The Wheel Keeper

By Robert Pepper-Smith

This novel is set in a fictional village in south-eastern British Columbia, in a valley near the Rockies. The narrator of the story is the child of an Italian Canadian family in a predominately... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1896300499
• ISBN13: 9781896300498
• Release Date: September 2002
• Publisher: NeWest Press
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.39 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Keeping the Stories Alive

Within only 118 pages, Robert Pepper-Smith's THE WHEEL KEEPER manages successfully to weave strains of the immigrant experience into a coming of age novel that also addresses the fate of the North American landscape. Poetic and evocative, this tale of a family and the land they occupy in Western Canada joins the company of other important narratives of the North American landscape in transition. Like some of the work of Linda Hogan, Annie Proulx and even William Faulkner, Pepper-Smith's novel portrays the anguish of people coerced by progress and technology to give up a way of life that their ancestors have forged through generations. Throughout the work, the building of a hydro-electric project threatens the dislocation of the family and the Italian Canadian community they are part of. The novel, which takes places mostly in the 1950s and 1960s, is narrated primarily as the boyhood memories of the main character, Michael Guzzo, grandson of Lucia, otherwise known as Nostre Nonna, who in her youth fled Italy as an unwed mother. Michael's attempts to understand himself, his family and its history on two continents, as well as his relationship to the land he lives on, are at the core of the work. Sensitive by nature and advised by his grandmother to "Pretend that everything is lost . . . Only then will you see the true face of things" (113), he struggles throughout with the fragility that he perceives in everything around him and a growing sense of the imminent destruction of the family's land. THE WHEEL KEEPER is the best kind of read--one that is at once mentally challenging and emotionally engaging. Its lyrical qualities and elegiac tone, along with its fractured, non-chronological narrative, are perfectly suited to the complex lives and somber themes it addresses. It shows how stories remembered and artfully recounted may become "distant music . . . . the song in the air to thaw pain" (118).