The Last Days of Lacuna Cabal: A Novel

By Sean Dixon

The girls of the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club are at a crossroads. One of their founding members is dead, they’ve made a few unfortunate compromises to their membership, some of them aren’t getting any younger, and they’ve been stuck on a single weepy tome for six long months. Resident maverick Runner Coghill decides to shake things up by introducing a cherished family heirloom to the group — ten pristine stone tablets, carved in cuneiform, telling the oldest story in the world: The Epic of Gilgamesh. Because their new book is written in an ancient language, the group must take the unprecedented step of allowing Runner to translate the whole story for them. But Runner’s narration is not of a common vein. Before they know it, the Cabalists have been thrust out to sea, on a journey in search of answers that extends halfway across the world to the war-torn land of this oldest story’s birth.

The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal is an offbeat rites-of-passage novel whose characters live out literature with ferocity and passion. It is a funny, quixotic debut that follows the members of a shallow, squabbling, time-wasting, protracted-adolescent book club as they find themselves transformed through the alchemy of the storyteller’s art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 28, 2009
• ISBN: 9781590513309

Sean Dixon

Sean Dixon is a playwright, novelist, and actor. His debut novel The Girls Who Saw Everything was published in Canada, the US, the UK, and Romania, and named one of the best books of the year by Quill and Quire. He is also the author of two middle grade novels and a forthcoming picture book. Sean lives in Toronto.

Reviews for The Last Days of Lacuna Cabal

[mariasavva_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I didn't like this book.The 'Lacuna Cabal', is a young women's book club, but it's a very strange book club. It is made up of some young women, some not-so-young, a cross-dresser (male) who is thinking of having a sex change, and a boy of 10 years old. The book club also allows 2 men to join as members, later in the book. The bunch of misfits who make up the book club,hold their meetings in delapidated buildings, and act like pre-teens. In fact, I think I might have actually enjoyed the book more if they were supposed to be pre-teens (except that then the gratuitous sex scene, which takes place in a hospital (of all places!) would not have been possible — or, who knows, with this author it may have been) , but we are supposed to believe that these people are in their twenties, and even in their thirties.The main problem I had with the book is that none of the characters were believeable; all of them were one-dimensional, with no emotions or feelings, and no depth at all. I was unable to become interested in any of them, I actually didn't care about them, or what they did next. Even when one of the members died, I couldn't feel anything. The characters were not developed at all, and I got the impression that even the author didn't know any of them. For example, when a member of the club dies, we are told that all of the others stood around crying together. One of these members in particular 'Missy' was said to be 'in floods' of tears. Then about twenty pages later, when another member witnesses Missy cry, the narrator states: 'Priya had seen Missy cry, something witnessed by no other mortal. Akin to Perseus glimpsing the face of the gorgon in his shield.' There are many other examples of exaggerated prose, which became almost cringeworthy at times. I was going to stop reading it, quite a few times, but I carried on reading to see why such a book was ever published — I was expecting to find something, but I never did.At one point the author compares one of the girls to a rape victim when she has her hair cut off by the two male members of the club, after she had consented to this being done. He states: 'She thinks she has one advantage over a rape victim: she knows she is complicit in her humiliation.' I think that women around the globe would be shocked by this statement. I certainly was. There is no comparison here, and it should not have been made.I think the author sums up the book better than I can, when he states in the footnote on page 309 'it is not a novel at all'. I totally agree. It's a disjointed, warped story, and I felt as though the author is taking the reader for a fool.This book would have been much more believeable if the characters were meant to be members of a lunatic asylum, rather than a book club.

[presto_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal is a tale, to give it its full title, about the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club, a tale which is narrated by two of its members. One of the books the group chooses to read sends them off across the world in search of answers, and along they way we watch them deal with their problems including their love interests; the members of the book club becoming not just friends but a surrogate family. The book sounded promising, so perhaps I was expecting too much from it for I found it disappointing. It is beautifully written, witty and at times very funny. Yet I found it un-involving. I think the root of the problem was that I did not find the characters appealing, such that I was not sufficiently interested in them to care particularly what happened to them. This is not to say that as characters they are not well developed, for they are; I simply could not relate to them. It is a book which I could happily pick up and read any part of and enjoy for the quality of the writing alone, but equally happily put down and not feel the urge to pick up again; simply because it did not inspire in me the need to find out what happens next. The cover design, by Becca Thomas, is the result of a competition, it certainly is quite striking. The book was first published under the title The Girls Who Saw Everything.