Fifth Business

I just finished reading Fifth Business by Robertson Davies. The story takes in the early 1900s in a small Canadian village. This fiction is told in memoir style by the main character Dunstable/Dunny Ramsey- who finds it necessary to validate himself and his life's choices to the headmaster at the school where he teaches. He starts with his humble and odd beginnings as a young boy and slowly and with great detail he builds to the very moment at which he is writing. He goes thru his obsession with Catholic Saints, and his survival of the Great Depression. This book isn't a mystery, but there were some elements that remained unknown until the end of the book. Like, what "Fifth Business" actually is. 


I thoroughly enjoyed this great read and I only wish more people found it so. I've read too many reviews where people just hated the book. I can understand why. Robertson Davies write the most amazingly beautiful prose I've ever read. And while I was greatly entertained the The Great Gatsby, I am totally in love with this Canadian novel. I would even go as far as saying that some of the experiences in Fifth Business are not so different than those from the Great Gatsby. The roaring twenties, has proven survival was only for the fittest and those "fit" are not necessarily the wealthy but those who lived outside it.