Touch
by Alexi Zentner
Nominations: Center For Fiction Finalist 2011, Dublin Longlist 2013
Date Read: March 16, 2023
In Touch, Zentner explores four generations of a Canadian family who persevere against incredibly odds – through arctic blizzards, food shortages, tragic deaths, fires and even against fantastical mythic creatures evocative of Inuit mythology. The narrator, Stephen, is reminiscing about the stories handed down through his family as he sists vigil by his dying mother’s bedside. That she will pass is inevitable, it’s just a matter of when.
Stephen’s family were the early settlers of a gold mining town that endured long after the boom, transitioning to logging and supplying miners in neighboring towns with lumber. The winters are brutal and a surplus of kindling and food is the difference between surviving and, in one instance, cannibalism. The mere act of surviving a winter was magical act.
Underneath the surface of the ice and between the trees in the woods lurked mythical creatures that attempted to lure people into their primal world. Although Christianity abounded in that region, the primal world of Native American folklore and traditional faith walk seamlessly hand-in-hand.
Enchanting, terrifying and visceral, Touch is an epic generational novel packed into a couple hundred pages. I am left with the terrifying thought that one moment of inattention can lead to death. I often end up home and can’t remember how I got there. I would never survive in those 1900s winters.
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