Funhouse

Lynne Perras teaches communication arts at the University of Calgary.

A skilfully crafted and disturbing novel, Funhouse depicts the Brazilian
childhood and adolescence of its narrator, an artist who has exiled
himself from his homeland in a northern location. The son of a strongly
religious mother and a distant and rational father, the narrator often
finds himself uncertain about his beliefs and his place is in the world.
The sexuality, spirituality, sensuality, poverty, pain, and fragility of
human existence are richly portrayed in a novel whose title is apt:
life, like a carnival funhouse, amuses, delights, sometimes frightens,
and offers appearances that can be deceiving.

As the narrator moves through his childhood at home and into his
adolescence at boarding school, he becomes more introspective and
reclusive. “Sometimes,” he notes, “it seems, the more I come to
know people, the greater my contempt for them. It may be better not to
get to know people, as opposed to things, which captivate us, the deeper
we delve into them.” Perhaps because of the painful reality he endured
early in his life, he escapes into his art and remains the eternal
outsider.

Kokis, a bestselling author in Quebec, vividly conveys the sights,
sounds, and smells of Brazil. He also communicates the creative process
through which memories and images are transformed into art. Beautifully
translated into English by David Homel and Fred Reed, Funhouse is an
occasionally depressing, but deeply poetic, novel.