A haunting historical tale
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 Montreal apartment last week. “I will never in my life write about a writer.”
Given that Lavorato grew up in Lethbridge, Alta. 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 pageturner whose flavour can be indicated by the sharply contrasting back-stories 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.