Gambling with Failure.

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

Halfway through Antonio D’Alfonso’s book of essays, he is interviewed by the Quebec teacher and critic, Denise Brassard. “The manner in which you develop your concepts is complex,” Brassard says. “Certain concepts are not clear to me. At times, there is a zone in which everything you say is fuzzy.” To which the Montreal-born writer/publisher/filmmaker replies: “The problems arise from the fact that I am using words that others have used before me. I add to these terms a new meaning. I do this on purpose.”

D’Alfonso has given new meaning to terms in English, French, and Italian—the three languages in which he is fluent. He laments how few Italian publishers are willing to translate “just one of the many Italian-Canadian authored books into Italian.” Similarly, he says, “most Italian authors translated into English rarely get reviewed or even noticed on this continent.” D’Alfonso uses what he perceives as this lack of cross-linguistic, cross-cultural miscegenation to launch into a description of what he calls the “Ethnic writer,” striving for a “supra-linguistic, nation-free tradition.” It is, indeed, in the realm of cultural literary creation where he sees literature most under threat. D’Alfonso believes that multiculturalism is dead-in-the-water within the publishing and book industries of the Western world. He founded the Montreal firm Guernica Editions in 1978 not to publish books, he says, but to “discover authors and promote these published authors.” It has become a “haven for writers who feel and share a common vision.”

D’Alfonso will not be categorized. To read Gambling with Failure is to expose oneself to an opinionated, idiosyncratic mind with strongly held ideas about culture and the creative process.