Club Protocol Release: A Map of Glass KINDLE MOBI by Jane Urquhart H.A.

Wiiner of the Governor General Award in Canada: A MAP OF GLASS is written in a a three-part structure that goes back into Canadian history and personal identity, with a central theme of visual art both in inspiration and in the lives of the characters. The title is based on a 1969 piece by Robert Smithson entitled "A Map of Broken Glass (Atlantis)," an 18-by-15 foot pile of broken window panes that suggests the debris of lost civilizations, but which nonetheless catches the light in unexpected ways and glistens with a mystery of its own. Urquhart's MAP is also a lament for the past, but its quiet glow of consolation is nothing short of a miracle.
This wondrous and evocative novel begins with a man walking over the ice to a distant island. He is so stricken with Alzheimer's that he cannot even remember his own name, Andrew, but the four pages in which Jane Urquhart describes his situation are almost poetry: "The whole unnamed world is so beautiful to him now that he is aware he has left behind vast, unremembered territories, certain faces, and a full orchestra of sounds that he has loved." He is walking, as one of the other characters later remarks, toward his past. The book that follows will be the slow uncovering of that past, not only as it applies to Andrew and his forebears, but by extension to the whole of Canada.
Julia is blind; Andrew developed Alzheimer's; Annabelle was lame; Sylvia appears to suffer from a form of autism; even the young and apparently healthy Jerome will turn out to have been spiritually crippled by the legacy of an alcoholic father. The most amazing of Urquhart's many feats of alchemy is that she manages to turn these apparent disabilities into gifts. The reader turns the pages with wonder, enthralled by the writer's inexhaustible ability to see familiar things in a new way. Central to it all is Sylvia, whose social limitations and fear of change will nonetheless turn her into the virtual author of a story of love and family whose very subject is change.


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