Just to continue your Canuck-bashing, albeit in a Francophone mode, Jacques Poulin's -Volkswagen Blues- would be right up there in my list of worst ever novels. I wonder if to be a truly bad novel, you have to demonstrate pretentions to profundity; the 'badness' of a novel then being gauged in terms of the distance between pretention and achievement.
Jeremy.
Jeremy | 09 Jan, 2007 - 5:38 am | #

Heh, I couldn't possibly comment about Volkswagen Blues.

But yes, I suspect that the gap between pretension and achievement has to be a good guide to at least one form of badness.

Or at the very least, surely to be truly bad, a book has to show no evidence that its author knows how bad it is?
Jon | Homepage | 09 Jan, 2007 - 6:06 pm | #

To add to the francophone Canuck abuse: Gil Courtemanche's -Un Dimanche a la piscine de Kigali - is a terrible book.
tim Beasley-Murray | 12 Jan, 2007 - 9:25 am | #

C'mon, our Francophone friends must have done something right... I've been recommended Anne Hébert's In the Shadow of the Wind. And what about Hubert Aquin?
Jon | Homepage | 12 Jan, 2007 - 9:45 am | #