From a Seaside Town

Norman Ravvin’s novel, Café des Westens, won the Alberta Culture New
Fiction Award.

Norman Levine’s From a Seaside Town, which first appeared in 1970, is
a touching and unreservedly sad book. Its key portrait is of Joseph
Grand, a Canadian travel writer living with his British wife and
children far from London—far from all things familiar—who repeatedly
wonders why he is “stuck” in their seaside home, a thinly disguised
St. Ives, Cornwall.

Levine’s surprising success in this volume is his ability to maintain
the reader’s sympathy for and interest in Grand’s predicament, to
make us appreciate and not tire of his small dishonesties, his moments
of self-hatred, and the difficulty he seems to find in becoming engaged
with his surroundings. He is an unhappy exile, but one with no motive
for moving back to his native Ottawa.

Having chosen From a Seaside Town for its “Sherbrooke Street”
series of reprints, the publisher (assumedly at Levine’s advice) has
left the text in its original form, and this allows the reader to come
as close as possible to experiencing the book as Levine envisioned it
when it first appeared. Affecting and spare, the book succeeds
brilliantly at conveying Joseph Grand’s personal credo regarding the
writing life: “I like being taken out of myself. I like the visible
world. And I like to record what’s going on around me.”