With images of Kosovo everywhere, we can’t help but wonder how those countless children with the wan, shocked faces will come through all of this. Sergio Kokis has much to tell us about the distortion such beginnings imprint on the human soul. Labelling Funhouse as magic realism misses the mark: its depictions of a Brazilian childhood – overbearing, overpainted female relatives, frenzied sexual couplings, corpses littering city parks and spoiling the beaches – reflect meticulously the limits of a child’s understanding.

Its unnamed narrator, now a painter exiled in Canada, is haunted by ghosts of this harsh past, which rise to the surface, compelling him to exorcise them in his canvases. We sense a similar process going on with Kokis, who like the narrator was born in Brazil.

Spurning that famous maxim of writing teachers, “Show, don’t tell,” the narrator recounts his story in the form of a long meditation. Despite a paucity of dialogue and set scenes, the effect is mesmerizing. Our narrator, the worldly child at the centre of this coming-of-age story, somehow retains an innocence at heart, in the midst of a virtual carnival of deadly sins. His Latvian immigrant father, proud of his education, with ambitions of becoming a famous inventor, succumbs to financial despair in politically tumultuous Brazil; his wife turns an interest in love and romance into a profitable cottage industry: the family apartment becomes a bathhouse, and the boy is thrust into the streets, then dispatched to boarding school. In time he becomes a student activist, moving on to Europe and finally washing up in a cold, polite land devoid of heroes or villains.

Having grown up under such extreme conditions, our narrator can’t really understand why Canadians whine so much, think golf is important, lack passion and heroism, and worry about RRSPs. In the shrewd, ironic descriptions of “dwarves of passion”(those preoccupied with golf and mortgages), who surround him, we may recognize ourselves.

First published in French as Le pavillion des miroirs, this book won several major Quebec literary awards. Happily, this fine translation by David Homel and Fred Reed now makes it available in English.