[Note: They're written for a magazine, so they're longish, and the magazine is Canadian.]
A Heart in Port by Emily Givner, $16.95, 210 pages, Thistledown Press, 633 Main Street, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7H 0J8, thistledownpress.comThere is something in these stories that stops the breath. Perhaps it is the apparent ease with which Givner writes of complex human emotions, effectively rendering them simple and transparent, almost obvious. Perhaps it is the way she unveils the connections between her characters layer by layer, like peeling the skins off an onion bulb and finally, conclusively, getting to the pungent meat. Perhaps it is because, as Alice Munro states, it is “only here, only once,” in this posthumous publication, that we are treated to Givner’s perspective.
If there is any flaw in these stories, it is in their slight repetitiveness. They are littered with Eastern Europeans, string musicians, and Westerners displaced to Asia – but Givner, who, in life, was a cellist and an ESL teacher, was clearly doing what all writers are told to do: “write what you know.” Regardless, the common devices do not detract from the stories, as each feels like its own separate entity. Many of the stories are, also, technically unfinished, subjected to only bare bones editing. It is impossible to say where Givner would have taken them and what her intentions may have been. What is clear is that they show remarkable promise.
Givner’s forays into magical realism – the stories “In-Sook” and “The Resemblance Between a Violin Case and a Cockroach” – are particularly promising. When a teacher holds a conversation with his student’s glass eye, for example, in “In-Sook,” it feels strangely natural; the magical reads as if inevitable, hitting a mark too many writers miss. It is, too, inevitable that readers will want more of Givner.
Twenty Miles by Cara Hedley, $19.95, 250 pages, Coach House Books, 401 Huron St on bpNichol Lane, Toronto, Ontario M5S 2G5, chbooks.comAt first, I didn’t think I could write this review: conflict of interest. There are times I slip into my trainers, pull a sweater on, head for the rink, and it’s laboured, a struggle. I see maybe too much of myself in Isabel (Iz), the protagonist of Twenty Miles – trying to connect, find hope, find a reason in a game. Sometimes I know the game is in my blood, where it has always been, and it roils beneath the surface; sometimes it’s lost there, though, hiding inside the marrow, and I need to set myself looking for it.
This search, Iz’s search for her reason, for self, through hockey, makes up the core of the novel. When she arrives at Winnipeg University to play for the Scarlets, she is swallowed by her new life: by practices and games, by music and banter and nicknames slung around the dressing room, by pitchers of beer, and, largely, by the ghost of her father, Kristjan, a former hockey star now deceased. He lives through her hands, his legacy, that instinctively move pucks down the ice, and through expectations - that she will live in his image, fulfill opportunities he never had, play as he played now that he is gone. The more she learns, the more she gets lost, and before her teammates can proclaim, “we found Iz,” she must find herself again.
The prose of Twenty Miles rattles along quick, staccato, almost conversational, and changes in setting sometimes come so quickly that they’re disorienting. The rare Canadian who didn’t grow up with the game may wish for a glossary to navigate around dekes and poke-checks, the hockey vernacular. Overall, though, the novel manages to explore common subjects of heartbreaking loss and redeeming discovery without falling into over-sentimentality. As Hedley writes, “a hockey game is the same story told over and over again. Shift the plot around, switch the characters, change the ending a bit, but it’s still the same and we already know how it will end.” In this way, the novel is like the game itself. When the ending comes, it is not a surprise, but it is a familiar release, like the exhale at the buzzer’s final sound.
calm![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
awake