Monkey Beach - Brossura

“Robinson’s tribute to the Pacific Northwest and Haisla culture, embodied in her stout-hearted heroine and all her other vital and complex characters, does what good literature does best: it moves meaningfully from the particular to the universal and back again. And Robinson performs this feat with genuine insight, wry humor and transcendent lyricism.”
—Chicago Tribune

“It is, in the best sense, a thriller, a spiritual mystery. The underlying plot centers on what exactly has happened to Jimmy (and why), a question that is only answered in the book's breathtaking final pages.”
—The Washington Post

“Tough, tender and fierce.”
—Sherman Alexie

“Unflinching, moving and shockingly, bloodily funny. Eden Robinson offers a raw, muscular, urgent new voice: she writes from the heart.”
—A. L. Kennedy on Traplines

“Eden Robinson is one of those rare artists who comes to writing with a skill and maturity that has taken the rest of us decades to achieve.”
—Thomas King

"A graceful and impressive book."
—Times Literary Supplement

"Far more than a novel of psychological transformation... It is, in the best sense, a thriller, a spiritual mystery... breathtaking... Robinson rewards our faith that after all these years writers can still, as Pound said, 'make it new.' In this year's lineup of lookalike literary prospects she could be the Willie Mays we've been hoping for."
—The Washington Post

"Glorious Northern Gothic... . A compelling story...Robinson has an artist's eye, and delicately evokes the astonishing natural beauty of the Kitamaat region...behind Lisa's neutral voice is an authorial presence, weaving Haisla and Heiltsuk lore into the fabric of the novel gracefully, but with the quiet determination of an archivist cataloguing a disappearing way of life... a deeply satisfying conclusion."
—The Globe and Mail, January 22, 2000

"Monkey Beach is a moody, powerful novel full of memorable characters. Reading it was like entering a pool of emerald water to discover a haunted world shivering with loss and love, regret and sorrow, where the spirit world is as real as the human. I was sucked into it with the very first sentence and when I left, it was with a feeling of immense reluctance."
—Anita Rau Badami

"Remarkable...Reads like a friend's conversation over coffee — warm, genuine...The simple, straight-to-the-heart prose gives each element, each event in the story, the same weight and perception of reality...Monkey Beach is both unusual and memorable...The book is a work of a deft talent, all the more remarkable that it is a first work."
—Denver Post

"Although death hangs like a Pacific mist over these pages, Robinson, herself a Haisla, fills this edifying book with the stuff of the living, from the tiniest details of Haisla life to the mightiest universals of tradition, desire and family love."
—LA Times Book Review

"Monkey Beach...is written with poise, intelligence and playfulness... Intricately patterned... there is much to admire in this tale of grief and survival...In Lisamarie Hill, Robinson has created a memorable character, a young woman who finds a way to survive even as everything around her decays."
—National Post, January 22, 2000

"...we bear witness as she spreads her wings — not one note rings false. All the characters...are stubbornly real, mixtures of good and evil. This is Robinson at her best...this is a world worth every ounce of remembrance."
—Toronto Star, Jan. 23, 2000

"A whirling magical style." "Native writer's debut novel catalogues the touch, sound and taste of Haisla life."
—The Hamilton Spectator, January 29, 2000

"A first novel that bristles with energy — and a spunky heroine.... A haunting coming-of-age story [whose] the tragic elements are leavened with wonderful moments of humour...The characters in the book emerge brilliantly."
—Maclean's

"[Robinson's] command of language and ability to create three-dimensional, believable characters result in a hypnotic, heady sensory experience —. The beauty of the book is in the details —Robinson combines mortal and spiritual worlds, the past and the present, seamlessly fusing them into a cogent, non-linear narrative —. Riveting."
—NOW (four-star review)

"Robinson...cuts through the superficial and goes straight to the heart."
—eye Weekly

"Robinson's specialty is presenting the day-to-day: no bells, no whistles, no filtered lenses...but a lot of close-ups... The humour is pure, but the grit and blood is mixed with meditations on still waters, ancestral voices, ghostly footsteps and beating hearts...[Monkey Beach is] an important work of understanding."
—Edmonton Journal

"Traplines was acclaimed for its startling blend of reality, brutality and humour — Monkey Beach carries [Robinson's] signature. But it does more. The dark humour is still pure, but the grit and blood is now mixed with meditations on still waters, ancestral voices, ghostly footsteps and beating hearts."
—The Vancouver Sun

"Eden Robinson taps her own Haisla-Heiltsuk heritage to hurl [our Native] stereotypes into the West Coast mist and cigarette fumes that drift through her story. Her heroine, Lisamarie, is fierce and funny and screwed up, [and] her story, told through her memories of a past both rich and troubled, reveals a woman as strong and intricate as a carved mask."
—Chatelaine

"Monkey Beach is an important novel. It exposes the redemptive, vital lives of a once dying culture with Robinson's insider compassion and trickster wit—. Robinson has energy; she resists the slickster sophistication that dries out so much of today's fiction; her humour is not urbane and nasty but shifty and wise."
—Quill & Quire

"Robinson's characters are refreshingly real, simply yet elegantly wrought"
—Elm Street

"Monkey Beach is a gift."
—Homemaker's

"Monkey Beach...is pervaded by a powerful sense of menace, and the haunting spirituality that lurks in the beautiful landscape of Canada's Pacific coast."
—Independent

"Fans of Robinson's bleak, compelling shorts won't be disappointed."
—Esquire

"Beautifully written and haunting, this is an impressive debut."
—Times

"Her debut novel is an absorbing, if at times, disturbing, imaginative work."
—Daily Telegraph

"In her debut novel, Monkey Beach, Eden Robinson, a young First Nations woman who grew up in Haisla territory near Kitimat BC, does not wring her hands or cast blame. This is a candid and contemporary tale of family love and societal screw-ups and she simply acknowledges the reality of an unfolding universe."
—Kitchener-Waterloo Record

"Well worth reading...a complicated fabric of disaster and redemption."
—Newsday

"A gripping read... Smart, lyrical, simple prose, dramatic and affecting... Her truths, like her heroine, are young, raw, stark...Nature is evoked so vividly that chronology seems almost artifice. You see the seasons through Lisa's eyes, as if they are calendars and clocks, until place becomes time, and you understand the world that was lost."
—San Diego Union Tribune

"A wonderful read...Lyrical but straightforward, enchanting... ultimately, redemptive."
—Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

“I was born on the same day as Edgar Allan Poe and Dolly Parton: January 19. I am absolutely certain that this affects my writing in some way.”

One of Eden Robinson’s biggest literary influences has been Stephen King, whose books she read compulsively between the ages of ten and fourteen, when she started writing her own stories. “I was a bookworm, right from the beginning. When I got bored of classes, I’d skip them and go to the library.” Later, studying creative writing at the University of Victoria, Eden says she flunked in fiction and blossomed in poetry. “My first-year poetry professor was Robin Skelton. He was a bit late for class and showed up wearing a pentagram ring. I thought — hey, cool.”

As a young writer, Eden Robinson shares some literary territory with the likes of Michelle Berry, Michael Turner, Evelyn Lau and Andrew Pyper, none of whom shirks from portraying the bleaker sides of growing up in the seventies and eighties. As a Native Canadian writer, Robinson joins the ranks of novelists Thomas King, Tomson Highway, Richard Wagamese and Lee Maracle, non-fiction author and poet Gregory Scofield, and playwrights Daniel David Moses and Drew Hayden Taylor in describing Native traditions and modern realities with beautiful, honest language and biting black humour.

Robinson grew up with her older brother and younger sister (CBC-TV anchor Carla Robinson) in Haisla territory near Kitamaat Village, surrounded by the forests and mountains of the central coast of British Columbia. They were children of a mixed marriage — her Haisla father met her Heiltsuk mother during a stop in Bella Bella in his fishing days. Kitamaat, a Tsimshian word meaning “people of the falling snow,” (and not to be confused with nearby Kitimat town), is home to seven hundred members of the Haisla nation, with another eight hundred or so living off-reserve.

After earning her B.A., Eden Robinson moved to Vancouver to look for work that would allow her to spend time writing. A late-night writer, she ended up taking “a lot of McJobs” — janitor, mail clerk, napkin ironer. She decided to enter the masters program at the University of British Columbia after having a short story published in its literary magazine PRISM international. Traplines was the young woman's first book, a collection of dark and brutal stories that feature a deadpan, gritty humour. While Eden was finishing work on the book, her paternal grandmother died; Eden feels the knowledge of real grief affected her writing. The book was published in 1996 and won the UK’s Winifred Holtby prize.

Eden holed herself up in her Vancouver apartment to write Monkey Beach. Though she had written a novella before (Traplines is composed of just four stories, one over 100 pages long), Eden had to work hard at the structuring of her first novel. The result is compelling and complex; The Washington Post called it “artfully constructed,” the National Post deemed it “intricately patterned.” Critics in the US, the UK and Canada were unanimous in their appreciation of the book.

Eden Robinson has become one of Canada’s first female Native writers to gain international attention, making her an important role model. Monkey Beach evinces a love of her culture — Robinson maintains that if you don’t grow up on Oolichan grease, you’re not going to learn to love it, never mind make it; and if you grow up on supermarket vegetables, you’re not going to learn when and where to find salmonberry shoots. She has used her celebrity to draw attention in Time magazine to the Canadian government’s chipping away at Native health care, and to the lack of subsidized housing for urban Natives. This limited housing leads to overcrowding on reserves, where there is little access to jobs. Robinson argues that Natives forfeited rights and land for just these types of government services. Eden Robinson has been a Writer-in-Residence at the Whitehorse Public Library, and will be working with the Writers in Electronic Residence program, which links schools across the country with professional writers. She enjoys travelling, and supported herself with travel writing in Europe before the publication of Monkey Beach.