Description:
At the heart of I'll Be resides a highly unreliable narrator. As he fumbles through his days, he breaks boundaries that are larger than the seemingly insignificant tasks at hand: the concept of space is uncertain, language is broken, history is rewritten, identity itself remains a question. The futility of language is a theme that surfaces continually. In a commentary on the nature of political systems, for example, the narrator points out its inadequacy in facilitating truthful communication: "To be fair, this country is safe, no one I know has fallen from a sniper's rifle, and not since 1970 have tanks roamed the streets. But that was in another province, another language, so it may not have happened." Between sentences strife with comma splices, existentialist questions, and other deconstructionist strategies, the novel is peppered with poetic metaphor and laugh-out-loud humor that is sometimes dark, and always searching. By working to unravel every strand of our understanding of the external world, the novel, in turn, reveals the frailty of our thought process, inner constitution, and essentially our humanity.
Brief description:
Claudio Gaudio is a Toronto based writer. Texas, his first novel, has been translated, in part, by Francesco Loriggio and included in an anthology in Calabria, Italy. Texas was shortlisted in 2013 for the RELIT Awards, and his work has appeared in ELQ (Exile Literary Quarterly), Rampike Literary Magazine and Geist, and Descant Magazine. Along with filmmaker Oleksiy Buyanov and composer Richard Underhill, Claudio is currently working on producing a series of videos based on Texas.
Review Quotes:
I suppose much of what I like about the book resembles what's mentioned in the blurbs, but not quite. I really like how the book constantly talks about political woes but isn't exactly political. That's hard to achieve.
--Michael Neuman, professor of philosophy at Trent University