Product Description

“It’s an immense night out there, wheeling and windy. The lights on the street and in the houses against the black wetness, little unilluminating glints that might be painted on it. The town seems huddled together, cowering on a high tiny perch, afraid to move lest it topple into the wind.”

The town is Horizon, the setting of Sinclair Ross’ brilliant classic study of life in the Depression era. Hailed by critics as one of Canada’s great novels, As For Me and My House takes the form of a journal. The unnamed diarist, one of the most complex and arresting characters in contemporary fiction, explores the bittersweet nature of human relationships, of the unspoken bonds that tie people together, and the undercurrents of feeling that often tear them apart. Her chronicle creates an intense atmosphere, rich with observed detail and natural imagery.

As For Me and My House is a landmark work. It is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand the scope and power of the Canadian novel.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #189604 in Books
• Published on: 1989-01-01
• Released on: 1989-01-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Largely ignored when it appeared in 1941 (the Governor General's Award that year went to Alan Sullivan's since-forgotten Three Came to Ville Marie), Sinclair Ross's first novel, As for Me and My House, has since become recognized as the great Anglo-Canadian novel of the Depression era. Ross's story of a married woman chafing against the strictures of small-town Prairie society, reminiscent of the masterpiece of another Sinclair--Main Street--gains a layered complexity from the growing unreliability of the narrator's perspective.

Amazon.ca
In "wind-swept, sun-burned little Horizon," Sinclair Ross sets As for Me and My House and his big, human themes of isolation, alienation and unrealized ambition. Our narrator, Mrs. Bentley, uses a diary to detail life with her husband Philip, the artist who puts aside his painting to become a small-town preacher. "What he is and what he nearly was. The failure, the compromise, the going on." Mrs. Bentley too had aspirations but gave them up to marry Philip. Her writing reveals just how brittle their relationship has become: "For hypocrisy wears hard on a man who at heart really isn't that way. As far back as I can remember, it's always been there, darkening, draining him, but with Horizon now it seems to be gathering for a crisis."

Even with disaster looming, the uneventful chronicling of a clergyman and his wife struggling through the Depression in Saskatchewan might sound dull. That is, until the reader realizes how absorbing Mrs. Bentley's ambiguous and layered diary entries can be. Ross leaves it to us to decide whether our narrator is sincere or deceptive, shrewdly aware or deep in denial, as she chronicles her interactions with her husband, the townspeople, and the false fronts which surround them. It's this complexity that makes Mrs. Bentley one of the most engaging characters in Canadian fiction and draws generations of readers back to tiny Horizon, Sask. --Carolyn Leitch

About the Author
Sinclair Ross was born on a homestead near Shelbrooke in northern Saskatchewan in 1908. He dropped out of school after grade eleven to work in a bank. After working in many small-town banks in Saskatchewan, he transferred to a bank in Winnipeg in 1933. In 1941 he published his first novel, As For Me and My House, with its evocation of prairie life during the Depression. The prairie is the major setting for his two collections of short fiction, The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories and The Race and Other Stories.

From 1942 until 1946 Ross served with the Canadian army in London, England. In 1946 he returned briefly to Winnipeg before settling in Montreal, where he continued in banking until his retirement in 1968.

Ross’ later novels, The Well, Whir of Gold, and Sawbones Memorial, continue his exploration of prairie life and its power to challenge as well as sustain its inhabitants.

Upon his retirement Ross lived in Greece and then in Spain. He returned to Montreal in 1980, and two years later moved to Vancouver.

Sinclair Ross died in Vancouver in 1996.