Hey, Nostradamus!

By Douglas Coupland

Random House of Canada - 2003 - 256 pages

reviewed by El Hombre

I'd like to start this review by stating, "I am an idiot." For some reason, I've spent years confusing Douglas Coupland with William Gibson. Huh? I know. It makes little sense. Their names aren't even close, really. Still, I believed they were the same guy and every time I heard William Gibson or Douglas Coupland mentioned, I'd transpose them into one amalgamated entity: Dougliam Gibland, the cyberpunk author that coined the term Generation X. Since I'm not really interested in the cyberpunk genre, I've avoided the work of Douglas Coupland. As I said earlier, I'm an idiot.

That all changed Christmas 2003. My mother, knowing I'm a fan of Canadian content in all its forms, bought me a copy of Hey, Nostradamus!. I'd read a bit about this book, and I thought to myself, "Hey, that doesn't sound like cyberpunk. That sounds interesting." So, rather than giving my Mom a phoney Christmas thank you and condemning the book to a life with an uncracked spine, I gave my Mom a sincere Christmas thank you and crippled the book with exuberance.

... I gave my Mom a sincere Christmas thank you and crippled the book with exuberance.

Hey, Nostradamus! is broken into four chapters, each narrated by a different character and each set at least a year after the previous chapter. Though the first chapter begins with a high school massacre (sadly, now so commonplace as to be almost a cliche) it's not simply confined to that topic. As the book enters the second chapter, the incident in the high school cafeteria becomes an important event in the history of the characters, but not the total focus of the narration. The motifs that really tie each chapter together are faith and the human soul. Coupland approaches these themes from a number of interesting and thought producing angles, but never strays from an engaging narrative into didactic blather or navel gazing. The characters are developed and flashed out, both through their own eyes and the narration of others, and each bring a different (and, in one case, intimate) perspective to the subject of our eternal soul.

Ironically, the main problem I have with this book is related to how it found its way to my personal library. As I said before, my Mom gave me this book because she knows that in many ways I'm a cultural nationalist. One way I exhibit this is by trying to preserve and promote the small ways in which Canadian English is unique. This being said, I was dismayed to notice an absence of ‘u's in words like flavour, colour and honour in the pages of this book. The author is Canadian, the stories are set (for the most part) in Canada and the narrators are all Canadian, but the spelling is American. I e-mailed the book's Canadian press contact and put the misspelling question to her. She replied that she suspected the book was printed with the US publisher. Strange. They throw Canadian book buyers the bonus of a Canadian Cover (yellow rather than white and missing the words ‘a novel'), but they don't print it in the language of the nation in which it's set. Still, this is my only gripe and I am a bit of crank on this topic. I still recommend the book, but I'd recommend taking the time to add the missing ‘u's with a red pen as you read.