Is it something like a triangle? With happiness, unhappiness and love arranged with an equal distance between each point? Perhaps. Certainly there are triangles in "Fiction", shifting alliances and fractures. Love triangles. Happiness triangles. Just enough. Too much. The kind of happiness discussed in "Fiction" is different from that which
A book-length demonstration of propulsive prose. This is the word that I wrote in capital letters, in the margins of my reading diary about Mark Anthony Jarman's Knife Party at the Hotel Europa (2015), but then I wondered if I had subconsciously (deliberately, even!) lifted it from the cover. It sounds like
Things that you can slip between. They are often 'new' in nature. Perspectives transform. If I was playing $30,000 Pyramid, I might think such things, in response to the idea of 'dimensions'. At the heart of Alice Munro's "Dimensions": a woman who is fundamentally altered, facing a 'new' future, slipping
When I began rereading The View from Castle Rock, I stumbled. It had not been a favourite and my return was not an easy one. I wondered if this had something to do with my personal response to the idea of expecting words to hold losses. I had lost a
And, "Who Do You Think You Are?" McClelland & Stewart, 2006 As readers approach the final tale in this collection, it seems appropriate to have it titled with a question. Whatever might be resolved in the effort of creating a narrative in which to secure one's ancestors, one could
