Douglas Coupland’s Massey Lectures
Asked to give the CBC Massey Lectures in 2010, Douglas Copeland responded by contributing the first work of fiction in the Lectures’ history.
Player One: What Is to Become of Us: A Novel in Five Hours features four different characters stuck in a Toronto airport hotel’s cocktail lounge, during a global disaster, making entertaining mental observations about each other while thinking about the meaning of life, the difference between people and animals, eternity, the afterlife, and whether their lives add up to any kind of story.
As always, the joy of reading Coupland is in how he evokes the poetry of how we live now. Anyone could create a character who breeds white mice for a living, but only Coupland would make her a member of the Fifty Thousand Mouse Club, and, in the midst of the crisis, have her feeling guilty “…because when she was at the computer, supposedly looking up the price of oil, she was actually visiting a white mouse-breeding website to see if the day’s events had altered the price of mice.” What a human thing to do!
The Massey Lectures are co-sponsored by CBC Radio, House of Anansi Press and Massey College in the University of Toronto, “to provide a forum on radio where major contemporary thinkers could address important issues of our time.” -– from the book jacket.
Comments