Fishing With Tardelli

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.