Every Friday in this spot True North will feature a book by a Canadian writer. The presentation will not be a review. It will include a profile of the author written by him/herself and about the product of the author’s literary labours. If a reader wants to file a review we’ll publish it. Today we offer Toko Cicak: A Voyage of Self Discovery, a human drama set against the background of the greatest volcanic eruption in historic times. Looking forward. — Carl Dow, Editor.
In April 1815 an incredibly heavy volcanic explosion, the greatest of historical times, racked the Lesser Sunda Islands of what is now Indonesia. At first its source was a mystery, but eventually the titanic upheaval was traced to Gunung (Mount) Tambora on the remote island of Sumbawa.
Just one literate survivor, a rajah whose daughter starved owing to widespread food-crop destruction, and whose palace roof collapsed under its burden of volcanic ash, wrote an eyewitness account of the enormous event. At least 90,000 fatalities occurred from such causes as blast, fatal scorching, concussion and other trauma, thirst, famine, related diseases, and tsunamis.
Little by little, the populace's fate was forgotten as 19 decades passed. Archaeological investigations have been launched only quite recently.
The Tambora disaster forms the chief setting of the exotic novel Toko Cicak, an intensely human drama that is necessarily fictive; for little was ever recorded about the people of Tambora — almost all of them long lost, alas, together with their culture, language, and history.
Pete Hodgins Sr. was born at Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, Canada, in 1932, where his father taught English and edited the Quebec Journal of Agriculture (English edition). The family moved to Ottawa at the outbreak of World War II in 1939.
As "the jack of all trades but the master of none", Pete made a difficult decision to enter Civil Engineering — then gravitated to teaching other engineers to make better use of the language.
In 1965 he married Gardie Holleman of Arnhem, Netherlands, who had been born within sight of the remains of Indonesia's Gunung (Mount) Krakatau which had famously exploded in 1883. They have three children and, to date, one granddaughter.
He wrote his first short story in 1954 and his first book in 1975, although it wasn't until the end of 2007 that one of his dozen long works, the historical survival novel Toko Cicak: A Voyage of Self Discovery, was actually published.
The novel is available from raymondcoderre.baico@bellnet.ca
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