normal children. Although the mother's vigilance is one of the most absurd flights of fancy in the novel, it does, all the same, emphasize an intertextual debt to literary and cultural sources; to be sure, in spite of his unique voice in characterizing a mother who feels she has not done enough to steer her children in this world, one is often reminded of the omniscient, phallic mother figure in Guy Maddin's film Brand Upon the Brain!
Franz later admits in his own vignette: "In truth, I did not want you, Sam. I wanted the space that surrounded you... The German language is so damned sexy; just hearing it gives me a hard-on; no wonder you wanted me, Sam." This clumsy juxtaposition of Webster's major themes here is made all the more so by this point in the novel; the introduction of first-person narratives grants us more subjectivity for tangential characters than the reader receives in Sam's more major and profound sections. In fact, the narrative distancing results in further displacing the main character along divisive lines that belie Webster's overt attempt to dismantle them: time and space, language and confusion, love and shame, and reality and fantasy are dichotomies that are less blurred by the cacophony of voices and the overwrought structure of The Lava in My Bones than they are fixated and made more resoundingly separate.
Webster certainly has a way with words, and this is largely what carries the reader through his debut novel. Less focused than his short fiction, The Lava in My Bones still explores similar themes of longing, the search for love, and the desire for self-acceptance; at the same time, due to the novel's excessive length and its chorus of voices -- many of which seem to be dead-end paths on a road already labyrinthine in terms of structure -- one comes away feeling as though language is the primary focus, especially how language can render magical the otherwise marginalized existence of the sexually and socially outcast. Webster's uniting thematic here is definitely praiseworthy in its message of tolerance, but it is one that is often lost among eaten rocks, mermaid infatuations, oozing honey, and the many fairy tales and films that overpopulate his novel.
Canadian author Barry Webster's whimsical, perversely playful fiction has garnered numerous accolades; indeed, his 2005 collection, The Sound of All Flesh, took home the ReLit Award for best Canadian short story collection. With The Lava in My Bones, Webster brings his talents in the shorter medium to bear on the medium of the novel. As a debut novel, The Lava in My Bones is witty and mature, and painstakingly intertextual, in its nearly seamless segues from teen angst to social commentary, from the use (and, most times, the overuse) of magical realism to a universal tale of the search for love and self-acceptance. However, where The Sound of All Flesh succeeded in its brevity and the far wider scope for which a story collection allows, The Lava in My Bones reads too redundantly like a short story stretched far beyond its logical narrative constraints, a series of vignettes tied together loosely by the themes of family, social ostracism, and the motherly ties that bind -- not to mention the oedipal ties that strangle when they can no longer mold according to social and cultural expectations.
The Lava in My Bones begins with Sam Masonty -- a geological expert on climate change "who'd gotten a BA, MSc, and PhD in eight years" -- barred from reentering Zurich and imprisoned in his native Ontario, where he commences not only his first relationship with another man, Franz, but his curious habit of eating rocks ("If you love something, you put it in your mouth"). Sam vacillates back and forth between recalling Canada's vast natural expansiveness to his lover who knows only the monotonous tedium of life in his own country, "Switzerland, the most land-locked country in the world." Webster's skill here is in presenting a relationship between two men that plays into self-parodies of queer life while also eschewing them: although Sam and Franz enact a doomed love affair, one that comments on queer subculture insofar as it emphasizes taut bodies and designer clothing, the body is less the focus than are the ways in which desire can be viewed as something intimate and yet something dangerous.
Webster foregrounds this theme of desire in a prologue that situates Sam's inchoate queer identity in terms of the grandiose and fantastic world of fairy tales; in these tales, Sam encounters "lovers who bit off each other's organs and when they opened their mouths, birds flew out," all the while recognizing that "these tales were telling the very story of his life." The magical realism found in these tales makes its way into the main narrative: during the height of Sam and Franz's relationship, snow falls in Zurich despite the fact that it is summer; Sam's academic work on climate change ("Rocks bear the imprint of the weight of our bodies... rocks record the details of someone's life") becomes personal when Franz first swallows a rock and then tempts his lover to appease his own wish to be closer to the core of the earth; and Sam's malevolent, religious mother appears at the foot of the bed he shares with Franz, casting judgment and externalizing Sam's own conflict about his sexual identity.
These fantastical elements carry over into the subsequent vignettes, episodes that are sieved through Sam's main narrative as we return to him for grounding. (It is no wonder that as each thread in The Lava in My Bones is titled after the four elements, Sam's element is that of the earth.) As Webster extends his terrain to introduce the reader to Sam's family, the reliance on magical realism becomes more of a crutch than a quirky trope that would allow the novel to flow more smoothly and inventively. We are introduced to Sam's sister, Sue, who begins to ooze honey from her pores; Sam's maritime father who is obsessed with mermaids; and Sam's hyper-religious mother who enlists the help of the Virgin Mary to save the souls of her far-from-normal children. Although the mother's vigilance is one of the most absurd flights of fancy in the novel, it does, all the same, emphasize an intertextual debt to literary and cultural sources; to be sure, in spite of his unique voice in characterizing a mother who feels she has not done enough to steer her children in this world, one is often reminded of the omniscient, phallic mother figure in Guy Maddin's film Brand Upon the Brain!
Franz later admits in his own vignette: "In truth, I did not want you, Sam. I wanted the space that surrounded you... The German language is so damned sexy; just hearing it gives me a hard-on; no wonder you wanted me, Sam." This clumsy juxtaposition of Webster's major themes here is made all the more so by this point in the novel; the introduction of first-person narratives grants us more subjectivity for tangential characters than the reader receives in Sam's more major and profound sections. In fact, the narrative distancing results in further displacing the main character along divisive lines that belie Webster's overt attempt to dismantle them: time and space, language and confusion, love and shame, and reality and fantasy are dichotomies that are less blurred by the cacophony of voices and the overwrought structure of The Lava in My Bones than they are fixated and made more resoundingly separate.
Webster certainly has a way with words, and this is largely what carries the reader through his debut novel. Less focused than his short fiction, The Lava in My Bones still explores similar themes of longing, the search for love, and the desire for self-acceptance; at the same time, due to the novel's excessive length and its chorus of voices -- many of which seem to be dead-end paths on a road already labyrinthine in terms of structure -- one comes away feeling as though language is the primary focus, especially how language can render magical the otherwise marginalized existence of the sexually and socially outcast. Webster's uniting thematic here is definitely praiseworthy in its message of tolerance, but it is one that is often lost among eaten rocks, mermaid infatuations, oozing honey, and the many fairy tales and films that overpopulate his novel.
August 24, 2017
Oh man, this book.
I heard about this book in a university English tutorial when my TA asked the class what they read over the summer. The only title I paid attention to was this one, because the girl who introduced it said that it was Canadian, Magical realist, and involved a girl who sweated honey.
I thought to myself "oh man, what's not to love".
And really there is a lot of potential love that I could have given this book. It is very beautifully written, so much so that I feel bad about giving it only two stars. After all, I've given books that are written more poorly than this one better ratings. My biggest problem is with the last one hundred pages, the magical realism that started off as quaint and perky became so impossibly surreal and hard to follow that I sort of lost my will to read. It was just too weird. And this is from a girl who loves weird.
Maybe it's not even the weird that I am against, but the cop-out allegorical clean cut ending. The one thing I really appreciated about the book was Sam's turbulent relationship with Franz and the struggle of him coming to terms with his sexuality, but even that was overshadowed by the weirdness of werewolf shape shifting, insanity, and phalic symbols that slapped me in the face.
I heard about this book in a university English tutorial when my TA asked the class what they read over the summer. The only title I paid attention to was this one, because the girl who introduced it said that it was Canadian, Magical realist, and involved a girl who sweated honey.
I thought to myself "oh man, what's not to love".
And really there is a lot of potential love that I could have given this book. It is very beautifully written, so much so that I feel bad about giving it only two stars. After all, I've given books that are written more poorly than this one better ratings. My biggest problem is with the last one hundred pages, the magical realism that started off as quaint and perky became so impossibly surreal and hard to follow that I sort of lost my will to read. It was just too weird. And this is from a girl who loves weird.
Maybe it's not even the weird that I am against, but the cop-out allegorical clean cut ending. The one thing I really appreciated about the book was Sam's turbulent relationship with Franz and the struggle of him coming to terms with his sexuality, but even that was overshadowed by the weirdness of werewolf shape shifting, insanity, and phalic symbols that slapped me in the face.
May 29, 2019
People eat rocks and sweat honey and change genders and collect the holy urine of the Virgin Mary. Parts of it are delightful. The underlying moral of the story — to love yourself and your body!! Of course!!! — feels shoehorned. All in all I think I prefer my magic realism with a little less surrealism. But lovers of Heather O’Neill and Andrew Kaufman may well love this.
August 22, 2021
The novel-in-novellas structure was interesting, and at first I was very much along for the ride. But I think as the book came to its last third, the absurdity had gotten so thick that I no longer felt connected to the story. The ending is also not good.
3/5
3/5
September 21, 2024
“some things are greater than fear, and i wanted to know what they were”
some books just carve out a place in your heart and when you’ve finished them you know they’ll sit there with you forever wherever you go. barry really slayed with this one
some books just carve out a place in your heart and when you’ve finished them you know they’ll sit there with you forever wherever you go. barry really slayed with this one
September 26, 2014
As it turns out, I care for surrealism in my novels about as much as I care for it in my art, which is to say "very little." Yes, this novel functions almost entirely in the realm of metaphor, but it's so out of sync with a recognizable reality that I couldn't ever get into it. I am also not a big fan of switching from first person limited POV to third person limited POV. Choose one, stick with it. This novel is certainly very creative and it reads like a modern, industrial-world fairy tale, but it was not to my taste.
March 8, 2013
Crazy, crazy, crazy book. Lovely language and descriptions. In the end, not sure what it was about. That's fine. The magic though, and I'm a fan of magic realism, but there was so much of it. Shape shifting from one thing to another, identity changing and personality changing. It was a little overwhelming at times. But the poetic prose pulled it through.
April 22, 2014
I loved this book so much, it's so inventive and daring and tackles big topics and truths with a wild humour and imagination. The final section was a surprise, and after a scene where a character escapes from a mental institution after his therapists turn into Sonny and Cher and then he himself morphs into a masturbating werewolf, well - I didn't expect that I could still be surprised!
December 6, 2012
It was fantastic, hilarious, and whimsical until the last 100 pages and then the author took it a bit to far and the story fell apart. The basic underlying theme was still there but the credibility and identification with the characters and their issues completely disappeared.
May 26, 2015
I loved the writing in this book. Sensual and evocative. However, for some reason, it couldn't hold my attention. I never finished it, as it wasn't a priority for me to pick up. Perhaps I didn't see where it was going. I wanted so badly to love this, but couldn't.
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