KRANK: love in the new dark times: Michael Ondaatje comments ...

About Krank:

A Tale of Time Travel ...

It is November 11th, 2009. Ainsley Giddings steps aboard the ferry to Ward's Island. A forties-something psychotherapist on a self-imposed writing retreat, she has sublet a cottage for a year in which to think and write and clear her mind of Dan, her former lover.

Berlin playwright Bertolt Brecht, astonished at being restored to life, is on that same ferry boat. Having died in 1956, his heyday was in Berlin in the 1930s, an anti-fascist playwright whose provocative musicals like The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, made him a 'person of significance' to the emerging Nazi party. Suddenly, he has been brought back — given a second chance at life.

The stranger and Ainsley strike up a conversation and she discovers that not only is he unsure of that day's date, but of the year as well. Fascinating and unsettling.

Their acquaintance develops into a bizarre and eccentric love affair. But mixed in with the affair are island airport politics and eventually a civic uprising in downtown Toronto — in effect, the G-20 — which provokes a brutal repression by the police. This reminds Brecht of the 1930s resistance against Fascism in Berlin, especially when he is caught in the sweep by cops and thrown into a temporary jail with hundreds of others.

Ainsley's exertions at translating modern life to Brecht while trying to remain resolutely apolitical lead to their escape to Berlin where time takes another weird half-twist around these two mismatched lovers.

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Michael Ondaatje comments ...

" Sarah Sheard, in her new novel, enters the surreal world of politics where Bertolt Brecht and the G-20 clash, and where the dramatist’s eccentric love affair with a contemporary psychotherapist takes place during the battles over Toronto’s island airport.

She is a very funny and vivid and graceful writer about the human condition."

— Michael Ondaatje