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At once a memoir, a work of philosophy, a story
of European immigration to Canada’s “dark places of the
earth,” and an exploration of the roots and effects of colonialism,
The Wolves At Evelyn is a stylistic and rhetorical tour de
force from “one of Canada’s master prose stylists."
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Dissident communists fleeing 1920s Germany, Harold Rhenisch's grandparents
imagined that British COlumbia's Interior was the end of the earth—a
"new world" where they could fulfil their dreams of the
land, freed from tyrrany and from history itself. A generation later,
in the wake of World War II, his father arrived, carrying many of
the same ideas with him. What they found instead was a colonial
culture as highly developed as Doris Lessing's Rhodesia.
Rhenisch grew up at the nexus of these cultures:
a Germany where Nazism simultaneously did and did not happen, a
Canada in the process of shedding British colonialism for American,
and a land—the Interior—that had no point of contact with
any of them.
With remarkable range and vision, Rhenisch turns in a bravura performance.
Sifting through the ashes of personal experience, family anecdotes,
literature, art, history, and the land itself for clues to a great
untold story, Rhenisch assembles a collage of images and ideas that
becomes a whole much greater than the sum of its parts. The hidden
history of a forgotten outpost of the Empire is laid open, shattering
dearly held myths and exposing buried skeletons.
How was the sunny, carefree Okanagan Valley fruit culture built
on the back of King Leopold’s Congolese slave trade? How does
Margaret Atwood’s garrison theory of literature reflect on
Rhenisch family’s hidden Nazi past? How did the Hudson’s
Bay Company Blanket act as both a cherished kitsch object for generations
of Canadians and a tool of genocide? Alternating between light and
darkness, great humour and sharp indignation, this is a disturbing,
thought-provoking and important work from a masterful writer and
cultural analyst.
In his brilliant and acclaimed Out of the Interior,
Rhenisch peeled back the layers of his father's story to pain an
unforgettable portrait of German culture in the Okanagan. The
Wolves at Evelyn traces his mother's history, his father's,
their ancestors', and his own, weaving threads of literature, history,
popular culture, rumour, anecdote, and imagination seamlessly together
to arrive at a vision of a country that never was, and that might
still be.
“Rhenisch proves that the unique adaptation of a magic-realist
style to non-fiction, combined with an episodic structure that would
be quicksand to most writers, wasn’t just a brilliant fluke
. . . but a technique he has mastered completely.”
—Vancouver Sun
"Rhenisch writes so lyrically it’s hard to believe his book is as angry as it is.... No one else does wonder and regret so well."
— Georgia Straight (read the full review here)
This book is printed on
ancient
forest-friendly paper.
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