Reflections of a Siamese twin : Canada at the end of the twentieth century

Pt. 1. Mythology -- Victims of mythology -- The mythology of the victim -- Imaginary options -- The quality of solitude -- A triangular reality -- The North American nation -- pt. 2. Some mythological propositions -- Ideas over facts -- A country of minorities -- Poverty -- Anti-heroism -- The Coureur de bois-Habitant tension -- East-West -- Practical metaphysics -- Animism -- The animistic image -- Oral over written -- An idea of balance -- pt. 3. Of reality and illusion, the natural and the unnatural, the positive and the negative -- An existential moment -- The referendum syndrome -- A natural and inevitable event -- Multiple reconciliations -- Positive versus negative -- pt. 4. Applied memory -- Trying to remember -- Fragments of a past -- I -- The indifferent mothers -- Fragments of a past -- II -- The expression of reality -- pt. 5. The fragile triangle -- Nationalism -- The belt clingers -- Élites -- The sensibility of an idea. In Reflections of a Siamese Twin , Saul turns his eye from a reinterpretation of the Western world to an examination of Canada itself. Caught up in crises—political, economic, and social—Canada continues to flounder, unable to solve or even really identify its problems. Instead, we assert absolute differences between ourselves: we are English or we are French; Natives or Europeans; early immigrants or newly arrived; from the east or from the west. Or we bow to ideologies and deny all differences in the name of nationalism, unity, or equality. In a startling exercise in reorientation, John Ralston Saul makes sense of Canadian myths—real, false, denied—and reconciles them with the reality of today's politics, culture, and economics.