Edwards crosses over into literary mystery
Sicilian Wife was 15 years in the making
The longer I immerse myself in Edmonton’s literary scene, the more treasures I seem to unearth. And I don’t even have to dig. They’re right in front of my nose, above ground, winking and blowing me kisses until I clue in.
No, we are not Toronto, or Brooklyn, or Berlin, but there abides an abundance of gifted writers in this city, authors whose determination and imagination knows no bounds.
Caterina Edwards is one such author. Why haven’t I exhaustively read this woman’s work, I asked myself recently while preparing for a phone interview about her new novel, The Sicilian Wife. Edwards has published six books, and the feathers in her writing cap make me green with envy. The Bressani Prize. The Edna Staebler Personal Essay Award. The Wilfred Eggleston Award for Nonfiction. An Edmonton Book Prize finalist.
Having dwelled in this city for 11 years, I’m borderline mortified that I don’t know Edwards’s writing better. And I felt the embarrassment sharply as I called her at a hotel in Montreal, where she’s launching her newest book. Within five minutes my trepidation was cooling, slightly, because the author is so amicable and encouraging.
The Sicilian Wife has been a 15-year effort in the making, she confides. “I started this book so long ago that it’s a bit embarrassing.” (If both parties are embarrassed, I decide, the embarrassments cancel one another out.)
Edwards goes on to explain the reason for this decade-and-a-half-long oeuvre. She’s always been a fan of mystery books as a form of relaxation, though finds the characters and writing in a whodunit lacking. She decided to write a literary novel that’s also a mystery — a crossover genre that’s respected in Europe, especially Italy, but not so much the done thing in North America.
Despite her accolades and track record, “I found that publishers didn’t get that it could be both. ‘How are we going to market it, as a mystery or a literary novel’?” Even her agent didn’t think the book was sellable. “It was really depressing. I just kept getting no, no, no, no.” Crushed, but determined, Edwards approached Linda Leith Publishing, a small press in a Montreal suburb, and finally got the answer she was looking for. The publisher “wrote back in two weeks and said, ‘I love it.’ Linda really knows European writing, and she’s more open.” Getting that yes, finally, was so gratifying. “I was writing the book I would like to read,” she says.
The Sicilian Wife tracks the story of Fulvia, a Mafia princess and dutiful daughter whose criminal-family past haunts her even after she escapes to Edmonton, Canada. Edwards interweaves folklore with suspense, carnage and recent Italian history.
Italy is a writing theme that Edwards wears well. Her mother was from Venice and her husband was born in Sicily. But while Italy appears again and again in her work, Edwards is more interested in the past, public and personal, in “how much can you really leave your past behind, and how much stays with you?” In a way, Italy is simply a way of framing the stories that inspire her right here at home.
“A lot of the stories I write about are based on things that have happened here. It’s just a way of intensifying them by setting them in Italy.” And it helps that Italy is thick with history. “There’s so much past, it’s almost chokes you because you can’t get away from it; it almost paralyses you. In Canada, the past is so much lighter. It’s empowering, because you don’t have that sense of the weight of the past. But because we can’t easily connect to the history, the past, that can make us unreflective.”
Writing mystery was challenging. “I had to learn to do the mechanics of the noir, so that if something was happening here on this day, I had to connect it with history and Mafia wars in Sicily, and then things happening in Edmonton, and the pace. I had to learn to not be selfindulgent. A lot of the rewriting was cutting out four lines here, a beautiful lyric sentence there that I didn’t want to give up, anything that slowed down the sentence too much.”
Of the mammoth effort to make the book a reality, Edwards says: “It’s been a lesson. I’m stubborn. Often you get so discouraged you give up. If you know you’ve got something in the story, it’s worth hanging on and going back until you get it as right as you can. I rewrote the ending three times. I knew I had a good story. I did so much work. I took my kids to Sicily and it was hot, 42 degrees. I thought, I’m not going to give up!”
The book launch for The Sicilian Wife, sponsored by Audreys Books and Faculty of Arts, Concordia University of Alberta, is on May 15, 7- 9 p.m., Tegler Centre, Concordia, 7128 Ada Blvd.