A literary meditation on memory, time, love, and loss
Fishing With Tardelli contemplates the relations among four parents - mother, father, stepfather, and a Brazilian fishing companion - and the author. Over marriages and remarriages, fathers and mothers become stepfathers and stepmothers, and brothers gain and lose stepbrothers and half-brothers, sisters and half-sisters across two continents. The various homes become part of Besner's internal geography, memory, dream, story, fable become permeable layers folded over bald facts baldly stated.
Beginning with an older man's recollections of himself as a young teenager fishing with Tardelli in the bay in Rio de Janeiro, the memoir reflects on time lost and time regained. The narration ranges across the mid-'40s in Montreal, where two couples marry, divorce, and remarry in a new configuration, proceeds to Rio de Janeiro in the mid-'50s, when one of these newly formed families emigrates, and returns to Montreal in the late '60s and early '70s. After a 50-year interlude, Besner returns from Western Canada to the pandemic moment in Toronto. A son's meditation on four parents - mother, father, stepfather, and Brazilian fishing companion - as he locates them on three home grounds: Rio de Janeiro and Montreal, and memory's story about time.
