The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

very least have expected her to be familiar
with Peter Buitenhuis's book on war propaganda,
The Great War of Words. The
Nation's Cause can be recommended to
those inclined to take a leisurely stroll
through a neglected body of poetry; however,
the more demanding reader may find
Marsland's faith in her own common sense
somewhat irritating.
Hanley's Writing War combines critical
essays with her own short stories in an
excellent attempt to break down the
boundary between critical and fictional
writing. Both the short stories and the
commentaries on Virginia Woolf, Doris
Lessing, and Joan Didion pound home the
thesis that men are bellicose while women
are nurturing. While this argument may be
reassuring to women readers, it is also
rather reductive in its simplicity. Not only
does Hanley's polemical identification of
bellicosity in male writing and behavior
itself border on the bellicose, but her rigid
opposition between bellicose men and nurturing
women essentializes and mythologizes
a feminine subject position which
deserves more careful investigation. If she
had not rather simplistically dismissed
deconstruction as yet another act of male
aggression, she might have argued from a
theoretically informed feminist position
which holds that her kind of binary thinking
remains caught up in the patriarchal
system she attacks. Hanley's lively style and
energetic argument communicate an
always timely reminder that the patriarchy
is indeed in need of being restructured
along more feminine-identified forms of
thinking. But her anti-theoretical animus
and her essentializing tendencies strike an
outmoded note in feminist conceptions of
gender. At the very least, the implicit suggestion
that the nurturing attributes of
women would spell the end of war rather
naively overlooks the dependence of the
capitalist system on the military-industrial
complex.
Surfaces and Depths
Beverley Daurio
Hell and Other Novels. Coach House $12.95
Anne Dandurand, Claire De, and Helene
Rioux, Trans. Luise von Flotow
Three by Three. Guernica n.p.
Reviewed by Julie E. Walchli
Beverley Daurio's collection often unrelated
short stories reads like a procession of
heavy, sensuous details. Hailed by critics as
the newgothicbecause, in contrast with traditional
gothic in which horror and mystery
are at the heart of the story, the
characters' commonplace lives conceal a
yearning for solitude and redemption,
Daurio's collection is characterized by an
obsessive attention to objects at the expense
of character and plot development. This
attention is both the strength and weakness
of the book.
In the first story, for example, "Big Oz,"
strange details lurk beneath commonplace
objects. The third-person narrator — the
dominant voice in the collection — traces
the unhappy life a young woman who lives
in Toronto with her "university teacher"
boyfriend, a life she tries to improve with
drugs, alcohol, and affairs with other men.
The plot is, for the most part, clichéd, but
the connections that unfold between the
protagonist and a young woman who is
found washed up on a beach outside the
cottage at which the protagonist stays make
the story compelling. The dead woman is
found wearing the protagonist's clothes,
and the image of the corpse becomes a kind
of fetish, an image of warmth and peacefulness
that the unhappy protagonist strives to
find. The idealization of death is disturbing,
but in "Big Oz," as in most of the other
stories, the goodness of life wins out, and
the tension is resolved in a reunion of the
protagonist and her lover.
Daurio's art relies on the tension between
depths and surfaces that characterizes the