Garry Serafin

The Cold War

This first novel by Garry Serafin contains many autobiographical elements, not least of which are its two settings. The protagonist, Ben Swiantek, appears first as a fifth-grader in the port of Churchill, on Hudson Bay, and then as a coffee trader in Geneva a quarter-century later. Although Ben often tells the story in the present tense, from the outset we know he is actually looking back from a vantage point in the distant future. A leitmotif of the book is his struggle to remember and the tantalizing sensation of having past moments almost within his grasp, only to see them slip back into oblivion.

The Cold War begins in Churchill in autumn 1963. Ben befriends his Métis classmate Danny. Together with Jeff and Robin, they play 'war' even as US aerial tankers participating in real war games fly out of the nearby airport to refuel B-52s streaking northward to the fringes of the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, Ben’s father, the new Indian agent, tries to improve the lot of the Chipewayan, a Dene band torn from their life hunting caribou in the bush and dumped in a flimsily built township next to the graveyard.

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Life and times

Garry Serafin was born in 1954 in southwestern Manitoba, Canada. His education began in the village schoolhouse under a sweeping prairie sky. After his father switched from the Game Branch to Indian and Northern Affairs, the family moved frequently, including to the northern port of Churchill and to Prince George, in central British Columbia. It was there that Garry forged the kinship with languages and literature that would shape the rest of his life.

Eager to learn French among native speakers and experience Quebec’s political and cultural fervour first-hand, Garry left western Canada at the age of nineteen. He attended university in Sherbrooke, southeast of Montreal, earning a B.A. in French and English and an M.A. in Canadian Comparative Literature. He then taught secondary school for three years in a Cree community on James Bay during its relocation to the present site at Chisasibi.

Garry moved to Switzerland with his first wife to study translation and has remained there ever since. After graduating, he managed a language school and worked in the import-export business and commodity trading, a world he describes in detail in his first novel. In 1989, he finally landed a salaried position as a translator at a private bank and continued to work in the financial sector for almost thirty years.

Garry lives in Lausanne, is married and has three children and three grandchildren. He began writing fiction after retiring in 2019.