Read more
An embalmer and his daughter at a diner. She's taking notes.
About the author
The Embalmer is Anne-Renée Caillé's first novel. She is writing her second book while she works at Queen's University. A regular contributor to Liberté magazine since 2012, she has published fiction and nonfiction in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Anne-Renée divides her time between Kingston and Montreal.
Rhonda Mullins is a writer and translator. She received the 2015 Governor General's Literary Award for Twenty-One Cardinals, her translation of Jocelyne Saucier's Les héritiers de la mine. And the Birds Rained Down, her translation of Jocelyne Saucier’s Il pleuvait des oiseaux, was a CBC Canada Reads Selection. It was also shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award, as were her translations of Élise Turcotte’s Guyana and Hervé Fischer’s The Decline of the Hollywood Empire. Rhonda currently lives in Montréal.
Summary
A small-town embalmer's daughter lifts the shroud on the fascinating minutiae of dealing with the dead.
Imagine rubbing shoulders with the dead for most of your life. As she picks the brain of her father for the most gruesome and thought-provoking secrets of his embalming career - from the drowned boy whose organs were eaten by eels to how to inject just the right amount of colour into a corpse's skin for that blushing look - the narrator must look her parents' deaths, and her relationship with them, straight in the eye.
Quietly poetic, The Embalmer glimpses at something most would rather look away from.
Additional text
"Using language that courageously refuses to wrap the cadavers in hypocritical shroud of lyricism, [the author] transcribes without flourish what she harvested, armed with a bias for the unsaid and for the silence contrasted with an era when death is too often buried in pop psychology babble." —Le Devoir
