The Book

"I never really grasped why it was at all necessary to leave our house now and then and go to other houses, to play with other kids…" So begins Emma Richler's story that takes us back to the magical world of the Weiss family with Jem, the sensitive heroine of Sister Crazy, once again narrating.

When Dad and Mum announce that they will leave their idyllic, rambling home in England to move to "Dad's country" (Canada), Jem is not sure it's such a good idea. Staying close to her nearly twin brother, Jude, Jem must find ways to cope with all of this unnecessary chaos. As the family journeys across the ocean and Mum becomes very ill, Jem knows things will never be the same and so she begins to retreat into her imagination: the history of astronomy and Shackleton's miraculous Antarctic mission captivate her and her world expands by her reading of Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur - applying all she learns about knighthood, chivalry and loyalty to the family she loves.

Slowly she begins to adjust to this new place - she's playing hockey with the neighbourhood kids and feeling the intensity of Canadian winter - but her world is suddenly thrown into disarray again: Jude, her touchstone, is going travelling and he hasn't made it clear when, or if, he'll return. Jude's breaking up of the Weiss family circle unmoors Jem and sets her off on a series of reminiscences about her magical early childhood - and gives the reader a glimpse into the unusual, heartbreaking early life of her beautiful mother, Frances.

Darkly humorous and full of intimate, funny-sad portraits, Feed My Dear Dogs explores the delicate emotions of childhood and leads us to a conclusion that at once reinforces and redefines familial love.

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Other Books By This Author

Feed My Dear Dogs (Vintage Canada, 2006)
Sister Crazy (Vintage Canada, 2002)

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Reviews

Praise for Feed My Dear Dogs

"This is a glorious hymn of praise to family… Richler uses a charming and cunning conflation of mature and immature vocabulary to capture childhood confusion… Time and again, Jem's world view made me laugh out loud. For all Jem's anxieties, this is a joyful book about a joyful family."
-The Independent (UK)

"Jem's voice is a great accomplishment: confiding, ingenuous, with a convincing thirst for answers and approval. From delight in the discovery of new words and family in-jokes, to her schoolgirl disdain for custom… But beyond the vignettes of a perfect childhood there is a dark undertow as the flow of observational comedy slips from childish prattle to damaged stream of consciousness…. The narrative is saturated with images of absence and loss: Shackleton in the Antarctic; Jewish history; Branwell Brontë's painting of his sisters from which he erased himself; the disintegration of King Arthur's Round Table… a profoundly moving elegy for lost youth that bristles with intelligence, verve and wit."
-Scotland on Sunday

Richler's writing is superb: crisp and… surprisingly poetic, often infused with a sly humour."
-Toronto Star

"Emma Richler's complex and moving first novel centres around the extraordinary and talented Weiss family… The handling of allusion is deft and understated; the narrator's stream-of-consciousness voice endlessly flexible, by turns charmingly frank and mysteriously obscure… Emma Richler has written a masterpiece; a brilliant and moving novel that defies description."
-Matthew Alexander, Sunday Telegraph (UK)

"Feed My Dear Dogs is a fierce and passionate summoning up of childhood… this is more than an extended feat of recall or an entertaining family portrait. The writing is flexible and confident. Brief lyrical passages, expressed in Jemima's hectic, heartfelt tones give the novel its meaning… There is a well controlled patterning of literary allusion designed to hide and reveal the undertow of sadness beneath the jaunty tone… Richler's long, brilliant autobiographical project can stand alone on its literary merits."
-Lindsay Duguid, Sunday Times (UK)

"Not since Salinger has a writer explored the relationships between children and adults with such grace, tenderness and wistful amusement."
-Carlo Gebler

"It's a bittersweet family portrait, by turns witty and dark: one of those rare books you just don't want to end."
-Rachel Seiffert

"Emma Richler's writing has a personality all of its own. You return to it as you would to a favourite friend, for the warmth, the humour, the company. Her books achieve what only the best books can: they become companions."
-Andrew Cowan, author of Pig

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Excerpt

ONE

Jude always said a kid is supposed to get acclimatised to the great world and society and so on, and just as soon as he can bash around on his own two pins, but the feeling of dread and disquiet I experienced on leaving home in my earliest days was justified for me again and again on journeys out, beginning with the time Zachariah Levinthal bashed me on the head for no clear-cut reason with the wooden mallet he had borrowed from his mother's kitchen. It did not hurt much, as I was wearing my Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat with both ear flaps tied up neatly in a bow on top, providing extra protection from onslaught, but I must say it struck me that Zach, who was nearly a whole year and a half older than me, same age as my brother Jude in fact, Zach was the one in need of a few pointers regarding recommended behaviour in the great world and society at large. Never mind. The way I saw it, he was just testing out his enthusiasm for tools and surfaces, and, possibly, exploring a passing fancy for a future in architecture or construction work, and in my household, enthusiasms were encouraged, which is why I regularly went to and fro with a handful of 54mm World War I and World War II soldiers in my pocket for recreation purposes, with no one to stop me, although I am a girl and expected, in some circles, to have more seemly pursuits. You have to allow for enthusiasms, you never know where they may lead, so I knew to keep my composure the day Zach hit me on the head with a meat pulveriser. No. Tenderiser. So there you are, that is what I mean, it depends on how you look at things, how bashing away at a piece of beefsteak with a wooden hammer can induce a quality of tenderness in meat is just as surprising, perhaps, as my not protesting the risk of brain damage I incurred at the age of eight or so, instead, forgiving Zach on account of his enthusiasms and general spirit of endeavour.

I think all stories are like this, about looking out for a way to be in life without messing up in the end, a way to be that feels like home, and if you bear this in mind, it's easy to see some situations as OK which might strike you otherwise as downright odd, and that story about Francis of Assisi and the crow is just one example of many. At the latter end of his life, Francis befriends a crow who is fiercely devoted, sitting right next to Francis at mealtimes, and traipsing after him on visits to the sick and leprous, and following his coffin when he died, whereupon the crow lost heart and simply fell apart, refusing to eat and so on, until he died also. Now, if you nip along the street or go about the shopping with a crow at your heels, you are not likely to make friends in a hurry, because it is odd behaviour, and not recommended. Unless you are a saint, in which case it is OK. So that's one thing. The other OK-not-OK thing in this story is how that crow did not choose to make life easy and fall in love with his or her own kind, another crow with whom that bird might have a bright future and bring up little crows and so on. No. For the crow, Francis was home, that's all there is to it, it is OK.

This is also how it goes for le petit prince in the book of that name by M. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a story about a small boy in a single suit of fine princely haberdashery, living on an asteroid with a volcano, a baobab tree and a rose, and having nothing much to do but watch the sunset. In the scheme of things, it is not so odd that he falls in love with the rose, and leaves his tiny planet in a fit of lovesickness, taking advantage of a migration of wild birds for his journey, hanging on to them, as it shows in the watercolour, by way of special reins. The prince finally lands on Earth wherein he has a shady encounter with a snake who has murder in mind, albeit concealed in a promise to this small lovestruck and visionary boy, a promise of return, a single ticket home by way of the eternal worlds.

Upon landing, the prince asks, Where did I fall, what planet is this?

I remember everything.

Everything and nothing is strange. It depends how you look at it.

Zach, now, is something in law, Jude says, although I keep forgetting the details, because all I can think is how Zach found a place where everything ought to come out right, and where even hammers crash down upon suitable surfaces for the tenderising of felony and injustice, and I hope he is happy, I hope so, though I don't know, as I do not go in for telephones and letters these days, not now I have fallen out with society and the great world, but still I have enthusiasms, ones I pursue in low-lit rooms, with my handful of soldiers here, entering my world in unlikely ways, it might seem, to strangers.

October 1935. Joseph Goebbels issues a decree forbidding the inscription of names of fallen Jewish soldiers on war memorials, men who fell for the sake of younger men who are now getting busy scratching out offensive Jewish names from tablets of stone with what you might call corrupt and frenzied enthusiasm.

Me, I turn away and weep.

Where did I fall, what planet is this?

I hear it, I see it, and I was not there, it's a vision. I remember everything.

Under the influence of gravity, stars in orbit in an elliptical galaxy such as ours are always falling, always falling without colliding, and the greater the mass, the greater the attraction, and the faster a thing falls, the faster it moves in orbit, so the Moon, for one, is always falling towards Earth, but never hits it, and I like to think William Blake, b.1757, d.1827, would appreciate this, as he was very interested in fallen man, and for William, memory is merely part of time, an aspect of the fall, and the visionary worlds are the true regions of reminiscence, a realm wherein every man is uncrowned king for eternity and there is no need for memorials because, so he wrote, Man the Imagination liveth for Ever.

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Excerpted from Feed My Dear Dogs by Emma Richler Copyright © 2005 by Emma Richler. Excerpted by permission of Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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