Daniel Soha
Photography by Alexander Sworik
Writer
Chroniques tziganes
“A pleasant mix of erudition and baroque, the novel is the focus of all that should have been, overflowing with energy, throwing words off balance, and always jostling time”.
Marilou Potvin-Lavoie
Canadian Literature
“Superbly written… A rich, original text overflowing with gusto that delights you while stimulating serious reflections on very contemporary, universal themes.”
Pierre Léon
L’Express de Toronto
“An effervescent novel, teeming with life and sensations, where the tough realities of our time coexist with humour, fantasy, courage and honesty. A stunning read.”
Jean Riley
TVO
“A book I currently relish, with its endearing characters, its emotions lurking behind the words, its philosophy, its testimonies of love… I turn the pages, I learn, I smile, I nod.”
Lysette Brochu
Planète Québec
“Matters of identity connected to territory eventually fade away and a universe oblivious of borders takes their place. In this respect, Daniel Soha’s novel could not be more contemporary.”
Stéphane Girard
Liaison
Amour à mort
“A multitude of sensations, all triggered by a whiff of Mediterranean fragrances, the sea breeze, the singing of birds, a Matisse-style luxuriance enriched by Cézanne, where vagrancy and exile sometimes lend themselves to melancholy, but most often to witty memories: all of this makes Amour à Mort a delectable collection of short stories, to be relished urgently.”
Pierre Léon
L’Express de Toronto
Du coeur au ventre
“In this book, which is a collection of his best articles, the Epicurian columnist wittily warns us against the dietary or cultural travesties of our gastro-democratic age, placed under the tyranny of all that is soft and tasteless. Loaded with advice and colourful anecdotes, these “chronicles of the belly” are particularly pleasant to savour.”
Marie-Josée Martin
LCBO Magazine
La Maison
Finalist of the Trillium Book Award
“A novel that endeavours to answer a strange question: Are you going forward or back when your ambition for the future is to adhere to the memory of your past? Is it reality or a dream, induced or not?”
Paul-François Sylvestre
L’Express de Toronto
L’Orchidiable
Winner of the Christine Dumitriu Van Saanen Prize
"As for L’Orchidiable, it is without a doubt one of the best Franco-Ontarian novels of 2009. The novel describes the encounter between Samantha Chadwick, an English actress self-exiled in Italy, and Peter Thomas, an American retiree with an unspecified Eastern European background. The stories of the two characters are connected through an old B-movie, Orgies of the Borgias, a true post-Sadian piece – an apocryphal film in which Soha has his character Samantha act alongside Oliver Reed and James Mason. The first scene of the movie, where young Samantha plays the part of a libertine Lucrezia Borgia on the verge of consummating incest with her brother Cesare, spurs in Peter, recently divorced and sinking into alcoholism, the desire to meet the actress. In this novel, we witness in turn the story of Peter’s personal failure, Samantha’s flight to the South of Europe on a scooter with her Italian lover, and the grotesque pornography of a movie that marks the end of an era, around which the author builds a kind of hagiography. The reader happily lets himself be mystified by the fictional stories of movies and the actors that they feature. Like a classical author, Soha playfully exploits the ambiguity of a historical truth that is barely outlined. A sublime, erudite novel written with the verve we like so much in Daniel Soha, L’Orchidiable already represents an unavoidable milestone in Franco-Ontarian literature."
Juan Jiménez-Salcedo,
Nouvelles Etudes Francophones,
Published by University of Nebraska Press
Le Manuscrit
Finalist of the Trillium Book Award
(Written under the female pseudonym of Christel Larosière)
“It is really fascinating, because if it is a man who wrote it, he did it impersonating a woman, but the manuscript [found by the main character – a female escort] was also written by a man, and most of the book is about a story, a tale describing the relationships between men and women. […] A book that speaks the truth.”
Gisèle Quenneville
Presenter, TFO
“A corrosive criticism of contemporary society [which is] all based on the shameless exploitation of others.”
François Paré
Writer and Scholar
“Truly, I think that a literary project based on a writer’s ability to write both as a woman – with the sexuality of a woman to boot – and a man, with his own sexuality – is a very ambitious literary proposition. Sure, we know Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary, but still, it is quite difficult. And I think that in this respect [this book] succeeds rather well, because the author – whether a man or a woman – has managed to find two distinctive voices. […] And I also find that this is a book that reaches into a whole lot of political issues, of controversial subjects. A book that makes waves. […] In fact, this book is about how to be happy, how to be a man, how to be a woman, how to be free, and it is […] also a book that liberates.”
Sophie Perceval
Literary Columnist
Chroniques tziganes II
Winner of the Christine Dumitriu Van Saanen Prize
“Daniel Soha takes obvious pride in this rewritten version of Chroniques Tziganes, which not only sheds a new light on some tragic destinies and badly known episodes of history, but revitalizes the story of his own family through the character of David and his idealized romance with a young girl who saved him from old age.”
Alice Côté-Dupuis
Project Manager, REFC
User’s Guide to a Blank Wall &
How Things Got Like This
User’s Guide to a Blank Wall & How Things Got Like This
“A novelist, translator, columnist and writer of short stories, Daniel Soha has more than one string to his bow, which enables him to play two parts at once, both as a translator and a writer – but need we reassert once more that a translator is also a writer. Whether through his rightness of tone, his semantic accuracy or his francophone aesthetics uncontaminated by anglophone canons, everything in Daniel Soha’s style contributes to creating for the francophone reader a degree of pleasure at least equivalent to the one felt on the English side. The masterful skill of the translator shows in his ability to thoroughly render the semantic contents of the English poem while imparting to the French version a musicality which was not necessarily there in English. In his rendition of the poem William Shakespeare at McDonald’s (translated as Molière au MacDo), which we supply herewith in its entirety for the reader’s pleasure, Soha also distinguishes himself by his adaptability when the translation process imperatively requires it.”
Aude A. Gwendoline
University of Toronto Quarterly