Anne Chudobiak's recent
Gazette review, reprinted in today's
Edmonton Journal:
You may be forgiven for not knowing who John Glassco was, or why biographer Brian Busby has written such a big book about him. He was, in no particular order, a writer at a time when writers still joked about who would be the first to write the first great Canadian novel; a pornographer at a time when obscenity laws were still a major impediment to publication; a poet whose career overlapped with Leonard Cohen's and Irving Layton's; and a literary translator whose first major effort, the groundbreaking Poetry of French Canada, came out in 1970, the same year as the October Crisis, when enthusiasm among francophone poets for communication with the other solitude was perhaps at its lowest ebb.
If you have heard of him at all, it might be because the Literary Translators' Association of Canada has named a prize in his honour.
Even so, it's not immediately obvious why A Gentleman of Pleasure is such an important book. But it is, so much so that the writer in me envies Busby his choice of topic: Somebody had to write this book, and it was smart of him to do it first.
The entire review can be found here. Sadly, the review is no longer available online.
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