Monday, February 17th, 2025

In his efforts to chronicle the life of Mordecai Richler, author Charles Foran spent five years living with the ghost of the Canadian literary icon, visiting haunted rooms and speaking with those who once knew him.

“He sustains that kind of attention,” Foran says, “because he belonged to an era when artists were self-consciously outrageous.”

With the publication of Mordecai: The Life and Times in 2010, the Peterborough-based author became an object of wide critical acclaim. The Globe and Mail describes the biography as “probably the single most awarded book of any genre in the history of Canadian literature.” Among the accolades it received are the 2011 Charles Taylor Prize and the 2011 Governor Generals Award for non-fiction.

On Sunday, February 19, Foran will be the special guest at a lunch hosted by Curiosity House Books at Chez Michel between noon and 3 pm. Tickets for the event are still available and cost $35. Later, Foran will be available to sign copies of his book at the bookstore.

Foran says he appreciates the awards he has received but he does not write for the sake of recognition and so does not feel pressured to repeat his past success.
“I don’t feel that I have to live up to Mordecai,” Foran says. “It was the book that it needed to be.”

A novelist at heart, he lives rather for those “lovely moments” of inspiration, when “language becomes its own engine” and the story “takes on its own fate.”
“Oftentimes my best work comes that way,” he says. “I emerge from my office not entirely sure what I’ve written, but return to it later and find that it is good.”
It is because of language’s capacity to “become its own engine” that Foran believes fiction cannot be autobiographical. And so, when writing Mordecai he was adamant that Richler’s life be separated from the characters and stories in his writings. And what a life it was.

At age 19, Richler left his home in the Jewish ghettos of Montreal for Europe, drawn by what Foran describes as the proverbial life of an artist in Paris, in which a young, North American artist absorbs the literary and cultural history of the city, fraternizing with like-minded people and producing art. However, Richler discovered that the Paris of the Lost Generation of the 1920s had passed. There were remnants, of course, but Paris had become a place where people who only wished they had what it takes travelled to.

Disillusioned, Richler left for Spain, later roaming the continent for a time before settling in London, where he hoped to become a “grown up” writer and do what Foran says is most essential for creating worthwhile art (or anything worthwhile, for that matter): work.
Like Richler, Foran has discovered in his own career as a writer that you can’t wait for those “lovely moments” of inspiration. Even if nothing worthwhile is produced, it is the act of writing itself that is most important.

While he was in London Richler wrote The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, the novel that Foran considers a “eureka moment” in Richler’s career. Prior to Duddy Kravitz, Richler’s works for the most part took the form of pastiche, borrowing heavily from writers that came before him. Foran believes that this prevented Richler from finding his own voice, which he describes as “how the writer perceives the world.”

“Before Duddy Kravitz there was no wit in his writing. He saw literature as a serious thing,” says Foran. “If he had not become funny, he would have had a lesser career.”

Canada did not have a solid literary infrastructure in the 1950s, when Richler first left for Europe. There were few publishers, or even bookstores, and Richler felt that Canada had nothing to offer a young artist of “ambition and appetite.”

Like Richler, Foran has travelled quite extensively, but in his case it was more a matter of simple wanderlust. Foran and his wife lived in Beijing for two years where they worked as teachers.

While in Beijing Foran witnessed the 1989 democracy protests. Classes were suspended, and unable to teach Foran and his wife travelled downtown everyday. Although they were not in Tiananmen Square on June 4, Foran watched as a battalion of the People’s Liberation Army – which would later that day use live fire as a means of dispersing protesters – travelled toward it.

Foran and his wife left Beijing five days after the events at Tiananmen Square but returned a year later. His first published book, Sketches in Winter, is about Beijing in the year 1990 and the aftermath of the student uprising.

In total, Foran has published 10 books including four novels. He claims that getting back to his fiction writing since the publication of Mordecai has been difficult because of the extensive touring the book’s success has necessitated. In the five years he spent working on Mordecai, he experienced a longing to write fiction that was “like an ache.” Appropriately, he is now at work on a new novel.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *