In Mexico City, a Canadian woman with a visibly contorted gait is emboldened by the example of Frida Kahlo, whose rich life was built around her own severe disabilities. A moose-hunting trip in Gaspé helps a Montreal man accept life changes. A Montreal teenager searches for her past in a cemetery in Guanajuato.
Mind the Gap NeWest Press
Alice Zorn
$23.95
paperback
334pp
9781774391341
As any reader of literary journals knows, travel stories are often resorted to by aspiring writers searching for interesting material. They exoticize, using the foreign setting as an easy hook.
Zorn’s stories are the sophisticated opposite, their vivid sense of place integral to the action. Her travelers are not simply tourists seeking to consume the strange. Instead, they are the strangers, provoked into a state of sensitivity by their inevitable exclusion – their own difference driving the plots and the development of the characters.
The unfamiliar surroundings of a Tunisian vacation impose new constraints on a teenager already testing parental limits (no crop tops!) – then offer an opportunity for a grand middle-finger gesture of independence. In a Texas roadside taquería strung with fairy lights wired to coloured shotgun shells, a man in pointed cowboy boots challenges Vance with stereotypes of Canada; in this unfriendly dive, he is as much a cultural outsider as any of Zorn’s characters in North Africa. In the layered title story, a Canadian child is sent to Austria to meet extended family. Barbara must help with housework; a girl would need these skills when she married. “I wasn’t sure about that,” Zorn writes, “especially if getting married meant living between the stove, the sink, the bucket, and the washing machine.” The claustrophobia of traditional wifehood, deftly evoked.
With seven stories and a novella, the book nicely balances cohesiveness and variety. Relationships are key, often multiple, with protagonists seeking – or seeking to avoid – self-knowledge. Zorn skilfully lets us see what the characters cannot, including blind spots of gender, culture, and class.
“The Land of Clouds” (the traditional Mixtec name for Oaxaca) is perhaps an exception, a story of arriving at a sense of belonging through friendship. It is a beautiful story. Zorn’s writing often engages with art and craft and here she shines brightest. A Montreal textile conservator meets a Oaxacan weaver who specializes in the rare and ethereal practice of tlàmachtentli, or feather weaving, an almost-lost traditional art. Traveling alone with little Spanish, Patricia’s openness, humility, and willingness to adapt to the place and people, serves as a quiet and very moving example of how relationships across differences can be connections of the heart.
Zorn is not as well known for her deeply crafted work as she deserves, although her first book appeared in 2009 and she has been publishing steadily since, steadily earning prizes and other recognition. One source of pleasure for a faithful reader of Zorn is how her writing, which started out awfully good, reaches new levels of accomplishment with each book. The best stories in Mind the Gap are as fine as are to be found anywhere, full of fresh, apt images and sensitive observation. With sharply detailed, precise language, Zorn conjures a parade of cars carrying moose carcasses along a Gaspé highway as beautifully as she summons the nighttime murmurs of birds that will, come morning, sing the sun up into the sky.mRb
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