Accordéon
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Accordéon

Kaie Kellough

  • ISBN-13: 9781894037839
  • PRICE: $18.95
  • Paperback, 168 pages
Finalist for the 2017 Amazon.ca First Novel Award

The Ministry of Culture wants to control the flying canoe.

Accordéon is the testimony of an anonymous witness. It is a satire in which fantasy and reality are enmeshed, and the past, the present, and the future exist simultaneously.

Seeking to predetermine every detail of Québec culture, the Ministry institutes a vast surveillance program. It plants agents in offices, cafés, and daycares. It abducts citizens, interrogates them, and meticulously catalogues their testimony.

When Accordéon’s itinerant narrator is arrested on a street corner, their testimony discloses a counter-conspiracy in which the flying canoe will ascent to thwart the ministry and decolonize Québec society.

“Kaie Kellough spells out the 21st-century’s inheritance of multiple movements: the engaged pedigree of dub poetry, the identity politics-infused lyric, and the advancement of a so-called ‘spoken word’ that bends–synesthetically–back to the page in concrete form.” — Wayde Compton, award-winning author of The Outer Harbour

Kaie Kellough

Kaie Kellough is a word-sound systemizer. His systems originate in the inchoate swirl of vowels, consonants, misspellings, shapes, stammerings, and emerge as audio recordings, books, visual entities, volumes of letters, and performances that verse and reverse utterance. Kaie's work fuses formal experiment and social engagement. Kaie is the author of two books of poetry, Lettricity (Cumulus Press) and Maple Leaf Rag (ARP Books), and two sound recordings, Vox:Versus (WOW), and Creole Continuum (HOWL!). Kaie lives in Montreal and performs and publishes internationally. Find out more at www.kaie.ca

Kellough’s vision of the canoe is embodied by Accordéon. It is a remarkable work of experimental fiction that pushes back against those who would forward a singular narrative of this unabashedly contradictory city, celebrating instead the messy multiplicity of Montreal. – Sara Spike, associate of Montreal Review of Books

Reviews

Kaie Kellough – Montreal’s Word-Sound Systemizer and the Voices of the City

By Sara Spike

Accordéon is a smart experimental novel with a timely message. Our narrator is an anonymous itinerant who stands downtown, at the corner of Sainte-Catherine and Saint-Mathieu Streets, delivering monologues mostly ignored by passersby. Having come to the attention of the ominous Ministry of Culture, which seeks to catalogue and thereby shape and control Quebec culture, the narrator has been kidnapped and their monologues have become testimony about the state of Quebec society. What readers have before them is a transcript, sporadically annotated by three ministry agents, each of whom has their own ideas about national culture. [Read the review at MRB]

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