What constitutes a person other than a collection of memories, both those acquired in one’s own lifetime and those passed down through generations? If you strip someone of his memories, do you strip him of his soul? And if memories are the very building blocks of humanity, who decides what to construct?
Alice Zorn’s debut novel Arrhythmia is an ambitious, deftly handled exploration of human beings in love. Far from stuttering along as its title might seem to suggest, it seldom misses a beat.
The stories are tight, economical, and each sentence has been nursed and carefully crafted. Spry has an ear for slang and tone; whether it’s a demented orderly or a young woman at rehab, he gets it right.
This gives the book an authentic feel, and provides the reader with the inside scoop (on insecurities, on sex – the usual topics that make a diary a juicy read).
Door weaves the journeys of several human characters – Aydee, Lucas, and Sandra – against a fantastical background of altered states of consciousness (and even states of identity), which seem to involve visits to a world of large, menacing creatures – part myth, part machine, part human.
Ravvin’s precise tonal control keeps the book fascinating; the unexpected stringing-together of odd incidents develops a curious sense of meaning. Nevertheless, the quiet elegance of the structure occasionally seems forced and tends to make the book’s more obvious moments seem even more obvious.
Exploring the dark side of the maternal and matrimonial experience is both relevant and valuable, and Akerman is to be commended for her choice of subject matter. But by populating her tales with bitter, resentful, powerless, and almost uniformly unhappy female characters, the author catalogues the weaknesses of women while largely failing to celebrate their courage and strength.
It takes a long time to read The Obituary, the eighth book from acclaimed writer Gail Scott, considering it’s a mere stripling of 162 pages. It’s a question of density, partly, but also of shifting gears – you might need to enter this book slowly, as you would a cold lake.
Do not create anything,” famously wrote Bob Dylan in his poem “Advice for Geraldine on her Miscellaneous Birthday”: “it will be misinterpreted. / it will not change. / it will follow you the rest of your life.”
Go into any bar of a certain type and you’re almost sure to see a guy like Spat Ryan. He’ll look like he’s been there for a while, sitting alone, but not so alone that he’s not compelled to voice his comments about all and sundry: the music, the weather, politics, women.
As Canadians, we pride ourselves on our national image as protectors of multiculturalism; H. Nigel Thomas’s new short story collection Lives: Whole and Otherwise offers a bleaker picture of our supposedly progressive nation. Thomas presents poignant, blunt, and hauntingly heartbreaking accounts of members of the Caribbean community in Montreal, many of whom struggle with the physically and emotionally frigid conditions of their new home.
The characters in Teri Vlassopoulos’s debut short story collection, Bats or Swallows, are trying to make sense of themselves and the world. Many are in that purgatory between adolescence and adulthood, when the security of childhood erodes and the ugly complexities of the self and human experience are revealed.
