cover image Lost Between the Edges

Lost Between the Edges

Eldon Garnet. Semiotext(e), $14.95 (298pp) ISBN 978-1-58435-042-2

Garnet's blend of fiction and recent Canadian history follows X, an unnamed radical graduate student, as he firebombs the Toronto headquarters of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel. X must also evade capture by neo-Nazis and federal investigators. Following this act of terrorism, there are a series of clashes between X's Anti-Racist Action organization and Zundel's network of skinheads, culminating in a violent 200-person riot. Garnet, a photographer, theorist and author most recently of Reading Brooke Shields, draws his plot from May 1995 events in Toronto, and includes blurry photographs that may or may not depict Holocaust victims. Thirty-two ""footnotes"" also appear throughout, excerpted from various texts denying the Holocaust. While these excerpts demonstrate that X has become what he sought to destroy, their abundance has a muddling effect. Yet despite fragmentary sentences and a plot overflowing with acts of brutality, rage and racism, Garnet's novel rings true as a traumatic and conflicted portrait of modern bigotry and extremism.