Finished
All My Friends Are Superheroes by
Andrew Kaufman, a Canadian literary fiction author who apparently has a much more famous US comedian namesake. This was the 10th anniversary edition of what's apparently a cult classic which has been translated into a number of languages worldwide, most of which it looks like I can actually get for an affordable price over at Kobo or Google Play.
As the title suggests, this is centred around an ordinary non-powered man whose entire social circle is composed of friends and acquaintances who happen to have superpowers (all of only 249 in Toronto), including his wife, who has been tricked by an enemy into thinking that Tom has abandoned her because the enemy has made him invisible to her (but not anyone else) despite his best efforts to show up in her life again before she leaves for a new life without him in Vancouver.
It's told in a series of back and forth slice-of-life flashback vignettes which describe who's who and how the entire Toronto superheroing scene works*, which is actually fairly mundane, with low-key superpowers and people who are pretty laid-back about them, interspersed with Tom's attempt to problem-solve his inflicted marital troubles according to superpower rules and how the situation came to be.
I really enjoyed this, and would recommend it if you happen to fall into (undoubtedly small) intersection/subset/whathaveyou of readers who like both experimental literary fiction
and superhero comics
and slice-of-life vignettes about them done in a low-key magical realism style: which is probably a teeny tiny niche. But this was cute and fun and sometimes touching and there was a nice added section as a 10th anniversary extra describing even more of Toronto's superheroes, which incidentally is available in translation as a
freebie bonus from the French publisher.
* Contrary to what Marvel (well okay, mostly John Byrne) would have you think, IMHO the appearance of superpowers in Canada would be less likely to lead to the formation of an Alpha Flight or a Weapon X program for creating increasingly homicidally escaped unstable perfect assassin experiments bent on wreaking revenge than to manifest as:
Quote:
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THE FORCED: He can explain something that’s happened to you in a way that you’ve never thought of it before, a way that offers wisdom and insight, a fresh perspective you would never have thought of on your own – but he can only do it using quotes, characters and situations from Star Wars.
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I'm pretty sure I've met this guy or one of his assorted clone/parallel universe doppelganger/robot duplicates online somewhere.
<-- to a Yoda smiley, probably the closest we have