Book description
Set in contemporary Montreal, Ondine's Curse follows the attempts of
Robert Strasser, a television documentary producer, to film the life
of Dr. Werther Acheson, the German director of a controversial
psychiatric institute. In the course of his journey through Acheson's
murky past, Strasser meets Ondine, one of the institute's patients,
and soon finds himself increasingly fascinated by the haunted young
woman. It is Ondine who is at the heart of this powerful probe of the
human psyche. A historian, she is trying to complete her own research
into the death of Shawnadithit, a Beothuk Indian woman who was the
last survivor of a Newfoundland tribe that was exterminated by
settlers in the 1820s. But Ondine's ability to cope in the modern
world is crippled by a repressed memory of violence as a witness to
the Montreal Massacre in 1989 when fourteen women were slain in
Canada's most shocking mass murder. Moody and macabre, Steven
Manners's expressionist novel is a literary tour de force that lurches
through the dementia of the twentieth century, seeking meaning behind
the massacres and mayhem.
Steven Manners's previous novel was Ondine's Curse,
published in 2000. He is also the author of Wound Ballistics, a
short story collection that was shortlisted for the Quebec Writers'
Federation's Hugh MacLennan Prize for Best Fiction in 2003. Recently,
he published Super Pills, a cultural history of prescription
drugs and a must-read by the Canadian Medical Association
Journal. He lives in Montreal.
