Jamie Dopp reviews Russell Wangersky's Whirl Away

Russell Wangersky, Whirl Away (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2012). Paperbound, 207pp., $21.95.

Russell Wangersky’s Whirl Away offers twelve stories about characters whose lives are spinning out of control. The stories depict the disorder and grief that results from this and the attempts by the various characters to cope. A number of stories deal with failing marriages. In “Sharp Corner,” we meet John and Mary, a childless couple who live at a sharp bend in a road at which there are a series of car accidents. The story hints early on that there are problems between them. Instead of dealing with these, John becomes progressively more obsessed with the accidents. Talking about them garners him attention at social events and becomes his way of coping with feelings of emptiness. Mary, meanwhile, is revolted. Near the end of the story she says, “I don’t think I can do this anymore,” and it is clear that she is referring to both John’s obsession and to the marriage.

Susan Walker reviews Robin Durnford and Monica Kidd

Robin Durnford, A Lovely Gutting (Montreal: McGill-Queen's, 2012). Paperbound, 88pp., $16.95.

Monica Kidd, Handfuls of Bone (Kentville: Gaspereau, 2012). Paperbound, 79pp., $19.95.

There has to be a poet, novelist, singer/songwriter, playwright, actor, fiddler, or storyteller for every postal code in Newfoundland and Labrador. Good ones too. According to prevailing theory, the long bitter winters and the isolation of the outports force creativity. You have to make your own entertainment. Robin Durnford and Monica Kidd, residents respectively of Stephenville and St. John’s, are no exceptions to the literary bounty of their homeland. In both cases, the language seems to arise from the bedrock, the imagery found in the landscape and harsh physical realities (and not infrequent joys) of life on the far-eastern coast of Canada.

Rachel Rose Reviews Kate Story's Wrecked Upon This Shore

Kate Story, Wrecked Upon This Shore (St. John's: Killick, 2011). Paperbound, 198pp., $19.95.

“I don’t believe this,” I say, as I read Kate Story’s second novel, Wrecked Upon This Shore. “What are the odds?” Friends with whom I share the coincidence shake their heads in sympathetic astonishment. The odds are slim, and yet, it’s happened: I’ve been asked to write a review, the first in years, of a novel that explores abuse, lesbian love, and motherhood, infused by Shakespeare’s The Tempest. And I’m writing my first novel, and it’s also a novel exploring abuse, lesbian love, and motherhood, infused with the spirit of The Tempest. I’m shaken, in the way eerie coincidences can make the ground under one’s feet feel unsteady.

Dobozy Writes a Doozy

Siege 13, Tamas Dobozy (Thomas Allen)

Siege 13 is a stupendous book, a surprising book, thirteen artful and exciting stories united by the events and fallout of the bloody siege of Budapest in 1944, where Hungarians were caught between the Nazis who occupied Budapest and the Soviet behemoth Red Army which soon conquered the city (what a cheery choice: Adolf or Uncle Joe). This battle is not as well-known as Stalingrad or Berlin: the specific settings and accompanying icons — machine guns, tracers, rockets, and bodies heaped in cellars — are both familiar and unfamiliar, a puzzling, devastating cauldron of a conflict that leaves Siege 13’s characters and families haunted and driven by violence, memory, disillusionment, traps, and dreams of escape. The war ends, the Iron Curtain goes up, and the horrors and arguments resonate for decades in kitchens and lecture halls and émigré cafes.

The book’s tone resonates with Eastern European influences, perhaps more akin to Kafka or Bruno Schulz than W.O. Mitchell. The moving betrayals and disappointments remind me of the classic Stalin-era novel, Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler (Koestler was born in Budapest), yet some of the cranky characters and muttering uncles in social clubs would not be out of place in the shadowed hallways of Ben Katchor’s NYC graphic novels, grainy milieus that are both aged and contemporary.

East Coast Meets West Coast Launch in Victoria tonight!

Tonight in Victoria we'll launch The Fiddlehead's Essential West Coast Poetry & Fiction issue and The Malahat Review's Essential East Coast Writing issue.

Monday, November 12th
Doors: 7 p.m.
Readings: 7:30 p.m.
The Fernwood Inn (art room)
1302 Gladstone Ave.
Free Admission

Lorna Crozier, Patrick Lane, Tim Lilburn, Patrick Friesen, Bill Gaston, Catherine Greenwood, Steve Noyes, and Jamie Dopp will read.

Copies of both issues will be for sale.

More info on our website

David Leach reviews David Adams Richards' Facing the Hunter

David Adams Richards, Facing the Hunter: Reflections on a Misunderstood Pursuit(Toronto: Doubleday, 2011). Hardcover, 214pp., $30.

I am, I fear, the kind of guy that David Adams Richards would hate: an urban-dwelling university professor, a self-proclaimed “progressive” (“such a damnable word,” laments Richards, in the opening salvo of his new work of nonfiction), whose greener-than-thou conscience starts at the Greenpeace pledge and stops at the recycling bin, whose outdoor know-how rests on the clay foundation of field guides, nature documentaries, and the occasional wilderness jaunt in the Gore-Texed guise of an “eco-tourist”—a word that likely infuriates Richards even more. My only consolation? At least I’m not the Chardonnay-sipping “neophyte poet” whose pontifications, at a party in Edmonton, about “how deplorable it was for men to work in the oil patch, to hunt with weapons, to kill the ecology we all must share” ignite, on page two, the fire that burns throughout Richards’ Facing the Hunter: Reflections on a Misunderstood Way of Life. The result is a sometimes angry, often nostalgic, and mostly engrossing defense of the working-class men (for they are almost all men) with whom the author once hunted and the wisdom they shared walking the forests of the Canadian Maritimes.

From the Inside

Yasuko Thanh. Photo by Will Johnson

Floating Like the Dead, Yasuko Thanh. McClelland and Stewart, 2012.
People who love to read know what’s in it for them: entry into a word-filled universe that is blissfully empty of self. But what’s in it for the author? The manipulation of words and imagery? Of course, that’s a pleasure an author can also share with the reader. But sometimes I wonder if the primary motivation to write fiction isn’t sheer curiosity. Sometimes the curiosity is of a prurient nature, or invasive, or not far off gossip; it would be tasteless if the people were real. Maybe what fiction does for us, author and reader alike, is to solve the philosophical problem of other minds. We know other people must be out there, when their depiction can be so varied and so convincing.

Floating Like the Dead by Yasuko Thanh is a collection of short stories that exhibits this kind of virtuosic inquisitiveness. What is it like to be a criminal on death row waiting for his execution, what is it like to be in flight from bank robbery, to attempt escape from a leper colony, to keep a suicide pact, to be a nursemaid with a Vietnamese boyfriend in rural post-War Germany, to die of AIDS?