Timothy Findley's Pilgrim is the story of a man who can't die even though he tries over and over to kill himself. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, in 1912 he's placed in a Zurich clinic where Carl Gustav Jung is hard at work trying to determine the perimeter of the collective unconscious. For Jung, this man becomes an embodiment of the psyche's mystery. Claiming to have no past history but to have simply arrived one day at consciousness, Pilgrim lives in a limbo outside individuality and subjectivity. He's everyone and no one. Is he a messenger? Or is he a basket case? As the novel gathers momentum, we realise that Pilgrim is a character much like Virginia Woolf's Orlando, a witness traversing gender and time. Imagining conversations between Pilgrim and Henry James, Leonardo da Vinci, and Oscar Wilde, this novel is like a party full of beautiful guests. Or a safe train trip through an exotic landscape of consciousness where men use cologne that smells like "moss...lemons...ferns", and schizophrenics are elegant and well dressed, like the old countess who believes she lives on the moon and asks her doctor, "Is this a ballroom? Am I being courted?"
Genre: Literary Fiction
Genre: Literary Fiction
Used availability for Timothy Findley's Pilgrim
Hardback Editions
October 2002 : UK Hardback

Title: Pilgrim Special Edition
Author(s): Timothy Findley
ISBN: 0-00-200551-4 / 978-0-00-200551-7 (UK edition)
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Availability: Amazon CA
December 1999 : USA Hardback
1999 : UK Hardback
Paperback Editions
May 2001 : UK Paperback
January 2001 : USA Paperback
May 2000 : UK Paperback
November 2000 : UK Paperback
August 2000 : UK Paperback
Audio Editions
June 2008 : Canada Audio CD
Title: Pilgrim
Author(s): Timothy Findley
ISBN: 1-55468-138-3 / 978-1-55468-138-9 (Canada edition)
Publisher: Canada Audio
Availability: Amazon CA
Kindle Editions
June 2010 : Canada Kindle edition
October 2009 : USA Kindle edition

Title: Pilgrim: A Novel
Author(s): Timothy Findley
Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
Availability: Amazon