Product Description

With section titles like `e-mails to the coast', `Accelerator', `Decelerator', and `Postscript: Three Teachers', the narrator of The Syllabus -- M -- digresses, fantasizes, catalogues and invents, slowly recovering the strands of childhood exploration and adolescent obsession, joy and morbidity, that have led him to both alienation and freedom. First friend, first love, first sex, inklings of vocation: all of the elements of the Bildungsroman are here, but put in a high-speed blender that tracks the hallucinatory smears they leave on the mind. Using a collage-like technique that mixes times and genres -- flashing forward and backward in a narrative that is, by turns, confessional, meditative, lyrical and comic -- The Syllabus traces the crooked path by which one student makes his way through, and beyond, the proscribed syllabus.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1747004 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-30
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .85 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 216 pages

Amazon.ca
The syllabus, in the case of this fragmentary first novel set in Toronto, refers to the details of the narrator's educational and sexual life, "a memory tree ... endlessly branching into stems, leaves, roots." The view is perceptive, at times inventive, at times scattered, but always written with an energetic, refreshing rush of language. Many young writers have written about their schooldays, but seldom in such a grade by grade, teacher by teacher manner, and seldom with so much insight and humour. The characters the narrator summons from his past, both teachers and fellow students, are utterly familiar yet unique: Case, his young friend addicted to speed (in a go-cart, no less); Bull, the near-adult still in grade school who knows all about sex; Mrs. Ellroy, a high school friend's wanton mother; Miss Edwards, the prim piano teacher still living at home.

Barnes is particularly adept at finding the humour in painful situations, his decrepit Hyundai, for example: "I pour money into it. Cash it often excretes immediately." Regular education is soon followed by a syllabus of the narrator's sexual education, with a focus on his greatest love, Desina Van, whose "arranged" groom is about to arrive any day from India. Despite needless experimentalism in the first several chapters and a tedious description of building a bookcase near the end, this is an engaging novel about the travails of never growing up. --Mark Frutkin

Review

`This is a funny book. There are moments of pure childhood stupidity and ignorance that made me laugh out loud. Particularly hilarious is a moment when a boy in high school, determined to get back at the person who is stealing his lunch, carefully empties an Oh Henry chocolate bar of its ``solid core of caramel'' and refills it with lead shavings, cat excrement, litter and other awful things. He then seals the chocolate bar back up and delights in imagining the victim's response to the first bite: ``One stupefied grunt when the taste cuts through the sugar, then bleats and yelps rising to a terrified crescendo, subsiding (very, very slowly) to the deep anguished lowing of a gored steer.'' '

`Toronto's Mike Barnes drew some very favourable notices for his 1999 debut story collection, Aquarium. Now he's accepted quite the challenge in attempting to marry the techniques of collage and the lower-case nature of e-mail writing into a sustained novel. Don't fear, Barnes' The Syllabus ... does have a plot. Our troubled narrator, dubbed simply `M', is asked by a psychologist to help him research the nature of memory by revisiting his own youth and reporting the results via the Internet.'

Bonnie Burnard (citation, Danuta Gleed Literary Award)
`Barnes brings to Aquarium a deceptively relaxed precision and a grown-up acceptance of puzzlement as a natural state of mind.'