I know many Rioters will have already read this book in high school or university, and I hope you’ll weigh in on the discussion even if you’ve been away from it for awhile. This is the only one of the books I started in advance, because it’s a bear-like 528 pages, and so far my favourite notion is the notion that the English Canadians are more English than the English and the French Canadians more French than the French. First used by Hugh MacLennan in his 1945 novel Two Solitudes, and associated by John Cruickshank with a feeling of perpetual separateness, the two. (When you think about it, to have your two founding settler nations be two nations, England and France, so fundamentally opposed to one another can only be the basis of trauma. The two solitudes of the title refer to French and English Canada and the religious and cultural divides that separate the two colonial founding halves of the country MacLennan posits that Montreal, where the two groups mingle, is the heart of Canada, and to understand how this relationship works is essential to making sense of how this nation functions. Two Solitudes is an award-winning novel by Canadian author Hugh MacLennan, published in 1945. I’ve read a lot of Hugh MacLennan, but never this - arguably his most celebrated novel and the one that won the Governor General’s Award in 1945. It’s been said that this is the one novel that you need to read if you want to understand Canada.
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