Word: montreal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Charming Nelli." When she pauses to chomp watermelon in the midst of an otherwise rigid training regimen, she fits that title, but Nelli and her coaches agree that she can often be much less than charming. The only thing that justifies her moods are the results. In Montreal four years ago, Kim not only won two individual gold medals but scored two all-but-unprecedented perfect tens -one in the floor exercise program and one in her specialty, the vault. In Fort Worth last December she took the all-round women's title. Kim, now training near her home...
...wandering Canadian, comes home. It is a place of great vitality, unabashed tenderness, grotesque humor and a grouchy reverence for things as they were. In some respects, the book is a Jewish Brideshead Revisited, the sacred and profane memoirs of an exaggerated autobiographical character named Joshua Shapiro, a Montreal writer and TV personality. A resemblance to Evelyn Waugh's novel is not farfetched. Richler twice borrows the comic master's line about the companions of his youth: "Mad, bad, and dangerous to know." In addition, the prodigal North American seems to have learned much from Waugh about episodic...
Joshua's childhood has left little room for pretensions. Like the author, he was born and raised in the low-rent Jewish section of Montreal, the background for Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and St. Urbain's Horseman. Shapiro's father Reuben is an ex-boxer and oldtime bootlegger who helped the Colucci family collect gambling debts and gave unorthodox religious instructions to his son: "There are ten commandments. Right? Well, it's like an exam. I mean, you get eight out of ten, you're just about top of the class...
Most questions are answered in due time. In the Richlerian calendar this means flipping back and forth from Montreal of the '30s and '40s, London and Spain of the '50s and la belle province of the present...
...author to hit the emotional highs and bawdy lows of Shapiro's lurch through a world of dubious achievements and even more dubious respectability. Joshua, with his raffish background and inherited street smarts, is an arbiter of such matters. Most of his childhood friends make it to Montreal's affluent suburbs and lose their roots in wall-to-wall carpeting. To put on occasional airs is human, but to be a full-time phony is to risk devastating caricature, like Yossel Kugelman who becomes Psychiatrist Jonathan Cole, author of the bestseller My Kind, Your Kind, Mankind...