A haunting historical tale
In the 1920s is the backdrop of Lavorato’s evocative, dramatic and poetic page-turner
From the old “write what you know” maxim to the current vogue for reality fiction, the notion of the novel as autobiography thinly disguised — if disguised at all — has been gaining a lot of traction. Well, Mark Lavorato didn’t get the memo.
“As a writer, if you’re given a talent to use your imagination to enter other ways of life, other ways of being and experiencing the world, it’s so silly to fritter that away on the experience you’ve already had,” said the 38-year-old in his Rosemont apartment last week. “I will never in my life write about a writer.”
Given that Lavorato grew up in Lethbridge, Alta. (“I left as soon as I could”) as the son of an Italian father and Austrian/Norwegian mother, no one is likely to accuse him of going the navel-gazing route in his third novel. Set mostly in Montreal in the 1920s and early ’30s, Serafim and Claire is an evocative, dramatic and poetic page-turner whose flavour can be indicated by the sharply contrasting backstories of its title protagonists. He, fresh off the boat from Portugal, is an aspiring photographer espousing a candid, on-the-spot method that hasn’t yet been accepted; he’s also something of a social and sexual naif. She, the rebellious daughter of dutiful French-Canadian Catholic parents, is intent on a career as a dancer in the city’s thriving dance halls and not picky about what she might need to do to get ahead.
Many will be tempted to read the novel as a love story, but while it does have some of those elements, it would be more accurately described as simply the story of two people whose very different worlds gradually converge, against a historical backdrop that, for all its uniqueness, has been strangely underrepresented in fiction.
“I can’t think of another novel set in 1920s Montreal,” Lavorato said, “and that’s weird, because it is such a sexy and enthralling time. Because of Prohibition, you’ve got trainloads of Americans coming up to this City of Sin — it’s hopping like mad, the red light district is a huge swath of the city, crazy social mores are being bent and flexed and explored in ways they had never been before. And all of this is happening (amid) a very religiously conservative culture, so there’s a lot of tension there.”
All too often in period fiction, the heroes come across as modern-day figures transposed back in time, representing modes of thought scarcely plausible in their surroundings. It’s a pitfall Lavorato says he was careful to avoid.
“Reading historical fiction I often find myself thinking, ‘This is essentially a contemporary novel but with different greenery.’ I really wanted to make sure that the history aspect was enmeshed in every word. Serafim and Claire are outliers, yes, but they’re not revolutionaries. They’re both pushing the boundaries of their own morality, and exploring those boundaries, but it’s not like they were seeing and doing things no one else could see and do at the time.”
Wisely, Lavorato doesn’t overplay the Babylon North angle; the more risqué goings-on in the novel are all the more significant for the forces of repression ranged against them. The Catholic Church, in particular, doesn’t come out of Serafim and Claire looking very good.
“(The Church) had a big hand in maintaining the status quo, and the status quo for French Canadians was, of course, abysmal at that time. One statistic that I came across in my research blows my mind. In 1932, if you were living west of the Main and were an anglo- phone, you had one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the western world. If you lived east of it and you were French Canadian, you had the second-highest on earth, after only Calcutta.”
Politically, too, it was an era whose more unsavoury aspects are often obscured in standard accounts. Unemployed young thugs engaged in widespread extortion, symptomatic of a culture of corruption for which prominent public figures such as Lionel Groulx were tacit proponents; it’s an epoch whose legacy is still literally visible in Little Italy’s Church of the Madonna della Difesa, with its historical fresco featuring Mussolini.
“No one wants to say this,” Lavorato said, “but Quebec and Montreal were profascist right up to the very last minute, when it was just no longer tenable. There were people in (government) immigration who would step in on behalf of fascist beliefs and aggressively boot you out of the country. That’s why I thought it was so important that the anti-fascists also be represented.” (Publisher and activist character Antonino Spada is an actual historical figure, and emerges as an unsung local hero.)
Having already largely completed two further books post-Serafim and Claire, Lavorato says it feels a bit strange to be talking about it, but he’s clearly proud to have shone a light on a part of his adopted city’s past.
“I recently got married, and will be calling Montreal home for the foreseeable future,” he said.
“As I guess you can tell from Serafim and Claire, I’m quite enamoured with the place.” Mark Lavorato’s Serafim and Claire
has its Montreal launch this Friday at 7 p.m. at Librairie Drawn & Quarterly, 211 Bernard St. W. For further details see 211blog. drawnandquarterly.com.