The Salvation of Yasch Siemens
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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.
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TThe other Gutenthal novels: |
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Stephen Leacock Medal For Humour
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.
Armin Wiebe is a comic story-teller without equal in Canada today. Please hold your sides while reading.
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.
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.
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