Cristoforo: Strange Tales of a Singular Traveller

Joseph Jones is librarian emeritus at the University of British Columbia
Library and the author of Reference Sources for Canadian Literary
Studies.

The often invisible narrator of these “strange tales” is Anastase de
Saint-Just, a bastard mute born without legs. The reader struggles to
move forward through the text, perhaps in sympathetic handicap. The
chief obstacle is a thicket of names, personal and geographic, that
bleed into the actual world of the early 17th century. No wonder the
work concludes with a geographical glossary.

As far as the history goes, what is fact, and who would swot to the
point of knowing? In the meantime, an astonishing voice convinces the
reader to persist, even while period seems askew. In this English
translation of the French, syntax and diction consistently convey the
18th century, while the story itself lodges in the first half of the
17th.

Scarcely mentioned in the first chapter, Acadia emerges as the thread
on which this liaise of tales is strung. After the final page is turned,
a poking about in history uncovers the figure of Charles de Biencourt de
Saint-Just (1592?–1623?). The fiction has split him into Anastase de
Saint-Just and half-brother Patrick de Biencourt. As the latter suffers
an inventive death in the appropriate year, he wishes to “consecrate
his last hours to recording the saga of his adventures in the New
World.” Anastase subverts this intention, and takes on the task
himself more than 40 years later as he senses his own death approaching.


Beyond Acadia lies a broader concern with the Old World’s
intersection with the New. Hence the title, Cristoforo. The Italian
given name of the most renowned “discoverer” of the New World, the
word provides multivalent occasion for narrative embroidery. In the
tradition of Moll Flanders, the women of this fiction exercise
particular agency—two notables being the mother of Anastase and
Franзoise Marie Jacquelin, historical wife of Charles de la Tour. A
series of animals (a cat, a horse, a camel, and a goat) become
characters yet manage to avoid the betrayals of loose fantasy.

Willie Thomas, the pseudonymous author of this novel, has created a
singular, baroque world where the reader encounters pageant, fratricide,
wedding, assassination, incest, mass execution, and a three-way—among
other things.