THE SALVATION OF YASCH SIEMENS
Shortlisted for
Books in Canada First Novel Award
Stephen Leacock Medal For Humour
Since its publication
in spring 1984 Armin Wiebe's comic novel The Salvation of
Yasch Siemens
is rumoured to have prevented a suicide, induced labour in an
overdue pregnancy,
and persuaded a major business to stay in Manitoba. It has
been carried in brown
paper bags, sold from under counters, and holds an unofficial
record for the most
copies of a novel sold in a hardware store.
The Salvation of
Yasch Siemens has come close to becoming a
feature film.
What Readers Say:
The Salvation of Yasch Siemens contains one of
the most fanciful, fresh, and
elliptical sex scenes I've seen in some time, and also
a scene in which the ecstasy
of spiritual life is wonderfully, clumsily glimpsed...only
the deeply cynical will fail
to laugh out loud as Yasch stumbles and lurches toward
true love, finding along
the way a new and puzzling kind of salvation.
--Carol Shields, author of The Stone Diaries,
writing in Books in Canada April, 1995
Armin Wiebe is a comic story-teller without equal in Canada
today. Please hold
your sides while reading.
--Robert Kroetsch, author of What the Crow Said
This is Wiebe's first
novel, and it's an impressive debut. It's more literary
than Ted Allan's,
and Wiebe makes good use of symbolism--the TV tower
just across the American
border, for example--and religious allegory. He
has brought to life
a colorful world that seems from the outside to be
tranquil and uneventful,
but which has its own inner tensions and imperatives.
--William French,
writing in The Globe and Mail March 29, 1984
As a woman reader,
I respond to Armin Wiebe's comic vision with a sense
of deep kinship and
with relief that hysterical laughter can be shared with
a man and can be a
reclaiming of community.
--Magdalene Redekop,
writing in Acts of Concealment