Milosz

By Cordelia Strube

Milo doesn't quite have it all together. His acting career has stalled. His girlfriend dumped him. His miserable father has vanished, and people keep moving into his house. When Robertson, the autistic eleven-year-old next door – the only person Milo really likes – gets bullied, Milo is finally spurred to action. Milo being Milo, that doesn't really go his way either, and soon people are winding up in the hospital, lost in the woods or possibly returned from the dead. Milosz is a novel about family: the blood kind, the accidental kind and the kind you rediscover on reality TV.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Release date: Sep 23, 2012
• ISBN: 9781770563285

Cordelia Strube

Cordelia Strube is the author of ten critically acclaimed novels. She has been nominated for the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Book Award and has been longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

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Reviews for Milosz

[randymetcalfe · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Cordelia Strube has a talent for portraying precocious, though troubled, young teens. Perhaps this explains why Milo, the titular hero of Milosz, is a thirty-something man who sounds an awful lot like a precocious, though troubled, young teen. Milo’s life is fractured and fraught, a slightly traumatized childhood leading to a career as a failed actor, orphan (sort of), and sad sack. His closest connection is to his 11-year-old autistic neighbour, Robertson, whose emotionally stunted relationship with the world and the people in it mirrors Milo’s own. And it doesn’t help that Milo’s house has become a world of chaos since being invaded by unwanted lodgers – Wallace, who owns a junk removal business but pretends to his English mum (who also ends up living in the house) that he is an accountant; Pablo, a handsome Cuban who sometimes gets work with Wallace but whose girlfriend has thrown him out; Tawny, a teenage Native American escaping from an abusive childhood on the reservation; and Gus, Milo’s estranged and presumed dead father, who has suffered either head trauma or a stroke and no longer remembers how to speak English (he can only speak Polish) or anything about his life with Milo, which we learn from Milo was not great, to put it mildly.The story meanders, even lurches, in one direction and then another without a clear purpose. But that is probably because none of the characters manage to rise above their stereotypes. Certainly Milo himself has no ideas and no direction. His actions often seem out of proportion, or border on the irrational, and, with respect to Robertson’s mom, Tanis, definitely slip over into the creepy. It makes the “happy families” ending come across as forced, since Strube has spent the previous 300 pages confirming Philip Larkin’s famous observation of the effects on children of their mums and dads.Quite apart from unbelievable characters, the very world Strube offers here is unbelievable. The elderly and befuddled Gus, both when in care and when returned to his home with his son, is only capable of speaking Polish. Yet incredibly, no one—not his care givers or any of the motley crew in Milo’s house—seems to have the wit to simply bring in some other Polish speaker from all of multi-ethic Toronto in order to communicate with Gus. Seems a bit unlikely.I have enjoyed previous efforts by Coredlia Strube, especially Lemon, but I’m afraid Milosz just doesn’t get it’s act together.