The Photographer's Sweethearts - Softcover

Diana Hartog has published three previous collections of poetry - Polite to Bees (1992), nominated for the BC Book Prize, Candy from Strangers (1986), winner of the BC Book Prize and Matinee Light (1983), winner of the Gerald Lampert Award. She has also written a memoir, No Hippies Allowed (1994) and a novel The Photographer's Sweethearts (1996). Her short fiction has been shortlisted for the Journey Prize, and she won second prize (poetry) in the CBC literary competition. She lives in New Denver, BC and winters in California.

Setting herself a difficult task, British Columbia's Hartog debuts magnificently with a tale--said to be based on real events- -of a pedophile and his not-quite-transcendent love of nature and children: a first novel at once so riveting and disquieting that it may well prove unforgettable. In the early 1900s, young Louie Olsen has come from Denmark to California to see the towering sequoias for himself and to live close to nature while observing its wonders through the eye of his camera. Foremost among those wonders is the naked beauty of children, and Louie's own childlike ways give him no lack of young acquaintances. These he takes on outings, to swim and hike, also encouraging them to visit him at home, and sooner or later his ``Teddybears'' end up both photographed and violated. Occasionally his acts are uncovered: A doctor gives him a room in his barn but drives him out when he finds his tenant's naked children there; a railroad co-worker, the big-hearted Mexican Pete, also takes him in, even letting the children sleep with him for warmth, but when a fever-racked infant daughter dies as self-designated healer Louie is giving her an enema, he again has to decamp, leaving a mortal enemy behind; much later, in 1946, when he is convicted of lewd conduct with minors, community support gets him placed on probation, and even after that, parents mainly believe him harmless, so that through his generosity with labor and herbal knowledge he can still join a young mother and her three children, in violation of his probation, in a remote mountain cabin as winter begins. There, Louie is free to abuse the youngsters, especially the youngest, a girl, until Pete finds him again and takes his revenge. Poetic in evoking California's landscapes and seasons, this is also painfully meticulous in detailing the black deeds of a complex man descending through a darkness still quite human to a place where demons dwell. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.