While he was still a teenager, a priest from Cape Breton, visiting Lebanon to research his Lebanese family roots, befriends Pierre and helps the young man come to Cape Breton. It was a civil war that devoured childhoods as ruthlessly as it did adults, Pierre’s among them. Pierre Cormier, a Lebanese Christian, was a teenager during the civil war that tore Lebanon apart between 1972 - 90, a civil war marked by massacres and betrayals. It is an effort to understand that brings the young reporter through the past as it has been cryptically recorded in his father’s journals, as well as through the present as a CBC reporter trying to grasp the themes and tragedies of the current world disorder, and the coincidental or conspicuous links between then and now. That refusal, or inability, to talk about a central event in one’s life, makes it difficult to communicate with others, particularly family.Īt its core Linden MacIntyre’s new novel, The Only Café, is the story of a son, Cyril Cormier, trying to understand the lifelong disconnect between himself and his father, Pierre. The reluctance of these survivors to speak about what their survival required of them may account for why people, soldiers for example, avoid talking about a war in which they have been part.

What we hear about much less, the author explained, is survivor shame, what people in desperate circumstances are capable of carrying out simply to survive. Earlier this autumn, being interviewed at the Cabot Trail Writers Festival, novelist Linden MacIntyre spoke about our familiarity with ‘survivor guilty,’ a condition in which people punish themselves for having survived an event others did not.

The only café linden macintyre