The Projectionist

Martha Wilson is Canadian correspondent for the Japan Times (Tokyo) and
a Toronto-based freelance editor and writer.

The Projectionist, with its commanding sense of place, its colorful
language, and its hilarious tribe of screwy characters, will shimmer in
your memory long after you put it down.

The narrator, Toss Raymond of Mayford, Saskatchewan, is a charming
eccentric, a man whose contemplation of a plastic saltshaker shaped like
a cowboy boot leads him to remark, “I once spent a whole day in bed
all but paralyzed by the materials of my existence, especially the many
kinds of summertime plastics.”

The complicated plot revolves around Toss’s many goals, which include
recovering from an old love and finding a new one, keeping the family
land, figuring out some mysterious family tragedies, and saving his
misguided friend Dewey from the town’s righteous fury. From the very
beginning, Saskatchewan, evoked in lyrical detail, takes on a magical
aura.