The Second Coming of Yeeat Shpanst
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| Manitoba's
literary landscape has brought you Margaret Laurence's Morag
Gunn,
Adele Wiseman's Hoda, Sandra Birdsell's Minnie Pullman and
Carol
Shields's Daisy Goodwill. Now, here comes Oata Siemens
in
an operatic political cartoon novel of the struggle for Canada's soul.
When the Prime Minister declares that it's a dark day for Canada, the citizens of Gutenthal, who believe their country's fate is more important than baseball, set out to save the nation from a storm of unwanted referendum questions and foreign take-overs. Led by Oata Siemens, armed only with a carpenter's pencil and a farmers' union notebook, The Second Coming of Yeeat Shpanst serves up the essence of living in Canada during the tumultuous time after the death of the Meech Lake Accord.
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In
The Second Coming of Yeeat Shpanst, Armin Wiebe returns to
Gutenthal, the fictional
town of previous novels, a community that comes with its own extensive
family
tree, phrase book, and 'Beetfield Chorus'. This 'Gutenthal Galaxy'
is comprised
of some of the more colourful creations to have bounded across
Canadian
pages in a while.... It is a playful book, and serious. And it should
be I opened it up--and that was it, I couldn't close it till I finished paddling across the lexicon....I loved it, absolutely loved it, from the 'Greek' chorus in the Beet Fields to the magic realism imagery to the artist's process descriptions to the critique of the Canadian political sell-out. Oata was great. I wish I could do a male character that well.
Wiebe delivers superb pictures of prairie baseball games, of cold rooms full of canned fruits and jams, and of still prairie nights where a woman re-discovers the thrill of life with her husband. These are the things that ordinary Canadians understand and believe in.
Armin Wiebe's The Second Coming of Yeeat Shpanst is a brilliant book...worth reading just to meet Oata Siemens, who emerges here as a wonderful, complex literary character. She has imagination, love, compassion, tolerance and patience. OK, so she was pregnant when she got married to Yasch. OK, so she sleeps nude and likes sex. OK, so her father was a jerk. Nevertheless, Oata has all those Mennonite virtues. Sorry folks, but she is 'the salt of the earth.' You've probably met her.
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