Anima

A novel of grotesque realism following Rabelais.Unique narration seen through the eyes (and told in the voices) of some 70 animals, birds, and insects who observe the protagonist as he travels the continent.The novel reads like a road movie, a thriller, as the protagonist, Waahch Debch, travels from Montreal across the U.S. border (stopping at Indian reservations in Quebec and Ontario along the way), through the Mid-West to New Mexico. He is on the trail of his wife's murderer, a Mohawk named Welson Wolf Rooney. The murder was violent beyond words. The violence of her death (and that of another woman murdered by the same man on the Kahnawake reservation) triggers a fault line in Waahch's memory and the ensuing events force him to pursue "the excavation of his memory." This excavation leads to a tale of almost biblical vengeance rooted in historical "tribal" traditions of honor. (Reminiscent of Joseph Boyden's The Orenda but set in a very different time and place.) The protagonist Wahhch grew up in Lebanon during the civil war of the 1980s, where a brutal childhood episode forever changed his life.Topicality: the painful legacy of the politics of the Middle East and the "Palestinian question."