Graeme Gibson | Biography

Graeme Gibson's first two novels each create their own category of Canadian fiction, and the third novel extends a mainstream tradition in Canadian letters, the pioneering story. The first novel, Five Legs (1969), is post-Joycean. By such devices as the fragmentary sentence, representing piecemeal mental processes, it adapts the stream-of-consciousness technique to capture thought issuing directly from the minds of its two "narrators." If the technique of Gibson's second novel, Communion (1971), calls to mind the work of Jorge Luis Borges, it is as a creation of multiple realities such as Borges writes about. "All possibilities exist in the same time, in space like a tapestry," thinks one character, and the statement accurately describes the effect of Gibson's technique. Perpetual Motion (1982), Gibson's third and most recent novel, is more immediately accessible than the first two works. It encapsulates the conflict of Progress and nature in Canada. Also,...
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