Canada

17 hrs. 37 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Richard Ford

Narrator Stepan Starchikov

Description

When the parents of fifteen-year-olds Del and Berner—decent and modest people—decide, quite suddenly, to rob a bank, the teenagers’ life is turned upside down completely. From now on, not only everything will go differently for them—so will they themselves. Del, a born observer, studies what happens to him and around him with the curiosity of a scientist, trying to make sense of the essence and flow of life—but its whirlpools carry him away, draw him in, and hurl him into full chaos of events and “non-events.” A bank robbery, three murders, a lonely life on the prairies, a meeting with strange and dangerous people who seem to have stepped right out of Dostoevsky’s novels—this is not what a fifteen-year-old boy expected on the eve of an ordinary school year. But instead of school, there is a journey to Canada—a mysterious and impossible country that is so ordinary and yet so different—from a place that stands on the edge of everything: sleep and waking, the real and the unreal, the everyday and the unbelievable.

“Canada” is a state of mind, an internal escape. No matter which side of the border a person ends up on, they remain who they were. People don’t change because it isn’t they who govern fate—fate governs them. Richard Ford’s novel is so emotionally gripping that it’s hard to imagine anything more perfect. Ford, in essence, gave a name to a previously unnamed state of mind—Canada.

Novels of big ideas are a rare bird in modern literature, and “Canada” is also full of wonderfully beautiful descriptions, startling thoughts, ironic dialogues, and subtle shifts of the soul.