And the references serve more to heighten reader expectations, which are not fulfilled. One of the epigraphs for the book is from Garcia Márquez: “The invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love.” And not that One Hundred Years of Solitude owns this feature, but Galore also contains a nice family tree portending its scope. There’s the strange old matriarch who seems to survive everything and intimidate everyone. There are some moments of magical realism for example, a dead husband walks around, morosely watching his wife cuckold him with the priest. There is even a “kind of sleeping sickness.” With all of this, I’m sorry to say, Galore is no One Hundred Years of Solitude. While I didn’t love it, I did enjoy it.Īs I said above, Galore is an homage to (or a rip-off of) One Hundred Years of Solitude. His sentences flow nicely, and his images are poetic without being overdone. Galore is an ambitious novel, filled with fascinating stories, and Crummey is a gifted writer. I’ll be up front: I wouldn’t have included it in my longlist either, though it still surprised me that it wasn’t selected because I think it would appeal to many readers. The Giller Prize jury did not include it on their list of twelve (in 2008, there were fifteen books on the longlist, making the exclusion more deliberate, unless there was a change in policy I’m unaware of). Crummey was shortlisted for the Giller Prize in 2001 for River Thieves, and Galore, his incorporation of modes familiar from Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude into the folklore of Newfoundland, seemed an obvious choice. Before the Giller Prize longlist was announced, KevinfromCanada rounded up some of the most likely picks for me to read.
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