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Your Secrets Sleep With Me
Toronto's CN Tower has fallen into the lake. The city is crowded with refugees from the US. Michael and Ruth Racco's dad has, in a rash of road rage, perpetrated the Backhoe Massacre. And, in the middle of it all, little Jimmy Hardcastle has, in the fountain of a suburban mall, walked on water. As helicopters chop the air over Toronto and a paranoid America slides into fascism, kids from south of the border collide with kids from north of the border and, over lattes, ruminate on new possibilities. Your Secrets Sleep With Me is a frenetic, ruthlessly hilarious critique of power and politics. Brilliant, absurd, incisive and fun, this caffeinated novel will take you on a doomed search for the place where you end and everything else begins. But you will not be alone. Shhh. Don't worry. Your secrets sleep with us.
- GenresFiction
220 pages, Paperback
First published May 19, 2000
45 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
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March 25, 2023back in summer, i met this girl at the flea market and we began to write and exchange letters to each other.
in one of the letters, i mentioned that a sense of sonder has always been engraved deep within me. complexity beyond my own self is so fascinating & comforting. yet, it is an experience that ive never been able to translate properly to anyone else besides myself.
im always searching for something and i dont know what it is. maybe im searching for a particular corner of the city where i feel content. maybe i hold onto small snippets of passerby’s lives in an attempt to feel grounded to the world. i don’t really know.
upon reading my thoughts, the girl gifted a copy of this book to me. this book was the closest thing that resembles how i feel. yet it is a strange, interactive book that i do not 100% understand.
it’s a tricky book to rate - not a 5 star book, but it did leave an impact on me & i am glad i read it.
in one of the letters, i mentioned that a sense of sonder has always been engraved deep within me. complexity beyond my own self is so fascinating & comforting. yet, it is an experience that ive never been able to translate properly to anyone else besides myself.
im always searching for something and i dont know what it is. maybe im searching for a particular corner of the city where i feel content. maybe i hold onto small snippets of passerby’s lives in an attempt to feel grounded to the world. i don’t really know.
upon reading my thoughts, the girl gifted a copy of this book to me. this book was the closest thing that resembles how i feel. yet it is a strange, interactive book that i do not 100% understand.
it’s a tricky book to rate - not a 5 star book, but it did leave an impact on me & i am glad i read it.
September 24, 2007
This novel is one of the strangest, most beautiful books I've read, and certainly one of the most politically perceptive.
April 2, 2022
Your Secrets Sleep With Me (YSSWM) is anything but your standard book. YSSWM asks you to engage with it in the same way that one engages with modern art; while there is intentionality behind everything, fundamentally what you'll get out of it is based on how much you're willing to trust this book. As someone who trusted this book completely and utterly; I was blown away by the poignancy of it all. On a more tangible level, YSSWM tackles multiple political issues present in Canada while also commenting on the Canadian habit to compare ourselves to other countries to excuse our colonialism, classism, racism, xenophobia, and more. O'Donnell's writing style is vibrant, impactful, and very, very, VERY real. The mix of surrealism and hyperrealism in YSSWM illuminates some of the inherent absurdity present in the systems that O'Donnell criticizes. YSSWM is a work full of hope and hopelessness, of progress and regression, of logic, love, lust, life, a cautionary tale and also a grim retrospective on current failures. This book will meet you where you decide to meet it, and I, for one, would gladly meet it there again and again and again.
December 31, 2009
My review in New York Press, 6.29.05
An electric current of upset drives Your Secrets Sleep with Me like a gale behind dominos. Things fall over; things fall apart. As the book opens, a wave of refugees enters Toronto from Canada's unstable southern neighbor, where the president has put the country on red alert.
Sixteen-year-old Kaliope Vally got out a couple days earlier, "before the streets started crawling with military, doors got busted down and people dragged away." At age eight, little Rani Vishnu sports a number of gray hairs—each a result of tear gas, getting trampled by police or otherwise witnessing state violence. When her mother Anu's University of Michigan colleagues are rounded up and detained, they get out, too. And while they play word games in the bumper-to-bumper traffic to pass the time, John Racco, father of Michael and Ruth, launches what the evening news quickly dubs "the Backhoe Massacre." Soon after, Toronto's CN tower takes a spectacular tumble. But the effect is more Wizard of Oz than WTC—and not just because of the tornado that tipped it.
I've never been to Toronto. My sense is that O'Donnell's portrayal of the city is no different from his rendering of the greater world: reality with a touch of funhouse mirror, minus the fun. His Toronto is "pubescent, a little nervous; masking shyness with a performance of aloofness; snooty but universally so and born only of an unawareness of just how beautiful it is."
O'Donnell's Toronto is also quietly treacherous. Somewhere downtown there's a sewer rumored to have eaten a child. Rocking the city is the case of the parents who kept their children in glass jars with air holes in the lids. "There's also shit floating in the lake; kids pushing through loose screens to tumble out of high-rise apartments; the leader of the police union enjoying the post-operative benefits of a pig's penis surgically grafted to his own; and the maintenance crew at the National Hockey Arena, a bunch of guys who fucked little fans for years."
It's a world in which Angela Carter would have felt at home, though here, the fantastical is just another commodity of globalization. Miracles are everyday affairs forced to fight for recognition once the machine of sensationalism has sucked them dry. (The first reference to 13-year-old James Hardcastle is from 16-year-old Ruth, who dismisses him, scornfully, as "that little piece of shit who had walked on water.")
None of the principal characters is a day over 16. But unlike J.S. Foer's Oskar Schell, these kids might at times be self-absorbed, even precious, but they're pocked to hell with recognizable human flaws, and their pain is all too familiar. The kids aren't just the focus; they're the only ones with soundness of mind. The suits and little league coaches are murderers and child molesters. Michael's father is in jail for the Backhoe Massacre, and when his mom isn't suicidal, she's neurotic with a 21st-century intensity. Rani's mother Anu is anodyne but ineffectual, while Kaliope's famed aunt Amina, a respected activist powerhouse, is disappeared by the government. James and his sweetheart, little Xiang Pao, live in a group home, no parents in sight. Together, on their own, these kids try to make sense of the world around them. Queer love unfolds as a matter of course. But flesh gets seared; hearts get broken; miracles go gut-wrenchingly awry.
A stream of meta-fiction courses through the book. In an interview (see nypress.com), O'Donnell describes his effort to "[create:] a narrative presence that could prove to the reader the interconnectedness of everything." Its construction is certainly "experimental"—sometimes as many as 20 pieces fit within a single chapter. One German critic read Your Secrets more as verse than fiction, saying it "emphasizes the poetry of language, situations and interpersonal constellations" over dramatic development, potentially sacrificing some of the work's narrative potential.
I disagree. This tale holds 101 compressed dramas; the resulting tension is as thick and refractive as DC air in August. Though Your Secrets critiques the global spread of America and the sprouting of police states, at its core the book explores the meaning of self, of our relationships with our bodies, the outside world and one another, down to a cellular level. One character "believes that while you can't escape the company of yourself, you can make yourself so big as to be unrecognizable. She believes that your sensation of your self is an actual landscape—a real geography, as real as the streets surrounding you." Your Secrets Sleep with Me is a fantastic, fantastical landscape, compacted into book form, that's slipping under the radar. And it's far too big for that.
An electric current of upset drives Your Secrets Sleep with Me like a gale behind dominos. Things fall over; things fall apart. As the book opens, a wave of refugees enters Toronto from Canada's unstable southern neighbor, where the president has put the country on red alert.
Sixteen-year-old Kaliope Vally got out a couple days earlier, "before the streets started crawling with military, doors got busted down and people dragged away." At age eight, little Rani Vishnu sports a number of gray hairs—each a result of tear gas, getting trampled by police or otherwise witnessing state violence. When her mother Anu's University of Michigan colleagues are rounded up and detained, they get out, too. And while they play word games in the bumper-to-bumper traffic to pass the time, John Racco, father of Michael and Ruth, launches what the evening news quickly dubs "the Backhoe Massacre." Soon after, Toronto's CN tower takes a spectacular tumble. But the effect is more Wizard of Oz than WTC—and not just because of the tornado that tipped it.
I've never been to Toronto. My sense is that O'Donnell's portrayal of the city is no different from his rendering of the greater world: reality with a touch of funhouse mirror, minus the fun. His Toronto is "pubescent, a little nervous; masking shyness with a performance of aloofness; snooty but universally so and born only of an unawareness of just how beautiful it is."
O'Donnell's Toronto is also quietly treacherous. Somewhere downtown there's a sewer rumored to have eaten a child. Rocking the city is the case of the parents who kept their children in glass jars with air holes in the lids. "There's also shit floating in the lake; kids pushing through loose screens to tumble out of high-rise apartments; the leader of the police union enjoying the post-operative benefits of a pig's penis surgically grafted to his own; and the maintenance crew at the National Hockey Arena, a bunch of guys who fucked little fans for years."
It's a world in which Angela Carter would have felt at home, though here, the fantastical is just another commodity of globalization. Miracles are everyday affairs forced to fight for recognition once the machine of sensationalism has sucked them dry. (The first reference to 13-year-old James Hardcastle is from 16-year-old Ruth, who dismisses him, scornfully, as "that little piece of shit who had walked on water.")
None of the principal characters is a day over 16. But unlike J.S. Foer's Oskar Schell, these kids might at times be self-absorbed, even precious, but they're pocked to hell with recognizable human flaws, and their pain is all too familiar. The kids aren't just the focus; they're the only ones with soundness of mind. The suits and little league coaches are murderers and child molesters. Michael's father is in jail for the Backhoe Massacre, and when his mom isn't suicidal, she's neurotic with a 21st-century intensity. Rani's mother Anu is anodyne but ineffectual, while Kaliope's famed aunt Amina, a respected activist powerhouse, is disappeared by the government. James and his sweetheart, little Xiang Pao, live in a group home, no parents in sight. Together, on their own, these kids try to make sense of the world around them. Queer love unfolds as a matter of course. But flesh gets seared; hearts get broken; miracles go gut-wrenchingly awry.
A stream of meta-fiction courses through the book. In an interview (see nypress.com), O'Donnell describes his effort to "[create:] a narrative presence that could prove to the reader the interconnectedness of everything." Its construction is certainly "experimental"—sometimes as many as 20 pieces fit within a single chapter. One German critic read Your Secrets more as verse than fiction, saying it "emphasizes the poetry of language, situations and interpersonal constellations" over dramatic development, potentially sacrificing some of the work's narrative potential.
I disagree. This tale holds 101 compressed dramas; the resulting tension is as thick and refractive as DC air in August. Though Your Secrets critiques the global spread of America and the sprouting of police states, at its core the book explores the meaning of self, of our relationships with our bodies, the outside world and one another, down to a cellular level. One character "believes that while you can't escape the company of yourself, you can make yourself so big as to be unrecognizable. She believes that your sensation of your self is an actual landscape—a real geography, as real as the streets surrounding you." Your Secrets Sleep with Me is a fantastic, fantastical landscape, compacted into book form, that's slipping under the radar. And it's far too big for that.
February 8, 2015
Reading playwright Darren O'Donnell's debut novel, you feel like you're sitting at one of his plays. Throughout Your Secrets Sleep With Me, we're told by the narrator to do certain things. Consider this. Smell that. Look carefully at the person sitting near us.
It's an intimate feeling, and it's relevant because O'Donnell's trying to capture all the swirling sensations and ideas involved in fully experiencing our self-conscious metropolis.
Set during a tumultuous summer after the U.S. has declared martial law and the CN Tower has fallen into the lake, possibly to become a link to the south, the book centres on a racially diverse bunch of kids who range in age from about eight to 16, with attributes from the banal to X-Men-type powers.
O'Donnell's an observant, often poetic writer who can describe the city's wants and needs with plenty of knowing winks. He's got lots of sympathy for these kids, who sip on designer coffees and try to grapple with everything from police violence to pornography to how to become a famous DJ.
But many narrative threads introduced at the beginning aren't woven through the rest of the book, and much of the middle lacks tension. O'Donnell gets too distracted by trips to Hindu temples or meditations on how our shit compares to others'.
He's a terrific writer - pick any page at random and you'll be seduced - but I'm not sure he's got his shit together as a novelist. Yet.
Originally published in NOW Magazine: https://nowtoronto.com/art-and-books/...
It's an intimate feeling, and it's relevant because O'Donnell's trying to capture all the swirling sensations and ideas involved in fully experiencing our self-conscious metropolis.
Set during a tumultuous summer after the U.S. has declared martial law and the CN Tower has fallen into the lake, possibly to become a link to the south, the book centres on a racially diverse bunch of kids who range in age from about eight to 16, with attributes from the banal to X-Men-type powers.
O'Donnell's an observant, often poetic writer who can describe the city's wants and needs with plenty of knowing winks. He's got lots of sympathy for these kids, who sip on designer coffees and try to grapple with everything from police violence to pornography to how to become a famous DJ.
But many narrative threads introduced at the beginning aren't woven through the rest of the book, and much of the middle lacks tension. O'Donnell gets too distracted by trips to Hindu temples or meditations on how our shit compares to others'.
He's a terrific writer - pick any page at random and you'll be seduced - but I'm not sure he's got his shit together as a novelist. Yet.
Originally published in NOW Magazine: https://nowtoronto.com/art-and-books/...
June 3, 2015
4.5
This is the first book like this I've ever read. I loved it. Why the half star deduction? Found the ending fell a little flat. Still, a great book that I have many highlights from, and will be reading again.
This is the first book like this I've ever read. I loved it. Why the half star deduction? Found the ending fell a little flat. Still, a great book that I have many highlights from, and will be reading again.
April 4, 2014
Smart, random passages. No real discernible plot. Shruggable at best.
November 1, 2017
A strange and occasionally breathtaking read that ultimately didn't do it for me. I do appreciate the way O'Donnell thinks and am generally glad for what he does in and says about Toronto. I'd suggest trying Social Accupuncture over this one.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews