Shovelling Trouble

by Mordecai Richler

SIGNED SCARCE AS NEW FIRST EDITION dust jacket hardcover, clean text, solid binding, NO remainders NOT ex-library slight shelfwear / storage-wear; WE SHIP FAST. In un-clipped very good jacket. Carefully packed and quickly sent. 201601838 SIGNED "Mordecai Richler" on the title page. Reading this collection of essays from 40-plus years ago is a bracing exercise in discovering just how much more artful one had to be as an adversarial pundit in the early 1970s. You couldn't just jab at this or that person, but explain yourself and what you thought. Mordecai Richler never had trouble with that, as "Shovelling Trouble" shows. A collection of essays and book reviews published in magazines from 1960 through 1970 and published in 1972, "Shovelling Trouble" presents Richler having at everything from Norman Mailer to comic-book ads, explaining his approach to writing at a critical juncture in his career, and expressing more than once a sadness about the fact his literary generation doesn't quite measure up against the famous "Lost Generation" (Hemingway, Picasso, et al) of the 1920s. This last point comes to the fore in the collection's best essay, "A Sense Of The Ridiculous", Richler's detailed remembrance of his younger days as a writer in the early 1950s in Paris, the city from whence the Lost Generation sprang and whose collective shadow haunted Richler and his mates. "We were not, it's worth noting, true adventurers, but followers of a romantic convention," he writes. Of the politics and poseurs of that time and place, Richler writes with great amusement and humor, while summoning an atmosphere of quiet, all-encompassing collapse. Walking into a cheap hotel room that once was part of a Wehrmacht brothel, Richler notes, he first would hammer at the door to scare away the rats and ghosts. The ghosts still linger in these pages. We recommend selecting Priority Mail wherever available. (No shipping to Mexico, Brazil or Italy.)

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Working-class Jewish background based novels, which include The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) and Saint Urbain's Horseman (1971), of Canadian writer Mordecai Richler.

People best know Barney's Version (1997) among works of this author, screenwriter, and essayist; people shortlisted his novel Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989) for the Man Booker Prize in 1990. He was also well known for the Jacob Two-two stories of children.

A scrap yard dealer reared this son on street in the mile end area of Montréal. He learned Yiddish and English and graduated from Baron Byng High School. Richler enrolled in Sir George Williams College (now Concordia University) to study English but dropped before completing his degree.

Years later, Leah Rosenberg, mother of Richler, published an autobiography, The Errand Runner: Memoirs of a Rabbi's Daughter (1981), which discusses birth and upbringing of Mordecai and the sometime difficult relationship.

Richler, intent on following in the footsteps of many of a previous "lost generation" of literary exiles of the 1920s from the United States, moved to Paris at age of 19 years in 1950.

Richler returned to Montréal in 1952, worked briefly at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and then moved to London in 1954. He, living in London meanwhile, published seven of his ten novels as well as considerable journalism.

Worrying "about being so long away from the roots of my discontent", Richler returned to Montréal in 1972. He wrote repeatedly about the Jewish community of Montréal and especially portraying his former neighborhood in multiple novels.

In England in 1954, Richler married Catherine Boudreau, a French-Canadian divorcée nine years his senior. On the eve of their wedding, he met Florence Wood Mann, a young married woman, who smited him.

Some years later, Richler and Mann divorced and married each other. He adopted Daniel Mann, her son. The couple had five children together: Daniel, Jacob, Noah, Martha and Emma. These events inspired his novel Barney's Version.

Richler died of cancer.

Reviews

[Glen · Rating 3 out of 5]

As much as I like Richler's writing and would like everything he writes to be timeless (his novels may prove to be so), some of the essays in this volume, most originally published in the late 1960s or early 1970s, have not aged well. I'm thinking particularly of his essays "Answering The Ads" and "Games (Some) People Play", both of which treat of subjects that seem to be beneath the worth of a writer of Richler's caliber. Other essays though, especially his reminiscences about living in Paris in the early 1950s and his musings on the Canadian literary scene circa 1970, are lively and engaging fare, and in almost every essay in this collection one is confronted with Richler's wry and acerbic wit, his knack for irony and jagged satire. He outs Sir Ian Fleming not only as an anti-Semite, but as a lousy writer to boot, and while his essay on the aftermath of the Holocaust is painful reading, he was early to recognize the importance of Eli Weisel's Night and to wonder aloud how the collective guilt of the German nation could be so quickly expunged when so few were actually held formally accountable. On the subject of literature he rightly laments his nation's slowness in recognizing the value of its most talented writers such as Morley Callaghan and Mavis Gallant, and publicly lauds the critical acumen of Northrup Frye, that most venerable of Canadian literary scholars.

[marcel · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first and only time I read Richler was in grade ten when I was forced to read The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. I remember next to nothing about that book and don't even remember liking it all that much but, being in love with Montréal, thought I should give one of its most famous authors a second chance. But Shovelling Trouble, quite literally, not what I was looking for. I took one glance at the contents and assumed it was a collection of short fiction. This is actually a collection of essays and book(?) reviews. That being said though, I did still read it all the way through real fast because Richler's writing is easy to read. I didn't get much out of the reviews because I am familiar with neither the source material nor the social context of the time. But some of the essays were pretty good and "Why I Write" and "Êtes-vous canadien?" in particular I found very funny.

Good news: Apparently Richler does have a collection of short stories called The Street and they're all set on our very own St. Urbain Street. Quite excited to read that if I can track down a copy.

[Heather(Gibby) · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a collection of essays, which for the most part are incredibly boring and self indulgent with one noticeable exception , "Answering the Ads" was quite informative and amusing.

I also have to ad that Richler's prediction that it was senseless for Canada to try and develop ats own film industry was pointless to have fabulously proved to be false.