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These superbly crafted stories reveal an astonishing range, with settings that vary from a farm on the Canadian prairies to Bloomsbury in London, from a high-rise apartment to a mine-shaft. Vanderhaeghe has the uncanny ability to show us the world through the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy as convincingly as he reveals it through the eyes of an old man approaching senility. Moving from the hilarious farce of teenage romance all the way to the numbing tragedy of life in a ward for incurables, these twelve stories inspire belief, admiration, and enjoyment, and come together to form a vibrant chronicle of human experience from a gifted observer of life’s joys and tribulations. This is Guy Vanderhaeghe’s brilliant first book of fiction.… (més)
An excellent collection of short stories. All of them had the same basic core: a family with one man (even with women around) who is an outcast or alone in some way. Often the family situation or the man's personal situation is going downhill fast, and the story focuses on how the protagonist deals with the situation. Do they stay and make the best of it, do they leave for something new, do they descend even further into decrepitude, do they become part of the "system" or whatever it is that's around them?
The last two stories are the best in terms of bringing up the main overriding theme of the collection, with the second-last providing the quote that titles the collection:
"His life, like every other life, could be graphed: an ascent that rises to a peak, pauses at a particular node, and then descends. Only the gradient changes in any particular case....We all ripen. We are all bound by the same ineluctable law; the same mathematical certainty.
"...I have begun the inevitable descent, the leisurely glissade which will finally topple me at the bottom of my own graph. A man descending is propelled by inertia; the only initiative left him is whether or not he decides to enjoy the passing scene." (192-193)
This collection explores a variety of descents, and Vanderhaeghe's diversity of settings and characters is excellent. The only suggestion I would make is not to read them all in one shot -- read them one at a time, puzzle them over, enjoy some of the great lines they offer. And when you're done, why not try the album of the same name by Justin Rutledge, a Canadian singer-songwriter? It was inspired by this collection and is similarly well crafted. ( )
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The watcher: I suppose it was having a bad chest that turned me into an observer, a watcher, at an early age.
Reunion: It was a vivid countryside they drove through, green with new wheat, yellow with random spatters of wild mustard, blue with flax.
How the story ends: Carl Tollefson was what people, only a short time ago, commonly used to refer to as a nice, clean old bachelor.
What I learned from Caesar: The oldest story is the story of flight, the search for greener pastures.
Drummer: You'd think my old man was the Pope's nephew or something if you'd seen how wild he went when he learned I'd been sneaking off Sundays to Faith Baptist Church.
What I learned from Caesar: His instincts could not help but prevail, and like his ancestors, in the end, on that one day, what could he do but make the shadows real, and fight to be free of them?
Going to Russia: And whenever I look into her wise, calm eyes set like stones in their Asiatc folds, I sense the grandeur of Russia, the infinite, colossal steppes sleeping there.
These superbly crafted stories reveal an astonishing range, with settings that vary from a farm on the Canadian prairies to Bloomsbury in London, from a high-rise apartment to a mine-shaft. Vanderhaeghe has the uncanny ability to show us the world through the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy as convincingly as he reveals it through the eyes of an old man approaching senility. Moving from the hilarious farce of teenage romance all the way to the numbing tragedy of life in a ward for incurables, these twelve stories inspire belief, admiration, and enjoyment, and come together to form a vibrant chronicle of human experience from a gifted observer of life’s joys and tribulations. This is Guy Vanderhaeghe’s brilliant first book of fiction.
)
Google Books — S'està carregant…
(3.79)
1
The last two stories are the best in terms of bringing up the main overriding theme of the collection, with the second-last providing the quote that titles the collection:
"His life, like every other life, could be graphed: an ascent that rises to a peak, pauses at a particular node, and then descends. Only the gradient changes in any particular case....We all ripen. We are all bound by the same ineluctable law; the same mathematical certainty.
"...I have begun the inevitable descent, the leisurely glissade which will finally topple me at the bottom of my own graph. A man descending is propelled by inertia; the only initiative left him is whether or not he decides to enjoy the passing scene." (192-193)
This collection explores a variety of descents, and Vanderhaeghe's diversity of settings and characters is excellent. The only suggestion I would make is not to read them all in one shot -- read them one at a time, puzzle them over, enjoy some of the great lines they offer. And when you're done, why not try the album of the same name by Justin Rutledge, a Canadian singer-songwriter? It was inspired by this collection and is similarly well crafted. (