Café des Westens

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

This is the first novel of a 30-year-old Calgarian who writes with
impressive strength and maturity. Ravvin explores generational conflict
between a father and son, finding roots in Polish shtetl life. The
author’s native Calgary plays a major role in the story, the gleaming
skyscrapers contrasting with the ghetto scepticism of the old world.

Widower Martin Binder owns a Calgary funeral parlor, and struggles, on
the one hand, with his son Max, for whom the past exists through a
succession of vivid stories, and, on the other, with his mother, who
resists the efforts of developers to purchase her home. Martin finds
respite from loneliness in the Café des Westens, owned by Ostrovsky,
who, with laconic stoicism, has built his own bridges from past to
present. Young Max finds his model of modernism in a relationship with
Sara, whose realism is colored by a desire to shut out the outside
world. Father and son frequent the Café des Westens for different
reasons, seeking there the resources they need to live their lives.

Ravvin’s prose skilfully mixes tenses and tones, colors and moods.
Martin’s dialogues with Max are in the present, messages mixed,
emotions shadowy. Memories of earlier times and other places are painted
with hues more solid and distinct. A favorite Ravvin image is one of
gathering clouds, the prairie horizon threatened with storms, even as
father and son struggle toward conciliation.

Ravvin is currently working on a second novel and a collection of short
stories. He is a writer to watch. Highly recommended.