Gentleman Death / Perpetual Motion by Graeme Gibson

Together in a single volume, two beloved works by the inimitable Graeme Gibson.

Gentleman Death

Novelist Robert Fraser comes face-to-face with creativity, his mortality, and the deaths of his father and brother. Set mainly in Toronto, the novel also takes us to London, Scotland, Germany, and New York as we follow the escapades of two of Fraser’s fictional characters. There is Simpson, called into service as an anonymous sperm donor, and Dunbar, an enigmatic tourist in Berlin just before the Chernobyl disaster, where he meets the captivating Lena, with whom he begins to sense an almost forgotten freedom and elation.

But at the centre of Gentleman Death is Robert Fraser’s own compelling story. Gibson juxtaposes reality and fiction in this compassionate, sometimes outrageous, often very funny exploration of the absurdities and alarms of aging, the nature of fiction itself, and the maturity that grows from reconciliation.

Perpetual Motion

First published in 1982, Perpetual Motion is Graeme Gibson’s superb evocation of a time when faith in material progress is still challenged by superstition and a lingering belief in magic. It is an ironic yet compassionate examination of the painful consequences of human folly.

Set in southern Ontario in the late nineteenth century when the machine age was coming into its own, Perpetual Motion chronicles the fortunes of settler Robert Fraser, a man obsessed with power and control. Driven by the idea of inventing a perpetual motion machine which will utilize natural energy, he neglects and destroys not only the nature around him but his own family too, as his overbearing rationality becomes a kind of tragic lunacy.

An important spokesman for Canadian cultural identity, Gibson was the initial organizer and a founding member of the Writers’ Union of Canada, and was its chairman in 1976. He was also an organizer and founding member of the Writers’ Trust, a non-profit organization, and was subsequently its chairman. From 1987 to 1989 he was president of the Canadian Centre of International PEN. In 1990, he won a Toronto Arts Award for writing and publishing, and, in 1992 he received the Order of Canada. He is the author of four novels: Five Legs (1969), Communion (1971), Perpetual Motion (1982), and Gentleman Death (1993), as well as two bedside companions, The Bedside Book of Birds (2005) and The Bedside Book of Beasts (2009). Graeme Gibson died in September 2019.

Author Hometown: London, Ontario

9780771057762
Paperback , Trade
English
General Trade
Aug 25, 2020