Saskatchewa

by Israel Centeno

Richard Ford’s Canada.

Saskatchewan, ‘Prairie Train Station.’ Photo: Collin Stumpf via Flickr.

“Loneliness I’ve read, is like being in a long line, waiting to reach the front where it’s promised something good will happen. Only the line never moves, and other people are always coming in ahead of you, and the front, the place where you want to be, is always farther and farther away until you no longer believe it has anything to offer you”

— Canada, Richard Ford.

“Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m now going to close it.”

–“Before the Law”, Franz Kafka

If we were to give a name to the place where the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s The Trial was killed, we’d have to call it Saskatchewan. And if we draw a parallel between Kafka’s novel and Canada, the most recent book by Richard Ford, Kafka’s Josef K would be Ford’s Dell Parsons, an adolescent with a vague idea of his roots, who is systematically flung from one non-place, where he first lives, into the non-place where his voyage of discovery ends.

Dell Parsons’ initiation — K? — begins the moment his parents are arrested and imprisoned for robbing a bank in rural North Dakota; it ends with his “expatriation”…