Truth Is Naked, All Others Pay Cash: An Autobiographical Exaggeration

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

Don’t worry if the title has you scratching your head. This collection
will have your head spinning throughout, but you’ll also laugh a lot
as Rempel skips through his history of the Mennonites and himself, and
numerous other considerations such as cards, sex, circuses, golf,
American movies, and autostimulation, which sounds like deviant sexual
behaviour but is actually about cars.

Rempel, who writes with a keen eye for the idiocy of human behaviour
and an effervescent skill with words, grew up in a Mennonite community
on the Canadian prairies and seems to have spent most of his life
travelling as far away as possible. His many odd jobs were sometimes
very odd indeed, but he has also edited a book on the geography of
Belize, published a novel (True Detective), and worked as a journalist
all over. He now lives in a pink church in Quebec.

The book is dedicated to his mother “for making all her comments”
and to his father “for making none.” This gets us off with a smile
that continues as the author launches satirical barbs in every
direction, including flip comments about how the Mennonites arrived in
Canada, until we start to feel the bite among the jokes and the shadow
of sadness. “Post-Modernism with Mom” has a footnote longer than the
main text referring to his “mentally retarded” sister. “Dudley’s
Magical Time Travelling Disease” may amuse at first as Rempel’s
father shovels snow in unstoppable circles and grabs for the mashed
potatoes, but soon we are into a compassionate tale of mental illness.
It’s a high-wire act, this mix of laughter and pain, as befits someone
who auditioned to be a clown at Le Cirque du Soleil.

Rempel has been accused in the past of having “a baroque mind.”
What, he questions, is baroque? Referring to his title: What, he asks,
is the truth? Much in these pages reads like engaging nonsense; most of
it is true. Maybe all of it. With this author, who knows? Don’t skip
the footnotes, the appendixes, and the odd index.