Hellman's Scrapbook

2nd edition by Moveable Inc., 2021 - 454 pages

Incarcerated in a mental institution after attempting a form of self-immolation, David Hellman is engaged in a desperate attempt to thwart attempts to fix his identity. Hellman’s only weapon is a scrapbook wherein he simultaneously writes and buries his self beneath scraps of newspaper articles. His disease is a kind of limited omniscience – the ability to glimpse the world from many points of view. 

Hellman’s Scrapbook, Majzels’ first novel, is an exploration of the relationships of power which have so deeply scarred the human experiment. And yet, as Hellman’s unquenchable desire for unity and meaning explode into multiplicity and difference, new hope emerges as a new cycle begins.

Translated into French as Le cahier d'Hellman by Claire Dé (Planète Rebelle, 2004)

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Reviews

"A huge, complex, and extraordinarily rewarding novel... Majzels has produced a major work of modern fiction.... Majzels achieves a collage effect at once compelling and irresistible....

daring in form, political, eclectic in setting and character and masterfully threaded with an intriguing story line".


---The Montreal Gazette

"Le livre imposant de plus de quatre cents pages que constitue Hellman's Scrapbook entraîne son narrateur — et son lecteur — dans toutes sortes de lieux et de milieux, de la vie dans un hôpital psychiatrique à celle d'une famille catholique d'origine irlandaise, des révolutionnaires philippins aux syndicalistes montréalais des années soixante-dix et aux bonimenteurs américains travaillant dans les cabines de jeu de la Ronde, en passant par l'atroce réalité des camps d'extermination nazis."


---Catherine Leclerc