Beautiful Books: A chat with Malcolm Sutton, designer of Not Even the Sound of a River

Malcolm Sutton on the design of Hélène Doiron’s Not Even the Sound of a River:

How to break up the rectangular picture plane. I thought, how do I break this up for Not Even the Sound of a River?

Work by another designer helped the cover to develop. I’ve never met or communicated with Joan Wong, but I was designing the cover of the Canadian edition of Thuận’s Elevator in Sài Gòn, which I discovered she had done for the US edition. Out of curiosity I looked up her other covers and was especially interested in those designed for New Directions, and even more so, the one for Inger Christensen’s Condition of Secrecy. Wong, I saw, masterfully breaks up the rectangular picture plane. She cuts things up, makes shapes that are strange and that create appealing negative space as well as a foregrounded image. In the case of the Christensen cover, the negative space becomes the positive, covering up the representational image of a man – something like a Blake figure – pieces of which, if you look closely, also creep over into the foreground. It is very playfully assembled and you feel that play when you look at the final result. As the viewer you also engage in the work of assembly and discovery. Parts of the image are concealed. There is motion that the eye loves. And perhaps my takeaway as a designer was to loosen up my approach, to work from pieces, to use my hands (one gets so caught up in the ease of the computer’s virtual pieces), to have more fun.

I scrolled through the text of Not Even, trying to get a sense of its tone and objects that might be emblematic of what the novel is about. This search for the emblematic is always part of the process. There is a ship that sinks in the St. Lawrence River – a real ship that I found an image of, a post card or newspaper clipping. I tried things with the ship but was not happy with any of it. There is a box of documents for a main character to sort through. So I tried to work with a box-like shape, its top flaps open. I didn’t like the 3-D thing that happened with the box or its potential to feel like the Pandora myth. There is the fleuve itself in the novel, cold and powerful and treacherous. Around the house, I have cheap art supplies used for painting and drawing with my children. I played around with cold paint colours, brushing horizontally across the page, wetter and drier strokes. I held up the paper to let the paint run, then let it concentrate in dark pools. I tore strips in such a way to allow the texture of the inside of the paper to show. A lot of garbage produced, a lot of repetition of process. I taped it back together. And then I kind of understood it all – the image would be both paper and river: look at it and see paper, then look at it and see river. The torn edges of the paper would become the St. Lawrence’s choppy white water.

I assembled the parts together to create a fractured picture plane. An early version had black separating the pieces of river. Then the black was taken away and in favour of a softer and subtler effect of fragmentation with pieces merging into one another. Some masking tape was left visible to show assembly and also for its colour contrast – the yellowish tape against the blue-green water.

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Malcolm Sutton is a fiction editor at Book*hug Press, where he also designs many books. He works as a writing instructor at University of Toronto Scarborough. His fiction and articles have appeared in Maisonneuve, Joyland, C Magazine, Border Crossings, and the Substack Send My Love to Anyone. He is the author of the novel Job Shadowing and is finishing a nonfiction book, An Extended Listen, on listening to improvised music in Toronto. He is currently writing a long essay on noise and work, called Noise Diary.