Contemporary Literary Criticism | Richler, Mordecai (Vol. 185) - Robert Fulford (review date 21 June 1992)

Robert Fulford (review date 21 June 1992)

SOURCE: Fulford, Robert. “Canada, From Inside and Out.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (21 June 1992): 3, 9.

[In the following review, Fulford evaluates the controversy resulting from Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!: Requiem for a Divided Country, calling the book “disorganized and rambling.”]

There are more French Canadians alive now than ever before, and they possess more wealth and power than at any point in the past; yet their politics is based on the profoundly held belief that they are in danger of disappearing into the fog of history like some preliterate tribe of the Amazon. They see themselves, all 6.2 million of them, succumbing to the demographic pressure of North America and slowly assimilating into the English-speaking majority.

This fearful view of the future animates Quebec separatism, which has kept Canada in a state of more or less permanent crisis for a generation and...

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