Living in the Republic of Love: Carol Shields' Winnipeg

A discussion of reading Shields's novel, set in the city of Winnipeg, as a Winnipegger. After considering the special experience of reading a novel set in the place where you are reading it, I compare Shields' descriptions of the city with my own real knowledge of it, in order to develop an understanding of the symbolic resonances she attaches to it and of how the reality of Winnipeg becomes, for Shield, a metaphor for the state of being in love. Really.