The Incident Report
What better place to escape the psychic tensions of today’s Toronto than an eighteenth century salon? To celebrate the launch of her latest novel, The Incident Report (Pedlar Press), Martha Baillie has assembled lords and ladies from various courts and artistic disciplines. Pianist Liz Acker will play solo pieces by Satie, and then accompany tenor Avery Krisman as he sings the Duke’s song (la donna e mobile) from Verdi’s opera Rigoletto. Director Gabriel Gillespie will screen a shot experimental video based on The Incident Report. And enjoy the Klezmer and jazz stylings of Jonno Lightstone (clarinet and flute) and Tony Quarrington (guitar). Marc Glassman, Executive Director of This Is Not A Reading Series and Proprietor of Pages Books & Magazines will host the evening.
In a Toronto library, home to the mad and the marginalized, notes appear, written by someone who believes he is Rigoletto, the hunchbacked jester from Verdis opera. Convinced that the young librarian, Miriam, is his daughter, he promises to protect her from grief. Little does he know how much loss she has already experienced; or does he? The Incident Report, both mystery and love story, daringly explores the fragility of our individual identities. Strikingly original in its structure, comprised of 140 highly distilled, lyric reports, the novel depicts the tensions between private and public storytelling, the subtle dynamics of a socially exposed workplace. The Incident Report is a novel of gestures, one that invites the reader to be astonished by the circumstances its characters confront. Reports on bizarre public behaviour intertwine with reports on the private life of the novels narrator. Shifting constantly between harmony and dissonance, elegant in its restraint and excitingly contemporary, The Incident Report takes the pulse of our fragmented urban existence with detachment and wit, while a quiet tragedy unfolds.
Martha Baillie is a novelist, poet performer and storyteller. Her previous novels, The Shape I Gave You, Madame Balashovskaya’s Apartment and My Sister Esther, have been published in Canada, Germany and Hungary. Baillie’s poems have appeared in journals such as Descant, Prairie Fire and the Antigonish Review. Her manuscript-based sculptural installation, Core Sample, has been shown in the Sidespace Gallery and the Type Books basement gallery. She has worked part time for the Toronto Public Library in branches throughout the city, for close to twenty years. Baillie is a bilingual storyteller (English/French) who has told in schools around the city and at the Toronto International Storytelling Festival.
