First of all -- and most of all – I would like to thank Miranda Hill who has worked tirelessly for a very long time to set up Project Book Mark in this city.
Doris Lessing writes of how there is a need within us “to colour in the map of the world with the hues and tints of literature". Though I think one names the places of a city not just for readers, but for all its citizens – and those in the past as well as those in the future. When I first came to Canada, I discovered Montreal and parts of Quebec by reading Hugh Maclennan and Anne Hebert and St Denys Garneau and Leonard Cohen. I discovered the interior of BC when reading Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook. I read Hugh Garner’s Cabbagetown to discover his version of Toronto -- it is still powerful and contemporary, and it is honestly thrilling to see it on sale at Home Hardware in Cabbagetown today. But I also remember being told when I began to write that it was commercial suicide to set a thriller in Toronto or any Canadian city as opposed to New York or Miami or Kiev. Even Delhi, they said, was better than Toronto!
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What is it that makes us desire to link a fictional character in a story or the intimate lines of a poem to a real location in a city?
There’s a remark made by a young Russian writer, Victor Nekrasov, (from Kiev) responding in excitement to discovering a house where the fictional characters in a Bulgakov novel lived:
“I don’t know how other people feel, but for me the exact “topography” of a book is always extremely important. For me it is essential to know—precisely!—where Raskolnikov and the old money-lending woman lived; where the heroes of Veresaev’s In a Blind Alley lived, whereabouts in Koktebel was their little white house with its tiled roof and its green shutters. I have always felt it important to know where the heroes of their books lived, not the authors. They have always been more significant to me than the authors who invented them. To this day for me Rastignac is more “alive” than Balzac, just as I still find d’Artagnan more real than Dumas.”
When I was researching and writing In the Skin of a Lion, there were hardly any sources where a person could find out who the people were who had actually built this bridge. The newspapers spoke only of the companies hired and the money used, or the poobahs who were in charge of it. It was only at the Toronto Multicultural History Society that I began to discover who the citizens were, mostly immigrants, who actually built it. It was in this building that I found, through Lillian Petrov who worked there, a Macedonian bridge builder named Nicholas Temelcoff. I have often got into trouble with some of my books for using real names in a fictional work, but for me it was important to name Nicholas Temelcoff in my novel, someone who was -- as far as official Canadian history went -- ‘unhistorical’.
Ideally I would love to have this bridge named after him, rather than calling it ‘The Prince Edward Viaduct’. …..because this is where the real Nicholas Temelcoff worked, and this is also where the fictional Nicholas Temelcoff worked.
But I am very glad that, because of the plaque, his name is somehow on this bridge at last.
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