Glenn Piano by Gladys Priddis: A Review

My good friend and former colleague Jason Dickson wrote a book. Well, he's written several books. His latest is Glenn Piano by Gladys Priddis, a haunting novella about a mentally disturbed woman and her relationship with a doctor who practices medicine on the margins of his profession. It's a terrific concept for a story, and when Dickson let me read previous drafts, I was excited to see where it would go. The final product, published with beauty and elegance by Book Thug, is everything I hoped for. It is small and it is strange, but it packs a hell of a punch for such a tiny little tome. 

Jason will laugh at my use of alliteration, but I don't have his gift of economy with language that is so apparent in Glenn Piano. The frame narrative introduces you to Gladys Priddis as an old woman, and then drags us back in time to London, Ontario in the late nineteenth century, where we slowly begin to see the world through her eyes. Our view comes closer and closer until we are reading her poetry in her handwriting, as she falls in love with Piano and further into her psychosis. The story occurs against the backdrop of fledgling London, Ontario, including carefully chosen details of the city that reveal themselves as much as Gladys begins to reveal herself to us. 

It is experimental fiction, as you can expect from Dickson and a Book Thug production. However, as experimental fiction goes, this is very accessible. Furthermore, the production is beautiful, and as someone who loves books not only as conveyors of information but as objects unto themselves, this little volume has a treasured place on my bookshelf. When I ordered it from the Book Thug website, it came with a membership card for the publisher tucked in the flyleaf, a nice touch. All in all, a very good purchase, and one I might have made even if I wasn't friends with the author. 

You can catch Dickson at the London Public Library Central Branch this Saturday (November 13) at 2 pm.