by Vladimir Nabokov
edited by Fredson Bowers
Harcourt , 1981
324 pp. $19.95
by Elof Axel Carlson
Cornell, 1981
457 pp. $29.95
Edited by Virginia Tufte and Barbara Myerhoff.
Yale, 1981. 403 pp. $6.95
(cloth, $25)
By Peter Brown.
Univ. of Chicago, 1982.
186 pp. $5.95
Translated and edited by Edmund Keeley andPhilip Sherard. Princeton, 1981.
203 pp.$5.95
and Great Britain severed their last formal constitutional links in March 1982. Ottawa has taken steps to curb U.S. economic and cultural "imperialism." Quebec separatists have edged closer to secession. Oil-rich Alberta is resisting Ottawa's move to tighten up the world's loosest federal system. Considering everything above the 49th parallel to be like everything below it, most Americans pay little attention to their neighbor "upstairs." Yet Canada is a very different place,...
"Some countries have too much history," Prime Minister Mackenzie King once said; "Canada has too much geography."
The intense cold and forbidding landscape of northern Canada-thick forests, mountains, frozen tundra-have dis-couraged settlement ever since the first permanent colonists, led by Samuel Champlain, stepped ashore in New Brunswick in 1604. Even the Vikings, visiting Newfoundland some 600 years earlier, found ice-bound Greenland more congenial than "Vin- land."...